The Messenger - June 2008 - Editorial / New Wine and Old Wineskins
By - 01 June 2008
We decide very early how things should be and we feel deprived, even deceived, when things change. I remember when I was five or six, having a new tweed coat with leather buttons. Those buttons were awkward and all my difficulties in life seemed to be summed up by my problem with buttoning that coat.
Somehow the idea got into my mind that old age would be a return of my problem of buttoning up a coat or at least of coping with the everyday demands of living. If only my life problems were all as easily dealt with as learning to button that coat. We in Ireland have lived through a period of very rapid change that has brought new problems. Many viewed that change with suspicion, as it culminated in an Ireland that is often hard to recognize. Some accuse change of undermining the faith of our fathers, others recognize how other changes have allowed our faith new expression in a liturgy that includes us more intimately, and in an opening up of scripture in a newly accessible way.
Then something happened that changed my attitude to change. Even though I had assumed I knew what happened when someone was blessed, and even felt stupid to be asking the question, I wondered exactly what happened when someone was blessed. I was surprised for I learned that when we bless someone we praise God, we recognize the goodness, the God-given goodness, of what we bless, and praise God for his creation. So we recognize the wonder of some natural beauty like a sunset, and gasp as it were, at the glory of God that we glimpse in this gift he gives us. Familiarity can blind us to the gift quality in what we are accustomed to, but the new can surprise us all over again by its wonder - if we can overcome our suspicion of the new. If we can learn to see the new as God’s gift to us, we can be ready for the gift of total surprise in God’s gift of heaven, in his big surprise waiting for all of us.
I had often read of saints who saw all of life as gift from God but I had not seen the point of it. I had experienced that the urgency about possessing something ended once I had it, and I took it for granted. I had not recognized that I was doing the same with my life: it was as if having once got it, life lost its must-have quality. Seen as a gift now being given from God, it was continually new and forever surprising. A real reason for getting up in the morning!