A Sacramental World

 Behold the lilies of the field...if that is how God clothes the grass of the field which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! (Luke 12 and Matthew 6).

Can you imagine Jesus walking through the fields, lifting up his eyes toward the mountains, seeing the trees and the birds of the air -- and seeing everything in the world proclaiming the loving care of His Father in heaven?    How much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!

Jesus forever refers to His Father as the God Who Acts in our lives, down to the smallest detail of every day.  He taught us to pray for our "daily" bread -- for the little things upon which we depend for daily life.  Elisabeth Elliot calls this our Declaration of Dependence on God:  "...to Him nothing is trivial or unimportant...He will not have us imagining that material things are in themselves unworthy....He made us human.  He made us to need what he gives. He tells us to ask for it" (God's Guidance: A Slow and Certain Light, p. 24).

Once we begin to see, through the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives, the graciousness of God toward us in the small things, we can begin to relax and smile -- our lives do not depend on our worry and anxious care.  It feels good not to be the "adult" here -- to rather live as a child:  whoever does not enter the kingdom of God as a child will not enter it at all (Mark 10).  Our adult lives are full of concern and responsibility and worry about tomorrow.  But that is not really how Jesus asks us to live, is it?  Seek first the kingdom of God, and these things will be added unto you.

Two nights ago, I promised a young lady that I would find a copy of God Calling for her.  Someone had been telling her about how much this small book had meant to her and how much it had changed her life when she started reading it every day.   I know the book well; it had ministered to me in the same way about 40 years ago, and I had started buying 5 to 7 copies at a time to give away.  Recently, however, I had stopped doing that.  My promise to her meant that I would have to make a special trip to Gulfport this week to find another copy for her, which of course I was happy to do.  

Yesterday, however, I stopped at the house of a friend to drop off an article I thought she might want to read.  "Oh," she said, "I have been cleaning out my nightstand, and I found an extra copy of God Calling you gave me.  I didn't realize that you had given me two copies over the years."  I started laughing.  Anyone else would call this a coincidence.  I don't!  At this exact moment in time, my friend discovers an extra copy of God Calling and saves me an extra trip to Gulfport?  When I gave her that extra copy all those years ago, God knew I would need that book this week.  And He kept it in storage until the exact moment I needed it.  

How can I worry about tomorrow, about food shortages in our country, about angry mobs attacking our nation, about people on facebook attacking one another, about our "cancel culture"? ---- all frightening in themselves and worthy of the attention of serious citizens, but not worthy of daily fear and anxiety on our part?

Our very world is sacramental, if we know how to see.  It tells us of a God of beauty, of love, and of  provision for the smallest detail.  Jesus saw the Father at work in every moment, and He invites us to walk with Him for a while so that He can point out to us what He sees.  How much fun might that be? It might actually feel like being a kid again!

A Startling Parallel

 I am constantly amazed at the ways the Old Testament --- 2000 years of history, poetry, prophecy, and teaching--- is reflected and fulfilled in the appearance of Jesus Christ on earth and in the words of the New Testament.  I recall hearing a bishop once say, "The Bible is deep enough to satisfy scholars and simple enough to be understood by a child."  We never come to the end of our amazement and discovery of new insights, no matter how much we read and understand.

So a few days ago, I read in the Gospel of Luke about the sinful woman who approached Jesus in the house of Simon the Pharisee.  Much to Simon's disgust, she anointed Jesus' feet with her tears and poured ointment on them.  Seeing Simon's discomfort with this embarrassing display, Jesus asks who will love him more -- the one who has a small debt forgiven, or the one whose debt was large.  In another place, Jesus comments that the Pharisees will see tax collectors and prostitutes entering the kingdom of heaven before they will.  

Today, I am reading David's remarkable Psalm 18:  

I love you, Lord, my strength;
O Lord, my rock, my fortress, my savior;
my God, my rock where I take refuge;
my shield, my saving strength, my stronghold.
I cry out, "O praised be the Lord!"
and see, I am saved from my foes.

The waves of death rose about me; The torrents of destruction assailed me; the snares of Sheol surrounded me; the traps of death confronted me.

 In my anguish I called to the Lord; I cried to my God for help. In the heavenly temple my voice was heard; my crying reached God's ears. 

Only someone like David, who had been trapped in the desert, hiding out in caves, pursued by those seeking his death, could have been so exuberant in praise and thanksgiving to the God who saved him, who gave him comfort and security in the midst of terror.   James H. Cone, the author of The Cross and the Lynching Tree, wrote this:  Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by by looking for pie in the sky. 

When Jesus announced "The kingdom of God has come among you," He was wrapping up the entire Old Testament in His Presence.  He went to Nazareth immediately following his baptism and temptation in the desert and announced in the synagogue, "Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your presence" (Luke 4:21).  And the scripture he read was that of Isaiah the prophet:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

If the presence of God in our lives is just a concept, a social construct, or a philosophy, we will be respectable in our worship, but not embarrassingly so to those around us.  If, however, the kingdom of God has arrived when the "torrents of death" surrounded us, as Psalm 18 says, when we were trapped in anguish and fear, our "religion" will be more like that of the sinful woman who cared nothing about Simon's respectability, but who could not stop thanking and praising Jesus for what He had done for her. 

 

The Dividing Line

 In his letter to the Colossians, Paul says, "Once you were alienated and hostile in mind because of evil deeds."  

Right here, I think, is the dividing line of the universe: those who are hostile in mind toward the things of God and those who are not.  Who of us does not remember being hostile in mind toward the things of God: His Word, His ways, His Presence in our lives?  Who does not recall not wanting to hear anyone speak of God, not being interested in the words of the Bible, not believing that God is present among us, acting in our very history?

The division is obviously not between the evil and the good, for according to the Parable of the weeds and the wheat, it is difficult to tell the weeds from the wheat while we are still alive.  Indeed, even in our own lives, the weeds commingle with the wheat on a daily basis.  We are all "good" in some ways; we are all "evil" in some ways, still needing to be cleansed and healed of our blindness and deafness to the ways of God.  But here is the difference: on hearing the good news that God is in our midst, some turn in hope of healing while others turn away, not wanting to hear anything about that stuff.

And while we are still hostile to God, it makes us angry to hear anything about Him.  We dismiss the testimony of those who believe in God as emotional, irrational, irritating, and annoying.  The Pharisees, for all their observance of the Law and the length of their tassels, were still "hostile in their minds" towards the ways of God as expressed in the words and actions of Jesus Christ.  He came to reveal the love of the Father to those who couldn't live up to the demands of the law, to those considered "less than" by the respectable, to women and children who were not be considered as reliable.  

I myself, despite being a lifelong churchgoer and believer in God, still did not want any overt manifestation of faith in my presence; I considered it embarrassing to talk about God, as if we had lost contact with reason and decorum.  I would not at the time have considered myself "hostile" to God, but I just wanted Him in His place -- that is, in safe sermons from the pulpit, not in my living room.

The Gift of the Holy Spirit and the amazing work of Scripture in my mind and heart changed all of that. Jesus came to make all things "new," removing the hostility toward God that spells death to our spirits, and to breathe the freshness of a new creation into our hearts.  If we are comfortable with God in our living rooms, we know that we have hope, despite the sin that still resides there too.  His presence will drive out the sin -- Paul tells the Colossians that Christ has reconciled us to God that we might be holy, without blemish and irreproachable before Him, firmly grounded, stable, and not shifting from the Gospel.  

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone will let me in, I will come and sup with him and he with me (Rev. 3:20).  He didn't say, "If you are good; if you do the right things; if you "try" hard, -- He said only, "if you will open the door."  That is, if you are not "hostile in your mind,"  I will come in.

It's amazing when we think about it: God does not ask much of us at first -- only that we let Him in.  He will do the rest!

....as if God existed.....

 Jordan Peterson's book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is the number one bestseller all over the world. In it, using the archetypal psychology of Jung, Peterson finds universal human truths elucidated in Scripture.

 According to Bishop Robert Barron, despite Peterson's serious engagement with the spiritual life and the history of religion, there is no evidence that the author believes in God in the traditional sense. Barron says, "No Christian should be surprised that the Scriptures can be profitably read through psychological and philosophical lenses, but at the same  time, every Christian has to accept the fact that the God of the Bible is not simply a principle or an abstraction, but rather a living God who acts in history." (Foreword to Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity, 2021)

When asked if he were a Christian, Peterson's answer was, "I try to live as if God existed."  This is not the flip answer it would appear on the surface.  According to Peterson, once the world population reaches the tipping point wherein the majority of people (of whatever belief) do not "live as if God existed," we will have reached the tipping point of existence.

Having experienced two catastrophic hurricanes in the past 16 years, I see before my very eyes exactly what Peterson means.  I am not ordinarily given to seeing pictures in cloud formations, but on the Tuesday morning after Hurricane Katrina, having spent the night in a school hallway with no food, no water, no flushing toilets, and very little breatheable air, I was lying on the grass outside of the building looking up at the sky.  I had heard from my fellow refugees about the looting and shooting going on in New Orleans, and I was concerned about my husband in the French Quarter.  It so happened that the t-shirt I was wearing pictured Michaelangelo's Creation scene, where the Creator is separating light from darkness.  I could hardly believe my eyes -- and I will not deny that my imagination was probably overwrought at that point -- but there it was in the clouds above me:  all by itself in an otherwise empty sky, there He was, with outstretched hand, commanding Light to overcome the darkness and chaos.

I could not help but reflect on what I was seeing and experiencing at the moment: a time of clear light and clear darkness---there were no grey areas after such a disaster.  All around me in the shelter, people were helping one another, cleaning up their common areas, sharing what little food they had brought with them the day before, and hosing one another off in the extreme heat outside the building.  Meanwhile, in New Orleans, in the absence of first responders who were busy rescuing people from rooftops and attics, looters were breaking storefront windows and carrying off television sets, electronic equipment, and whatever they could carry.  A good many of them were carrying guns in case someone tried to stop them.  Even the police were fearful of the utter chaos that ruled in the city.

So here we are again, following Hurricane Ida, sixteen years later.  People are reaching out all over the city and the United States to feed, shelter, water, and care for the sick of those who are helpless, going to great lengths and extreme sacrifice to help one another.  The city of Ocean Springs and the Gulf Hills subdivision have banded together to feed refugees from neighboring New Orleans and are serving hot meals each evening to those who have found their way to that location.  One man from Marrero drove his truck to Mississippi searching for gasoline to run his neighbor's generator because she is on oxygen and needs electricity to generate the oxygen she needs.  

Meanwhile, a few looters in New Orleans are finding what they can and loading up their cars with stolen goods, not necessities.  One man complained on facebook that his neighbor has a loose shutter that is keeping him awake at night.  [Give me a break.....go fix the shutter and shut up!]

In time of disaster, those who live "as if God existed," despite their beliefs, shine as stars in a dark universe, as St. Peter described it.  In Genesis, the Word of God reaches beneath the chaos and draws out light and order.  That word/Word still speaks in today's chaos, overcoming the darkness and restoring light.  

Once we reach the point where those who fail to live as if God existed overcome and outnumber the others, we are doomed.

Understanding the Wise Virgins

 Last week, Bishop Barron commented on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, saying that the oil in their lamps was prayer, study, and the Eucharist, habits and fortifications built up over a lifetime, which cannot be shared at the last minute with others.  As this terrible storm (Hurricane Ida) approached the Louisiana coast yesterday, I was reminded of his words.  

Padre Pio once said, "I shudder to think of the harm done to souls by a lack of spiritual reading."  A friend of mine recently locked into Father Mike Schmidt's Bible in a Year broadcast available through Ascension Press.  For 20 minutes a day, she blocks out everything else, puts in her earbuds, and just enjoys Fr. Schmidt's commentary.  Sometimes she deliberately goes a day or more without listening just so she does not have to stop the broadcast after the daily segment.  It reminds me of watching episodes of Downton Abby a few years ago.  The feeling of agh! when the episode ends makes you anticipate the next episode all week.  Her plan is that when the year's cycle comes to an end, she will begin it all over again -- now that she understands the Bible, she really wants to dig into it more deeply.

As someone who has read and studied the Bible for over 44 years now, I am so happy that she had caught the fever.  The more you read, the more you understand; the more you understand, the richer the Word becomes, ministering daily, monthly, yearly to your spirit like water in a dry and thirsty land.

 Recently, when I was grieving for a couple of weeks because we may have to leave this house I love so much and move to a smaller place, the words from Jeremiah 29:11 suddenly came into my spirit:  For I know the plans I have for you, plans to give you a hope and a future, and not to harm you.  I realized then that God has always led me into green pastures and beside still waters, that He has always given me good things, and that I needed to trust Him to continue doing the same in the future.  

It is passages like this that come to me when I most need them that provide oil to my lamp and keep it burning.  There are so many events in my life where the Word of God came as a living word, sharper than a two-edged sword, and brought me peace and courage.  One time, when I was out walking, a strange dog came at me aggressively.  Immediately, I heard, "Stand still, and you will see the deliverance of God."  I immediately calmed down, stood very still, and the dog backed off.  A minor incident, but the greater ones are too long to talk about here.  

When faced with a Category 4 hurricane, I grieve for those who have no reserve peace and backup assurance from Scripture to help them face the catastrophe.  I would give them some of my oil if I could, but when there is no carved-out space, no meditative rumination on the word within us, someone else's lamp oil sounds like hollow platitudes.  It just doesn't keep our lamps burning.

For those who just cannot get into Scripture (it's almost impossible without the Holy Spirit), almost any spiritual reading will break the hard ground of our hearts.  Almost anything!  I think in my earliest days, I started reading Corrie TenBoom books, and I asked myself, "How do I get from where I am today to where she is today?"  I would never venture to say that I have come to her level of trust in God, but reading her stories started me on the way, and I am most grateful for that journey!

Is This Not Amazing?

 In 2010, the year I was diagnosed with lung cancer, a dear friend gave me a book called Anticancer, A New Way of Life.  At the time, I glanced through the book, assumed it was all about changing one's diet, but never actually read the book, which is heavy on technical data and research.  Actually, the book has been on my shelf untouched all these years.  

Yesterday, as I was sorting through books to give away, I casually flipped through its pages once again, trying to decide if this was something I would ever read or not.  I had almost decided to discard the book when a sub-title on page 159 caught my attention:  The Mantra and the Rosary.

The lead-in sentence to this section of the book was this:  There is a perfectly objective way to measure the relationship between exercises such as yoga and meditation and what is happening in the body.  Then the author describes the research of Dr. Luciano Bernardi of the University of Pavia in Italy, who had been looking at variations in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and the way these rhythms fluctuate at different times of the day.  He knew that a balance between these various biorhythms is the most accurate indicator of good health; in some studies, measures of this balance can accurately predict survival forty years down the line.

Dr. Bernardi was looking at the conditions that lead to a temporary disorganization of these rhythms and the way the body recovers its equilibrium.  In other words, the slightest stress affects all of our biorhythms, and our bodies need some way to recover. [I myself had just experienced the effects he was describing.  I had just told my husband how upset/ angry/ frustrated it always makes me to spend an hour or more on the phone with a friend who just loves to talk.  As an extrovert, it doesn't matter to her what we talk about; the more trivial, the better, it seems: the flow of words is the important thing. I don't mind letting her talk, but as an introvert, mindless chatter seems to affect all of my biorhythms with discord.  I need recovery time when I get off the phone. Fortunately, I have discovered that a Sudoku puzzle seems to help me forget and de-program the effect of aimless and empty conversation.  By the way, an hour or more of meaningful conversation has the opposite effect of energizing and revitalizing me.]

Anyway, back on topic:  In order to measure the physiological changes in his experiments, Dr. Bernardi needed a "control" experiment, a so-called neutral condition in which the subjects talked aloud without mental effort or stress.  As the subjects lived in Italy, a deeply Catholic country he naturally thought of having them recite the rosary.  When his subjects started reciting a stream of Ave Marias in Latin, the laboratory instruments recorded a totally unexpected phenomenon:  all the different biological rhythms being measured started to resonate.  They all lined up, one after the other, mutually amplifying one another to create a smooth, harmonious pattern.  What Dr. Bernardi discovered was that during the rosary, the body mechanically and subconsciously adjusts breathing to a frequency of six breaths a minute, which happens to be the natural rhythm of fluctuations in the other biological functions: heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow to the brain. The result of this synchronization is that the rhythm of each function resonates with the others, mutually reinforcing one another, just as when one is on a swing and the forward thrust of the legs, timed precisely with the upswing, amplifies the movement.

In 2006, two researchers at Ohio State University published a review of all the studies concerning the variations of biological rhythms.  They concluded that everything that amplifies variations, as in Bernardi's study, is associated with a number of health benefits, namely, better functioning of the immune system, reduction of inflammation, and better regulation of blood sugar levels.  These are, precisely, three of the principal factors that act against the development of cancer.

Of course, Dr. Bernardi's study is the only one that used the Rosary as a control factor; other studies have used mantras and meditation as controls, with much the same results.  Here is what I find amazing, however:  The Blessed Mother gave the Rosary to St. Dominic in the 12th century to combat the heresy of the Albigensians.  What preaching and teaching could not do at the time, the rosary did without effort, almost automatically.  But who knew at the time that the rosary would continue its benefits down to the 21st century, not in combatting heresy, but in combatting stress and discord in our bodies?  Perhaps this is the reason so many people say the Rosary in order to fall asleep each night.

I'm thinking that maybe I need to replace Sudoku with at least one decade of the Rosary!

Downloading God's Energy into the World

 Listening to the radio last week, I heard a psychologist advising a mother whose three-year-old was having meltdowns on a regular basis.  He told her that when we give someone a hug, particularly a child whose verbal capacity does not allow her to verbalize to express her pain, that we "download" our peace, our joy, our energy, into the person we hug.  He also suggested that the mother say something to the effect of, "It's tough when things don't go the way we want them to, isn't it,"  letting the child know that someone understands the frustration she cannot express any other way.

The doctor went on to extend the analogy to others beyond childhood.  When we give someone in distress a really good hug, we can usually feel them exhale and relax, letting go of some of the pain he/she is carrying.  Again, he mentioned that we are in some way downloading our own peace into the other person.

In a time of Covid, I know that hugs are probably few and far between among friends.  Still, thinking about his use of the word "downloading," it came to me that it is such an apt description of what Jesus meant when He said, "You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world."  

In the words of John Henry Cardinal Newman:

The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll, full of "lamentations, and mourning and woe....if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.  It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator.

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man...their mutual alienation, their conflicts...the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish...that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world," --  all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.  (from Apologia Pro Vita Sua)

God called Abraham out of the pagan Ur of the Chaldees, and brought him gradually into a position of trust that God was with him.  Finally, God revealed to Abraham the reason he was called out of darkness:  I will bless you, and you will be a blessing.  All nations will bless themselves through you!

Anyone who has experienced the Light of Christ in the chaos of their lives has been blessed with the peace the world cannot give.  It seems to me that the task we have been given as Christians is not to judge the world but to bless the world -- to hug and to download to others the blessings we ourselves have received from God.  If we cannot physically hug those with whom we come into contact, we can hug them with our eyes, with our ears, with our understanding, and with our hearts:  it's tough when things don't work out the way we want them to.  That sounds condescending when said to someone in grief, so I don't recommend those exact words to anyone beyond three years old.  However, the idea is the same -- what I can give, I give you; what I have received from God, I freely offer you.  My peace I give you, not as the world gives, but as God gives!