Dear Friends,
Today we see Jesus and the Sadducees discussing resurrection. The Sadducees did not believe in resurrection and eternal life (So, they were sad, you see?). It seemed impossible for them. It made no sense. There was no verifiable proof.
Yet, Jesus counters that it is only because of the limits of their imagination that they cannot believe in resurrection. And he makes it clear that there is indeed resurrection from the dead. Why? Because as Jesus says, God is the God of the living, for to him all are alive.
Yes! God is Life Itself and God has created us for one reason only: to share in God’s own life—which is eternal. God made us to share the divine life in time and in eternity. In other words, God made us for relationship with Himself and once that relationship begins, it is for ever. It doesn’t end when our earthly body dies. How could it? God is in a relationship of love with us and God doesn’t just end that relationship when we die. It’s not like God says, “Ok, Liam was nice. That was fun. Now it’s over.” How could God do that? The same God who loves us in our bodily form continues to love us, our essence, our person, after the flesh dies.
We often say that in God we live and move. True. But the amazing truth is also that God lives and moves in us. God, who is Eternal Life itself, lives and moves in us. Eternal life lives and moves in us and does so eternally. How could it be any other way?
The important thing to learn from this is that our eternal relationship with God doesn’t begin when we die. It begins the moment we begin, the moment we are conceived. Our Eternal Life with God is NOW. God creates us for relationship beginning right now, here in this present moment. In this moment, and in every moment, we are, as Ilia Delio puts it, “entangled in the life of God.” To be entangled in God’s life means our life is caught up in God’s life and our life is doing what God’s life is doing. As Ilia says, “To be entangled in the life of God means to be caught up in evolving life and where that life is headed, where the God of the future is calling us and all creation.”
How exciting is that? We are together with God, caught up in LOVE itself, loving this whole evolving Cosmos into its future of fullness of life beyond what we can now imagine!
And while we can’t completely imagine that future, believing in resurrection, knowing we are even here are now partakes in Eternal Life, we know that our purpose now is to be ever in sync with Eternal Life living in us so that our entire selves are caught up in Love and loving our Universe into everything it is meant to be.
That happens, of course, little by little, since we so often lose our focus as we worry about so many things in our own lives and in the world. But the call is ever with us: in this moment, in this situation, in this chaos, how can I let go and let Eternal Life live and love in me to move things forward—in however small a way—towards the future of Eternal Life for all?
It’s not just heady, it is intimate. God and you, God and me, actively evolving the Cosmos towards Fullness.
I love this poem of Hafiz—not a Christian but a mystic who saw into the Heart of IT All. He is madly in love with God and considers how God and he can work together:
It used to be that when I wake up in the morning
I would with confidence say, “What am ‘I’going to do?”
That was before the seed cracked open.
Now Hafiz is certain: there are two of us housed in this body,
Doing the shopping together in the market
And tickling each other while fixing the evening’s food.
Now when I awake, all the internal instruments play the same music:
“God, what love-mischief can ‘We’ do for the world today?”
Since we know we live in God and God lives in us, and since we know that, in sync with God we are creating the future in which the entire Cosmos will live eternally, why not begin each day asking our God-Lover, “What love-mischief can We do for the world today?”
The consequences are eternal, and the results can be lovely beyond all imagining.
Peace and every good,
Father Liam