It feels like there is a sense of powerlessness in the air. Today in the face of overwhelming violence, madness and triviality a lot of people are either burying their heads in the sand or signing up to altruistic causes in an attempt to better our world. In my little bubble, both actions don’t seem carry a lot of hope. Those who are hiding from the realities in our world feel a sense of gloom each time they cautiously poke their heads out for a moment to check-in on the status quo. And those who are signing up to causes feel as though they “have to do something, anything” even though they don’t hold a lot of hope for change.
I’ve been thinking about whether there is some other kind of option for today. How do we carry on with hope for change in the face of a pervasive sense of powerlessness that is sitting over us like a threatening storm cloud?
I was asked the other day whether mysticism can sound a little esoteric and out of reach for most people. I always reply that mysticism is accessible to everyone. It’s simply about paying attention to the numinous in the everyday. So while we can study the thoughts of the great mystics, I’m focusing in my understanding and practice, on finding those moments that resonance with “that which is beyond” in day to day life. I find those encounters often while I am cooking, rarely when I’m cleaning, many times in nature, always in conversations with neighbours, through poetry, and in the words of wise ones in our society.
I turn to a simple comment attributed to Mother Theresa. I find her journey with the Divine beautiful. If you read her story you notice that she had experiences of ecstasy but more often she was familiar with despair and angst. Yet she persisted in seeing the mystery, complexity and truth in the everyday – even in the midst of much suffering. She found a connection to the sacred in all mundane things. Even when that connection felt like distortion.
She once said “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” I wonder if today we need to hear that more than ever. At a time when lunacy, violence and unfairness seem to be institutionalised, could our “solution” be to pay attention to what is going on around us then take action in very small ways – small ways that have the potential to alter the bigger and more difficult things?
I’ve been thinking about micro-moments that bring change for a some time but the thought came to me again while I was watching the film These small things based on the book Small things like these by Irish author Claire Keegan. I had read the book a few years ago and was reminded of the story as I watched the film. I experienced the numinous when I was reading this book. I’m going to share the ending so if you don’t want to know it you can stop reading here.
The book is a story about Bill Furlong who discovers a young woman locked in a shed in freezing temperatures in a convent. It is the mid 1980s in Ireland. The woman has been abandoned in the convent because she is pregnant outside of wedlock. The Catholic church was a hiding place for these young woman in those times who were a source of shame for their families and for the community. However that hiding place – the church – often dealt with these women cruelly and controlled whole communities. There was a level of corruption on par with the mafia. Babies were taken from their mothers and placed with other families. The sheer audacity, power and utter lack of mercy practiced by the church institution is sickening. This young woman, Sarah, has been put in the shed by the nuns.
Bill struggles to know what to do. If he intervenes to save Sarah, his daughters face an educationless future since the nuns run the schooling system. He will also be an outcast in his community who fear the wrath of the nuns. At one point he is not so subtlety threatened by the Mother Superior who knows exactly the power she wields in the community.
My husband and I watched the movie and inevitably asked each other what we would do in a similar circumstance. I felt that it was a situation many of us can identify with these days. It seems as though many institutions speak out justice and support for the weak yet in reality nothing seems to be changing. And some of those institutions more recently have become corrupt and are distortions of themselves.
What can Bill do?
Instead of doing nothing, burying his head in the sand like the rest of the community who turns a blind eye to what they know is going on in the convent, and instead of directly confronting the corruption of the convent, he does a small thing. Bill takes Sarah by the hand leads her out of the dark shed, drives her to his home and quietly introduces her to the rest of the family. This action is a “small thing with great love”. We might ask; how will that help the other girls locked in that insane convent? What about justice that needs to come to those cruel nuns? How do we stop them? What steps need to be taken to challenge the institution? All those questions are valid. But sometimes – and especially these days, I wonder if it will be in the small things that we will find our salvation.
As we take small steps to change the way things are, worlds begin to change and new horizons emerge. I think about how Bill’s small step will challenge the whole community to rethink their attitude to the convent. I think about how one precious life -actually two – has been saved. I think about the shame that the nuns will hopefully feel one day. I think about how this small step has the potential to unravel a whole secretive and oppressive system in that small town.
By taking determined micro-steps daily we fortify our compassion muscles and build up our courage in these disorienting days. My husband I were called to put this into practice when we saw on Instagram this week a video post of a local restaurant owner who we thought crossed boundaries in the way he treated a young female customer. In the footage he was clearly harassing this young woman even though she was resisting. We struggled to know what to do. Report him? Tell other neighbours? In the end we wanted to do something so we wrote to the owner and said it was unacceptable and that we would not be eating there again. What changed? Maybe nothing, but this micro-step strengthened us and gave us courage to take action against something that we felt was very wrong. It gave us a sense of power for good. And it was an encouragement to do it again next time.
Doing small things with great love is a simple command but one that will save us today in an atmosphere where many of us feel despondent about the status quo. Small things can instigate tsunamis of change. And it’s in there, in that eye of the storm that the real revolutions begin.
Rev. Dr Karina Kreminski, Mission Catalyst – Formation and Fresh Expressions, Uniting Mission and Education. Karina also blogs at An Ordinary Mystic.
