CALLED TO QUESTION


Last week I sat amongst a group of bright and talented women as we continued to make our way through Joan Chittiser's book: CALLED TO QUESTION, A Spiritual Memoir. Though Sister Joan is a Catholic, Benedictine, nun and we are for the most part Protestant, married/widowed, career/retired women, it's amazing how similar the spiritual touch-points of her life and ours.

Two things from our discussion are still with me. The first is that though life continues to unfold before us,our life is really the sum of the choices we make in response to what we find on our life's path. Secondly, we can make those choices from our own well of information, or we can make those life-forming choices from the depths of God's love for us and His life in us. Simply put, we choose to be God, or to seek God.

For those of us reared and educated in the 20th century, in a country that reflects back to us the virtues of fierce independence and the right of might... the humility necessary to daily submit to a God we cannot see, listening for instructions we cannot hear with our ears sometimes seems ludicrous or worse yet, foolish.

But as Chittister reflects on her life and the instances which have been her rudder through a life of turbulent waters, what quickly becomes evident is how peace, beauty, joy and fulfillment came not as she ventured out on paths of her own choosing--or someone else's--but as she followed paths revealed in the richness of prayer (as listening) and of solitude(as uncluttering). She found in the end that these spiritual practices bouy her, anchor her, and send her out into the world for her own good and the good of others, with or without the consent of the organized structures of her religious affiliation.

This Sunday I'll be in the pulpit walking the tightrope of acknowledging the celebration of Independence Day while in faithfulness to the Gospel I'll remind folks that life 'under God' is meant to be lived in dependence upon the Creator and interdependent within a community of faith -- truths that our culture does not honor and which the redeemed cannot ignore. Our individual freedom (s)is held within other of God's loving guidelines.

The peace, beauty, joy and fulfillment we seek will never be dictated to us by a leader, or given to us as inalienable rights through any document of any nation. It simply is not theirs to give. They are instead the gifts of God, freely given, to any who choose to accept the freedom God offers, from all that binds us. They are the abundant gifts to all who find refuge in the Christ. The freedom that will be celebrated with fireworks this weekend is merely a dim, dim reflection.

So I choose on this Independence Day to remember the One who has truly set me free, while also acknowledging the blessing of living in a free nation. I choose on this Independence Day to remember the words God gave Moses to take to Pharoah: "Set my people free, that they might worship Me." And wonder what those words could mean for this nation at this time in our life together. With those thoughts echoing I'll reflect on my/our freedom's, hoping not to draw from the shallows of my own well, but from the depths of God's. BLESSINGS AND PEACE TO YOU, AS YOU DEPEND ON HIM. The Celtic Monk

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