Summary of Chapter 3. Enjoy! Chapter 3: Who Art in Heaven “Language is incapable of accurately describing the transcendent God. The God who lives in heaven has taken on human flesh, thus making holy all human flesh.” “When we locate the presence of God “in heaven” in the Lord’s Prayer, we are not confining God to a snail-mail address or physical location. Though the Hebrew scriptures suggest that God dwells in a place, they also make clear that heaven and earth cannot contain God. And so, to pray to God “in heaven” is to admit the totally incomprehensible nature of God. Our words and images stagger, wobble and stumble before God. No word or image can accurately describe this ineffable, unapproachable and incomprehensible God who lives in heaven. Our presumptuous attempts to definitively name or describe God bring us to a dead-end street. Indeed, when describing Divinity, our language is a straightjacket that confines us to sometimes cruel characterizations rather than to accurate expressions. As if we are trying to describe a Hawaiian sunset to a person blind from birth, our adjectives and analogies instantly become gibberish before the reality of the Divine.” “The moment we think we have captured God in an image, metaphor or description, however, our very words turn and betray us. We become idolaters like the ancient israelites and the golden calf.” This leads us The Word made Flesh: Jesus. “Judaism, christianity, and Islam all acknowledge the one God who is in heaven. Each of these great religions has a profound respect and reverence for the transcendent nature of the Divinity. However, from the Christian point of view, the transcendent God who is in heaven “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). This is the great Christian insight: the God of the heavens has come down to earth in human flesh. And with that incarnation, human flesh became a tabernacle and dwelling place for the ineffable divine Word of God. Paul had an intuition into this when he asked, “do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” (1 Corinthians 6:19).” “When the God who is in heaven became the God of human flesh, the flesh of every human being was consecrated and made holy. Christ represents the potential of every disciple. Indeed, by virtue of our baptism, each of us is a christian, a little Christ. As Christians, we are challenged to adopt a deeply contemplative vision of one another. We are called to look beyond the superficial appearances of hairstyles and first impressions, to see and reverence in our neighbor another dwelling place for the Divine, another temple of the Holy Spirit, another incarnation. To confine God to an image or metaphor is idolatry; to ignore God in my neighbor is a sacrilege.” “Thomas Merton wrote, “our faith is given us not to see whether or not our neighbor is Christ, but to recognize Christ in him and to help our love make both him and ourselves more fully Christ”. An Important Aspect of spiritual formation is growing in the awareness that the world and my neighbor are to be embraced and engaged, not simply endured. It is recognizing that our God who is in heaven has taken on flesh and walks this earth in the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the forgotten--Indeed, in everyone.” Hope this is beneficial in your understanding of “Who Art in Heaven”. One of my favorite Gospel passages for meditation/lectio divina: Matthew 25: 31-46 usccb.org/bible/matthew/25
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 06:20:14 +0000
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