Preparing for One Month to Live Study

September 8, 2009
I have been preparing for the “One Month to Live” study at church by reading the book A Tree Full of Angels by Macrina Wiederkehr. She is a nun who has some very refreshing techniques on connecting with God. My therapist suggested her to me because of her unique connection to nature. She mentions a special tree named “Molly the Maple” that she ran to in times of distress. She calls her her first chapel. This cannot but remind me of my first connection with a tree. It was “Windy the Willow” in our backyard at Dorchester. I remember driving back to that infamous town and discovering that Windy had been cut down by the new inhabitants and crying in mourning. I had lost a friend. Macrina also sees conversion as a daily process not a unique event such as the current “born again” perception. She also says that we have focused on grace as simply “redemption” and not as the gift of potential it truly is: to commune and become part of God. Sin is merely not using the power of good God gave you or living for yourself rather than God. It is not being as God wants us to be. It is staying in one place due to our selfish choices and not embracing our mistakes, our joys and pains and seeking to fulfill the life God wants for us.
Her view on reading and prayer are also really refreshing. We want everything to be quick and easy. Our religion included. We want our children baptized and marked for redemption and to be known as moral people for going to church but we do not want to invest the trust and openness to let God fill our life. Even the emptiness of an unanswered prayer gives us cause to reach out to God from our hearts. That is what we should be doing. Living in companionship to God is an uncomfortable thought. Like all things in our life we want God to fit neatly into our daily planner and react to Him when it is convenient. So many times I think that God is portrayed as a “magic genie” who will reward us for “rubbing him the right way”. I think many times the old vision of Zeus upon Mt. Olympus presides over Christian faith. We think of God as being something high and powerful that we must appease. We can’t appease God, Jesus did that by dying for our sins. We must live with God, in God, which much harder than coming to the foot of a mountain and asking Him for what we want. God wants to walk with us not wait for us to come.
In all my traveled routes of Christianity I cannot fully say I have been told how to live with God. I have been giving prescriptions for keeping the devil out, pleasing and praying to Him, rules for my life and so forth but like a spouse, no one can really tell you what living with someone is going to be like--you have to take it day by day. It is not that I am any more informed about God than the average person. I am just realizing that a lot of the emptiness and hunger I feel is because God wants out of the box I have put Him in. I also think anyone would be totally insane to choose to live my crazy, scarred, at times dangerous life with me. There are times I would not have chosen to live my own life but there are also times I would not have traded it for anything. God wants to be with me through the good and bad, and even the times when I am an absolute brat. Having parents that I will never give credit for wanting me, this is a doubly hard concept to grasp. If they didn’t want me, how can God want me? The truth is that God is more loving, more devoted, and more willing to accept me as I am than they ever were. That is a very big gate to open and I am fearful if I open it I will have to let everyone and everything in where it can “touch” me. Of course this is what God want me to do: to fully live life with Him. I want to protect myself and I want to carefully hand out passes to those I feel are safe enough to deserve it. God wants to say, “Open the gates I will protect you from harm but I will also bring you more life than you can imagine.”
You can’t live Christianity as a set of principles. You have to live it as you live with gravity. It’s always there and keeps you where you need to be.