RESURRECTION BUOYS UP EVERY MOMENT

The resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus two thousand years ago and will happen to each of us sometime in the future, after we die, when our own bodies will be raised to new life. It is that, but it is much more.

The resurrection is something that buoys up every moment of life and every aspect of reality.

God is always making new life and undergirding it with a goodness, graciousness, mercy, and love that, in the end, heals all wounds, forgives all sins, and brings deadness of all kinds to new life.

Ronald Rolheiser

MORAL LONELINESS

Our deepest loneliness is not sexual, but moral. More than we yearn for someone to sleep with sexually and emotionally, we yearn for someone to sleep with morally. What we really want is a soul mate. What does this mean?

Ancient philosophers and mystics used to say that, before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything in relation to its original sweetness.

Inside each of us, there is a dark memory of having once been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent imprint inside us, one so tender and good that its memory becomes a prism through which we see everything else.

Thus we recognize love and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside us. Things "touch our hearts" because they awaken a memory of that original kiss. Moreover, because we have a memory of once having been perfectly touched, caressed, and loved, every experience we meet in life falls a little short. We have already had something deeper. When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged it is because our outside experience does not honor what we already know and cling to inside.

And that dark memory of first love creates a place inside us where we hold all that is precious and sacred. It is the place we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to enter, the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of compassion and the place of rage.

The yearning and pain we feel here can be called moral loneliness because we are feeling lonely in that precise place where we feel most strongly about the right and wrong of things: that is, we feel alone in that place where all that is most precious to us is cherished, guarded, and feels vulnerable when it is not properly honored.

Paradoxically, it is the place where we most want someone to enter and yet where we are most guarded. On the one hand, we yearn to be touched inside this tender space because we already know the joy of being caressed there. On the other hand, we don't often or easily let anyone enter there. Why? Because what is most precious in us is also what is most vulnerable to violation and we are, and rightly so, deeply cautious about whom we admit to that sacred place. Thus, we often feel wrenchingly alone in our deepest center.

A fierce loneliness results; a moral aching. More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for moral affinity, for someone to visit us in that deep part where all that is most precious is cherished and guarded. Our deepest longing is for a partner to sleep with morally-a kindred spirit, a soul mate. Great friendships and great marriages, invariably, have this at their root: deep moral affinity The persons in these relationships are "lovers" in the truest sense because they sleep with each other at the deepest level, irrespective of whether they have sex or not. In terms of feeling, this kind of love is experienced as a “coming home," as finding a home, bone of my bone. Sometimes, though not always, it is accompanied by romantic love and sexual attraction. Always, however, there is a sense that the other is a kindred spirit, one whose affinity with you is founded upon valuing precisely the same things you do.

But such a love, as we know, is not easily found. Most of us spend our lives looking for it: searching, restless, dissatisfied, and morally lonely.

Ronald Rolheiser

THE WORLD IS NOT AS IT SHOULD BE. WE ARE NOT AS WE COULD BE.

Father in Heaven,
The world is not as it should be.
We are not as we could be.
Have mercy on us. 

Darkness hovers over our homes.
Despair has displaced hope.
We listen to lies and illusions
That water our fears and harvest hate. 

The world is not as it should be.
We are not as we could be.
Have mercy on us. 

Sin has shaped our city.
Our neighbors are isolated
Without friends, without shelter, without food.
Our neighborhoods are divided
With the darkness of inequality and disparity. 

The world is not as it should be.
We are not as we could be,
Have mercy on us. 

Violence has stained our city’s story.
Places of light now marked with memories of death.
Evil has ended precious lives
In our schools and streets,
In our theatres and groceries
In our nightclubs and churches.  

The world is not as it should be.
We are not as we could be.
Have mercy on us. 

We lament the darkness and long for Your light.

May your mercy bring healing.
May your grace make us whole.
And may your love bring us at the last
To our eternal home.

Jared Ray Mackey
Lent 2023

LENT CAN SCARCELY BE TOO LONG

The purpose of Lent is to arouse. To arouse the sense of sin. To arouse a sense of guilt for sin. To arouse the humble contrition for the guilt of sin that makes forgiveness possible. To arouse the sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins. To arouse or to motivate the works of love and the work for justice that one does out of gratitude for the forgiveness of one’s sins.

To say it again—this time, backward: There is no motivation for works of love without a sense of gratitude, no sense of gratitude without forgiveness, no forgiveness without contrition, no contrition without a sense of guilt, no sense of guilt without a sense of sin.

In other words, a guilty suffering spirit is more open to grace than an apathetic or smug soul. Therefore, an age without a sense of sin, in which people are not even sorry for not being sorry for their sins, is in rather a serious predicament. Likewise an age with a Christianity so eager to forgive that it denies the need for forgiveness. For such an age, therefore, Lent can scarcely be too long!

Edna Hong
Bread and Wine

INTERIOR FREEDOM

Nobody can prevent us from believing in God, hoping in Him, and loving Him. Faith, hope, and love make human being fully human.

That others are sinners cannot prevent us from becoming saints. Nobody really deprives us of anything.

The harm people do to me never comes from them, it comes from me. Harm is only self-inflicted.

If the wrongs people commit do penetrate our hearts, that is because they find room there. If suffering makes us bitter and ill humored, it is because our hearts are devoid of faith, hope, and love.

God is the eternal present.

Living in the present termites our hearts to expand.

It’s a mistake to add the burden of the past to the weight of the present, it’s still a worse mistake to burden the present with the future.

Jacques Phillippe
Interior Freedom

PRAYER TAKES PLACE IN THE MIDDLE VOICE

Prayer and spirituality feature participation, the complex participation of God and the human, his will and our wills. We do not abandon ourselves to the stream of grace and drown in the ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull the strings that activate God’s operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate God (active voice) nor are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). Prayer takes place in the middle voice.

Eugene Peterson
The Contemplative Pastor