Shorelines of the Spirit

Well, I had a nice Pentecost reflection ready to put on paper, until this weekday morning as I did lectio on the day’s Gospel, John 16: 12-15. During his Last Discourse to the Apostles at the Last Supper, Jesus says that he has much more to tell them, but that they’re not yet ready to hear it all, that the Holy Spirit will be with them to reveal it at the proper time. So the Gospel, the Good News, is not a tightly-wrapped package that we open to inventory its contents and put them on their proper shelves. It’s rather a gift that keeps on giving, as we become more transformed by what we have already heard and seen, more ready for the next revelation. Thus the Good News is always good, and it’s always new. Its goodness is easy to accept, but its newness can be a challenge. This Good News has a way of shattering things: age-old assumptions, etched-in-stone certainties, tightly-held identities. Spirit-sourced insights can shatter our well-meant assumptions that turn out to be based on part

  Be the Dance Here at our monastery, and in Catholic parish churches as well, we’re listening to daily readings from the Acts of the Apostles during this 50-day Easter season. The calendar also tosses in a few apostles’ feast days, like Philip, James, and Matthias, and we get a sense of the amazing stretch of the Gospel message as it begins in Jerusalem, spreads rapidly through the Middle East, and by the end of the Acts of the Apostles, comes to Rome in the person of Saint Paul. The more those early Christians were persecuted, the greater the spread of the Gospel. The small band of disciples who had followed Jesus and later experienced him as alive again had grown to the point where the Gospel message was now, only a few decades later, at the center and capital of the then-known world. And remember, there were no social media platforms or 24-hour news cycles to convey the message. As I listened to the readings for the feast of Philip and James, I asked myself: how did this happen

  What do you think is the most important word in the Gospels, if not in the entire New Testament?   According to one writer (and if I could recall who wrote the article and where it was published, I’d give her/him full credit)    that word is “WITH”.    Not God, or Jesus, or love, or peace, or any other word you might expect, but “WITH”.   Once   I encountered that insight,   I began to see “WITH”   everywhere:   in the common life I live with my sisters in the monastery,    in the companionship of praying/working/eating/recreating with them,   in the care and concern that Jesus calls us to show to others,   in the life of our Three-Personed God who is an eternal, infinite “WITH.”    In fact, it’s that divine “WITH”    relationship that’s the source and energy of all the “WITHS” that we are called to sustain, because that same God lives in each of us, is WITH us in the most intimate way possible. When we pray in solitude,   we are not only with (I’ll stop the capitalizing!) God