Perusings on The Living Parable

We are comfortable; he will make us uncomfortable.

We feel personally liberated; he will question why we have left our communities behind in quest for the "I."

We love our families; he will pierce our hearts and demand deeper and more unique love within our families.

We work so hard; he will question for whom and for what do we work?

We are a country of peace; he will ask why we gate our entrances and allow only pieces of peace to so few.

We seek more money, nicer homes, more recognition; he will call us to be small and humble. 

We will set nice tables for him, but he will seek out the dirty abandoned tables.

He will turn us on our heads. He will make our lives a parabola, "a parable," when we were only seeking a "nice story with a moral." Are we really ready? 

Love Home

Love Being Home 

I could say that since the moment I left home in 1993 for college, I have been running. There was a time before I was married and had children that my roommates actually asked me why I even paid rent. You are NEVER home they said. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d8pvD_4Pd1A

I love to serve; it's my guilty pleasure. Granted, I like cake too, but serving in the world from here and there and everywhere is truly my joy. I have a the residue spirit of St. Dominic, I love putting my sandals over my shoulder and engaging in full-time itinerant ministry. 

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." --Frederick Buechner

That "place" has been out in the world for 22 years. 22 years! A place where some people likely feel uncomfortable; I feel very comfortable. I love meeting new people ever week, ever day. I love praying with strangers. I love working with teenagers and young adults; the hard to reach. I like telling stories and hearing stories...

But things and place change.

I have been called to push beyond MY comfortable "place" into a new "place."

I was telling some of my friends just today that I was thinking initially that my body was demanding double the rest that it usually receives. I know now that it needs four times the rest it once needed (I have an autoimmune disease). My home is becoming more and more my "place." My itinerancy is becoming less and less physical and more and more spiritual. 

Mother Teresa was once sent a letter by a teenager girl asking what she could do to help with the mission in India. Mother's first and immediate answer was: "You must love home."

You must love home. It is first.

You must love the place in which you have been placed. 

These words are ringing in my ears today; they are in the gentle breezes of my rest.    

Stephanie, you must love home. Stephanie you must love your place, in this moment. Stephanie you must be present to the holy presence that is now, not what will be nor what has been.

So, as we enter fall and into the warmth of our homes, let us not be afraid to be home-- to love our home, our place, our present. It is first. For ourselves and those that surround us... 

Be present. 

 

Mercy!

Today my autoimmune disease won: a repeat of the last 24 months. Today, like the last 24 months, I reached a point in which I could no longer fight the pain and fatigue. One would think that I would allow myself to settle for just a bit of hopelessness, but no. I’m still in shock every day when I lose because my belief is so true. Call it naïveté or a simple child-like belief in hope, but I got it. Every. Day. I believe I might win. Every. Day. 

In his text Mercy Cardinal Walter Kasper writes that “we must be silent about God if we don’t know how to speak anew the message of God’s mercy to the people who are in so much physical and spiritual distress (5).” 

And, for that reason alone, my dear friends, I will remain hopeful and merciful not just to my neighbors (a simpler task for me), but to myself. 

I must meet myself daily with mercy. Not with a far away, all-powerful God, but a God right in the middle of my pain and unconquerable fatigue.

How are you granting yourself mercy?

I will pray for you; will you pray for me?