OLD HABITS DIE HARD

OLD HABITS DIE HARD

An old missionary used to come in from a hard day in the outstations and take off his boots in his upstairs room. He would take off one and then fling it across the room to a corner; then he did the same with other. The priest downstairs put up with this for a while but finally got tired of this ritual and went up to complain. Next day the old man returned as usual and flung one boot across the room. Then he remembered! The man downstairs waited a long time for the second boot but there was silence. This maddened him even more and he mounted the stairs and said, “For heaven’s sake, throw the other boot as well so as I can get some peace!”

Old habits die hard, they say, and it is probably because we are unaware of them. They are so ingrained. They are part of us. We devised our ways of coping with life years ago. Some of our eccentricities are harmless but some are the opposite. I can size up another person and all their behaviour is viewed through the lens I have created. Then one day someone praises that person using words quite different from what I would have said. I wake up with a jolt and, maybe, change my way of thinking about the person.

Whatever else Lent is it is a time for paying attention to jolts and not inoculating ourselves from them. They come but I brush them aside because they do not fit with my lens. Those people who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them or the ones who died in the Malaysian missing plane – they must have been guilty somehow. Perhaps we are not so crass as to believe such things today. But we can still be in the habit of categorising people: Muslims, migrants, prisoners or the disabled.

We can read about the “stone rejected which has become the keystone” and quickly say we understand its meaning. But can we file it away so easily? Rejection is a constant theme since Eve chose the apple. I think I am a reasonable person and yet hidden away are these dark habits I am hardly aware of. I am weighed down by the burden of my own self-centredness which makes my compass always point in my own direction. I hear the words, “Choose life,” (Deut 30:19) but they don’t get through because I have built up habits over the years that block out the word than liberates.

28 February 2016                   Sunday 3C in Lent

Exod. 3:1…15                        1 Cor. 10:1…12                                  Luke 13:1-9