Now

 

"For the Now in which God created human beings, and the Now in which the last member of the human race will pass away, and the Now in which I am presently speaking to you, are all the same in God and are nothing other than a single Now."
This is from Meister Eckhart's The Sermons, quoted by Frank X. Gaspar in his novel Stealing Fatima.
My birth and death and all in between are simply Now to God. This means that there is no "Before Christ" or after Christ. When God looks at the human race God sees all of us caught up in the dying and rising Christ. Even though I remember and sometimes regret the past and even though I anticipate and sometimes worry about the future, I really live in God's eternal Now.

Time Goes

 

Across the morning sky all the birds are leaving
Ah! how can they know it's time for them to go....
But I will still be here.
I have no thought of leaving....
I do not fear the time.
Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
--Sandy Denny
A few days ago as I took my morning walk I heard this flock of Canada geese coming and shot straight up, just barely catching the end of the flock. They hang around the lake all summer but they seem all gone now.
I love Judy Collins singing "Who Knows Where the Time Goes." I listen to it more often at this time of year. I am listening to it now as I write. There is a kind of melancholy about it, a feeling that I associate with this dying time of year.
There have been a lot of deaths and funerals these past two weeks. "Time for them to go." Makes me think of my own death and of death in general. The loving embrace in which God holds us here continues into hereafter. By his dying and rising Jesus has transformed death from a blank wall that could stop us cold into a door that opens onto a new life filled with joy and peace.

Cardinal Newman

 

"To live is to change and to be perfect in this world is to have changed often."
Each year as fall takes hold I remind myself of this quote from John Henry Newman. The words are from his writing on the development of doctrine. His evolutionary approach to doctrine was so at odds with the very conservative theology that we were taught in the early 1950's that none of us ever dreamed that Cardinal Newman might become a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. But on September 19 the pope went to England to declare him "Blessed."
He strikes me as a perfect example of faith for our time. He was a famous Anglican priest in 19th century England when he decided to become a Roman Catholic. This took great faith on his part because it meant that he would lose a lot of his Anglican friends. What seems to me to require even greater faith is that he felt he had to do this even though he was very critical of the way authority was exercised in the Roman Catholic Church. What I find encouraging is that his criticism of the contemporary misuse of authority did not keep him from recognizing the truth and goodness and holiness of (for him) the 1900 year history of the Catholic Church.

Fruitful Faith

 

In the first two chapters of the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk the prophet and God have a conversation. The prophet complains about what a mess the world is in. God agrees but then God says,"The upright, because of their faith, shall live."
Near the beginning of his second Letter to Timothy Paul tells him that if his faith is just smouldering he needs to stir it up into the flame it was when he first believed, so that he can better deal with the problems he is having as leader of his community.
In chapter 17 of the Gospel According to Luke Jesus tells the disciples that they must forgive someone as often as the person hurts them. Knowing that they don't have what it takes to do this, the disciples ask, "Increase our faith."
Whether I am trying to cope with the mess in the world and in the Church or in my personal life I can always use more faith. I think of faith as my relationship with God. Like any relationship, it must be constantly growing or it will smoulder and be snuffed out.

Unprofitable Slaves

 

We had finally had two days of rain, some of it very hard. This morning the rising sun peeked out under the clouds and threw an almost unearthly light on the shoreline and trees and bushes, before being hidden again above a completely cloudy sky.
I meditated today on Luke 17:5-10. The initial difficulty I have with the parable is that Jesus takes for granted that I would know what it is like to be the master of a slave. When the slave comes in from doing hard outside work, wouldn't I expect him to fix my meal and wait on me before he gets anything to eat himself? I have a hard time imagining myself into such a situation.
But what really brings me down is telling God, after I have done my duty, that I am an "unprofitable slave." The Greek word used by Luke means "unprofitable." It doesn't seem to fit the context. Neither do some other attempts to translate the word as "useless, worthless, humble, good for nothing." I can say that by doing a retreat day and some Masses and going to a funeral and taking time for meditation I have merely done my duty and expect no particular praise. I realize that I can do those things only because God is doing them in me. In that sense I might be God's "humble" slave, but I can hardly think of all that as "unprofitable" or "worthless."

Looks So Lovely

 

Sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy,
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry,
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely,
Sunshine almost always makes me high.
-- John Denver

Islam

 

Yesterday morning I meditated on Luke 16:19-31, the parable of the rich man ignoring the poor man at his gate. I asked God who the poor man was that I was ignoring. The answer that occurred to me was Americans who are Muslims. I'm sure the recent expression of prejudice towards them has something to do with their coming to mind. Maybe it's a good thing that I rarely thought about the Muslims among us, but now it seems that I want to pay more attention.
I started looking stuff up and was surprised at how far back we have had Muslims in America. The earliest documented was in 1630, a Dutchman who came to New Amsterdam (now New York.) I was astonished that the founders of our nation talked and wrote about Muslims and included them in freedom of religion. In fact in 1788 North Carolina opposed ratifying the Constitution for fear one day Catholics and Muslims might become president.
Many slaves brought to Colonial America were Muslims from Africa. The numbers of Muslims did not begin to increase significantly until the 20th Century. The first mosque built in the United States was in 1934 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
In 2005 96,000 Muslims came to the United States, more than in the previous two decades. Estimates differ widely about how many are in the United States now, from one to seven million. Since Islam began in Arabia, I had always thought that most Arabs were Muslims, but the majority of Arabs in the United States are Christian.
There were Muslims working in the World Trade Center the day of the attacks. There were Muslims among the heroic police and firefighters who were killed that day trying to save the people working in the buildings. They grieve for their dead as well as the Christians and Jews who lost loved ones that day. We do our fellow Americans who are Muslims a terrible injustice by lumping them together with the terrorists who were behind those horrifying attacks.