It is good to be human

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Father’s Day

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

It is good to be human

We arrived at Roaring Fork restaurant at 4 pm. After 4:15 there were no indoor tables till 9 pm. And Friday the temperature outside in Austin was 104 degrees. Even beside a lake with breezes, that was too much for us.

Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons. Freely you have been given, freely give.

And more than that, in another account Jesus told them not to take a second set of clothing, and to shake the dust off their feet when they were turned away. What a far cry from sitting at Roaring Fork during Happy Hour, having two margaritas instead of one with our friends.

But it does not escape observation that a place full of party like Roaring Fork last night is full of people filled with pain. We too have ours.

At the sight of the crowds, Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.

Laughter is probably the best medicine, and also the best way to be with people who are not willing to show or admit their sadness. And anyway, I’ve always been a glass-half-full guy, assuming the best, avoiding pessimism and cynical thoughts and comments, with some small success.

I bore you up on eagle wings, and brought you here to myself.

Had he been there with us, how about Henri Nouwen’s way of experiencing Roaring Fork Friday night? He might share his vision both vertically and horizontally, and across the First World to the Third:

One of the greatest human spiritual tasks is to embrace all of humanity, to allow your heart to be a marketplace of humanity, to allow your interior life to reflect the pains and the joys of people not only from Africa and Ireland and Yugoslavia and Russia but also from people who lived in the fourteenth century and will live many centuries forward.

Even as those metanoic insights come few and far between, they are precious. We are all one people, and in our infinite relationships we cross borders of all time and all space. James Finley and Thomas Merton, friends and fellow monks for a few years, both try to express this: The poetic jist of Merton’s words fits well on this labyrinth marker near St. Louis:

Finley, now a psychotherapist and spiritual teacher, tries to express his experience while he was at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky:

One day as I walked back and forth in the loft of the barn reading the Psalms, I began to realize that what we tend to think of as the air is actually God. In a subtle, interior way I sensed that I was walking back and forth in the atmospheric, all-encompassing presence of God, who was sustaining me breath by breath…. 

The most intimate depth of this awakening moment was a simple awareness that God, who was sustaining my life breath by breath, knew me through and through as mercy within mercy within mercy. I was so overtaken by the intimate depths of my very presence being accessed by the presence of God in this way that I stopped reading the Psalms and simply sat on a bale of straw breathing God as I looked out over the meadow…. 

As both these guys point out, you just can’t put it into words! Some of us simple folk, not monks, know this too, but we remember our moments breathing in God deeply and forever.

Nouwen offers a strong future to us as we turn more and more toward others, and toward God:

Somehow, if you discover that your little life is part of the journey of humanity and that you have the privilege to be part of that, your interior life shifts. You lose a lot of fear and something really happens to you. Enormous joy can come into your life. It can give you a strong sense of solidarity with the human race, with the human condition. It is good to be human.

 (Exodus 19, Psalm 100, Romans 5, Mark 1, Matthew 9)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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