(The Nationalist, 11 November 2005)
Who would you rather give a gift to – a person who used it, or one who left it unused? Would you rather bake a cake for someone who ate it and enjoyed it, or one who put it away safely in a cupboard until it went stale?
Christianity is about tough love, not love that is sentimental or permissive. It’s about account-ability, about decisions having consequences.
Where talents and abilities are concerned, we either use them or lose them. A pianist who doesn’t practise will lose the ability to play. Skills are developed by being used, not by being left unused. There is nothing humble in living below our best, apologizing, as it were, for our existence.
Jesus liked telling parables. They were an attempt to use human language, ideas and experience to say something about God and us. One parable was about a man who was “a safe pair of hands”; he took no risks; for him prudence and caution were synonyms. When called to account, he tried to shift the blame onto someone who had trusted him to act like an adult. Childishly, he blamed the other for his own inactivity. There was a small-mindedness about him. He didn’t accept that doing nothing is a decision with consequences as real as any other.
What held him back was fear. It can paralyze. But, as an old friar said to me many years ago, ‘The man who never made a mistake never made anything’. And another said, ‘If you can’t do the best, do the best you can’. God wants us to grow up and take responsibility, not to be timid and fearful.
God doesn’t believe in letting sleeping dogs lie; he wants us to wake up and use our abilities to the full. He wants us to be better than we are, to have life and have it more abundantly. (John 10.10) God wants us to be fully alive, integrated human beings, to live in the wholeness which is also called by the name of holiness.
For those in a hurry: ‘How can one who knows nothing of the Resurrection in this life, expect to discover and enjoy it after death?’ (Saint Simeon the New Theologian, 949 – 1022 AD)