Good Morning!

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link, presence, present, silence, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton: A Book of Hours

Have you ever had one of those mornings where you wake up hardly able to move with everything you need to accomplish by day’s end? How to decide where to start? And then you grab a cup of coffee and sit down to figure it out…and suddenly the sun blasts out from behind the clouds .and you look down at the book you have just pulled off your shelf and Thomas Merton says:

Here I am. In me the world is present, and you are present. I am a link in a chain of light and presence. You have made me a kind of center but a center that is nowhere. And yet also I am “here.” To be here with the silence of Sonship in my heart is to be a center in which all things converge upon you. That is surely enough for the time being. (A Book of Hours, p.47-48)

And so it is.

Epiphany

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chain of light, Christ, Ephesians, epiphany, link, manifestation, Matthew, Paul, responsibility, stewardship of God's grace, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, Thomas Merton

Today Christians the world over celebrate the feast of the Epiphany, a Greek word that means manifestation and symbolizes the day when Christ was manifested to the “world” as represented by the visit of the Magi (MT 2:1-12). In a larger sense, the word has come to mean the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something (Urban Dictionary).

In the second reading for today’s feast Paul writes to the Ephesians: You have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for your benefit, namely that the mystery was made known to me by revelation. (EPH 3: 2-3A). The phrase “stewardship of God’s grace” amplified for me the meaning of epiphany by adding to it an element of responsibility. Paul had a private revelation of Christ, certainly a powerful and sudden realization of the meaning of Christ to the world. What it caused in him, however, was the necessity of spreading the news of what he had come to know, spreading it as far and wide as he was able with the passion engendered by that one moment of recognition.

Just before I began to write this reflection, I read a passage from Thomas Merton’s Book of Hours that came originally from his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Merton is offering morning praise to the God of creation and gives another perspective, I think, on the vastness of an “epiphany” of God’s presence.

Today, Father. the blue sky lauds you. The delicate green and orange flowers of the tulip poplar tree praise you. The distant blue hills praise you, together with the sweet-smelling air that is full of brilliant light. The bickering flycatchers praise you with the lowing cattle and the quails that whistle over there. I, too, Father, praise you, with all these, my brothers, and they give voice to my own heart and my own silence. We are all one silence, and a diversity of voices. You have made us together, you have made us one and many, you have placed me here in the midst as witness, as awareness, and as joy. Here I am. In me the world is present, and you are present. I am a link in the chain of light and of presence.

If we are also links in the chain of God’s presence to the world, how do we, how will we in this new year perhaps, manifest that presence in our own unique way that will help to spread that recognition to someone somewhere who is ready and in need of the light?

Discipleship, Anyone?

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Christmas, disciples, distribution, Eucharist, feed the hungry, give thanks, Jesus, link, loaves and fishes, Matthew, miracle, The Last Supper, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

This morning we have Matthew’s version of the “loaves and fishes” story (MT 15: 29-37). He says there were seven loaves and “a few fishes”. Something struck me about the miracle that I hadn’t felt in the same way before this morning. The process for the distribution was as follows: Jesus took the loaves and the fish, gave thanks, broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples who in turn gave them to the crowds. They all were satisfied.

The point of the process is that the disciples were a necessary link in the miracle’s chain. Jesus gave the job of distribution to them. That could be seen as simply efficient because of the number of people but what if their participation was essential to the multiplication? It is also true that this verse is strikingly similar to the words of Jesus at the Last Supper when he commissions his disciples to remember him each time they celebrate what has come to be known as Eucharist. So it sounds this morning that as we prepare to celebrate the incarnation of Jesus at Christmas, we ought to be thinking about our willingness to assent to the role of feeding those who are hungry for bread or for the presence of God in their midst. We may be, as the saying goes, “the only gospel they ever read.”