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12/03/2010 Richard's Ramblings - March 2010

I’m late! Normally it is my intention to have my reflections complete and on the BCM web-site by the 1^st day of each month, and here it is nearly 2 weeks into March, and I’m only now writing.

I suppose I could give a lot of excuses for the fact I’m late, and they would almost certainly be excuses most of you could identify with. But I won’t! Instead, the situation has caused me to reflect a little on the way in which we set ourselves so many deadlines. It sometimes feels as though life is limited to the process of running from one deadline to another and another and then another.

Most of us, or if not ourselves, the people who have set the deadlines, would argue that each of the issues with which we are dealing are important, urgent and necessary, or would apply some such justification to our busyness. And, at one level, that would be correct. The complexity of life in the 21^st century means that there are many things that simply have to be done in order for the wheels of society, the economy and general living to continue turning. The interconnected complexity of life both enables us to achieve what we want from life, whilst at the same time trapping us in its web of consequential deadlines.

I may have referred in a previous Ramblings to a time when I had cause to read quite a bit about a group of people often called the Desert Fathers. These were men (at least the ones I read about were all men) who separated themselves off from what might have been called normal life at the time, and went and lived in remote uninhabited corners of their world. Often, along with the isolation, they subjected themselves to quite stringent self-punishment. In simple terms, it seemed their desire was to remove themselves from any and all of the distractions that are such a normal part of most of our lives, in order to put themselves in touch with the core meaning of life, to understand themselves and to be worthy of relationship with God – their conviction being that all the things they had separated themselves from were hindrances to achieving this.

In the midst of the busyness of deadlines to meet, the Desert Fathers do sometimes seem to be onto something – apart from the self-punishment bit! But what would life be like without our normal interests and the people who are part of those interests?

It really does get back to balance: So difficult to achieve amongst the stresses and pressures that surround us, and yet essential to well-being.

And how do we achieve balance in our lives? A start might be making the space (…there’s the first hurdle…) to evaluate for ourselves what is important, what is at the core of meaning and purpose, what gives underlying value to everything else we do. The next step might be to act upon our convictions…

Rev Richard Johnston
March 2010

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