Faith

Faith is not about having the right answers –

 
10 Commandments,

12 Apostles,

7 Deadly Sins.

It's about our hearts and how we live our lives –

How we make God's love real for each other.

I Wish You Enough

Recently, I overheard a mother and daughter in their last moments together at the airport as the daughter's departure had been announced.

Standing near the security gate, they hugged and the mother said, "I love you, and I wish you enough."

The daughter replied, "Mom, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I wish you enough, too, Mom." They kissed and the daughter left.

Then the mother walked over to the window where I sat. Standing there, I could see she wanted and needed to cry.

I tried not to intrude on her privacy but she welcomed me in by asking, "Did you ever say good-bye to someone knowing it would be forever?"

"Yes, I have," I replied. "Forgive me for asking, but why is this, a forever good-bye?"

"I am old and she lives so far away. I have challenges ahead and the reality is the next trip back will be for my funeral," she said.

"When you were saying good-bye, I heard you say, 'I wish you enough.' May I ask what that means?"

She began to smile. "That's a wish that has been handed down from other generations. My parents used to say it to everyone."

She paused a moment and looked up as if trying to remember it in detail, and she smiled even more.

"When we said 'I wish you enough' we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with just enough good things to sustain them."

Then turning toward me, she shared the following, reciting it from memory:

"I wish you enough sun, to keep your attitude bright.

I wish you enough rain, to appreciate the sun.

I wish you enough happiness, to keep your spirit alive.

I wish you enough pain, so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.

I wish you enough gain, to satisfy your wanting.

I wish you enough loss, to appreciate all that you possess.

I wish you enough hellos, to get you through the final good-bye."

She then began to cry and walked away.

Pentecost Sunday

Historically, the Feast of Pentecost is an ancient Jewish agricultural festival that celebrates the first fruits of the grain harvest fifty days after Passover and the spring planting. The significance of Pentecost took on dramatic new meaning after the Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus. Now instead of thanking God for sun, rain good soil and a bountiful crop, Christians celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, a gift given to the disciples and a gift given to each of us. We have so much to celebrate. Not only did God give all of us the Holy Spirit “to be with [us] always,” God gave us our Church and Pentecost is the birthday of the universal church.

What makes Pentecost so special is that it is more than an historic event that happened over 2000 years ago. Pentecost is an infinite interaction between God and us that can touch our lives very day if we are open to the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the force that inspired Jesus in his ministry. The same Spirit animated the disciples in the upper room and transformed them from cowering, fearful people into bold, dynamic preachers who became witnesses of Jesus throughout the world. This same Spirit animates us.

When we are baptized, we are anointed with oil that “signifies the gift of the Holy Spirit to the newly baptized, who has become a Christian, that is, one "anointed" by the Holy Spirit, incorporated into Christ who is anointed priest, prophet, and king” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1241). At our confirmation, the Bishop anoints us again to “confirm” and complete our baptismal anointing. Confirmation “increases the gifts of the Holy Spirit in us” and “it gives us a special strength of the Holy Spirit to spread and defend the faith by word and action as true witnesses of Christ, to confess the name of Christ boldly, and never to be ashamed of the Cross” (CCC 1303).

Through these two sacraments, we receive all the tools we need to become bold, dynamic witnesses of Jesus. There is a catch, however. We have to be willing to do it. In our second reading today from 1 Corinthians 12: 3b – 7, St. Paul says, “There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit; there are different forms of service but the same Lord; there are different workings but the same God who produces all of them in everyone. To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit.” The Spirit is here. The Spirit is with us and the Spirit is in us. Each of us must look into our own hearts and prayerfully discern where the Spirit is leading us.

In every generation, O God of Easter glory,
you send forth your Spirit
to breathe upon the world and make it come alive!
Fulfill the promise of these Fifty Days
with the abundant harvest of your Spirit's gifts.
May we, the community of believers in Christ,
adorned with various ministries and gifts,
be continually formed into one body
by the one Spirit which has been poured out on all of us.

We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who sends us the Spirit of truth from you,
and who lives and reigns with you,
God for ever and ever.

AMEN.

Biscuits

A minister was attending a men’s breakfast. He asked one of the older farmers in attendance to say the prayer that morning. The farmer began, “Lord, I hate buttermilk.”

The pastor opened one eye and wondered to himself where this was going.

Then the farmer said, “Lord, I hate lard.” Now the pastor was worried.

But the farmer prayed on, “And Lord, you know I don’t care much for raw flour. ”

As the pastor was about to stop everything, the farmer continued, “But Lord, when you mix ‘em all together and bakes ‘em up, I do love me those fresh biscuits.

So Lord, when things come up we don’t like, when life gets hard, when we just don’t understand what you are saying to us, we just need to relax and wait ‘til You are done fixin’ and probably it will be something even better than biscuits.”

Amen

Searching

In the search for me,

I discovered Truth.

In the search for Truth,
I discovered Love.

In the search for Love,
I discovered God.

And in God,
I have found Everything.

Our Human Nature

Our nature is not to go forward all the time. It has its to’s and fro’s. – Blaise Pascal

We prefer straight, unrelentingly, upward paths and the slightest dip is often enough to throw us into confusion.

We diet for eight days and fill up on the ninth and then berate ourselves as though the eight days don’t count, as though they never happened.

“Look at me. I’m a failure. How come? I was doing so well.”

And the answer comes back: “Because it’s in our nature to forever gain a little, and forever to lose a little. Life has a lot of two steps forward and one step back.”

The spiritual journey is no exception, because we make the journey as who we are … human beings … not as what we would like to be, escapees from a frail, inconstant humanity.

For eight days we set aside time to prayer. And on the ninth we set aside time for a mindless sitcom.

But the journey is all the steps, even the backward ones. It’s no in our nature to go forward all the time.

It’s certainly no what God expects. So why are our expectations higher than God’s?

- John Kirvan in “Raw Faith”

Primordial Souols

Some mystics taught that the human soul comes from God and that the last thing that God does before putting a soul into the body is to kiss the soul. The soul then goes through life always dimly remembering that kiss, a kiss of perfect love, and the soul measures all of life’s loves and kisses against that primordial perfect kiss.

The ancient Greek Stoics taught something similar, that souls pre-existed inside of God and that God, before putting a soul into a body, would blot out the memory of its pre-existence. But the soul would then be always unconsciously drawn towards God because, having come from God, the soul would always dimly remember its real home, God, and ache to return there.

In one rather interesting version of this notion, they taught that God put the soul into the body only when the baby was already fully formed in its mother’s womb. Immediately after putting the soul into the body, God would seal off the memory of its pre-existence by physically shutting the baby’s lips against its ever speaking of its pre-existence. That’s why we have a little cleft under our noses, just above center of our lips. It’s where God’s finger sealed our lips. That is why whenever we are struggling to remember something, our index finger instinctively rises to that cleft under our nose. We are trying to retrieve a primordial memory.

Our souls dimly remember once having known perfect love and perfect beauty. But, in this life, we never quite encounter that perfection, even as we forever ache for someone or something to meet us at that depth. This creates in us a moral loneliness, a longing for what we term a soulmate, namely, a longing for someone who can genuinely recognize, share, and respect what’s deepest in us.