VITAL
BALANCE
Mark 2:1-10
Your
sins are forgiven...stand up, take your mat and walk.
There was drama on Volmoed two weeks
ago. A large Pittosporum, whose roots
were cracking Old Farm House, had to be cut down. Professional tree cutters did the job, but near
the end a gust of wind snapped a branch which fell across the veranda smashing
its roof. By that time Anton and I had
already left the scene with the bakkie loaded up with large chunks of wood
which we planned to turn into bowls on my lathe. We had no idea whether Pittosporum, otherwise
known as Cheesewood, was any good for turning. But it is one of the most attractive of all
indigenous garden trees, its bark is good
for stomach ailments and malaria, and its roots are used to treat chest
complaints. So why not give it a new
life by turning it into a beautiful bowl?
That was the challenge as we
looked at two large pieces on our work bench.
But first of all we had to cut the chunks
with a chain saw and shape them with a power plane to get them more or less
round and balanced. You cannot turn wood
on a lathe if it is not well balanced before you start. Otherwise as it turns and gathers speed your
whole bench, even if securely fixed to the floor, will begin to shake making it
is impossible to work the wood. Balance
is vital in woodturning. And that also
requires making sure it is centred on the lathe. The wood can be balanced, but if it is not
centred, it will still wobble. Getting
it balanced and centred is vital.
Many years ago as a student in Chicago I
took a course on ministry to the mentally ill.
This required that I spend one day a week for a semester in a
psychiatric hospital interviewing patients, then discussing these in a seminar
with the professor and other students. The patients were graded according to the
types of mental illness diagnosed. We had
to go through a series of locked doors to visit them. So those through the
third door were badly disturbed, prone to violence and almost incapable of
communicating, and labelled accordingly.
We did not often go through that door.
But even so I came away after each day totally drained by the experience.
At that time I read one of the latest books
on psychiatry entitled The Vital Balance
written by a leading psychiatrist, Karl Menninger. Menninger was against labelling mentally ill
patients because that led to treating
them according to a label rather than as unique individuals, and also led
people to think that they were incurable. Diagnosis was necessary for
medication, but labelling could impede healing.
The truth is, Menninger argued,
just as we all suffer from some physical ailment, to some extent we are
all mentally ill or unbalanced. For
Menninger the aim of psychiatry was using the illness as a starting point to help
his patients to become more centred and therefore more ba;anced, and therefore, as he put it, "weller than
well."
As we grow older we begin to understand the
importance of balance. My balance is not
what it used to be. I am not talking
about my mental balance, though some might think that is in need of help, but
physical balance. I can no longer stand
on one foot for any length of time without some kind of support -- as I
regularly discover when I go to gym! But
balance is vital, and the ability to recover balance is essential to prevent
one from falling and hurting oneself. It
is precisely what infants learn when they begin to walk, or when we begin to
ride a bicycle. In the same way, learning
to balance is fundamental to coping with life, just as a chunk of wood needs to
be balanced before it can be turned. But
balance is also vital for our spiritual journey, for "turning the
soul" if you like, and that requires establishing a firm centre around
which the rest can revolve. In fact this
is critical for our physical and mental well-being as a whole. For if there is no centre, or the centre does
not hold, the rest becomes unstable.
This is equally true for society. A major reason for the world's
ailments is the loss of an integrating moral centre that holds things together,
and without which things fall apart. So the rich get richer and the poor,
poorer; people become dysfunctional through bad social conditions and
parenting, and turn to drugs, crime and violence, and nations go to war.
Jesus' ministry of healing, of making us
whole, is all about helping us recover our vital balance in which the
spiritual, mental and physical aspects of our lives are integrated around a centre
or core that holds everything together.
That is the message of the gospel story for today. "Your sins are forgiven...take up your
mat and walk!" Healing the body and mind, and forgiving sins
are part of the same process of healing.
Inner healing, the healing of memories, dealing with guilt and the past,
restoring relationships through forgiving and accepting forgiveness, learning
to trust and to love, discovering hope, even becoming a child again in order to
get fresh perspective and learn to walk again are the keys to the way in which Jesus wants
to make us whole. And we can recover this
vital balance even if we are not physically as well as we would like, or our
mental faculties are beginning to weaken.
What is fundamental for a balanced life
according to Christian faith is that our
lives are centred in Christ. That is why
we are here today sharing in this Eucharist. That is why we read the gospel day by
day. That is why we pray. That is why we
have AHA moments when we share with those in need. And in doing so, each day we regain our
balance and become whole. You can't become
a balanced person without becoming centred day by day, just as you can't learn
to ride a bicycle unless you keep trying.
Lent is a good time to work at restoring
balance to our lives because it draws our attention to the spiritual
disciplines that are so fundamental for doing so. how to meditate on the
gospel, get centred in our prayers, practice the presence of God, and live
lives of compassion and caring. Lent is
not meant to make us pious ascetics through much fasting in order to prove how
spiritual we are. Its purpose is not to
batter our bodies, though some of us might need the equivalent of a chainsaw in
order to get balanced. But as we
journey with Jesus and the disciples towards Jerusalem and the cross we are
once again helped to find the centre around which everything else turns --
God's love and grace towards us in Christ through which we find forgiveness and
wholeness again. In this way we might
even be turned into something beautiful
for God.
John
de Gruchy
Volmoed 12 March 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment