Called Out of Darkness
Page 20
These truths I celebrate with my whole soul. I do not want to be tempted by divisions and controversies. I do not want to judge, to condemn, to quarrel. I want to remain with the Lord on the green grass of the hills of Galilee as He gives us the blueprint for God’s Kingdom on earth. I see Him standing there in His simple, timeless robes, with His arms out. I hear His voice as if He were only a few feet away. I draw closer to Him, until I am sitting at His feet. Centuries don’t matter anymore. He is as real and immediate now as He was two thousand years ago. Having entered history, He remains our own and our timeless God. I feel that I can reach out and silently touch the hem of His robe. I close my eyes as I listen to Him, and I dare to imagine on my head, on my shoulder, the warmth of His loving hand. But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for He makes His sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. How can this not be enough?
How is it that I, unlike Him, am a broken creature of my time? And in the softest voice possible, want to say this: Centuries ago the stars were sacred. A man could be burnt at the stake for declaring that the earth revolved around the sun. Churchmen feared that if astronomers gained authority over the Heavens, Scripture would be undermined. But no such thing took place. Scripture is too great, too powerful, too fathomless for such a thing to take place. Now the Christian world holds the stars to be secular. C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s Most of the Christian world holds biology and geology to be secular as well. And Scripture is as potent and irresistible as ever. Scripture still guides our lives.
And the stars are still the lamps of Heaven. Is it not possible for us to do with gender, sexuality, and reproduction what was long ago done with the stars? To realize that these are also secular areas, and that new sources of information about them may be as valid as the information given us long ago by men who gazed through the first telescopes at the night sky? Is it not possible that gender, sexuality, and reproduction are areas for which the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount may be entirely adequate as they are for every other sort of behavior we face?
If I am wrong on this, I pray you will forgive me for this suggestion. And a suggestion is all that it is. But I see people driven away from churches by these issues. And some for their whole lives.
And too many make the mistake I made. They leave the loving figure of Jesus Christ because they feel they have to leave His churches.
I will never leave Him again, no matter what the scandals or the quarrels of His church on earth, and I will not leave His church either.
Next Sunday, I will walk into my parish church as I do every week, and I will celebrate the Mass with my fellow Catholics, and I will stand before the altar of the Lord. This is a California church, as I’ve already mentioned—
very different from those ornate and immense churches of my youth. It was built only a few short decades ago, yet it 2 4 5
reflects the ancient truths and dogmas of my venerable religion as beautifully as did the churches in which I grew up. And coincidentally, beyond the altar, there stands against the curving wall of the sanctuary that very same giant statue—of the Crucified Christ embracing St. Francis with His right arm—that so startled me in a church in Brazil over ten years ago, and that so captivated me in a little shop in San Francisco ten years before that.
Yes, in this church, of St. Francis of Assisi, here in the Coachella Valley of California, I stumbled upon that very same image. And it means to me what it has always meant: The Lord loves us. The Lord embraces us. The Lord has made this world for us. And from the scandal of the cross, He reaches down to embrace His beloved saint—the saint who put the Infant Jesus in the crib at Greccio, the saint who bears the wounds of the Stigmata in his uplifted hands. I am broken, flawed, committed: a Christmas Christian searching for that Stigmata, for the imprint of those Wounds on my heart and my soul, and my daily life. a n o t e o n t h e t y p e
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