This is a great time of the year for lists. With Christmas approaching all sorts of outfits produce lists. We get the Best Books of the Year, Best Cafes of the Year, Best CDs of the Year and so on.
I must confess that I often have some trouble with such compilations.
For example, the other day I read one magazine’s “Best Books of the Year” – of the ten books mentioned, I hadn’t heard of eight of them and couldn’t finish the two I had heard of. While I accept that that may say more about me than about the compiler of the list, I do feel that I spend a reasonable amount of time in book shops and I have a fair pile (both read and unread) at home so I should have heard of more than two, I would have thought.
A similar problem arises with a recent magazine article that listed Best Cafes in Wellington. Being reasonably familiar with a few such places, I was intrigued to discover a write-up on a café that sounded superb and that I didn’t think I was aware of. Reading further on in the article, though, I found that not only did I know that café, I frequent it often – but my experience of it is far removed from the write-up.
And as for Best CDs of the Year ….ever noticed how two CD shops can be 10 metres apart and feature quite different lists? The lists would be better entitled “Best Selling CDs of the Year in This Particular Store” but that doesn’t have quite the same impact.
The point, of course, is that such lists aren’t intended to be an accurate reflection of objective truths – they’re designed to encourage people to spend money in the run-up to Christmas. Put simply, they’re basically an advertising tool.
However, that shouldn’t dissuade us from considering our own lists at this time of year. And one list I’d like to suggest we could compile for our own personal benefit is a List of Significant Events This Year.
Inevitably, such lists will be highly personal and reflective of how things have been for each of us in the past 11 months or so.
But the point of compiling a list is precisely that we do spend some time in reflection. Or to put it another way, that we retain some control of our lives.
In the Introduction to his latest book, The Future Church, John Allen writes “Catholics in the twenty-first century won’t just need hustle (though they will certainly need that), but above all they’ll need imagination. They’ll need the capacity to reconsider how they think about the Church, and what they do with their faith, because otherwise Catholicism won’t rise to the occasion of these new challenges – it’ll be steamrolled by them.”
A similar thought was used by Mark Raper in the recent Provincial Retreats when he quoted from Meister Eckhart at one stage: “We make progress by stopping”. To put it another way, perhaps, “We need to take time to reflect in order to understand where we are going”.
That’s not always easy to do.
Often we can feel that if we stop, we’ll get flattened by the great train of work and demands that always seems to be less than two metres behind us. Faced with that possibility, we feel we have little option but to keep going as fast as possible for as long as possible.
But simply charging on from one day to another, one month to the next, year by year, is a trap also. Simply moving isn’t necessarily a sign of progress (just as simply stopping isn’t in itself a sign of reflecting). Often we can be conscious of how much still remains to be done, or hasn’t been achieved, and that can cause frustration and a certain amount of depression.
But by taking the time to reflect, we can instead focus on what has been achieved both by us and for us. We can see that what we may have intended to accomplish in the year has in fact in some instances been superseded by events that we never imagined. That what may have seemed a failure six months ago has in fact led to something much more positive by the end of the year.
It is by reflecting, as individuals and as a Province, that we can for example give due prominence and celebration to such things as a new Superior General and Council; the first Final Profession in the Province for 8 years; two entrants into the Seminary next year; the increased co-operation in MAP apparent in the recent meetings in Sydney involving joint approaches to vocations promotion and on-going formation for recently Finally Professed.
No doubt there are lots of other things that could be suggested – the above is only my list and as such obviously debatable.
None of the events I’ve mentioned – taken separately or collectively – suggest by themselves a bright new world or that we have suddenly turned a corner and everything is fine in the Marist garden.
But I don’t think either that it’s a Marist equivalent of a Christmas list of obscure books, highly over-rated cafes or top-selling CDs – nor even a Scriptural equivalent of a lone voice crying in the wilderness.
Events within the Province and within the wider Society are significant precisely because they are signs (sometimes small, sometimes larger) of life and energy – and by stopping to reflect on them and other events we can see that there is progress.
And that is a list worth celebrating as Christmas approaches.
– Brian Cummings