Lost and don't know where to go

Thursday night biking home I was stopped by a woman wearing a Canada Post uniform asking me where certain streets were, including my own. Nothing strange except I continued on my way home and about 10 minutes later she came up the street delivering mail and I found out from her she'd been asked to do this round at 11am. I noticed it was now 6.30pm.

I am surprised at her devotion to duty to get the letters delivered but surprised that she had no map book or guide to help her. She was clearly wandering around trying find the streets and those she asked about weren't small little roads. I wonder how many people are wandering through life without a reliable map or even better a guide.

A spiritual director is more of a companion who walks with you and points out the presence of God or refers you to pages in the guide book. A mentor tends to work more intellectually to develop and support growth. When looking around I still don't understand why so many rely on peers rather than searching someone older or more mature to help them. I am still blessed to have many people to learn from and guide me. People who don't tell me what to do but point to God.

Downsizing

During a time of sharing this week I was amazed for a moment how many of us were feeling challenged or at least considering issues surrounding the quantity of stuff we have accumulated. Somehow confronted by the realities of our own mortality, the members of our group were considering what we really need in life. I remain challenged especially because my great cleanup is stalled again. Put another way, at the moment I'm wondering would I want my friends and family have to expend huge amounts of energy and resource dealing with all this stuff.

Somehow over the years I've had to help 3 elderly ladies move and all were traumatic because of the quantity of stuff. One woman had a single room 20 feet by 12 feet (6m x 4m) however there was a mountain of bundled newspapers and magazines and boxes about 5 feet tall (1.7m) in the centre of the room and it occupied close to 75 percent of the floor space. She was moving to a small room in sheltered housing and in the end I was throwing bundles out of the window rather than carrying them down out into the street.

I know I need to clear but the will to keep going is finding it difficult at the moment. I know how difficult it was for many of my relatives to let go of stuff and I struggle. But it has to happen if I am to move forwards in life.

Ministry and its cost

Every time we make the decision to love someone, we open ourselves to great suffering, because those we most love cause us not only great joy but also great pain. The greatest pain comes from leaving. When the child leaves home, when the husband or wife leaves for a long period of time or for good, when the beloved friend departs to another country or dies ... the pain of the leaving can tear us apart. Still, if we want to avoid the suffering of leaving, we will never experience the joy of loving. And love is stronger than fear, life stronger than death, hope stronger than despair. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking. Henri Nouwen Bread for the Journey

The trouble working with internationals is many leave or become busy and distracted and disappear. Saying goodbye is always tough and more the so when you know that it is unlikely you'll meet again. All the hours and time invested in developing relationship with them means that they take a piece of you with them. Alfred Lord Tennyson in one of his poems wrote :

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. (Section 27)

This is from section 27 of 'In Memoriam A.H.H.' and the initials standing for Arthur Henry Hallam. Hallam was Tennyson's close friend at Cambridge who died aged 22. The poem is more a collection than a cohesive unit and Tennyson uses the analogy of a father losing his son, a mother losing her son or a woman losing her boyfriend to try and understand grief. The sections after 27 start with Christmas and then reflect on the death of Lazarus in the context of the passion of Easter .

Yet still in this age of technology an email or a phone call out of the blue is a special moment. It feels like a moment of new life and hope and an affirmation that the relationship was and is not a mere shadow.

My own dim life should teach me this,
That life shall live for evermore,
Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is; (section 29)

In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Hebrew 2:10

Some happier news

Last Friday I wrote about my friend's daughter who was sick with dengue fever which took her father's godson's life. At last some good news that her blood platelet levels are what they should be and she has recovered and is going back to school. A frightening time if you are a parent.

Today I learned about the pain of Alzheimers, not for the person who has it but for the family. We talk about the sufferer as the patient but they have memory loss, cannot do things, lose language and lose all sense of place and time. But family has to live with the memories as they were, the things they did and said and know that the present time is nothing like the past. However even here there can be moments of grace a minute or two of recognition and memory.

Recently I started thinking again of M who died in February taking her own life. It's strange the depression and desolation has changed in my memory. It is almost a year since I met her for the first time on campus and she breezed into life at the college. She was not able to receive or accept the love and care offered by so many and although there is some heartache there is also a feeling of hope and new life, no paralysis but reaching for new life and new hope and new purpose. I remember her well and her memory drives me out there again.

The void or chasm of self

If you know what you’re good at and you’re reasons for doing it are right, you have to shut [everybody else] out and say ‘I don’t care, ... I don’t have to convince everyone else in the world to be like me. I’m happy with who I am. I don’t have to be unhappy because I can’t convince the world to be for or against something. Steve Wozniak IDF 2008

Sunday morning I was wondering about God's answer to Moses for a name and he got the reply "I am who I am". This brings reflections about ontology and that statement "In the beginning was the word" literally was the logos the same Greek word as"ology". Descartes famous Cogito ergo sum marks a definitive shift in Western thought. "I think therefore I am" almost usurps the divine statement, that my consciousness defines my very existence. Many of us live this way however moving this along to my decision making or even my consuming defines that I EXIST! My latest purchase or my latest gadget is who I am. Or my job or career is who I am.

Yet this removes our definition in the divine human relationship - child of God to self-definition. Cofounder of Apple Inc, Steve Wozniak's determination is good though rather individualistic and self determining. In the end we are responsible for what we say or do. There is no escaping blame to something else whether genetics or emotional history. The phenomenon of swarming crimes seems to be on the increase almost as a way of escaping identification and also escaping responsibility. But in the final accounting what we did or did not do will be reckoned.

If we co-live our lives or co-author our lives with God then the responsibility is not so heavy. When we live our lives for ourselves then somehow the life is never full rather it is empty. I think Heidegger has this concept of Dasein which is the mundane our average everydayness, which is in a sense our embededness in the world, as if we are thrown into this state.
Whether Heidegger or Sartre, existentialist philosophy names a human dilemma in understanding who we are when all that is left is our self definition.

A gift as representative

Thus, the challenge of Marcel's philosophy -- the challenge of living by a set of values at odds with the world of the problematical -- will be difficult. It involves the commitment of one's entire life and of one's being, and might bring pain and rejection... For those of us who are heirs to the legacy of the atomic age and of mass death -- the twin scourges of the century -- the call to repent, to change how we think and act, has never been louder. John Barich Reflection on Marcel's 'On the Ontological Mystery'

Sunday morning I was asked for the titles of some books suitable to give to people in certain circumstances. I was immediately troubled because sometimes the book is a substitute for being with a person in their current situation and therefore can be a cheap way out. Sometimes it is the setting aside of personal responsibility to share who God really is to me. But most of all any book I give as a gift is my representative. I should have read it and consider it personally suitable.

Gabriel Marcel has been instrumental in my thinking and he introduced the idea that the greatest gift you can give to another is to be truly present to that person. To be present is not merely being there to listen but to be available to that person. Marcel stressed that this gift cannot be possessed or acquired . Even to give it requires personal awareness through the process of recollection and by establishing authentic relationships with other people.

Over the years a few people have given superficial gifts of books, some of which turned out very significant and others which caused pain. Giving books that offer solutions to problems that the other doesn't think they have is most unhelpful and certainly no substitute for giving your time to be with them. Our world is full of the quick cheap fix and lacking in those willing to go the second mile.

If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. Matthew 5:41-42

The garden of the human soul

It is almost a year since I started blogging and I am always wondering whether I'm repeating myself. I don't think I've written about this before. This Sunday morning I was reminded of Teresa of Avila's analogy of the human soul being like a garden. She described the stages of the spiritual life in terms of stages of prayer by using the analogy of watering the garden. It is a beautiful organic metaphor.

The four methods are sort of steps or stages by which a garden can be watered: drawing water from a well, obtaining water by means of an irrigation channel or hose, letting water flow from a stream, and receiving the rain directly from the heavens.

Drawing water from a well is where we take the initiative to place ourselves in the presence of God. Obtaining water from a channel or hose is the prayer of quiet which involves receiving and understanding consolation. Water from a stream where we find rest only in God for the stream comes to the place and is not directed. But this is at the same time both active and contemplative, where both doing good works and being with God come together. The fourth stage is like gentle rain watering the garden. This final stage is the state of mystical union with God.

But what is this water. I struggled this morning because I couldn't think of a passage which linked water with the Word of God which is what was suggested. I remembered Jesus talks about the consequences of receiving living water with the Samaritan woman. However the medieval spiritual writers associated water with the love of God, not the Bible. Has a whole history of interpretation been supplanted by the assumption that the Word of God can be used to understand the water metaphor in reading the Bible?

Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." John 4:13-14