Patterns That Are True

March 10

Readings – DT 4:1, 5-9; MT 5:17-19

Today we hear a few different messages.

In Deuteronomy, Moses is addressing the people and encourages them not to forget what God’s done for them and brought them through.  “Teach this to your children,” he says.

Maybe that’s something to be mindful of today:  Remember what God’s done for you or seen you through.  Journal about it or talk to someone about it.  This is all part of the practice of gratitude.

Then in the gospel, Jesus says that he didn’t come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.  I know that my postmodern, Western ears have such a hard time when I hear the word “law” and I have needed other ways to think about it.  I get stuck in pretty rigid thinking about what the law is and start to think about God as a curmudgeonly old judge.

Richard Rohr offers an idea of law as “patterns that are always true.”  Others like Detroit activist adrienne maree brown speak about the fractal patterns that we see reflected in the world all around us.

With these ideas, we might think of law as being what original peoples knew to be true about the world and about their relationship to the earth and each other.  We might think about the mutuality and radical interdependence of all creatures on each other.  We might think of our individual lives being reflections of a much larger Life that moves through us.

When I think about “law” this way, of course Jesus isn’t going to come to abolish it.  Instead, he offers us a view of what it can look like in an embodied way.  He becomes the pattern so that we, too, might see it, taste it, feel it and witness it in action.

Most of us “know” these patterns down deep, but over time have forgotten them because our culture has moved so far away from them over the generations.  We see that even in Jesus’ time, people had already drifted far from the patterns that hold us all together.

Quite often in the gospel, we hear that Jesus went to the “wilderness” – for time alone, for prayer, and, I would submit, for instruction in the patterns that are true.  That’s where we, too, must go.  If you are able to, spend some time outdoors today.  Reflect on “patterns” that are true in the natural world and in your life.  Imagine what a social order built on these patterns would look like.