An End or A Beginning
Richard Haslam omi
As I prepare this year to celebrate the 60th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood I thought I might venture into print, and share a few thoughts with those who like myself are now retired from ministry.
My first temptation was to reflect or ruminate on the past; but that process is always open to misconception, exaggeration or even bitterness over real or imaginary hurts.
I recall one fellow Oblate saying to me in a jocose manner years ago, ‘Don't take away from me the memory of the past that never happened!’ Rather, I would like to reflect on how I am facing the present, and, hopefully, will continue to face the future in the years I may be given.
ACCIDIE
One temptation in retirement would be to withdraw from the world and its problems, and ‘hole up’ in one’s petty pleasures, pains and pathologies, and even take solace in cynicism. I have done that, but have come to realise more and more that any real life calls for involvement and vital relationships. Here the struggle that I faced, and still face at times, is what spiritual writers long ago spoke of as ‘accidie’ or listlessness. At times I can settle to do nothing, nothing interests me or appeals to me, or engages my interest. At times I ask what is the point of my life at this stage. Yet, the opportunities for dynamic engagement and creative involvement are there if I wish to seize them.
Thankfully, I have found good friends who help me through these phases, and keep challenging my inertia.
IDENTITY CHALLENGE
My life over the past years, spent variously in the Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong, and on the west coast of the USA, was taken up mainly in what I would term functional relationships. My identity was mostly based on my function, and I identified myself by what I was doing or had done.
Now that my sails are no longer filled with the winds of activity, I find myself in life’s doldrums. I need to discover a new identity, or, actually, one that was there all along and mostly ignored in my ‘busy’ life. I mean, of course, my identity as a human person, gifted by God with existence and grace and invited into dynamic relationships of sharing and caring. Here, I feel, the challenge is to shift from ‘doing’ to meaningful ‘being’ and ‘presence’.
PRESENCE AS GIFT
Happily, in my life, I have encountered a few people whose very presence gave my hope, joy and peace just by spending time with them. They did not counsel me or do anything for me; they were just there for me and with me and the gift they shared came, I am sure, out of their own appreciation of how much God loved them, and from the fruits of time spent in quiet attention to God’s love in their lives. Such people have been a true source of inspiration and hope for me.
I feel W. B. Yeats described such people well when he wrote:
‘ We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even fiercer life because of our quiet'.
SEEKING THE TRUTH
I rejoice in these retirement years that I experience a greater freedom to express what I feel and think. I certainly do not set out to hurt anyone in expressing my thoughts, but the former constraints imposed by job, status or even false self-esteem are dissipating gradually. I can be more truly myself, I can risk being wrong or even being ridiculed, and can relish true dialogue without feeling I must tow some ’party line’. (I notice that even a few bishops are doing this on retirement.) I feel freer to share my doubts, my fears, my hopes, my disillusions.
I feel that I can reach out to others without untoward conditions, allowing them to speak their own truth with less fear that mine will be overly disturbed. I am more and more impressed by the conviction of Simone Weil that
‘Christ likes us to prefer truth to him, because before being Christ he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.’
SICKNESS AND DEBILITY
It is natural at my age to experience physical limitations and anticipate even debilitating illnesses as life progresses. How am I to cope with these? New questions will arise about the meaning of life in such a context. A short time before his death in 1984, the renowned German theologian Karl Rahner wrote:
‘A Christian is a person who accepts without reservation the whole of concrete life with all its adventures, its absurdities and its mystery’.
Quite a challenge! St.Paul reminds us in the eighth chapter of the Letter to the Romans that ‘the whole created universe groans as if in the pangs of child-birth’ and that ‘we look forward to our liberation from mortality’.
So I feel the need to stop trying to understand this great mystery of creation, and to pray constantly that I can be drawn, however reluctantly, into this great mystery of creation, to welcome it and to embrace it.
A PRIESTLY PEOPLE
St. Peter tells us that we are called to be a priestly people. The deep significance of this call is best appreciated in later life, as we face our own self-emptying, as Christ did, and so permit the fullness of God’s love to come into our lives. We pray not only to endure, but to joyfully entertain the contradictions between the experience of increasing limitations and the deepening desire for limitless life. Let me finish these few musings with a quote from Edith Stein, now St.Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, the Jewish Carmelite nun who died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1942.
‘To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels – that is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth’.
Richard Haslam, omi
2010
A PRAYER
O loving Creator and Sustainer
of this awesome and complex universe
I thank you for the gift of my being,
and for the gift of that self-awareness
that allows me to respond,
however fitfully,
to your generous self-revelation
in your Word made flesh
Jesus, the anointed and promised one.
As I continue on my pilgrim way
to that destiny You have offered me in Christ
may I always follow Him
who shows me the way
in the dark moments of my life,
and who guides my search for the truth
until I find its fulness in Him.
Richard Haslam, omi
2010