Tag: Jacob

“Ifs” and “In-Betweens”

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Courage, Faith, spirituality6 Comments

Monday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
July 10, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071023.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Genesis takes us deeper into the story of Jacob, and Matthew tells of a faith-filled centurion and a hope-filled woman. These are a wonderful narratives painted in images so intense that they have infused the prayers of generations.

Jacob’s Ladder by William Blake

Jacob and his mother have successfully stolen the birthright from Esau. But now Jacob, threatened with muder by his wronged brother, is an exile seeking a place to live out his life.

Jacob is on a journey in between his past and his future, between his choices and his regrets, between his security and his hope. He is in a place of momentous “ifs” because he has no “for sures” in hand.

Pausing at a shrine, Jacob sleeps and dreams of angels, of a laddered freeway to heaven. God appears and speaks to him, reiterating the essence of the Abrahamic promises.

By Divine Graciousness, God has intruded on Jacob’s “in-betweeness”

In you and your descendants
all the nations of the earth shall find blessing.
Know that I am with you;
I will protect you wherever you go,
and bring you back to this land.
I will never leave you until I have done what I promised you.”

Genesis 28:14-15

The experience moves Jacob to make a vow, hinged on a particular word of hope : IF

“If God remains with me,
to protect me on this journey I am making
and to give me enough bread to eat and clothing to wear,
and I come back safe to my father’s house, the LORD shall be my God.
This stone that I have set up as a memorial stone shall be God’s abode.”

Genesis 28:20-22

If I But Touch the Hem by James Tissot

In our Gospel, the suffering woman pivots her hope on the same word: IF

A woman suffering hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him
and touched the tassel on his cloak.
She said to herself, “If only I can touch his cloak, I shall be cured.”
Jesus turned around and saw her, and said,
“”Courage, daughter! Your faith has saved you.””
And from that hour the woman was cured.

Matthew 9:20-22

It is clear from God’s spontaneous generosity in both these passages that Divine Mercy does not swing on an “IF“. God waits for us to open our hearts. God’s Promise is constant, and God’s Will for our wholeness in immutable. The “IFs” are our constructions, not God’s. God is with us no matter what, not if.

Most of our life is spent atwix one thing and another – between youth and old age, sickness and healing, security and contentment, courage and fear, indifference and awareness … beginnings and endings in a thousand forms. It is at these in-between places that God waits for us, as God did for Jacob, as Jesus did for the suffering woman.

“In-between” is usually an uncomfortable place because we are stretched between growth and passivity. But in the stretch, we may find a holy place, as Jacob did. In the reach of our heart for the hem of God’s garment we, like the extravasating woman, may find new life.

Poetry: That Passeth All Understanding – Denise Levertov

An awe so quiet 
I don’t know when it began. 

A gratitude 
had begun 
to sing in me. 

Was there 
some moment 
dividing 
song from no song? 

When does dewfall begin? 

When does night 
fold its arms over our hearts 
to cherish them? 

When is daybreak?

Music: In Between – J.J. Pfeifer (lyrics below)

In between the day and the night
In between the dark and the light
In between what′s wrong and what’s right
I′ll find you

I’m not really sure just why I care
My heart is broken and I’m scared
Walls are coming down
My defense is on the ground
I′m falling

In between the day and the night
In between the dark and the light
In between what′s wrong and what’s right
I′ll find you

I don’t want to lose you
Can′t stand the pain
I wanna feel the sun
Not always feel the rain
Walls are coming down
My defense is on the ground
I’m falling

In between the day and the night
In between the dark and the light
In between what′s wrong and what’s right
I’ll find you (find you)

I′ll find you
Forever beside you (beside you)
I′ll find you
Breathing inside you
I’ll find you

I′ll find you
I’ll find you

The Promise Survives Deception

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Eternal Life, Faith, Gospel, Jesus, spirituality1 Comment

Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
July 8, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070823.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Genesis presents us with a story that may make us pick sides.

Jacob Deceives Isaac (Rebekah in back). James Jacques Joseph Tissot. c. 1896-1902.

(All I can say is that Esau must have been one hairy dude!)

Old, blind Isaac, sensing death on the horizon, dramatically prepares to hand over the promise to Esau. But his wife Rebekah has other ideas:

Rebekah then took the best clothes of her older son Esau
that she had in the house,
and gave them to her younger son Jacob to wear;
and with the skins of the kids she covered up his hands
and the hairless parts of his neck.
Then she handed her son Jacob the appetizing dish
and the bread she had prepared.

Genesis 27:15-17

It’s a fascinating and powerful narrative. I can see the movie trailer in my mind’s eye:

Watch as “The Promise” is passed to the wrong son
by means of his mother’s deception.

So is that what the story is about? Well, only on the surface.

The real story stars an Actor who is never mentioned in the script:

God, the Promise Keeper

This Bible passage teaches that God does not deviate from the Promise, no matter how the other players manipulate its unfolding. God performs the Promise despite human fiddling.

Friends, aren’t we just a little bit like Rebekah and Jacob? When our life’s dramas swirl around us, don’t we make every effort possible to salvage our own designs? It’s human nature, and it’s all good.

But all the same, God must smile at us and our sometimes frenzied efforts to control our lives. I think God smiled like that at Rebekah, covering her favorite son with smelly sheepskins so as to deceive her hungry husband.

Rebekah thought she had a better plan, but it was God’s plan all the time!

It takes some of us so long to realize that we can’t control much of our life. We can only engage our days, trusting that, as they unfold for us, they carry the promise and will of God for our hallowing.

By grace, we can learn to receive our lives as an infinite river of blessing, with all its natural turns. We can pray to trust that blessing when it is hidden in the curve of life’s shadows.

In our Gospel, the Baptist’s disciples are confused by Jesus’ behavior because it contradicts the old Law which offered them a controllable path to holiness.

Jesus tells them that the Law of Requirements is no longer sufficient. It is an old wineskin.
With the new wine of the Gospel, He is calling them to trust and enfold themselves in the Law of Love.

No one patches an old cloak with a piece of unshrunken cloth,
for its fullness pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse.
People do not put new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined.
Rather, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.

Matthew 9:16-17

Poetry: Late Ripeness – Czeslaw Milosz

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.
One after another my former lives were departing,
Like ships, together with their sorrow.
And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.
I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget -- I kept saying -- that we are all children of
the King.
For where we come from there is no division
Into Yes and No, into is, was, and it will be.
We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.
Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago --
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef -- they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.
I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

Music: Piano and Flute Meditation – by Laura Sullivan

That Family Reunion!

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Community, Courage, Faith, Forgiveness, Hope, Love, repentance1 Comment

Friday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

July 12, 2019

Click here for readings

Today, in Mercy, we read about a family reunion of biblical proportions!  After many years, Joseph – long-thought dead- is reunited with his grieving father, deceitful half-siblings, and beloved younger brother. Wow!

For better or worse, “Family” is a powerful force in every one of our lives. It both nurtures and siphons us; both exalts and critiques us; frees us and binds us.

Genesis46_30 family reunion

In many ways, family makes us who we are – by blood and genes – but more importantly by the hope and promise it places in us.  This was the case with Joseph, the great hope of his father Jacob and the misunderstood threat to his jealous brothers.

Today’s reading shows us a family who has made it through their devastating conflicts, not by their own effort, but by the abiding promise of God.

So many fractured families wish they could tell the same story of redeeming wholeness! What were the openings in this family’s brokenness that allowed God to enter and heal?

As so often in our human story, God comes dressed in ordinary clothes.  God wears the garments of our grief, repentance, forgiveness, hope and longing. He is disguised in our memories, cherished or painful. He peeks through our unresolved regrets, and dances in our acts of kindness, patience, and understanding.

We reach through to touch this God of Hope by our smallest mercy, our offered reconciling word, our tendered apology for a slight grown bigger with the years. And sometimes, we must simply let go of that which is unreconcilable, of those human hurts that can’t be healed because of time’s passage or unreachable hearts.

We let this God of Promise live in our families by honestly loving one another, supporting one another, thanking one another, and anticipating one another’s needs.

Being a strong family takes courage and sacrifice – something Joseph’s brothers were lucky to learn, however late. Let us pray in hope and thanksgiving for our own families – and for all families —  that God may give us that kind of self-sacrificing courage. Let us pray especially for young families, in today’s very inhospitable world, that they may grow strong in God’s and each other’s love.

Music: Family Prayer Song – The Promise Keepers

Wounded by Mercy

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Courage, Eternal Life, Faith, Forgiveness, Mercy, spiritualityLeave a comment

Tuesday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

July 9, 2019

Click here for readings

Today, in Mercy, we continue to learn from the amazing saga of Jacob.

This passage tells a story we may have heard: 

Jacob, after years in isolation, is returning to seek reconciliation with his aggrieved brother Esau. Jacob is stressed, penitent, and maybe a good bit nervous about the first encounter.

He tries to get a decent night’s sleep before the highly anticipated meeting. But that was not to be.

Jacob and AngelJPG
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel by Eugène Delacroix

Jacob wrestles through night with an unnamed stranger. The stranger – perhaps an angel, perhaps God – wounds him, renames him, and ultimately blesses him.

The passage is so worth a reflective read! In that reflection, we may see glimpses of our own relationship with God. God comes to us too, unexpectedly, in both our lights and our darknesses. God wrestles us to look him in the face, in the heart – to turn our attention from all the luring distractions and shallowness that keep us from him.

At best we, like Jacob, might come to a sort of truce with God: we do not fully know God’s Name but we, nevertheless, receive God’s blessing. That blessing changes us, renames us. And, in a visible way, it marks us – just as Jacob was marked by a “limp”. We become vulnerable to the things of God, to God’s hope for the world, to the Mercy of God for all Creation. We become marked by a Love which, though it seems to weaken, is our ultimate and indefatigable strength.

Today’s final thought: Will we let ourselves be changed by the grace offered us in life’s struggles? Will we let ourselves be renamed and marked as God’s own?

Frederick Buechner, in his sermon The Magnificent Defeat talks about such surrender:

Power, success, happiness, as the world knows them, are his who will fight for them hard enough; but peace, love, joy, are only from God. And God is the enemy whom Jacob fought there by the river, of course, and whom in one way or another we all of us fight-God, the beloved enemy. Our enemy because, before giving us everything, he demands of us everything; before giving us life, he demands our lives – our selves, our wills, our treasure.

Will we give them, you and I? I do not know. Only remember the last glimpse that we have of Jacob, limping home against the great conflagration of the dawn. Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.

Music: Jacob Wrestles with the Angel – Leo Kraft

Twisted Blessing

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Community, Faith, TruthLeave a comment

 Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time

July 6, 2019

Click here for readings

Today, in Mercy, we move on to the next great Genesis drama – the story of Jacob and Esau.

Gen27_esau_Jacob

We remember the circumstances. Isaac, grown old and blind, wants to pass the inherited Promise to his firstborn and favorite son – swarthy, earthy Esau (a definite Robert Mitchum role😀) Rebekah, inclined to her son Jacob, helps him disguise himself as Esau to steal the birthright blessing.

Their deceptive success is one of the greatest Biblical examples of how God turns our lives upside down – imparting grace and blessing, even in the disguise of life’s adverse experiences. The story, ripe with Biblical theology and human psychology, is just plain fun to read. See which character you most sympathize with in the drama- and maybe ask yourself why!

But beyond the reading, we might pray with an awareness of God’s unexpected, even amazing, interventions in our own lives. We might ask for that steadfast faith which reveres all circumstances as an unfolding dialogue with this Giver of Grace. As we consider Jacob’s call and promise, we might thank God for our own Baptismal call, and renew our own promise of enduring faith.

Music: Hymn of Promise – Debra Nesgoda