Phillip Adams writing on Kerry Packer in The Australian October last year provides us with an insight into the powerful and wealthy man he became. In his article, Adams shares some of the conflict and difficulties Kerry suffered at the hands of his father and how the need to succeed and to be successful was a burden. Adams finishes the article as follows, and I quote, “ At the beginning of our odd friendship, after the first of our conversations that would go on until two or three in the morning, Kerry would talk about black holes. “That’s what I’ve got inside me. A black hole,” he said.”
Last week some of us watched the apology of the richest and the most powerful sportsman in history who has been humbled by a similar black hole. Tiger Woods said, “"I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn't have to go far to find them.”
The black hole is merciless and swallows up the rich and the famous as well as the ordinary schoolboy or girl who thinks the rules do not apply to him or her. Despite all the opportunity we have before us, no matter how successful we are, we often find selves bemoaning our place in the world and looking for ways to fill that black hole. It never goes away.
In the 15th Chapter of Genesis we discover one of the most successful, most powerful and most wealthy of men, Abram, having to deal with his own personal black hole, one that if you follow this career never goes away. He never quite got over his fears and his doubts and his life is littered with bad decisions. Here we meet him after he has had a very successful time. In chapter 13 Abram & Lot had divided the land between them, with Lot taking the best parcel, described in ways similar to the Garden of Eden; Abram get’s a somewhat lesser although a quite extensive lot, simply “the land of the Canaanites”.
In chapter 14 Abram rescues Lot, defeats Chedorlaomer, among others with the result that the warlord King of Sodom offers him the riches of his conquest. He takes nothing – he does not use this as the opportunity to secure his future, for him his future can only be secured by “the Lord Most High”.
Very grand and full of faith. Yet…. Here in the beginning of chapter 15 he is anxious, he’s not as happy and relaxed as one who makes the claims he does may be expected to be. God is aware, and says to him, ‘Do not be afraid, I am your protector, you will get your reward’.
Abram seems to be like most of us. We can rise to the big occasions, deal with that extraordinary challenge, find some where in ourselves the necessary resources of wisdom, skill and faith to deal with the big stuff but become unstuck by the little.
For Abram it’s that he and Sarah still have no natural heir. It has been some time since God had promised that, Abram and Sarah have tried a number of stunts to help God get the job done and it hasn’t happened. So Abram is anxious – unsure about whether God can do that thing – he can do big things but can he do that thing?
God shows him the stars and says don’t worry your descendents will be as plentiful as the stars. Abram shrugs his shoulders, he’s not convinced.
How often do we do so in our own lives? We don’t have trouble with God sorting out or helping us through tragedy, difficulties or the unexpected stuff – but what about the day-to-day stuff? Some how we don’t think so, for to allow God to handle the minutiae is for us losing control over the things we think we ought to control.
The rather nonchalant comment that Abram indeed does believe the Lord in verse 6 is a little to simple, a little to easy. We know his track record, he does believe, but we also know that he stills struggles in the midst of his belief.
He sits some where in between, balancing his faith with his doubt, his fears with his assurance, his confidence with his anxiety. A priest I know often asks the question: What is the opposite of faith? (PAUSE & REPEAT) The answer is not doubt it is certainty. Certainty takes faith completely out of the question for we now no longer need to believe for we know.
God seems very comfortable with this perceived duality for it is not a duality at all. Faith and doubt are twins and sit comfortably together. Without one you do not have the other and neither will defeat the other but will simply provide the nourishment to stay with the questions in our life.
Thomas Merton in "Thoughts in Solitude" comments:
“Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison."
In verse 6 God honors that living with the questions in that “the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness”. God understood his desire and accepted his questions as being the right way to live. He said to Abram and he says to us through the life and words of Jesus that he accepts us with all our contradictions as being the people he calls us to be.
Perhaps the challenges is best expressed in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, in his book “Letters to a Young Poet”: ““Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
Abram did and so can we. AMEN
Genesis 15:1-6
Showing posts with label Rilke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rilke. Show all posts
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Life Balance.
Living on the surface is an art form modern humanity has appeared to have mastered. Even those of us who strive for depth and integrity have, if we are honest with ourselves, to admit to not being the person we publicly seem to be. While we can appear to master this art for many years, the mask will slip and we will appear to others as we really are at some point.
The danger is we can hide behind the fallibility of others and fail to firstly recognise and then deal with the imperfections in our own lives. Modern media with its moral outrage aids us in this project and we can go through life either comfortable with our own dark secrets or, at least able to live with them, albeit in some degree of tension. Often those of us who are the most strident in our criticisms of others are living fragile lives on the edge of imploding if our real self is exposed.
In many ways this need for duplicity in living sits at the centre of mental health issues and addictions. Unable to be honest and open about who we are forces us to live balancing on the high-wire of public and private expectations and at some point the high-wire snaps.
How do we get to the point of honesty and acceptance, firstly of our own hidden struggles and then of those very same struggles we witness in others? How do we get to understand that those struggles do not disqualify us as both valued and valuable human beings. In fact they actually verify us as human so we are able to celebrate our ordinariness and cease to strive for perfection, being able to live in that space-in-between where all fall short.
If we look closely at all the great people past and present we will find personal failings, faults and, sometimes, seemingly incongruous contradictions and passions. Yet those very same people were and are able to rise above or live in tension with their inner shadow in such a way as to make their mark on the world. Sadly we do not want our heroes to be too ordinary, it would ruin the illusion firstly, but it would also ask us to make something of our ordinariness as well.
Two people have made an impact on my life: Thomas Merton and Rainer Maria Rilke. Both were recognised as poets with Rilke possibly one the greatest European poets of the 20th Century. Both inspired others to great heights of spirituality, one within the traditional Christian setting for most of his life, and the other outside the traditional realm but always within the world.
Yet the tale of both men point to great incongruity within their lives. Both experienced a challenge to their inner being through love. For Merton this was a passionate love affair as well as with his engagement with controversial issues, and for Rilke many such love affairs and strange behaviours. Yet their desire to pursue pure art and spirituality never wavered and, one could argue, was in fact enriched by their seemingly outrageous actions.
It is for these very reasons that I and many others embrace their work. For it is in this space-in-between perfection and ordinariness, desire and reality, hope and despair, questions and answers that one finds the still place of not being that saves us. When we start on this journey and begin to jettison the unnecessary cultural and societal collateral we have gathered around ourselves we begin the journey (which is no journey) into the place (which is no place) and find that we no longer are. It is not that we no longer exist but that we no longer are who we were or who we thought we had to be. As we begin to drop the veil of illusions we come face to face with our hidden self and find ourselves in a fight for our soul.
Like a snake who slithers out of the old skin into the new, and does so every year, we shed our illusions one after another, and continue to do so while we still have breath, seeking always the very place we began, innocent as a new born child who's imagination welcomes the world into theirs.
This unnerving journey of hidden beauty is the mysterious reason for our being and can never be accomplished while we inhabit the surface. Go into the deep seeking not to breathe the everywhere air but to breathe under water.
The danger is we can hide behind the fallibility of others and fail to firstly recognise and then deal with the imperfections in our own lives. Modern media with its moral outrage aids us in this project and we can go through life either comfortable with our own dark secrets or, at least able to live with them, albeit in some degree of tension. Often those of us who are the most strident in our criticisms of others are living fragile lives on the edge of imploding if our real self is exposed.
In many ways this need for duplicity in living sits at the centre of mental health issues and addictions. Unable to be honest and open about who we are forces us to live balancing on the high-wire of public and private expectations and at some point the high-wire snaps.
How do we get to the point of honesty and acceptance, firstly of our own hidden struggles and then of those very same struggles we witness in others? How do we get to understand that those struggles do not disqualify us as both valued and valuable human beings. In fact they actually verify us as human so we are able to celebrate our ordinariness and cease to strive for perfection, being able to live in that space-in-between where all fall short.
If we look closely at all the great people past and present we will find personal failings, faults and, sometimes, seemingly incongruous contradictions and passions. Yet those very same people were and are able to rise above or live in tension with their inner shadow in such a way as to make their mark on the world. Sadly we do not want our heroes to be too ordinary, it would ruin the illusion firstly, but it would also ask us to make something of our ordinariness as well.
Two people have made an impact on my life: Thomas Merton and Rainer Maria Rilke. Both were recognised as poets with Rilke possibly one the greatest European poets of the 20th Century. Both inspired others to great heights of spirituality, one within the traditional Christian setting for most of his life, and the other outside the traditional realm but always within the world.
Yet the tale of both men point to great incongruity within their lives. Both experienced a challenge to their inner being through love. For Merton this was a passionate love affair as well as with his engagement with controversial issues, and for Rilke many such love affairs and strange behaviours. Yet their desire to pursue pure art and spirituality never wavered and, one could argue, was in fact enriched by their seemingly outrageous actions.
It is for these very reasons that I and many others embrace their work. For it is in this space-in-between perfection and ordinariness, desire and reality, hope and despair, questions and answers that one finds the still place of not being that saves us. When we start on this journey and begin to jettison the unnecessary cultural and societal collateral we have gathered around ourselves we begin the journey (which is no journey) into the place (which is no place) and find that we no longer are. It is not that we no longer exist but that we no longer are who we were or who we thought we had to be. As we begin to drop the veil of illusions we come face to face with our hidden self and find ourselves in a fight for our soul.
Like a snake who slithers out of the old skin into the new, and does so every year, we shed our illusions one after another, and continue to do so while we still have breath, seeking always the very place we began, innocent as a new born child who's imagination welcomes the world into theirs.
This unnerving journey of hidden beauty is the mysterious reason for our being and can never be accomplished while we inhabit the surface. Go into the deep seeking not to breathe the everywhere air but to breathe under water.
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