|
|
SERMONS Sean Gilbert Christ Church April 22nd, 2007 Acts 9:1-6 (7-20) One of those books on my shelf I keep returning to - and there aren’t all that many, I’d have to say – is a two-year-long journal. Written between the years 1941-43, it is the reflection of a Dutch Jew by the name of Etty Hillesum; a highly intelligent and spirited woman, who in the midst of Nazi occupation, persecution, forced labour and eventual transportation to her death at Auschwitz, embarks on a spiritual quest, in which through her journaling, she records her encounters with the life-giving presence of the divine - with God. How is this then for a compelling beginning. “Sunday, 9th March 1941. Here goes then. This a painful and well nigh insuperable step for me yielding up so much that has been suppressed to a blank sheet of lined paper. The thoughts in my head are sometimes so clear and so strong and my feelings so deep, but writing about them becomes hard. The main difficulty, I think, is a sense of shame. So many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go, of allowing things to pour out of me, yet that is what I must do if I am ever to give life a reasonable and satisfactory purpose. It is like the final, liberating scream that always sticks bashfully in your throat when you make love. I am accomplished in bed, just about seasoned enough I should think to be counted among the better lovers, and love does indeed suit me to perfection, and yet it remains a mere trifle, set apart from what is truly essential, and deep inside of me something is still locked away …” Well, as with all good literature, the opening paragraph holds within it the kernel of all that which is to follow, and without doubt Etty remains true to her desires and yearnings that her life becomes deeper and more meaningful, and yet unexpectedly, in one sense, the pressing reality of God begins to impinge upon her almost at every turn. Through people and very difficult, indeed dehumanizing circumstances, the experience of otherness, - the rediscovery of beauty, hope showing its face with hopelessness – all these things bring her to that sacred place of the enlargement and reorientation of being that was so true to St Paul also. Maybe not as dramatic, but certainly just as lasting and real. And this is a place not of religious certainty or religious triumphalism, but of seeming nothingness, even emptiness: hands and hearts open to a new way of being in the world. Turning full circle… In Etty’s own words: A patient once said to my friend, “I sometimes have the feeling that God is right inside me, for instance when I hear St Matthew Passion.” My friend’s reply was something like: “At such moments you are completely at one with the creative and cosmic forces that are at work in every human being.” And these creative forces, she concludes are ultimately part of God, but you need courage to put that into words. Well to cut a long story short, Etty chooses to go to Auschwitz, (she could have avoided it), simply to be with her people. And according to those who knew her in that environment, she was truly a redemptive figure, hopeful and deeply human to the end. An end that cruelly took place in the November of 1943, Rightly so, I think, conversion tends to get bad press. A doorway to religious extremism or a religious infatuation that tends to lack congruence with present reality. Not always, of course, but often enough for the conversion of heart and mind we are pondering over to be blurred into indistinction or considered to be of less power and importance then the more public and highly visible events; Blinding lights, loud voices, dramatic healings… So let me backtrack to Etty’s own description. “Some time ago, I said to myself, “I am a kneeler in training. I was still embarrassed by this, as intimate as a gesture of love that cannot be put into words either, except by a poet.” I wonder if this is how we have experienced or conceived faith conversion to be? An encounter of rare beauty and intimacy that for all of its overwhelming nature, does not and cannot force change upon us. Rather, this is but a meeting place, a union of wills, if you like, that even for someone as strident as Saul, is a coming home to true identity and purpose through the great encouragement and belief of Spirit. In the end, therefore, what one is given in conversion is not the supernatural power to overcome everything and anything in life, but an enlarged capacity to love (and be loved for that matter). And to love, as did Etty and St Paul, in the face of that which was love-less, almost void of any recognizable humanity whatsoever. Hardly an abstraction to life then, or a religious commodity to buy and sell. And so my hope, more particularly within this community but also within the Uniting Church in this State, is that “conversion growth” is practised and understood in such real and human terms as this. Because lives attuned to the creative and cosmic forces already within are lives that do make a difference. They have the courage to put themselves out there, without shame and hopefully with decreasing amounts of hubris. In expressing themselves, they indeed express God, in God’s beauty, compassion and fidelity to the whole of creation. Shall we take a few moments for our own prayer and contemplation …
|