stability

For all sorts of reasons, there's more of a 'butterfly' mentality in how life's lived today.

Sometimes through necessity, often, though, through choice, we flit about from place to place and job to job.

Butterflies.

Restless: unwilling to settle for anything more than a moment or two of our time. And perhaps, who knows, incapable, too, of settling down.

We get bored with our jobs, or the thing becomes too hard. Problems arise, the pressures increase, we don't find it quite so fulfilling as once we did. And so we quit. We pack up our bags and move on. Always on the look-out for the perfect job, that one elusive avenue of work down which we'll find whatever it might be we're looking for.

Folk get bored with their 'partners' as well. We fall in love and life and love is absolutely wonderful. And then there is an argument. It isn't all a lovely bed of roses. Tensions arise. Resentments seep under the door of our spirit. Or a boredom creeps into our hearts, and the air of that love is no longer as fresh as it was and we start to feel a staleness in our spirits and we feel we're unfulfilled again and yearn for someone else.

Butterflies.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

The famous quote from Dickens has become the strap-line of our age and generation.

We want to be free. Free to flit into and out of relationships, past-times and jobs. Free to keep jumping from one bright-coloured 'flower' to another in the garden of society today.

We're attracted by 'colours' and have subtly become the advertisers' dream.

And yet, despite it all, we're probably far less free, and hugely less 'fulfilled' than the slow-moving, 'colourless', 'caterpillar' generations of another age.

I called on a lady today who set me thinking once more upon these lines. She's newly into her 97th year and as bright and alert as many a third of her age.

And she's lived in the same little flat for 73 years.

The stairs to her door are round the back and up the outside wall. Good, old fashioned stairs of stone, weathered by long years of village life. And the flat itself is hardly big. Compact and simply adequate, it's been her home for all these years. And even if she'd had the chance to move, I doubt that she'd have taken it.

She's from the 'caterpillar' generation. Solid, settled, and slow. Not in a hurry like most are today. Not jumping up and going off in a huff at the first sign of trouble or when things are not quite as we wish.

73 years! The second World War had yet to begin when the lady had first moved in. It's an impressive statement of the value of commitment.

And it reminded me of something which I'd read a long while back from Eugene Peterson's book, Under the Unpredictable Plant. He's writing about the pastoral ministry, though what he says has perhaps a wider application.

"When I began my pastoral ministry in my present congregation, I determined to stay there for my entire ministry. I was thirty years old. There was nothing particularly attractive about the place; indeed, there was nothing but a cornfield at the time. But I had been reading St Benedict and was pondering a radical innovation he had introduced that struck me as exceedingly wise. In the community of monks to which he was abbot he added to the three standard evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience a fourth: he added the vow of stability."

He ends this particular section of the book with this telling statement -

"The norm for pastoral work is stability. Twenty-, thirty-, and forty-year-long pastorates should be typical among us (as they once were) and not exceptional. Far too many pastors change parishes out of adolescent boredom, not as a consequence of mature wisdom."

That 'adolescent boredom' has become somehow a hall-mark of society today. Perhaps because we've lost that truest wisdom, whose roots are in the humble fear of God.