Easter 7
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 4th May, 2008
A little girl asked her father, “How did the human race come about?” The father answered: “God made Adam and Eve and they had children and so all mankind was made.” Two days later she asks her mother the same question. The mother answered: “Many years ago there were monkeys, and we developed from them.” The confused girl returns to her father and says: “Dad, how is it possible that you told me that the human race was created by God and Mum says we developed from monkeys?” The father answers: “Well, it really is very simple. I told you about the origin of my side of the family, and your mother told you about hers.”
I always admire parents in trying to answer the difficult questions but I know from talking to many parents that one of the most difficult days for a parent is the day you first take your child to kindergarten or school. Here´s your baby leaving the security and comfort of home for the great big world out there. Is she ready? Will he be okay? The journey from delivery room to classroom turned out to be a blink of the eye. Ready or not your child is suddenly ”in the world”. You may recall C Day Lewis´s poem in which he goes to see his son play in his first football match and as the whistle goes he gets ready to hug his son but sees him instead stay with his team and wander off to the changing rooms with them. He reflects at the end of the poem: How selfhood begins with a walking away, and love is proved in the letting go. There’s a “flip side” to this picture. It is the perspective of the child who is going off to kindergarten and is possessed by feelings of excitement and apprehension all at once. That kindergarten child will remain with us throughout our lives in one form or another. During times of anxiety and stress, our inner child will wish it could return to the safety and security of home. Some years ago, a friend was getting ready to defend his Ph.D. dissertation in New Testament. He was a bit anxious and I asked, “How are you feeling about it?”“Actually,” he replied, “I’m feeling a little bit like I want my mum.” The world can be a scary place sometimes. For children, mums and dads, grandparents, for all of us.
In the Gospel today, the long prayer that Jesus offers to his Father, Jesus is praying for his disciples in the world. The Gospel of John often refers to the world as dangerous for those who wish to follow God, “world” in the sense of the “world system”, the ways of the world, rather than the natural world. The first letter of Peter just now talked of the fiery ordeals we can go through, the anxieties, suffering and sense that something strange is happening to us. And then in this prayer in the Gospel Jesus asks his Father to protect his disciples and asks that they stay together, and that their togetherness, their unity, may reflect the togetherness of Jesus with his Father.
Now one of the world´s dangers for our spiritual life today is our busy-ness. I am pleased, then, that the abbot of Worth Abbey is in Copenhagen on Wednesday to address this very issue. Recipes for busy mums, tips for busy teachers, workshops for busy executives, life coaching for stressed clergy – these are just some of the courses around at the moment to help us all with our busy-ness or our need to be busy or think we are being busy. In the abbot´s book, which I warmly recommend to you, he asks us all how we allowed ourselves to get into this state. He then, as a Benedictine monk, looks at the life and teachings of the 5th century St Benedict to see how they may relate to us all in our everyday living. In particular he asks how we can find a space beyond the demands of our lives which will bring energy and peace. He calls this space Sanctuary – it is a sacred space and a place of refuge. The search for this space in our lives is essential and Benedict´s rule for his monks is clear from the start, the basic starting point for entering sacred sanctuary is the quality of your day to day dealings with other people. You cannot mistreat people one moment and then find sanctuary the next. We need to see the sacred in our daily living. That is why the motto of the Benedictine community is PAX, the word for peace, surrounded by a crown of thorns. There is no peace without sacrifice. It is also why when the monks or nuns walk into church for their worship in twos they first bow east towards the altar and then to each other, recognizing and reverencing Christ in each other. Benedict´s Rule for the brethren spells it out: “You are not to act in anger or nurse a grudge. Rid your heart of all deceit. Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when somebody needs your love. Bind yourself to no oath lest it prove false but speak the truth with heart and tongue”. As a Christian Benedict speaks to his fellow Christians: “We should try to be the first to show respect to each other, supporting with the greatest patience one another´s weakness of body or behaviour”.
The other great lesson of Benedictine life is the importance of prayer. I was recently at a Benedictine monastery with over 40 monks and they prayed as a community six times a day, beginning at 6am. Benedict called this the divine work. Their prayer life is based on the recital and singing of the psalms and on listening to readings from scripture and the early church. Prayer is God´s search for us as well as being our search for him. It is the desire to set our life on course with God´s agenda. We need to re-evaluate silence, reflection, and prayer as instrumental in our lives if we are to understand something of God, something of ourselves. We need to pray as discovery.
The abbot writes in his book Finding Sanctuary: “If your life is centred on yourself, on your own desires and ambitions, then asserting those desires and ambitions is the way you try to be true to yourself. So self-assertion becomes the only way of self-expression. If you simply assert your own desires, you may have the illusion of being true to yourself. But in fact all your efforts to make yourself more real and more yourself have the opposite effect: they create a more and more false self. This self-assertion is false because it cuts you off from other people. If your own desires are your guide in life then you end up imposing yourself on other people and then you start demanding their affection, which can only be given, not demanded….The monastic tradition insists that as we make room for stillness and prayer, new possibilities in life are opened up and one of these is responding more generously to the needs of others.”
In other words: in order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be. Humility is maturity.
I have to tell you that, personally, my Christian life has been resuscitated many times by visits and retreats to Benedictine monasteries and abbeys. There is something very authentic to me about their way of Christian living and it is far from an escape – their hospitality is incredible as is their work and living in community. Perhaps before the year is out you might book a day or two´s retreat and enter into their life of prayer, letting it wash over you, wash inside you. Benedict called his way “a little rule for beginners” for all those who “yearn for life and long to see good days”. Prayer and community, just as we heard in the Acts of the Apostles reading.
Jesus prayed, “Father, they are in the world…Holy Father, protect them”.
