From the Vicar

Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4 v 6-7

February 2011

Happiness is a serious business. Some philosophers have made the search for happiness the heart of their approach to life. The anti religious Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mills thought that they could make the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number of people’ a quantifiable and objective goal of social and moral action. Unfortunately happiness remains as elusive as ever. Worryingly, social studies have found that older people are generally happier than younger people today. “Young adults reported more anger, anxiety, depression, financial problems, troubled relationships and career stress” according to an article in the Washington Post in 2008 in America. This does not hold out much hope for the future because apparently the young people are not getting happier as they get older.

Of course it may be that the young people are actually facing up to the realities of life and realizing that perhaps a lot of “happiness” is in fact avoidance of the truth. If we really love people, then that will inevitably involve a lot of sadness and anxiety as we share with them the problems that come our way throughout our lives and then there is the sorrow that separation and parting will finally bring. The sadness of mourning for those who have died and yet remain so important in our lives never really ends.

February is the Feast of Candlemass when we remember the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple by Mary and Joseph as reported in Luke 2.22-39. It is a joyful festival as we remember the parents bringing the new child to priests with thanksgiving and the prophets Simeon and Anna thanking God for the privilege of seeing the Messiah. However, the feast also has a bitter side to it. A picture in a medieval missal now in the municipal museum in Toulouse, shows Mary laying the child Jesus on the altar in a sacrificial manner, which makes the words of the prophet Simeon so much more poignant "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against and a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed." Luke 2:35 (RSV)

Recently I was visiting some Spanish Catholic churches and they had statues of the Virgin Mary – a sombre figure, dressed in a black cloak and an actual sword piercing her chest. Though this may be a particularly passionate Iberian tradition, it does serve to emphasize the fact that our religious faith will inevitably involve the sadness and pain of our world.

However, the story of Mary’s suffering does not end there. Firstly, there is the trauma of the Resurrection – note that Jesus rebukes the disciples on the road to Emmaus for being sad: And he said unto them, “What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?” Luke 24:17 (KJV).

Then there is the further distress of fleeing Jerusalem and being a refugee all over again. Add to that all the disturbance that inevitably came with the birth pangs of the Church as it grew dramatically throughout the Mediterranean in those early years. Happiness for Mary amongst that entire trauma must have been something to really treasure and perhaps it was only finally to be found when all her prayers were answered at the throne of God.

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