Category Archives: Miracles Small and Large
The Timing of Miracles in Lives Differs
It’s a lovely sunny day in Memphis. I’m as usual playing on face book before getting serious about unpacking my mess of decades of writing in hopes of gathering some together to describe my spiritual journey. The point being, that I am convinced that the timing of it differs from person to person. But if open to mystery, to miracles past our understanding, even if finally only in old age, we can recognize that amazing connection of God to our daily lives. It can be in the timing of really small things or recognizing God’s hand in the large and even scary aspects of our lives. I know that I was a weak person and needed immense doses of grace early on to keep on keeping on. But, there are times in all our lives when our natural strengths are not enough. And if we are naturally strong people we may not recognize our limits as gifts. Because they open us to grace in ways beyond our understanding. To the strong it may seem like failure to need that grace, but it’s the gift of Jesus’ life as a human being. His journey is our journey complete with miracles beyond human understanding, because we too have the Spirit of God within us and surrounding us. God is as alive and well in our times and our lives as God was in Jesus’ life, suffering, death and resurrection. The timing of our need for and openness to God’s interventions is different from one person to another. But ultimately we are all called to experience our limits and need for God’s active participation in our daily lives. Admitting our natural limits is harder for the strong than the weak. But it is part of the spiritual journey. The Spirit is within us and outside us. We are a tiny, but needed part of God’s plan for humanity. But recognizing our personal limits and need for an awareness of our connection to God is part of God’s plan for humanity.
Ordinary Lives Transformed
Father Richard Rohr writes about encountering the Risen Christ in our ordinariness and woundedness. I’ve noticed in the Gospels that even after two appearances of the Risen Christ, the apostles return to their old job of fishing (John 21:3). They don’t join the priesthood, try to get a job at the Temple, go on more retreats, take vows, leave their wives, or get special titles. Nor is there any mention of them baptizing each other or wearing special clothing beyond that of a wayfarer or “workman” (Matthew 10:9–10). When the inner is utterly transformed, we don’t need symbolic outer validations, special hats, or flashy insignia. We can also note that the Risen Christ is never apparent as a supernatural figure, but is mistaken in one case for a gardener, another time for a fellow traveler on the road, and then for a fisherman offering advice. He seems to look just like everybody else after the Resurrection (John 20:15; Luke 24:13–35; John 21:4–6), even with his wounds on full display! In the Gospels it appears we can all go back to “fishing” after any authentic God encounter, consciously carrying our humiliating wounds, only now more humbly. That is our only badge of honor. In fact, it is exactly our woundedness that gives us any interest in healing itself, and the very power to heal others. As Henri Nouwen rightly said, the only authentic healers are always wounded healers. Good therapists will often say the same. True mysticism just allows us to “fish” from a different side of the boat and with different expectations of what success might mean. All the while, we are totally assured that we are already and always floating on a big, deep, life-filled pond. The mystical heart knows there is a fellow Fisherman nearby who is always available for good advice. He stands and beckons from the shores, at the edges of every ordinary life, every unreligious moment, every “secular” occupation, and he is still talking to working people who, like the first disciples, are not important, influential, especially “holy,” trained in theology, or even educated. This is the mystical doorway, which is not narrow but wide and welcoming. Matthew Fox affirms mystical experience as a gift: Deep down, each one of us is a mystic. When we tap into that energy we become alive again and we give birth. From the creativity that we release is born the prophetic vision and work that we all aspire to realize as our gift to the world. We want to serve in whatever capacity we can. Getting in touch with the mystic inside is the beginning of our deep service…. Mysticism is about the awe and the gratitude, the letting go and the letting be, the birthing and the creativity, and the compassion—including healing and celebration and justice making—that our world so sorely needs…. Every mystic is a healer. We are healers all.
Sidewalk Spirituality
Richard Rohr identifies mysticism as a way of knowing accessible to all:
While most Christians consider themselves disciples of Jesus and try to follow his teachings, a smaller number move toward practical acts of service or solidarity. But I’m afraid even fewer Christians have the courage to go on the much deeper mystical path. The most unfortunate thing about the concept of mysticism is that the word itself has become mystified—relegated to a “misty” and distant realm that implies it is only available to a very few. For me, the word “mysticism” simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, in contrast to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.
Much of organized religion, without meaning to, has actually discouraged us from taking the mystical path by telling us almost exclusively to trust outer authority, Scripture, various kinds of experts, or tradition (what I call the “containers”), instead of telling us the value and importance of inner experience itself (which is the “content”). In fact, most of us were strongly warned against ever trusting ourselves. Roman Catholics were told to trust the church hierarchy implicitly, while mainline Protestants were often warned that inner experience was dangerous, unscriptural, or even unnecessary.
Both were ways of discouraging actual experience of God and often created passive (and passive aggressive) people and, more sadly, a lot of people who concluded there was no God to be experienced. We were taught to mistrust our own souls—and thus the Holy Spirit! Contrast that with Jesus’ common phrase, “Go in peace, your faith has made you whole” (see Matthew 8:13; Mark 5:34; Luke 17:19). He said this to people who had made no dogmatic affirmations, did not think he was “God,” and often did not belong to the “correct” group! They were people who affirmed, with open hearts, the grace of their own hungry experience—in that moment—and that God could care about it!
Pentecostals and charismatics are significant modern-era exceptions to this avoidance of experience; I believe their “baptism in the Spirit” is a true and valid example of initial mystical encounter.
Richard praises the Franciscan approach to mysticism:
In my experience, Franciscan mysticism is a trustworthy and simple path precisely because it refuses to be “mystified” by, or beholden to, doctrinal abstractions, moralism, or false asceticism (although some Franciscans have gone this route). The Franciscan way is truly a sidewalk spirituality for the streets of the world, a path highly possible and attractive for all would-be seekers. It doesn’t insist every person must be celibate, isolated from others, highly educated, or in any way superior to our neighbors. In fact, those kinds of paths might well get in the way of the experience itself. A celibate monk or nun may have a totally dualistic mind and live a tortured inner life—and thus torture others too. Everyday workers and caregivers with mystical hearts and minds can enlighten other individuals, their families, and all they touch, without talking “religiously” at all.
Faith for Miracles and Faith to Trust God
Matthew 21:22: And whatever you ask in Prayer you will receive, if you have faith.
This one is tricky. First of all, faith is a gift. Secondly, this isn’t heaven and if everyone lived forever here, it would be standing room only! Thirdly, when sweating blood and asking God to save him from the suffering he saw coming, Jesus recognized that suffering was part of his spiritual journey for the good of all and he accepted that. It’s part of our journey also. Fourth, we may still just have the faith of a mustard seed, but when we focus our mustard seeds of faith together, it can make a difference. Fifth, I have witnessed impossible instantaneous healings and experienced healing myself, but I helplessly watched my mother die by inches for fourteen years with Alzheimer’s. I once was in a prayer group that had been praying for a young husband/father fighting cancer. He would get better and then get worse over and over for a year or more. At a prayer group that had been praying for him, something told me to let go and put him in God’s hands, when I said this, several others confirmed that they had gotten the same message. So, we prayed that way. We learned later he died at that time. When early in my walk with Jesus, older people in a prayer group would pray “Your will, God, not mine,” I’d cringe and think, “Don’t you remember what he let happen to His Son?” But Jesus incarnates both the Love of God for all his creation and children, but also the spiritual journey of all of us which becomes “Your will, not mine” when we have grown free to love more than need and to trust God no matter what.
Come, Lord Jesus, Come and Be Born in my Heart 2021
I feel new.
It’s really sort of weird and funny at eighty-four. But it feels delightful, like a wonderful blessing, though even a tad scary, since it’s a little like being in first grade again. I know the challenges to the new me will come and have to be responded to in new ways. But meanwhile, I am just dancing in my heart with happiness.
I feel more “whole” than I ever remember feeling.
Or course I still need taller people to reach high things. I still need stronger people to pull down heavy boxes. I still need my youngest, Tommy, to rescue me from the insanity of dealing with Infinity/Comcast. I still needed all five of my wonderful kids to replace my ancient computer. I’m blessed that my eldest, Chris lives near me and brings me meds when I’m sick and yummy food from his wife Molly. I still need Steve to come visit from Atlanta and listen to my life story, the good and the bad of it, and to write a list of simplified short cuts for me to use on the computer. (And sneakily pay for a new Microsoft Windows for me.) I still delight in my weekly Face Time call from my Mike and his Patrick in Cambodia. I am also grateful for daughter Julie’s wonderful notes affirming me and that she and Scott have invited me along on an eight day visit in Michigan with my great-grandchildren at Christmas. And I’m grateful to grandson Josh and his amazing Paula, who not only send me videos and photos of my three youngest great-grandchildren, but are including me in their Christmas. And thank God for granddaughter, Carmen, who checked out my tires and warned me that I needed four new ones right away. I still need my friend Rachel, who affirms me in writing, so when I lose my sense of well being, I can read and remember.
And I still need my friend Jenny who can laugh with me at our shared old lady humiliations. The list goes on and on.
But something inside me shifted and either I finally don’t feel so inadequate or I’ve simply accepted the hand I was dealt and can laugh at the recurring Three Stooges Act that I regularly play out. Whatever it is, my underlying fear of being inadequate for whatever life requires that has haunted me for most of my life, seems to have been put at bay, a least for now.
I think this is this year’s answer to my Advent prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus. Come and be born in my heart.” Another Christmas healing like my “Dirty Sock Under the Christmas Tree.” What a wonderful God we have. I highly recommend praying that prayer and then waiting and watching for the answer. Some years, I haven’t recognized it, but many years I have. Pray it. Wait for it. Watch for it.
I am praying for blessings for you who read this post during this season of celebration of God’s unconditional Love expressed in Jesus. Merry Christmas to you all.
Come AS a Little Child: To Pray or Not to Pray Chapter 11
Many, probably all, people experience miracles large and small. Some don’t expect them, so miss their significance and others are hesitant to speak of them. Humanity has come to either reject what we don’t understand or to only connect miracles with “saints or the delusional.” And we all know deep down that we’re not saints.
After my experience of the love of God expressed in Jesus, I wondered why I was having so many and such a variety of them. Some of the major ones were to major heartbreaking problems, but many were just little boosts over tiny bumps in the road of my daily life.
When I encouraged my children, aged 8, 6, 5 and 4 to ask Jesus to be their Savior and Lord, they had not been going to church or Sunday School. Their responses were unique to each of their personalities, but not based on being taught much about God or Jesus other than His love. In writing about these, it brought alive for me Jesus stressing coming to the Lord as a child.
I have become convinced that the reason I experienced things even the other “born again” Christians did not, was because of having thrown out everything I had been taught in church and by the society around me, I was pretty much coming as a child without preconceived notions. When I read the Bible while I was questioning everything, I realized I had never heard Christians talk about personal miracles, only ones connected to extremely holy people who lived long ago and far away. When I began to devour Scripture like a starving person after my conversion, I went from believing nothing, to believing everything. I came with an open mind and heart like a child.
I have come to see that each generation is to some extent limited by what we are taught when young by authority figures. Even those, who like me question, are still limited by what we have absorbed from the culture of our times.
A lot of my spiritual journey has involved letting go of preconceived ideas. At the age of eighty-four I am still having to do that. It’s scary to realize that no person or group knows all the truth and believes nothing but the truth even with the help of God. We are simply not equal to God. And not only is God not finished teaching us yet, but God is not finished teaching humanity yet.
An eye opener to me was becoming aware of the pattern of growth in Jesus from when he was a brilliant twelve-year old, but still emotionally immature so needing his mother’s guidance in learning to consider others’ feelings. The Scriptures say he went home with his parents and GREW in truth and holiness. Then at thirty he needs a push from his mother to make the leap from his comfort zone into his calling to a whole other level of ministry….miracles. Jesus then still believes his call is only to God’s chosen, the Jews. But he is challenged not only by an unclean woman and heretics, but by a soldier of the oppressive conquerors to out of the kindness of his heart, include them in his kingdom of the Love of God. He comes to understand that his call is not about political freedom, but spiritual freedom. He slowly and with natural human reluctance recognizes that he will not be a conquering hero, but a rejected vulnerable scapegoat for even those who kill him. And he tells his disciples who depend on him for faith for miracles, that he must leave, so they will experience the spirit of God within them to also do what he has done and will do. And finally, on the cross he makes the leap from “Why have you forsaken me?” to “Your will, not mine” Growth in truth and holiness takes a life time. And a lot of it involves letting go of some of the beliefs that make us feel most secure. And ultimately it is the challenge of, “Your will, not mine.”
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 