Sarah Bachelard’s third point about living contemplatively
in the Tragic Gap is that we begin to discover how to live beyond being
“right”. The way she puts it is: …how moving beyond the need to get our lives
“right” frees us to be fully ourselves and to receive our lives, as it were,
from the future. (Puzzled brows…)
The urge to be right, surely, is something we take for
granted. Who wants to be wrong? I can think of people who insist they’re
right when everyone else knows otherwise – and they do it because it’s
intolerable to have been wrong, even if they were. This is by no means unknown in religion. That’s
what I believe, it’s what I’ll always believe, and you can’t convince me
otherwise…
Of course concepts of right and wrong matter. It is important that we choose some paths and
not others. One of the real difficulties
now is that, to many, especially younger people, right and wrong seem often so
confused that you might as well simply please yourself. Why not respond to what I believe I want, get
what I think or hope will make me happy…?
Religious faith is rejected, because it is perceived as restrictive –
and also because, as it seems, the paladins of religion can’t agree among
themselves anyway about what’s right and what’s wrong. So we find no important place in our lives
anymore for religious faith. The same
with politics… one public demagogue believes one thing is right, and another
public demagogue says exactly the opposite… so why bother choosing,
understanding, voting?
Move to the personal sphere…
A parishioner who lives in my memory claimed that there was nothing in
her life history she regretted; she would, she said, do it all over again just
the same... she wouldn’t change a thing. This was important to her, to have been right. I think of a book by a senior policeman at
the time of the 1981 Springbok Tour riots, about his philosophy of life, and
the book was entitled, Never Back Down. We once had a Prime Minister whose theme song
was Frank Sinatra’s, I Did It My Way. To be able to say, I was wrong, if I was, is a rare and humble gift.
There are two kinds of life, as in Robert Frost’s timeless image:
two roads diverged in a wood… One road is indeed largely a matter of being
right, getting it right, justifying myself, being sure, being seen to be right,
fulfilling expectations, achieving goals, meriting praise, receiving awards…
and of course these days we have to add, feeling right.
We may come to the other, the road less travelled, he calls it, the fork in the road, perhaps
later in life. Sarah Bachelard says it
is when we see, it dawns on us, that we can
receive our lives from the future. That
is the future that used to frighten us. This
is what the biblical writers have always meant by faith, since Abraham. It is when we find we can lay down the burden
of anxiety about the past, the weight of memory, particularly about wrongs and
regrets, but also about triumphs and the big satisfactions. They are all there, with our frequent need to
keep control of life and events, and they’re unlikely to go away, but we are
ready to leave them, as we can, at the side of the road. And now, helped by stillness and silence, and
our awareness of God’s presence in Christ, we learn increasingly to be
unafraid, to receive life from what is given along the way, to say Yes… We learn to respond, quietly and gently, to
listen to the world and people, to bear pain, to be present and attentive in
our world… much as Jesus was. It is what
Jewish and Christian scriptures know as Sophia,
Wisdom.
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