Sunday, 22 July 2018

BUILDING OUR HOUSE


BUILDING OUR HOUSE
I am out of my “comfort zone”! I am moving around among people my relatives live among.  They are different from those among with whom I normally stay.  For two days we have visited historical building in SW England. Yesterday it was the fortified home of the Earl of Devon, built around 1390 and full of vicissitudes ever since. At one time they favoured the Catholics, at another the Anglicans; at another time they favoured the king and, yet another, the Parliament ranged against him.
We also visited later buildings built on the enormous wealth of the new industrialists of the nineteenth century “to reflect their new status and position in society.”  These once magnificent places are no longer lived in.  Skilled craftsmen and women made them beautiful but they are now monuments to human hubris. In one house a special staircase was put in to show off the sumptuous gowns of the ladies as they ascended and descended.
We look back and smile at the follies of our ancestors and future generations will look back at ours.  When Jesus yearned to reach out to the multitudes because they were “like sheep without a shepherd” he was proclaiming his longing to fill the emptiness that people often feel when they try to express themselves in their surroundings and way of life.
We are always going to have to face who we are at the core of our being and what it is that is going to fill our starved hearts.  Maybe we are edging towards being open to this.  At a time when the exteriors of religion are finding fewer followers, the interior search of the mystics is arousing curiosity.
22 July 2018                            Sunday 16 B
Jeremiah 23:1-6                                   Ephesians 2:13-18                   Mark 6:30-34  

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