These words of the Psalms, and the following verses from Isaiah, give me comfort and consolation:
“Do not dwell on the past, or remember the things of old. Look, I am doing a new thing: now it springs forth. Do you not see?” (Isaiah 43:18-19).
My faith in God is faith in the future, that is, God’s present becoming our present. My hope in what God has in store for us can be summarized colloquially: you ain’t seen nothing yet. My love for God and for neighbor is possible for as long as I long for love to come to me in full from the God who is love and has always loved me first and best and has yet to show me just how much love God has for me, or how much power I have received to love others. Faith, hope, and love are always news, always coming.
I trust that I will be filled. I trust that I will be made new, continually made new. And I trust that someday is becoming today more and more frequently. God gives me the blessing of tears more frequently, and I rise into song after sowing in tears. And despite my temptation to timesickness, I remain fixed on what is to come. I believe in the crucifixion only because of the resurrection. We must overcome the crucifixion so that we can be overcome by the resurrection. The sacrifices we make during Lent are rituals intended to make of us a real sacrifice of ourselves to God and to one another. But it is a sacrifice not unto annihilation, but a sacrifice to generate life and to welcome the new creation. It is a sacrifice whose aim is to reduce suffering—the suffering of the poor, the suffering of the earth. It is an emptying so that all may be filled with eternal life. Jesus, the ultimate self-sacrificer, is the first to be filled absolutely with the life of the new creation. Not that he sacrificed himself to receive the first fruits; he really did sacrifice himself selflessly. So let us also trust that we will be filled when we give ourselves away. But let us have the mind of Jesus and know and intend, truly, to cast everything away, including ourselves, into the bright abyss of God.
I can venture forth to do this only if I trust what God says and does through the prophets, saints, and Jesus. Only if I trust in the new thing being done, leaving the past, and hoping that when I go out with seeds and tears, I will come back, when the harvest is full.
Here are a few more words in the New Testament that brings me a firm but costly hope:
“Do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised” (Hebrews 10:35-36, English Standard Version).
It is hard doing a new thing on a new day. It is hard to stay focused on God’s present moment when it seems like everyone is running the other way, back into the past, or into their own idea of the present, which is only a another expression of the past. I wrote a poem years ago with these lines: “Everybody's drifting, goin’ back to what they did/They got a glimpse of glory, then they ran and hid.” How do you hold on to your confidence when it not only seems but it is actually happening that the human race is regressing, or worse, moving willfully into night forever? Yes, this calls for perseverance; this calls for persistence. It calls for a particular type of remembering, too. It is not the remembering that pines for old things. It is a remembering that recalls the new things that have broken into the old time. It is not nostalgia. It is not timesickness. It is the flashing forward that recreates the new today in God’s present moment. The exodus never gets old. Miracles of compassion and justice never get old. The resurrection never gets old. The victories of God never get old. To these we cling, to these we look forward in anticipation of the ultimate fulfillment of hope as a people who move from darkness and shadow of death into perpetual light and brilliant, undying life. In this movement we live and have our being. In this movement, giving all that we have got, we do not imitate the old, but we imitate the new and never-before-seen, and we participate with the ever-young Creator in the beauty of redemption.
These thoughts appear to be detached from mundane realities, I know, but I pray they are not. Being here in Bolivia is bringing out of me a desire to continue striving past the limits of old and unhelpful ways of being, perceiving, and doing. It is not easy. My temptation, to do over the past, to recover lost time, is part of what keeps me from receiving God’s present moment and throwing all that I have into it. Is this a source of my sleeplessness—not only trying to live fully in two spatial world, Bolivia and my beloved communities in the United States, but also trying to live in two temporal realities, my past-present and God’s present? I am too limited to straddle these worlds and realities. God is unlimited, but God would have me remain in the one world and one reality that matters, where I can behold the grace and truth and beauty and love that I crave with all my soul.
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