Keep Telling the Story

Recently I read the novel Where the Crawdads Sing and came to a point in the story where a character was put on trial for murder. I had become very invested in the character and had to force myself to read those difficult chapters and not skip over them. This experience reminded me of a bit of wisdom from the poet Malcolm Guite:

“The great thing, in the dark chapters, is not to close the book, but to keep telling the story, trusting that we are not at the end of the story yet, and that we are in the hands of a Good Author.”

Throughout history as recorded in the Old Testament, the people of God experienced many dark chapters of war, slavery, betrayal, self-destruction, natural disasters, plagues, and displacement, but they kept telling the story of how God made a covenant with them and would lead them to a new kingdom of peace and prosperity. They trusted they were in the hands of a Good Author, and indeed, a major plot twist occurred when Emmanuel, God-with-us, was born. This unusual Messiah proclaimed that when we are poor in spirit and are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, the kingdom of heaven is—not will be, but is now—ours.

Advent reminds us that even after Jesus was killed and resurrected as the Christ, we are not yet at the end of the story. We need to be awake to the presence of God among us even in our own dark chapters of pandemics, racism, and class wars and do our part to bring the kingdom of God to fulfillment. We need to keep telling the story; when we get discouraged, let us not close the book but remind each other to take heart, because we are in the hands of a Good Author.  

Come to the Water

Thanksgiving celebrations will be very different for many of us this year as we weather the COVID-19 pandemic. We won’t be able to enjoy our familiar, comforting rituals, such as going to mass, gathering the extended family for a feast, watching football with Uncle Charley, and preparing for out-of-town guests. Perhaps it doesn’t feel like we have much to be thankful for this year.

The prophet Isaiah offers us an image that might be helpful for this unusual Thanksgiving holiday:

With joy you will draw water

from God’s saving well;

then you will say to each other,

"Praise the Lord! Proclaim God’s name!"

                   —Isaiah 12: 3

The thing about traditional rituals is that you don’t have to give them much thought—just repeat what you did last year and the year before that and the year before that. When those rituals are interrupted, we find we need to draw on deeper wells of creativity and connection and prayer within us that we didn’t even know existed. The joy of digging deep and finding unexpected abundance leads us to praise God, who never lets the well run dry. Then, we can affirm with Shakespeare, “The only answer I can make is thanks and thanks and ever thanks.”

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Keeping Our Eyes on Christ

In the novel In This House of Brede, a famous sculptor has carved a statue of Our Lady of Peace for a women’s monastery. Mary is holding the infant Jesus, and the statue is described this way: “The Baby looked out with eyes that saw far, while hers saw only Him.”

Because we are immersed in the day-to-day challenges of our lives, it is difficult for us to see far. However, Christ has the vision that we lack—the understanding that we are all interconnected, we all belong to each other. As Cynthia Bourgeault puts it, Christ “sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans.”

Other than the mystics, most humans see God as separate from themselves. Our belief in that separation makes it difficult for us to know the true God, so out of fear we often create an image of God as remote, demanding, and judging. We also see other humans as separate from us, which makes it easier for us to exclude, exploit, and judge them.

We may not yet be able to see as Christ sees, but when we follow Mary’s example and keep our eyes on Christ, our awareness and attention will be focused on the One who can lead us to the truth and fullness of life. Then, our external circumstances will no longer consume us. As St. Paul says, “I know indeed how to live in humble circumstances; I know also how to live with abundance. In every circumstance and in all things I have learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry, of living in abundance and of being in need. I have the strength for everything through him who empowers me” (Colossians 4: 12-13).

The prayer of St. Patrick makes this invocation: “Christ be ever before me, Christ be ever behind me, Christ be ever within.” When we keep our eyes on Christ, we will find peace and have the confidence to say with St. Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

In God's Name

A former work colleague recently posted on Facebook that religious faith is often used to justify war, genocide, patriarchy, racism, misogyny, bigotry, and the like because people believe all this is God’s will (or see this “belief” as a convenient way to get what they want). It is absolutely and tragically true that through the centuries, millions of people have killed, raped, enslaved, and discriminated against others in God’s name. On the other side of the coin, millions of people have harbored refugees, adopted orphans, fed the hungry, marched for the rights of women and black people to vote, and performed countless acts of justice and compassion, also in God’s name.

Richard Rohr notes that the word “religion” means to “re-ligament” or bind together. The sign of healthy religion is always that it binds up, makes whole, and recognizes the dignity of all people. The sign of unhealthy religion is separation, exclusion, and hierarchy. To have integrity, people with a healthy religious faith need to publicly call out and disempower those who engage in acts of hatred, theft, suppression, and discrimination in God’s name to gain personal wealth, power, and fame. Jesus modeled this need for action when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple and called out the Pharisees for their hypocritical and oppressive behavior.

One way to discern whether our own religious faith is healthy or unhealthy is by observing our appetites. If we continue to be insatiable, dissatisfied, restless, and empty no matter how much power, wealth, or fame we accrue, we have not found the true God. If we have an underlying spirit of contentment and peace, trust that our needs (not our wants) will be always be met, and are willing to share our resources with others, we have encountered the God of life.

Another mark of persons with a healthy spirituality is their abiding faith that God’s goodness will always triumph over evil, despite temporal appearances. Jesus overcame evil by forgiving those who tortured and killed him, and he was resurrected into life as Christ. Our human life spans are short, and not all of us will see the evils of our day overthrown; however, as our consciousness and capacity for wholeness continue to evolve, the inherent goodness of God—the God who lives in us—will prevail.

Repairing the World

Today a common topic of discussion is why there is so much division between people in the United States. The teacher and author John O’Donohue has an answer: “We have fallen out of belonging.”

The scriptures teach us that we belong to God and we belong to each other in the Body of Christ. That basic sense of being connected to God and others gives us a foundation of security and eases our loneliness. It also mitigates inflated feelings of superiority and inferiority; everyone belongs. No one is excluded.

Somehow, the image of a judgmental God who condemns certain people has come to supersede the truth of a merciful and compassionate God. That false image of a dismissive God has created the illusion that we too can decide who is evil, expendable, inconsequential, and/or unworthy of our attention and resources. Not surprisingly, the people who are excluded often become angry and bitter and lash out at their oppressors. Both sides point to the bad behavior of the other and believe they alone are in possession of the truth.

How do we get out of this mess? The first step is to “Be still and know that I am God.” Recently Sr. Bettina Tobin told me an anecdote about Sr. Mary Ann Fessler, who taught her first graders that God lives in a house within their hearts. Each day she asked them to be quiet for a few minutes, go into their hearts, and visit God. If first graders can learn to be contemplative, so can we. And when we encounter God within ourselves, we are met with a love and mercy so powerful that we are inspired to extend those graces to others.

Another step is to admit what the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have revealed: We need each other. We need everyone to wear masks to prevent the spread of the virus. We need undocumented immigrants to harvest our food and factory workers to manufacture personal protective equipment and vaccinations. We all need to switch to renewable energy, stop our wasteful consumption, and plant trees to slow down the global warming that is feeding drought, fires, and hurricanes. In pandemics and environmental degradation, we have a common enemy that unites us in our desire to survive and leave a habitable world for our children.

We who have fallen out of belonging can each choose to participate in what the Jewish people call Tikkun Olam—repairing the world. By practicing contemplation and acknowledging our kinship with all people, we reveal Christ who is at the heart of everyone and everything and affirm our universal web of belonging, which will help us create a more peaceful and harmonious world.

Giving Christ Room

Most of us know a few people who are so full of themselves that you can’t really have a relationship with them. We rarely think of ourselves in these terms, but with regard to our relationship with Christ, the question is worth considering: Are we sufficiently empty of self to allow room for Christ within us? In her book Grace in Every Season, Catherine de Hueck Doherty put it this way: she tells us to “give Christ room, not only to grow to his full stature in you, but to have a place within you to roam as he may wish, a place for him to breathe and stretch.”

It is intriguing to think what our life would be like if we allowed Christ to grow to full stature in us, to give him room to breathe and stretch and expand our horizons. One person who achieved this goal was St. Gertrude of Helfta, whose wholehearted devotion to God allowed her to empty herself to make possible the Spirit’s in-dwelling. As a result, she described herself as “happy, carefree, and liberated.” She had gained the inner freedom to overcome fear and worries and unconditionally follow her convictions.

St. Gertrude learned from Jesus to let go of her ego by being humble of heart; in this sense, she took his yoke upon herself and found that the burden was light. As a result, she had a joyous attitude, and love of and praise for God flowed from her.

Richard Rohr says that we come to know God by loving God. That advice sounds simple, but to love anyone, we have to shift our focus from ourselves to the beloved. When we let God be God in us, we are able to shed our false self and replace fullness of ourself with the fullness of joy, freedom, and the fruits of the Spirit.

Before Our Very Eyes

To be humble is to be authentic—accepting who we are, acknowledging our gifts and weaknesses, and not longing to be more intelligent, more popular, more attractive, or more athletic. Benedict says that the first step of gaining this humility is to keep the fear (that is, awe) of God always before one’s eyes (Rule of St. Benedict [RB] 7:10). When we remember that God is God and we are not, the pressure is off to be anyone other than who we are.

In our technological age, we are much more likely to keep our smartphone rather than God always before our eyes. Some of the consequences are that we are exposed to a stream of ads telling us that who we are is insufficient—we need to wear a particular type of clothing to fit in, use cosmetics to “improve” our appearance, or buy latest fitness equipment so we can lose weight. We are encouraged to seek approval of others through the number of “likes” we receive on our posts. We become easily distracted and less able to concentrate. We seek to be entertained rather than enlightened. Furthermore, social media is designed to show us what we want to see, so we become encased in a bubble with like-minded people and lose the ability to listen to and engage with people who have different views and interests than we do.

Rather than letting our phones and other technological devices control us, we can choose to recenter our focus on God, who is present to us through nature, other people, and in contemplation, not just in a 2” X 4” (or smaller) phone screen. Many of us say we don’t know where the time goes, but if we were to count the number of hours we spend in front of a screen every day, the answer likely would become clear.

St. Benedict says “We believe that the divine presence is everywhere” (RB 19:1). Let’s not be so preoccupied with our technological devices that we miss the awesomeness of God who is present in the beauty, diversity, and flesh and blood that exist outside the boundaries of our screens. Expanding our awareness in this way will help us become more humble, authentic, centered, and content—important keys to the good life.

Christ is Ever Within

Advent will commence in a few weeks. However, the coming of that liturgical season does not mean that God is adventitious! As I learned today, “adventitious” means arising from an external source, happening by chance, or appearing in an unusual place.

Although we may have learned once that we who are on earth are separate from God who is in heaven, that is not true. God is not external to us—God is as close to us as our breath, which comes from within us. Nor does God’s presence in our lives happen by chance; God chose to create us and be in relationship with us, whether or not we acknowledge and respond to that gift. Finally, if we believe that within us and within others is an unusual place for God to appear, we have a limited understanding of our worth, dignity, and potential as people created and loved by God.

The incarnation of God in Jesus is a wonderful event to celebrate. However, it is important to remember that through his humanity, Jesus the Christ invites all humans to participate in the divine nature, which is already present in and among us. There is nothing adventitious about that!

Witnesses of God's Goodness

Liturgically, November is the month when we especially remember our loved ones who have died. It seems appropriate, then, that Sr. Elaine Fischer and her maintenance crew have been cutting down dead trees on the Mount St. Scholastica campus the past several weeks—35 at last count. These trees are our beloved dead too. Most of us have treasured memories associated with trees—climbing them, harvesting their apples or walnuts, napping under them, watching them bend in the wind, or marveling at their vivid blooms in spring and leaves in autumn. As with our deceased grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and friends, trees that are now gone witnessed to us of God’s goodness and provided shade, fruit, and beauty to nurture us.

In A Passage About Trees, Herman Hesse says that, like us, trees are made to form and reveal the eternal in their smallest special detail. He goes on to note,

“When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.”

Our memories of the lives of our beloved dead, be they people or trees, remind us that we too are called to live with integrity, to reveal the eternal in our own unique lives of love and struggle, joy and suffering, persistence and impatience. Furthermore, as a Jewish Prayer of Remembrance says, “So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.”

Shaped By Waiting

As our technological prowess has grown, humans have become much less tolerant of waiting. We can heat our food within a few minutes in a microwave oven, contact almost anyone at any time with our electronic devices, and access information instan-taneously through the World Wide Web. These abilities that we take for granted today would have been seen as marvels a mere 50 years ago. However, we have paid a price for living in an age of instant gratification; we have lost the ability to be shaped by waiting.

Most of us can look back at our life and offer thanks that we did not receive something we once fervently desired, such as a job or a relationship that would have consumed us, wealth that would have corrupted us, or fame that would have alienated us from family and friends. Waiting gives us the opportunity to mature in our vision of the good life and clarify what we need to thrive.

Waiting gives us time to prepare for a role that awaits us, as a woman begins to learn how to be a mother while awaiting the birth of her first child. Waiting also confers patience and trust that God will bless us, as shown in the stories of Abraham and Sarah who waited for a son, the Israelites who waited to be led to the Promised Land, and the disciples of Jesus who waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

We learn things while we wait: how to calm ourselves when we feel anxious, how to conserve water while we wait for rain, how to listen while we wait for God to speak. We also learn that we are not in control, which is an important lesson in humility and an opportunity to practice dying to self.

Although we don’t spend nearly as much time waiting as our ancestors did, life still gives us plenty of opportunities to be shaped by waiting, be it slow election returns, electrical outages, or the prolonged death of a loved one from cancer. Waiting always has and always will be one of the building blocks of our humanity; instead of resisting it, we should consider it a teacher and trust that it offers us a gift in disguise.

Be the Mirror

Elections often seem to make it even more difficult to love our neighbor. We ask ourselves, “How am I supposed to love someone who would vote for that idiot?” Elections reveal our deep divisions and feed our tendency to judge others. Yet, as Thomas Merton says, “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy. “

We can love people when we don’t agree with their actions, views, and values. The key is to do what Fr. Ed Hays suggests in his book The Gospel of Gabriel: “Simply be the mirror in which others can see themselves as God sees them.” When we reflect God’s love for others back at them, they are more likely to feel secure, nurtured, and generous rather than fearful, egocentric, and avaricious. Jesus had a heightened awareness of God’s love for him, which allowed him to extend compassion to others; as it was for him, so it is for us. Helping people see God’s love for them is more likely to foster their better nature than judgment, condescension, and criticism.

Like so many of you, I long for justice and unity and the unleashing of our human potential in a world that seems to continually frustrate those aims. However, we are not helpless in this imperfect, maddening world in which we live. Fr. Daniel Berrigan said, “If you want to have hope, do hopeful things.” To be a mirror of God’s love is one of the most hopeful things we can do.

We Will All Be Changed

On the Feast of All Souls, I find it helpful to meditate on this verse from the Book of Wisdom: “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.”

It is natural to view this proclamation with skepticism. If God did not make death, why do we die?

We have difficulty resolving this dilemma because we do not see as God sees. What we view as death, God views as a passageway to a new form of life. As the Book of Wisdom goes on to say, “He fashioned all things that they might have being.” Note that the form of that being is not specified. It is likely that our being will not always be in human form; as it says in 1 John 3:2, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” We, of course, prefer to maintain our current state of being because it is what we know, but that signals a lack of trust in God’s imagination and care for us.

St. Paul had some sense of this transition when he said, “Behold I tell you a mystery. …we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet.” What happens to us when we die is a mystery, but we haven’t arrived at the doorway of death yet. Today, we have time to enjoy our current life as a human being on earth, with its delights, challenges, and memories of those who have gone before us. Ultimately the glory of God is that, whatever our state of being, we are fully alive.