How to Please God

In Psalm 65 we hear the speaker say to God, “To you must vows be fulfilled, you who hear prayers.” Apparently the psalmist believes that our relationship with God entails a transaction: God hears our prayers, and we make vows that we must fulfill.

We don’t “owe” God for the gift of life and other blessings we are given. God does not demand a certain percentage of our time or our goods in exchange for favors provided. However, Jesus told us how we can please God, if we wish to show our gratitude: by loving God with all our heart, mind, and soul (which is really another gift to us, to join in the love triangle of the Trinity), and by taking care of our neighbor (with its gift of seeing God's face). People often ask “Where is God?” in times of tragedy, when God is present in our desire and efforts to provide assistance and companionship.

May our prayers—evident both in our wholehearted attentiveness to God and our actions on behalf of our neighbors—rise like incense before the giver of all gifts.

Me and My Shadow

In my new formation class on the Desert Mothers, Sr. Cecilia asked the question, “What are your thoughts on what these desert dwellers could possibly have to teach us in the 21st century?”As it turns out, they have much to teach us about living simply, the need for silence and solitude, and keeping our primary focus on God. Perhaps most importantly for us today, however, is that they teach us how to struggle with temptation, which today we often call our shadow—the thoughts, feelings, and impulses within us that create fear and shame and that we thus try to bury. What we fail to appreciate is that we cannot throw light without creating a shadow. Instead of viewing our shadow as a teacher, however, we generally choose to project our own faults and failures onto others, which often leads to acts of scapegoating and exclusion.

Someone once told me that if a monster is chasing you in a dream, you should stop running, wheel around to face the creature, and shout “Why are you chasing me?” It is likely the monster will respond, “You tell me: it’s your dream!” The desert mothers and fathers sought seclusion to avoid the distractions that keep us from facing our inner monsters and our role in creating them.

We are living in a world in which people don’t know how to face their inner darkness, and they are suppressing it so thoroughly that it is exploding into consciousness through gun violence, fear of “the other” (people of different races, cultures, religions, and sexual orientation), domestic violence, and addiction. The desert mothers and fathers can give us much-needed guidance in how to face our shadow and work with it to become more whole (holy) and compassionate people.

Creating God in Our Own Image

Voltaire once said, “In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.” Why do we try to cast God in our own image? We could call it a failure of imagination or a failure to listen to the revelation of God through creation, scripture, and our lives. Most likely, though, it is an effort to control God. If God thinks like us and acts like us, then we know what we are dealing with. As Paul said in the letter to the Colossians, we need to put aside the “greed that is idolatry”—the worship of idols that, we believe, will satisfy our greed for wealth, success, praise, and security because we create these idols ourselves and thus can control them.

The true God, on the other hand, is mysterious and unpredictable. We do know some things about God because they have been revealed to us over and over throughout human history: God is merciful, compassionate, loving, trustworthy, and creative. However, because God is continually making all things new, God also constantly surprises us with new invitations, new companions, and new revelations that challenge our circumscribed, narrow understanding of what life with God is meant to be.

It is very human to want certainty regarding how God will act and what the future will hold. Such a desire is futile, of course. However, we can pray for the openness and trust displayed by American civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy, who said, “I don’t know what the future may hold, but I know who hold the future.”

Life Is No Coincidence

I recently came upon a new word coined by Donald Drysdale: Godincidence (definition: not a coincidence, but caused by God). Not everything is caused by God, of course, because we have been given the free will to make choices, and those choices have consequences. However, I do believe that God uses whatever we encounter—in ourselves, in others, and in the world—to call us to fuller life in the Spirit. In this respect, everything is capable of leading us to wholeness and holiness.

As Christine Valtners Paintner observes,

“Monastic spirituality calls us to see everything and everyone—including ourselves—as holy.  The tools of the kitchen are to be regarded as sacred vessels. The places in our heart where we wrestle are to be embraced with kindness. The person who irritates us or makes us feel fearful is a window into how God is at work in our lives. Being a monk in the world means that there are no more divisions between sacred and secular.”

This attitude can lead us from despair to hope; the deeper the shadow we face, whether within ourselves (addiction, feelings of unworthiness, or pride) or in the world (disregard for life, unbridled greed, racism, or misogyny), the more urgent the invitation to face our wounds and misconceptions and choose that which gives life—which is the true “Godincidence.”

Listening to the Earth

St. Benedict instructed us to “Listen and incline the ear of your heart,” but what should our listening encompass? Most of us probably think first of listening to God, and then perhaps to one another. However, it is becoming urgent for us to take time to listen to the earth, which, as part of God’s creation, carries its own wisdom. Consider the following verse from Christine Valtners Paintner:

Beyond my plans
for how to spend the day,
I hear the great breathing
of the sea.

We get so caught up in our human agendas that we forget to listen to the sea, which is a living, breathing organism. What does the sea have to tell us? After Hurricane Dorian blew through the Bahamas, someone posted a picture of a garbage-strewn beach and said, “When the planet is tired of being sick, she vomits all the ocean trash and pollutants back on solid ground.” Likewise, the reduction in the number of bees and butterflies, the increased number of earthquakes in areas where fracking occurs, and the increase in 100- and 500-year floods have something to tell us, if we have the good sense to listen.

Autumn is approaching. During this season of quieting within, may we all include some time to go outside and listen to earth’s wisdom.

In the Twinkling of an Eye

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul says, “Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” As we now know, we don’t have to wait until the last trumpet to be changed in an instant, because science tells us that approximately 300 million cells die in our body every minute, and they are replaced at a rate of about 2 million per second! Thus we are constantly being changed in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye!

How do we respond to this remarkable phenomenon? Perhaps we could take a cue from Sr. Dorothy Heideman, in a story relayed by Sr. Susan Barber. Sr. Dorothy asked a visitor where she lived, and the visitor replied, “In Colorado,” and pointed west. Sr. Dorothy said, “I used to live over there” (pointing the the north), “and now I live over here” (pointing to Dooley Center in the south). With an elaborate shrug, she then said, “Whatever!”

We can respond to life’s changes with an eye roll and apathy (muttering “whatever”), or we can greet it with a sense of trust in and excitement about the new things God is doing (exclaiming “whatEVER!”). However, our very bodies are designed to give us practice in letting go of old life and welcoming new life; we would be wise to embrace that ever-present lesson so we are prepared for whatever is to come after our earthly body becomes humus, the humble building block for yet another form of life in God’s creation.

A Day of Rest

It seems somewhat ironic that the United States celebrates Labor Day as a holiday, a day off from our labor. However, we cannot hold up the importance of our work and the need for just labor laws without also considering the importance of our time for rest.

Why is rest so important? It is not just so we can function more effectively at our jobs. No, when we work all the time, we tend to lose our perspective, believing that our lives are in our own hands and forgetting that everything is a gift from God. As it says in Exodus 31: 12-14, God said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘You must observe my Sabbaths. This will be a sign between me and you for the generations to come, so you may know that I am the Lord, who makes you holy. Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you.’”

Why do we rest? So that we may know that God is God, and we are not. To cultivate the humility that keeps us from the pitfalls of pride. To have the time to reflect on the needs of others who don’t have jobs that pay a living wage or whose health is endangered by the work they do.

May we all enjoy a balance of work and rest, of prayer and play, of enjoying the goodness of the Lord and acting on behalf of those on the margins of the good life.