St. Gregory’s Church Woodstock
Sunday, 19 July, 2009, SeventhSunday after Pentecost
The Rev’d Susan Auchincloss
These are sobering readings for a person in my
position. Anyone who aspires to be a spiritual leader gets fair warning in
today's first reading. God expects us to nourish his flock and keep it together.
I can't help but ask myself, am I doing that? When I first went to Hawaii I
marveled at the lush green pastures, and commented on the cattle, how well fed
they were. “If the cattle had only this grass,” I was told, “they would starve
to death.” It turned out, that grass was all water. So I worry: am I preaching
truth or am I watering it down to where God's flock is being starved? This
morning I want to share my thinking about being a faithful shepherd.
First, I looked at the Gospel reading. The twelve have just returned from their
first missionary journey. Although the Gospel does not name the place, we may
assume that they went to Capernaum, a small village on the shore of the Sea of
Galilee. Seeing how drained they were, and knowing they would get no peace in
the village, Jesus told them to pile into one of the fishing boats. He thought
they could sail to a secluded cove and enjoy some solitude. But that part of the
Sea of Galilee lies in a bowl of hills. From anywhere on the hillside you can
see a boat and guess where it is going. Throngs of people saw the boat,
recognized who was in it, and ran for that cove. Imagine being in that boat,
rounding a headland, and finding – not an isolated beach as you expected, but an
early day Coney Island.
I asked myself, what drew that crowd? Why did so many run to where they knew
Jesus would be? It seems to me that only a basic need could have drawn them – a
basic need that was not being met. We are told that food and shelter come first
among our drives, but I wonder. Perhaps we really hunger and thirst for meaning
in our lives even more than we hunger for food and drink. For instance, later in
this same chapter Mark tells us that 5,000 people lingered in that deserted
place long past the time they should have been heading home for food and
shelter. They ran and they stayed, because Jesus was feeding their souls –
filling their spiritual bellies.
What was he telling them? Certainly it was something different from what God
complained about through Jeremiah. Jesus drew the people; those shepherds
scattered the people. What pasture, so to speak, did Jesus lead them to,
that satisfied the hunger of their souls? What did he teach them that answered
those aching questions, “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” Whatever he said, it seemed
to me that the answer would hold good 2,000 years later, or even 20,000 years.
I'll get to that in a moment, but first let me guess what the pseudo shepherds
in Jeremiah might have been saying.
Their answers probably ran along three basic lines, focusing on the body, the
mind or the emotions. What would these answers sound like translated into
today's idiom? First, they suggest we turn to our bodies for meaning; that is,
our physical activities. Take self care: some people become vegans, or locavors
– that is, those who eat foods grown locally. Some take up a healthful body
practice, such as Yoga or Tai Chi. It could also be the care of others. Mother
Theresa springs to mind, a tireless giver of her physical strength to help the
poorest of the poor. Whether we do these things to care for our own health or
for the well-being of others, these are acts of compassion, and they truly count
as basic values, not to be despised.
As another source of meaning, they suggest we turn to our minds. Most of us feel
stagnant if we are not learning and growing intellectually. We hear about
life-long learning, as if it were something novel, brought on by the pace of
technological advances; but isn't the quest for understanding innate in us?
Don't we seek truth for its own sake, quite apart from any sense of security it
gives or power? I think of Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner in two fields,
doing research and publishing scientific papers into his 90's. Seeking
knowledge, insight, understanding and truth also count as basic values, and not
to be scorned.
Finally, they suggest we turn to emotion to find meaning. Many of us immerse
ourselves in one of the arts, either as a creator or an appreciator. Music, for
instance, can take us beyond words and thoughts. Think of art's power to lay
bare injustices and make us feel their ugliness. Or its power to instill hope,
compassion, or sometimes, fear. A friend of mine is an Episcopal nun, now in her
80's, who holds a PhD in composition from Julliard. She told me that she had to
study the compositions of Bach in small doses, because she found the sheer
beauty of them almost unbearable. So immersing ourselves in art and aesthetics
makes a third basic value.
These three areas of our being – body, mind, and emotion – interlock and make up
the stuff of life. They do not, however, make life worth living. In our quest
for meaning, the three answers I just gave do not add up to what Jesus must have
been telling the people. They are modern-day examples of what Jeremiah's priests
might have said. You get a sense of how these answers fall short by asking
yourself a variation on this question. Do I live to eat or eat to live? If I
live to eat I am living with only a fraction of my whole self. So, too, with
answers centered on the body: do I live to serve or serve to live? Doesn't it
feel somehow inadequate to say I live to serve? To say I serve to live, on the
other hand, implies something larger than my serving. Likewise with the mind: do
I live in order to learn, or learn in order to live? Again, the second answer
implies that living is larger than learning. So too with the emotional life. I
dance in order to live; I paint in order to live; I go to the opera in order to
live. Okay. Is there anything we live to do? What do we
live to do?
We live to pray. We live to worship. Let me quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
from his book, Quest for God. “Prayer is not a need but an ontological
necessity, an act that constitutes the very essence of [humankind]. [The
one] who has never prayed is not fully human.” In other words we pray in order
to become whole. We pray in order to realize the fullness of who we are, and
that fullness goes beyond everything we do, think or feel – beyond anything we
may accomplish. Through prayer we become aware of the life of Christ in us – not
an alien life, not an added life, but the real depth and breadth of our own true
life.
For example, I read recently that as a young man, the Russian writer, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, had allied himself with the rising socialist movement in Russia, and
scorned religion. In 1849 the secret police rounded up the group of student
radicals to which he belonged, and caught Dostoevsky among them. He was
sentenced to five years' hard labor in Siberia. In 1854 he returned to St.
Petersburg, now a devout Christian. What had turned him around? As he told it,
it was the simple faith in Jesus Christ of the people he lived among in the
gulag. Privation, illness and exhaustion kept them from almost any
accomplishment other than bare survival; yet they retained their dignity thanks
to their devotion.
Devotion to God, however we express it, answers the question, “Who am I?” “Why
am I here?” Once we have that in place the rest can follow – all our activities
and accomplishments in the realms of doing, thinking and feeling. As long as
none of them are being asked to carry the full burden of meaning, they become
the substance of our lives, but not the goal. They are like love letters.
Suppose I compose the most beautiful love letter I know how to write, but I do
it simply for the sake of the letter itself; won't my soul wither in time? I
need the beloved. In all we do we need the beloved. Not any beloved, but the
beloved. Prayer, we could say, sends the love letter.
That, it seems to me, is what Jesus was teaching the people: the proper ordering
of our devotion. He was teaching the secret of being fully human. The secret of
that strange peace and joy that stand up to any gulag. The secret that meets
God's criteria for spiritual leadership; that is, to nourish God's flock and
keep it together, and not only outwardly as a parish community, but inwardly,
also, in our soul's integrity. The secret is prayer.