DAILY DEVOTIONAL
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Why do some Christians seem so unloving?
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, so that the outside may become clean as well. – Matthew 23:25-26
I call it the cycle of contemplation/compassion. We spend time in contemplation so that we might then go into the world to compassionately serve. And when we do the work of the humble and compassionate servant we come to know our need for contemplation. And as this cycle of prayer and servanthood is continued, the contemplation becomes deeper and the compassion becomes greater.
When we first seek that purity of heart within then that purity reaches out into the world with pure love Oh, at first, the purity is not so perfectly pure, but the purity become more perfect over time. This is the vector of Christian Love, Love practiced becomes Love More Perfected.
I find the idea of purity of soul seems so discounted and disregarded in our times. We seem to focus on changing the world without changing ourselves. We seem to be more focused on controlling the attitudes and behavior of others than on the quality of spirit found in ourselves. Thus even those who say they love, so often have but a veneer of love, a love that seems to be shallow and rather contrived. They speak of love but they are not experienced as loving.
This process of becoming more and more the embodiment and expression of Christ’s Love, this process I refer to as the cycle of contemplation/compassion, is a daily process and yet a process that spans over a lifetime.
Always in Christ’s Service,
Fr. Charitas de la Cruz
Nearby is a grand, old oak. As far as oak trees it is a perfect example of an oak. Where if I were designing an oak tree might make the branches straight and the leaves perfectly spaced, the oak tree under the guidance of its Creation chooses to have branches that bend and turn, this way and that, with seemingly little care for perfection. If you inspected its roots of that oak tree, you find a tangle of roots going every which way. Yet … in an order that is beyond our human definition of order … this oak tree is a most “perfect” oak, perfectly fulfilling its mission of being an oak tree in Creation. And in time, its acorn will grow into oak trees that are very much alike but yet each a little different.
“And when Christ drew near and saw the city of Jerusalem, He wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” – Luke 19:41-44
Blessed are the merciful for they shall know mercy. Such a significant teaching tucked away in the Beatitudes, yet I fear too many Christians do not seriously and authentically take it to heart. To act mercifully toward others is part and parcel with experiencing mercy toward you.
I believe James the brother of Christ shares with us an inspired truth that we often rationalize away. I believe it is an insight into all humanity but especially in the life of the Christian soul. Fresh water flows from a fresh water spring; but salt water cannot. A corollary which may be more accurate to the original metaphor would be … pure water flows from a pure water spring, but from a poisoned well, it does not.
Shekinah … the glory of the Divine presence manifested in a radiant light. Shekinah … is a rather contemplative understanding of how we are to live and how we are to behold one another. When the Holy Light is strong within us then our countenance, our words, our attitudes, our actions we become radiant. We mature into our calling to become children of the Light. In this world with so many dark and shadowed places, the Lord’s Presence within us turns our lives into candles and lanterns. The Light of God’s Presence within us cannot be contained within our inner selves … the Holy Radiance appears, and the Light of God is all the more.
A lemon-yellow butterfly has come to visit me, sitting oh so properly on a bouquet of tiny, red flowers. A trace of a breeze is stirring, and that stirring moves the branch ever so slightly so that the butterfly appears to slowly rocking back and forth in her rocking chair. Now and then, in these quiet days of contemplation, when the quiet is all the more, these butterflies that visit seem to linger with me awhile. They do not say much, these butterflies, but they make me smile. And they listen well to the thoughts within me.
In the third century, our list of writings that the Church thought were reliable and were used by sizeable shares of Christian communities was set. This is referred to as the Canon of scripture. The canonization of early Church writings has been taken to mean this is the limits of God’s official inspiration. For centuries, the orthodoxy has imprisoned the holy truth within a first and second century culture and within a first and second century state of knowledge. But I have of late thought that the orthodoxy has misunderstood and misapplied what the canon was meant to be. I believe the canon was not meant to a wall that demarcated the boundaries of the Truth but rather the channel markers through which the River of Truth would flow.
With Paul, a soul with a blended mind of Hebrew, Greek and Roman thought, a soul who desperately to bridge the chasm that divided the Jewish and the Gentile, the old ways and the new ways … speaks to both sides and to all. You and your world must be transformed first by the renewing of you own mind and then the renewing of the world’s mind. Only then will you be able to do the challenging work of discerning … not so much what you think is right and wrong … but what is the ideal … the good, the pleasing, the perfect will of God.” The renewing of the mind is a transformation from a pattern of thinking “en-cultured” in you by the society around you, especially that pattern of thinking that you presume to be right, to be “common sense”, to be “just the way things are, and the way things are to be. It is a new way of thinking, a new awareness, a new sensitivity, even a new way of reasoning and a new way of feeling.
Into the Sacred Hills of Jade 