Revision of Scripture Reflections - Feast of All Saints 2015 from Mon, 11/09/2015 - 11:24am

Scripture Quote

Beloved: See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like God, for we shall see God as God is. All those who have this hope make themselves pure, as God is pure.

-- 1 John 3:1-3

Reflection

A rabbi once said to his teacher, "Show me one general way to the service of God."  The zaddik replied: "It is impossible to tell you what way you should take.  For one way to serve God is thorough learning, another through prayer, another through fasting, and still another through eating.  Carefully observe what way your heart draws you to, and then choose this way with all your strength."

Every person born into this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.  If it were not so, this person would not have been born.  Our foremost task is the actualization of our unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetiion of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved. 

We are essentially unlike one another, and therefore must not aim to make ourselves alike.  We all have access to God, but each has a different access.  Our great chance lies precisely in our unlikeness, in the unlikeness of our qualities and inclinations.  God's all-inclusiveness manifests itself in the infinite multiplicity of the ways that lead to holiness, each of which is open to each person.  

But what it is that can be done by just this person and no other can be revealed only to this person and to none other.  Thus, the way by which you can reach God is revealed only to you, only through your knowledge of your own being, the knowledge of your essential quality and inclination.  "Everyone has in them something precious that is in no one else."  This precious something in a person is revealed only to you as a person when you perceive your strongest feelings, your central wish, that in you which stirs your inmost being.

Holy, holy, holy is our God.  And you, like the saints before you, were created to be holy.

                                                                      -- Martin Buber

In the choices we make, we are shaping our lives into the individual identities we wil be for all eternity.  May we allow the love of God to shape us into the kind of individuals who can take their place among the communion of saints.  May it be so.