A person of faith today may feel like they have been orphaned. In our particular circumstances of ill-health or loneliness we may feel totally abandoned by God. In our society we may, more and more, feel in a beleaguered minority as anything or anybody associated with Church is seen as a hurdle or barrier to a mature and vibrant society. Among some, the Church has become relegated to an opposition party’s election slogan . . . ‘if we get rid of them . . . all will be well’. These circumstances may have us feeling abandoned. In spite of this, Jesus says it is not necessary to feel like this. A man I knew lived until he was ninety-three. He achieved the highest that anyone could achieve in the world of business and society and yet he was orphaned at a very young age. He never attended school yet, as I say, he surpassed himself. We can be an orphan because that is the way the world describes us, but we are more than how others describe us.
The writer and mystic Thomas Merton, a Cistercian monk who lived in a monastery in Kentucky in the United States in the sixties said, ‘how do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another’s city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else’s life?’ He goes on to say that, ‘it takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the person, or the artist, that God intended you to be’.
The man I knew who lived until he was ninety-three was orphaned, yet in his own mind, and in the mind of the God who created him, he refused to be defined by that. With ‘heroic humility’, he remained the person that, he felt, God intended him to be. For every one of us the challenge and the task is plainly put before us. God’s Spirit helps us reach higher, harder and deeper in the belief that God’s help is close as we strive to live an authentic, humane and contented life where we can be faithful to the journey that God wants for us, and not to become a prisoner in another’s city.
It takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the person, or the artist, that God intended you to be. – Thomas Merton