St Mary's

HOMILY  by Joan Mooney Jan 23rd-24th 2010

Some years ago one of my brothers was in Ireland researching our family history. One day, not being sure of a destination he asked directions of a bystander. The gentleman replied, ‘Ah well, you go along here, then you turn right, and then you turn right etc etc’. It was all very complicated, and he ended with ……‘but if I was you I wouldn’t be startin’ from here.’

I am calling this talk ‘the way forward.’ One day Thomas, one of the disciples, said to Jesus, “we do not know where we are going, so how can we know the way?’ To get anywhere, then, we need to know not only our destination and the way there, but , most important of all, where we are starting from, where we are now.

TS Eliot puts it-
In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

We live in a very future-oriented world. An article by Kevin Rudd in The Australian this week is entitled – How we can achieve a more productive future. He begins …….
As we enter the 2nd decade of the 21st century, we can be optimistic about our future. But we cannot be complacent.

The catchcry of education today is –prepare them for the future. Then there are the ‘futures funds’, whose meaning escapes me entirely, and countless other futures predictions.

What many are forgetting about, is to consider where we are now, for to know where we are now is to know who we are.

To know where we are now is to know our place in history, for the way forward is the way back. The great contribution of Charles Darwin was to show us our position in the chain of evolution. And history is more than facts and data. That part is easy. History, as the word implies, is story, and story includes experience and understanding. We have all kinds of stories to investigate –more than investigate, we have to enter a story, walk around in it , absorb its message, its wisdom, and translate it into an understanding and a guide for ourselves and our own time. We have all sorts of stories – family stories, literary, ancestral, national, global, universal, cosmic etc. A crucial genre of story, in my view, is our religious story. A person I was speaking to recently dismissed our religious heritage as ‘mere fairy stories.’ Unknown to him, his statement was ironic, for fairy stories also hold wisdom.

Why are our religious stories of such importance? Because they contain wisdom. I am not , of course , speaking of literalism and dogmatism, but of the pearls of wisdom hidden in our scriptures. I beg to differ from the person who recently stated that God did not write the scriptures. Divine wisdom, in my view, is clearly evident in our Christian, as well as in the  scriptures of other religious traditions.

To cut people off from their history, from their story, as happened in the dispossession of land of our own and other indigenous people; in the displacement of peoples through war and exile is to deny them their very humanity.

Of course, we don’t want to get stuck in the past, either, to cling to clearly outmoded practices or world views. The thread that binds us to our history is both strong and fragile, and brings us right down to our present time.

What , then, can we do to answer the question in Drew Dellinger’s poem

my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered

Drew Dellinger is a contemporary American philosopher and poet, recently in Brisbane.

In a recent interview, Andrew Denton asked the distinguished White House journalist, Helen Thomas   ‘what do you see as the future of our species?’
She answered – I don’t care about the future, but I worry about how we are now.   -  people killed by wars, the gas chambers, people discriminated against.’ Among a battery of journalists hers was the only voice to publicly challenge George Bush on the torture of Iraqis by American soldiers She asked later- where were they, where were all the colleagues who should have spoken out in support? When Peter and Terry were dismissed from St Mary’s, unjustly, was there a single colleague, a single bishop, a single priest who came publicly to their defence or support. Where were they? We may well ask.

In a recent talk Drew Dellinger suggests that a way forward for is to listen to the voice of women. There’s no shortage of women’s voices in this community, but in most societies and communities throughout the world, despite the great feminist movement, women are still largely unheard. Most commentators judged the Copenhagen meeting a flop. Penny Wong would have been there, but amidst the large array of men in suits I didn’t notice many women.

Most ages of history have made a specific  contribution to our human story eg the cathedrals of medieval Europe, the plays of Shakespeare, the inventions of modern science etc. Drew Dellinger opines that the unique contribution of our era may well be our embracing of ecology. This is more than planting a few trees, important in a practical way  as that is; ecology implies understanding , entering the story of our earth; going further, to cosmology – the story, not just the scientific, facts, of the universe. Cosmology is recognising the interconnectedness of all things, and therefore treating all creatures, all things, with respect, compassion and love.

‘Lifting millions out of subsistence living should be our moral imperative’, writes journalist John Cox. Development is not necessarily a dirty word. Here again the way forward may well be the way back.  Harry S Truman’s inaugural address in 1949 used the word ‘development’ to commit the US to world economic progress. ‘The present focus on terrorism and globalisation makes me pine for the idealism of the 2nd half of C20’, writes Cox. The fierce opposition in the US to Barack Obama’s proposed health reforms is born of the unwillingness of Middle America to share their wealth with the poor, especially the black poor. They are forgetting that in degrading these people they are degrading their own flesh and blood.

Then we have to wake up the dreamers, the poets, the philosophers, the statesmen, of today. A young boy, Laurie Wallis, topped the NSW HSC English course for a sequence of poems in which he meditates on mankind, nature and language. This is a voice, the voice of youth, which we could well heed.

And we have to wake up ourselves. We are all depositaries of wisdom, but on the whole we don’t know how to access it. We can’t just sit around waiting for sparks of wisdom to come forth, we have to prepare the ground.  The great C16 Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, tells us that after spending 20 years meditating, patiently and perseveringly, she experienced a Divine and transforming illumination.  Mozart wrote 41 symphonies. On one occasion he saw in his minds eye an entire symphony. But Mozart, too, had done the hard yards. From the age of three he had studied music, worked at his harmony ezercises. Then there was more more hard work, translating the wisdom of that symphony into a format that others could access. And so we can listen to the great Mozart symphonies today.

On the other hand, the spirit breathes where she will. In our Peace Dance tradition there is a beautiful song and dance. The text is
Suddenly, at any mundane moment, the infinite may come through.

If we are lucky, wisdom may simply strike us out of the blue. As the first reading for today says,

‘wisdom walks about looking for those who are worthy of her.

A pity if we do not recognise her. For Wisdom comes in many guises. She won’t always come as a full-blown symphony.  TS Eliot reminds us–
The only Wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility

That, surely, is accessible to us all.

KR urged us not to be complacent; Goenka, a meditation teacher in the Vipassana tradition, says over and over. Every moment is so precious; we cannot afford to lose a single moment.We can glibly dismiss the fleeting moment as  just that, but this moment,  to give TS Eliot the final word,

‘is not isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

We must seize that moment.