CONVERSATION STARTER

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APOLOGIES

This has been a unique couple of weeks. First, on August 18 I had a total knee replacement. Everything has gone extremely well, thank God. I'm walking without a cane and going to physical therapy three times a week. The second reason I haven't posted anything recently is that our internet here went down, and I had no connectivity even for email, let alone for Blogger. But everything is back now, so let's pick up where we left off.

LISTENING FOR GOD TO START

The God of Scripture, both the Old and the New Testaments, is a God who acts in history. But we often forget that God's acting in the course of history is not confined to the pages of the bible: God is acting in our lives all the time. It's obvious, for example, that the Lord suddenly intervened in the course of history by sending the angel Gabriel to that teenage girl in Nazareth, but recently I got a great reminder of another truth about the annunciation. 

I was rereading Fr. James Martin's "Jesus: A Pilgrimage" which I highly recommend when, in the chapter

on the annunciation I came across this simple sentence describing what Mary might have thought when Gabriel suddenly appeared to her. "Perhaps this is God beginning a conversation." These words went right to my heart, as I sat here in my room in the abbey infirmary doing my rehab exercises. I'd already been reflecting on how this surgery might affect me, but Fr. Martin's question put a sharp point on my meditations: "Perhaps this is God beginning a conversation."

I started asking the same question about lots of different emotions and events, such as when one of my brothers is extraordinarily kind to me, or when the Lord offers me a beautiful reflection or consolation during lectio divina, or when I start to get "down" because I'm cooped up indoors and can't take noce power walk around our school's running track. "Well," I ask myself in each of these instances,"Perhaps this is God beginning a conversation." 

St. Benedict would approve heartily of this approach. He believed that God is always trying to communicate with us, and so our first duty is to listen. So, when I start feeling crumby because of my knee, I need to be quiet and listen, because this is probably God beginning a conversation. I need to say with young Samuel when he heard the Lord calling his name, "Speak Lord, your servant is listening" (1 Sam 3:10). 

Speaking to God is, it seems to me, often overrated. Our transformation happens not by our speaking to God but by our listening with the ear of our heart to the Lord. So, as I go though the experience of recovering from my knee surgery, or as all of us suffer through the privations of covid-19, a great question to keep asking is the one that James Martin puts in the heart of the young maiden of Nazareth, "Perhaps this is God beginning a conversation."