June 13

Matthew 5:13-16

“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your [Mother] in heaven.”

I’m reading Rowan Williams’ Where God Happens.  His theme is “discovering Christ in one another,” but he gets there through the Desert Fathers and Mothers.  This morning I read from a chapter on “fleeing,” a theme that runs through the desert experience.  Williams describes what it meant to flee, and how “fleeing the world” in fact opened the early monastics to seeing Christ in one another and in those who came to them.  They left “the world,” only to find that “the world” sought them out for their light!

Then I went down to Eucharist, and the Gospel for the day was this passage from Matthew (we follow the Episcopal two-year daily lectionary).  I pondered how the command to let our light shine goes with the call to flee.  I remembered when I first entered religious life.  I didn’t have a vision of service or ministry, beyond wanting to be with people as they prayed and discerned God’s work in their lives.  All I knew was that I had to leave what I was doing and who I was being, not because they were bad but because there was more.  I went to a community that let me focus on prayer.  After a while I noticed that something was growing in me, a desire to serve and share the love that was coming to me.  I began to engage in ministry.  It was rewarding, but in a different way than my prayer-focused life.  I struggled with balancing these two parts of my life, two locations.  Ministry took me into “the world,” with its values and priorities; convent life centered me in Christ, but brought its own challenges and problems.  There is no simple refuge.  Wherever we go, there we are.

Most of you live in “the world,” as the desert monastics would put it.  You live and serve there, you let your lights shine there.  So I’m not telling you anything you don’t know about the challenges.  Instead I wonder, how do you “flee” in place?  Where do you find that inner desert that sustains you, that community of other sojourners who support you in the quest to discover God?  Do you have a corner of your home dedicated only to prayer and reading?  Do you have times during the day devoted to renewing contact with the Source?  How do you keep your lamp lit?

If you don’t have such practices or such a community, let me invite you to begin.  Even the most extroverted disciple needs quiet time to hear the chatter in her head and to turn again to God.  As we breathe in and out, we receive Spirit and we return it.  

May you discover God in communion with others, and in your prayer, this day and always.