Counterculture?
All three of today’s readings suggest that the life of faith is, one way or another, to live a life that is different from the world around us. The passage from Jeremiah is only half of a prayer (Jer. 20:7-13) where the prophet questions his calling, realises that he doesn’t really have any choice, and remembers that God is with him. St Paul, immediately after exhorting his readers to remember God’s goodness and let that shape their lives, reminds them to live in peace and harmony with each other, remembering that everyone has their place in the community. St Matthew has Jesus arguing with Peter, who understandably doesn’t want to accept Jesus’s words about what was waiting for him in Jerusalem. Jesus used such strong language precisely because Peter’s words were a temptation for Jesus himself.
What, though, does it mean to ‘not model yourselves on the behaviour of the world around you’? Some Christian communities have taken this to mean becoming radically isolated sects, sometimes with unfortunate consequences. There are many more positive examples. In the third century after Christ, some men and women left the towns for the Egyptian desert. There, these Desert Fathers and Mothers lived lives of austere simplicity, but people often sought their counsel. Many of their brief and pithy sayings have come down to us: they still make the reader stop and think.
Similarly, monasticism over the centuries has often been understood and practiced as a withdrawal from the world. Thomas Merton, after a typically riotous student life, entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky at the end of 1941. His 1947 autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, became a classic conversion story, and sometimes it seemed that Merton congratulated himself on leaving the wicked world. In 1958, though, he had to go to town and in the middle of the street was ‘suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me’ (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 140).
Merton had realised the value of solidarity, of standing with our neighbours. In a world where, often, the language is that of division and of ‘what’s in it for me?’, that’s quite counter-cultural.
Jim McAloon
