First of all, I felt a little cheated today by having not remembered to claim two hours on the adoration schedule instead of just one. I could have stayed longer, but I know the guy who comes after me treasures some time alone there as much as I do - though of course either of us would be glad for company by more participants who wish to keep watch for a while in the night. (Post-adoration additions are smaller and in parentheses.)
God's plan is not to rescue a religious elite from an otherwise botched creation, but to restore all things in Christ. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon
Through him all things were made - Nicene Creed, 1975 ecumenical version (ICET)
Are made. We must be restored in Christ, are not whole until we are indeed fully restored in Christ, precisely because we are made in him. In him we live, and move, and have our being, as St. Paul professed to the Athenians (Acts 17, 28). Why do we expect to find ourselves in any way other than the Way, the Truth, and the Life?
(Oh, there is so much more to be said about this! I could not capture it all in the moment nor, I suspect, in a hundred lifetimes!
Why do we insist on viewing our existence as something outside of or independent from God? Earlier Fr. Neuhaus has lamented that even those who serve God with their lives have this tendency to think of our corporeal world as the real one and our spiritual world as, well, something less than real.
Knowing that we would reject him in the Garden of Eden and repeatedly throughout history, God nevertheless loved -- I should say "loves," as God is eternally in the present tense -- us so much that he created us anyway, along with the plan for our deliverance back to him. So we are made through the eternal Son and restored in him. There is nothing else for us to be restored to! Yet we insist on keeping "our" stuff -- our family, our career, our finances, our entertainment, our recreation, our "real lives" -- to ourselves and seeking God to what we consider the minimal degree necessary to accomplish our goals: being rescued, becoming the people we think we ought to be. Anything beyond this and we begin to think that we are the ones being crucified by God's unreasonable demands of us.
God longs to fully restore us in Christ, and is waiting only for us to want to be truly and fully restored.)
(That Christ is the only way of salvation:) Many Christians are embarrassed by this claim. They are intimidated by a culture that decrees that all truths are equal. Who are you to claim that you have the truth and others do not? That is indeed an intimidating question, unless we understand that we do not have the truth in the sense that it is ours by virtue of our having discovered it; we do not have the truth in the sense of it being a possession under our control . . .
But Christ is not my truth or your truth; he is the truth. He is not one truth among many. He is the truth about everything that is true. He is the universal and cosmic truth. Everything that is true -- in religion, philosophy, mathematics or the art of baseball -- is true by virtue of participation in the truth who is Christ. The problem is not that non-Christians do not know truth; the problem is that they do not know that the truth they know is the truth of Christ. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon
What is truth? - John 18, 38 (Pontius Pilate)
(This passage is so stunningly complete that I can add only a prayer:)
Lord, help me to stop chasing the world for a truth that accommodates me (and my desires, my vision). We each have a truth, or understanding(, to which we cling). Let mine no longer be more important to me than you are. Help me to see that the biggest obstacle to all things being restored to you -- the biggest for which I have responsibility, at least -- is my selfish, stubborn insistence that I have been "restored enough," so that I might cling to my sinful unrestoredness.
A certain cognitive humility is in order at this point and at all points in our talking about God and his ways . . . . Now all our talk about God, including the God-given talk of the Bible, is by analogy. That is to say, the mind of God infinitely surpasses the human mind, the Creator infinitely surpasses the creature. Analogy means that we can draw inferences and make comparisons. We can say, for instance, that God is to the world as the artist is to his or her work. But in saying that we should not think that we thereby understand God or his relationship to the world. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 put it very nicely: "No similarity can be found so great but that the dissimilarity is even greater." God is always infinitely "more" and infinitely "other." . . . Therefore it is rightly said that all theology is finally doxology. That is to say, all analysis and explanation finally dissolves into wonder and praise. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon
Cognitive humility indeed. Yet we insist that our minds are individually -- or, at least, collectively -- capable of (comprehending and) containing all truth. Could there be a prouder concept? And Christians are -- I am -- as guilty of this as anyone. "The truth is nothing other than I understand it to be," we think in our conceit. Even as revealed by God's very Word in sacred Scripture, the sum of all that all of our minds know about God is still infinitely less than God himself, and will be for all time, for God is beyond time. But Jesus restores us to himself in time so that all of his creation may enter into a God and an eternity that we cannot otherwise begin to even conceive.
(How timely relative to my rereading of this relationship of theology and doxology is Pope Francis' reminder this week to the theologians of the Church to remain rooted in prayer, and especially of the dangerous effects of theology that is not thus grounded. In Christian circles we often refer to the difference between knowing about God and knowing God personally, in a relationship that can only be made possible by the Holy Spirit's -- God's -- presence and movement within us. When we spend too much time studying and analyzing and not enough time praying, we become foolishly proud of what we think we have figured out about God. We scorn the humble simplicity that must form the foundation of a right relationship with a God who is utterly unreachable except by his grace-full condescension to his beloved creatures.)
I thankfully find myself, at the end of this hour, dissolving into worship and praise. May it always be so! You are so worthy, Lord! Help me to trust in you, to entrust my life to you, to know that you are the only Way, Truth and Life that ever matter, and to be the only One that I ever desire.
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