BOOKS OF FORMATION

I'm not really sure where this is going today. Hopefully as I form my thoughts on paper (that's kind of funny) it will become something.

I have been attending a Bible study for the last couple of weeks. I haven't felt the call or the need for this for quite a while. It's kind of interesting that it would come during the last month we will be at this church. One of the reasons I wanted to go was to see how Episcopals do Bible study.

Last night we read the story from Luke of the road to Emmaus. We mostly spent time picking out the "facts" of the story. As we were wrapping up the evening I became aware of the personal revelation of this story. One thing I love about this sort of thing is that I wasn't looking for revelation. In just reading the word I discovered something. Much of the last few years I have been saying to myself, "Ok, so I have 'known' God for quite a while; so what? How has knowing God and experiencing God been effecting my life daily?" It's a real question. In the midst of this move we are going through and it not happening the way I thought surely God would cause it to happen, how has knowing this Eternal helped?

I think maybe, possibly that could have been the discussion the followers were having on the road to Emmaus. They had thought they found God, the messiah, the savior, the one who will change everything and now....where is he? Now what do we do? Now who are we? We're not really Jews anymore.

Then comes the Eucharist. This stranger that walks with them breaks the bread and "do this in remembrance of me" becomes present. Christ is revealed in the breaking of the bread.

I have had many times recently when all I do is wonder, ponder, question. God won't always reveal himself to me in answers but when I receive the blood and the body, I know who he is.

This morning as I continue reading Robert Benson's "Living Prayer" I found a passage that somehow fits together with this personal revelation. In "The Word" or in words I find Christ revealed. And somehow it's like a combination of a puzzle and a scavenger hunt. The difference being that in this scavenger hunt I don't have a list of what I need to find. I just know there are things I need to complete who I am supposed to be.

Here is the passage from "Living Prayer":

" 'Open our eyes to see', we pray, and our ears to hear and our hearts to feel and our souls to know, 'that whatever has any being is a mirror in which we may behold You.' Somehow we begin to see God in the stories and songs and tales and poems and paintings and photographs that we did not know God inhabited. We read a favorite novel and suddenly we see the Christ hiding between its lines. We study a treasured photograph and discover His face in the crowd. We listen to a symphony and suspect we hear angels praising the One Who made us.

"We begin to acknowledge that the searching has shaped us as much as what we have found. Though we still see through the glass darkly, we find that God reveals Himself more and more"

St. Ignatius would like this.