I Timothy 3:14-15......

“Luther didn’t want to start a new church.  He wanted to stay in the church.”

“If he truly wanted to remain in the Church, that was easy enough to do.”

“But he couldn’t--- they would have suppressed him!”

Why, yes indeed, “they” would have, as has happened with a good many priests and theologians over the course of time when they run afoul of the institutional Church and/or get out ahead of the people of God….one sad fact about the sinful people who make up the Church is that we will rarely miss an opportunity to mess things up.  There is no guarantee that the institutional face of the Church will do the best thing at the most opportune time, avoiding any possible misstep.  But even in the face of certain suppression, the choice to leave the Church is still that: choice.

Consider, as one example, St. Padre Pio: mystic, stigmatist, confessor and spiritual director extraordinaire, subject to suspicion, controversy, removed from priestly duties and forbidden to correspond with those with whose spiritual direction he was entrusted, but who was later canonized, and whose spiritual insights on suffering and the nature of God have enriched us all.

Consider Henri de Lubac, one of the founders of the nouvelle theologie movement, whose works were suppressed in the 1940s and who was removed from teaching posts, but who later was a theological expert for Vatican II, and whose insights into ecclesiology can be felt as some of the fresh air Jophn XXIII sought , blowing in Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes and Dei Verbum .

Consider St. John of the Cross, whose reform of the Carmelites resulted in his imprisonment and torture, from which came his great mystical poetry, who was eventually both canonized and recognized as one of the great Doctors of the Church.

As I recall, Christ indicated we would—not might, would—suffer for our faith. The question is—what do we do with that suffering?  Do we allow it to separate us from the Body of Christ, which after all, in this world is made up of sinners just like us, with all that implies for the potential for persecution and unjust action, within the Church as well as without.

Faced with rejection of their unique vision of Christ and His Church, each of the men above was opposed by the institutional Church of his time.  None of them wanted to leave—and none of them did.  They accepted the rejection of their ideas with humility trusting that in His good time God would either make clear the error of their own thinking or that of those who opposed them. In short, none of them fell into the trap of believing that because they believed their vision to be of value—in its own way a part of the Truth and therefore, somehow correct though always incomplete—that the world would be changed as they wished, when they wished and in the manner they wished.  None of them fell into the trap of taking themselves too seriously, of believing themselves infallible in matters of faith and morals, even as they knew that they had encountered God in a new, real, and valuable way.

In short, they were content to witness to the Truth as they saw it within the Church, accept whatever came as a result and trust the outcome to God.

This stands in distinct contrast to the so-called Reformers—who really were rebels, for they left the Church rather than submit to her temporal authority.  Not content simply to witness to the truth and let God handle the rest, they fell into the trap of sinfulness to which man has been prone since time began.  With a sometimes great clarity of vision (the selling of indulgences was wrong; there was corruption among some of the clergy, the hierarchy had sometimes forgotten their mission as pastors—and none of this was the teaching of the Church), they in their enthusiasm  forgot their own role: to witness and be faithful.  It is God’s role to change hearts.  

In a way, their faith in God faltered, really.  They did not trust that He would change that which needed to be changed in His own good time and way.  In a way, The Adversary used the good they saw—the things that did need reforming—as a lever to extract them from the Church by appealing to their pride and in pride they fell as we all do each time we sin. 

 Reform—true reform within-came and continues within the Church.   And to a man, the “reformers” left….because reform was not occurring according to their preconceived notions and the voice of Christendom has been muffled ever since.

When Christ appointed Peter the head of His Church, he did not give Peter the grace of perfection.  And good thing, for had it been so, we would have been ever tempted to believe that it was through our own efforts that the Church endures.  One thing for sure: no Catholic can claim that the Church endures by dint of  the goodness of her people, nor her shepherds!  There is far too much evidence to the contrary….

Christ  did, however, promise that if we remain in the Church—in Him—that she will never lead us away from God.  He did not  give the charism of perfection in all that the hierarchy does, but gave instead  the grace that the Church will never teach error in faith and morals.  And when you get right down to it, how could she, as the Body of Christ, who is her head?   However, the details of implementation, we get to work out and we often—regularly--sometimes spectacularly-mess that up.

It’s worth keeping that in mind today.  There is much in the institutional face of the Church today that should be changed.  We are called to vigorous witness to that piece we see and to add our vision to others who with us in the Church seek God and are working out our salvation in fear and trembling.  We are called to remain in the fold, to know and live the apostolic faith handed down to us, to be faithful in the sacraments and to use the grace they give us to go out to all the world proclaiming the good news and inviting others to the household of God, helping them and allowing the to help us, on our journey.  And we are called to be obedient to the Church for "he who hears you (the Church)  hears Me"….trusting that as hard as it may be sometimes to submit to her authority (as Padre Pio, de Lubac and John of the Cross discovered) , she will never lead us away from God.  NEVER.

And we are called to trust and believe that God is sustaining and reforming His Church—and the world-- even when it doesn’t happen according to our timetable.  The Church is in the process of becoming that which she already is: the spotless Bride of Christ.

As Christians, we may question, we may debate, we may explore, we may converse, we may argue, we may have difficulty with teachings of the Church, we may take polar positions on issues of great importance (and Catholics do all these things).  The one thing we must not do—and the mistake Luther and the others made—is to put ourselves in the position of God and demand that reform be done our way, according to our timetable, with our ends in mind.  To do so is to grasp at the prerogatives of God, seizing the fruit of the Tree.  That is the way of schism and of pride, the mother of all sins.

Is it difficult to see the human face of the Church sullied by missteps?  Yes, as it would have been difficult  to see the face of Christ sullied by thorns and beatings.  Is it difficult to be rebuffed for simply telling the truth as we see it?  Yes, as it was difficult to see Christ sentenced to die for simply showing us the Father.  It is difficult to remain in the Church when her human face seems to reject  what we offer with sincerity and love? Yes.  Yes, it is. 

Protestants avoided this problem by rejecting the idea that there is any binding, temporal, institutional Church to which they owe obedience, relying instead on the spiritual dimension of the Church alone to guide them and making the Bible their only source of inspiration, for they rejected the Church and her Magesterium.  This freed them to redesign their version of church in any way they wished, changing and reformulating teaching and practices and moving from one ecclesial body to another as their desires moved them; from my perspective that hasn’t worked out all that well. 

Christ is both human and Divine, both Eternal and in-time.   And just as He cannot be divided into the Eternal Jesus and the temporal Jesus, neither can His Body the Church.  In some mystical sense the temporal Church is one with Jesus, really, truly, and indivisibly.  Like it or not, Jesus established one Church, the temporal and human nature of His body on earth as well as the invisible Church of all time—and this subsists in its fullness  in the Catholic Church.   

No Protestant body can even attempt to make that claim, to stretch back in time to Pentecost and before…. the Body of Christ is as visible here and now as He was visible to those in first century Judea: a Church that is a body we can touch, with a voice we can hear, a conduit for grace, the source of the sacraments.  God knew—Jesus knew---anyone who had ever encountered brash, enthusiastic, bumbling, sinful  Peter knew—that the men He left in charge of His Church would not act perfectly in every instance. That the sins of church leaders (including Paul who, because of his ego and passion, very nearly precipitated the first schism with his public denunciation of Peter in violation of his own admonitions about fraternal correction)  would complicate life for everyone was clear early on.   But establish a Church He did, and appoint a vicar, He did and He told us that the Gates of Hell would not prevail against her.  Moreover, He prayed that we would remain one in Him in this Church as He is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Jesus simply asks us to have faith in His promise and not let pride and impatience take us out of the house and away from the family table.  He asks that we take with thanksgiving all He left us—graces and warts—not pick and choose that which we prefer, shaping the Church He left into the one we want like Luther did.

Luther and the other “reformers”  chose earthly influence, trying to see their (competing and often incompatible)  visions  implemented immediately in their own ways over obedience to the Church.  They were unable—unwilling?—to exhibit  the humility  to trust that God would see that whatever truth they had to propose would flourish in God’s own good way and time in the Church Jesus Himself established. They did not  trust God to change that which could and should be changed and to maintain that which must be maintained unchangeable within the Church that bore them, taught them, sustained them and gave them life.  They chose instead to, as St. Augustine put it, rend by schism, tearing into pieces the body of Christ anew.  They chose—deliberately—to violate the unity Christ over and over asked of His followers.

The same happens today in the Catholic fold.  The “cafeteria”  Catholic  acts in the same mold as the “reformers” but without as much visibility.  Their agendas—be it lay empowerment, a married priesthood, or acceptance of homosexual unions—must be implemented immediately and on their terms; otherwise the Church is obviously and irredeemably corrupt.  What arrogance!

 Sometimes it’s worth remembering that just because we are working for God, it doesn’t mean we are always doing God’s work.  God always has a better plan than we do, if we only have the faith to leave Him to it.  And remain in the Church which is the household of God, the pillar and bulwark of the Truth.

Spiritual Exercise

[In a fit of insanity I volunteered to  share my faith journey with the Catholic Medical Association of Nashville tomorrow night.  This--more or less--is that I have in mind to say.   Prayers appreciated.]

Thomas Merton began his biography with these words:

On the last day of January in 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French Mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world.

I think mine begins this way:

On a holiday now forgotten, in 1951, under the sign of the Balance, as a minor war came to a stale mate, under the shadow of a crucifix, a baby scientist was delivered of a Methodist mother by  a Jewish doctor in a Catholic hospital.

My birth is a metaphor for my journey—Protestant to Catholic by way of Judaism, always with Holy Mother Church in the background, surrounding me, waiting, watching, guiding me.  It just took me 50 years to figure it out.  Sometimes for a scientist, I am not all that observant….

 God  made me a scientist before He made me anything else.  As long as I can remember I have had the urge to understand even the inexplicable.  But if God  gifted me with the burden of a scientist’s nature, He also gifted me with an understanding that whatever I could explain was necessarily insufficient.  For example, I understand all manner of things about chemistry.  I can explain the chemical reaction that produces water.  I can to regurgitate the formulas that explain chemical bonding and draw diagrams that make it visible.  But  I also know instinctively  that understanding the material concepts of how water comes to be doesn't explain water.  If doesn't explain rain, or soft Irish mist , or ponds, or the ocean, or the incredible relief  a cold, wet cloth or cold drink on a hot day brings.  I suppose God  gifted me within innate understanding of the difference between substance and accidents and He gifted me with a sense of Mystery, and with that can sometimes be a great frustration …

The good sisters at Holy Name of Jesus Hospital soly Name of Jesus ent the crucifix that hung over my crib home with my mother.  It hung over my bed throughout my growing up and I managed to hold onto it even during the turbulent years of college.  It now hangs at the apex of the family oratory, a reminder that even when I didn't see where I was going God did.

  My parents were sporadic in church attendance but looking back I realize that they taught me something perhaps more valuable:  that religion starts in the home and informs one’s  very life.  Religion to them was a way of living, not a Sunday exercise.  It is telling that all three of us children have strong—though wildly different—faiths even to this day: A Methodist-turned Lutheran, now Pentecostal, a Methodist, turned Episcopalian now Baptist and a Methodist Jew now relatively newly-minted Catholic. 

I would show up in our little church  for the first day of Sunday school, and Easter, and promotion day, and a few days in between.  I would learn vast quantities of Scripture (though in a foreshadowing of my Catholic destiny I never managed to learn citations along with it).  But mostly in my early and Methodist  years, I was formed by two things: music and mystery.  But perhaps they are the same thing.

My two older brothers—13 and 15 years older-- would take me to hymn sings on Sunday evenings and   if we did not go to church on Sunday, I would spend Sunday mornings with my dad watching Gospel music programs on television.  There is a lot of theology in music and I internalized it largely in silence because in my family the more important something is the less likely we were to talk about it.  While that sometimes causes problems it also gave me the gift of interiority that has served me well as a Catholic.  I learned without ever talking about it that God was present and unseen in even the most mundane things I did.  If I did not learn to worship Him every week in church, I least came to know that He is, is real, and is not some distant figure but part of the very fabric of life.  My own personal life, not random, generic, life-in-general.

Every once in a while, we would wander into church on something other than the appointed days and sometimes it would be the last Sunday of the month, communion Sunday.  In our church, we would kneel at the altar railing, in which was carved Do This in Remembrance of Me.  We would pass a tray filled with little cups of grape juice and cubes of Wonder Bread and we would take and we would eat.  It was entirely symbolic.  But there was something inexplicably special about kneeling there with my family on either side of me, doing something that I knew had been done from the very first days of the very first Christians. 

When I was in high school, I once wandered into the Catholic Church for a noon mass, mostly just out of curiosity.  I was surprised by the fact that even though the mass was in a language I did not understand-it was in the last days before the English mass would be introduced in our area--I knew the rhythms and when I looked at the translation in the Missal,  I knew the words, both from the Bible and from our communion services.  And when, as a quick study with no idea that I was not to come forward, I followed along with the crowd, and knelt at the altar, said the Amen, tipped back my head and opened my mouth and received our Eucharistic Lord for the first time, I knew this was as different from the communion service in my church as night was from day even though I was not sure how.  I just knew that I had been a presence overwhelming and very special.  But that is where it ended, at least for the time being.

 I mentioned that Holy Mother Church was always present.  My next door neighbors were Catholic and I was great friends with the second son who was a few years older than I.  Catholics were somehow exotic : Ray got to wear  a cool uniform to school, he rode the city bus to and from, the school he went to was so much better than mine and besides, he got days off I didn't.  And in his family, like mine, religion was something you lived not something you just  believed.  I saw it in the way they went to church,  in the way they did not eat meat on Friday, in the Sisters and priests who dressed and lived differently from everyone else.  

Somewhere along the line, my dad brought it home to me a rosary someone had left behind where he worked —I have no idea why and, true to form, I never asked.  It was enough it was a gift from my father.  It was pink glass beads, and it came in a little box that had “my rosary”  on the top of it.  Ray took it to his parish and had it blessed and told me how to pray it.

            When he explained the Hail, Mary, I remember asking him why he called Mary the Mother of God when she was Jesus’ mother.    He is explanation was simple: Jesus is God, right?  If Jesus is God and Mary is His mother, Mary is the Mother of God. 

Even my still developing scientific nature got that on the first try.  If A=B  and B=C, then A=C. I eventually lost those physical beads, but when I would pick up another set some forty years later, they were inexplicably familiar, like reconnecting with an old friend.  Mary was never an obstacle in my journey.

In college, I drifted away from my Methodist roots but I was still surrounded by Holy Mother Church.  I went to school in Arizona and I started my college career as an anthropologist.  The scientist in me chose physical anthropology before the practical side of me switched to chemistry upon realizing that people with Ph.Ds in anthro were driving cabs for aliving…..   Anthro course work required studies in cultural anthropology as well as bones and digging.  I learned the skill of looking at a culture at least in part through its own  lens.  And what a culture I was surrounded by   Tucson was steeped in the Catholic way of life, very much in the Hispanic mold.  It is home to one of the most beautiful churches ever established by any missionary in the Southwest:  San Xavier del Bac, the White Dove of the Desert, fruit of Fr. Eusebio Kino’s faith and fortitude.  When I got involved social justice issues in college—it was all the rage--they were colored by the presence of the Catholic Church.  I worked in the barrios among the poor, cleaning houses and community buildings and sharing tortillas and beans with those who lived there.   I got to know how the Yaqui Indians  celebrated Easter and how the Hispanics celebrated Christmas and assorted feast days in wonderful, public and ways that stirred up something more than just my intellectual appreciation of them.

When I finished college, I went to medical school because it was oddly enough the path of least resistance.  There  I met and married husband.  Reflective of where we were at the time, it was a secular ceremony and we wrote our own vows.  Later,  I would learn what a gift my marriage really was;  how I would learn the meaning of love and sacrifice; how God would communicate the mystery of His love through the very real presence of my husband whom I will never be able to thank enough…marriage: the icon of the interior life of God..who knew?  Intellectually, I never encountered that notion until after I entered the Church, but once I did, it found an immediate home, for I knew the reality before I had the words to explain it.

In the middle of residency,  and for reasons that are lost in the mist of time, I began to have religious stirrings again.  And for reasons that are likewise lost, I was not attracted to the “Me and Jesus” Protestantism that surrounded me.  Like a good scientist, I suppose, I decided to go back to basics and so I studied and entered the Jewish faith.  I'm pretty sure my husband thought I had taken leave of my senses but he supported me because I suppose at some level he trusted me not to be completely crazy.

I don't know that I was ever a particularly good Jew, but I entered into it as fully as I could.  I read about it (because that's what scientists do) but more importantly I lived it: I made Shabbos, celebrated Passover, went for the festive reading of the Megillah at Purim, attending at shul for Yom Kippur—I did it all, or at least all that presented itself to me for my participation.  For Judaism, as with the religion of my youth, is a way of being more than a way of thinking.  In the few years that I practiced actively,  it inserted itself in my very bones.  For me, Passover is not a concept is a reality.  The story of God caring for the Israelites is not some abstract tale but is family lore.  And the idea that God works through the very stuff of this world is as natural as breathing.  When I look back, I know that learning to be a Jew helped make me a Catholic.

When our son was born, like all pretty much secular couples we were faced with an existential crisis: how to raise this child.  Both of us knew that we would raise our children with faith but the question was which one?  Steve had never been able to embrace the practice of Judaism.   We shook the family tree and a couple of Episcopalians fell out--- and an Episcopal church was just around the corner from where we lived--so that's where went.

We spent 20 years as Episcopalians.  We learned to love the beauty and rhythms of liturgy for there are few things more beautiful than High Anglican worship.  We learned the power of prayer and mystery reentered my life in a new form and quite unexpectedly in something as close to a mystical experience as my clay-footed and scientific nature is ever likely to allow. 

It happened like this: The Holy Week after we entered the Episcopal Church, I walked through a pouring rain in the middle of the night to the chapel of repose to keep vigil on Holy Thursday.  I spent an hour there alone, trying to make sense out of this religious commitment I had made in light of the daily life I was living at the time as a medical examiner hip deep every day in the evil that men do that—I can testify to this—really does live on after with great force. 

Miracles, you see,  have never been a mystery to me; the mystery to me has always been how to make sense of this very broken world when somehow I know a good God exists.  I will not bore you with the details; suffice it to say that night, as I walked back home in the rain in the darkest hours of the night, at some level beyond the edges of my mind, in a space not my intellect, a place where I think my heart lives, I understood that I would never understand but also knew  that if I were quiet and open I would somehow come nearer that good God even through the awful things I worked with every day.

Because we eventually spent so much time in a parish led by a descendant of the Oxford movement, we considered ourselves as fully Catholic as anyone.   If you believe you are already at the destination, it makes it hard to continue to journey.  In my experience, those who consider themselves Anglo-Catholic are at once the closest relatives and the most distant strangers to Catholicism.  I am sure that had we remained in our Anglo-Catholic parish in Florida we would eventually have still swum the Tiber but a constellation of events in God's good time made it happen sooner. 

As we were getting ready to leave our little island of orthodoxy in Florida for parts unknown and parishes untested in Tennessee in 2003,  ECUSA elected Vicki Gene Robinson a bishop.  As this was happening I remember thinking that this was simply impossible, that the ECUSA would never do such an outrageous thing. 

But they did.  As a result, we sat  in Episcopal Church after Episcopal Church in the Chattanooga area listening to the various Episcopal ministers in each church castigate those of us orthodox inclination who could not accept that it was all right for a priest of the Episcopal Church to abandon his sacramental marriage for a gay relationship he then called sacramental and then be ordained bishop in the bargain.  After one particularly memorable moment of which I am not proud—but which is the stuff of legends-- I turned my husband and said, “There is a Catholic church down the street.  I'm going.  Come with me if you want.” 

It was an act very much born out of frustration and anger and in some ways it was a running away from more than a running to.  But much like a child who at the first sight of lightening and  the first peal of thunder knows instinctively to seek her father's lap and her mother's arms, I went to the Church.  When I think about it I am reminded to Peter’s words: To whom else would we go Lord?  You have the words of eternal life.”

All I knew at the time was that the sands had shifted beneath me.  The Episcopal Church that had nourished me for so many years with liturgy and music and communion had suddenly decided to put truth up to a vote.  And the scientist in me knew that that we discover truth, we encounter it, we do not decide it or create it.

The decision to go to the Catholic Church was very easy: I had learned to depend on communion and I could not be without it.  I did not know why but I knew that my very life depended on being at table.  And at table I was going to be.

Of course it took over a year for that to come about.  I would have done quite literally anything Holy Mother Church asked of me in order to be able to receive again.  That time when I could no longer in conscience kneel at the Episcopal altar and was not yet received into the Catholic Church was a period of great dryness and trial. 

It was made worse by the fact that our college-age daughter was in the midst of a deep depression that found its expression in lashing out at me.  I remember telling God that I didn't care whether or not my daughter ever loved me again, I only wanted her whole.  God took advantage of the Desert to teach me in very real terms what redemptive suffering is all about—I would learn the intellectual  concept only after coming into the Church and being there for some time--- and He did it then even though—perhaps because—I was without the usual consolation of communion. 

In my very bones, the same bones that carry the rhythm of Jewish life (and the Jewish understanding of suffering as beyond comprehension but not enough to separate us from God)  even today, I know that had the Eucharist not brought me home, the lessons of redemptive suffering would.  And if not that, the realization that the relationship of Christ to His Church is that of Groom to Bride—in a real and mysterious, not just metaphorical sense would have been the key.  I have found God hedges His bets…

Even so it was not until sometime after we were received that I actually converted.  I was standing in the kitchen, where my best thought and prayer occurs, peeling potatoes for a winter stew.  Suddenly it hit me, the incredible, mysterious, consonant, rational,  senseless, incomprehensible beauty of the Catholic faith.  And  just as suddenly I couldn't stop talking about it.  In contrast to my many years in the Episcopal Church, when I never felt moved to share my faith,  I will tell anyone who will  listen (and some who won't) about what I found when I came home.  And of course the scientist in me has to explain what that is even though I know I can't possibly do that.

What I found is what I had been looking for all along: a path to the fullness of Truth that would lead me encounter the great I AM as He is, where He is. And He is most fully and most gloriously is in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, in the faith passed down whole and entire from the Apostles, and especially, most especially. in the sacraments, and most particularly in the Eucharist. 

I started this with a quotation from Thomas  Merton.   I want to end with something I heard on Downton Abbey.  This is a my best recollection of a conversation between the Lady Mary and her husband Matthew.  Over the three seasons of the show, Lady Mary has established herself as a sometimes mean and unpleasant character.  The conversation begins in the bedroom where her husband has just given her a good night kiss and told her what wonderful woman she is.

Mary: No one else seems to think I'm very good.  Why do you?

Matthew: Because I have seen you naked.  Because I have held you in my arms.  Because I know you better than you know yourself and I love you.

The scene ends there but the conversation really concludes  some weeks later, after the birth of their son.  Mary looks at Matthew and says something like, “I want to be your Mary for all eternity.  Thank  you for loving me."

And that is what this scientist found in the Catholic Church.  I found the place where Jesus, really and substantially, body and blood, soul and divinity, waits to meet me in and through the sacraments He established, surrounded by my family, the Church; family that by its very existence communicates Him to me in ways real and supernatural. I found Jesus, in the way that He intended, in the fullness I sought, the great vastness of mystery laid out for me not to understand but to encounter and live contented within and sit in awe before.  I found Him who has seen me with all my faults.  Who has held me in His arms.  Who knows me better than I know myself.  And yet, Who, loves me.

                  I want to be His Barbara for all eternity.  And I thank him for loving me into and through His Church.

Deo Gratias.

Gift

A couple of years ago, I was walked from the Marriott Marquis  in Atlanta to Georgia State University to attend stations of the cross during Lent.  My walk earned me some chastisement from the good Father in charge of the college chaplaincy, as doing so requires transiting a slightly sketchy part of town.  Perhaps he is right, as on my way, a scruffy fellow—tattered clothes, long and unkempt beard, odiferous, and a little wild-eyed but with a broad smile-- approached me, grabbed my arm and pressed a scrap of paper in my hand. 

“Gift,”  he said and hurried on before I could become alarmed by his familiarity, let alone respond to it.

It was the bottom half of an old flyer on which he had written in blue ballpoint, legible and surprisingly neat, a series of pithy little thoughts.  I read them right there on the sidewalk.  Somehow I have managed to keep track of that bit of paper for more than two years.   It’s Lent again and I’ve been spending a great deal of time thinking about God and how I encounter Him. 

How too often I miss Him because He surprises me, showing up, like Alan Funt, where and when I least expect Him.  But isn’t that His way?  A God who acts through history is a God who continues to do so and a God who turns expectations upside down in the beginning will upset the applecart still.  The King is still found in the manger and on the cross, not in the palace.

And this surprising God speaks to me in my own history through those to whom I am related, however briefly.  I am made different by every relationship; my life, the one God is making for me whether I acknowledge it or not, whether I particularly like it or not, is both changed and created by those with whom I am in relationship.  I cannot even exist without relationship, creature that I am; and I cannot know who I am except against the mirror of others.  Relationship is of God, whose very life is relationship in the mystery of the Trinity.

This business of relationship is something quite different than mere interaction.  Interaction is a sterile, impersonal term, transactional and commercial.  Relating, on the other hand, implies that the encounter leaves something of me with the other and something of the other with me.  It is certainly, true for this evanescent and random encounter: I’ve picked up that paper over and over in the past two years and when I do, the moment comes back and I smile.  Surely, that man left more with me than a bit of paper with a few lines written on it. 

In this case, I am related by a that walk, that street, that day, that time, to a perfect stranger on a sunny street in Atlanta in almost springtime.   I’ve come to think of that little encounter as something of a living fortune cookie, with that scrap the paper filling that God sent playfully my way that morning.  Here’s what He said to me  on that particular day; tiny thoughts that make me smile and make me think…

A hero is a man who does what he can.

Rule your desires lest your desires rule you.

Any song that moves you to joy or tears has greatness.

The most difficult meal for a wife to get is breakfast in bed.

The more laws the less justice.

Jealousy is the fear we have no value.

Beauty is a lover’s gift.  Exuberance is beauty.

And the best of all:

Freedom is a universal license to be good.

Except for the comment about breakfast in bed (which I can no longer endorse, given that my groom brings me coffee every morning), that list contains a pretty good summary of the things I—maybe most of us- struggle with most.

And what strikes me is that it was pressed in my hand with the assurance that the paper, the thoughts, the realities that underlie them, the relationship that reminded me of them, even the struggles I have with them--are gift.   

Speed Painter

A few days ago, Mark Shea posted on his blog a video of a speed painter, with only a tongue in cheek comment that his entire life had been wasted and he was a failure.  

I haven’t been able to get the speed painter out of my mind.  If ever I found an image  for the world that is God’s and so often makes no sense to me, it’s this video.

Like the judges, I couldn’t see the image, even when the painting was done, until it was flipped upside down.  Even going back and watching the video over and over, I can’t see it except for the smallest hints.   And I know the image is there—and I know what it looks like.

I’ve had this experience before.  Artists just see the world differently from the rest of us poor mortals.  I once watched Dik Browne, creator of Hagar the Horrible, draw an image of hi famous Viking,  I would have started with the hat.  Dik started with the beard….and went from there, in what seemed like no particular order.  A watercolorist I know painted a scene of pueblos for us—and started with the shadows of the roof poles on the wall.    A talented young painter friend describes sounds in terms of color.  I just hear…well, sounds. Even my own dear groom has a bit of that artist gene.  He’ll take a picture of the strangest bits and pieces of the world, disappear into his digital darkroom and return with something totally unlike the image I saw going in.

No one really knows what’s in the mind of the artist until the work is done, and God is the greatest Artist of all. He not only works upside down, He has to accommodate the work of a myriad of apprentices who think they see the work but who all see it differently, are not particularly good at listening to directions, generally spill and smear the paint, argue with each other and try to elbow the Master Painter out of the way.

No wonder the world looks like a total, incomprehensible mess.  I’m beginning to see the merit in giving up the effort to organize the world along the lines of my own mind.  (I see the merits; I won’t be able to stop, but maybe I’ll be less frustrated when I remember D. Westry…)

Someday, the painting will be done and God will flip it over.  Then we’ll see what He saw in His in mind all along, spills, splashes and all.