There’s an old story from the Muslim Sufi tradition which goes like this…
A traveller was once walking along the road when he came upon a holy man, a dervish, sitting by the side of the road quietly praying. The man was old and frail, and had obviously been sitting in this place a long time.
As the traveller watched, a young man on a great white horse came riding hell for leather along the road towards them. When he got to the place where the holy man sat, he reined in his horse, jumped down and started beating the man savagely. The traveller started forward to defend him, but the young man leapt back up into the horse’s saddle and rode off down before he could reach him.
The holy man struggled to his feet and looked down the road after his young attacker, who was vanishing from sight in a cloud of dust, and he shouted after him
“May you get what your heart desires!”
The traveller was astonished at this and said to the old man, “Tell me, why did you shout that at a man who had so brutally beaten you? It’s not at all what I would have shouted at him”.
“Ah” he said “But, you see, the thing is, the person who has what their heart desires will not need to go about the world beating up holy men.”
I’ll let that sink in. “The person who has what their heart desires will not need to go about the world beating up holy men.”
This year has seen a great deal of loss for many people. The death toll from Covid 19 stands at over 46,000 in the UK, and there have been many other deaths from disease and natural disaster too, like the recent earthquake in Turkey. But today, on Remembrance Sunday, we’re not remembering those death, deaths caused by viruses, or the shifting of tectonic plates, impersonal forces. Today, as if all that was not enough sadness, we are mourning deaths which were caused deliberately. People have different opinions, of course, about when and whether war is justified, but I don’t think anyone with a shred of decency would say that it’s good, or desirable. It’s always a sign of failure. Wars don’t spring from nowhere. They are born from petty disagreements, suspicion, prejudice, fear, which only escalate into cataclysmic destruction because we can’t find or won’t seek other ways of resolving differences and we often don’t realise the importance of doing so until it is too late.
That’s the tragedy of war; the knowledge that it didn’t have to happen at all. When we look at the names on our war memorials we know that these people, young people for the most part, could have lived full and happy lives, had brilliant careers, formed relationships, seen their children grow up, and their grandchildren too, if it hadn’t been for the wars into which human failings catapulted them.
In our first Bible reading, the prophet Micah, amidst the loss and violence of his own time, had a vision of a better world. There are grand images in his vision, of nations streaming to Jerusalem, for example, but it’s the small things which really stand out for me, because it’s often the small things which matter most to us. Micah dreams of a time when people will be able to sit under their own vines and fig trees without the fear that an invading army is going to take it all from them. Sitting under your own vine and fig tree? It’s not so very much to ask, is it? And yet, for so many people, in every age, even that simple dream is beyond them. War steals their dreams, along with their lives, their loved ones, their homes, their futures. War slaughters them in the trenches, gasses them in the concentration camps, drives them out as refugees, causes them to die of starvation and cold as they try to seek safety. And we know, deep down, that it didn’t have to happen.
As that Sufi story implied, violence isn’t inevitable. It springs from a sickness in the human heart, but it’s a sickness that seems so endemic that we all grow up infected by it to some extent. It produces in us a deep insecurity, which makes us cling to what we’ve got instead of sharing it, and grasp at what we haven’t got, thinking it’ll be the magic wand which makes us finally feel safe and loved and worthwhile. That Sufi mystic knew what made for peace; not, in the end, diplomatic treaties backed up by sophisticated weaponry, but the healing of the human heart.
The way of life Jesus calls his followers to in today’s Gospel reading depends on us finding that kind of healing and wholeness. We can’t live a life of radical generosity, we can’t love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us unless we’re secure in ourselves, and Christians believe that security ultimately comes from discovering we’re secure in God. We find that security by trying to live as Christ did, and failing, and being forgiven and trying again, and failing again and being forgiven again, until we realise that we can’t destroy God’s love for us, that nothing can separate us from it, “neither death nor life nor anything else in all creation” as St Paul put it.
Today, as we look at these long lists of names - far too many – names that are echoed on war memorials all over the world, of course, we long for peace, from the depths of our broken hearts. The invitation of Christ is to bring those broken hearts to God, to let him heal them, casting out the fear and hatred which destroys peace, and filling them with his love, so that it can overflow to others. Then maybe, we will realise that we have what our hearts desire, and we won’t need to go about the world beating up holy men, or anyone else, for that matter.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment