Posts Tagged ‘striving’

Blessed are YOU

November 5, 2022

All Saints – 2022
Luke 6:20-25
Marian Free

In the name of God, Creator of the Universe, Sharer of our earthly existence, and Giver of life and love. Amen.

Some decades ago, in experiments that would now be considered to be unethical, infant rhesus monkeys were removed from their mothers at birth and put in cages. with so-called “surrogate mothers”. These “surrogates” were very basic inanimate structures. One consisted of wire and wood and the second was covered in foam over which was a soft cloth. There were two experimental conditions. In one the wire structure had a milk bottle and the cloth one did not and in the other the situation was reversed. In both cases, the infants spent more time with the cloth mother. In both cases the infants were, needless to say, traumatised by the experience.

Touch is an essential component of human well-being, the sense we missed most during COVID. It not only indicates love and compassion, but it is essential to a child’s development – the growth of physical activities, of language and cognitive skills and of social-emotional competency. In adults, touch signifies safety and trust, reduces stress, and allows the immune system to function effectively. Without touch a person can become stressed, depressed, or anxious.

Indeed, the power of touch is such that it is seen to have the ability to heal or to transfer energy from one person to another. Physical touch gives a sense of connection, as if by association, the essence or charism of the other passes to the recipient and they share, for a moment at least, something of the other. (We see this when crowds reach out to touch, albeit briefly – a member of royalty, a rock-star, or say the Dalai Lama. Their desperation to touch suggests that they believe that the contact will mean that something of the status of the other will brush off on them and that their lives will be changed as a result.)

When Jesus begins his “Sermon on the Plain”, he is surrounded by a “great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. All in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.”

“Power came out of him and healed all of them.” Everyone wants something from Jesus – they want to touch him, or to be touched by him. They want to be healed by him or they want to feel distinguished from the crowd by virtue of association with him. In other words, they want what Jesus has to give them – whether it is wholeness or a sense of importance.

When we read the Beatitudes in this context, we can see that they are not so much a comforting set of sayings but much more a form of rebuff, a corrective to the crowds’ way of thinking. Jesus is not commending the poor etc as much as he is challenging the crowds to consider what he really means to be one of his disciples and whether they are truly prepared to follow where discipleship will lead.

Luke tells us that the crowds have come to Jesus to hear his teaching and to be healed. They are drawn to him for what they can get out of the relationship. Jesus needs them to know that it is not so simple –something of him may rub off on them – but it will not be what they expect.

Perhaps this is why, when Jesus begins to speak, he focuses his attention his attention on his disciples – those in the crowd who identify themselves as his followers. What he has to say relates directly to them. When Jesus says: “Blessed are you who are poor”, he is not referring to the poor and hungry in general, but to those who are in right front of him – “you”.

His words then are a stark description of what it means to be a disciple, to be one of his followers. Jesus is saying that if some of his charism has flowed from him to them, it is a charism that leads not to glory, but to the cross, not to wealth and distinction, but to deprivation and obscurity. Being a disciple of Jesus will not spare them poverty, hunger, grief, or persecution. It will require resilience, fortitude, being willing to follow Jesus wherever that takes them, and understanding that the fate of the master will be the fate of the follower. But – and this is important – it is this dependence on God, this trusting in God to see one through, that will lead to the blessedness of being able to take life as it comes, to being content with one’s current situation and being able to cope with grief and loss.

In contrast, Jesus warns, those would-be disciples who are seeking notoriety, wealth, or entertainment will not, in the end, be satisfied. They will always be striving for what they do not have, and such striving will, in fact, take them away from the satisfaction, joy, and security that they are seeking. They will be cursed by dissatisfaction, discontent, and disappointment.

Jesus is telling his would-be disciples, and by inference us, that if we want to touch and be touched by him and if we want to share his charism and to be made whole, then we must understand that blessings will be found in suffering as well as joy, in emptiness as well as in satiation, in deprivation as well as in richness and that seeking to escape poverty, sorrow and obscurity will only lead to the very things that we seek to avoid.

Blessed are you if you seek Jesus above all else, for then you will know that you already have all that you need.

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‘Second half of life’ – return to the source

October 26, 2019

Pentecost 20 – 2019

Luke 18:15-30

Marian Free

 

Loving God fill us with the wide-eyed wonder of a child and free us from all our striving that we may learn to depend entirely on you. Amen.

I can still remember the first time that our daughter clapped her hands. I was hanging out the washing and she was sitting on the grass behind me. When I turned around, there she was, looking in amazement at her hands, filled with wonder that she could use them to make a noise. As I watched she sat there and clapped her hands together over and over as if she couldn’t believe that it wasn’t an accident. It was one of those magical moments of which there are many if you are privileged enough to have and to raise a child.

What happens to us that we lose our sense of joy in the small things of life, our sense of achievement in little things? When do we stop taking pleasure in what we can do and what we have and begin measuring ourselves against others and holding on to our achievements and possessions as markers of our identity?

Richard Rohr, who is one of my favourite writers on the subject of spirituality, has published a book called Falling Upward: a spirituality for the two halves of life. It is not, as I had thought from the title, a book to provide spiritual direction as we age but rather a handbook for the spiritual life in general. Rohr argues that there are two halves of life and that these are not related to physical age but to spiritual maturity. Many people, he contends, never reach the second half of life because they spent so much time building up the first half that they are unwilling or unable to relinquish those efforts in order to enter the second half.

In the first half of our lives, Rohr suggests, we need boundaries and rules so that we can learn self-regulation and so that we can live in harmony with others (much as a two year old needs to know where the boundaries are so that she or he can feel secure and find their place in the world). We begin as a blank slate so it is essential that we spend time learning who we are and discovering what we can do. Once we have developed a sense of identity, created a framework as it were then, Rohr suggests, we need to stop striving and begin to seek the contents that the container is created to hold.

In other words, in order to grow spiritually, to become complete and whole, we have to enter the second half of life. To do this we have to learn to let go of the externals that we have allowed to define our lives and begin to focus on the internals – why we do what we do, why we need recognition from others, why we need to build up material possessions. When we learn what motivates us, we can relinquish those superficial markers of achievement and give ourselves permission to focus more on those things that are more deeply satisfying and that lead us to end our striving, to recover our innocence and to rest in the deep peace of knowing ourselves loved and perfect in God’s eyes.

Some of us are jolted into the second half of life by a life-changing event – a heart attack, a diagnosis of cancer or worse – a deteriorative disease, a death of a family member or a close friend, a fire or a flood that destroys everything we own. Faced with the reality (and perhaps proximity) of our own mortality we take stock and work out what is really important and ask ourselves whether (for example) seeking wealth or recognition are as important as building relationships with our families and friends, whether striving for what we don’t have will really bring us happiness or whether should we learn to be happy with what we already have. We are forced, if reluctantly into some version of the second half of life.

While most of us accept and learn from the challenges and setbacks that life throws at us, not all of us take the initiative to embark on the discipline of giving up the hard-won markers of self that we have spent the first halves of our lives collecting and building. We want to hold on to both the positive and the negative aspects of our identity. We cling to both our achievements and our injuries without understanding that both of them hold us back. Our past efforts and experiences whether positive or negative, whether faith-related or purely secular – those things in which we have built our identity are the very things that turn our focus inwards towards ourselves rather than outwards towards God and that indicate reliance on our own resources rather than dependence on God.

In today’s gospel, Jesus says: “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

Like many of Jesus’ sayings and the journey towards a spiritual existence, this saying contains a contradiction. Jesus is not encouraging us to return to childishness or to childish ways, but to recover the openness of childhood, the joy in simple pleasures, the willingness to rely on God and to the deep contentment of being just who we are which is just who we were created to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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