Persistent Love

The parable of the Prodigal Father reminds me of the love God expresses in Hosea 11:1-9: "When Israel was a child, I loved him and I called my son out of Egypt."  This is the first place in the Old Testament where we hear of God's love as the cause of God's choosing Israel as his people.  It is not because of anything that we have done that God loves us.  In fact God imagines us here as children who don't even know that he has been a parent caring tenderly for us.  The words Hosea puts on God's lips might well be those of the Prodigal Father speaking to us: "How could I part with you!  How could I give you up!  My compassion grows warm and tender.  For I am God, not a mortal, the Holy One in your midst."

Prodigal

Nature is so prodigal with her beauty.  Dictionary says the word comes from a Latin word that means reckless.  Meanings: 1. recklessly extravagant  2. characterized by wasteful expenditure, lavish  3. yielding abundantly, luxuriant.  The most famous of the parables of Jesus (Luke 15:11-42) is most commonly called "The Prodigal Son," because he so recklessly wastes his inheritance.  But I think that title shifts the attention wrongly to the son when it is the father who is so recklessly extravagant with his love, the image of God, "The Prodigal Father," so lavish in freely offering love to anyone and everyone.

Incarnation

Poet Sister Maura has Mary say,
"It is lonely, Joseph,
 feeling bones and tissue stitch
 eternity to flesh inside my womb."

"Reality with a personality," is the way evolutionary theologian Michael Dowd suggests thinking of God. (quoted by Richard Rohr in The Universal Christ.)

Putting these two notions together might help us capture the Mystery.

Elusive

God appeared to Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-15) and sent him to help the Hebrews escape from Egypt.  Moses asked, "Who shall I tell them sent me?"  Robert Alter in his 2004 translation has God answer "'Ehyeh-'Asher-'Ehyeh, I-Will-Be-Who-I-Will-Be."  It has always struck me that God is refusing to be pinned down by a name.   Like fire, Ehyeh, is impossible to grasp.  God invites us to spend a lifetime in search of the Living God, growing deeper and deeper in our relationship with the Divine.

Becoming Divine

"God became human so that humans might become divine," said St. Athanasius in the 4th century.  Jesus in glory on the mountain is a promise of what we shall become.  We surrender, as Jesus surrendered, to everything God asks of us and we are transformed.

Capturing Glory

It looks like this house and the trees are holding on  to the glory of the sunrise the way Peter wanted to build huts to hold on to the glory he saw in Jesus on the mountain (Luke 9:33.)  We couldn't stand to see the glory of God all the time.  Glimpses are all we are allowed.
(Clicking on the picture enlarges it.)

Easy Access

"You need not go to heaven to  see God,
  nor need you speak loud as if God were far away,
  nor need you cry for wings like a dove to fly to God;
  only be in silence,
  and you will come upon God within yourself."
                         ---Teresa of Avila

Transforming Prayer

Yesterday's sunrise.
Luke doesn't call it a "transfiguration."  He tones it down a little (9:28-36.)  He says simply that the face of Jesus was changed and his clothing became sparkling white.  Luke describes this as a prayer experience. That helps me to think how deep prayer takes us to another world of Light and Love.

A Dance?

When we are sick or get tired dealing with chronic diseases, we may feel that God has left us, but we know that that's not possible.  Yesterday reading Richard Rohr's The Universal Christ I came across an image that hit me.  Our love affair with God is like a dance.  Sometimes for us to step forward God must step back a bit.  The withdrawal is only for a moment and its purpose is to pull us toward God--but it doesn't feel like that in the moment.  It feels like God is retreating.  Or it just feels like suffering.

Filled with the Holy Spirit

Matthew, Mark, and Luke say that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert.  Only Luke adds at the very beginning that Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit (Luke 4:1-13.)  Even without being asked the Holy Spirit floods our being at every moment and is immediately available when we ask.  But I am grateful for the many times that the Spirit is working in me without my awareness.

An Acceptable Fast

The people are complaining to God that they are fasting and he hasn't paid attention (Isaiah 58:11-9) always the reading for the first Friday of Lent.
God answers:
"Look! You seek your own pleasure on your fast days
 and you exploit all your workmen...
 Is that what you call fasting! a day acceptable to the Lord?
 Here's the sort of fast that pleases me:
 free those bound unjustly
 set free the oppressed
 share your bread with the hungry
 shelter the oppressed and the homeless
 clothe the naked when you see them
 do not turn your back on your own.
 Then your light shall blaze out like the dawn!
 and your wound shall be quickly healed over!"

For All Humanity

"God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself."  That's one of the verses in Second Corinthians 5:11-6:2.  The last four verses were used as the first reading for Ash Wednesday,  but I found the verses before that also rich for meditation.  Paul stresses that Christ died for all humanity.

Ash Wednesday

We don't have to be very creative to make a Lent acceptable to God.   Just accepting illnesses and physical limitations.  Giving up our most frequent sins and faults.  If we arrive at Easter proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished, our Lent has been a failure.  We want to come to Easter aware that we are absolutely dependent on God to help us to be good.

Mardi Gras

Mardi=Tuesday; Gras=Fat.  A day of excess before a lean season.  In the seminary I remember dreading Lent.  It was much stricter then.  Baltimore springtime was rainy and the chapel benches were sticky from the humidity.  Now the fast is not longer as strict.  Growing in our relationship with God is more important than punishing ourselves.

Come Back to Me

I meditated this morning on the first reading for Ash Wednesday, Joel 2:12-18.  God begs the whole community, "Come back to me with all your heart."  I can't remember a Lent when I felt that we as both a church and as a nation needed to turn back to God.  It's much easier to see how the leaders need to turn back than to see the responsibility that we also have for bringing about that turn.

Hypocrite!

It's spring! It's summer!

Once, when I confessed anger, the priest told me that the person that provokes anger in us is usually someone like ourselves.  "Why?" asks Jesus, "do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye and never notice the great log in your own?" (Luke 6:41)