Falling in Love with God
As I prepared for my first chemotherapy treatment last week, my focus shifted from trying to find the good and opportunity in this diagnosis to simply and fully accept God’s love.
This was just an idea until the chemo started. Once the treatment did its magic, it knocked me down like Ali in his heyday. All I could do was rest and recover, and my prayer shifted from “God, what must I do” to “God, help me better love you.”
Henri Nouwen, one of my favorite spiritual writers, says it this way:
“If you believe you are the beloved of God, you need to spend time listening to his voice- period! You can’t say, “Yes God calls me the beloved, but I have to go out to do something now.”
There are many spiritual lessons for me to still learn, and fully accepting my place as God’s beloved is on top of the list. The need to do, or to even help others to accept their place as God’s beloved, can often becomes my priority. It is necessary that I have time to revisit my own relationship with God and to allow it to explore even greater depths than I have yet to experience in my first 42-years. This will be one of the most important gifts of this cancer diagnosis.
A few weeks ago, my friends from Focolare Media sent me a statue of St. Joseph (see above). Joseph is not holding the baby Jesus or teaching Jesus his craft, as we often see him depicted. Rather, he is sleeping.
I placed the statue on a table in our living room, and I find myself glancing at Joseph often, giving myself permission to rest and to heal.
As I rest, I find myself pondering how Joseph embraced his own place as God’s beloved. Just imagine the responsibility he felt to protect Mary and Jesus, all the unknowns, and as a faithful Jewish man, the understanding of what scripture predicted for his son later in life.
I relate deeply to the importance of responsibility, as parents often do. My sudden questioning of my own mortality raises many questions for the future that goes well beyond my control- not easy for anyone. St. Joseph has been the focus of my reflection and writing before, but never quite like this.
I am reminded by Nouwen that this is a season to simply be, and to rest in God’s love. I do not fully know the depths of God’s love, just as my own wife and children cannot truly appreciate and know the depths of my love for them.
Before I can further shine the love of God for others, I must experience it first. I must, as Nowen writes, first believe I am God’s beloved, and second, listen to God’s voice. This is a daily task, not just a past “mountain top” experience or something we can recall from a moving homily, sacrament, or faith event. It is a daily invitation that we can choose, or not choose, to answer.
As I stare at Joseph resting, I reflect on his dream when the Angel Gabriel validated all that Mary shared when she revealed her own conversation with the bearer of great news. Although it proves to be one of the most important nights in human/Christian history, this is only part of the story- just one night in Joseph’s life.
I ponder what Joseph is learning and feeling on all the nights prior, and all the nights that followed:
· How did his relationship with God prepare him to bring Jesus into the world?
· How did he embrace being God’s beloved before he could reveal God’s love and protection for his Holy Family?
· When he stopped and rested, how far into the depths of God’s love did he journey?
· How did this nourish him, and yes, how did this then allow him to be the man that Jesus and Mary required?
In closing, Nouwen offers these two insights/prayers that I will revisit often to further embrace my place as God’s beloved, and I pray, can also invite you into a deeper relationship with God as well.
“When I trust deeply that today God is truly with me and holds me safe in a divine embrace, guiding every one of my steps I can let go of my anxious need to know how tomorrow will look, or what will happened next month or next year. I can be fully where I am and pay attention to the many signs of God’s love within me and around me.”
“All I want to say to you is “You are the Beloved,” and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. My only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being- “You are the Beloved.”
