Words, spoken and written are used to communicate; we use them to connect to one another. With out them it can be difficult to learn about another person, to get to know them, to relate to them. We use them to help us learn about the world around us, the collective observations of the human race recorded, remembered and spread in words. Sometimes it seems that although they open up so much information to us words can also stunt our ability to learn, relate and understand in other ways. We are so reliant on them.
I often find in a lot of churches that learning about God is very restricted to words. The pastor gets up and teaches people about God. It’s a useful thing and a good thing to learn about God in this way, another person’s knowledge is sheared with you to add on to what you already know. My parents both find this way very good. I never have. Often I sit and do my best to focus on the words, but my understanding is next to nothing, the preacher might as well have been speaking a foreign language because I understand little.
I have learnt a lot about God though words. The Bible, prayer and discussions with people who explain things in ways that I understand have taught me much. But words are not the only way. A lot of people learn about God thought music or symbols. For them maybe the music time in church is the way they learn more about God, for others maybe it's the symbols that we sometimes find around churches that teach them the most. For others maybe looking at the world around them teaches them the most. Maybe it’s all of these ways and more.
No matter what way a person learns about God, words are used the most. Perhaps that is what has created the idea of some people that without the words, the Bible, and the teachings of our churches and parents there would not be Christianity. A troublesome idea I have come across put forward by some people is that we only believe in God because of what we are told and taught. But God never has and never will be restricted by words. He created them, but he is not dependent on them, he does not need them to communicate with us. They are simply one of many tools.
God transcends words. A child not yet able to use or understand words is not unreachable by God. God can communicate just fine with them if he wants to. A person who finds language hard to understand and express with does not need words to understand God. Perhaps a person will not be able to read the Bible, perhaps they cannot understand the words of a pastor, perhaps the music in church can overwhelm them and cause a person to shut down, and perhaps they still know God. Before I could talk and before I could organise understanding form those around me I understood that God was real, I understood he was present. It was a very simple concept to me.
All of the patterns that fill up the world, so perfect and beautiful and all tell me about God. It is like the grass and the sky and everything is covered in words about God, but not words like you hear or read. God is everywhere, he fills up the world. For me the patterns in the world, the symbols in a church, the way rain looks as it falls, my niece, and these things teach me the most about God.
I wrote most of this last night. My brain was very clear. The less stressed my head feels the better I can write. My brain is not clear now. It feels muddled and stressed and tiered. One of my favourite saints is St Bernadette she had trouble with talking also. Sometimes my brain scrambles, and sometimes my words go. Talking and words are difficult for me and for her. But God is the same forever.
Showing posts with label Bernadette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bernadette. Show all posts
Monday, 10 December 2007
Saturday, 8 December 2007
The wonder of my being
Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you', and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'”
Today Danni and I went on a retreat called 'An Advent Journey with Mary', given by an elderly Carmelite friar from Ireland. Mary is Danni's focus for Awake the Dawn, not mine, so I am entering her territory in writing about the retreat. (This is rarely a sensible move to make - the last time such a thing happened, as I was finning through a coral lagoon twenty-eight metres down in the Red Sea, an indignant moray eel shot out of its hole to register a pointed complaint.) What I want to write about here is self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge that Mary possessed so absolutely.
St Teresa of Avila, the Carmelite reformer and mystic, realised that when she was at her closest to God she was at her closest to Teresa. We are accustomed to seeing God as a separate entity, the Almighty enthroned in the sky. If we could only understand that "this God is not 'out there', but intimately present to me, in the blood pulse of my life," as the Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows puts it in her book To Believe in Jesus, sinful behaviour would no longer seem so attractive. We would recognise it for what it is - self-strangulation. Anything that cuts you off from God cuts you off from yourself. You go against who you are, and that's the pain of it.
This was a kind of pain that Mary never experienced, as God preserved her from sin from the moment of her conception. The freedom and self-knowledge that resulted from this gift of God is made clear in the story of Bernadette Soubirous, a saint who has special meaning for Pebles as she almost certainly had autism. Among other things, Bernadette struggled notably with speech and language. When told by a teacher that she was too stupid to learn anything, Bernadette replied, "I know how to love God." Yet it's unlikely that this French peasant child from a desperately poor family, who grew up gnawing on candlewax to satisfy her hunger pangs and was practically illiterate, would ever have been recognised for her God-love if she hadn't received visions of the Virgin Mary in the filthy grotto of Massabielle. She was fourteen years old at the time.
Mary (or Aquero, as Bernadette called her) made no prophecies. She didn't make a bare rosebush flower when the bishop asked for this to happen as proof of the visions' authenticity. She spoke very little during the apparitions themselves. She did, however, reveal her identity to Bernadette in the child's own dialect: "Que seroy era Immaculada Concepciou."
I am the Immaculate Conception. I am the Immaculate Conception. Bernadette ran to the house of the local priest who had demanded to know the apparition's name, repeating the unfamiliar phrase under her breath to prevent herself from forgetting it. At the presbytery, the priest tried to adjust the odd phraseology. Surely the woman had said "I am Mary Immaculate" or something along those lines? But Bernadette remained firm. I am the Immaculate Conception. This was what she had heard, and this was what she maintained.
Mary's words to St Bernadette Soubirous, the girl to whom Pebles refers as 'the one everybody thought was stupid', are pregnant with knowledge of God and knowledge of the self. This is why the apparitions of Lourdes resonate with me in a way that the apparitions of Fatima cannot. Mary's simple statement of being, given in reply to the priest's demand for her name, reminds me of God's answer to Moses in similar circumstances: "I am."
This intensely personal knowledge of yourself, this assurance of your place in the universe, grows deeper as you grow closer to God. This is why the psalmist was able to write, "I praise You for the wonder of my being." But how many of us view our being as something wondrous? How many of us can sing those words from the psalm and really mean the song?
People travel to wonder at the height of mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars -
and they pass by themselves without wondering.
- St Augustine
If we really want to prepare a place for God in our lives, we must not pass ourselves by. We must remember God's reply to Moses, making it the basis of our preparation and our understanding - an understanding that was personified by Mary.
Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you', and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'”
Today Danni and I went on a retreat called 'An Advent Journey with Mary', given by an elderly Carmelite friar from Ireland. Mary is Danni's focus for Awake the Dawn, not mine, so I am entering her territory in writing about the retreat. (This is rarely a sensible move to make - the last time such a thing happened, as I was finning through a coral lagoon twenty-eight metres down in the Red Sea, an indignant moray eel shot out of its hole to register a pointed complaint.) What I want to write about here is self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge that Mary possessed so absolutely.
St Teresa of Avila, the Carmelite reformer and mystic, realised that when she was at her closest to God she was at her closest to Teresa. We are accustomed to seeing God as a separate entity, the Almighty enthroned in the sky. If we could only understand that "this God is not 'out there', but intimately present to me, in the blood pulse of my life," as the Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows puts it in her book To Believe in Jesus, sinful behaviour would no longer seem so attractive. We would recognise it for what it is - self-strangulation. Anything that cuts you off from God cuts you off from yourself. You go against who you are, and that's the pain of it.
This was a kind of pain that Mary never experienced, as God preserved her from sin from the moment of her conception. The freedom and self-knowledge that resulted from this gift of God is made clear in the story of Bernadette Soubirous, a saint who has special meaning for Pebles as she almost certainly had autism. Among other things, Bernadette struggled notably with speech and language. When told by a teacher that she was too stupid to learn anything, Bernadette replied, "I know how to love God." Yet it's unlikely that this French peasant child from a desperately poor family, who grew up gnawing on candlewax to satisfy her hunger pangs and was practically illiterate, would ever have been recognised for her God-love if she hadn't received visions of the Virgin Mary in the filthy grotto of Massabielle. She was fourteen years old at the time.
Mary (or Aquero, as Bernadette called her) made no prophecies. She didn't make a bare rosebush flower when the bishop asked for this to happen as proof of the visions' authenticity. She spoke very little during the apparitions themselves. She did, however, reveal her identity to Bernadette in the child's own dialect: "Que seroy era Immaculada Concepciou."
I am the Immaculate Conception. I am the Immaculate Conception. Bernadette ran to the house of the local priest who had demanded to know the apparition's name, repeating the unfamiliar phrase under her breath to prevent herself from forgetting it. At the presbytery, the priest tried to adjust the odd phraseology. Surely the woman had said "I am Mary Immaculate" or something along those lines? But Bernadette remained firm. I am the Immaculate Conception. This was what she had heard, and this was what she maintained.
Mary's words to St Bernadette Soubirous, the girl to whom Pebles refers as 'the one everybody thought was stupid', are pregnant with knowledge of God and knowledge of the self. This is why the apparitions of Lourdes resonate with me in a way that the apparitions of Fatima cannot. Mary's simple statement of being, given in reply to the priest's demand for her name, reminds me of God's answer to Moses in similar circumstances: "I am."
This intensely personal knowledge of yourself, this assurance of your place in the universe, grows deeper as you grow closer to God. This is why the psalmist was able to write, "I praise You for the wonder of my being." But how many of us view our being as something wondrous? How many of us can sing those words from the psalm and really mean the song?
People travel to wonder at the height of mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars -
and they pass by themselves without wondering.
- St Augustine
If we really want to prepare a place for God in our lives, we must not pass ourselves by. We must remember God's reply to Moses, making it the basis of our preparation and our understanding - an understanding that was personified by Mary.
Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you', and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'”
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