My cousin Mark studied well at school and made many attempts to encourage me to learn. Setting his sights on a couple of A levels he developed what he described as retrieval calls. He trained his mind to use the barest of information to draw from the files stored in his mind. An illustration of this would be 1066. Immediately you are transported to a battle field in Hastings and the Norman conquest of England.
Not all retrieval calls are willingly lodged in our minds or welcomed back out. My middle sister when we were 5 or 6 years of age would tease me. She would place a piece of bread on her dinner plate and cover it with tomato ketchup, even slurping it up! To this day when I see ketchup I’m back in the old family kitchen feeling sick.
Some months ago I came across a copy of The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer by Evagrius Ponticus. He was a monk with some influence in the late fourth century whose legacy is less well-known than his contemporaries. On this subject of stored information and its effect on us he says: ‘The person who stores up injuries and resentment and yet fancies that they pray might as well draw water from a well and pour it into a cask that is full of holes’.
Unwittingly we can create retrieval calls, or triggers that bring to the front of our mind a paralysing effect on our spirituality. Why not look today at any occasions when a thought of being hurt by someone or feeling that they in some way deserve an item, acknowledgment or favour less than you? It happens doesn’t it!
Christian or not we are often drawn to the prayer pattern given by Jesus. ‘Our Father in heaven hallowed be….’ Mentally walking through the familiar lines of this prayer we encounter ‘forgive us as we forgive those who…’ injured or caused resentment to rise in our hearts! Many of us stumbled here for the very reason Evagrius suggests – we have a store room or filing system deep in the archives of our hearts which unleashed can take us away from prayer to pain.
Early in my time as a CEO of a charity I was encouraged to have two files – bouquet and barbed wire. In one were the thanks for all we had done well, kind encouraging words to build our sense of worth. The other was full of complaints! Here people pointed out where they were disappointed in us, they detailed our failings. I can tell you, that file did nothing good and rereading them helped no one. In time I learned to read them once, make an attempt to address the issue and close the file.
It may sound a crass illustration but building retrieval calls which take us directly to the file marked bouquet (encouragement, affirmation, love) will aid our spiritual wellbeing, storing injuries and resentment is like pouring all goodness down a drain.
Here’s one for the bouquet file to be retrieved another day-
‘For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord’. Romans 8:38-39
Rob Wykes 