Grace Saturated Gravity
Dear old and new friends,
The Galilean Liberator freed us from the need for sacred temples or churches in order to experience God. We were taught this deliverance by the events in his life, death and resurrection; none of which occurred within sacred sites. Paradoxically, we now go inside church buildings to celebrate what initially happened outside in nature and ordinary places. Churches exude a magnetic pull even for those who rarely or no longer enter them. Does this gravitational power flow from the fact they are “God Houses,” or is their attraction a remnant of childhood religious memories? Regardless, God doesn’t need majestic church buildings to draw us!
The Divine Author inscribed in everything a powerful, irresistible gravitational energy towards all that is beautiful, lovely and handsome. Whenever you involuntarily feel attracted or erotically drawn to a beautiful or handsome person know you are experiencing the same mysterious magnetism that gives birth to stars and created the universe. That same magnetic attraction awesomely permeates everything that exists!
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, priest, theologian and paleontologist of the 20th century, said that the heart of the Big Bang universe was passionate love! The operating energy of the entire universe is erotic attraction, a passionate allurement that yearns for cosmic unity and more wholeness. The saintly mystic Chardin also said that love seeks not only union, but more being, and all being is primarily relational: so to “be” is to “to be with.” He also said, “I exist in order that I may give of myself for it is in giving that I am myself.”
Next Thursday in Holy Week we keep the Memory of Memories of a consecrated meal eaten in a plain upstairs room in Jerusalem. There the Teacher and his disciple-friends gathered to share another friendship meal that would be their last. That Last Supper Memory became the galvanizing core of the future gatherings of his followers. At each of those millenniums of mystical meals they observed the Memory of how he gave away himself…body, blood and spirit to all. The captivating energy within that Sacred Memory shouts, “Remember, so you also can give away yourself in love.”
In churches today at the conclusion of that Memory Meal do any rush to the doors to give away themselves to others? If the Last Supper remembrance now is merely a prayer service with a sermon and communion, does that mean the Holy Memory suffers dementia? If so, let those present at the Memory Meal, or a few of them, breathe life back into the Memory by pledging to live it out daily by giving away themselves in love to all.
In this meditation we have explored love’s gravitational magnetism. Can that mysteriously dynamic energy that created and sustains the universe, and also pulsates in each of us, perhaps be The Source?
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