Baby

Monday, March 3, 2025

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Baby

Who in the nether world can glorify the Most High in place of the living who offer up their praise? How great the mercy of the Lord!

Will this be the day our new grandchild first breathes the air of earth?

The day Andi and Aki’s new baby opens his lungs and shouts for the first time?

With glad cries of freedom you will ring me round.

As I’m writing this, we know that at 6 am today, Andi’s doctors will begin inducing this young boy’s birth. And I think of what Garrison Keillor once said:

The world is not my home but here I am.

It might be a few years, but I can imagine this new child of God recognizing the wise words of Carl Jung, well, not the words exactly, but the meaning and power behind the words:

I find that all my thoughts circle round God like the planets round the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by [God]. I would feel it the most heinous sin were I to offer any resistance to this compelling force. —Carl Jung, letter, March 1955 

Richard Rohr wrote that Jung believed that if God wants to speak to us, God has to use words that will, first of all, feel like our own thoughts. How else could God come to us? Jung recognized that Scripture and priests are external to the self, and offer us a religion from the outside in. Jung wanted to teach us to honor those same symbols, but from the inside out, to recognize that there are already numinous voices in our deepest depths. If we do not have deep contact with our in-depth self, he believed we could not know God. 

Before he grows into a rational being, our baby grandson lives and breathes in this “inside out” world of the “deepest depths.” In the ways that matter, this baby boy knows God as we mostly do not.

For the most part, my own past crowds out the present, my inner thoughts push back whatever God might have to share with me. At least that’s how it feels. Memories of 75 years shoulder their way past the breath and taste of today. Like the rest of us, I am alone in my plans, hopes, regrets and recollections. Even now as I write, my mind flits back and forth from thought to thought, face to face, song to song.

All things are possible for God.

I notice, however, that prayer stands firm; it does not yield so quickly to yesterday or tomorrow. Prayers don’t give way to the past; being is here now.

Our pastor Matt, preaching on the spiritual rhythm of generosity, reminded us that the greed which all of us suffer somehow is unnecessary. Contentment (which is almost exactly the opposite of greed) reminds me that when I fear God, I need fear nothing this earth can take from me, or afflict me with. In God’s abundant world, there is nothing I need that he does not provide.

You are my shelter; from distress you will preserve me; with glad cries of freedom you will ring me round.

(Sirach 17, Psalm 32, 2 Corinthians 8, Mark 10)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

#