Rest a while

A mission statement is used by a company or an organization to explain, in simple and concise terms, its purpose(s) for being.

It is usually one sentence or a short paragraph, explaining a company’s or organizations culture, values, and ethics.

Mission statements serve several purposes, including motivating employees and reassuring investors of the company’s future.

Let’s say for example that I founded a company that made steak knives; the mission statement would be something like : “SharpNTasty, we make knives so you can enjoy your food.”

The culture, values and ethics are in fact in the very name of the company; its purpose is stated concisely, namely making knives.

Mission statements ran rampant among religious organizations, Churches and Religious Congregations; they were posted on the doors of the Church, both outside and inside, they formed the headline banner for letterhead on correspondence.

As you are reading this consider, does your Parish, Congregation have a Mission Statement?

Do you know what it says?

And therein lies the problem – most, that I am familiar with a too long, and too flowery!

It is as if we need to make it sound all holy!

The best Mission Statement for a Church I have ever seen was the one for Calvary Chapel, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

It is two words – “Making Disciples”.

What more needs be said?

A couple of Sunday’s back, (Week 3 of Ordinary Time), we heard Jesus proclaim his Mission Statement. Quoting from Isaiah Jesus read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

“He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”   (Lk. 4: 18 -19).

There it is; clear, concise, short sentences.

Many companies and organizations (religious included) have also what they call a “vision statement”.

How do the two differ?

A Mission Statement defines the company’s or organization’s business, its objectives and its approach to reach those objectives.

A Vision Statement describes the desired future position of the company, or organization.

Put very simply, a Mission Statement focuses on today, the Vision Statement focuses on tomorrow.

This Sunday’s Gospel (Lk. 6: 17, 20 -26) which we know as The Beatitudes, provides us with the ‘future position’ of the company/organization, namely, “the poor are blessed, the hungry will be filled, those who weep will laugh, those persecuted will leap for joy.”

The illustration is of a disciple being under construction

It is not you that shapes God
it is God that shapes you.
If then you are the work of God
await the hand of the artist
who does all things in due season.
Offer Him your heart,
soft and tractable,
and keep the form
in which the artist has fashioned you.
Let your clay be moist,
lest you grow hard
and lose the imprint of his fingers

-Irenaeus of Lyon ( 130 –  202 ad)

This Sunday, 6^th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year C) is known as World Marriage Sunday.

There’s no swiping right on Tinder for the animal kingdom. Instead, many species of wildlife must risk life and limb to find a partner so they can breed and avoid extinction.

Over five episodes, David Attenborough’s The Mating Game turns the spotlight on the sex lives of creatures big and small.

The mating rituals of wildlife from termites, worms and spiders to humpback whales, zebras and giant pandas are exposed in this latest documentary, recently aired on TV1 on Sunday evenings.

From grasslands to the ocean, from jungle to freshwater, and at times against all odds, the viewer witnesses bitter rivalry, ingenious strategies, and quite spectacular rituals.

The documentary captures the extraordinary lengths – dramatic, unexpected and, sometimes, comical – to which creatures will go in their desire to find a partner in habitats from every corner of the globe.

The documentary also turns the spotlight on some mating strategies that are so extreme that they have no connection with anything else.

Commenting on the mating ritual of the hairy angler fish, Attenborough comments, “The female takes the male, which is very small, and the male clings on to her, and the two fuse so that they become one, and their very blood circulation is shared between them. The male is reduced to a sperm-producing mechanism, but it’s served its purpose because it has brought a different set of genes into the gene pool. “

Attenborough comments, “all life is driven by the need to breed”; in that breeding is the continuation of the species.

The documentary excluded one of the biggest groups of the animal kingdom! Humans.

Humans can move on their own and are placed in the animal kingdom. Further, humans belong to the animal phylum known as chordates because we have a backbone. The human-animal has hair and milk glands, so we are placed in the class of mammals.

It appears that we can sneak in with our long-distanced lens cameras and observe a giant toad copulating, a male and female ostrich engaged in an intimate pre-mating dance, and on the plains of Texas be absorbed as a dominant wild turkey is aided by his less impressive brothers who help keep rival males at bay whilst the top male turkey secures as many mates as possible.

And none of this “watching” is considered ‘voyeurism’; I, and no doubt many others sat watching as other species were engaged in copulation!

So, what makes this animal (humans) insist on privacy, the lights out, the door closed, the sheets covered over, while zebra, and the ostrich engage with one another on the open savannahs of Africa, spider and tamarin monkeys mate with one another in the jungles of the amazon, and humpback whales call to one another off the coastline of Hawaii.

Maybe it is because we have a different name for The Mating Game; we call it Love-making, and while many species of wildlife risk their life and limb to find a partner, and copulate – it is for the sake of the species; they breed in order to survive. For the human, animal species, the preservation of the species is not the uppermost intention of a human couple lying together, rather it is the most intimate way of saying to the other, “I love you” and that is confirmed by the intimacy and immediacy of the physical act of intercourse.

An intriguing aspect of the documentary was that while precoital rituals were at times extravagant, once coitus had been achieved, separation was immediate, the ground squirrel was back to its hole in the desert of Morocco, both male Zebra stallion and mare resume their grazing on the grasslands, and the chimpanzee and gibbon were off looking for the juiciest of branches.

For many couples, the postcoital lying in each others arms, the gentle touch of skin on skin, the “pillow talk” continues the ‘love-making’. Humans in fact, don’t mate; humans love.

The illustration is of Flamingos. Flamingos have a staggering 136 moves that they display in order to attract a mate, according to new research.

I have a vague recollection of learning to swim; it certainly involved the use of a flutterboard and the shallow end of the school swimming pool. It also involved going side to side in the shallow end. The security was I was able to put my feet on the bottom of the pool and my head would be above the water. I have no recollection of the transition to deeper parts of the pool – however, I do remember that by the end of my schooling I was swimming lengthwise which meant of course engaging with the “deep end”. This Sunday’s Gospel (Luke 5: 1 – 11) has this request of Jesus to the fishermen whose boat he had sequestered “ put out into the deep water and let down your net for a catch.” (v.4). Put quite simply, ‘engage with the deep’. The preceding verses are worth noting because it tells us two important facts; firstly, the request was to fisherman who had already been fishing all night, “we have worked all night and caught nothing.” (v.5), and, secondly, “they were washing their nets.” (v. 2) When I read the Gospel event symbolically, I read something like “we have done our work (which resulted in nothing), and now we are tidying up, why would we want to go out again (at the request of someone who knows nothing about the wind, the tides [“he is the carpenter’s son surely”]. Again, as our Church enters this time of Synodalitymaybe there is something in this story that may be of advantage; for example, listen to the voice of the other (especially the voice that ”supposedly” knows nothing; listen to the voice of the one(s) on the edge, “once while Jesus was standing beside the lake .” (v. 1); be prepared to take what has already been cleaned and go out into the deep, where you cannot stand up (yikes!) and you may even need the supporting hand of another (double yikes!!), and, be prepared for the clean nets to be dirtied again! And the biggest yikes of all, “so they signalled their partners in the other boat to come and help them.” (7)

The illustration is of what is known as The Ancient Galilee Boat; it is an ancient fishing boat from the 1st century AD, discovered in 1986 on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel. The remains of the boat, 27 feet (8.27 meters) long, 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) wide and with a maximum preserved height of 4.3 feet (1.3 meters), first appeared during a drought, when the waters of the Sea (which is actually a great fresh-water lake) receded. Upon retrieval, by archaeologists, the boat was then submerged in a wax bath for 12 years, which protected the boat before it could be displayed at the Yigal Allon Museum in Museum in Kibbutz Ginosar, Israel.