Friday, February 14, 2025
Memorial of Saints Cyril, Monk, and Methodius, Bishop
Valentine’s Day
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Ashamed
The sacred is always brimming from the heart of everything. If what it means to be a mystic is to walk through this world looking through the eyes of love, then anything and everything that we do with the intention and attention on the sacred, including our most difficult experiences, counts and belongs. – Mirabai Starr
On this day to celebrate love, what do we do with the serpent? Is “the sacred brimming” from his heart too? Change two letters in the word “sacred” and you get “scared.” In the bible God repeatedly tells us, “Do not be afraid.”
Change scared to sacred.
Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals
that the LORD God had made.
The serpent asked the woman,
“Did God really tell you not to eat
from any of the trees in the garden?
You certainly will not die!”
Eve points out the serpent’s mistake. We can eat anything except fruit from that one tree, the one he calls the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it
your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods
who know what is good and what is evil.”
And what could be wrong with that? Eve takes a bite.
C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra takes us back to Eden before the bite. Eve’s lookalike, the Green Lady, “is uncorrupted by sin, and she enjoys a perfectly harmonious relationship with God, whose will is her deepest delight. She has effortless command over her own desires and emotions.”
Eve gave some of the forbidden tree’s fruit to Adam, and he also took a bite.
In that instant everything changed. The sky fell, and like Chicken Little, those first children had nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened,
and they realized that they were naked;
so they sewed fig leaves together
and made coverings for themselves.
Sometimes we made up games in the forest, cowboys and Indians with our pop guns. We hid from each, we sneaked up on each other and said, “Stick ‘em up!” We made little brush forts and filled them with dead leaves to sit on, or sleep on. We watched the squirrels and sometime rabbits frolic in their green home. We even read books to each other about cowboys and treasure and terrible dungeons. None of us told our parents about any of this. Our secret. They didn’t need to know.
When they heard the sound of the LORD God moving about in the garden
at the breezy time of the day,
the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God
among the trees of the garden.
Because, if they knew, our parents, they would tell us to come in out of the rain, and the cold, and the miserable huts we had made for ourselves. Why stay out there when you can come in here and sit by the fire, eat chocolate chip cookies, drink cold milk, and be happy?
We didn’t know. We just wanted a little freedom. So we ignored their call as long as we could, feeling more and more guilty the louder they called. But what were we doing wrong?
Open our hearts, O Lord, to listen to the words of your Son.
Open our ears, too, O Lord. We are like deaf boys and girls, filling up inside with words ignored, thoughts unspoken. All alone we are.
Jesus put his finger into the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!” (that is, “Be opened!”)
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
and he began to speak.
To be continued … there is more, much more …
(Genesis 3, Psalm 32, Acts 16, Mark 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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