In The Living of These Days

"Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you." - Ephesians 4:32 Be kind to one another.  Or, be tenderhearted.  Forgive as you have been forgiven first by God in Christ.  Paul says such easy words, or at least easy on the surface.  But, these words are hard.  Kindness is a virtue; being kind to another person takes work, struggle, and even a bit of passion. This week, the Junior Varsity and Varsity teams from South Haven High School have started their football games.  That means that the Band has started practicing and drilling for their halftime show as well.  I've been thinking back to my days in band this week.  My band director had this motto in the front of the band room that he would always open and end the school year with:  Be Kind.  Two simple words, but they were there in front of everyone; not at the side or in the corners of the chalkboard, they were plastered in capital ...

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.  We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.  We should like to skip the intermediate stages.  We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.  And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability –  and that it may take a very long time.  And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually – let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.  Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstance acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.  Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.  Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete” [“Patient Trust” by Pierre Teilhard deChardin, SJ) I l...

"We are not called to relate to God without a world. To love God we must also love what God loves. We are called to love this created world as God loves it. . . . We are to help transform this universe in Christ by seeing Christ in the universe and loving Christ at the heart of the universe." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin de Chardin has become one of my favorite thinkers and mystics in the life of the Church.  He writes a prayer that I have used with my spiritual director about trusting in the slow work of God and helping us to slow down a little bit in a culture that calls for "the need for speed." This morning, this quote is what I am resting with.  To love God we must also love what God loves.  We must also love the creation and everything it as God does.  Everything in it- that even includes people, and sometimes, admittedly, that's a challenge.  God is active in out world- not some displaced far off entity that sets things in motion and then leaves them ...

"For in [Christ] every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’ For this reason it is through him that we say the ‘Amen’, to the glory of God." - 2 Corinthians 1:20            We are reading here the first little bit of what our Bibles break down as 2 Corinthians.  This is Paul's letter to the church/community of faith in Corinth and both 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians are likely really just one letter, not two separate books like our Bibles tend to separate them.  Some of the correspondence from the Corinthian congregations are lost, we don't have those manuscripts, but we do have what is left of Paul's reply.  In this first chapter of the continuation of the letter, Paul and Timothy are writing to the community to tell them they are going to be delayed in coming to see them.  They did not plan for this to happen, and they could not have said, "Yes, we are coming" and then "No, we are not."  Thus, in Christ eve...