A journalist recently did an interview with me about my trip and thankfully after my rumbling babble asked the poignant question: “So what was the point of it all?”
Here then is my answer.
The congregation at GracePoint Fellowship permitted me to leave the pastorate for a short sabbatical in order that I might gain a needed fresh spiritual perspective on the world, life, and other things that matter. That is what leads to the point. Often anyone who works too long in one position can lose perspective on what’s important.
The pics that inhabit this blog indicate a penult to the lesson of this sabbatical. It starts with “Luister” translated “listen”. (If you read “a sign from God?” and the journey to get there in this blog you can get the short story behind my journey leading to the encounter with St. Benedict’s pivotal rule.)
“Listen” according to St. Benedict is an exercise that breaks the bondage of self-ish-ness. It is a ‘being there’ for another person’s story. Ultimately that is my journey’s lesson. For instance, the ‘pic’ of the bug on the needle in front of the gold gilded library for the learned, begs for the learned ‘to listen’ to the needs voiced by the not so fortunate longing that the knowledge of the learned be used for the common good and not for the bonds that come with the self-gratification of academia. The pic of the magnificent city hall, begs the occasional tourist ‘to listen’ to the stories of the 236 statues that serve as its edifice and more deeply to the stories of the culture that created it. The research that I completed concluded that in a pluralistic democratic society the majority needs ‘to listen’ to the stories that voice the pain of its minorities. If it silences those voices, it soon becomes neither pluralistic nor democratic.
Much more could be said but instead it can be summed up in my ‘final pic,’ a picture of me offering an invitation to the arguably best chocolate on earth, Leonidas. It is a metaphorical Belgian semi-sweet dark chocolate with the burst of vanilla liqueur within that invites others to hear the lesson-that is the point in hand-with which I have returned, “listen.” Perhaps it might make a good New Year’s resolution.
