the most also fear the most. It is not God who they fear, but suffering. They ignore the poor and suffering because without faith, suffering is meaningless and personal or national security becomes their god. To ignore the suffering of the poor is to live unethically and defy the voice of morality that comes from God. The attempt to provide meaning through acquisition, through self-empowerment, is to avoid experiencing the meaningless of a life without faith. Such an effort is self-deification and ignores the connectedness of each person with one another and with creation. It is the birthplace of desire and it is natural to human beings. Only when we become spirit and open our eyes to reality can we overcome desire.
This misguided effort to become meaningful is impotent because of mortality, bringing the eternal into the temporal through acts of love is to bring God into the world and such echoes into eternity. Human beings cannot escape suffering, they either harden their hearts to it, or recognize that suffering has meaning because God is watching, because God cares about how we live in relation to one another. Ultimately we do not possess life in ourselves; life is a gift from God.
Blindness is healed when eyes are opened. Love is the healing salve that mediates healing to the fearful; everyone is afraid and everyone wants to be loved. Love is irrational, love is self-sacrificing, love is not selfish and offers mercy to all. The love of God flows through a life, a person, whose belief in the goodness of God is supported by a conviction that opens the heart of the blind who long to see.
Face to Face
Standing in Heaven
He needed me
When I found him he was crushed by the weight of reality
His irreducible love, his indomitable hope, had led him to the precipice of the lost
He invited me to come
He had passed through death’s portal and never relinquished the burden he carried
“Follow me” I heard him say
I chose to come and see
My questions were outweighed by his call, by his way of living
A power gripped my soul and held me captive to a dream
I’m standing in heaven
I chose to continually remain waiting letting others pass ahead
There was one who stood with me
I beheld him face to face
For we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face For now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love
First Cor 13:12-13
Facing God
To stand face to face with another is the defining encounter for knowing, for experiencing the spiritual dynamics of relationship. Face to face there is the potential for intimacy, when eyes speak and the intricate movements of the face communicate, when words are defined by inflections in the voice, and body language incorporates the entire person. Face to face is the call to embrace the person of the other who bears the image of God.
Beholding another face to face is a place of equality; if it is not then the encounter is not face to face. Without equality the dynamics of the encounter are disrupted by powers that separate one from another. Vulnerability is the essential openness for insuring a truly face to face experience with another. In the man Jesus we can see God face to face, it is in the Lord Jesus Christ that we see God join the creation to experience living as a human being. His continuing existence as a human being is where the one who is uniquely Son of God lifts us to learn how to find the invisible, ineffable, God in the human family.
Through the use of poetry, Paul the apostle expressed belief in a time of human and divine encounter when the vulnerability of humanity before the Lord is matched with the vulnerability of God. God’s vulnerability is an irreducible love, a love that enters the depths of creaturely difference to lift us up from the earth (ground) to become children of God.
Humanity’s perception of the voice of God will have moved from prohibition to ‘God our Father’.
There is no exchange or loss of power, rather there is the knowing of God as the divine lover, the relational redeeming creator who makes inviolable promises to his creatures; the surety of life resident in the source of life, the one God. This knowing eradicates the creature’s desire for surpassing the limits of knowing, a limit placed upon us as like, but other than, God.
This moment is the kiss of marriage, the intimacy of humanity incorporated into the Spirit of God. In Christ, humanity learns to live and not reach for fruit beyond the limits of the creature’s existence, an existence defined by the wisdom of God. The inward voice of human intellect seeking to explore regions beyond the structures of reality will turn from the prohibited tree and see innumerable trees in the garden of life, each rich with the fruit of life.
Beholding the Lord, the lowly man, the exalted Christ, the patience of eternity calling us ever forward into life, is not a single moment but a constant reality, a spiritual revelation as we are held in the being (Spirit) of God. Hiding and absence are words no longer descriptive of the divine-human relationship. We will know the Lord; all of us, and hierarchical structures of relationship will fade into harmonious creativity.
In Jesus Christ the Lord, part of what it means to be God is to be human. Humanity is incorporated into the being of God and this is an unchangeable reality. In the beginning of scripture we learn that one human being is an incomplete creation; God created us to be many. Jesus is Lord because he is the word, the wisdom of God incarnate, the one who is before all things. Jesus is Lord because he earned this exalted title as the one who conquered all that inhibits human beings from being temples for God.
Face to face we shall behold the one whose mercy endures forever. Face to face we are welcome at the table of God where life is the sustaining food and drink. Face to face the vulnerability of God humbles the children of God
Tell Me a Story
When Storytellers Rule the World
‘I’ am a story
From the highest heaven he watches
Leaning forward he waits
The drama of history has captured me as one among many
Defined by particularity
At risk to chance
My freedom to choose is always only a will away
Bound by reality
Equipped to defy reality
Now I hear his call
To change the world is simply to be
The courage to be is the faith of a saint
Today ‘I’ write my own story
a story infused with all the pain of the present
a story untold, never lived before
a story of peace in a land of war
He is my father and ‘I’ am living his dream
My story has eternal meaning
I am a child of God
But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
John 21:25