Brian’s Reflection: Friday, October 25, 2007


God can make you anything you want to be,
but you have to put everything in his hands.

When you sing gospel you have a feeling
there is a cure for what's wrong.

- Mahalia Jackson, Gospel singer,
born on this day, 1911


I think I had every record that Mahalia Jackson made when I was young. I remember one album cover (remember “albums”??) as if I still had it in front of me. A black & white photograph of her from the shoulders up, eyes characteristically closed - but they were never tight closed as I remember. They were closed in a way that looked as if they were going to flutter any minute, and open, and joy come pouring through! I have no recollection of how or why I “found” Mahalia. But obviously something of this African-American woman reached out to this Canadian kid. I think now that I saw authentic Belief in her face, and heard it in her beautiful, sometimes-dark-sometimes-soaring, moving voice. Long before I discovered Liturgy and Sacraments, she represented a deep relationship with a wonderful God. And that there’s a “cure for what’s wrong”.

“Putting everything in God’s hands” is not, I repeat not, an excuse for refusing to take responsibility for our own life - for failing to “work out our own salvation in fear and trembling”. Oh no. God gave us, at minimum, what the Tin Man and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion were in search of. They represent each of us in our Life’s journey. A Heart and a Brain and Courage - those are the basics we all need. “The Wizard of Oz” is a parable, of course. We are tempted to think that some mysterious being will give us those things. But we already have them - and that’s what the Wizard reveals. “God” won’t mind me comparing Her to the Wizard. God appears huge, scary, but when we look behind the curtain, there is a gentle soul saying “Look inside. What you seek is there.”

And Dorothy? Little Dorothy from Kansas? To me, she represents each of us saying bravely, “I am going to find that Wizard and find my way home, and get me and my friends what they need!”

“Putting everything in God’s hands” is the absolutely necessary Step One. It means saying, “To be human is to love. I will love, and let myself be loved, and believe in Love”.

And then we are off dancing down the Yellow Brick Road, determined to do what we must do to claim our Life, singing arm in arm as we go.

Brian+