St. Alphonsus Ligouri wrote "the teaching of God is not by word but by being; 'The Word became flesh'. Our task is to let our flesh become Word." In other words, as God took on human form to communicate His Heart to us we should allow Him to make our flesh into His Word and so communicate His Heart to others. We should incarnate the Gospel.
This is a concept that I have tried desperately to lay aside in the past 1/2 a year but it just won't go away. God has "induced me and I have been persuaded" a la Jeremiah and therefore am looking at the concept yet again.
The Lord is taking me on a very interesting journey lately and as I ended up in November realising that I do indeed want to sit at the feet of Jesus, like I did at 17, He is now showing me that He was also the One who put this other burning desire in me. It's like I'm reliving my late teen years and getting a clearer grasp on what He was showing me. Rather odd journey, maybe, but for those of you who know my testimony of the sexual abuse I went through in college (starting at 18 and going throughout all my college years), maybe it won't seem so odd.
At any rate. As I studied Amy Carmichael, a missionary/mystic in India who rescued child prostitutes and was steeped in the Bridal Paradigm, when I was 17, so I now am finding myself running into books like The New Friars. This book was one of the elements God has used lately to re-open the reality that He has called me to "incarnate His Word" among the poor & broken. It's stories of young people who are leaving everything behind to live in slums with the poor and allowing Jesus to incarnate His Word through them. My heart burst into flame again and I thought...I need to be involved in something like this!
So. Having re-engaged with the part of me that "sits at the feet of Jesus" I am now exploring that part of my heart that wants to walk as Jesus walked. Hmm. The Marriage of the First & Second Commandments. Hmmm. Union With God.
What that looks like at present and in the near future has several angles. First, I have been going through an inner healing program for the...what....4th time? (let's make sure all the layers are off this onion!!) It's been good. The desire of my heart is that my "laying my life down" really really be out of love for Jesus and not in fulfillment of some need of my own. I want to love Him as I see Him behind the eyes of the poor & broken (as Mother Teresa said) knowing that when I offer even a cup of cold water to one who is hurting I have offered it to Him. So, I am going through healing yet again to get rid of anything else that still might be in there that would cause me to be incarnating out of mixed motives or will keep me from loving Him and others well.
Then I am going to be off exploring my heart, as it were. :) Larry & I will be going down to Little Portion Hermitage to be volunteer monks with the charismatic Franciscans in June. He will be there a week and I will stay 2-3 more. Then I will be going to Nicaragua for two weeks in July to help with a ministry that rescues child prostitues from the garbage dump slum in Managua. (see: http://www.aguafresca.org/NicDump.html) I have long had a heart for prostitutes, and esp young ones, as "sex for survival" is something with which I am unfortunately familiar from those college years (and, no, I wasn't a prostitute... somewhat different swirl but same result at the end of the day). I am also working on plans to go live in the Cuernavaca Slum for a month sometime in the next year, though probably not this summer. I want to be in there with the poor...praying, worshiping, just being with them. I am also looking more deeply into the possibility of doing a small clinic and a small scale feeding program.
I do very much still believe in the pre-eminence of prayer! And I have no intention of leaving that aside. But I also know that other things burn and groan within me as well and unless I am living out both sides I will not encounter Jesus fully and I will not love Him fully, in the way that I was created to love & encounter Him.
And so I will follow the Lamb wherever He goes......
