How annoying…

There are lots of people who annoy you. I know. They annoy me too.

There are lots of people who annoy us. I know. I’m one of them. Some of you I annoy you so much you don’t listen to the sermons so you’ll never know I know. But I do. 

Apart from me then. Politicians, journalists, archbishops…

By the way, it might seem like you’ve heard this before, but this is a new sermon, just the same old preacher.

Where was I…. Annoying people. Car salesmen. People in the park with sound systems. People revving their cars  in the street outside your open window. Anybody whose job title involves the words Fresh Expression, unless they’re selling Taiwan’s premiere brand of cat litter, in which case ‘ni hao’. Other people in the shops, other people on the roads, other people at school and work and church. A Nnoy, Ing.

And

Your cousins. Your aunts and uncles. Your siblings. Your parents. Your in-laws. After a few years your husband, boy he’s the most annoying, you try living with him. Yes, the person you love so much you tied yourself to them with legal spiritual and emotional bonds is really, really annoying.

Your nearest and dearest. A Nnoy, Ing.

What hope then for the rest of us, less tied by mutual bonds of love or kinship?

There are some difficult requirements Jesus makes of his followers. Sell everything you own and give the money to the poor. Take up your cross and follow him. Leave everything and everybody that means anything to you and follow him. If anybody said it was going to be easy trailing in the wake of the guy in the sandals they hadn’t been trying. But probably the hardest commandment of the Christian faith is this one: love one another. 

I mean. Really? Do you know annoying those people are?

Just to make it that little bit more taxing, there is a hard and fast rule that the more you know you want to love someone- family, friends, parishioners, the more impossibly annoying their idiosyncrasies and foibles are.

Theological educators know this which is why until very recently you had to go and live in a theological college first if you wanted to become a parish priest. Sort of makes sense. If you can live in close proximity for two, three years with aspirant clergy, who are probably the most irritating, most vexing, most b bothersome and annoying of all God’s creatures, if you can get through seminary without having tried to murder someone and retained something resembling sanity you can survive anything and anyone the parish throws at  you. That’s the theory anyway.  It doesn’t stop you trying. And sometimes succeeding. But mostly not, because you’re never going to be as vexing as a final year ordinand.

Anyway, people. They are just… annoying. Why did Jesus have to say that, ‘love one another’? How can you love them? How do you do it? To get anywhere close, you need the patience of a saint, and none of us have that much patience, least of all saints.

One of the places of the most concentrated, festering resentments bred by years of annoyances small and great are convents and monasteries. What, you thought those monks never had a bad thought cross their minds,  the nun never tuts? I’m not sure anyone with extended contact with the sisters would seriously think a nun was incapable of harbouring malicious thoughts, but maybe that’s just me: the Wimple wearers do tend to hate priests, particularly the sisters who run the sacristy at Walsingham. But still, those religious foundations, the abbeys and priories, houses and friaries set up to be a taste on earth of the gifts of the world to come, humanity called back to its first innocence, those gothic incubators of the saints: all awash with backbiting, bitching and belligerence.

Now, as I’m sure the sea cadets will tell you when they come in a couple of weeks’ time, the patron saint of sailors is St Nicholas, yes the jolly red chap with the big beard and the bigger belly. This is weird; more fitting I would suggest is the Carmelite nun St Therese of Lisieux. Now, she never set foot on a ship, never sailed the seven seas, was never keel hauled, tied to an anchor or eviscerated with a windlass, which was the fate of some of the other nautical saints like Clement or Elmo,  but in many ways a ship is a floating convent, just with fewer nuns and a lot less alcohol. A small space with a fixed number of people forced to interact with each other day in day out for long periods with no escape- is it a convent? is it a ship? Who can tell?. I’m sure the crew of your average ship spend much of their time fantasising the slow and painful demise of their shipmates such is the effect of living at close quarters.

Parish Churches are in this regard also rather like ships, though again with fewer nuns and less drunkenness, because, unless you jump ship,  you can’t choose who your church-mates are, not even clergy have that privilege which means you’re bound to be bumping into people in the pews who are really annoying.

Back to St Therese, Beddington’s newly minted patron saint of sailors. Therese is one of the sources of my claims about  how annoying people in religious orders find each other. Therese entered a Carmelite community of nuns in Lisieux, Normandy in 1888 at the age of fifteen. She lived the next nine years in that convent before dying from tuberculosis at the age of twenty four. The future saint kept a journal of sorts during her time in the convent, and, oh boy, those nuns. A Nnoy, Ing.

There was the nun who spent every meditation time fidgeting like a novice chorister. The hem of her habit. A tress of hair. Her breviary. Her fingernails. Her beads. Click, swish, chew, fidget. E-ver-y day. While Therese was trying to be still and prayerful, listening for the still small voice. Click, swish, chew, fidget.

Work offered no escape. Therese writes,

“Another time, I was washing handkerchiefs in the laundry opposite a Sister who kept on splashing me with dirty water.  I was tempted to step back and wipe my face to show her that I would be obliged if she would be more careful. But why be foolish enough to refuse treasures offered so generously? I took care to hide my exasperation. I tried hard to enjoy being splashed with dirty water, and by the end of the half hour, I had acquired a real taste for this novel form of aspersion. How fortunate to find this spot where such treasures could be given away! I would come back as often as I could.

People are annoying, even to future saints. People are annoying. That seems to be the way God made us. Who are we to suggest that our creator was wrong? It’s reasonable to assume that we annoy him quite a bit as well as irritating each other; to the extent that he once promised that however annoying we were in the future he wasn’t going to wipe us all out in a flood. Again. Heaven is quite possibly full of people picking their noses and fidgeting and flicking dirty water at you and singing Oasis songs out of tune. Actually, not possibly, but definitely. Maybe. Happily for all of us, we will be transformed in Heaven and see our siblings as God sees them: faults and annoyances obliterated by love.

But that is then, and this is now. This side of Heaven, people remain annoying. And it seems, maybe, just maybe, there is a test of sorts here.

Here are the words of Jesus:

”If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.  If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.  If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again.  But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.  “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven;  give, and it will be given to you.

Nobody likes being annoyed. What can we do? Can we love one another, however annoying? Is there a solution? We could do worse than going back to our nuns, who have to live with each other in a pressure cooker of mutual annoyance.

When someone is getting on your wick, bless them. Pray for them. Be annoyed by them, certainly; there’s not much to be gained from pretending otherwise. And then go out of your way to be kind to them. 

A big caveat. Don’t be a doormat. Turn the other cheek, don’t slap back. But you don’t have to stand there your whole life getting slapped. Someone annoying you is not the same as someone wronging or abusing you. To forgive is to not seek retribution; to eschew revenge— it’s not to welcome wrong or allow it to continue unchecked.

But the annoying people that are one of the mainstays even of the saintliest life. Bless them. Pray for them. Be kind to them. And amazingly, those people who really get on your… nerves, who you’d never invite to your party or to sit in your pew: that lot— they can turn out to be a blessing. Maybe we’ll never enjoy being splashed with dirty water — it takes a saint to convince herself that she can— but we can overcome our own irritation, our own annoyances. At least we can try.  People never change, but we can. Everybody is loveable, in some way, at some time. That’s something we should try very hard to see. 

After all, that’s all that God sees when he sees us.