"Like a little child..."

Unless you enter the kingdom of God as a little child, you will not enter it at all.

 

Several years ago, I was in France with some friends who had a three-year-old grandson, little Theo.  We spent a week with our hosts and their extended family.  During that time, for some reason, little Theo fell in love with me, perhaps because I did not "court" him.  As the oldest of six children, I learned at an early age that we must allow small children to come to us, somewhat like our relationship with cats.  If we immediately try to "make friends" with little children upon meeting them, they tend to hide behind their mother's skirts, where they feel safe.  But if we tend to ignore small children and go about our business with adults, the children feel safe "out in the open," where they can size us up at their own pace.

 

Over the space of a week, little Theo approached me a little at a time, to get my attention.  At first, he would come to sit beside me on the sofa, just looking.  I would smile at him, but not attempt to hug or engage him in conversation, and I would continue to be engaged with the adult conversation.  Then, he began to bring me his favorite toy to look at, clearly wanting me to love what he loved too.  So we began to converse (with the help of translation) on his terms, not mine, about the things he was interested in.  By the fourth day of the visit, as we were all sitting at table -- there were about ten people altogether-- in a restaurant.  Little Theo had finished his meal, but as usual, the adults continued their conversation over glasses of wine.  Theo slipped under the table and crawled to my chair, leaning against my legs.  I reached down and grasped his hand in mine, without looking at him, but continuing to talk and listen to the adults.  He held my hand wordlessly for a long time, and I felt the love between us.  Then, he emerged from under the tablecloth and slowly reached up to give me a kiss on the cheek and a small, sweet hug around the neck -- again, with no words passing between us.  His family was amazed; they had never seen him do anything like this before.  Finally, I felt free to give him a loving embrace, a real hug, which he was happy to get and return.

 

This entire incident reminded me of Mary Magdalene at the house of the publican, sitting uninvited at the feet of Jesus, loving Him without words, and knowing His love for her.  Little children come to us, like Mary Magdalene came to Jesus, not out of reasoning or knowledge, but out of a spiritual attraction to one who they sense loves them.  We do not 'explain' our love to a small child, because it would be empty words to a vessel that cannot yet understand.  As we try to "explain" what we mean, who we are, we usually end up making things worse:  Never explain; your friends don't need it, and your enemies won't believe you anyway.

 

Dionysius the Areopagite, an anonymous monk and mystic who lived in Syria in the fifth century, wrote under an assumed name about the Christian and mystical life.  His theme was that we can experience a union with God in this life only by "unknowing," much as Theo came to me without knowing who I was -- he spoke only French; I spoke only English.

 

In the classic Cloud of Unknowing, by an anonymous writer in 14th century England, the author says this: Knowledge hinders, not helps you, in contemplation.  Be content feeling moved in a delightful, loving way by something mysterious and unknown, leaving you focused entirely on God, with no other thought than of him alone.  I think that advice perfectly describes what I experienced with little Theo.  We could not even communicate on a human level; all our love had to be on another level.  If I had remained in France, I think he would have learned my language, and I would have learned his, in our effort to draw even closer to one another.  And the same is true of God.  We do not "learn doctrine," and then love God.  Rather, we respond in some mysterious way to His love for us, and gradually, we come to understand and be able to express our experience with Him, as did the author of Cloud: Contemplation is the free, more penetrating gaze of a mind, suspended with wonder.

 

"Thinking is a rambling analysis of many things, a truth John Keats observes in 'Ode to a Nightingale,' when he writes that 'the dull brain perplexes and retards' (from the Introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing, a New Translation by Carmen A. Butcher).  Many writers have focused on the Song of Songs as a paradigm of the "superior wisdom" of the human heart over the intellect, noting that the Lover in the poem listened for the Voice of the Beloved with the 'ears of experience,' rather than with the mind.  Even a three-year-old child has enough experience to listen with the heart.  It is the mind of a teenager that destroys and obscures the ability to listen for the voice of love.  Gregory the Great penned a now-well-known phrase: "Love itself is a kind of knowing."

 

We do not 'analyze' those we love; when we begin to do so, we abandon the gaze of our hearts and enter into our minds.  The love of the heart will reveal to us the Truth we seek; the mind will lead us astray in the matter of love.  Teresa of Avila tried to put into words the power of contemplation to "revive a desolate and very dry heart."  She compared the gaze of love, or contemplation, to "a union with God that is like rain that comes down abundantly from heaven to soak and saturate the whole garden [of the soul]."  When our minds and hearts are sick and weary, sitting in a small room with Jesus Christ and letting him speak (perhaps without words) to our hearts is the beginning of prayer.

Knowing God

If you knew Me, you would know my Father also (Jn. 8:19).

 

...it is love that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings (Hos. 6:6)

 

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The cover of Give Us This Day for March is the image of a wood carving of St. Joseph with the Christ Child, from St. Wilfred's Church in England.  The artist has captured on Joseph's face the most beautiful expression of serenity and love for the child he holds in his arms.  And the child returns to his earthly father the expression of contentment, peace, and unconditional love. 

 

Our Father in heaven was never content with our man-made, made-up, images of Who He Is.  He was never content with being worshipped from afar with sacrifices, whether of burnt offerings or human sacrifice, or slashing ourselves with knives, as did the Indian tribes of South America.  God has always wanted man to know Him. He has always desired the kind of communion with us portrayed in the wood carving mentioned above.  He has always wanted to hold us in His arms, protecting us from all harm, loving us with every fiber of His Being.

 

Jesus said, Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent....for you granted him authority over all people, that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him (Jn. 17: 8 & 7).  Mankind, however, has always preferred his own images of God to the true knowledge of God As He Is.  Man has always wanted his idols, the ones he carves himself, to the revelation of Who God Is.  The evil that is natural to man's heart pushes away the Truth about God (the "living water") and replaces it with "broken cisterns" that we make for ourselves.  The Greeks imagined the gods in their own image; they loved their jealous, philandering, lustful, and demanding gods.  I would say that every culture, every tribe, has continued to create a god in its own image and likeness.

 

Jesus came as 'the exact image of the invisible God."  He came in the flesh, that we might see, handle, touch, smell, and taste the love of God for us in the flesh, just as Joseph was able to hold the child in his arms and gaze into the eternal love of God for him.  If we cannot know God from studying and knowing Jesus Christ, we will never know any god except that which we create for ourselves, or the god someone else has created and handed on to us. 

 

A deacon in New Orleans recently told a group of teens about a close friend of his whose wife developed a serious illness shortly after they were married.  The young wife is paralyzed, blind, and deaf, and her husband is her caretaker.  "This is not how he expected his marriage to turn out," the deacon told the teens.  "For the past 31/2 years, he comes home from work every day to bathe her and feed her.  "He told me, 'That's what I do, Josh. I'm in love with my wife.  That's why I do this.  I can't take a vacation from the vocation God has called me to."

 

The deacon left the conversation with his friend and went back to the seminary, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament:  "God," he said, "can I ever love You the way my friend loves his wife?"  Deacon Johnson said, "There was a silence.  And so I shut up.  After that, I heard Him say, 'Josh, will you let me love you like that?" (from the Clarion Herald, Mar. 22. p.3).

 

Jesus told Peter that if he (Peter) did not allow Jesus to wash his feet, Peter would have no part in Jesus.  Peter's pride crumbled in the face of such love from his Master, the One he had already confessed to be "the Son of the Living God."  Peter relented, allowing Christ to wash his feet, a preparation for the forgiveness and greater washing that was still to come.  If we do not admit that we are spiritually ignorant, paralyzed, deaf, and dumb, if we do not allow the Christ to wash not only our feet, but our head and our hands and our souls, we will never come to know the living God either.  If we do not let Him love us, we will continue to feed our hunger by creating other idols to worship, idols that tell us to slash ourselves or to offer our children as holocausts.

 

If we would know God, we must allow Him to love us the way Jesus loves us.

Evangelical!

About 15 or 20 years ago, I was teaching at the college and every single day, I was in terrible pain.  My feet hurt so much that I was taking 4 pairs of shoes to school and changing all day long.  I could barely make it back and forth across campus for classes and meetings.  When I got home, I was so exhausted from the constant pain that I would have to lie down for an hour or more before starting dinner.  One day, on the way back from class to my office, all I could think about was taking off my shoes and walking barefoot, carrying both my shoes and my briefcase in the most professional manner I could manage.  "Oh, God!" I burst out spontaneously, "if You will just tell me what to do, I promise I'll do it!"

That afternoon, I decided to stop on my way home to see my mother, something I rarely did because of my exhaustion and because of my tight schedule of preparing lessons, grading papers, and fixing dinner.  When I complained about the pain in my feet, she said, "It sounds as if you are developing arthritis; that's the way mine began."  I didn't think she could be right; I was "too young" for arthritis, I thought.  But then, she went on, "And if you are craving anything, it is poisoning you.  Corn is the worst offender!"  As she told me of the intense pain that had led her to that discovery, I thought again that that could not be the problem.  I had stopped eating popcorn about a year previously because it was making me sick, even though I was craving it.  And I had not eaten any corn in recent memory. 

The next morning, I reached into the pantry for the instant grits I had been craving for about 3 months, eating them every morning and sometimes at night before I went to bed.  "Wait a minute," I thought, "that's corn!"  Intrigued, I got out all my books on natural healing and began doing some research.  I discovered that all the nightshade vegetables ---corn, potatoes, eggplant, and potatoes -- aggravated arthritis.  I also discovered that corn was at the top of every list as the worst offender.  So I decided on an experiment: for one month, I would avoid all those foods.  At the end of the month, all the very expensive shoes I had been buying and then putting in the Goodwill Bag came out again.  To my delight, I discovered that as long as I did not eat corn or the other vegetables (which I had grown in my backyard and loved), I could wear every pair of shoes I owned. After my body had been purified, if I cheated and said that "one" tomato wouldn't hurt, I knew the minute my feet touched the floor in the morning that I had eaten something on the forbidden list -- sometimes, even without realizing it. 

All these years, I have been entirely free from arthritis, except when I cheated, and I have become positively evangelical in my determination to help others avoid the pain and inflammation I had experienced at one time. I have "given my testimony and my witness" to family, friends, and even strangers in airports all these years.  Whenever someone gives me an opening, I will tell my story with joy!  Even if I do not have an opening, if I see someone in obvious pain from arthritis, I want to tell them to try my remedy.

 Last week, I ate corn for the first time in about 15 years, and by 2:00 am, I had to get out of bed because the swelling was so painful I could not find a comfortable spot.  Yesterday, I ate corn again -- just a little that happened to be floating in the white turkey chili I had ordered.  I slept well, but as my feet touched the floor this morning, I realized that I would not be able to wear shoes today.  My body was in a little pain, since I was not entirely poisoned, but my spirit was, like the crippled man healed by Peter, "walking, and leaping and praising God!" (Acts.3).  Spiritually, I was literally jumping for joy, thanking God for all the pain, swelling, and inflammation He had delivered me from all these years.  The small pain I have today reminds me of all the pain I have not had all these years, and I am so grateful that I could fall down with my face to the floor in worship, praise, and thanksgiving to God, who inspired me to stop that afternoon, and to my mother, who shared her story with me.

This experience leads me to a couple of conclusions about our spirituality.  First, if we are not evangelical about our experience with God, it may be that we have not yet realized how much pain we have been delivered from.  It may be that we are "suffering in silence," thinking that life is supposed to be full of pain and misery, that we are "suffering for our sins," or whatever.  If we are not willing to "try Jesus," it may be that we have not actually been in enough pain, or not helpless enough to deliver ourselves from pain, to turn to him.  The woman at the well, after five husbands, and a new guy, obviously was thirsty enough to crave the living water He promised to give her -- and as a result of drinking this water, she left her jug at the well and ran to the city to tell others that she had been set free from constant pain.  Many cradle Catholics grow up with doctrine, but fail to realize that doctrine will not "deliver us from evil" any more than the Law and sacrifices of the Old Testament could purify us from sin.  All the Law and the sacrifices could do was to make us acutely aware of the pain of sin.  We still needed a Deliverer, Someone to set us free from our psychic pain and suffering.

Those who have been addicted and set free; those who have been clinically depressed and delivered, know the Song of Isaiah 61:

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim freedom for the captives

and release for the prisoners...

to comfort all who mourn,...

to bestow on them a crown of beauty

instead of ashes,

the oil of gladness

instead of mourning,

and a garment of praise

instead of a spirit of despair.

They will be called oaks of righteousness,

a planting of the Lord

for the display of his splendor.

 

The next time we are accosted by a true witness, a true evangelical, instead of being annoyed by his religious fervor, we should recognize, "Here is someone who has been delivered from pain by the ministry of Jesus Christ in his life."  And instead of pushing him away, we might ask, "Tell me your story; what pain had you in its grip?  How were you delivered?"  Because, believe me, once we have been delivered from pain, we want the world to know that deliverance is available to all who will "try Jesus!"

The Laying On of Hands

The Acts of the Apostles is an amazing book.  Some people have said that it should have been called "The Acts of the Holy Spirit," and indeed, it is truly the story of how the Holy Spirit acted through human instruments.  Peter, James, John, and the rest had no "planning sessions" or committee meetings to decide how to go about doing what Jesus told them to do.  Rather, they had a novena -- nine days of collective prayer -- awaiting the Promised "Gift of the Father" that Jesus had told them about.  "Don't do anything; don't go anywhere," He said, "until you receive the gift my Father promised, about which you have heard me speak...in a few days, you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit" (Acts 1:4).

When the Holy Spirit descended, the Apostles simply had to hold on to His coattails, things moved so fast.  The first day, 3000 people accepted the message and were baptized.  These people, visitors to Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost, returned to their homes throughout Mesopotamia, Asia, Egypt, Rome, Arabia, etc., filled with the Holy Spirit and the knowledge of Jesus Christ -- without a lot of catechesis!  The Spirit Himself taught them, just as Jesus said, "Unless you are born again of water and the Holy Spirit, you cannot see the kingdom of God."  These 3000 converts were the first church, the first missionaries, as they returned home filled with the Good News.  By the time the Apostles began to spread out from Jerusalem, there were pockets of new Christians all over the known world, baptized in and by the Holy Spirit, and awaiting further instruction from the Apostles. 

Last night, when I returned home from class, I noticed that I had missed a call from a Vietnamese woman who had been a powerful influence during my 2010 experience of lung cancer.  She was the one who admitted me to the hospital, after a previous day of chaos and confusion, when it seemed that not a single hospital of the five she called had me registered for surgery the next day.   It was late in the afternoon when I received the call to report to the hospital for pre-opt work; I lived 45 minutes away from the hospital, and knew that if I arrived after 4:00 pm, the pre-opt work could not be done.  I could barely make it on time, even speeding.  When I arrived, it was 3:50, and the hospital had no record of me.  Khanh told me, "don't worry; God sent you to my desk.  I will take care of you."  She ran to the back and requested the staff to remain overtime to process my tests. While they waited, she called every hospital in the region.  Nada.  She could not reach my doctor; he was gone for the day.  Meanwhile, the staff waited.  By the time my doctor could be reached and agree to admit me to Northshore Hospital, it was 5:00 pm.  (He had registered me at another hospital, but they had lost the paperwork.  Since I arrived at the hospital he had mentioned in the office, he agreed to perform the surgery there.)  Needless to say, I was extremely grateful to Khanh for her calm and professional handling of the situation, as well as her repeated confidence that I would be okay.

In our conversation last night, Khanh asked what class I was teaching.  Then she said to me, "I need to come to your class; I am a 'cheater Catholic'."  She went on to tell me that she had been married for 23 years to a devout Catholic man; her religion was ancestor-worship.  Whenever she went to church with him, she felt she was wasting her time, and she was bored.  When her husband was dying of cancer, however, knowing that he had prayed all their married life for her conversion, she wanted to be baptized as a gift to him.  She told me that he was such a good and generous man all their life, and that she admired his faith.  She had no lessons in Catholicism; she had almost no instruction at all.  Her husband's pastor agreed to baptize and confirm Khanh immediately.  Her husband and a nun at the church were her sponsors.  Khanh told me that as Father Rareshide baptized and confirmed her, her husband and the nun lifted their hands over her in prayer.  As they did so, immediately, for the first time in her life, she, in her words, "felt full."  "Miss Gayle," she said last night, "until that moment, I never realized that I had felt empty my whole life.  But now I felt full."

Khanh's ministry to "her" cancer patients (the ones God sends to her desk) is amazing!  Her stories sound just like the ones in the Acts of the Apostles.  She prayed every morning and every night and "a hundred times a day" for her patients.  She visited each one of them before her shift at the hospital began each day, and she spent an hour in the chapel each morning praying for them.  When she looked into their eyes, she could see their soul and what they were experiencing.  One evening, she visited a man who had esophageal cancer, one of the hardest to treat and cure.  He was completely depressed, sitting in total darkness.  The next day, the man's family came to her desk, asking what she had done the evening before.  After she left him, his depression lifted, and he returned to his normal personality.  Today, despite the fact that 99% of esophageal cancer patients die from the disease, he is still alive, and his cancer is gone!

When Khanh tells me she needs to learn about Catholicism, I tell her that she already knows everything she needs to know -- the love and the power of God, taught to her by the Holy Spirit at the "Laying on of hands."  Her instruction was about the same as the apostles gave to the 3000 on Pentecost, and it was enough!  I should write a book about Khanh's ministry as a hospital admit clerk.  Through her compassion and prayers, the Holy Spirit has touched hundreds of cancer patients with comfort, courage, and healing.  I was blessed to be one of the people God sent to her desk.  From the fullness she has received, she has given to so many others.  From the "laying on of hands" she received, she has "laid hands" on everyone she has met.  The same Holy Spirit Who acted in the Acts of the Apostles continues His action even today through human hands and hearts!

On Cats and Dogs and The Body of Christ

Connections were made between continents and churches...we all came away feeling blessed by our encounter with such a huge effort achieved through collaborative human talents and love (from the blog of a friend on participating in a St. Joseph's altar).

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!" and the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!" ....But God has combined the members of the body ... so that there should be no division in the body, but its parts should have equal concern for each other...Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it....If they were all one part, where would the body be?  As it is, there are many parts, but one body (I Cor. 12:14ff).
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In The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis devotes a special section of his encyclical to "The Evangelizing Power of Popular Piety."  While he does not mention St. Joseph's Altars specifically in the section, my friend's blog so perfectly describes one of the areas of "popular piety" that embodies what Pope Francis puts into words in his letter:

Once the Gospel has been inculturated in a people, in their process of transmitting their culture, they also transmit the faith in ever new forms...Each portion of the people of God [i.e., the "hand" and the "eye" of the Body of Christ] by translating the gift of God into its own life and in accordance with its own genius, bears witness to the faith it has received and enriches it with new and eloquent expressions...Herein lies the importance of popular piety, a true expression of the spontaneous missionary activity of the people of God.  This is an ongoing and developing process, of which the Holy Spirit is the principal agent. Popular piety enables us to see how the faith, once received, becomes embodied in a culture and is constantly passed on....Popular piety "manifests a thirst for God which only the poor and the simple can know...it makes people capable of generosity and sacrifice even to the point of heroism, when it is a question of bearing witness to belief.  Closer to our own time, Benedict XVI, speaking about Latin America, pointed out that popular piety is a "precious treasure of the Catholic Church," in which we see "the soul of the Latin American peoples.: the Aparecida Document describes the riches which the Holy Spirit pours forth in popular piety by his gratuitous initiative.  On that beloved continent, where many Christians express their faith through popular piety, the bishops refer to it as "the peoples mysticism."  It is truly "a spirituality incarnated the culture of the lowly."  ...it is a legitimate way of living the faith, a way of feeling part of the Church and a manner of being missionaries....Journeying together to shrines and taking part in other manifestations of popular piety, also by taking one's children or inviting others, is in itself an evangelizing gesture.

 

There is much more to Pope Francis' letter, which I would love to continue quoting here, but what my friend wrote in her blog about participating in a communal effort to express the faith of an elderly woman who years ago had made a promise to St. Joseph so perfectly embodies the sentiments of Pope Francis!  He is trying to get the church as a whole to say what Paul wrote to the Corinthians:  "the hand cannot say to the eye, "I have no need of you...."

 

Some years ago, at a social gathering, a friend casually mentioned that she had observed that, in general, people tend to fall into one of two categories.  She said that when meeting new people, she could usually tell whether they were "cats" or "dogs."  The "dog" people fell all over themselves trying to love other people and gathering the affection of others in return.  "Cat" people, however, tended to be laid back, observing and thinking, allowing others to decide whether they wanted to "pet the cat" or not.  "Cat" people were affectionate in their own way, but did not immediately jump up and put their paws on other people's chests, with their tongues hanging out, saying "I love you; pet me, please."  Now that I live with 3 cats, I have noticed a tender and undying affection in all of them, expressed in different ways.  All of them want to be in the same room where I am, and sometimes on my lap, but often just curled up beside me, or at my feet, peacefully napping.  There is much relaxation about being around a cat, just as there is much joy in being around a loving dog.  And I have noticed that it is not true that dogs and cats don't get along.  Rather, I think what is true from the perspective of both species is expressed in the words of Henry Higgins: "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" (Why can't a cat be more like a dog? -- and vice-versa).

 

Pope Francis is obviously aiming to get the church to appreciate both the cats and the dogs in the body of Christ, but of course he is much more eloquent in his words than I am!  And he opens our eyes to the faith of those who "express that content more by way of symbols than by discursive reasoning.....to understand this reality, we need to approach it with the gaze of the Good Shepherd, who seeks not to judge but to love....I think of the steadfast faith of those mothers tending their sick children who, though perhaps barely familiar with the articles of the creed, cling to a rosary; or of all the hope poured into a candle lighted in a humble home with a prayer for help from Mary, or in the gaze of tender love directed to Christ crucified....they are the manifestation of a theological life nourished by the working of the Holy Spirit who has been poured into our hearts (cf. Rom. 5:5).

 



Our Source of Joy

Today, I want to continue quoting from The Joy of the Gospel, the first encyclical of Pope Francis, in the hope that whoever samples his writing will have a thirst for more and will read the entire letter.  In a way, I wish that we still called these letters "Epistles," since the word "encyclical" is (1) hard to spell and (2) sounds so formal, like something that should be studied by theologians but might be above the rest of our daily lives. 

Goodness always tends to spread.  Every authentic experience of truth and goodness seeks by its very nature to grow within us, and any person who has experienced a profound liberation becomes more sensitive to the needs of others. As it expands, goodness takes root and develops....

 

The Gospel offers us the chance to live life on a higher plane, but with no less intensity: "Life grows by being given away, and it weakens in isolation and comfort.  Indeed, those who enjoy life most are those who leave security on the shore and become excited by the mission of communicating life to others.".....Consequently, an evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral!....And may the world of our time, which is searching, sometimes with anguish, sometimes with hope, be enabled to receive the good news not from evangelizers who are dejected, discouraged, impatient, or anxious, but from ministers of the Gospel whose lives glow with fervor, who have first received the joy of Christ....

 

God constantly renews his faithful ones, whatever their age....He is forever young and a constant source of newness....With this newness, he is always able to renew our lives and our communities, and even if the Christian message has known periods of darkness and ecclesial weakness, it will never grow old. ...

 

Christians have the duty to proclaim the Gospel without excluding anyone.  Instead of seeming to impose new obligations, they should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty, and who invite others to a delicious banquet.  It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but "by attraction."

 

There are many things in this letter that will interest all active and involved Catholics today.  In fact, I think that a careful and systematic reading of The Joy of the Gospel, preferably in a group setting, would renew the face of the church among those who want to be more involved but are not sure about what they should do or how they should do it.  If nothing else, reading this encyclical under the anointing of the Holy Spirit should awaken every reader to a desire for the encounter with Jesus Christ that is the source of such joy!

 



The Body That Heals Itself (Continued)

(during the previous entry, my computer suddenly shut down and would not allow me to continue working in any capacity.  I had to simply turn it off and now am continuing the previous blog.)

As with the human body, there has always been the church we see and the parts we don't see -- the parts animated by the Holy Spirit and working to heal the Body of Christ against all illness and corruption.  With the first encyclical from Pope Francis, I see "rivers of living water" flowing out to heal the church and to bring it to a new stage of life.  Of course, I cannot quote much from this long document, but I can quote enough in a few days to give readers a sense of where the church is heading under the leadership of this new pope:

 

The joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus.  Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness, and loneliness.  With Christ, joy is constantly born anew.  [Note:  already, his opening sound much like the writings of the early church fathers, like Ignatius of Antioch, Ireneaus, etc.]  In this Exhortation, I wish to encourage the Christian faithful to embark upon a new chapter of evangelization marked by this joy, while pointing out new paths for the Church's journey in years to come....

 

I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them....The Lord does not disappoint those who take this risk....Our Christian joy drinks of the wellspring of his brimming heart....

 

There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter.  I realize of course that joy is not expressed the same way at all times in life, especially at moments of great difficulty.  Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures...

 

Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Thanks solely to this encounter --or renewed encounter--with God's love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption.  We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.

 

Encyclicals are not widely read by Catholics, unfortunately, but they hold some of the best teachings of the church in different ages.  In this new century, I would suggest that every serious Catholic ponder the words of Pope Francis as he leads the church in new directions of health and healing.

The Body That Heals Itself

Recently, I have been in a lot of pain, pain that has shut down the normal operations of my day to day life.  With the wisdom and guidance of doctors who could advise me how to help the body heal itself, the pain diminishes a bit more each day now, and I am in amazement at the healing operations of our bodies -- the way they know what to do in a crisis.

About 40 years ago, having been renewed in mind and spirit by an anointing from the Holy Spirit, I looked hard at the Catholic church and decided that it was a sick and dying church.  I wanted to hear more emphasis on the Word of God, which I had grown to love and wanted to see taught in homilies and bible-study classes.  I wanted my children to learn Scripture and the love of God given to us in Jesus Christ.  One Sunday, after a particularly distressing sermon, I cried out to God, "I feel like I'm at a wake!"  (I had been thinking for some time of following the lead of some of my charismatic friends and looking for a more dynamic church.)  At that moment, the Spirit spoke to me clearly in my heart and mind:  Have I told you to leave the church?  I had to admit that my thoughts along those lines were coming from me, and not from the Lord.  "No," I answered.  If you don't stay for the wake, you won't be here for the resurrection, the Lord said to me.  And that settled it.  As Scripture says, "Let peace be the umpire in your heart, settling all your decisions."  And I did have great peace in that decision, even though at the time, I saw no changes in the church. 

The changes came slowly, but they came surely over the next 40 years.  Those who had been influenced by the charismatic movement of the 70's became the musicians, the teachers, the liturgists, the preachers, etc. of a newly-reviving and energetic church.  At the same time, another movement was taking place, just as Jesus foretold:  the weeds would grow among the tares, because "an enemy has done this."  Even while the church was renewing itself, coming back from the grave, evil was growing rampant with clergy abuse.  From the time Herod heard of a 'new-born king,' he determined to destroy the threat to his throne.  And spiritually, every time there is new growth in individuals or in the Body of Christ, there will be a concomitant threat to destroy the new growth. 

What people cannot see from the outside is the healing process that has been going in the Body, the Church, ever since the disease, the pain, has become evident.  I cannot detail here all that has been done in the past 20 years to rid the Body of the toxins that were poisoning it, and all the safeguards that have been put in place to ensure that such evil will not continue to grow.  What I would like to highlight here, however, is the first encyclical of Pope Francis, released on Jan. 16 of this year.  The Joy of the Gospel is heading the church in new directions, undreamed of 40 years ago, when the church was circling the wagons against the Indians -- a reaction that had begun centuries ago with the Counter Reformation, as a reaction against Protestantism.

I believe the Church, the Body of Christ, knows how to heal itself if it can just listen to the wisdom of the "doctors" who have seen the disease and can guide the Patient into new avenues of healing.  All along, even when we (or I) have not been able to "see" the healing process, there was always an undercurrent of health and of hope.  T

The Rocking Chair Class

When I was teaching The Bible as Literature, every semester as I reached Genesis 12, "The Call of Abraham," I would haul in a rocking chair to the classroom.  Sitting in the chair, I would tell the story of how I came to Delgado, a story full of the wondrous and strange design of God in my life.  Then I would invite others in the class to come sit in the rocking chair and to tell their own stories.  Students who would never "stand" before the class would eagerly come forward to sit and rock and reflect on their life's journey. 

Today, I have a rocking chair on my front porch.  It reminds me of my mission at this stage of my life --to reflect on my life's journey as somehow mysteriously designed by God-- and to invite others to do the same.  All spiritual writers recognize the universal patterns of the faith journey; it is the same journey outlined in the journey of Abraham, beginning in Genesis 12: Come to a land I will show you...and I will make of you a blessing to all....

In The Great Themes of Scripture: Old Testament, Richard Rohr writes this:

Evolutionary faith is not something you have to believe in.  It is something that you can verify in your own life.  But it is something that you can only see in retrospect.  Only from the vantage point of where you've gotten can you see how you got there, how the Lord was leading you from the beginning, and how the entire story was really a journey of faith.  People who have never trusted in God or who are just starting out in the life of faith cannot see this, because they have not yet experienced it.  But people who have experienced it eventually come to a point where they can begin to understand it, to see how the Lord was leading them from where they started out to where they ultimately got.

 

When they look back at their beginnings, people of faith can perceive the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary.  They can begin to see God's action in their lives, much the same as the Israelites looking back saw God's action in their history. But at the beginning, everything seems so ordinary.  When St. Francis started out begging stones to rebuild a church, he didn't know that the Lord was leading him into the rebuilding of the medieval Church. When St. Benedict or St. Ignatius or Dorothy Day or Martin Luther King were starting out, they weren't sure where they were being led. Maybe they weren't even certain that God was calling them to found orders or to start movements.  And certainly along the way there were dark periods when they did not know where they were going.  Only later, when they looked back on their lives, did they see their paths illuminated and understand that the Lord had been there from the very beginning, leading them all the way through (p. 111-112).

 

Reflecting on our life journey is a form of prayer; it can lead us to acknowledge the hand of God; it can lead to praise, thanksgiving, and worship of His love and providence on our behalf.  Most of Scripture is reflection and commentary on "what God has done for us."  It is not that we have loved God first, but that He has loved us and acted on our behalf.  Almost all of the psalms dance around the theme expressed in Psalm 118: I was pushed back and about to fall, but the Lord helped me.  The Lord is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation (vv. 13-14).  But Psalm 106 is a sobering reminder of what happens to a people, to an individual, who refuses to remember what God has done:

 

When our fathers were in Egypt,

they gave no thought to your miracles;

they did not remember your many kindnesses,

and they rebelled by the sea, the Red Sea.....(v.7)

 

they soon forgot what He had done

and did not wait for His counsel...(v.13).

 

The psalm goes on to list the many results that follow forgetting what God has done for us:

 

(1) They forgot what God had done, and (2) they gave in to craving.  (3) They grew envious, and (4) they worshipped idols.  (5) They despised the inheritance of the Lord, and (6) did not believe His promises.  (7) They grumbled in their tents, and (8) did not obey the Lord.  (9) They yoked themselves to Baal, and (10) sacrificed (their children) to lifeless gods.  The progression of degradation listed here is similar to that progression outlined in the first chapter of Romans.

 

So many popular writers today, so many psychologists, etc. advise us to make a 'gratitude journal,' listing at the end of the day at least 3 things for which we are grateful, knowing that we cannot be grumpy and grateful at the same time.  One or the other attitude will inhabit our mental space and be reflected in our faces and our lives.  I have found again and again that by reflecting on where "God has been my Helper," I have discovered the marvelous paths He has led me on, and I have been restored again and again to praise, thanksgiving, and worship.   If I were still teaching today, I would have a rocking chair class at least once a semester, if not more often.

In Every Age

The Book of Judges in the Old Testament tells the story of the Israelites settling in the Promised Land after crossing over the Jordan River.  Each tribe had its own assigned territory that could not be infringed upon by the other tribes -- it was their own inheritance from the Lord.  So the Israelite tribes lived in peace with one another, each man working his own land.  However, because there was no central place of worship, the individual tribes tended to drift into pagan practices, adapting even sometimes the practices of their neighbors who worshipped other deities.  Invariably, they would leave themselves open to attack from the foreign peoples who lived all around them, especially from the Philistines. 

In every age, in every case, God was mindful of His people when they called to Him in their distress, and He raised up a "judge" to defend the Israelites, to give them direction, or to go to battle against their threatening neighbors.  The story of the Judges in Israel continues down to our own times, though it may be more difficult to see today, in a more pluralistic society.  Throughout the history of the church, whenever the official church seemed to be dying from neglect, idolatry, or corruption, God has raised up "heroes" and "heroines" to restore holiness and to, in the words given to Francis of Asissi, "rebuild My church."  Once we see the pattern and study the lives of the saints, it is amazing to see the counter-balances; we begin to see a powerful and personal force at work in the church, a God who knows His way out of the grave and the almost-certain death of His church.

But it is not only in the formal "church" that we can see this personal Energy, this powerful Deliverance at work.  The hand of God reaches into every corner of the world; it is only because we do not have access to the testimony of private lives that we do not see it.  In hindsight, however, the Deliverance of God in every age becomes more clear. 

Harriet Tubman, for example, was born into slavery on a plantation in Maryland.  As she grew up, however, even as a child, she heard the voice of the Lord, much as did Joan of Arc.  She became convinced that God intended her to be free.  In 1849, she understood that the time had come, and she escaped at night, following the North Star until she reach Pennsylvania.  Once she was free, she returned again and again (19 times) to Maryland, rescuing at least 300 slaves.  The slaves called her "Moses."  She died in 1913.  Like Queen Esther in the Old Testament, she had been raised up "for such a time as this." 

Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ---- how many "judges" have been raised up to rescue people in times of great evil and threat?  We will never know until we get to heaven and see for ourselves and hear for ourselves the marvelous stories of our own histories, and of the great and powerful and personal action of God in the world through those who trust Him.

Seeking the Face of God

You have said to my heart, "Seek My Face!"

Your Face, O Lord, I do seek....(Ps. 27).

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Save your best striving for seeking My Face.  I am constantly communicating with you.  To find Me and hear My voice, you must seek me above all else.  Anything that you desire more than Me becomes an idol.  when you are determined to get your own way, you blot Me out of your consciousness. 

 

 Instead of single-mindedly pursuing some goal, talk with Me about it.  Let the Light of My Presence shine on this pursuit, so that you can see it from My perspective.  If the goal fits into My plans for you, I will help you reach it.  If it is contrary to My will for you, I will gradually change the desire of your heart.  Seek Me first and foremost; then the rest of your life will fall into place, piece by piece (Jesus Calling; March 8).

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About a year or so ago, I began to experience in my prayer time the image of Jesus, wearing a white linen alb -- the vestment of a priest.  Every time I would begin to pray, I would see Jesus as my Confessor, in the sense that Augustine's Confessions were written  -- not necessarily always a confession of sin, but an unfolding and an opening of all that was within my heart and mind, whether good or evil or just confused and befuddled.  Furthermore, when I prayed, I had the sense of entering a small room, much like a modern-day confessional room, that had a small table at which we both sat, He on one side and I on another.  And we would converse, "as a man speaks with his friend, face to face"(Exodus 33:11).  Sometimes, I would "confess my sin" to Him; other times, I would seek His advice, His word, His enlightenment, His counsel on my journey of faith.

 

This morning, after about a year of praying in this fashion, I suddenly understood the meaning of the small table in the room.  Although I had not seen it before, I now understand that the Lord is feeding me "my daily bread."  As I sit at the table with Him and converse easily with Him, He is sustaining my spirit, infusing me with His wisdom and truth and understanding, and opening my mind to His Word -- the very thing He said man would live by.  I am eating and being satisfied spiritually by the counsel of the Lord. 

 

What a wonderful, inexpressible gift is the Living and Active Word of God:  the purpose of God, the wisdom of God, the plan of God, the provision of God, the providence of God.  If we want to understand the ways of God, we must set our hearts on pilgrimage; we must leave behind the things (and ways of thinking) of earth and the "empty way of life handed down to us by our fathers," and set out on the journey of faith, knowing that we cannot be disappointed, for God Himself is our Guide -- indeed, He Himself is the Way.  The food He feeds us is Himself: His own Body, His own Mind, His own Spirit.

 

The Jews were the "Chosen" people.  What were they "chosen" for, but to have an experience of God Himself leading them, feeding them, teaching them?  God set them apart to journey with Him through the wilderness to the Promised Land.  He Himself promised to go with them on the way, and they were not disappointed.  Always before we have doctrines, we have the experience.  The doctrines, the beliefs, are only our attempt to put words to the experience.  The church has consistently gone through cycles of emphasizing doctrines over experience, and then the Holy Spirit has to re-visit the church to renew its experience.  But He never fails to do so:

 

Before there was a doctrine of redemption, there was the experience of Christ's death and resurrection.  Long before theologians dissected the operations of spiritual manifestations, there were biblical stories od spiritual manifestations to base the theology upon.  Prior to a theological explanations on demonology, numerous individuals in the New Testament were delivered from evil spirits.  My point is this: there was first an experience before there was a systematic theology taught explaining and dissecting those experiences.

 

With the expansion of knowledge, including biblical history, studies on biblical language (Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic), and deep discussions and debates, the emphasis has been upon receiving knowledge instead of receiving an experience [emphasis mine].  In the Bible there is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.  If we have only the letter, then we will become stiff and only emphasize the intellectual reception of the Word.  If we emphasize only the spirit of the law, then we may have manifestations without knowledge.  The letter and the spirit should be the power twins of our spiritual growth.

(Perry Stone: The Code of the Holy Spirit, p. 150) 

 

When we seek the Face of Christ, we seek much more than knowledge, although that is given to us.  Rather, we seek the "Word coming forth from the mouth of the Lord," the Word which speaks to our daily journey of faith.  We seek His wisdom on our current situation; we seek the bread of life which He offers to the world.  We want to know what He has to say to us today, now -- and very often, He does speak through Scripture, through a friend, through a "random" reading which we might pick up.  But He does speak to us "face to face, as a man speaks to his friend."+

 

I love entering into a small, private, room where there are just the two of us, where I can freely pour out all that is in my heart and mind to the only One who can truly sort it all out.  I love receiving all the wisdom and knowledge that I am ready to absorb today, much of it that I was not ready to hear yesterday.  I love seeking the Face of God, my "Helper," (the same word in Hebrew that is used to describe Eve as Adam's "helpmeet:"  our constant Companion and Advocate, our Advisor and Counselor:  Your Face, O Lord, I will seek!



Out of Darkness into His Marvelous Light

Yesterday, I wrote about the process of daily conversion, of allowing the Son of God to dwell in us, as He has promised, to cleanse us from the darkness of sin and evil.  Today, I want to quote some of the passages from the Confessions that relate to the same idea, as I think Augustine expresses it so much better:

For those, on whom Thy good Spirit is said to rest, He causes to rest in Himself....for living is not one with happy living, seeing it lives also, ebbing and flowing in its own darkness: for which it remains to be converted unto Him, by Whom it was made, and to live more and more by the fountain of life, and in His light to see light, and to be perfected, and enlightened, and beautified.

 

[In the passage above, Augustine is comparing our lives/ our souls to the process of creation, at first unformed and chaotic, darkened -- with the Spirit of the Lord hovering over it--until the Word is spoken into the abyss:  "LIGHT, BE!"]  And gradually, not all at once, our lives, our souls, enlightened by the Word, begin to take on harmony, beauty, and form.]

 

To whom shall I speak this? how speak of the weight of evil desires, downwards to the steep abyss; and how Love raises up again by Thy Spirit which was borne above the waters?  To whom shall I speak it? How speak it?  ....the uncleanness of our spirit flowing away downwards with the love of cares, and the holiness of Thine raising us upward by love of unanxious repose...for even in that miserable restlessness of the spirits, who fell away and discovered their own darkness, when bared of the clothing of Thy light, dost Thou sufficiently reveal how noble Thou made the reasonable creature, to which nothing will suffice to yield a happy rest, less than Thee.  For Thou, O our God, shall lighten our darkness: from Thee rises our garment of light; and then shall our darkness as the noon day.

This only I know, that woe is me except in Thee: not only without but within myself also; and all abundance which is not my God is emptiness to me....My weight is my love....[Augustine has just reflected on the fact that the weight of any body "strives toward its own place."  For example, fire tends upwards; a stone downward.  Urged by their own weight, they seek their own places.  Oil poured below water rises above the water; water poured on oil sinks below the oil.  When out of their own order, they are restless until they find their place; then they are at rest.]  My weight is my love. We are inflamed; by Thy Gift, we are kindled, and are carried upwards; we glow inwardly, and go forwards.  We ascend Thy ways that be in our heart, and sing a song of degrees.....

 

Whoso can, let him understand this; let him ask of Thee....our darkness displeased us, and we turned unto Thee and there was light.  And, behold, we were sometimes darkness, but now light in the Lord.

 

In the First Letter of Peter, he says, "...that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light" (2:9).  This is the entire Christian story --- once, we were living in the darkness of sin, and now we are being continually rescued from the pit and being drawn to the Light of the World, through the action of the Holy Spirit hovering over our souls and infusing into them the Christ, the Savior of the world.  Whosoever can, let him understand this; let him ask of God if he does not.

 



Because We No Longer Believe in Demons

Despite her reputation, nowhere in Scripture does it say that Mary Magdalene was a whore.  The Pharisees remarked that if Jesus were a prophet, he would know "what kind of woman was touching him," and we of course conclude from that statement that she was a loose woman.  What Scripture tells us, however, is that Jesus cast out seven demons from Mary Magdalene.  Those two images -- one of a whore, one of a woman controlled by demons -- present completely different understandings to us. 

In the first case, most of us would believe that she was somehow a "sinner" and that her love for Jesus converted her from a shady way of life.  In the second interpretation, we see someone whose life was out of control because of the demons that inhabited her and who dictated her thoughts and actions; we see a miserable, suffering person.  With this interpretation, we can better comprehend the scene where, at a public meal, at the house of a Pharisee where she would surely be scorned, she openly wept and washed the feet of Jesus in gratitude.  Who of us in her situation would not be so grateful to the One Who released us from a lifetime of mental illness or slavery.  For once, she was free to be "Mary," the one Jesus loved so much that He appeared to her first after the Resurrection.

But we no longer believe in demons; we believe instead in labeling mental illness in all its various forms.  We no longer believe that we can be inhabited by seven demons -- or even one, for that matter.  The story of all the saints, however, is the story of people "out of control" in one way or another until they meet the only One Who can deliver them from evil -- Jesus Christ.  Mark's Gospel is the Gospel of Power; from beginning to end, it shows the power of Jesus Christ to deliver from the power of demons, from the power that evil exerts over all of us.

We are all "sinners" and "saints," if we have allowed Jesus Christ to expel from us the demons of anger, lust, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy, drunkenness, orgies, etc. (see Col. 5:19).  These are the things over which we have no control, once they have taken a foothold in our lives; indeed, these things control us -- whether you call them "demons" or not is irrelevant. 

When Peter protested that Jesus would not wash his feet, as a slave, Jesus replied, "Unless you let me wash your feet, you will have no part in me."  At this response, Peter, the great lover, said, "Then, Lord,....not just my feet but my hands and my head as well" (Jn. 13:9).  Jesus answered, "A person who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet; his whole body is clean. ....(and in Chapter 15:3) you are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you."

Yesterday I wrote about how reading Scripture changed my mind and my heart, changed my whole life.  I would not hesitate to say at all that it "cast demons out of me."  Every single "saint," whether great or small, whether canonized or not, has had the same experience:  because of an encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ, his/her life has changed.  The Word spoken to us, in us, through us cleanses us from all unrighteousness, as both Paul and John have written.  And the process is ongoing; every day, our sins "are piled up higher than our heads," in the words of David, and every day, we must allow Jesus to wash our feet, to transform our unrighteousness into His holiness.  He does this by taking our sins (our natural man) to the cross and eventually burying our natural man, only to rise again in a new "body," a new form -- no longer controlled by sin, but by the Spirit of God.

Someone has objected to my writing about St. Augustine, because he lived with a woman from the age of 15 to 30 without marrying her.  To her, this was "abuse."  So why would we admire such a person?

At the age of 33, Augustine experienced a conversion to Jesus Christ and was baptized.  Like Mary Magdalene released from her seven demons, he spent the rest of his life in praise and thanksgiving to the One Who had released him from the control of lust, ambition, jealousy, etc -- all the demons who had controlled his life from childhood.  Without conversion, without allowing Jesus to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, we are all "abusers;" we all control others, whether we intend to or not, for our own purposes -- exactly the way demons do.  We are all sinners; there is not even one of us who is righteous.  But, fortunately, like Mary, like Augustine, that is not the end of the story. 

Peter, Paul, Mary, Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, ---anyone you can name--- know what is means to have their demons cast out.  From that point on, they worship in immense gratitude the One Who set them free.  I myself have know what it means to have my own demons cast out so that I am no longer controlled by them.  But each day, I still have to allow Jesus to cleanse me from the dust that I have picked up from the journey of the day -- if I don't allow Him to wash my feet today, the sins of today will allow the demons of yesterday to re-enter, and they will bring with them seven others.

The letter of I John tells us, "if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from every sin....if we claim we have not sinned, we make him to be a liar, and his word has no place in our lives....no one who is born of God (has "had a bath") will continue to sin, because God's seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning because he has been born of God."

Conversion only begins when we meet Jesus Christ; every day after that is a process of cleansing, of being released from the demons that control our lives -- but because we no longer believe in demons, we have also lost the immense gratitude of Mary Magdalene and of Paul and of Peter and of Augustine -- the ones who know the freedom of walking with Jesus daily and of having Him release their feet from the snare. 

What Are We Eating?

You are what you eat.

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There is a battle of two wolves inside us all.  One is evil.  It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, lies, inferiority, and ego.  The other is good.  It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.  The wolf that wins? The one you feed  (Cherokee Proverb).

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Some years ago, one of the teachers at the college came to my office.  She told me a rather involved story that led up to her not being re-hired.  Since she was a first-year teacher, and did not have tenure yet, the college was within its legal rights not to re-hire her without explanation.  However, the circumstances behind the event were strange and relied on the gossip of another teacher who had the supervisor's ear.  From the story I heard, I believed an injustice had been done to this teacher.  Her question to me was, "Do you think I should sue the college?"  (Her family was urging her to do so, but she was not sure she wanted to do it.)

 

My question to her was, "Would it be worth the 3-to-5 years or longer that you would have to nurse this injustice, that you would have to re-hash and rehearse it within you?  In the meantime, you could not move on with your life and start over, because you would be tangled up in this mess and it would occupy your mind and emotions.  Even if you got another job, you could not give yourself fully and joyfully to it with this lawsuit hanging over your head."

 

The teacher decided to let go of the injustice and move on with her life.  I know that there are times when it is not advisable to "let go," when the perpetrator must be brought to justice -- but in this case, I doubted that she would win the case, and she would have wasted five years of her life trying to do so.  Then the injustice would have been doubled or tripled.

 

I was angry at the supervisor for being so stupid, but I was glad this teacher had decided not to feed her soul with her anger for years to come.  For we become what we eat, spiritually.  Every time we rehearse a wrong done to us, we deepen its imprint in our brains and the wound in our hearts.  One reason I love Scripture so much is that it has literally "changed my brain" from patterns of worry and anxiety to patterns of confidence and hope. 

 

I remember once being asked (back in the 70's), "Who is God to you?"   Fortunately, I had overnight to think about the question.  The next day, I came back and said, "He is the God of my past, and occasionally, I can see Him in the present moment ---but He is not the God of my future.  I worry about my children; I worry about what might happen to the economy, that we might have famines" (I had indoctrinated myself with the prophecies of Edgar Cayce), etc.  I told the questioner that I could not trust God for the future. 

 

The first thing that happened after that session was that I learned to wake up each morning with gratitude -- I have written about this before, when a cardinal on my windowsill taught me that I did not have to solve every problem that faced me; all I had to do was to "wake up and sing" each morning.  Shortly after that, I was baptized with the Holy Spirit and began to devour Scripture.  I read it, ate it, digested it, and read it again.  Then I began to study it, to reflect on it, to journal about it.  I was feeding a life-long hunger with real food at last!  Slowly, but surely, my mind-set began to change.  There is a verse that says, "I cried out to the Lord, and he heard my cry; from all my fears He delivered me."  Looking back on my life, I realize that is exactly what happened -- the Lord delivered me from all my fears and anxieties.  Now He is the God of my future, and He is the God of my children's futures also.  I rejoice before Him; even though I do not know what tomorrow may bring, I know it is in His hands. 

 

The Book of Philippians says this:  The Lord is near.  Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

 

Finally...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy---think about such things...and the God of peace will be with you (4:4-9).

 

When we are anxious and upset and worried, it is not always possible for us to drag ourselves out of the rut we are in -- the continuous loop that runs through our brains.  That is why the intervention of Scripture is necessary during those times.  If we rely on ourselves for "nirvana" or "positive thinking," we do not get very far at all.  But if we allow the Spirit of the Lord to direct our minds and hearts to the Scriptures we need, we find our minds changing and our hungry hearts satisfied "with the finest of wheat."