One of Father Thomas Hopko’s maxims for Life in Christ, is ‘Do nothing for someone else that they could or should do for themselves’. In our world of individualism this sounds like a recipe for ignoring other people, but it is not. It is rather a check on our own ‘self importance’ – which is such that we all too readily fill any vacant space, fill any silence, obliterate any sense that We are not the centre of the universe. This ‘itching’ to live other people’s lives for them, this inability to stay within our own space is a sign of the deep seated anxiety which besets our age.
The Modern world is one which we have created for ourselves and thus if we do not keep ‘hard at it’, ‘beavering away’ (although that is to be unfair to beavers which only make one lodge for themselves), Working to ‘keep things going’, then everything would fall apart.
Having eradicated God from our consciousness we believe utterly in our own self importance, for that is all that is left, and so the stronger amongst us fill the space and take over the lives of the weaker (As Nietzsche amongst others predicted of a world stripped bare of the Worship of the living God).
We see this in the famous 80:20 rule. 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the people. We (the 20 percent) mutter about those who ‘do not pull their weight’ but we are ‘whining compulsive ‘Marthas’’ overspilling our bounds. Less than gentle we take from others the small tasks given for them and them alone to do, and then complain that they should come and help us!
Our lives are actually quite small. Not many of us are more than 2m tall, or weigh more than 90 kilos . . . or so. This is the space that is given to us – but we have lost sense of the givenness of our boundedness – and thus many are deprived of life – either around us for we have spilled into their space or in the wider world, for in our anxiety driven consumption we have stolen their space from them.
It is hard to look out at the world and believe that really ‘we all need to work harder, to do more’, as the ‘natural world’ falls apart around us under the stress of our unboundedness.
Jesus is ‘gentle and humble in heart’. Put another way, he is very small. [We have a tendency to dwell on God’s Greatness, but He is at the same time humble beyond our imagining – the mightiest mountain has the very deepest roots]
Gentleness and humility do not fill other peoples’ space. So we could follow his example and learn to be small, learn to be our selves. Perhaps meditate upon the nature of Love as expressed in 1 Corinthians 13 – do you See how self-effacing Love is . . . ?
Yet in another way we ARE vast beyond imagination. As St Paul reminds us ‘your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit’. Lenten disciplines call us to small acts – to live with an open hand to all who ask for alms; restrain our bodily appetites – Come to our own space; and therein to pray. A world filled with compulsive work is prayerless. We are too busy to pray, to tired with ‘keeping it all going’. Of course we have little need of prayer for we are all ‘doing it for our selves’ keeping the world we have made in our own image going . . .
Yet we have all the space we need in which to pray, for if the Holy Spirit still dwells within us, if we have not driven the humble one from our lives with our own self importance, then the space for prayer within us, these Temples of our bodies, is infinitely large.
When we begin to see the illusory nature of what we call the Modern world and Behold the world as it truly is, as God’s, we realise that we do not need to overspill our lives, indeed that that is a grasping blasphemy, for in Truth All is Gift.
We can come back to our senses. We can leave others to the small work that is theirs as we do the small work which is ours. We need only be still, and Christ in us will do the rest . . . which of course brings us back to where we began . . .
the elves are heading west 