Twenty-eight of Year C
October 2007
A person can have many friends. A person can have many children. Each of these friends, each of these children, will have a different relationship with that person depending on their personality, their outlook on life and their abilities.
In the same way each one's way to God or each one's relationship with God may differ. So when I, or anybody else, speak about their relationship with God you may find it helpful or you may not find it helpful. There is nothing wrong with cherry picking in this case and discarding what you don't find helpful. Today's theme is not about physical healing -which you would be inclined to think from the readings -but about gratitude. If the main motivation for all my religious practices is not gratitude then I am missing the point.
For most of my life I have missed the point. For most of my life gratitude to God was not the motivation for my religious practices or any other practices. My motivation went from fear of God and of eternal damnation; to doing what everyone did because if I didn't, it would be remarked on; to not having the courage to break with the known and familiar and launch out into the unknown; to not seeing a credible or acceptable alternative, etc. etc.
I suppose, looking back now, things began to change when I slowly realised that there was no way that I could live up to the expectations which the Church had of me and which I believed God had of me. There was no way I could gain or merit Eternal Life. If I was to enter Eternal Life, it had to be through something other than my own efforts. This was quite a change for me and it began to lead to a new understand of God and of the Church. As God was slowly allowed (allowed by my changing attitude) to reveal something of Himself to me, I began (again ever so slowly) to realise the goodness and love of God, and this brought the realisation that Eternal Life was a gift -a free gift from God. As my great good fortune began to dawn on me it gave rise to a sense of gratitude. This gratitude slowly began to motivate my religious practices and also other areas of my life. This has brought a blurring of the boundaries between religious practices and all other areas of my life as all tend to be coloured by this same sense of gratitude.
A realisation of my total inability to effect any true relationship with God is truly the beginning of wisdom. Another name for it is humility. I must be like the dry sponge in the dry desert, waiting for God’s rain to come and soak me with the rain of his Spirit.