Unity through Communion
The painting below is by Anja Rozen, and was drawn when she was a 13-year-old school student in Slovenia in 2022.
It’s title is “Unity”:
"My drawing represents the land that binds us and unites us.
"Humans are woven together.
If someone gives up, others fall. We are all connected to our planet and to
each other, but unfortunately we are little aware of it. We are woven together.
Other people weave alongside me my own story; and I weave theirs."
The poster is being used for a call to global interdependence; to recognise the need to care for the earth and for one another. It’s popularity is growing with all the conflict playing out across our world at the moment and the climate challenges we face.
One admires the skill and vision of this child and, an intuitive and innocent call. A call for collaborative decision-making processes within our divided world and for greater unity with an emphasise on collective action, dialogue, and shared responsibility.
Whilst this image has profound insight, a plea from her heart and soul, the way its being interpreted misses the most important ingredient. One sadly overlooked by our secular, Western mindset as it places hope in a web of global institutions or powerful individuals to solve humanities problems which are spiritual in nature.
This icon is a better representation of our place within nature and to whom we are ultimately accountable - in true unity with Him, through Him, and with one another.
Hunger and hungry thoughts are a very basic human passion and desire. If we can tame and discipline this particular passion, we can hopefully develop the discipline to tame our other passions and get them in order. If we can go without certain kinds of food, we can learn to discipline ourselves to go without other behaviours that are spiritually destructive. So fasting from food is to gain control of our other passions.
Jesus asks us to fast (Matthew 6: 16-18) so that we can benefit spiritually. We express our recognition that spiritual things are more important than earthly, physical things. We learn to deny ourselves pleasures in spite of the discomfort. We recognise the need to reform and to get closer to God. We willingly shoulder the burden and adopt a humble posture, recognising our dependence on God and affirming our submissiveness to His will.
If not, this may be our future:
Gadjo thanks Jack for this Lenten message.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite a splendid piece of work for a 13-year-old (though one wonders if she had some help with the text).
A "call to global interdependence" sounds as if it might spark discussions like the ones we've recently had here about an event in our city called Gather25, something about a "Global Church" - people who went said it was kosher (and "vibrant"), but one of our top local theologians pointed out at length that this idea just could not be.
HJ is always sceptical about such evangelical events, especially one based on a "dream" of Jennie Allen and other "visionaries" that Jesus may return in 10 years time and they should send "workers into the harvest". These sessions seem to be more emotional than devotional. Rock music, dancing, charismatic speakers, trance-like handwaving, just don't do it for me! Guess I'm just old fashion; plus I do like a sense of peace, quiet, and reverence when I worship. Looking at the videos on-line, it had more in common with 'Live Aid' than Pentecost.
DeleteGadjo agrees. The main point that our local theologian seems to be making is that while there is a "universal church" - the body of Christ - it is not visible in a way that someone can fancy their chances of gathering it together, as here.
DeleteStephen King in an interview in 2014, rather cynically observed:
Delete"I think that we have a lot of carny aspects to life in America – everything from television and the movies to our religion. And we can see from the megachurches that – my goodness – people love a show.
You can have a nice Methodist church somewhere in Oak Park, Ill., if you want it. People are going to come and they’re going to sit there and the organ’s going to play and that’s all terrific, but what I want is down in the ‘amen’ corner, Jesus jumping. I want that big choir with the people swaying from side to side, ‘Ooooh, God,’ and I want the electric guitar.
Then I want the preacher where the guy’s going to walk back and forth and not just stand like a stick behind the pulpit. He’s going to, you know, shake his fist a little bit in the air and then he’s going to smile and throw his hands up and say, ‘God’s good! God’s great! Can you give me hallelujah?’ I just adore that. And it’s really only about two steps from the carny pitchman, because I like that, too.”
Interestingly, Lent originally simply meant 'spring' (lencten in Old English), before it became attached to the fast held in the same period. This is preserved in the Dutch word for spring - de lente. Lent is a time for eagerly anticipating new life (definitely not a time to immiserate oneself by giving up chocolate).
ReplyDeleteA lot of converts to Orthodoxy get scrupulous about the Church's detailed fasting rules (does 'no wine' also mean 'no beer'? Is 'no oil' just 'olive oil'?) and comb through the ingredients of everything they eat, just in case they accidentally break the fast. But this misses the point.
A brother said to an old man: “There are two brothers. One of them stays in his cell quietly, fasting for six days at a time, and imposing on himself a good deal of discipline, and the other serves the sick. Which one of them is more acceptable to God?” The old man replied: “Even if the brother who fasts six days were to hang himself up by the nose, he could not equal the one who serves the sick.”
Bodily hunger should be a model of the soul's hunger for God (Ps 42:1). We feel the first acutely, but rarely the second because our spiritual senses are numbed. A day of missed meals, and we complain bitterly. A day of missed prayer, not so much.
Unity is possible, because God is One and, in the end, there is only God. Our separation from him - the veil between us that Christ tore open - is an illusion (Acts 17:28), and the root of all our sin. Unity can't be found while we remain attached to earthly passions, tossed this way and that by the eight winds, lusting, fighting, arguing and dying for ideologies and things that came from dust and shall return to dust. The spiritual cannot be found in the world of forms.
Someone said that there are only two things that God cannot give us, and that we must give him: servility and dependance. Once we realise our total dependence on God, and how silly our attempts to be 'captains of our soul' are, then we can surrender to him and he will give us what we need to serve him. Then there can be true unity - first of God and the soul, and then of all souls. Lent is an ideal time to strip away those attachments to the 'sin that clings so closely', to realise afresh our fundamental unity with God (which is redemption) and prepare for the paschal miracle of resurrection (which has happened, will happen, and is already happening).
Not Being Serious: Thomas Merton and Karl Barth by Rowan Williams from 2008.
ReplyDeletehttp://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1205/not-being-serious-thomas-merton-and-karl-barth.html
Yeah, I know it's by RW, but it has some interesting quotes in it.
I rather warmed to Rowan Williams as a person. This is intellectually quite interesting... though I don't think I would have chosen Mozart as my inner child!
DeleteWho would you choose?,
DeleteHmm, it's a question I've never considered before. I'm tempted to say Iggy Pop... one's artistic heroes are rarely as angelic as one might like...
DeleteOh dear!
DeleteA powerful Lenten message from my Mull Monastery homey, Fr. Seraphim: https://youtu.be/ybjeh1jOOck?feature=shared
ReplyDelete