It’s Who You Know…
Photo Credit: Daniel Tamas Mehes
Men and women who work 12-step programs are eventually surprised when they find out that ending their drinking and drugging careers is just a start. The evolving challenge is to live sober and clean or to put it into a Salesian context: thus redeemed, to live whole, well, and devoutly. It’s not surprising that…
Lent inspires many of the same sentiments that are latent in recovery— for example, wellness, conversion, redemption, etc. But experience tells us that both the redeemed and the recovered can only live whole, well, and devoutly when they have (in the words of the 3rd Step) … “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.”
So it’s a question of finding a God we can work with. How could we otherwise turn our will and lives over to Him?
Lent’s liturgy, its evocative ritual, and ascetic practices provide a brilliant spiritual landscape wherein the God of our understanding reveals something about Himself at every turn. Thus, all the beautiful moments and movements of our Lenten season yield two benefits: a richer relationship with the God of our understanding and greater clarity about who we are called to be as disciples. Knowing God shapes our identity. Immersion in Lent and its defining habits disclose as much about us as about God as we understand Him.
Our brothers, Peter, James, and John will continue to grow this Sunday in their understanding of who Jesus is through their experience of the Transfiguration. Jesus reveals Himself as Son of God in an unexpected way and the Father urges their attentiveness.
Yet, we the readers know they will only fully understand who Jesus is when they suffer His passion and death and their own despair and isolation. Only when they pass through the worst days of their lives will the God of their understanding be revealed to them in the good news of the Resurrection. Jesus transfigured will then be manifest as the God who redeems.
We are challenged to find a God of our understanding, not anyone else’s. If this seems distressingly ambiguous, consider this:
You have heard the expression… “It’s who you know?”
Well, that is not a bad place to start in applied spirituality. You could say that Catholic spiritualities each focus on Jesus (and more broadly the Holy Trinity) as they have come to know God in a particular way. We Salesians gravitate to Jesus, humble, and gentle, and this outlook has implications for how we disciple and the God we help others to know.
Who then do you understand God to be? Is He angry, indifferent, loving, or inconsistent?
To oversimplify, let me suggest that …
On the one hand, there is the God who is feared or indifferent and is altogether unapproachable.
And on the other, there is God who embraces us in the Eucharistic festivities, who once a vulnerable child, grows up to embrace the cross for us, and who pours out His salvific love over a world of wounded hearts; a God who speaks heart to heart (Treatise 6.1). There is then, the God who demands fearful prostration or the God who releases us from fear (or addiction, or selfishness, or whatever) so that we can be Love’s gift to others.
Let’s join Peter, James, and John as they work through their confusion, seeking God as they and we will come to understand Him and to whom we can freely turn over our will and our lives.
Fr. Mark Plaushin, OSFS
Love. Learn. Serve. Charlie Mike
