A Pentecost Prelude C. Callahan [ORGAN + FLUTE]
Susan Addington, Flute
Meditation on “Jerusalem” [ORGAN]
Improvisation [ORGAN]
Who has trouble coping with happiness? The challenge is how to cope with adversity — when difficulty or calamity befalls, or we see Injustice we feel called to address.
One classic approach was articulated by the Stoics, a philosophic school founded in Athens approximately three centuries before Christ. A core idea of theirs is that even though we may not be able to control what goes on externally to us, we DO have control over our RESPONSE to it. Thus the ’sage’ can learn to be content regardless of circumstances (more than passing resemblance to Buddhism methinks). In the centuries immediately after Christ, the Roman elite added a twist to this idea: the gods & goddesses are omnipotent, therefore how things ARE must be the will of the gods. And since Rome was master of the Western world, therefore that must be Rome’s gods-given Manifest Destiny. What got early Christians sent to the lions wasn’t just that they wouldn’t worship the Emperor, it’s that they refused to drink the kool-aid of “Rome Über Alles!” “Rome: Love it or Leave it!”
Another classic approach to adversity is simply to leave. That’s what the so-called “Desert Fathers” (and Mothers) did in the third century — they left the cities and went to live in the desert. Enough did so in Egypt that they formed an alternate Christian society. The solitude, austerity, and sacrifice of the desert were seen as a close substitute for martyrdom (the highest form of sacrifice). And thus the monastic movement was born. Indeed, there are Christian (and Buddhist) monasteries here in SoCal.
An alternative to ’flight’ is, of course ’fight’, and that’s what the Reformers did. But in my mind the Monastics and the Reformers have much in common — in service to their Calling both were willing to give up embracing society’s norms, and all the material and other benefits that go with that, instead enduring real hardship, solitude and danger. After nailing his 95 theses to the door at the church in Wittenberg, Luther lived ’on the lam’ for the rest of his life, sometimes all too close to being the guest of honor at an auto-da-fé (burning at the stake). Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 21 years for refusing to yield his principles. Gandhi lived a life of poverty on par with St. Francis. And I’m sure facing danger daily, living out of suitcases in Motel 6’s got rather old for Martin Luther King.
William Blake (1757-1827) put it rather nicely:
Bring me my Bow of burning gold,
Bring me my Arrows of desire
Bring me my Spear — O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green & pleasant land.”
(Surely Blake had in mind the “New Jerusalem” we are called to build in the ‘England’ wherever we find ourselves.)