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| SERMONS Sean Gilbert – 28/9/08 In the midst of my virally induced haze this week, I did have the time and energy to read just a bit; the contemporary reading we’ve heard this morning taken from an engaging book written by the Franciscan priest, author and well travelled speaker, Richard Rohr. Rohr tends to ramble and rave a bit about modern western life, but when he grounds his perceptions within his considerable knowledge and love of St. Francis, his conclusions are most compelling. Francis, of course, is one of the most admired and integrated Christians ever to have lived. For not only did he readily preach the vision that is Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he authentically lived it out. An opinion shared amongst all world religions. A man of perhaps unequalled humanitarianism and egalitarian practice, thus not surprisingly, a man of great spirituality and prayer. And at the heart of his devotion lay a mysterious, invisible, feminine figure (did you know); one ‘Lady Poverty’, an idealized, yet very real object of his love and vows. Indeed, a celibate love affair that soulfully gave expression to Jesus and the Gospel within his life and in the Franciscan Order in general. I make mention of this because, like the example of most great saints and martyrs, a life given over to, and sometimes sacrificed for, peace and justice doesn’t simply arise from a pressing social or political agenda of reform. Something has first captivated, moved and then transformed the heart. In Francis of Assisi’s case, a highly relational, if not mystical experience of God that continued to sustain his vision of a better and more inclusive world, despite severed family allegiances, hardships and wounds inflicted along the way. Well, ‘Lady Poverty.’ Something or someone who perhaps makes little sense to us, but for Francis an alluring and beautiful vision for life, wherein fullness is found through emptiness, love is found through self-giving, true richness found through letting go. In other words, a way of being in the world that is totally contrary to conventional wisdom or conventional religion for that matter. Now the last thing I would want to do this morning, is simply wax lyrical over the cruelty and indignity of poverty, in all its complex and raw forms. The events in the US over the past few weeks (if not years) have shown us yet again, how the so called capitalist, democratic systems of the world, can display a crass and open cannibalism, so far as the most vulnerable and impoverished in their own societies are concerned. Fodder, almost, for those with too much to lose, and particularly so when de-regulation of the market was cynically passed off as a philosophical virtue – in keeping with the real America - when in actual fact it is a total disregard for a Common-wealth or even the Republic, as I think the founding Fathers of the US envisioned it to be. It is about vested interest. Rather, it has nothing what so ever to do with the common good, despite the weasel words of trickle down effect and the like. You only have to drive down parts of the Jersey Shore or around the seaside suburbs of Newport, Rhode Island to see the sickening symbolism of excess without the common good in mind; holiday homes of the rich and powerful from NYC that are but mansions by another name, open for perhaps a month a year, yet maintained and manicured to a tee. And so, in the face of all this self absorption and madness, St. Francis’ life-long embrace of Lady Poverty may not look or sound so silly (or just male) after all. For he knew (as I think we all know deep down), such is the strength and seductive voice of the human ego that our soul does need to find union with something or someone much larger than itself to grow and become a gift of substance and well being for others. To be motivated and moved outwards and beyond the immediate or obvious. “Love is not loved! Love is not loved!”, Francis often lamented. Think about that for a moment in relation to our own world. So whilst poverty is such a practical, pressing and in our face issue, never to be rationalised away by wordsmith’s like me, it is also a pressing matter of human spirit and soul. In other words, frameworks and systems, governments and ngo’s just can’t do it all for us. For it is ultimately the stuff of human conversion, of finally yielding to another way of being, another way of doing. And it may well be, as Richard Rohr suggests, such radical newness of thought and practice within us all – even as a global community - can only genuinely take place when something old and familiar and valued, duly falls apart around our feet. Let us take a few moments for our own prayer and contemplation…. | |||||||||||||