I
am struck how little we think that there is another world beyond this world. Without
this vision our sights get set too low. Even if we do hold some vision, too often
it is a world beyond only. It is the
faith journey where we hope one day to be. “The sweet by and by,” it has been
called. Or we think it can be made synonymous with this world if someone/everyone
will just act correctly. Sometimes we
hope ‘they’ will be shoe horned into this ‘correctly.’ We sometimes pass laws to see to this. Yet
seldom do those laws legislate that we care for one another or relinquish desired
greed.
Yet
as I read scripture and Jesus and St. Paul, it seems to me this other world,
this reign of God, is more a beckoning finger, a hide to be sought that says, “Just
look over here, find it and take it home.” And thus I continue to read, and
find a hope to take it home. But my home
is not just in me. It is in the world of
you and ‘they.’ So what I/we find is not
just for me/us, it is for all, a righting of our way.
And
so there is forever this tension: as I work on sorting life for me, I must work
on getting it right for ‘they.’ And I
know this is not like legislation, it is more like beckoning, a gentle ‘look
over here.’ Tell me what you see. Do we see the same? Have I missed some part
of the vision you see?
For as the loincloth
clings to one's loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house
of Judah cling to me, says the LORD, in order that they might be for me a
people, a name, a praise, and a glory. But they would not listen. Jeremiah 13:11
But
I will listen, I do listen and I understand that here is a gift: to live our
lives united in the purpose to reflect God’s praise and goodness (glory). We help each other as either a nation or a
subset of a nation, (a people).
Seldom do I look to power and see this vision noticed, seldom legislated though occasionally the vision pushes even those who receive power.
St.
Paul sees things as dichotomies, there is law (which defines human limits more
than possibilities) and there is faith (which opens possibilities, God’s will,
God’s forgiving grace or care). I would
add that as we seek and see the possibilities for good and enter them we become
what God intends. This, St. Paul calls
sanctification, allowing our lives to be useful and thus infused with God’s
intention. It is to allow the world of God to invade us and this world. We taste of the God’s intention and flavor
life with it.
In
His Poem, AIDS, Among Other Things, Peter Kocan reflects on life when we live
in the place of forgetting the world of God’s reign.
The wages of sin is death.
These words run
With a quiet persistence in my brain,
As though the biblical archaic phrase
Had been precisely meant to diagnose
What’s bothering an unreligious man
Like me today. The
blasphemy was met
By sins of silence, cowardice and doubt,
And so we muddied what clear light might thresh
The good from the bad or merely foolish
When the consequences begin to hit.
I fear that we have too glibly mocked
For too long in the word and in the act
To hope we’ve any second chances owed
Or plead extenuation when we’re paid
The wages we knew always to expect.
We acquiesce to birth-in-bottles now,
Dissimulate on every law we knew
Was solemn in the covenants we had
With whatever we call Nature or God,
Yet we never think to reap what we sow.
The ills multiply as we unlearn
That ancient wise humility of men
Who saw, beyond the wreckage of taboos,
Despair and madness, hatred and disease—
The promised
payment in the promised coin.
So
in Lent I choose to see a world beyond that is not the “sweet by and by” but
the possibility now. May it overlay me,
beckon me and may I act as if it is the truer world so I might be paid by its
coin. Yet I need to be aware I get there not alone but in company, in subset
perhaps, or with more. The way there is
created by the many who dare to see, hope and act as if.
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