Sitting with the Sacred

This Week’s Readings:

• Isaiah 2:1–5
• Psalm 122:1–2, 3–4, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9
• Romans 13:11–14
• Matthew 24:37–44

Also Cited

• Isaiah 55: 8-9
• Colossians 3:2

As a whole, the readings above offer a lot of hope. They tell me that people from every nation, regardless of their circumstances, are invited to enter God’s kingdom. They remind me that “[my] salvation is nearer now than when [I] first believed” (Rom 13:11, The New American Bible Revised Edition).

Yet even as these readings inspire me, I find them daunting. The first reading tells me that its promises won’t be fulfilled without me first fighting a battle that won’t just be an uphill one. It will be an “upmountain” one. Isaiah envisions the place where God dwells as being on the summit of a mountain because the Jewish people had a long history of meeting God on peaks. These settings seem fitting because Scripture reminds me that God’s ways are not my ways. They are high above [my] own (Isa. 55:8-9). In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he reminds me to “think about what is above” (3:2).

However, if I take the concept of “climb[ing] the Lord’s mountain” out of the context of the rest of the passage, the words carry connotations of a meeting with God being the result of an achievement on my part (Isa. 2:3, The New American Bible, 2001) It isn’t. Isaiah calls me to make the trip “that [God] may instruct [me] in his ways and [I] may walk in his paths (Isa. 2:3). I have a lot left to learn and to do. The learning and doing will mean letting go in order to transcend “what is on earth” (Col. 3:2). It will mean letting go of the weights of selfishness and self-centeredness. It will mean recognizing that whatever is not God or does not share God’s character is temporary and may act like a weight that holds down the balloon of my soul and keep it from ascending to God. The heavier the weight, the harder it is to get out from under. I can’t just shrug it off. Only Someone above me can lift it, and that Someone is God. But God often doesn’t pry out of my hands what I have a white-knuckle grip on. Instead God waits for me to release to Him the burdens of selfishness that I clutch to myself, though His cross would lift them from me if I let it.

Still, it feels like another kind of burden to lay the burden of selfishness on the cross because it can be hard to recognize selfishness for what it is. It can feel like a weighted blanket I hide under. To come out from under this blanket is to be at my most vulnerable, to be naked, to stand out rather than be camouflaged by the temporary trappings of day-to-day life.

I won’t have forever to act as the Divine reflection on earth that I was born to be — that each of us is born to be. My time on earth may well end when I least expect it to end, on a day that previously seemed as uneventful as the one before it. May I recognize opportunities to act selflessly, to build community, and to make peace while I have these opportunities. This is the prayer that the New Testament reading I cite at the beginning of this post inspires me to offer. Amen.

The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.

Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc. “Sunday July, 2 2023: Readings at Mass.” The New American Bible, 2001. Universalis for Windows, Version 2.179, Universalis Publishing Ltd., 26 Feb. 2023, https://universalis.com/n-app-windows.htm