Madonna - November/December 2008

Presentation of the Lord - Peter Steele

Apart from the numerous American words that appear in our Australian context, there are others that have taken on nuances of meaning. Amongst these is the word ‘presentation,’ in its contemporary sense. At any given moment, multitudes of individuals are ‘making presentations’ across the country. Papers are being read, posters are being unfurled, pointers are being wielded, positions are being espoused.

And we know, don’t we, that each of those presentations is also a pitch? However seriously, however urgently, the speaker makes her case, or his, there is also an important element of self-commendation, of self-offering. Sometimes, no doubt, fraudulence comes into this, so that the telling is all a conning: but I am not talking about that. I am talking about the fact that much would be lost if some intellectual position, or some policy were adopted, but adopted in such a way that its human commender were simply shucked off, like oyster-shells from around the oyster.

It happens: it is happening to people right now: and it is a pity. Because the most excellent policy or insight in the world is still inferior, is still unimportant, if it is taken away from a human milieu, a human matrix. Ideas matter not for their own handsome or glittering sake, but because they are the ideas of human beings about human existence and its context.

On the day of judgement, whether this be intimate or public, we shall certainly not be asked how well we knew, but how well we loved. And this remains true even though, as is certainly the case, the path to loving well is for some people a path through knowing well.

A presentation is a transaction—something I offer to you, something you accept from me. Today’s feast, that of the Presentation of the infant Jesus to his Father, the God of heaven and earth, is also just that. It was a ritual moment—the proferring of these few pounds of animated flesh and blood to the originator of all that is: the entrusting of this totally vulnerable fragment of humanity to the God who was his source, as God is the source of each of us.

The child could say nothing, though he might do some gurgling or crying or coughing or sneezing, and perhaps he did. Others had to speak for him, whether Mary or Joseph or the much older Simeon or Anna, and in different ways they did so. But one way or another, the baby boy was being put forward for endorsement; and endorsed he was.

He was also put forward as dedicated, as committed, as not just an item rolling around at loose in the world. Everything that follows in the gospel stories, and in the rest of the New Testament, and in the Christian tradition from that day to this, hinges on his being truly dedicated, truly committed. Not dedicated as a fanatic, but dedicated as someone who knew that his personal truth lay, and could only lie, in an ever-deepening relationship with God, and an ever-deepening relationship with his fellow men and fellow women. His short earthly life, and his unquenchable heavenly life now, were conditioned at every point by that commitment.

Each of us was born for endorsement, and each of was born for commitment. God made us to be endorsed—to be affirmed, to be accepted, to be cherished, to be embraced. Each of us, from the moment of our primary being, was orientated that way for all eternity. No human being has ever been conceived of whom that is not true—no human being, however villainous, however vile, however odious. All of us were engendered for embrace: and, so long as any of us can take decisions, that remains true.

We were also born for commitment. God knows, it is true that in the run of our lives, it can seem that commitment is not a shot on the board. It can seem that we are so hedged about by this pressure, or that cajolement, this thrust or that seduction, that we are the mere pawns of time.

And our society can offer, in a thousand ways, to reinforce such a view—can take us off the moral hook, can take us off our own hands, and consign us to the inevitability of market forces, or the whiplash of impulse, or the long, lethal slow-motion of melancholy. We can kiss commitment goodbye, almost without noticing that we are doing so. And yet, commitment to God, and to those he loves, is the primal, and tidal, and final, swing of our hearts. God made none of us at random: and it is not at random that we will find our peace, our fulfilment, our vindication.

Sundays come and go, as do the church’s feasts. We have seen them before, and most likely we will see them again. But we will never see them twice from precisely the same angle. Next year, if we are given it, we will come round once more to the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord after having had one more opportunity to live as endorsed, affirmed human beings, and one more opportunity to live as committed ones.