Right Turn

It was an early morning trip to church, as usual.  I think I may have had a meeting.  When I got to the railroad tracks, my car seemed to have a mind of its own.  Instead of turning left, I turned right, for no apparant reason.  Maybe I was still half asleep.  Suddenly awake, wondering why I had done that, I decided that since I was now half way to the local gas station/pit stop, I'd go ahead and get a cup of coffee on my way to church.  

As I opened the door to the store, I was met by a very frightened and desperate young man, about 17 years old.  "Please," he said, "can you drive me somewhere?"   I hesitated, not sure of his character or motives.  Would I end up in a ditch somewhere?   More frantic, he said, "I have money.  I can pay you for gas money."   "That's not what I'm worried about," I said.  

I went to the cashier.  "Look at me.  Look at him.  If I end up in a ditch murdered, he did it."  

"Please," said the young man, desperately.  "He dropped me off to get something and he's coming back for me in a minute."  

With that, I hurried him into my car, and we took off at his direction.  He was guiding me into an area of Pass Christian that I was unfamiliar with, and I began once again to wonder about where I would end up.  But as we talked, I discovered that he was being trafficked, and that there was a warrant out for his arrest.  Now he was afraid that I would take him to the police station.  I reassured him:  "I'm not going to do that.  You've suffered enough already."

I found out that he wanted me to take me to a gas station owned by the father of an ex-girlfriend.  He was sure the man would take him in and keep him safe, despite the fact that the girl needed an abortion.  We talked about abortion, but he was not in a position at that moment to think about the right or wrong of abortion.  His own life was in danger.

Looking back now, I wish that I had thought to ask him one question:  What happened the moment before he met me at the door?  Had he desperately prayed to God for help?  Had he asked for a way out?  I'll never know if I was an answer to his prayer, or if God reached down before he could even think to ask.

At any rate, that's one right turn that turned out to be the right one!

Paying Attention to God

 I have a wonderful book called Paying Attention to God: Discernment in Prayer, by William Barry, S.J.  Now I love the title of this book because it seems to me that paying attention to God is the one thing that most of us do not do.  We may be engaged in prayer, in ministry, in works of mercy, etc. --- but it seems to me that somehow we are not really convinced that God is actively engaged in our lives.  There's a huge gap between heaven and earth, and God is in heaven; we are on earth.   

St. Paul says, In him we live and move and have our very being (acts).  God is not remote to us; He is actively engaged in every part of us: our minds, our hearts, our wills (souls).  ANd He is not static: He is not a noun but a verb: I AM.  He is dunomis in Greek -- energy (dynamite).  There is no moment in which He is not acting in us and with us and through us.  

So it would probably be beneficial for us to start paying attention to what He is doing in our lives.  St. Ignatius taught his followers to practice the Examen, that is, at the end of each day to look back at the God moments, the places where God was acting during the day.  It may take a few days to get the hang of it, but once we start practicing, we may find ourselves smiling at the memory of those moments -- and thanking Him for being there.  As we continue the practice, we begin to notice the moments when they occur instead of waiting til the end of the day -- The fullness of joy is to see God in everything. (Not sure which saint said that!)

I guarantee that once we start paying attention to what God is doing in our lives, we will begin to know that we are loved and cared for.  What we do is important, but what God is doing on a daily basis --- that's the whole story! Most of our attention is on what we are doing --- and I guarantee also that focusing on that will bring us not joy but chagrin, if not frustration.  For which of us does not struggle and stumble through life?

One small example of God at work in my mind:   I have been taking Melatonin at night ever since I started chemo because someone told me that Melatonin helps chemo work better.  A few nights ago, as I picked up the bottle, I thought to myself, "I think I'll skip it tonight and see whether it affects my sleep or not."  I don't know why that thought went through my mind; it's the very first time I skipped the supplement on purpose.  

About an hour after I had gone to sleep, the fire alarm went off in our house.  Both of us were startled out of sleep and pretty disoriented and groggy, trying to figure out what to do.  My husband had taken a sleep aid; I had not.  One of us had to get on a ladder in the middle of the night.  As I climbed up, I thought to myself, "Thank God I did not take a melatonin tonight; I need all the clarity I can get right now!"  Thinking about it the next morning, I came to the conclusion that it was the Holy Spirit acting in me that night when I decided to forego taking the supplement.  I had to smile and thank Him for "little things" that make such a difference in my life!  

We can dismiss such accounts as coincidence, or we can at least start to wonder --- and pay attention -- to the fact that God might be closer to us than we thought.

Beauty is His Garment

 Someone once wrote: Beauty is the garment with which God clothes Himself.  I thought of that saying this morning as I read a few pages in Enchanted with Eternity by William Slattery, PhD.  Slattery is writing about the world to come as described by Revelation 21:3:

Behold, the dwelling of God is with men.  He will dwell with them and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them.  

The original Greek manuscript seems to mimic the way Hebrew treats poetry, repeating the word "God" at the end of the verse, "forming a little word picture:"  Himself God/ with them/ is/ their/ God.  God protectively surrounds the sentence as God encircles his holy city and the bride.....at the center of the sentence is the verb of being: is.

What follows is a descriptive paragraph that could be captioned Beauty is the garment with which God clothes himself:

.....while having a more vivid awareness of your own uniqueness than you ever had during your mortal lifetime, you will simultaneously feel your soul flow into intimacy with your Triune Creator-Lover-Rescuer as you experience him cosmically inside you  and all around you: 

in the warmth and soft light of the summer morning, in the freshness of the breeze, in the smile on the other's face, in the grandeur of the mountains; at the sight of turquoise-blie streams, in the aromas of the oak- and pine-vaulted forest where wafts the scent of mint, in the rich, fruity, orchard-sweet taste of the blackberries picked off the hedge, in the soothing lapping of sea waters on the sunrise-gold sands, in the orchestral symphony of the birds, in moonshine-clear Alpine lake waters.  

In all our surroundings, we will intuitively see God's face, hear the resonance of his voice, experience the heat of his love.  He will radiate His presence to us through the exercising of our own creativity and by the delighted experience of other people's creativity.  In the sight of the perfecton of the craftsmanship of our fellow humans, we will sense the inner fire of their authors.  In works of art, architecture, and music, we will sense not only the supreme creative power of the Creator but, in a way beyond our present power to imagine, we will see God himself.

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Today is Thanksgiving.  Can it be a coincidence that this morning I read these pages, just as the weather is gorgeous, with sunshine bouncing off each leaf as I write this memory?  Just as I am wrapped in the sweet memory of an evening meal spent with 14 members of my family?  It might be worth printing these words on a card to be carried with me to a park bench where I can enter into a prayer of thanksgiving for the exquisite treasures of life itself.

God is Watching!

 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; the earth was waste and void; darkness covered the abyss, and the spirit of God was stirring above the waters.

According to modern science, what was true, is true today.  Scripture says, In Him we live and move and have our very being (Acts 17:28) and

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col.1:17).  Bruce Gordon, a philsopher of science states, "....reality, in toto, is continually realized through divine action (mental causation) as an expression of ongoing creation."  In other words, creation is not an event in the past, but an ongoing action of God in the present.   "God saw....God said."  God continues to see and He continues to speak --- and His Word holds all things in existence, just as at the beginning.  He speaks to what He sees.

The physicist who invented the term black hole  (John Wheeler) studied the relationship between the observed experiment and the observer (the scientist performing the experiment).  In quantum physics, it is only when the quanta packets of energy are being interfered with by the observing of the scientist that they "collapse" into a particular material state.  Only then do they become identifiable and measurable.  Wheeler concluded that an "Observer" was essential for the existence of the universe itself, because only such an observer could give it reality:  ....the entire universe only exists because someone is watching it----everything, right back to the Big Bang some 15 billion years ago, remained undefined until noticed.

When the physicist sets up his experiment to detect particles, he finds that light energy exists in particles.  When he sets up the experiment to detect waves, light energy expresses itself in waves.  Leading physicists have concluded that there is not only the experimentally verifiable horizontal cause and effect, but a "vertical causality" (the scientist himself).  For them, the solution to the quantum enigma implies the existence of another dimension of time. 

Interestingly, Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas had all seen the real world as "images" of the model in the mind of God.  The pagan philosophers, of course, referred to the "ideal" forms to which the material forms conformed.  Aquinas spoke of "aeviternal" time where eternity overlaps with chronological everyday time and configures the "real" world.  In other words, God has set up His World as His "experiment" to produce and reveal the Image in His Mind of the real world.  

When we were children, we were told that God is "watching" us.  Indeed He is!  

Spooky Science

 About 40 years ago, when I was still working at the college, a colleague came into my office one day with a lengthy newspaper article.  "Read this," she said, and walked out.  As I began reading, my hair stood on end.  The article was about a famous experiment in quantam physics, wherein scientists were trying to determine whether light could be defined as particles or as waves, a question that had plagued them for some time.  In fact, one scientist had received the Nobel Prize in physics at one time for determining that light could be defined as particles.  Years later, that same scientist's son won the Nobel Prize for proving that light could be defined as waves.  

According the latest research, the determination was now that light, when unobserved, acted as particles; when the experiment was observed by a scientist, however, light behaved as waves.  And they could prove this theory by experimentation!  My colleague and I agreed to call this "Spooky Science."  That article has stayed with me all these years, for some reason.  Even though I am not scientifically inclined, I never forgot my reaction to that article.

Now, all these years later, I am reading an entire book about the issue of Quantum Physics and its effect on Newtonian Physics.  For years and years, scientists believed and taught that atoms were the stable building block of the universe--- that everything we see is made up of atoms.  Turns out that is not exactly true.  Atoms themselves are made up of sub-atomic particles called "quanta."  And, unlike atoms, quanta are not stable at all  -- the chance of finding any quanta today where you found it yesterday is absolute zero.  And quanta "control" or affect one another from great distances --- even 20 miles or more apart.

As I read this book, spooky science gets more and more weird.  The question is how anything in the world remains stable when it is constructed at bottom by quanta.  When you build a house in one locale, you do not expect to find it on the other side of the city the next morning!  Yet, that is exactly how quanta behave --- until they are observed by a scientist!  Then they manage to rearrange themselves into nameable and measurable elements like waves.

The implications of this science are almost unbelieveable to the modern mind.  Einstein's reaction is famous:  "All I know is that God does not play dice with the universe!"  Max Planck (the father of Quantam Physics and friend of Einstein's) spoke to an international group of scientists in 1944:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such.  All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom and holds this most minute solar system of an atom together. Since there is neither an intelligent nor an eternally abstract force in the whole universe...which moves of itself... we must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit.  This spirit is the matrix of all matter.  Not the visible, transient matter is real, true, manifest...but the invisible, immortal spirit is the real thing!  However, since spirit cannot exist as such, but every spirit belongs to a being, we are compelled to presume the existence of spirit-beings. Now since even spirit-beings cannot exist out of themselves, but have to be created, I do not shy away from calling this mysterious creator the same as all cultures of the earth have called him in previous millenia: God!

What this means is that the opening page of Genesis is on-going and eternally true:  God "hovers" over the "chaos"/particles and moment-by-moment conforms them to the image in His mind.  Tomorrow, I'll try to explain why this is the present conclusion of modern-day science!

Connecting With Zoe

 "I have come that they might have zoe, and have it more abundantly."  (Jesus)

"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life (zoe)."  (Jesus)

In English, unfortunately, we do not have a way to distinguish between the 2 Greek words for "Life:"  bios and zoe.    Bios, obviously, refers to our biological life or energy.  Zoe refers to vitality, energy, enthusiasm, connectivity, alertness, overflowing......I will give you a spring welling up to eternal life (Jesus to the woman at the well.)

Most of us probably connect the words "eternal life" to the idea of biological life without end  --- with the result that many people consider that heaven and eternity might become boring after a few thousand years! But what if we could read the Gospel with the distinctions that are made in the Greek original between bios and zoe?  I once made a study of these words in the Gospel of John and regret now that I did not make the distinctions in my bible.

At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus said, "The one who believes in me will never die!"  Quite a statement!

In his book Enchanted by Eternity, William Slattery proposes a future for each human person in a resurrected body in a new heavens and a new earth, connected to God Himself, to one another, and to the earth/nature itself.  According to him, that future can begin now.

When we refer to "God," we tend to think of Him as another object in the universe.  There's plants, there's animals, there's people, and then there's God.  But actually, God is not an object, however exalted; He IS LIFE itself --- and our life is actually participation in HIM!  In Him we live and move and have our very being (Acts 17:28).  In fact, the word enthusiasm literally means "God within"  (en theos).  Whenever we are living our lives with enthusiasm, or participating fully in life/energy, we are connecting to the Source of Life Itself.  

Slattery does not use the term "God" in his book, but rather Creator, Lover, Rescuer ----because that is how we experience God.  "God" is the answer to "what;" Creator, Lover, Rescuer is the answer to "Who."   In Him, all things hold together (Col.1:17) ---- Jesus Christ is the sustaining force of the entire universe --- all creatures, all peoples, all visible and invisible life.

C. S. Lewis once wrote: If you want to get warm, you must stand by the fire; if you want to be wet, you must get into the water. If you want joy, peace, power, eternal life (zoe), you must get close to, or even into the thing that has them.....they are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you; if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?

Blessed are You, Creator of the Universe......

 Wearing a heart monitor for a couple of weeks revealed that my heart has an extra beat that is exhausting me upon exertion.  I have noticed that walking just a few steps in my neighborhood takes all the energy I have.  But the problem, fortunately, is fixable.  

When I told a friend about the issue, she said, "You would not think an extra heartbeat would be a problem."   And that started me thinking.  About eight years ago, my husband had to have surgery to correct the same problem that had progressed to life-threatening status.  It seems that the top part of the heart was not communicating with the lower part, so that when blood was pumped into the upper half, the lower part of the heart would not empty it with the same rhythm.  (I have not studied the actual process beyond the casual explanation offered by the doctor, so you will have to forgive me any inaccuracies here.)

Anyway, what I was thinking about was the absolute precision and timing of our heartbeats.  The rhythm of our hearts must be exactly measured --- neither too fast nor too slow.  And both halves of our hearts have to communicate precisely with one another.  There is no room for the slightest irregularity!  

It is also pretty amazing to me that mankind is able to correct an irregularity when it does occour -- not only with surgery, but sometimes even with just a small pill.

Along the same lines, I watched an interview recently with a priest who wrote a book called Enchanted with Eternity.  He mentioned that sometime in the past, Christopher Hawkins dismissed the wonder of our planet by saying we were "an insignificant planet on the edge of the universe."  In other words, to Hawkins, there is nothing remarkable at all about our existence or the creation of the world.  Recently, however, scientists have started to comment on just how remarkable indeed is the placement of our earth planet "on the edge of the universe."  It seems that we are situated at the exact spot that allows us to observe the galaxies of the universe.  Any further into the center of the universe, we would not be able to see and to study the elements of space that are now available to our understanding.  The comments of this priest made me marvel once again at the precision of God's creation and the wonders of our world.  I have ordered the book and will share more in-depth comments once I begin reading it.

A traditional Jewish prayer begins with the words, "Blessed are You, Creator of the universe, for you have given us bread to eat and wine to drink....."   Einstein once said, "Any scientist who says he doesn't believe in God is either lying, or he is a very bad scientist."  The more we look at creation and its precision, the more the Creator is revealed to us!