St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

Sermons by Sergio Milandri, St George's Cathedral, February 2004

We are our past
We are our future
We are our present

WE ARE OUR PAST

Please be seated, a warm greeting to all of you. It’s good to be back here after some time. Finding our unique spirituality in Christ. This series will be on telling our stories and the three sessions will be on: we are our past, we are our future and we are our present. As we live each moment, each moment carries the quality of our lives. We are only alive this moment, we can only make choices this moment. We make decisions, we do things, we experience things, and it’s interesting that the whole world, everybody alive on earth, is only alive in this very moment. But this moment carries tremendous influence which it gets from all that has gone before and all that lies ahead so that the moment becomes very poignant. It becomes the place where life is happening and it is being fed by all that has past and all that is to be. So it’s very important that we, in experiencing the moment, become more aware of what is feeding that moment, of the quality of what is coming into the moment is. If we had a glass of water, how pure would that water be? What do we allow to contaminate that water? Why do we drink that water? What do we live for in our moment.?

So, in looking at our past, the question is: what of our past is here in this moment? Next week we’ll look at our future and what of our future is actually affecting this moment too and in the third week I would like to pull it all together and say the quality of this moment is how we live it, because the temptation is to either live in the past, or to live in the future and to avoid the fullness of the moment, to avoid the full responsibility that the moment brings to us, to live fully as we are, as we are invited to be, as God wants us to become. Most of us think we are quite free of the past and free of the future, that we have quite a lot of freedom in the moment, but if we had a special camera that could see the bigger person, that could see the whole person that we are, we’d see a much, much bigger story.

If you could see the video of my life, of all I carry, at the moment you can only see my head probably above the pulpit here, but you would see that I was born in a little village in Italy, in 1950. My mother was an orphan child and had escaped from a foster home and had run away with the man who was to become my father and they got married when she was 14, and I was born on a cold winter morning a year later. My story is so different from each of yours, each of our stories is so totally different. Each of our life experiences are so totally distinctive, so unique and each day has added so much to who we are, that sitting here is a miracle of life in each of us, of experience, of perceptions, of decisions, of choices, of roads walked, of relationships that we’ve been part of, of tremendous joys, of abject pain and loss. All of that is within us, in our body, in our bones, in our very being and all of that is carried, we carry it all the way, it’s all there within us. The question is, what do we carry, how much do we carry, can we carry too much, can we carry the wrong stuff, can we carry it in the wrong way? Can we avoid the present by trying to live in something that happened in the past that was pleasant, or can we justify the present by remembering the way we lived in the past and keeping certain stories alive? How do we see our past and the past of others, our siblings? We share such similar stories with our siblings and yet we’re so different from them. Why is it that we can be born and grow up in the same family and have a totally different life experience and a life unfolding? So the stories in a sense carry the miracle of who we are or they carry the prison that we keep ourselves in, because the quality of our stories becomes the quality of our lives.

One of the strange things about our memory and what we remember of our past, is that our memory is very selective. We don’t realise we do this, but we select only those memories that justify or make sense of who we are, that help us to understand who we are now. So as we look back down the corridor of our lives, we only see those memories and those events that make sense or justify who we are now. Many, many memories we forget, not because we have poor memories, but because they don’t fit in with our understanding of what’s happening now. This is all subconscious, we don’t consciously think I’ll remember that, I’ll forget that, but in our being, we draw together the threads that make sense to us or that want to prove something and we let go or cut those that don’t make sense. So my sisters and I remember totally different things of our family experiences. I remember the things that make sense of what I want to believe, of who I am, of what I want to prove or what I live for or how I carry myself. This is me, and these memories support who I see myself to be, they will remember different memories and reach different conclusions of our common past.

So without even realising it, we put ourselves into a frame of reference and carry ourselves within that and when we tell our stories it’s very telling, because we tend to remember the same ones and tell the same stories over and over again. In fact, if ever you tell the same story in the same way twice, you’re stuck in that particular story, because no event only has one perspective, no story only has one view. As it happens, the same story changes minute by minute. As our perspective shifts, so all our stories should shift and change, but our stories can get quite stuck and frozen. But coming back to what we carry, we need to get a sense of how alive we are inside, of the quality of the emotions we carry and the tone of the stories, whether they give us life or whether they sap life from us and drain us. Our Lord wants to transform our stories so that they are life giving but the problem we find most often is that our stories can keep us held in a particular frame of reference. It is as if we’re trying to prove a past belief or a past assumption or perception by keeping our storied memory of it frozen. If we hang onto that we’re not allowing ourselves to live and open up in the moment as we should be.

I grew up with a very strict father who was always at work. He was strict because he was very self disciplined and motivated and he worked non-stop. We grew up as peasants on a farm in Italy. Before and during the war there was just no food. In fact, about a month ago somebody sent my father a parcel from Italy and he phoned me from Johannesburg and was overjoyed to tell me this parcel was full of onions and I was amazed, I said, what’s the significance? They are thin onions called scalonia, he said, I lived on these all my life as a child. I think the English name for them is scallions. That’s all we had to eat. Sometimes for months they ate nothing but scalonia, these onions, because they just had nothing to eat. So this was so much part of his life and it had no significance for me at all. I don’t ever remember eating scalonia, but it helped me to see him in a new way, because all his life he lived to make sure we had enough to eat and he would often say, my children will never go hungry. We emigrated to this country in 1954 and my father always worked, but he was quite distant because he worked non-stop. He bought a garage and he worked seven days a week and I resented the fact that he was never there for me. My friends had fathers who took them camping and on outings and bought them presents and I really wished my father had been like that. I grew quite resentful of that and only in subsequent years when I started seeing a different picture of him, did I realise that his whole desire was to make sure that we never went without and I could have a different relationship with him. In fact, my relationship with him changed quite dramatically.

So, so much of what we carry is stuck in the assumptions we made at that time when things happened to us. But when we re-tell the stories or revisit them or tell them in a bigger context or hear other people’s stories, I have four sisters and they all grew up a lot younger than me and they saw a different side of my father. Hearing their stories of him, helped me to get a new picture of him and helped me to change in my understanding of who he is and freed me to actually start relating to him in a much deeper way, because I have desires for my children and I could connect with him on that desire level, on something which is very real, my struggles. So when we look at our stories, we need to see how stuck they are, how much pain they carry, how we deal with the pain, because if we carry too much pain from the past, too much unresolution, too much regret, we will have our emotional resources over-filled. We won’t have capacity for new emotional interaction and we will find our relationships becoming increasingly shallow because we won’t want to know more problems, we won’t want to get deep, we won’t want to be there and totally available, because we have too much pain that we are already trying to cope with.

I find myself sometimes watching a television programme and when I see that it is becoming sad or painful I have to I switch it off because I can feel my pain level is up here somewhere in my throat, I start choking up and then I know I need to go and get rid of some of it, let it out. It’s interesting that Richard Rohr says our faith is the place where our pain needs to be worked through and dealt with. Our faith needs to help us to deal with our pain and if we’re carrying too much pain, there’s something that is disconnected. It’s here with our faith community that our pain is dealt with, that our stories have more life, because when we carry too much pain, they die within us and something goes hard inside. So being aware of what we carry and the quality of it and how it invites us to live in the present moment is important, because we are going to meet people who have the same feelings as us. Even people twho have got into relationships that have become stuck, how do we relate to them in new ways? Do we have ways that just are the same as the past, this is how I deal with that person and that’s how it will always be. Our stories invite us to always become new. The question is are we so connected to the past that we won’t let them change or do we actually want to let them go and allow them to change us?

In the reading this morning Jesus stood up and spoke in the temple and they said, “Oh, what a lovely young man, isn’t he Joseph’s son?" (Luke 4:21-30). And then he started saying, “But in the time of Elijah, etc., etc.” and they became incensed because their story was very narrow, “this is what we believe, this is how it was and this is how it will always be,” and he had the audacity to say, “but the story has a different picture, you can see it from a different angle." They became angry because in a way he was taking away from them what they were cherishing as their point of reference. We can become so stuck in our point of reference that we even become angry when God wants to show us a bigger picture, when God wants to free us from our past and say lighten up, let go, release that stuff, you don’t have to carry it all your life. In fact I want to transform that stuff and make that your joy, your gift, because it’s out of our pain that our sensitivity comes, our maturity comes, our richness comes. But if we keep our pain defined in the way we want it to be defined, we keep ourselves very narrow, we keep ourselves stuck in the past and we prevent ourselves from really being able to open up to the moment. Jesus repeatedly told stories that opened people’s framework. They were stories they were all familiar with, but he told them from a new angle, in a new way, with a new perspective, with a new conclusion, and they were suddenly freed.

Jesus is wanting to tell stories into our lives, using the same stories we know but in a different way, from a different perspective, from his perspective and to take off us the things that hold us constrained. So in telling stories, the object is to hear the bigger story, to speak to others, to hear in them our story, to hear in their story how we have selectively controlled our stories. It’s wonderful to hear stories, but they must open our own weave, our own perception, our own control. In the next hour after the service, we will just be telling some of our earliest stories, our earliest memories and just sharing them and hearing each other’s stories. It’s wonderful to hear those stories, because they help us to see ourselves in a new light. Next week we’ll look at our future and how that equally constrains our present moment. If some of you are interested, I’m running a year long course in telling our stories and it’s quite intensive and again it’s just going through our years, looking at how we’ve lived, how we’ve chosen to live and how that’s affecting who we are now. But for now, enjoy your stories and let them become the place where you are being transformed. In Jesus’ name, Amen

To next sermon: We are our future

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