Blog # 172 Alone. Alone?

Blog # 172 Alone. Alone? The picture of Jesus that goes along with this blog appeared on the cover of one of the weekly bulletins of a Church in Chicago. As soon as I saw it it made me think and wonder about the prayer of Jesus. Several familiar texts in all four of the Gospels immediately came to mind. A constantly recurring characteristic given by the Evangelists in reference to Jesus praying is that He regularly designated a time and place where He would be alone for His prayer. This would be especially in times of major conflicts and before making important consequential decisions such as choosing the Apostles. Jesus is given as going off to the mountain or a deserted place, again to be separated, for a time, I would imagine, from the distractions and the frustration of dealing with the closedmindedness and hypocracy of some of those who opposed Him, and to address the personal pain He must have experienced in witnessing the immense need for the message He had come to share on the part of sinners, the poor and the suffering , coupled with His realization of how few there were among those who heard Him speak who seemed to understand and give themselves to loving all these people as He loved them. Here are a few samples of texts from the Gospels that came to mind for me in response to the picture of Jesus above. Matthew 14: 22-24. This text occurs after Jesus had heard of the death of John the Baptist and had miraculously fed a huge crowd of people. "Immediately afterward, while dismissing the crowds, Jesus insisted that his disciples get into the boat and precede him to the other side. When he had sent them away, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray, remainng there alone as evening drew on." Mark 14: 32 - 36. This text is placed in the garden of Gethsemani after the celebration of the Passover Supper on the night before Jesus died. "Sit down here while I pray", he said to his disciples...Then he began to be filled with fear and distress....He said to them. "My heart if filled with sorrow to the point of death."...He advanced a little and fell to the ground, praying that if it were possible this hour might pass him by. He kept saying, "Abba (O Father),...Take this cup away from me. But let it be as you would have it, not as I." Luke 6: 12 - 13. This text is placed after a miracle in which Jesus heals a man with a withered hand. "Then he went out to the mountain to pray, spending the night in communion with God. At daybreak he called his disciples and selected twelve of them he called his apostles." These and similar texts focus primarily on Jesus and his experience of prayer as a personal union with God the Father. Texts from John that came to me in response to these texts and then the picture of Jesus on the mountain add a different dimension to the picture. Several major texts from John clearly claim and emphasize our union with Jesus through faith and Baptism. In Blog # 173 we will consider some of the meaning and implications several texts from John have in relation to our experience of prayer and consequently of our experience of life here in the USA, already past the midway mark of 2011.

Blog # 171 Anatomy of a blog

Blog # 171 Anatomy of a blog

This morning I had the good intention of getting two Blogs ready to be published. I had some thoughts in my mind about eternal life but none of them seemed to focus well. With some disappointment and a minor sense of frustration I decided to back off and get to reading and responding to the emails that came in since yesterday. Before I realized it the morning was gone. I tried again but could not get anything I thought was appropriate from my mind into words for the computer.

... .... ...

Now here it is already three o'clock in the afternoon and all I have is what you have been reading. I don't know where it is going but I am happy it is on its way, and even this far along. I almost gave up when all I had was Blog # 171 in the title box waiting for the next blog.

I wondered why I could not get going with a blog and what I could do about it. Then I looked up at the title of my blogspot and the word Insights grabbed my attention. I looked it up in the dictionary and found that insight means an ability to see and clearly understand the inner nature of things. That is exactly what I thought it meant. I thought how it is that insights come to me easily and plentifully.

The most recent one was just an hour or so ago. Yesterday my wrist watch stopped, I think it just needs a new battery but did not get out to check it today. I have a back-up pocket watch for just such occasions as this. As I took that out of my pocket I thought of how we say a watch tells us what time it is. But a watch doesn't tell time. The sun tells time and watches merely register the witness of the sun. And the sun belongs to God and is regulated by God, so really it is God Who tells us the time! Thank You, Lord! And thank you for my watch which keeps telling what time it is all night long while the sun is shining on the folks in Hong Kong. I wish I could tell the folks over there, and evrywhere the sun shines, it is Your sun and Jesus is Your Son!

This illustrates how insights get to the inner nature of things. There is so much more than appears on the surface, as bright and wonderful as that might be. Thank You,Lord!

Blog # 170 Freedom

Blog # 170 Freedom As I recall it, it must have been back around 1936 when Sister Mary Polycarpa OP taught our fifth grade English grammar class the meaning and proper use of the words may and can Can has to do with ability, power, knowledge, time available, and talent. "I can means I have the power, ability, knowledge, money, etc to do something, to go somewhere. If I were to ask the school's basketball coach "Can I substitute for Pete Murphy in his absence this evening?", the answer "Yes" would mean the coach judged I was able to do that, and my question would have sought that precise information. In 'can' questions the information sought has to do with the person asking the question. A 'May I' question seeks information that has to do with the person who is answering the question. The information sought is in the power of the person to whom the question is addressed. 'May I' questions seek permission for something and asks am I allowed to do this or that, would you permit me to do this or that. The difference in the two questions would show if I were to stand before Pete and the coach with loaded camera, fully charged flash and a confident smile and ask "May I take your picture together?" I know I have the power to take the picture but I want to know whether I have permission to take it. "May I?" In another scenario I am in a supermarket in quest of a jar of mustard. A friendly clerk asks me "Can I help you?" My correct answer would be "Yes, IF you know where the mustard is". My answer has a condition on it. If the clerk said " May I help you?" I would have correctly said "Yes, please do". Now, applying all of this to our unique individual relationship with God it comes out this way. In order for God to help us, we have to be searching. As Psalm 42:2, and Psalm 63:2 put it "thirsting" for God "in truth"( Ps 145:18). To be thirsty is to be in need, to be reaching out, to being aware of a personal incompleteness. To search for anything that is good,in view of our faith in a single Creator of all that exists, is in its completeness a search for God. God is all powerful. all good. and loves and cares for all creation with an everlasting love. If we ever hear God asking the question "CAN I...?, that is merely God's way of asking us do we know who God is. When we know, the question need not be asked. It is altogether different with the 'May I' question. This question comes from God to all believers over and over again. The very nature of the question implies and requires freedom on the part of the person to whom the question is asked. The question comes through our conscience in many forms. "May I give you peace, patience, generosity, forgiveness of your sins, a deeper faith, courage. May I help you think of the poor among you, feed the hungry of the world, and help you pray? God CAN do all of this. Because of an unfathomable mysterious infinite love God asks MAY I do it in you? Though we are commanded to go one way, we are free to go another. Freedom is a mystery. It is like fire. It can give light. It can give warmth. It can destroy. It is one of the essential elements in the content of the notion we have received in faith concerning our creation "in the image and likeness" of God. What a gift! What a God!

Blog # 169 Our Creator 'at work'

Blog # 169 Our Creator 'at Work'. Here are a few examples of what God is 'doing' in our physical universe. God the Creator is also present and 'at work' in the spiritual reality we cannot see or hear but which we experience just as surely and wonderfully as we see and hear the physical world around us. The sun (a small star) is BIG - so big that if you put the earth in its center, the moon ( 220,000+miles from the earth) would reach just about half way to the sun's surface. Compared to the sun the earth is like a pinhead in the center of a saucer. Traveling 1,000 miles an hour, it would take you a month , going night and day, to go around the sun. At the same speed you could go around the earth in 25 hours! As for speed,Pluto, the 'slow' planet, is moving more than 23,000 miles an hour. The fastest planet is Mercury, doing 30 miles a second - more than 100,000 miles an hour. Earth moves 18 miles a second, 65,000 miles an hour, and covers 1,500,000 miles a day around the sun. (All free of charge!) In our galactic system there are so many stars that if you looked at each one of them for a minute you would be 60,000 years old before you counted them all. If we really care to look almost everything we experience in creation is just as amazing.We inhale about 108,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (21 ciphers after the 8!) molecules of air at each normal healthy breath. If you could arrange to let those molecules escape at the rate of 10,000 each second, it would take a million years to blow out one breath. The molecules in an air space the size of a golf ball, if placed end to end 4,250,000 per inch, would circle the earth 10,000 times at the equator, or reach to the moon and back 52 times. An average oak tree, in its five active months each year, evaporates about 28,000 gallons of water. Man-made suction cups make water rise 33 feet. Yet water flows in great quantities to the tops of trees 200 feet high. There is a Brazilian moth with a wing span of eleven inches. There is also the Nanosella, a water beetle one-hundredth of an inch long complete with eyes, mouth, legs, etc. If a man could construct a tiny machine designed to walk and fly, with automatic appliances for finding and consuming food, for building itself a suitable garage or shed, for repairing breaks in its parts, and finally for reproducing other machines like itself, his name would be world-famous overnight. Yet it has been done ! (The name is God if you care to tell someone). What is color in the dark, or sound unheard? It is perhaps something like Goodness unappreciated or a person's life without personal contact with God our Creator. There is still the choice that any man can make: there is no God. But it seems very important to me for someone who does happen to say there is no God to know something of the content of what he is saying. Some people never look beyond themselves. Some people look out but only see what they see. Others see the work of a Workman, and see God. In the light of some of the previous considerations how minor some of our personal problems seem ! And why do we not hear more of this kind of thing when we speak of God? How wonderful it is to trust and love Someone Who has and shares such wisdom, power, and goodness with all who believe in Him !

Blog # 168 One Creator of All

Blog # 168 One Creator of All To believe in a single creator of all that exists is to believe everything and everyone has its/their origin and destiny, purpose and fulfillment in God. Knowledge of the anatomy and life of a single honey bee would be enough for me to marvel at the wisdom and power of its creator. That awesome wisdom and power is shared in some mysterious way with all who believe in a single Creator of all. In the light of my strong conviction in the truth of this insight I have no problem welcoming advances in science technology and human development. I see the tremendous advances we have experienced just in my own short lifetime not as threats to my love for God but as ground and reason for deepening that love. Yet my faith and my love for God remains a choice on my part. The answer to the question Is God real? is Yes or No. The question is more important and God deserves more than the answer Maybe. Can I prove God is real? No, thanks be to God. To prove God is real would in a real sense require us to be greater than God. God would necessarily have to be identified. measured and contained in our limited human capacities and consequently under our control, identifying us as God's God. Can or need we prove that red is red, or five pounds is five pounds? It would be something like that to try to prove that God exists. The big question is not whether God exists, but whether or not God is benign and gracious, whether God is our Friend and our Father. To prove that God exists is one thing. To discover God is another. That we can do.. God has revealed Himself in creation, the Bible, especially in Jesus, in history, and through our own individual unique conscience. Someone has said: "I know God exists because I pray." You need not prove someone is with you when you are talking to him. It is something like this with God and God's relationship with those who pray. Once we arrive at the idea of God's 'footprints', as it were, in nature (Wisdom 13, Romans 1: 19) then it helps to investigate the nature of things around us. We know something of a person by what that person does. We know something of God through our knowledge of creation. Beginning here in Blog # 168 and continuing tomorrow I will share with you quotations from a small pamphlet a science prof gave our class back in third year high school in 1943. It is an invitation for us to remind ourselves and respond again to the claims we make for God when we say we believe in God as the single creator of all that exists. Perhaps it is because we find too little in our personal world that is marvelous wonderful mysterious and loving that we do not relate these terms in a significant personal way to God. The words of Jesus: knock, seek, ask, seem very important here. What do you know about the sun? The sun has been throwing out 4,000,000 tons of light energy a second for millions of years. (There are 86,400 seconds in a single day.) The sun's surface is 10,000 degrees. Its interior is about 30,000,000 degrees. If we had to pay some power Company for the light received by the earth daily from the sun the bill would make the national debt look like the price of a hot dog at the beach. Yet the earth receives only one billionth part of all the sun's power. And it all belongs to God our Creator !

Blog # 167 Wake Up!

Blog # 167 WAKE UP ! Not being conscious of ever experiencing a single day I did not wake up, and not having heard from my mother or anyone else who might know with regard to the earliest days of my life I estimate I woke up a minimum of 30,496 times including today. In my grade-school days my mother would wake me. In the seminary one of my fellow seminarians appointed to the position of bell ringer would walk through the hall of our residence in one direction ringing his bell and then reverse his direction and on his way back knock on each door while saying in Latin "Let us bless the Lord", with each of us responding with "Deo Gratias!"("Thanks be to God!"). After ordination I used an alarm clock and as I gradually began to lose my hearing I used two of them and then three, all set for the same time in the morning. After that became inconvenient and ineffective I gave up on alarm clocks and began to depend upon setting my mind to get up at a certain time and that has worked out very well. In recent years, with no one else but God living in the house with me, and with no other resource available to me for performing the task, I habitually identify God Himself as the one who personally awakens me each day. In response to this conviction it has been appropriate for me to form a habit of making the first thoughts of the day the proclamation of Jesus identifying Himself more than thirty times in John's Gospel as being sent by the Father. "Here I am,Lord. I come to do Thy will!." Then it is a short series of standard prayers that includes the 'Morning Offering', the 'Memorare', acts of faith, hope, and love, a prayer for dedicating and preserving chastity, and an experience of calling to mind in thanks and praise a litany of people who have gone on before me and remain a source of inspiration and support. Positioning my watch on my wrist and putting on my shoes are also part of the standard ritual of waking up and 'getting on the road'. A watch is a wonderful example of a servant role. It stands ready to serve by telling the time any time at all, night or day, to anyone who seeks it. And shoes are great examples and reminders of how obedience works. They will go with me any place I desire, uphill or down, rain or shine, wearing themselves out in 'obedience' to me. If they had a human nature and the freedom that is mine they could be labeled perfectly obedient. Both the shoes and the watch are good teachers! I don't imagine many or any of the folks reading this blog, in light of the different circumatances of their life and mine, could or should even desire to follow the routine I have outlined as my own. But I would hope it might be an invitation to discover the grace and joy of being aware of God's presence and love throughout the day and appreciating each new day as a special gift from Him to be shared with Him in praise and thanks and with all with whom we meet each day in generous joyful love.

Blog # 166 Jesus lives !

Blog # 166 Jesus lives ! A long time ago a small boy told me he wanted to be like Jesus. I have lost contact with him since and I wonder how his life is turning out. "to be like Jesus..." Our Christian faith is not an invitation or command to become a carpenter, but rather the power and command to receive in faith the share in God's love which is offered us uniquely in Jesus each day and in each experience of our life. Many people seem to see and experience the Christian life as an attempt to imitate Jesus, but it is more. We can and should imitate all the holy people who have gone before us and who are living around us now,and Jesus is among them, but with Jesus there is more. We do not merely hear the words of Jesus and then try to make them our own. Rather we receive the experience of prayer as a gift that unites us to Jesus. Prayer is our response,in Jesus, to God's love in our life, death, and resurrection. When asked how to pray by the disciples, if Jesus merely wanted to be a model or a good example of prayer for us, I think the Lord's Prayer would have begun: "My Father...". But the prayer Jesus gave in response to the disciples' request begins with the words Our Father...". We pray not merely in imitation of Jesus but in union with Jesus. We find ourselves trying to become more honest, more generous, more prayerful, more chaste, as the ideal of the Christian life. Many holy people have been sent as messengers and prophets to teach us these good human experiences. We tend to put Jesus in the same category as others, a teacher, a messenger, a prophet, a good example. These insights are true. Jesus is all of these. But Jesus is also more. We tend to think of God as giving us commands and inspiration to encourage us and inspire us to do good and avoid evil, almost as though in creating us, that is in willing that we exist as a unique creature, was for us to get something done for God and wanted us to do it. Again these insights are true. But there is more. Behind and within God's commands is not a need on God's part as we think of need from our experience of need. Nor is there a desire on God's part as we think of desires from our experience. Rather in God's commands we have God's wisdom and love shared with us. In the personal meaning behind the good we are called to do and the evil we are commanded to avoid we have the question of our relationship with God through Jesus. Through reflection upon these insights we can begin to discover the deeper meaning of the words Jesus spoke of the poor widow who gave two pennies to the temple treasury, that she had given more than all of the rest. Jesus was not talking obedience or mathematics in this instance but rather love which is not so much an achievement as a relationship, which can ever continue to grow even between two equal human beings, but unimaginably so between God and us. It is New York City to anyone, but it is where I was born to me. She was a woman to anyone, but she is mother to me. It is December 25th to anyone, but it is Chrismas to those who believe. In each of these realities there is one thing for all and something more for some. There is more in Christmas and Easter not because we are better than those around us or have worked harder, but because we believe, and guided, supported, and motivated by love we seek to grow in holiness in our accomplishment of God's will. May our Christian faith , our union with Jesus in love, bring joy to us and to those around us, now and forever !