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2-14-2014
The geese are flying south again; I hear them honking in the sky and I go out to look for the long waving V that is the shape of their communal life. It is mid-February, and the geese should have been flying south over Kernville last November. I check again; yes, they are going south, lots of them. Winter was late in coming, and so are the geese, I guess. But this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I don’t know whether to delight in the geese or to feel the rage (of a long time teacher of scientific thinking) about the fact that politicians keep “playing” with climate change, or to fear the loss of the seasons and the order of the world as I’ve known it. Which is to say that I have skipped over my one real choice, namely to show up fully for and in the present moment.
The readings for this Sunday hammer on the theme of radical choice, and they tell us to choose God. Over and over they say that we have to be radical in choosing God in order to choose life, in order to avoid death, in order to avoid being caught up in legal fascinations that lead to death. From Ecclesiasticus: “Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given.” From Deuteronomy: “See today I set before you life and prosperity, death and adversity. . . . Choose life then so that you and your descendants may live. . . .” From First Corinthians: “For as long as there is jealousy and quarrelling among you, are you not behaving according to human inclinations?”
From the Gospel, it is given even more radically by Jesus that, if there are impediments in your consciousness, attend to those; get rid of anything and everything that separates you from God, even your own body parts!
In times of uncertainty, the guidance is clear: show up with all your heart and mind for the present moment. It’s not enough to check off in the rulebook that you did all the right things in all the right ways. It’s not enough that you were in the correct political alignment with the best of all bishops. You do not belong to Bishop Chet or to Bishop David-one plants, the other waters, but you are God’s field, God’s building, God’s very place of residence.
Yes, it is a time of change in the Diocese of San Joaquin, another time of change, change upon more change, but one thing is constant: that if we as individuals and congregations and as the collective that is the Diocese of San Joaquin show up for the present moment, neither clinging to the past, nor engineering the future, but just meeting reality as it presents itself, we will be saved.
If we fall into the reality of the present moment, giving our real selves in full trust, saying what we really mean, as Jesus habitually did, we will certainly fall into God’s embrace, as Jesus also did. In surrender to the present, we make the most radical choice; we are the wisest of fools because reality, shifting and changing moment by moment, meets our hearts as they too shift moment by moment. And that dance is where God lives, where God meets us in infinite embrace.
Falling Upward
At last I lay my head
in the lap of life.
All my sorrows have
brought me home
To this moment.
All that I wanted has
betrayed me.
All I have not wanted
has set me free.
Faithfully,
Anne+
Rev. Anne Benvenuti, Ph.D., is an assisting priest at St. Paul’s, Bakersfield, a professor of psychology and philosophy, and a published poet. She is the author of the forthcoming interdisciplinary treatise on human-animal relations, Spirit Unleashed (Wipf and Stock 2014).
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