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This New Year Embrace Hope

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Did you happen to notice that the Gospel chosen for New Year’s Eve is the Prologue to the Gospel according to John (John 1:1-18)? I hadn’t. Is this on purpose, or is it just the next Christmas-related scripture in line? These first 18 verses were added to this Gospel later, and placed before the traditional beginning where John the Baptist comes on the scene. These verses set the stage for the drama of Jesus’ life by inserting his life into a timeless, cosmic context. 

Jesus is identified as the Word of God that speaks creation into existence. God speaks. It happens. And it is all very good. Before any unfolding, or evolving, or developing. there was God, there was God’s Word. Then God speaks, and that is the beginning of all else, of all that will come. 

This adds to, and contrasts with, the stories of creation in the Book of Genesis. In Genesis, there is some primordial chaos, over which the Spirit of God, the breath of God, hovers. God says, “Let there be…,” and it happens. God brings forth order, and progressively introduces the principal pieces that we human beings recognize as created reality.

John points out that the Word, that takes on flesh in Jesus, has been part of everything since before the beginning. It is God’s Word, the divine, effective Word. This Word is the source of life, and manifests itself as light – which was the first outcome of creation.

This Word becomes flesh, moves in with us, and offers us a choice – the light of belief, or the darkness of unbelief.We can pretend, against all scientific evidence, that creation always was, or just randomly came about (lucky for us!). Or we can accept that God’s desire from before the beginning was that we have all that we need to live well, and to be well.

On the cusp of a new year, we are offered this wonderful message: God wants, and has always (as in eternally) wanted to manifest the fullness of divine love for all of us, for all creation – to the point of entering into creation and becoming one of us. No darkness, real or imagined, has ever, or can ever, overcome the light offered to us. This truth is the source of our hope. Welcome the New Year! May it be abundantly good and richly blessed for all!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born to You this Day…

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“Every normal human birth is a miracle!” Fr. Graves, my college biology professor, would repeatedly exclaim. Think of all the cells, systems, chemical processes interacting and developing according to a pattern embedded in each and every component to bring an infant, alive, whole, well and able to the moment of birth. Life, from onset, is pure gift. Every newborn child is an embodiment of promise, waiting to be nurtured and formed in order to reveal its unique mission and contribution to humanity, to us.

Christmas Eve. We know the story – perhaps too well. Advent has done its best to prepare us, recalling to our mind Isaiah, John the Baptist, Mary, Joseph. God has acted. God is acting. God will act. It is God’s promise and God’s absolute fidelity that give us hope. But, do we realize, really, the love behind the Incarnation? 

God makes a home among us, within an occupied people and nation, in the home of a tradesman and a young maiden. If you were God, is this the matrix you would have chosen?  Not wealth, palatial estate, privilege, entitlement, every possible advantage of education, advancement and career path to success? What was God thinking?

Even this child’s name, Yeshua, is permeated with promise: God saves! Not with armies, force of power, manipulation of history, but through a tiny baby who is loved into fullness of humanity by us, ordinary folks. By being with us (Emmanuel), as one of us, God offers us a path to healing and liberation – the way of love. In Jesus, God saves.

 

The Santa Claus is Coming to Town god

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This festive time of the year brings with it at least one popular, yet disturbing, distorted image we might have of God. A popular Christmas song begins with a warning: You better watch out! Don’t show any of your true feelings (pout, cry shout), because Santa Claus is coming to town. This fantastical elf is all-seeing and is noting down everything about you. And, you will pay the price for any misbehavior. You are being weighed in the balance. Don’t you dare get caught lacking whatever level of comportment this Santa set as the bar for you to achieve.

This Santa is not far from an image of God that is derived from an exaggerated and literal interpretation of the Old Testament: God the ultimate Judge, ready (eager?) to punish any transgression, or to reward compliance with the law (as determined by the experts of the law). This ancient and inadequate image of God is a great tool for controlling the behavior of others, especially children – or the childlike. It relies on fear: fear of punishment, pain, banishment (excommunication), to force submission and to manage the masses.

But are we meant to grovel in fear before God? I don’t think so. Yes, God is just, and has turned the responsibility for judgment over to Jesus. Jesus is our brother, one like us in all things, except sin. He understands what we live, because he has shared our life – to the full, to the end. He gave himself over to us completely in love. We rejected his offer. He was raised from death, and continues to offer us his love. Our response, especially in how we treat the littlest and the least among us, is the basis for any judgment. We are totally loved. Freed from any divine expectations, we can become all that God fashioned us to be. How do we deal with this? Are we even aware of this? 

Bottom line! God is not some morality judge, police officer, or accountant. God desires that we know, in the depth of our being, how precious and beloved we are. God invites, coaxes, our response of love for one another. Jesus is willing to cut us all kinds of slack. He left us with only one commandment: love one another as I have loved you. This is much more challenging than trying to obey a set of rules that we humans have projected onto God. Give it all you’ve got! But we do need to continually allow God to transform us through love – the greatest power in the universe. 

What Size and Shape is Your God?

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Way back in the 1950’s, a British biblical scholar, J. B. Phillips, wrote and published a small, but impactful book entitled: Your God is Too Small. His premise was that many of our images of God are totally inadequate. Doctor Phillips gave a number of examples of images that people regularly put onto God, and showed how and why they did not fit the God of Scripture, especially as revealed in and through Jesus.

It seems to me that we tend to fall into one of three big mistakes (I’m sure there are more than three) when we try to capture God in an image. The first is when we make God think, feel, behave, act just like we human beings do: anthropomorphism. We project onto God how we think we would be if we were god. This never works.

The second is when we dive into the Scriptures and choose an image depicted there that does not reach the full image of God that Jesus presents to us. Too often we can’t get beyond the compelling images of God in the Old Testament. Don’t you dare stir up God’s righteous wrath! The irony is that the Israelites grew beyond their own earlier less adequate images of God. Just compare the God described in the Pentateuch (first five books = the Torah) with the God of the Prophets. 

The third big mistake is when we cozy up to and get comfortable with an image of God that matches our individual preconceived ideas and personal preferences. This God (My God), surprisingly enough, is totally in tune with what I think, my idea of right and wrong, how I judge others, and is enamored of the way I choose to live my life. This God is on our side; so sorry, not on yours.

In random posts to come, I hope to look at some of the less than healthy, or even less than holy, images that we human beings come up with to justify our way of being in the world.

Are You Sure? – Discernment part 7

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How can we be sure we’ve made the right choice?  Sorry, but we can’t – at least not absolutely. A key moment in the discernment process comes after we’ve chosen what we believe is the better option, when we pray for confirmation. As we live into the consequences of our choice, we seek this gift/grace. We ask the Holy Spirit to bless us with some sense that we have chosen rightly and well.

Praying for confirmation is not asking for a divine guarantee. Such a thing doesn’t exist. As long as we are fallible and easily swayed by forces within and outside of ourselves, we cannot be absolutely certain.

I was finishing my commitment with a L’Arche community, and had made plans to enter a program in a few weeks that would lead to a Certificate in Respiratory Therapy. Having studied philosophy and theology, I was not prepared for any kind of career. I knew that my life was meant to be of service to others, and I had worked in hospitals for a number of years and felt comfortable in that environment.

The community’s leader approached me with a request: Would I be willing to stay on just a bit longer to allow a part-time assistant, who also worked full-time outside of the home, to participate in a large international meeting of L’Arche? This was a first for this person, after a number of years of humble, faithful service. I knew two things to be true, if I chose to stay: The people with disabilities would feel safer and more secure with me than with a patchwork of benevolent caregivers who did not know those I was living with as well as I; and, I would not be able, at that moment, to fulfill my desire of attaining the skills that could lead to the satisfaction of having a concrete and tangible line of work.

I had an immediate and clear sense of what appeared to be the “right thing to do” – to continue a little while longer with these wonderful, vulnerable people who had taught me so much. Yet, in the back of my mind, there was this creeping sense that I was “throwing away” my first real opportunity for stable work. After all, respiratory therapy was a relatively new and much needed area of healthcare. I would be helping plenty of people.

I stayed on in the community. The community leader and the other assistant went off to the big meeting. The extra time passed by, and I savored each day. I became filled with peace and the sense: this is the right thing to do. Yes, I did miss the date to enter the training program, but it was okay. 

I hadn’t formally prayed for the grace of confirmation, but it was given, and I recognized it as a gift from God. We can feel the grace of confirmation. We are at peace, even though the decision was difficult and may have seemed illogical. There is an inner sense of rightness. We can feel joy, new energy; we may feel freer and more alive. Choose carefully, and then ask for confirmation, before you finalize your life-plans or major decisions.

Something Messy Emerging

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We wish it weren’t true! We would much prefer a gentle unifier; someone who makes everyone feel at ease, content – a conciliator. Jesus, please, tone it down a little!

In Luke 12:49-51, Jesus cries out, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing. There is a baptism which I need to undergo, and how great is my anguish until it is done. Do you imagine that I have come to establish peace in the world? Not at all, hear me say it, rather division is what follows in my wake.” Jesus, these are not the words we wanted to hear.

Jesus has taken the road to Jerusalem. His disciples are dreaming of conquest and glory, despite Jesus’ regular reminders of what is likely to be the reaction to his mission there. He now turns to images from the prophetic tradition to describe his experience and what awaits him: fire, baptism, division. He feels in his bones the tension and conflict of his impact on others and on the inevitable confrontation before him. Jesus, once again, invites his followers to see what he is seeing.

“I have come bringing fire!” For the prophets, fire was symbol of purification, of transformation. Jesus understood his mission from Abba-God as one that required the kind of radical change that fire generates. The way things had devolved could only lead to disaster, incredible suffering and misery. Business as usual can never save us. But not even his closest disciples were able to see this coming. 

Jesus had submitted his life to God’s Will and sensed that now he was entering into a new, critical phase (crisis = a defining event). This is the baptism he refers to.  He is about to be plunged (and all those who continue to follow him) into the crucial (literally = cross roads) moment that will define his life and ministry. Is this the baptism we are ready to endure?

All the true prophets had experienced opposition – frequently from the powers that be. The people divided in response to their preaching: acceptance of the message, or rejection. Jesus is only noting what was obvious when he said that division, not peace, resulted from his words and actions. He saw families split apart because of him, maybe even some of the families of his apostles.

All this was likely on his mind when he cried out these terribly anguished words. Hearing them, we are called to choose to follow him all the way, or to dismiss him and huddle with a familiar, risk-delaying life. It’s either hanging on to what we think we have or opting for the messy disruption of something new emerging – the Kingdom of God.

What Do I Know?

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We can grow so insensitive over time to what is familiar that we dissociate ourselves from its true meaning and implications. “Oh yes, I know that. I’ve heard it before.” The question becomes: “Am I hearing it now?”

The one group that Jesus consistently called out with rebuke and forceful warning was not the oppressive Romans, not the unbelieving neighboring tribes, not the Samaritan half-breeds, not even the Israelites who were unable to strictly keep God’s Law (at least as interpreted by the majority of  teachers of Jesus’ day). Jesus got after the religious leaders, represented by the teachers of the Law (Scribes), the priestly class, and the zealous laymen – the Pharisees. Instead of bringing the ordinary people closer to God, they pushed a righteous life beyond the reach of almost all. “Woe to you!”Jesus cries out. “This isn’t what God wants!”

In Luke 11:52, Jesus unleashes an especially poignant broadside. “You scholars of God’s Law are in big trouble! You hold back the key of knowledge, refusing to enter yourselves, while blocking the way for others who are trying to enter.” Harsh. 

In Jesus’ day, only a tiny minority of the people could read. These understood and practiced their faith by listening carefully to what was transmitted orally, memorizing the content, repeating what they heard in prayer and in instructing their children. The scholars of the Law were able to read and write. They had a privileged place in society. They had direct access to the written word, including the Word of God – the Scriptures. They had the possibility to enter into, to immerse themselves in, and to ponder deeply the full meaning of God’s Law. Most of them didn’t. Rather, they just repeated and debated the teachings and arguments of one another.

In doing so, these scholars of the Law whom Jesus addressed so pointedly could only pass on to the people who depended on them for knowledge well-digested food – nothing life-giving. They refused to dive into and wrestle with God’s Word, and in doing so, they failed in their responsibility to teach. Real teachers are excited to learn, to grow, and to share what they have learned with others.

Knowledge, in the biblical tradition, is not a static storehouse of facts, information, canned truths, but an ongoing, dynamic process based on personal experience. You know what/who you have experienced and are experiencing in your life. If what you know is not constantly evolving, something in you is frozen in time, stuck, if not already dead. All you have to offer is nostalgia.

Life happens. Life is continually changing. As we experience it, our understanding grows and reshapes itself. And remember, our love is rooted in our experiential knowing, and love carries us beyond what we can know. St. Paul, whose well-honed knowledge was blown to bits by his encounter with Jesus risen from the dead, wrote of this: “Love never fails. Knowledge is imperfect, partial. It will come to nothing.” Paul continues: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, thought as a child, reasoned as a child; when I became an adult, I put aside childish ways.” (1 Corinthians 13: 8-11) Perhaps Jesus was trying to say to religious experts, “Grow up!”

The Queen, the Ninevites, and Seeking Signs

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Are we an “evil” generation? Jesus used this descriptor for those who. came to him demanding a sign from God to “prove” his legitimacy. (Luke 11:29-32) Do we seek signs from God before we decide to follow a way of life? Are we in a “Show Me” state? What would it take to convince us so completely that we are willing to live and to die (if necessary) for someone or some cause? Following Jesus is no part-time job.

Continuing his response, Jesus points to lessons from history. When the pagan queen of the South came to visit Solomon, based on his reputation for wisdom, she went away certain that she had been in the presence of someone who had acquired wisdom. When Jonah, the reluctant and rebellious prophet, preached in the capital city of the hated enemy, the brutal, unbelieving people of Nineveh, they repented.

Jesus finishes his argument with a powerful and mysterious statement. There is something here greater than Solomon’s wisdom or Jonah’s preaching, as impressive as these were. He doesn’t say that there is someone greater here. Though we might be tempted to go there.

The implication is that all the people around him need do is open their eyes and see what’s going on: countless people’s lives are being transformed. There is only one source for such an outpouring of gracious goodness – God, our loving Abba (Papa/Mama God). Jesus’ teaching, healing, liberating and the response, especially of the little people, is the only sign to be given. God’s Kingdom is breaking into our history in a new and definitive way.

We today are also called to open our eyes, our ears, our hearts to the signs of God’s love at work among us.The heart of Jesus’ mission and message is and always will be, whatever the age: The Kingdom of God is at hand! Allow yourself to be taken and transformed! Believe this Good News! Live it!

Disordered Attachments (not talking about emails here) – Discernment part 6

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We all have likes, and some of these are strong, compelling, almost non-negotiable. We have favorite foods, colors, sports teams, things to do when we are not directly engaged with our responsibilities… The combination of our individual preferences make up a profile of our characteristic style. They are so familiar, so comfortable, and yet, they are not who we truly are.

One of the major barriers to making free and loving choices is what Ignatius of Loyola called disordered attachments – those people, things, activities, substances that we value more than our relationship with God. Whatever deviates our mind and/or our heart and/or our life-path away from what we know is right and good, away from God’s call, away from God’s loving desires for us and for others; these are disordered attachments. When it comes time for us to make an important decision, we are pre-conditioned by our attachments to choose according to whatever we are attached to. This can severely impair our discernment of God’s Will for us.

Ignatius has a simple antidote for disordered attachments – indifference (or detachment). To choose well, we need to be indifferent, detached. Ignatius was a passionate Basque. He was not talking about developing apathy as some backward kind of virtue. Indifference doesn’t mean that we don’t care. As fully alive human beings, we need to be in touch with, and have access to, all our feelings, no matter how fierce or deep. But when we choose, we need to be free from the domination of our feelings.

Once again, a huge help to dealing well with disordered attachments is awareness. We need to know ourselves inside and out. What claims us? What tugs at our heart? What siren’s song sings more loudly and more seductively to us, drowning out the voice of God? What, in our life, is more important to us than doing what is loving and just? Whatever pulls us away from God and God’s ways is a disordered attachment. It means more to us than is healthy and good for us. Knowing the answer to these questions allows us to choose more freely.

Because we do care, very much, we try to discover how our caring, or our passion, clouds our vision and moves us in one direction or another. Does it help or hinder our listening to/for God’s direction for our life? We may want something with all our heart. We may be totally convinced that what we want to do has to be the right way, the only way. We are attached. We need to back off and try to see our life and the choice in front of us from God’s perspective.

Brainwashing, Insidious Advisors and Leaning Giants – Discernment part 5

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The gift of freedom we have been given offers us the opportunity to participate in God’s ongoing work of creation and to continue the mission of Jesus: to call all people, by our lives, to fundamentally change their way of seeing and acting; to believe in, and to build up God’s Kingdom now, where we are. Our freedom is awesome and, at the same time, so restricted. Our choices have vital significance, and are starkly limited – to the point where some people claim that because there is so much constantly shaping and conditioning us, we have no freedom at all. We can choose to focus on the awesome and do what we can, or get lost in the littleness of the impact of our decisions and choices, and court frustration and despair. 

Discernment requires that we have the fullest measure of interior freedom as is humanly possible. In order to recognize and choose according to God’s loving preferences and desires, we need to remove distractions (physical, sensory, mental, emotional, as well as spiritual). Distractions are whatever pulls us away from being freely present in this moment.

There are conditions that make it next to impossible to make a free and loving decision: ignorance, attachments, passions, deep wounding, intense pain, brainwashing, addictions, physical or psychological threats, being reduced to basic survival, social and familial conditioning… Brainwashing can either be a psychological weapon wielded by an expert, or the creation of a dependency on a powerful or charismatic personality who serves as one’s auxiliary mind, conscience and will – a substitute god, or a divine parent. 

Most of us, thank God, are not dealing with such heavy duty constraints. For us, the impediments to our freedom are usually simple, common and pervasive. I tend to lump them together as fear, ego, and expectations. If we are in fear, and to the extent we are afraid, we are not free to make good decisions. If we, because of some illusion of self-preservation, have set ourselves as the sole reference for orienting our life, ego rules – and ego is less concerned with freedom than with preserving its imaginary control over reality. Expectations are like a smiling giant with a cudgel, leaning down to us and suggesting what has to be right and good for us, and inviting us: “Now choose.” How free is that?

Since, I believe, we all are struggling with these challenges to making good, loving choices and decisions, how can we ever choose freely and well? The biggest factor is awareness – awareness of the influences that tend to restrict and inhibit our freedom to choose. If we know and can name these persuasive voices, they have less power over us. The secret is to know and name as many of these familiar “advisors”  as possible and to see how they are bending our will. This is choosing with our eyes open. We can say, “Yes.” We can say, “No.”