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There are two moments that matter.
One is when you know that your one and only life is absolutely valuable and alive. The other is when you know your life, as presently lived, is entirely pointless and empty.
You are the desiring of God. God desires through you and longs for Life and Love through you and in you. Allow it, speak it, and you will find your place in the universe of things.
You could not have such desires if God had not already desired them first—in you and for you and as you!
New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.
Only people who first choose “dualistically” for the Big Picture, the life adventure, the journey with God, eventually proceed to non-dual thinking or “mercy.” Sort of a paradox, isn’t it? You need both to go the full distance.
Clear choice and decision gets you started, aims you on the right course, and then if you stay on it, that very path will open you up to subtlety, nuance, shadow, contradictions, inconsistencies, brokenness, and variance in almost everything. One soon realizes that what Jesus said is indeed true: Nothing is entirely good except God alone (see Mark 10:18).
The choice for this all-good God allows us, ironically, to deal victoriou...
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“Lord, show me how to make good decisions and then be willing to learn what they really ask of me.”
Isaiah says explicitly that God prefers another kind of fasting which changes our actual lifestyle and not just punishes our body. (The poor body is always the available scapegoat to avoid touching our purse, our calendar, or our prejudices.) Isaiah makes a very upfront demand for social justice, non-aggression, taking our feet off the necks of the oppressed, sharing our bread with the hungry, clothing the naked, letting go of our sense of entitlement, malicious speech, and sheltering the homeless. He says very clearly this is the real fast God wants!
Jesus has come to transform people, not to exclude them. He has come for the seeming losers, and not to create a country club for the supposed winners.
We can only be tempted to something that is good on some level, partially good, or good for some, or just good for us and not for others. Temptations are always about “good” things, or we could not be tempted: in these cases “bread,” “Scripture,” and “kingdoms in their magnificence.” Most people’s daily ethical choices are not between total good and total evil, but between various shades of good, a partial good that is wrongly perceived as an absolute good (because of the self as the central reference point), or even evil that disguises itself as good. These are what get us into trouble.
Forgiveness is not some churchy technique or formula. Forgiveness is constant from God’s side, which should become a calm, joyous certainty on our side. Mercy received will be mercy passed on, and “will not return to me empty, until it has succeeded in what it was sent to do.”
It demands that we release ourselves into the belly of darkness before we can know what is essential. It insists that the spiritual journey is more like giving up control than taking control.
It might even be saying that others will often throw us overboard, and that we get to the right shore by God’s grace more than right action on our part. It is clearly a very disturbing and unsatisfying sign. And this is all we are going to get? You see, faith is precisely no-thing.
As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wisely said, “Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.”
He has no message whatsoever to give until he has first endured the journey, the darkness, the spitting up on the right shore—all in spite of his best efforts to avoid these very things.
It is an excellent example of how the biblical text itself reveals both a movement forward into a gradual discovery of God and a simultaneous movement backward into a self-centered using of God for our own purposes. Both are often in the same text.
Did you know that you only ask for what you have already begun to experience? Otherwise it would never occur to you to ask for it. Further, God seems to plant within us the desire to pray for what God already wants to give us, and even better, God has already begun to give it to us! We are always just seconding the motion, but the first motion is always and forever from God. The fact that you prayed at all means God just started giving to you a second ago.
God is always much better than the most loving person you can imagine, Jesus is saying. It is not that we pray and God answers. It is that our praying is already God answering within us and through us.
But that is our final and full act of trust in a God who always gives us “good things”!
Ezekiel is saying loudly and strongly that your human life matters, your personal decisions and choices do define you. You have worth. Both individually and now! This gives a necessary significance, dignity, and urgency to the whole human journey.
We really do need prods, goads, ideals to help us think outside of the little boxes we all create for ourselves.
If there is a constantly recurring theme in mythology, literature, and theater, it is that human beings who try to avoid changing themselves (an invitation which normally comes through “humiliating self-knowledge”) always set out on a destructive course of trying to change the world, others, or even God.
Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung said that to avoid the “legitimate suffering” of being human, we inflict untold suffering on others, and finally actually bring more suffering on ourselves anyway.
We still do not want to change ourselves; we want to change others instead.
Oppositional energy never knows what it is for, it just knows what it is against. It is sort of a sad substitute for vision, yet negative people feed on it.
Religion which was supposed to be life and healing for the world has too often become death and boundary-keeping for the few.
Whole people create whole people.
Divided people heal nobody, but only scatter because they are “scattered” and un-whole themselves.
“Merciful God, all I can give you, and all you ever want, is who I really am. This little woman or little man that I am now gives you back my only and true self.”
Prayer, more than anything, seeks, creates, and preserves relationship—which is always both giving and receiving.
He is a second half of life man in a first half of life religious courtroom.
Vengeance is often an open, but denied secret when fear and gossip reign in a society.
It seems that we have a part to play in creating a culture of life and resurrection.
In short, humans have a hard time distinguishing between lust and true love.
The crucified Jesus is God’s at least three-level vaccination plan: (1) against humanity’s desire to scapegoat or kill, (2) so we could “catch” a universal and healing love from God, and (3) toward the mutual encounter whereby we know the great “I AM” through our own deepest “I am.”
Most Christians would probably be slow to admit that by these criteria almost all of us would have opposed Jesus. “This is not our tradition, he is not from our group, and he has no credentials!”
“God of perfect freedom, open spaces inside of our minds, our hearts, and our memories, so we can just begin to be free. Do not let me be hardened against anyone of your creatures, so that I cannot hear and respect their truth.”
Each succeeding time God, in effect, says “I might as well let you in on the big secret, I do it all anyway!” Jesus becomes the living icon of that new and everlasting covenant, where God does all the loving and we do all the receiving. It is symbolized every time we hand out the “cup of his blood” to you—and say “the new and everlasting covenant.”
“Good and Generous God, why do you have such a hard time giving yourself away? You want to share your very self with us, your own divine nature, and we will not allow it.”
There are still two ways of gathering, the way of fear and hate and the way of love.
Trust the down, and God will take care of the up.
Jesus dies “for” us not in the sense of “in place of” but “in solidarity with.”
Now you are ready for Sunday, the first day of the week, the ever-new day of Resurrected Life, which will allow you henceforth to read all your life backward and understand, and read it forward with hope., hope is not some vague belief that “all will work out well,” but biblical hope is the certainty that things finally have a victorious meaning no matter how they turn out. We learned that from Jesus, which gives us now the courage to live our lives forward from here. Maybe that is the full purpose of Lent.
