THE RIVER OF INFINITY/ETERNITY

   When God gives himself to each of us in grace, i.e., as he calls us to our life-vocation and opens us to discern what he expects of us in our everyday life, we have Infinity/Eternity flowing into space/time.  Space/time can never completely receive and understanding the fullness of Infinity/Eternity.  Being space/time creatures, we receive God's grace with all the incompleteness and limitations built into us.  Even in eternal heaven, we will forever keep wonderfully growing in our comprehension, appreciation and love of God.

   More particularly we are limited in our reception of and response to God by our personal aspects, e.g., age, gender, personality, language, culture, education, personal experiences and history, etc.  All these can enrich our experience of God and our response to him, but they can also obstruct our relationship with God, if we let them.  So, to fulfill ourselves in all the aspects of who we are, we have to keep ourselves continuously open to receiving and growing in God's grace, which includes our reading the signs of the times to see God's intentions in today's ever changing world, and responding to him ever more fully and effectively.  Our life in Christ is a Way, a continuous movement, like a river, of growing and flourishing in God's living, ever flowing, loving grace.

   What is true of us as individuals is true of us as the community of faith that we are.  Through our leaders, we are all spiritually empowered and responsible to channel God's flowing, living water of grace into the most effective means of working for the ongoing salvation of the world.  Our leaders, therefore, must keep themselves open to God's living truth, doing nothing to obstruct it.  They must channel God's living water so that it flows within us and from us (cf. Jn. 7:38) to bring ever flowering life to the world in all seasons.

   Unhappily, our leaders are failing in their responsibility.  In many areas they are stopping the truth from flowing.  They have dammed the flow of God's grace, e.g., in the areas of sexuality, women, the freedom of the laity to discern God's intentions and contribute their sense of the faith to the whole church, the work of many of our best theologians, and the forward-looking vision of American nuns.  They have also dammed up insights from today's science, philosophy and psychology--all of which can lead to our ever evolving understanding and appreciation of human nature itself.

   I believe that God is responding to our leaders' self-imposed theological and spiritual stagnation by inspiring many of the laity, theologians and nuns to speak and act prophetically and thereby open the way to new visions of the truth that God wants us to recognize and incorporate into our lives.  For our part, we must intensify our discernment of the gifts, talents, possibilities and opportunities that God is giving us.  And we must gather together with other discerning people.  Together we can test ourselves in the Spirit to ensure, as well as we can, that we are discerning correctly, so we can act in the fullest possible accord with God's truth and intentions.

   To help ourselves we can look deeply inward to see, as openly and truthfully as possible, if our intended actions are alive and flowing with truth, justice, peace, humility, and most of all, with love--all for the building up of ourselves and our society and culture, in the saving grace of Christ.  Thus we will keep God's grace flowing like a river of living water.

OUR ROYAL RESPONSIBILITY

   Vatican II says that we participate in Christ's kingly office.  That means that we have the spiritual empowerment and responsibility to correct our society and culture in the saving grace of Christ.  It means that we are in this world in order to work to save it in the grace of   Christ.  It means that we are the 21st century eyes, mind, heart and hands of Christ.

   Just as the universe and world were created incomplete, we were born incomplete.  Jesus died, rose again and returned to heaven so he could send us his Spirit of completeness, in whom we could now achieve completeness and wholeness of life, beginning here in space/time, and fully in eternity.  

   A deeply human prayer has been answered, "Lord, open our eyes, minds and hearts that we may see."  Alive in Christ's Spirit, we can see ourselves and all people and things in terms of both our present incompleteness and destined completeness.  We can see what we and the world were created and destined to be and become, especially in maturity, peace, hope, joy and love.

   We can clearly and effectively "see the signs of the times."  We can see the needs and possibilities of today's people in today's world.  We can see the obstacles that we put in our own way--educationally, socially, politically and economically.  And we can see what is necessary to overcome those obstacles and we can work to overcome them.  Let's go back a moment.  Imagine in the 1930's, if Christians and all people of good will clearly and effectively saw what Hitler was about to inflict upon the world.  And imagine that they exercised their royal responsibility and corrected the Nazi movement before it gained its lethal power.  And imagine that they could have done it non-violently.

   Question:  Do we really believe that the Nazi horror could have been prevented by spiritually discerning, royally acting people?  If we don't believe it, we must sadly accept that we have fallen into the spiritual anemia that many Christians are suffering from today.  So first, we must stir up the grace to imagine what we can truly do.

   In the America of the 1960's, one Christian woman, Rosa Parks, inspired a spiritual revolution with her own, individual royal act of refusing to sit in the back of a bus.  The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the American people to a new vision of equality and respect for all our brothers and sisters.  In the Poland of the 1980's, Lech Walesa helped lead his country to freedom from Communism.  We personally will no doubt act in more modest ways, but that's no problem.  The problem arises only when we don't act in whatever way we can.

   There's a story of a man who carried a sign back and forth in front of the White House every day, all alone, in all kinds of weather.  One day, a policeman asked him, "Why are you doing this?  You're not going to change anybody?"  The man replied, "I'm doing this so that I don't change."  Everyone's road to salvation begins with a single step, possibly alone, preferably with some others.  Where that road ends is up to God.  Our royal responsibility is to take that first step.