Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message
October 23, 2014
Diversity in Spirit
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a
net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind.” Matthew
13:47
Last Sunday’s Forum featured Shirley
Woodring leading a Mutual Invitation Bible Study on several passages from the
New Testament on the variety of gifts God gives us. As I heard different parishioners share their
stories and feelings about the variety of gifts we receive, I was struck by the
contrast between such an expansive view of God’s love of diversity and the “one
size fits all” wooden ideology of conformity commonly ascribed to Christians.
Most traditional Christian treatments
of spiritual life and development talk about four processes of God at work in
us that happen simultaneously over years:
awakening, purgation, illumination, and union. Awakening is the stirrings of our desire
for God and realizing the fact that God is already present in us and loves us. Purgation involves a variety of disciplines
and habits that help us identify and lose those things in our lives that impede
God’s presence and overshadow our true self.
Illumination is the gradual process of how such darkness flees and is
replaced by the light behind it alone.
And union is where we live in contemplation and appreciation of God’s
beauty, and channel God’s love to others.
These processes at work in each of us
produce true individuals, each different from the other. God does not call us to be robot victim
souls, all marching to the same drum, all with the same blank zombie
stare. God calls us to be authentically
ourselves, each and every one.
God in creating each of us has
different things in mind, and the way I must walk by definition is different
from the one you must follow. This is
why Paul speaks of a diversity of gifts, but one spirit. This is why Jesus uses the image of a
dragnet, with its diversity of catch, to describe God’s Reign.
Grace and Peace, Fr. Tony+
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