Author: DVO

Jesus assures us that his disciples will recognize his voice. But we are surrounded by many voices which promise life. How do we recognize which is the voice of the Good Shepherd? How do we distinguish voices which infuse life from voices which lead us away from life? James Mackey teaches that divine providence is a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks. Frederick Buechner notes that this does not mean that God makes events happen to us that move us in certain directions, like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who, even in the most demanding and most hair-raising of them, offers us the possibility of that new life and healing. God is always speaking to us in every event in our lives. For a Christian, there’s no such thing as a purely secular experience. The event may result from purely secular and contingent forces, but it always contains a faith-related message for us. Our task is to read that message. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we mostly hear God’s voice only in deeply painful experiences rather than in events that bring us joy and pleasure. But we shouldn’t misread this. It’s not that God speaks only through pain and is silent when things go right. In the words of C.S. Lewis, pain is God’s microphone to a deaf world. God is always speaking; most of the time, sadly, we aren’t listening. God doesn’t cause AIDS, global warming, the refugee situation in the world, a cancer diagnosis, world hunger, hurricanes, tornadoes, COVID, or any other such thing to teach us a lesson, but something in all of these invites us to try to discern what God is saying through them. It’s only when our hearts start breaking that we begin to attune ourselves to the voice of God.

Have you ever wondered if the mustard seed realized what it would become? In the familiar parable, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds on earth.” From such a small, seemingly insignificant start grows “the largest of plants,” with branches attracting birds of the sky. Deacon Greg Kandra writes that all of this is so improbable. “Let’s face it: the mustard seed is so small, the sort of thing most of us would easily overlook. But it holds something tantalizing; a tiny grain contains growth, life, shelter, and shade. Its future is vast—a story aching to be told, a purpose waiting to be fulfilled. How often do we forget that? And how often we forget this simple but humbling reality: life is full of mustard seeds. We share the world with so many who are easily neglected, abandoned, and swept away: the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the lonely, and the unborn. But Jesus assures us that every seed, even the smallest, contains possibility and purpose. Hold a seed in your hand, and you’re holding an unwritten future. We can’t begin to imagine what will come. Faith is like that. God’s kingdom is like that, too: a place where even those who feel small and forgotten are given the grace to grow. We become more than we ever thought possible. In this way, we are all mustard seeds. Do we realize what we can become?”

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus speaks about giving our lives away. But that raised the question, is life over when we have fulfilled all we desire? When do we reach this point of total fulfillment in our lives? At what point do we say: “That’s it! That’s the climax! Nothing I can do from now on will outdo this. I’ve given what I have to give.” Fr. Rolheiser looks at this transition as when our living stops and our dying begins. He goes on to say, “When does this occur? The medieval mystic, John of the Cross, says we reach this point in our lives when we have grown to what he calls ‘our deepest center,’ the optimum point of our human growth, the deepest maturity we can grow to before we begin to die. For a flower, its deepest center, its ultimate point of growth, would be not its bloom but the giving of its seed as it dies. That’s its further point of growth, its ultimate accomplishment. When did Jesus give off his seed, the fullness of his spirit? On the cross. Jesus was faithful to the end, to his God, to his word, to the love he preached, and to his own integrity. At this point, he stopped living and began dying, and that’s when he gave off his seed, and his spirit began to permeate the world. He had reached his deepest center; his life was fulfilled. When do we move from being in bloom to giving off our seed? Superficially, of course, it’s when our health, strength, popularity, and attractiveness begin to wane, and we start to fade out into the margins and eventually into the sunset. But when this is seen in the light of Jesus’ life, we see that in our fading out, like a flower long past its bloom, we begin to give off something of more value than the attractiveness of the bloom. That’s when we can say: “It is fulfilled!”

Jean Vanier’s book, “Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John,” asks, “What is this life that Jesus is referring to, that we hold onto so desperately and that we must lose?” It is not just physical life but life according to the world’s values, a world as empty of God as it is filled with idols: greed for wealth and power. This “life” also refers to our psychological tendencies: our desires or compulsions for success, to be loved, to be held in esteem, to be acclaimed by those in our group, and to have power and control over others. These passions of life are found in each of us, and they appear in different ways at various stages of our lives:

We can feel the desire to be admired by the group, to become the best spiritual person and control others, or to become the best theologian in our church or group.

We can seek self-glory and self-satisfaction by doing good things.

We can create an intellectual or religious or “good” personage or mask.

These passions for life and the need for recognition can be oriented towards good and holy goals: they may be necessary at the beginning of our journey to God. But if we want to go further on our spiritual journey and grow in humility, love, and openness, we must separate ourselves from them. If we want to live eternal life now and follow the Spirit of God, we must die to our need for recognition, admiration, and power.

Scripture scholar Curtis Mitch notes that the scriptures provide us with many examples of people walking the faith that we should be emulating in our lives. We can read of the Blessed Mother Mary’s life and her example of discipleship; we can read of Mary and Martha, sisters with different focus points in life – prayer, and service – both of which we should emulate in our lives; and today, we see another example to emulate from the Canaanite woman, that being an effective prayer practice. Now, what do we make of the Canaanite woman’s story? A long tradition in interpreting this story stresses the woman’s perseverance in the face of the “test” that Jesus sets for her. And there is something right about it. St. Augustine says, “We pray in order to expand our will to accept what God is going to give us.” She does three things that we should check our prayer practices against. First, she approaches the Lord with faith, never questioning that Jesus can fulfill her request. Second, she perseveres and doesn’t simply make one request but repeatedly asks the Lord for his divine help. Third, she does all of this with an attitude of humility. Isn’t it amazing that the Canaanite woman doesn’t take offense when Jesus compares her to a house pet? Instead of being offended by the comment, she accepts that she has no claim on this Jewish Messiah. Her reaction presents us with the type of disposition that is essential in petitionary prayer. If we approach the Lord Jesus as the Canaanite woman did, we too can hope for a similar response: “Let it be done for you as you wish.”

Old Testament scholar James Mays, reflecting on Psalm 51, speaks to its nature as a prayer for help, “Be gracious to me, O God.” The psalm is a prayer made by David after the prophet Nathan confronted him with his sin in the affair with Bathsheba. The confession of sin is based on the grace of God. The plea appeals to God’s steadfast love and abundant mercy and is not merely an expression of human remorse or preoccupation with failure and guilt; it looks beyond self to God and lays hold on the marvelous possibilities of God’s grace. Those who confess their sin know and believe that God judges their life. The confession of sin seeks renewal and forgiveness: “Create a clean heart for me, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” The synonyms “heart” and “spirit” do not merely designate parts of a person; instead, they stand for that through which the self is expressed. A clean heart would be a mind and will open to God, oriented to God. A steadfast spirit would be a mind that will be fixed and steady toward God—ready to praise, faithful to God’s covenant, and trusting in God. It is a steadfast heart that holds close the words of St. Paul, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God.”

Today’s verse comes from Psalm 81, in which the people praise God, and he calls on them to hear him and obey his Law. How do we hear God’s voice in the noise of our everyday lives? Whenever you listen to a voice that sounds coercive, threatening, overbearing, that is somehow loud, and in your face, you can be sure that it is not God’s voice, no matter how religious and holy it might claim to be. God’s voice in this world is never coercive or overbearing in any way but is always an invitation and a beckoning that respects you and your freedom in a manner that no human institution or person ever does. God’s voice is thoroughly underwhelming, like a baby’s presence. Ultimately all our aching is, for one thing, to hear God, lovingly and individually, call us by name. There comes a moment in the night for each of us when nothing will console us other than this, hearing our names pronounced by the mouth of God. In Fr. Rolheiser’s book, Prayer: Our Deepest Longing, he writes that we need to discern the unique cadence of God’s voice among all the voices that surround and beckon us. And several principles come to us from Jesus, Scripture, and the deep wells of our Christian tradition that can help us discern God’s voice among the multitude of voices that beckon us.

• The voice of God is recognized both in whispers and in thunder and in the storm.
• The voice of God is recognized in the call to what’s higher and invites us to holiness, even as it is recognized in the call to humility.
• The voice of God is the one that most challenges and stretches us, even as it is the only voice that ultimately soothes and comforts us.
• The voice of God always invites us to live beyond all fear, even as it inspires holy fear.
• The voice of God is always heard wherever there is genuine enjoyment and gratitude, even as it asks us to deny ourselves and die to ourselves.

Fr. Rolheiser writes about the growing body of literature that chronicles the experience of persons who were clinically dead for some time (minutes or hours) and were medically resuscitated and brought back to life. The movie “Miracles from Heaven” portrays the true story of a young Texas girl who was clinically dead, medically revived, and shares what she experienced in the afterlife. Hundreds of stories like this are gathered through dozens of years, published, or shared with loved ones. What’s interesting (and consoling) is that virtually all these stories are wonderfully positive, irrespective of the person’s faith or religious background. In virtually every case, their experience, while partially indescribable, was one in which they felt a warm, personal, overwhelming sense of love, light, and welcome, and not a few of them found themselves meeting relatives of theirs that had passed on before them, sometimes even relatives that they didn’t know they had. In virtually every case, they did not want to return to life here but wanted to stay there like Peter on the Mountain of the Transfiguration. As Christians, we believe that God is infinite and ineffable. This means that while we can know God, we can never imagine God. Given that truth, it makes it even harder for us to imagine that the infinite Creator and Sustainer of all things is intimately and personally present inside us, worrying with, sharing our heartaches, and knowing our most guarded feelings. How can God be as close to us as we are to ourselves? Partly this is a mystery, and wisdom bids us befriend mystery because anything we can understand is not very deep! The mystery of God’s intimate, personal presence inside us is beyond our imaginations. But everything within our faith tradition and most everything in the testimony of hundreds of people who have experienced the afterlife assure us that, while God may be infinite and ineffable, God is very close to us, closer than we imagine.

Fr. Michael Peterson, reflecting on today’s reading from Matthew’s gospel, suggests that the darkness must have been palpable when Herod snuffed out such a great light as John the Baptist. Yet, as Zechariah foretold at John’s birth, he was preparing the way for Jesus: “The dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.” We claim these words daily at Morning Prayer, often when the sun rises in the east, giving light to our world. We may ask, “Who am I to be this kind of light?” Lights of any kind are lifesaving in the many storms we face. Light is salvation. Sometimes, we experience the light of other people. At other times, we are called to be a light for others. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we are all called to live in the light, but we tend to have an overly romantic idea of what that should mean. We tend to think that to live in the light means that there should be a kind of special sunshine inside of us, a divine glow in our conscience, a sunny joy inside us that makes us constantly want to praise God, and an ambiance of sacredness surrounding our attitude. But that’s unreal. What does it mean to live in the light? Living in the light means living in honesty, being pure and simple, being transparent, and not having part of us hidden as a dark secret. John the Baptist stands as our witness: It is not the amount of darkness in our world that matters. How we stand as a light in that darkness makes all the difference.

It’s not hard to imagine how others stereotype us when we grow up or when they meet us so many years later when we return to their presence. They find it difficult to reconcile who we are now versus how they previously viewed us. Anyone who has attended a reunion can instantly connect to the words of Jesus. The Nazarenes can only see Jesus as the son of a carpenter, not the Messiah he had been revealed to be. What causes this inability to get past the stereotyping of people? Many experts will point to our human pride. Think about the voices you thankfully didn’t hear at the reunion, “Who does she think she is? Just because she married a fancy lawyer doesn’t change where she came from. We know who she really is!” For Jesus, a similar conversation occurred among the Nazarenes, “Can you believe this? Joseph, the carpenter’s son, thinks he’s a prophet! I know for a fact that he didn’t receive any formal religious education. Where is he getting this teaching of his? Does he really think he’s somebody great?” This type of behavior should concern us and probably put the fear of God in us. Pride has an incredible ability to close our eyes to the truth. It can also harden our hearts. But most of all, it puts us at odds with the Lord, as noted in The Letter of James: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” As disciples, our daily prayer should include a reflection on these verses from Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.” Amen, amen.