How big is your God? I love that question… its one whose answer changes continually… yet always remains the same, encompasses the very activities we do and call religion, our “conversation” (i.e., prayer) with God, and our engagements of faith with one another. God’s place of relationship in our lives is as big as we allow it to be. A lot of people throw around the phrase “God is a gentleman,” referring to God not forcing relationship upon any of us, but once we feel a true need in ourselves, tap into the slakeless thirst for Him, we are totally enslaved. And we desire to be so. Yet, we live in a fact of life that is full of extremes, of many varying positions, many good choices, many options that affect our ordering and composition of life. God may be the captor of our hearts, but the amount He does in us, with us through us does entirely depend on how much we submit to His life, that life of heaven on earth… and because we are mortal (as I am slowly learning… and coming to terms with my own nature), we are limited in what we can do.

I am not Jesus. But the Spirit of Jesus lives in me…why should it be any other than Him who sets the standards? Yet look at Jesus, he took rest, He didn’t heal everyone, He opened His heart to everyone.The Jesus I know is this person who listens to every story of any heart that unfolds itself to Him… there is a sort of invitation in His presence to come close and rest your head against His knees if you happen to be too weak to rise, or to run energetically with Him into the dawn of a new situation. This invitation Jesus is constantly extending unnerves me to the very core of my soul, inspite of a relentless desire to fly up from my place, wherever I am, catch His hand, and follow Him into the adventures of a different sort of day. Yet the vulnerability it takes to let go of where I am to grasp hold of the hands He extends to me shakes me… terrifies me: What wonderous love is this, my soul, that caused the Lord of bliss to bear the dreadful curse for my soul? I know how undeserving I see myself to be… and He sees whatever the truth of my being is, and its constant change, draws me by the slender connection we have formed over my heart.

This wild and restless heart, this seat of my soul, wrapped up in will and full of stubborn desires… what will tame it into the stillness required to run away with my Jesus? Submission being chosen obedience, what would cause that which resists, dodging and weaving through the labyrinths of live, dancing walls… the people and commitments I have made to each individual, avoiding  the facing of Jesus, in spite of how much I desire it. He catches my chin and siezes me gaze, and my heart can avoid him no more. What will bring me to You, Jesus, when all my life is running, but running away, because there is an end of the running in You?

I have been stilled by You in the mystery of litrugy… the song of heaven woven and spun by the chorus of earth. I remember the first time I was going to mass… it was at a Civil Air Patrol event, I had recently turned 13… cadet conference, I believe. I had heard words like litrugy then, but in the unruly, untamed passion of my little heart, I resisted any sort of structure. Who would want to be part of something that was rote, redundant, repetitive… boring. My first mass, I still remember the content of the homily: spiritual leprosy, from one of the gospel passages, Matthew, I think, of the leper who returned to thank Jesus for healing Him. We are all infected with spiritual leprosy, the priest told us… how many are willing to return for the thanks. Litrugy, to me then, took on the character of that return to thanksgiving. So our music wasn’t stellar, a couple off key boys and me, cracking out a hymn…but the prayers which I first encountered and learned were prayed all over the world struck me. I witnesses a mystery in that continuation… the same prayers, same pattern, but that pattern seemed to expand, like a song with chords that continue throughout the entire piece, but are complicated by additional notes.

Attending mass again (the only real litrugy I have been too on any consistent basis, having once been to a Byzantine liturgy and a Lutheran liturgy)… I was struck by the same familiar mystery, but since my first exposure, my curiousity was a little thirstier. I watched a bread and cup ceremony, invocation, that had the same matter (with the addition of alcohol) to a service that happened anywhere from once a month regularity to scattered occurance at other churches I’d attended. Why everyday? Why so central? Why did the doctrine of substance changing at some point matter so much? Why pit this at the middle of everything, and rest upon it as a mark of something requiring an innitiation? My soul brimmed with questions then, and now too. I began to continue my re-visiting to the mass. There was something same about it each time… that same thing, whatever it was, I didn’t know at first… but it was something… someone I knew my soul was absolutely craving… and always present in a sense I couldn’t find elsewhere, in a way every other place I went to seemed empty. I think I met Jesus in a different way. I think in that litrugy, He let me kiss Him; He let me be still, and consoled and encouraged my soul to a further holiness. Not every time, but the potential was always there… but my heart did not always offer a great expectation of His advent.

I learned that litrugy was more than the mass. And I hungered further with a greater wonder as I learned more. I was asked, why, if I can see Jesus anywhere, feel Him anywhere, would I limit myself to that re-presentation, that set order of encountering my God? Limit? The prayers I have learned to say as I was increasing in the volume of my liturgical life came from one of the most dynamic sources of prayer: the Psalms. Learning that they fulfilled the needs of my life, the cries of my heart to God, that they traced the human events and decisions and provided words where I was speachless, I found myself falling in love with the Divine Office: there again, a set aside sacred time and place, where I begged Jesus to open my lips and receive my praise; where I long for a burning coal from the altar to be placed on my tongue and where I found created for me in the presence of my God and community a place to be still, and wait for my God to come. I love going to morning prayer and kneeling in the silent chapel before we begin… savoring the time with Him. He quiets my heart and restores my soul… giving me the space I need to wrestle out with Him His place in preeminance over the rest of the business in my life. In this liturgy, this ordering where I remove from what is familiar to be quiet, directed and focus, my Jesus walks with me into the stillest dance I could hope for, and begins to teach me rest, something I am absolutely incapable of on my own. Finding my resst restores my joy, and I am free to run and live with/in Him.