Day 3, Lect. 9 - Compassion and Solidarity

Compassion and solidarity

We are all called to contemplatives in action (ones who see then act with thoughtfulness and deliberation) in this world. We are co-creators of the Kingdom, with God, and with each other. We need community, compassion, and solidarity if we are to help this world.

What if we could give without counting the costs? What if we could see our neighbor suffering, and enter into their life with true love and compassion to help them. And sometimes it is not about "fixing" their problems, sometimes it is just about "being there" for them.

It is hard. If you live in a big city like I do, you tend to get overwhelmed by the shear number of homeless and destitute. And some not so much physically destitute as spiritually destitute. I live on the edge of a DMZ. I am in a quite little pocket of a neighborhood, but I am surrounded by... well, by ghetto. Everyday, I drive through "Cracktown", see the girls working the corner (or at least dressed as though they were), and the guys with their britches falling off, buying Swisher Sweets and magnums of Colt 45 malt liquor at 830 in the morning. Everyday, I see these people pulling out of their Section 8 supported apartments in their Cadillac Escalades, and their BMW's. I find it very difficult to not shut it all out. To try to see God at work in this environment. To think to myself, "What can I do to help these people? Do they even really need or want my help?"

We are called to give all of our love to God, Christ, Ourselves, and Our Neighbors. But Lord, it is hard. Sometimes I have to block it all out, lest I become overwhelmed with it. There are times that I would take on all of the pain of a complete stranger, so that they may experience the Love of God. But I know that is not always, or even often possible, so I feel I have to lock it down.

But I am just one man... Do you notice the overwhelming flood of compassion and support that comes to a community after a natural disaster or a tragedy? It is immense! But where is it in the quiet days in between? For the homeless, for the sick, for the mentally ill? No one man can fix it all, but as a community, can we come together in love and compassion, in solidarity, to fix what is broken in our communities, in our cities, in our country, in our world?

One must open oneself up to see the suffering, before one can be available to heal the suffering.

In the eyes of God, no one life is worth more than any other life.

Day 3, Lect 8 - Passion

Readings: Jn 19:25-27     Mk 15:22-41    Lk 23:44-49     Phil 2:5-11


The conversion experience is a continuing process. It is continual and ever renewing. Each morning when I wake, I have to decide to pick up my cross and carry it, or I can decide to lay it down and walk away. Now, by this, I do not mean to imply that bearing my cross is always a bad thing. It is simply making the conscious decision to try to walk with God that day, to lay down and turn away from my sins, to bear my burdens, and to be continually thankful to God for all of the good things that I have, and thank Him for the lessons to be learned from the bad.

When Jesus was crucified, it was because he was a political and religious dissident. He was showing the people a new way to live, think, and love, and that threatened to turn the Hebrew and well as the Roman establishment on its ear. So they arrested him on more or less trumped up charges, beat him, humiliated him, tortured him, denigrated him, and ultimately executed him. And all the while he maintained his connection to God. All of these things that man could do to him would not, and could not break his connection to God; break his spirit. All of this he suffered without anger. Without thoughts of revenge. To the very end, even as his spirit left him, he showed compassion.

All of this suffering is us. We are the arrested, the tortured, the beaten, the denigrated, and humiliated, the sick, the damaged and broken, and even sometimes the executed. Every one of us experiences some of this in our lifetime. And He experienced it all for us all at once. Why?

So that He could be the very embodiment of compassion. He came here to experience being Human. What does it mean to be these things that I made? What do they do, how do they live, how do they love, laugh, suffer, cry, and even die? How I can I love them if I don't know them, and how can they love me if they don't know me? So He came to us, in the form of a human male, Yeshua bin Yoseph of Nazareth. He walked with us for 33 some odd years. Lived as we live, loved as we love, laughed, cried, suffered, and died, as we laugh, cry, suffer, and die. As we do. And as he did, the sought to show US the nature of God. A God of love, compassion, honesty, and integrity. A God that now understood what it meant to be human, and so that Humans could understand what it meant to be as God.

In the end , he suffered and died on the cross. But even as he did, he suffered and died in solidarity with and with compassion for all of mankind's suffering. And what happened? He overcame it. He rose. He became God again. This is our fate. This is our mission, our journey, our destination, our destiny. If only we will learn the lessons that He taught us, and walk in His footsteps, carry His/Our crosses, whatever they may be.

+BLESSINGS+

Day 3 Lect. 6- Jesus: Beloved Brother and Sacrament of God

Here we turn to Jesus. Jesus as the God/Son of God, and Jesus as a Man who could be our friend, our confidant, our mentor, our guide, our brother.

If a  sacrament is a sign of God, the Jesus is the sacrament of God. Jesus said "If you have seen me, then you have seen the Father." He tells us that He is the embodiment of God here on Earth, so that we may KNOW who God is.n reading the parables, the miracle stories, the healing stories, we may also know the nature of God. Read them and see who God is. Let yourself feel His love for you. Let yourself fall in love with Him.

We are all called to live in (to imitate is a common way of phrasing it) Christ, but what does that MEAN? Second century christian philosopher/saint St. Irenaeus said "The glory of God is the human being fully alive."

Most Christians profess that Jesus was both fully human (being born of Mary) and fully divine (being begotten of the Holy Spirit). What this means for us is that as God, he came to us to live like us, to experience joy and suffering like us, and to die like us. To be fully human... like us. But in doing so, he came to show us LOVE like Him! To show us that we may live with integrity, honesty, compassion, justice, and with LOVE! In doing so, may we find that it is to be fully alive in God.
This is what it means for us to live like Him. For us to imitate him. For us to be Christ's emissaries in this world. Jesus broke all social, religious, economic conventions to show us God. And that in being Human, we could be as God.

"I wish I could show you the astonishing light of your own being."
When we realize that God is in us, and in everyone else, and everything else, we start to be able to see God in everyone and everything. If we all treated each other as though the other were God, then the world would be a much better place.

On Love
"Nothing has the transformative power, can move even mountains, more than LOVE."
In Luke 7:36-, we are told that Jesus is confronted with a woman who is accused of being a sinner. But she comes to Jesus, even though Jesus is seated for dinner with the Pharisees, she comes with love. With a love so great, despite her sins that she prostrates herself before Jesus and washes His feet with her tears, and drys them with her hair. She recognizes the Grace of Jesus and moves towards Him. He recognizes her repentance, her metanioa, and forgives her, releases her of her sins.

Love is hard. It's hard to do all of the time. We are not God, even as we strive to emulate Him. We are fully human, but we have the spark of the divine within us, and we are called to kindle that spark and "set the world on fire" with it.

Q: How do you relate to Jesus? How does reflecting on His humanity challenge you/comfort you?
I know that this may sound silly, but the comic strip Coffee with Jesus has been very helpful in my relationship with Jesus. Up until a couple of nights ago, I has always had a real issue with trying to reconcile the whole Jesus/God/Son of God thing. The the other night, I was laying in bed praying, and I imagined Jesus sitting on the edge of the bed next to me. It was such a powerful feeling that I actually moved my legs out of the way to give him somewhere to sit. We talked. I confessed to some problems that I was having, he gave me advice. It was really quite remarkable. I wish I had written it all down at the time, but sleep came easier that night. Being able to relate to Jesus in a more human form than ***SON OF GOD*** opens the door to a whole new relationship.