Chipping away to reveal your beauty

This is the second week running that we read Mark’s warning that the ‘Son of Man will suffer grievously.’ Why this insistence on this theme? This is the centre of his gospel and this is its central message. It is a message we don’t want to hear.

 

In Chishawasha, near to Harare, there used to be a group of stone carvers. They have had to move. I used to watch them work and I always remember their answer to my question, ‘How do you decide what to carve?’ ‘The stone itself’, one of them answered, ‘has within itself what it wants to be.’ I am blankly looking at a rock. Each rock looks much the same. But the artist sees each one differently. This one has within it the figure of an owl. That one the figure of a woman.  The sculptor sees in each rock its own unique future.

The sculptors chip away over days and even weeks, leaving a carpet of stone chips scattered around the base of the sculpture. It is an untidy scene as I wait for some hint of what the end product will look like. Paul says we are God’s field where the Lord works patiently to form us in the image he has in mind for us. He could equally have said we are God’s workshop where we are chipped away into shape. There is no escaping the chisel – whatever shape it comes to us. It could be a broken relationship, sickness, failure in exams, an accident.

Michael Paul Gallagher has a marvellous little book he calls Faith Maps. It is an account of ten well-known, and not so well-known, writers’ descriptions of our journey to faith. He starts with Newman and ends with Benedict XVI. One is Lonergan and Michael Paul uses his image of ‘the sculptor releasing a beauty hidden in stone’. But he also quotes Karl Barth who speaks of ‘the two sides of faith; the aspect of joy and the aspect of the cross.’ He quotes the joy of the mother who waits six weeks for her new born baby to look at her with a smile of recognition. But he also has us think of the beauty of the cross.

I have just read of a war correspondent, Lindsey Hilsum, who witnesses awful scenes and has to report them. She says she always carries a book of poetry with her. It helps her make sense of the dreadful things she sees. Poets reveal to us that suffering, pain and chipping away, can lead to something beautiful. Of the executions following the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916, the poet Yeats wrote ‘a terrible beauty is born.’ Giving of oneself that may lead to suffering and even death is terrible. But it can also be noble and ‘beautiful’ in the sense that it touches something very deep in our nature. We can understand that the martyrs are fulfilled in their giving of themselves. 

22 Sept 2024 Sunday 25 B    Wis 2:12-20   Jm 3:16-4:3    Mk 930-37

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