Are you familiar with the word viaticum?
I'm sure you will see at once from its structure that it's Latin, and within it one can spot the smaller word via, which everybody uses. If I catch the train to Victoria Station in London, as it pulls in to Warrior Square Station where I board it, the recorded message booms out over the platform to tell me it's going via Polegate or via Hampden Park or wherever. "Via" is the way it's going, and that's what it means. In Jerusalem, Christian pilgrims walk the Via Dolorosa, which means The Way of Sorrow, or The Way of Pain — the way Jesus walked, stumbling and falling, struggling to carry his own cross on his flogged back, to where he was crucified.
So that word via is tucked inside viaticum, which is the term for the eucharistic host given to Christians in the last rites. Back in the High Middle Ages when our ecclesiastical terminology developed, as the church became ever more sophisticated in its formalisation as an institution, accruing doctrines and dogma and hardening into a propositional shape, only the priest participated in the wine at the Eucharist; the laity received just the bread. So when someone was approaching death they would make a confession if they could, and be absolved of all earthly sin, and receive the viaticum, which means "bread for the journey". The term originally meant a supply of provisions or money, for a traveller, and was taken up into church terminology to envision the bread of the Eucharist sustaining and equipping the Christian soul to make their Great Journey home.
I have a strong and settled belief that though I love and revere this Earth, it is not my home. My soul comes from another country. I have a dim and hazy certainty about this, beyond all received ideology.
I believe that when a soul comes out of the world of light to experience life on Earth, they do so in agreement with guides and mentors, choosing the path and set of circumstances appropriate for forming the spirit. I have to conclude that my own spirit must be distinctly timorous and flabby, because my life has been lived in the shallows — quiet, protected and uneventful — and I prefer it that way and do my best to keep it like that. I am solitary and unregarded, I don't carry the burdens of riches or fame, but I have always been loved, always had good food to eat and a safe home, warm and dry, nice things to wear, a garden full of trees and birds and herbs, books to read and enough money to buy things to make and play with. I have had everything a human being dreams of. I have never been starving, never lost an eye or a limb, never been terrorised or beaten up or arrested. My home has never been bombed or my garden poisoned by aggressively encroaching factories. The air around where I lived is sweetened by the cleansing sea and the trees of Sussex, not choked by the relentless smog of traffic. I am blessed beyond measure.
And yet, even so, I do not find life easy. Nor do my children, these wise and shining souls who honoured me by choosing to make their way into this world through my body.
Looking into my life and circumstances, I cannot help noticing that I can make very little difference to absolutely anything. The greatest lake is made up entirely of single drops, of course, so it matters that I do my best to be responsible in the contribution I make to the whole. I must not demand too much for myself, or grab resources at the cost of great suffering to other beings, or ask so much that this beautiful vibrant planet is impoverished by my consumer lifestyle. I must be mindful of the whole in every particular choice I make.
But that said, I look at the cruelty of the Home Office and the shameful corruption of my government, at the rapacious indifference toward the poor and the refugee, the sick and disabled and all who struggle; I look at the arrogant greed of my own society prioritising its foreign holidays and large homes and yachts and cars and manufactured objects over the future of its children — and I am brought to despair at times, that I cannot change this, cannot make enough of a difference.
So what I try to do is choose the places where the little I have to offer will really count. And that starts with my family. One of the things I most want in this world is to create for my children a viaticum, a small wafer of provision so that when I am no longer here to use what ingenuity and experience I have to stand alongside them and help them make their way through this difficult world, I will have left them sufficiently set up to be able to cope.
What has enabled me to work towards providing this viaticum for all five (!) of them is the simplicity of minimalism, because that's what makes a little go a long way. Minimalism is the engine side of providence. Whatever you set out to do, minimalism will boost and advance it.
Minimalism is, in a sense, a sort of viaticum; it is spiritually and materially effective in offering sustenance to the pilgrim making the journey home through these stony and crumbling earthly pathways into the misty mystery of the great I Am.
Here are the things I am moving on from my life today; a collection of pots of paint.
You know how it is with paint. If you have enough, you have too much, so you have some left over, so you keep it just in case you ever need it again. "Just in case" is a flag fluttering over every hoarder's home. The pots sit in the cupboard peacefully acquiring a soft grey covering of soft and gentle dust, the tops welding firmly to the bodies of the pots as the paint inside grows harder and dries, becoming ever less useful with each passing month. There comes a time when those pots of paint have always been there, in the cupboard under the stairs, part of the landscape of this home, this life, this way of being. What are they? No one knows. How long have they been there? No one can remember. Whose are they? Oh! What? Mine? Surely not.
But, yes. They are there, and they are mine, and they've been there for ages and it's time I took responsibility for them and moved them out of the house.
No comments:
Post a Comment