One of our effective teachers of Christian spirituality is
an Australian Anglican minister, Sarah Bachelard. Along with insight she has the rare gifts of
brevity and clarity – her little book entitled Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis[1]
is a model of readability, lucidity and good sense.
What she calls the Tragic Gap is the gap we all know,
usually unbridgeable, between what ought to be and what is, what might have
been and what wasn’t. The Tragic Gap,
then, is where we live. The gap between
a peaceful world and the world we’ve got; the gap between what I wanted in life
and what actually happened; the gap between reasonably good health and the fact
that I’m falling to bits; the gap between youth and ageing, religion in our
family and irreligion in our family… One
of our problems with much familiar Christian faith and teaching is that, truth
be told, it often makes not a lot of difference in the Tragic Gap except to
help help us feel better or be hopeful.
Sarah Bachelard however sees ways we do find liberation and
new life from God in this gap. This she
finds in the simplest disciplines of contemplative life and prayer. First, she says, the gap is not about
me. Second, she says, I am wrong if I
think my only options are to fix it or else ignore it. And third, I need to move beyond being
right.
Today, let’s have a look at the first of those: The gap
is not about me. Sarah Bachelard
instances a person who has spent all his life in the cause of peacemaking, only
to see, at the end of his days, endemic wars and violence. We can multiply that story 10,000 times. We have met parents who consistently modelled
decency and respect, love and care, only to see their son or daughter peel off
into just the opposite, the myriad forms of self-concern and
irresponsibility. Neither is it right
that a healthy young mother succumbs to some cruel malignancy or pointless
accident. Plenty of things are simply not
right. That’s the gap. The media typically express this by one or
another version of: He didn’t deserve… whatever happened… as though it might have been better
if he did.
Sarah Bachelard suggests we ask ourselves, here in the
middle of the gap, not whether we are being effective in changing things, but
whether we are being faithful.
Secularism can’t answer that question.
You are either effective or not, achieving goals or not. You can scarcely be faithful without a
faith. So the question, for us, is not
so much whether I have made a difference or saved the world, but whether my inner
life and motivations, thoughts and hopes and the decisions I hold to, were, are
in fact the way of Christ... as Jesus taught.
That is absolutely the most I can do – wedded indissolubly with
humility, gentleness and kindness.
If anyone still wants to charge out gallantly into the gap,
into No-Man’s-Land, to put down injustice and destroy the tyrant, then good
luck with that… The real and longer-term
battle is the changing of hearts, one by one.
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