“He took him aside by himself, away from the crowd…” (7:33)

It is a well-known phenomenon that, as soon as we are surrounded by people and activity, we have the tendency to forget about ourselves.  In the worst case we forget what we came to do or wanted to say.  Without interruption the noisy world chatters into us, wants our attention and, in the end, makes us forget why we actually came to the earth. That phenomenon is as old as the world; however, in our time that world is so noisy that everything and everyone risks being drowned out by it.

Formerly, life was still ordered, more or less, according to the principle of “pray and work,” ora et labora.  Now there is nothing left that imposes the duty on us to turn away from the world at set times and go into our inner room.  But there is something else that has taken its place, something that in former times was not yet so obviously present.  That is loneliness.

Even when we are in the midst of a crowd, surrounded by distraction and diversion, we may experience a profound loneliness that throws us back onto ourselves.  Only, we often have the tendency to escape from such loneliness and drown it out.  We throw ourselves into the rush of things, into the whirl of life.  And then comes usually the hangover, the realization that we are even lonelier than before.

We can also choose a different way.  When we succeed in staying in the loneliness, a conversation may arise from it, a conversation with ourselves.  Then what was one is turned into two.  This is what Dag Hammarskjōld meant when he wrote in his diary: “Lonely. But loneliness can also be communion.” *

Even more than a conversation with ourselves, loneliness may become communion.  For Christ wants to be alone with us, away from the crowd, to open our ears to His voice.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, September 1, 2024

* Dag Hammarskjōld, Markings.

When at the end of the day you look back and wonder: Where was I today? you most often come to many places, to a lot of busyness in many ways, but hardly to yourself. We are called from one task to another, or we simply let ourselves be led from one impression to another. But where was I myself?

There is only one place where I am completely myself, and that is in my own midst, a place where I am not more and not less than myself, where you can have a feeling of poverty and riches at the same time. On the one hand, you feel privileged because you are king in your own realm; I can myself decide to whom I open the door. On the other hand, you feel poor because you are impotently facing yourself and find that you hardly know who you actually are. I don’t know myself.

In this empty space I am alone with myself. Of old, this space has been called the hidden Holy of Holies—not only in the temple, but also hidden in the human being.

“In your midst stands one whom you do not know.”

With these words, John not only indicates Christ who is waiting for him in order to be baptized. He also indicates our midst, where Christ stands and waits until He may come into our hidden Holy of Holies.

– Rev. Bastiaan Baan, July 15, 2024

“I have made manifest your name to those human beings who have come out of the world to me through you.  Yours they were, and you have given them to me, and they have kept your word in their inmost being.  Thus they have recognized that everything which you have given me is from you; for all the power of the word which you have given me, I have brought to them.  They have taken it into themselves and have recognized in deepest truth that I come from you, and they have come to believe that I have been sent by you.  I pray to you for them as individual human beings, not for mankind in general.  Only for the human beings which you have given me, because they belong to you.  Everything that is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine, and the light of my being can shine in them.  I am now no longer in the world of the senses; but they are still in the world of the senses.  And I am coming to you.  Holy Father, keep, through the power of your being, those who came to me through you, so that they may become one, as we are one.”  *

The message of the High Priestly Prayer seems so simple: “They have kept your word in their inmost being.  Keep them through the power of your being.”

How do you do that—keep His word in a world of chaos and violence?  How do you create order in that chaos?  For us humans that looks like an impossible task.  It is even difficult to imagine that the angels will unravel all the knots.  They may have the patience of angels, but unraveling the chaos human beings bring about has to be a colossal job.  You can even imagine that the angels lose courage and sooner or later turn away from humanity with the message: “We can’t help you if you don’t help yourself and each other.”  In our time the danger arises that the angels will lose interest in human beings.

In the High Priestly Prayer, Christ prays for all who want to follow Him.  In this one sentence the task of all true Christians, wherever and whenever in the world, is expressed: “They have kept your word in their inmost being.”  Again, how do you do that?  For it can’t mean that we have to learn and remember every word in the Bible?

God waits and works in silence with more than the patience of an angel.  He works with divine patience to bring His word to manifestation in us.  No longer does He call us to order through commandments and prohibitions, but His word sounds in the still voice of our conscience, and in the strong voice of our destiny.  And even when this becomes fateful to us, even then it is still hiding the gift of the Lord of Destiny.

If we follow the voice of conscience, if we say yes to the voice of destiny, we have kept His word in our inner being and will be kept in the power of His being.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, May 26, 2024

* From: The New Testament, a rendering by Jon Madsen.

“Attempt to live in the truth” is the name the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel gave to his inner compass in a society in which the lie rules.  He did not call it “living in the truth,” as if it had already happened but, with a modest expression, an attempt.  That word indicates that it is not a ready-made recipe that produces results all by itself.  If you could speak of a result at all, it could perhaps only be the power of the powerless.  Vaclav Havel several times had to pay dearly in prison for this attempt, because the authorities of his country could not bear the truth.

On the other hand, it does not take any effort at all to live in the lie.  That does indeed go all by itself in a society where the right of the strongest rules and you can just let yourself be carried by the masses.

Whoever makes an attempt to live in the truth has to walk a lonely road.  We can’t follow Vaclav Havel in this.  I have to go my own way, which no one can prescribe for me.  But when in all modesty I try day-in-day-out to make the truth a reality, I walk on the path of Him who says: “I am the way and the truth and the life.  I walk with you in your attempt to live in the truth.”

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, May 5, 2024

One of the most revealing and confrontational discoveries of the past century is that of the unconscious and the obscure forces that slumber in it.  It seems as if this discovery has brought it about that the forces of darkness have been unchained more than ever.  Be that as it may, in this regard we are not only contemporaries but also fellow sufferers.  We are not simple, straightforward human beings.  Every person of this time is a vessel full of contradictions.  With part of consciousness we shine light on the inner and outer world; another part remains hidden in the unconscious and leads a life of its own in the dark.  Increasingly, we are confronted with this uncomfortable truth: in every person forces are slumbering that may be destructive.  One need not be a criminal for this.  The saint knows better than any other person that he too might do anything.  And we will be wise, since we are no saints at all, to watch out for what we don’t know and don’t want to know about ourselves.

But in the depths of the soul there is not only a demon hiding that is waiting for the opportunity to do its destructive work.  Hidden under this abyss there lives in every human being—even in the criminal—a deep longing for redemption.  In the grave of the soul something is buried that is waiting for us to awaken it.  And only if the grave of the soul becomes an altar of the soul, if we seek Christ with heart and soul, will He let Himself be found and will rise from the depths.

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, Easter 2024