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“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
~ Oscar Wilde
John the Baptist was born permeated with the Holy Spirit, as the Archangel Gabriel announced to Zachariah amidst the incense smoke. Zachariah is silenced by Gabriel for 9 months until the 8th day after John is born and he must be named.
There is a silence around the childhood and early life of John as he lives his life of preparing for his task, in the loneliness and wildness of the desert.
In this time, there had been the great silence of the prophets, as the wait for the Messiah continued. It is estimated that it was some 400 years between when the last prophet, Malachi, spoke out (see the last book in the Old Testament) to the time of John the Baptist.
The silence breaks as John becomes the voice that calls out to the people to prepare themselves, calls to them to speak out their wrongdoings, to gain self-awareness and to be purified by the flowing water. So many heard him and went to him. It is always moving to imagine the words of the Gospel where it recounts that “ the whole of the Judean countryside and all of Jerusalem went to be baptised by John.”
John calls to the conscience and his words burn within the people. He makes them aware of guilt. We do not hear this word very often in our services or festivals and it is a word, a feeling, that many have an aversion to. The Vedas may shed light on this word for us. There it is written that there are four different types of guilt according to the four different beings to which we are indebted to:
1.Divine - towards spiritual beings and all that which is sacred, ritual, and of prayer.
2. ‘Rishis’ - This is towards all we those have learned from, alive, or passed on. Our teachers and thus towards all knowledge we have read and studied. What have we done with the wisdom we received?
3.Ancestors - Our responsibilities towards those who have died and carried the conditions for our lives thus far. Also our moral obligation to our children and the seeds we leave for them for their future. The environment and the health of the Earth could be considered here.
4.Fellow Human Beings - How hospitable were we to our guests? How have we treated others and given what they needed? How truthful were we?
Those who encountered John felt all of these responsibilities and a new conscience was set alight with the power of the Holy Spirit.
And a mighty question burns in them, it burns until they find the courage to ask John;
“What must we do?...how do we change?”
To each different group, he gives a different answer. To the Jewish people he encourages sharing, to the tax collectors he advises ethical finance, to the soldiers he encourages truthfulness and gratefulness (see Luke 3).
John offers advice that nourishes a new kind of brotherhood and community. Now people strive to be awake to social responsibility and with an awareness of how many we are indebted to.
This journey of awareness of guilt leads to gratitude, to all those people, and beings who have enabled us to live as we do, understand what we know, and be who we are.
With this journey taken, in the Spirit of Saint John the Baptist, we start to truly and authentically live rather than exist.
~ Selina
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