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Gorgeous!

Jan 21st, 2012 by

Ted Turner is quoted as saying, “If I only had a little humility, I’d be perfect.” While Ted Turner may not be the poster child for Christian humility, neither does someone with an attitude of self-disparagement witness to the humility of Christ.

When Beverly P. Gordon (“My Daddy Said So“) was filling out a questionnaire which asked her to describe herself with one word, she wrote — without any hesitation at all — the word “gorgeous.” Startled, and wondering why she hadn’t written something that sounded less vain, she pondered her response. She thought about her father and his unconditional love for her, and she remembered how her mother had told her about the wonder of her birth, and she concluded: “So the world can argue all they want; but my Daddy said I was gorgeous and my mother affirmed it, and that’s good enough for me.”

God’s word tells us that we are created good  — and lovely, too, since we are made in the image of the beautiful God. Whether or not our own parents were as loving as Beverly Gordon’s, God looks at each of us as a loving parent looks at a baby and says, “You’re gorgeous!” A humility which says, “Poor me, I am so wretched that God wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me” or, “I am such a terrible sinner that God could never forgive me” — this is a specious humility, not from God, and contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Christian humility is recognizing who we are before God. When we gaze at the magnificence of the Grand Canyon or the splendor of the night sky, we are conscious of how small we are. When we become aware of the depth and height of God’s love for us, we also see our own smallness and our unworthiness. We are creatures, we are weak, and we are at every moment in need of mercy. But we also stand in the truth of what our heavenly parent has shown us: that we are wholly loved and incredibly beautiful in the sight of God.

The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.
(Zephaniah 3:17-18a)

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Does Belief in God Cause War?

Jan 14th, 2012 by

I just saw an ad for a bumper sticker proclaiming: “Atheists don’t start wars.”  In our local newspaper, a recent letter to the editor stated: “Nonbelievers are the most politically defiled people in America, yet we neither create nor fight wars and kill people.”  And do you remember John Lennon’s song, “Imagine”?

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

If we were all rational atheists, the common argument seems to run, violence would come to an end, and the world would finally be at peace. History, however, shows us otherwise. Here are just a few examples from the twentieth century:

  • Stalin, a fanatical atheist, was responsible for the deaths of many millions of people: a common estimate is 20 million, although some have thought the number of victims to be as high as 60 million.
  • Hitler knew how to use religious language when expedient, recasting Jesus in the image of an anti-Semitic Aryan fighter. Far from being a Christian, Hitler is quoted in Konrad Heiden’s A History of National Socialism as saying, “We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.” And according to William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, what Hitler’s government envisioned was that eventually “the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels … and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.”
  • Later in the twentieth century, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge (Cambodia) banned religion. The victims of his genocidal and anti-religious reign of terror are estimated to be around 1,700,000.

Sadly, though, too many people have indeed turned to violence in the name of God in whom there is no violence. (See “Who Would Jesus Torture?”)  Some of these sincerely believe that war is a righteous undertaking. (Even conceding the very rare situations when war may have been necessary or unavoidable, we must not forget that it remains an evil.)  Other makers of war may find in religion a convenient excuse for the violence already in their hearts and justification for the violent acts that they would do anyhow, with or without religion. (If this sounds farfetched, we might look into our own hearts, for I believe most of us carry, like a virus, the potential for violence, no matter how hidden.)

But despite the scandal of wars undertaken for “religious” reasons, to claim that belief in God causes war, or that without belief in God humanity would be peaceful, is to neglect the overwhelming evidence of human history.

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus said, “for they shall be called the children of God.” May all of us, believers and nonbelievers alike, be peacemakers for our troubled world.

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What Star? Where?

Dec 30th, 2011 by

Hubble image

NGC 346 Star Cluster (detail)

What if it had been cloudy when the Wise Men were looking for Jesus? What if the sky had been a total blank, with no star visible? Although with today’s light pollution, a cloudy night sky may be lit up by reflected light from the city, the Magi would not have had even that artificial glow to encourage them.

And what about our own journey? 

Few of us will be called to climb on our camels and head out across the desert, relying only on the night sky for a GPS. But most of us will probably have times when the lights we do rely on seem to vanish. Here are some indications (and you can probably name others) that despite the darkness, we have not lost the star of Christ:

When, rather than giving up on life, we get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other.

I admire more than I can say some of our homeless brothers and sisters. I have long suspected that if I were in their situation I would curl up on the sidewalk or in the woods and abandon hope altogether. Many of these women and men not only survive but manage to attain a level of humanity beyond the reach of some who have never known hunger or deprivation.

(See, for example, “Junkies and Hookers in God’s Kingdom.”)

When we are kind and compassionate even though we don’t feel like it, claiming the light and goodness of Jesus, rather than our own.

When we admit we are lost and ask help from someone we trust.

Finding someone trustworthy to consult can be tricky though.  The three Magi sought help from a very unreliable source—from Herod, who told them, “‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage” (Matthew 2:8). Much heartache came from their mistake (see Matthew 2:16-18 on the massacre of the innocents), even though they heeded the dream that told them not to return to Herod, possibly saving the life of the child they had just left.

When we acknowledge our sins and our mistakes—of which there will inevitably be many during our lifetime.

When we humbly and gladly accept God’s forgiveness for our sins, rather than thinking our own virtue will suffice.

And when we ask God to bring good out of both our sins and our mistakes.

Then we may hear Jesus say to us, as he did to Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

And in the blessed night our stumbling prayer, our inadequate words and images, our divided hearts, all reach toward that unseen divine light, greater than any star—that Light and Love toward which we are being drawn (sometimes in spite of ourselves), and for which we were made.

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One of Us

Dec 23rd, 2011 by

God has become one of us. “And therefore,” says Karl Rahner, “everything is different from what we imagine it to be.” God is here, and all creation is being led toward its fulfillment in love.

When we say, “It is Christmas,” we mean that God has spoken into the world his last, his deepest, his most beautiful word in the incarnate Word, a word that can no longer be revoked because it is God’s definitive deed, because it is God himself in the world. And this word means: I love you, you, the world and human beings.

And then Rahner adds what we might not want to admit that we are thinking:

This is a wholly unexpected word, a quite unlikely word. For how can this word be spoken when both the human person and the world are recognized as dreadful, empty abysses? But God knows them better than we. And yet he has spoken this word by being himself born as a creature. The very existence of this incarnate Word of love demands that it shall provide, eye to eye and heart to heart, an almost unbelievable fellowship, an astonishing communion between the eternal God and us. Indeed, it says that this communion is already there. This is the word that God has spoken in the birth of his Son.

Rahner, The Eternal Year

“An astonishing communion,” says Rahner. Or as Catherine LaCugna writes in God for Us, because of Jesus, both the divine and the human “now literally ‘exist’ entirely with reference to each other.”

What an amazing thought this is! Whether we know it or not, it is impossible for our lives not to be in relation to the divine life. And God, now human in Christ, is always and forever God in relation to and connected to us. Through this mystery of the Incarnation we are transformed—the universe is transformed—for God’s purpose will not be thwarted, even though our hearts may be heavy and we see no guiding star in the sky.

The love that brings about the birth of the Christ-child also calls forth the gloria of the angelic song—that cosmic canticle of peace and divine favor sung throughout the universe, though not always heard. And this love also brings glory to birth out of what may seem like the chaos of our lives, for glory is both our calling and our inheritance.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)

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Images:
– Paul Gauguin, “Bébé” or “Naissance du Christ à la tahitienne”
– Unknown artist, “The Birth of Christ,” Fort Hall Memorial Chapel, Kenya
[Click on images to view larger size.]

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Waiting for God

Dec 14th, 2011 by

A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (Isaiah 40:3)

What is it like when you are getting ready for someone to come?  How do you prepare, say, for guests? You might clean the house and go to the grocery store and prepare food and sweep the sidewalk or the porch.  Then what?

You wait for the guests to arrive. 

And once you begin waiting, there is a change in your position relative to the guests: you are no longer the one in control.  Who is in control?  The ones you are waiting for.  You can make phone calls (Where are you? I’m waiting!), send a text, complain to the neighbors —but you can’t make the arrival happen.  The guests may get here on time, or early, or late – or not at all.  All you can do is wait for them to show up.

Your time no longer belongs to you, but to the one who is coming.  This is true whether you are waiting for guests or simply to board a plane; whether waiting in a doctor’s office, or waiting for the plumber to come.  It is true when we are waiting for an elevator or for the pedestrian walk signal at an intersection (perhaps pushing the button over and over, even though we know it doesn’t do any good).

There is a helplessness involved in waiting.  And we generally don’t like it when we’re not in control.  But how we want to be in control!  How we detest having to wait, powerless to hurry things along.

If we can’t control guests or elevators or walk signals, even less can we control the coming of God.  Waiting for God brings us into a sacred darkness and helplessness.  If we are really waiting, if we have truly accepted to wait, we have let go of our need to control and have acknowledged the sovereignty of God.  This is a helplessness that can be thought of as falling into the hands of God.  When we choose to wait with our whole being, we slip into God’s time, rather than the illusory time we think is our own.

Fr. Pedro Arrupe was a saintly Jesuit, the superior general of the Society of Jesus for eighteen years.  In 1981 Fr. Arrupe suffered a massive stroke which left him virtually helpless.  These are words that he wrote to the General Congregation in 1983:

More than ever, I now find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life, from my youth. And this is still the one thing I want. But now there is a difference: the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in his hands.

The “initiative is entirely with God,” he said.  The acceptance, though, was Father Arrupe’s.  He now had control of almost nothing except for that holy assent.  He lived for ten years in this helplessness.

So in our own waiting, too, in our human helplessness to hurry God along or to save ourselves or to control God in any way—this helplessness can be the occasion of a holy acceptance, a holy giving over of ourselves into the hand of God.

But our helplessness is not hopelessness, because God comes.  Christ always comes.  And the hand of God is the very best place to wait, no matter what else is going on in our lives.  Christ is always coming, yet always with us. We wait for God in God.  We wait for the Christ who is already here waiting for us.  We wait for the transformation of all things, trusting, as Karl Rahner says to God, “that the heart of all things is already transformed, because you have taken them all to your heart.”

Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him.  (Psalm 37:7 KJV)

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Shepherd drawing by Rose Hoover, rc.

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