Author: Karl Möller

Random thoughts

Gary and Mrs. Camp

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Here’s another gem from Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier’s book Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness. In his article, ‘Finding God in Strange Places: Why L’Arche Needs the Church’, Hauerwas tells the following delightful story about his time at a United Methodist church, a story that involves ‘Mrs. Camp, a very elderly lady, and her son, Gary, [who] was mentally disabled’:

Gary was hard of hearing, so he and Mrs. Camp sat in the front pew during services. When it came time for Eucharistic celebration, Gary would slowly help Mrs. Camp up and move to the rail. The ten-foot trip took two or three minutes, and the whole church waited with bated breath for Gary and Mrs. Camp to make it. Once they did, we all would follow. But we were led by Gary and Mrs. Camp. If they weren’t present, you could feel the congregation worry whether we ought to have Eucharist that day. It wasn’t clear to us that we were all gathered.

Spirituality

Walls of fear

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Jean Vanier’s article ‘The Fragility of L’Arche and the Friendship of God’ offers some important observations on fear, compassion and transformation. Vanier notes that:

Transformation has to do with the way the walls separating us from others and from our deepest self begin to disappear. Between all of us fragile human beings stand walls built on loneliness and the absence of God, walls built on fear – fear that becomes depression or a compulsion to prove that we are special.

However, as Vanier points out, ‘God cannot stand walls of fear and division’ and that ‘to be a Christian is to grow in compassion’.

The article can be found in Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness.

Random thoughts

When we killed God

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When we killed – or exiled – God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren’t going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off he branch we were sitting on.

Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

Random thoughts

A proof of love

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Julian Barnes’s latest book, Levels of Life, offers some intriguing observations about the beginnings of ballooning and photography. But that shouldn’t fool anyone: the book is essentially about grief, Barnes’s grief for his wife Pat, who died in 2008. Two passages struck me particularly.

In one, Barnes describes his experience in terms of a seventeenth-century map, which features ‘the Desert of Loss, the (windless) Lake of Indifference, the (dried-up) River of Desolation, the Bog of Self-Pity, and the (subterranean) Caverns of Memory’.

The other passage talks about the persistence of pain. Barnes comments: ‘Pain shows that you have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavour of memory; pain is a proof of love’.

Spirituality

Perfect love overcomes fear

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In his concluding observations to Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier’s Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness, John Swinton notes that ‘Vanier continues to draw our attention to fear as a source of violence. Perfect love overcomes fear, but fear turns us in on ourselves and opens us to the possibility of violence’.

Random thoughts

Gentle concern

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Community is made of the gentle concern that people show each other every day. It is made up of the small gestures, of services and sacrifices which say ‘I love you’ and ‘I am happy to be with you.’ It is letting the other go in front of you, not trying to prove that you are in the right in a discussion; it is taking the small burdens from the other.

Jean Vanier, Community and Growth

Random thoughts

On love, maturity, emotions, living in the present, problems, grief and stoicism

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Here are some more thoughts from Alain de Botton’s book On Love.

First of all, on falling in love:

Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together,’ when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

On maturity and emotions:

We could define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong to, and should be restricted to, oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals.

On (not) living in the present. He asks, ‘Had there not been many times when the pleasures of the present had been rudely passed over in the name of the future …?’ and talks about ‘anticipation in the morning, anxiety in the actuality, and pleasant memories in the evening’, only to conclude that ‘the inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely … to live’.

On problems: ‘One can think problems into existence‘.

On grief: ‘Bewildered and exhausted by grief, I suffocated on question marks: “Why me? Why this? Why now?“‘

On mature love:

… mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated ….

On stoicism:

At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else had the chance to do so. Stoicism was a crude defense against the dangers of the affections of others, dangers that would take more endurance than a life in the desert to be able to face. In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love.

There is much to ponder in these quotes.