Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Do you feel safe? It’s a complicated question. In many of our workplaces, we hear slogans about safety being the number one priority. After the recent Tornado outbreak, we may be wondering how safe our homes are property will be as climate change makes these kinds of storms worse and more common. Sometimes we feel insecure or unsure about our relationships with friends, family, children, and spouse. We may not feel financially secure. And unfortunately, our faith is no guarantee that each of these concerns will not happen. So, what is it are we praying for in today’s psalm?
We want to pray to God for any good thing, and certainly our safety is a good thing. But at the core, there’s a big disconnect between how safe we feel, and how safe we are. For our time and place in the world, perhaps that’s the key to today’s psalm. Our anxiety has little relationship with reality. Prayer connects us to the ultimate reality. It brings us in communion with God, ourselves, and the world as it truly is. Jesus speaks in today’s gospel reading about our oneness. He prays that the Father may be in Him, and He in us, and we in the Father. It’s an intertwining circle of perfect love and glory. It overpowers all our other concerns, whether they happen or not. Bad things will happen, but with God, we will be okay. Paul shows eloquently in the first reading exactly what happens when people forget their unity. A group of Jewish leaders united in their desire to persecute Paul are divided and disabled from having any effect on him. A house divided cannot stand.
Our anxieties have the same effect on us. They divide our attention between what matters and what does not. They disconnect us from reality, and replace it with an infinite list of ‘what-if’s’ that will mostly never happen. So today, may we join Jesus and the psalmist in prayers for unity and safety though a true connection to the divine reality. Amen!
-Chris Nieport