From Where I Sit                           Judith Lynch (Melbourne)                  Judith's previous articles        Judith's website                            

March 24, 2012                                       BROKEN DREAMS                     5th Sunday of Lent – Year B

It’s not an unusual sight on a country road – a lone brick chimney marking the spot where a house once stood.  Leaning over the chimney a misshapen plum tree froths with blossom and beneath it a few sheep nibble the sparse new grass.

The house that once stood here was not just a structure to keep out the rain and protect its inhabitants from the summer heat. It sheltered a dream - that life here would be satisfying, that children would flourish and a couple grow old together.

This is the way young men and women move into marriage, it’s the way we start a new job or make the move to secondary school or uni.  We start with the seed of hope and possibilities. It’s the way Jesus left his village life and began his public life as a travelling preacher.

New beginnings are a mixture of excitement and tension. If we give the ending much thought at all it would go no further than happy ever after .  It’s the in between bits that we don’t anticipate and that catch us by surprise. We rejoice at the beginning of a first pregnancy and long for the soft weight of an armful of new baby but the nine months in between are something else! A longed-for job ends in boredom, marriages break down, children grow up and become their own person and we struggle to recognise the little boy or girl we thought they would always be.

Reality has a way of catching us unawares. No matter how much thought we put into structuring our future or how forward thinking and flexible our planning, we invariably find ourselves wishing we were somewhere else, even someone else.  A marriage that began like a fairy tale gets bogged down in what to cook for dinner and taking the kids to soccer practice. The unexpected butts into our carefully constructed lives and tumbles us around. It can be as tragic as a sudden death, as life-changing as a bush fire or flood, or as simple as a change in the weather or a broken washing machine. Suddenly we are not in control.

It can be unbearably hard to accept that God doesn’t always go along with our plans, however worthy we might think they are. Thirty three years ago my husband and I adopted a baby girl.  We had survived the rigorous adoption process and now had the joy of parenting this beautiful child. Seven months later she died with a rare infantile cancer. I had been so sure that nothing would ever take her away from us, certain that at last God had smiled on our childlessness.  And yet the unthinkable happened.

When something happens and our careful plans lie in shards on the ground we can handle it in different ways. We can blame God, using it as an excuse to turn our back on our religious faith, as if we can punish God for taking something away from us. Or we can grit our teeth and speak solemnly of God’s will while peace and joy gradually get swallowed up in our unresolved grief. Or we recognise at some deep level that God is with us in this, that together we will get through it. 

Three years into his preaching ministry Jesus was aware that this was all the time God was giving him. He was open about how he felt. ”My soul is troubled ….…. Father, save me from this hour. “ When we want to close off from what reality offers us and we too are troubled, we do well to remember the seed image that Jesus found so comforting. Like the seed that splits open to release the life within, so too our difficult and troubling times can open out into unexpected peace, joy and  possibilities.