We ended February and began March by being on a retreat. It started Friday evening and ended on Saturday at dinnertime. It was in the form of what we previously called Discovery. It is like a Via de Christo or Cursio retreat and is conducted and lead by lay people. This year it was called “Faith Builders”. Pastors do give talks on the doctrines of Faith found in the Creed and elsewhere. The main speakers were lay people and their ages ranged from fourteen to seventy five. They told the story of how their Faith has helped them in their living of life.
June and I both worked on the retreat. June as a table leader and I served in the chapel as Chaplain/prayer leader. It is a time to consider your faith and how it is being lived out in your life. It is a pulling back from every day affairs and giving time to your deepest feelings and beliefs. It is a practice that even business people exercise. They call them conferences or such and they spend the time reviewing how well they are doing and what they can do to improve etc. Men or women who have succeeded and written books about it, etc usually conduct them. Men and women listen to them to learn how to better their beliefs in a business success. So we do the same in pulling back and reviewing our success in understanding and living our faith.
Being in the chapel gave me time to pray and read. Each speaker did come to the chapel before his or her talks and pray. We received requests from participants to pray for their particular problems. But most of the time was spent in readings and attempting to mediate on them. One of these reflective readings was by CS Lewis. It was a proposition I had heard before but not as well stated. It was about how a Christian and Materialist who both want to do good to their fellow man. “The one believes that men were going to live forever, that they were created by God and so built that they can find their true and lasting happiness only by being united with God. The other believes that men are an accidental result of the blind workings of matter, that they started as mere animals and have more less steadily improved, that they are going to live for about seventy years, that their happiness is fully attainable by good social services and that every thing else (e.g. vivisection, birth control, the judicial system, education) is simply to be judged to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ simply in so far as it helps or hinders that kind of ‘happiness’” They both can agree on a number of things for example one might be very keen about education but the kinds of education they wanted people to have would obviously be very different. “To the Materialist things like nations, classes, civilizations must be more important than individuals, because individuals live only seventy odd years and the group may last for centuries. But to the Christian, individuals are more important, for they live eternally; and races, civilizations and like, are in comparison the creatures of a day.
“The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can’t both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way, which simply doesn’t fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction”
The comparison is revealing and makes sense. It is particularly appealing in that it speaks only of the part the basic beliefs must play in our wanting to do good for mankind. It is not even an attempt to convince one of their errors but to plainly show how it must exist. It is to me another example of the ability of CSLewis to use our language precisely and to clearly draw reasonable conclusions.
Being reminded of how our basic beliefs affect our wish to help caused me to recall another expression of the idea. It is our physical connection to one another. In a book entitled “Longing for Enough in a Culture of More” the author talks about ‘navel gazing’ Navel gazing reminded me of some oriental religious practice, but I found a simple explanation of it on the net. It advised me that contemplating one’s navel was called “Omphaloska”. It is done to aid one in meditation. This author wasn’t talking about that kind of ‘navel gazing’. He spoke of it as a way to look at where we originated. It is to realize our bodies are ‘hand me downs’. So too is the ability we possess even to consider them in the first place, identify their original source and purpose. He quotes a Bantu South African saying which states, “A person is a person through other persons” He notes that despite Descartes assertion that “I think therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum), what is even truer is “I am related therefore I am”. Others have both created me and now sustain my existence. “Others” include more that Dad, Mom, Grandparents. He asks questions like, who purifies the water you drink? Do you know the name of the mid-wife or doctor who delivered you from your Mother’s womb? We don’t have the benefit of knowing them or their names so they could logically be called “perfect strangers”. The realization of our being because of others should give us a desire to help others as a ‘perfect stranger’. Basically he is saying we should help others because we are all related!
March is the month in which we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. It is surprisingly this year also when we celebrate Easter. I forget how many hundreds of years before it happens again but I need not worry since I am sure I won’t be here to celebrate it. In years past in March we were reminded of the warning in Shakespeare, “Bewared the ides of March!” The ides of March is March 15th and it was years ago the date when your tax return was due. The warning was a lot more applicable in those days. The ides of April is the 13th day so we can’t apply the warning.
This month as usual brings birthdays and we have three grandchildren, Hannah McSorley, Colleen Baker, and Matthew Golden. It was the birthday of my good friend Bill King. He is no longer with us having gone to heaven in November of last year. I always had to dig him every year when his birthday arrived by noting that he ‘was now older than I’. Of course, two months later I would catch up.
March is as we noted above is the month in which we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. The day is full of parades all over U.S. and elsewhere. We remember, as we probably noted in some other March Jottings, on that day the first to arise and get to the piano and play “Wearing of the Green” got a buck. I wasn’t in the running back in the childhood days since I did not get around to learning how to play the piano ‘till law school days. But I still remember some of the words of the song. They were: “Oh! Paddy dear, did you hear the news that’s going around, they’re hanging men and women now for the wearing of the green!”
St. Patrick (I don’t think he was every officially made a saint but he became one just naturally) could be considered as one of the first reformers of the Roman church. “Patrick’s gift to the Irish was his Christianity- the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history. A Christianity without the socio-political baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the Irish scene” Today his day is a celebration more of the Irish spirit as expressed by Patrick. ”He enjoyed the world and its variety of human beings—and he didn’t take his self too seriously. He was in spirit an Irishman” (The quotes are from “How The Irish Saved Civilization” by Thomas Cahill)
Patrick said this about himself in his “Confessions”: “…be astounded, all of you great and small who fear God, and you men of rhetoric on your estates, listen and pay attention to this. Who was it that raised me up, fool that I am, from among those who in the eyes of men considered wise and expert in the law and powerful in speech and in everything? And He inspired me—me, a despised outcast of this world—above many others, to be the man (if only I could) who, with reverence and without complaint, should faithfully serve the race of Gentiles to whom the love of Christ brought me and left me for the remainder of my life, if I should be so worthy; yes, to serve them humbly and sincerely”(#13). He may not have ‘taken himself too seriously’ but he knew why he had the power to do what he did.
We hope you had a great St. Patrick’s day and Easter. Until next time, Pax Tecum!