In the summer of 1921, Mother Etheldred, OSA, sent a letter to the Associates of the Order of Saint Anne, writing “Please pray for us and for this very real venture of faith… Above all, give us your prayers, that through our House of Retreat many may come to know God, not merely to know about Him.”

Intellectual knowledge about God may satisfy the curious mind, but I’ve never found that it satisfies the heart.  Our spiritual journey often starts with thinking, reading, and exploring, but it never ends there.  God within is our nearest and dearest Friend; our Beloved.  When all else fails us, people included, God is closer than the air we breathe.  St. Paul had a very real experience of this, writing to the community in Rome:

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?... For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8: 35, 38-39)

Perhaps it is just me, but does it feel to you that the pace of life seems to be increasing exponentially? There are more things to do than time to do them! At the same time, the scale of injustice in our world seems to have a parallel exponential increase.

Amid this reality, my heart keeps coming back to this question: how much spaciousness is there in my life? Perhaps that feels too naïve or too micro a question given the many macro urgencies that call for our attention.

For your prayer and meditation this week:

“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

If one member suffers, all suffer together with it;

if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”

-        1 Corinthians 12: 27, 26

At Easter, we see God’s power on full display.  Miracle of miracles!

Looking at the Easter narrative more carefully, we see greater nuance to the power of God.  On the road to Emmaus, Jesus walks and talks with two disciples, talking about all the things that have been happening.  Somehow, they do not recognize Jesus until he breaks bread with them.  At that point, they exclaim, “Were not our hearts burning within us?”

When Mary Magdalene finds the stone rolled away at Jesus’ tomb, she experiences shock, grief, and confusion.  We can almost feel Mary’s joy as Jesus calls out to her: “Mary!” and she realizes this gardener is her beloved teacher and friend!

When Jesus displays God’s power through miracles, he doesn’t tell the disciples to spread the news widely.  “Tell no one,” he says.

Lent is often associated with wilderness. Sometimes, the most we can say of the wilderness times in our life is that we survived! Yet, as we look at our ancestors in faith, we see a deeper alternative with wilderness. Henri Nouwen compares the desert and wilderness with entering the furnace of transformation.

In “The Way of the Heart,” Nouwen calls Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness the “three compulsions of the world:”

‘There Jesus was tempted to be relevant (“turn stones into loaves”), to be spectacular (“throw yourself down”) and to be powerful (“I will give you all these kingdoms”). There he affirmed God as the only source of his identity (“You must worship the Lord your God and serve him alone.”)’

As a college student, I was engaged in a lot of social activism, while just beginning to learn how to pray.  During my activism work, surrounded by many people working for outer peace in the world, the realization/question came to me: “Why is it that so many people working for peace in the world don’t have peace inside themselves?”

This realization pointed to the both/and of the spiritual journey.  It is a journey of seeking to be peacemakers in the world, as Jesus invites us, while seeing peace as a holistic journey that starts in our own heart.  In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh (from ‘Peace is Every Step’): “Can the peace movement talk in loving speech, showing the way for peace?  I think that will depend on whether the people in the peace movement can ‘be peace… Peace work means, first of all, being peace.”