Called or Uncalled, God Is Present

The Rule of St. Benedict says, “We believe that the divine presence is everywhere (RB 19:1).” This statement is astounding. It means, for example, that the divine presence is in me, even when my thoughts and behavior are less than divine! It means the divine presence is in people whose brokenness leads them to injure others and exploit the earth! How can that be?

God told Moses “I am who am,” which means God is being. God is in everything that has being. The fact that we are not aware of God’s presence does not mean that God is not present. It means we choose to create a persona that does not reflect God within us. It means that we have internalized images of God (e.g., demanding, judging, angry, punitive, capricious) that make us believe we would be happier in our own self-serving, self-created world.

When we constantly receive the message that we are not worthy to be in God’s presence or receive God’s loving attention, it feels almost scandalous to consider that God chooses to live in us. Yet, as Carl Jung observed, “Called or uncalled, God is present.” If we truly believe that, or at least suspect that it might be true, we would do well to create a new message for ourselves so we can internalize and begin to live out of God’s presence. A simple meditation I came across recently is to breathe in as we say “God is in me” and breathe out as we say “I am in God.” If we breathe that in and out often enough, we will begin to believe it is true of ourselves and other people as well. Then we can treat ourselves and others with kindness and compassion even as we confront our/their destructive behaviors.

God says to us through Jesus, “I am here. I am with you. We are one.” It is not too good to be true, for God’s goodness has no limits. Believe, and live the good news.

Heartbreak and the Essence of Being Human

Surely one reason God placed us on earth is so we can learn from plants and animals to accept and trust the constant movement of death and new life. As I was reminded this week, upon learning of the death of Ellie, my beloved feline companion before I entered the monastery, heartbreak is an inevitable part of coming to this acceptance. David Whyte states it eloquently: “Heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.”

I was very fortunate to find Ellie along my journey from here to there, because she has been my best teacher in how to be present to others and to each day of life. She offered gentle hospitality to all those who came to our door, she spent much more time in meditation on my prayer rug than I did, and she radiated a sense of serenity, trust, wisdom, and grace.

I am heartbroken to hear that a sudden illness left her in great pain before her current human companions freed her to move into new life. I take comfort in words of St. Francis, paraphrased by Daniel Ladinsky: “Does every creature have a soul? Surely they do; for anything God has touched will have life forever, and all creatures he has held.” Her wise soul surely lives on, and my heartbreak at her passing is yet another gift to help prepare me to be ready for my own ultimate letting go. What a blessing she has been to me. From the depths of my sadness, another emotion can’t help but surface—gratitude that God gifted me with such an extraordinary guide and companion for a brief but graced portion of my journey.

Being Open to Sacred Surprises

On Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday, and Easter Monday, we had temperatures in the upper 70s and lower 80s, and I asked Sr. Elaine if she thought it was already too hot to plant lettuce seed. She didn’t think so, and thus I fought the wind to get some seed in the ground on Monday afternoon…and the next day the temperature plummeted.

Gardening is an exercise in trust; as Mandy Hale says, “Sometimes you just need to breathe, trust, let go, and see what happens.” The same could be said of life. We can make careful plans only to be reminded again and again that outcomes are not in our control. Life is much more satisfying when we temper our expectations and open ourselves to sacred surprises.

Buddha said, “In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” We receive so many gifts in this life, but not everything is meant for us…including, some years, home-grown lettuce!

Alleluia Anyway

This year, events during Holy Week and on Easter Sunday almost felt like they were daring us to rejoice at Christ’s victory over death and destruction. First, a fire destroyed significant portions of one of our great human icons of faith, the Notre Dame Cathedral in France. Then, more than 200 people were killed in terrorist attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka. In my smaller communal circle, on Easter Sunday, a friend’s brother was killed in an accident and another friend’s father died. How can our hearts not be heavy at hearing of this cluster of deaths and upon knowing that so many people are grieving?

The following words from Richard Rohr, OFM, offer a helpful perspective:

“If we don’t believe that every cruci-fixion—war, poverty, torture, hunger—can somehow be redeemed, who of us would not be angry, cynical, hopeless? … Easter is not just the final chapter of Jesus’ life, but the final chapter of histo-ry. Death does not have the last word.”

Grieving the loss of life as we know it, whether through the death of people or any of life’s changes, is an unavoidable aspect of being human, as Jesus experienced when he wept for his friend, Lazarus. But in the midst of our grief, we need to cling to the message of Jesus’ death and resurrection—death does not have the last word. What has died has been broken open to a new experience of life. When our bodies die, we will experience the same thing. How it all happens is a mystery, but as Fr. Duane Roy said in his homily on Easter Sunday, what we do know is that God’s love never fails. And thus in the face of earthly death and destruction, we can say with surety, “Alleluia—alleluia anyway.”

Behold the Wood of the Cross

A haiku for Good Friday:

O tree who offered

Jesus’ holy rough-hewn cross

Paradise awaits

Just as Christ was present when the universe was created and the sun, trees, water, and rock came into being, so were these elements present when Jesus died—the sun reportedly was hidden by an eclipse, Jesus’ cross was made from a tree, and after he died his body was washed with water and laid in a tomb hewn from rock. Thus all God’s created world was a witness to Jesus’ death, along with the insurrectionists crucified alongside him.

As has been pointed out by Fred Bahnson, we are inflicting an ecological Good Friday on the world, as we tear down forests and destroy habitats, strew our oceans with plastic, apply poisonous pesticides to the earth, and spew carbon and other toxins in the air. This Good Friday, I pray that Christ will say to the trees, the water, and the earth, as he said to the insurrectionist who was crucified with him, “This day you will be with me in paradise.”

Sweat, Tears, and the Sea

As we approach the Triduum, I am reminded of an observation by Isak Dinesen: “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.” During Jesus’ agony in the Garden, we are told that he sweat blood. Peter, along with the women who watched Jesus carry the cross and observed his crucifixion and death, wept from the depth of their souls. The resurrected Christ appeared to the disciples at the shore of the sea, where they sought solace in the familiar task of fishing.

In Matthew 5:13, Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth,” and our sweat, tears, and fascination with the sea confirm that. To accept our humanity, we must be willing to sweat (work hard at what matters), cry (out of compassion and grief), and immerse ourselves in awe and gratitude, which are triggered by the immensity, power, and gifts of the sea.

During the Triduum and Easter season, our senses will be “assaulted” by many stories, songs, and symbols. Let us take it all with a grain of salt, that we may experience the full flavor of what we are commemorating.

The Anointed One

Christ means “the anointed one.” Peter typically is remembered as the one who says to Jesus, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God,” but it is Mary who acts on that understanding by publicly anointing Jesus at Bethany. She did so to acknowledge who he was and to profess her great love for him, risking censure and humiliation from those who were uncomfortable with such an intimate, wholehearted, prophetic gesture.

As we recall Jesus’ brutal flogging and death during this Holy Week, it comforts me to think how Mary’s act of love and kindness sustained him in his suffering. As Cynthia Bourgeault observes in her book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, “We see that Jesus’s passage through death is framed on either side by her [Mary’s] parallel acts of anointing. At Bethany she sends him forth to the cross wearing the unction of her love. And on Easter morning he awakens to that same fragrance of love as she arrives at the tomb with her spices and perfumes, expecting to anoint his body for death. He has been held in love throughout his entire passage.” Thus Mary was an agent of God to remind the crucified Jesus that he was not forsaken, that he was held in love despite the seeming failure of his earthly mission.

The anointing of Jesus by Mary echoes through the ages, calling us to be courageous in kindness and to counter evil with simple but profound acts of love.  

Sacrament of the Present Moment

Every night as part of my daily examen I consider how God spoke to me during the course of the day. Sometimes I hear God speak through the words or actions of another person, in something I read, in a song, or in something I observed in nature. Last night the words of God that surfaced were “Don’t take spring for granted.”

That advice seems odd. How can I possibly take spring for granted when, after a long and dreary winter, the trees are in spectacular bloom, tulips and daffodils are brightening the landscape, and the grass is an impossible shade of green? As our friends in the Dakotas experienced just yesterday, an unexpected blast of snow can disrupt a lovely spring, and here in Northeast Kansas, our temperatures are dipping dangerously close to freezing at night. Spring is precious, delicate, and fleeting. We all know that. But as God knows, although most of us readily express our appreciation for the beauties of spring, we rarely take time to actually savor it…and then the heat of summer sets in and our opportunity is gone for another year.

If, even in the most beautiful time of the year, we cannot live fully in the moment, how can we hope to do at times that we consider inclement or unpleasant or boring? It can be helpful to consider the following words of Evelyn Underhill: “God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive God there with gratitude in that sacrament.”

If the present moment is a sacrament, that means it is a means of divine grace or a sign of a spiritual reality that is always available to us when we choose to dwell there. God is coming to us and communicating with us in every moment—moments of pain and struggle, as well as moments of beauty and inspiration.

Don’t take spring—today’s sacrament of the present moment—for granted.

Maybe this advice isn't so mundane after all.

The Name Beyond All Names

One of the greatest privileges in life is naming a child, or even a pet. To name is to participate in the act of creation, for the name becomes part of that thing's being. Thus, in the book of Genesis when God told Adam to name the animals, God was directly inviting humankind not just to enjoy what had been created but to participate in the very act of creation. Giving a title, a name, to a piece of art, music, or a book or poem we have fashioned has the same effect of answering God’s invitation to join in creating, to name that which didn’t exist before and will now have a new life.

Psalm 148 calls us to “Praise God’s name…this name beyond all names.” Although we humans have attempted to name God ourselves—Father, Creator, Redeemer, Judge, Guide—because of our limited vision, none of these is “the name beyond all names.” When Moses asked God directly, “What is your name?” God replied, “I am who am.” God is not a thing or a person but being itself, and thus God’s DNA, which we name “Christ,” is in everything that has being. In John 14:20, Jesus tells us that it is through Christ that we are able to be one with God: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” God’s name isn’t a noun but a verb: Being, Uniting, Creating, Reconciling, Playing. That is why Abraham Joshua Heschel could say, “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”

I Am is with us—and thus, however we choose to name what we encounter, all is blessing.

To Ken that We All Are Kin

In the Gospel story of the woman caught in adultery (Jn 8:1-11), when Jesus said, “Let the one among you who is without sin throw the first stone,” he was establishing a kinship, a mutuality, between the accusers and the woman. He opened the eyes of the crowd to the understanding that, like the woman, they too had acted immorally at times. Interestingly, the word “ken,” which is so close to “kin,” means “the range of perception, understanding, or knowledge; the range of vision.” When we are in kinship with others, we see them, acknowledge them, understand them.

I’m sure the self-righteous people who brought the woman to Jesus saw no connection between her and themselves; she was a scapegoat who allowed them to feel superior and deflect their own sinfulness. Jesus pointed out the connection between them, the mutuality, and thus the relationship changed. As Fr. Gregory Boyle says in his book Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, “God invites us to always live on the edge of eternity, at the corner of kinship and mutuality.” We are all kin, all related in the body of Christ, and the sooner we ken that, the sooner the kingdom of God will come to fruition.

The Quest to Know God

One advantage of keeping silence at breakfast is that it provides time for bird watching. This mor-ning I was entertained by a robin, who energet-ically performed a treasure hunt by snatching a leaf, throwing it aside, pecking at the ground a couple of times, running over to another leaf, throwing it aside, pecking at another patch of ground, and so on. It reminded me of myself in my quest to know God: turn a page of the bible and dig around a little, get distracted by the new Joan Chittister book and start taking notes, notice that a  friend has posted a Mary Oliver poem on Facebook and see what I can glean from that….

God is too expansive for us even to begin to understand, but we keep trying. Curiosity about God is natural, but it is also important to remember, as Kallistos Ware notes, “God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.” Knowledge is not the only thing that leads to wisdom; having the humility not to need to know and being willing to live with mystery is perhaps a truer path to the heart of God, who will provide revelation when we are ready for it. In his poem A Giving, Brendan Kenelley says, “I now know it does not matter that I do not understand.” Being attentive and thankful is enough of a challenge for this day.

Sing a New Song

It seems like scripture is forever telling us to sing a new song unto the Lord. However, most of us like the old songs because they are familiar, comforting, spark memories, and don’t require us to do the work of learning something new.

It is true that certain songs contain a lot of wisdom that take a lifetime of singing to unpack. As an adolescent I was enamored of the music of songwriter Jackson Browne, and having recently listened to some of his songs again, I was surprised at how much wisdom I still found there, this time from the perspective of late middle age. However, it’s also true that if we only listen to the old songs, we miss out on the movement of the Holy Spirit who is inspiring musicians to create new songs that speak to us today.

Furthermore, although we aren’t all songwriters, we are all creators of our own lives through the choices we make. Thus we can view each day as an oppor-tunity to “sing a new song” to God through what we make of the gift of this day of life. Tomorrow will bring different opportunities and choices, so we need to fo-cus on the possibilities that exist this day, this moment, only. In this way we participate in the forever joyful and fecund work of our creator God, who in Isaiah 65:17-18 says, “Lo, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the things of the past shall not be remembered or come to mind. Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness in what I create.”

Let’s get singing!