"...get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel?" Ezekiel 18:31b
Ezekiel makes it sound as if our getting new hearts and new spirits is a matter of life and death. If this prophet is right, then how do we set about changing our hearts and spirits in so vitally an important way? We don’t. Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has said we cannot “convert ourselves; we get converted. We have to settle in the world in such a way that circumstances, reality, can get at us."
Rohr firmly believes that the deepest changes we experience in our hearts and spirits come about not because of resolutions to which we “stick” or practices to which we adhere. New hearts and new spirits are not the fruit of human discipline and determination but of God’s grace. We do not make new hearts and new spirits for ourselves - we are given them.
Mary of Nazareth did not go to a life coach and set as a goal becoming the mother of the Messiah. That life-changing event happened to her, and she went with it. Gradually her heart and spirit were reshaped, and all along the way, she learned the meaning of what was happening to her.
The thing about God’s grace is that we either go with the flow of it or resist it. The gifts of grace God sends us are, well, gifts, that come our way.
Like all gifts we receive, initially we may love or dislike them or prefer we had been given something else. We might wish we had been given a gift certificate or a check so we could have gotten something we would choose. God seems to prefer selecting our gifts - giving us what we most need.
God sends them daily, but Rohr cautions us that we will not notice or receive them if we prefer to keep circumstances, reality, at bay. He says the gifts are actually within our reality. We can exert great effort to keep away from situations or people we prefer to avoid because they are too irritating, challenging, or scary. We can try to keep daily life safe, predictable, comfortable. However, sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, we just cannot keep other people or circumstances under our control. God may seem like an insistent person who puts his foot in the door, preventing our closing it.
The poet Francis Thompson compared God to a persistent hound dog that has our scent and keeps seeking us. Grace happens when we just cannot manage to fend it off. It forces its way in, in spite of our best-laid plans. Grace is like a visit by a thief, it comes at a time we least expect, when we are unprepared and lulled into a kind of slumber. Grace, though it may seem to bring upset and even loss is not primarily a deprivation but an enrichment - for the world - and us at the deepest level. One translation of Ezekiel says “...get for yourselves a new heart and a new way of thinking.” This Lent our new hearts and new ways of thinking might best be “gotten” not by our arranging for them but by our receiving who and what God puts in our circumstances.
The Rev. Janice Schuyler
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