Jacob is on the run. His mother Rebekah had come from the family of his grandfather Abraham’s brother to marry his father Isaac. Jacob was the second-born of twin boys, and he had been born, “clutching the heel” of his brother Esau. Old Isaac preferred Esau, but Jacob was his mother’s favorite. With the connivance of his mother, Jacob had managed both to cheat Esau of his birthright and trick Isaac into bestowing his patriarchal blessing on Jacob. Now, with Esau’s threats to kill him still ringing in his ears, Jacob is on the run. He is running to his mother’s family in Haran, ostensibly to find a wife.
Jacob stops for the night and dreams of a staircase, a staircase like the ones the Canaanites build in order to reach the heavenly abodes of their gods. However, in Jacob’s dream, God’s angels travel up and down, joining the heavenly and the earthly realms. What is even more surprising in Jacob’s dream, the God of Israel, unlike the remote Canaanite gods, comes face to face with Jacob and directly addresses him. In this astonishing first encounter with God, Jacob hears God reiterate his covenant with Abraham and assure Jacob that indeed his descendants will be as numerous as the dust of the earth. In that promise Jacob also hears implicit reassurance that it was part of God’s plan that Jacob deceive Esau, and that Jacob’s exile from his home will only be temporary. As he awakens, Jacob realizes that “surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” To ensure that others will understand that this is now a sacred place, Jacob upends his stone pillow and anoints it.
“Surely the Lord is in this place.” Have you had an experience something like Jacob’s? Many of us find it hard to pray. For some us, dialogue with God is well-nigh impossible. For others of us, meditation makes no sense. Even in our own room, how can we quiet our minds enough to discover if God is speaking to us? Most of us ignore or can’t remember our dreams. However, some of us have experienced God’s presence in “thin places,” places where we can almost see through the veil and get a glimpse of the heavenly realm, places where God’s presence is palpable and undeniable, places where God personally touches and moves us.
Some of us encounter thin places in natural settings. Some of us, like Jacob, have found God in the vast open spaces of the southwest deserts. For some of us, mountain tops or ocean shores speak of God’s majesty and our own insignificance. Sometimes God breaks in on us in national parks, like Acadia in Maine, where “the mountains meet the sea,” or retreat centers, like Our Lady of the Pines, where I spent the week surrounded by pines, firs, cedars, and many other kinds of trees. And some places seem to draw us more tightly into God’s embrace because generations of faithful people have encountered God there. I think of Iona, on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland, where 7th century Irish monks established a monastery to lead the Scots to Christ and where a restored monastery and retreat center now stands. I think of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the end of the Camino Real, to which pilgrims have been walking since the 9th century. I think of the cathedral of Chartres, France, built in the 13th century, whose great labyrinth in the floor still draws pilgrims. One day I walked into St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The scent of incense that met me bespoke the prayers that have been said there for almost two hundred years. And then there are the sacred places of other faiths: the Great Synagogue in London, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Hindu temples, and Buddhist stupas. And beyond these are all the ordinary places in life where God continues to show up: among devoted followers of Jesus in even the smallest clapboard churches, at bedsides and deathbeds, or when one person lovingly speaks truth to another. All of these are places where people have had and continue to have a deep sense of God’s presence. In all these places, when we open our hearts, we know that “surely the Lord is in this place.” In all these places we are privileged, in Meister Eckhart’s words, to “penetrate things and find God there.”1
And when we sense that “the Lord is in this place,” when God grants us the grace of a face-to-face encounter, how do we receive it? Do we distrust such a felt sense of God’s presence, such an intuition of God’s reality and love? “Couldn’t happen to me,” we say, it must have been my imagination. People like me don’t have experiences like that.” Or do we distrust such experiences because they feel too pious and private? Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr rightly cautions us that what he calls “false mysticism,” often feels too much like ‘my little Jesus and my little me,’ and doesn’t seem to make many social, historical, corporate, or justice connections. As Pope Francis says, it is all ‘too self-referential.’”2
But, by the grace of God, sometimes we are enabled to see something greater than ourselves in experiences of God’s nearness. When Jacob encountered God face to face, he realized, perhaps for the first time, that God’s covenant with his grandfather also included him, that he was called to be the ancestor of multitudes, that he would be connected to generations yet unborn. He remained a runaway, a trickster, and a womanizer, siring the twelve tribes of Israel by two wives and two concubines. Nevertheless, from that day forward, his life was forever transformed.
As it was for Jacob, so it is for us. Teilhard de Chardin reminds us that, “Spirituality is not meant to be an alternative lifestyle, a road to retreat and escape; it needs to be an active leaven of life, feeding the zest and healing the wounds of life.”3 By God’s grace, when we unexpectedly encounter God, we may glimpse for a moment the vast and infinite being of God, the God in whom we and all creation “live and move and have our being,” the God who loves and cares for all more deeply than we can ever imagine. And by God’s grace, we too may be transformed, so that we may have deeper compassion for all humanity, indeed for all creation. By God’s grace, we may be enabled to share with others what we know of the God of love, who showed himself to Jacob, and who shared our humanity in Jesus. By God’s grace we especially may be able to extend to others the care and compassion of that God for all.
If our encounter with the living God, in sacred spaces in nature, in this sacred space, in the sharing of Christ’s Body and Blood, enables us to see more deeply God’s love for us and all of creation, then perhaps too God will show us or lead us to those who particularly need our compassion and care. In the last several weeks, a poignant example of those in need of our compassion and care has come to light: the unprecedented number of undocumented Central American children who have streamed across the U.S. border. There is much that can be said about the impact of undocumented people on border cities, and of what the U.S. government should or might do to secure our borders. Our elected representatives have, for whatever reason, not had the will to enact sane immigration policy, despite the desire of the majority of Americans to fix the immigration system. Seeking a quick fix to the most recent influx, many Americans believe that all undocumented people, whether children or adults should be immediately deported.
Our church has taken a different stance. Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori counsels us “to remember these people and their difficult and dangerous position in [our] prayers – today, this coming Sunday, and continuing until we find a just resolution.” Urging us to contact our elected representatives, she reminds us that, “we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper, and as a Church, we are asking the United States government to support [a humanitarian] response, grounded in justice and the fundamental dignity of every human being.”4 The Episcopal and Methodist bishops of Los Angeles have gone a step further. Together they visited the child detention center in Port Hueneme, California. They then joined with Muslim and Jewish faith leaders to prepare worship materials for the Interfaith Weekend of Compassion and Prayer for Unaccompanied Migrant Children, to be observed this weekend in the Los Angeles area.
There are no easy answers to the plight of undocumented Central American children, nor to the violence and poverty that impel them to leave their homes. Nor are there easy answers to the poverty of the people around us. If we have experienced God’s nearness, if we have ever been able to say, “Surely the Lord is in this place,” then surely too we can pray that God will remind us that we are all God’s children, and that God will allow us the blessing of experiencing the renewal of life that comes when we share God’s love especially with the least among us.
1. Quoted in Synthesis, July 20, 2014, 2.
2. http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Richard-Rohr-s-Meditation--The-One-Face-and-the-Everything.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=3Fx3z_67osI, July 18, 2014.
3. Synthesis, 2.
4. http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2014/07/10/presiding-bishop-on-the-crisis-of-unaccompanied-children-at-us-border/
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