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| Saturna sunrise |
Looking back in order to look forward and still live well now, each new day, and every moment.
My computer has become a treasure chest that has been neglected, and as I reach another milestone in this journey of life, I am compelled to treasure first of all the simple blessing of a single word. An old English expression, it is explained in the British Dictionary as -
Godspeed |gɒdˈspiːd|
an expression of good wishes to a person starting a journey
ORIGIN Middle English: from God speed you ‘may God help you prosper’.
I am too soon to be 60, and while I do not relish reaching this milestone, I am reminded that it is better than the alternative, and so am thankful at least for length of days. While it is obviously not the beginning of a life's journey, it feels like the beginning of a definite aspect of that journey, wherein the ending is more in view than the beginning. And so, 'Godspeed' for this time of my life feels both appropriate and necessary.
Preparation for the journey: the treasure chest. Like most treasure chests, the decision about what to choose begins somewhat randomly. So here I am with pieces and pages I collected at an earlier time and faithfully carried from computer to computer. From Madeleine Delbrêl (of the last century), in her own words:
We the Ordinary People of the Streets
by Madeleine Delbrêl
1. It is possible to be an excellent theologian and still live God’s love very poorly; we can know quite well what the Church is while still being only an anemic cell within her…Even when we live a life in close union with Jesus, it is still worth asking ourselves whether we are not making him or his love into something a little “historical,” whether we don’t see him above all as he was, and not as He is.” (P.122)
2. Faith, for the Christian, is the science of mystery, of the true mystery, not of the mysteries concerning the origin of life, its laws, its evolution, and its development, which gradually receive elucidation. The true mystery: how is it that the world is so intelligible? What makes us able to understand it…? (P.180)
3. Faith was not made to teach us what reason can know…Faith is made to teach us the mystery of our very existence: that we exist because God exists; that we are alive because we are loved by God; that human beings are immortal because they are eternally loved by God.
For of all for us, Jesus Christ is a man. We know what he did, what he said, the country he came from, his profession, and his age. But for Christians, Jesus Christ is not only a man, he is God. [And] if all of this has been merely made up, we have to say that it was made up by Jesus Christ himself, his own insane idea. We cannot say it was made up by Christians. It is not, for example, a sort of legend that gradually over time grafted itself onto a real person like some of the legends of Antiquity or the Middle Ages. It was Jesus Christ himself who said, who repeated, who affirmed, and who proclaimed that he was God.
So what is at issue is not a legend that we have stuck onto Christ, so that we now have to decide whether or not to relieve him of it. No, what is at issue is believing or not believing Jesus Christ, believing or not believing what he said about himself; refusing to believe him just as those who lived around him constantly refused to believe him. The Christian believes Jesus Christ when he affirms that he is God…. The basis of faith is not only the words Jesus Christ spoke about himself – words that are facts – but the deeds of Jesus Christ which are also facts. Among all of these facts, the one that is the most crucial because it is the most disconcerting, is that Jesus Christ, who was sent to death because he claimed to be God, was raised up again, and became again a living man. Indeed, his friends doubted…and doubted again, and continued to deny it until they saw it for themselves, and even touched, felt, and proved it to be so.
…They set out through the world of their time, not to proclaim in the first place the universal love that Jesus taught them, the justice for the little ones, for the weak and the oppressed, the goodness for each living person on behalf of each living person – but to proclaim first and loudest that Jesus Christ, the friend of the poor and of sinners and of the downtrodden, Jesus Christ who threatened the selfish and the proud with an eternity of suffering, Jesus Christ who was spat upon, mocked, struck, and scourged, who was tortured amidst laughter, Jesus Christ who was hung upon a cross, who was bled dry, who let out his last breath with a moan, who no one doubted was dead, Jesus Christ with whom we lived, who died before us, who was buried in a grave not far from us, with a great stone rolled over where his body lay, and where soldiers stood to keep us from opening the tomb and stealing his body, this Jesus Christ, is risen because he was, because he remains today, tomorrow, and forever, truly man and truly God.
Christians believe what these people went to proclaim to everyone who would listen and even more so to everyone who did not want to listen. They did not present themselves as the witnesses of the doctrine of Jesus Christ, as its most perfect observers. They presented themselves as witnesses of Jesus Christ, of his life, his death, and his resurrection… They presented themselves as the personal witnesses of the very person of Jesus Christ. Twelve out of twelve of them suffered martyrdom one after the other because they refused to keep quiet… It is because of these facts that we believe Jesus Christ, that we believe what he told us about God. We believe Jesus Christ who taught us and who showed us how a person ought to live the law of the immortal human being, the human being that God wills, the human being that God loves. (Pp.185-187)
