SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY after PENTECOST (26)
26th September 2004
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“If ideas are just patterns of nerve impulses, then how can one say that any idea (including the idea of materialism itself) is superior to any other? One pattern of nerve impulses cannot be truer or less true than another pattern, any more than a toothache can be truer or less true than another toothache.” In other words, human judgment and evaluation, which are necessary to determine truth and error (including the truth or error of materialism), presuppose a world of moral meaning that transcends the merely material. The very effort to demonstrate the truth of materialism thus refutes materialism.
A PRAYER FOR THE WEEK
Lord, you have given me this space for prayer: fill it with your gifts of grace; fill it with manifestations of your truth, with holy thoughts and inspirations, with the communion of peace. Occupy it with the work of love, to ask your mercies upon those I love, upon all my acquaintances, upon all in need, upon all whom you love. Overshadow me with your Spirit, with that light that is you. Banish distraction, inattention, coldness of heart. Make my eyes to see, my ears to hear, my tongue to speak, my soul to be still, and then be merciful to my prayer and to me, a sinner. Amen.
Based on a prayer by Eric Milner White
MEDICARE
An overweight man went to the Medical Centre to see if he could do anything about his obesity. The doctor gave him pills to be taken every night for two months with a promise of a loss of two stone. The first night he took the pill and dreamed the most marvellous dream, being on a beautiful island, inhabited by the most gorgeous girls, all scantily dressed, whom he proceeded to chase round the island. The result was a pound gone in the morning. This happened every night for two months and the two stone was dutifully lost. Another man, equally fat, asked him how he had done it. Off he went to the same doctor for the same prescription - but his dreams were of a rocky island on which he was chased every night by horrible creatures, but the result was the same - two stones lost. He went to the doctor to ask why he had such horrible dreams and the first man such good ones. The doctor's reply was: " Oh well, you see, he was a private patient!"
LOSS OF FAITH
Fr Andrew Neaum
One of the greatest and most moving of nineteenth century poems is Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”. I love it almost beyond telling. The poem is set in Dover, and Arnold is staying at an inn with his bride. They are on the way to honeymoon in Europe. He stands looking out of a window over Dover Beach and the English Channel on a lovely evening....
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, & fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
He goes on to reflect upon what Sophocles made of the same sad sound of waves on a beach of the Ægean Sea many centuries before, and then pens the most famous of the poem’s lines.....
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, & round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.........
The poem is suffused with sadness, regret and unease at the ebbing of Christian Faith among the intelligentsia of his day and in himself.
How far removed from Arnold’s sensitive regret and unease at Faith’s retreat, is the response shown today to its continuing decline by so many gurus in the media. Faith is widely decried, diminished and despised. Its demise is predicted and anticipated with relish. The influence of the Christian Faith upon our civilization is portrayed as largely inimical, and it is not infrequently argued that loss of faith will improve the world enormously. Behind much of the apparent fervour and glee displayed in publicising the Church’s failures, behind much of the hounding of a Governor General who happened to be a bishop, behind much of the chronicling of sexually wayward priests and of the absurdities of fanaticism and fundamentalism, lies an ignorant hatred of the Christian Faith that I find disturbing, annoying and extremely stupid.
Our civilization arises out of Christianity. Christianity has provided not only most of its foundation stones, but also much of its cement. The continuing decline in Faith will have and indeed is having incalculable consequences.
To replace as role models the extravagantly self-sacrificing Saints of old with the extravagantly self-indulgent pop stars of today is bound to have enormous and almost certainly regrettable consequences. To swap sacrificing Love’s great symbol the Cross for the logo of MacDonald’s or Nike likewise. A retreat from the awe and reverence associated with traditional worship of God, into navel gazing, self obsession and narcissism could well be as dangerous as it is deplorable. Even today’s widespread concern for the environment is based less upon its God given beauty and intrinsic worth, than it is upon a carefully orchestrated fear for our future that is as essentially selfish (and so no less absurd) as primitive Faith’s use of the fear of hell and damnation to frighten people into goodness!
The catalogue of reasons for regretting Faith’s decline rather than rejoicing at it could be extended for pages. I resist the temptation in order to point to an irony that arises out of Arnold’s great poem. The only answer that Arnold in his poem finds to the sadness that arises within him at the Sea of Faith’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar...”, is human love.....
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle & flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Well, human love might indeed in Arnold’s day have still seemed to provide some sort of consolation and realistic substitute for love of God, but only because the Christian view of married love as lifelong, exclusive, faithful and sacrificial was still largely aspired to and not infrequently adhered to! Now, however, the retreating tide of faith has washed that view of marriage and human love away. Wherein then lies any consolation in the brave new liberal world of our faithless intelligentsia? Nowhere! So stand firm in the faith!
WALKING THE SECOND MILE
David K. Reynolds, therapist and author of a number of books....... (talks of) "walking the second mile". You are asked (or ordered) to walk one mile for someone else's sake; the second mile you walk because you have chosen to do so.
You are asked to help clear up for an hour after a neighbour's house has been burgled. Instead, you work with your neighbour until the clearing up is finished.
You are asked by your boss to do a task you loathe. You do it, and voluntarily do something else you dislike almost as much.
You are fed up with your partner's habit of sitting in a chair and calling out to ask if you are thinking of putting on some coffee. You are ready to shout, "Put it on yourself!" Instead, not only do you make coffee, you put the pot and mug on a tray, with a plate of biscuits, and flowers in a vase.
What is happening in each of these scenarios - and your own life will present you with dozens most days - is that you are exercising free will. You will almost certainly feel stronger for doing so.
It helps to know that you are not "walking the extra mile" for the other person's sake only, although to do so can be a powerful expression of respect or love or concern. You are walking that extra mile to express that you can make choices - that the quality of your life is in your own hands - and that you are choosing positively, rather than negatively. Every choice that expresses love is a positive choice. Every choice that recoils from love is negative. Experiencing this through the appropriate giving of time, money, concern, is an utterly direct and uncluttered way to gain a sense of centredness and power within your own life.
Reynold's unusual therapy is Zen-based, but in this teaching he is drawing on the example of Jesus Christ, who urged his followers to carry the Roman soldier's pack not only for a single mile, as Jews were then obliged to do, but to carry it for just as long again - this time free of the weight of duties, orders, or obligations.
In Saint Matthew's Gospel we learn more about this therapeutic tool: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain [my italics]."
Reynolds gives two examples of "walking the second mile" that may seem extreme on first glance. In Constructive Living, he writes: "A young teenager complained about his stepfather's disinterest and strictness. I suggested he shine his stepfather's shoes twice a week. A middle-aged woman wondered how to get her wealthy brother to return thousands of dollars he had owed her for years. I advised her to send him still another fifty dollars along with a letter of apology for pressuring him to return the money all these years."
Commenting on those suggestions, Reynolds says: "Servitude and subjugation were the farthest things from my mind ... Service and voluntary self-sacrifice are quite different matters from servitude and subjugated passivity. One who walks a second mile may change the person whose load he carries. That result would be fine. But he is certain to change himself. That result is dependable. Control returns to his own hands. He frees himself once more."
Then Reynolds asks: "Do you see why choosing to be a slave makes one free? Why choosing, to
throw good money after bad makes one rich?"
MYTH
Myths are never true or false, they are only living or dead....The myth is not there to answer but to illuminate. Peter Stanford