FEARING NOT THE HEAT WHEN IT COMES

FEARING NOT THE HEAT WHEN IT COMES:
An Experience of God through Lectio Divina

Thus says the LORD: Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the LORD. He is like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season, But stands in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth. Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose hope is the LORD. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: It fears not the heat when it comes, its leaves stay green; In the year of drought it shows no distress, but still bears fruit.( Jeremiah 17:5-8)

Heart and Mind in Tandem

Lectio Divina suits my personality fine. I can bask under the warm glow of feelings for as long as I want. I can also bathe in the refreshing waters of novel insights born of a more mind-based reflection. There is abundance of the heart and free-flowing cooperation of the mind in this ancient process-prayer that puts the heart and mind in a dynamic mode of cooperation. As a basically heart person, trained, for the most part, to be a thinker, lectio divina is an experience that brings me more in touch with my strong feeling component.

A passage from Jeremiah quoted above, part of the responsory in the Office of Readings for one of the last weeks of ordinary time is what I base this reflection on.

Nature as Nurturing Mother

I love nature. I can spend hours gazing at a stream, and lolling on the grassy embankment. I am spiritually energized every time I go up mountains and trek by gorges and heights. In the countless foot journeys up mountains I have done in life, passing by refreshing rivers, gurgling and glinting under the sun, after a long, dry spell of seemingly endless, thirst-inducing trek, has always been a welcome treat. It has always led me to think about God as present in nature, a God who cares for weary trekkers like us, who could use a refreshing, reinvigorating time with mother nature.

Jeremiah’s image of a tree planted beside water is one that I found myself very much at home with, for actual and existential reasons.

Falling Leaves, Faltering Hopes

It is nearing autumn once again (even if I live in the torrid tropics!). Four years ago, when I was deep in further studies in Baltimore, Maryland, me and my siblings, along with a great many relatives and friends, buried an older sister, the second in our large family, taken away at a relatively young age at 56, by a cruel and unforgiving disease called cancer.

Not long after that, it was once more “autumn” in my life. Just when I thought we were just getting started on our downhill trek towards recovery, the shattering news came that another sister, younger this time, has a similar cancer … and then another, still more recently … third in a row!

To shift metaphors, I am once more on the uphill climb, up towards a barren, dry, and hot, lava-seared landscape that reminded me of a mountain I climbed 19 years ago. I am once more struggling and groveling up the lava waste of an experience that saps away hope, that dries up tender saplings of trust in God-nurturing-mother who seems to have walked out on us, on me, once again.

My sisters’ and the rest of my surviving siblings’ own “Goldengrove,” in allusion to Manley-Hopkins’ poignant poem addressed to the young Margaret, “grieving,” is now once more “unleaving.” The falling leaves speak not only of both actual and potential losses. They speak to me of unwanted endings. They remind me of “hope growing grey hairs,” of what the same Jesuit poet refers to as an experience in which “all I endeavor in disappointment end.”

What No Mind, Nor Thought Can Express

The prayer experience proved to be, as usual, an oasis for my thirsty soul. “As runs the thirsting deer to find where cooling waters flow, so rush the wishes of my heart to come before you Lord,” was a refrain of an old, old song back in seminary days that I kept on repeating. Jeremiah’s prophetic utterance could not have come at a better time. I dwelt on it. I mulled over it for a long while. I allowed images of me actually peering over the crater of a hot, smoking volcano (something I actually did in that climb 19 years ago), and then running down for dear life to the safety and refreshing coolness of regurgitating waters further down refreshing me. “What no mind, no, nor heart expressed, ghost guessed” … the possibility that I could actually be not that kind of tree Jeremiah may be speaking of.

Searing Pain, Healing Word

The rhythm of the prayer, with its four stages, that allowed me to rock back and forth lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio, brought up to me images of a nurturing mother lulling her child to safety and warmth. The pain I felt was real and deeply searing. But the prayer experience, based on the Word, came out as a healing experience. More than that, it offered me reassurance. And even more than that, it gave fresh insights. Hope falters when love’s conviction alters. When one is far from the life-giving waters; when one is not rightly planted near where grace flows, hope shrivels at the root.

Searching and Finding

I have always wondered at the internalized object I have been associating with God all this time. I have always wondered how best for me to think of God and how best to relate to this internalized object-image I learned from when I was a child. My search did not go in vain, at least as far as this prayer experience is concerned. The experience convinced me, more than ever, that my internalized object-image of God has always been that of a parent, a caring, nurturing mother, to be exact. Although thinking of God as father was not entirely distasteful to me, I realized I could “taste and see the goodness of God” more if I imagined Him as a provident parent. No wonder I always found it easier to commune with Him in and through nature. No wonder images of deer running to the water always strike me. No wonder, too, that Francis Thompson’s poems delight me, particularly his “God and the Child,” and “The Hound of Heaven.”

Fearing No the Heat When It Comes

I am afraid of the worst for my two other siblings just as I had been eight years ago. I am afraid of so many things, including what the future has in store for me and the rest of what used to be a big family. The realization that our genetic make-up is not that resilient to disease comes to me as one “long dry spell of searing heat,” placing me in a situation where I can “enjoy no change of season,” as Jeremiah wrote.

But it is precisely at times like these that prayer becomes more meaningful. It is only when one’s faith is sorely tested, when one’s love is forcibly “altered” by both pleasant and unpleasant circumstances, that one’s hope shines. Earth is, indeed, “crammed with heaven, and every bush is afire with God,” as Elizabeth Barrett-Browning so nicely puts it. But “only he who sees takes off his shoes and worships.” Only he who sees far beyond … Only he who sees can understand the meaning behind things and events, including a bush – nothing more and nothing else, but a manifestation of God.

I still do not understand the “heat” that has once too often come into my life. But prayer at least helps me to accept what is unfathomable and what is unacceptable. It, at least, helps me gain back precious perspective. Most importantly, it shows me who I basically am, someone who may need to draw closer to the stream, someone who may need to remain planted beside the waters, if I want to be, and remain a tree that “fears not when the heat comes, and whose leaves stay green.”

CON-SPIRING WITH THE SPIRIT: Grace and Nature at the Crossroads

In-Spiration and Con-Spiration Right from the Start

The image of God breathing on “chaos” (“formless wasteland” in NAB), is seen as God creating human life and calling to existence all the rest of creation. The account makes use of a fundamental meaning-laden metaphor in biblical creation theology. This first account of creation refers to “a mighty wind [that] swept over the waters” (Gen 1:1-31). The second account, equally poetic and symbolic, refers more directly to this creative In-Spiration (breathing act) of God: “The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground, and blew his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen 2:7).

Divine In-Spiration, however, was not a one-sided event. Right from the start, God wanted his first living creatures to have a complementary role in the ongoing process: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28); “The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it” (Gen 2:15).

Borrowing Haughey’s terminology (Gillespie, 2000), this Divine-Human con-Spiracy can be said to have begun at creation, and is a process that goes on till now.

The Call to Life as Process and Partnership

Scripture is clear about the nature of human life vis-à-vis the rest of the created world. Life is a gift that needs to be unwrapped, a call that needs to be answered daily. For humans, the world remains a place to be taken care of. Countless mysteries about life in this world still have to be “named,” and solutions to the riddle of sustainable and ecologically sound development of the earth that is our only home still await discovery. Unfortunately, now as before, humans have often been less than responsible, creating a mess of what Messer (1992) refers to as “world-havoc” instead of putting into place a “world-house,” engaging in wanton disregard of the breath of God that still “in-Spires” life from chaos, both natural and man-made. The original call to caring was replaced by selfish “possession.” The invitation to “mastery” turned out to be, in many cases, “abuse.” Self-less cooperation and partnership turned out to be sinful collusion, instead.

Re-appropriating the Tradition

Despite this, however, God continues to in-Spire order, truth, and wholeness into everything that is broken, chaotic, and sinful in our human lives as individuals and society. In and through Christ, the call continues and gradually becomes reality in the new life his dying and rising have wrought in us. Re-appropriating this creation spirituality leads us once more to the path of cooperation, as against the path of collusion; to the way of social responsibility, as against the way of selfish gain; to the way of solidarity in the good, instead of solidarity in evil.

From Selfishness to Solidarity

This call to con-Spiracy, understood as engagement with the world and with others, and the Holy Spirit’s continually in-Spiring humanity to walk in solidarity with creation, with others, and with the Trinitarian God, leads to some disturbing realizations. For one, anyone deeply steeped in a spirituality characterized by cooperation, partnership, and solidarity, can never revert to a one based on personal, private, and selfish concerns. The Biblical injunction to “subdue the earth” no longer has connotations of wanton abuse of the earth’s resources without a corresponding sense of social responsibility. One realizes, furthermore, that everyone is called to cooperation. All are called to take part in this divine con-Spiracy toward personal and social transformation.

Beginning from the Home Front: Grace Building on Nature

In a very literal sense, the earth and the created world comprise a household given to our care. The same, however, is true with regard to my personal ongoing process of salvation in and through Christ. What is true for society is also true for me as an individual. For both, life is meant to be an on-going task-in-partnership. Christ’s call to “fullness of life” (Jn 10:10) is both a gift and a task to do in union with him. The grace of salvation needs to be met with human cooperation. This delicate interplay between God’s and man’s effort is partly what spirituality is all about.

This spirituality of partnership and collaboration leads me now to confront certain elements within me that stand in the way of full cooperation with God and with others. As an introverted personality with some narcissistic features (as do many of us clergy and religious), who still grapples with some self-esteem issues, collaborative ministry (Sofield & Juliano, 2000) is something I still need to develop. The grace that comes from ordination to ministry, understood as springing from, and flowing back to the community, finds a reluctant partner in me. Nature, thus, poses an obstacle to efficacy in ministry. The full flowering of the in-Spiration from the Holy Spirit cannot take place with said unredeemed parts of my nature still holding sway. Grace cannot build on a nature that continues to rebel, that continues to hold on to a misguided appropriation of a tradition that sees holiness and ministry as merely personal pursuits. Becoming a con-Spirator with the Spirit, and with other Spirit-led people, gets stalled, unless I allow grace and nature to come to a healthy interplay as they meet at the crossroads that is my life here and now, and in the days to come.

References:

Gillespie, C.K. (2000). Spiritual conversation groups: Con-Spiring with the Spirit. In Wicks, R. (Ed). Handbook of spirituality for ministers: Perspectives for the 21^st century. Volume 2. New York: Paulist Press.

Messer, D. (1992). A conspiracy of goodness: Contemporary images of Christian mission. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

Sofield, L. & Juliano, C. (2000) Collaboration: Uniting our gifts in ministry. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press.

USCCB & NCCB (1987). The new American bible. South Bend, IN: The Green Lawn Press.