Who Is like unto Thee

Exodus 15:11, 13

Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?

Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed: thou hast guided them in thy strength unto thy holy habitation.

 

Who is like unto thee, O LORD?  Among all powers, among all treasures, who is like unto thee?  You are not the highest.  You are not the deepest.  You are not the strongest.  You are not the weakest.  And you are not the in between.  You are height and depth and strength and vulnerability.  You are not the most – you are in the most, as in the least, and you are beyond.  No words can describe you.  No images can capture you.  No concepts can contain you.  Infinite, eternal, and absolute, you are the Holy of holies, the Wonder of wonders, the Life of lives, the Hope of hopes, the Love of loves.  Any fears are blinders; we blind ourselves from your mighty mercy and your merciful might; we delude ourselves in the darkness of self-centered night, turned away from you who are the Light of lights, though you call us into your everlasting Day.  You, who creates and masters the universe, create and master us; we have rejected, forgotten, ignored, and manufactured ourselves like unto moles, blinded by our groping further and further into our little graves.  You, who are the depth, who are the height, call us out of the little graves we dig, out of the little piles we mound, rip the blinders off – not with your strength with which you crush the mountains and storm the seas, but with your vulnerability, with Weakness; give yourself totally to us, you who have no total, who cannot be totaled, give yourself absolutely to us in complete surrender of height and depth and strength; finite, fragile and fleeting, breathe but a dying breath in this world of matter and we are redeemed.  For you are the Love of loves, the holy habitation of truth that sets us free.

Not

Exodus 20:13-15

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

 

Rules.  The seemingly common outcry in our society is that organized religion has just too many rules.  The thought is that a handful of men, who think they know better than anyone else, impose strict rules on human beings, regulations imposed upon us that take away our freedom and squash the authenticity of our individualism.

 

Really?

 

We are all human.  We have in common the essence of who we are as human beings.  Yes, each of us is an individual with unique particular characteristics – but, to other members of the animal world, I bet that we all look alike.  And that’s because, essentially, we are alike.  Not just in basic physical needs and appearance, but even in our deepest yearnings and inner needs.  St. Thomas Aquinas, using common sense and reason, laid out basic inclinations of Man, what the founders of the United States of America might call “self-evident” truths about human beings.  First and foremost is the natural inclination to seek the good – and the good is what is in accord with the nature of humanity, that essence we share.  And, so, as a human being, I am inclined to preserve myself, to preserve my species, to live in community, and to know and to choose.  Without getting too much into philosophy for this blog post, let me simply say that the rules of the 10 Commandments are specifics of these basic human goals/needs. 

 

So, if I steal from members of my community, I will be jeopardizing my ability to continue living in that community.  I mean, who wants to live next to an unrepentant, perpetual thief?  The act of thievery, therefore, goes against the grain of human nature, contradicting the natural inclination to live among others.  The act of killing other human beings is generally detrimental to preservation of the species – but not always so.  It is, however, always detrimental to preservation of human life.  So, we could say that it is my natural desire to preserve my own life that instinctively tells me not to kill another unless in self-defense.  Because, I mean, if I go around killing people, someone’s probably going to come along and kill me.  We can take the act of adultery in the same way – if I don’t want someone to take my husband, it is best for me not to take someone else’s.  In this way, I am best able to keep my own husband and, therefore, in a committed and supporting relationship with him, fulfill the inclination to preserve the species.

 

These are just basic concepts of right and wrong and why they are right and wrong.  What is important is to remember that the concepts do not come out of nowhere, imposed upon us from some foreign source.  No, they are organic, true to human nature.  They are also not concepts decided upon in committee, by a majority vote of individuals or their representatives.  We did not make ourselves, we did not design our natural inclinations and, so, we do not get to redesign them or reinvent human beings into something else.  The good that we seek is an objective good – objective because it is innate to who we are as humans.  You could say that it’s part of our DNA – in fact, I heard an agnostic put it precisely that way.  But, let us not reduce ourselves to mere particles and chemical combinations.  Jesus of Nazareth, when asked which of the 10 Commandments was the most important answered, that the most important one was to love God and that the second was in accord with the first – to love one’s neighbor.  And, so, it is good, it is right and true, that we should look upon the basic understanding of right and wrong in terms of love: of what it is to be fully and truly human.

 

For we are created in the image and likeness of the Creator.  We are endowed by our Creator “with certain inalienable rights”[1] and with God given intellect, free will, and imagination.  And we are meant to seek what is in accord with our good.  And, because our Creator loves us, knowledge of this truth is practically “self-evident”, while ways of achieving this quest are divinely revealed to us by the working of the Holy Spirit – through prophets, Sacred Scripture, and most sublimely in, with, and through Jesus Christ.  This is our faith, grounded in reason.  For, as Pope John Paul II said, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

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[1] The Declaration of Independence, United States of America

No Root in Themselves

Mark 4:16-17

And these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground; who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness;

And have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time: afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word's sake, immediately they are offended.

 [This is a bit of a mess, which I would like to edit if there were no time constraint.  Hopefully, some parts makes some kind of sense…]

Isn’t Christianity supposed to make me happy?  If I believe in God, in Jesus Christ, if I keep the Lord’s Commandments and do what is right and just – then I should be richly blessed with all good and pleasing things.  I should have property and wealth, friends and family, I should have good health and a long life, with the enjoyment of happy and healthy grandchildren – shouldn’t I?  What use is it to give my whole life to Christ if I will still suffer evils, heartaches, poverty or disease?  Didn’t God promise good things to those who follow Him?

 

How tempting it is to be caught up in the good feeling of Christianity.  And it does feel good to know that the Creator and Master of the universe knows me and loves me, that He became a human being like me and died for me, that He rose from the dead, vanquishing the power of death, and gives to me the gift of eternal life in the joy of heaven.  I would want to live in that feeling always, singing songs of Thanksgiving and praise with my like-minded brothers and sisters, sharing the plenty of God’s Creation, safe from anyone who would harm me – safe even from sorrow, fear, temptation and doubt.  That good feeling that we get inside when we are joyfully filled with the loving presence of God is, it seems, the just reward for acknowledging and accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.  But… that good feeling doesn’t last.  We can, however, be satisfied with a more mellow knowledge of divine love without the fireworks.  We can live in a kind of peace that makes the whole world seem right.  But… even this doesn’t last.  And it shouldn’t.  Because the whole world isn’t right.

 

Something terrible happens in our lives – a loved one is diagnosed with terminal cancer or killed in a car crash or murdered in cold blood – and we cannot understand how God, how our loving and Almighty God, could let something like that happen to us.  We might ask: Did I not profess my belief in Jesus Christ loudly enough?  Did I not pray enough?  Did I not make enough sacrifices of my own self-centered will for the good of others?  What did I do wrong that God should let something so terrible happen to me?  Why wasn’t my loved one spared, why was I not saved from evil?  These are the questions inspired by Job in the Hebrew Testament of the Bible.  And God, perhaps, could answer us with the words that He gave to Job.  God could simply say to us, mere creatures, that we have no right, indeed, not even the ability, to question the will of God; for we cannot possibly fathom God’s mind or God’s plan.  In the Hebrew Testament, God allows Job’s faith to be tested to prove to the devil, as it were, that faith is not dependent upon happiness.  Faith is not dependent upon good feelings.  Faith is not dependent upon reward.  Of course… this Old Testament story has Job rewarded with earthly enjoyments at the end of its telling.  And a common answer to us, as Christians, when we suffer great loss in our earthly lives, is that we will be richly rewarded with great joy and plenty at the end of our earthly lives.  And so often, perhaps too often, we rest our faith in that promise.  When cruel people do cruel things to us, when we suffer physically, emotionally or psychologically, when troubles are set upon us from the world, we believe that God will make up for it in the hereafter, we believe that all will be right in the ultimate end.  That is the promise made by God, and, so, I believe it.  But… I should, I must, always remember that my faith cannot be dependent upon reward.

 

I cannot look at my troubles as something to simply endure and get through so that I can get to the good stuff at the end.  I must remember that there is goodness here and now in the limitations and difficulties of my earthly life – not only because through them I am purified, I am made better and more able to love and receive the fullness of joy in eternity, but also because I am created by God, living in the necessary limitations of my own body and of Creation itself precisely because I am not God.  God loves me enough to bring me into being, God, who is perfectly self-sufficient, perfectly perfect without me, creates me so that I may be, so that I may be alive in the goodness of God’s Creation.  As creatures are not God, we are imperfect, and therein lies our suffering.  Yet, this suffering is the suffering of love.  For our imperfections exist only because we exist, and we exist only because God loves us.  How could God love us if we did not exist?  How could we ever be joyful and happy if we were not first created, if we were never alive?  And, yet, in being alive, we first had to be created, and in being created by God we could never be God.  We were always going to be imperfect, which means that we were always going to suffer.  Would it be better to never have been born?  Only if we never become fully alive, only if we merely exist, ignorant of our reason for being, separated from the reality of God’s loving gift of life, only if we use our God-given gift of free will to turn away from God and live merely for the self-centered pleasures of our limitations and reject the fullness of being alive, reject God’s love and cruelly take others from it – only then might it be better to never have been born.  For beyond this earthly life is the choice of loving self or loving God, the choice of imperfection or perfection; one is the way of eternal suffering and one the way of eternal joy – for in eternity, joy is solely the giving and receiving of God’s love.

 

What does this have to do with faith in Christ?  Everything.  For Christ makes manifest for us the truth and power of God’s love.  For, though we suffer, we do not suffer alone.  We suffer for God’s love that brought us into being and God, Himself, suffers for that divine love as well.  God suffers with us, always and everywhere, because God loves us, always and everywhere.  To accept God’s word is to accept God’s love, to receive God’s word is to receive God’s love, and so to live God’s word, which is to live God’s love – it is to accept, to receive, and to give Christ.  Not in a self-centered burst of good feeling, for nothing true or good has it’s source in ourselves, but in the God-centered reality of life-giving, other-feeding love.

Given by Inspiration of God

2 Timothy 3:16-17

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.

 

“Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”  Genesis 2:7

The breath of God gives life to human beings.  Through God’s respiration, as it were, humans become living beings; so, through God’s inspiration, human words become divine message.  A book is more than a book, Scripture is more than scripture.  What would otherwise have been merely earthly is also holy, of the Divine, by the breath of God.  Lines and curves, shapes and densities, grammar and biology are all but dust without the breath of God to give them meaning, to give them true life.  For, that which is given by inspiration of God becomes truly and fully alive, worthy of righteousness, of the ways of perfection and all that is good.

 

Christina Chase

 

Sit Down on the Grass

Matthew 14:19-21

And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.

And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full.

And they that had eaten were about five thousand men, beside women and children.

Sit down on the grass, all you weary of body, sit down on the grass and repose your soul.

The earth will hold you upon a living bed of green, the waning sun alight upon your skin,

soft breezes to cool and refresh your flesh.  And I…

I, with my sight upon the infinite reaches of heaven and my beating heart within your own, I will gaze deeply into your eyes, into that heart, into the core of your being, and I will give you all that you need, all for which you hunger and thirst, and you will be filled with the food of my love.

See, the food of the earth fractures within my hands that are eager to give life;

the earth spreads open at my word to yield forth its sweet verdancy and receive you;

and the life that I give comes from me to you, and through you

to your brother and sister, who receive and share onward the food of my love.

You would willingly hazard long journeys and rough passage for the food of the earth,

the earth whose very stones would cry out my name if you should deign to speak it not – but what of the food of my love?  The food that does not perish with the perishing of the earth, the food that feeds not the mortal and so never satisfies, but the food that feeds the immortal, that feeds your heart beating with mine, that feeds you fully and eternally, satisfying your ever-living soul –

For this food, you need only to sit down on the grass and receive all that I give to you.  You need only to listen to my voice, to hear my word, to let my heart into your heart, and to do as I call you to do, so that you may be who I created you to be.

The food that I give you to eat is the food of heaven, is the food of my love, is my very life, my body and blood that pulses and flows and fractures the earth to give you life, abundant life, in the fullness of reality, in the fullness of who you are: You, pulsing in your blood for the goodness of Creation, you, through whose body flows the divine action, you, who break apart the clods of earth for the perishing beauty and bounty of the seed – You hear my voice and crave my word, you long for the Goodness, Divinity and Unperishing Beauty and Bounty of my heart, so listen and receive… be fed perpetually… Sit down on the grass, eat and be filled with the food of my love… now and forever.

Christina Chase

Selah

Psalms 4:4

Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.

(I don't know what this burst means - I don't even claim that it means anything.  Like selah, I guess...  Rambling mind...)

 

In the light of day we may do many things that are brash and bold and make us feel strong, right and good.  But, when the night comes, and we lie in dark silence, alone in our beds, we might not feel so sure.

 

Am I my own strength?  Do I call upon my intellect and wit, my distrusting eye and sharp tongue, to get me through the day?  Do I defend myself against those around me and put them in their place?  Do I stand out among the others as the one who is right, as the one who is justified, as the one who is more capable and sure, while I shake my head in pity, wag my finger with superior knowledge, and stiffen my spine with indignity when others don’t follow my way?  I am right, I am beautiful, I am unique, I am not to be hurt or mistreated, I am better than you think and if you don’t know it, then it’s your loss.

 

And what about when I take to my bed?  The lights and sights and sounds of the day fade into the night and I’m alone in silence and stillness, preparing for sleep.  In my self-righteousness, perhaps I tune out the silence by tuning into more noise: talk radio, music, or the company of someone in bed with me, or the thousand thoughts of the day.  Or, perhaps, the still silence is truly silent and I allow myself to truly be still….  I am but a creature preparing for sleep.  I fluff the material around me and snuggle in for warmth.  I breathe in and out with delicate layers of tissue, needing the air as I need to sleep, in order for the current and pulsing of my body to continue and survive.  Am I my own strength?  Am I my own master?  What thoughts will come unbidden to me at night… Thoughts of loneliness and pain… thoughts of weakness and of dying… thoughts of remorse and sorrow… thoughts of wanting so much more… wanting and pining and longing… me, in my bed alone.

 

It is always at night that sorrow is more sorrowful and loneliness is more lonely and weakness is weaker.  For there is nothing to distract me from the truth of who I am: a mere creature of flesh and blood in a vast, dark and silent world, no better, no different, than any other creature.  Dependent am I.  Small and flawed.  Insignificant in the ultimate stillness of the cosmos.  What use to rage against others’ incompetencies and pump up myself as the right one who has been wronged?  If I have been wronged, then we all have been wronged, by being deluded into thinking that what we say or do makes any difference at all, is important in any kind of way.  I lie in my bed alone and know that I am useless, know that I am worthless, know that I am helpless, and become bitter tears… sorrowful tears of all that is not.

 

The saving light is not the rising of the Sun over the Horizon that makes mere things bright and shiny and illusory again.  The saving light is the rising of the Son over the depths of Hell that redeems mere things to true radiance and the fullness of reality.  I am a creature of flesh and blood, no better, no different, than any other creature… except… I am a creature of spirit and soul, no better, no different, than any other human being… except… My flaws are unique, my difficulties and challenges my own.  How my creator and master redeems me is as different and singular as infinity.  The song is His song, the breath and the hands are His, as is the very crafting of me… But, if I do not acknowledge my flaws, if I do not humbly bow before my incompetencies, then my creator and master cannot use them in His masterpiece.  It is the humble and contrite confession of my heart that opens the stops and lets the song sing through.  It is my tender touch upon others’ wounds that sounds the rhythm and flow.  My confession, my compassion, and, yet, not solely my own, but my gift from Him who made me.  The righteous words of the brash day, the wagging finger, the shaking head, the stiffened spine, all are useless, helpless – the whisper of my heart in deeply quiet repentance into the listening organ of the night, into the ear of the universe, this sigh, this silent plea for love and forgiveness is the most powerful and worthy act of all my life.  Without it I cannot love.  And it is only with love that I am worthy… worthy of peace in my bed, day and night.  Worthy only because He loved me first and gave me life, and redeemed me unto life ever new, in union with His infinite love.

Of The Water

Matthew 3:16-17

And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him:

And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

 

 

 

When our lives first begin, the instant that two physical cells merge and the spark of life ignites the soul, we are submerged.  We are surrounded, cocooned, enshrouded, in the liquid darkness of the womb.  We remain under this water in order for our bodies to form – heart, brain, kidneys, bones, eyes, mouth – for unless we remain submerged for our forming the pulse of life will not be held bodily.  When this fragile, early formation is complete, all the work that must be done in the sanctuary of sacred waters, we are born forth out of the waters and into the world.  We are taken up into the arms of another upon whose care we are dependent.  And here we live the lives of creatures that are visible, named, fed, taught, and hopefully loved.

 

But, there are other sacred waters.  Though we have been formed and born forth bodily, the business of our bodies may cause us to forget the pulse of our souls.  For what caused the cells of our bodies to first multiply and beat together was the animating principle of life.  As human beings, we begin to be by the breath of God.  And this divine breathing in us is what we need in order to fully be ourselves, fully and truly alive.  The care of the soul is different than the care of the body – but, for both, we need to be submerged in order for formation to begin.  Water sustains the body; Living Water makes healthy the soul.  In baptism, through water and the Holy Spirit, we are born anew, we are born from above.  Enshrouded in sacred waters once more, to touch the abyss, the touchstone of Creation, to be given the gift, the spark of new life in Christ, we are lifted up as the Spirit of God descends upon us, and we emerge as splendid and radiant creatures, God’s Word engraved upon our hearts, to be fed and taught the way of Divine Grace in the world redeemed by God’s love.

 

And, so, too, we will experience another submersion when our physical bodies, limited and imperfect, are no longer able to hold our souls.  We will descend again into sacred waters, there to touch the abyss, the touchstone of Creation, and then to come up by the grace of God, into the Almighty, Ever-Living, Ever-Loving Presence of God, infinitely and eternally.