The Seventh Day of Lent

It won’t surprise me to learn that some of you have reached this point ahead of me. I’ve commited to a Lenten discipline of giving up those things that interfere with my relationship to God, and now I’m discovering that God may very well be present all the time everywhere. If this is true, it creates a very dire scenario of what is interfering and how to give it up: life itself is the culprit. When I set out to achieve a stronger connection with my Creator, I cannot rule out that through my experience the Creator is setting out on the same journey. Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees! The harder I look for God, the further I am removed from the realization that God is literally right under my nose—more accurately: is my nose. In the most theological of the four canonical gospels, that according to John, Jesus makes an incredibly bold claim: The Father and I are one. The Father is in me and I am in the Father. The history of Christianity supports my contention that the Church uses this claim to support the divinity of Jesus the Christ; to demonstrate, if you will, how Jesus is superhumanly one third of the Trinity. Taken in an existential context, however, the statement applies not only to Jesus but to those to whom he is speaking. It does not make sense to me that Jesus’ calling was to distinguish himself from the rest of humankind as God on Earth. As Albert Schweitzer contends, this is a claim made for Jesus by others. According to the Gospel of Mark—generally agreed to be the earliest of the canonical gospels—the very first words out of Jesus’ mouth proclaim that the reign of God is at hand. Taken in a static context, that statement would raise the expectation for the apocalyptic end of time, but understood as a dynamic process it confirms the imminency of God in both time and space. In other words, don’t go looking for God somewhere else. As I have said before, without God I am nothing. What I need to learn to give up is anything that detracts from the continuous perception that I am in God and God is in me.