God Talk and Tea

As they die, the lights of the world are going out

“What are we going to do without Mike?”                                                                                                                                                                                           

The sentiment came from a Facebook post after the death of a family member, the cousin of a special friend of mine.

As I read it, I suddenly became acutely aware of the thousands of Mikes who have left our lives because of this pandemic.

Suddenly, the grief of tens of thousands of loved ones, friends, family members and acquaintances, made me catch my breath in a painful moment of awareness.

Those who have died are more than just numbers on a screen or data in a news report. They were people whose lives impacted others.

Mike was described as a beautiful soul, the source of special joy, comfort and peace, someone who made everyone’s day better, a light to those who knew him, a light to the world.

My God, I thought. As we fight over the accuracy of death toll numbers and beat our chests, demanding our freedom to break free of quarantine, the lights of the world are going out.

I imagined the night sky I once had the privilege of sleeping under in Montana, filled with so many stars they seemed to hide the black sky from sight. Now, in this moment, I saw those glimmers of light dim and go out, one by one, until the darkness rolled over the light.

I thought about how blessed Mike’s family was to have such a bright light among them, bringing so much love and peace and joy to others.

And I thought about all those others whose lives have been diminished in some way by the losses this virus has inflicted on them.

But the loss is not just a loss for others. It is a loss for all of us.

We, the collective community, have lost the minds and hearts and passions of thousands of souls. Souls who had a place and a purpose in the world.

The loss is immeasurable. If we are going to beat our chests about anything, it should be this.

Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

Discovering the lessons of a reluctant prophet

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Jonah and the Whale.                                                                                                       

As a child, reading my full-color illustrated book of Bible stories, I was most interested in how Jonah got in the whale and what it might have been like for him sitting in the whale’s belly for three days. I never questioned the veracity of the story because, after all, if God can create a universe, God can certainly arrange for an errant Jonah to have a time-out in a most unusual place.

As I grew older, I thought more about how Jonah, the reluctant prophet, ended up in trouble because he tried to run away from God, and I often thought my life was going in a similar direction. If I didn’t stop disobeying what I knew God was telling me to do, or not to do, I could end up underwater myself.

As a college student, reading the classics, I found myself wondering if Jonah ever felt like Francis Thompson, the English poet who wrote the exquisite poem, The Hound of Heaven, which describes an unrelenting God pursuing  a soul seeking to hide itself as a hound relentlessly follows a hare.

As an adult I have learned that there is more to the story than a man running from God and ending up in the belly of a big fish.  The essential element of the story is the “why.”

God had a job for Jonah to do – to preach repentance to the Ninevites, whose reputation for evil was known to God. Jonah didn’t want to be that prophet so he ran from God and tried to sail away to Tarshish.  While he slept in the hold of the ship a storm arose and the seas threatened to capsize the boat.

The sailors figured out that Jonah was fleeing from his God, so to appease God they threw him overboard and the storm ceased. But God saved Jonah by providing a big fish which swallowed him and kept him safe for three days – the length of time it took Jonah to repent for running away.

God hears Jonah’s prayers and commands the fish to spit Jonah up on the shore so Jonah can finally undertake the task God asked of him – go to Ninevah and preach to the Ninevites so they change their ways and turn back to God. 

Jonah preached and the Ninevites listened. Everyone, including the King, fasted, put on sackcloth and ashes and repented.  Scripture says, “When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out.”

And Jonah was angry. His reaction was essentially, “I knew this was going to happen!” Jonah admits to God this was the “why,” the reason he ran away from God in the first place. He didn’t want God to forgive these enemies of Israel.

Jonah responds to God, “O Lord, is this not what I said while I was still in my own country? This is why I fled at first toward Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, repenting of punishment. So now, Lord, please take my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.”

God simply asks, “Are you right to be angry?”

Reflecting on my own life, I realize I had to learn the difference between being angry at someone’s bad behavior and being angry at the thought of God treating them with mercy and forgiveness should they repent.

There are times when I am like Jonah, not yet ready to forgive. But with God following on my heels, I may get there eventually.

 

Image - Jonah and the Whale, by Herbert Mandel

Mary Clifford Morrell is the author of "Things My Father Taught Me About Love," and "Let Go and Live: Reclaiming your life by releasing your emotional clutter," both available as ebooks on Amazon.com.

 

Mary Clifford Morrell is the author of "Things My Father Taught Me About Love," and "Let Go and Live: Reclaiming your life by releasing your emotional clutter," both available as ebooks on Amazon.com.

Mary Clifford Morrell is the author of "Things My Father Taught Me About Love," and "Let Go and Live: Reclaiming your life by releasing your emotional clutter," both available as ebooks on Amazon.com.

Love lives in the sacred place called home

So, here we are. Stuck at home.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

For many, the situation is challenging, frustrating and claustrophobic.  With children home from school, it may seem impossible to meet everybody’s needs all at the same time.  Many of us are also working from home, trying to meet deadlines, sanitize every surface and hidden crevice and figure out how we are going to get groceries without leaving the house and putting ourselves or our families in jeopardy.

There may be chaos and clutter and confusion, but there is something else – love.

Where there is love, there is God.  We may be confined for a time, but it may make a difference to know we are confined in a sacred place.

My understanding of home as a sacred space came about slowly as I grew up, but one ordinary experience was an important lesson.

When I was in high school, I took the city bus to school every day, even in the snow. One winter evening, after a day-long snow fall, I got off the bus to walk down the street to my house – a walk I took daily. It was a crisp night, frosty enough for my breath to be visible but not so cold as to be uncomfortable. Except for the crunch of my boots on the snow, there was a calm silence.  

The moon hung brightly in the sky, making glitter out of the snow falling around me.  I looked down the street into the dark night and saw a warm light shining from a front porch, illuminating the steps and the holly bushes nearby.

 I felt warm inside because it was my house. The light was meant for me. My mother always made sure the light was on, leading me home.

How blessed I am, I thought, to belong.  I walked home with a new understanding that home was sacred.

I’ve thought a lot about that over the years, the meaning of home for each person and, especially, for children. I’m thinking about it more now that, for many of us, home is the only place we are supposed to be.

In our homes we are in the world, yet apart from the world. If we love our families, our homes are sanctuaries where we come to be ourselves, to step away from the world and still be loved for who we are.

We build this sacred space by being co-creators with God, by bringing life to our families through love and letting that love spill out into the lives of others.   We establish traditions and create rituals that reinforce faith and family. Simple things, like taking off our shoes at the door, even when we are not in the middle of a pandemic, show respect for our home and the people in it, including ourselves, before we even enter the rooms.

By sharing meals and chores, prayers and conversations we establish bonds that are difficult to break, unless we forget to love.  And in the building of this little community we are following Jesus’ command to “love one another as I have loved you.”

Our homes, as our efforts to love, may not be perfect, but that doesn’t diminish the power of home in the life of a family, even if we are now only a family of one.

While we are confined to our sacred place, let us all pray for those who have no experience of belonging and no physical place to call home, those who are displaced, those who are not loved, or those who are homeless due to violence of any kind or poverty.

St. Theresa of Calcutta teaches us, “We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”

Joshua Hanks photo on Unsplash.