The Name of God is Mercy!

The Pope – the spiritual and intellectual head of the Roman Catholic Church – is on to something. It comes, I think, from his Jesuit Training. It will, I also think, be good for the church in the long run, but it will cause some tribulation until the dust settles and nervous Roman Catholics see how good this man is for the church and its future.
by Charlie Leck

A new book by the Pope will be released in English very soon: The Name of God is Mercy! How wonderful! How hopeful!

The Pope has already declared this time as a Holy Year of Mercy. I, personally, have always found some sense of belief and faith in the concept of God as Love; and I don’t mean that God is loving, merciful and kind. I mean, fully, that “God is Love!”

Those who can love, show kindness and mercy, give assistance to their friends and the needy, treat the earth with caution and care, they (those who love) can know God.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, even before he became Pope Francis, has always shown an inclination toward this kind of theology. He has always expressed such deep concern about the desperate need for forgiveness and mercy. For years his ministry was among the poor in Buenos Aires.

This is a Pope who is Christ-like!

He knows that the heart and soul of the message that Jesus brought to us is that we must be merciful and kind in order to know God. These compassionate human traits are so much more important than dogma and complex theology.


How shall we know God? Those who love fully and are merciful in all their ways do not even need to ask the question. They have known God and God is in them.

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One Loving, Blind Desire for God

My 70 year struggle to understand the concept of God goes on (I should add… without great success).
by Charlie Leck

I have written here a number of times of God.

The following was included in an email yesterday from the Sojourners organization. I found it pleasing (in other words, I liked it). And, it provides something to think about…

"For I tell you this: one loving, blind desire for God alone is more valuable in itself, more pleasing to God and to the saints, more beneficial to your own growth, and more helpful to your friends, both living and dead, than anything else you could do."
   [From a fourteenth-century anonymous work, The Cloud of Unknowing]

I could write more, but this morning I believe this is enough.

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By Love Alone We Live!

I get cranky when I hear or read long, complicated definitions and descriptions of God. Something so beautiful and so simple should not be complicated.
by Charlie Leck

One of my daughters, because of pressure from some family members, I think, attends church quite regularly with her husband and two children. She struggles through some of the sermons and much of the litergy – for a couple of reasons: (1) she has the analytic and critical mind of one who teaches creative writing, which she does; and (2) she finds a lot of religion to be a bit of the hocus-pocus variety and lacking substance. When we are together, we talk occasionally about whether one can formulate a concept of God for oneself – a concept with which one could be satsfied. I think, over the years, we've gotten to that place by using the definition offered by the writer of the Epistles of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. That is, “God is Love!” Or, more precisely, as the epistle itself puts it….

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.”

And, further on in the same letter, John continues…

“No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”

Often, in her church, my daughter will try to hear the minister saying this to his congregation. Instead, she mostly hears the clutter that comes from centuries of struggle within the church to come to grips with the bulk of scripture versus this little bit of brilliant information from the letters of John. I chuckle when my daughter tells me that she often listens to these Lutheran sermons and substitutes in her own mind the word “love” for dangling, mangling ,wangling descriptions of God by the pastor.

It is too bad that thinkers within the church over centuries and centuries have made so complex what John makes so simple. Few churches talk with the brilliant minimalism of John. The church I go to happens to be one of those exceptions and my wife and I both came away from services yesterday shaking our heads in wonder about how a sermon could be both brilliant and simple – and, by the way, beautiful.

During the service yesterday, the congregation sang a lovely and short hymn, By Love Alone We Live (2012). The music is by Stephen Paulus and the lyrics are by Michael Dennis Browne. The lyrics thrilled me (as did the music):

By love, by love alone we live,
     By love alone.
Whoever has love is in God
     And God is in every heart.
All to be held, all found.
     By love alone.

By love, by love alone we live,
     By love alone.
Now bless, now redeem, now heal,
     These are the leaves of the Kingdom.
All to be saved, all changed.
     By love alone.

By love, by love alone we live,
     By love alone.
Spirit remembering light,
     Out of death we pass into life.
All to be told, all known
     By love alone, by love.

By love alone, by love! Amen

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God Speaks

I rose early on this Sunday morning and did a lot of writing and some significant reading. I came upon something that seemed very special, especially for a quiet day like this.
by Charlie Leck

So far in this new year, I’ve been very faithful about my daily readings from A Year with Rilke, a book I received for Christmas. I found today’s reading especially good and meaningful and I felt certain it belonged as today’s blog. It follows.

God Speaks

I am, you anxious one.

Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can’t you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?
Hasn’t my longing ripened in you
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am waiting.
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.

                [Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours I, 19]

Nothing more! Silence!

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A Year with Rilke

My intention is to spend all of 2013, beginning on 1 January, with Rainer Maria Rilke.
by Charlie Leck

In a blog a few days ago, I listed the books that I received for Christmas this year and into which I’m very excited about jumping. One little item that Santa gave me, I forgot to mention. It’s a clever little book edited and translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows called: A Year with Rilke (Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke).

Macy and Barrows laid the book out with daily readings taken from Rilke’s letters, journals, prose and poetry. The entries begin on January 1 and run throughout the year. They look to be no more than a page each day and often a lot less than a page. I have not read much Rilke and I have always felt left out when some of my more literary and well-read friends talk about his work or quote him. Here’s my chance to get to know the fellow, at least, a little better than I currently do. In anticipation of enjoying my introduction to Rilke (1875-1926), I’ve also ordered (from my favorite on-line used book dealer, ABE (American Book Exchange), a copy of Letters to a Young Poet, and that ought to be here in a week or so. It’s supposed to be his most influential work and it’s much beloved by writers. It was also translated by Macy and Barrows.

The pair that presented this book to us also translated Rilke’s most respected and admired work, The Book of Hours. It was published when he was only in his twenties.

If we surrendered
to Earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
      [Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours]

Reading the authors’ short introduction to their little book gives me some hope that I am going to like this Rilke guy and that I will find some philosophical and theological kinship with him.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
      [Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours]

Who? What is God?
It is a question with which I struggle more and more in these aging, aching days. Rilke writes of God as the Unsayable and the Invisible. He is the Coming One. Rilke is acquainted with the world’s religions and he can bring to his poetry stories from Greek mythology, or the Bible, or from Budda and Mohammed to help us understand the God he is defining.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us
then walks with us silently out of the night.

                    [Rainer Maria Rilke, Love Poems to God]

Thus, I begin. I am entering another adventure with great excitement. The Earth is blanketed in white here in Minnesota and large (half dollar sized) flakes of snow are falling now and a strong wind blows them hither and yon. In this light of mid-morning the stars are invisible, but our loved-ones long gone are there, looking down upon us even in our most private moments. There is no embarrassment among those out there with the stars; and neither is there judgment. They are free of such things.

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By their love shall ye know them!

Nobody was fooling himself/herself around here about the Arab Spring! We knew of the inherent dangers of it and it looks as if those nightmares may come true!

by Charlie Leck

We knew the Arab Spring revolutions in a variety of nations were dangerous because we knew these were not revolutions for democracy. There was always the danger these movements would turnout as enablers for theocracies to be established here, there or everywhere where the movements took place. We could only hope that any theocratic governments that might be established would not be controlled by ultra-fundamentalists.

Now, we are seeing our worst fears being played out.

It is what happens when religious people believe (quite sincerely and thoroughly) that they are followers of the ONLY way to true salvation or followers of the ONLY true will of God.

It is dangerous if it is a Christian attitude and it is dangerous if it is an Islamic attitude – or the attitude of any faith.

We have got serious problems in places like Libya, Yemen and Iran. And, these problems could spread to other places as well.

The danger develops, of course, when such religions believe that violence against non-followers of their own, true God is just and called for.

As one who believes that the only possible way to define God or the only possible way to describe God is through the concept of LOVE, I am boggled when I see hate and violence used in the name of God.

OMG
How frightening is the hateful defense of religion and religious faith that we are now witnessing! It is so difficult for me to comprehend that people might think they are doing God’s will – the will of Allah – when they turn to such angry and violent actions. However, I must admit that I often hear the same sharp edged, unforgiving voices of hatred and meanness from Christians in my own nation.

A wonderful old Sunday School teacher of mine (Mrs. Beiser, God rest her soul) would explain to me, when I was a child, a very simple concept: “By their love and in the kindness of their deeds shall ye know them – the servants of God!”

I may have been only eight or nine years old, way back then, but I knew with such certainty that she was dealing in essence and truth. Yes, dear woman, you were correct then and it shall always be true.

When my, supposedly Christian, friends send me such hateful emails about people with whom they disagree and spread hurtful, cruel lies about people while, in the same breath, mentioning their love for God, I am left aghast. I want to take their hands and look them in the eye and ask: “Do you really believe you are a child of God? Do you really believe that this is his will?”

“By their love ye shall know the servants of God!”

I weep this morning for the disciples of hate and for those who do not understand that the abiding will of the one God, by whatever name He might be called, is that we ought to love one another even as He loves us all.

If I can teach my grandchildren anything at all, this is the lesson I would like to leave them – that we ought to love one another as we have been loved!

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