Sunday 22nd July 2007TRINITY VII
Fr David Cherry
Genesis 18 : 1 – 10a ; Colossians 1 : 15 – 28 ; Luke 10 : 38 – 42
“Mary has chosen the better part”
Jesus is leading us deeper, deeper than ‘the doing’ to the place, the spiritual disposition from which all action proceeds – what we could call a ‘contemplative stance’.
Anthony Gormley, in his extensive exhibition at the Hayward, places
the human form in a space. He says he is not so much concerned
with the human form itself but with the space around it; what the space
looks like by placing a human form there. So if you go outside
onto a balcony you will notice his figures on top of buildings round
about, near and far. Inside you can go into a cloud in a glass
box and find yourself completely lost. In other sculptures
made of steel wire, the space that holds a floating human form is articulated
in atom-like cells. He is focussing on the space around us. It’s
disorientating – the human form is being used to articulate
something other than itself …. one begins to contemplate…
Naturally, with a theological mind working away, the verse from St Paul
came to mind: ….all things were created through him and for
him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
What is Mary doing at Jesus feet?
In last week’s gospel, in answer to the lawyer he asks what he
must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus asks what he reads in the
Law. The lawyer replies; “You must love the Lord your God
with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and
with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” And
then Jesus gives the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The parable illustrates the second part of the Law injunction: loving your neighbour as yourself.
Surely, we think, this is what Martha is doing: loving her
neighbour. But no, a rebuke: Martha you worry and fret
about so many things…
In today’s gospel we are invited to contemplate – as at a
disorientating exhibition – to see ourselves in a new
context. What is loving God with all your heart, with all your
soul, with all your strength and with all your mind?
Jesus is leading us deeper, deeper than ‘the doing’ to the
place, the spiritual disposition from which all action proceeds –
what we could call a ‘contemplative stance’.
Without this foundation, without this kind of prayer, Christians run
into the danger of thinking and behaving as if Christianity is about
moralising; about what you have to do – as if that is what
Christianity is: a mere keeping of injunctions and being good as if
what I do is first and foremost. From all moralists and all
moralising, good Lord deliver us. It is a fretting over
piffle.
What is Mary doing at Jesus’ feet? Or rather, we can ask, what is happening to Mary?
Mary is finding her life being reorientated in reference to her Master
and Creator, the one who is there before all things and who holds her
very life in being; the one who is there before we arrive; the one as
St Paul says elsewhere, quoting a Greek poet, ‘in whom we live
and move and have our being.’
The heart of believing in God is to experience God; and in that
relationship that God has with you and all people, to begin to find a
freedom. It is, I suppose, a kind of unravelling of the musts and
oughts, the unwinding of compulsions and the things we might insist on;
a subverting of normal life.
When you are faithful in silent
meditation … You will slowly experience yourself in a deeper
way. Because in this useless hour in which you do nothing
‘important’ or urgent, you have to come to terms with your
basic powerlessness, you have to feel your fundamental inability to
solve your or other people’s problems or to change the
world… You will find that your many obligations become less
urgent, crucial and important and lose their power over you. They
will leave you free during your time with God and take their
appropriate place in your life.
And we find ourselves rather resistant to having normal life
disorientated; what we think is important; our assumptions under
interrogation.
Gilbert Meilander writes : It is the
free relinquishing of our plans and projects in order to receive what
cannot be planned, intended, or manipulated: loving union with God.
Many of us through life grow naturally tired of moralists and
ideals. Some discover the God who is inviting us into
relationship and to the discovery of what that is like. We
find other things to fret about.
The ‘contemplative stance’ is about freedom; what the
saints and spiritual teachers have called
‘detachment’. When God impinges on us, through
art, through changes in life it is disorientating (sometimes
infuriating). The second half of today’s first lesson finds
Sarah laughing at the prospect of having a child at her advanced
age. Disorientation, surprise.
Summer – when it truly comes – is a time of recess. Allowing the fretting to recede.
How will we cultivate a contemplative stance? Novels, art,
recreation, wondering, dreaming – meditation. In various
ways let us allow ourselves to be disorientated so that we might
discover ourselves in a greater space to see our lives anew; to see and
feel the God who is before all things and find with Mary ourselves held with all Creation in being; growing in the awareness that she has chosen the better part. Amen