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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