DOES GOD REALLY LOVE ME?

My parents raised five children. I am the oldest and, while she was still alive, I was my Mom’s favorite. I know this to be true and so do my siblings. We were at my sister’s home for some gathering with four conversations going on at once: typical when Italians gather. All of a sudden and seemingly for no reason at all, my Mom got up from here chair, walked across the room to where I was sitting and announced to the gathered throng, “I want you all to know that Billy is my favorite.”

Immediately my brother Fran asked, “Mom, what about me?” And she said, “I love all of you equally.” That ended the discussion and I did not dare add to it. Why Mom even brought up the subject of favorites’ I have no idea. I did not ask back then and never did afterward. I suspect I was her favorite because I was her firstborn. The truth is that she had five favorites. The further truth us that each of us over the years has done something that put us in her disfavor as well, human beings that we are.

I think about Mom’s equal love for the five of us and know it to be true. Just because I may have been her favorite, she did not love me more than she did any one of my siblings nor did she ever love them less than she loved me. I got that. However, when I move on to think about God’s and God’s love for me and God’s love for the other six billion or so people who inhabit this planet, it becomes almost unimaginable how God could love each one of us equally. Loving five people equally is difficult enough given our individualities. Try six billion!

Gold’s love is universal. God loves everyone, no exceptions, and God loves everyone equally. We believe that and, yet, when we think about that truth, we find it almost incomprehensible and wonder if it is indeed true especially when we ask why some people are so blessed while others seem, well, so cursed. God has to be playing favorites, does not God? If God loves everyone equally, why is there so much disparity when it comes to doling out the benefits of such love? Should we not all be equal in the reception of God’s gifts if we are all equal in God’s love for us? Mom never gave me better gifts than she gave my siblings. She could have if she wanted to but never did. Could we not say the same for God? Should we not?

Thus we can ask the question: “Does God really love me or am I just one of the lucky ones?” It’s a fair question. The truth is, however, that for many Gild seems to be quite indifferent, like the God of the Deists who claim God created us and then left us on our own. Thus, if we are blessed, well and good. If not, too bad. God really doesn’t care, so they assert.

That is an easy and logical conclusion to draw and many have over the millennia, and still do. It is true, as Father Ron Rolheiser has written, that God’s love is so universal that it is perceived as indifference. The facts may say that is true. Our faith says that it is not. We believe God loves each of us equally, totally, eternally. We do not understand how or even why. We have more questions than answers but that does not stop us from believing that God really does love us.

AMAZING GRACE

A while back Arlena and I attended the funeral of her brother’s mother-in-law. It was a combination of a Baptist-Methodist service, meaning that there was a lot of singing, preaching and praying but not much in what I would consider worship. The Baptists and Methodists in attendance, meaning just about everyone else, loved the service. I like the post-service meal much better.

Be that as it may, the service bean with a hymn by the Baptist choir, one that I had never heard before. It was a take-off, if you will, on that old standard that is almost always sung – or played on a bagpipe if a piper is available – at most Protestant funerals, namely, “Amazing Grace”. I like the hymn even though I am not fond of singing about “a wretch like me”. I may be a sinner, no, I am a sinner, but I don’t think I am a wretch, nor do I believe God considers any one of us to be such. But I digress.

The hymn that was sung I think in titled “No Other Word for Grace But Amazing”. When the choir sang the hymn and I was, to say the least, at least at the moment, startled; brought up short. Yes, I had sung “amazing grace”, those words, many, many times. The words flowed out of my mouth without, to be honest, much thought. And that is true about so many of the hymns that we sing. The words roll off our lips and we sing them with gusto; but we hardly ever pause to reflect on what we are actually saying when we sing those words.

When I heard the choir sing that “there is no other word for grace but amazing”, it was as if I had heard those words for the first time and actually got the message and the meaning of that hymn. Perhaps the reason is that over the years I had allowed myself to be so distracted by being called a wretch that I had missed the central point of the hymn: God’s grace is truly amazing and, as the hymn continued, “no other explanation will do”. God’ grace is amazing. There is no other word or war to explain it.

If you are like me, we will have to admit that we often take God’s grace for granted. We truly believe that God is with us through thick and thin, on good days and bad, even on those days or those times when it almost seems as if God has abandoned us entirely. Throughout it all, we believe that God does leave us alone, that somehow in some way God, through God’s grace, will see us through. We believe that it is God’s grace that makes the good days better and helps us find resurrection and new life when those bad days occur and we feel nothing but death inside us.

In fact, it is only after those bad days, those bad times have passed, when we have found life again, that we can look back and discern just how amazing God’s grace was in helping is through those times when we thought that new life, resurrection, was impossible, so horrible everything was. Yes, we did what we could do, even if it was only to dump everything into God’s hands. Yes, we had the love and support of our family and friends. But even that did not seem enough. What made resurrection possible then and what will make resurrection possible in the future when those bad days do, was and will be God’s grace. Amazing! No other word, no other explanation will do. None.

NOTHING NEED BE SAID

Father Ron Rolheiser, an on-line mentor whom I frequently cite, tells the story of a woman at one of his workshops who shared a story about her six-year-old son. She had taught him to pray and to kneel beside his bed each night and say a number of the prayers she had taught him, ending with “Bless mommy, daddy, grandma and grandpa.” He did so every night.

Then one night shortly after he started first grade, when it came time to kneel down beside his bed to pray, he simply crawled into bed and got under the covers. Shocked, his mother asked him, “What’s the matter? Don’t you pray anymore?” Calmly he replied, “No, I don’t pray anymore. The sister teaching us at school said that we are not supposed to pray. She said that we were supposed to talk to God and tonight I am tired and have nothing to say.”

Prayer certainly is to be about our conversations with God even if that conversation always seems to be one-way: we do all the talking and we trust that God does all the listening; and we hope that after God listens, God will respond in the manner we want God to respond. God often does, but often God does not. Yet even then we have made our concerns known to God. That’s what matters.

Then, too, like the little boy in the story there have been times when we have been so tired that it was an effort simply to crawl into bed and that any thought of prayer, any effort to converse with God, was simply and impossibility. We immediately dropped off to sleep even though there were some serious issues we wanted to lay before God in prayer. Had we not been so tired, so exhausted from the trials and tribulations of the day just passed, we would have. But we were powerless to say anything, so tired were we.

Yet we know, at least subconsciously, that God already knows what is on our mind and in our hearts. Even when we are wide awake and in full contact with our senses, knowing full well what we are about to take it to the Lord in prayer, God already has a good clue about what is about to come out of our mouth. God knows us better than we know ourselves, much, much better.

That does not mean that we need not pray. That does not mean that we have no need to have a conversation with God even though we are the only one who will be doing the talking. No matter how well we know another, in marriage, for instance, even when we can finish the other person’s sentence and that person can finish ours, we still need to be in conversation.

So it is in our relationship with God. Nothing needs to be said between our God and us, but say it we must if we can, if we are awake enough to speak; and hear it God must even if God knows what is about to come forth from our lips, even if God can finish our sentences. Yes, formulated, memorized, rote prayers are fine. They often say exactly what we want to say. But conversations, even one-sided, are vital and better even if nothing need be said.