Pursuing Our Unique Path to God

God delights in our uniqueness. The saints know this and don’t waste time trying to follow someone else’s path. For example, St. Ignatius Loyola was a soldier before he became a priest, and as Robert Ellsberg notes in Give Us This Day, after an all-night vigil at the Catalonian shrine of Our Lady at Montserrat, “he laid his sword on the altar and became a soldier of Christ.” On the other hand, St. Therese of Lisieux said in her book The Story of a Soul, “despite my littleness I can aspire to sainthood. To make myself bigger is impossible; I have to put up with myself such as I am with all my imperfections…. So I sought in the holy books … and I read these words that come from the mouth of Eternal Wisdom: ‘Let all who are simple come to my house’ (Prov. 9:4). So I came, suspecting that I had found what I was looking for.”

Finding our unique path to God entails offering hospitality to ourselves, just as we offer it to others. What does it mean to offer hospitality to ourselves? As Maria del Mar Albajar-Vinas, OSB, observes in Benedictines magazine, “In the same way that hospitality toward my sister means to recognize and value who she is, with her particular way of understanding and response to life — to look after her and allow her the time and space she needs to walk the path of being who she is — just so, hospitality toward myself means to recognize and value who I am, with my particular way of understanding and responding to life — to look after myself and give myself the time and space that I need to walk the path of being who I am.”

God’s world is large enough to encompass many ways of understanding and responding to life. Because we have lived in different cultures and had different experiences, it is not possible for us all to think alike and follow the same path, and it would not be healthy to try to do so. The kingdom of God needs nurses and artists, warriors and administrators, and farmers and sanitation workers, with their different skills and outlooks on life. If we are true to walking the path of who we are, as St. Ignatius and St. Therese and so many other blessed ones have done, we will find our own unique way to know and serve God. The sure sign we have found it is a sense of abiding joy, vitality, and inner peace.

Training Ourselves to Be Open to Grace

Every morning at the Mount we begin prayer with a reading from the Rule of St. Benedict and a commentary on the passage. Today’s commentary was by Norvene Vest, from her book Preferring Christ:

“So often the key issues in the spiritual life are those moments calling for a spontaneous and immediate response. The way I have trained myself through my daily habits will make a great deal of difference in my capacity to receive the grace God would give me in such moments.”

As it happened, today’s Gospel reading for mass is about Jesus’ arrival at Bethany after Lazarus has died. Surely this could be considered a moment in the life of Martha that called for a spontaneous and immediate response. Understandably, she was upset with Jesus for not coming sooner and preventing the death of her brother and could have refused to welcome him, but she had trained herself through her daily habits of service to provide hospitality, so she went out to meet him. In doing so she received the grace that allowed her to recognize Jesus as the Christ and to trust in his promise that he is the resurrection and the life.

Undergoing training is not easy, whether we are preparing to play a sport or a musical instrument, learning a new job, or attempting to grow in spiritual wisdom. We must put in many, many hours of practice (some people say as many as 10,000!) so we are able to respond immediately and spontaneously when the opportunity arises to steal second base, improvise while playing a piece on the piano, fix a problem at work, or recognize Christ’s presence in difficult times. The times when we get impatient with the monotony of our daily training regimen are the very times we need to trust that God will prosper our efforts and that our dedication will lead to joy and freedom.

It Is In Giving That We Receive

Often we are exhorted to seek the kingdom of God or change our lives so we are worthy of entering this seemingly magical place. Robin Ryan, CP, offers a different perspective when he says, “The gift of the kingdom is meant to be given away. It must be made present in and through the priorities we set and the choices we make.”

God does not hide the kingdom from us or create elaborate stipulations for entering. Jesus repeatedly told us that the kingdom of God is available to anyone who is single-hearted (e.g., selling everything to buy a field containing treasure or an incomparable pearl) and willing to share God’s love with others (i.e., acting like yeast in bread dough). We can’t believe that gaining entrance to the kingdom of God is that simple, so we become distracted by complications that we create ourselves.

We all face situations in which we struggle to be kind to people who irritate us, pray when we are tired, or help someone when it inconveniences us. It is helpful to remember that when we choose to prioritize kindness, prayer, and the needs of others we are actually making the kingdom of God present and, paradoxically, finding it by giving it away.

God's Poetry

Image by Stefan Chinof

The poet and novelist Robert Graves said, “There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.” I understand what he’s getting at—unfortunately very few people make enough money to support themselves by writing poetry, and in general we do not associate money with beauty of expression. However, it does not have to be that way. For example, when Jesus was challenged about whether people should pay taxes and he replied, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God,” I would argue that there was poetry in his words, even though he was talking about money. After all, his response was eloquent, imaginative, concise, employed the literary technique of parallelism, and evoked an emotional response.

I believe God is a poet. Is there not meaning, sound, and rhythm in the things God has created, such as ocean waves lapping the shore, a bird calling its mate, and the echo of thunder? And if God is a poet, then that must mean that everything contains the seed of poetry, because something of God is in all things that God has created. As is so often the case, we don’t see poetry unless we look for it, just as we don’t see God in others and in our experiences unless we look for God there.

The beauty of God’s expression through creation surrounds us. As St. Benedict counsels, all we need to do to hear it is to listen and incline the ear of our heart.

A Model of Faithfulness

As we celebrate the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, what strikes me is her faithfulness to Jesus. All four gospels mention that she was present at his crucifixion and death. As Cynthia Bourgeault points out, “…when all the other disciples are fleeing, Mary Magdalene stands firm. She does not run; she does not betray or lie about her commitment; she witnesses.” Not only that, but she kept vigil at Jesus’ tomb after it was sealed (Mt 27:61), and she was the first to return to the tomb after the Sabbath.

It is clear that God values faithfulness. How do we know this? First, God models this attribute for us throughout the scriptures and in our own lives. Second, God rewards people who are faithful; for example, Abraham was given more descendants than stars in the sky, and Mary Magdalene had the privilege of being the first person to meet the risen Christ.

Perhaps faithfulness is so highly valued because it comes at a cost. Being faithful requires trust in the face of ridicule, relinquishment of our own desires and plans, and the willingness to suffer with the people we love by witnessing their pain. Yet, as Richard Rohr, OFM, observes, “Mary Magdalene and the other women were the first witnesses to the resurrection because they remained present for the entire process, from death unto new life, exactly what is necessary to witness resurrections in our own lives as well.”

Remaining present. Witnessing. Let us be faithful so we can be joyful beholders of the resurrections that occur in our own lives.

Thy Kingdom Come

Good gardeners pick over their seeds before they plant them to discard any that are broken, withered, or moldy. If we consider God the Master Gardener, as it says in the song What Is the Kingdom We Await?, we “trust the One who plants the seed.” Our trust that God has planted good seed in us gives us the conviction that our dreams and gifts are worth nurturing.

The Word of God might be considered a “super seed.” As it says on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Web site, “[The] Word of God … possesses a special sacramental power to bring about in us what it proclaims … it not only tells us of God and God’s will for us, it also helps us to put that will of God into practice in our own lives.”

For many of us, the Word of God that we likely proclaim most often is the “Our Father” prayer that Jesus taught to his disciples. In fact, we pray it so often that it can become rote. However, praying “thy kingdom come” carries the power of God’s Word regardless of whether we are fully aware of what we are saying.

Therefore, we should not be surprised when we see signs of God’s kingdom unfolding around us: the arrogant of mind and heart dispersed, the lowly lifted up, the oppressed set free, the (spiritually) blind recovering their sight, the hungry being filled with good things. For example, the many long-oppressed people who are letting their God-given seeds of dignity and worth flower in peaceful protests are a direct sign that God’s kingdom has come, as we ourselves have so often asked! In God’s kingdom, all people are valued, respected, loved, heard, and nurtured, and nonviolent protests are a way to help bring that Word of God to fruition. Although it is a sometimes chaotic process (people in power generally don’t step aside without a struggle), we can rejoice that a fuller expression of God’s kingdom is unfolding in our midst.

The good seed of the Word of God is implanted in us when we hear and speak it. We need only trust in the wisdom and ways of the Master Gardener to be fruitful in God’s kingdom.

A New Perspective

So much of life depends on our perspective. Verse 2 of Psalm 40 says, “I waited, I waited for the Lord,” which implies that God is absent. How does the situation change if we realize that what we need to pray for is clearer vision to see God who is already present?

Often we aren’t even aware of our underlying assumption that everyone else has the same perspective we do. Yet how can a tree be seen the same way by a boring insect (which relies on the roots for food), an owl (which depends on the branches for shelter), and me (who counts on the leaves for the oxygen I breathe)? Our own particular needs and the experiences that have shaped us feed our perspectives, which makes life interesting when we encounter the differing perspectives of others in our homes, schools, workplaces, and communities.

Robert Morneau’s poem A New Song takes a helpful approach to this situation:

We each are given a song to sing

the notes of which

are essentially the same.

We simply order them differently

(or is it, they order us?)

Recognizing the notes we have in common can help us be patient with each other: we all are loved by God as we grapple with fulfilling our basic needs, developing relationships, finding satisfying work, dealing with loss and grief, and facing death. On the other hand, celebrating our differences by enjoying the unique songs people create as they order these notes differently can make life a rich and joyful adventure.

At least, that’s my perspective.