Today I was going through the prayers
and noted that it was the Lesser Feast of Charles Simeon (September
24, 1759 – November 13, 1836) who for half a century was a Fellow
at Kings College and preached at Holy Trinity, Cambridge and
influenced decades of students. When I first seriously entertained
the idea of being a Priest, I was teaching in a college and loved
interacting with students and was drawn to the example of Simeon who
by his teaching, preaching and example of his life changed lives.
My problem was that I was filled with
the hopes of grandeur and glory and meeting my own ego needs to show
how bright and clever I was, and missed the point of learning how to
empty myself so that God would shine through. I was deeply aware of
my own failings and I wanted to mask them so that no one would ever
know. It reminds me of the old joke about the actor who was accused
of not being sincere, to which he replied, “If only I could fake
sincerity I would have it made.”
Simeon understood the depth of his own
sin but he could look at it with honesty and balance it with the love
of God which redeems everything. He wrote:
I have continually
had such a sense of my sinfulness as would sink me into utter
despair, if I had not an assured view of the sufficiency and
willingness of Christ to save me to the uttermost. And at the same
time I had such a sense of my acceptance through Christ as would
overset my little bark, if I had not ballast at the bottom sufficient
to sink a vessel of no ordinary size.
One of the advantages of screwing up
one's life is that failings become public and attempts to hide them
are silly. Such was the case of my divorce and the subsequent
acceptance of the broken man by the love of a congregation. Being a
failure made me a better priest and keeps calling me back to remember
who I really am- a fellow sinner beloved by Christ- at the end of the
Reconciliation of a Penitent the Priest hears a confession,
pronounces absolution and then says: “The Lord has put away your
sins. Go in peace, and pray for me, a sinner.”
This weekend brought the news of the
head of the CIA, a highly respected retired General, resigning in
disgrace. My prayer for him, and for the rest of us – as the old
Prayer Book used to call us -“Miserable Offenders”, is that we
understand what we have done and then use the love of the forgiving
power of the One Greater than Ourselves to find the strength to
continue; to find who and whose we are.
No comments:
Post a Comment