Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Today’s text

Mark 8:34-35

[Jesus]He called the people and his disciples to him and said, 'If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.'

Reflection

Saving is losing and losing is saving. Life is meant to be given away. To give it away is to enter the adventure of living beyond ourselves and entering the world where God is near to the heart.

God is near always. But we know God’s nearness more acutely as we enter the life of giving up the self we so energetically protect to become the self we are in the heart of God.

That self emerges and rises from its hiding place deep in the soul when we know there is nothing to defend, when we recognize that our lives rest in unutterly love.

Then we know the self we have been is not the true self, the free self that God loves out of us. Looking back on what we have been, it all seems like illusion, a poor facsimile of the life for which God intends us.

In losing the self we think we are, the self we protect and pretend to be, we are free to be and ever more become that which the seed of God grows in us. That seed, planted in the depth of our hearts, springs to life when we turn from the illusion we pretend to be. It grows when again we feel the faintest rays of that Love who has long wanted us to arise from sleep.

Pr. David L. Miller