A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

One of my favourite films is entitled ‘Mail for Pastor Jacob’, which is set in the 1970s.  It’s about a blind elderly Finnish Lutheran minister, who amongst other things has a ministry in what we might call ‘spiritual direction’ although that phrase is never used in the film. Every morning the mailman cycles up the path, rings his bell and leaves mail for Pastor Jacob in his mailbox. The pastor goes and collects it, and later in the day a woman reads the letters to him. They’re asking for his advice or his prayers and he dictates a reply to each of them.

Then one day the mailman cycles up the path, doesn’t ring his mail and doesn’t leave any mail. The following day the same, and the next one too. Pastor Jacob realises that his ministry is over, and feels that God has no further use for him. There is a scene towards the end of the film where he is sat on a chair in his bedroom, in his underclothes. Underneath his bed are neatly tied little bundles of letters: he sleeps on his life’s work.  He has obviously been reflecting on his life as it draws to an end, and he is praying to God. He says “ Lord I thought that I was doing this for You, but I begin to wonder if it wasn’t rather the other way round, and that this has been your way of holding on to me and leading me Home.”

That line hit me like a brick. Here was I, a priest, thinking that I was serving God & other people, and there might have been some truth in that, but it had also been a great gift from God to me, God’s way of holding on to me & leading me Home. And that this was true for anybody in some sort of ministry, not just me!  Moreover, it was true for anybody exercising their vocation, their calling. I have many other callings beside being a priest, I have a vocation to be a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and simply a friend, as well as many others, and they’re all ways in which God is holding on to me and leading me Home. And if me, presumably for every human being.

There is deep simple, wisdom here. We each have a number of vocations. It is by exercising them as faithfully as we can that we will become fully ourselves, the person God has created us to be. It will be the way we best serve God and other people, and it is God’s way of preparing us to return to the God Whom we left at our births, and to Whom we return after our deaths. It’s all been God’s gift to us.

And there is more. We seek to use our gifts for the benefit of others, but we need others to draw those gifts out in us, without them our gifts would wither and die. It’s always a mutual process.