2 Kings 6:8-33 and 7: Predictions
Saturday, October 14, 2023
If we have found our examination of God’s uproar a bit overwhelming, we will want to look for signs of God’s peace as we did in this Favorite from May 4, 2010. When we consider Father Jarrett’s words below, we may find a channel for our own internal uproar.
So many times we wish our lives away wanting to know details about our future when all the while we really only need to remember one thing: The journey is the destination. Just last night I had this conversation again with my granddaughter who wanted to know or predict the outcome of a particular experience in her life. We talked about the human urge to lunge toward a final event as contrasted with savoring each step in our journey. Instead of lurching from one episode in life to another, we might put aside our fascination with predictions; and when we harness ourselves to the present and not the past or future, we are better able to live the gift of life to its fullest, to appreciate each moment we are given.
In today’s reading we find ourselves in a story with good and evil characters whose lives intertwine in a web full of twisting and turnings. When we change a few details we have before us a narrative we might hear on the evening news. In reality, the human story does not change much over time. We struggle for peace, thinking it to be something that arrives at the end of the story, and we forget that the serenity we seek is an inner state of being, a way of perceiving life, a way of taking each moment as it comes to us.
From today’s MAGNIFICAT Meditation by Father Bede Jarrett, an English Dominican famous for his preaching who died in 1934: The peace our Lord came to bring was dependent entirely upon an interior state of soul, and was wholly independent of external circumstances . . . The peace of the world was largely in its cause negative; it implied the absence, the careful removal, of every form of trouble, evil, distress; it was a peace through circumstance. But the peace of Christ depended wholly, under the grace of God, on the attitude of the soul. It was built upon a firm determination of the will never to be troubled or dismayed. It was compatible with every form of suffering, with every privation, with failure in every line of life.
This reflection indicates that we must learn to live with suffering rather than eliminate it. It tells us that when we cease our yearning for predictions and focus on living through the moment, we might not be so obsessed by outcomes. We might be more peaceful, more serene.
This is something worth contemplating; it is something worth striving for.
Tomorrow, Pax Romana.
Cameron, Peter John. “Meditation of the Day.” MAGNIFICAT. 4.5 (2010). Print.
Images from: http://floridapolitics.com/archives/187516-latest-check-on-my-five-bold-predictions-for-2015-has-me-headed-for-the-minor-leagues and https://www.seekstudyserve.org/peaceinthestorm
The Noontimes 