A Light Reflected

Miracles happen!  They are the swaddling clothes of our daily lives.  They are God’s whispers of faith and hope and love that come to us all if we are listening.  In this season of miracles, I share such a whisper with you.

We live in a world of gurus and experts.  There is a plethora of books; an abundance of workshops, articles, and television shows all proclaiming parenting strategies that work.  Maybe they do.  More often than not, all this external knowledge never becomes wisdom and transformation.  If the strategy is not easy to fit into our daily lives, we never really internalize someone else’s solutions.  We continue to cling to the notion, however, that somewhere there is an expert who can save us.  We are weary of this culture of violence and death.  We long for a transformed kingdom on earth.  There are times when those who have made peace with the status quo exhaust our vision of what could be.  But our vision is about children.  Our vision is about an awakening of our spiritual identity.  Our vision is a moral quest to reclaim for our children the values, the virtues and the dreams that are their inheritance as children of God.   We cannot accept anything less.

In the past few years, my prayers for the children in our society have taken on an urgent tone as the chaos they experience grows.  One morning, as I knelt in a church in Memphis where I live, I felt a certain sadness that tempted me to despair those things would never change.  I looked at Christ on the crucifix, His arms outstretched, and thought, “We need you to wrap your arms around your children and protect them, but sometimes it seems as if You have no arms.”

About a month after that morning I was at a conference in San Diego.  The group I was with visited one of the old missions.  As I knelt in the dimly lit church, I looked up.  There, over the altar, hung a large crucifix.  The finely carved figure of Christ that hung on the cross had no arms.  I was transfixed.  Here, thousands of miles from Memphis hung the armless God of my prayer.  What a coincidence.  Who would hang a broken cross over the altar and why?   I asked the priest at the Mission why the figure had no arms and why a broken cross hung so prominently over the altar.  He told me he found the crucifix buried under a tarp in the corner of a small shop in Rome.  In spite of the fact the arms were missing, the wooden figure of Christ was so beautiful and the look on His face so moving, he decided to buy the crucifix, have it restored and hang it in the Mission.  When Father returned to San Diego and the Religious Sisters at the mission saw the crucifix, they convinced him to hang it just like it is, without arms.  They said it would remind us that we are Christ’s arms and must do His work in the world.  What a very clear answer to my prayer.  What a loud whisper of hope.

We cannot clutter our lives with more voices telling us how to raise our children.  The only voice we need is the one that whispers to our soul, “They are made in the image and likeness of God, to whom else shall you turn?”   We turn to God for our answers.  Our prayers are an act of faith in the midst of doubt.  He will give us the wisdom to discern the truth.  He will give us the courage to transform the world.  He will give us the strength to take unprecedented action on behalf of our children.  He does have arms.  They are ours.