It isn’t that loving others will make us feel
fulfilled. It’s the other way
around: when we feel fulfilled, we will
spontaneously love our neighbors, love them unconditionally and without
motivation, not in order to gain anything but as a result of our own fullness
of being.
Meanwhile, the craving for secure and complete
being drives us to bolster our petty, finite beings in all these miserable and
destructive ways.
Beatrice
Bruteau
____________________________________________________________
There is an old story about a man who had many
faults
He did many things that people considered “sinful”
and bad
But he attended a church that had a weekly “altar”
call
A charismatic fellowship that took seriously the “filling”
of the Holy Spirit
As the story goes each Sunday evening this man
would sit through the sermon
and every Sunday he would become emotional and
caught up in the moment
and every Sunday he would go forth to confess his
sins and accept again
the grace of God
As he would wander forward he would call out, in a
loud and fervent voice
“Fill me Jesus, fill me” “Fill me Jesus, fill me”
He would leave renewed
Only to act the way he had always acted
Only to come back the next week and go through the
some routine
Finally one Sunday, as we made his way forward
calling “fill me Jesus, fill me”
A voice cried out from the congregation.
“Don’t do it Jesus, he leaks”
We all leak
All of us
We are such poor containers for the Sacred
And yet
And yet
This is our hope
This is the hope for the world
That we can be filled with God
And thus filled
Go forth in fullness rather than need
And love
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