Sign Posts on the Way

How good to give thanks to the Lord! (Psalm 92)
This past Sunday's psalm reminds us that as Christians we gather weekly to collectively offer our thanksgiving to God.  This sense of "giving thanks," from the Greek word "eucharist" (εὐχαριστία), is what for more than two millennia has convened us. We gather precisely to celebrate with joy and gratitude!  However, I fear that, in general, we have been losing this experience of living the "Mass" as a true Feast of gratitude for the Good News that God, really, Is-with-us.  I know very few people who describe their participation in Sunday liturgy as a joyous gratitude gathering.   Moreover, as I reflect on this, I wonder if this is not, deep down, because we have lost our sensibility to discover the little "signposts along the way," that is, that we have lost our ability to live in conscious communion with God's manifestations.

I recently heard a statistic on a health podcast that blew my mind.  A medical doctor said that people living in the US spend 97.3% of our daily time inside a building or car.  In other words, we spend most of our lives locked up and separated from the world created by God.  And, in addition, we spend an average of 4 hours and 37 minutes a day looking at our cell phones.  So, adding the time we spend as prisoners of our minds - anchored in the past or anxiously searching for the future - we practically live disconnected from all of nature, from others and, consequently, from the presence of God's "reign".

With yesterday's Gospel reading we can affirm, as the work of many biblical exegetes has pointed out to us, that the core of Jesus' preaching was the "Reign of God." In the two parables, Jesus, using imagery from nature, "points out" to us that the Kingdom of God is to be discovered in the small, ordinary and subtle.   Jesus always prompts us to discover that God is acting, here, in a continuous and processual way and that we only need to see, observe, listen, in other words, attend to this presence with love.  The Kingdom is not the consequence of norms, programming, beliefs/doctrines, in fact, it does not depend on our doing anything.  It will arise within us, states Fray Marcos Rodriguez, OP (Madrid), "from an intuition of what you really are...when you stop considering yourself as an isolated self and discover that you are one with all of Reality."  Could it be that our lack of attention and connection has robbed us of our capacity for wonder and gratitude? What if we make a point this week to step outside the walls that separate us from others just a little bit more and observe smiles, petals, sunsets,...? Might we discover how God reigns in even the "smallest of seeds" (cf. Mark 4:31)?  I suspect that if we take the time to attend with love, we will have to cry out: How good it is to give you thanks, Lord!