Jeremiah 17:5-10
Psalm 1
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
Luke 6:17-26
Today’s readings all invite us to reflect on what does and doesn’t lead to a flourishing life, and perhaps to even ask ourselves ‘How do we know if we are flourishing or not? What does flourishing actually look like?’
Our Old Testament readings both play with the image of trees to explore these questions. When we are not flourishing, we are like trees in the desert, parched and dry; alone in uninhabitable places with no relief in sight. It’s a vivid and depressing image, and I’m sure that like me, you can feel the despair in the words and can also probably think of times when life has felt that way.
This contrasts with the image of a flourishing life, which is like a tree near water, with deep, well-watered roots; leafy and providing shade; fruitful and lush; not anxious even when drought comes (which of course it will) because its roots still tap the deeper waters. There is a feeling of deep peace and fullness, perhaps even contentment that comes from this image, and which we can recognise in ourselves when we feel ourselves flourishing.
Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, would call these feelings ‘desolation’ and ‘consolation’ and uses them as the basis of the Ignatian Examen, a spiritual discipline which invites us to reflect on these feelings of consolation and desolation and to see them as signs of God’s movement and calling in our lives. Recognising these movements can help us begin to discern and learn what brings us towards God and flourishing and what leads us away.
Our readings are clear that one important factor for flourishing is in what we put our faith, or using the tree metaphor, it matters where our roots are planted. Do we ‘trust in mere mortals’ and ‘make flesh [our] strength’? Or as Jesus more bluntly says, are we rich and well-fed, laughing and loved by everyone? Because all these things are shallow rooted and make it harder to be planted deeply in faith.
Or do we instead ‘trust in the Lord’, something which Jesus suggests can be easier for the poor, hungry, sad and persecuted, possibly because they know from hard experience that relying on the things of this world doesn’t always work out. They have already had to throw themselves onto God’s mercy and not humanity’s.
Richard Rohr (an American Franciscan priest and monk) puts it another way – he talks about how easy it is to live at the periphery of our lives – taken up with surface and passing things, such as human power, values and achievements – and trying to make these the centre of our lives, and understandably, never feeling quite content. Or quite secure, because to a large degree we know we cannot control the events of our lives, no matter how hard we try.
Rohr goes on to say that the things of this world aren’t necessarily sinful, but rather just shallow and incomplete. If all we do is live from that place of human values, our roots can never grow deep and can never be nourished by God’s living water, and we remain parched and wind-swept. What deepens and completes our human life and gives all the things on our periphery meaning, is a strong and solid centre in God through Christ.
Our call then, as Christians, is to respond to God’s invitation to move to the centre of our lives, that place in which we can ground ourselves deeply into the love of God – the Love which gives everything its meaning and fullness; which gives water to all the things on the periphery so they too can flourish and be used for God’s purposes. Then, if we find ourselves with power, that power then becomes used for God; and if we find ourselves without power, that powerlessness also finds its home in God’s reconciling purposes. The more we root ourselves in God, the more all the parts of our lives find purpose and nourishment and healing.
Whether you visualise flourishing as growing from a shallow rooted tree to a deeply rooted one, or as moving from the periphery to the centre of our lives, the call is the same – to move into the depths of God – to centre all of our being and doing in the One who is the Ground of Our Being.
So, how then do we do that?
Awareness is important. You might call it being ‘mindful’, or ‘God-attentive’, but it involves seeing all our actions and challenges in the light of the eternal Love and presence of God. This awareness is something we cultivate – we aren’t born with it, and nor is it something we achieve once and have forever after. It is instead something we continue to nurture, just as we do a tree, or a garden. Our attention might be nurtured through prayer and worship and all of the many ways we find to remember God in the midst of all we do. The things that work for each of us will be different and may change from season to season across our lives, but prayer, I suggest, forms a backbone.
Lent, which begins in just over a fortnight’s time, is a period in which many of us take time to attend to this cultivation of God’s presence at the heart of our life, and this year the Diocesan focus is on prayer, and the different ways in which we might pray. There will be two Lent groups focusing on prayer and some books for individual reflection will be shortly stocked in the Cathedral shop. I invite you, over the next couple of weeks, to think about how you might use Lent to practice attending to God more deeply, so that you, as the letter to the Ephesians puts it, “…being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of the all the fullness of God…” (Ephesians 3:17-19).