My Prayer to the Holy Trinity

 

Dear God, 

I'm not making excuses but your residing within my very being is all very new to me and frankly has never been discussed as part of my religious education. I hate to sound critical but this doctrine of the Indwelling may have been passed over; I don't remember hearing from the nuns in grade school or the brothers in high school. I wonder if they even knew?

Yet Lord, all the while, deep down I wanted your love and the assurance of your love and I always tried to earn it. So you can see why your Indwelling Presence strikes me as strange and foreign.  Now I’m being told that while my prayers are beautiful and comforting, whenever I want to speak with you, it’s not always necessary to say the prayers I was taught and had memorized . No, rather I should converse naturally, in a familiar and relaxed way as if you’re “one of the family” because you Eternal Three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, have made your home in me.

My religious training emphasized that you were the one who would punish me if I even talked in Church... and as a youngster I remember confessing it. It was a sin. I was trained to be meticulously respectful when I came into your presence, as if your presence was only in Church. (I remember feeling guilty for a long time when Sister Janice discovered Ralph and me playing the theme from “Dragnet” on the organ in the choir loft, one Saturday afternoon. Who knew she was preparing the sacristy for Sunday Mass! I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to face her wrath on Monday or roast in hell forever?) Now, I’m being told that your presence is within me! And I’m supposed to be comfortable with you. I feel as though I should hold my breath.

Dear God, now I’m learning not to think of grace as the absence of sin but as a gift of your presence, Father, Son and Spirit within me.  And that you are closer to me than I am to myself and that you want to be for no other reason except that you love me. That is so beautiful that I really want to hold on to this feeling forever.

I’m trying to understand that the more aware, conscious, alert, and attentive I am to your triune presence within me, the more I will find you in all things. Dear God, I really do want this.

Frankly, I must admit that in the past I hadn’t given much thought to your presence, your intimacy, you activity within me. What a love you must have for me! A genuine, boundless, omnipotent, all-present, eternal, home love within me! I certainly need a mature faith for this. I no longer can go just gliding along the surface of my old religious practices anymore, can I?

Thank you Lord.

In the Name of the Father, from whom we came and to whom we are going, and to the Son, in whom we find our true self, and to the Holy Spirit, the divine aliveness in our innermost life. Amen                                                                                            (John 3 :16-13)

(adapted from  Ronald T. Haney SJ, God Within You, Mysticism for the 21^st Century, pp. 150-151)

 

Come Holy Spirit

 

Pentecost preserves the memory of Jesus and his teachings while on earth through the Holy Spirit who restores and renews the breadth and depth of our faith through our love for one another. God and Love cannot be contained and must be shared. God is love.

David Steindl-Rast writes in Deeper than Words that The Holy Spirit is the awe-inspiring power of life and love. We differ only by the degree to which we open ourselves to this power. If we patiently cultivate courage and openness, we will become more and more aware of the Spirit which allows us to know God within.

In our Creed when we proclaim our belief in the Holy Spirit, we acknowledge the Trinitarian God as the ‘Father,’ the ultimate mystery from whom we come and to whom we are on our way; the ‘Son,’ in whom we find our true Self; the ‘Spirit,’ the divine aliveness within our innermost life, Here we touch upon the very core of faith.

We are charged with remembering all that Jesus lived while he was with us. (John 20:19-23) The Spirit is the ultimate power of the Gospel through which the Word becomes flesh in us, and are no longer just words. We become those words and they define who and what we are. We remember not as if it were yesterday but because it is today; we live the memory now and again and again.

“When we remember, we leave the present for the past. To say it better, we bring the past into the present and give it life alongside the tangible realities we are compelled to consider. Not physical presence but love leads us to live with this remembered person even in his/her absence. When love is strong, the memory of this may be even more dear and more real than the reality of those who are present. Our memory of another confers the present upon him, gives him further life in our life, and keeps a moment of the past from drifting away or fading into death.

“We are fed and nourished by communion of life in which our lives intersect in memory and merge into a common experience. No lover forgets. No beloved is forgotten. The memory of love is life; the memory of another becomes ourselves. So when the communion of believers remembers Jesus, Christ is present and is brought into the present with his grace by the power of the Spirit…The gift of the Spirit is fidelity to the memory of life’s mystery and confidence in the mystery of its future.”  (Anthony Padovano, Dawn without Darkness) 

When you're awake, the things you think
Come from the dream you dream
Thought has wings, and lots of things
Are seldom what they seem

Sometimes you think you've lived before
All that you live to day
Things you do come back to you
As though they knew the way 

 

 

 

The Great Commission

 

 

 

Let’s face it when we hear the gospel of the "Great Commission" in (Matthew 28:16-20), we may not necessarily feel inspired or encouraged but instead just a little guilty. Why? Because we somehow do not consider ourselves as being "called" or sent to "bear witness" to our faith and, even more, do not feel equipped to do so. So when we hear Jesus' very clear instructions we are reminded of one more thing we called to do but often do not … a sure recipe for guilt. 

As adults, much of our identity is related to our areas of competence -- at work, at home, in volunteer activities or hobbies. When we find ourselves in situations where we do not feel competent, our anxiety level escalates. (Psychologists tell us, that this is why adults have a hard time learning a new language or musical instrument; it's not that our brains are too old or incapable of learning something new; it's that we don’t like feeling incompetent and so quit before we even try.)

How often have we been invited to make connections between our faith and our daily lives or to share that faith with others? Perhaps it’s because we’ve rarely been asked, let alone shown how to do these kinds of things even in the relatively safe confines of church let alone in more threatening situations outside of church. It’s just that we don't feel competent to be part of anything remotely resembling Jesus' Commission.

These few short verses in today’s Gospel summarize our calling and are such an important text in the context of Matthew's gospel. Too often it is assigned as a reading for Trinity Sunday and seems to get lost in “dogma.” However, it clearly proclaims the supreme authority of Jesus, as being one with the Father and having no earthly equal. It also reminds us that we are “commissioned” to love one another as Jesus did and remember that God, through the life of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, is with us until the end of time.

Yet let's admit it, most of us feel a little guilty when we hear Jesus' instructions. More than that, most of us don't have the foggiest idea of what it would look like in everyday life to implement his instructions. So after acknowledging where we are, 

So how can we go about gaining a sense of competence and confidence to help us  share our faith? Perhaps it starts with moving to a more participatory style of Christian formation in which we reach out to one another, inviting our hearers to do more than just hear but to respond to the word proclaimed in our services and revealed in our daily lives. And maybe, over time we will be inspired to share these revelations and proclaim the Word with our own “gift of tongues,” and in and by our actions. How good are we at doing what we are told? How good are we at not allowing arrogance, negative patterns from the past, and doubts to hold us back from making disciples for Jesus Christ? We can't afford to wait until we are perfect and conditions are optimal to become and make disciples. Some people who call themselves Christians can't bring themselves to share their faith. They remain forever trapped on the mountain depicted in the scene from Matthew, mired in their doubts and excuses.

Come Holy Spirit

 

Over the years we have come to understand that John’s Gospels often defy literal translation. We suspend our intellect's literal inclination to enable the words to become flesh in us. In so doing we take them to our hearts so that we might intuitively feel their presence through the power of the the Holy Spirit. Padovano tells us that Jesus will never be found by those who reduce faith to words or doctrines or who limit religious behavior to moral exercises or spiritual behavior. 

So, in our Gospel (John 14:15-21) Jesus says: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.”

Have we ever seen the Holy Spirit? This is not a trick question. Let’s think for a moment. The best description we ever get in religious depictions of the Holy Spirit are tongues of flame or a freely blowing breeze. However, in this week's reading we get two helpful hints that offer a pretty good picture of just what the Holy Spirit looks like. 

The Holy Spirit looks like an Advocate --the one who stands up for you when you need it; the one who speaks on your behalf; the one who lends you a helping hand, takes your side, and won't leave you while you're down. 
The Spirit is "another advocate" because Jesus is the first. The Spirit, Jesus goes on to say, will abide with us and is sent in Jesus' name to remind us of what he taught while on earth. In a very real way, the Spirit affirms Jesus presence in us and through us, and helps to keep his promise that he will not leave us orphaned. You know him, because he abides and lives with us 

An advocate is defined as one who upholds and defends a cause or person, and intercedes on the part of another. Yes, we've seen the Spirit many times in those who share the love of Christ, and stand up for one another. 

John’s Gospel is as relevant today as it was when it was written two thousand years ago. There are advocates for the love of God in our midst…and there are adversaries. 

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love.  

 

Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled

We are taught to read literature as we would a newspaper. Time and words are sequential. It’s one–dimensional, in that the words on the page are an array of letters in our English language that communicates information in real time. What you see on the surface is what really is in "black and white." There is nothing but space between the lines. This is not the case when we read the Gospel and especially John’s. David Steindl-Rast writes: “to understand John’s images in the way they were meant, we must develop a sense for poetic language. These images speak to our intellect through our poetic sensibilities…Tuning in to this language means both taking them seriously and not taking them literally.” Marcus Borg goes on to say “it invites his hearers to see in a radically different new way. The appeal is to the imagination, to that place within us in which reside our images of reality and our images of life itself.” 

So when John begins the first chapter of his Gospel with In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God (verse 1)…And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, he announces the incarnation of God in all his humanity as the Word became flesh in Jesus, and by extension, he signifies that the Word becomes flesh in us. “The Word speaks to us in that place in which resides our personal images of reality and our images of life itself.” 

So back to John’s Gospel for today (John 14:1-12).  Jesus comforts his apostles and says: Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me, says Jesus. Trust me. Trust God— you have seen God in me. I am enough. Trust that you will find me in the community as we come to see God in one another. Andrew Prior writes: “I do not think we can overstate the love and the intimacy of the household of God and our place in it. What we can miss, however, is that it is not a geographical place at a certain time. It is a relationship in eternity into which we can enter; in which we can place our trust. We will not be left alone, or orphaned.”  

We know that Jesus was killed for political reasons: he violated the “status quo,” the prevailing Jewish law that caused the Judeans, not all Jews, to want him removed. The Judeans were those who aligned themselves with Rome to maintain “control” of their “religion” and maintain their “status quo.” As such, their religious leaders collaborated with Imperial Rome to have Jesus “removed.”  

Throughout his life, Jesus made it clear that he resisted the man-made rules of “organized religion” as it existed. I wonder what he would think about the religions of today.  How different are some of its members from the Pharisees who resisted change. History reminds us that Jesus was not the last to be persecuted for bucking the “status quo.” Leave things alone I’m comfortable with the way things are; hey, I read the scripture and preach the Gospel; isn’t that enough?  But where is the Love that is Jesus?  

Wills tells us that “Jesus opposed any religion that is proud of its virtue, like the boastful Pharisee. Any that is self-righteous, quick to judge and condemn. Any that wallows in gossip that destroys and divides the community in order to serve its own purpose and not God’s.” And how do we relate to hear Jesus’s words in our Gospel: Do not let your hearts be troubled…I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.