Two Cents

The widow gives everything she has to God in today's gospel.  I find myself learning more, the longer I live, what "giving everything to God" means for me.  In my early 40's, I find myself in what feels like a macro transition (ok, a mid-life crisis - but only in the Greek sense of the word, a turning point).  For decades I've tried to "dedicate all I have to God."  Even one of my favorite prayers by Ignatius is all about giving everything to God.  But what I'm learning now is that just like the widow's two coins, what I have I did not make.  It was/is all given to me.  In a sense, I don't know where it came from, and I don't innately know how to use it.  It's the process of coming to understand myself, others, and my relationships that I am now called to "give to God."  "Take, Lord, and receive... my understanding."  Was this prayer written by someone who often felt confused about what he was supposed to do?  The evidence is there: decisions that didn't pan out the way he thought, doing "penance" to the point of permanent self-injury.... So, perhaps the wisdom to discover now is a new level of surrender: of my desire to understand, to make sense; of ideas and habits that seem calcified in my mind and spirit; of people I had grown more to possess than to love.  "Whoever loses his life for my sake will gain it."

The rock n roll spirit of Christianity

I just saw 'Bohemian Rhapsody" in the theater.  The story of Freddy Mercury, as told in the movie, moved me more deeply than I ever would have guessed it would.  The story, for me, was at its heart a story of a person who had no interest in what his own culture or surroundings told him he should be.  Instead, he lived his life according to his discerned vocation as a performer.  This has made me think about similarities between his way of living his life and the way of living life as a Christian to which we who profess this way of life are called.  What would happen if all of us who called ourselves "disciples" would live The Way the way Freddy Mercury lived his life: without compromise with or deference to the culture around us?  What if we lived each moment of each day as an expression of the kingdom of God?  What if we loved each other radically and were unabashedly grateful for every moment of existence?  Freddy Mercury and Queen rocked millions of people.  Could the billions of "Christians" around the world rock the entire human community by witnessing boldly the Way of self-sacrificial love for each other?