With your Love and Grace I need for Nothing By Beth DeCristofaro

 

With your Love and Grace I need for Nothing By Beth DeCristofaro

 

 

I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts. (Ezekiel 36:26)

 

“The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. He dispatched his servants to summon the invited guests to the feast, but they refused to come. … Go out, therefore, into the main roads and invite to the feast whomever you find.’ The servants went out into the streets and gathered all they found, bad and good alike, and the hall was filled with guests. But when the king came in to meet the guests he saw a man there not dressed in a wedding garment. He said to him, ‘My friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?’ But he was reduced to silence. Then the king said to his attendants, ‘Bind his hands and feet, and cast him into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.’ (Matthew 22:9-13)

 

Piety

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will, all I have and call my own.

Whatever I have or hold, you have given me.  I return it all to you and surrender it wholly to be governed by your will.

Give me only your love and your grace, and I am rich enough and ask for nothing more.

   (Suscipe, St Ignatius of Loyola)

 

Study

We’ve probably all felt like outsiders at one time or another.  During our teenage years, it’s almost a given we felt as if we did not belong. Mostly we yearn to belong, to be an insider.  In college I went almost out of my way to not belong:  I refused to join the brand-new sorority starting up at my previously all-male college.  Why?  I did not want to join someone else’s group and be told by the already-insiders what to do.  But I ended up being part of the GDI’s (Gosh Darn Independents) who were nerdy, fractious students.  We formed our own fluctuating, insider clique.  We are hard-wired for community.  It’s a gift from God.

 

So why did the wedding guests refuse the King’s invitation?  Why decline a feast with free food, drink and dancing?  As a GDI, I had little commitment other than to be a good friend, good student, and active in the college community as I chose. The King expected and expects much more from us.  Our Creator King expects a complete “yes.”  God expects us to accept a new life with our heart ready, even eager, to be influenced and guided by his spirit.  Our interior life, our white garment, must be of God and for God first rather than the comfort of being the insider or even the obstinate displacement as an outsider.

 

We are invited by an infinitely loving God to accept relationship on God’s terms not our own.  By any standards this is giving up in order to get – a love which we cannot earn. God asks a lot.  The Israelites of Ezekiel’s time had trouble staying the course.  Even today it’s hard to put God first even over the desires which God hopes we do not stress over such as health, freedom from addiction.  It’s hard to realize, deep within, that it’s not about us but about God in us. It’s about God’s feast we to which we are invited.

 

Action

In college I chose my insider group. God asks me to step out of the center of my own universe and all the comfortable identities and groups that I call mine.  How much do I truly need God?  How much do I yearn for the infinity of love God offers?  Am I stingy with my yearning?  Am I grudging with the love God gives me to share?

Illustration: 

“The Feast” by Bud Meyer, 1967.  http://willvaus.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-parable-of-wedding-feast.html