Come IN??

The “in”-ness to which this particular writing in Mark’s first chapter – believe in the Good News – calls us to look!

Life lived agape.

Inside a lofty interior, like a cathedral or other public building, our eyes are sometimes drawn upward by the architectural character of the space.  Something happens physically when we look straight up.  (You can try this.)  To look STRAIGHT up, we need to put or head back very far, and if we don’t stop it, our mouth opens to allow that upward turning.  We are literally agape.  Our mouth is a gaping shape from which our natural vocalization would be Ahhhhhh.

When we allow ourselves to stand in the middle of something, we are opening ourselves to Awwwwwwwwe.

Owned or Loaned?

A second thing that happens when we enter a place not our own (which includes any interpersonal relationship) is that we relinquish control.  The word “relinquish” is from the same Norse root as the word “loan.”  When we enter, we discover that something we thought we owned (our control) is only loaned to us.  When in the posting two days ago I mentioned someone swinging the door open and saying “Come IN” when all we wanted to do was drop something off – like “here’s a dinner for you; I gotta go.”  In 2012 I posted the story of a meal in a Migrant Camp in “I’m the 4th of the Magi: Doofus."

Funny.  We glibly say that our children are loaned to us, our life is loaned to us, but when we look at attitudes and behavior, we act as if we own them.  Even in amorous love, we are subliminally guided by syrupy lyrics like “You belong to me” and “Be mine”. 

Restrained or Embraced?

A third thing that happens when come IN to a place or relationship is that we are embraced.  The word “embrace” (in-bras) comes from French embrassier, to hold in the arms.  But it is natural for animals, including humans, to discern whether being held is threatening or loving. 

So Mark’s story of the beginning of the life of this historical character Jesus is the story of a guy who wants to embrace us, or even more quizzically wants us to let his Father, who we can’t see, embrace us. 

But the Good News that he invited us to believe from the inside is the Kingdom that has been promised to the striving, suffering, wandering, failing Jews, now occupied by the Romans.  (He swings the door wide open in a little while, inviting everybody, even the Romans.)  So those listening are looking for shelter from this political storm, a promised paradise, and protecting arms of a strong leader.

Will we let this invisible Father wrap us up and consider it embrace and not restraint?  Will we come in and light, relinquishing our plan made when we thought we owned our time?  Will we allow our emotional and psychological jaws to drop, and limit our language only to awwwwwe and ahhhhhhhhhh?  

Jesus called, in this reading from Mark’s first chapter, the first two of his homies, James and John.  But first he called us.  Will we enter?  Will you?

Next: Kingdom, Free Will, and Kid-Proof Car Doors

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Mirrors and Selfies and Eyes of Love

Courtesy LocalStew 1/22/2015

How many times, I wonder now, had Gary sensed the unasked question in Suzanne’s face: “How do I look?”

How many times did she hear the response in his unspeaking eyes: “You look beautiful.”

The Pope spoke on January 9th about “mirror men and women” who close themselves off from others, building a superficial and fragile sense of self from their image reflected in a mirror.  And research last year spoke of the compulsion to post “Selfies”, our image taken literally from arm’s length.  Francis said that focusing in on ourselves hardens our hearts.  Selfie research considered the need to establish one’s existence by posting evidence of it, kind of a “Posto, ergo sum” corollary of the Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” premise.

Maybe it’s simpler than that.  Maybe we just look in the mirror or take a selfie to answer an ordinary question: “How do I look?”

Since reading about the Pope’s Mirror People reference, I’ve reflected on my friends on the street, the ones who live there, without mirrors or selfies to see how they look.  And I shudder to consider that they rely upon our gazes for their sense of self-worth. 

There is a car commercial that shows a pretty plain-looking guy walking unknowingly in front of a good-looking car.  Women look admiringly at the car, but he thinks they are looking alluringly at him.  

Pretty soon his posture and bearing change; he’s feeling pretty darned good about himself.

Cut to a guy in layers of clothes, unshaven and carrying his most essential belongings in a plastic bag. How many looks of disdain or averted eyes does it take before he feels pretty darned bad about himself?  Aversion and disdain are, spiritually speaking, looks that kill.

Yesterday I saw the photo on top that showed me that the opposite is true too.  Looks of love can give life.

Gary Lichtman is a real mensch.  Wikipedia describes that word adeptly as “a person with the qualities one would hope for in a friend or trusted colleague”. For years Gary was a colleague and friend at University of Detroit Mercy.  A few years ago we learned that his wife Suzanne had been diagnosed with cancer, and that the prognosis was not positive.  Yesterday was saw on his Facebook page that Suzanne had passed away.  The photo!  Look at their bright young faces in the lower half of the photo!  I see promise and hope and possibility and potential.  But it is the one on the top half that blows me away, because I see Suzanne’s beauty and the love in Gary’s eyes. 

Suzanne and Gary and their daughter had visited us last year, five years since our retirement had put us across the state from them.  Gary was his usual smiling self, all attention and encouragement and affirmation and gratitude.  So was Suzanne.  I reflected on her freedom to be her best self despite the hair loss and swelling that come with the cancer fight.  After only moments of thinking of their fight with cancer, I was fully drawn into their dance with life, their enjoyment of the moments with us surrounded by the beauty of nature.

How many times, I wonder now, had Gary sensed the unasked question in Suzanne’s face: “How do I look?”

How many times did she hear the response in his unspeaking eyes: “You look beautiful.”

I was just sitting with my writer friend Steve, who is “winter camping” in his van these months.  As we shared an order of toast and a couple of cups of coffee, I shared with him that I was writing this note about Suzanne, and her feeling beautiful because that’s the way she was seen.  And I shared too my fear that those on the street may learn to feel ugly.  He looked at me gently, and said, “For us, it’s all about finding relationships that help us see our value.”

Gary will, I hope, continue the work he does at the university, helping people see our best face, the beautiful things and people at our school.  And I pray that he will see Suzanne just looking at him, from time to time, with the same loving eyes as those with which he looks at us, that tell him he is a beautiful Mensch, that help him know his immeasurable value.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Mark 1:14-20…Will you LIGHT for a minute??

I lean into life.  I’m awakened most mornings by the pull of a project, or a task, or a word.  

Meanwhile, my beloved sleeps, in the embrace of Psalm 127’s second verse.

It is vain for you to rise early

and put off your rest at night,

To eat bread earned by hard toil—

all this God gives to his beloved in sleep

Looking it up just now, I discovered that the first verse leads into this morning’s posting perfectly:

Unless the LORD build the house,

they labor in vain who build.

Unless the LORD guard the city,

in vain does the guard keep watch.

Mark’s Gospel leans forward too. 1/3 of the way into the first chapter, Jesus has already been prophesized by John the Baptist, baptized, tempted in the desert, and is into his Galilean ministry.  Mark’s my kind of man.  I recall Gust Kopack sweeping in from the milking barn, jumping out of his coveralls and putting on his fishing gear, calling to my godfather, “Come on, Joe, time’s a-wastin’!”  And off they’d go for our breakfast trout, the sun barely risen.

So it is no surprise that when I anticipated getting into this Sunday’s Gospel, it was all about the call of Jesus.  Drop everything and follow me.  Time’s a-wastin’.

But we’re a third of the way through this Gospel before Jesus calls Zebedee’s boys out of the boat.  His call comes only after he calls all in his earshot to “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”

Jesus didn’t say “believe the Gospel”.  I was all ready to jump up and go fishin’.  But the word in stopped me cold.  I’d never noticed that little word.  I am inclined to work at believing the Gospel from where I am, outside it.  I pick it up, read and study it, trying to understand it.  But Jesus called me to believe in it.  It was like He was a sweet old lady to whom I wanted to deliver a gift, who when she saw me, swing the door open, smiled and said “Oooo!  Come in!”

Looking at things from the inside is a whole ‘nuther thing than looking at them from the outside.  From the inside of a place or a person or a relationship, our affective faculties – our feelings – join our cognitive faculties – our thoughts – and we are given a three-dimensional picture, a four-dimensional experience. 

Do you lean into life too?  Can you join me for a few mornings in accepting the door-swung-wide-open invitation of Jesus to come in and light for a minute? 

Tomorrow: what it’s like from the inside.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Christmas to Epiphany XII - Tenderness as the Fruit of Patience and Closeness

 On this 12^th Day of Christmas, my final entry in response to the question of Fr. Delp – How are things different now that Christ is born – and the three characteristics of God – the Patience of God, the Closeness of God, and the Tenderness of God.

I desire to live a life of tenderness. I have had glimpses of this in relationships with people facing difficulty. 

When my dad was progressively weakening with congestive heart failure, my wife and I would make more and more frequent drives to Chicago, the six hours each way opportunity for preparation and reflection. For those condensed weekends, I was able to focus caring and kindness, knowing that my wife and I would soon be back in our car with time to reflect and recharge our batteries.  An unforgettable experience was that of my dad who was not expressive of his emotions looking into my eyes and saying “Johnny, you’re so kind to me.”

When my friend Fred had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, I had the opportunity in my retirement to sign up to spend time with him once a week.  As with my dad, the focused, short-term time with him allowed me to be very kind and loving.  I was free to be the best of myself.  Fred came to know me at my best, and in his eyes I saw myself at my best as well.

My relationships with people experiencing homelessness has mellowed over time, allowing me to focus on them, help them see their own dignity and value…because I have been blessed to see them as good, as my dad and Fred saw me. 

As I have reflected on these experiences of tenderness, I realize that tenderness is a fruit of patience and closeness.  These times with my dad, with Fred, with my acquaintances on the street are really effortless. The effort that preceded them were being getting past impatience and isolation. 

So today on the 12^th Day of Christmas, I’ve outlined what I’ve come to learn about Patience and Closeness, and set out some closing thoughts on Tenderness.

1.    Patience

a.    With myself: allow time to be simply loved by God, to learn God as source of all, and my primary and essential identity as beloved

b.    With others

                                          i.    Grace to keep in mind they will not grow as I think they should

                                         ii.    Grace to keep in mind that they are as imperfect as I am

c.    With God

                                          i.    God as friend – is not made in my image; God’s ways are not my ways. God is perfection, harmony, truth and beauty, goodness…but not as I define or expect.

d.    Withal: nature other than man shows growth as slow, seasonal

1.    Do I accept starts and lags in myself and others as natural, or as failings of consistency and persistence, as imperfection to be grown beyond?

2.    Do I respect the season of my own life (retired and aging)?

2.    Closeness: as night and day guide all of nature to work and rest, closeness to God in solitude and closeness to God in human companionship are gifts in alternation as well as combination.

a.     To others

                                          i.    This Christmas gift of God-as-Love calls me to be accept the gift and share it.  Being drawn into relationships is natural.

                                         ii.     Aversion to others is based on fear of them or of my own inadequacy, each a failure of trust in God’s love.

                                        iii.    Physics and grace consort to draw me to the other.  As I get closer, attraction increases, grace providing what is needed for the relationship.

b.    To myself - sitting with myself, accepting of my imperfection, respecting my own needs, physical and emotional

c.    To God: time for nothing but God, in prayer, liturgy, nature

d.    To all: delight in beauty of nature, including people, without taking responsibility to nurture or change, to remake them according to my preference

3.    Tenderness:  My tenderness has come in focused relationships, condensed periods of time.  I thought momentarily that it was like putting on a costume of kindness and acting out the part.  But I think it was actually removing the shell of my self-doubt and fear and acting as my true self. What difference it makes to me that Christ is born – Fr. Delp’s question – will show in the degree that I am this true self with my wife, my children, my neighbors, those who I see without the gift of preparation and focus.  

But I need to remember that the Pope spoke of these three characteristics as characteristics of God. They will never be mine except through the unearned and freely given gift of GRACE!

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Christmas to Epiphany XI: Step Two, and a Longer Walk

This is the Eleventh Day of Christmas, and Epiphany approaches quickly.  

Fr. Delp’s question, how has the birth of Christ changed me, has been playing in my mind – falling asleep, waking, and in moments of quiet that have somehow invaded my busy days.  The question has found paths in my darkness by the light of the three characteristics that Pope Francis says that God is to us, and calls us to be to others – patience, closeness, and tenderness.  I notice now that these paths, having been walked on repeatedly, are becoming easier to recognize, easier to walk.  God’s way is becoming worn in me.

Walking ,walking, walking…this brings me right back to where yesterday’s story left off – my learning from relationships with people living on the street.  Step one was finding a way to actually sit down with them.  Step two is walking the streets with them.

I’d been helped through the first step – sitting down with Malcolm and feeling my kinship to him.  But when our parish’s shelter week was over, I lost the opportunity for a relationship with him.  It was a Warming Center that let me proceed toward God’s call to me to “touch them.”  Sts. Peter and Paul is a parish in downtown Detroit that is staffed by the Jesuits.  With the urban mission of the university and the urban commitment of the Jesuits and the Sisters of Mercy, the parish opened “Sts. Peter and Paul Warming Center”.  http://www.sspeterandpauljesuit.org/center.html   Brother Jim was a Jesuit who had started the Warming Center, but led from the rear, empowering those who began as guests to become hosts.  So the luncheon was prepared by those with the gift of feeding, and the speakers were those among them with the gift of words.  The room was filled with people sitting at round tables.  They were law school people on lunch break, parishioners, street people, Jesuits and Mercys, and others who supported the center. 

I’d shared that Ignatian Contemplation, inviting us to enter the story, to be there in it, and not just intellectualize, had been a powerful influence on me, driving me to take the first step.  And it was that gift that drew me powerfully to take the second.  The luncheon speaker told us that the Warming Center was special to him and the others who were homeless because it was a place where they were welcomed, not shunned.  He told us something that I never thought about.  While there are numerous places that those on the street can go for lunch and dinner and shelter, the in-between times find them walking from place to place because to stop is to loiter or freeze.  Duck into a restaurant or store to get out of the cold and you are asked to leave.  Sit down and you are dangerously cold…and seen as loitering, being seen as an eyesore or a threat.  So, he said “We walk, as if we had somewhere to go.”

Just as my retreat had “taken me in” – to the story of Jesus and the crowd – His simple mention of “walking as if we had somewhere to go” took me in to life on the street.  As a passionate introvert, I feel capable of being social when there is something that I can do, some use I can fill.  But ask me to simply mix with people and I’m tortured by self-consciousness.  So at conferences when I am presenting or participating in sessions, I’m comfortable.  But put me in a “reception” in a large room full of strangers, and I want to escape.  Since escape was not appropriate, I’d found a way to cope.  I’d walk randomly through the room as if I had somewhere to go.  I’d do this until we were free to sit down for the meal…just like the person on the stage was saying.  So those words “as if I had somewhere to go” transported me into a person on the street doing the same thing.  I was walking to stay warm, self-conscious of the fact that I didn’t belong, averting my eyes, looking at the cracked sidewalk.  And then I realized that I smelled, and that the clothes that I was wearing were not my own. 

My retreat experience of Jesus calling me beyond my revulsion to the crowd was so real that I knew it as truth for me.  And this very real walk on the streets of Detroit in clothes not my own had the same certain truth for me.

I’d been given three gifts.  I knew in my mind what a Warming Center was.  I knew in my mind why they were valued.  But me than anything else, I found that we have something in common, the street people and me.  We have words to speak…and we find similar ways to cope with our gifts being unneeded or undesired.

And three responses emerged. I left the luncheon shocked to know that there were thousands of people on the street in the city I held proudly as my own.  I felt ashamed that I had lived so long and thought of myself as a caring person so deeply, while this went on and I did not feel it.  And I was determined to make this reality a part of my life. 

The story has continued to unfold since that day at Sts’ Peter and Paul.  After becoming deeply engaged with people on the streets in Detroit and those who care about and for them, retirement in Northern Michigan gave me the opportunity to find caring on a smaller and more personal scale. 

See more about this; learn about my developing ministry with Home Sweet Homelessness, a board game designed in a shelter that serves as a learning tool to help close the distance between those with homes and those without. www.HomeSweetHomelessness.org

Tomorrow – Tenderness as the fruit of patient closeness.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Christmas to Epiphany X: Getting Closer – the First Step

On this tenth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.  And we return to the model of the good life provided by Pope Francis in his Midnight Mass homily as we look toward Epiphany, the opening to that good life: The patience of God, the closeness of God, the tenderness of God.

LEARNING AN UGLY TRUTH ON RETREAT

Yesterday’s posting began to look at the closeness of God by proposing that being close with another calls us beyond fear and self-doubt through the gift of “actual grace”, a gift given freely to us as we begin to act, to reach out.  And I promised to share the story of my own becoming close with people who are homeless…despite my strong aversion to it!  Here’s the story of the first small step.

In my first 8-day Ignatian retreat, my director had given me a story to enter in prayerful imagination. 

There I was in the crowd as Jesus walked down the road, the crowd attracted by his healing and his speaking. By now I had been on retreat for a few days, and felt very close to the person Jesus.  And as I saw him coming closer to where I was, each of us being moved by the crowd, I felt in myself a desire to walk with him, right next to him, like the white minister I recall walking next to Martin Luther King in a march in the 60’s. 

But the crowd was thick and aggressive, pushing toward Jesus, saying “Touch me, Jesus!” “Love me, Jesus!”  “Heal me, Jesus!” 

I looked at Jesus, flanked by some of his closest followers, who were trying to give him room to walk.  I wanted to be one of them, one of Jesus’ friends.  I found myself next to him, on his left, and as he looked straight ahead, I said “I want to touch you, Jesus.”  “I want to love you.”  I want to heal you!”

He looked at me deeply, calmly, and with the pity of someone who loves one who does not understand, and gently said to me, “Don’t touch me, touch them!  Love them! Heal them!”

I looked down, to where my heart sank. I felt revulsion for the crowd. They were dirty.  They smelled, like the baskets of dirty laundry that I remember my grandmother bringing for my mother to wash when I was a small child. I literally sobbed to Jesus, “I don’t want to touch them!  I want to touch you!”  I realized that I was pleading with him.  But he looked again at me, kind but firmly repeating, “Touch them. Love them.  Heal them.”

In my revulsion of the crowd despite Jesus’ clear mandate to me, I knew that my contemplation had taken me to a truth in myself. Where Jesus was calling me to compassion for the crowd, I was stuck with my revulsion, my distaste for them.  I did not come to resolution on this.  I took it home with me.  If one can look at “sin” not as a shameful act deserving punishment, but sin as distance from God, I would say that I went home knowing my sin.  I committed it to prayer, but I did not resolve it.

BEING MOVED A FIRST STEP CLOSER

Some months later I was in the kitchen of our church hall making sandwiches for the guests of our rotating homeless shelter, with other members of my prayer community.  I was concentrating on being productive, spreading the peanut butter and jelly, bagging the sandwiches, there in the clean, bright kitchen, so I could get back to my afternoon’s work across the street at my job on campus.  I was in the huddle of my friends doing something charitable.  Our quiet conversation paused as we realized that the evening’s guests had arrived on their bus, and were walking single file down the hallway outside the kitchen. We could see them through the narrow opening of the door.

Suddenly I was back in that retreat chapel, and they were the crowd, and I knew that Jesus was telling me to touch them, but I was glad to be separated by the kitchen wall.  Again I decided to retreat with my sin in place.  I finished my work and got back to my job.  But I knew that I needed to get past that wall.

The next day I went to the woman coordinating our rotating shelter and told her I’d like to cook and serve a meal. We did not serve the hot breakfast from the kitchen, but from long tables out in the cafeteria.  There was no wall to separate us from the shelter guests.  After serving breakfast on that first morning, I hesitatingly took my own breakfast and as directed joined the guests at table.  They were speaking to each other, and I felt incapable of being of any use to them.  My eyes seemed glued to my plate.  I felt like a failure.  On the second day I took my plate and scanned the room for someone sitting alone.  Malcolm was a slight light-skinned African-American perhaps in his late 30’s.  His eyes were glued to his plate too.  I felt so different from him.  I had no words.  But I told him my name, and he told me his, and despite the fact that no more was said, I felt that I had taken a first step closer.

On the third morning, I watched for Malcolm to come through the line, repeating his name in my head. Malcolm…Malcolm…Malcolm.  I wanted to remember it despite my jangly nerves, feeling so out of place, so ineffective.  It was toward the end of the meal when he did come in, and my heart leapt.  He glanced at me as he held his plate out for the scrambled eggs I was serving.  “Good morning, Malcolm,” I said, smiling.  I weep as I recall the transformation in his face, his slight brightening as he looked at me fully and said, “You remembered my name.”  I told him I’d been looking forward to seeing him, and each of us continued with our tasks – him to getting his breakfast and me to serving others.  I joined him again with my plate.  A third person was at the table, and conversation did not grow much. 

The week ended after a few more mornings.  Malcolm and I said little to each other, but he gave me a gift that took me to more and more steps closer and closer to others who had previously been the crown I’d passively resented as getting in the way of my getting close to Jesus.  Malcolm had let me see his face, and had let me look into his eyes as he looked into mine.

While I felt better about taking that step, I knew it was still about me.  But Malcolm remained with me as a person as real as myself, and his gift of being companion at that breakfast table soon had me taking another big step.

Tomorrow: a next big step closer. my walking the streets in other people’s clothes.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Christmas to Epiphany IX: The Closeness of God: Gotta Have a WITH-ness!

On this eighth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born, through the Pope's three lenses: the patience of God, the closeness of God, the tenderness of God. 

I don’t know what to do with it, I just do with it. My friend said this the other day about moving beyond his reluctance.

Fr. Delp’s question calls us not to answer, but to action, to our letting the birth of Christ make a difference in our lives, to be, as Pope Francis says, the patience, closeness, and tenderness of God in the world, as Jesus was.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.  I have three faults.  I am resistant to patience, closeness, and tenderness. I want to move quickly, which I find easier alone, and find tenderness difficult in light of my perceived masculinity.  Fear and doubt are names I give this resistance in myself.  But Delp’s question calls me to action. And I know that it’s God’s grace that has taught me that action is not only possible, but rewarding.

A lifetime Catholic, I was taught in grammar school that there are two kinds of grace, actual and sanctifying.  I think of sanctifying grace as a something like habit.  Virtuous activity leaves breadcrumbs along its path, making it easier the next time, and eventually a trail is formed in our psyches.  Modern neurology would call this our brain forming neural pathways. 

I think of Actual Grace as a cartoon, or a science fiction special effect.  The character stands at a chasm, driven to get to the other side.  Urged by some assuring force, the character steps out in trust, and (cue the special effects) with each step, a bridge forms under the outstretched foot.  The means of crossing is formed as the crossing is made. 

We Make the Road byWalking is the title of a book by Miles Horton and Paolo Freire, two advocates of social change from the 70’s.  Miles Horton came out of undergraduate studies ready to get the poor in Appalachia organized to escape poverty.  But he learned from the people there that change came from something more like a conversation than a lecture.  

Change is something that we do with people.  We change too.  The Samaritan was changed by the man on the side of the road, perhaps more than the man he “helped”.

The bridge that Actual Grace builds across the chasm of fear or doubt has, according to Fr. Howard Gray, S.J., four steps: See, Feel, Help, and Change.  If I allow myself see the person in need, I will feel compassion.  If I allow myself to feel that compassion, I will reach out to help.  If I allow myself to help, I will commit to do all I can to help things (in the world and in myself) to change so that the kind of thing that is hurting that person will not hurt others.

Seeing, feeling, helping, and changing is not a practice of walking a trail alone.  My friend’s comment in our earlier discussion of New Year’s resolutions added a word to the Swoosh brand mantra.  He didn’t say “I just do it.”  He said “I just do with it.”

We make the road by walking with.  And the path is made in us as well as in the world.

For the story of the photo, see this link

Tomorrow – I witness my with-ness and homelessness.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Christmas to Epiphany VIII: Vicinanza di Dio (The Closeness of God)

On this seventh day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.

And we return to the stable, three-legged base of the good life provided by Pope Francis in his Midnight Mass homily as we look toward Epiphany, the opening to that good life.

Proximity. This is how God works. 

Pazienza di Dio, vicinanza di Dio, tenerezza di Dio:  the patience of God, the closeness of God, the tenderness of God.

This morning we sit at the warming fire of the second characteristic to which we are called, the closeness of God.  This is a morning on which much of Western culture celebrates New Year’s Day…and the Catholic Church celebrates “The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God”. 

Closeness.  What more perfect model than the pregnant mother, in which, as Fr. Delp says, the tension between infinity and temporality is set to rest.  Zero distance.  Being married to a mother for 46 years now, I can assert that the distance between mother and child remains zero in the mother’s heart.  The tension in the mother is caused by the variance between this zero distance and the mathematics of geography.  Geographic distance x maternal love = longing.  Afterbirth: it’s not merely a name for the physical connective tissue called placenta.  It is a lifetime of feeling the pain of separation.

In his description of the closeness of God Pope Francis describes Jesus as an example:  

"He was close to the people. A close God who is able to understand the hearts of the people, the heart of His people. Then he sees that procession, and the Lord drew near. God visits His people in the midst of his people, and draws near to them. Proximity. This is how God works. Then there is an expression that is often repeated in the Bible: 'The Lord was moved with great compassion'. The same compassion which, the Gospel says, that moved Him when he saw so many people like sheep without a shepherd. When God visits His people, He is close to them, He draws near to them and is moved by compassion: He is filled with compassion".

"The Lord is deeply moved, just as He was before the tomb of Lazarus". Just like the Father who was moved "when he saw his prodigal son come home".

Again, the use of maternity to illuminate the idea of the closeness of God.  Jesus restores the zero distance in this story in Luke 7.  Soon afterward he journeyed to a city called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd accompanied him.  As he drew near to the gate of the city, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. A large crowd from the city was with her.  When the Lord saw her, he was moved with pity for her and said to her, “Do not weep.”  He stepped forward and touched the coffin; at this the bearers halted, and he said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!”  The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

 And Francis mentions two examples of male longing, Jesus for Lazarus and the father for the prodigal son.

R. Buckminster Fuller’s OperatingManual for Spaceship Earth defines “synergy” as “behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of their parts”.     The scientist too sees that by relationships, the impact of individuals increases.  We do more with others that independently. 

Just as Jesus restored the son to his mother at Nain, Fuller calls us to restore the earth by restoring our relationships.  And Pope Francis, too, reminds us of this in that same homily: 

"Closeness and compassion: this is how the Lord visits His people. And when we want to proclaim the Gospel, to bring forth the word of Jesus, this is the path. The other path is that of the teachers, the preachers of the time: the doctors of the law, the scribes, the Pharisees ... who distanced themselves from the people, with their words ... well: they spoke well. They taught the law, well. But they were distant. And this was not a visit of the Lord: It was something else. The people did not feel this to be a grace, because it lacked that closeness, it lacked compassion, it lacked that essence of suffering with the people".

  

Tomorrow – more on the compassion through closeness as a mutual restoration of hope

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.