Theme 3 - The Hope & Renewal of Our Lives by Greg Allen

Transcription

1 Theme 3 - The Hope & Renewal of Our Lives by Greg Allen Richard Rohr is a Franciscan Friar ordained to the priesthood in the Catholic Church. I deeply enjoy his writings and find much spiritual wisdom there. I'd like to start this third session with a few quotes from his writing. First: There is only one absolutely necessary starting point for spiritual growth and renewal. The experience of powerlessness is where we all must begin. Here we find a very profound spiritual paradox that surface in numerous religious traditions. We grow by letting go. Surrender in a deep, utter sense, is what God calls us to. "Be still, and know that I am God" Second: All mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning...as German mystic-philosopher Meister Eckhart said, spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition. Again, less is more in our spiritual lives. We need to let go, take away, de-clutter our lives interiorly. How can God's presence fill us if we have no room for God?

2 Third: To fully understand is to always stand under, and to let things have their way with you. It is strangely a giving up of control to receive a free gift and find a new kind of control. Once more we are met with paradox...to be free, one must give up control. Surrendering gives one a new kind of freedom where God is fully allowed to work within our souls. If Mary had said no to God, we would never, ever have known who she was or that she even existed. Clinging to the ways of the world (Security, Attachment, Prestige, Status Quo) we lose our soul, our true self that God conceived us to be. Fourth: God has to radically change the central reference point of our lives. Fr. Rohr speaks deeply to this in his book Falling Upward. True spiritual growth is possible only after we have been shaken out of our safe everyday patterns, when our world is shifted, when our inner compass is spun and directed to a new reference point. Being attentive to these spiritual pearls of wisdom moves us into the third phase of the Advent Season...Hope and Renewal. It is the Surrender and Letting Go of Mary & Joseph that allows God to enter

3 history in a new way in Jesus, rupturing the distance between God & Humanity and allowing true Transformation to occur. Their submission allows God's saving activity to become operative in the world. "And the Word of God became Flesh and dwelt among us". Much can be said about the human condition we all find ourselves within. We have so much potential not yet realized. We are capable of such profound love and self-sacrifice...and also such cruelty and monstrousness. We feel a yearning to be more than we are and we hold up those who live more closely to this divine potential (King and Gandhi and Teresa and Romero and Francis and Clare and Malala and Katerie). We yearn for a Kingdom where justice will prevail, where swords will be beaten into plowshares, where Lions will lie down with Lambs, where peacemakers will be called Sons & Daughters of God, where one is judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, where all are seen as created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, where want and need are relics of the past, where we dwell with the Divine face-to-face in loving relationship in a city of utopian bliss. Where feelings of love and unity and belonging and comfort and compassion prevail. The Advent season reminds us that this is God's desire as well. This is God's plan for us, for God's world, for all of Creation. The Advent season also reminds us that God respects us as beings...god invites, offers, asks, presents. But God never demands, forces, controls, captures or manipulates. No, those are the methods of a more sinister

4 spirit, one who divides and separates us from our fullest potential. God values and respects us enough to wait for our internal Yes, our surrender, our Marian "let it be done to me" before acting. God will not heal our lives until we open ourselves to His activity. God will not transform history without us or in spite of us, for we ARE HIS STORY! We move and live and have our being because of the Divine. Advent reminds us that God so loved the world that God sent his only Son into it, to be the LIGHT in its darkness. Jesus, God dwelling among us, is the Light that makes the Darkness Holy. We read this GOOD NEWS in the opening of John's Gospel In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.* He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness,* and the darkness has not overcome it.... The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God;

5 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son from the Father. For Reflection: Where in our lives do we need light to overcome darkness? What are we being called to surrender, to let go of, to put in God's hands for renewal? Where are we being shaken out of our patterns, shifted to a new reference point? What do we Hope for, dream of, wait expectantly for this season? Advent calls us to Hope and Renewal. We must be attentive to these words and realize their true meaning in this Advent Season. Hope is not wishful thinking. That is part of a child's experience of this season. "I hope I get a new bike for Christmas. I hope I get a new Xbox 360 for Christmas." No, Hope in its truest sense is a deep trust in a better future which is lived out and acted upon in the present. It is ACTIVE trust, something we pour our energy and activity into in the here and now as we look to that new future. We can get a clearer sense of this when we reflect on some of the great movements and figures that have led to a changed way of life. MLK's "I have a Dream" speech given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a Hope in this sense. He and many others acted on this Hoped-for-future with trust in the years following that speech. And it is because of their active trust that this dream

6 would become a reality that a similar gathering occurred at those very same steps to celebrate the inauguration of America's first African American President in Advent reminds us that we are called to be active in our darkness...not passive and fearful. Renewal is the second thing that Advent calls us to. In one sense Renewal means to make new again. We renew memberships and wedding vows, thereby recommitting ourselves to participate fully again. And too, there is a note of transformation in the idea of Renewal. The season is meant to transform us, to form us beyond what we are now. For this to occur, however, we need to have an understanding of what we are to be transformed into. What is the ultimate endpoint of our existence? For what were we created, intended? St. Ignatius addresses this specifically and directly in his Spiritual Exercises. He names it as The First Principal & Foundation. In his words: The First Principle and Foundation The human person is created to praise, reverence, and serve God Our Lord, and by doing so, to save his or her soul. (All other things on the face of the earth are created for human beings in order to help them pursue the end for which they are created. It follows from this that one must use other created things, in so far as they help towards one's end, and free oneself from them,

7 in so far as they are obstacles to one's end. To do this, we need to make ourselves indifferent to all created things, provided the matter is subject to our free choice and there is no other prohibition. Thus, as far as we are concerned, we should not want health more than illness, wealth more than poverty, fame more than disgrace, a long life more than a short one, and similarly for all the rest, but we should desire and choose only what helps us more towards the end for which we are created.) Other spiritualties present this as being united with the Divine fully forever. And so, our focus in Advent turns to ultimate things, to our very existence in the grand scheme of things. Mary's yes to God's advent or coming into the world is the first act of transformation where God offers the Hope and the Reality of the fulfillment of Creation. God also calls humanity into this transformation not as spectators, but as actors in the mission of this transformation. We are called to renew our lives, transform our lives as Hopeful signs of the coming ultimate transformation of all of Creation which has begun in the person of Jesus. We are each called to reflect on where our lives need transformation, recommitment, refocus, re-shifting of direction. We are called to take seriously these questions and begin this work of transformation within ourselves and our lives. Thus we become

8 living signs of Hope in the world of God's transformation. God's activity in Creation and the Holy Darkness of our lives leads us to Hope & Renewal spiritually...and ultimately to the completion of the Creative process that God has been attending to throughout history.