Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
These are the closing sentences of Middlemarch, the great Victorian novel by Mary Ann Evans, who went by the pen name of George Eliot. She is describing the invisible, lasting effects of the life and works of Dorothea Brooke, the principal heroine of the novel. I recently reread Middlemarch and these closing words came home to me as I struggled with what to say this morning. The novelist’s words and many of the words of today’s readings provide some guidance for us with a perennial problem that I think is particularly acute for many of us today. So, stay with me–humor me with your attention–and I’ll try to make clear what I mean.
The sense that one’s life has been small, obscure, without much consequence in the larger scheme of things is a familiar feeling for many of us–it certainly figures prominently in my reflections on my own life. We want our lives to be significant. We want to make things better in the wider world. This is a strong desire in the world we are facing today, with its multiple climate, economic, military and political crises, to mention only a few. Yet, the immensity of the crises that face human life on earth brings home to us the realization that there is very little we can do to effect any large-scale change. Rather than feeling effective, we are vulnerable to feeling overwhelmed, to feeling helpless, to feeling hopeless and despairing in those moments when we actually wake up and see the world as it actually is. There are few, if any, grounds for optimism. Though I am ultimately pessimistic, I also believe that there are grounds for hope. Hope is not optimism. Hope is not about the future. It’s not the belief that things will, somehow, be better eventually. Hope, rather, is about the present. Hope is the deeply held belief that the present has possibilities. It’s the belief that there are things we can do now that are of value, that are the right things to do, regardless of their results in the future. Living in hope means taking our focus off of the results of our actions and putting it on the rightness, the authenticity, the purity of our actions in the present moment. As we might say these days, it’s about focusing on the process rather than the outcome.
The parables of the mustard seed, the yeast, and the buried treasure all speak of the reign of heaven as infinitesimal, as invisible. At the same time, the Kindom of God, as we sometimes call it here, is infinite and everywhere. I’m reminded of the words about water from Lao Tzu, the legendary author of the Daoist classic, the Dao De Jing. He wrote that water always finds the lowest place but it penetrates everywhere. Let me repeat that: water always finds the lowest place but it penetrates everywhere. Water does not have a plan or an outcome that it is trying to achieve. It simply flows, without effort. Likewise, the mustard seed and the yeast are not seeking anything. They are just expressing their true nature: in the case of the mustard seed, it is to take up water and sunlight and grow; in the case of yeast, it is to metabolize sugar and turn it into carbon dioxide, which makes the dough rise. These are metaphors for living in hope–doing the next thing in the present, as fully and authentically as we can, letting the results take care of themselves. It is also a metaphor for living with humility: accepting the truth of ourselves and the world–accepting things as they are and doing the next thing with love and faithfulness.
These metaphors have their expository counterpart in the opening of Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he assures us that the Spirit is always praying within us, even when we don’t know how to pray. Regardless of what we think, regardless of what we want, regardless of all our plans, the Divine Mystery is creating and sustaining us and all things. We are living in that Mystery, that Infinite Love, and it is living in us. We are loved into being in each moment, regardless of who we are or what we have accomplished. This invisible wholeness is both a consolation and a challenge. On the one hand, we are consoled by the reality of the Divine Presence as the foundation of our lives. As Paul tells us today, nothing “…in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God…” Or as an old friend of mine used to say, there is no way we can fall out of God. On the other hand, there is the challenge of our ignorance: our failure to see and know this reality as it shines through every person, thing and moment of our lives. We are instead caught up in, we are distracted by, all our ideas about what it all means, our desire for answers, our focusing on the results of our efforts. Even in our spiritual lives–in our prayer life–we think we should be making some progress; we are frustrated that we can’t do it correctly; we are frustrated that we don’t see any results. We forget that the Spirit prays within us–the Divine Mystery helps us “…with sighs too deep for words.” God’s prayer in us is deeper than any ideas we might have about it. Our challenge is to get ourselves out of the way and listen, in silence and emptiness, to that invisible, silent whisper. As my favorite spiritual writer, Thomas Merton, put it, our challenge is “…to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.” To that I say, shall we dance?
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
Thomas Merton, in a letter to Jim Forest dated February 21, 1966