Ponder: "the residual sadness of the lonely heart"

“I often run across people who have gone back to menial work in their 60s and 70s because they just want to get out of the house. When you ask them more questions, you find that they are devoted to home and work, but that they often don’t have rich connections outside these spheres.  Many of their friends came through work, but those friendships tend to fade away when the job ends. There are older people who feel unneeded. There are younger people who feel lost. Somehow these longing souls never find each other.

Suburbia isn’t working. During the baby boom, the suburbs gave families safe places to raise their kids. But now we are in an era of an aging population, telecommuting workers and single-person households.  The culture and geography of suburbia are failing to nurture webs of mutual dependence.

We are animals who can’t flourish unless we can’t get along without one another. Yet one finds too many people thrust into lives of semi-independence.

These are not the victims of postindustrial blight I’m talking about; they are successful people who worked hard and built good lives but who are left nonetheless strangely isolated, in attenuated communities, and who are left radiating the residual sadness of the lonely heart.”

David Brooks, Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class, New York Times, 20 Sep. 2016

For Meditation: "The Highest Grace"

“But it need not be so. Christ has come, and has breathed on us his Spirit to make us human again. We ought therefore to hope for — and to show within the fellowship of Christ’s redeemed a model of — a kind of human closeness that is deeper than and is not dependent upon the exchange of seminal fluids. If sexual intercourse finds its only proper place in the male-female pair bound together in covenant and open to procreation, then our natural desire for human closeness — even perhaps physical closeness — must properly be consummated in something other than sex. What if this is friendship?

This would make sense eschatologically. As Fr. Austin pointed out, we tend to think of the phrase “till death us do part” as meaning “forever.” But that is exactly what it does not mean. Christians don’t believe that death is the end of our story as human beings, but rather the door from our brief earthly existence into our everlasting glory in the world to come. “Till death us do part” in the marriage vow means that marriage ends at that door. But friendship doesn’t. “No longer do I call you servants … but I have called you friends” (John 15:15). Friendship realizes what is highest and truest about us: that we exist for an eternal friendship with God and with one another in God. And this friendship is nowhere more clearly manifested, at least on this side of heaven, than in the Holy Communion, where we bring our souls and bodies to feast together with our friends at a table where Christ is the host. Perhaps this is actually the highest grace, not only of the soul, but of the body as well: to share a meal with our friends. Perhaps this is where our good and natural desire for human intimacy finds its consummation.”

Mac Stewart, “I Have Called You Friends.”  Covenant, 9 Dec. 2015

It's Not All About You: CCS Baccalaureate Sermon

 

“But Jesus answered, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?" They said to him, "We are able."  St. Matthew 20:22

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

You know, this really isn’t all about you.  This grand succession of banquets, awards ceremonies, sunshiny photo-ops, and sentimental speeches, all the parties, everything festooned in orange and black—it’s not really all about you.  It is of course, largely about you.  You have worked very hard, and achieved a great deal, and there is much to celebrate as you are commenced, launched out into the big world beyond these quiet hills. 

 But this is about the rest of us as well, your parents and teachers, your friends who have watched you grow up into such intelligent, strong, and capable men and women.  If you haven’t recognized this yet, you will after that tenth awkward photo with your strange aunt Sue, and seventh time your rather formidable social studies teacher gets teary-eyed.  And let’s not even think about your mother’s emotional state next Sunday afternoon.