I’m always grateful for the bay of light that rips through the book room as the sun begins its descent. It’s a west window and I suppose I’m not much of a morning person so it’s well I have the opportunity to see late day sun turn the rosewood finish amber. June is a month loaded with nostalgia, carrying the cargo of the peak of early summer as well as my birthday. In July there are already back-to-school sales and premature dead leaf litter but in June there is nature's guarantee of freshness and perfection. The cottonwood trees have just finished their magical gauze-snow and the first lightning bugs are ready to take their place. The fireflies greet me as if in anticipation of my birthday, leaving shortly thereafter. This month of the strawberry moon contains the days for great saints of St. Anthony and St. Thomas More and seems redolent of the Pogue’s “Fairytale of New York”.
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There’s something electric about those gilt-edge’d pages declaring the Faith, declaring God’s interventions. The sign of love is presence and God is always present - though for us carnal types the more palpable the better. We’re hungry for his consolations and interventions; on this day, Pentecost, we read of the Apostles receiving the wind and fire and Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Now we baptize and confirm without fire or wind or speaking foreign languages and we are tempted to say that means less is expected of us. The apostles received much but incipient enviousness is checked by a shudder at the cost: i.e. the shipwrecks, imprisonment and martyrdom of Paul and the upside down Crucifixion of Peter to name two. And here I get upset over a dental visit.
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Was at a large party over the weekend, 90+ there, and a family member wanted to use the prayer at dinner as an evangelistic opportunity. “Did I do well?” I was asked. I understand the impulse but prayer is intrinsically valuable, it’s end is not evangelism anymore than Mass should be so used. The by-products should not be confused with the main purpose which is to invoke God and be in unity with Him. The only Christian witness that "works" has an unconscious aspect to it because it has nothing to do with us but everything to do with God. Unconscious not only, in this case, as far as what words to use in prayer but even a kind of indifference as to whether God will use us or not. Perhaps that is too quietistic but there it is.
I think nothing has been more challenged by modernity than the doctrine of grace. William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” was all about using religion as a means to an end rather than it being an end in itself. Bill Moyers wrote a big bestseller “The Power of Myth” to the same effect. It’s affected us in ways we scarcely realize (Kathy Shaidle says that like it or not “we’re all Modernists now”) and it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle. We are in the position of needing his grace more than most generations due but that is counterintuitively a good place to be since to stand in need is to be poor and to be poor is to be blessed.
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The great thing about family is that you’re stuck with them. God as Father means he’s stuck with you, regardless of your lack of ability to please Him. And for that I praise the Lord! Because he has made us family and he’s stuck with us!
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Oh I love the Psalmist. Who cannot relate? He sounds so modern - like a manic-depressive! One minute he’s complaining of God’s inattention and the next he’s “Praise the Lord!” sometimes in the very same psalm.
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