On one of the posts near the entrance to the house, there is a sign that reads:

Good morning.
This is God.
I’ll be handling all of your problems today.
So relax, and have a nice day.

It is a great message for retreatants – to know that they can trust God to keep the world spinning on its axis while they are on retreat trying deepen their relationship with God.

But, in a differen way, although we don’t always realize it, God says the same thing to us every morning – indeed, in every moment of day. God is with us in everything we face. None of our problems are ours alone. And so we can relax, confident that God is handling things with us.

As I asked the retreatants during our morning prayer yesterday: What do you need to let God handle for you so you can relax and have a good day?

In that passage, St. Paul reminds us that “by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God.” In fact, to make sure we make no mistake about it, twice in that passage he repeats “by grace you have been saved.” And twice he says, in slightly different ways, it is not by our hand, not by our work that we are saved.

No confusion there. It is not by our own efforts that we have been brought to life in Christ, but by the grace of God.

But – lest that create a different confusion- lest it make us think that now that we have been saved we get to sit back in our armchairs with our feet up waiting around for Judgment Day – Paul goes on in the next sentence to tell us that “we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.”

To say that we are God’s handiwork…that we have been created in Christ Jesus to do God’s work says everything about who we are meant to be in the world. We don’t do good works, the work of God, so that we may be saved. We do it because we have been saved. Because we are God’s handiwork.

PS Mark and my mid-day dialogue will be on February 15; stay tuned for the podcast.

Do we stay silent while the world screams out its lies? Sell your body, buy your beauty, live at the cost of others’ lives.

Specifically, the line that stuck in my head was “live at the cost of others’ lives.” In what ways do we live at the cost of others’ lives? I’m thinking it is not too difficult to find examples.

Buying fair trade goods (e.g. fair trade coffee) costs a bit more than non-fair trade coffee. But, every time we buy non-fair trade goods, aren’t we living at the cost of another’s life? Shouldn’t we be paying more if “more” means a fair price for the goods?

When we buy chocolate that is produced by the labor of children who are the victims of trafficking, aren’t we living at the cost of others’ lives?

We can all come up with examples beyond these two, but the point is broader than any specific example. We we all need to examine all of the decisions we make to ask: are there ways I am living at the cost of others’ lives? Are there ways I am not valuing the dignity of all human persons? And if so, what do I need to do to change that.

The story of Paul’s conversion in Acts is a great story, a dramatic story. It is the kind of redemption story we love to hear. (As I said to the students yesterday – who didn’t love the scene in Star Wars Episode Six when Darth Vadar sees the light and saves his son…who wasn’t smiling (or in tears) when we see his redeemed spirit with Obiwan and Yoda at the end of the film.)

The risk of such dramatic stories is that we see conversion as a single dramatic event. It is true that we all have some significant conversion events in our lives, moments we can look back at and say – something significant happened to me here, events after which nothing is really the same. (And I shared a couple of mine with the students.)

But looking back at those moments, and at what transpired between them, helps us to see that we are engaged in an ongoing process of conversion that continues and is not complete until we die.

One important implication of this, and this is one of the points Fr. Dale raised in his homily yesterday morning, is that our conversion doesn’t proceed in one direction. Conversion can be called a process of moving closer and closer to union with God, but the reality is that sometimes we do better than others. Sometimes we move closer…and sometimes we take a step or two back.

Understanding conversion as process also helps us understand how important are each of the steps we take along the path of our conversion journey. We have such a strong tendency to judge harshly what we in hindsight view as missteps along the way. It is so very easy for us to forget that everything we experience and learn from contributes to our growth process, is part of who we have become and how we relate to God and others, and is a potential source of grace. For me – some one who returned to Christianity after spending 20 years of her adult life as Buddhist, this meant coming to understand that my years as a Buddhist, far from being a misstep, were an integral part of my spiritual journey.

So, by all means, enjoy story like Paul’s conversion. But don’t be fooled into thinking conversion happens in a flash and is done.

One of the challenges that caught my eye immediately was “Shed 100 possessions.” As my husband can attest, I periodically look around the house and get crazy at all that we have. “We have too many things,” I cry out. This is usually followed by my walking around the house stuffing things in a paper bag to get rid of. Loving the idea of encouragement to get rid of more, I entered the challenge and am working my way toward reaching 100.

I don’t always easily find the words to explain this impetus to my husband. But, I know it is a good one. In a wonderful coincidence of timing, shortly after I began the “Shed 100 possessions” challenge, I came across this excerpt from Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. I think it does a great job of explaining why the impetus is positive. Rohr writes:

Living in the second half of life, I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment. I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort—every day—is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. I now realize that I have been gratuitously given to–from the universe, from society, and from God. I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, “to live simply so that others can simply live.”

For St. Vincent de Paul, one of the five characterisic virues is simplicity. I can’t say I’ve achieved it (far from it), but I’m working on it.

One of the things Williams talks about in the book is the need for us to be “strenuous yet relaxed.” He observes that we know how to talk about being strenuous, that is, to “portray Christian life as a struggle, a drama, in which we’re called to heroic achievement and endurance.” We also, he says, know how to talk about being relaxed, that is our need to rely on God’s mercy. However, he observes, it is less easy for us to understand how to hold those two together.

The desert fathers help us understand how to do that. They had an enormous awareness of, and deep sorrow for, their own sinfulness. But they also knew that God heals and accepts us no matter what. Williams writes that the desert fathers

are not, in their tears and penances, trying to make up their debt to God. They know as well as any Christian that this is paid once and for all by the mercy that arrives in advance of all our repentance. They simply want to be sure that this assurance of mercy does not make them deceive themselves about why mercy is needed, by themselves and others. If they continue with this awareness of the sinful and needy self, it is so that they will understand the tears and self-hatred of others and know how to bring them to Christ by their unqualified acceptance and gentleness.

Thus, explains Williams, we need to be both strenuous in our “effort to keep before our eyes the truth of our condition,” yet relaxed “in the knowledge of a mercy that cannot ever be exhausted.”

Williams goes on to say that we can only fully understand what it means to be strenuous, yet relaxed in the context of community, for it is in community that we learn the nature of God’s mercy.

I drew from Joan Chittister’s book, The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Women’s Life, as the basis for our time together.  Chittister sees the biblical women Ruth and Naomi as metaphors, as models of all of the women of the world, and she uses their story as a way to identify the defining moments “that mark every women’s passage through time in a way separate from the men around her and that shape her as she goes.”

In the first part of the morning, I retold the story of Ruth and Naomi, with a focus on its revelation of the defining moments in our lives as women. I then focused on the first of the defining moments Chittister identifies in her book: loss, talking both about our experiences of loss and the invitation to change that flows from loss. Each of those talks was followed by a period of quiet reflection as well as small group sharing and large group discussion. I ended by talking a little about the final moment revealed by the story of Ruth and Naomi: fulfillment and our invitation to explore how we bring ourselves to fulfillments, and in so doing, make the world a fuller place as well.

I am enormously grateful to the women who participated in our mini-retreat. The sharing was rich and God’s graces flowed.

I recorded the two main talks I gave, which you can access here and here. (Each podcast runs for about 22.5 minutes.) Alternatively, you can stream them both from here.

The Story of Ruth and Naomi:

Loss and the Change it Invites Us To:

It is essential for us to realize that we don’t operate on our own power. This is something that came up, not only in Fr. Dale’s sermon, but in the Women’s Retreat I gave at St. Stephen’ Episcopal yesterday. (More about that, tomorrow.) We are most strong precisely when we realize how weak we are – how dependent we are on God – the God who will always be with us, who will always be a source of strength and direction for us.

Our task is to be open enough to allow God in, and to realize that, with God’s help, we can further God’s plan whatever our situation. It brought a smile to my face when Fr. Dale quoted in his sermon a prayer of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s that I have used often. Here is an excerpt:

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for His purposes, as necessary in my place as an Archangel…. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.

Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life, He may shorten it; He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me—still He knows what He is about.

Do we have that trust? The trust that allowed Simon and Andrew, and James and John to drop everything when Jesus called. To trust that whatever they were and were not, they could be part of Jesus’ plan?

Martin’s aim, as his book title suggests, is to “bring the Gospel of Luke to life for its readers.” Dividing each chapter of the Gospel into manageable segments, Martin provides a commentary to the passages that is much less academic and more accessible than are many scriptural commentaries.

Even more valuable in my view is that each segment has one or more questions for reflection that invite the reader to pause and give seriously consideration to what the passage means in one’s own life. The fact that the questions are interspersed throughout the commentary encourages stopping and reflecting as one is going through (rather than putting questions for reflection at the end of a long chapter, where they are far too easy to ignore).

Martin also includes throughout background paragraphs, useful for readers who might not be familiar with certain terms or historical facts. I appreciated that these were set off from the rest of the commentary, thus not bogging down those readers not in need of the background material.

There are several features of the commentary Martin provides that I particularly appreciated. First, it includes cross-references that are helpful in reflecting on the Gospel. As one example, in talking about Peter’s denial of Christ (Luke 22:54-620, Martin talks about “denied” having the sense of repudiation or disowning, and cross-references Luke 12:9, where Jesus says that “whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God.” For me, this magnifies not only what Peter has done, but Jesus’ forgiveness of an act that Jesus has already characterized as a damning one.

Second, it includes Old Testament references that are helpful in elucidating the text. For example, in the parable of the mustard seed (Luke 13:19), Jesus says that the planted mustard seed grows into a large bush and that the “birds of the sky dwelt in its branches.” For me, the passage is enormously enriched by the knowledge that Jesus is here echoing “Old Testament prophesies that use a tree as an image for peoples finding security within the empire.” (And here, Martin quotes Ezechial and Daniel.)

Finally, I appreciated the commentaries because they in a number of instances (as does a good sermon) pointed out something about a particular passage that helped me to think about it in a new way. To give one example, in talking about the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-36), the commentary points out, not only that the amount the Samaritan gave the innkeeper represented two days wages and would pay for the injured man’s lodging for a week or more, but that the Samaritan’s promise that if the innkeeper spent more he would repay it was an open-ended commitment. That stopped me in my tracks – so often our own promises, if not conditioned, have some limits on them, yet, we are called to precisely the kind of open-ended commitment of the Samaritan.

I look back at what I have written and realize it is impossible to capture the richness of this book in a few paragraphs. So let me just end by saying that, in his preface, Martin expresses the hope that his book will prove useful as an aid to sacred reading. At least for this reader, I believe he has succeeded. And I’m confident that will be true for others as well.

Although his intended use of “for God’s sake” in his sentence was as an exclamation for emphasis, I smiled at my friend’s wonderful afterthought. Although I am no longer a practicing lawyer, there is accuracy to the meaning conveyed by his phrase when one omits the comma from it: I am an Attorney for God’s Sake, as I am a Law Professor for God’s Sake, or a Retreat Director for God’s Sake, or any of the other descriptions I may use to explain my various roles.

If my life belongs to God, then there is no part of my life that is separate from my discipleship. Everything I am, everything do, is a response to God’s call. Everything I am and do is for God’s sake, for the furtherance of God’s plan for me and for the world.

And the same is true for you.

Who are you for God’s sake?