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STRIKING A BALANCE

Most catechisms contain the same two questions, ‘What is
my duty towards God?’ and ‘What is my duty towards my
neighbour?’ ; and the answers are based on our Lord’s two
commandments – loving God with all our heart and all our
soul and all our mind and loving our neighbour as ourselves.
Sometimes we struggle to strike a balance between these
two ideals. The task is made harder because the most we
pray, the more we feel called to pray and the more we help
others, the more we feel the need to do more.
One of the Christian authors who has most influence on my
life is a woman called Sheila Cassidy. I once had the privilege
of hearing her speak at a meeting in Dublin. She was born in
the U.K and trained to become a doctor in Oxford University.
Afterwards she went to gain experience in Chile but while
she was there, there was a military coup. She was arrested
for treating a guerrilla who had been shot, and was tortured
and imprisoned for two months before returning to England. She wrote a book on her experience called
‘Audacity to believe.’

In another book she wrote though, she gives a very simple and yet powerful illustration of striking this
balance by using the dynamics of a cross. The upright or vertical component represents our relationship
with God while the crossbeam or horizontal component stands for our relationship with our neighbour.
Now if a cross has a slim upright, it can only carry an equally slim crossbeam. If we tried to carry a heavier
burden of kind deeds and social work on a patchy prayer life or in other words we try to carry a heavier
crossbeam while allowing our spiritual life and our relationship with God to fall into abeyance, we will
quickly run of steam or perhaps burn ourselves out.

The lesson is of course that if we can only make that crossbeam strong and solid. If we can only, by
prayer, worship, and reading our Bibles, build a strong relationship with God, then we will be able to
bear more and more of other people’s pain and suffering because at the end of the day it is not us
carrying the load but God.

On another occasion, Sheila Cassidy wrote, ‘Prayer, even more than eating or sleeping, is not a luxury
but a necessity and we are only fully human when we remember this and arrange our lives accordingly.’

Let us get back to basics!

Canon Mark Lidwill
School Chaplain

6 The Royal Times 2016-2017