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.

FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE

It almost goes without saying that there aren’t many good shows on television these days. As Newton Minnow observed fifty years ago, network television was then and is even now more so a “vast wasteland”.  It is even worse especially given the fact that we have over 200 channels to choose from. Back then it was only a half dozen if that. And as much a wasteland as it might have been, there were still great programs every night. Not anymore.

But there are some. One of Arlena’s and my favorites is Elementary. It is the latest version of the Sherlock Holmes series. In this one Sherlock lives in New York City in 2013. Dr. Watson is a woman and so is, as we followers have just learned, Holmes’ arch nemesis Moriarity. It makes for interesting and fun viewing. But in this version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes there is even more to the character than I have seen in other portrayals over the years.

This Holmes is brilliant, as are all of them. He is also a piece of work, as they say, as are all of them. But this Holmes is different. He is fragile. He has been broken because he believed that the one and only love in his life was dead. While he might have been able to rationalize her death, he could not deal with it internally. It ate him up so much so that he became a complete addict and had to be discharged from his duties with Scotland Yard. He moved to America to escape from his past and, thanks to his father, went through rehab and counseling and found a consulting job with the New York City Police.

Even so, this utterly brilliant man remains fragile, broken and has to be handled with care, with kid gloves – and he knows it. Because of his fragility he is wary of getting close to anyone. He feels a sexual connection to Watson but it frightens him because he knows he might lose her just he lost his one love. He does not want that to happen again. He has to be handled with care and he knows he has to handle himself with care.

But don’t we all? We are all fragile creatures, are we not? No matter how brilliant we are, no matter how strong we think we are emotionally, no matter how rich or how powerful or how anything, in the end and throughout it all, we remain fragile human beings. We need to be handled with care – all of us, each and every one of us: there are no exceptions. None.

And isn’t that good news, wonderful news, saving-grace news? That means that it is okay to be afraid. It means that we are allowed and expected to cry when tears should be flowing, tears of joy or tears of sorrow. It means that it is no sign of weakness that others come to hold our hands when those hands need to be held because it is truly a sign of strength that we allow them to do so.

What it means is that we are human and we are just like Jesus. Jesus wept. Jesus feared for his life. Jesus allowed others to minister to him. Jesus was just as fragile as you and I are. He needed to be handled with care just as he handled with care all those fragile people he encountered every day of his life. That’s why we need one another.

THE CRITIC IN US

There is a critic that lurks deep inside each and every one of us. It is part of or being and there is nothing we can do to eliminate it, nor should we. We make judgments about everything whether we realize it or not, whether we verbalize them or not. These judgments come automatically. They simply well up from somewhere within us without our having to summon them.

We watch a movie and we critique it. We eat a meal, whether we dine in or dine out, whether prepared by ourselves, by a loved one or by some anonymous chef, and we have an opinion about the food not only after we have completed the meal but even while we are eating it. A young woman walks by and we critique her outfit, her demeanor, how she is wearing her hair, and soon. It is instinctive and it is human nature to do so.

In the vast majority of those critical moments we do not dwell on our thoughts and opinions. They are quick and they are passing. Most of them are not even memorable as quick as they are and so little effect do they have on our lives on that moment in time. Here they are one second and gone the next. In fact, very few events, meals, movies, even passersby have more than a momentary effect on our lives. That is very good. We would not be able to move on in life if everything and every person transformed our being.

Some do, of course, but most do not. What we need to be aware of, however, is when we begin to dwell on the negative, when we fail to allow ourselves to see the positive that is there. For there is a positive even when it is truly difficult to discover. When we allow ourselves to block out the positive by dwelling so much on the negative, the one who gets hurt the most is ourselves. The negative pulls us down, always. It is only the positive that s uplifting. Thus, if we want to find happiness, we have to find the positive even when it is extremely hard to do so.

While critique is part of a natural response to what we see and hear, the problem is that our spontaneous critiques can easily devolve into criticism, which, by definition, is negative. Yes, “to criticize” means “to evaluate”; but the second definition means “to find fault with”. Thus, the question arises as to why this is so. Why, when we critique someone or something, do we not automatically look for the good, the positive, rather than, it seems, automatically look for the negative. Why, when critiquing a movie, a meal, a person, do we not look for reasons why it or s/he is nor four-star than reasons why not?

Jesus always tried to find the good, the positive, in everyone, especially those whom society critiqued to be losers: the poor, the sick, the outcasts. Jesus knew, and we know, that there is good in there, even if it is hard to find, even when it seems it is impossible to find. In our own personal lives, when we are down on ourselves for whatever reasons we are, the only way to rise up is to recognize the good that is in us, good that seems to be covered up by what we perceive as so much bad. That is not to say that we overlook the bad. It is to say that the only way to overcome the bad is by being aware of the good that is present. That is not easy to do, but do it we must.

SINS, DEBTS AND TRESPASSES

Most of us when we say the “Lord’s Prayer” (it is called that, of course, because it is the only prayer Jesus taught his followers – us – to say), ask God “to forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. The newer translation asks God “to forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”. Our Presbyterian brothers and sisters normally ask God, “to forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”. According to most of the theologians I read, the Presbyterians have it right, or more right as the case may be.

Nevertheless, my suspicion is that, given a choice, most of us will stick with the word with which we are most familiar and, in all honesty, more comfortable: trespasses. For when we think about that word, we usually think about going into another person’s property that has a “No Trespassing” sign posted. The property is off limits. Thus, if we do in fact trespass, we know we are doing wrong and will probably get into some kind of trouble if we are caught. But let’s be honest, we do not think it’s any big deal unless the property owner has a shotgun pointed at us or is the federal government.

“Sins”, on the other hand, are a big deal. When we trespass on someone else’s property, we may be breaking the law but we don’t usually consider what we are doing as being sinful. Sin has to do with a deliberate moral failure and not a deliberate legal wrong. When we sin, we know that what we are doing is not what God would has us do, but we do it anyway, whether it is a sin of commission or a sin of omission: dog what we know we should not do or not doing what we know we should do.

In the realm of morality most of us would consider sinning as being worse than trespassing even though, in the real world, we sin more every day than we trespass: we break more moral laws than we break civil laws. Yes, we know in our heads that when we say the Lord’s Prayer and ask God to forgive us our trespasses, we are really asking God to forgive our sins. So why are we so reluctant to say so?

Even more may be our aversion to the word “debts”. We don’t owe God anything, do we? How are we so in debt to God that we have to ask God to forgive whatever debts we have? Yes, we may have financial debts, but those are not any of God’s concern are they? Or at least they are not so much a concern that we have to ask God to forgive us for getting into debt in the first place, are they?

Well, maybe; maybe if we have gotten into debt because of some sinful and foolish action. But, then, that is not the point of the prayer is it? The debts we are asking God to forgive is based on our awareness that everything we have is a gift, a freewill gift from God. What we owe God is to use those gifts and those talents to the very best of our ability. The fact that we do not always do so is the reason why we need to ask God to forgive us for not so doing.

Maybe we really need to ask God to forgive us our “sins, trespasses and debts” and will be covered. But, the other side of the coin is that we must so forgive as well.

ALL GOD CAN DO SOMETIMES IS LAUGH

There was a picture being passed around a while back, maybe still is, of a smiling, actually laughing, Jesus. I suspect many people were/are scandalized. How dare anyone dare a picture of Jesus laughing! With all the suffering going on all over the world to so many innocent people, the vast majority of them children, how could Jesus laugh? How, in fact, can any Christian laugh in such a world of so much suffering?

There is certainly nothing to laugh at in the face of suffering, especially suffering children. Jesus never smiled in such a situation. In fact, it angered him. In the 25th chapter of Matthew's Gospel Jesus warns us that we will be judged based on how we responded to those in need: the poor, the naked, the hungry, the sick. There is nothing funny about suffering. It is no laughing matter. Never was. Never is. Never will be.

There is, however, much in this life that is funny, for which we can do nothing but laugh. Just as tears flow spontaneously, so does a laugh arise spontaneously. When something strikes our funny bone, we laugh. It is just as difficult to suppress a laugh as it is to suppress a tear. We should try to do neither. We should do neither. While it is good to control our emotions, our feelings, they arise because of our God-given nature and they should be allowed to be made manifest.

If we can laugh, if we are allowed to laugh, so it is with God. As there are times when we can do nothing but smile, even guffaw with a hearty and loud laugh, so there are times when God can do nothing but laugh.  I have to believe that God indeed laughs. Thus, the closest we can visualize God laughing, I suppose, of a picture of a laughing Jesus. God laughs with us because God can do nothing else but.

Think about the times in our lives when we have done something so foolish that all we can do is laugh at ourselves. We wonder why we did what we did in the first place that made us look and feel so foolish. We may have even known ahead of time that we were walking into a situation where even angels would dare not go, but we went ahead anyway, and we came away looking like a fool. We were humiliated but all we could do was laugh right along with those laughing at us -- one such laugher being God.

God has to have a sense of humor. After all it was God who created us as we are: fallible, weak, sinful human beings who, on occasion, can and do make fools of ourselves. When we do so, God can do nothing but laugh at us and even laugh along with us. And while laughing, all God hopes for us in that we learn from our foolishness. That is all we can hope for ourselves.

We do learn, thankfully. As we grow older, we grow wiser. That does not mean we come to a point in our lives that we never make foolish decisions, commit foolish acts that can only be laughable in hindsight. God's Kingdom has not yet come. Until it does, we will keep God laughing and laughing at us, individually and collectively, until we get the message. Sometimes that's all God can do when it comes to our foolishness. For that we should be thankful and, someday, be eternally grateful.