THE JOY OF BEING WRONG
Rev Dr Nikolai Blaskow
Of course, there is no joy in being wrong. Turning into a one-way street, driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road when you go from English left to the continental right, especially when you are turning at an intersection - can be catastrophic. To not listen to your body, not to draw to the side of the road when it is telling you you’re in danger of a micro-sleep.
How on earth can the state of being WRONG ever be joyful? This is the conundrum, the paradox which we embrace this morning. And with that central question the attendant questions: how can the poor really ever be happy? The grieving ever be comforted? The hungry and thirsty in such a state of deprivation as in the Gaza strip, how can they ever really be satisfied?
Isn’t all of this sentimental nonsense - at best delusional at worst cruel and dangerous?
Nevertheless, our readings this morning suggest otherwise.
That it’s about wisdom – not the head-scratching kind, the wise-guy, the arrogant who are insanely competitive and who aim to belittle people with their knowledge. But rather they are those people who choose to share their understanding with humility, knowing, because they are wise, that they are surrounded by diversities, complexities, mysteries paradoxically defying and yet exciting the imagination.
That in fact humility is the only possible attitude in a world of such diversity and intricacy and not because it might be morally and politically correct to do so.
That honesty is advisable not just because we owe it to one another, but because to lie about what we have seen, would be, as Jesus suggests in his mountaintop heart-to-heart talk with disciples, to betray the truth of the great things ‘that make up the grandeur of life.’ That in fact humility is the only possible posture in a world possessed of such diversity and intricacy.
That there in the wilderness at altitude, with Jesus you are exhilarated, enraptured by his vision of reality, which turns the world upside down with its wildness so well captured by Joel McKerrow in this reflection:
As the tamed horse
still hears the call of her wild brothers
and as the farmed goose flaps hopeful wings
as his sisters fly overhead,
so too, perhaps,
the wild ones amongst us
are our only hope in calling us back
to our true nature.
Wild ones
who have not been turned to stone
by the far-reaching grasp of the empire
and its programme of consumer sedation,
the killing of imagination.
Where, my friends,
have the wild ones gone?
The French writer, Appollinaire recognises what is required to achieve such wildness
‘Come to the edge’ [silence]
… They said,
‘we are afraid’.
‘Come to the edge’,
He said. They came.
He pushed them, and
they flew.
In effect, he is saying what Parker J. Palmer is saying in his advice to teachers – the title of his book says it all The Courage To Teach. It’s courage we need.
The kind we saw displayed last night in the Australian Open Women’s Final … in the attitude which won her the title against all odds, including Rybakina’s personal friendship with Sabalenka which had to be set aside, but not denied in the true spirit of sport played at the highest level. Where the dynamics for success play themselves out. Finding one’s personal rhythm, and after discovering it, staying with it … not trying to be like the other but being true to yourself, playing to your strengths – constantly resetting, adjusting to the moment, opening up to, relaxing into your true self with all its strengths, minimising its weaknesses. And even when you are 3 games down to love – you believe in yourself and trust all the years of experience and diligent practice will come to the fore – trust the process that has brought you success.
Keep things simple – don’t overthink things. Only think about what is required by the moment – let the solution loom large in your mind - not the problem.
The kind of mind posture which Jesus chose in the moment of crisis which the writer of Hebrews and the Director Martin Scorsese in The Last Temptation of Christ understood so well – For the joy that was before him, he endured the cross.
When I view my whole life, as Jesus might have done with his short life of thirty three years, for me in just a few short weeks, my 80 years – I find it useful to rehearse the three great questions of my life:
Do I have to go? I don’t eat very much.
How can you love anyone if you don’t have a mother?
Nikolai, what are you going to do with what you know?
The Courage to Teach Parker J Palmer
… a community where the ‘BIG’ STORIES of the great traditions and the disciplines are read and heard and understood, without diminishing the ‘LITTLE’ STORIES OF THE STUDENTS THEMSELVES, where ‘little’ is not a pejorative and dismissive term, but rather refers to those stories’ fragility, and the danger that they might never see the light of day
DUET
(song and dance for Mr. Curly and Vasco Pyjama)
You understand the many things
That I don’t understand.
And I can understand the things
That you don’t understand.
Both of us stand under things
That we had never planned.
How it came to be like this
We both don’t understand.
This is how we find each other.
This is how we care.
This is how we love each other
This is what we share.
And David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life … his injunction to put roots down to where one is even in exile in order to find oneself, one’s true self.
The fullness is in the Child’s moving away from me, in his stepping so lightly, so joyfully, naked, into his own distance at last as he fades in and out of the dazzle of light off the water and stoops to gather—what? Pebbles? Is that what his eye is attracted by now, the grayest, most delicately veined of them? Or has he already forgotten all purpose, moving simply for the joy of it, wading deeper into the light and letting them fall from his hands, the living and edible snails that are now no longer necessary to my life and may be left now to return to their own, the useless pebbles that where they strike the ground suddenly flare up as butterflies, whose bright wings rainbow the stream.
He is walking on the water’s light. And as I watch, he takes the first step off it, moving slowly away now into the deepest distance, above the earth, above the water, on air.
It is summer. It is spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six.
I am there.