Jim Cogley: Postings 18-24 July

Tue 18^th July

The Professional Worrier

A man told his friend that he was up to his neck in debt. He had lost his job, his car had been repossessed and he was way behind on mortgage repayments. However he was not in the least bit worried. His friend was curious to know why since he had every reason to be. ‘I have hired a professional worrier’, he was told, and he does all the worrying for me, and so I don’t have to think about it. His friend said, ‘That’s fantastic and how much does this professional charge?’ ‘Fifty thousand a year’, he was told. And where on earth are you going to find that kind of money’, he asked. ‘I don’t know’ came the reply, ‘that’s his worry!’ Casting our cares upon the Lord is in effect to have him as our professional worrier.

Wed 19^th July

That Troublesome Trio

One Sunday recently was a day that started bad. I awoke with a list of shoulds, oughts and musts. At 7am, ‘I should read my Bible’, but I didn’t. Later, ‘I ought to spend an hour in prayer’, but feeling tired I rolled over and went back to sleep. Later, ‘I must get up and go for a walk’, but outside it sounded like rain so I turned over yet again and went back to sleep. Before going to say Mass I briefly went on my knees and said, ‘Lord this is a bad start, and so far I have done nothing right and I certainly don’t deserve your love, yet, I believe you love me no less now than if I had spent the last three hours praying.’ As the day unfolded one positive event after another began to happen and each awakened within my heart a deep sense of Divine presence and it felt as if the Lord was confirming a truth I had often preached, that ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’. From a bad start and a real sense of unworthiness the day was one of being surprised by the joy and the love of the Lord.

Thurs 20^th July

Back to Basics

Still reflecting on the Sunday experience mentioned in yesterday’s posting of waking to the tyrannical trilogy chorus of ‘should’ ‘ought’ and ‘must’ ringing in my ear, I felt I was relearning one of the most fundamental lessons of the spiritual journey. Had I listened to and obeyed those voices and then experienced the love of the Lord I would have, at some deep level, felt deserving of it. Herein lies a subtle ego trap that denies us the reality of what we so badly want to experience. The ego loves to take credit and in a myriad of ways. If I pray and do all the right things, then God will surely love me, have I not deserved it? Wrong! God loves me even when I do all the wrong things, and this is the surprise of grace. It comes into our heart precisely at the point where we feel we are most unworthy and least deserving of it. Paradoxically, it is when we think we deserve it that we feel most deprived.

Fri 21^st July

Praying to Myself

The parable of the Tax collector and the Pharisee is a great example of how Divine grace is dispensed. The Pharisee is very religious but in a very egocentric way. His journey to the front of the Synagogue is itself a statement of his sense of entitlement on the basis of his impeccable lifestyle. Notice his ‘I’ statements when he comes to pray. ‘I thank you God that I am not like the rest of mankind … I fast, I pray … I pay my tithes … I am not crooked or adulterous and particularly I am not like the tax collector down at the back. Interestingly, we are told he prayed to himself, the portals of grace remained closed. Yet when the tax collector prayed, the one who had done nothing right, his prayer was heard and he went home justified. One was disappointed that he didn’t get what he believed he deserved, while the other, who knew he deserved nothing, was surprised by God’s overflowing mercy towards him.

Sat 22^nd July

A Mother’s Prayers

A colleague who is a late vocation tells the story of his early years. He grew up in a religious home but rebelled against religious practice. At eighteen he left home and his mother, through her tears, promised to pray for him daily. He took the boat for London and teamed up with some mates who were already there. One befriended him who was into burglary and brought him on a job. They were disturbed and deep down he felt this was not for him. Next, he tried drugs and felt good. Returning to his supplier he looked in his face and didn’t like what he saw and decided that this was not a road he wanted to go down either. Later, he met a girl, whom he fell in love with. However, she was involved in prostitution. She gave him a book of a sexually explicit nature and its sordid nature turned him off that way of life. He wondered if his mother’s prayers were being answered but he was still not prepared to admit that they were. He was still in a rebellious mood and lost contact with home. One day a neighbour who had just arrived saw him in a bar and passed him a note. It was from his heartbroken mother reassuring him that she was still praying for him even though she didn’t know his whereabouts or even if he was still alive. Finally, his heart melted and he cried as the gift of his mother’s prayers awakened within him the Love of God. It was from there that his life took on an entirely new direction that eventually led him into priesthood.

Sun 23^rd July

Wheat and Weeds

When someone says to me that they don’t have much time for the Catholic Church, I usually reply by saying, ‘There are a lot of things about Church that I don’t have much time for either but there’s still more than enough that I do agree with and am prepared to invest my life into’. We are part of a Church system that so often didn’t teach what Christ taught and on many occasions got what he was saying completely wrong. The parable of today is just one such example. A man sows good seed in his field and when his back is turned his enemy sows weeds. Later, he looks with horror to find both weeds and wheat growing together. His servants suggest that they go in and pull out the weeds but the master in his wisdom forbids then saying, ‘Allow then both to grow together until the harvest then the good can be separated from the bad.’ Remember from our teaching we were taught the very opposite; that whenever you saw weeds appear, you should immediately rush in and pull them out.

Why did the master give the opposite advice? There are a few reasons that come to mind:

First the presence of the weeds growing alongside the wheat creates a more challenging environment for the wheat to grow. Precisely because of the darnel the wheat will be forced to grow taller. If we apply that to our lives it invites us to accept people and circumstances as they are and not as we would like them to be. In other words, imperfection is part and parcel of life at every level; there always will be weeds. We will never have the perfect community or the perfect family or the perfect job or the perfect partner, or perfect leaders and neither will the church ever be perfect. The challenge is to accept the imperfection that is part of life and rise above it.

It’s just all too easy to fall into a negative and judgmental mode where every sentence we make is laced with a complaint or judgment against something or someone and in the end the only one we are hurting is ourselves. There are even serial complainers who may well be the last in the world to recognize their problem. Like the boy who opened his lunch box and complained to his mate, ‘Yet again cheese sandwiches, the same every day, I’m sick and tired of cheese sandwiches.’ The friend replied, ‘Why don’t you ask your mum to put in some ham tomato and onion, to add a bit of variety?’ ‘Its not like that’, said the other, ‘my mum goes to work early and I make my own sandwiches.’

Don Helder Camera put the teaching of that parable very succintly when he said, ’Don’t seek perfection in anything or anyone, rather seek to perfect your love’. Another part of Buddist teaching is that things are as they are and it is only in accepting them as they are that they begin to change. It’s so refreshing to meet someone with a positive optimistic outlook, who looks at reality through the eyes of acceptance and love. You go away feeling refreshed and energised. On the other hand, when you meet someone who is a moan a minute we end up feeling drained and wanting to get away.

Going back to the Gospel another reason for the master wanting the wheat to grow alongside the weeds is a very obvious one. When the two begin to grow how is it possible to clearly identify one from the other and more importantly how are you going to eradicate one without damaging the other? Can you imagine how much wheat you would trample on as you went around looking for weeds. This is where Church teaching that was  so prevalent in the past would now be recognised as being so wrong and even destructive.

This was teaching that encouraged self-discipline and bodily mortification as the way to becoming holy. When something immoral raised its head like a negative emotion, a wayward thought or a sexual urge you were expected to deal with it harshly and employ moral surgery on yourself in order to eliminate it.

Unfortunately, that was the thinking of the time. The shadow side of human nature was bad news and needed to be treated as an enemy, beaten into submission or destroyed altogether. In other words, eliminate the weeds. History has shown that it just didn’t work. The litany of child abuse that reared its ugly head in the Church is a prime example of how the sexual repression that was part and parcel of clergy training became so destructive. These were men who, at 20 years of age, were told that if you had sexual feelings they were sinful and if you saw a female walking towards you on the street you should go to the other side to avoid temptation! How sick was that kind of teaching and what an insult to women and to the God who became human. When we try to block a river it’s bound to overflow and affect the surrounding plains. To deny any part of our humanity or sexuality is asking for trouble and in our church the chickens of denial and repression just came home to roost. The scandals we heard about were not just individual failures but the failure of a system that was not doing justice to the central tenet of its faith; God becoming human.

The tragedy is that so many good sincere people went down that road of self-denial and repression that only led to suffering and alienation. It was never the gospel road in the first place, no matter how much it appeared to be. Jesus always preached love the enemy whether within or without. In the parable remember he didn’t allow the servants to pull up the weeds, much as they wanted to do. The more we try to disown our negative qualities the more they will continue to control us even to the point when they can ultimately destroy us.

The Christian life is not about weeding or using the scissors treatment on anything that we discover about ourselves no matter how unacceptable it may appear. Rather it is about accepting it for what it is and owning it as ours rather than projecting it onto someone else. Without the weeds our lives might be easier, but would they be more fruitful, and might they not be a lot less interesting as well.

Mon 24^th July

Sin – The Wages of Death

We can think of sin in the sense of anything that enslaves us and causes us to be untrue to ourselves, alienates us from others, and separates us from our God. The consuming self-destructive nature of sin is like an ancient gruesome method used by Eskimos to kill wolves. First, he would coat his knife blade with animal blood and allow it to freeze. Then he would repeat this process over and over until the knife was completely congealed in frozen blood. Next, he would fix the blade in the ground with the blade up. A hungry wolf comes along, and following his sensitive nose, discovers the bait and begins to lick it tasting the fresh frozen blood. As he licks faster and faster through the artic night the blade becomes exposed and in his craving for blood he fails to notice the sting of the blade as it cuts his tongue. Nor does he realize that his craving for blood is now being satisfied by his own blood. He just craves for more and more until he drops dead in the snow. It’s by our own lusts that we are consumed, so the Bible warns.