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)

- – - – -

Shepherd drawing by Rose Hoover, rc.

Lesson 1a: Walking a cat is a problematic undertaking. Lesson 1b: Sometimes – most often – it is best to let other creatures, whether animals or human beings, be who they are and not expect them to follow our own path.

2. I had not seen the mentally challenged man for quite a while, but there he was as before in the downtown library.  His mission in life seems to be to greet people and wish them well (an occupation contributing far more to the general happiness of the world, I believe, than the jobs of many wealthy and highly educated people).  So as I was heading for the stairs, he was greeting a man at a computer: “Hey, brother!”  The other, who was intent on what he was doing, either did not realize he was the one being addressed or didn’t want to be bothered.  (Perhaps he didn’t know that all he needed to do was to respond, and the greeter would move contentedly on to the next person in need of a friendly salutation.)

Not to be deterred, he tried again, “Hey, brother!  Hey, brother!”  I was down the stairs and at the checkout counter before he gave up.

Lesson 2: Our responsibility is to persevere in our calling, “in season and out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2 RSV).  The success or failure is not up to us.

3. This is spring in North Florida, when the huge live oaks release their leaves to make way for the new ones.  If you sweep the porch or blow off the driveway, before long they will be covered again.  At the same time, pine, cedar, and oak pollen drifts onto everything.  Even in the shelter of the carport, the car is dusted with with yellow.

Lesson 3: While purposeful action is required in many situations, in others, the only thing to be done is to wait things out as peacefully as possible, no matter what you are being covered with.

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  (Colossians 3:12)

(1. Soul of Christ, sanctify me.)

(2. Body of Christ, save me.)

(3. Blood of Christ, inebriate me.)

- – - – -

Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Aqua lateris Christi, lava me.

Who of us is not aware of the need for cleansing?  We are all sinners, and all in need of mercy.  As Sister Elizabeth is fond of saying, “Everyone is 100% in need of mercy!  There is no one who is just 99% in need of mercy.”

Who is worthy of Christ?

I ran across a website called “Long Hair Care Forum,” where one post was from a woman who expressed her own feelings of unworthiness.  (I can’t give you a link to this discussion, as the thread seems to have been deleted.) She wants desperately to entrust herself to God, but is holding back as she feels undeserving of Jesus and of happiness.

A wise and holy response comes from someone who calls herself “Your Mary Kay Consultant.”

“Sugar,” she says, “we are all unworthy.”

She goes on to point out that no one deserves God’s love, and that it is Satan who tries to make us forget that Christ died for us.  But Satan, she adds, has already been defeated.

And it is true — feeling that we are unworthy is normal, because before the grandeur and goodness of God, we are indeed all unworthy.  But the feeling that we are too unworthy to come into God’s presence is not from God — it is from the evil one who wants us to stay away from God.

And the feeling that we are worthless is not from God.  There is a big difference between unworthiness and worthlessness.  We are of infinite worth.  “You were bought with a price,” Saint Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7.

From the cross Jesus says, “It is finished.”

There is nothing more to give.  The name of the water from the side of Christ is: totality.  The sheltering sac around the heart has been pierced and the heart itself rent.  The water and the blood now announce together: “All is given.”

(Mother Mary Francis, Anima Christi: Soul of Christ, p 40)

Jesus has given all for you and for me. We are accepted without reserve.  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound!

So we pray, not in despair, but in gratitude:

Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Aqua lateris Christi, lava me.

- – - – - – - – - -

Photograph, Waterfall at the Butterfly Rainforest, by Rose Hoover, rc

By what boundless mercy, my Savior,
have you allowed me to become a member of your body?
Me, the unclean, the defiled, the prodigal.
How is it that you have clothed me
in the brilliant garment,
radiant with the splendor of immortality,
that turns all my members into light?

Symeon the New Theologian, trans. by John Anthony McGuckin,
The Book of Mystical Chapters:
Meditations on the Soul’s Ascent from the Desert Fathers
and Other Early Christian Contemplatives

Faced with the grandeur and goodness of God, it is normal to feel unworthy. However, the feeling that we are worthless is not from God. There is a big difference between unworthiness and worthlessness. Each one of us is of infinite worth. “You were bought with a price,” says Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 6.

Where worthiness is concerned, there are, as I see it, at least three stances that are not what we are called to as Christians.

• The “I’m worthy, but it’s doubtful that you are” stance. This is the self-righteous position. I’m afraid that this false sense of worthiness too often raises its head among church people, especially where there is finger-pointing at those we don’t think are quite orthodox enough in their worship or their beliefs—all the while being assured that we ourselves are totally correct with no possibility of error.

• I may not be worthy now, but if I work really hard I can make myself worthy. If I just pray enough and discipline myself enough and do enough good works, I can make myself worthy. This is actually a form of an ancient heresy called Pelagianism, which says, basically, that human beings have the ability to choose the good apart from any movement of God in us, and therefore to save ourselves by our own efforts.

• Despair. The problem with thinking that we have to make ourselves worthy is that no matter how hard we try, we find it’s never enough. We can never be good enough. We can never be unselfish enough or generous enough or forgiving enough or attend enough masses or go to confession often enough or pray well enough to be worthy. So trying to make myself worthy can easily lead to discouragement and eventually to giving up. I can never be worthy, so why try?

But wonder of wonders, we don’t have to be worthy!

In Christ, we are offered the grace to entrust all to the heart of God, and there we are accepted — with our sins, our neuroses, our emotional quirks, our inadequacies, our divided heart — and in the spacious and welcoming heart of God we are shown that peace lies in the handing over of all to God who is always sufficient.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.
For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Ephesians 2:8-10

The captions started me thinking about which human needs can rightfully be withheld if they are are not earned.

Is food, for example, something that one must deserve in order to receive?

What about housing?

Or health care?

And these questions inevitably bring up others.

Does having money make a person more worthy of food, housing, and medical care than someone who has none?

Does having millions of dollars that you have earned by the sweat of your brow make you more worthy than someone who has earned only a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand?

Does having millions of dollars that you have not earned, but inherited, make you more worthy than a struggling school teacher with a burdensome debt – or a homeless person with nothing?

Is a person who is unable to work for one reason or another less worthy than someone who holds down two jobs to make ends meet – or than someone who with one relatively unburdensome job earns more than enough to pay for the necessities and the superfluities of life?

When you get right down to it, no one is worthy of God or of God’s gifts. We are all unworthy, but we are all of infinite worth.

Our value lies not in what we possess, or how much we earn, or whether or not we have a job, or whether we are even capable of holding a job. Our worth is not calculated according to whether we are sober or blind drunk, illiterate or highly educated, fortunate or unfortunate in our genetic makeup. The truth is that our value resides in the fact that we are beloved of God, infinitely treasured, infinitely cherished.

Rejoicing in the love of God, we must also be humble, for as Saint Paul says,

What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?
(1 Corinthians 4:7)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a poem on this very point less than a year before he was executed by the Nazis. Here are a few lines:

Who am I? This man or that other?
Am I then this man today and tomorrow another?
Am I both all at once? An impostor to others,
but to me little more than a whining, despicable weakling?
Does what is in me compare to a vanquished army,
that flees in disorder before a battle already won?
Who am I? They mock me these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, you know me, O God. You know I am yours.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from the poem, “Who Am I,”
written in prison, June 1944.

Whoever I am, I am yours. It is crucial to hold onto this fundamental reality of our life, because whatever is opposed to God, whether inside us or outside us, will try to deceive us into believing the contrary. The following quotation from Acedia and Me, by Kathleen Norris, offers an example of one form this deception can take:

I appreciate the writer Jeffery Smith’s observation that it is all too easy to succumb to the dangerous notion that only our despair truly knows us as we are, even as it mocks any desire we may have to improve our condition.

Our despair may tell us that we are worthless, that no one who really knew us could love us, that we are mired too deep in sin to be forgiven. Our despair, lying through its blackened teeth, whispers that only its voice tells us the truth about ourselves.

It can be very difficult, when we are feeling the worst about ourselves and about life, to tell this inner voice to shut up.

In fact, a sense of unworthiness before the grandeur and goodness of God is normal.  Consider the experience of Isaiah when God called him (Isaiah 6:1-8) or Peter (Luke 5:1-11).  We are all unworthy of the living and loving God.

But there is a big difference between unworthiness and worthlessness.  A spiritual warning bell should sound when we begin to think we are worthless.  Sometimes, though, our interior noise drowns out the warning of danger, so we have to remind ourselves over and over of the truth.

The truth is that we are of infinite worth, and we are infinitely loved. “You were bought with a price,” Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6:20. Jesus Christ has paid the ultimate price of his own blood for us.

I may not know myself inside and out, but I can be sure of one thing: I am God’s.

We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.
If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord;
so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.

(Romans 14:7-8)

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

U. A. Fanthorpe, “BC:AD”

I am convinced that most of us stumble into the reign of God, not because of our sterling virtue or our skill in prayer, but in spite of ourselves,

Sandro Botticelli, "The Mystical Nativity" (detail showing an angel pointing out the Christ child to the shepherds), National Gallery, London

thanks to a loving guidance of which we may be totally unaware. And sometimes where we find ourselves – what turns out to be filled with grace and glory – is not at all what we would have expected.

You might enjoy listening to Paul Simon’s song “Graceland,” which is ostensibly about a trip to Elvis Presley’s house in Memphis.  As the song goes on, however, one realizes that it is really about something far bigger and infinitely deeper. Here is one verse:

There is a girl in New York City,
Who calls herself the human trampoline,
And sometimes when I’m falling flying
Or tumbling in turmoil I say
Whoa, so this is what she means,
She means we’re bouncing into Graceland…

The shepherds and the Magi “walked haphazard” or bounced into Graceland. And so do we bounce — usually awkwardly — into the glory of God where we are expected, longed for, and welcomed.
In the words of Paul Simon:

Maybe I’ve a reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland

First, Jesus never says, I’ll wait until your faith is perfect before loving you.

Consider the distraught father in Mark 9:17-29, who brings his son to be healed. The boy has been having convulsions, even falling into the fire. The disciples of Jesus have not been able to heal him, and when Jesus himself arrives, the father pleads,

“If you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.”

“If you are able!” Jesus says. “All things can be done for the one who believes.”

Then we hear the father cry out, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

And Jesus heals the boy.

The father didn’t pretend that his faith was any greater than it was; and Jesus didn’t require perfect faith of him.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (153), “Faith is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue infused by him.” In other words, faith is not something that we can give ourselves. However, it is our responsibility to nurture it. Even when we are plagued with doubt, we can still walk in faith and nourish faith, for faith and doubt are not mutually exclusive.

Second, Jesus never ever says, I will wait until you no longer need forgiveness before forgiving you.

In truth, what makes us qualified for forgiveness is being sinners. We are forgiven precisely because we are unworthy, not because we have been able to make ourselves perfect.

“Is your being thirsty a hindrance to your getting water?” asks Horatius Bonar (1808-1889)? Of course not. Indeed, Bonar titles his essay, “How Shall I Go to God?” – and answers the question in the first paragraph. “It is with our sins that we go to God, for we have nothing else to go with that we can call our own. This is one of the lessons that we are so slow to learn…

After all, “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners,” says Jesus (Matthew 9:13 ).

Mercy surrounds us at every moment of our lives. Amazing grace, without any doubt!

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”

(Lamentations 3:22-24)

 

There was always something just slightly mysterious about his presence – a mystery which I felt obliged to respect. One day, after a week or two of absence, he was back. I told him I had missed seeing him there.

“I got picked up,” he explained.

For what? I wondered – but did not feel free to inquire.

Another day I did ask him where he was from.

“Mississippi,” he replied.

“I thought you must be from the South.”

“Yes,” he said, “I’ll always have the accent.”

I didn’t tell him — though I realize now that I should have — that it was not his accent that made me suppose he was from the South, but his courtesy. For he was indeed supremely courteous. Even with his begging cup, there was a gentility about him, and a natural hospitality.

Then suddenly he was no longer there. I had no idea what happened to him. Had he found a better spot to beg? Did he have a job? Had he come into an inheritance?

But I did see him one more time before I moved away from Chicago. He was with a group of men walking along Fullerton Parkway, near the Cenacle. When he saw me, he stopped.

“Sister!”

You would have thought we were long-lost friends. (I can’t imagine what his companions thought of this unlikely association.) He was not asking for money, simply greeting me with pleasure. And this was typical of him, for his welcome and his obvious delight in seeing you were unrelated to what you could do for him. In this he was not only a model of disinterested kindness, but he was also a sign of the welcome of God and of God’s delight in us, which is not dependent on our worthiness.

Welcome one another, therefore,
just as Christ has welcomed you,
for the glory of God.
(Romans 15:7)

There was no small number of runners, and they were a whole microcosm of humanity — every age and shade, including a baby in a stroller being pushed by his father. Some were obviously athletes. Others, out of shape, had given up running and were trudging along. Some were really dragging.

No spectators were in evidence on our street, but on the corner stood an official-looking woman who turned out to be the source of the clapping and cheering.

“Whoa! All right!” she called to one.

And to others, “Look at you go! Not even breaking a sweat! Good job!”

Everyone was cheered, no matter whether they were Olympics material or barely able to make it to the next block.

The cheering woman reminded me of God. In her voice it seemed as if I could hear God rooting for each of us as we travel our life’s path: “Yeah! You’re going to make it! Good job!” or “Whoops, try again! All right!”

Whether we are sailing smoothly along or whether we are stumbling and bumbling in our journey with and toward God, I could picture God clapping and cheering, encouraging us when we become discouraged, lifting us up when we fall.

In this race, being in the lead is no cause for boasting, and there is no cause for despair if we are slow or stumbling. What matters is that we are on the road with God our companion and headed toward God our destination.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

(Hebrews 12:1-2)