Nicaragua, November 1984.
“Jesus
loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so: little ones to him belong,
they are weak, but he is strong.”
We
began singing this song during a Pride parade. Someone unsuccessfully tried to
get us to sing a “corrected” version, one that edited out our “littleness” and
“weakness” and, I suppose, our dependence on Jesus, giving us a more positive
self-image.
But
it is a children’s song, who need
someone bigger and stronger and wiser to see them through the vicissitudes of
childhood. And now, as I anticipate growing much older and a bit weaker, I may
need someone younger and stronger like Jesus to steady my gait, lift my
perspective, and remind me who I am.
When
she was 79 years of age, my mother phoned me while I was working on my daily
devotional The Word Is Out to ask me
to include this scripture in my meditations: “I can do all things through
Christ which strengtheneth me” (KJV). I realized Christ served as her beacon
throughout the troubles and griefs and challenges of her life.
I
remember her praying with me as a child. She prayed to Jesus, not God, and I
wish now I had asked her in later life if that’s how she always prayed. Maybe
she was just praying that way because I was a child, or because she taught
first grade in a Christian school all of her life. Maybe not.
As
Advent begins, we are reminded of the story of Jesus’ birth narrative, grand
and glorious and dramatic as it most certainly was not. The Gospels which report it tell it the way it should have been in a world awaiting a
personal representative from God to deliver it from Roman colonization and from
a vain and abusive Caesar as well as those like the Herodians willing to surrender
their principles to remain a friend of Caesar and Rome.
The
Gospels tell of Immanuel, God-with-us, coming to poor shepherds in a field and
fishermen on the shore and hungry multitudes on a hillside and a thirsty
individual at a well, reminding the poor that they too are blessed, that the
humble should inherit the earth, that
peacemakers belong in the commonwealth of God.
You
who follow this blog know of my reservations about ever “knowing” God with
certainty. The Bible uses many metaphors to help us wrap our minds and hearts
around something we cannot know. Jesus, of course, is more than mere metaphor,
but one who wanted, like any good messenger, to point us toward the God beyond
our grasp yet within our reach.
Saints
(both official and unofficial) and icons (in art and music as well as in
nature) and charismatic preachers and prophets have helped us, in a sense,
touch the face of God through their witness and beauty and spirit and
teachings.
But
strangers and the suffering, the vulnerable and the excluded, have also
awakened us to the spirit of God, both in them and in us. That spirit is
compassion, making us one, for “God is love.” “Love in fact is the spiritual life,” is my favorite Thomas
Merton quote, as you probably have guessed by now.
God
is not a “thing” to be grasped or known or understood absolutely; yet the
entire witness of scripture and saints and Jesus is that God is within our reach.
For those who missed last
week’s post because of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., click here: Thank God You Were Born!
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