Monday, March 10, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Kiss Me
Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.
Can I be too courteous with God? What happens to me when I mean to be sincere, but by force of habit I eventually just go through the motions?
As children we learn to express empty gratitude.
“Thank you” for this and “Thank you” for that,
though it was rote, absent emotion and sincerity.
So too with our prayers, full of dull obligation and shallow ritual.
We need to grow up,
to learn to kiss with an open mouth,
to abandon decorum, especially when it comes to God,
when it comes to Love.
The pathway to our salvation is vulnerable, honest and raw,
and time spent being courteous with The Divine is procrastination.– Clarence Heller
I learn more about my own desires when I tell God how I feel and what I need (really feel and really need). This must be one of the important ways God shows me not just who I am, but who He is, and how he knows me from the inside out. Yesterday I wrote about Walter Wangerin’s “mirror of dangerous grace.” Do I dare to open my eyes before that miraculous heaven-made mirror, to look and see?
This Mirror is made of righteous flesh and of divinity, both. And it is active, creating new things to be. It shows a new me behind the shadow of a sinner.  When I gaze at Jesus’ crucifixion, I see my own death – but my death DONE! This death is the death of the selfish one, whom I called ugly and hated to look upon. And resurrection is upon me. – from Reliving the Passion
So as I read the scriptures for today I join Clarence and imagine kissing God on the mouth. I try to imagine. I know that God kisses me back. He taught us how to kiss. He gave us lips to kiss with. He’s there from the instant of our conception to show us how to love. “Kiss me, my darling!” Miles’ line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, spoken by a second grader who has yet to discover romantic love, sounds strange to me when I imagine God and I each saying this to each other. But should it sound strange? No, it is the most natural thing in the world.
Jesus spoke to us about how natural and right it is to give. This is love:
I was hungry and you gave me food,
I was thirsty and you gave me drink,
a stranger and you welcomed me,
naked and you clothed me,
ill and you cared for me,
in prison and you visited me.
And whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.
Celebration is the order of the day that God has made. In Greece and Turkey the people dance. Dervishes, especially, dance. Muslims are presently fasting from sunrise to sunset during their Ramadan holiday. Muslim dervishes surely dance after they break their fast.
“If a man cannot dance, he cannot pray. Angels have mouths but lack the power of speech. They speak to God by dancing.”
“Father, what name do you give God?” asked the abbé. “God does not have a name,” the dervish replied. “He is too big to fit inside names. A name is a prison, God is free.” “But in case you should want to call Him,” the abbé persisted, “when there is need, what name will you use?”
 The dervish bowed his head and thought. Finally he parted his lips: “Ah!—that is what I shall call Him. Not Allah, but Ah!”- Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (pp. 152-153)
Each week the Associated Press offers email subscribers a host of photographs from around the world. The mosque below the moon is one of them. This portrait of Palestinians at table is another, taken at they break their fast at sunset on March 1, the first day of Ramadan. When I saw this picture, I began to weep.
Perhaps I have no right to dance when children around the world are killed by bombs, or have nothing to eat, or die by the thousands of AIDS or malaria or diarrhea. I do know how children play with each other anyway, whenever they can, as soon as they can. If they recover, they soon are singing about the sun coming out tomorrow. That’s just what children do.
I think it’s more right to join them than to weep.
As best we can.
Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
 (Leviticus 19, Psalm 19, 2 Corinthians 6, Matthew 25)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
