I would like to share the entry for this day in ‘The Monastic Way‘ –
“Father Daniel, at the age of ninety, was on his way to the front door for a walk one Sunday afternoon. Passing through the lobby, he came upon a young man and his mother. No one was attending to them, and Father Dan exclaimed, ‘Oh hell! Now I’ve got to do hospitality.’ Despite his initial reaction and response, he did the right thing. He took them downstairs and gave them cookies and coffee.”
We are all ‘Father Daniel’ – we all have stuff we prefer to do, we all find reasons/excuses to avoid stuff we do not like, especially at times we could be doing the stuff we really want to do…
The question is whether we can see beyond our own biases, our own likes and reach out for what The Other needs. For example, I get a White Poppy around this time to commemorate and support civilians caught up in war, killed by war and I find the over eager way we show our appreciation for the armed forces, the focus on red poppies, and political figures convincing us of how sacred a day this is, rather unnerving. For me, I have to breach my bias and know that almost all who commemorate Armistice Day, and Remembrance Sunday, do so for the sake of their own grief or to uphold a state that saw so many die for Good Causes, and after reading/learning about both World Wars, I do think that both of them were Good Causes. I am more ambivelent of later conflicts, however that doesn’t matter here.
What matters is that folk want to march in sympathy with the sacrifice of the dead, and that others want to march in sympathy with those yet living in a particular conflict zone… I find it hard to think the first should be in conflict with the second, but some are… but still – what should we do?
Father Daniel, from the excerpt, knew what he wanted to do, and at ninety, who are we to say he doesn’t know what’s good for him. The thing for us to do, if we knew and loved Father Daniel would be to let him go for his walk. There are thousands, if not millions, (if not billions) who remember Armistice Day, who are told what it means and how important it is, but if a few thousand also want to draw attention to present suffering, uncomfortable as it is, should we not support them?
I’ve been watching Survivor, and one of the things that struck me on the last episode I’ve seen is that, not only is one person thrown out of their ‘tribe’ they are then thrown into the ‘other’ tribe (there are only two competing tribes…) and the excerpts for the next (exciting) episode have the recieving tribe grilling the unfortunate, the rejected – and I could only think that the best way of gaining their loyalty for and wanting to identifying with the new host tribe was to welcome them in; be the home the other tribe was not…
Are we in danger of becoming so short sighted that we can no longer host difference? That if folk do not agree with our proposed view of the world, no matter how painful their reflection makes us, should we not, as Father Daniel did, give them sustenance – and by that I mean, on this day, on this year, the freedom to protest that thousands of innocent civillians have recently died, and many more may follow?
Should we not search our hearts and minds and think through these issues thoroughly – not giving to knee-jerk, politician fed answers and see that The Other is like us in War – that civillians are dying and we are, or should be, moved enough by that to simply say – Let them march for peace…
and for those, like Giles Fraser, who think I may be terribly niave, I invite you to reflect on the fact that I have lived for some time in NI…
the Father Daniel reflection, imbedded in The Monastic Way, is from Benet Tvedten’s book, How to Be a Monastic and not Leave your Day Job: An Invitation to Oblate Life obviously the views of this post are mine…