Presence

Presence is our awareness of ourselves as a gift. We are beautiful and our Creator is in love with us. We respect that love relationship as the abiding communion of our lives. It’s a loving communion we share with others who are also gifts, also beautiful, and also beloved. We risk living intimately, in touch with our holiness and our brokenness, our joys and our sorrows, our contentments and our longings, as others risk such lives with us.

Christ Jesus embodies Presence. People felt Presence, giftedness. Martha and Mary felt it from their enduring friendship. This Sunday’s Gospel describes a time when Martha forgot the contemplative basis of their friendship. She complains about others being absent. They are absent from tasks she wants them to do. She grows angry and demanding, forgetting who she is – Presence within a friendship. As a result of that memory loss, the gift of herself, her hospitality, is momentarily lost as well. She made of the relationship instead a burden and impediment. Martha got caught up, as we all do, in an outer performance that lacked the inner gift of Presence.

Presence is enlivened and nurtured in different ways. Among them are a communion with creation, engaging in contemplative prayer as Jesus practiced, and being of loving service. Like Mary in the Gospel, our habits of Presence help us to live from a contemplative center amidst a marketplace of distractions. Distractions that have us feeling empty inside rather than whole, anxious rather than peaceful, and busy rather than creative. At some point the flurry of the outer world shuts down. The T.V’s., phones, and iPods’ turn off. The distractions we make of other people no longer suffice. The contemplative energy of the inner world beckons. What is our response?

Prayer: Dear Jesus, we live in a fullness of Presence together.

Question: How do my habits help me nurture contemplative Presence in myself, in others?

Presence: July 21, 2013 – Gospel Luke 10:38-42 Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time