Nearly Advent, Thanksgiving

Hoping for Advent, getting through too much food and excess of Thanksgiving. Not how it should be maybe.

Am losing sleep with the same old feelings of inadequacy and questioning: Does God really mean me, is God really calling me? And the same answer: Yes. Get over it. (well maybe not the last part--that sounds like me).

At diocesan convention last weekend, I heard about using parishioner spiritual autobiographies as a tool for evangelism. They showed some videos of autobiographies. I rememberd how spiritual autobiographies affected us in EFM. To know someone's spiritual journey is to be allowed into the depths of the person's greatest pain and sorrow as well as their greatest joy. A person's depths are reached by God as they open themselves in vulnerability. Without that vulnerability, we are not reaching our very humanity, our humbleness and humility before God and are not open to God's grace. When one refuses to feel sorrows, griefs and challenges, and feels nothing, one cannot feel grace either. When we touch our very depths, that open space allows mercy to flow into us.

So, hearing a person's autobiographical journey with God helps us know them deeper than before. As they talk about those places of vulnerability where they have met God, we see them as fully human, without the mask of anonymity for the general public, but with the grace of God as a beam of light suffusing their very self before us. What a transformation we have of understanding. Where before we saw a two-dimensional human being, now we see God's created spirit coming through this person whom God loves unconditionally. We want this for ouselves, we want to love this person as God has loved them, and we do because they are now purely themselves.

Before we see the full human being, we have perhaps seen a person who seems perfect. When you don't know a person's story, you only see how they appear at church, at work, in the grocery store--put together for public faces. We begin to "judge our insides by their outsides": we certainly can't feel perfect like that person is perfect. But then we come to really know their struggles. We find out their challenges, the problems of their family and home life, their growing up, their personal demons. We find they are like us in every way, flawed yet loved by God.

Knowing another is to reach into God's spirit a little more. It is to break out of the self-pity, or navel-gazing we may be doing about our own problems, and to see ourselves as part of God's created world and of God's own hand, along with all of humanity. We are special in our unique selves. but our challenges and foibles are not unique--we share them with all the world. When we know this, we join humanity and join with God in seeing the grace of God walking before us. We begin to see the face of Christ in the suffering we all have undergone and to see how loved we are in our struggles.

Tomorrow give thanks.