Perfectly Me!

Tags

be perfect, be whole, compassionate, Jesus, Matthew, perfection, The Beatitudes, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Chapter five of Matthew’s Gospel starts with Jesus going up a hill, sitting down and giving a brilliant teaching that we call “The Beatitudes.” The lessons do not stop with the last “Blessed be…” however; there’s much more in that chapter to be ingested.

The last line of today’s teaching is one that we have attempted to find a more kindly or reasonable translation to explain. “Be perfect,” says Jesus, “as your heavenly Father is perfect.” We’ve tried on many synonyms to dress that line in a more realistic way. “Be compassionate,” we say (my personal favorite) or “Be whole.” You may have found your own translations that make it possible to hear and live without cringing at the seeming impossibility of coming close to what Jesus was proposing.

This morning, as I began to ruminate on it once again, I heard inside my head: “Be a perfect Lois…” That was a total surprise but it now seems to me the closest to what Jesus was asking. It isn’t a question of becoming like anyone else here on earth in order to achieve the “perfection” of God (“for God?). We just need to be the best of ourselves — loving and forgiving and accepting ourselves, being and giving the best of ourselves from our waking to our sleeping. I’m fairly certain God rejoices in that every day.

That may be just the thing for a Lenten practice, starting on this coming Wednesday!

The Good News from Valentine

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God, God loves us, love, perfection, St. John the Evangelist, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Today is all about love – not just with chocolates and flowers (although I am partial to both) but also with thoughts from St. John the Evangelist who, among many other messages, gave us this deep and meaningful word from his first letter. Keep it close today!

“Love consists in this: it is not we who have loved God, but God who loved us. My dear friends, if God loved us so much, we too should love one another. No one has ever seen God but as long as we love each other, God remains in us and God’s love comes to perfection in us.”

Everyday Miracles

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A Deep Breath of Life, Alan Cohen, awareness, consciousness, creative mind, human, intelligent force, life, loving heart, miracles, perfection, planets, prayer, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, universe

Here is an interesting thought for pondering that brings my awareness to the importance of how I look at life. I invite you to suspend judgment and just read the words, then see if you can agree with the concept. If not, spend some time assessing your objections and ask yourself what it would take to adjust your attitude.

The universe was designed to work and in spite of appearances, it does. All of life, from the tiniest amoeba to the trillions of stars, planets and galaxies, operates with clockwork precision. Surely there is an intelligent force with an unfathomably creative mind and loving heart behind such magnificent perfection! (Alan Cohen – A Deep Breath of Life)

What are the most amazing miracles that you observe in life? For me it’s the incredible cooperation of systems in the human body and the way the planets keep moving without colliding. Or it could be the way that the change of seasons is so vibrant in my neighborhood or the prayer plant in front of my window whose leaves move from a horizontal position in the day to verticality at night so I can sleep knowing that there is, in fact, a creature lifting up prayer in my stead throughout the night. I could go on (big surprise, right?) but each of us must choose what it is that stuns us into consciousness of the amazing universe given to us even in our darkest days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Mercy

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abbot, Benedict, gracious, Joan Chittister, judgment, kindness, Lent, merciful, mercy, monastic life, perfection, Pope Francis, Psalm 95, spirituality, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, Year of Mercy

I’ve thought and talked a lot about mercy, especially since I came to understand that it has more to do with love than with pity. At the conclusion of the “Year of Mercy” declared by Pope Francis, it was suggested that we continue to keep that virtue front and center in our lives. Not a bad idea, it seems, in our broken, frustrating world as we attempt to maintain equilibrium and good faith each day.

Lent is a perfect time for practicing mercy and contemplating the breadth of what it can mean – not just as an aspect of God but in our human interactions as well. Psalm 95 acknowledges God’s mercy to us this morning with the refrain: The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness. The Lord is good to all and compassionate toward all his works.

From the human side, Joan Chittister has a great paragraph about mercy in monastic life in her book Wisdom Distilled From the Daily. In speaking about the qualities of the abbot she writes the following which I find to be comforting as well as challenging.

The abbot must be more intent on mercy than on judgment. But if that is the case, then clearly Benedict knew the world was made up of the very imperfect, the very human where a great deal of mercy would be necessary as we each wound our stumbling, human way to God. We, on the other hand, find it so hard not to expect perfection of ourselves and, because of that, to expect it of others as well. We drive ourselves and drive everyone around us beyond any achievable standard and then wonder why we fail and fail and fail. Benedictine spirituality says that life is a set of weaknesses in search of wholeness and we must be patient with one another’s growth. (p. 115)

Sinners All

Tags

blessing. wisdom. humility, divine love, failures, frailty, Jesus, Mark, perfection, PopeFrancis, righteous, sinners, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, unconditional love, wholeness

In today’s gospel (MK 2:13-17) when he is asked why he is eating “with sinners and tax collectors,” Jesus answers that “those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.” Just in case they don’t get the point he adds: “I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” I always wondered how the people at the table felt when he announced to the Pharisees and the scribes (who were not the dinner guests) that he knew he was eating with sinners. Most of us would be horrified to be put in that category; we would much rather believe that our sins are well-hidden. My perspective has shifted on this point, however, as I’ve gotten older and practiced letting go of what I consider to be my failures. The recognition that perfection might be a goal for the end of life, but only if it means “wholeness” as some have come to define it, is much less anxiety producing. A more sensible way to be is to live in the present, accepting myself as I am and trying to accept others that way too.

Although this way of being is more easily said than done, Pope Francis has been quite helpful in the consideration. When he announced to the world, “I am a sinner,” some could have thought he was just trying to help the rest of us think better of ourselves. I have come to appreciate that what he was really doing was embracing the totality of the human condition and acknowledging that no one is exempt from failure to choose the good – and even to be downright mean on occasion. If this holy man who has electrified the world with his loving, expansive touch can admit his frailty with an honesty that makes me believe he means what he says, why would I not follow his example?

Today I pray a blessing on Pope Francis for his wisdom and humility and for the genuine expressions of love that he pours out in word and deed wherever he goes. And I ask God’s blessing on all of us who are, indeed, sinners – that we might know the embrace of a God who longs to lift us from our sins with the message that divine love is unconditional and that we are, indeed, enfolded in that love.

A Higher Law

Tags

covenant, creation, Deuteronomy, God, heart, Israelites, Jesus, letting go, Lord, love, Matthew, perfect, perfection, Sermon on the Mount, soul, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Much more comfortable with readings that speak plainly of love than of law, I wasn’t thrilled this morning to see Deuteronomy show up with a first line of “this day the Lord God commands you…” I was pleasantly surprised, however as I read on and heard that the observation of the law was to be not with the mind and will (although that would necessarily be involved) but with “all your heart and all your soul.” The entire section (DT 26:16-19) was based on an agreement that sounded quite mutual, resulting in the Israelites becoming “a people peculiarly his own, as he promised.”

Jesus took this theme and expanded it at the end of the Sermon on the Mount (MT 5:43-48) – an extraordinary section that calls us to love those we would not and sometimes think we could not: our enemies and those who hate us. There is that line at the end that people (including myself) are always trying to translate in a softer way than what we learned as children. It says be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. What dawned on me this morning, however, in putting the two readings together (I really am a slow learner sometimes!) is that the perfection is not the perfection that comes from the mind – working hard at while still resisting internally what the “law” calls for. Rather, Jesus is talking about that law of the covenant in Deuteronomy, that agreement of God with his people that comes from the heart and the soul. That law is not about resisting anything but rather letting go of what holds us back and allowing love to flow through us as God does in the entire creation. The perfection of love is what God already is. It is only in God that we can accept the terms of this law and move toward it each day anew so that, in the end, when we see God “face to face” we will recognize ourselves in God’s eyes the way that God already sees us.