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Easter 5: Perseverance

Last week we knew where we were: sheep and shepherds again. This week the lectionary is all over the place – first a story about Philip being sent by an angel of the Lord off to Gaza to baptise a eunuch and then being whisked off by the Spirit of the Lord to Azotus for the next task. (An apostle’s work is never done). Then the first epistle of John (he who loves God should love his brother also).  The psalm is about worshipping God and John’s gospel is about us bearing much fruit if we are the branches of the vine that is Christ.

If there is a common thread, it is perhaps that our life as a Christian involves hard graft:

Most of us have days when life seems too much – how tempting it would be to give up all our commitments and responsibilities and simply flee to a desert island (does anyone know of one with perfect weather, no mosquitoes and a comfortable hotel?)

 

 

Like Sisyphus, we feel it is our lot in life to roll a boulder up to the top of a hill, knowing that it will only roll down again and force us to start again at the beginning. Albert Camus, in ‘La Peste‘ specifically compares his hero, Dr Rieux, to Sisyphus – Rieux’ wearily summed up the human condition: an everlasting re-commencement.

 

Do you know Piet Hein and his Grooks?

“Here is a fact
that should help you fight
a bit stronger

Things that don’t
actually kill you outright
make you stronger.

Put up in a place
where it is easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T

When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.

Problems worthy
of attack
prove their worth
by hitting back!”
― Piet Hein

 

Perhaps we manage to stiffen our sinews by reciting Kipling:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

The problem with this is that getting the earth with everything that’s in it seems likely only to increase our workload and ‘being a Man’ is an even less attractive proposition for at least half the world’s population.

Thinking of female role models, what about Lady Macbeth? We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not failAct I Scene 7
Unfortunately, as the Shakespearean scholars among you will remember, the play was a tragedy at least in part because of our heroine’s sticky end. Perhaps Winnie the Pooh is the best model, and all we need to do to keep going is to hum a little tune, perhaps with Harry Lauder:

Keep right on to the end of the road,
Keep right on to the end,
Though the way be long,
let your heart be strong,
Keep right on round the bend.

No wisecracks please about going round the bend being the problem that we began with. The point is:
What does your anxiety do? It does not empty tomorrow, brother, of its sorrow, but ah! it empties today of its strength. It does not make you escape the evil, it makes you unfit to cope with it if it comes. 
Arthur W. Pink

The journalist John Derbyshirewrote this in the aftermath of 9/11:

My daily newspaper, the New York Post, gave over its Letters page on Saturday to readers’ suggestions about how we should spend the anniversary of September 11th. Edward Every declares that he will “live the day as any other.” I’m with Mr. Every on this. “Defiant normality” should be the watchword — or, as Winston Churchill used to say: KBO.
National Review 3 September 2002

 

Mother Teresa had the following text, ‘Anyway’ by Kent Keith, on the wall of her children’s home in Calcutta:

People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centred.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

In the spring of 1939, an anonymous civil servant was entrusted with finding the slogan for a propaganda poster intended to comfort and inspire the populace in the event of Nazi invasion. In the event, the poster, Keep Calm and Carry On, was never distributed and the message was all but forgotten until recently, when a copy was discovered in a box of books bought by a Northumberland bookseller. Rescued from obscurity after 70 years, the Ministry of Information’s appeal for calm has now risen to cult status and thousands of copies have been sold across the world. You may be relieved or concerned to know that customers include 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. The need to encourage others to keep going, and the need to be so encouraged ourselves, seems to run very deep.

 

The Queen is said to have a new mantra: Go with the flow:

Taoist story tells of an old man who fell into the river rapids leading to a huge waterfall of great power. Onlookers feared for his life but, miraculously, he emerged unharmed at the bottom of the falls. People asked him how he managed to survive. ‘I accommodated myself to the water. Putting aside conscious thought, I allowed myself to be shaped by it. Plunging into the swirl, I came out with the swirl. This is how I survived’.

What’s it all for? Where are we headed? Is it all worth the struggle? Well, Kipling knew the answer to these questions:

When Earth’s last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it — lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.
And those that were good shall be happy; they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from — Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!

And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!

Rudyard Kipling – L’Envoi To “The Seven Seas”, 1892
◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

The illustration is a depiction of Sisyphus by Titian (wikimedia)

2 comments on this post:

UKViewer said...
avatar

Charles Spurgeon wrote a wonderful sermon on the Perseverance of Faith: http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/2253.htm

Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.”—Matthew 15:28.

In a nutshell, he points towards the perseverance of faith:

“This Canaanite woman was a very sensible woman, wise and prudent. She knew how to turn the hard words of Christ into arguments in her own favour. She would not be put back. If he had not answered her, she would have pleaded with him again. When he did answer her, and say that it was not meet to give the children’s bread to dogs, she found even in that dry bone some little marrow on which to feed her heart. But wise as she was, and prudent as she was, she would not have held out to the end, and obtained the blessing she desired for her daughter, if it had not been for her faith”.

If only I could have her humility and patience and perseverance.

George Herbert also had a handle on it:

“Perseverance by George Herbert.

“Only my soul hangs on thy promises
With face and hands clinging unto thy breast,
Clinging and crying, crying without cease,
Thou art my rock, thou art my rest”.

Lay Anglicana said...
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Thank-you for this, UKViewer. You always manage to find something of George Herbert’s that is new to me – and I love this one. And Charles Spurgeon – a real ‘meat and potatoes’ sort of sermon – they don’t make them like that any more! But I love that he makes faith the key, on which ‘the other graces’ depend. I had not looked at it like that, but of course it is so true.

04 May 2012 14:44
04 May 2012 13:42

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