Obedience to Being, Not Doing

At our 2019 retreat on spirituality in the wilderness, Abbot Jerome Kodell offered an insight we can learn from Rebekah, wife of Isaac. God told Rebekah before her twins were born that the younger would serve the older, but Rebekah was impatient for that to happen, so she devised a plan whereby her son Jacob would dupe his father and cheat his brother to receive the blessing of the firstborn. This plan caused a rift in the family that separated brother from brother and child from parent; Rebekah never saw either of her sons again, and it took more than 20 years for the brothers to reconcile.

What can we learn from this story? Abbot Jerome quoted St. Vincent de Paul: “Those who are in a hurry delay the things of God.” We need to be patient and wait for God’s way to unfold, for that way contains wisdom beyond our own ability to see and our own desires.

It is hard for humans to wait. It feels like we are wasting time. The following meditation by Bob Holmes offers a helpful perspective:

In Christ,

Being always precedes becoming and doing.

Take time to be, to breathe and dwell.

Take time and own this moment.

Take time with eternity.

Most of us are very busy about becoming and doing. Even on retreat, I find myself working to accomplish things: Finish reading that book. Write that letter. Prepare that lesson for the prison. Instead, as Jesus showed, we need to show obedience to God first by being and by leaving the rest in God’s hands.

How Do You Know God Loves You?

In one of his conferences during our 2019 retreat at the Mount, Abbot Jerome Kodell observed that throughout human history, God’s message to us is consistent: (1) I will be with you; (2) I love you; and (3) trust me.

Paul Quenon, OCSO, a monk at Gethsemane Abbey and a former directee of Thomas Merton, has helped me flesh out what it means when God says to me, “I love you.” In his book In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk’s Memoir, Quenon relates this story: “One time he [Merton] asked me, ‘How do you know God loves you?’ I fumbled out some vague reply. He said, ‘You know God loves you because he brought you here and takes care of you.’”

I considered how I would answer the question, “How do you know God loves you?”

• My first thought was that I know God loves me because God created me, and everything God does is done out of love. Fair enough—but that can be said of everyone.

• Well, I also know God loves me because of God’s self-revelation through creation and specifically through Jesus. That’s true, but again, it could be said of everyone.

• Okay, how about this: I know God loves me because he has given me teachers and friends to guide me, inspire me, and provide comfort and companionship. That feels more personal—that God has chosen these particular, extraordinary people to be my companions.

• And then there’s this: I know God loves me because God gives me challenges that increase my wisdom and insight. It is clear that these challenges are designed specifically for me with an understanding of what I need to grow.

• Even more intimately, I know God loves me because of the desire that has been planted within me to know God.

• Which leads, coincidentally, to the same reply Merton gave Quenon: “You know God loves you because he brought you here [to the monastery] and takes care of you.”

Knowing God’s individual, personal, intimate love for us helps us accept the other parts of God’s message: “I will be with you” and “trust me.”

So. How do you know God loves you?

Our Choice in the Wilderness

The theme of the Mount’s 2019 annual retreat, preached by Abbot Jerome Kodell, is “The Spiritual Path in the Wilderness.” One of the intriguing points Abbot Jerome makes is that, when Moses says to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of Egypt?” God does not reply by affirming Moses and listing his qualifications. Instead, God says, “I will be with you.”

How would our lives change if we truly believed that God is always with us? We likely would be more courageous in living the gospel and less fearful that our own needs won’t be met. Yet we don’t believe God is always with us because, after all, bad things have happened in our lives…illness, the death of loved ones, financial difficulties, relationship problems. How can God be with us when things like that happen?

When we equate God with an invisibility shield that will protect us from all of life’s struggles and pain, we are bound to be disappointed and lose faith. As difficult as it is to accept, a life without struggle and suffering is not in our best interest. Sr. Jeanne Weber has noted, “We need to enter into the mystery of suffering instead of trying to understand it or evade it, and that suffering has the potential to open us to God in ways not otherwise possible.” As Abbot Jerome explained, “Unlike other creatures, humans are given a choice. If you don’t have to struggle, you don’t have to choose. Wilderness is not a punishment but a gift that helps us keep choosing God.”

In response to the temptations he experienced in the wilderness, Jesus chose God. His choice helped clarify who he was and what he was intended to do. The same is true of us. The path won’t be easy, but along the way we will receive signs that God is with us if we listen and incline the ear of our heart, as St. Benedict advises us to do in the prologue to his Rule.

Navel Gazing

I learned a fun new word today: omphaloskepsis (om-fuh-lo-SKEP-sis), meaning contemplation of one’s naval or complacent self-indulgent introspection. Overcoming the tendency to engage in omphaloskepsis is one of the purposes of Lent. We can do this by focusing on the opposite of omphaloskepsis: giving our full attention to others.

As Karen Casey and Martha Vanceburg have noted, “When we give one another our full attention, we embrace one another’s humanity.” To embrace a person’s humanity is to be aware of and celebrate God the Creator’s presence in that person and in the space between us. To have someone look directly into our eyes and listen to us is a holy moment, and it is a gift that we can offer to others at any time and any place.

When Jesus retreated into solitude during his years of active ministry, it wasn’t to practice omphaloskepsis but to gaze into the heart of God. During Lent, may our gaze be directed toward God in times of silence and toward others in our day-to-day activities.

An Offering of Well-Being

This Ash Wednesday, I am pondering a curious line from the book of Sirach: “One who heeds the commandments makes an offering of well-being.”

What does it mean to make an offering of well-being? Doesn’t it seem selfish to offer our own well-being to God?

First, God desires our well-being, because people who are physically and spiritually healthy have more energy to participate fully in the life God has given us, which leads to an enhanced ability to love, to serve, and to be grateful. Why would God want us to experience the pain of addiction, illness, and broken relationships when they cripple our ability to live and love fully? God who loves us desires our well-being.

Second, achieving well-being requires sacrifice. To be physically healthy, we need to eat healthy foods in moderation and avoid overindulging in fatty, sugary foods, alcohol, and other drugs that dull our senses and deplete our energy. We must sacrifice our tendency to work so much or engage in so many sedentary activities that we don’t take time to exercise or get enough sleep. To be spiritually healthy, we need to pray every day, listen more than we talk, curb our pride and our tendencies to judge and gossip, and cultivate gratitude. These sacrifices are not self-indulgent, because when we live a balanced life, we can enhance the lives of others. Nor are these sacrifices easy to achieve; they require dedication, patience, and dying to self.

Our bodies and our lives do not belong to us; they are given to us in sacred trust. As Thich Nhat Hanh observed, “Your body belongs to your ancestors, your parents, and future generations, and it also belongs to society and all other living beings. All of them have come together to bring about the presence of this body. Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos — the trees, the clouds, everything.”

This Lent, may we make God an offering of our well-being as an expression of gratitude and our desire to live fully the life to which we are called.

God's Dwelling Place

The psalms repeatedly insist that the earth praises God. How does the earth do this? Through its very being, because Christ is present in all things. What goes for the earth goes for humans (for we are, after all, of the earth). Our very existence is an acknow-

ledgment of God’s creativity and love, which is not earned and cannot be negated. Here is a poem to encourage you to embrace the God who dwells in you, in all your complexity.

Multitudes

Stop screening your gaze

and you will witness all the earth

living the fullness of God—

Buttercups,

       blushing sunrises,

                     and coral beds,

Yes, but also

               howling gales,

      stinging sleet,

            and erupting lava,

For creation is

      the body of God

            and it contains

                 multitudes.

You too are

a masterpiece

     of magnanimity

            and miserliness,

        fragility and ecstasy,

                 impulsiveness

                         and despondency—

An honorable vessel

   of the holy imagination,

        a blueprint of possibility                       

for the revelation

              of the infinite One

Who says where I Am

            you will be.

                    –Jennifer Halling, OSB

The March of Our Contradictions

It is said that the month of March either enters as a lamb and departs as a lion or vice versa. Garrison Keillor quipped that God invented March to show people who don’t drink what a hangover is like. It’s a month of sudden changes in weather—one day can bring a blizzard, the next 70° temperatures. For Catholics, it’s a month of penitence interrupted by the feasts of St. Patrick, St. Joseph, and the Annunciation. What are we to do with this month of contradictions?

The poet Walt Whitman would tell us to embrace March’s contradictions, along with the contradictions within ourselves. He famously said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Similarly, Whitman’s contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Consistency, sameness, routine, and boundaries can offer us the comfort of knowing what to expect. However, they can also be stifling when they blind us to the multitudes within ourselves. Such multitudes are surely in us because the God of multitudes dwells in us through the boundary-less Christ. May the March winds remind us to be open to change, to newness, to the surprise of what God will be doing in us next.