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Think about it. look at quantum physics and the telescope pictures.
What would you think of posting the essay on your teen renewal page?
Carol, thanks. I wouldn’t know where to publish it, other than some professional pages. I made some few changes after the homily this evening and talking with a few folks. What do you think?
Sherri. Good stuff. I never would have thought of things the way you are. This shows that the Spirit speaks to us in our life as it is, and the same scripture passage can say very different things to people. You have the gift of being open to the Spirit, and you use it well. Impressive.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son is no doubt about God’s loving mercy and care for all of us. While we have heard the Parable many times and accept God being caring and merciful with us, it probably does not have much of an affect on how we live our every day lives.
There are a number of ways to look at this Parable, or any parable, in our own life. One way is to pray the Parable.
— We begin by asking the Holy Spirit to help us, without sayin the kind of help we want. The idea is to be fully open to the Spirit in every way.
— We then slowly read the Parable over a few times, ready to be surprised, not thinking what the Parable will say because it has always said this, etc.
— Then we look at the characters in the Parable — the Prodigal Son, the Father, the elder son, the servants, finally Jesus. We try to get inside their heads. The Parable tells us what they were thinking, but when we put ourselves inside them, we might begin to see things that somehow have an effect in our thinking, in the way we see something we are dealing with in our own life.
— The important thing is to do this slowly, not forcing any particular idea or insight.
This approach can be used with any of the Gospel Stories. The important thing is being ready to be surprised.
In the Story Jesus’ disciples fell asleep while Jesus was having his experience. They felt they knew him well enough that nothing was going to change. When they woke up and saw what was happening with Jesus, they wanted to build tents and stay with that. This might suggest to us that in our own life we might feel we know Jesus well enough that nothing more or new is going to happen. In our own version of listening to Jesus we concentrate on our own perfection by doing things that we think are important and will keep Good happy. Listening to Jesus becomes something of a performance according the the rules issue, and so we focus on rules, terminology, etc, trying to gives ourselves some sense of control. We are not comfortable with any changes. In the Gospels Jesus is not talking about performance, but what tradition calls union, being increasingly aware that we live in a relationship with God that becomes the basis of our life. Rules and doctrines are important, but they point beyond themselves to awareness of this union. They are means to an end, not the end itself.We run the risk of some sort of a static faith that does not grow because it feels it already has all then answers. So, we feel we can judge others by our ways — we are right, others are wrong. This is rampant in christianity, as well as in other traditions.
Jesus calls his disciples to learn from him to see God happening in real life as it is, to let God be God, be open to meeting God in new and unexpected persons and situations. We are on a journey from God, with Good, to God, always being drawn ahead, often well beyond our comfort zones, beyond comfortable routines and ways of thinking.
Sherri, I would never have thought of it that way. I’ve never had your experiences. What you said shows the Spirit speaks to us in the setting of what is going on in our life when we read/hear it. The same Story can have any number of messages. There is no just one meaning for everybody always. Nice job.
Carol, here is a website to give you an overall idea of Centering Prayer — https://www.contemplative.org/contemplative-practice/centering-prayer/
Let me know what you think.
Ever hear of something called “centering prayer”, or meditation, or contemplative prayer, or the different between saying prayers and prayer itself?
Carol, studying the Scriptures is good, but praying them is the next step. Passages we thought we knew the meaning of can take on a whole new meaning in our personal experience of them in our every day life. If you choose to move in this direction be ready to be surprised. This is very difficult for folks who need the control of already having the answers.It usually moves us beyond our comfort and safety zone.
An important step, though, is that when we start to read a passage, we don’t think we already know what it is going to say to us. It’s good to begin with praying to the Holy Spirit for openness to whatever She is going to say to us.
In the Story God says, “This is my Beloved Son, listen to him”. So often though, rather than listen to Jesus, we tell him what we want him to say, and this is what we listen to: a Jesus who thinks just as we do, doesn’t like the same people we don’t like, agrees with is on pretty much everything. In other words we create our own image of Jesus to believe in. Since this Jesus agrees with us, we just assume that we are right, and any who don’t think the way we do are, by definition, wrong.
We are surrounded by this sort of thing these days. Look at how many people say the way they see Jesus is the only correct way for everybody everywhere all the time. Then there are the clergy who say that anybody who votes in a certain way is going to hell, as are any who are of certain life styles or marriage status — always, of course in the name of Jesus who shared his Father’s love with everybody, especially those who were on the wrong side of the religion system in his day.
Jesus taught and lived his Father’s unconditional love for everybody. We feel threatened by that, so, throughout history, we have imposed, often violently, conditions and standards that Jesus condemned in his day. We need a sense of control, so we create standards, develop approved terminology and beliefs, and establish behavior codes that we expect Jesus to follow, even though he opposed them in his own day.To spread Jesus’ message of his Father’s unconditional love, we have, and in many ways still do, used violence in its many forms, always, we say, in Jesus’ name. If he knew these people, his Father’s creations, as we do, this Jesus would do the same. We seem to feel that we have to protect God from God’s own creation.
We would prefer to keep Jesus as an idea rather than be open to knowing Jesus as an experience that transcends all that we think important. Following this Jesus becomes for us a matter of performance rather than transformation.
The basic responsibility of any who would be truly a disciple of Jesus is to be open to the Spirit who offers conversion, constant growth, and helps us change where we look for our happiness. Jesus said, “I will the Spirit who will remind you of everything I taught you”. When we choose to be open to Her, the Spirit shows us what it means for us to be a disciple of Jesus in our own life circumstances. It is a journey we have to make for ourselves, and nobody can do it for us.
A lot of people think temptation is a sin, or at least is wrong. But temptations are opportunities for us to look at ourselves and see where we are going on our journey of life. If we think of God as some super being out there somewhere it is easy for us to think that this god is testing us to se if we will pas and are doing all the right things. But this is not the case. God is not “out there” but is in and with us. Some of us need to believe God is testing us because we need to feel that we are doing all the right things and have to earn God’s love. In other words, we believe that if we are not doing the right things, believing the right dogmas, etc, God is not loving us. This causes many people a lot of pain. We don’t see any of this in Jesus. What Jesus shows us is God loving everybody without any limitation whatever. This also bothers folks who need to feel a sort of control over God — an “if I do the right things God has to love me and get me to heaven after I die” sort of thing. Having all the answers all the time offer a sense of power for us, and in our own mind qualifies us to judge others.
The basic message/journey of the Gospel is our transformation, through our openness to the Spirit who, as Jesus said,”will remind you of everything I have told you”. The Spirit helps us understand what it means for us in our particular circumstances to live as a disciple of Christ. Temptations give us the chance for us to look at ourselves at any particular place on our journey and see how open or closed to the Spirit we really are.
Lent is a tradition; to look at this in our daily living.God does not need our prayer and penance, and we do not do them to keep God happy. We do them to help ourselves be open to the grace of God happening in us, and, consequently, in others.
One of the things the Story reminds us of is that Jesus became one of us to show us that each one of us is important. God sent him to show us how to live, because folks had forgotten that their covenant with God also included their relationship with each other. Men back then, Pharisees and Sadducees, had taken over the covenant for themselves and enforced it according to their own comfort and convenience and their desire for power, and taught the people that to get to God, they had to go through them. Jesus showed that this was not as God intended. He did this by showing that every person, whether accepted by the various societies or not, was important to God. This means that each of us as we are is important to God and necessary to each other. God is a community, Trinity, and is being God (godding) in all of us, and as reflections of God we need each other. What is going on around the world today, and is exacerbated by the coronavirus, is what happens when we choose not to acknowledge our inter-dependency and instead focus on our own comfort and convenience and our desire for power, which leads us to judge others, even God, by our standards.
“Why do we assume
that God became
human only once,
in the incarnation?Not so.
God becomes human
here and now just
as he did then.Why is this?
So that He might
give birth to you, too,
as His only
begotten son or daughter.”
Paraphrase of Meister Eckhart, certainly worth prayerfully looking at.After a disturbing couple of days enmeshed in the messiness of life, some worthwhile thoughts from Rainer Marie Rilke, a 19th – 20th century Austrian poet:
“We become so accustomed to you
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow. For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly.
Often when I imagine you
Your wholeness cascades into many shapes.”“You are not yet dead, it is not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.”John teaches his followers the beginnings of what Jesus would amplify later in his life and ministry. What they both taught was not bout keeping God happy so we can get to heaven later. It was/is about how we live with others here and now in our life. This means from time to time getting involved in the messiness of others’ lives.
Along these lines just came across this. It seems worthwhile, and maybe more folks could benefit fro seeing and praying it.
The Romero Prayer
It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts; it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
