Dear Friends,
Deathless Beauty in the Fleetingness of Time
We are living in an unprecedented, turbulent time of chaos and change that seem relentless. We’ve never been here before. We wonder whether the center will hold. I want to use this opportunity to introduce Jesus’ mystical reality that can anchor us to remain sane in our maddening world. There is a saying, “Still water runs deep.” I hope we can go deeper under the churning surface of the sea and find our grounding in Christ who offers a much more expansive view of reality in the fleetingness of time.
1 Corinthians 13:12-13 (The Message)
12 “We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
13 But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.”
When Jesus roamed the earth to set people free from ignorance and suffering, he encountered a myriad of sick people. I can’t walk. I can’t see. I have leprosy. I’m demon possessed. I’m a prostitute. I’m an outcast. I’m lost. And so on with the litany of human sorrows. And we can put ourselves there. We come to Jesus asking for healing and to end our suffering. I’m scared about myself, my loved ones, and for all of us living in this dark, chaotic, uncertain time.
And what Jesus does in each of these healing stories is he first responds to their suffering.
Mark 10: 46-52
The Healing of Blind Bartimaeus
46 They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” 50 So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51 Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” 52 Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
And he does so in a miraculous way that’s beyond our power. As Jesus says in Luke 18:27: “What is impossible for man, it is not impossible for God. For God can do what man cannot.” The lame walks, the blind sees, the lost finds, and so on. We don’t know what happened to these people, but we do know they all died after living their day by day lives.
But then he says, “I do this for you as a sign that you might believe.” Here, the true miracle is shown to demonstrate that these outward miracles are signs of interior miracles. So how can we participate in the interior miracle from these outward signs?
Here is the distilled essence of our Christian faith. Jesus stands with people who come to him in their suffering. And you are standing before Jesus in your own suffering. And Jesus says to you, “I know you. Because God the Father has eternally contemplated you in me before the origins of the universe. I see you, the unborn you.
Ephesians 1:4, 11-12 (The Message)
“Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love.” “It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ,… he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone.”
For God is never, never, never, not known you eternally in me since the beginning of time. God forever knows this unborn you that will never die in God. Because God will never, never, never, not know who you are in person eternally in God. You are created in the image of God (imago dei), the likeness of God whom God blew his breath, his Spirit, his essence, in you to make you who you are.
Jesus says this to set us free from all that separate us in sweet Union with him, with God. Jesus says this to set us free from the tyranny of fears that separate us from life of love and freedom in God. What’s devastating about our fears is not that we can’t walk, we can’t see, we have leprosy, our lives are in shambles. What’s devastating about our fears is that we think we are what’s wrong with us. We tend to think that the conditions in which we find ourselves have the authority to name who we are. Jesus knows that the conditions in which we find ourselves do not have the authority to name who we are. Jesus sees that only the deathless love of God has the sole authority to name who we are, forever. Because the deathless love of God is life’s subsisting flame that sustains us.
This is the enriched depth dimension of God’s eternal time as we live day by day in the passage to time. Therefore, as we pass, as all things pass away, God remains. Here is St. Teresa of Ávila’s famous prayer “Nada te turbe”:
Let nothing disturb thee,
Nothing frightens me,
All things are passing,
God alone remains.
Patience obtains all things.
Whoever has God lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.
God eternally remains as this beginning-less, endless, boundaryless, oceanic presence. It is true that we all pass away in this mystery of death. Moment by moment as we sit here, we are all passing away like burning candles in the presence of God who never passes away.
And so we are standing there in the presence of Jesus. We experience first-hand our own salvation through what is reflected in his eyes who we were before we were born. In that moment of recognition of “I was once blind but now I see,” we are set free from the tyranny of fears that separate us from life of love and freedom in God. And in that moment, a deep, deep healing from suffering takes place.
So tell me? What kind of life do you live after being liberated this way deep within your heart and soul, when your fleeting life goes through the passage of time?
First of all, we are to do what Jesus did in these healing stories in the gospel. Respond first to the reality of the traumatizing suffering that we are going through. Ask yourself, “What is within your power to protect yourself, your loved ones, and others in the community?”
There is a saying, “Act locally, think globally.” We are to locally engage in social activism, and like prophets, we are to speak the truth to power in the presence of living God. We are to remind ourselves that we are doing God’s love work grounded in the “Peace of Christ” that Christ gives to us that is not dependent upon the outcome of our efforts, that is not contingent upon external result.
John 14:27
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.
I do not give to you as the world gives.
Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”
This is what we pray for to be grounded in the deathless love of God in the fleetingness of time. Jesus prayed fervently all through the night in the Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives. There, he surrenders himself over to the reality of eternal oneness with the Father that was his very identity as God’s presence on this earth. He said, “Father and I are One.”
We trust in the expansive view of God’s work. We put our trust in the eternal resolution of God’s work in Christ.
“Everything will be all right in the end.
If it’s not all right, it is not yet the end.”
~ Richard Rohr from The Universal Christ
John
