The Timing of Miracles in Lives Differs
It’s a lovely sunny day in Memphis. I’m as usual playing on face book before getting serious about unpacking my mess of decades of writing in hopes of gathering some together to describe my spiritual journey. The point being, that I am convinced that the timing of it differs from person to person. But if open to mystery, to miracles past our understanding, even if finally only in old age, we can recognize that amazing connection of God to our daily lives. It can be in the timing of really small things or recognizing God’s hand in the large and even scary aspects of our lives. I know that I was a weak person and needed immense doses of grace early on to keep on keeping on. But, there are times in all our lives when our natural strengths are not enough. And if we are naturally strong people we may not recognize our limits as gifts. Because they open us to grace in ways beyond our understanding. To the strong it may seem like failure to need that grace, but it’s the gift of Jesus’ life as a human being. His journey is our journey complete with miracles beyond human understanding, because we too have the Spirit of God within us and surrounding us. God is as alive and well in our times and our lives as God was in Jesus’ life, suffering, death and resurrection. The timing of our need for and openness to God’s interventions is different from one person to another. But ultimately we are all called to experience our limits and need for God’s active participation in our daily lives. Admitting our natural limits is harder for the strong than the weak. But it is part of the spiritual journey. The Spirit is within us and outside us. We are a tiny, but needed part of God’s plan for humanity. But recognizing our personal limits and need for an awareness of our connection to God is part of God’s plan for humanity.
An Illusion of Separateness
Father Richard Rohr explores a broad definition of the word “sin”:
The great illusion we must all overcome is the illusion of separateness. It’s almost the only task of religion—to communicate not worthiness, but union; to reconnect us to our original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls that state of separateness “sin,” and its total undoing is stated frequently as God’s clear job description: “My dear people, we are already the children of God; it is only what is in the future that has not yet been revealed, and then all we know is that we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2).
The word sin has so many unhelpful connotations in most of our minds that it’s very problematic today. For most of us, it does not connote a state of alienation or separateness. Instead, it connotes naughty behavior and personal moral unworthiness. But these are merely symptoms and not the state itself! Disconnected people will do stupid and harmful things. Instead, the core and foundational meaning of sin is any life lived autonomous and outside “the garden of Eden.” We cannot ever become perfect or “worthy,” but we can become reconnected to our Source.
Sin primarily describes a state of fragmentation—when the part thinks it’s separate from the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who we are in God. That “who” is nothing we can earn or obtain. It’s nothing we can accomplish or work up to. Why? Because we already have it.
The biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. It’s about realization and not performance principles. We cannot get there; we can only be there, but that foundational Being-in-God, for some reason, is too hard to believe and too good to be true. Only the humble can receive it, because it affirms more about God than it does about us.
The ego, however, makes it all about achievement and attainment. At that point, religion becomes a worthiness contest in which everybody loses—which they realize, if they’re honest. Many people give up on the whole spiritual journey when they see that they can’t live up to the performance principle. They don’t want to live as hypocrites.
Yet union with God is really about awareness and realignment, a Copernican revolution of the mind and heart that is sometimes called conversion. (Copernicus, of course, was the first to claim that the world revolves around the sun, not vice versa—a truly shocking revelation in the 16th century!) Following conversion, that deep and wondrous inner knowing, a whole new set of behaviors and lifestyle will surely emerge. It is not that if I am moral, then I will be loved by God; rather, I must first come to experience God’s love and then I will—almost naturally—be moral.
The Mystery of the Cross and Suffering
One of the dialectics that Paul presents is the perennial conflict between “conservative” and “liberal”, to use today’s terms. In his writings, Paul’s own people, the Jews, are the stand in for pious, law-abiding traditionalists; the Greeks provided his model for liberal intellectuals and cultural critics. Paul sees the Jews trying to create order in the world by obedience to law, tradition, and kinship ties. The Greeks attempt order through reason, understanding, logic, and education. Paul has a unique vantage point, with a foot in each world—as both a Jew and a Roman citizen.
Paul insists that strict adherence to neither worldview can finally succeed because they don’t have the ability to “incorporate the negative,” which will always be present. He recognizes that the greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order. There seems to be a shadow side to almost everything; all things are subject to “the principalities and powers” (Ephesians 6:12). Only the unitive or nondual mind can accept this and not panic; in fact, it will grow because of it, and even grow beyond it.
Neither a liberal pattern nor a conservative pattern can deal with disorder and misery. Paul believes that Jesus has revealed the only response that works. The revelation of the cross makes us indestructible, Paul says, because it reveals there is a way through all absurdity and tragedy. That way is precisely through accepting absurdity and tragedy, trusting that God can somehow use it for good. If we can internalize the mystery of the cross, we won’t fall into cynicism, failure, bitterness, or skepticism. The cross gives us a precise and profound way through the shadow side of life and through all disappointments.
Paul allows both conservatives and liberals to define wisdom in their own ways, yet he dares to call both inadequate and finally wrong. He believes that such worldviews will eventually fail people. He writes, “God has shown up human wisdom as folly” on the cross, and this is “an obstacle that the Jews cannot get over,” and which the gentiles or pagans think is simple “foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:21–23).
Questions for Believers
What is the difference between saved and loved? Does being saved mean being finished? Is the Bible the Word of God or is Jesus the Word of God fleshed out for us?
Was Jesus making choices to love more and more people other than his own religion and nationality, even the Roman enemy, a major part of Being the Word of God? Is the WAY of Jesus’ life and willingness to love even those that killed him supposed to be the WAY of Christian’s lives? Did Jesus love unconditionally? Does God love unconditionally? Do we?
What is the difference between need and love?
Could our life journey from the neediness of a baby be a process of becoming able to love unconditionally? Does loving our neighbor mean only loving others whom we know and who are like us? Does loving Jesus mean we get to be rich? What did Jesus say about the rich man? Are our heroes rich? Are they kind? Are they like Jesus?
If, as he was dying, Hitler recognized the horrors he had caused and was stricken with sorrow and regret, would God forgive him?
Is our Spiritual journey more than following a set of ten rules basic to the survival of humans living together? In fact, are the Beatitudes the challenges that Jesus gave us for our adult Spiritual journey to loving BOTH ourselves AND others unconditionally, because Jesus fleshed out the unconditional love of God for all?
Do you love all your children even when they fail, hurt you, and abandon you?
Does God?
Have you ever failed God?
Earth Has No Sorrow that Heaven Cannot Heal
In my sixties, it hit me that most of my misery comes from a misunderstanding about what life is actually about. This life isn’t about being happy, it’s about being transformed. Happiness is the dessert, not the main course. Unfortunately, I ( and probably most of us) don’t change easily. So, it’s the challenges in life that cause us enough pain to accept the need to change and to also admit we need Grace. Later life seems to be about stages of letting go of the many things, pleasures, people, and even achievements that we think we need to be happy. Letting go of these idols is painful. And my desire to protect both myself and even those I love from any suffering often circumvents what God is trying to do in my and their lives. But, Whatever the challenge is: 1. If God is allowing it, there is a purpose. 2. Jesus has been there, experienced it, grown from it, and is in it with us. 3. If it’s happening in this life, it is temporary. 4. There’s a “pony” in it for someone, even if it’s not us. My mother’s fourteen year losing battle with Alzheimer’s was the hardest test in my past life. She came to live with us at the age of sixty-six before we knew what Alzheimer’s was. After seven years, we were in a financial crises so both of us were working, our oldest three children were in college, so we used Mom’s social security to pay for her caregiver during the day. But then she began to run away at night, so we wired our nine doors shut. Then in the middle of the night, she would try to cook and forget and leave things burning on the stove. Finally, we realized that she needed to be in a nursing home for safety. Everything in me protested. The Sunday after we put her in the nursing home, I was driving home in the evening from my job as DRE of Catholic Education at Ft. Campbell, Ky. I had not managed to get to Mass that morning and our church didn’t have a Sunday evening Mass. I felt a great need for the Spiritual and emotional support of Church. Driving home through a poor rural area, I notice people going into a tiny sort of ramshackle church. I thought of stopping and joining them, but they were all black, so I felt a white stranger might make them uncomfortable and I kept going. It had begun to drizzle and I noticed an elderly black man dressed in his “Sunday go to meeting” suit walking toward the church, so I stopped and offered him a ride back to the church. When we reached it, he cordially invited me to join them, so I took it as a nudge from the Holy Spirit and did. The God moment for me was when they sang a hymn about someday understanding their troubles. When I thought of black history in the South, their hundreds of years of struggles put mine and even mom’s in perspective and helped me hang in there with both mom and God in the next seven years of her increased suffering. But shortly after her death I was waiting in my car to meet a friend and her suffering and the sorrow of all those years overwhelmed me. I was shouting angrily at God in my mind, “WHY? WHY?” I didn’t want to be crying when my friend came, so I wiped my eyes and went into a small shop where I was parked. As I walked in the first thing that jumped out at me were the brightly colored words on a card right in front of me. It said, “THERE IS NO SORROW THAT HEAVEN CANNOT HEAL.” God is in the timing. And I cling to these memories as I face my own journey through Alzheimer’s. Neither Mom, nor I knew for many years what was causing her problems. Though knowing is scary, so far awareness seems to be a blessing for me and those who will help me make it through. And I cling to the hope that my awareness may help not only myself, but somehow might help others who are dealing with this.
A Universal Christ
Christianity is the most radical of all world religions
Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio focuses on the theology of the incarnation and the universal nature of the Christ mystery:
The Christian message is that God has become flesh [sarx in Greek or “matter”]—not a part of God or one aspect of God but the whole infinite, eternal God Creator has become matter. The claim—God has become flesh—is so radical that it is virtually unthinkable and illogical. Christianity is the most radical of all world religions because it takes matter seriously as the home of divinity. [1]
So does everyone have to become Christian to know the Christ? Absolutely not. Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality—every star, leaf, bird, fish, tree, rabbit, and human person. Everything is christified because everything expresses divine love incarnate. However, Jesus Christ is the “thisness” of God, so what Jesus is by nature everything else is by grace (divine love). We are not God, but every single person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in [their] unique personal form, and has the capacity to be united with God…. Because Jesus is the Christ, every human is already reconciled with every other human in the mystery of the divine, so that Christ is more than Jesus alone. Christ is the whole of reality bound in a union of love.
We are transformed by experiencing the presence of Christ in all things.
Eileen: (And all people.)
I believe this. But find expressing it difficult without it becoming so complex that only theologians can “get” it. In the fifty-eight years since I experienced the incredible unconditional Love of God fleshed out in Jesus, my view of Jesus and Christianity has been expanded, rather than changed, until I realized that we have mostly missed the point of Jesus. Our importance is as a part of the whole…..we are part of God with God’s Spirit within us, but we limit the Spirit because of fear. Fear is literally the root of all evil. It’s the root of Musk’s need for power and my need for pleasure as escapes from the reality of our human vulnerability. We are fragile physical beings in a huge universe beyond even our understanding, never-the-less, our control. Unconsciously, we are all aware that the possibility of heartbreaking disaster lurks in the next minute. We do all we can to make this life pain free……our idea of heaven. We miss the point of Jesus. We want Him to be a “get out of this life’s possibility of being hell free” card. And we consider Him our key to the spiritual country club of escape from it. And we miss the point of both His life journey and His death as the prototype for ours. He grew spiritually. He became aware of the need to balance achievement with simple kindness through his mom. He was literally pushed into the increased danger of becoming known for doing miracles by His mom’s caring about a family’s social embarrassment. He was challenged over and over to love the least of these (lepers, tax collectors, fallen women, Roman Soldiers, people unwilling to help themselves, cowardly best friends, and the leaders of His own religion who had Him tortured and killed) and even God when He felt God had abandoned Him.
This life is not meant to be heaven. It is school. It is the journey from Self as number one, to being willing to lay down our lives for not only those who are different from us, but those that would kill us. That takes Growth through Grace with a capital G! Ultimately it takes a willingness to die to what we value most in our lives and ourselves.
This may not sound like the “good news,” but it’s a letting go that ultimately frees us from the fear that controls and corrupts us, so that we can ultimately Love all others unconditionally.
Seeing the Oneness of Everything and Everyone
Christ in All Things by Richard Rohr and others.
Sunday
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.
—John 1:1, 3
Monday
Discovering Christ as the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe can transform the way we perceive and the way we live in our everyday world.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
God’s word to humanity is not primarily the word spoken in a book, in sacred literature, but it is a word that is incarnate, not only as a human being, but present as an element in all beings, in all created reality.
—Ursula King
Wednesday
On Christmas Eve, we celebrate a new beginning. We welcome the dawning of a new light.
—Brian McLaren
Thursday
Christmas became the great celebratory feast of Christians because it basically says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on this Earth, it’s good to have a body, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of it!
—Richard RohrFriday
Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality.
—Ilia Delio
Accepting Jesus as Savior Takes a Minute. Accepting Jesus as Lord Takes a Lifetime.
I want to explain something about having a relationship with Jesus and about saying the prayer accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord.
For me, as an agnostic, it was a new beginning. Jesus became both a partner with His life as a guide, and a presence as a source of God’s Love that is the grace to grow more loving all along life’s spiritual journey.
I began to recognize the pattern Jesus had of opening up to more and more people as those Loved by God…..until it included not just good Jews, but the Jews that used the power of the enemy government to get rich, the slut at the well, the guy at the pool who wouldn’t help himself, Soldiers of the hated enemy government, his closest friends who abandoned Him, and even the Jews that thought they had a monopoly on God and were instrumental in his torture and death. And as He died, Jesus chose to trust God even when He felt abandoned by Him.
Jesus fleshed out both the Love of God for ALL of us and the WAY for us to become Loving. That Love is the grace for us to grow more loving every inch of the way until we die.
I don’t know what God is… I don’t know what heaven is. Sometimes I’ve felt like this life was hell. But I do know we are all different and have different limits. I’m not sure we all die loving like Jesus, because we are not dealt the same hand. We only have to play the hand we were dealt the best we can with the grace of that Love. I cannot judge ANYONE, even myself. At 88, I’ve realized that I wasn’t dealt as great a hand as I thought I was. But I’m still here, so I’ve got more growing to do. Sometimes when I see really GOOD people suffer horribly, it mirrors Jesus to me. Maybe they love enough to bear what the weaker people they love couldn’t. I don’t know. NO one knows! If we think we know the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, we are claiming to be equal to God. Being human is living and, even by the measure of perfection, dying unfinished.
We want so badly to feel safe, and we think either worldly power/riches or religion will guarantee it. This life is not about safety or perfection. It’s a journey from our own NEEDING to LOVING. Some of us are born better at it than others. It’s a personal journey, so some of us need more grace than others. Some of us, like me, even need miracles among the heartbreaks. It’s a JOURNEY of learning to LOVE like Jesus did to the best of the grace we are given. Though the journey varies from person to person, groups of us start out more like each other than others. The challenge isn’t getting to heaven, it’s becoming the loving person God created us uniquely to be. And often our failures are in what we DON’T do, because of limiting our love to only people like ourselves. And that includes both conservatives and liberals in any society.
I KNOW I am LOVED, but that doesn’t mean I’m perfect or will ever be perfect. And the same goes for every single child of God. I know that by the pattern of the life and death and Love fleshed out in Jesus.
Through Memories
I remember you in memories of running in the rain, of funny children’s stories, and haunted Halloweens. Of how you learned to hold me and simply let me cry, listening to my many fears to heal me of my fright. Of you overcoming phobias so I wouldn’t be alone while camping in the woods or giving talks on Type. Nightmare trips in broken cars and cabins full of scouts, houses filled with strangers and jeep rides in the night. Letters shared in parking lots and rooms filled with flowers, the kaleidoscope of memories that keeps our love alive.
Eileen 2000
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 
