Monday, May 15, 2023

 

Monday, May 15, 2023


Psalm 104:1-25

Exodus 34:27-35:9

John 13:36-14:7


Observance: Matthias, apostle and martyr [If not observed on February 24]


I am the way.


There is a certain way of looking at the journey of discipleship that many of us struggle to get past. Many of us imagine that God is somewhere “over there” (wherever that may be), whereas I am “here”, and I need to work on my spiritual life to travel closer towards God.


Catherine of Siena, whose day we observed earlier this year, once reflected that “the soul is in God and God in the soul, just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.” A wise spiritual director explained that we can think of ourselves as fish swimming in the presence of God, in whom we all have our being, but sometimes we stop using our gills, and so we forget that God is so intimately present with us that we don’t have any further to go in order to reach Him.


Admittedly, the title of this devotional doesn’t help: we walk a narrow path of discipleship, but that doesn’t mean we are walking from a place where God is not to the place where God is. Rather, we are keeping on the straight and narrow so that we never forget that God is always with us. We do our best to keep using our spiritual gills.


When Thomas asked Christ to point where he should be going in order to get to God, the response he got wasn’t something he could jot down in his spiritual refidex (or plug into his Maps app on his phone). Jesus self-identifies as the path to follow, in a turn of phrase which would be grammatically incorrect in any other circumstance. The “way” to the Father is not a path to travel, but a spiritual posture, and that posture is facing towards Jesus. If we lose the sense of the Father’s presence, we need to turn back to Jesus, to open our gills and fill ourselves with Him.

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