Today people travel more and airports are like Mbare musika. Further, communication technology has brought distant places – like Afghanistan and Syria – into our living rooms. The internet gives us access to unlimited knowledge.
Yet in another way our horizons are limited. We become satisfied with the life we see around us, with our families, our friends, our work and our entertainment. There is an inner horizon that we miss, an inner space that we do not explore.
Here there is no internet to guide us. It is a ‘journey without maps.’ Perhaps for that reason it is frightening and we avoid it. There is a story in the book of Kings (2 Kings 4:42) where Elisha commands his servant to give the little bread they have to the people to eat.
The servant replies, ‘how can I serve this to a hundred men?’ ‘Give it to them,’ Elisha insists and the servant does so and ‘they ate and had some over.’
This story is the curtain raiser to the account in John 6 where Jesus feeds 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. In Mark’s account of the same incident we have the explicit command of Jesus, ‘give them something to eat yourselves’ making it more than clear that it is the disciples who are to do the feeding. Neither they nor Elisha’s servant before them could conceive of feeding people without having the basic resources needed to hand. The bread stories look to the future when Jesus will use this as a sign of his death and the life that it brings. But it is at the same time a sign with a general application of going beyond our limited horizons.
It is often remarked that our age is one of spiritual search and that people try all sorts of ways to satisfy their inner hunger. But many of the solutions proposed are quite superficial and appeal only to a ‘feel good’ factor. There is nothing wrong with long vigils and prayers, witnessing and singing, so long as it does not end there.
All these things have to lead to an inner journey of expanding horizons. Otherwise they are no more than ‘cymbals clashing’ (I Cor. 13:1). Elijah did not find God in the ‘mighty hurricane’ but in the ‘light murmuring sound’ (I Kings 19: 11f).
Post published in: Faith