The Mystery Revealed

I wrote recently about the mystery of Christ's suffering and how our (my) sin of pride often puts me in contempt of the suffering that he endured. And, while it's true that He did choose that time and place to be conceived, born, live, minister, suffer and die (and don't forget, rise from the dead!), the reason was not just the suffering itself.

By enduring the suffering, He shows us that He loves us. Jesus did it because He does love us. And, because by doing so, He demonstrates what love is, what it means to love. Loving means to give of oneself, to empty oneself. To love means to will the good of the other. And, love is always sacrificial. Maybe it's waking up in the middle of the night to feed an infant, when all you really want to do is sleep. Maybe it means giving your time at the food pantry when you could be getting things done at your own house. Maybe it means giving your child your own meal when there is not enough for both of you.

And, it's not just Jesus who gave of Himself in His act of suffering and death. God the Father also showed us what it means to love. He sacrificed something (Someone) that we would never dream of. He gave His all when He gave His only son. It would be like us giving up that one last thing that we are hanging onto, the one remaining beautiful thing that is ours, because it is God's will. Because it has a greater purpose to bring glory to God.

The other thing about love is that, by nature, it is a gift. We cannot force someone to accept a gift. They may or may not return the love to you. So, when we try to love someone and they refuse it or take it and never "return the favor" by loving us back, it can really hurt. When this has happened to me, it really does cause pain. But, even the Perfect Lover who gave the perfect gift of love does not always receive love in return. So, it makes me realize that perhaps my love wasn't so perfect after all, when I give and expect to be loved back. When we give without wanting something in return, then we truly free the other to receive our love for what it is - a gift.

God extends the same to us. We have free will. We can choose to accept Him or not. If He only allowed us to receive Him, then it would not be love. He would be forcing it on us, which is not love. Instead, He allows us the will to refuse or receive the gift. And, oh how He delights when we love Him back, just as we bask in the joy of being loved by our own little children, who often do so with reckless abandon.

Lord, may we accept your gift of love, even when it is hard to believe
that your love is for us or when sin clouds our vision. May we learn to
love those around us with the same self-gift that you give us.

Putting Our Faith in the Stars

We recently had the opportunity to go to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. We went down there to see the last launch of the Endeavor space shuttle. We didn't have the opportunity to see the launch, because it was "scrubbed" about three hours prior to the launch time, but we had an great time at the Space Center anyway!

One of my favorite parts was seeing an IMAX movie about the Hubble space telescope. It was truly amazing! The film told us about the telescope, which is up in space, and then showed various images which the Hubble has captured. Sometimes, they would speed up the showing of the images, so that it looked like you were moving through space, among the stars. They chose a pink, milky-looking nebulus near the constellation Orion, and began zooming in closer and closer. Keep in mind that this thing is millions of light years away, and we're pretty much looking into the past, since the time it takes for the light at that moment to reach us is so long.

They described that from this nebulus, stars are "born." And, not just the stars themselves, but whole solar systems are forming and coming out!

I left that day thinking about the Big Bang Theory, which is the most widely supported scientific theory about how the universe as we know it began. I've read a little more about it since coming home, and this is my non-astrophysicist, lay-person's version. It makes some assumptions, like Einstein's theory of general relativity (which I am not an expert on!). We have observed that the universe is expanding, i.e. galaxies are moving further and further from one another. So, from that we deduce that at one time all the matter must have been closer together. So, at the moment of the "big bang", about 13.7 billion years ago, the extremely hot and dense state expanded rapidly. The expansion caused the universe to cool and continue expanding in its "diluted" state, even today.

This begs the question: Where did all of the matter in that hot, dense "ball" come from?

Joseph Pearce gave a talk at a conference I recently attended, and he made a great observation: Something cannot come from nothing. Humans can create some amazing things. Think about a beautiful painting that an artist might "create." But, it's not coming from thin air; he uses the ingredients that are available to him: paint, a paintbrush, the landscape that he sees, a canvas. The same holds true for our "recent" ability to imagine, design, and manufacture cars, cell phones, even space shuttles. We're using what we have available to us to make things.

There is only one person who can create something from nothing - God.

In closing, I came across the John Templeton Foundation recently, whose philanthropic mission is to support "discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality." They try to bring together science, religion, spirituality, etc. to encourage research in everything from "complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will."

Sir John Templeton observed that we have known so little about the physical and spiritual realities of our world, but that we are in a time of human history that our discoveries and our progress are speeding up. We have learned more about the "furthest" star and the "tiniest" cells in the human body in the last hundred or so years. And yet, we still know so little compared to what is unknown (yet still knowable!).

God has revealed himself over time to us. Perhaps at this time in human history, God is revealing himself to us by allowing us to learn more and more about what he has made.

I will thank you, Lord, among the peoples,

among the nations I will praise you

for your love reaches to the heavens

and your truth to the skies.

O God, arise above the heavens;
may your glory shine on earth!
(Psalm 57)