God is the “bottomless encouragement to a faltering and frightened being”.
John Updike
Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed, inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.
Benedict XVI
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Truth is that indestructible life that is open to us when we cease to live as private and self-determining individuals and enter the communion of God’s own personal life-in-relation.
John Zizioulas
Image: John August Swanson, The River
Admitting to need seems so hard for us. Admitting that we are/can be faltering and frightened seems inadmissible. We think our personal insufficiency is unacceptable to God, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Our incompleteness, our emptiness is the other side of our longing for more, for God, and is the “spaciousness into which we can welcome the flow of grace”. Finding spac e- and letting God be an encouragement to us – endlessly, because this is a process we are invited into – is where we learn and taste the goodness of God.
Jesus said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God”: or as Charles Williams translate that: “You are in the right place when you are poor in spirit”.
Being in the right place implies being poor, gentle, mourning, merciful, peaceable and persecuted- in other words, powerless, weak and vulnerable. How can that possible ne the right place? It is the right place because it makes no claims on anyone, not even on God. And it is then that God’s offer of love and wholeness for the individual and the community can be accepted. As it is accepted so the richness of the offer is revealed.
Charles Williams
Our vulnerabilities, the places where we know only too well our weaknesses and our blindness – or in Jesus’ words, “our poverty” – these are the places which are for us “the right place”. Thomas Merton wrote: “My fall into inconsistency was nothing but the revelation of what I am. I am thrown into contradiction: to realise it is mercy, to accept it is love, to help others do the same is compassion”.
Being real is the only gateway into waking up to the reality of God.
It surprises us:
it often confounds us.
But it is “here”, in the midst of our inconsistency,
that we discover and experience mercy.
Such an experience opens us up and draws us out of our narrow self-contained isolation into love,
into the self-forgetfulness and self-giving of compassion.
Flawed as you are you stand on holy ground….
This is the ground that God has cleared for you. …
God meets you here and nowhere else.
Angela Tilby
John August Swanson is an American artist whose vibrant colours and playful style capture the joyful Gospel stories of people meeting the grace of God. The image at the top of the post is Psalm 85, which the artist based upon the words, “Justice and Peace shall kiss, Truth shall spring out of the earth. Kindness and Truth shall meet, Justice shall look down from the heavens.”
JOHN AUGUST SWANSON was born January 11, 1938 in El Monte, California, and died September 23, 2021, in Los Angeles. He painted in oil, watercolor, acrylic, and mixed media, and was an independent printmaker of limited edition serigraphs, lithographs, etchings, and other prints.
His art reflected his strong heritage of storytelling, inherited from his Mexican mother and Swedish father. John Swanson’s narratives are direct and easily understood. He addressed human values, cultural roots, and the quest for self-discovery through visual images. These include Bible stories and celebrations, circuses, concerts, and operas. He optimistically embraced life and spiritual transformation.
Source: John August Swanson
Fr Philip Carter has previously led a meditation on this blog called How to be alive. One in the series has the title , How to be alive: being found, and encourages us to reclaim our own sacred site. In that post we shared this beautiful song and hope you enjoy it again.
Meet me here
Won’t you meet me here
Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins
There’s a balm in the silence
Like an understanding air
Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins
Then we’ll come to the mountain
We’ll go bounding to see
That great circle of dancing
And we’ll dance endlessly
And we’ll dance with the all the children
Who’ve been lost along the way
We will welcome each other
Coming home, this glorious day
We’ve been walking through the darkness
On this long, hard climb
Carried ancestral sorrow
For too long a time
Will you lay down your burden
Lay it down, come with me
It will never be forgotten
Held in love, so tenderly
We are home in the mountain
And we’ll gently understand
That we’ve been friends forever
That we’ve never been alone
We’ll sing on through any darkness
And our Song will be our sight
We can learn to offer praise again
Coming home to the light . .
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
