God, our eternal love, let your love pierce and wound our ego so that we see you in us and others. Amen.
It might be a bit redundant to go over all the lessons we heard this morning, and I wouldn’t do this very often. But I think it’s worthwhile to read them again. I’m not going to read all the verses but a few that might directly have an impact on us. First from the Wisdom of Sirach: "If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice. He has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for whichever you choose. Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given...He [God] has not commanded anyone to be wicked, and he has not given anyone permission to sin." As you can see, the teaching of Sirach is not too hard to understand. We’re given a free will to choose. We have a free will to keep the commandments. We have a free will to act faithfully. We can choose between fire and water. We can choose between life and death. While God has given us a free will, we are to make a right choice that is not wicked or sinful. God commands us to make a choice that is aligned with God’s will. Yet, God cannot force us to make that choice. It’s to be done on our own willingly out of our own desire, never coercively. Most importantly, whatever choice we make, we are responsible for that choice. Let’s look at some verses from Psalm 119 we recited together: "Happy are they whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. Happy are they who observe his decrees and seek him with all their hearts. Who never do any wrong, but always walk in his ways…” While we can easily see that the point of this psalm is to keep the law of God, it also says something that might interest us, which is about happiness. If you want to be happy, walk in the way of the Lord and seek God with all your hearts. Again, the heart of the psalmist’s teaching is to walk in the way of God, keep God’s commandments. Let’s skip Paul and go to Jesus. Jesus goes way further than the teachings of Sirach and psalmist. He mentions about one of the Ten Commandments that you shall not murder. For him, this isn’t enough. It’s not even a bare minimum. He asks more from his followers. So he says: "...if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny." Now, after listening to these lessons, how do they make you feel in your hearts? I hope you don’t say “Nothing!” All these lessons should actually trouble us, and their function is supposed to bother us or make us feel uneasy. We might feel like they trigger too much guilt in us for what we do not do for others. They indeed do, but that’s not everything. I would like us to carefully and mindfully pay attention to your hearts. Before getting caught in that thought of judgment of yourselves, then of guilt, there’s a movement of our conscience that responds to the lessons we have heard this morning. The conscience is the divine sensor built in our souls that detects what ought to be done or knows what God wills in situations where we need to choose and act. The conscience is not just personal but communal in that it always prompts us to take action for others. As I was reflecting on today’s lessons given to us, I found myself brushing off all these teachings of what we ought to do. It’s too moralistic or even legalistic. I’m sure I’m not the only person who experiences this sense of resistance or restraining forces when heard of what ought to be done or all the rules and restrictions we are urged to keep. We can so easily pick and choose what we want to hear from Jesus or from the Bible. But this morning, we are challenged to go beyond this restraining force in order to truly get what Jesus means. Also, let’s remember that Jesus said to his followers that not one letter or one stroke of a letter in the law will disappear. Let’s stay with that discomfort that we experience from hearing all the lessons of what we must do, all the commandments of God, Jesus’s command to reconcile with our sisters and brothers who have something against us before offering anything to the altar. What it does to us is to help us sense that the Spirit is talking to us through our conscience. It’s reactivating the conscience. Feel your conscience reacting to all these teachings and wisdoms from Scriptures this morning. Let your conscience speak for itself. This is not an easy task. This pains our strong ego-consciousness. This ego-consciousness is what Paul calls “the flesh.” The flesh is the ego. This flesh, this ego is a barrier when it is self-interested, self-focused, so much prone to justify and defend oneself. It then disconnects our experience with God. I wouldn’t say it cuts us from God because nothing can do so. Yet, the flesh or the ego blinds us to see what’s beyond the flesh. It confuses us that there are only waves but no ocean in which waves dance tiding in and out, that there are only letters but no white background in which letters are only visible. This discomfort or resistance we feel inside when we hear what God calls us to do with our free will is our ego or the flesh being punctured or pierced. The flesh is being pierced or wounded. What is wounded is our ego or flesh. And there’s what’s not wounded, which is our oneness with God or our divine nature in us. God is not some object to be analyzed, standing far away but we in God as well as God in us that there we discover this divine, perpetual union. Without this pain of the ego, which is the mystical death of the flesh, we simply remain as the people of the flesh, not spiritual people or the people of the Spirit. There is this short story: The lover knocked at the door of his beloved. “Who knocks?” said the beloved within. “It is I,” said the lover. “Go away. This house will not hold you and me.” The rejected lover went away into the desert. There he meditated for months on end, pondering the words of the beloved. Finally he returned and knocked at the door again. “Who knocks?” “It is you.” The door was immediately opened. (Anthony de Mello, The Song of the Bird, pp. 99-100) This puncturing of the conscience is like the lover’s experience of rejection. But through this wound, he can enter the house of his beloved, being one with his beloved. There are no two individuals but one union in love. My friends, do you believe what Paul says about you in the second lesson that you’re God’s field and God’s temple. You are where God happens in this world. For us to take care of God’s field and to build God’s temple, this awakening of the conscience must happen. And this process of our conscience being awake involves the mystical death of the flesh, or the ego being wounded through by the divine love. Some mystics call this mystical experience the “wound of love.” There’s a beautiful saying about this wound of love in the statutes of the Carthusian Order: “Here is acquired that eye, By whose serene gaze the Spouse is wounded with love; That eye, pure and clean, by which God is seen.” (Statutes of the Carthusian Order I.6.16) Keep your conscience awake. Feel that awakening pain, the wound of love, which becomes that eye, pure and clean, by which God is seen, by which our eternal oneness with God is experienced, by which our neighbors as well as our enemies are seen. Let that wound of love burn your ego, be consumed by that living flame of love. Then, we will truly get what Augustine meant when he said, “Love and do what you wish.” In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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