Hansel and Gretel

I do believe God talks to me, but no, I do not hear audible voices. Becoming conscious that he is addressing a “word” to me is more akin to feeling that my attention is being drawn to several disparate things that converge to illuminate and reveal something that I could not see until then. God seems to weave together elements from my memory, my experience, my knowledge, my feelings to present a tapestry that I recognize as expressing his thought, as his “voice” in my life.

When Jesus spoke to his disciples, he did the same thing. He used concrete everyday realities, “Look at the birds. The lilies, the mustard tree.” He used stories – parables - about ordinary people: sons and fathers, rich men and poor men, unjust judges, hard-hearted unforgiving men, poor widows. He used scriptures, what we now call the Old Testament. He used people’s experience of life: crumbling towers killing many, threatening storms on lakes, coins stamped with the face of Caesar.

The other day, when I said that God answered my question, “Lord, how were you present and acting in all this aggravation today?” that is exactly what I meant. He “spoke” to me using the very fabric of my life.

One memory that surfaced while I was “waiting” for God to answer my question, was that of a Grimm’s fairytale: Hansel and Gretel. I had to look it up to recall all the details of the story, but what I initially remembered was that Hansel had used white pebbles to retrace his way home after being left to die in the forest with his sister Gretel (that this was ever considered a children’s bedtime story is amazing!) In addition to the white pebbles, God also drew my attention to scripture passages, “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.” He also gave me a sense of all the times he had shown me mercy and forgiven me my wrongdoings.

Just as the pebbles were, for Hansel and Gretel, the means of finding their way back home, the aggravations in my life, are the pebbles that remind me to be “merciful as my heavenly Father is merciful” - to ground my responses to the hurtful actions of others in the mercy that God constantly shows me so that I can, in turn, forgive and pray for them and ask God to bless them. I cannot truly forgive others unless I return "home", to the very source of forgiveness: God's merciful love for me.