Letting God Love Me More

The issue – if I can call it that – of what we can do when God seems to be absent in our lives, has been presented to me frequently in the past week or so.  This is true in my personal life and with a couple of people raising that with me.  This has also come up a few places in the messages I receive regularly from different sources.  There are times when God does not seem to be making God’s presence known to me.  These raises (or perhaps begs) the question, how can I help God to be more present in my life?

One of the Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr from last week was on point: 

Seeking to experience God’s love more fully, spiritual director Colette Lafia asks a monk with whom she is friends, “How do I let God love me more?”:  

Without missing a beat, Brother Paul answered in his joyful tone, "God cannot love you more. God already loves you infinitely. You just need to become more aware of [God’s] love … by becoming more present to it. It’s like hearing birdcalls. By paying attention and delighting in it.”  

The Advent Reflection by the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine was also applicable:

If we aren't paying attention then that narrow space between pleasure and anxiety can trip us up, and just like a crack in the pavement, cause our steps to stumble and our resolve to falter. Henri Nouwen reminds us, "The Lord is coming, always coming. When you have ears to hear and eyes to see, you will recognize him at any moment of your life. Life is Advent; life is recognizing the coming of the Lord." SSJD Advent Reflection 2025

This brought to mind the line from Leonard Cohen’s song, Anthem, “there is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.”

I have believed – known - for quite a while, that God is always present n our lives.  God makes Godself known to us in many ways.  However, because of who we are and how God created us to be - ironically – we are blind and deaf and dumb to many of these ways.  Due to who and how we are, we are not open to many of the ways in which God is present to us.  This is, in part, because of our personalities and in part because we are often unavailable to God presence in our lives.  If we quiet ourselves and pay attention, we may be able to discern more clearly God’s presence in ways that are familiar to us or even ways that are not familiar to us.  For me, I am not usually attuned to the outer world around me – walking in nature does not do much for me but I am working on that. 

I will close with another message that I received this morning from Richard Rohr:

Marabi Starr offers this stirring description of the Dark Night of the Soul, in which God moves from dynamic presence to loving absence:

Say what’s secretly going on is that the Beloved is loving you back. That your first glimpse of the Absolute was God’s first great gift to you. That your years of revelation inside his many vessels was his second gift, wherein, like a mother, he was holding you, like a child, close to his breast, tenderly feeding you. And that this darkness of the soul you have come upon and cannot seem to come out of is his final and greatest gift to you.

I would disagree on one point.  It is not a case of God {the Beloved} loving us back.  It is a case that God always loves us, and we have to opportunity to love God back.  It is not a question of God being more present in my life?  The question is, how can I be more aware or God’s presence in my life?  When I do, how can I respond? 

I hope we can be blessed to do that on our journey. 

 

 

 

Advent 2 Good Hope for Peace on Earth

Today, we light the candle of Peace. There is considerable comfort and peace, in the assurance that all of us “share in the grace of God” together. Blessed voice in the midst of a hard place.  

That Advent Reflection from the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, marked the lighting of the Candle for Peace on the Second Sunday in Advent.  This is indeed a hard place that we find ourselves in a world that seems to be anything but peaceful.  Reflecting on this brought to my mind the beautiful carol Christmas Bells which is based on the 1863 poem "Christmas Bells" by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and was written during the American Civil War.  As a reminder, the carol begins (please exclude the masculine language):

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play
And mild and sweet their songs repeat
Of peace on Earth, good will to men

The verse that came to my mind was actually a middle verse:

And in despair I bowed my head
"There is no peace on Earth, " I said
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on Earth, good will to men

That seems to me exactly what I was thinking when I thought about the birth of the Prince of Peace which we are preparing for this Advent.  Admittedly, there is peace on earth but it seems to be receding into the distance and becoming a goal which is less achievable these days.  Admittedly, there have been other times in the world in the not too distant past that peace seemed to be even a most distant hope.  When I look around, I see divisions growing deeper and wider and the chasms that divide us seeming to become insurmountable.  It has been two thousand years since the Prince of Peace was born in Bethlehem so why has not peace taken a stronger foothold in the world and in the hearts of men and women? 

How then do we, who follow the Prince of Peace, respond to this?  Last week I wrote about the lighting of the candle for Hope.  There is still hope for peace within us and in the world.  However, that hope needs to be based on concrete action and not just wishful thinking.  If we are to hope for peace, we must each seek the peace of God which passes all understanding by seeking peace within ourselves and with each other.  A commentator on cable news in the United States speaks of “good trouble.”  It is the kind of trouble which seeks to disrupt and change the unjust systems in the world – that is good hope.  For this to be good hope and good peace, it cannot be accomplished through violence.  That is the message of the Prince of Peace.  Jesus taught that you are not to return violence with violence – you are to turn the other cheek – you must love your neighbour even if he or she is the despised Samaritan. as difficult and seemingly unnatural that is.  There is a turn towards good hope in the carol a few verses later:

Then rang the bells more loud and deep
God is not dead, nor doth He sleep
(Peace on Earth)
(Peace on Earth)
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on Earth, good will to men

That is the good hope for each of us and for the world – wrong shall fail and right will prevail - we need to work for peace through good hope and good trouble.  The carol Christmas Bells is a carol for our time and for our world today so if you have the opportunity join in and raise you voice and sing.  Here is a link to it on You Tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOGz9WqNQoI. 

May we all be blessed with good hope for peace on earth on our journey.

 

 

The Unknown Faces of God

Last week I wrote about the unknown unknowns and encouraged all of us to open up the boxes which we have constructed for our ideas of God and how they are constrained by the walls of those boxes.  Over the weekend, Lorna and I attended a workshop with John Bell, the well-known hymn writer, on the psalms.  This was offered by the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine in Toronto.  John did a wonderful job of mining the treasure that is contained in the psalms which, in my experience, has been unexplored to a great extent in our churches. 

This week I want to share a small part of that treasure revealed by John and continue on my exploration of the unknown, or at least lesser-known, images of God contained in the psalms.  The session of the workshop I want to share with you was entitled appropriately ‘The Faces of God in the Psalms’.  John introduced this by telling a story - he is a wonderful storyteller - which illustrated the idea that the sign that we know someone well is that we have many pictures of them.  He initially illustrated this point by drawing on a biblical source outside the psalms – the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin.  These appear as companion parables in the Gospel of Luke chapter 15.  The figure of the Good Shepherd who leaves the flock and searches for the lost sheep is male and can easily be seen as the masculine face of God.  This is juxtaposed with the woman who searches for her lost coin is the female homemaker and therefore presents a female aspect of God who cares for any of the lost children.  It concludes, “I tell you, there is joy in the presence of angels of God over one sinner who repents.” 

Turning to psalms, John explored some of the other images of God which are there if you have eyes to see.  Here are some of the ones we explored:

Psalm 2 v 04 “The one who sits enthroned in heaven laughs, the Lord derides those who conspire against him, then angrily he rebukes them.”   God is pictured as a judge – not something surprizing to us.

Psalm 17 v 08 “Guard me like the apple of your eye; shield me in the shadow of your wings.”   God is pictured as a bird – less familiar to us.

Psalm 22 v 09 “You are the one who brought me from my mother's womb, who laid me on my mother's breast. To your care I was entrusted at birth; from my mother's womb you have been my God.”  God as the midwife – which is always a woman’s role in the bible bringing new life to birth in God’s people.

Psalm 31 v 11 “You have turned my laments into dancing; you have stripped off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.”    God is the one who turns our sorrow into joy.

Psalm 38 v 2-3 “Your arrows have rained down on me, and your hand on me has been heavy. Your indignation has left no part of my body unscathed; because of my sin there is no health in my whole frame.”  God is the disciplinarian. 

Psalm 41 v 2-3 “The Lord never leaves those who care for the helpless to the will of their enemies. On their sick-beds, the Lord nurses them, transforming every illness to health.”  God is the disciplinarian. 

Psalm 23 v 01 “The Lord is my shepherd; I lack for nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me to water where I may rest.”  The last example which ends where I started with the best-known psalm and the well-known image of God as the Shepherd. 

I will close with a quote John gave us from Allan Boesak, the great anti-apartheid crusader, “God is sometimes a lion, sometimes a lamb, but never a chameleon.”   May you be blessed to encounter many faces of God on your journey.   

The Language of Jesus

 

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Lorna and I are taking a course on Benedictive Spirituality offered by the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine.  One of the many aspects of the course which have caught my attention is the statement that the psalms were the ‘language of Jesus’.  This was quite a surprise for me and I followed up on this assertion questioning this with the following.

As I mentioned yesterday, I would appreciate a discussion of the Benedictine understanding (perhaps not unique to them) that the Psalms were the language of Jesus.  I am aware that the psalms were integral to worship in the synagogue in Jesus’ time but is there more to it than that.  My reaction to reading that is that the psalms often presented God as retributive and the psalmist often wanted God to do a lot of smiting of enemies - not what Jesus preached and lived.

My question was presented in a supplementary discussion period offered by the course leader, Sr. Constance Gefvert, which enabled me to flesh out my understanding of this.  I find it is helpful to engage in a discussion to more fully develop my thoughts on a subject (sometimes it is a discussion with only myself).  I came to the awareness that Jesus probably had a full and detailed familiarity of the psalms throughout his life.  He also had a full and in-depth familiarity with the people in his life and was fully aware of the complexity of the human condition as demonstrated in his relationship with all the Mary’s and the Martha’s; the Pharisees and the Sadducees; the rich and the poor; the outcasts and the tax collectors.  This was best demonstrated in his parables.  He seemed to know people better than they know themselves.  The psalms were and are a record of just that – an expression of all of human nature from praising God for all that God had done to blessed the psalmist, to a cry for help, a cry of anguish, and a cry of (sometimes) righteous anger.  

In the course of our discussion, Sr. Connie asked me to consider what Jungian psychology would make of the psalms.  I did just that and later when the opportunity arose, I responded that Jungian psychology was focussed on wholeness and not on perfection which is expressed so vividly in the psalms.  On further reflection I would add that we need to accept all of who God created us to be including the unacceptable parts.  Those parts which are unacceptable are demonstrated quite vividly in many of the psalms.  If we do not acknowledge them, they remain inaccessible in the unconscious part of ourselves.  They return when we are not looking like a thief in the night and can wreak havoc for others and us.  Jung talks about these unacceptable parts of ourselves as the Shadow.

The shadow is often one of the easier images to identify in a dream. We can also identify it at work when we take an instant, irrational dislike to someone,  It can be helpful to notice when you have a strong reaction to someone that seems to have not rational basis and explore what it is about the person that triggered that reaction.  When you have figured that our, look for that characteristic in yourself.

Blessings on your journey and know that God is with you and so is your Shadow. 

Confronting and Affirming

Lorna and I are currently enrolled in a course in Benedictine Spirituality which is being offered by The Sisterhood of St. John the Divine (SSJD) in Toronto.  It is being offered via ZOOM which enables us to participate in the course.  The current COVID Pandemic has opened up many possibilities for distance learning.  So, this very dark cloud does have at least one silver lining. 

 We have attended the first of six classes, so it is early days.  However, my assessment is that it will be a very positive experience.  I did not have much information about St. Benedict or Benedictine Spirituality prior to this and am impressed by the strict nature of the rule and Benedictine life of those who dedicate themselves to it.  It is not for the faint of spiritual heart.

We are using two books as the primary reading, The Way of St. Benedict by Rowan Williams (the former Archbishop of Canterbury) and The Rule of Benedict by Joan Chittister, a renowned, prolific theologian and author.  They are both very good introductions to Benedictine life and how it can apply to life today.

Reading Williams yesterday, there was a passage which struck me as very much on point with the situation facing us with the current pandemic.  The sentence is from his chapter Benedict and the Future if Europe:

We need to recover Benedict as that kind of patron for our presently confusing continent; there is still much to do to spell out further the ways in which, both confronting and affirming (my emphasis), his Rule may open some windows in a rather airless political room and create a true workshop for the spirit (chapter 4). Page 83

This applies of course as much or more to this continent as to Europe.  I was particularly struck with the phrase “confronting and affirming” as it applies to the current resistance which people are demonstrating to rules for how to operate in the pandemic; including wearing masks and restriction on activities and businesses.   I must confess that my initial reaction to the protests has been a desire to confront rather than affirm.  I find the people who demonstrate for freedom to put their own health and lives and the health and lives of others at risk to be short sighted and selfish.  However, on reflection I don’t believe that attitude is very helpful or Christian.

So, to follow the Benedictine Rule, how can I be affirming of this approach to the position?  I think that there are likely many reasons for people objecting to the restrictions placed on them.  Perhaps part of it is due to fear of the unknown; some may be due to the lack of control people find in this situation which seems to be unending.  There may also be a reflection of the lack of trust in institutions and in government which has developed in the recent decades.  People don’t seem to know who to trust these days with the spread of “fake news” on social media – there does seem to be a significant number of people that just don’t believe that the pandemic is as bad as reported or even that it is actually real.

This is, of course, is supposition on my part.  However, it does enable me to appreciate those actions with an attitude that is more affirming and less confronting.  I believe that the Rule which can be applied for everyone today is the Golden Rule i.e. do unto others as you want them to do to you.  For Christians, this is can be understood as the great commandment of Jesus – to love your neighbour as yourself.  We can love one another and prayer that this pandemic will be brought under control and intimately defeated so that there will be no more need for masks and social distancing and people being hospitalized and dying because of it. 

Blessing on you journey and please care for one another.