How loving God helps us become better People.
The popular images of the presence of God in life are stern ones. Forbidding ones. They speak of mistrust and punishment, of rules and sins, of dread and control. God the Policeman, God the Disciplinarian, God the Spy are all more familiar to the common mind than is the tender, caring God, the Good Shepherd. We have all grown up with too many of the controlling images. But not here. Not in Benedictine spirituality.
Here, in the very first two steps of humility, all those ideas of God as the Master Rule Giver, or God the Autocrat, evaporate. Here God becomes our perpetually present Lover—Mother, Father, Refuge—whose will for us is shalom, peace. This is the God who created us—and knows us.
Not even the Ten Commandments assume the extinction of our human errors. That is impossible in the realm of the human. No, it is rather a belief in the possibility of human growth, your growth and mine, particular to each of us and yet universal to all of us.
The presence of God is not about our being under suspicion. On the contrary, the Commandments themselves are all about right relationships. Their subject matter is manifest: Love God, love your family, love your neighbor, love well, do not seek satisfaction in amassing what is not yours. But most apparent of all, one message rings through every one of them: The will of God for the world—peace and justice—is all you need. When the will of God for the world finally comes, you will have what you need, what you yourself have been seeking all your life. The only bewilderment, perhaps, lies in the fact that we ourselves must be part of bringing the will of God.
This story is from the May/June 2017 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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This story is from the May/June 2017 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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