CROSSING THE THRESHOLD OF OURSELVES

 

CROSSING THE THRESHOLD OF OURSELVES

How quickly we have forgotten the lessons of lockdown. Planes no longer flew and we could hear the song of the bird. It was a war without weapons but with the soldiers on duty day and night spending themselves for the casualties with the same intensity and risk. Those closest to us became precious for we never knew; would they be next? Would I? Travel became a brief walk to the shops and entry there was spaced out as we kept our distance, measured in meters.

That year seemed like a long time and when it ended, we rejoiced to ‘get back’ to normal. But had we changed? Did we learn something?  Author Monica Furlong introduces us to an account of a prisoner of war camp, called The Cage. The men are in each other’s presence day and night with little to do. It was an unusual opportunity for them to get to know one another. But were they willing to do so? They prepared their isolation.

Opening ourselves to one another, she says, ‘is hopelessly entangled with feelings of danger. We dream of love and yearn for relief from isolation but run away when the moment arrives. What is it that is so dangerous about loving? I think we sense it asks of us something exceedingly painful. Sooner or later it demands a going out from ourselves, a vulnerability to other people, a carelessness about guarding our psychic boundaries.’

Furlong quotes Michael Quoist who says religion is all about ‘crossing the threshold of ourselves’. It not only means opening the door to the stranger but also dropping the defences we carry with us. How firmly we hold on to ourselves and do not allow another approach. When that ‘other’ is God, we are doubly afraid. Letting God approach fills us with terror. What might it mean?

And yet in our hearts, we sense it is the only true path to freedom. There are two sayings in the gospels which are really only one: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart’ and ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’ Opening my door to the stranger is opening my door to God. John, in one of his letters, tells us we cannot go straight to God. We go through other people. ‘How can you say you love God, whom you have never seen, while you ignore your neighbour whom you see every day?’

‘How can you molest a stranger or oppress him? You lived as a stranger yourself in Egypt.’ (Exodus). Self, the other and God. We are all entangled - not hopelessly – but in a life-giving way.

29 Oct 2023                Sunday 30A        Exod 22:20-26        Thess 1:5-10        Mt 22:34-40

CAESAR AND GOD

 

CAESAR AND GOD

‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.’ Simple! Well, maybe? But what actually belongs to Caesar? We have a reading from Isaiah that seems to resist an easy answer. God says to Cyrus, king of Persia, ‘I have called you though you do not know me. … I arm you that people may know that, apart from me, all is nothing.’

God is calling a pagan king to serve his purpose. The immediate aim is to restore Israel after the Babylonian exile but the implication is that ‘all things work together for good for those who love God’ (Rom 8:28). God is at work, not just in the Church, but everywhere and through all people. ‘I have called you though you do not know me’ applies to those people we meet each day who are doing the best they can in their circumstances even if they never raise their minds to breathe a prayer.

This is true of small everyday things but it also holds good for the bigger issues. We completely mess up in Darfur, Palestine or Ukraine and God cannot save us from our folly because he has given us freedom and if we misuse it, we have to bear the consequences. But God works so that, even if there are terrible consequences now, in the future there will be a good outcome. We have seen this time and time again as nations gradually see the futility of war and the exhilaration of working for peace.

And there are prophets continually stepping forward, often at great personal cost. Alexei Navalny is serving a long prison term in Russia for doing just this and an Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, has just spoken of the senselessness of Israel always resorting to force and never pausing to think of the rights of the Palestinians and listening to them. And we can turn our eyes to Zimbabwe and also see people ignored and persecuted because they speak for peace.

There is a lot that belongs to Caesar but we cannot rely on him for everything. This is not his world, his creation. If we ignore God, and rely totally on Caesar, we will not succeed because ‘the world cannot give’ the peace we seek (Jn 14:27). It is a gift that comes to those who seek it; it comes to crown our efforts not to substitute for them. So we need both: to ‘give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.’   

22 October 2023   Sunday 29A          Is 45:1…6   Thess 1:1-6     Mt 22: 15-21

AN INVITATION

 

AN INVITATION

A little girl was excited about her First Communion. A pretty white frock was made for her and there would be a party for all her friends afterwards. Being a little girl conscious of her appearance, she took ages dressing and her mother fussed that they would be late for church. The little girl suggested skipping ‘the church bit’ and going straight to the party.

Such honesty! She had her priorities and ‘the church bit’ was not one of them. When the scriptures attempt to describe the ‘exultation and joy of all peoples’, they fall back on the image of a party. ‘There will be rich food and choice wines’, Isaiah tells us. It is virtually impossible to describe the joy of heaven. Even Paul was at a loss; ‘the human heart cannot conceive what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Cor 2:9).

As we approach the closing weeks of the Church’s year (end of November), we are introduced to the message of completion and fulfilment. Life may be extremely messy – wars on the international level, frustrations on the personal – but it will all be ‘fulfilled’, done, completed – the word of Jesus as he died on the cross (Jn 19:30).

Tomorrow (16 October), we will bury Jesuit Fr Oskar Wermter, a prolific writer who was involved in organisations too numerous to mention. He was also a pastoral priest who served in urban and rural parishes throughout his more than fifty years in Zimbabwe. But his early life was traumatic, messy, starting with having to leave home and flee three times before he was six years old. His last years too were painful as he suffered from a succession of illnesses that left him discomforted and frustrated.

Oskar did not skip ‘the church bit’ but embraced it fully with all its lights and shadows. Isaiah’s banquet is now his and we ‘cannot conceive’ what it is like. Matthew takes up Isaiah’s banquet and emphasises it goes with an invitation. But he tells us, ‘Those who had been invited’ ignored it. In fact, they repeatedly turned on the messengers who brought the invitations, beat them up and even killed some.   

The invitation stands. It runs through the whole Old Testament and is renewed in the words of John the Baptiser at the Jordan. It is repeated again and again by Jesus. Yet people just turned away – and they continue to do so. They want to skip ‘the church bit’ which involves commitment and frustration. Yet it is the only way, acknowledged or not, of getting to the party.

15 October 2023         Sunday 28A                Is 25:6-10        Phil 4:12…20      Mt 22:1-14

 

DISCOVERING SOLIDARITY

It took two world wars to get people to sit down and fix the world economic order. As Britain, America and Russia struggled to overcome Hitler in the early 1940s, they faced the awful conclusion that they had created a mess in the peace arrangements in 1919 which had much to do with provoking the 1939-45 conflict. As a result and taking a deep breath, around 730 delegates from 44 countries met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, in July 1944 with the aim of ‘creating an efficient foreign exchange system, preventing competitive devaluations of currencies, and promoting international economic growth’ (Google). Two of the instruments created for these goals are still with us: the International Monetary Fund and the Word Bank.

We celebrate the founding, a few years later, of the United Nations and the organs it created, like the World Health Organisation whose president was on our screens nearly every night of the Covid crisis, and rightly so. But the Bretton Woods agreements have had an unsung beneficial leaven effect on the living standards of vast numbers of citizens of the planet in the past eighty years. They did not solve all the problems – the poor are still poor and there are more of them – but they did prevent the sort of financial crisis and depression we experienced in the early 1930s.   

It is striking that 44 countries could do something like that. Coming to the present and our own corner of the globe in Southern Africa, we had, a month ago, an orchestrated renewal of our government’s mandate to rule. At first there was resigned acquiescence, but now it seems some governments in our region are reacting and possibly moving in a new direction – searching for ways in which to create and shape the solidarity to proclaim that if one country is failing, all are affected. States in the region have, only relatively recently, won their independence and there is an understandable bias towards building national ‘sovereignty’. It is an alluring concept but it carries a ‘best before’ date that is rapidly approaching. The sort of ‘give and take’ that marked the tough negotiations in New Hampshire eighty years ago, is earnestly needed.

The workers in the vineyard, in the gospel story, thought they could grab the land for themselves. They could not think beyond their noses. They rejected all the promptings of history and ended up losing everything. The 730 delegates at Bretton Woods dug deep into their individual and collective memory and came up with policies that, though far from perfect, brought peace and development to many for decades.

8 October 2023     Sunday 27A          Is 5:1-7       Ph 4:6-9      Mt 21:33-43