Tags
frightening, God of All, hear, hearts, Macrina Wiederkehr, mind, prayer, seven sacred pauses, souls, spirit, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, truth
I heard an urgency in the voice of Macrina Wiederkehr this morning in a prayer she wrote to the God of All. Take it with you today as a plea for what we need to stay the course of courage in this fragile world.
All peoples, all nations, all seasons, all years, all hours and days — You, who have invited us to love, hear our cry! Listen to our prayer. Make our spirits free, our hearts open, our minds healthy, our souls awake. Then we will be able to love as You have asked: with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls. The all is frightening, yet in our deepest moments of truth we know that this is what we desire. O God of all, hear us. (Seven Sacred Pauses, p.104)
This morning I found a quote in Thomas Merton’s Book of Hours that I hope to remember as the day progresses. It is in his Wednesday reflections at dusk, so I thought that if I kept it in my heart and consciousness all day, maybe I could say the same as life unfolds and I arrive at evening. It’s a new way to pay attention to the events of the day, a “holy expectation” perhaps – at least worth a try. Here is what he says:
I was on the internet yesterday checking driving directions to the location of the retreat center I will be visiting next week. It was astonishing how quickly I came to know not only how to get there but also how many miles I would travel depending on which of two possible routes I take (with a map available for each) and how long (to the minute!) it would take to arrive at my destination – including the indication of how dense the traffic might be. Although this service of mapquest – or google maps or another site – is quite efficient, there was a tiny twinge of sadness associated with the exercise. I have always loved maps and figuring out the best way to reach a destination was always satisfying for me. No matter. The important thing is arriving at the destination, I suppose, even though the journey itself can be engaging and instructive if sometimes confusing.
We haven’t had much morning sunshine lately but the light of dawn does come early now. As a first task this morning I felt the need to make a list of things to remember – contacts that are overdue from email, calls that I haven’t returned, “homework” for upcoming events…The last entry is something that generally only occurs to me with the morning sun: I must wash my bedroom window. How much more needful it appears when the sun shines! What a difference a little Windex and elbow grease would make.
The word “trust” keeps floating to the surface of my thoughts and experience these days. I think of how often we exercise trust in another person or group or organization without naming it or even recognizing that we are allowing it to function. We get in a car and trust that other drivers will obey the rules of the road and that we will be able to do the same. We get on a plane and trust that it will not fall out of the sky even though it is extremely heavy and is resting on nothing solid (like a road). We travel to a new city and trust others to take us to places that we could not find ourselves.
There’s an urgency running through the Scripture readings this morning that calls us to recognize this moment. It’s as if we are crouched at the starting line of a race, having registered late, maybe, but waiting for the gun to signal: “GO!” The prophet Joel starts it off with his initial words: Even now, declares the Lord. St. Paul picks up the theme telling us that now is the acceptable time and Psalm 95:8 (the gospel acclamation) chimes in with the familiar line: If today you hear God’s voice…These are the prompts that get us from “READY” to “SET” but what will start us running?
Transition ceremonies for the inauguration of a new president of the United States have already begun. The early morning news is reporting the use of pepper spray by police to quell what seemed to portend a violent protest. Today begins in trepidation and – for me – sadness that we are in such a position of fear of disruption and disrespect from within our own country as well as from foreign terrorists. I have not been enamored of every president who has been elected during my life but I learned early on to respect the office. “How have we come to this?” I ask myself. The only answer I am able to offer myself is: “It’s not that simple.”
I presume it is intentional on the part of those charged with the choice of liturgical texts to have the first reading today (1 JN 2:18-21) begin with the words, “Children, it is the last hour…” Scholars have said that the author was writing to the Christian community to strengthen them against those (“antichrists”) who were spreading untruths about the Christ and about what faithful disciples believed to be imminent, i.e. the fact that Christ would be returning soon to the benefit of “the anointed ones.” It sounds like a serious moment of choice about belief and how to live it. In a way, we might see an analogy in the situation of Americans today. Clearly we are on the cusp of great – one might even say stunning – changes in our country, and it is becoming clearer that similar scenarios are being played out in other parts of the world as well.
I return to this reflective task from an extraordinary outpouring of care that included not only family solidarity but also the prayer and compassion of two faith communities – one Roman Catholic and one Presbyterian – who embraced us because of their experience of my cousin, Paul, and his wife, Janice. Celebrating Paul’s earthly existence and his entry into new life in God, I was not surprised by welcome in two Christian denominations; I presumed hospitality at such an event. There was something deeper there, however. It seemed, rather than two, we were experiencing one seamless worship service because of the respect, compassion and real love that was palpable throughout the day.