![Picture](/uploads/5/3/1/4/53145165/published/act0141-medium.jpg?1517803900)
Peter JB Carman
February 4, 2018
Mark 1:29-39
I.
In childhood I first remember meeting Dorothy and Douglas, visiting my parents’ home in Massachusetts. Douglas and Dorothy Steere were Quakers, from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. By the time I got there as an eighteen-year-old student, Douglas, a philosophy professor, had been retired for quite some time. But that didn’t stop two students, a sophomore named David Hamilton and me, from seeking him out about doing an independent reading course.
In the spring of 1977, every Saturday morning, we walked to the home of Dorothy and Douglas on the edge of the college campus, and we read together, read whatever Douglas suggested. We read old mystics and we talked about Kierkegaard and world religions and we listened to Douglas reminisce about the meetings he had with bishops and gardeners.
After a while, Dorothy would walk in, and let us know it was time for breakfast. Then we got to listen to her too, a fine treat. I remember one time over breakfast—we were eating delicious home-made jam. As Douglas reminisced, she interrupted the great man… “Douglas Van Steere, that wasn’t the way it was at all…” and she corrected him at length. Douglas just smiled gently and admitted that she was probably right.
It wasn’t the only time that happened. Dorothy had a sharp memory and an acute love of the truth—and wasn’t intimidated by the credentials of her well-known partner. Douglas’ memory was failing.
Years have flown by! Douglas Steere died in the 1990s, Dorothy, the woman who set him right all the time, died more recently. David, my fellow student, is a federal judge, last I heard.
It was a long time ago. Yet one thing I learned that year I have never forgotten. It was about 8:30 or 9 one Saturday morning.
II.
Douglas started talking about the life of faith as a continuous cycle, with three parts that flow, if we are deliberate about it, from one into the next. Start anywhere on the wheel, he said, and yet it needs each phase if we are going to live our lives well!
Let’s start with contemplation, Douglas said: the life of faith starts with prayer, with listening in silence, with waiting on the divine…. Stage one: we center ourselves in the presence of the holy, still our souls, allow God in. No one can live a life of faith without allowing the sacred to come in! Where do you find the holy? Where do you find the time and space to still yourself in the presence of something bigger than we are?
But a life of contemplation isn’t everything. Real people in the real world need to talk and think and question and sort out how the rubber hits the road, how the life of the soul relates to the world around us. So, the second stage, the next stage after prayer is reflection—it might be study, or it might be conversation with others we know and trust-- but whether we reflect alone or engage in discussions and dialogue together, reflection is the place where the contemplative person starts to deal with the world—and where we learn from each other’s experience. Reflection is where the heart that has been immersed in God reckons with how that relates to a world in turmoil. Stage two, reflection.
And finally, the third stage--action. When we are done praying, and we have reflected well enough to make informed good choices, we must act in this world—we must engage. We must respond! It isn’t enough to pray, it isn’t enough to teach and learn, to discuss and deliberate. There comes a time when we must become people of action. I learned years later that my teacher Douglas Steere had been instrumental in the years after world war two in arranging humanitarian relief to Finland, to Norway and to Poland. This writer of more than ten books on spirituality and philosophy had understood that there was a season for thinking and a season for acting—and he had done his part to save lives.
And when the action is done? When the healing is accomplished, or when we have tasted failure, when we have gotten worn out doing, it is time to start over—and so we move again into contemplation, When the day of action is done, it is time to return to prayer. And when morning comes, it is time for planning the next steps. And then it is time to walk. Prayer; reflection; action. And then yes, back to prayer—contemplation, returning to the “Love at the heart of things”.[i] So turns the wheel in our life of faith together—never stopping, and never leaving us in the same place we started![ii]
III.
Prayer. Reflection. Action. Action, prayer, reflection. The wheel spins, as night follows day, and day follows night.
Our reading from Mark today throws us into the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, coming to the home of Simon Peter, in the town of Capernaum. They have just moved out of a time of prayer and reflection in the synagogue. As they enter the house, Jesus is told about Simon’s mother-in-law, sick with a fever. He goes right away to her, takes her by the hand. She is raised up, fever-free.
Right away, without waiting, she begins waiting on the people starting to gather there. Ministering to them. The word for her service, in the original Greek, is the word for the kind of table service that early church listeners knew was the highest kind of honor—ministering at the communion meal—it’s the word we get “Deacon” from.
The first recorded use of the word “minister” or “serve” in the gospels is an unnamed woman in chapter 1 of Mark’s gospel is a woman. Not one of the official disciples, but Simon’s mother-in-law. She is a woman who has just been raised up by Christ’s hand from her sickbed, raised up from fever. She has a fresh sense of purpose. Hers is a straight line—from fever to an encounter with the healing of God, to be raised up, yes to action: but not any old action! Action that is the finest example of compassionate service, to whomsoever comes through the door. And they keep arriving, and Jesus keeps healing….
IV.
In the dark of the early hours of morning soon after that crazy night, Jesus arises, slips away, to be alone, to pray, in quiet. Jesus goes to a quiet place, to be centered in the presence of the One who sent him. Jesus’ apprentice rabbis, the disciples, after a little, soon rise to find him, and interrupt his solitude, to tell him everybody is looking for him. Could be more people looking for healing? But maybe they mean word is out, that there are powerful people searching for him, people it would be better to avoid. After listening to them, it turns out Jesus has a bigger agenda anyway! It suits his purposes to keep on the move. He answers, "Let’s go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; that’s what I came out to do."
Jesus never seems to do anything halfway. He throws himself totally into prayer, into conversation with any one—a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, a rich man, a beggar, homeless children, a centurion, a rebel bandit. He commits himself to a life of action: healing bodies, bringing a message of revolutionary good news to marketplaces and houses of worship, embodying resurrection love. Always on the move, always on the go, always looking for new opportunities to turn the world upside down, ready to give his life completely.
To follow the path of Jesus isn’t about balancing one’s life of faith—it is about fully embracing all of it! It is about soaking in the sacred. It is about wrestling through the tough questions, together and apart. It is about daring to act, committing to a direction—when the moment demands.
We are invited on a journey: invited to pray, challenged to learn, raised up to act. For this it is that we are called. Some from our nets, some from our books, some from our disability, or fever or uncertainty. For this new and lovely life.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[i] Love at the Heart of Things: A Biography of Douglas V. Steere, by E Glenn Hinson, Pendle Hill, 1998, is fine biography and more.
[ii] Douglas credited Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a well-known Catholic scholar and mystic of the late 19th and early 20th century, with this essential insight. However, the version we received in 1977 bore the simplicity and pragmatic insight into the life of faith that was Douglas Steere’s very own.
Graphic: Christ Healing Peter's Mother-in-Law, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56407 [retrieved February 4, 2018]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meister_des_Hitda-Evangeliars_002.jpg.
February 4, 2018
Mark 1:29-39
I.
In childhood I first remember meeting Dorothy and Douglas, visiting my parents’ home in Massachusetts. Douglas and Dorothy Steere were Quakers, from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. By the time I got there as an eighteen-year-old student, Douglas, a philosophy professor, had been retired for quite some time. But that didn’t stop two students, a sophomore named David Hamilton and me, from seeking him out about doing an independent reading course.
In the spring of 1977, every Saturday morning, we walked to the home of Dorothy and Douglas on the edge of the college campus, and we read together, read whatever Douglas suggested. We read old mystics and we talked about Kierkegaard and world religions and we listened to Douglas reminisce about the meetings he had with bishops and gardeners.
After a while, Dorothy would walk in, and let us know it was time for breakfast. Then we got to listen to her too, a fine treat. I remember one time over breakfast—we were eating delicious home-made jam. As Douglas reminisced, she interrupted the great man… “Douglas Van Steere, that wasn’t the way it was at all…” and she corrected him at length. Douglas just smiled gently and admitted that she was probably right.
It wasn’t the only time that happened. Dorothy had a sharp memory and an acute love of the truth—and wasn’t intimidated by the credentials of her well-known partner. Douglas’ memory was failing.
Years have flown by! Douglas Steere died in the 1990s, Dorothy, the woman who set him right all the time, died more recently. David, my fellow student, is a federal judge, last I heard.
It was a long time ago. Yet one thing I learned that year I have never forgotten. It was about 8:30 or 9 one Saturday morning.
II.
Douglas started talking about the life of faith as a continuous cycle, with three parts that flow, if we are deliberate about it, from one into the next. Start anywhere on the wheel, he said, and yet it needs each phase if we are going to live our lives well!
Let’s start with contemplation, Douglas said: the life of faith starts with prayer, with listening in silence, with waiting on the divine…. Stage one: we center ourselves in the presence of the holy, still our souls, allow God in. No one can live a life of faith without allowing the sacred to come in! Where do you find the holy? Where do you find the time and space to still yourself in the presence of something bigger than we are?
But a life of contemplation isn’t everything. Real people in the real world need to talk and think and question and sort out how the rubber hits the road, how the life of the soul relates to the world around us. So, the second stage, the next stage after prayer is reflection—it might be study, or it might be conversation with others we know and trust-- but whether we reflect alone or engage in discussions and dialogue together, reflection is the place where the contemplative person starts to deal with the world—and where we learn from each other’s experience. Reflection is where the heart that has been immersed in God reckons with how that relates to a world in turmoil. Stage two, reflection.
And finally, the third stage--action. When we are done praying, and we have reflected well enough to make informed good choices, we must act in this world—we must engage. We must respond! It isn’t enough to pray, it isn’t enough to teach and learn, to discuss and deliberate. There comes a time when we must become people of action. I learned years later that my teacher Douglas Steere had been instrumental in the years after world war two in arranging humanitarian relief to Finland, to Norway and to Poland. This writer of more than ten books on spirituality and philosophy had understood that there was a season for thinking and a season for acting—and he had done his part to save lives.
And when the action is done? When the healing is accomplished, or when we have tasted failure, when we have gotten worn out doing, it is time to start over—and so we move again into contemplation, When the day of action is done, it is time to return to prayer. And when morning comes, it is time for planning the next steps. And then it is time to walk. Prayer; reflection; action. And then yes, back to prayer—contemplation, returning to the “Love at the heart of things”.[i] So turns the wheel in our life of faith together—never stopping, and never leaving us in the same place we started![ii]
III.
Prayer. Reflection. Action. Action, prayer, reflection. The wheel spins, as night follows day, and day follows night.
Our reading from Mark today throws us into the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, coming to the home of Simon Peter, in the town of Capernaum. They have just moved out of a time of prayer and reflection in the synagogue. As they enter the house, Jesus is told about Simon’s mother-in-law, sick with a fever. He goes right away to her, takes her by the hand. She is raised up, fever-free.
Right away, without waiting, she begins waiting on the people starting to gather there. Ministering to them. The word for her service, in the original Greek, is the word for the kind of table service that early church listeners knew was the highest kind of honor—ministering at the communion meal—it’s the word we get “Deacon” from.
The first recorded use of the word “minister” or “serve” in the gospels is an unnamed woman in chapter 1 of Mark’s gospel is a woman. Not one of the official disciples, but Simon’s mother-in-law. She is a woman who has just been raised up by Christ’s hand from her sickbed, raised up from fever. She has a fresh sense of purpose. Hers is a straight line—from fever to an encounter with the healing of God, to be raised up, yes to action: but not any old action! Action that is the finest example of compassionate service, to whomsoever comes through the door. And they keep arriving, and Jesus keeps healing….
IV.
In the dark of the early hours of morning soon after that crazy night, Jesus arises, slips away, to be alone, to pray, in quiet. Jesus goes to a quiet place, to be centered in the presence of the One who sent him. Jesus’ apprentice rabbis, the disciples, after a little, soon rise to find him, and interrupt his solitude, to tell him everybody is looking for him. Could be more people looking for healing? But maybe they mean word is out, that there are powerful people searching for him, people it would be better to avoid. After listening to them, it turns out Jesus has a bigger agenda anyway! It suits his purposes to keep on the move. He answers, "Let’s go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; that’s what I came out to do."
Jesus never seems to do anything halfway. He throws himself totally into prayer, into conversation with any one—a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, a rich man, a beggar, homeless children, a centurion, a rebel bandit. He commits himself to a life of action: healing bodies, bringing a message of revolutionary good news to marketplaces and houses of worship, embodying resurrection love. Always on the move, always on the go, always looking for new opportunities to turn the world upside down, ready to give his life completely.
To follow the path of Jesus isn’t about balancing one’s life of faith—it is about fully embracing all of it! It is about soaking in the sacred. It is about wrestling through the tough questions, together and apart. It is about daring to act, committing to a direction—when the moment demands.
We are invited on a journey: invited to pray, challenged to learn, raised up to act. For this it is that we are called. Some from our nets, some from our books, some from our disability, or fever or uncertainty. For this new and lovely life.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[i] Love at the Heart of Things: A Biography of Douglas V. Steere, by E Glenn Hinson, Pendle Hill, 1998, is fine biography and more.
[ii] Douglas credited Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a well-known Catholic scholar and mystic of the late 19th and early 20th century, with this essential insight. However, the version we received in 1977 bore the simplicity and pragmatic insight into the life of faith that was Douglas Steere’s very own.
Graphic: Christ Healing Peter's Mother-in-Law, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56407 [retrieved February 4, 2018]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meister_des_Hitda-Evangeliars_002.jpg.