"Blazing in Faith" by Beth DeCristofaro

"Blazing in Faith" by Beth DeCristofaro

Thursday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

 

(May God) grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:16-19)

 

Jesus said to his disciples: “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. (Luke 12:49-51)

 

Piety

Glorious God, grant me to know your breadth, length, height and depth.  Holy Spirit, strengthen to me the grace to accept the purifying fire of your presence and justice.  Lord Jesus, please grant me the peace of your presence and mercy. 

 

Study

Paul certainly endured the refining fire of God’s glory during his conversion. In the sudden and complete wrenching of Paul out of Saul, he no longer feared.  Paul’s strength, freedom, teaching, surviving, traveling, and everything was now embedded in his sure knowledge of salvation through Christ.  And in this he saw further, he longed for God more deeply, he felt his life expanded not confined.  Jesus chose God’s refining fire not for his own need but ours, the divine refining of sin and exile into righteousness and resurrection. 

 

The burning of a blast furnace is awesomely frightening. Worthless elements are burned away in the refining process.  Paul acknowledges that process with humility and strength, grateful that God touched him and he accepted.  We all too easily gather elements upon ourselves that keep us from God but it is a dreadful course to discard that which we believe is us.  We mistake those extraneous elements as essential to us.  Jesus’ challenge is to let those be purified away through him.  Jesus’ gift is himself, gateway to God.

 

Denise Levertov uses an image of water in her poem “To live in the mercy of God”.  She writes:

 

To live in the mercy of God.

 

To feel vibrate the enraptured

waterfall flinging itself

unabating down and down

to clenched fists of rock.

Swiftness of plunge,

hour after year after century,

 

O or Ah

 

uninterrupted, voice

many-stranded.

To breathe

spray. The smoke of it.

Arcs

of steel

white foam, glissades

of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion—

rage or joy?

Thus, not mild, not temperate,

God’s love for the world. Vast

flood of mercy

flung on resistance[i]

 

Action

What image speaks to you of losing yourself to gain God?  Falling off a horse? Blast furnace? Hanging from a tree? Deluged in a waterfall?  In a different poem, Levertov’s image is of floating lightly in a warm stream, resting in God’s arms.  Ask for the grace to courageously accept the division Jesus brings as well as the loving mercy he extends.

 

Illustration:  Skógafoss Waterfall, Iceland, https://hekla.com/blog/14-waterfalls-you-have-to-visit-in-iceland/

 

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[i] “To live in the Mercy of God”, https://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/denise_levertov_2012_3.pdf, p. 95.