Ever wonder what it's all about? I need to try and work it out. I'll just begin with the deer.
This is about what and who and where strength comes from.
I fell out big time with my church sometime in the 1990's (not the only time) over the text book for First Communion. It was one of many things that needed changing, and I had expectations of change.
Other things had been turned upside down for the good of us all after Vatican 2 in the late sixties and seventies. Dark wooden benches had been ripped out of chapels and nuns had thrown away their habits. I'd seen it myself. So I had expectations.
You may say I lacked patience. Where does patience slip into apathy, or impatience into arrogance?
Anyway, the trigger straw for a delicate camel's back this time was the instruction: 'Draw a picture of God's house'.
What it meant was to draw a picture of a church, drawing us in to seeing church as a building that houses God, not church as the people that carry the love of God.
Or maybe (John 4:2, my translation): 'There are plenty of rooms for travellers to rest and remain in the many mansions of my Father's house, and I'm going now to prepare a place for you.' In the Gospel of John, that means a place beyond.
So we chose colours and made rainbows, and imagined the colours of peace and light and love and rest where you can lay your head and no longer listen out for the prowling lion, because you are absolutely safe for ever.
Imagine now the sound and the sense of this place, and the absolute everywhereness of access to this place in the vast creation of the universe and beyond.*
God is everywhere. God lives in you and me.
For me, everything about God is about meeting God, the sense of self changing in the light. Of course I can't do it, or engineer it, but I know it is there, and I know that I must try, and that the trying in itself is a kind of bliss, so that I don't mind, just want, and just want to keep nearly finding.
Communion, sharing the bread and wine, you can find the real presence there, that is a real moment of change. Sometimes you feel it, you just feel it. And sometimes you don't. It's not about holiness or the lack of it. Saints go though awful deserts of no sense of God at all, it's not all the luxury of God's enveloping for them. God has her own ways, like the mother hen, with her chicks under her wings. (Luke 13:34)
But in Communion, we teach the sacredness of that meeting.
God lives in you, and in me.
Some ground is specially sacred ground, like churches, especially for me when the sacred light is lit at the tabernacle. I do revere that. But still, we can't trap God into a building that we have made. God is everywhere. His house has infinite rooms, for all of us. You can't draw that. You just need to go there.
Be happy.
You will.
There is always forgiveness.
'A contrite heart I will not spurn.'
There is always a place for you and me.
Jump into the rainbow.
Jump into the wild.
He is there.
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* Reference to the wonderful teaching of Fr Pierre Mesters O Carm (Netherlands) on our Father, the Father of the Universe and beyond.
