Dimensions of Spirituality
"The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him."
Saints Sergius and Bacchus Chapel
Palm Springs, California
"The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him."
"Behold, I am the servant of the Lord, may it be done to me according to your word."
“I baptize with water; but there is one among you whom you do not recognize, the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.”
"John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
"What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!"
"You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."
"And then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in the clouds' with great power and glory.”
“For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had.”
“’Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone!’”
Last week, Jesus addressed that question to James and John who wanted places of honor in God’s kingdom. Today, he addresses it to a blind man…and to us.
For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
In his private talk with his disciples, Jesus is quoted as being more forthright. He calls divorce and remarriage adultery. At the same time, this stance contradicts our nearly universal human experience. Can we resolve this contradiction? Obviously, Jesus is appealing to an ideal of marriage. We have to ask, is every committed union of two people—even a solemnized commitment—a real marriage? What is a marriage, anyway?
What are you willing to give to get your own way? How much effort are you willing to expend? What are you willing to pay? to sacrifice? What’s it worth to you?
Which do you think would be more difficult, to be born sight-impaired or to be born hearing-impaired? I’ve always thought that blindness would be worse: not being able to see the beauty of the world or the faces of my loved ones, and not being able to get around easily without some sort of assistance. That’s what I thought until I started meditating on today’s gospel. “And the people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment.” That’s when I began to understand things somewhat differently.
The more spiritual you are, the more conscious contact you have with God, the more mindful you become—the more religious you are—the less hold any laws will have on you. You will instinctively know what the right thing to do is by following the law of love in your heart, and you will do it.
Once that which was special ceases to be special, what’s left to focus on but the discordant and ugly? Those are the things our consciousness starts to focus on when the harmonious and beautiful has faded into the background.
I’m certain that something happened on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. All four gospels record the event. Some scholars suggest that, when the bread and fish were distributed, people who had brought food with them took it out and began sharing it with others. In that case, it was a miracle of compassion and generosity. But, it doesn’t matter.
If you’ve spent any time around the ocean, you’ll know that anything that hangs around in the water for very long sooner or later gets encrusted with barnacles: little sea creatures that build themselves tiny shell castles out of calcite. It’s not only the sea that does this: just about everything that hangs around long enough gathers accretions. Even people can become “moldy oldies.”
Although today’s gospel is very familiar to us, like much of Saint John/s gospel, its meaning can be quite complex. First, to make sense of it all, we need to […]
In the Lenten Series on this past Wednesday evening, I talked a little bit about the Satan – the prosecuting attorney in Hebrew. Like Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, this being […]