Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

[Week of Prayer for Christian Unity]

Mark 4:1-20

It has been a pleasure and an honour helping to assemble some guests from diverse Christian traditions for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I’m thankful for Marilyn Malton’s continuing work on the blog, and for her part in inviting guests for this week as well.

Due to the busy ministries of several of my ecumenical contacts, I was unable to find someone with the time to commit to writing something for today. So here I go again...

I recently heard a homily from the Rev’d Canon Dr. David Neelands at Trinity College, on the parable of the sower. He pointed out how we usually interpret the different types of ground as representing different people. “I’m rocky ground. She’s like the healthy soil, etc.” Dean Neelands, though, suggested that throughout our lives each one of us is like all the different types of ground. We might have a stretch where the Word of God gets tangled in thorns. Then we might have a rocky period. Sometimes we’re the healthy soil. And so on. 

A very popular (and ecumenical, and interfaith) figure who witnesses to this sort of evolution is the famous monk and author Thomas Merton. He was raised Anglican, but it didn’t have much of an impact on his day to day life. He was a smart young guy, but lived a wild, bohemian life. (Wild enough that the Franciscans didn’t want him, even after he had converted and calmed down.) He eventually became a Cistercian monk, and even though he wanted to become an anonymous figure, praying behind the scenes of the world, he became quite famous for his poetry and spiritual writing. 

As a young, zealous convert to Catholicism he looked back upon his prior experience in the Anglican Church with a critical eye. To him it was “a class religion, the cult of a special society and group, not even of the whole nation, but of the ruling minority in a nation.” His autobiography is moving, and a classic, but parts like that sting for some of us. 

As he matured in his life and his faith he came into contact with Anglicans that left him with a better impression. He would eventually write “I feel very much at home with the C. of E., except when people are awfully stuffy and insular about it.” That’s my feeling exactly! When someone wrote to him about the possibility of a reunification between Rome and the Anglican Church, Merton wrote back that what mattered most was union “in love and in the Holy Spirit.... Where there is a sincere desire for truth and real good will and genuine love, there God Himself will take care of the differences far better than any human or political ingenuity can.” 

http://merton.org/ITMS/seasonal.aspx

Merton’s vision of Churches growing together organically fits very nicely with the farming imagery in today’s parable, don’t you think? Official ecumenical dialogue is important, but sometimes there’s a lot of red tape. Those of us on the ground can do our part by expressing that genuine love of which Merton wrote.

• Matthew Kieswetter

Quotations from The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, Eds. William H. Shannon, Christine M. Bochen, Patrick F. O’Connell (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2002), 135-136.