Rogation Sunday
I have been planting seeds of late, actually for the last few weeks. As yet nothing has sprung from my work, but the garden looks fine for the moment. Although it is rogationtide, I do not intend to speak about crops and their circles, the hard work of the farmers, and our hope in God’s bounty.
Rather I would like to share with you something of my reading of late, a reflection on another sort of bounty all around us. You may remember that I have been reading about the Pagans and Christians in Rome during the early period of the Church. And last week I read a novel called the Centurion. This is a curious coincidence, or given the message of the novel, I wonder whether I should call it that. It turns out that the protagonist in the novel is a “dowser”, you know, those people who find water with sticks or bent coat-hangers. This character soon realises that there is no coincidence, the amor fati overtakes, destiny is revealed, and everything unfolds in a grand scheme which includes the main character of the novel, as all novels should do.
Let me carry on with my book review, for eventually it will lead me to the bible. This novel is a good read, I may even get my wife to read it, just as she encourages me to take up her “good reads.”
The novel begins with a crotchety old man who is angry with events in his life. For a lark he and his wife go to a symposium of dowsers and, as he has had some experience of the notion, he is away in a rationalistic, scientific way, becoming someone from the new age at his age for the sake of an age gone by; the whole point of the novel which the main character acknowledges is that the old should become explorers which is a line from a T S Eliot poem. His explorations are at times happy as he gos into the incidents which the dowsing brings up, at other times fulminating against the sheer idiocy of the whole adventure.
He is just like any person who has an experience of the ineffable and wants to know more, but things get in the way. Faith is deep within him, knowledge is abundant, but somehow there is a conflict which he himself must pacify. He must reconcile the seemingly warring parties of heart and head.
As christians, I believe we all know this conflict, don’t we? We have all have had a moment (however long in clock time that is) of doubt and uncertainty. We have all railed against that unproven which bobs up and down on the ocean of our experience calling us to it. That unproven – whether it is the beloved partner, or the ground of all being, our God – that unproven jostles us on this merry-go-round of life and causes us to pause for thought.
That moment of pause can be a moment of anxiety when everything is called into question, when everything is uncertain, when we struggle to keep on an even keel. So it was with the novel’s main character. He had to suspend his disbelief and, more significantly, his belief, and just accept the experiences which presented themselves to him. We all have to do that, and learn about ourselves and that unproven calling.
That education is most important, for without that open heart and mind, we learn nothing. Life, it seems, means nothing and we are bereft of sense, that other sense that life is worth. Without that education we become like some of the characters in the plays some of the existentialists wrote in the last century. We are vague vehicles of emptiness, with no zest for life. As people with faith however, we are fully alive and open to the new. In that moment of anxiety, that moment of education we become aware of the unproven other which beckons us. It only lasts a moment, but that moment is so very important in our lives, for it gives us the whole of our lives to live fully. That is the moment when faith strikes us.
But it is not novelty we seek. Rather we seek the comfort of the old, much like the character from the novel who is comfortable in his historical research and his irascible nature, but he is confronted by this mysterious ability he did not know he had, nor did he wish to acknowledge it. Sometimes we are all like that, whether it is with the children or our neighbours, we just do not see what others see in us, and sometimes we see what others will never see in us. Whatever, we must be open to a new interpretation of ourselves, just as that old man finally acknowledged in the novel. Here the novel and we part company and I would like to take up the story of Paul in the marketplace.
“To an unknown God” is the title of his sermon, and I imagine it is the theme of every sermon I have preached here in Purton, Indeed, I think it informs the whole of my career. For that unknown God calls to me every day, when I meet the people who claim no faith, I look at them and say to myself (and sometimes, when I am emboldened, I say it even to them) “There is something there in the depths, if only we could agree on what we see in front of us.”
That unknown God whom the Athenians worshipped – that God Paul claims as his own, just as we must claim him today. There are people who do not know the depths of their own experience until disaster or enjoyment come along and knock them about a bit. Then we must listen to their stories, just as I read novels – then we must listen to the meaning they are proclaiming and encourage them to think profoundly upon it. That is what we are doing here in church, perhaps that is what the unchurched are doing in their own Sunday morning employment, the car washing, the trip to visit Mammon, the outing to the country. All exhibit ties binding to that unknown God. But those whose eyes are open, like Paul’s or even like yours and mine, those who see, must use their whole being to proclaim the reality of that vision, to proclaim in word and deed what it is that drives people to life in the joyfull lane, the life of the Easter people.