Too Much Today

The Westboro Baptist Church protesters are out in full force today at my son's school.   Having given them the courtesy glance over their very accusatory website with the posted schedule of where they will protest next, they essentially argue that this is "tough love" for their Catholic brethren (my words).   I only can say that one day, when they and I are both in purgatory receiving the necessary consequences of our failures to love and to act as we ought, with full charity in all things big and small for all peoples, big and small, God will respond, "Me too."  In that searing moment we will grasp for the first time what absolute justice and absolute mercy and absolute love all in one means and see by how far we missed the mark and wonder at our own blindness when the opportunities to be lights were everywhere at our fingertips during our lifetimes.

No matter our religion, we as individuals all labor under the misunderstanding brought on by our own fallen natures that we somehow have a greater grasp on the infinite mind of God than all that came before us and all that are here now.  It is a spiritual narcissism that gains the upper hand once we come of age and that all must battle ruthlessly unto death or be consumed by our own darker more narrow or less truthful vision of God.  Even the Apostles spoke of testing themselves to see if the spirits were of God or fallen; Even the disciples on the boat after witnessing the feeding of the 5000 with 12 plus baskets left over from the five loaves and fishes, misunderstood what they had experienced and sought to have an exclusive understanding of Christ, apart from the rest of the crowded masses who had pressed to hear Jesus speak.  Saint John tells us, their hearts were hardened as all of ours become when we fail to recognize the absolute gift nature of all grace; be it understanding or mere witnessing of a miracle or the opportunity to illustrate courage or the desire to speak truth to others.    

So I told my son to pray for them and simply go about his day and I hope that is what happens, that they come and hold up their signs and the men of my son's school, act as men and simply pray for these people who come to hold up angry signs at their doorstep.   Show the charity that we would wish they would have.  It would be a greater witness to speak silently with love than to engage in clever retorts; as to do so would give credence to the people with the hateful messages by placing them on equal footing in a debate type scenario.  

Looking at all this, I am grateful God does not weary of all of us in our desires to gnash our teeth at each other because admittedly, it is my first instinct and I'm sure that of many in this situation.  Thank God He Loves us infinitely and understands our great littleness and all our willful blindness better than we do ourselves. 

The Answer to Prayer is Always “Fish”

I've been reflecting on the means by which suffering can have or rather does have meaning, on the sorrowful mysteries.

Sometimes, you can see how suffering brings us closer to God, how it cracks open a community that was meant to be more than it is at the moment before the suffering begins. The community can be a family or a church or a school or a town or a nation or a people, but the suffering is a means of revealing the true relationships that were obscured by the world, by sin and by the false comforts.

I can get that far, and then I get afraid. That awareness is too much knowledge for me, unbearably intimate and overwhelming as it washes over, and I find I did not trust love, trust God enough to use these great pains and sufferings for good because I find the great pains and sufferings so very great.

It is only if we Trust God, that we can bear suffering and know it has meaning.
Next time I hope I will remember. He always give us "fish."

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The Answer to Prayer is Always “Fish”

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Summer Mana

I do not know how many people fall asleep in their lives, but I do know that there are moments in my own history where I suddenly felt slapped awake by reality, and I wondered how it was that I did not appreciate before what I now could not appreciate except in memory. Whether it was a friend who moved or a toothless grin, a beach house or a favorite bakery in New York, I always labored under the foolish self deceiving perception that these good good things, these would last, these would stay, and even decades would not alter the landscape.

Nothing in reality reinforces this dillusion, yet it persists just the same. Children grow. Friends move. The seasons even though they come again each year, do not echo their prior manifestations, and the beach is never the same two days in a row. Music played live never repeats itself even if it is the same song. Berries picked from the same plant are not uniform in taste, color or size. Every instant of our lives is a moment of variety, at odds with all that came before and will be. Life is change, and not all of it expected, pleasant or easy.

It is only our morals and our relationships that we can fix, by how we choose to act. I can always wear red, but even the same red will fade with the washes, and the color will seem brighter or duller based on current fashions. But one can always choose to hold a truth to be true, regardless of fashion. One can hold that charity towards all will ultimately make a difference in how we experience the whole world. One can choose to love, and allow that choice to dominate all actions that flow, regardless of the other's response. In fact, the way in which we can be like God is to choose to be constant in truth, in charity and in love.

We can also hold that even with all this chaos that defines our breathing in and breathing out, God loves us in all our disorderly messiness, in all our sins and flaws and faults. Knowing that in all the universe, there is this one constant, makes all the discord of everything else, bearable.