The Stories We Tell
Grantchester’s beloved vicar, Alphy Kotteram, is struggling deeply in the program’s last season on PBS.
It’s not been an easy road for Alphy, serving his first parish as an Indian man in the 1960’s English countryside. His congregation fought to keep him when the church hierarchy was ready to move him out, downsizing the clergy care to a part time status assigned to another vicar. The congregation thrived under his leadership, his personal life included a burgeoning relationship with Meg, who turned out to be his boss’s daughter; not easy, but workable. When it became known that he had been raised in an orphanage, his close friend and crime-solving colleague, Detective Inspector Geordie Keating, wanted to help him find his birth parents. Geordie is very good at his job and was successful in finding Alphy’s mother.
Here is where Alphy’s current struggles live.
Meeting his mother was a joy for both of them, until Alphy started asking the hard questions: Why did you not want me? Why didn’t you reach out to me in the last thirty years? For his mother, Mira, there are equally hard questions for him: Why are you in this line of work? Why didn’t you escape this White, Colonial world you were raised in?
Both Alphy and Mira and crafted stories for themselves about each other’s lives and what that meant for them in their own. For Alphy, having been left at a Christian foundling home, he saw the beginning of the purpose for his life now fulfilled in his ministry, which he loves. For the teenaged Mira, after giving birth secretly so as not to alert her parents, she brought him to the closest place she could find on a cold night, hoping he would be adopted by a nice Indian family.
Their personal hopes are now colliding with their mutual reality, creating fundamental, deep conflicts with which neither can reconcile themselves.
As human beings, we often do this, deciding what has happened in the past has a direct meaning with our present, often in very specific, personal ways. Sometimes we comfort ourselves, sometimes we torture ourselves with scenarios that may or may not be accurate or true. When we meet up with reality, whether as soothing embrace or a smack upside the head, we can see the larger truth that serves us.
In the Old Testament scriptures, Daniel shares that, “There is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries.” (Daniel 2:28) God often reveals the mystery of our human need for making sense of things in the context of our own lives. Our individual lives are a constant, unfolding mystery that can be made clearer, more easily, by turning over all our questions, concerns and anxieties to God for discernment and truth. The struggle to hold onto what we have created is human. The desire for more understanding, more life in all its fulness, is Divine.
Alphy nor his mother are in this place of renewed hope yet. You may not be either. But God is with each of us, waiting to reveal the mystery of the moment and help us make sense of it.
Work Satisfaction
How satisfied are you with your work?
Whether or not your present position is what you intended for yourself, assuming you show up regularly and make a contribution, it is serving you in some way or multiple ways.
Jesus seemed pleased to get up each day and get to work. He enjoyed engaging people, helping them and training his disciples to expand his work beyond his immediate interactive reach. I don’t know how much strategic thinking he put into this, but he appears to have consistently responded to those he served with grace, dignity and power.
And that can’t have always been easy, given the political, religious and cultural structures within which he lived and worked. Those clashes that we are able to see feel more and more to me like sacred, clarifying moments, not dissimilar to what you and I face too. His work was simple, straightforward and responsive to human need. But it was not always easy.
Satisfying, but definitely not easy.
Handcrafted Closet Cleaning
What does handcrafting your faith feel like?
Handcrafting your faith is like cleaning out a closet you walk by every day, but keep avoiding opening the door because you know there is A LOT of work behind it you simply don’t want to face.
Then, one day, you tell yourself you have the courage to just look inside, even if you immediately shut the door again.
But, in opening the door, you catch a glimpse of a long-forgotten book or dish, once cherished, and now remembered. You don’t need to struggle or give up anything, you just need to hold and cherish it once again.
What have you cherished about your faith that you would like to hold once again?
Praying
In the three years of Jesus’ recorded public ministry, he spent a good amount of time in prayer. Especially so in the early morning and late at night, the still points in his day. Perhaps those times are special to you for the same purpose.
Jesus prayed for the same kinds of things you and I do, very human desires that make life more comfortable, better and simply easier. He prayed for the people around him in whatever state of being they found themselves at the time they met. And, he prayed for the people closest to him with whom he shared his work. Jesus prayed for the disciples every day, at every turn, that God would strengthen them, guide them and protect them.
Prayer is such an incredibly accessible and powerful tool in living our faith each day, sharing it with others in the most important way possible. While prayer affirms and builds lives, it also creates community and changes our worlds for the better.
It’s not a big stretch to see the opportunity that praying for those we supervise affords our workplaces. In doing so, just as Jesus did, we affirm and build lives, creating community that changes our work environments for the better.
Do you pray for those within the scope of your leadership? If so, do you see the difference it makes?