Not getting on?

There’s been more time for reading and watching. Human relationships are often at the centre. I’ve been reading The Carer by Deborah Moggach. I haven’t finished it yet but it’s about a son and daughter who hire a carer to look after their elderly father. But because the carer is so caring and gets on so well with their father they begin to suspect her of terrible things, whilst their own relationships with their partners are very messed up and their relationship with their father very cold. Although now in their late middle age they still bear childhood grudges against him, he wasn’t there for them even on family holidays, they never felt that they could do anything to please and yet the carer seems to take their father out to the most banal entertainment, cook rather ordinary food and he revels in the carer’s company. 

Mum laughed when I told her what I was reading. She had been given a book about a woman who in her old age goes to live with one of her children and how very difficult that relationship was.

One of the big watches on iplayer at the moment is Normal People about two young people growing up in Ireland never feeling that that fit in. It’s a love story but also examines life at school - that sense of wanting to belong and yet being an outsider and then onto university where again there is that sense of alienation, not quite fitting in or getting on with others.

 

We learn a great deal about our own lives by reading books and watching films, we often long as an audience to intervene, tell the characters to see the bigger picture that we see the love that lies behind the foolish talk and behaviour. They can be reflections of ourselves, though, can’t they?

 

Jesus’ disciples didn’t always get on; Philip and James argued about who was the greatest, Paul and Barnabas had such great differences on their missionary journeys that they decided to go it alone, despite Paul’s teaching about all of us being children of God and that we are all have a vital role as the body of Christ.

‘People do people things’ a trainee curate commented to Doug once at the hospital chaplaincy, wise words he thought from one so young (well, he did happen to be a bishop’s son!) We learn in life that we will not always get on with people, in families, work or amongst our friends but books and films and particularly the Bible can give us that greater perspective that not getting on affects us in such unhelpful ways that it is far better to turn the other cheek and learn to forgive as Jesus said, better for them and for us.

 

 Dear Jesus, help us to spread your fragrance everywhere we go. Flood our souls with your spirit and life. Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly that our lives may only be a radiance of yours. Shine through us and be so in us that every soul we come in contact with may feel your presence in our soul. Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus.

Stay with us and then we shall begin to shine as you shine, so to shine as to be light to others. The light, O Jesus, will be all from you. None of it will be ours. It will be you shining on others through us.

Let us thus praise you in the way you love best by shining on those around us. Let us preach you without preaching, not by words, but by our example; by the catching force - the sympathetic influence of what we do, the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear to you. Amen.

 Cardinal John Henry Newman