A Simple Path

-
“The Simple Path:
Silence is Prayer
Prayer is Faith
Faith is Love
Love is Service
The Fruit of Service is Peace”
-Mother Theresa 

I’m leading worship at Eigenheim Mennonite Sunday morning but most of the work is being done by others, including first-hand impressions of Haiti by recent visitors to this “unpeaceful” country. The overall topic for the morning is Witnesses to God’s Peace, a somewhat enigmatic theme unless we first of all decide how God would define peace. Sometimes we define it (on God’s behalf?) quite narrowly as being the state of personal quietude coming from being reconciled to God through Christ’s life, teaching, death and resurrection. Sometimes we define it more socially, culturally as the harmony that precludes interpersonal conflict: wars, dissension, discrimination, or the multitude of “isms” to which humans are so vulnerable.

Perhaps it’s a mistake to separate them. Perhaps we do the teachings of Christ a disservice when we split the two. Perhaps they’re intertwined: personal quietude (German Gelassenheit, perhaps) equips us to be instruments of reconciliation among persons, among communities, between nations. Conversely, the absence of an anchor--such as an undying commitment to following the pacifist Jesus--means we’re ill-equipped to the work of reconciliation because we ourselves live lives unreconciled, uncentered.

That’s somewhat theoretical. We know that many who claim Christ as their centre choose never to take the step toward engaging in the actual practices of reconciliation. Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew addressed the decline in church participation in 1965; the promise of personal quietude can become the exclusive reason for being a church member; the revolutionary nature of Christ’s gospel for some of us, some of the time, may even feel like a threat to the orderly peacefulness of Christians getting together to sing hymns, read scripture and go to lunch together. But the comfortable pew may also sound the death-knell for the church. A church without a purpose and a task is like a hammer in a place with no nails; “what’s the point?” upcoming generations are always bound to ask.

Tommy Douglas said that “It’s never too late to make the world a better place.” But that makes little sense if a) the fate of the world holds diminished interest for us since “we’re bound for the promised land,” or b) we’re embedded in the pessimism that surrounds us, namely that humanity in its totality is a lost cause.

Mother Theresa probably clarified peace-making better than I can: “The Simple Path: silence is prayer, prayer is faith, faith is love, love is service, [and] the fruit of service is peace.” In other words, it begins with quietude, it journeys through service and in that service, peace blossoms. It’s a “simple path,” not a complex process.

This post is early; not the usual Sunday morning because it contains an invitation. Eigenheim Mennonite begins its Sunday with “Sunday School,” a time when adults gather in a circle and work quite deliberately at understanding and practicing “The Simple Path,” although we probably won’t call it that. Really, that’s what every church congregation is about . . . or ought to be . . . and like others, our comprehension is never complete, consensus isn’t always reached, our efforts sometimes misguided or “mispracticed.” But if you’re with Tommy Douglas’s “It’s never too late to make the world a better place,” or if you long to embrace a better understanding of Mother Theresa’s Simple Path, we invite you to join us. Sundays, 10:00 to 11:00, worship 11:00 to 12:00. You will be warmly welcomed! 8 Minutes west of Rosthern on 312.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." (Matthew 5:9)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Democracy or bust

-
Image
  Politics . You can tell how people relate to this word by the way they use it. “I’m not much interested in politics,” for instance, equates it with the day-to-day news about our current government, elections, party dynamics, etc. A narrow definition.                By whatever word we use, it’s clear that the setting and enforcing of the principles under which we form community—and function as community—existed before the word was coined. In families, in schools, in workplaces, on the roads, in the economy, the making and respecting of agreed-to behavioural expectations in a community is the necessary defense against chaos.                How behavioural expectations come to be, how they are altered, how they are enforced … and most importantly by whose authority … is fundamental. The “benevolent dictator” model has a long history: give...
Read more

Do I dare eat a peach?

-
Image
  All the talk of Joe Biden’s unfitness for the position of president of the USA must have others of his age—80 plus—wondering about their own fitness. Most of us octogenarians are well aware of our physical limitations, I think, but mentally? How can I know, for instance, if the lines I’m writing are logically sound, or if they fall somewhere between inane and gibberish? How can I know if my diminished capacity can be trusted to make such a judgment? And what if my friends are too kind to tell me when to close my laptop? Hearing an aging loved one tell the same stories to the same people every day has the able-minded nodding knowingly and cluckingly (that’s a word, isn’t it?). We’re obviously too kind and too hip not to know that people experiencing obvious dementia deserve to be “handled with care,” and we’ve devised places and strategies to preserve for them whatever dignity is still possible. But it’s not dissimilar from the pain-relieving, ointment applying, chair-exercisin...
Read more

Stories We Live By

-
Image
  David Brooks, writer, philosopher and journalist, said in a recent speech to the Aspen Ideas gathering that the current divisive, belligerent mood among the people of earth can’t be attributed to our real-life situations. We have space, food, water, shelter, healthcare enough for everyone, and more. We don’t fight because we need to, he said, but because we carry stories in our heads to which we respond. It's clear that he doesn’t mean story in the same way I meant it when I published a collection of short stories , but there’s something to be gained in connecting the two, particularly when behaviour is guided by, for instance, The Holy Bible , or the Quran , each telling a story by which adherents understand life and by which their actions are governed. Scientists, as a rule, act according to a very different story of life, their exploration guided very much by the saga of evolving nature and the incontrovertible principles that govern all things. Our stories —I think Broo...
Read more