Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
The friendship of Yahweh and Moses
The people would all rise and stand at the entrance of their own tents, watching Moses until he entered the tent.
All rise! Here come da judge. Aaron (Judge), Moses, and countless others, even Judge Roy Bean, require this gesture of respect. Roy Bean probably didn’t deserve it, officially, but west of the Pecos River in south western Texas, that didn’t matter much.
Judges, however, don’t last forever. Moses died, and Judge Roy Bean died, and so did all the rest. I hope to have a heart procedure on Friday, and I hope not to die. Ron Rolheiser recently had serious surgery himself, but he did not die. One of Rolheiser’s weekly columns did address the “grace” of dying. He cited several of his favorite authors:
Kathleen Dowling Singh suggests that the dying process itself “is exquisitely calibrated to automatically produce union with Spirit.” What she is saying is that what is experienced by someone in the final stages of dying, particularly if the death is not a sudden one, is a purgation that naturally lessens the person’s grip on the things of this world as well as on his or her own ego so as to be ready to enter into a new realm of life and meaning beyond our present realm of consciousness.
James Hillman thinks that there some wisdom in the very DNA of the life-process that mandates the breakdown of physical health in late life. There’s an innate wisdom in the process of aging and dying: The best wines have to be aged in cracked old barrels. The breakdown of our bodies deepens, softens, and matures the soul.
Psychologist and philosopher William James was convinced that there are realms of reality and consciousness that lie beyond what we presently experience. All religion, not least Christianity, tells us the same thing. But our normal consciousness and self-awareness literally set up boundaries that prevent us from going there. Normally, for us, there’s this world, this reality, and that’s all! The dying process helps break open that contraction in our perception, awareness, and consciousness.
And then Rolheiser reminds us (and himself) that prayer and meditation will take us along the same path. “They too are exquisitely calibrated to loosen our grip on this world and open our awareness to another.”
Moses climbed Mt. Sinai when God told him to come up there. God was helping Moses “loosen his grip.”
The Lord passed before him. Moses bowed down to the ground in worship. He asked the Lord to come along with his people, his stiff-necked people, to pardon their wickedness and sins.
God spoke of forgiving wickedness and continuing his kindness for a thousand generations, while at the same time punishing children and grandchildren of the guilty “to the third and fourth generation for their fathers’ wickedness.” (It should never be said that God does not speak out of both sides of his mouth.)
The LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as one man speaks to another.
What could Moses say? He asked God for his forbearance more than once, and God honored his requests. Their relationship seems precious to them both. God had found someone who would listen to him day after day, and follow his instructions.
So Moses stayed there with the LORD for forty days and forty nights, without eating any food or drinking any water, and he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.
(Exodus 33, Psalm 103, Matthew 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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