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

 

 

 

‘RESENTMENT IS A FOUL THING’

 

‘RESENTMENT IS A FOUL THING’

It is not difficult to think of actual cases of resentment that we have known but it is not helpful. What is really beautiful – and healing – is to think of cases of forgiveness. After the bitter war of liberation, Robert Mugabe began his tenure of office with a magnanimous expression of forgiveness which was sincerely meant at the time. We were inspired and looked forward to the creation of a new society where all the ills of the past would be addressed. That was 1980.

The twentieth century saw other instances of reconciliation in Germany, Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere. Forgiveness, whether between people or nations, frees us and opens doors. Resentments lock us into ourselves and block any kind of growth. The story of the unforgiving debtor in Matthew 18 is both cruel and ludicrous. The practice of selling a person’s wife and children to pay a debt sounds heinous to our ears. And the act of cancelling a debt of the equivalent of millions of dollars without a moment’s hesitation sounds just funny. But neither of these are the point of the story. The man was forgiven but he could not forgive.

Resentment and forgiveness seem direct opposites but they have one thing in common: passion. People can be passionate and obstinate about their resentments, but if they are touched by God, as Paul was, they can be even more passionate about the new life that opens up for them. ‘I am living in faith, faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20). He goes on to boast about his troubles – ‘dangers at sea, from rivers, from brigands, from my own people …’ He is full of life and energy and makes light of his troubles because of the forgiveness he has experienced.

A person living with resentments is like a caged dog whining the day away while other dogs cavort in the sun. The person’s energies and capabilities lie thwarted and unfulfilled. Yet they are only a step away from new life and freedom if they could only see it.

The other sad reflection is that resentment has a social impact; it contaminates relationships in the family, the community and the state. The attitude of the resentful person is contagious and blocks those around him or her from doing what they could do.

No wonder Ben Sirah, writing more than two thousand years ago, could say, ‘Resentment and anger, these are foul things…’

17 Sept 2023         Sunday 24A          Sir 27:30ff   Rom 14:7-9   Mt 18:21-35

I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT I TAME

 

I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT I TAME

This Sunday, we do not have a story about what Jesus did; it is simply what he says. His words are introduced by Ezekiel’s idea of the prophet as a watchman. Many houses and institutions in Harare have watchmen or watch women. It is a lonely – even dangerous task. It is akin to the shepherd who guards his flock by night. It is also a responsible task. The physical welfare of the people and their property is in the hands of the one who watches. Jesus extends this to their spiritual welfare and here we see the prophet moving beyond just watching and warning. He tells his disciples they are responsible for the welfare of others.

This has political consequences. Anyone in a leadership role – parent, teacher, councillor, president – has the task of caring for all in his or her care. Everyone, at the level at which they find themselves, is duty bound to care for those for whom they are responsible.

A hundred years ago the pope came up with the clumsy word, subsidiarity. It was the time when states were claiming total power over their citizens, making choices for them that it was none of their business to make. Pius IX insisted that responsibility should be shared out according to the level at which one finds oneself. It is none of the state’s business, normally, to tell me what to plant in my garden, (unless, of course, I am growing that will be harmful to others!)

Similarly, local people are most likely to know where to put a bore-hole, (unless, again, they have no idea and some expert knowledge is required). But, to return to our watchman, the point we come to is: we are responsible for each other at whatever level we find ourselves.   Yet, we hate taking that responsibility. We fear we will be rebuffed or we will be accused of poking our nose in another person’s business. It is much easier to just say nothing. Perhaps, too, we feel young people especially are exploring life, trying to find their place, and the last thing they want to be told by some fuzzy adult is that they may be on the wrong track.

Yet experience also shows that, when someone in a responsible position – an aunt/uncle, a teacher or a friend – and does make the effort to share his concern, it is often deeply appreciated. In the story of The Little Prince, the fox says to him, ‘You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.’ We need to remind ourselves; relationship always carries responsibility. Our age is often characterised as one of ‘individualism.’ People feel free of custom, tradition and religion and want to make up their own minds. This is good in a way but we also need the balance and wisdom that listening to the experience of others can teach us. 

A SHOCKING CONFRONTATION

 A SHOCKING CONFRONTATION

Just after ‘an election win’, when Peter is confirmed as leader of the little group

of disciples, there is a strong exchange of words between him and Jesus. Having

identified himself to them as indeed the Messiah, Jesus explains what he will

have to endure in order to achieve his goal: ‘… to suffer grievously … and be

put to death’. Peter is horrified and vehemently advises against it.

But this is the heart of the matter and Jesus tells him bluntly; ‘you are a scandal,

an obstacle in my path.’ How often that confrontation takes place! Not only

between people but within the heart of a person? The war in Ukraine gets far

more coverage than the war in Sudan but the same dynamic is at work. We hear

of young men, on the cusp of life, opting to stay and fight, knowing that they

may not live to see their wives and children again.

Matthew, Chapter 16, right in the heart of the gospel is the heart of the gospel. It

is decision time. Am I going to choose the ‘better part’, the ‘road less

travelled’? Or am I going to take ‘the easy way out’? The question comes all the

time. There was a banker in Zambia who was doing well, ‘climbing the ladder’,

‘upwardly mobile’! But she knew in her heart she was not satisfied. The work

brought her a comfortable life but no peace. She gave up her career and studied

psychology and became a psychotherapist helping countless people. She ‘lost’

her life and found it.

There are many people who make this good and generous choice each day and

let us celebrate them. Much of the time we can include ourselves! But the

yawning question remains. It goes on beckoning us. It is there in the elections

we have just endured. Do we settle back into our normal ways which disturb no

one, least of all ourselves? Or do we keep up the reaching, the searching, the

straining for something better. There is no authenticity without the cross. It

leaves a mark on every decision we make. We either choose the cross and find

‘life’ or avoid it and settle for a half-life.

A hundred years ago, James Joyce gave a terrifying description of a priest’s

sermon on judgement and hell to boys in a secondary school in his Portrait of

the Artist as a Young Man. I hope no priest would do the same today! But I

suppose many of us have sometimes wondered about what our final exam will

be like! Will we get a warm welcome, a ‘well-done’, a Summa cum Laude, or

just a pass?! It will be a warm welcome but we still have to keep the question

always before our eyes: ‘can I lose my life each day and so find it?’

3 Sept 2023 Sunday 22A Jer 20:7-9 Rom 12:1-2 Mt 16:21-27