Picking Blackberries with a Deer

I would like to share with all of you a children’s story I wrote that is dear to my heart.  It has been a labor of love over the years.  My hope is to have this book published, therefore I am interested in your comments in order to improve it; grammar and typos are likely there.  For those Oblate brothers who have experience in getting articles or books published, please give me any helpful feedback you have.

You will find a link to the book after the introduction below.

Thanks and Blessing,

Fr. Ron Rissling, OMI

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Introduction

I have long been intrigued by a little book in the Old Testament called, The Song of Songs. This short little book speaks of an intimate relationship with God that surely must have belonged only to the greatest Saints. Or so one would think at a first glance! Many years ago, after only one year of priesthood, I discovered Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. So the saying goes!  It has always had the ability of rolling of one’s lips quite easily as a popular saying. But what does it really mean? Actually the truth is that I discovered Him staring at me from the Monstrance on the Altar at Benediction when I was a child in church with my family. Jesus has never stopped staring at me. He has always been a personal God. He was chasing me like “the Hound of Heaven” even then, drawing me into a personal loving relationship! When I look at the sun shining its rays down on the earth, I am forcibly and lovingly reminded of the host in the Monstrance. It reminds me of a song “I’ll be Watching You”!

But this is not a God who watches us trying to catch us doing something wrong! That would mean God is a God of wrath and vengeance. When the disciples asked Jesus who God was, He told them that they should look at the good works he did of healing the sick and the poor and raising the dead. He went on to say God the Father and He were one. God is the One who climbs on a cross and dies for us. This is not a God of Wrath. If God were a God of wrath, God would be imperfect and no longer God! It is we, God’s humanity who love wrath and vengeance! God’s look is “The Look of Love”!

According to the Song of Songs, God is compared to a stag chasing a doe through the forest! As one author says, in his book on daily meditations, “God is on the make for us!”  Do we dare talk about God in such erotic language?  Can we afford not to?  Is this perhaps the solution to moving from a religious life that is so caught up with “obeying all the laws, crossing every “t” and dotting every” i ”  trying to make sure one gets to heaven after one dies to a truer and deeper spiritual life with a loving relationship with the Living God?”  Do we still believe that heaven has to be earned or can we dare to maybe believe that it is a gift? Many spiritual authors speak of the necessity of moving from being religious to the spirituality of a love relationship/friendship with God!

The New Testament speaks of everything as being a gift, there is nothing we have received that is not grace.  Furthermore, St. Paul tells us that all our sins have been paid for by Jesus’ death on the Cross. The rock opera God-spell, quoted scripture for a generation of youth when I was a young priest, “All good things, come from heaven above”! (James 1,17 ).  St. Catherine Sienna had it nailed down cold when she says in her autobiography that God was totally besotted and preoccupied with her! Saint Catherine wasn’t the only one of the saints who speaks of falling in love with God! St. Theresa the Little Flower writes of how she sat in front of Jesus in the Tabernacle one day in her usual time of prayer. Mulling over her thoughts about how all her plans had fallen apart for some project she looked up and said out loud, “If that’s how You treat Your friends, no wonder you have so few!” You can only get away with saying something like that when there is deep and love and trust in a relationship! Can we imagine that for ourselves? Can we dare believe that God is besotted with us? Fr. Edward Farrell wrote a book called, “The Father Is Very Fond of Me”! Lately, after lower back surgery when I was forced to slow down, I re-read this book and began to re-experience Abba the Fathers concern and love. I heartily recommend a reading of this great classic!

More recently I have been reading the letters of St. Eugene De Mazenod, the Founder of our Order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. He proudly speaks of having an “intimate relationship” with Jesus! In his moment of conversion at the unveiling of the Cross on Good Friday, he saw Jesus reaching out to him in love, accepting him as he was with all his sins and healing him. As the years passed, his memories of his past life continued to be healed by this Image of Jesus loving him. He speaks of God looking at us with a mirror and it is our faces that are reflected in God’s mirror and God takes delight in looking at us! Going against the clerical opinion at the time, Eugene dared to maintain that we should not waste the precious time we have here on earth preaching about an angry punishing God and the fires of hell when we could be talking about how much God loves us! How many people have gone to confession repeating the same sins over and over again for years without being able to believe in God’s forgiveness and love for them?

I believe that a positive spirituality is more effective in healing poor self images and a lack of self forgiveness than many sessions of therapy can even come close to! As I move into my seventies, working with the elderly in a care home, I find myself growing into a relationship with God that is beyond fear. I find that there is too much talk of asking God for “mercy” as if we were afraid of God punishing us! Perhaps the question should be asked, “Why would the beloved or the Lover punish one another?” If God is a God of love as Jesus has taught us, then we must be consistent in our prayers! Why can’t we say, “Lord, send me Your healing love, help me to accept and trust in Your healing love. Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world, send us Your healing love!”?  Perhaps it was the movie “The Shack” that affirmed what I had always believed and maintained in my prayer life, that God was not someone to be feared. For almost forty four years of priesthood, I have preached that God is only concerned about loving us and has better things to do that watching  us to catch us sinning!

God walks with us as in the poem “Footprints” and then the relationship winds up in celebratory joy as in the sequel to the poem, when footprints scattered all over the beach  are the result, says Jesus, of us having danced together! After all, St. Paul tells us, in our relating to God here is to be no fear! In a love relationship, that is a true loving, trusting relationship, there should be no fear of the other person. That would be an abuse of a relationship; and it happens in our world all too often but not so with God!

No, in our relationship with God, our Abba (translated from the Hebrew as Daddy) Father and Jesus, we find their Spirit relationship that is offered to us on the basis of mutual intimate love. If we are to believe that God has created each of us uniquely and out of love, then this must be true. We can move from being religious to the deeper spiritual union of God as lovers! This means we have to move beyond gender and this worlds stereotyped ideas of sexuality. If we do, we find a God who has nothing to do all day long but be infatuated and in love with us. God chooses never to stop thinking about us! Watching us, rescuing us, healing us; wrapping us up in his/her arms until our heartbeats become one! What a way of healing a poor self image!

The whole purpose of the Book of Job working through his losses and sufferings is to discover a God who personally cares for him and loves him! After all, hasn’t the Church for years, compared the Sacrament of Marriage to the union between God and His church; daring to call the Church, who are God’s people, the Bride?  As priests we have taught this in the marriage preparation of couples. Let us not forget that Jesus speaks in the Gospels of himself as the Bridegroom while inviting us to the wedding feast-banquet in heaven!

Can you dare to fall in love with God? Could it possibly enhance your marriage, priestly life? Perhaps you are single and looking for a deeper meaning in life?  Can God’s love for us be intoxicating and something that settles deep inside of us? For this to happen, we need to become as little children; innocent, open and trusting. “Lord Jesus, come and sit down inside of me” is a prayer we can use for it is based on scriptures promise of God the Father and Jesus coming to live in us with their Spirit of healing love!

I give you the present of my story of picking blackberries and being kissed by a deer which of course, is the symbol of God from The Song of Songs, approaching, embracing and loving us!  No matter who we are, or whatever our personal history may be, I deeply believe that God wants to kiss each and every one of us into New Life!  May the innocence of childhood keep you open to God when this happens and may you not run away in fear!

CLICK HERE FOR STORY – Picking Blackberries with a Deer

By Ronald Rissling, OMI