Saturday Lent Five

“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

Jeremiah 31, Saturday Lent Five, the Reading, Morning Prayer, the Daily Office Book, Year One

Such is the great grace and wisdom given to us by God’s compassion: that we can come through our travails; we can be made new, should we but make our hearts available to God’s loving promise, a new covenant written in love and forgiveness. It may be difficult to accept, but we do know each other as ourselves, in our hearts illumined by Christ's truth, we are no better or worse than ourselves or the other. We are all variations on the same tune, at times we all hide in the shadows in our shame, and at times we dance in the light of our truest being; why is this so hard to accept? We are all music and harmonic discord made a symphony before God in God's loving Oneness. 

The questions which keep returning to me are: Am I willing to abandon the twisted security of the familiar bondage, the bondage of my heart and mind, bound in chains of anger, fear, doubt and shame? Am I willing to surrender and risk, trusting God to hold my heart and to write the perfect law upon my heart, and know the compassion of Christ within me? Am I willing to let go of the security of my perception of you, to see the Christ in you? Honestly, not always. Yet, the more I give of my heart to God, the more my trust grows, because the greater strength is gained in willingness to be vulnerable, and to have it affirmed in experience of God’s presence, through my vulnerability, as to the humility and the poverty of knowing the reality that our fullness of being comes only in the dependence of relationship, to the need of Christ’s love, and the need to continue to seek out and serve Christ’s love in each other.