God or No God Becomes God Because I Know Good News When I Hear It

October 10, 2019

 Notes from Gethsemani Abbey, Trappist, KY.

What goes on here at Gethsemani Abbey daily is really quite astounding.

Deep calls to deep for the sake of the world.

Could it be that God or No God is the very same thing? That our cry in praise or supplication to either is doing so to the very same person or place or thing?

It is deep calling to deep.

Who cries out? The Deep.

Who hears and listens? The Deep.

I’m not trying to be cute, whimsical or fancy with the truth. I’m trying to see if anybody is there to hear.

I do not know. That is the truth of it. Not until I hear it again and hear it again every day I must in order for it to stick with me. 

And I will not be led by or fooled by your surety. Simply because you know doesn't mean I know. I must be told. Tell me that story again. Not just any story. That story. It doesn't have to have sacred names but it must have no strings attached self-giving. And if you name Jesus in the story please don't stop by telling me to follow him in some way. Tell me he is following me in a very specific way. Then it might have chance with me. 

I do know I am longing for Home and that I want others to be there or here with me.

And I do know good news when I hear it.

And it could be, yes, likely is, not only maybe is, that I will get some of that today, well, if I am fortunate. And it will be all that I need.

I like to ask people, when I sit with them in settings where conversation is called upon to bring hospitality to the moment, to tell me a story. By that I mean, I and normally do explain what I mean, tell me something of what’s going on with them.

I could of course hear most anything and it could be complaint or it could be happiness, but more likely it starts out at least as “not much,” not much is going on. Not much to comment on much less expound upon. But with another question or two – something like “so on a Sunday afternoon, like today, what do you plan on doing?” – there begins to be an opening and a story begins. It is the story of their afternoon which is the story of their life.

I think, I wonder, in asking and in the hospitality of allowing another to tell their story, if I am not always searching for some good news. Not that complaint or happiness, but the liberation of soul that comes with unconditional love given out of nowhere. Deep calling out to deep.  Could I hear such good news today? If I am fortunate this gospel will be given to me today. It can be super simple and straight forward and not at all complicated and will most of the time have no sacred text or name involved.

I will get the gift – did you catch that I said unconditional love and I don’t mean necessarily given to me although that  is the most explosively liberating – and it will be all that I get. Nothing will be explained and nothing will be solved and there will be no deus ex machina.  It will be religion-less good news. It will be all that I get, again, if I am fortunate.

And it will be all that I need.

In the Flesh: On Mortality as Life

Could it be that the truth of life, that is to say life's depth and breadth and its center, comes not from a detachment from the material and finite but rather from an attachment to the very same? That, for example, Jesus' admonitions not to fear are not a call for us as subject to act against our death and loss but rather for us as object of the promise to receive that promise so that or so as to embrace our mortality as friend rather than enemy. It is to realize as Martin Hagglund in his new book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom seems to me to argue, full life comes when, not in spite of but because we know we will not have life forever. When Paul in the New Testament Bible book of First Corinthians states that the last enemy to be destroyed is death, and this destruction by Jesus and his resurrection, he is saying that death becomes friend not by it's elimination but by it's embrace. Could it be that the profundity we see and recognize and are drawn to that is the incarnation, the divine in the flesh, the immortal in the mortal, is precisely that all of life is found only in life, not a life after death, and that the only hope we have for a real or authentic and full life comes not in having it never end but in realizing and embracing that it does?