31st Sunday Reflection: Beginning Again In The Return To Genesis
31st Sunday In Ordinary Time Year B 2021 – (Mark 12:28-34) –
In a dying world, the rage of madness threatens to overtake us! In this time of danger, we return to beginnings, the genesis in which Light and Love overcomes darkness and chaos. It is this Light and Love that protects us and guides us. God is with us; Love is with us and the Light has come into the world… and the darkness cannot overwhelm it.
The book of Love has a number of chapters, that begins with an ending, and end with a new beginning! Each chapter details the journey of the heart, the soul, our reason, and our strength. This journey begins through the experience of Love, which is the beginning that informs us of our links through creation and the chain of time.
These are links that centre us, form us, and anchor us through the chain of ancestors to our very first ancestor, the source and progenitor who is both father and mother. This window for our initiation and experience of Love is a short five or six years at the beginning of our lives. First comes Love! It is this first experience of Love that will inform our experience of the senses, the soul. When this chain has become twisted and love deformed, the journey will include the suffering of reforming through metanoia to begin again.
The journey of any child who has been rejected or abandoned will need to go through many stages of suffering and reforming to recognise who he or she already is; Beloved in the eyes of the Lover.
Our senses are the touchstone to knowing within space and time, moulded by that Love that was the beginning, the plan, and the agency in whose ending each one of us have our beginning. For this reason, we move to an understanding of what is good, true, and beautiful. But there are more steps and more chapters to fill to reach the strength of the will. This new chapter is called ‘falling in love’. It is here that all the striving of the ego to be on top, to dominate, and to control comes to end in the ‘vulnerability of love’. This is the exemplar of the Cross of Christ.
Suddenly all striving becomes meaningless. Suddenly the ‘me’ that I thought I was, becomes the ‘I am’ as seen in the eyes of the Lover, and I stand in awe at who I am.
Any religion of Imperial power and domination leads to corruption in which the vulnerability of love is stifled and trampled upon.
Our Franciscan call has always been to begin again from the bottom, from the outside, from those rejected, because this is where Jesus is to be found. In this vision, the corruption of clericalism is an abhorrence.
Each one of us is called to make that journey to the centre of our being, finding that core of the divine within us that resonates with the transcendent divine beyond space and time. Touching the eternal transcendent we come face-to-face with Truth that dissolves or our illusions of who I portray.
This is the sacred space of encounter with Jesus who is the Way, the Life, and the Truth. It is only from the stage of encounter that we have anything to say to the world. It is only then that we are truly awake and aware. It is only then that we can see all our diversions and divisions for what they truly are. It is only from this position of newfound humility; a position stripped of Imperial prestige and the gilt of our patriarchal and hierarchical power structures that we are able to rebuild again as St Francis did, in his own age.
This is where the kingdom of God is to be found. This will be a difficult journey filled with rejection and much suffering as was Jesus’ journey.
All power structures that have been forged in corruption will fight to hold on to their positions, prestige, and possessions.
May Jesus the Christ grant us the insight, courage, peace, and joy that the world cannot overcome.
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