The second year continues

From St. Cyril writing about the Gospel according to John: (T)he Spirit changes those in whom he comes to dwell; he so transforms them that they begin to live a completely new kind of life.

It would be trite to say I have been amazed that the changes that have marked the passage of the past year and I have no wish to diminish the intensity of what has been seen, experienced by trying to describe what has happened with tired phrasing and clichéd stock responses. All we can do is to rise up in prayer and give thanks to the Holy Spirit for continuing to refresh the old with a new way of living. I am anxious to begin my second trip through Office of Readings and the cycle of the Liturgy of the Hours. I am promised that the revelations will continue to spring out of the sacred texts.

Saint Ambrose, Bishop - an excerpt from his writings

If you shut the door of your mind, you shut out Christ. Though he can enter, he does not want to force his way in rudely, or compel us to admit him against our will.

Closing my eyes and letting my mind build a visual image of this observation, the image I see is of a mud house with simple window openings unprotected by glass with plank shutters and an unframed door opening closed off by an unlatched wooden plank door.  I can see sort of a Hobbit kind of thing except without the charm and warmth of the real hobbit town we experienced in the Lord of the Rings. By securing the doors and window of our simple little hut, we not only shut out the sunlight, we are blocking out the eternal light of Christ. Try as we might, our attempts to hide ourselves away. We are imperfect carpenters and shafts of light stream through cracks in the wood and around the clumsily constructed edges. That we cannot block the light makes us uncomfortable in our seclusion because it reminds us what waits if we only open the door. To reach for the door to open it requires us to overcome the shame we feel for having tried secret ourselves from his presence. Once the door is open and we are again with him it takes but a moment for his healing grace to restore us.

 When we are healed we find ourselves living in a spiritual summer where good things grow and flourish. Inevitably we have to enter a spiritual winter when we try to answer doubts whispered into our hearts by voices that are not from God. We cannot avoid this time because we are human. The gift that growing faith brings us is that we recognize earlier that winter has settled in on us and we can take the first steps ourselves to journey back into the light of spring. The journey begins by simply opening the door to let the light of grace flood in on us and then we can again step out into the brightness.

Psalm 90

To your eyes a thousand years are like yesterday, come and gone, no more than a watch in the night.

God’s time is not our time. The eternity I spent waiting for a meeting to end today was really just a blink of time. I think back of the experiences from years past when time seemed to have come to a stop. Think of the nights we spent walking the floor with a sick baby or even the days the spanned the time from when a close family member died until the funeral came. We struggled to acknowledge when we were stuck in those fear filled, anxious or sorrowful days that we would survive to the next day. Sometimes it was more than we could bear just to wait out an hour or a few minutes. Then, as we slid unthinking into the future memory of frozen  time fades until it becomes like a scar we only think we can still see for the gift of healing is that we understand that time does move on at a constant rate and that time is our friend.

The other gift I have taken from the treasure store of scripture is that even though we who share this experience are few in number and our collective lives are but a blip in God’s history, his love for each of us is surpasses our ability to comprehend it. As minimal as we might be, He has a plan for us that was conceived before our ancestors came into being. So then, who I am to question that plan? A human who still needs to work at getting in step with the plan before he runs out of his time here.  

A grownup looks at the 23rd Psalm - verse 1

The Lord is my shepherd. There is nothing I lack.

There has been major shift in my perspective of this line since childhood. When I first memorized the verse, I took the meaning to be that all of my wants would be met. I would always get the extra dollop of whipped cream and a cherry on top of my hot chocolate when we went to the Park Café after church on Sundays. The coveted peddle car I found at the department store would assuredly be found under the tree on Christmas morning and let’s not forget the State Farm insurance and Western Montana College bumper stickers that should cover the fenders. I expected that my emotional and physical desires would be met. Times and desires have changed. Now when we pray the second line we are confident that our spiritual needs will be met. 

23rd Psalm - The beginning

The 23^rd Psalm:  The Lord is my shepherd.

That means that logically I have to admit that I am one of his sheep. My great uncle was sheep rancher and I was fortunate to spend a fair amount of time his ranch as young boy. I was exposed to sheep enough to determine they are not the brightest of God’s creatures. In fact I was amazed at how dumb they behaved. To say that I am like a sheep and be ok with it takes some effort. When I consider how many of our Jewish and Christian brothers and sisters have clung to the prayer in hours of sorrow or learned to recite it as a teaching prayer as children, I realize I am in a rather large crowd of sheep. I am in the best of company. The Lord is my shepherd and I am filled with joy at the thought of it.

Like a deer yearns for running water

I have mentioned before that my backyard borders Beltview Park which runs down into town from the base of Mount Ascension. Since pleasant weather is finally upon us the last few days, I have been able to pray the Hours outside and enjoy the rural atmosphere of my backyard. As I settled down to read I noticed a mule deer doe just beyond the open rail fence marks the boundary of my yard and the greenbelt.  She was standing awkwardly, straddling 2 tiny spotted fawns while they nursed urgently.

Seeing deer in my backyard is not unusual and they have stirred my imagination before in writing my share. I ended up just watching momma deer and the fawns until I had to leave for an early morning meeting. The fawns had to have been only a few hours old and were still wobbly an uncertain on their feet. I was glad my Labrador has long since made peace with our long legged visitors so all she did was to watch them with some mild interest before resuming her early morning nap.

The second reading this morning was from a sermon on psalm forty-one addressed to the newly baptized by Saint Jerome, priest who wrote, referencing the first line of the Psalm:

As the deer longs for running water, so my soul longs for you, my God. Just as the deer longs for running water, so do our newly baptized members, our young deer, so to speak, also yearn for God.

I spent some time before I had to leave home reflecting on this line for some kind of inspiration. I felt certain that had to be some reason why I should be granted the privilege of watching the doe with her fawns the same morning the reading spoke of deer. No inspiration came to me and I resigned myself to the realization that this would be one of those days were my effort at lectio would just come up empty

I am filling in as a temporary substitute Sacristan for the Thursday noon Mass at the Cathedral since Val is gone for the summer. As communion was proceeding at mass, my eyes were drawn to a young lady, Amy, coming up the center aisle to receive communion. I was, in that moment, blessed with understanding of what eluded me about the reading. I was looking for some kind of meaning for my experience, for my yearning, for my desire for God but today the message was not about me. The message was about Amy. She was received into the community this past Easter so she is literally newly baptized. The yearning I saw in her face, the joy that flooded her countenance as she received communion and the peace that followed the look of joy as she turned to back to her seat was what St. Jerome was describing in his sermon.

 
The lesson for me is that I should not focus solely on myself in the process of lectio. Sometimes the lesson I need to learn is about how God moves the heart of others around me and wonderful that experience can be if I open myself up to recognize it.

St. Origen

One of his homily turned the battle of Jericho into a metaphor for the New Testament. His text equates Jericho with the world, the spies of the Joshua as being the apostles and the harlot Rahab became a metaphor for us, the body of believers. In the Old Testament story, the Israelites knew to spare the household of Rahab because she hung a scarlet cord from her window. In Origen’s mind the cord became a metaphor for the blood of Christ which saves us all. I knew very little of Origen before today but it appears there is large body of this work that remains in existence despite dating back to the early third century and his ability to spin metaphors between the history of the Old Testament and the experience of the new testament is certainly something that will draw further inquiry from me in the future. For now, however, I am left to wonder how I should display the scarlet cord that will spare me from destruction when the end comes. There is no physical sign that can represent my belief that spiritual salvation awaits me. All that I can do is hope that when God looks beyond my physical image and deep into my soul he will find that I have prepared my inner self, my essence to radiate the glory of belief in life eternal. The words of the old song we often sang when we were young ring through my ears loudly today: “And they will know we are Christians by our love, by our love. They will know we are Christians by our love.” The expression of that love for one another will be our scarlet cord for the Lord to find when the time comes for us.