Managing Well

“He entrusted to them his property; to one he gave five talents,  to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.”  St. Matthew 25:14-15

Last weekend, I went an apple butter boil, an old family tradition, at a cousin’s farm in my hometown.  By the bubbling kettle, I struck up a conversation with another cousin, Robin.  She plays the organ at Mount Carmel Methodist Church, a mile or two up the road in Shanktown, Maryland, a place that doesn’t make it onto the road atlas.  Mount Carmel is a white clapboard chapel, built around the time of the Civil War.  My grandparents were members and four generations of Michaels sleep in its shady churchyard.  I’ve always thought of it as a timeless place.

But Robin said things have changed.  There are only twenty of them in the pews most Sundays.  There’s no choir or Vacation Bible School anymore.  My cousin Andrew’s baby girl is the only child.  Mount Carmel has never been a big church, and it has always shared a pastor with the other local Methodist churches.  But it was probably two or three times that size when I was a kid. 

Ponder: The Unbought Grace of Life

It was with the advent of modernity, and of what we call “the Enlightenment,” that a decisive change comes, creating the idea of happiness that dominates our own time— an idea which envisions happiness as something that all human beings can rightly aspire to, in the here and now, without resort to world-denying asceticism, as a natural expression of their natural human endowment... What does this suggest about joy, and about what makes joy so dramatically different? To begin with, it suggest that joy is something radically different precisely in that it is free from the self-mastering, self-engineered, and self-referential character of happiness. Joy is perhaps a little bit more akin to ecstasy in that regard, that it places a much lesser emphasis on self-consciousness and self-direction, and a greater emphasis on self-yielding, on emptying the ego of its compulsion to direct and manage all things, and reveling in the world as it presents itself to us. It is less about action than passion, less about possessing and more about being possessed, less about human ingenuity and more about what Edmund Burke called “the unbought grace of life.”

Wilfred McClay, "Some Reflections on Joy, Happiness...and Guilt" (2014)