Positively Job-like, Part 4

I note this Sunday morning, the Adult Sunday School of St. Margaret's Episcopal, Lake Ridge, Virginia, covered Chapter 2(A), Pages 37-42, of Brennan Manning's, The Importance of Being Foolish: Transparency.

Manning uses St. Francis as an exemplar of a transparent Christ-like personality, and then asks us about our capacities for contagious joy, enthusiasm, gratitude and forgiveness. Manning maintains preoccupations with security, pleasure and power (what I shorten to SP&P acronymically) block our way.

In the interests of transparency, I immediately confessed to preoccupations with SP; not so much '&P.'

Focusing on &P, I marked the 5% theory on the easel contrasted against the MTM ideal.

All my theories initially assume I'm average (though maybe a little stranger than an absolute mean, I'll grant) in that if I think about something, or not, or do something, or not, than most other folks have probably thought or done the same, or not.

Over the past thirty years then, as a bureaucrat, and in military service, I reckon there's been only two in which I toiled under an exceptional leader - the one you'd follow to hell and back. If that's, indeed, average, it means that for most of us, we've had that privilege 5% of the time over our careers.

The ideal against which that falls short, MTM, refers to the WJM newsroom where Mary, Murray and Ted, working for Lou, seemed happy as much as 60% of the time.

A quick class poll produced a range of workplace happiness responses, i.e., 0%, to reasonably content, most of the time.

Manning posits that if your attention is continuously focused on SP&P the results are 'worry, frustration, suspicion, anger, jealousy, fear and resentment, keeping us from transparency, dimming the light, and obscuring the glory of God in the face of Christ,' and I'd add, keeping us in a bloody miserable state indeed.

A question as to whether class members had ever personally encountered anyone transparent in a Christ-like way yielded few positive replies, but led, otherwise, to rephrasing the question more basically, then, as to how would you define Christ-like?

Those responses:

do unto others;
patient, upset, passionate but in a non-relativistic way;
love one another;
forgiving, accepting;
love, Corinthians-style;
submission as expressed in the Lord's Prayer;
everything that is good (submitted by our resident wonderfully precocious 10-year old in a non-intentional but wonderfully Greek sort-of-philosphical way).

I brought up once again that old personal bugagoo, materialism, while wearing the $7 shirt I bought at Wal-mart yesterday, which while admittedly providing a sense of security and pleasure, only seems to instill a too-fleetng high which is satisfying only until the next fix.

As is almost always the case, the Gospel reading today about the fruits of the Spirit, in concordance with yet another sermon challenging the congregation to give more of themselves, mysteriously completed the class - but we're not finished yet.

During coffee hour, we heard two Five Talents representatives provide an update on their international micro-loan program, particularly, in the Dominican Republic and Peru. As printed in the prospectus, one DR participant plans to buy 18 pairs of pants and 24 pair of underwear for re-sale with her loan.

I have more than 18 pairs of pants hanging in the closet and own as many pair of boxer shorts. The poverty spoken of today is unimaginable. At St. Margaret's, we don't just want to donate money, we want to feel a connection.

Unlike our lovely ladies, some of us, especially me, are aging (I was thinking during the presentation, if I went on a 5 Talents mission trip, would I be able to still take my twelve daily med's?) - but as discussed in the class, and in Kate's sermon, if we make an effort, we think, and I hope most of all, Jesus loves us for trying.