While the Lord is experienced in positive and negative ways, He is always love

A man’s heart cries out. For years, Jeff has tried to follow God, but hasn’t found his dearest dream: a woman he could love and be loved by, who wants God as the foundation of their marriage. Why the rejection? Isn’t God love? Isn’t this cruel?

Other Christians have experienced God as silent, steel, remote, distant, stingy, unyielding, ruthless, “the great vivisectionist.” At other times we know Him as tenderness, gentleness, beauty, life, creativity, kindness, compassion, intimate presence. Who is He really?

“You’ve got to learn to wrestle with God!” Our model is Jacob, who spent the night wrestling someone (Genesis 32). At dawn, Jacob’s adversary wounded him, blessed him and gave him his name, Israel. In the struggle with God, we may discover our true name, and our real self — wounds and all. At least by wrestling, we dare to show what’s going on inside us.

The Church helps us wrestle by giving us Lent. Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13, shows Lent is physical as well as spiritual: we mark our bodies with a reminder of mortality, we take on spiritual disciplines that affect us in the flesh. It’s total; we use everything we have and are to communicate with God.

In its early centuries, the Church wrestled with many questions about God, including this: how could there be any true communication, any meeting-point, between the real God and us? Wouldn’t humans be lost in God’s vastness or God somehow be made less by being grasped?

Wrestlers get so intertwined that they look almost like one person. They feel each other’s strengths and weaknesses, bodies and spirits. Could it be like that between us and God? Could Jeff, by not giving up but coming back and back with his question, be in true communication with the living God?

Among us humans, communication happens through electronic forms known as “social media.” These involve much self-presentation: showing photos and videos of ourselves, our friends, food or pets or silly moments; we write bits of news about what we were thinking just before breakfast; we put together montages revealing our thoughts and desires, without discrimination, the painful and the odd, the beautiful and delightful. It allows for creativity as well as self-exposure.

It’s as though people are holding their faces up to an invisible mirror. Through it, they see their own reflection and invite others to see it too. Like the ordinary, visible mirror, this sort of self-study can be destructive, as in the myth of Narcissus: the youth whose handsomeness broke many hearts. One day he saw his reflection in a still pool. He had nothing to prepare him or help him understand it. He fell in love with his own beauty, but died because he couldn’t touch or fulfill his love of the image he saw.

Underneath the Narcissus story, and behind the passion for electronic self-exposure, lie understandable human desires. We want to see and know ourselves, to contemplate our image — though we can’t see our own faces. We want to show ourselves to others, be reflected back, have someone find us beautiful and interesting and love us. We want to dig inside ourselves and find creative ways to bring forth what we discover inside. We want these things even though we fear they’re impossible, since we also experience ourselves as ugly, unimportant and unlovable.

These desires reflect a divine movement: God beckoning, reflecting back our true image, the image of beauty He called forth in us. God “bending the heavens,” as the psalm says, to show us we’re beloved. God doing the impossible to call us to this truth of ourselves, beyond the scars of sin — our own and others.

Deepest, truest, wildest in us is our desire for God, without whom we can never find rest. Our need to communicate, to be seen, can’t be fully satisfied by any human communication, by electronic self-disclosure or song and dance or feasting, by studying ourselves or even by loving one another — though all these things may, and some must, bring us closer.

That’s why human communication always involves frustration, even when it’s exhilarating. Whatever we seek is never truly found except in God. And He’s completely beyond us, though nearer to us than our fingernails to our fingers.

How could there be a meeting-point between God the Creator and us His creatures? Only in the one who in Himself unites human with divine. There’s no humanity without God — and because of Christ, there’s no God without humanity.

That’s the intimacy we seek, whether through electronic media or dances in the village square. It’s what we invite through our Lenten spiritual practices. They prepare us to receive the fullness of God’s love without any shadow or cruelty or pain.

No wonder we experience Him in negative as well as positive ways: thirst and hunger, pain and longing, cruelty and ruthlessness. Gentleness, kindness, wonder, delight. And love.

He’s in everything, even in Jeff’s long longing.

VATICAN CITY - A lack of faith in God can damage marriage, even to the point of affecting its validity, Pope Benedict XVI said.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI said the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day calls humanity to work to overcome all forms of hatred and racism and to respect the dignity of each human person.

WINNIPEG - Three bishops walked into a bar... and there, before an enthusiastic crowd of youth and young adult ministers, they shared their stories of how they came to have the faith that they have today.

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) Feb. 3 (Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; Psalm 71; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30)

ROME - Politicians who act as if God did not exist and as if there was no such thing as objective moral truths are bound to fail in their efforts to promote the common good, said the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“The politics we have today in Europe and North America without ethical foundations, without a reference to God, cannot resolve our problems, even those of the market and money,” said Archbishop Gerhard Muller.

Speaking Jan. 11 at a Vatican bookstore in downtown Rome, Muller said, “Faith and reason are like two people who love each other deeply, who cannot live without each other, and who were intimately made for one another, so much so that they cannot be considered separate from one another and cannot reach their goals separately.”

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) Jan. 27 (Nehemiah 8:2-4, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-30; Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21)

Conversion is not always easy or joyful — in fact; it can sometimes be a very painful experience. The reviewing of one’s life with all of the “should haves” and “could haves” can bring grief and shame.
Nehemiah recounted the story of the returning exiles and their conversion and renewal. They had spent a couple of generations in Babylonian exile and their way of life prior to the disaster of 586 B.C. was but a dim memory. Only a small group of prophets, priests and scribes had kept the traditions alive. Now that they were back in the land of Israel they had to put the collective life of the nation back together. Jerusalem and the temple lay in ruins and the land had been devastated.

During the exile, there had been much soul-searching and reflection. Why had God permitted this disaster? How could they prevent such a thing from happening again? They did not blame God but themselves. In their own eyes, they had not been obedient to the covenant and the Law. They had been guilty of injustice and idolatry. Only a firm recommitment to the Law would save them and put them on the right path again. In the scene described in our reading, the Law has just been read in its entirety before the assembled people. They were devastated and grief-stricken, for it was very clear to them how far they had fallen from the ideal. Nehemiah and Ezra gave the people excellent advice. Guilt, self-condemnation and sorrow are all useless. A conversion or repentance should be a joyful time. Move resolutely forward and don’t look back unless it is to learn from one’s mistakes. They were told even to celebrate and have a good time — the joy of being in harmonious relationship with God would provide them with the strength they needed. It is never too late to make positive and even radical changes in one’s life or in the collective life of a group.

Paul’s mini-essay on the body of Christ and the community was deflating news for many in Corinth. They had been engaging in the age-old practice of competition and one-upmanship to the detriment of the community’s unity. The bad news from Paul to the Corinthian community is that in God’s kingdom no one is more important than another — all are different but equal in worth and dignity. Every part of the body has an important role to play and injury to any part affects the whole. The body is a symbol of interdependence and harmony rather than hierarchy, domination or exclusion. We still have so far to go in understanding and appropriating this lesson.

Jesus returned from His testing in the desert filled with the Spirit of God and on fire for His mission. He made a favourable impression on most of those who heard Him. Luke lets us in on his debut in the synagogue of his hometown. Isaiah’s words that were read aloud cut deeply for they revealed the gap between ideal and reality. In the passage from Luke, Jesus read from Isaiah 61 and proclaimed that its promises were fulfilled in Him. The words were meant to be joyful and to give hope — how could such wonderful promises do otherwise! But they also carried a challenge that became evident in the part of this story not included in the lectionary. There would indeed be sight for the blind, liberty for captives, hope for the oppressed and good news for the poor. These marvelous acts were seen as signs of the divine presence and would go hand in hand with a more expansive and universal view of God. We might ask if the promises have in fact been fulfilled since we still have a world full of captives, oppressed and poor.

The arrival of Jesus signaled a sign of compassion and favour on the part of God for suffering humanity. They described perfectly the earthly ministry of Jesus and what He did for those whom He met. As we return to the long journey through human history, these promises serve as ideals and goals for us to implement with the aid and guidance of Jesus. Building a just, compassionate and peaceful world is the way we continually proclaim a year of the Lord’s favour.

OXFORD, England - A Catholic bishop in war-torn Mali whose diocese lies in the path of Islamic insurgents said "people are hiding in their homes, unable to venture out."

GUELPH, ONT.  - In my role as a vice principal in a Catholic high school, God is revealed in raw emotional landscapes: old-fashioned fist fights, cruel words in 120 character texts that ravage reputations, startlingly tragic losses.

Second Week in Ordinary Time (Year C) Jan. 20 (Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 96; 1 Corinthians 12:4-11; John 2:1-12)

What is in a name? More than we might think! The ancients believed that a person’s name was a reflection of their nature and the direction of their life. The Old Testament is filled with odd names and mid-life name changes that reflected changing relationships with God.