11th Sunday Reflection
OUR LIVES REFLECT THE COSMOS – (Mark 4:26-34)
The first step of wisdom; beginning always again, to know that I do not know.
The disciples who were with Jesus needed the parables explained beyond the face value of the mustard seed that speaks of small beginnings that end in big returns; the carport business that becomes the global corporation!
The parables invite us to go deeper, to grow deeper roots, to hear and to understand, to see and to perceive, to raise the level of our platform, and to find that union with the heart where we come to that encounter with God that heals and renews.
We all suffer from the same inability to perceive the relation of linked essentials that develop out of our sight and out of our line of vision. The root causes of our suffering, discord, dissatisfaction that are linked to the groaning of all creation often eludes us and has us looking in every other direction.
Without ownership, the blame is always elsewhere, the need for transformation is with others. This leaves us addressing symptoms and visible indicators without considering where the life of a system flows from.
Our individual pain and suffering is an invitation and opportunity to ownership and integration into a world of change. This calls us beyond our burden of confusion, frustration, disappointment, and anger; beyond our preoccupation with that selfish misery. Now our struggle becomes rather a service of courage and hope to each other and to the world.
This is how our smallest acts of courage and encouragement become linked to God’s universal plan of salvation and the establishment of the Kingdom of God. This is the link between the least and the whole, the vital view of how each one of us has a radical place in the cosmic plan of creation.
Our understanding, systems, and formulae fail us at the smallest sub-atomic levels as they also do at the largest cosmological levels. The quantum world of entanglement, ghostly and totally strange, and its mirror beyond infinity just do not have the same rules as the world around us and so we have no concepts to deal with it.
In that awe between certainty and absurdity, Jesus invites us to return to God, the source of time and Love where healing and rebirth become our hope and the reason for living and working towards integral justice, peace, and integrity of creation that ushers in the Kingdom of God.
Angela of Foligno, a medieval Franciscan mystic, wrote: “As we see so we love and the more perfectly and purely we see, the more perfectly and purely we love.” Vision is a matter of consciousness, a visible awareness that the God in me is the same God in you; we are bound together. Jesus constantly challenged others to “see,” to awaken to the presence of God and to be part of an undivided whole, the Kingdom of God, where Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male and female, are invited as equals to their place at the divine banquet.
Knowledge is not enough to understand the world, we must see it, touch it, live in its presence, and drink the vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality. The mystic, says Thomas King, is ‘a reflection of the larger process going on in the universe; the mystic is a microcosm reflecting both the Many and the One found in the macrocosm.’ The story of your life reflects the Cosmos.
- The Church Year and Advent - December 1, 2024
- Easter Sunday Reflection: The Way – Love Overcomes Violence & Death - March 29, 2024
- Palm Sunday Reflection: Re-Espousing And Anointing - March 22, 2024
