Overflowing with... ?

I’m writing this at the beginning of Holy Week: the busiest week of the year for vicars - yes - even busier than the week before Christmas. By the time you read this, we will be into May, and enjoying a Bank Holiday weekend. Hopefully, like the rest of you, I’ll be watching the garden grow and maybe even enjoying a bit of sunshine again…

Thinking about this made me reflect on how the way we spend a short amount of time can change our perspectives and attitudes quite profoundly. If anybody asks me to do anything extra this week, I’m quite unlikely to receive it well, and it’s even possible that I might be ever so slightly snappy! But ask me in a fortnight’s time and I’ll be happy to talk it over. I won’t be a different person, but my responses will be very different because of how I am spending my time. I am trying right now to carry a sense of love, peace, and gentleness, but I know that this week, if I am not careful and prayerful, I am just as likely to be carrying anxiety, and a bit of impatience.

I think I may well have written about this before, but there is a saying I find quite useful which is “you spill what you carry“. If you bump into me one day, and I happen to be carrying some gorgeous, scented oil, then that is what I will spill on myself and on you. If I am carrying the water I just mopped my kitchen floor with…. then both you and I will come away from the encounter pretty grubby. We would both be unclean and unhappy. 

What I spill is likely to affect me as much as it does you. What overflows or spills from me may be beautiful or polluting- and the same is true for all of us. Jesus says it isn’t what we eat or wear that makes us clean or unclean, but what we carry within ourselves.

“A good person brings good out of the treasure of good things in his heart; a bad person brings bad out of his treasure of bad things. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”

But, when I’m under pressure, it’s not always easy for me to focus on or “refill” the good.  Which is why, for Christians, and for people of many other faiths, daily prayer is so important. It enables us to find a wisdom and a patience beyond our own resource, to bear with people in situations we find difficult, and to act with courage when our natural inclination may be to take the path of least resistance. For those people who don’t profess a faith, many find meditation and mindfulness enable them to carry a sense of peace and perspective.  Other people find a similar resource and “resetting” through running, gardening, or painting. 

Spending even a short amount of time in quietness and prayer (or meditation, or fishing if that is your thing) isn’t just good for you, it’s good for everybody you bump into - and for the whole community. We all need to balance ourselves before we can carry the right attitude of heart and mind into our encounters with other people. So, this spring, I encourage you to spend some time doing the things which enable you to carry peace, patience, love and gentleness in your heart. And if I do the same, then when we do bump into each other, neither of us will have cause to regret it!

Blessings

Revd Kalantha