Wednesday, October 12, 2005
LORD, BE MY PASSION
LORD, BE MY PASSION
By Mary Anne P. Ledesma
Oct 9, 2005
I am grateful for this privilege of sharing with you my reflections on
the theme "Lord, Be My Passion". Such a privilege has found me awakened
in the early hours of the morning as well as gripped many times during
the day with the question: Lord, what exactly does it mean to ask You
to be our passion?
The answer I got was earth-shaking, to say the least. No matter the
wrestling with such an answer, the same response was quietly but
uncompromisingly given. And the answer was this: that to ask the Lord
to be our passion is to embrace pain and suffering without running away
for that is what it will entail. And by pain and suffering, the Lord
did not seem to refer to that which lasts a day or a week or a month,
but one of such severity that no pain-killer has yet been formulated to
numb the ache. It is the kind of pain so severe and intense that one
may be driven in utter desperation to beg for release to the point of
considering death as sweet. And, I was led to recognize that indeed,
this is the place where passion is born. When one finally stumbles on
the truth in the midst of one's inconsolable grief that every promise
of happiness and pleasure that life led us to believe in is at best,
ever so fleeting, at worst, a deceptive illusion, one finally discovers
the awesome and magnificent truth that the saints of old, the martyrs,
and the men and women of God in the Bible knew all along: that when one
is left with nothing and no one in this life but God, God is enough,
more than enough, to live with and for.
I must categorically qualify that I do not think that the pain and
suffering the Lord will permit us to have should we ask Him to be our
passion is of the masochistic variety. Certainly, that would contradict
the kind of God who has only love and yes, passion for us. Rather, it
is the pain and suffering that is necessary to extricate us from
passions we have apart from Him, perhaps some of which we are not even
aware of for you and I really know so little of our own hearts until we
ask the Lord to reveal them to us. And when that heart does become
revealed to us, what a chamber of horrors it turns out to be. In that
heart is the conglomeration of all that faith is not supposed to be
about: fear, lust, anger, jealousy, bitterness, insecurity, and a
manipulative and controlling spirit, among many others. If the Lord is
to be our passion, the heart will have to move towards facing and
purging all these demons. That in itself is so excruciating that it is
possible only astride a solid understanding of God's grace,
unconditional acceptance, love, and forgiveness. Yet such heart surgery
is one that may people choose to escape; after all, it is infinitely
easier to just continue immersing ourselves in work , or going through
the comforts of a well-ordered life, or talking about other people's
problems, imperfections and struggles, or simply pretending and denying
that these don't exist within us. When we ask the Lord to be our
passion, however, it is highly possible that He will do for us what we
are not able to do for ourselves, namely, release us from the bondage
of these passions that compete with Him. I would like to believe, and
do know from experience, that He prefers to do this gently. Yet I also
believe, and do know from experience, that gentleness too often does
not work for us because we resist too ferociously and cling to our
passions too vehemently. And quite often, the only way left is that of
allowing pain and suffering to visit our lives so that we are left with
no choice but to surrender.
And so, I submit before you, people of God, that it is probably a
terrible, terrible thing to ask the Lord to be our passion for I have
no doubt that He will answer this prayer in unimaginably startling
ways. Yet, I believe that it is even a more terrible thing to NOT ask
the Lord to be our passion for if the Lord abandoned us to our own
passions, and I praise Him that this is the last thing that He would
do, it would be better for us to not even have been born at all.
I have been in both these places. I have been to that place where I
sought and won the sweetness of human applause, that place where I
labored for and enjoyed the pleasures of human affection, that place
where I chose to merely relish the privileges of material comfort, that
place where everything that the perfect life is supposed to consist of
knew existence. I stand before you, a woman redeemed and delivered from
private hells so terrifying that a horror movie could be made of them,
to testify that nothing, but nothing, yes, nothing satisfies but Jesus.
And so with a trembling heart that acknowledges that pain is definitely
not among my favorite things yet nonetheless knows to whom it belongs
and who it is that it believes, I do dare ask: Lord, be my passion.
I sense that somewhere deep in your hearts, this prayer is yours as
well.
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