Author: rkcdlitt

Meditation:

Jesus gives us an awe-full (as in full of awe) gift in Matthew 22:

When asked by one of the apostles which is the greatest commandment, Jesus response was to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And the second is to love your neighbor as yourself.

Jesus repeats this in John 13: – I give you a new commandment: love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another.

This was and still is quite an awe-full task; not the one word awful; the two words awe and full.

We are in awe of the immense responsibility this commandment imposes on us.

As I was thinking about concept of Love (capital L), several ideas invaded my meditation.

We know that one of the greatest gifts God gave us through Jesus is the ability to love – to love one another. Taken in this light, perhaps the second greatest commandment is not a commandment at all, but it is an invitation to share in the Love God freely gives us.

During the adult forum on Sunday, Joe demonstrated the effect of communion with God – the vertical communion between God and man. And by spreading that with our neighbors, we are spreading God’s communion horizontally, thus completing the message of Love on the Cross. Jesus demonstrated this Love when he forgave those who crucified him.

This is the second time in as many days as this image was presented to me. On Saturday, while attending the Diocese’s Intercultural Summit in Richmond, Bishop Shannon demonstrated the same vertical and horizontal relationship between man and God, and man and man when it comes to reconciliation and repentance. These concepts are freely given by God to us, only to be shared with one another, thus completing Jesus’s mission on the Cross.

If we are truly to share in the gift of Love, God’s Love, we must not only love God with all our hearts, with all our souls and with all our minds, we must do the same for, with, and to all mankind.

After all, we are all children of God and we will all be recognized as this after we leave our bodies.

Life, Death, and Love

No, I am not talking about leaving this earth as we know it, only as we perceive it. That is, if we can ever accurately understand it.

I was born in 1943 to a 55-year-old father and a 26-year-old mother, who already had a daughter, born 18 months before my arrival. As with all families, ours was the typical American family in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I think it would be generous to say that we were upper lower class. My father, a 1912 Yale graduate, lost everything with the market crash in 1929, including his first wife. Fortunately, they did not have children. My mother was from a very lower class southern European family; she worked two jobs and raised her younger siblings during the Great Depression. My maternal grandmother was a barfly and two years younger than my father.

When I was 15, my father was 70. I emphasize this because I was raised by a relatively young mother and a grandfather, so to speak. At best, there was peace in our family. I cannot say that there was an overly emphasis on showing love – at least through physical connection. dis

My father was a Christian Scientist and spent many hours towards the end of his life reading his Bible and Science and Health. He was a gentle soul who rarely showed his emotion, reflecting on his New England raising.

For many years, and even today, when I reflect on it, I feel cheated from a life with a normal father to take me fishing or teach me to throw a baseball; I could pad the list with examples. Then I think what I learned from my father and his relationship with God. First: be thankful, for health, family, a roof over your head, an income; I could list many other things, but you get the picture.

My father, mother, and sister have all passed into God’s eminent domain, and I have a hard time thinking of them in a loving fashion. It is a very difficult struggle to remember love, when for all practical purposes, there was little. Henri Nouwen reminds us that it is not always easy to express our love even to those who mean the most to us. We do not have the proper words to express how we truly feel; for example, in Greek, there are five separate words for the concept of love. We have one. . .

I really do not care how many words we have; if we can say “I love you,” we create a whole different world for us. Jesus lived a life of unconditional love, even loving from the cross, when he asked God to forgive those who crucified him. As I recall my family, can I do any less?

When I open myself to admit that there is love between me and my family, even if they are no longer physically with me, I realize that Clarence, Beatrice, and Judith are not gone; they are still alive in my mind, still alive in my body, still alive in the very essences of my life.

For this, I am grateful.

Source: Turn Around

Henri Nouwen says, We belong to a generation that wants to see the results of our work. We want to be productive and see with our own eyes what we have made; but that is not the way of God’s Kingdom. We are too enveloped by our own importance, causing both external and internal pressures.

Our friendships and relations with all others can be challenged by this egocentric obsessive personality trait. On a grander scale, this egocentricity can be disastrous for many greater relationships, causing permanent damage with these relationships, or at least a permanent lowering of trustworthiness.

Internally, this obsession can cause both physical and psychological difficulties, triggering unfortunate long-term results. If we concentrate on our true inner selves, we are rewarded by better relations with others and with ourselves, William Stafford (1914-1993) says this best in his poem, “The Way It Is,” expressing what the true inner self means:

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

That thread is your true self, the one created by God. This is the self that we must please, the false self, the one concerned with our productivity and self-importance, is the one that causes our problems. Stafford says that this self is difficult for others to see; I say that all too often, it is very difficult and sometimes impossible for us to see this true self. We are too busy to allow this true self to emerge. It takes practice, and all too often, it is hiding from us. We must take the time to find its hiding place within us.

I do take the time to meditate, daily if possible. Much of my meditation is trying to contact my true self. My brain is so focused on what I have to do, what I did not do that my mediation seems unfocused. And, it is! I find it difficult to be patient enough to allow my contacting my true self. However, those days that I do reach down and allow my inner self, the one created by God, comes out of hiding. The feeling is euphoric. I come out of my period of mediation to a world that looks beautiful.

We are promised rain today, tomorrow and the next few days in Virginia. So what! By allowing my inner voice to speak this morning, the day is not a waste. The weather-forced limitation is given by God to allow me to quiet down, read, write, and stop to smell the proverbial roses.

What a truly joyous day this is.

Caring for others:

We are at a time in our lives when we must look beyond our own interests and look to the welfare of others. Jesus is a part of us, coming in the form of the poor, the sick, the disables, the rejected. It is only there that we confront him. He was and remains always on the side of those rejected by the Pharisees (think the rich and powerful).

We are faced with overwhelming deprivation in the United States; this should be a call to act in favor of those on the bottom rungs of society. WE have to act now to reduce the fate of those living in poverty. The Spirit of Truth (think God) draws us toward a much-needed greater empathy of our neighbors’ conditions, much needed is the training our minds and hearts to utilize the tools afforded to us, both on the government and non-government levels.

Reading about ALICE, (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed), my eyes were opened to the realities of trying to live in communities, such as Fredericksburg, but also all around the United States. Over half the jobs in the Fredericksburg area, requiring a high school diploma pay less than $20.00 per hour (a total of $800.00 per week, or $40,000 per year). Yet, when looking at living expenses in the area, the minimum income required for a family of four to live above poverty is over $60.000 per year (or $25.00 per hour). Making less than $25.00 per hour forces the family to eliminate one or more necessities. It is no wonder that there are so many homeless students in our area schools. Jesus opened the door to God’s Love to all people, not just the Pharisees.

The number of people who shop at The Table at St. George’s and who make livable (?) wages is surprising; but reading about the cost of living compared to the average income, it is no wonder that our needs for greater funding to keep The Table a worthy force against malnutrition continues to grow. The Table allows people to shop every week. Although I commend other food sources and their abilities and desires to assist our ALICE neighbors, I do question how some can restrict a household to shop only once every six months. Somehow, this does not acknowledge the words of Jesus when he said that what we do to the poor, we do to him.

We need to pray our existences, acknowledging the dignity of our own life and the dignity of others. We need prayer to discern how to factor this gift delegated to each of us by Jesus; we need a path bringing us back to live in a world filled with God’s undying love for all his children, particularly those in need. We must do this, not for ourselves, but to honor the lives of all God’s children.

The Feast of the Transfiguration

Malcolm Guite’s “A Sonnet for the Transfiguration” begins: For that one moment, ‘in and out of time’, On that one mountain . . . and ends thusly: Eclipse that glimpse of how things really are.

This makes one think about what the scene on the mountain really means. I am basically referring to Luke 9: 28-36. You can read it to see how you might interpret it. In this scene on the mountain top, Peter sees three images: Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Three very important prophets in biblical history. All were messengers from God, to whom nobody really listened until many ages later. All were spurned in their life on Earth.

Many times, the apostles lacked understanding of what Jesus said in his parables; and Jesus took the time to explain their meanings. By the time the Transfiguration occurred, the apostles were not yet commissioned, or taught, all that Jesus later conferred on them. Understanding this, could Peter have misinterpreted, or at least misidentified, the three images. (I am thinking the Trinity here.) All three figures were semi-clouded in mist, so this could easily have happened. A voice, presumably God’s, says, This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him. They kept silent? Why? Did they not understand?

Perhaps the transfiguration occurred in the minds and hearts of the apostles, not in Jesus. Guite ends with the words, as things really are. Jesus was not transfigured on the mountain; He was always the Son of God, living as the true earthly image of God. (Think about the dove coming from heaven when John baptized Jesus.) I feel that the Transfiguration occurred in the eyes of the apostles. For the first time, they truly saw Jesus as Jesus truly was . . . as he truly is.

Just something to ponder on . . .  

Ripples in life, as the ripples in water, are both hypnotizing and mysterious.

Like the ripples on the surface of water, my life has affected many people. The ripples are on the surface, but below the visible plane; these ripples create dynamic changes in people. We just do not always accept or see these changes. They may be far into the future.

For many years, I thought my life was a failure. As I reflect on what I did with my time, I did not, and to a certain extent, cannot accept the fact that much of my life was wasted, non-productive, and replete with failures.

In my schooling, I was not a scholar; I was not an athlete; and I was definitely not a part of the in crowd. I even failed out of college – twice. So, I joined the Marines to toughen my inner being. It did just that . . . sort of. I was not a great Marine, due to physical issues. My injuries earlier in my life kept flaring to keeping me from any true success. I was medically discharged before my unit was sent to Vietnam. Now, don’t get me wrong; I had no desire to go into combat, to kill, or be killed – or worse. Other than strengthening my fortitude, what purpose did my joining the Corps do for me, or the country? I seem to have wasted three years of my life. Pride, in itself, is no reward.

For almost thirty years, I labored as a small businessman, joining my parents’ retail business after my discharge from the Marines. I joined this business to assist my mother, when her camera salesman quit suddenly. I did not realize this at the time, but I was then trapped in this business for thirty years, due to the self-loathing of my mother and her constant threats of suicide. I left the business as a failure, broke, in debt, with only thirty years’ experience dealing with people for my efforts. This, however, prepared me for the next stage in my life.

Reflecting on this, I can now say that my long-held guilt of leaving the Marines early and the inability to turn the retail business into a profitable entity, did, in all likelihood, affect many people. I see now that in addition to giving me an understanding and compassion for others, my hiring of many young people over the years matured them in many ways. I remember one young lady, Rachel, whose only desire was to finish school, marry, and be the best mother she could be. Several years after she worked for me, she did return to share her new status as a mother. Another young employee, a boy, wanted to attend college and become a doctor. Unfortunately, I lost touch with both, but I am sure that they are very successful in whatever they are doing now; remembering that they are now both in their sixties. I am also sure that most of the others, and there were hundreds over thirty years, have been successful mature adults. Unfortunately, I have lost touch with them, and I remember few of their names and faces.

In 1993, I began my quest to becoming a teacher, by working as a swim coach for a local high school. This began when my son was still in school, I was the president of the booster club, and the swim team coach quit suddenly. For three years I labored as a coach, and a retailer. However, since 1997, after becoming a productive teacher, I did virtually everything in the school to promote the welfare and opportunities for all students. I had both boys and girls hug me for affection and thanks for how I treated them. As I have remained friends with many of them through Facebook, I continue to revel in their achievements.

Thinking about my early teaching career, I tutored a young lady, fat and on drugs, who would not conform to high school rules or society. I think we talked more about life’s successes and failures than we talked about history. She did graduate on time; I was hired as a full-time history teacher; and we parted ways. I met her years later, when she thanked me for all of the frank talks we had. She is now a history teacher in New Hampshire. One of the first students I had, when teaching in high school, was a young boy who had mild Asperger’s syndrome. He was in one of my history classes, and also asked to join the debate team I was mentoring. He is now an international banker. Another young man, who has Cerebral Palsy, has matured into a bright college student, majoring in film animation. Many of the young people I mentored are now parents in their own right and share their lives with me through Facebook.

My efforts with these students are ripples in the lives of many, as they go and share their talents with others. They are not only creating ripples on the surface, they are making waves in the lives of many.

I may at times revert to the insecure feelings I had before entering teaching, but deep inside, I know that what I have done for others is more important than any feelings of self-importance and success on my part. As I continue to teach at a local community college, I still am happy to know that I am affecting the lives of my students.

My wish now is to finish my life as a part-time English professor and a writer of inspirational literature that may or may not be shared with the general public. I still would like to be a positive influence for those around me.

I am reminded of the verses in Proverbs 17:3: The refining pot is for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests hearts. I believe that the only thing stopping me is the same type of ailment, magnified, that caused my early discharge from the Marines, but the Lord reached into me, and I am cured of the life-long pain that I have had from a severely injured back.

May God bless all of those I have influenced.

Last night, I attended the weekly prayer session at St. George’s; the meditative practice is called Lectio Divina. If I parse this expression: lectio means to read, to reflect, to respond; divina means divine. Together, we understand that the session is to read passages from the Bible, reflect and discuss how a certain word or phrase alters or enlivens your understanding of life, yours and those around you.

Last evening, we studied part of Psalm 119 (vs 105-112). In this passage, there is one line that really upsets my apple cart. Verse 111 reads: “I have inherited Your testimonies forever, For they are the joy of my heart.”

I meditated on one word in that verse, the word testimonies, or better yet, prayers, guidelines, or any number of other words one may use as the sermons and parables of Jesus that remain with us. This is not a message for just Christians, as it appears in our bibles; it is a message for the world to study. Jesus did not just preach to the Jews in ancient Israel, he upset the Pharisees by going outside the Jewish to include all, such as the Samaritans.

Jesus struggled for 40 days I the deserts of what we refer to as the Levant. He fought with a least three opposing forces: God, himself, and the devils within him. I present the question as to which force is the most compelling. For Jesus, or for us. His internal devils were reflections of himself maturing in his old-time society, which he rejected as a human concerned with those at the bottom. These we call temptations.

Jesus called his disciples to follow him. How can we follow him? Is it truly, or realistically, possible? I try; I meditate daily to accept Jesus’s testimonies. But I am tempted by society’s norms. My wilderness in the very society we live in today. I am physically and psychologically unable to lay down my fishing nets and give up all I have attained to live the life that Jesus did.

I play the lottery. As many know, my wife, Linda, is one of the leaders of the feeding ministry (The Table) at St. George’s. I play the lottery with the main purpose of donating enough money to allow The Table to operate with having to apply for grants. It takes many tens of thousands of dollars to continue assisting those in need. So, I play the lottery in the hopes of winning millions to assist my brothers and sisters in Fredericksburg. You would think that I could win with such a lofty objective in doing God’s work, following Jesus as best as I can. But, I have an ulterior motive also, which is to allow Linda and I to live with a mortgage and other necessary expenses. So, there we have it: I am also looking for personal gain. Obviously, I have not won the lottery. God has not reached down to award this man-made honor to me and my church. This is not what Jesus preached. He condemned the money handlers in the synagogue. There are many better ways to serve those at the bottom of society; winning the lottery is not one of his high points.

I continue struggling; we continue struggling.

I meditate on Jesus’s testimonies, daily, and they are the joy of my heart. The last line of that passage (verse 112) reads: “I have inclined my heart to perform Your statutes forever, even to the end.”

I try, which is what I think Jesus would want me to do.

I was in deep conversation with God this morning; actually, I was arguing with Him as usual. Even though I know I am one of His children, and I may not have advanced from the typical teenage mentality; but I know that He loves me.

I was trying to convince Him that I am not only one person; there are too many sides to my personality and my life. I am one person to my wife; one to each of my children; one to my students; and, one to those I pray with. However, I do try to shed all of these different personas, when I sit back to have my daily conversations with God.

God knows that realistically, I am merely a hollow piece of rock, much as a cave in the higher hills of an arid wasteland. When all the different layers are peeled from my personality, I am merely one of His sons, an entity that relies completely on His grace. My life is nothing without His understanding and Love. I know this deep within me, even as I surf with old-age pain, even as I argue with Him, knowing that I can never win.

At times, I am a galaxy unto myself that awaits exploration. I struggle to the depths of my soul and the heights of my imagination to understand how and why I do the things that I do. My travels through my galaxy are usually at the pace of medieval travel. When I feel as if I am travelling as a meteor, I look at my trail to see that I have only progressed, or for that matter, regressed, only a few inches. I laugh, when soaring as a meteor, I think that Don Quixote on his flea-bitten horse travels farther and faster than I do.

Most of all, as with many, no, most people, I suffer with a brokenness that only God can heal. When I was born, I was loved by my mother, my father, and my older sister. Through life, we argued, we fought, we parted in anger; but, through it all, as I look back on that one-inch travel, I see a family full of love. A love that we mortals say transcends all other love; but we are wrong. As strong as that love seems, we cannot place our eternal life on that love; doing so leaves us open to be broken. As I reflect on my life with my family and the love that saturated our very beings, it was only a transitory love; one that does not transcend the grave. My mother, my father, and my sister are no longer of my world, except within my mind. I still love them, but it is not Love, God’s Love.

Their love no longer exists in this world. It is of a different, greater word, the world that belongs to God. This is why I suffer from brokenness, why I am a rock on a dusty road, worn down by the elements; I rely on the love of others to get through life. My wife is wonderful, supporting me in everything I do; support for each other helps us travel our slow inch-by-inch journeys. When I die, or when she dies, there will be brokenness, because this love cannot surpass the grave. Only God’s Love does.

I try each day to pray, to converse with God, to argue with God. I crave understanding how I fit God’s plan. How I go through each day depends on the Love that God gives me, the Love that takes me from my brokenness, the Love that embraces me through eternity.

The realization that only God knows me, knew me before my birth, and only God will know me after I die, is not only comforting, it is supportive as I endeavor to continue glorifying God. The other realization is also shockingly comforting and very difficult to appreciate. I knew God before my birth, and I will know God after I die.

I wonder that there is no reason why I cannot achieve oneness with God now. Jesus, the Son of God, knew God on this earth. I feel as a son of God, I should endeavor to do the same. I will not be able to perform miracles, but I can comfort people in their times of trouble. I cannot forgive their sins, but I can show them how to talk with God, so that they know that He forgives them.

So, perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I am a single person. That person is a son of our heavenly Father, who wants to explore, to learn, to share my oneness with God. As Jesus did, I seek my own personal wilderness to find my Father; to argue with Him; to plead with Him; and, finally to accept my reason for being. As Matthew said: “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they see your good works, and glorify your Father, who is in heaven.”

I pray daily that I do.

I had a very interesting dream last night. A dream that on the surface is very disturbing, but when I looked at it thoughtfully, clarity struck me in the gut. Let me explain my dream:

I was a recruit in the military, and selected to be the acting platoon sergeant as we traveled to a combat zone. There were several wiseguys who thought one of them should have been chosen, and they decided to be total disrupters. This may have been my remembering a scene from the movie To Hell and Back, when this happened in real life to Audie Murphy. Only in my case, I decided to defend myself and get these few in line immediately; unfortunately, I chose fists to accomplish this, but that only created more problems.

I awoke this morning with a screaming headache, my dream fresh in my thoughts. My wife continually asked if I was all right. My response was that everything was perfect . . . except my dream kept intruding in my reading the news, another distressing thing in the mornings.

In finally dawned on me after reading the daily inspiration from the Henri Nouwen Society, “When someone hurts us, offends us, ignores us, or rejects us, a deep inner protest emerges.” And, “It is precisely here that we have to dig deep into our spiritual resources and find the center within us.”

My inner voice is telling me that I have to face reality. I wake up each morning reading and hearing about the murders in Washington D. C. then I read about some inane thing that a congressman says about female senators. My natural instinct is to ignore this and get on with my day, my life. Maybe God is telling me something else. Spiritually, I am an activist; in the real world, I a m a strong participant in church and local social issues, but not in politics. I cannot believe that God wants me to get politically active. We will have to talk about this, and this should be a very interesting conversation. “Oh God, what . . .