- Saturate us with Your Mercy, oh Ocean of Divine Mercy - !
Each day the Lord presents to us is overflowing with an ocean of His tender mercies for us. Our task is to awaken from the slumber of our self-absorption, open our eyes, and truly see what God has prepared for us. Every earthly gift contains the divine gift of God's Self. Meister Eckhart describes this very well. He says
"For God does not give us anything in order that we should enjoy its possession and rest content with it, nor has he ever done so. All the gifts which he has ever granted us in heaven or on earth were made solely in order to be able to give us the one gift, which is himself.…"
Every moment in our lives is a God Moment, then. I remember so many God Moments from New York City.... I think of God Moments as God Time -
The time to talk about all we were experiencing, even to weep together with joy over the time we could spend with the N.Y.C. portion of our family, only an hour away from Buffalo, New York, if you fly, but light years away in terms of the time and money it takes for them to come to us, or for us to go to them....
I think of our God Time at our grandchildren's School, and the flower faces in many colors of the children there - faces from the U.S., India, China, South America, England, Africa, Australia, etc. - as well as the rainbow of teachers. At this truly international school, race and ethnicity are important, because they are respected, and paradoxically are unnoticeable because it's one another's humanity that is the primary priority. The most important moment is learning a new child's name. Why? To shower him or her with the extraordinary love which rules the school.
I think of our God Time as we ate dinner with our son John, and then went together to see the musical "Wicked." The rich voices, the script, the acting, blew us away. How appropriate in N.Y.C. to see a story about a witch who is simultaneously taunted and ostracized because she is different - green - and to see her rise up in righteous anger as animals who can speak are discriminated against. I discovered in the program that Gregory Maguire, author of the original novel, lives in Massachusetts and Vermont with his husband, painter Andy Newman....I was enlightened. It's no wonder a gay man has such a clear understanding of the toll it takes on an individual to endure misunderstanding and persecution.
I think of our God Time as we ate every morning in our hotel restaurant and grew closer and closer to the waiter who served us every morning. When I first stumbled in ordering and told him that I wanted the melon without the melon (I meant to say "without the yogurt") he laughed and said "So you want nothing, then?" Such a sense of humor delights us. By the second morning, we discovered he came from Morocco. By the third, we discovered his name was "Mohammad. But you don't pronounce the 'h.' I tell people who pronounce the 'h' to call me 'Mo.'" Needless to say, we called him "Mohammad" without the "h" and agreed that he had an important name. Mo was in his twenties or thirties, and had a wife and a baby son. He was also in charge of training the wait staff.
We told him the story of our friend Mouna, an African Muslim, my mother's best aide in the nursing home. They loved each other so much! When Mom died, Mouna asked to speak at her funeral. She ascended the podium in front of a Catholic congregation, and told them "I am Muslim, but we worship the same God. Mama B is now in God's garden."
Mohammad's young, sensitive face was amazed, his eyes filled with tears. "That is so touching," he murmured. "No one should speak about any of our Holy Books - like the Bible or the Koran - unless they have studied them. We are all connected across the world."
"We are all Allah's children," I answered.
"Yes."
On our last morning at breakfast, he bent over and warmly hugged both of us, blew me a kiss, and told us to come back the next time we visited New York City. In my heart, I have another adopted "son" to pray for; he joins my other heart-adopted "son," who is a Jewish agnostic.
Another God Time was our Sunday Mass at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Manhattan. My heart was so warmed and eased by the interracial and inter-ethnic altar servers and congregation. The pastor, Father Duffell, had this powerful message in the Church bulletin:
"Thank you to all of you who expressed their concern for me after learning that I was in Barcelona the day of the attack last Thursday....This world is marked by sin, and its manifestation that day was all too real and tragic. Another tragic reality, as we all know, is manifesting itself in our own land...what Bishop Blase Cupich has called our country's original sin, racism. There can be no equivocating...racism is a sin, white supremacy is a sin, Neo-Nazism is a sin. Our God calls us to a life of reconciliation, and may each of us be strengthened for that journey which is both deeply personal and deeply communal."
Oh, I thought to myself, - it was really a prayer - if only every priest, deacon, minister, rabbi, and imam would have the courage to speak the same message to their congregations: racism, white supremacy, and Neo-Nazism are sins!
As the altar server knelt, rhythmically swinging the censer of incense during the Eucharistic Prayer, and the bells rang as the priest consecrated the bread and wine, I embraced the powerful miracle of Jesus' Real Presence on the altar, the Lord Jesus Whose divine and human arms on the cross embrace the Universe during his supreme act of reconciling the world to God and the people of the world to each other.
"Speaking poetically, I will suggest that, incredibly, the timeline of the entire human saga - and in fact all of cosmic history - is spanned by Jesus' outstretched arms, nailed to that horizontal crosspiece! Imagine: the universe and all that is in it forever embraced within the distance between the spikes in each of Christ's wrists! Those arms stretch even wider than the epoch from Adam's fall to our redemption. They encompass the alpha and the omega of God's eternal intentions." (Bradley Jersak, in "A More Christlike God.")
Yet the miracle also reduces itself to each God Moment in our lives. Jesus asks us, moment by moment, to become miraculous instruments of God's Divine Mercy and Reconciliation. Complete within us, Lord, the healing work of your mercy. Help us to listen to Your Voice, speak your words of mercy and healing love to all we meet, whenever and wherever we meet them.
A model for our divine mercy and love are the words proclaimed by the Statue of Liberty; with her, with Christ, we proclaim "Give us your tired and your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe and be free...."
The final God Time was our last moment with John, Stephanie, four year old Octavia, and two year old Xenia. The girls' Mom asked them to hug and kiss their grand-parents "goodbye." At the Very Last (God) Moment, terribly-two Xenia, who had thus far refused us any affection whatsoever, lifted her chubby arms to hug us, and her flower face with her lips petaled into a waiting kiss. Now - THAT is a Real God moment!
What a wonder - that the God Who created the Universe nestles in the souls of beautiful, tiny, innocent children! Nestles there, waiting to be hugged and kissed, and to hug and kiss us back.
Good Bye, New York! Stay safe, until we come again.