Stability – the unsung virtue of the Oblate life!
We live in a world very different from the one in which I grew up. Stability was the norm back then. Divorce was difficult to get. A job was very often a job for life. Opportunities to travel, follow interesting possibilities, take a Gap Year, change your life significantly, were limited. Commitment was almost non-negotiable. That doesn’t mean all was easy, or that lives were happier or more fulfilled. I am very glad that life now has wider horizons, far more choices, is in many ways much richer and genuinely life-enhancing for far more people. I am grateful that in my own life I have experienced so much that seemed completely out of reach when I was young.
Stability is a different way of seeing the world as we experience it now. I suppose it’s now counter-cultural. There is nothing inherently wrong about moving, after careful and prayerful discernment, to a new place, a new job, a new social group, a different parish, a more nourishing spiritual home in which we can find life, grow and flourish. The problem lies, perhaps in how frequently we abandon one choice and move to something that seems superficially to be more instantly satisfying. We live in the world, we are very much part of the mindset of the digital age, which confronts us with seemingly endless choices and constantly suggests ‘Why Not?’ Why put up with something boring? Why not abandon this job, this church, this friendship, this marriage, this social group, in search of something new and sparkly? Why not seek to be relentlessly ‘fulfilled’, chirpy, stimulated 24/7? Why not move on to yet more
experiences? We only have one life! We have a ‘right’ to enjoy it!
Stability, commitment is much more challenging nowadays. It is harder for people to see that it is what enables growth, in a relationship, in marriage, in monastic life, in our commitment to a particular spiritual path. If you plant trees, you do not expect them to reach maturity in your lifetime. Even if you plant flowers or houseplants, forever repotting them or digging them up to see how they are doing is not a recipe for flowering or fruit-bearing. Young children have difficulty learning to wait! We have reached the point, hopefully, where we know we are in it for the long haul.
Can I see stability as life-giving? Particularly when life casts up major challenges? As it will. Where is my stability in the stage of life in which I find myself right now, this October? I personally find myself approaching a significant birthday, an age I am lucky, indeed blessed – huge thanks to the NHS and a wonderful brain surgeon – to have reached in almost one piece, but which is accompanied by increasing diminishments, loss and grief. How am I called, as an Oblate, indeed as a Christian, to remain a person rooted in the stability of a listening person, a person with a hospitable heart, a person of
inner balance, a forgiving person, a person open to change and adaptation in the hope of growth and fruit-bearing, whatever the challenges of life?
Stability means we keep turning up. We may just be going through the motions, in a desert patch of life. Or we may have stopped turning up in any meaningful way, swamped by whatever is going on in our life. If I am sensing God is very distant, not bothered about what I am going through, then it is possibly because I am not keeping in touch, not messaging him regularly, not responding to his communications. If I am feeling disconnected, this is the day to ask myself why. Which of us is likely to be absent from the meeting, myself or Our Lord?
Stability is life-giving when we see it as a source of growth, a route to flourishing and fruit-bearing at any stage of life. It enables us to enter into a deeper relationship with Our Lord, who loves each of us, values each of us, invites every one of us to fullness of life in this life. Let’s pray for the grace to find happiness, growth, flourishing and life in stability in our Oblate/Christian commitment– and to give that life to those whose lives touch ours.
Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power, through his Spirit, for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, you will, with all the saints, have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God. (Eph. 3, vv16-19)
Mary Cockroft, Oblate of Stanbrook Abbey
