Nurturing,
Loving God—remind us that we are to be both a channel for your love to others
and a channel to receive your love from others.
Teach us how to find the spirit of nurture within our hearts. Amen
I love the passage that we read
today from Luke’s Gospel where Jesus gets in trouble—really pretty big trouble—with
his parents, particularly his mother.
This passage is often romanticized and focuses on Jesus’ greater
knowledge of what God had called him to do.
Poor, not very insightful, Mary and Joseph didn’t understand what Jesus
was about. But the first view we have of
Mary is the one I most like. Imagine
yourselves in Mary’s shoes. The Passover
Festival has ended. More than likely,
she was tired and ready to be back home.
They are traveling home in a large group. It makes sense that it took them some time to
realize that Jesus is missing. After
all, there were lots of people in their group and the kids more than likely
stayed together. When Mary and Joseph
realize that Jesus is not among them, they are very worried. They travel back the day that they had
already traveled and begin looking for Jesus.
Now, it doesn’t take much to feel the steam building
up in Mary throughout this process. It
seems likely that everyone was supposed to meet at a given place. They trusted Jesus to be where he was
supposed to be. So, here and there, they
look, Mary getting quite worked up along the way. They find Jesus sitting in the Temple talking
to the elders, completely unaware that his parents are beside themselves with
worry. Our modern translation has Mary
start by saying, “Young man,”. Now I
would think that, for most of us, that beginning would give us a clue that
trouble was brewing. Jesus, tells her
that there was no reason for her to be looking for him as he was doing the
business of the One who sent him. While the
scene sort of fades to black at this point to hide the fact that Mary and
Joseph did not understand, my suspicion is that Mary was not done talking to
Jesus. What we do have recorded is that
Jesus traveled home and was obedient to them.
I’m thinking it was a long trip home for Jesus.
This passage, when taken as a parable of sorts, is
about much more than Jesus’ spiritual precociousness. It can be taken as a parable regarding the
parenting of our Divine Creator, who surely must want to address us on numerous
occasions as “young man” or “young woman”.
The Divine Heart heart must surely break during all the times we have
been lost. Taken as a parable, we can
imagine the concern that spreads throughout the Sacred when we fail to respect
our Holy Parent. We experiment and learn
through all our mistakes, while our Divine Parent walks with us through each
step of the chaos we may encounter along the way. God’s nurture does not necessarily mean that
we will never suffer the consequences of poorly-executed decisions. However, it does mean that God will be
walking beside us and allowing the place that we are in to bring us closer to
God’s heart. This not only gives me
great comfort in the moment; it also allows me to say with confidence that
every place I have been, every detour and every wrong turn has made me into the
person that I am today—a child of God open and ready to receive the nurture
that God longs to pour out for my having.
I am grateful that God allows me the freedom to learn at my own pace and
from my own experiences. And there is a
second aspect to God’s nurturing—one that reminds us of why we are here.
Mothers’ Day celebrates the nurturing roles that we
take on as mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, teachers, grandparents and
friends. And, so, it is the perfect day
to think again about the nurturing part of God’s or Beauty’s character and the
way that nurture is relayed to the rest of the world through us and to us,
child of God to child of God. I am the
first to admit that the aspect of God as father or mother can be difficult for
some of us. If we did not have a kind,
loving, caring father or mother, it may be difficult to comprehend the
nurturing nature of God if we use the same words that may be painful to us for
one reason or another. This is why I am
suggesting that we talk about God in terms of a Divine Nurturer—a friend to our
souls, a teacher to our hearts, and a lover to our spirits. When we think of nurture, we often think of
how a child was “raised”. Was he guided
in moral principles that benefit the common good or was she allowed to run
amuck, laying the groundwork for an irresponsible or self-centered adult? This, certainly, is a part of nurture; but
God’s nurture goes so much deeper and leads us so much further.
What
is the goal of God’s nurture freely given to us? It is to grow more and more Godlike. So, it is more than just knowledge. It is the receiving of deep insight into the
nature and love of God. And with this
receiving, comes the responsibility to care for and nurture others into a
deeper relationship (whatever that looks like to them) with the Ground of all
Nurture which many of us call “God”. First,
though, we must look at how we allow God to nurture us.
An old priest tells the story of an elderly farmer who
would stop at a little country chapel every night on his way home from his
fields. The priest, having observed the
farmer, knew that he was apparently doing nothing during those times in the chapel. The priest asked him one day, “What are you
doing when you just sit there every day?”
The old farmer smiled and said, “I look at the Good God and the Good God
looks at me.” Now, if you were to look
at the size of my library, you might conclude that I had missed the wonder of
such simplicity along the way. This
story caught my eye precisely because it is so simple. What this farmer was doing would be called ‘prayer’
by a lot of us. And, it is through
prayer that God’s nurturing presence abounds.
For many of us, it is so much easier to keep running around doing good
things for other people, and talking about those things we are doing, than it
is to sit quietly and open ourselves up to the ministering of God’s heart to
ours. Here’s the catch, though: unless we have experienced just that, we will
be unable to pass that spirit of nurturing care on to others.
Prayer, and nurturing prayer in particular, is an
activity of the heart. Heart-to-heart,
our heart to God’s and God’s to ours.
Really, that is all that prayer truly is. But, so often we hide our hearts, or we try
to, from the very God who made us. I
have spent a good bit of time this week, wondering about why we do this and how
does our doing this relate to the way we interact with those with whom we are
walking this earthly life? I think—now hear
me out before you dismiss what I am saying—that it is because we do not feel
worthy of God’s undivided attention. We
let God off the hook, just in case our suspicions are right about our
unworthiness, and do not give God the chance to show us we are wrong. This translates directly into why we seem hesitant
to allow others to love us and care for us with the same passion for our
well-being as God. We do not think we
are worthy of another child of God’s undivided attention. And so, we build fences between us and God
and us and anyone who is radiating the love of God to us. Not necessarily big fences, but fences,
nevertheless.
If we are to follow our commitment to worshipping a “God
without fences”, then we must start here at the place of individual to
individual relationship. And, if, we
were to find ourselves able to break through these smaller fences, we might
find the larger ones not quite so large.
God’s nurturing heart longs for us to sit quietly and allow the presence
of God to enter the core of our very being.
Many people wrongly believe that only “mystics” or “contemplative nuns
or monks” follow such a course. This
belief cheats us out of a spiritual relationship with God that spontaneously overflows
into our lives with other children of God.
When we allow God to do God’s work in us, we are naturally nurtured in
the character of goodness and the heart of God.
When we are nurtured ourselves, we will attract to us those who need the
nurturing love that we have to offer through God’s grace.
Today, I wanted to focus on the simplest aspect of nurturing—that
of simply being with God and, believe it or not, of being with each other. In our striving to understand, we make more
complex the simple act of loving. I
would suggest to you that as you think today as you think about your mother,
grandmother or some other loving mother-figure in your life it will occur to
you that, with few exceptions, they did not have to ‘figure out’ how to love
you. They simply did. They may have fallen short of perfection and
stumbled along the way, but the feeling we call love is simply nurture at its
simplest. This is what we are asked to
allow God to give to us and what we are called to give to each other. This Nurturing Day, I invite you to challenge
those thoughts in your heart that whisper, “God does not have time for you” or “you
are not worthy of God’s attention” and set your intention upon letting God
in. And, in the same way, I invite you
to let another in, another child of God who longs to show you they love
you. And we will never be the same. Amen and amen.
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