13th Sunday Reflection
THE WAY FORWARD: THE OPTIMISM OF FAITH & TRUST – (Mark 5:21-43)
Indifference is not an option; we touch the great mysteries of our human journey, life and death, love and faith, in either stunned awe or with weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth. When the inevitable dark spectre of weakness and sickness start to unfold our final chapter many experience horror and resentment at the envisaged loss… somehow feeling cheated. This is the resentment that throttles love and stunts life. For some, too little time, yet for others, too much time.
The mystery of evil has the same effect on us; in silent horror, we stand before the nightmare of those who are excluded, voiceless and powerless and we also feel the sickening, numbing, dark emptiness clutching at our stomachs. Sin experienced as the pain of isolation, as having no essence, as delusion and ignorance now becomes synonymous with sickness and death.
In the dismal reflection of this consciousness, we create for ourselves a gloomy panorama so that instead of the gratitude that comes with seeing grace as a gift, our hearts become hardened, seeing grace as the necessary penalty that must borne because of the actions of others. A vision of God demanding vengeance and repayment.
The problem with all of this is that God’s creative love is also the basis of life. Where this love is replaced by anything else, life is also lost.
We may try to find life through or by some other means, but this can only be an illusion; without love, we have no life in us.
Instead of love being creative, life-giving, demonstrable, effusive, gushing from the wells of the creator; it becomes instead something stilted, something I cling to; not trusting that love returns love, so that we cling to love as to breath; holding on as though in breathing out, there will be no next gulp of air available. Seeking to save my life, I lose it.
How do I choose my perspective in this dark arena? What is the motivation of my life? Are my words also creative; do they bring compassion, forgiveness, healing, and life to those I meet? When last did someone encounter God’s Love through me?
Such questions are valid as we consider the history of humanity, as a species infecting creation, sick, and disabled and always in the hopeless process of seeking to recover eternal life, a lost innocence, and a squandered past golden age.
The vantage point I seek needs to be on a higher level than the history of humanity; needs a higher authority to have validity, and needs to provide us with the necessary optimism that embraces our faith and our trust.
It is the revelation of Jesus the Christ who calls us to this higher vantage point. God desires, life and not death. God created us to be eternal, in God’s image; created because of Love, created by Love, created for the purpose of love.
Like Christ, we also are called to reflect beauty and grace as the foundation of the Good News that aligns itself with Truth, the Incarnation as God’s language; in whose very breath, we share in the ongoing exciting and vital creative process of Christifying our world and becoming Christ-like.
For contemplatives and mystics like Julian of Norwich, a new vantage point moves through the transcendence of the whole paradoxical structure life and death, love and faith. This becomes possible through the perspective of spiritual optimism and trust. The way of transcendence merges with the profound spiritual transformation of human consciousness so as to recognise and enjoy the presence of goodness as the foundation of reality.
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