When you make a speech, you are attempting an embrace – you are saying to your listeners – you and me both.
Don Watson
Don Watson, in a book called Death Sentence (on the decay of public language), says that when you make a speech, you are attempting an embrace – you are saying to your listeners – you and me both.
This is a helpful insight into Jesus – who is attempting an embrace with us – who is always saying to us, you and me both.
Jesus – as the embodiment of agape love – which Pope John Paul II said is best translated in English by the word solidarity – says to us that God is not going to bypass our bodies. God meets us here, in our flesh and blood reality, “present in the quick of being, one’s own body, and in the present tense itself, in existence as it exists, in the fibre and pulse of the world” (Dennis Potter).
___________________________________
Jesus said ‘this is my body’ – and this is what we say at every Eucharist, rather than ‘this is his body’. This is Jesus saying ‘you and me both’. We are involved, implicated whenever we speak of God. In fact – far better than speaking about God, we at best speak to God – to a Thou or You, and not an ‘It’. God-talk asks of us a deep integrity of the human heart, so that when I say ‘I believe’ it is simply another way of saying ‘I am‘
H.A.Williams
When we make a full, responsive, authentic and embodied response to an-other,
to our circumstances,
to creation,
then we have discovered our unique and personal way of being Jesus in the world.
This is more than the ‘imitation’ of Christ;
it is discovering that ‘we are found in him, and he in us’.
Another way of saying this is ‘Becoming what we are’.
Jesus says to us that God is on our side, that God-is-with-us. Far from ‘intervening’ from outside, God is living and yearning from within. Like a single cell in the process of evolution ‘groping’ towards greater complexity of life, God is ‘groaning’ with our spirits towards greater intimacy, greater intensity of life.
_____________________
Jesus is always asking us to locate saving grace in ‘the warmth and sweetness and dryness and terror of actual living’.
H.A.Williams
He did not say, ‘You will never have a rough passage, you will never be over-strained, you will never feel uncomfortable’, but he did say, ‘You will never be overcome’. God wants us to pay attention to these words, so as to trust him always with strong confidence, through thick and thin.
Julian of Norwich 68
Truth sees God: wisdom gazes on God. And these two produce a third, a holy, wondering delight in God, which is love.
Julian of Norwich 44
Julian of Norwich wrote the beautiful words, ‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’. Here is a lovely contemporary setting.
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
