How often we forget the words I prayed this morning in Morning Prayer from the Breviary (I use the app IBreviary to pray the great Prayer of the Church - which includes Morning, Evening, and Night Prayer, and others): "Come, let us give thanks to the Lord, for His great love is without end." God loves all people (and all creation) from generation to generation. God never quits loving us and searching for us. God desires nothing but our good.
Listen to these reassuring words from the Canticle of Isaiah 45 as God speaks to us across the centuries: "I am the Lord, and there is no other. I have not spoken from hiding nor from some dark place of the earth." No, God has not spoken from hiding. Jesus, Son of God and son of Mary, is God's Word Incarnate, God Who has become forever audible and visible in human flesh. In Jesus' time, we humans could see, touch, hear, and embrace God. And now the risen Christ, God Incarnate, Whose Body contains all of creation, sees us, every one of us, hears the sorrowful and joyful hearts of every one of us, touches all our souls, and heals us, if we only let Him in to our deepest being.
Once we allow God into our hearts, once we allow God to illuminate our vision, we can see that all of creation groans with us in ongoing stress. Our poor, polluted earth, our decimated animal species, wait for God's purifying and powerful touch in the hands of those who are and will be awakened by the urgency of the Holy Spirit. Over seven billion people on this planet, stressed out and suffering from poverty, famine, disease, and war, await the justice and peace and the reign of God that's been promised to us - if only God's people would act in God's Name. Our knowledge of global stress can bring us to our knees in despair. But it should bring us to our knees in prayer - and then, onto our feet in action.
St. Teresa of Avila says "Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes with which Christ looks out his compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now."
God promises us, in the words of St. Paul, that where sin increases, grace abounds all the more." (Romans 5: 20) The promise of God's ongoing grace, which increases more quickly than our stupid, willful, sinning can destroy, is what makes Christians unequivocal optimists. For our own lives, for the life of the world, - God's grace - God's very life - will always abound, ready to transform us as individuals, as a society, as a world. But this transformation cannot happen unless we go "beyond" Church attendance and also do the inner work of prayer - being silent with God, listening to God, allowing God's vision to deepen and widen our own. "Come, let us give thanks to the Lord, for His great love is without end."
Prayer brings us to an intimate knowledge of Who God is, a God Who fiercely desires justice for all, across the earth, and an end to conflict, a God Who creates the hearts of all and listens to all, a God Who loves mercy even beyond justice.
Fr., Richard Rohr, O.F.M. says
"I know the situation in the world can seem dark today. We are seeing theological regression into fundamentalist religions which believe all issues can be resolved by an appeal to authority (hierarchy or Scripture) and so there is no need for an inner life of prayer. In the United States we have seen the rolling back of a compassionate economic system and the abandonment of our biblical responsibility for the poor, the sick, and refugees. Fear and anger seem to rule our politics and our churches. We see these same things in many parts of the world....."
Yet, he goes on to say,
" In so many places, there are signs of the Holy Spirit working at all levels of society. The church might well have done its work as leaven because much of this reform, enlightenment, compassion, and healing is now happening outside the bounds of organized religion. Only God gets the credit."
Have we "sat long enough" with God to recognize that God operates even beyond the boundaries of our own Christian religious denomination? That God can even operate - and does operate - in the hearts of Jews, Hindus, Moslems, and other non-Christians? That God even daily operates in the hearts of those who do not know Him but who seek the truth with a sincere heart? That all are in Christ, and Christ is in them? The more deeply we allow God into our hearts, the wider our vision becomes of how great and powerful our God is. This is not betraying Christianity, because we are not denying Christ or Christianity. We're simply seeing that God's Plan and God's activity operate world-wide. When we see people who are different from us doing good work, we need to recognize that God is alive in them, slowly, patiently, bringing them closer to Himself.
St. Faustina, in her marvelous Divine Mercy Novena, says that all the souls of those who do not yet know God and those who do not yet know Christ abide in the compassionate Heart of Christ: "Most compassionate Jesus, You are the Light of the whole world. Receive into the abode of Your most Compassionate Heart the souls of those who do not believe in God and of those who as yet do not know You. Let the rays of Your grace enlighten them that they, too, together with us, may extol Your wonderful mercy; and do not let them escape from the abode which is Your Most Compassionate Heart."
Stress seduces us into thinking that everything has to happen right now. But, please, become an optimist. Trust in the slow, steady, unknowable work of God. The evolution of the universe took how long? We're not even sure. It takes a lifetime for each of us to evolve into the person God desires us to be, and it's a road fraught with missteps, regressions, and wrong turns. It will take our global society generations and generations to evolve and overcome the racism, sexism, and prejudicial religious and sexual stereotyping that afflict us, the constant war between the haves and the have nots. Our poor planet earth, so ill, so hurting, will take a long, long time to heal. Prayer not only fills us with optimism that God is continually at work evolving all of this, but also illumines us with what our part is to play in the healing of ourselves and the healing of society.
"Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action - faithful action, for the world, and in God." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin