Welcome to the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time.
I deeply appreciate both the readings of this Eighteenth Sunday and Fr Mike’s homily. As he read the Gospel Jesus’ words rang out
Jesus said to them,
“I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
Never hunger.
Never thirst.
These words captured my attention almost enough for me to pause the recording and wander around a bit in my own head. Instead the aha! moment echoes through and the enjoyment of learning and affirmation of the homily carried through. Towards the end of the homily Fr Mike says, “the only way out (of the desert/of this life to eternity) is through the desert of this life” as paraphrased by my being. The Grace of Through is something I’ve been pondering for a long time, something I’ve shared with others, something worthy of looking and and praying with.
The understanding of the Grace of Through started in a conversation with my spiritual director. “The only way is through,” he said “trying to go around it will only frustrate you further.” In other words, don’t try to avoid the place of the desert, go through it. As Fr Mike preached bringing together the experience of the Israelites being freed and taken to the desert he spoke of the desert as being a place of trust, a place of learning to trust God. I often we often think “If only I had foresight I could trust God.” That’s not trust.
I’ve often wondered why they had to wander through the desert for so long. It takes time, it takes practice, it takes being willing to be taught, it takes the experience of being provided for to learn to trust.
And in that conversation with my spiritual director we were talking about the trust relationship with parents, how sometimes this needs to be revisited so that God can bring you (me) to that place of Trusting Him through the experience. We learn about God, we place on God those qualities that we learn from our parents and sometimes it takes a while to be ready to go through to a place of Trust in God and healing. Sometimes this is a paradigm shift, a place where many things are coming together, so that I can be reformed, reoriented, towards God and that ever deepening relationship.
The Israelites needed time to practice Trusting God for their needs. I need time to practice Trusting God for my own. They needed to come to a place of detachment from the experience of over 400 years. I need to come to a place of detachment of the experiences of my years. Yes this happened, it’s not the boss of me, God is kind, merciful, trustworth and is taking me Through to deeper intimacy with him. I need to share this and am reluctant so please bear with me and prior to reading know that I’m sharing this from a place where God and I have worked together to go through and while I am likely still going through I’ve experienced some wild healing and great grace.
Sometime between kindergarten and first grade my mom, for a period of time, abandoned our family Dad, older brother and two younger sisters. The memory of the night she left was clear for so long, being up either most or all night looking out the window yearning for her to come home. Not knowing where she was, if she would ever return, and at that age wondering what *I* did for her to leave. She returned just days before we moved back to Maine to be near my dad’s parents. The insecurity and fear of this happening again remained with me a long time and with some other experiences formed in me some ways of being that have taken a lot of time and some seriously intentional work to get through. Part of the healing came in spiritual direction in that conversation of the Grace of Through and also in a prayer/healing experience earlier this year. (I am giggling at God’s sense of humor right now because when this experience happened our family lived at the edge of the desert.)
There are times when I think I’m completely on the other side of something there are hidden things associated that bubble up to the surface. That said, in the prayer experience I was led to ask Jesus where He was in that moment with me. What I experienced was He was right next to me, looking out the window waiting for her, desiring for her return home. In my little kid mind that took forever! The physical healing part stunned me as this annoyingly odd stiffness in my right shoulder eased off as that’s where Jesus’ hand was. As I experience this in this moment, my head is resting on His chest, I can hear His heartbeat and a sweet peace surrounds. As I pick up my head to write to you, my head tilts towards Jesus’ chest, eyes closed. it is a physical sensation I’m experiencing.
Part of the healing is in the prayer experience, part of the healing is in the learning how to count the cost in a way that leads to forgiving a debt, and part of it has come in the yearning for a more intimate relationship with God in a way that has permitted me to look at experiences that come to the surface, that were formative in my life and allow God to, with my cooperation, transform them.
We all have experiences that lead us to believing that God abandoned us in the worst moments of our lives. Yet it is these experiences that lead us towards greater compassion for others. Where we can say to others from a place of surety that God didn’t abandon you in this moment. It is here with the Israelites in the desert, it is with Jesus on the Cross that we can experience the Grace of Through. This Grace of Through in some ways affirms this call I experience towards spiritual direction both in being IN direction myself and in the ever deepening desire to Walk with others in spiritual direction. It is also the Grace of Through that leads me to reexamine some work experiences looking for where I didn’t do so well, but also to see where God was in them and pick up those drops of Grace he has for me there, to count the cost for forgiveness and to realize that in this desert place I am actually learning to Trust God more.
May you experience the Grace of Through.
Teri
A Quilter's Heart 