Weekly Meditations

“Ye shall be as gods.”’  Gen. 3:5 (KJV)

“You shall be as gods.” This was the deception that so appealed to Adam and Eve that they were willing to confuse their humanity in favour of what seemed to be a better deal for their lives.  How are we similarly tempted by such flattery in our lives?  How do we fall prey to the deceptive spirit that says to us, “You should be as gods?”

We all carry images of ourselves that can be said to be divine projections of who we wish we were.  Maybe you call it your ideal self—a projection of the person you think you ought to be.  Maybe it applies to your ideal body, your ideal status, your ideal of how you should act, or how people should relate to you.  Sometimes this is a good thing.  But more often than not it involves a blanket rejection of our humanity, a denial of the very God-given earthiness of who we truly are.

We all have difficulty accepting aspects of our humanity that fall short of the ideals we carry for ourselves.  There is of course nothing wrong with bettering yourself in life.  But if this comes from a spirit of guilt, or from anxieties we feel over the inadequacies of being human, it is certainly not the spirit by which God leads us.  It is more likely the voice of the accuser appealing to an inordinate sense of God-envy.  Tempted with its allure we risk succumbing to the very same suggestion that trapped our first parents:  “You really should be more like gods.”

Our idealized images of ourselves diminish us.  And then we wonder why we lack inner peace. The opposite of self-acceptance is to be anxious about the self that we are.  This might seem like basic pop psychology but, at its core, lies a fundamental theological error regarding our true sense of self.  And such errors always bear bad fruit in us.

There are two ways that the rejection of our humanity do so.  On the one hand, projections of our perfect self often puff us up.  We all know people who are “legends in their own minds.”  Perhaps we too at times overly relate to our ideal self in ways that appeal to our vanity.  Refusing to accept ourselves as anything less than we think we should be, we also project our idealized self onto others.  We are afraid of letting them see us in our unfinished state.  Because we reject our own poverty of spirit, we assume that others too will likely reject it. All this because we have believed the original lie that  “you should be more than what God made you to be.”

The other way that the ideal self erodes our soul is by the sense of failure and guilt we feel when we are so painfully aware of how we fall short of that ideal.  We end up loathing our poverty of spirit in the false belief that we should really be more divine than we are. We reject ourselves as we are, and this sets us up for a life of conditional love. Whenever we live up to our ideal persona we love ourselves, but we loathe who we are when we fall short of it.  And that’s clearly not how God loves you—God, whose heart is most moved by compassion precisely because of our poverty of spirit. And so should we also be moved to accept with compassion the very poverty that Jesus calls a blessed state.

What do you wrestle with in your sense of self that prevents you from fully accepting of your humanity?  What would it mean for you to embrace your poverty of spirit?  What would help you to accept the humus of who you are with the same compassion that God does?

Embracing the reality of our creaturehood sets us free from the lies of the imaginary, ideal self.   Let us welcome the earthiness of our lives as something that God has not only created, but also loves.

“Reverence stands in awe of something—something that dwarfs the self, that allows human beings to sense the full extent of our limits.  When we stop trying to act like gods ourselves, we will be led to the proper reverence of the creature for its Creator.”

Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World

Just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”                                                                     1Pet. 1:15-16

The vocation of holiness is not something we often hear discussed among Christians in our day.  For some reason it seems to be a value that we have relegated to a past age, a quality that we no longer expect from ourselves in the same way our forebears did.  And yet the call to a sanctified life is no less imperative today than it was in past generations.  The Lord still commands that we be holy for the simple reason that He, in whose image we are made, is holy.

Among contemporary advocates of holiness Mother Teresa perhaps most readily comes to mind as this is a theme that repeatedly shows up in her writings.  In Come Be My Light, a compilation of letters written to her spiritual directors and various convents, the “saint of Calcutta” defines holiness in the most simple terms as she encourages her sisters saying, “Let us try to come as close as the human heart can come to the Heart of Jesus.” This is the essence of holiness—to be as close as possible, in identity and in action, to the heart and person of Christ.  In this we seek to reflect the sanctity that belongs to Him alone.

Biblically speaking, to be holy is to be consecrated, set aside for God.  It is an act of self-offering in which we invite the holiness of God to express itself in our lives.  Our motivation towards holiness comes from our love of God, but we can also be motivated by our love for others, as well as for the integrity of the Church.  Mother Teresa writes of her own response to this vocation,

I am determined to show my love for the Church by becoming very holy. I ask you as well—please, for the love of God and the love of others take the trouble to be holy.

Mother Teresa lists three offerings on our part that contribute to the consecration of our lives to God: the offering of time, of will, and of our submission to others. She speaks of time set aside for prayer as a first priority, more important even than our ministry or our relationship with others.  Of her own experience she writes, “I always make my holy hour with Jesus straight after Mass, so that I get the first two hours of each day with Jesus.  Before people and the sisters start using me, I let Him use me first.”

Her motivation for holiness comes from her deep love for the integrity of the Church.  She also finds motivation in her love for others and from her desire to give as much as she can to those she ministers to.   As she plainly states, “people are hungry for God. What a terrible meeting it would be with our neighbour if we give them only ourselves.”  Elsewhere she writes,

The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls.

The second offering that she encourages from her sisters is that of the will.  In submission to God, Mother Teresa sees all circumstances in her life as coming from the freedom she has given to God’s will.  She encourages this same disposition in her sisters when she writes, “I pray for you that you let Jesus use you without consulting you.”  In her own experience of submission she revels saying, “Today I have made a new prayer—Jesus I accept whatever You give—and I give whatever You take.”

The third offering she encourages finally that of our submission to others.  In this Mother Teresa sees an action that is synonymous with submitting to God.  She exhorts her sisters saying,  “I only ask you to love one another as Jesus loves each one of you—for in loving one another you only love Jesus.”

Such offerings, placed on the altar of consecration, express our desire that God would make of our lives a sacred place for His activity.  Our own actions are then able to reflect something of the holiness of the Spirit to whom we are submitted.  Because God is holy, we can realistically hope to see this holiness mirrored in ourselves.

He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream.

Jeremiah 17:8

Like the proverbial dust in the wind that inspired so many of my generation, much of my young adult life was spent wandering.  Hitchhiking back and forth across North America, backpacking in Europe, moving from one communal house to another, at one point I calculated that the longest I had stayed in one place over the course of five years was six months.  My life was like a ball bouncing on the pins of a roulette wheel as it spins around.  Eventually the wheel slows down and the ball falls into a slot, and I too finally settled down, got married, raised a family and established a career.  In other words, after years of unsettledness, my life finally became “rooted and established.”

I see a similar process happening in our relationship to prayer.  For many people, prayer is a destination that attracts them from a distance.  They might circle this attraction for years, keeping it topical, reading books to kindle the heart.  As we move in and out of relationship to this hope it’s easy to wonder if we will ever take this invitation seriously.  Will it ever become established in us as we sense it desires to be?

Fortunately, by God’s grace, people do eventually become rooted in the life-discipline of prayer.  Something finally quickens their conviction that this is a call they must respond to more seriously than they have.  Like the ball bouncing on the roulette wheel, they finally fall into its slot.  Prayer then becomes non-negotiable—the most precious pearl of their lives.  Only at this point can it be said that the person is “rooted and established” in the life of prayer.

In the meantime, it is fair to accept that it takes a long time for a sustained discipline of prayer to take root in a person’s life.  Like seed on stony ground, our enthusiasm rises for a season only to disappear again.  Or the seed of prayer simply gets choked in the thorns and thistles of our busy lives.  We should not be discouraged nor surprised by such glaring evidence of our fickle hearts.  God is not deterred.  Slowly and steadily, He is wooing each one of us from a casual to a more committed relationship.  Heaven’s final objective, as Scripture so often depicts, is a relationship more akin to marriage than to dating.

Eventually, through what Jesus calls “the perseverance of noble hearts” (Luke 8:15) the seed of prayer does take root in us and starts to bear its promised fruit.  It shifts from the periphery to become the central focus of our relationship with God.  To it we more consistently return for restoration, and from it we now draw the articulation of our lives.  In other words, by God’s grace, we find ourselves finally established (lit. “made stable”) in a committed relationship to that which our hearts have so long desired.

All true prayer promotes its own progress and increases our power to pray.

P.T. Forsyth

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.     Mat. 6:10

There is no more succinct way of expressing the dynamic union of heaven and earth than in Jesus’ petition to our Father that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  It is a prayer that has absolute implications for all of creation as well as for the minutiae of our individual lives.  Jean-Pierre de Caussade, a 17th century Jesuit spiritual director best summarized this petition when he wrote, “Let God’s will be done; that is the whole of Scripture, the universal law.”

God calls us to conform to the movement of His will.  It is an imperative that comes not from an autocratic need on God’s part but from the loving hope the Creator has for His creatures. For it is only in submission to God’s movement that we ever fully become who we are.  As de Caussade puts it, “saints become saints only by living the life to which they have been called.”

To apply this petition to ourselves—to say to God “Thy will be done in me as it is in heaven”—requires nothing short of the same type of obedience that Jesus demonstrated in His own life when he said, “Whatever I see the Father do I do” (Jn 5:19).  Like Jesus, it is in our submission to the Spirit that God’s particular will becomes evident in our lives.  De Caussade writes of the close relationship between our self-offering and God’s will being manifest.

Obedience to God’s undefined will depends entirely on our surrender to it, our preparedness to do anything, or nothing.  Like a tool that, though it has no power in itself, when in the hands of the craftsman, can be used for any purpose within the range of its capacity and design.  Such souls are like molten metal, filling whatever vessel God chooses to pour them into.

St. Frances de Sales, a spiritual director who lived a century earlier, also spoke of such fluidity in our submission.  In his book, Introduction to the Devout Life, he writes,

We must always be rendering ourselves pliable and tractable to God’s good pleasure, as though we were wax.  A hundred times during the day we should turn our gaze upon God’s loving will, making our own will melt into it.

We also have the contemporary example of Mother Teresa who sought to live her life in perfect submission to God’s will.  Far from passive, such obedience requires the greatest degree of self-control and spiritual focus in its offering.  Mother Teresa speaks of the progressive maturity that a life of submissiveness will entail.  She writes,

The first duty required of souls is self-discipline; the second is self-surrender; the third requires great humility, a humble and willing disposition and a readiness to follow the movement of grace which motivates everything if we simply respond willingly to all its guidance.

These are people who know, each in their own way, what it means to intentionally submit their will to God’s.  And they have all, as de Caussade suggested, become who they are, and born such a wonderful influence on life, as the direct result of their desire for God’s will to be done in them as it is in heaven.

The prayer within all prayer is “Thy will be done.”  My prayer is Thy Will.  Thou didst create it in me.  It is more Thine than mine.

P.T. Forsyth

Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart. Mat. 11:29

Paul encouraged the Christians in Ephesus to ”be completely humble and gentle” (Eph. 4:2). Jesus also, from the perfection of His own example, invites us to emulate these same traits. They are evidence of grace in Christians who, because of their faith, are gently poised in relationship to all the circumstances of their lives.

The spirit of gentleness receives life graciously, without need to manipulate or force it to be other than it is. It measures its own engagement with life more minimally than the spiritual footprint left by those who are anxious. We lose the gentle spirit whenever our lives are overly defined by impatience, or by imperatives for the way things should be.

In his book, Spirituality and the Gentle Life, Adrian Van Kaam describes the gentle person as “one in whom there is a friendly accord between themselves and their life situation.” This disposition is most expressive of faith and grace. Van Kaam describes the freedom that gentleness produces in us.

Gentleness is an attitude of letting be, combined with a patient abiding with myself or with the person, task, or problem God calls me to be involved in. This attitude leads to peace and contentment. The gentle person is more free. He can take himself and the world as they are because he feels free to be himself and to let all things be with the same gentility.

Gentleness is also directly related to our experience of God. Aggressiveness of spirit diminishes our congeniality—the trait most needed to live in communion with the humility of God. It is difficult to be open to the gentle spirit of Christ when we find ourselves in an agitated state. Gentleness, therefore, is a prerequisite to remaining in sensate relationship with God. In the spirit of gentleness it becomes easier to pray, to meditate, and to stay attuned to the movements of God’s Spirit. Van Kaam writes,

Gentle reflection proceeds in an atmosphere of leisure and repose. Its quiet presence to divine things is animated by a desire to be at home with God in love—a love that itself is a grace of God.

The more gentle we are in relationship to God’s presence within us, the more hospitable we will seem to the Spirit. As St. John of the Cross noted, “God dwells in some souls as though in His own house; in others He dwells as though a stranger in a strange house, where they do not permit him to do or touch anything.” A gentle soul is more disposed to welcome God’s movement than someone who feels they need to control their spiritual experience.

Jesus presents Himself as gentle and humble of heart. He then invites us to be closely yoked with Him in the character of His life. By imitating Christ in these virtues we prepare an environment for the Lord to more fully dwell in us, as though in His own house.

What we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him.

1John 3:2