Beyond Our Vision

The incompleteness of our faith is quite astonishing.  Don’t misunderstand me.  Not an incompleteness in the faith, but an incompleteness insofar as we are part of a complete faith.

I am convinced, personally, intellectually, academically, historically, experientially, that Jesus Christ as presented in the Gospels of the New Testament; as experienced by millions the world over; as known and loved; as thought upon, as worshipped….is the point of life itself.  The purpose of existence, mine and yours, is only and truly and fully found in this Jesus Christ.

That means we do not live for ourselves in the here and now, but for eternity, standing on the shoulders of the giants of the past, to live well in the present, that we may see and believe and live the glorious future of eternity that Christ Jesus has promised.

I have found the following prayer by Catholic Bishop Ken Untener such a thrilling description and encounter with the Divine-ness of God in a temporal world.  A world saturated with plastic faith and sound-bites and short-termism and quick-buck economics and cliche spirituality and hackneyed vision statements churchmanship and other Disney spiritualities.

Let us pray….

“It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection.

No pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.”

 

Known as the ‘Oscar Romero’ Prayer but ironically never spoken by him.  They were offered by  Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw, as a prayer in 1979  for departed Catholic Priests.  Oscar Romero was a priest and bishop in El Salvador. His love for his people who were suffering violence and oppression led him to take their side and to denounce their oppressors. And so he was killed, whilst saying Mass, on 24th March 1980.