June 12, 2022
(third and final version)
The first place that we go to look for God is in our “heart of hearts.” Somewhere deep within our consciousness – partly in our mind, somewhere in the depths of what we call our hearts, our souls.
In an old cosmology of 2,000 years ago, God was placed at the top of the planet earth, that is why Jesus prayed: “our Father who art in heaven.” That was how people imagined God.
Somewhere along the line in Christian art, God the Father was depicted as an old balding man, but that is imagination only.
Then we got into threatening people with God. Like parents who threaten their children that God will punish them if they don’t do this or that.
And we are forever blaming God for the consequences of our poor decisions and actions.
First of all, God does not make rules. Human institutions, like the Catholic Church, make rules because they promote good order and perhaps a righteous life. But rules engender fear and fear engenders doing things in our life out of obligation or fear of punishment. Then we become nervous and a cog in a wheel and then we begin to either lose our confidence in God or displace God from our lives altogether.
I do not personally find all the God-talk about God from theologians and philosophers that helpful either, because often it is too intellectual, too theoretical and does not speak to our lives.
So, here is what I think is most important to know and to experience about God: that God wants to have a most personal and loving relationship with each one of us.
God is not an idea, nor a doctrine, nor a power, nor a judge. Jesus always spoke about God as his Father – from whom He came and for whom he spoke. And, and this is the most important aspect of our relationship with God – that God wants us to live our lives well – with honesty and integrity and love. That is how we take care of our lives and succeed in our lives.
It is indeed a mystery, something that we do not completely understand and about which we cannot memorize an easy answer to a question.
What God invites us to do with God, of course, is to walk through life with this sense of a Divine Presence living within us, which fills our life with a presence and purpose greater than our own, and with a destiny greater than we can create.
Today, we appreciate God who created wisdom, the first sharing of God, like a craftsman, the Book of Proverbs describes God. We are only beginning to explore a creation greater than earth, that expands into billions of universes beyond ours – the magnificence, the grandeur, the mystery of life.
We become more and more aware of Jesus who has, as St. Paul writes, “poured out the love of God into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”
Jesus tells us today that he has so much more to tell us, but we are not ready to hear it now. All we need to know is that “the Spirit of truth will guide us to all truth.”
So, my dear brothers and sisters, this loving God invites us to walk with the divine presence, present within us, to be another Jesus, wherever we go and in whatever we do. That is our contribution and our thank you to God for the gift of our life here.
[End with praying Psalm 8]
Psalm 8:
For the leader, upon the gittith (musical instrument). A psalm of David.
O Lord, our Lord,
How awesome is your name throughout the earth!
I will sing of your majesty above the heavens
With the mouths of babes and infants.
You have established a bulwark against your foes,
To silence enemy and avenger.
When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,
The moon and stars that you set in place,
What is man that you are mindful of him,
And a son of man, that you care for him?
Yet you have made him little less than a god,
Crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him rule over the works of your hands,
Put all things at his feet:
All sheep and oxen,
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air, the fish of the sea,
And whatever swims the path of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord,
How awesome is your name through all the earth!
Harvest and Hope 