Feast of the Holy Innocents

30Dec
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away….And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying,

 ‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more 
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’ 
                                         - Revelation 21:3, 4


 Yesterday was the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when the Church remembers the infants murdered at the hand of King Herod in his rageful mission to eliminate the newborn Messiah. This passage from the Book of Revelation seems to widen the human lens in remembrance. It looks to a time after “first things” have given way to something new. A new awareness of the God who dwells among us. The promise of a reality past this life’s grieving and tears, one surpassing death itself.


How tragic that the killing of innocent children by those in power remains a reality in our world, in places like Gaza and Ukraine (among others). And yet how challenging to our faith to still believe in a truth somehow larger than this. To rage and grieve on behalf of the innocent and most vulnerable in this world on the one hand, while on the other to know that even the deepest human loss and pain, even death itself, are but the “first” of things, not the last .


My own struggle with this tension between faith in an indwelling God and the presence of evil in the world so monstrous that it would destroy the innocent, is not going away any time soon. My “enlightenment” still awaits me on this. But the tension was eased, at least a bit, by my recent reading from Anthony de Mello’s “The Song of the Bird.” It’s one in a series of passages which the author suggests reading twice, followed first by reflection, and then by one more reading:


“Uwais the Sufi was once asked, ‘What has grace brought you?’


He replied, ‘When I wake the morning I feel like a man who is not sure he will live ‘til evening.’


Said the questioner, ‘But doesn’t everyone know this?’


Said Uwais, ‘They certainly do. But not all of them feel it.”


(adds de Mello: “No one ever became drunk on the word ‘wine’”)


After letting this passage sink in, I walked outside and found myself looking up into the sprawling canopy of an ancient oak in front of our house; and I allowed myself to not just think, but FEEL, the truth that this possibly might be the last time I might wonder in gratitude at God’s creation. Then I reflected on how this same FEELING might affect a shared coffee with my wife or a friend, or a call with my son or daughter or someone in distress. And rather than fill me with a morbid sense of mortality as I age, this exercise opened a space for me. It anchored me not intellectually but spiritually to the sacred gift of life in any given moment.


After letting this passage sink in, I walked outside and found myself looking up into the sprawling canopy of an ancient oak in front of our house; and I allowed myself to not just think, but FEEL, the truth that this possibly might be the last time I might wonder in gratitude at God’s creation. Then I reflected on how this same FEELING might affect a shared coffee with my wife or a friend, or a call with my son or daughter or someone in distress. And rather than fill me with a morbid sense of mortality as I age, this exercise opened a space for me. It anchored me not intellectually but spiritually to the sacred gift of life in any given moment.


As the old year fades into the new, I come a step closer, as we all do, to joining that vast “cloud of witnesses” including the “Innocents” we remember today. In the days given to me before then, I want to remember this feeling, this sense of BEING beyond thought, that washed over me under the oak. Because there was such a blessed certainty in that brief experience, the understanding that life is BOTH a “first thing” so passing and fragile as to be taken away this day or another, AND a wondrous sanctification of even our most ordinary moments. It isn’t the type of certainty that arrives through thinking. It is more a knowing that drew from the whisper of an Inner Voice, or the inhalation of air made fragrant somehow with a whiff of the Divine. It is, in short, something both simple and mysterious, hidden one moment and obvious the next.


I believe such moments as these are free and available to us as people of faith. Year-end or year-long gifts, even after all the sales are done.  


Happy New Year, my beloved Trinity family!  


Musical Reflection - Break Forth, O Beauteous Heav'nly Light · Glad J.S. Bach


You taught us, Lord, that to take on the joyful innocence of children is to open the path to your Kingdom. Help us, then, to quiet our adult minds and open our life-weary hearts, so that we  might learn from the innocents among us just how miraculously and wondrously You have made the life we share each day. Amen. 

Saints

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