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GhostbustingThursday, April 19, 2001
Luke 24:35-48
They were startled and frightened,
thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them Confidence and confusion do not do well together. Jesus' presence requires something "rooted" in me that opens me up, makes me teachable and receptive. A new-age word for this characteristic is "centeredness." I'd like to share a passage written by Father John Main in a book called Silence and Stillness in Every Season: There is nothing that our world needs more urgently than men and women who are rooted in themselves, confident in their own being, confidnt in their own capacity for goodness, their own capacity for loving and for being loved - and for that confidence we need that sense of being wholly at one with ourselves and sitting still in meditation every morning and every evening. Once we are rooted, once we are still, then we begin our next great task of learning to be attentive to the mystery at the heart of creation and learning to live our lives in harmony with the mystery. What does it mean to be alive? Surely, it is our awareness of being. And that awareness is intensified by our awareness of the being of others, by our awareness of the being of all creation, by our awareness of the being of God. Our life begins to be fulfilled when we begin realizing that being is love. Each is filled to our capacity for love and for being loved - and meditation is how we enter fully into that mystery of love. Lord, let me retreat from my fear of your majesty, your mystery ... into stillness and silence. Show me there who I am, the one you have made me to be, your son. And allow me to approach you again, Lord, knowing you better, knowing myself, learning to love. |
Whenever Jesus actions or words engaged the supernatural, the flesh-and-blood folks around him were amazed, but they also were confused. Was this God or Satan in their midst? The "dark world," as Paul calls the spirit world was a huge unknown, and what little naming of the creatures living there was done by mediums, witches, cast out by their culture as evil.