20th August 200611th Sunday after Trinity
Fr David Cherry
Proverbs 9 : 1-6; Ephesians 5 : 15-20; John 6 : 51-58
“Wisdom hath builded her house, she has hewn out her seven pillars…Come eat of my bread and drink of my wine which I have mingled. Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding.” Proverbs 9
Face the void where God can give you this gift
In this great season we call Trinitytide we are invited to
contemplate what the life of God is like, the life of Persons in
Communion. The Church, a gathered community of Persons is called
to become what we contemplate. Contemplating what God is like is
meant to have an effect on the way we are and the way we relate to one
another.
In the Collect we asked that God would ‘make (us) to ask such things as shall please thee.’
It is a prayer for Wisdom. We are praying that we, who have been
given the life ‘after the Spirit’, born again into the life
of the Trinity, may be so in-spirited (inspired) to ask wisely.
In the book of Wisdom there are these beautiful words:
Give me the wisdom that sits by your throne…
Send her forth from the holy heavens
And from the throne of your glory send her
That she may be with me and toil and that I may learn what is pleasing to you….
A wise person may be thought to be someone who has all the
answers. But, of course, we do realise that this is probably the
apogee of foolishness. Certainty, it is often said, is the
opposite of faith. Perhaps ready-made answers are the opposite of
true Wisdom. We live among sound-bites, quick quips, witty
put-downs, spin. Wisdom has been reduced to cleverness.
“Wisdom hath builded her house” and it takes time - a life-time.
The forming influences of our lives shape who we are: the people and
relationships; class (let’s not pretend that it doesn’t
still exist), race, nationality; clubs and associations, political
parties and church parties too - they give us our common sense, our
assumptions and expectations, aspirations, the stances and opinions we
take as self-evidently true. We ingest others, consume their
opinions, their way of being – they become our own.
A friend once told me I read the Guardian too much – as if he
stood on some kind of neutral territory unaffected by anything he
read. Teasingly, he added: “it was in the newspaper so it
must be true!”
The process is natural and good but it depends on who our models are,
what we are ingesting. Too easily we are entrapped, prevented
from seeing further than our self-interest. In the language of
the saints, these are ‘attachments’. Attachments
prevent freedom, the breathing space to hear and see another and where
they’re coming from. St Ignatius talks about
‘indifference’, an indifference which is positive in the
sense that it is freedom from being bound by one’s assumptions,
being able to see them for what they are, being able to be reflective,
being able to be self-critical. This is at the heart of becoming
more humane, more human, wise – what we call true
‘holiness.’
In his book Writing in the Dust, our Archbishop, Rowan Williams, writing within days of 9/11 wrote these words:
“Simon Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it
filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the
presence of the void. The more closely we bind God to our own
purposes, use God to help ourselves avoid our own destructiveness, the
more we fill up the void (p.11) . ….” This may
sound a bit like "count to ten before responding"; "engage your head
before you open your mouth." But it is much deeper. The
archbishop goes on: In the presence of the void…..
“we have the freedom to think what we actually want, to probe our
desires for some kind of outcome that is more than just mirroring what
we have experienced…. It means trying to pull apart the longing
to re-establish the sense of being in control and the longing to find a
security that is shared. In plainer English, it means being very
suspicious of any action that brings a sense of release, irrespective
of what it achieves; very wary of doing something so that it looks as
if something is getting done. It means acknowledging and
using the breathing space; and also acknowledging and using the rage
and vengefulness as a way of sensing a little of where the violence
comes from….” pp 25&26
It is here in indifference, a state of freedom, equilibrium, where one
notices what it is we really want, how we are pulled this way and that
by our attachments; where we notice our hidden motives and inclination
to be defensive that Wisdom is able to do her work. If we will
face the void and notice our inclination to leap at an answer, and yet
resist foreclosure of an argument, hold back from asserting an
unquestioned opinion, we will come by Wisdom, this precious gift of God
which makes possible a life of Persons in Communion.
The Church is in desperate need of it as much as our society and the
nations – space, breathing space, freedom for Wisdom to build her
house.
The letter to the Ephesians this morning bids us ‘to make the
most of the time’. This can also be translated as
‘redeem the time.’ Face the void where God can
give you this gift, redeem it from the fears and anxieties, the terror
that all one can hope to do is make sure you are secure enough.
Redeem the time that seems to be running out towards death so that you
can come into an understanding of God’s will for you which is
‘a life without end.’
In an article called Blessed are the Reconcilers by Daniel O’Leary (The Tablet 18th August), that saintly priest in Yorkshire, writes about this process of redeeming the time:
“When I pray to be a reconciler I’m praying for the death
of my all-powerful ego. I’m praying for the grace to
transform, within my own body and soul, within the most redeemed part
of me, the sins into graces, the curses into blessings the destructive
forces into life-enhancing gifts. … So often in our daily
routine of getting hurt we add force to the negative energies, by
turning them round and redirecting them with still greater velocity
back to the source from which they came…. We are
indebted to the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr for the phrase
‘what we don’t transform, we transmit.’
Doing this, God’s People can be Good News for the world.
Here in the Eucharist, you and I are exposed to Another, to ingest
another, Our Lord Jesus Christ, so as to be shaped and formed by Him
and his life. Jesus lives by
the Father. He is shaped through his relationship with the
Father. He enables us to see what God is like and his Spirit is
given to inhabit and empower us to be like him for the sake of others.
In the midst of the confusion, the power games – the Jews strove,
they argued among themselves, affronted by the claims of Jesus. To them
he declares: ‘Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and
Drink his Blood, ye have no life in you.’ Unless you ingest
me, unless I live in you and you in me; unless you find my life
bubbling up in you, you will never be free. You will never know
eternity, you will be lost in fear and anxiety, the imagination of your
hearts, living as foolish men, swayed by every wind of strange doctrine
and opinion; living in enmity and threatening one another. Make
your home in me. Feed on my life; ingest my life. Live by me.
Here we come to Holy Communion to allow God’s life to be shaped
in us; to redeem the time, to be drawn into his very life where Wisdom
builds her house….
“Come eat of my bread and drink of my wine which I have
mingled. Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of
understanding.”