Fear of God

Thursday of the First Week in Lent

Esther 14:1, 3-5

Then Queen Esther, seized with deadly anxiety, fled to the Lord. She prayed to the Lord God of Israel, and said: "O my Lord, you only are our king; help me, who am alone and have no helper but you, for my danger is in my hand. Ever since I was born I have heard in the tribe of my family that you, O Lord, took Israel out of all the nations, and our ancestors from among all their forebears, for an everlasting inheritance, and that you did for them all that you promised."

The biblical term "fear of God" does not refer to the emotion of fear. Fear of God is a technical term in the Bible meaning the right relationship with God. The right relationship with God is to trust him. The right relationship with God involves reverence and awe for God's transcendence and immanence as well as trust in his goodness and compassion. To envisage what the biblical fear of God actually means, imagine a child at Christmastime in a huge department store. The top floor, the size of a whole city block, is filled with toys. When the child emerges from the elevator into the wonderland of desirable objects, her eyes grow bigger and bigger She looks to the left and to the right, seeing everything her heart has ever desired: skis, teddy bears, doll houses, toys, sleds, electric trains, computers. She wants to go in every direction at once. She is so enthralled that she does not know where to start. She wants to grasp everything and take it home. The biblical fear of God is similar We feel ourselves invited into a mystery that contains everything our hearts could possibly desire. We experience the fascination of the Ultimate Mystery rather than fear of the unknown. We want to grasp or be grasped by the mystery of God's presence that opens endlessly in every direction.

~Invitation to Love

Prayer

Come, Holy Spirit, be present in time of temptation
and gently coax our timid hearts to trust in You.

Purification

Friday of the First Week in Lent

Ezekiel 18:21-22

But if the wicked turn away from all their sins that they have committed and keep all my statutes and do what is lawful and right, they shall surely live; they shall not die. None of the transgressions that they have committed shall be remembered against them; for the righteousness that they have done they shall live.

In religious circles there is a cliché that describes the divine purification as "a battering from without and a boring from within." God goes after our accumulated junk with something equivalent to a compressor and starts digging through our defense mechanisms, revealing the secret corners that hide the unacceptable parts of ourselves. We may think it is the end of our relationship with God. Actually, it is an invitation to a new depth of relationship with God. A lot of emptying and healing has to take place if we are to be responsive to the sublime communications of God. The full transmission of divine life cannot come through and be fully heard if the static of the false self is too loud.

Once we start the spiritual journey, God is totally on our side. Everything works together for our good. If we can believe this, we can save ourselves an enormous amount of trouble. Purification of the unconscious is an important part of the journey. The decision to choose the values of the gospel does not touch the unconscious motivation that is firmly in place by age three or four, and more deeply entrenched by the age of reason. As long as the false self with its emotional programs for happiness is in place, we tend to appropriate any progress in the journey to our selves.

The experience of God's love and the experience of our weaknesses are correlative. These are the two poles that God works with as he gradually frees us from immature ways of relating to him. The experience of our desperate need for God's healing is the measure in which we experience his infinite mercy The deeper the experience of God's mercy, the more compassion we will have for others.

~Invitation to Love

Prayer

Holy Spirit of God, may the refining fire of Your Love reach into the hidden places of our inmost being and make us one spirit with You.

Oneness of Creation

Saturday of the First Week in Lent

Matthew 5:43-45

You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. " But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray, for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

One of the things that Centering Prayer, as it deepens, will affect is our intuition of the oneness of the human family, and indeed, the oneness of all creation. As one moves into one's own inmost being, one comes into contact with what is the inmost being of everyone else. Although each of us retains his or her own unique personhood, we are necessarily associated with the Divine-human person who has taken the whole human family to himself in such a way as to be the inmost reality of each individual member of it. And so, when one is praying in one's inmost being, in one's spirit, one is praying, so to speak, in everyone else's spirit.

In the Eucharist, we are not only joined to Jesus Christ present with his whole being under the symbols of bread and wine, but we believe we are joined with all other Christians, with every member of the human race, and indeed with the whole of creation. Jesus Christ in his divinity is in the hearts of all men and women and in the heart of all creation, sustaining everything in being. This mystery of oneness enables us to emerge from the Eucharist with a refined inward eye, and invites us to perceive the mystery of Christ everywhere and in everything. He who is hidden from our senses and intellect in his divine nature becomes more and more transparent to the eyes of faith to the consciousness that is being transformed. Christ's Spirit in us perceives the same Spirit in others.

The Eucharist is the celebration of life, the dance of the divine in human form. We are part of that dance. Each of us is a continuation of Christ's incarnation insofar as we are living Christ's life in our own lives--or rather, instead of our own lives. The Eucharist is the summary of all creation coming together in a single hymn of praise and thanksgiving. In the Eucharist all creation is transformed into the body of Christ, united with his divine Person, and thrust into the depths of the Father for ever and ever. Even material creation has become divine in him.

~Contemplative Outreach News, Winter, 1997

Prayer

O Holy Spirit,
through our growing union with Jesus, 
help us to practice the utmost charity
toward the members of our family,
toward our respective communities,
and toward the whole human family.

~~~~~