Jack Hardaway
]
So here is a puzzling thing, we’ve been puzzling and figuring this for a long time, not sure if we have ever gotten many of the pieces to fit together.
How do we stop people from doing horrible things?
That is the puzzle. It’s a real stumper.
The Catechism has a deep reading of the 6th commandment, Thou shalt do no murder.
“To show respect for the life God has given us, to work and pray for peace; to bear no malice, prejudice, or hatred in our hearts; and to be kind to all the creatures of God.”
The insight of ancient spiritual wisdom is that murder begins long before it happens. It begins with a frustrated and festering heart that is untended and allowed to burn and boil until one day something sets it off, and if there is a fire arm available, things then happen quickly and end suddenly.
We are to pay attention to our hearts and what is simmering and boiling in there. And we are to deal with it before things explode.
Our culture cultivates rage, it is a very lucrative industry, and the weak willed and weak minded, those with fragile souls are easily twisted by it. They reap what we sow.
The spiritual wisdom of heart tending, is also that we cultivate our hearts with kindness, rather than rage.
How do we cultivate the habits and culture of kindness in a world that pays good money to do the opposite?
That is one of those questions that point to the spiritual conflict that is really going on, to the war for our hearts, the great battle against the spiritual forces of wickedness.
We are creatures created for communion.
More than that, all creation is created for communion.
For flesh and blood to choose to love.
And that is what today is about, this Ascension Sunday, at the end of the Easter season, after Jesus ascends and before the Spirit arrives.
Today is an in-between time.
The early believers knew that creation happened for a reason, for God to become flesh and blood, the incarnation is the why of creation.
The resurrection is for the redemption of a broken creation.
But incarnation is the why. Creation was spoken into existence by God, so that God could be human, and choose to love in the flesh, to be in communion.
When Jesus ascends bodily to the Father, our humanity ascends with him and we share in the divine communion of the Trinity, our humanity is joined to God, and the gift of the Spirit is the life of that communion filling our flesh and blood, our bodies and bones.
So the Ascension isn’t about escaping the world, it is about the world being set free to choose to love, it breaks the chains, opening the prison doors.
We live in an in-between time.
Between Ascension and Pentecost.
Between despair and hope.
Between kindness and rage.
Between bondage and redemption.
Between a world created for communion and world that pays good money to break communion.
Choosing the way of communion is to be contrary, like puzzle pieces that don’t fit anywhere.
The puzzle of the human heart.
Cultivate that puzzle with kindness.
Don’t fit in.