"Action Please"
"Action Please"
If the Bible is anything, it’s the word of God’s involvement in the action of history. A great image of this is Mary’s Visitation, as recorded in the first chapter of Luke. Last year I gave a retreat in the Holy Land to the Franciscans in Ain Karem, the town of John the Baptist. Right across the valley is the Church of the Visitation. Every night after I’d talk to the friars all day, I’d walk across the valley and sit on a beautiful wall and look over the area and try to picture Mary coming from Nazareth (which is quite a walk, by the way, and would have certainly taken some days) up through this valley and to this place where she met Elizabeth.
As I read this story, I was struck by how different her response was to what my response probably would have been. If I found out I was to be the mother of God, the first thing I would plan would be a thirty-day retreat or something. I’d say to myself, “I gotta go into solitude and get it together and purify my motives and work this out theologically.” I would go inside my head.
Yet read the passage. She is out of herself; she is free of her need to get it together. Immediately she set out for the hill country of Judea to help her cousin, whom she heard was pregnant, too (Luke 1:36-39).
Marian images are so simple that we can listen. They’re so right on; they’re so clear-cut and defined. And here it is, the primacy of action. God can reach me in my taking care of my pregnant cousin, in moving toward the world as it is. I think when we respond to need as it is right in front of us, usually we are not as susceptible to our egos. Life in front of us pulls us out of ourselves and we have to do it because it’s there. That’s how I see people being purified. That kind of spirituality I can trust.
If your life is not moving toward practical action in this real, living world, with other people, with the not-me, don’t trust your spirituality. But your engagement must happen in tandem with contemplation, the inner disengagement with ego and openness to God. Contemplation is the Divine therapy that purifies our work and involvement.
Action and contemplation are the two polarities that regulate and balance the faith-filled life. It saddens me that most Christianity is right in the middle. It’s neither radical interiority nor radical engagement. You don’t learn much in the mediocre middle, and you don’t have much to give.
from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction
If the Bible is anything, it’s the word of God’s involvement in the action of history. A great image of this is Mary’s Visitation, as recorded in the first chapter of Luke. Last year I gave a retreat in the Holy Land to the Franciscans in Ain Karem, the town of John the Baptist. Right across the valley is the Church of the Visitation. Every night after I’d talk to the friars all day, I’d walk across the valley and sit on a beautiful wall and look over the area and try to picture Mary coming from Nazareth (which is quite a walk, by the way, and would have certainly taken some days) up through this valley and to this place where she met Elizabeth.
As I read this story, I was struck by how different her response was to what my response probably would have been. If I found out I was to be the mother of God, the first thing I would plan would be a thirty-day retreat or something. I’d say to myself, “I gotta go into solitude and get it together and purify my motives and work this out theologically.” I would go inside my head.
Yet read the passage. She is out of herself; she is free of her need to get it together. Immediately she set out for the hill country of Judea to help her cousin, whom she heard was pregnant, too (Luke 1:36-39).
Marian images are so simple that we can listen. They’re so right on; they’re so clear-cut and defined. And here it is, the primacy of action. God can reach me in my taking care of my pregnant cousin, in moving toward the world as it is. I think when we respond to need as it is right in front of us, usually we are not as susceptible to our egos. Life in front of us pulls us out of ourselves and we have to do it because it’s there. That’s how I see people being purified. That kind of spirituality I can trust.
If your life is not moving toward practical action in this real, living world, with other people, with the not-me, don’t trust your spirituality. But your engagement must happen in tandem with contemplation, the inner disengagement with ego and openness to God. Contemplation is the Divine therapy that purifies our work and involvement.
Action and contemplation are the two polarities that regulate and balance the faith-filled life. It saddens me that most Christianity is right in the middle. It’s neither radical interiority nor radical engagement. You don’t learn much in the mediocre middle, and you don’t have much to give.
from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction
posted by LuisVelasco @ 8:34 AM
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