God does not make junk!

Many years ago my wife Suellen and I became involved in the Marriage Encounter programme as presenters. (Marriage Encounter is a mostly Catholic programme designed to help couples enrich their relationship - and to stop taking it for granted.)

One of the sessions has the title of this post as its theme - and it is a thought that has never left me.

Look at the logic: we are created by God and we are made in God's image. God is incapable of shoddy work. AND God loves every single perfect thing he created. That means that the part of each one of us that is created in God's image is perfect - and is wholly loved by God.

Because God does not - can not - make junk.

That is my underlying theology for running a Catholic school. Every single student, parent, teacher is made in God's image, is loved deeply by God (as am I), and is a wonder of creation. Each one of us is a marvel - and accepting this adds richness to our lives, and our community, and our world.

Take it a step further. God is love. God loves each thing he created. All the things he created are linked together through that love of God. AND in loving God, in relating to each other, we are roped together in a web of love.

We are in the season of Lent. As I have said many times, this is not the time for feeling bad about our sins and faults and failings.

Rather it is a time to stop taking ourselves and our relationship with our Creator for granted. It is time to remind ourselves as forcefully as we can that we are, in fact, made in God's image. And that is the important thing about our existence.

All the little comforts we have made habits of, and now take for granted, are not all that important. To do that, we give up some of them.

It is time to remind ourselves that we are tied to each other person created by God, and the knot that ties us is Love. To do that we give to people on the margins: people who need our help.

And it is time to remind ourselves that our relationship with our Creator is at the heart of all life. The way to do that is by dedicating a little time as often as possible to quietening our spirit, and then being with our God. Some would say praying - but being is enough.

And, if you want to do something really significant this Lent: while your spirit is quiet, and you are being with your Creator, remind yourself that you actually are wonderful, that you are loved absolutely by your Creator.

You must be, because you were made by God - and God does not make junk!

Peace be with you!

Over the last few weeks I have been talking to our students about peace. 

In that time I have introduced our “we have two minds” exercise (and have been very proud of the serious way they have worked at it).

The key quote for me, and shared with them, has been Jesus’ promise Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give it as the world gives: do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. John 14:27.

The world sees peace as the absence of war – or at least the absence of noise: to be in a place without noise, trouble and hard work. That is the best most people can do when they seek peace. But that is not the way the world works. I believe that when Jesus said that he left a different kind of peace, he was saying that we can be surrounded by noise, trouble and hard work – and still be at peace in our hearts.

This distinction between peace in our heads and peace in our hearts is what Jesus was talking about. The peace he gives is not the world’s peace – he says not to let our hearts be troubled – not to let fear into our hearts.

When I wrote about our two minds I drew the same distinction. Our brain has evolved to help us survive. It does not handle peace well – it is too suspicious and fearful. Even when we are on holiday in tranquility, our minds still try to worry about things that happened in the past or might happen in the future. We work hard to quieten it: the holiday is pronounced as "good" if we gained some success.

The urgency of our brain will always dominate unless we develop some serious strategies to quieten it.

Our hearts do not deal with past and future – only now. And right now, this instant, is a little oasis of peace if we want it – if we dare to believe it. Jesus told us not to let our hearts be troubled. He had faith in us – in our ability to control our fears and anxieties and resentments. He had faith in us. He needs us to have faith in him.

For the last 2000 years people have retreated from the world to solitude, to silence, to mind-numbing repetition, looking for God – looking for peace. These all work. But there are other ways to open our hearts to peace. We have lives to live, we have growth to accomplish, we have responsibilities we cannot ignore. If we seek peace as well, we need to look for it in the midst of noise, of busy-ness, of troubles and expectations and work. We will not find it in a mind that evolved to gauge and eliminate threats, that looks for attack in every word, a mind that suspects everyone.

If we sincerely seek peace we will find it only in the peace Jesus offered: do not let your hearts be afraid. In this very moment God is with us. We just need eyes to see it.

Lent & Easter

Easter is at the centre of the liturgical practice and faith of Christianity. It is the time to remember and to celebrate that we are in fact immortal spiritual beings - and not just intelligent animals with a fixed life-span.

The first of the seven readings of the traditional Easter Vigil is the Genesis story of creation where we are reminded that "God created humankind in his image." (Gn 1:27)

That is the point of Easter: we are created in God's image as immortal spiritual beings, and Jesus demonstrated that when he rose from the dead and appeared to people (then and still now) as a resurrected person. That is the point of Easter.

So what is the point of Lent?

Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday next week, is a very old tradition. For many people it has been captured by the idea that really we are not immortal spiritual people created in God's image. For those people Lent is a time to make ourselves worthy (through acts of penance, prayer and giving) to become immortal spiritual people created in the Creator's image.

But we can reframe that idea and see a more clear purpose.

We may be immortal spiritual beings created in God's image, but the immediacy of our physical lives takes over and we spend most of our time worrying about the physical threats and dangers we face. Lent can be a time when we go back to basics and remind ourselves that we are in fact spiritual beings with an umbilical cord rooted in our Creator.

We can work for seven weeks to put our physical needs where they belong - by putting things right and giving up some of our little luxuries, by talking daily to our God, and by giving our stuff and money away to remind us that, in fact, we don't need it all!

If we don't do that, we drift more and more deeply into the physical world, until in the end we cannot conceive of any other.

Meeting Jesus

Right now it seems to me that the most important story in the New Testament is the conversion of Saul.

The first gospel to be committed to paper, the Gospel of Mark around 70AD, ended with the death of Jesus. Maybe there was a worry about being too challenging or maybe the resurrection was such a personal story that it could not be shared – but for whatever reason the writer did not include it in his record of the life of Jesus.

Saul was a committed Jew and a committed anti-Christian. But one day, on the road to Damascus, he had an experience that changed his life: he had a personal experience of the long-dead Jesus. 

It did change his life – but, because he was such a passionate and skilled thinker and communicator, it also came to change how the early Christians came to talk about Jesus. Until Saul/Paul’s insights, Jesus was seen as another passionate and talented communicator who had died for his refusal to compromise his knowledge of God and his role in relation to God.

Based on his experience on the road, Saul/Paul suddenly had first-hand irrefutable proof that Jesus still lived. To him the resurrection was first-hand – he was a witness to the fact that Jesus still lived. True, he no longer walked among us, but he did visit, he did speak, he did form relationships with other living people. 

Clearly Paul was not the first person to have this experience – but the mystical nature of Paul’s experience was intensely personal, and clearly changed him.

And maybe because Paul had not met the historical Jesus while he lived, this meeting became the central event in his life. 

It led him to claim the title “apostle” just like the other apostles called by Jesus, and it inspired his whole interpretation of the life and sayings of Jesus. His excited recounting of the experience also gave permission for others to share the intense and personal relationships they had formed with Jesus after his death, and so the stories came to be recorded in the writings of the early Church (including later revisions of Mark’s Gospel).

When I first read these writing in the Gospels (as a much younger person!) I understood that personal contact with Jesus ended with the ascension – despite my own experience of what felt like a personal contact with Jesus in my prayer life. Now I know better.

Now I see the ascension as writers clearing the way for future pray-ers (like us) to understand our own personal experience with Jesus is real, but also as an experience (like that of Paul) that is not part of the material world.

When we encounter Jesus today, it is a spiritual meeting: a meeting just as real, just as personal, just as affecting (if we have the courage to accept it) as that of Paul. And right now, for me, that event is at the very center of my reading of the New Testament.