God has given us His life, light, and love.
Life:
We have life.
We have consciousness.
We have free will.
We have agency.
Light:
We have purpose.
We have desire.
We have instinct.
We have intellect.
Love:
We know God.
We are connected.
We are loved.
We love God.
We are divine agents of God.
O Lord, may Your life, light, and love pour through us, channeling a divine source of healing, compassion, and reconciliation wherever we go and whatever we do.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:3
Being poor in spirit means giving up control, recognizing God as sovereign and able to supply all our needs. Poverty is rooted in the fact that we do not control our own existence. So being poor in spirit means to live without possessing anything, material or spiritual. It means giving up the desire and constant seeking to possess everything. Then, everything you receive is gift and given. The one who coined the aphorism “Less is more” understood the blessing of being poor in spirit.
When you are poor, in the permanent condition of poverty, you are constantly receiving gifts, not only day by day, but moment by moment. If you were child-like, which is what Christ calls us to be, every day would be like your birthday; the gifts never stop coming. Being in this state of poverty truly is a blessing.
Accepting our poverty is also an antidote to perfectionism. When we desire perfection, it is because we want to be our own God, in control of everything, sovereign over ourselves. But being a perfectionist brings constant misery.
When we are less than perfect we feel shame, and we try to hide it. We try to preserve ourselves from shame through control. “Perfectionism is striving in our own strength to make everything right so that our shame is concealed. Perfectionism isn’t simply striving to do well. Striving to do well is good, worthwhile, and commendable. The Bible calls us to it (Colossians 3:23). Perfectionism only arises when there is shame involved.” (Tabletalk magazine, October 2018).
The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing tells us to remember our spiritual needs more than our spiritual achievements (Chapter 2, p. 6). This may be why Jesus says the poor in spirit are blessed (Matthew 5:3) – because they recognize their needs and trust God to fill them, rather than exalt in what spiritual plenty they believe they already have. No matter how great our spirit, it pales in comparison to God’s Spirit, which he wants to give us. If we are offered the gift of God’s Spirit without price, why would we seek to puff up our own spirit, other than for pride’s sake? Thus, humility must be at the core of our spiritual journey.
According to Father William Meninger in The Living Search for God, we need to remember that the Lord can supply everything we need and protect us from every evil. So humility is our way of acknowledging that we need God to fill us and He is both capable and desiring of supplying all we need.
It makes sense that this beatitude – blessed are the poor in spirit – is first: Ask these questions about the three beatitudes that follow:
– Who mourns? The one who has lost something cherished.
– Who is meek? The one who claims nothing.
– Who hungers and thirsts? Those who have nothing.
All of these blessings are for people who do not possess anything, who have either lost everything or never claimed anything.
The Austrian philosopher and poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote, “Now the days of riches are gone and no one can bring them back for us. But we can let ourselves be poor again.” (Book of Hours, poem III, 15). The first line is not a nostalgic remembrance or a lament, but a setting for a fresh and new potential. That potentiality is the paradoxical blessing we receive in becoming poor, just as Christ promised in the first beatitude.
This state of being is about letting everything go, being without, possessing nothing, and in that poverty, being content. Contentment to the point of feeling a release from all burdens and a palpable sense of joy. This is a state of consciousness. It will be exactly what we experience when we die–we will possess nothing, we will take nothing with us when our body gives up (releases) its spirit.
And Jesus tells us we can have this blessing now; we don’t have to wait until the end of our life, but we can experience it “here on earth.” Jesus taught us to pray for this, to invite God’s kingdom into our life here and now: “Your kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven.”
Francis of Assisi said that those who fast and pray but “become immediately offended and disturbed about a single word which seems to be harmful to their bodies or about something which might be taken away from them,” such people are not poor in spirit.
According to this understanding, to be poor in spirit is to have no false self, nothing against which the self will take offense. It is to be so open and clear and transparent, that any barb or verbal aggression or hurtful thing will not find any flesh to lay into, to hurt or to harm. It is to be not strong but diaphanous. Not courageous, but fully vulnerable. Not impenetrable but fully penetrable. To be poor in spirit is to not possess anything, yet to have everything. To be poor in everything and at the same time to have everything in abundance. This seems to be a paradox…until I view it in this way:
I am not strong, but God gives me strength when I need it. I am not wise, but God gives me wisdom when I need it. I am not courageous, but God gives my courage when I need it. I am not generous, but God gives me generosity when I need it. I am not humble, but God gives me humility when I need it. I am not forgiving, but God gives me forgiveness when I need it.
All that God wants me to be, He gives to me. I am nothing without Him. Yet I am complete through Him. It is His presence in me that makes me complete, that makes me everything He wants me to be. I am truly blessed by the presence of His Spirit in me.
As Rilke wrote “We are not poor. We are just without riches, we who have no will, no world… Yet, if our Earth needed to, she could weave us together like roses and make of us a garland.” (Book of Hours, poem III, 16)
from our Lay Leader
According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, communion is
– the act of sharing;
– the Christian sacrament in which consecrated bread and wine are consumed as memorials of Christ’s death or as symbols for the realization of a spiritual union between Christ and communicant or as the body and blood of Christ;
– intimate fellowship;
– a body of Christians having a common faith and discipline.
I tend to use the word communion for the second and fourth meanings, but in this essay I would like us to reflect on communion as the act of sharing or intimate fellowship. These simple understandings of communion intensify the purpose of the sacrament, reminding us that we are one, that we share everything in common.
We as humans have a core of commonality that is our unity. All our differences are for the sake of making us a complete whole; we need and celebrate our differences because that is what completes us, gives us all things. As long as we share our diverse selves with each other–the broad realm of our natures, our talents, our skills, our vocations, our interests, our possessions, our lives, our love–we live together in harmony, fully alive, full of joy. That is what it means to be human.
As Christians, we recognize that Christ is the connective tissue that runs through us all. When we receive communion, the consecrated elements of Christ, we are practicing the act of sharing and celebrating the intimacy of being fellow beings, sharing the one life that is in and through Jesus Christ.
I’ve found that I focus on communion as an act of repentance; as an individual act, where I repent and seek forgiveness from Christ for my individual shortcomings and transgressions, so that I might be received by Him and accepted into the communion of saints. What if, instead of kneeling at the altar after receiving the elements and lamenting our failings and seeking our personal redemption, lost in ourselves, we joined hands and lifted our voices together to praise God for making us one with another, all of us connected together with Christ, our Savior and Exemplar. Would this help us to remember the overarching purpose of communion?
The last definition of communion (a body of Christians having a common faith and discipline) focuses our commonality on like belief and practice, which overlooks or minimizes the fellowship that we have as human beings–all sharing in this thing we call life, experiencing this thing we call reality, on this planet we call earth. We share all those things as miraculous living beings in this beautiful, mysterious, awe-inspiring universe, loved and guided by a Benevolent Creator who specializes in goodness and beauty. This is the communion that we pray for when we say, ” Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Let us practice communion not just once a month for a few minutes. Let’s practice communion — the shared intimacy of life together– every moment of every day and let eternity start now!
from our Lay Leader
Paul tells us, “Live a life of love.” (Ephesians 5:2) An embellishment of that instruction is “Live an ordinary life with extraordinary love.” That extraordinary love has only one true source: God, the Father of Love. To live a life of extraordinary love, we must live our life in God.
Father Pedro Arrupe tells us, “Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
John O’Donohue wrote, “When you love, you open your life to an Other.” When you love God, you let Him become not part of your life but your full life. Your soul becomes twinned with God’s soul.
Remember the commandment that Jesus said was the most important. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). In his own life, Jesus showed us how to live completely in the power and presence of the transforming and redeeming life of God. God sent His Son into the world to show us this Perfect Example.
All of our religion is worthless unless we love God in this absolute and complete way, because our love of God decides everything about who we are and how we live.
from our Lay Leader
Here is an allegory of God’s plan for humankind, inspired by Galatians 3:
When God created us he gave us a bright shiny car that we call life. He showed us the road that he had made and he pointed out the muck and swamps on both sides of the road and told us to keep the car in the middle of the road.
After we had constantly driven the car off the road and into the mud and gotten stuck, he gave us the guardrails of the law. Now we could drive that car and be prevented from going off the road and into the mud. But we took advantage of the law, and we constantly hit those guardrails, first dinging up the paint, then denting the car, and finally bending the frame so the car no longer could even drive a straight line. The car no longer looked like the car of life that we were originally given. Those guardrails helped us from going off the road and getting stuck in the muck, but life on the road still wasn’t what it was supposed to be.
Then God did something unbelievable. He took away the old beat-up car and gave us a brand new car AND his son, Jesus, to drive the car for us, to chauffeur us safely down the road toward our destination, which is Paradise, our perfect life in the garden with God. And when he sent his son, who gave up his life with his father to be our driver forever, God took away the guardrails because they were no longer needed. His son, as long as we let him drive the car, always keeps us on the road and we never have to worry about going off the road and into the muck.
As we sit back and enjoy the ride, looking over Jesus’s shoulder through the windshield and down the road, we have no worries, only the assurance of God’s blessing through His son, our driver. As the garden of God at the end of the road grows closer and closer, we remember those guardrails and how they helped keep us free from getting stuck, but we know our new car is much better off under the control of our Perfect Driver, who made those guardrails unnecessary and obsolete.
from our Lay Leader
“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I am fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12
The pastor preached recently on the “Love” passage from 1 Corinthians 13. The first part of the chapter tell us the nature of love, things about love that we observe and easily accept. But the last few verses tell us things about love that we must accept on faith: love never fails, and it never ends. Verse 12 describes the nature of this faith, what is known as mysticism, a word not commonly used or understood these days.
Mysticism is seeing partly, dimly, as in a poor reflection from a fogged up mirror. Thus, a mystic “is someone who knows that they don’t know everything and, [at the same time,] trusts that they are being held by something much larger, wiser, and more loving than themselves” (Father Richard Rohr).
A mystic knows that Ultimate Reality is mystery. A mystic lives life in acceptance of mystery, never believing that he is able to see or understand the full reality that surrounds him. Living as a mystic is the best stress-reduction approach to life, because you never believe that you are or can ever be in control. A mystic gives up control and trusts the “Larger Presence,” who he knows loves him and has compassion for him. The mystic knows only one thing fully: “Love never fails” (1 Corinthians 13: 8) and that is the only thing we need to know.
from our Lay Leader
We can’t see the Kingdom of God with our physical eyes (John 3:3). Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God is within us or among us (Luke 17:21). The specific wording (“within us” or “among us”) depends on the translation. If it is within us, then it is contained within our mind, body, and soul. If it is among us, it is in our relationships, in the love that we have for one another.
Love is the connective tissue within and between all of us, making us the one, connected and whole Body of Christ. Love is the Kingdom of God within us. We are love embodied. You can’t see love with your eyes any more than you can see God’s kingdom by looking around, but they both exist within us and among us.
Love is bound up in our bodies. Love is existential in our mind. Love is the heart of our soul. We are soulless without love. We founder and sink without love. Love is our existence.
Love is God. Love is God’s kingdom. Love is the Father, love is the Christ, love is the Holy Spirit. Christ is love embodied as we are love embodied. He is the template, the blueprint from which all of us have been made. Love alive, love incarnate, love with a body. That is God’s kingdom. It’s not just near; it’s here, within us, among us.
from our Lay Leader
We are one with Christ. Jesus is our Exemplar. He is both human and divine. He is the man, Jesus, and the divine, Christ. We are both human and divine. We are human beings and the divine Christ. Christ is in you–read Colossians 1:27 if you don’t believe that.
God’s will is to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, which is Christ (Ephesians 1:10). That is what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer — “your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” And Jesus says again and again that the kingdom of heaven is near (Matthew 4:17). That is…we are already divine, we carry divinity in our bodies, in our DNA. We are made in and through Christ. Christ is in us! (Colossians 1:27).
This was the mystery that was hidden for thousands of year, but disclosed by Jesus: we are divine! (Colossians 1:26). That is the gospel! We were made to be perfect, to have eternal life, to live with and for God, the creator of all things! God lives in us in these fleshly bodies and when these bodies give out, we receive new bodies that shall never die! Our consciousness will live forever. We will never lose our personhood! You and I will never cease to be. The good news of the gospel goes far beyond the fact that our identity will never end, but that our very existence will be transformed from one of pain and loss and separation and suffering to one of glory and gain and unity and peace.
Paul says “God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27). We are all “little Christs.”
Paul instructs us: “Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.” (Colossians 2:6, 9-10).
Live each day in the full knowledge that Christ lives in you and His power reigns in you. You are Christ to the world!
from our Lay Leader
How do we understand God’s plan in sending Jesus Christ into the world? Was Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross God’s only purpose, a transaction—Jesus paying a ransom to save us from the penalty due us for our sins? Did Jesus purchase our eternal salvation? Paying the price in full so we would have eternal salvation?
One understanding of transaction is “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other.”1
So many of us have viewed Jesus’s death on the cross as God transacting for our sake. With whom was He transacting? The devil, us, Himself? God is the Creator of everything. He has no one to transact with.
Another definition of the word “transact” is “to carry to completion.”2 This is a process, to move something along until it is completed. We think of transacting as a business deal, like buying a house. Buying a house requires a number of steps that have to be carried out: a survey, a title search, qualification for a mortgage loan, an inspection, and all of this must be completed before you have purchased the home.
Was Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross a transaction?
Indeed, the Father was communicating His love for us by sending his Son into the world to redeem us. But our cruel treatment and brutal execution of Jesus revealed to us how sinful we are. It showed us that we were willing to murder God so that we could continue to live as our own god. Except something happened in the cruel crucifixion of Jesus. The hidden aspect of this communicative action was to reveal how debased we were, how far we had sunk from who God created us to be. It was the nadir of the human existence.
“But up from the pit He [we] arose,” as the hymn says. We saw in the crucifixion of Jesus that we hadn’t just killed a man, but we also were trying to kill off our God. But in that attempted execution of God, we saw something: we were killing ourselves. We thought we were liberating ourselves, but instead we were sending ourselves forever to the bottom of a inescapable pit.
God wasn’t transacting for us, He was transforming us, through Jesus. In the killing of Jesus, we saw that God would give everything for us, including Himself. He was modeling His love in a way no one had ever conceived of His love. In Jesus’s willingness to die without making a defense, without violence by His disciples, without calling forth legions of angels, by wholly and completely surrendering Himself into the hands of sneering and hateful men, Jews and Romans, priests and kings, God demonstrated the divine depth of love like we had never understood. And it became the unforgettable example and future model of what Jesus taught His disciples and all of us: to deny yourself and to be ready and willing to lay down your life for a friend (Luke 9:23, John 15:13).
Jesus’s dying was not a divine transaction we might have thought it to be: Jesus’s death was not a divine “Get Out of Jail Free” card given to us by God. We have sought out and memorized those verses of the Bible that seem to guarantee us an easy way to heaven. Just say these words, just believe these things and you are guaranteed to join Jesus in heaven. Many of us have understood evangelism to be trying to get people to believe and to say the right words, believing ourselves that this was “the way” that Jesus was speaking about in John 14:6. But Jesus told his disciples that the gate to heaven was narrow and the road hard, and there are few who take it.
Remember Jesus’ very first words of his ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2). Meaning: change your mind, turn away from your sinful way of living. Instead, live for me, live like me.
And in His crucifixion, He showed us that living like Him also meant being willing to die like Him. To give our lives in love of Him, in love of our brothers and sisters, and even in love for our enemies. That is the transformative work of our God. But Jesus’s death on the cross yields nothing if you will not allow yourself to be transformed. God’s work is incomplete without your own work, without your willingness to give up everything you are for Him. Your salvation, like Jesus’s sacrifice, will cost you everything you can give.
from our Lay Leader
People are “wild, uncontrollable, dangerous, unpredictable, crazy, beautiful. And if I sort of see each person as their own embodiment of nature’s power, I can watch it with much more wonder than I used to try to control it with much more fear.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
What Ms. Gilbert is saying is that we are afraid to let life play out as it appears to be going. We foresee a trajectory and think that is not good and out of fear of the future that we have forecast, we attempt to change the course of that future. However, we believe we have more power than we do to change people and their decisions and actions, and so we set ourselves up for frustration and failure mixed with fear and dread.
We also arrogantly believe we can accurately predict the future course of events and their consequences, when in fact we can not. The world is so much more complex than we can understand, and even magnifying our brains’ power with the use of computers cannot overcome our shortcomings in prediction because of our wrong assumptions and incomplete models.
Instead, we need to let our experience of reality — our belief in a greater power, our understanding of what we call God — lead us to surrender our desire to control events and outcomes and to accept what is and what will be and to be grateful and awed by the working out of reality. When we take this step of surrender and acceptance of grace, we find that our fear disappears and is replaced by wonder. We become an observer simultaneous with being a participant, and in our observation of the present without concern for the future, we find a new way of comprehending the world free from the stress of trying to control it.
Our mind believes its job is to protect the body, but it tries to take over all control of the body and deny that the body has its own intelligence, a wisdom that resides in the muscles and organs of the body, beyond the brain. As powerful as the brain is, it is not complete without the body and soul.
As God is tripartite, so are we. Our human trinity is mind, body, and soul. The soul is who we are in God and who God is in us. The mind and body are not complete without the soul. The mind and soul are not complete without the body. Even after our earthly bodies give out, we will receive new bodies. We will never be disembodied souls. We will always be comprised of mind, body, and soul. Forever.
Our mind has a totalitarian urge to rule over the body and soul. Our life-long task is to restore the rightful role of the body and soul to our personhood and that is why we seek to be spiritual, to recognize our completeness, to deny the mind full control and authority, and to allow our soul to be the center of our being, because the soul has God’s imprint and that divine impression within each of us is always saying to the mind and body: “Do not be afraid. I am with you always.”
Surrender your desire to control everything and accept what is and what will be. Look at reality with awe and be grateful that God has given you a supporting role in His Masterpiece.