Whatever Stirs in the Plains, Belongs to Me

July 2, 2008
Wednesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time

By Melanie Rigney

Seek good and not evil, that you may live; Then truly will the Lord, the God of hosts, be with you as you claim! (Amos 5:14)

For mine are all the animals of the forests, beasts by the thousand on my mountains. I know all the birds of the air, and whatever stirs in the plains, belongs to me. (Psalms 50:10-11)

Thereupon the whole town came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him they begged him to leave their district. (Matthew 8:34)

Piety
Lord, I sing a prayer of praise and thanks for the goodness of You and the life You have so graciously given me. I strive to live in awe, not fear, of Your wonders.

Study
Today's Readings
Original Faith

You might have seen Paul Maurice Martin running or shooting hoops when he lived in the Diocese of Arlington, but you probably didn’t know him. He isn’t a Cursillista; isn’t Catholic either. He was an elementary school counselor and taught English as a second language, and lived in the Clarendon/Lyon Park area. But you would have loved to be in group reunion with him all the same.

Paul, who has a master’s in religious studies from the University of Chicago as well as an M.Ed. in counseling, was living in Pennsylvania when he hired me to edit his book, Original Faith: Finding the Interfaith Soul of Progressive Religion and Spirituality. It wasn’t a job that took him to Pennsylvania, but preparation for his death. While Paul was living in Arlington, he was battling a condition has yet to be diagnosed. The manuscript for Original Faith had to be set aside for the better part of a decade. During that time, Paul lost the ability to walk and work with paper. He can be out of bed only briefly. A publisher was interested in the book, but got skittish upon finding out Paul wouldn’t be able to do much of the stuff that authors usually do—book tours, signings, lectures, interviews, and the like.

As a result, Paul and his sister, Lynne, are publishing Original Faith themselves. Paul’s sharing his beautiful words in the only way available to him: through a moving blog at www.originalfaith.com that shares his philosophy and his struggle.

Today’s reading from Psalm 50 made me think of Paul and his confidence, despite all that life’s thrown at him, in the One, as he refers to God, life, being, reality, or whatever you wish to call that force. Here’s a sample from his blog last month:

Faith is a whisper, as soft but relentless as autumn leaves, that it’s somehow perfectly okay for us to live and move and have our being rooted in the context of a reality that is more than we can understand.

Unlike the townspeople in the territory of Gadarenes, who begged Jesus to leave after hearing how he had driven the demons into a herd of swine that then drowned, Paul’s faith is allowing him to go forward into the unknown with little fear. Original Faith’s afterword focuses on his thoughts on one of his final days in Arlington, at a stop light at Arlington Boulevard and Irving:

And so I care uncaringly. I care without a care. I care now and at this moment, but I am not concerned anymore: a driver poised and ready for the light to change. We are in the world, but not of it. We are here to embrace fully and then let go completely. We are here to discover who we are minus 100 percent of what we have to give.

Godspeed, my friend.

Action
Who are you, minus 100 percent of what you have to give? Start to learn the answer this week by giving unstintingly of your time, talent, and treasure. Let go completely and find out what’s underneath.