Feast of St. Nicholas
“He who is your teacher will hide no longer, and you will see your teacher with your own eyes…on the day the Lord dresses the wound of his people and heals the scars of the blows they have received.”
--Isaiah 30:20, 26
I love this image of God gently dressing our wounds. The concept of woundedness and brokenness has become very important to me in recent years. I think I have slowly gotten more in touch with my own existential wounds, and I see them less as a problem and more as a natural by-product of life. We are all wounded and while these wounds will always shape the way we look at the world, they do not have to alienate us from each other, from our deepest selves, from God. In fact, the whole message of the Christian Gospel is that God is recklessly, wildly pursuing us, trying with all his might to make us his. Isaiah reveals the kind of love God will show us when we finally stop our struggle and acquiesce to his embrace. The wounds and scars of life will no longer define us.
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I like to beleive that we are already HIS, but tend to wander away and forget....the thought of God in a frantic search for souls is a disturbing thought...to me. I agree God wants us with all His might to be part of the everlasting wonder that He is, and that all we need to do is submit to that fact. It is all about submision of our own ideas and perceptions....something that is particularly hard for me to do...I think meditation, from what I have read, is exactly that....and that is why those who meditate seem to achieve a higher level of spiritual understanding. (I know...I seem to always deviate from the path of the acutal post...sorry).
Marco, the authors of the Sacred Romance respond directly to this tendency of ours to "forget" when they talk about the necessity of spiritual practice in community, the necessity of ritual. We engage in ritual and community religious practice to remind ourselves again and again of who we really are, what are destiny really is. Because we do forget.
But I think in there lies the problem with the generality of religion...ritual....
Ritual...does not really bring you closer to God, nor does it make you have better understanding of who you are. It does, however, give you a sense of belonging, and some might argue that belonging can lead to a more detail endevour of self revelation....I suppose that is true for some, but not for me.....at least not for now. I guess the leason learned, at least for me, is not to force what is not welcomed (more importantly, not undestood), lest it becomes a beast to be detested. If I would have choosen literature over science my life would have been much more pleasant....
Thank you for the response to my post...as always...your grace of understanding unsurpases my knowledge of the subject matter.
Isaiah reveals the kind of love God will show us when we finally stop our struggle and acquiesce to his embrace.
Isaiah is quick to reveal ?another side? of God. Is. 30:30.
Good point, Thomas. One of the translations of Is 30:26 is, "the Lord dresses the wounds of his people and heals the scars of the blows they have received from Him."
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