Thursday, September 10, 2020         (today’s lectionary)
Genealogy
Grandma Dot’s sisters died this year, one in January and one just now. In their childhoods Villa Mae and Ina Jeanette both looked to their oldest sister for mothering, and now they are gone, while Dorothy Lee remains. Who will she mother now?
Oh, such lives we all live, looking for love. And what’s so wrong with that? Nothing, I think. What else is there?
If we love one another God remains in us
And his love is brought to perfection in us.
But that perfection doesn’t look as shiny as I expect it to. There are cracks in it, and sufferings. Mistakes of every kind, and pain.
Search me O God and know my heart,
Test me and know my anxious thoughts
See if there is any offensive way in me
And lead me in the way everlasting.
Can Margaret look back on her genealogy, as Jesus must have, and see sin? But she can also look back, as Jesus did, and see saints!
Oh Lord, truly you have formed our inmost being
You knit us all in our mothers’ womb.
O thank you, Lord, for we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Jesus does not hesitate when he tells us to “love your enemies.” But he knows, as we would if we thought about it, that we are own worst enemies, and we cannot love one another until we learn to love ourselves.
His next words take on a different feel when I think of it that way.
Do good to those who hate you
Bless those who curse you
Pray for those who mistreat you.
And what if that is me, hating me! What if that is me scourging myself up and down like Luther and those many other monks, alone in their cells with backs too bloody to lay down on their beds, weeping in the corner feeling more dead than alive? Who taught me to think like that? Not Jesus, I’ll tell you that.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
Give, and then good gifts will be given to you, a good measure poured into your lap, packed together, shaken down, overflowing.
Oh, Lord yes! The measure with which you measure
Will in return be measured out to you.
We all of us every single day need a fresh start, and we won’t be getting it whipping it up in our secret closet. We must find our moist new birth each morning in our soul, as we are shown by God. Otherwise, our scrupulosity becomes a vice, never a virtue. Confession leads to forgiveness, not recrimination. When I cry out at Mass, “Mea culpa, mea culpa,” God does not condemn me, he convicts me, feeds me and sends me out again.
Here is what James Finley says about the stuff that prayers are made of, “this distilled awareness of our entire life before God.”
In prayer we journey forward to our origin. We close our eyes and then open them in the pristine moment of creation. We open our eyes and find God, his hands still smeared with clay, hovering over us, breathing into us his own divine life, smiling to see in us a reflection of himself. And thus in prayer we transcend both place and time.
           (1 Corinthians 8, Psalm 139, 1 John 4, Luke 6)
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