His Chalice

There's a hymn that we sing at church that contains the phrase, "here we will drink the wine of compassion." While the lyric refers to the Communion Cup, I think that we limit ourselves if that's all we see.  It is the nature of compassion to overflow - it isn't something that we can keep to ourselves. So, while this prayer acknowledges that we will be touched by Divine tenderness when we drink the Cup, it is only so that we may, in turn, become a Chalice through which the people in our lives taste the compassion of God.

To be compassionate is to understand another's need and meet it, to be supportive and not judgmental, to be lenient, empathetic and full of mercy. All of this is what we hope for from our God; all of this is what God hopes we offer to one another. Jesus said "love one another as I have loved you." How did Jesus love? He supplied bread for the five thousand and wine for the wedding guests; He healed the blind and the lame and comforted the sorrowing by raising the dead; He absolved the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, Zaccheus and Matthew the tax collectors and forgave all of humanity at His death on the cross. This is what it means to love as Jesus loved.

This is a seemingly impossible task except that through the Holy Spirit who lives within us we receive the very gifts that we are to pass on to others. Galatians tells us that the presence of God brings with it love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. We are not asked to do anything more than pass on what we have already received by grace. If we find our personal well running dry at times, all we have to do is ask for more.

I like the idea of being called to be a Chalice and quenching another's thirst for understanding and consideration. To be a cold glass of water on a hot day - how cool is that!

Light Overpowers Darkness

I watched the story of the rescue of the Chilean miners on NOVA last night.  It was inspiring, but what really struck me was the the thought of living in darkness for 17 days before they made contact with the world again.

Theirs was a physical darkness not of their own making, but there is a psychic darkness, too, which we often make for ourselves. It can be just as debilitating and requires just as much courage.

When our thoughts focus on what is lacking - lack of love, lack of money, lack of opportunities - we are focusing on the darkness. When we immerse ourselves in what is light - love for others even in their weakness, love for ourselves as God's beloved, love for God as our bulwark for the future  - we fill ourselves with light. This Light will overcome the darkness.

Shine a flashlight in a corner and all that's there becomes visible - nothing can escape the power of the light. Jesus said, "I am light of the world." Filling our thoughts with Jesus - with God - leaves no room for the dark to kill our hope and to smother our love. We are able then to fill the world of others with Love and Light as well.

There can be no darkness where there is light. The miners had to bring their own inner light to their situation when their artificial light failed. They succeeded admirably. "Love never fails" is true because love is more powerful than hate just as light is more powerful than darkness. Would that each person we meet say of us: "You light up my life" just as the miners did when all was darkness.

Behind an SUV

At one point as I was out and about today, I was stuck in traffic behind a massive SUV and I couldn't see a thing beyond it. I had no way of knowing how far the line of stopped cars extended, whether or not there was a traffic signal coming up or why things were slow in the first place. All I could do was follow. It's a frustrating feeling and I've done my share of complaining about these behemoths of the road that take away my ability to see ahead and prepare for what's coming.

As I moved slowly along, it occurred to me that what I was experiencing was a perfect metaphor for the spiritual life: We can't see beyond the present and the only way to survive is to keep our eyes on the leader. On the highway, it was the SUV; on the heavenly journey, it is God.

Jesus said "I go before you to prepare a place for you, so that where I am you might be also." Our task is follow Him closely so that we wind up in the proper room of the mansion that He was describing to His apostles. Jesus is the SUV ahead of us, tall enough to see over the tops of cars, with eyesight good enough to avoid the pot holes and with enough skill to navigate through the construction zones and traffic cones safely.

If we keep our eyes on His bumper and brake lights, then we can expect to reach our destination. It's not the way we might have planned the trip, but it's guaranteed to be the best way. His yoke is easy - His burden light - and His SUV has four wheel drive that takes the changing terrain like a champ.

Higher Power

There are 32 different definitions of the word power in the online dictionary that I use at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/power. Each one adds another nuance to its meaning: Power is capacity, energy, authority and strength, but it is also a name that we give to that which is greater than ourselves.

Our Higher Power, as the twelve step programs refer to what I would call God, comprises all of those 32 shades of meaning and more besides because power is not just something that God has, but it is God's essence - it is something that God is. God is Power just as God is Love.

The Catholic Church, at the moment, is becoming more awed by God's Power than God's Love. The new translation of the prayers of the liturgy recalls more the experience of the people of Moses' time who were told not to touch the mountain of God lest they die, than the example of Jesus who allowed a woman - a woman! -  to pour oil over head and wash his feet with her tears.

This ambivalence about the nature of God, however, is not peculiar to the Catholic church. Throughout history, religion has see-sawed between honoring the majesty and power of God and accepting God's nearness and care for us all. Jesus went to the cross because of His insistence that the Father heard Him and loved Him and was One with Him.

This might be purely a philosophical debate except that when we err on the side of distance, we deprive ourselves of the Power to live life to the full. When we believe that it is up to us to solve our own problems, we guarantee that the outcome will be puny. When we hand our problems to our Higher Power, God "can do more than we can ask or imagine," as St. Paul promises in Ephesians.

God's "out of the box" approach to all that concerns us shouldn't be surprising. If medical science can use electricity to rearrange our brain's thinking patterns and relieve depression, how much more can the God who created the Universe bring new awarenesses and opportunities into our lives? Far from giving up or giving in, asking God to take over our fears and concerns is an opening up to possibilities far beyond our control.

Let go; let God is a contemporary way of saying what was told to the Psalmist: "Be still and know that I... am...GOD. Thank God!

Double Vision

Have you heard the joke about the adherents of the various faith traditions reaching Heaven and being surprised to find that they are not the only ones there? We will all probably find people whom we might not have expected to see. This raises one potential drawback to living forever: we get to live with all these others who are living forever, too. If we haven't gotten along with them in life, how are we going to get along with them in death?

Eventually, we will all come face to face with those with whom we have been at odds. Nothing will be hidden because there are no barriers in Heaven. We must all be one, just as Jesus prayed that we be. That is the joy of Heaven: there is no separateness; there is complete unity.

If we are estranged or full of hatred or non acceptance or even if we are simply people who have harbored non-loving thoughts about others, these attitudes will have to change in order for Heaven to be Heaven - the abode of Love. Non-lovers will be changed by the grace of God, but God won't run roughshod over our will. The opportunity for reconciliation will be ours to choose or not.

I don't think this will be a private experience. Our non-loving relationships will have to change and that takes two. What we thought about the individuals whose lives interacted with ours will be evident to them and to us and must be healed. I sometimes think how mortified I will be when people know what I might have thought about their behavior during my life.  What is it that God will show us so that we become capable of embracing the loving response? What explanation, excuse or insight will overwhelm our former attitude of judgment?

We can pray for God's grace to be there then or we can choose to ask for the grace to change our perceptions now. This calls for double vision: to see the people in our life as we know them now and to also see the image of facing them at some future point when what we have said and done and thought will be evident to us both. I think I'd rather ask for God's grace to alter my vision now than wait for eternity. If we all did, we might bring Heaven a lot closer a whole lot faster.

Memories

I didn't think I was a collector. I'm the one who visits the thrift store with bags and bags of household goods because I can't stand crammed closets and disorderly shelves. The refrigerator that I like best is the one with the empty shelves, not the one bulging with food and leftovers. What I have faced into recently, though, is that I am a collector after all. I collect memories.

In cleaning out the attic last week, I found our son's First Communion suit, his cub scout uniform, his boy scout uniform, his band jacket, his morterboard, every stuffed animal he'd ever had and the sweater set that my grandmother had knitted for him as a baby. Not to mention every report card and scrap of paper that spoke of his love, every love letter my husband ever wrote and dozens of art works that have hung in our home of 40 years. Yes, I collect memories and what memories they are.

Our scriptures are like that. They are our memories of our encounters with God. Some of these memories are  clear, some are foggy, but they are a record of the moments when people were touched by something beyond themselves and they said, "I must remember this."

Sometimes what the scriptures record doesn't seem worth recalling because the stories speak of cruelty and bloodthirsty revenge.  The punishing and judgmental God of the Hebrew scriptures and the Book of Revelation is not one who is easily loved and it takes a lot of faith to get past this image and find the God who saves us by grace. Some of what the Christian church has chosen to remember, on the face of it, we might really be better off forgetting.

Memory, however, serves a purpose. It provides a context through which we are able to examine our choices and how these choices played out in our lives and the lives of those who have gone before us. However, I believe that we should be retelling some of these early stories of our relationship with God more to remind us of who we have been than to reveal who God supposedly is.

We have been a people so limited in our understanding of reality that we sometimes made God into the worst of ourselves in order to elevate our own responses and excuse them. The Islamic extremists are still doing it today. We shake our heads over their misguided interpretation of God's will, but, to be fair, the Hebrew scriptures depict much of the same kind of violence, allegedly sanctioned or even demanded, by God.

Our collected spiritual memories reveal our progressive understanding of the nature of God, culminating in the gospel of John where we discover the God who is Love residing within us. Because of this awareness, we are changed and we see our non-loving responses for what they are: the places within us where we haven't made room for God.

As a collection of memories, the Bible is something of a mystery. We may have misconstrued over the years why our forebears wrote down some of the stories, just as I looked in wonder at some of the things I had saved in the attic. We shouldn't be afraid, though, to look at what is written through the lens of our enlightened understanding and say: "don't ever think like this again."

There Is No Time In God

When I was little, I asked my parents where I had been before I was born and they told me that I had come from "God's pocket." It's a wonderful image, really, as well as being a clever way to avoid the "where do babies come from?" question that they didn't wish to address. The idea that I had a life with God before my life here on earth has been with me ever since.

Jesus said that He had come from God and that He was returning to God. I believe that we can say that, too. In a different form, we have all lived forever and in a different form, we will continue to live forever. I suppose you could call this "pre-existence" which is a Platonic notion, not a Christian one, but the scripture suggests that our souls have always lived, too. God tells the prophet Jeremiah "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." In Ephesians, Paul says that "He chose us in Him before the foundations of the world." My point is that God does not live in time; therefore, our existence has no beginning and no end for Him. It is all one. We live in time and are limited by its unfolding, but God is what the catechism calls, "omnipresent," that is, God is everywhere and in all times - past, present and to come.

Interesting theology, but does this have a bearing on how we live out our relationship with God? I believe that it does because we can bring the God of the present into our lives of the past and ask that God heal the wounds that occurred. It isn't the "past" to God, only to us. Whatever the moment, whether it be a mistake or a sin, a hurt or a heartbreak, God can enter in and change the consequences. How else can Romans promise that "Everything happens for the good for those who love the Lord?" When we bring God into every moment of our lives, our lives change.

Guilt, worry, fear and regret are the product of a mindset that believes that "what's done is done and cannot be undone." However, nothing is final with God. With God, "all things are new" because God is like a time traveler, appearing in and out of our existence as we make Him present. Our God is not limited. Only we can make Him so.

The Root of All Evil

The Scripture says that the love of money is the root of all evil. It has struck me recently that money certainly plays a part, but that its pursuit has a deeper base: the fear of being without it. It is what money can save us from that is its attraction and why it becomes the focus of so much prayer and effort. Poverty, hunger, inconvenience and ill health are all alleviated by money and so the desire for it has the potential of squashing a concern for others and ruining relationships.

In actuality though, it is fear, not the love of money, that is at  the root of all evil. Abraham Maslow constructed his Hierarchy of Needs in 1943 as a way of explaining human motivation. Fear pervades each rung. Our most basic needs are bodily - food, water and sleep. Until these are met, people are a threat because they stand in the way of our own existence. We want to alleviate the fear of our own imminent death.

The next step in the hierarchy is our need for Safety. We cannot enjoy what we have until we are sure that we will not be harmed in the process of enjoying it. Once that is accomplished, there is a need for Love and Belonging. We fear being alone. After people are welcomed into our lives, there is a need for their Esteem. We fear being abandoned.

Finally, there is what he called Self Actualization which is our quest for knowledge and personal achievement. This is closely related to the need to be seen as worthwhile, but this need also relates to our desire to feel equipped to handle all the dangers that might come at us in life.

Thus, fear is the driver behind our needs and fear is the explanation of the behaviors that mar our relationships. Fear is misery, not iniquity. Fear needs healing, not judgment.

Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve hid from God because they were afraid. St. John's gospel tells us that God is the answer to our fears, not their punisher: "Perfect love casts out fear." Where God is, there is no room for fear. God's light outshines any darkness. So, if we are afraid, it is because we are not letting God into the problem.

 Likewise, our quest to become more perfect lovers ourselves will be more successful if we put aside our fear of others and see the God within them instead. Jesus said the Law could be summed up in two sentences: Love God. Love your neighbor. What He also said makes the first two possible: Fear not.