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Carrying God In A Bottomless Bucket
Carrying God to the world sounds like a tall order – and if we think we can really do that, we may be teetering on the brink of a Messiah complex!
There was a time when I used to think that we could receive grace from God into our own ‘containers’, rather like the old days when people used to take their jugs and jars out to the milk-cart to get their daily supply of milk. How much you got depended on the size of your container. When it came to grace, I thought, I would receive as much as my heart would hold, and if I hoped for more, I would have to do something about ‘expanding’ my heart. This way of looking at things served me reasonably well for a while (even though, as you can see, it is rather a me-centred approach to the problem) – until, that is, the bottom fell out of my bucket.
Maybe there have been times in your life when your ‘system’ packed in, and your tried and tested methods of doing things just didn’t seem to work any more. Maybe it was some traumatic experience that brought you to a fuller realisation of your own inability to save even yourself, let alone the rest of the world. Or maybe it was just the gradual advance of a sense of personal helplessness, when it came to questions arising out of your journey with God. Whatever it was, it quite possibly left you feeling as though your solid certainties had become unreliable, and the jug you had been using to collect your ‘daily grace’ from the milk-float of your prayer, had sprung a leak.
Every life is shot through with little ‘dyings’. At the time they seem only to diminish us, but over time, if we look back reflectively, they may become the very moments when we really came alive. The bucket becomes a pipe. The few litres of grace we might have held in our bucket turn into the possibility of a constant stream that – at last – is free to flow through our open-ended hearts.
We can no longer bracket ourselves with neat beginnings and endings, and when God removes our brackets and leaves us feeling naked and bereft, he is actually throwing open our limiting barriers and exposing us to the glory and pain of eternity. Pain, because we cannot bear, lightly, the truth that we are not ourselves the purpose of it all, but the provisional containers through which the Purpose flows; and glory, because that Purpose is so infinitely greater than anything our blinkered hearts could ever have imagined.
Once the ends are off our life’s pipeline, and the certainties we thought we held are dissolved in the acid of experience, grace can flow, freely. Or not so freely? For myself, honesty demands that I acknowledge the many blockages and resistances that cling to the walls of my own heart’s channel, like limpets to a boat’s hull. Detaching the limpets is painful. Yet even here, there is great promise: the more freely grace flows, the more clear the channel becomes. What begins as the merest trickle will swell, and the more power it gathers, the more surely will it remove my barnacles.
I cannot give God to the world. Only God himself can do that. But I can give him some space, and if space is what I seek, where might I find it if not in my own inner emptiness? In those places that hurt me so much that I try to fill them up with achievements and attachments. When I learn to let go of those false friends, then space is something I find I have plenty of. I can give God my empty broken bucket, to be a little segment in a channel for his peace.
Landmarks
An Ignatian Journey
Margaret Silf
Paperback |256 pp |234 x 156 mm
‘I know of no publishing house which has ever offered to reimburse a buyer who remains dissatisfied after reading one of its books. I think Darton, Longman and Todd could safely make the first such offer with Landmarks. I delighted in following Margaret Silf’s journey of exploration today … lucidly written, down to earth, free of jargon, full of hope and encouragement.’
Gerard W. Hughes
‘Margaret Silf is one of the most talented spiritual writers, and her Landmarks will become a classic.’
Margaret Hebblethwaite
Landmarks help us to find ourselves when we think we are lost. When we don’t know where to begin, they give us a starting point. When we think we know where we are, they give us the confidence to keep going. And if we think we have arrived, they remind us that there is always something more, somewhere beyond …
This is a book of Landmarks for the heart’s journey. Written out of the author’s own prayer and lived experience, and inspired by her practical explorations of the insights of St Ignatius Loyola, it opens up questions which concern us all:
– How can we recognise God’s ceaseless action in our lives and begin to discern his will?
– What does ‘fallenness’ mean for us today?
– How can we live true to ourselves and make decisions in freedom?
– How do we penetrate our deepest desires and become free of the lesser attachments that obstruct them?
Big questions – but as Margaret Silf shows, there are clues to be discovered in every moment and situation: at home, at work, in the garden, in the market, in the bath!
Landmarks will help us discover and deepen our individual journeys. Written for both groups and individuals, it is illustrated with drawings and diagrams, and contains exercises and suggestions for prayer and reflection. Be warned, however. Landmarks are not for armchair pilgrims. They are for People of the Way.
Wonderful ! Thanks for that