Thursday, April 11, 2024
Memorial of Saint Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Hearing the words of God
Our maintenance manager Scott, who lives a bit north of us in Austin, said he had more than three inches of rain Tuesday in his rain gauge. On our way to and fro, soft slush and hard hail smacked into our windshield. We escaped as soon as we could into somewhere with a solid roof.
Tuesday’s stormy day was NOT the day of the total eclipse. So many hundreds of thousands of us were grateful for that. On Monday the weather in Austin was warm and cloudy, and Margaret and I went outside about 1:15 to sit and watch the sky, along with our neighbor Laura. At just the right time the clouds broke a bit and we got glimpses of the corona around the sun that awed people everywhere along its path.
The rain yesterday didn’t bother Jasper much. I finished a counseling appointment about 10 am and he wandered into my room, “Grandpa, can we go outside and play in the mud?”
Well, you can, I guess.
So Jasper put on his swim trunks and shirt, took two umbrellas and draped them between bushes to make a lovely little hideaway, where he piled sticks, dug mud, and moved the mud around. I sat under another umbrella and became his encourager, since Miles wasn’t here.
Margaret and I mostly intersect with Jasper in his own very physical world. I think that’s what God does with us. But our physical world, and Jasper’s, is just the tip of God’s iceberg. There is so much more underneath. Even a moment in those deeper realms is worth a thousand elsewhere.
Religious ideas, too, are sometimes concrete, but often they are just confusing. The confusing ones don’t confuse God, of course. I think my confusion comes when I try to understand something that isn’t mine to understand, like the Trinity, or the resurrection, or eternity. Either I need to think differently or stop thinking altogether. My ideas usually just get in the way.
Here’s a poem that kind of gets at this. The poem is called “Holy Trinity – Part II.”
How easy it is to worship our image of God
instead of God.
The Trinity is not a doctrine, it’s a koan.
It’s a way of slippery-izing our images of God:
God is This, the Opposite of this, and None of the above.
God is More Than One Thing. And The One Thing.
God is beyond our knowing or pinning down;
yet known, revealed, embodied.
The Intimate Beyond, the Infinite Companion,
and the Immediate Arising.
God is mostly mystery, and all love.
Your understanding is fog.
Your certainty is noise.
Your belief is irrelevant.
All there is is love.
Let the Loving Mystery confuse you,
the Unknowable know you,
the Unspeakable do the speaking.
God,
the Lover, the Beloved and the Love Flowing,
holds you.
Let it be so.
I especially like, and take to heart, that middle part:
Your understanding is fog.
Your certainty is noise.
Your belief is irrelevant.
All there is is love.
Which is why Jesus invited the children, whose understanding, certainty and beliefs have not yet replaced their ability to Experience the here and now, one moment at a time, and then going on to the next, without too much thinking. This is how Jasper lives.
I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall be ever in my mouth. Taste and see how the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
(Acts 5, Psalm 34, John 20, John 3)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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