30th Sunday

The seemingly accidental character of human existence.

30th Sunday

Exod. 22.21-27; 1 Thess. 1.5c-10; Mt. 22.34-40

There are several interesting themes in these readings. But I'd like to try to take the first and third readings, with their insistence on love as the centrality of religious life, as a theme. I'd like to come at it from what might seem at first blush to be a fairly long distance.

These are clearly the ruminations of a guy who is entering what we call the "golden years". The more I think about my own life and the world in which I live, the more all of life seems to me to appear fortuitous, accidental. I know this is a bad thing to say in a university, where we're all supposed to be getting things organized and making these big rational plans about how this is to happen, what this means. And we, particularly in the west, in North America, love that kind of stuff. But more and more I really believe that the reality is quite other than, that and all this planning is a kind of self-indulgent luxury that makes all kinds of sense. But it has very limited validity.

From my own life: I spent two years trying to find a teaching job after I left St. Michael's at the University of Toronto. So, I sent out close to two hundred letters to that many universities in North America. Got one answer. King's College and so I've been here for 27 years.

And then I think about how much of my life has been the playing out of some real decisions: I think I've made 3 decisions in my life. Real decisions. From what I read from novelists and some philosophers, I don't think that in that, I am a fluke.

I know the history of music better than most areas of human life. The music of J.S. Bach was lost for 200 years. It was found accidentally with the performance of the Matthew Passion by Felix Mendelshon, a converted Jew, in the 19th century. J.S. Bach! Nobody knew about J.S. Bach! How many Bach's are lying around in somebody's archives. You know, Sotheby's just sold a 51 second string quartet movement of Beethoven. Is it great music? I don't know but the point I'm trying to get at is "What is buried where?" "What greatness is lost?"

Arturo Toscanini, the greatest conductor of this century, was playing cello in an opera orchestra. The conductor got sick and they handed him the baton. And out of that totally fortuitous event, this massive career! Bernstein the same sort of thing. Somebody got sick, they called him up. A couple of hours and he shows up. I don't think his case is peculiar.

I didn't choose to have the intellectual capacity that I have. I had nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing to do with it. I didn't choose to be born white. I didn't choose to be born male. And yet how much of my life and the benefits that I enjoy from my life, are precisely from these totally fortuitous things? And I really would propose that question to you . I don't want to frustrate the younger people to say that.... therefore whatever you do is feckless, although the book of Ecclesiastes might suggest that. But certainly what we call luck, that wonderful kind of garbage can category, accounts for an extraordinary amount of who we are, where we are and what we're doing. And more and more of that has bore in on me. The seemingly accidental character of human existence. If I wanted to push this harder, I could take the whole business of the biblical stuff. There's a little couplet of G.K. Chesterton which is cute but also very telling. "How odd of God to choose the Jews." Where's the big plan here? Where's the big design? If there is one it's certainly lost to us.

I think it was probably in the anticipation of Thanksgiving and trying to say something about gratitude that prompted these thoughts but also I think it's just age and a more relaxed and open approach to my own existence and the existence of everyone else I know in the world. We'd like to say our lives play out on the basis of merit. It's all our own effort. We surely do want to be in control and that accounts, I think, in very large measure for who we think we are. I am the person that can control and manage this sector of reality. We argue from out strengths, in other words. And we are so accustomed to doing that, that the fortuitous or accidental character of things is greatly obscured. Even, at times, absolutely obscured. I am 64 and that has been the case for most of my life. Literally, it is inaccessible because we have this great illusion that everything is organized by somebody. Not God! Forget God! Just bracket God through this whole thing. The way the world is, the way things unfold is somehow the result of some kind of rational choice and organization of things.

Psychologically, why we want to do that is very clear. Because the alternative seems to be chaos and a kind of nihilism. But also psychologically what is in play, and this is where I can connect with what Paul was talking about last Sunday about the action of the spirit of God as enlivening us, the one thing we don't want to take very much account of is our own weakness. We really don't. I mean there's something shameful there. It's something that must be ignored. The weaknesses only emerge, I think... Well, that's the question. When can they emerge? They cannot if we simply stand pat on our own achievements. Of course, the converse is true too. When you see people who are failures in life it is precisely because they consider themselves failures because they measure themselves over against this totally organized view of existence. It is only then that they seem to be failures. And yet we're really talking about, I think, the smallness of our own existences. The weaknesses of our own existences. Those things that we want to ignore, deny and the fortuity of life is the great entree I believe, or one of the great entrees to the emergence of our weaknesses.

Now, what has this to do with being here on Sunday morning? I think everything. Because Paul, as I said last week, will talk about the spirit of God as somehow activating us in light of the life of Jesus, whose life in a sense was very fortuitous too. I don't think hanging up on the cross was any great shakes as a human destiny or something Jesus planned! So Paul will say over and over, that it is precisely under the power of the action of the spiritis: that we acknowledge our weaknesses. That our weaknesses come into view. In other words, it is this paradoxical thing, it is the enlivening power of God which helps me to see that I am weak. That is what being truly alive is. That kind of acknowledgement. And if you read the Pauline letters it comes out over and over and over again. We do not - in that great line from Romans - we do not even know how to pray. We don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know what prayer is about. But the spirit of God, with unutterable groanings, speaks in us.

So the spirit is there all over the place. I glory in my weakness, Paul will say, that the power of God will be made manifest. This has a couple of other implications I'd like to spell out.

What is the consequence of our vaunted self-sufficiency? This sense of I am who I am by the dint of my own gutty effort, by God! It is our inaccessibility to each other, I'd like to propose. On several levels. At least 2 are important. One, because we just indulge the illusion again that I am somehow sufficient unto myself. That's the first illusion. That's the first level. But the other one is, of course the fact that you cannot love except what is truth. And if we're all just faking it then nobody knows anybody else really. We know these simulaira of ourselves, these projections of ourselves or of each other. And so we live in this goofy hall of mirrors where it's very hard to tell what's real. And so what do we end up loving? Whom do we end up loving? Indeed, whom do we end up loving?

And that's of course what this is all about. That's where we finally land four-square on the first and second readings. All this stuff about love, being careful of other people. "Love your neighbour as yourself. Love God with all your heart. On these two commandments and everything, the law is just a kind of word that says all the Jews knew about their own religious history.

In other words, I think, that you can get from the fortuitousness of life to, Jesus’ understanding of what we are all to be all about, which is to love. And it may even help illumine what love is all about because the older I get the less I find I know about love, really. And much of what I see as having been given in the name of love by me is really something else. So, to be able to offer myself in my own weakness, mediocrity, meagreness, I can only recognize because God enlivens me to the other. To receive the other. And the upshot of all this, which is one of the beauties of growing older, you can relax more. Otherwise life is a terrible strain. It's a terrible stain – we suffer from the Atlas complex. "Yeah by God, I've got to be in charge." "Yeah by God, we've got to have our five year plan!" "Yeah by God, we've got to have our strategic organization of everything." "Yeah, by God, we've got to get organized, folks!"

I'm not arguing for chaos but I'm arguing for the profound relativization and disillusionment of our lives because that's where I think God is trying to lead us - kicking and screaming, against our own fears - to God's self and to each other.

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