Category Archives: God

Things I am pondering…

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Wisdom House, Litchfield CT July 2014

Today I am wondering about how compartmentalizing our spiritual life keeps us from God. Many of us seem to think that the place to pray is Church, perhaps at mass. I’ve heard the remark that mass is “my time with God.” While I do understand that, and have thought it myself, I have to wonder how this harms our spiritual growth and well-being.

This is not to say that mass is not time with God, but it is time with God in community. For me, I see it as a rather large, raucous, dinner party with Jesus. I love time alone with God, but mass is not where I expect it.

This is not meant to be a post delineating liturgical elements and ecclesiology. Maybe we will do that another day, but today I am pondering the nearly invisible but resilient fabric of integrated spiritual life. It is something I long for, gratefully something I glimpse, but it can appear to be elusive.

This got me wondering about how I compartmentalize, without fully understanding the utterly shocking reality of Christ in the most mundane and often annoying moments of life. Doing the grocery shopping, cleaning the bathroom, dealing with a difficult person, and so forth. How many times am I sitting in a meeting as a sense of growing testiness rises up within me because I am impatient, thinking to myself “I can’t wait to go on retreat.”

If I cannot experience the presence of God in all moments and all things, how can I expect to find God at a monastery or retreat house?

Of course retreats, mass, spiritual direction, and other such pursuits are important. However, today I am hoping to smooth out the ridges that keep me from traversing the ordinary and the holy in one journey. Maybe my need for this day is to experience the “Quiet Area” that is deep within my heart, rather than seeking it as part of something external.

What is your quiet area? The one in your heart and the one outside. How can any of us stitch the interior and exterior together with the thread of God in our very being into a quilt of holy integration?

This will be my prayer today. Will you join me?

Allowed in

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This morning I came across the words of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, also known as the Kotzker Rebbe. You can learn more about who he was here. When asked where God could be found, he replied, “Wherever He is allowed in.” You can find this and more of his wisdom at this link.

If you look at the graphic at the top you may read it as GOD IS NOWHERE.

Or you may see it and understand it as GOD IS NOW HERE.

What a reminder that God is where God is allowed in. We might believe that we always allow God in, but it is worth examining how we might do quite the opposite.

Where is God in your life today? Nowhere? Or now here? God is all powerful, but the choices here are given to us by God. What a risk on God’s part, vulnerable, and also hopeful.

Today when each of us wonders in prayer about where God is, perhaps we can pray with this notion, that God is turns out to be where we allow. What will you choose today?