Prayers and Other Resources
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Item The Rain of God(Creighton University, Online Ministries, 2015-03-31) Gillick, Larry, S.J.If, or better said, when, I have a problem with my computer, I call our Help Desk here at Creighton University and they fix it quite quickly and well. I counted eleven different radio and television programs which deal with various problems.|There are financial, relational, medical, programs all centered around solving things. Cars, gardening, home-improvement and computers also have specific problem- solving programs. Everything can get fixed it seems. I have not, however, heard of any programs dealing with the problem we humans have with God.|There does not seem to be an available Help Desk for our questions about certain aspects of God, such as God's Will, God's Justice/Mercy conflict, God's creationality, that is, why did God allow evil as well as good. So we can come up with various theologies and theories, but we continue to stumble around with the unsolved. We have problems of all kinds with God, especially why God doesn't become more clear about Who God is really and why does God hide in the mystery of infinity.|On the other hand, God has a problem with us, a problem that God created, that is, our freedom, our free will. At times we would wish that God would intervene and make this or that happen. We would wish that God would send us little secret notes about what to do or not do. At other times we love making our own decisions.|We say that if God loves us, then all will end up well no matter how stupid we are about our process of deciding. God's basic problem with us is our free will and of course there is a problem about whether our wills can ever be free.|I am writing this early in the morning and a thunder storm is getting my attention. I love the sound of rain and I have had to stop typing at times, just to open my window and enjoy. Is this a distraction? I take it as an attraction and a delight. Lately I have found myself taking notice of and praying with what delights me. Falling raindrops and the smells they offer are just one of many, when and if I take the time to listen and smell. I can fuss about how things ought to be and how this or that problem can be fixed. I have spent lots of time praying at God's Help Desk, that's for sure. I am moving more to consider and reflect on my personal Delight- desk. The whole thing is about how is God going to get my attention and draw me closer in the relationship which seems both important to God and problematic.|The gift God gave us of our own wills prevents the same God from forcing us to do or not do. As I mentioned above, I have been attending God's delight-desk during my prayer-time. If God wills my attentive relationship with God, then God has to send rain with its smells and sounds to me. Perhaps those do not delight you. So each of us has to pay attention to the things that delight us and allow them to form a personal pattern of God's will taking shape in our lives. We have five outward senses which deal with the taking in of things. Thousands of sense-bites are being sorted out by our bodies every day. I am finding myself nourished and enlivened by the ones which get my attention and lighten my spirit. If I can take in enough, I tend to be moved to want to live a little longer and deeper. I love being delighted.|Now you might be wondering about whether this sort of prayer is self-centered. God is centered on each one of us and comes courting us the same way a young lad attempts to get the awareness of his heart's-desired lovely lass. God comes to us according to how we get "come-to". This kind of prayer moves from our being selfish to our being more available to be a way that God delights others through us. See, the object of God's delighting us is our sharing in God's delighting others. Listening to the rain has assisted me in attempting to delight you. It is only a glimpse and darn, the rain has stopped. - No Thumbnail Available
Item Stick to Your Knitting(Creighton University, Online Ministries, 2014-09-30) Gillick, Larry, S.J.There are many warnings and well-justified, about "texting" and even hand-held cell-phone use while driving. Having two eyes and only two hands is definitely a distracting limitation. Multi-tasking usually is a multi-masking of our fears of being insufficient.|There is a Latin phrase we Jesuits learned very early in formation. "Age quad agis" which means, "Do what you are doing". (Age is actually pronounced, ah-gay and agis, ah-gis, hard G.) It is the old way of reminding us to "Stick to your knitting." It relies on our hands, head and spirits being united. This was a hard lesson for me and maybe I'm still learning.|I worked as a janitor my first couple of years in the Society and my first "task" each morning was to visit each of the twenty-seven "castles" aka bathrooms and collect used paper hand towels. I had a quite large canvas bag thrown over my shoulder and did my little pilgrimage doing what I was doing.|One morning I was diligently doing in the infirmary. One of the rooms had been made into a little chapel, so I paused outside the door, knelt down for a little visit. I thought myself quite the little pious Jesuit, stopping my "doing" to pray before the Blessed Sacrament inside the room. I stood up and was about to move on with my "doing" when the Brother Infirmarian called to me to come into his office. He asked me if I had made my morning meditation and gone to mass. I humbly affirmed that I did. He then asked me why I stopped the work, the "doing" to pray. That was quite a shock, why wouldn't I, I wondered.|He took my silent response as a sign of confusion, which it was. "Your prayer, your participating in the Eucharist is prayer which prepares you to pray with your "doing", and you have not learned yet, that there are various forms of prayer and your work is one of them." I was missioned to pick up damp paper which didn't seem much like prayer to me. My mind and heart were raised to getting my work done and the only fault was that I wouldn't have done my work fast enough. Ah so much to learn!|The big insight, or little glimpse, is that prayer is not always thinking about God and then separating off from prayer by some kind of "doing". Do spouses love each other only when they think of the other? Changing diapers might move the one spouse to think of the other sometimes in thoughts less loving. The washing and changing are unthinking-ways of loving. Prayer is a "doing" which is inseparable from other "doings" which extend prayer-time into time. We do prayer, or receive prayer so that we can pray with our "doing".|I have been writing this without kneeling down or even saying little words or even thinking of God, but I have been doing what I am doing and God gave me the gifts to do both within the one "doing".|No texting while driving, but you can text while doing if texting is what you are doing. We do not pray then as the holy thing and then go off and do something we consider less holy. I am going off now to do something having nothing to do with God or prayer, except it all is and always.|It is only a glimpse enjoy the praising by your doing. - No Thumbnail Available
Item Partly Cloudy(Creighton University, Online Ministries, 2016-03-29) Gillick, Larry, S.J.In some grade long ago, the teacher presented us, me, with the term "whole number". So shortly after I got my mind around such a funny term, she hit me with "broken numbers". I could imagine the number eight as having two little circles, the one delicately balanced upon the other. Now what would an eight look like with only one little circles looking for its partner? Then came the word, "fractions" which sounded like "fractures" and I could imagine a five without its little horizontal cap and or its half bicycle tire missing. Whole numbers were hard enough, especially when lining them up together, combining them to form really super-whole biggies.|The Latin word, "Integer" means "whole, fresh or uninjured". Fractions are how the whole gets broken into littler ones. Numbers can be broken into really tiny things that hardly exist. I prefer round, uninjured things myself. Numbers that go beyond the amount of my fingers and toes can injure my whole brain.|Generally, we do not deal well with the incomplete, the broken, and the unwhole. While painting a fence or room or even a picture, someone coming along might tell us that it looks real good. Our natural response would be, "Yes, I guess so, but wait until it is finished, then you'll see something really good." We have in mind what it is going to look like before we begin; we know the whole, the final and fine product.|We do not deal well with the slow realization of what and how things of our industry might turn out being.|In our northern part of this country, we say that there are two seasons, winter and road-repair. Our streets and highways get so fractured by snow and ice and cold that reconstruction is all around our speeding lives. The road to personal re- integration is always under construction. Our human wholiness is the awareness that holiness is how we hold our unfinished, fragments together without being negative about our progress. God, the Creator, is constantly and continuously laboring upon us and with us to bring us back into being personally and communally whole. Because we do not live in the delusion of being "all together", we live in the Grace of being grateful, imagine this, grateful for the fractures, the partial, the almost, of our persons and lives and so we know exactly where God's Reconstruction is always taking place. The integrated person grows in loving her/his partliness.|God never says to us, "Get it together!" In prayer we hear God saying, "I'm working on it!" Holiness is living toward wholeness with patient and more patience. It is only a glimpse and incomplete. - Loading...
Item Let's Get Personal(Creighton University, Online Ministries, 2014-07-29) Gillick, Larry, S.J.Two of my Jesuit brothers were walking along the beach near Santa Barbara, California. They met a man standing in the water fishing. One of these two asked the man what the name of this river was. The man looked quite annoyed and replied, "This ain't no river, this is the (blankity-blank) Pacific Ocean." In mock surprise and apparent disappointment, the smart-aleck Jesuit replied, "Hmm, The Pacific Ocean, somehow I thought it would be bigger."|I recently was speaking with a person who was worried about his relationship with his long-term woman-friend. After a bit of time, he simply stated that the "spark" was gone. He could not describe the "spark" exactly. It had something to do with the sense of romance, though he still enjoyed spending time with her. I asked him about how he felt about himself when he was in her presence. That slowed him down quite a bit. He eventually admitted that he was finding things about himself, when with her, that he'd rather not know. Somehow he thought he was going to be better and, by her being his special friend, he was being revealed to himself.|We all have expectations about the more personal things in our lives. The word comes from the Latin, (look-out) or "watch-for". We are always looking out for the "spark" or that certain something. Very few things about others, about events, about ourselves fulfill our lookings. The term "romantic" when applied to literature describes a type of writing which denies the limitations of actuality. When applied to a person, he/she loves the spark which looks past human failures in hopes that they will vanish because of the relationship. The closer we get to the reality of the other, the more the limitations of his/her actuality will be difficult to deny.|In our relationships with God we find out all those actualities which can move us to be more concerned with them than with the relationship itself. We become quite assured that God is viewing us in the same way as we are viewing ourselves. Somehow God thought we would be bigger, better, gracier. So this is the framework which we look-through. Our expectation is that God is definitely not a romantic, but an investigative realist, concentrating on our being smaller, worser and too real to be known and loved. God is a Divine Spark Whose very nature is more than feeling. In listening to people who do pray I find a sense of disappointment and darkness, because somehow they thought, over time, they would constantly experience that Spark and it is their fault and faults that smother the spark. Our expectations of how we should feel in prayer or because we pray, either in private or communal prayer, can be so romantic that we get depressed at our own reality and actualities.|Prayer is a relational matter and not to be measured or evaluated. Obviously we would love raptures, (whatever those are) and as in loving relationships we would desire intense intimacy and belonging. It does not take long in any interpersonal relationship to have the reality of limitations become a partner in the relationship. So too with God. I may have had a couple, a fleeting couple, of real, honest, intimate experiences of God's being this close. Mostly God is that-near, but it is real as long as I stay real in my expectations of God. I cannot make God come as close as I would wish and if God did that, I would have the expectation that God come even closer. That is just the way we are and God is.|People always get in trouble when they trip over the barrier of their too-lofty expectations of themselves or the other. It is only a glimpse and somehow I thought it would be better. - Loading...
Item Pleased to Meet You(Creighton University, Online Ministries, 2015-09-29) Gillick, Larry, S.J.Being in the presence of persons of fame or in some way a celebrity can make us feel important or a little kind of celebrity ourselves. Thirty years ago I shook hands with Pope John Paul II and I'd say he felt pretty good about it, especially when I greeted him in Polish. Years before that encounter, I was at a wedding of a famous hockey player in Boston and felt like a little kid. I wanted to get autographs and chitchat with them about my ideas about hockey and sports in general. The Boston players seemed to be having a very good time dancing with their wives and fooling with each other so I kept my ideas to myself.|Something within me had changed in the six years from the wedding until the Pope had an audience with me. I think it has to do with the concept of the "Majesty of God" which had changed for me. That sounds rather majestic I suppose, but here is what has changed. God's grandeur is different. God's awesomeness, majesty is not as we picture: kingly thrones, wings and trumpets. God is not our "buddy" either. God's majesty is not even a concept. The real issue in superconceptualizing God is that we keep God way up yonder and we are way down under. That will form in each of us then a "Little-boy/girl" image which prevents us from being real human persons in the presence of God.|God is not a celebrity! We are growing-up-persons, because Jesus mingled with such as we are. So the Pope was met person to person by a me that didn't ask for his autograph. Are we more important, because we meet "important" others? Here's the whole picture. Nobody gives us our importance! Nothing we do makes us any more important than before. We really have reached spiritual maturity when we meet anybody else and experience their person as one who has the same dignity, beauty, status as we do ourselves.|There is a wonderful world-wide community-based organization, L 'Arche. The L'Arche communities welcome "specially-blessed" adults into their Christian groups. Living and working with these women and men helps to mature the L'Arche Assistants. Once you spend time with David, Gordy, Peggy, John, wanting autographs is no longer on the menu. We do not get our dignity from those whom we celebrate and meet and get their signatures. We meet them and allow them to meet us if they have the time. If they do not, they have missed a great opportunity. This is not pride. It actually is humility with which we accept gratefully the gifts that we are. Perhaps we need the autographs of "the biggies" to temporarily boost a little-poor-me, but as with any mind-altering drug, the diminishment soon falls upon the user. If I am getting my name, image, importance from meeting you, I am not actually meeting you, but using you to meet a false me. In a real faith-way, Jesus is God's signature written in ways we live and relate.|That signature is written in the persons of wealth, power, beauty, achievement. It is written in the hidden, quiet, disfigured, and all those kinds of folks Jesus met. He gave them His autograph which became a part of their names and image.|When someone says to me that they are pleased to meet me, I would wish that they are pleased by how I have met them and helped them to meet themselves as well. Pope Francis shook lots of hands this past week for sure. I assume they are feeling better, because the Pope met them. I would hope they feel better for how he helped them meet themselves. It is only a glimpse, enjoy your own signature.