Morning Has Broken

This morning, I had the privilege to hear from the 12th chapter of the Gospel of St Luke. Luke's gospel, I must confess, has not been a book I've read for some time. As the resonant words echoed in my head, I appreciated once more the beauty of his words, and the skill with which King James's translators turned them into English.

This is of course one of the three synoptic accounts of Jesus' teaching regarding 'the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy'. What is interesting is that you can tell quite often whether a person has read this passage (and other like passages from the synoptic gospels) from the way in which that person views Jesus' response to the world. In Luke 12, as in other parts of this gospel and the other gospels, Jesus shows his role as social catalyst in the original Greek sense of the word 'catalysis', the agent of a sudden breaking-up of the status quo.

He came not to bring peace, but a sword; he came to kindle a fire, to baptise with water, to make the power of the Spirit more freely available. His is not, has never been, should not ever be, the way of incremental and plodding change and shifting ground; rather, as he says elsewhere, his is the way that establishes the past and fulfils it in for the future. In doing so, he avoids the twin traps of sticking to the uninterpreted and misunderstood past, and of charging into the future without the firm foundation built by those before us.

The term status quo is often misunderstood. In this exact form, it means 'the state of things which is'; it does not mean 'the state of things as it has always been'. Quite often, a rude shock to the system is required to shift it out of the low depression into which it has sunk and stalled for a while; sometimes, the state is one of physical and material expansion but spiritual degradation. It is the case in Luke 12: this chapter mentions the fate of a rich man who had so much that he did not know where to put it, and so tore down his barns to make way for larger barns. As the story goes, that night, God required the man's soul, and so sic transit gloria mundi.

We are then enjoined to consider the ravens, who neither sow nor reap, and yet are provided for by their Father in heaven. It isn't that ravens are faithful, quiet, innocent birds; ravens are inquisitive and clever, possibly the most intelligent birds on the planet. What the message here seems to be, throughout this morning's reading, is that God gives us all certain gifts; use them wisely and it will result in a fair provision. And just as in the story of the manna in the wilderness, greed and a desire for more than what God provides results in a messy state of affairs. I like the punishment inflicted on the Israelites here: when they complained about a lack of meat (notwithstanding that God gave them quail to eat), God fed them a huge superfluity of meat till it came out of their nostrils. Beware what you wish for: you might get it!

Morning Devotions — Secrets Revealed

Recently, two things happened which led to the writing of this particular post. The first thing was that one of my former students pointed out an ancient post on another blog which mentioned that I used to deliver morning meditations without reference to notes, thus leading the blogger to believe that I was either particularly religious or some sort of cyborg. The second thing was that about a month ago, I found an envelope containing those notes, and promptly threw them all away.

Here then is the secret history of my morning meditations.

To begin with, I've always found it difficult to do justice to any part of the Bible without recourse to a shelf of books. In preparing for a half-hour sermon, I normally refer to a stack of books that comes up to my waist. In preparing for morning devotionals, I need slightly less than that, but this is because a lot of it has stuck in my curious and slightly eccentric neural network. I never delivered a 'canned' devotion; every single one was an original. How did I do it? Here is an outline.

I spent time in prayer. The most important thing to me about speaking in public on questions of faith and practice is that the message is universal and slightly less than totally focussed. Why? Because if it were totally focussed, it would probably hit only one or two people, and morning devotions and such are meant to reach as many people as they can (and make their day better, hopefully). The problem with universality is that I'm not God. So I've always believed it is best to ask for help.

I would then write out the reading for the day, the thoughts that were related to it, and the logic that linked them all. I cut and erased till the 'script' fit a ten-minute maximum. And then I looked through once for mistakes. I always slept well. When I woke up, I would read through the notes (always written on a small piece of paper from a notepad or a 3 x 5 inch index card) once. I would read them again about ten minutes before delivery. And then, I delivered. And it was never quite the same as what I wrote out the night before.

This was the same routine I followed for chemistry lessons, TOK lessons, and any lesson except those for which I had no preparation for whatsoever. (Last year's batch of Year 4 students from a certain class will remember the unprepared one on graphic novels, Shakespeare, Homer and the three dimensions of literature. It wasn't that bad, right, guys?) The routine for the long lectures was of course different; I never had a written script since all the notes I needed were on-screen.

But the colleague who helped me cart the last material vestiges of my previous life away immediately understood why I was also throwing my devotional notes away. It wasn't to conceal the truth about the myth of my 'no notes' ability, or out of bitterness, or out of a desire to perpetuate the myth. It was because I realised (as I should have, earlier) that such notes are instants captured on paper. You can never deliver the same message twice. In fact, I never even once delivered the message as it was written out in my notes.

Which is probably why people never saw me referring to any notes during all my years of morning devotions. Well, that's the true story. And no, I am not an unusually pious human, nor a cyborg.