12th Sunday Reflection: Do Not Be Afraid Of Death
Franciscan Reflections From The Hermitage – 12th Sunday In Ordinary Time Of Year A – Do Not Be Afraid Of Death – (Matthew 10:26-33)
The experience of our early Franciscan seekers… mystics and hermits: Caught in the embracing gaze of the beloved, we find our own woundedness reflected in the suffering of the other. In the bloodied heart of the other’s suffering, I become blinded, sightless and rudderless… now subsumed into the heart of the other, where there are no longer two hearts… only one heart beating. It is in this beating of two hearts become one that we find the birthing of our soul identity. To deny this identity is to seek annihilation… the way of illusion and paranoia.
In this all too fleeting space of time, in this NOW, I become one with the heart of the cosmos. I am among the trees that embrace the divine breath. I gaze into the heavens and the awe of ages sings within me. The sunrise and the sunset envelop me in the majestic divine melody.
As I bend to sit with the broken-hearted, the bereft and the dying, something new awakens within me.
I was called to bring the sacraments to a dying woman. The aged matriarch of the great clan of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. As her final moments arrived, her face started glowing in radiant light. As this light filled the room, the great gathering of family around her deathbed moved into a sacred hushed silence. What a wonderful and awful manifestation… this dying woman was already the sacrament I presumed to bring to her. That which was within her already, echoed the divine and we all stood together with her in that luminous doorway between the imminent and the transcendent. Now we stand in that juxtaposition… more God’s transcendence is emphasised, the less God’s immanence can be understood and vice-versa.
Yeshua says, “If your spiritual guides say to you, ‘Look, the divine Realm is in the sky,’ well then the birds will get there ahead of you. If they say, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. No, divine Reality exists inside and all around you. Only when you have come to know your true Self will you be fully known, realising at last that you are a child of the Living One. If, however, you never come to know who you truly are, you are a poverty-stricken being, and it is your ‘self’ which lies impoverished.” (Logion 3, The Gospel of Thomas)
Where is the Love? Can it be found in the reciting of our creeds? Can it be found somewhere along the way like some treasure that makes the journey worthwhile? Or is Love the journey itself? Or is it the dream that makes the journey possible? These thoughts ran through St Francis’ mind one day as he listened to Brother Leo reading to him the letter of St John the apostle… God is Love, and if you abide in Love, you abide in God and God in you.
Yet, if you found God, you also found Love. But that was only the beginning of the quest, for was Francis ever sure of having found God or even sure of looking for God in the right places and by the right road?
Francis’ experience in the cave assured him that Jesus dwelled within him, that God was nowhere farther than his own heart. That is where Love was, that is where God was… anywhere and everywhere.
To find God in the poorer crumbling houses of Poggio Bustone, to find God in the Castle of a count, in a cave on Mount Subasio, as well as in the Eucharist reserved in the tiny chapel of St Mary of the Angels. Francis suddenly realised that somewhere along the way he had begun finding God everywhere because God was with him all the time he brought Love with him on the road and that is why he found Love all along the way. [ The Journey and the Dream. By Murry Bodo, 2011.]
It was all so simple when he thought about it now. Love comes to those who have Love already. You find what you bring with you in your heart. God has loved us and that gift is ours before we ever set out to find it. This is our soul identity.
This is the experience of our species now moving out into the world after the darkness within the bloodied heart of creations’ groaning. Our species renewed once more in our young people, baptised in mystic awakening to experience all that unites us to each other, to other cultures, to other life forms, to the earth and to the cosmos.
Thus, they become third partners with the earth and heaven. As such, they are authorised, and have the authority, to speak for and as the whole creation. This is the awareness that ignites the fire of true prophecy. It is the authority to speak with the presence of the author, of Christ’s Logos, of Christ the prophet. Confirmation ‘confirms’ the mystic and opens the heart to the fires of the prophet. [ The Modern Christian Mystic: Finding the Unitive Presence of God. By Albert J. LaChance, 2007.]
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