different and still the same

We hosted an open time for folks to drop by on Tuesday to view and hear the inauguration via our large screen and good sound system in the sanctuary at Fairlawn West.

I was teary eyed and pumped.

Now time is the same again. The news reports have the same voices on the same topics with different policies implemented, but the world has not changed!

The election of Obama is the culmination of wider change. Oh, maybe not the culmination, but a major accomplishment on the road. But the world has not changed.

These are the times when I am confronted by and reminded that true change comes from God and it is a change that happens from the inside out of all of us. Barack Obama is no more a change agent than the rest of us. Right now he is a great gift of a vessel used by God to show us on what God can do with each of us. And all of us as a human family. And many have allowed God's work in them to change them which has led to where we stand today with the son of an immigrant from Africa (we've had lots of European immigrant children become president).

However the election, new policies and directives, a Democratic controlled Congress and White House...these in and of themselves do not indicate true change. Whether we are joyed by this reality in Washington or are cynical and critical of it, we all need to be changed...from above. Day by day. Step by step. Breath by breath. And this is what Jesus Christ has done and is doing as God's change agent. Thanks be to God for servants like Barack Obama who accept this change from above as the guide of their life. There are more like him. They may be much more anonymous than him. But no less vital in God's action in human history. And they aren't all overtly "Christian." Yet they are no less followers of Jesus Christ than those who are overtly Christian. In truth many who follow Jesus and aren't overtly Christian are more true to God than a number who claim the title "Christian" for themselves. That's a sign of how God is in charge and we aren't!

Here's the link for a great, short youtube video by Brian McLaren on what it means to follow Jesus today...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NtgjNLNpao

Thomas Merton quote on God

I am re-reading Merton's "New Seeds of Contemplation". This paragraph speaks to me in a time when we are attempting to be "intellectually spiritual" and trying to work through in our minds what we will accept about Jesus and what we will discard as irrelevant or "out dated" about God.

In all the situations of life the "will of God" comes to us not merely as an external dictate of impersonal law but above all as an interior invitation of personal love. Too often the conventional conception of "God's will" as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love. Such a view of the divine will drives human weakness to despair and one wonders if it is not, itself, often the expression of a despair too intolerable to be admitted to conscious consideration. These arbitrary "dictates" of a domineering and insensible Father are more often seeds of hatred than of love. If that is our concept of the will of God, we cannot possibly seek the obscure and intimate mystery of the encounter that takes place in contemplation. We will desire only to fly as far as possible from Him and hide from His Face forever. So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tell us more about ourselves than about Him.

Thomas Merton