On the night flight over to Paris, I watched a young mother pace the aisle with her almost sleepy baby. She jiggled and patted and swayed as she walked, that young mother. Even when she paused she did not stop moving, always swaying, patting, gently jiggling. She looked tired. And I thought, this is love. No matter what she is thinking, what she is feeling. No matter if she resents her baby right now, if she is doing it only for the sake of the other passengers, if all she wants is to sit down and sleep. Her body loves her baby. With every jiggle, every pat, every step, her body gives her baby love.

This is how I want to love God. Not with feelings that come and go and depend on how rested I am, what I’ve had to eat or what has annoyed me, whether I have time and quiet to pray. I want to love with my doing.

I’ve given up on love as a feeling (except in songs). I choose to believe in God, I choose to believe God loves me, I choose to base my actions on love for God, myself and others. Like that mother, I choose to walk in love.

A friend, who is a divorced Catholic, told me of having to leave a social gathering because she got so agitated when she realized one of the men was “working up the courage” to ask her out. “I didn’t know what to say to him,” she said. “I’m just not interested in dating.” I joked with her, “Let me teach you a two letter word to handle situations like that — NO. You can add ‘thank you’ but that is optional.”

I have been thinking about that on and off all week — about my own difficulties saying “No” (with or without the thank you) when I am asked to do something. A difficulty shared by many women and, maybe, especially by many older women in denominations like the Catholic Church.

And here was my personal insight this morning: The ability to say No is a gift that we give to others. It frees others to ask us without worrying that they will be imposing. I think of my friend and how careful I am about what I ask her to do because she will not say No unless it is literally physically impossible for her and even then she will apologize repeatedly and feel badly. So that shifts the burden of judging the appropriateness of a request to me.

Exercising the right and ability to say No is not just a matter of personal liberty (although it is most assuredly that), it is also a great and good gift that we give to others.

With my third graders last Sunday, I told the gospel story: Jesus’ parable of the two sons whose father asked them to work in the vineyard; one said “no” but then went and worked; the other said “yes” but never got around to going to the vineyard. Jesus asked, “Which one did what his father wanted?”

We talked about what Jesus meant to teach us. I asked how many had fathers who owned a vineyard. No one. How many went to work with their father every day? No one. So does this parable have anything to do with us?

“Well, God is our Father too,” offered one child, “so maybe Jesus is telling us not to just say prayers but to do God’s work.”

“That’s good. A good answer'” I said, “So the next question is, What is God’s work?”

This took some discussion to figure out. “Going to church?” “Helping poor people?” “Doing what our parents and teachers tell us to do?”

It took a while, but we got there. Together we decided, as one girl suggested, that God’s work is love.

“Yes,” I said, “God wants us to love God and love each other.”

“OK,” said Elise, “as long as that doesn’t include me loving my 5 year old brother. He’s impossible to love.”

“Why is he impossible to love?” I asked.

“Because he’s mean. He is always mean to me. He does mean things to me every day.”

“And when he is mean to you, are you mean back to him?”

“Not always. Not usually. Sometimes, but I try not to be.”

“Well, Elise, every time he is mean to you and you are NOT mean back to him, you are loving him.”

“Uh? But I never FEEL like I love him.”

“That’s OK. The love that God wants from us is not a feeling but an action. There’s a saying ‘Actions speak louder than words.’ God doesn’t care if you ever say or think ‘I love my little brother.’ God cares how you ACT.”

Of course, at that point, someone else wanted to talk about mean words, bullying words, and how sometimes people can act nice in front of others but sneaky say mean things to you. So that got us into a whole other discussion about words and actions, bullying and protecting, only seeming nice and really being nice.

Continuing to reaffirm my belief that third graders are the best theologians.

I have been preoccupied lately with the extent to which USA culture has shifted towards belief that life is a “zero sum game” – when you gain, I must lose. Compassion and generosity then require “self-sacrifice” and we become fearful of losing too much. But Jesus taught that only by losing do we win. Losing is not sacrifice but gain. Compassion and social justice are not just to benefit others but are the highest good for ourselves.

I read about Ignatius’ three types of people exercise and, as I tried to think my way through it, I began to feel that my faith wasn’t “good enough.” I think because I misunderstood the exercise.

Then, believe it or not, Divine intervention came through Facebook. I saw a link on Facebook to an interview with Karen Armstrong and in that interview I read this, “thinking can only take you so far. Action, behavior, especially compassionate behavior, is more important than thinking. By constantly exercising compassion, the golden rule, you enter a different state of consciousness. This rather than thinking will get you to enlightenment.”

And there it is. There’s the freedom that God wants from me. Freedom from attachment to always thinking my way through life.

God is an ideal. Pure good, no faults. Eternal, unchanging. That is beyond any human reality. Maybe by focusing love on a perfect God, we actually make it more difficult to accept imperfect reality, to love imperfect people (including ourselves).

Can God be both light and dark? How do we understand the world of light and dark, the people — the real, flawed people — we are called to love, as the beloved creation of a God of all light, of steadfast love?

How do we learn to love the imperfect through the adoration of the perfect?

Is this why the psalmist so often has God changing, growing angry or simply forgetting him? Is it easier to love people if we don’t hold too closely to an image of God as unchanging perfection, always worthy of love?

Perhaps the proper focus of words is this world. God cannot be approached in words. My thoughts, my words neither contain nor define God.

Words are bricks and mortar. We can use words to build strong and true and needed houses to live in. Houses of ritual and dogma. But we cannot use words to feed us, to sustain us. Not through words do we grow, not usually and not easily. Even as bricks and mortar, words become more prison than home if we are not careful.

Thoughts and words are our homes, our shelter.
God is our earth and sky, our food and water.

In a voice barely above a whisper, one of my third grade boys asked, “Will there be tests?”

“There are never any tests in Sunday School,” I reassured them all. “And here’s why: Teachers care if we pass or fail tests; God doesn’t care if we pass or fail; God only cares that we try.”

And so, once again, Lady Wisdom blessed my teaching and used it to lighten my own darkest doubts with a spotlight on the essential. It’s enough that I keep trying. Success is optional (and by no means guaranteed).

And so, once again, the Paraclete teaches through me and to me.

A few days ago I read this quote from Carl McColman’s Joy Unspeakable: “The problem is not that privileged people are drawn to contemplation. The problem, as I see it, is that the contemplative community has not yet found a way to step beyond its privileged pedigree and become a more truly multi-cultural and diverse community of contemplatives.”

I’ve thought about it for days because something about it bugs me. And here’s the closest I was able to get in words: I think there is power and necessity to this point of view, but I also think there is power and necessity to the opposite point of view: “meditation”, “contemplation” (in the sense it is used here) and “mindfulness” are, perhaps, not privileges that need to be shared but correctives. Correctives that God graciously offers to those of us too much dependent upon words and thoughts, too little skilled in approaching God in the immediate exigencies of NOW (which, as C.S. Lewis says, is where time touches eternity). So maybe the practice of meditation is not a privilege but a corrective. Maybe those of us who use it are not uniquely privileged but rather impoverished. And maybe, with a little luck and a lot of Divine assistance, we can learn how to hold both of those views simultaneously.

Then, in a coincidence that I choose to see as something of a Divine affirmation, today in a transcript of Maria Kalman’s interview with Krista Tibbett for On Being, I read this:

It’s taken me these many years to understand that a human being can encompass very contradictory ideas and feelings at the exact same time. They’re not separate; they don’t even follow each other so much. They just live in you. And for me, to clarify what I love, to do what’s amazing, to understand my confusion or my sorrow and to still continue to — I mean the thing about it is that you persevere. And so I do follow my nose, and I do have many rituals that I love following; and I love breaking the rituals, so I’m not a prisoner of the construct of my day.

Sometimes, I’m spending too much time wandering around when I actually have work to do, but I always say that’s — “Oh, well, this must be the work that I need to do right now, before I do that other work.” And really, I think, the more that I work and the more that I see what my life is, the more simple it becomes and very elemental. I mean it’s really — it’s very boring, actually, for probably — if most people had to live it, they would go, “Oh, that’s it?”

Namaste

Forgiveness is just another word for loving the real person rather than our idealised image.

Humility is accepting that both evil and an omnipotent, loving, good God are real.

It has taken my working through over a hundred psalms to truly understand that God is not changeable – it is our perceptions of God and our feelings about God that are changeable. The psalmists live through storms of despair and doubt and feeling that God is angry and has abandoned them but return again and again to the calm climate of joy and praise.