The Six Word: Learning to Read—God’s Fusion

Almighty God, author of my life,
help me learn to read what you have written on my heart
Give me discerning eyes and an untiring spirit
to look within me
in order to understand how to reach outside of me.
give me the generosity to help others to read you,
to sound you out one letter,
one word of radical giving at a time
—Author Unknown

I don’t remember learning to read, it happened gradually as it does for most children. I do remember when I began to move from word to story. It all began with a little boy named Mark, who played in a park with a dog that would bark. At that moment I discovered how my imagination allowed me to become that little boy playing with his dog and how the adventure could move beyond the page of the book into the greater idea of meaning in a letter, a word, phrase and story. I could read.
God reads us and in turn we are invited to read God who is the living Word, as the prayer above suggests…one letter, one syllable, word and sentence at a time. It is discerning the pattern, the phonic sound, the syntax. True discerning of Gods will, my journey to do his will is always that, sometimes simply, sometimes complex, in walking with others becoming the center of the story in Jesus and then going out to toil in learning to read once with others which in grace and blessing brings the other back to the center with Jesus…again and again, over and over with some stories becoming fruitful while others a jumble of letters and phrases, unintelligible in the beginning but in reality a story to be shared and given in God. God who in the Spirit will help us to rewrite and unscramble the fear and failure into the beauty of a living word.
The fusion of God’s grace and blessing and our acceptance the becomes a reality, a story of life and love amidst the hurt and sin that surround us. In discerning the spiritual blessings and the decision we make we begin to decipher anew how our stories become deeper and more full of life where the next chapter gathers the past into a foundation of a future of blessing. The temptation is to fear the fusion of the Spirits fire and all make the story about me and only me, my hero story where we never write the next chapter but begin to fearfully repeat with unimaginative variation the small story again and again. Never looking outward to hear other stories or find the other in our story that is worthy of growing…to never seek the second chapter, the continued journey, the quest for the greater but remain stuck in the repeating script of mediocrity.
God sending us out is the invitation to be life—go be life giving—to be a child who enters into the imagination of God.

The Seventh Word: Balanced—to absorb and be absorbed

In seeking freedom we are often searching for a balance in life but find ourselves trapped into an illusion, the deception of the evil of the sin of isolation instead of the union we desire. We close our spiritual eyes, the eyes of our heart, and allow our physical desires tome from satisfied into the excess of indulgence the feeds the gluttony of our desires. Our heart breaks and instead of turning around, we say: Let’s try that again.
The deception is that fantasy while the truth means confronting the messiness of the story that takes time, effort, pain and sorrow as St. Catherine of Sienna reminds us, “He who grows in love, grows in grief”
The fantasy we fall for is the false spirit who blinds us with a vision of glory. With a spotlight shining towards a great and glorious accomplishment somewhere in the future where we are tempted to run as fast as we can, forgetting everyone and everything to grab on to the fantasy, the vision of glory. The false spirit keeps the temptation alive by allowing us small victories that quickly turn to dust in relationship, conquests and flattery of how great we are.
The Holy Spirit, the truth of God, invites not with a shining trinket but with the voice of trust to take on small step where the lamp of God guides our footsteps, our ministry, our life to walk with the other in the shared ministry of trust. He says, Follow me, and we respond in the confidence of hope that foundation that we are building is true in the creating the true future…not of our making…of God’s holy will.
We seek God not a goal. The false spirit of fantasy temps us to move beyond the path with others and find the shortcut of unfreedom, where holiness becomes an exercise of my will and ego against the love of God and the community. The true Holy Spirit invite each of us into a the cross, the holy work the conversion from death to life.
Choosing life is accepting the journey…on slow step at a time…the unwinding of the story of God’s plan, It is the life of absorbing the grace. The stretching and expanding grace of love where we are called to be absorbed into something even greater: becoming…just becoming like God.

The Eighth Word: Respond—slow down—prayer—invitation

In the beginning God spoke a word of creation, and it was good. In the beginning God speaks a word of creation to each of us, a daughter and son, in which we are asked to respond. He speaks: “follow me” and continues with the invitation “remain in me”. The in-between of the then follows with at the experience of so many things including the miracles, blessings, loves, joys and peace (to name a few) were we discover the truth of grace—mercy—reconciliation in the middle muddling of life. It is in the slow-down and the prayer we soon discover the moment to be with in the groundwork of relationship. A relationship joining the first and last words to constantly beating and growing in our heart.
Life begins with a daily, hourly and each minute response and choice to love and be love, to seek and be sought, to be embraced and to embrace by the beloved and those others in our lives.
I like the responding to the call: it is full of excitement, possibility and movement. I like the invitation to remain because there is a the promise of peaceful and restful of holding and being held in a soft and warm embrace.
The middle, the work of discipleship is hard—unrelenting, it is full of failures and hurts where I cannot always grasps the smallness of the necessary miracles or the grandness of the joy of companionship because I am in the middle where distraction and the next thing always seem to be vying for attention.
The middle of prayer, of slowing down of remembering “in the beginning” become the initial love and the promised love of eternal gift. The middle becomes the soil fertilized and tilled producing he fruit of abundance. It is the surprise of seeing the first sprout, it is the hard work of the harvest…it becomes the banquet where we are once more asked to respond and invited to remain in love.