"To Vanier, every heart has a secret that is known only to God."
- Carolyn Whitney-Brown, in Jean Vanier:
Essential Writings,
p. 121 |
|
We appreciate your loyal readership and kind words of gratitude for the Soul Windows - Reflection newsletter. We are glad to send it free of charge. However, if you would like to support our ministry financially, you may make a contribution online through PayPal. May God bless you a thousandfold.
|
Soul Windows Greeting Cards
Fill someone's heart with inspiration.
|
Please share Reflection freely by forwarding any issue (click "Forward email" below), but remember to respect copyright laws by not altering, copying, or reproducing Reflection, whole or in part, without written permission.
Copyright (c) 2012 Soul Windows Ministries
|
|
We find the words of Jean Vanier to be so profound that
we have dedicated another issue to his writings.
|
|
|
Holding Secrets | |
 I remember a time years ago, around the late '80's, a fragile time of a deepening spiritual conversion. I heard a Retreat Master say that if you are looking for God, go to that deep dark corner within your heart where you will not look, and there you will find him. Yes, there is that corner where I did not want to look. It is the place of my secrets. Amazingly, I have found that God does abide there. My secret yearnings, joys, fears, wounds, hopes, anguish - all of those secrets - are being held by a tender and merciful God, there in the dark corner of my heart. God holds - embraces - all that I am, my uniqueness.
In that place of secrets, God reveals his secrets: love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, healing. Having found that place, I feel peace and consolation knowing that God is there. Sometimes I bow my head under the burden of grief and pain. Sometimes I bow my head in profound gratitude for the immense grace of God's tenderness. Taking some time in a relaxing place, while listening to soothing music, I bring my awareness to that place in my heart where God is revealing his secrets for me. Those are sacred moments of veneration: the body is the temple of God.
Those moments are not for me alone. Jean Vanier goes on to say, "When I discover that I am loved and accepted as a person, with my strengths and weaknesses, when I discover that I carry within myself a secret, the secret of my uniqueness, then I can begin to open up to others and respect their secret."[1] Vanier fully understands how secrets and sacred tenderness open to compassion and community. This, he believes, is where human beings find transformation, freedom and liberation: in a community that honors and protects the mystery of each person. "To be free is to know who we are, with all that is beautiful, all the brokenness in us; it is to love our own values, to embrace them, and to develop them; it is to be anchored in a vision and a truth but also to be open to others and, so, to change. Freedom is a process of going deeper and deeper into an unfathomable reality." [2] | |
[1] Jean Vanier: Essential Writings, p.122.
[2] Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, p 117
--by Jan |
|
Jesus' Four Secrets
--by Bill
Jesus, writes Jean Vanier (Essential Writings, pp. 123-125), wants to reveal four secrets to us. Each secret "will at the same time reveal and calm our fears."
The first is about Jesus himself. "He is the place where God resides." His body - his particular flesh: strong hands, piercing eyes, and weary, callused feet - "is the temple of the Spirit of God." We have heard this first secret so many times; it may no longer surprise us.
The second, however, "is an incredible secret." Our bodies, too, are temples of God. Most of us look at our bodies with some mixture of shame and vanity, frustration and pride. Few consider our bodies with reverent awe. Our guilt, our shame or our fears keep us from seeing our own bodies, fit or flabby, as "the temple where God resides." Do you find that hard to believe? Is there something frightening about this thought?
"The third secret ... is that [Jesus] is hidden in a very special way in the poor, the broken, and the suffering." The very people many of us shy away from are where Jesus is found. And if that were not troubling enough, Vanier then touches another of my tender spots, suggesting that Jesus is to be found in the places of my own poverty, in the spots where I am broken. Jesus dismantles all our false securities "to bring us into the insecurity of love and the insecurity of communion, where God is present and calling us."
Jesus' fourth secret concerns the meaning of pain. "We have been taught that pain and suffering, loss and grief are the worst things that can happen to us." Jesus, who faced his own cross, encourages us to walk toward pain, the pain of others or our own. When we walk toward pain, we discover "that pain can be enfolded in love, that pain and suffering can become a gift that I can give to God and to humanity."
Four secrets, four fearsome secrets, all about the insecurity of love and the gift of pain. We are blessed that Jesus came, bearing secrets about where God is found. |
|
|
|
|
