Yesterday we began to look at the facts of
life, those things which affect us all, which impact on us and the way we live,
which define our beginning and our ending. We shall look this evening at the
middle few facts in our poem.
The
Facts of Life
by
Pádraig Ó Tuama
That you were born
and you will die.
That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.
That you will lie
if only to yourself.
That you will get tired.
That you will learn most from the situations you
did not choose.
That there will be some things that move you more
than you can say.
That you will live
that you must be loved.
That you will avoid questions most urgently
in need of your attention.
That you began as the fusion of a sperm and
an egg of two people who once were strangers and may well still be.
That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes even better than good.
That life is often not so good.
That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.
That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.
That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constraining.
That you will probably be ok.
That you must accept change
before you die
but you will die anyway.
So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.
That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.
I wonder what the questions which are most
urgently in need of your attention are. What are the things which stop you
going back to sleep at night once you have woken up? For me it changes. It
depends on what is going on for me in my life at any particular time. So at the
moment it is a combination of “Have I replied to that email; did I send that
message; have I updated the website; did I publish that blog; have I paid that
bill; did I call that person back; what am I going to say in my Holy Week
reflection this evening and what else have I forgotten to do?” For you it may
revolve around work or home life or finance or church or any number of things.
Questions which dominate and nag at us. But hang on a second, I thought we just
said that we would avoid the questions most urgently in need of our attention.
Well these questions are definitely in need of our attention but we are hardly
avoiding them, the problem is more that there are so many of them that we cannot
handle them all at once! So what are the questions which we are avoiding which
most urgently need our attention? Well that question itself is perhaps the most
urgent – or to put it another way, where are our priorities? What is most
important to us? I suspect that if we were to ask each other that we would say
the things which matter, family, relationships, friends maybe even God and
church. So where in our lives is that priority seen? Are we able to set aside
those questions which fly around our heads about work or money or the routine
of daily life and address those that are most urgently in need of our
attention? When did I last speak to my spouse or partner, not about what is for
dinner or what to watch on TV but really speak to them, about their lives and
thoughts and feelings? When did I last arrange to meet that friend and give
them my time without feeling the need to rush off to the next appointment? When
did I sit and listen to some music or read a book or watch the sea just because
I like it and it is good for me? When did I last devote time to God, to sit
with God and listen? This is such a challenge to me and, I suspect, to all of
us. No one ever said on their death bed “I wish I’d spent more time at work!”
We are human beings not human doings, even Jesus went away and hid at the end
of today’s gospel reading. As a teacher I know that with children the behaviour
you give the most attention to is the behaviour you get, which is why it is good
to ignore the poor behaviour and praise the good. So perhaps the question which
most urgently needs our attention is how do I ensure that the things that
matter most are what I give most attention to?
That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg of two people who
once were strangers and may well still be.
I feel vaguely naughty saying sperm in church
– and now I have said it again! I spoke yesterday about our lives as stories
which we co-write with God and we should rejoice in their marvellous uniqueness.
The act of conception and of giving birth is the ultimate co-working with God –
being creators alongside God. For many people that act of creation happens in a
loving, and stable relationship, for many others it does not. For some that
stable relationship exists there as a foundation for their lives, for some it
breaks down either due to divorce, death or other circumstances, let’s not
forget that Jesus seems to have lost his father Joseph as a young age so knows
what that feels like. But none of that takes away from the act of creation that
we are privileged to be involved with and which we are all involved with as
members of the wonderful creative human race whether we have our own children
or not.
In the King James Version of the Bible there
is that wonderful euphemism for when two people had intercourse – it says that
they ‘knew’ each other.
And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and
bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.
And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare
Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name
of his son, Enoch.
And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and
called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead
of Abel, whom Cain slew.
Always makes me chuckle! But maybe there is
something to this. Perhaps the implied intimacy here is something we might
aspire to – not in a sexual sense but in the sense of really knowing the people
around us in our lives. Not simply passing like ships in the night but giving
time to actually knowing each other. Isn’t that what our faith is about, a
relationship with God, with each other and with ourselves?
That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes even better than good.
I am quite sure that you don’t need me to
tell you that life isn’t fair and that sometimes we are on the right side of
that fairness and that sometimes we are on the wrong side and of course it is
all relative. We might perceive it unfair that Lewis Hamilton should secure a
contract for £21 million while we struggle on our wage or pension or benefits.
Someone in this country with no home or income, someone in another country who
has to walk several miles to collect safe drinking water might think it unfair
that we have the money that we have or that we have access to free drinking
water. Now of course there is a debate to be had about how someone got
themselves into certain situations and to what extent personal responsibility
plays a part and we will hear an awful lot of rhetoric about this in the six
weeks leading up the General Election. But we know that an awful lot of where
we find ourselves is about the circumstance we are born into – statistics tell
us that. But we do not have to simply accept this. Yes life is not fair but it
is sometimes good and it is sometimes good because we all play a part in
redressing that balance and making some things fairer. Remember that we are
considering the facts of life the things which are common to all of us. Birth, death
and what we do with the inbetween part. These are amazing precious gifts given
to each of us – what we do with the inbetween part is up to us but if we spend
at least some of it helping to make life a bit better, a bit fairer for others
then it is also good. In fact it may even be better than good.
As Martin Luther King Jr said “It’s all right
to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel just to
say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
That life is often not so good.
Then of course there are those times when
life is not so good. When things do not work out the way we have planned or
anticipated. When we lose a job, become ill, a loved one or friend dies, we
can’t make the money stretch to the end of the month or a hundred other reasons
life suddenly is not so great. I have no answers, no clever theology or
explanation why this occurs because I don’t think there is one. But what I do
know is that, as we considered yesterday, in Jesus God experiences what it is
to be a human being and there were plenty of times when Jesus’ life was not so
good- particularly the end part. He continued to do the right thing, he
continued to follow God’s will, he continued to love and he was reviled and
rejected, humiliated and abandoned, treated unfairly, beaten and killed. God
know what it is to suffer. And so I believe that when life is not so good Jesus
stands there with us. Loving as he always does.
One of the remarkable things about the 9/11
attacks was that amidst all of the horror, amongst all of the pain and chaos
and turmoil and death there was love. Lots of love. In their dying moments in
buildings or planes people left messages of love for their families, lovers and
friends.
I remember very well taking the funeral of a
19 year old lad who had been killed in a motorcycle accident. The crematorium
was packed and people had spilled out onto the pavement. It should have been
horrendous and yes there was plenty of pain amongst the mourners but I could
not help but feel uplifted by the love that there was in that place for that
lad. Life is sometimes not so good but love remains with us. God remains with
us.
That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment