Thought
Loss invites us into reflection, and reflection can lead to transformation.
Psalm 91:4
February 27
Healing
Healing has many dimensions. While there may be need for physical healing, there may also be need for emotional
restoration. And full restoration is always relational.
St. Anselm in his writings on prayer, pens one of great tenderness. He writes, “run under the wings of Jesus your Mother and lament your grief under his feathers. Ask that your wounds may be healed and that,
comforted, you may live again.”58
This prayer recognizes the importance of shelter, nurture, and homecoming in the healing process. The language in this prayer is significantly feminine, relational, and profoundly healing.
Unwellness can come from many sources, but it can also come from a sense of lostness, alienation, and fragmentation. It is often the sad result of relationship breakdown. We don’t live well when we are isolated and alone.
Christ is the great healer and restorer and one of the key dimensions of the healing process is to find comfort through closeness, through
acceptance, through embrace. In this embrace we are invited to cry out our hurts, sorrows, and pain. We are invited to speak our doubts and to express our hopes.
In being heard and embraced we are healed. Therefore, the community of faith needs to be a place of welcome and honesty. It needs to be a place where we are accepted with all our hurts and needs. It must be a place where masks can be dropped and where our true self, rather than our social self, is in the forefront.
Thought
Healing is being comforted into wholeness.
Philippians 2:22
February 28
The Caring Friend
Great friendships come from great hearts tempered by love and suffering who have come to the place where the well-being of the other is more important than their own concerns.
The twenty-first-century Western world is not rich in deep friendships. Our individualism and self-preoccupation have left us so self-focused and self-concerned that we are imploding. We have little sense that we are well loved and cared for.
St. Bernard, writing to the parents of a new monk, assures them: “I will be for him both a mother and a father, both a brother and a sister. I will make the crooked path straight. . . . I will temper and arrange all things that his soul may advance and his body not suffer.”59
Here we have a very different vision of friendship. It is one of deep care and nurture. This is a level of care that we feel we could never promise or deliver. Yet St. Bernard could do this within the framework of a monastic community.
The challenge, therefore, for us, is not to try to become the heroic, caring individual, but to create communities of care and friendship in the midst of which great friendships can emerge and grow. Nothing great comes from isolation. Only in relationship do we become who we can be, and from common nurturing much goodness can emerge.
Thought
Friendship is possibly the greatest gift we can give to another.
Galatians 2:19–20
March 1
Christ in Us
Living the Christian life is not simply believing Jesus is Savior and Lord. It is also that Christ is found in us and grows in us and that our lives resemble that of Christ.
While the important theme of justification by faith was already emphasized by the early church father, St. Clement, the church fathers also focused on the centrality of a Christo-mysticism. Here the theme is that Christ is being formed in us. Thus we take on Christlike gestalt.
St. Simeon the New Theologian, in the eleventh century, wrote “The ineffable birth of the Word in the flesh from his mother is one thing, his spiritual birth in us [is] another.”60
This clearly is the work of the Holy Spirit weaving the presence of Christ into the very fabric of our being. It is also us taking on the gentle yoke of Christ. This results in us becoming more Christlike.
In this dynamic process we are invited to place the sanctuary of our being open to this inner spiritual formation. Thus we too have to become like Mary. We too need to say, be it to me according to your purpose and word of promise. We too need to allow the Spirit to have her way with us in this creative work of inner rehabilitation.
And throughout the entirety of our Christian life, we need to
welcome this renewing work of the Spirit so that the person and the pattern of the life of Christ become embedded in us. This is the heart of Christian formation.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, Son of the Father, may you grow in me and may I become more and more conformed to your likeness. Amen.
Ephesians 3:16–19
March 2
The Nurturing Christ
Being a Christian is not only having come to faith in Christ and living a life of discipleship. It also has to do with being sustained and nurtured by Christ.
Sadly, for many Christians their sense of the life of faith is primarily one of demand. The Christian life is living with intensity the expectations God has of us. And since God demanded a lot of Jesus, God’s faithful Son, God will also demand much of us, his often unfaithful followers. The demand of God rather than the grace of God is thus the main theme.
But the life of faith is first and foremost not one of demand but one of welcome, grace, and blessing. It is living in the joy of reconciliation, the goodness of forgiveness and the wonder of God’s presence.
The church father Theophilus understood well this uplifting movement of God’s grace. He writes, “Today Christ feasts us; today Christ serves us; Christ, the lover of mankind, refreshes us.”61
This clearly reflects the movement of the gospel. Christ came to
forgive. He came to heal. He came to serve. He came to give us life as a blessing for all. Here generosity is the main theme.
Christ loves us into a fullness of life. He sustains us in our faithfulness. He nurtures us into obedience. He empowers us for service. He shapes us into God-likeness.
Thought
The word of demand constrains us. The acts of love free us. The presence of God lifts us up.
Isaiah 40:10–11
March 3
God’s All-Encompassing Love
What we think of God often has more to do with what we think of our parents, other authority figures, and of ourselves. But Scripture invites us into the open spaces of God’s all embracing love.
God gets a lot of blame in our contemporary world. God is the cause of religious conflict and bigotry. God causes wars in our world. God is self-interested in the call to worship. God causes people to become dependent. God fails to solve the world’s ongoing problems. The list could go on.
But the Bible gives us quite a different picture of God. This God has made a beautiful world. This God calls unlikely people to do acts of