THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH HOUSES

 

We will see a steady stream of speakers about the lack of affordable houses in Canada. There are not enough houses for the peoples/families that need them! In Vancouver and Toronto young people cannot afford to live (the rent is just too high).

 

Every human being needs a dwelling. They need a place to be safe (protected), a place to prepare and eat their meals and a safe place to sleep every night. Housing is a strong a need as clean water is for our bodies.

 

Now, where does God live? Hang his hat?

 

God wants to make his home within the human heart. God wants to make his home in each human being. People may be very respectful of the presence of God inside our church buildings, in the reserved sacrament in the tabernacle and in the elements used in the sacraments. But there can be a complete absence of the sense that God is present and wants to make his home within us.

 

This means that when we gather for prayer the first place of reverence for the presence of God is within our fellow believer. Up to this point we may never have been alerted to the sacred presence of God within the other. Our awareness of God’s presence must develop so that we sense the presence of God in the other. There are many consequences that flow from this when we look around in our church communities and recognize that God is present and active in people who are so different from ourselves.

 

If God makes his home within us, we do not have a passive house guest. This is not some fat, lazy house cat that just wants to be feed. God within us is a restless God. At times, he will be very demanding. And this restless resident may make some very heavy demands on us.

 

He may become the pain of conscience when we choose not to bring respect to people who are different from us, whether that be difference of culture, race, religious identity or sexuality. The presence of God is the first anti-racist movement in society and it happens in our own soul. If you listen! And the listening may be very demanding!

 

The presence of God within us may move us to significant acts of charity. This restless spirit may prod you to take time to visit your ancient aunt in the nursing home. Her family does not seem to care that much. You are being moved to take her hand, hold it with care. All the while, she does not recognize nor remember you. You are bringing moments of human kindness to this wonderful human being. She does not speak. There is no thank-you. But the spirit of God living with you have brought you to this wonderful act of human warm.

 

One of your fellow employees must sharpen his tongue every morning so that he can speak some critical and hurtful things about other human beings. He is not pleasant to be around but you have to work with him eight hours a day. The God who lives within you may give you the courage to clearly confront him and his offensive mouth with “I don’t think that is true.” “Would you like anyone to say such negative things like you have just said?”

 

The presence of God is not pussy-footing but can be very clear and direct. Who said that God was always nice?

 

Spend  a little time reflecting on the home that God has made in your heart and what it means for you daily life.

 

 

 

THIS IS OF NO VALUE TO ME

 

When I drive around the Province, along functioning and non-functioning farm yards, I see old buildings  falling apart. The old barn has not had a coat of paint for at least thirty years. Old sheds have open doors that indicate that the doors are not closable. Drive through many of the little villages and you see many old houses falling apart.

 

Very recently, a young professional woman in her early thirties was offered the fine China sets of her grandmother and great-grand mother. In past generations, a set of fine China wear was a sign of wealth and prestige. The young woman responded to the offer of her mother to the two sets of very good China wear: “I don’t want them!”

 

In all these situations people are making a clear statement. “This old China set and these old buildings are of no value to me” Most people just walk away and leave these things crumble into decay.

 

We bring the same attitude toward our relationships and our participation in the community at large. We may be very involved in the political process when we were younger but have become disillusioned and now keep our distance towards any type of political commitment. “This is no longer of any value to me!”

 

We were good friends through high school and the college years but then he married a classmate and all their involvement is on her side of the family. His marriage jus whittled away any chance to continue the friendship. Now with his complete focus on the in-law side of his family and his history, there are only memories of good friendship in the past. Today there can be no involvement in continuing the friendship because “This is no longer of any value to me!”

 

We used to be very involved in an active prayer life. We continued to have the discipline towards daily prayer that we received from our parents, but life got busy and more independent that we no longer feel the conviction that prayer actually has anything to offer my life. When it comes down to the bottom line of using my daily energy, prayer “no longer has any value to me!”

 

Follow through on the image of driving the roads of Saskatchewan. What parts of your own life are no longer of any use to you? To answer this question honestly does not mean that all the time what we have discontinued is negative. There are many things in life that we must let go of and move on.

 

But there are valuable relationships and values that we have allowed to diminish. Answering this question will alert us to what we have lost along the way.

 

What part of our family life needs new bridges built, a reaching out to rebuild friendships and a strong sense of connection?

 

What part of our religious upbringing and our share in the life of the Church have we let fall, but now need to reconnect?

 

These old, decaying buildings have spurred me on to ask in my own life and relationships, “And what no longer has value for me?”

 

 

HEAVEN IS OPEN ALL NIGHT

 

How many stories on TV have you watched that had a person, lost and lonely, no where to stay for the night; ending up at a all night café or coffee shop? This coffee shop with the lights on becomes an island of safety for a few hours. There is a certain  pointlessness to opening the door. It is so lonely.

 

What \what a good image to consider our God. There are no hours of business or consultation with God. When life is just empty and without direction, or when life is buffeted by storms we can go to God, no matter what the time of day or day of the week. God keeps no hours!

 

We have too much religion but we live in a time of spiritual malnutrition. Too often people will only run to God when the situation of their lives becomes impossible. This is the god of the gaps! God serves as as the last clause on the insurance policy.

 

We want to teach people that God permeates all parts of our lives. Whether or not we pay attention ,God is alive and working in our day-to-day activities. God is never absent from our lives. It is ourselves who are absent from God.

 

This explains why the cross has such a strong hold on our Christian faith. This is God who lives and suffers with us. God is not distant but the sufferings of the cross identify with our own sufferings. God is actually one of us in the tears and the pain of living. We can identify with the suffering God. In all our difficulties, we  are assured that God walks with us.

 

That is why the lonely diner with the lights on in the middle of the night remind us that we can go to God. There are no restrictions or standards of acceptance.

 

The person who is struggling with drug addiction can cry out to God for help to seek help and sobriety in their addiction. There are no office hours with God to cry out for help.

 

The elderly grandmother who cries every night because her children are divided from one another. One son and her only daughter refuse to talk to each other over a dispute over their father’s car when he died seven years ago. Every night she can lay out her pain, her anger and her dis appointment before God. There is no appointment list where to share her pain with God and request a healing to her family.

 

Your forty-seven year old brother struggles with stage four cancer. He can come to God in those dark moments of discouragement and ask for the strength just to get through another day.

 

God is never distant. We can drop into God’s herart at any hour of the day, especially in the lonely hours of the night. Always check, the lights are always on!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BE IN TOUCH WITH YOUR OWN POVERTY

 

How you define poverty is a delicate matter. If you identify a successful life with economic security and a decent ownership of personal wealth ( i.e. house, investments, retirement funds) you probably will define poverty as having a very weak flow of cash.

 

If you identify the good life as filled with strong and generous relationships, you will define poverty as being alone; on the margins or without friends. Poor people have no friends!

 

As we move through life, we should be getting a better understanding of who we actually are: our good qualities and our weaknesses. Everyone else knows our weaknesses much better than we do ourselves. Self-knowledge comes only with a lot of hard work.  The last person to ever know our faults and failings would be ourselves!

 

The revealing exercise is to take our finger and slowly move over our arms and legs after we have fallen and rolled down the stairs. We are trying to discover if there is anything bruised, bleeding or simply not working!

 

There is a gaping area of poverty in your person if you eliminate people because of their race, their gender, religion or their country of origin. A healthy, integrated person recognizes their blind spots towards people who are different. This does not mean that such a person does not have difficulties with people from other countries. There may be cultural blocks that limit how respectful we can be at this point in our history.  Knowledge of self means that we do not have to rely on our young , adult children to point out our racist attitudes!

 

The person who will not share, whether it be their wealth, their time, skills and compassion is a very poor person. Their poverty is most often manifest in the word, ‘no.’ They have tremendous talents, a hard working schedule and a wealth of experience, but they are reluctant to every share themselves. People have learnt that you only receive the answer ‘no’ twice and you never ask them for any assistance again. Here you are rich in skills and work habits, but poor in helping your neighbor.

 

There are people who walk in deep poverty because they cannot see the good things in other peoples lives. The grandmother next door  has twelve grandchildren and they visit almost weekly and  you have  no grandchildren! Their poverty is expressed in the absence of any joy over the good things that belong to the lives of others: steadfast friends, children and grand-children, golf buddies and good health. Their poverty is the absence of joy over the good things, the blessings, that flower forth from the lives of others.

 

Poverty is very real but first of all it is a poverty of spirit: our lives have big gapping holes in them: absence of generosity, not rejoicing in the goodness of  others and no sharing. Such a person may have a strong cash flow but be very, very poor in their personal lives.

 

Look around. Where do you see big, gapping holes of poverty in the lives of your co-workers, your relatives and the people you do business with?

 

 

 

LIVING IN A THROW-AWAY ECONOMY

 

Frequently, Pope Francis will bring up the topic of taking responsibility that we live in a ‘throw away world.’  When we are finished with something or someone, we cast them aside.

 

What does that mean to us as individuals and as human beings?

 

There are many people within our Christian churches whose faith is only about our relationship with Jesus and our salvation for heaven and to avoid hell. This constricted notion of the Christian life has no responsibility for the well-being of our fellow human beings nor for the sustenance of the earth.

 

If you wear socks that are much too tight on your feet, the blood circulation will be constricted and you will experience pain. If your religious horizon is too limited, you will be limiting how God’s grace is able to work in your life. Your too small spiritual socks could shrink your spiritual life.

 

A throw-away culture treats people and things only in so far as they are beneficial to me. I do not have to care about the consequences of the things I use. It is all very self-centered.

 

I will buy a vehicle, use it for so many years, and then trade it off on the purchase of a new one. What happens to all that mental, glass and plastic (plus all the energy it took to manufacture that vehicle)? Is it just cast in the garage dump?

 

Humans can do the same with people. There are groups of poor people who are so limited in their access to education, good jobs and health care. Every society has the people who are at the bottom of the social ladder. Who cares for them? Who sees to it that the poor people are given the same opportunities as the people in the upper layers of society?

 

Here is where the power of our Christian faith lies. It challenges us not to look away from our wasteful culture but to take a second look at what we are  doing with resources and examine how well the goods of the earth are shared with the people at the lower socio-economic levels.

 

Pope Francis is challenging all humans and all Christians to take a second look at what we are doing. And at the same time, to see how we could be making much better use of the resources of the earth and looking how we are treating all human groups within our society with equality.

 

As soon as we reflect on how we are a throw-away society we will ask how much of the earth’s resources we are using and how many of the earth’s resources we are over-using. How many people or social groups are we casting aside? As we begin to frame our questions in terms of a throw-away society, we are being challenged to do some heavy lifting with regard to our use of the earth’s resources. What if we are using the earth’s resources in a useless manner?

 

Will there be enough of the earth’s resources for future generations?

 

This is a very simple concept, but it packs a strong punch!

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRAYER ARISES FROM THE WILD FIRES

 

The past week has been a tense time for all Western Canadians. The evacuation of the people from Yellowknife and surrounding communities and the tension in Kelowna over the threatening fires have kept us on edge.

 

This is a time to hold before our God all the firefighters, the pilots and the unsung service people such as medics, people who prepared food and transportation for these fire fighters and the government officials who kept a close watch on the encroaching fires. We also include the four persons who were killed while fighting the fires.

 

Our prayer must include all the people who have lost their homes and/or their farms from the flam es. Some unfortunately did not have insurance to cover the loss of their houses.

 

There were so many volunteers who maned the centers that sought to direct the evacuees to hotels, lodging and community shelters. Who can measure the goodness of our fellow citizens who reached out t help those who were displaced? There is great strength in the generous willingness of people to help one another. It is at such moments of this that the strength of our country is manifested.

 

We must include all the parts of nature that suffer because of these fires. How many animals, birds and insects were destroyed or displaced by these fires.? We know how well the forest will regenerate but we must include all the animals in nature’s process of regeneration.

 

Now, we want to teach everyone that we pray out of the stuff of everyday life. Our prayer can never be a safe, sterile activity that we do only between ourselves and God. Prayer must be just the opposite. We feel that struggles of our lives (this week, the fires) and we ask what does God want to bring to us through these disasters? How is God present to us in the smoke, the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway and the volunteers who reach out to help their fellow citizens? Where is God in all this?

 

What are the spiritual movements within our own souls that move us toward preserving and caring for the earth? How is the Holy Spirit leading us to see all of creation as kin, as our sister and brother? How are being moved to see that we humans are only one part of the earth family. Where are we being moved to work and live more and more in harmony with the atmosphere, the soil, and all the living things of the earth?

 

Today, pray in the smoke from all the wild-fires; pray beside the burn out ashes of peoples homes and farms; pray beside the exhaustion of our fire fighters. Then pray beside your future great-grandchildren and picture the world that we can hand on to them; a world where humanity cares deeply for the earth and not only preserves its future but works towards making it our home for thousands of years to come.

 

How is God coming to us in the smoke of this past week?

YOUR FAITH CAN DIE

 

 

The drought that we have experienced this summer has strong lessons. We cannot live without water. No rain: no crops to harvest! The bean plants in my garden are surrounded by cracks in the dry, hard soil. You can barely see any bean pods on the stocks. If Mother Nature does not  water the earth, we have no beans to harvest!

 

If we do not care and nurture our friendships, they die. If we do not work hard at family life it will wilt and often, disintegrate.

 

The same is true of our spiritual lives. Faith is always a gift from the Holy Spirit but we must do our part to nurture  and care for the gift of faith. It is not an automatic thing: God may be most generous with us, but we must work at our faith and respond. The spiritual life stresses responsibility.

 

There is a pithy piece of wisdom that applies to our physical bodies (we need movement), our brains (they will seize up if they are not used) and our spiritual life: if you do not use it, you will lose it!

 

We cannot have a life of faith in the triune God all on our own. We are born into a faith community. We learn and develop through the practices and traditions of this community which is actively pursuing  life in and through the Holy Trinity. It will be with the help of the faith community that we grow and develop a spiritual life.

 

Throughout the world we have learnt that when a person stops participating in the life and spiritual practices of the faith community, they soon do very little of any spiritual practice. This just affirms that adage: if you don’t use it, you lose it.

 

All people who claim to believe in God (focus on our Christian faith) must be taught that you could be like the sorry looking bean plants out in the garden in this draught season: you will die if you are nourished and sustained by the good rains, sunshine and the friendly bumble bees. You need to take care of your spiritual life just as a gardener needs to take good care of the bean plants in her garden.

 

The care for our spiritual life comes from three sources.

 

First, we must have a daily prayer practice, a regular time to spend time with the divine. Prayer will always take many forms. For the busy parent, they may find that when they wait to pick up one of their kids, the silence in the vehicle is an opportunity to move into prayer.

 

Second, we need the weekly gathering and prayer of the faith community. Our Christian faith brings us together every seven days to share in the great event of our salvation, the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Sunday Eucharist is not only to nourish our faith life but also to empower us to go forth into the world to bring the love and mercy of God to others.

 

Thirdly, we need to share our stories and experiences with other faith people. Their stories can encourage and support us to grow in our faith life. We need that sharing (i.e., nourishment) from our fellow believers.

 

There is no built-in guarantee to our faith life. It could thrive or it could wilt and die. Choose life. Chose to use it!