Ronnie McBrayer Unknown

In this talk - part 9 of 10 in the series - Ronnie asks the listener to open his or her heart to the ”Real” - with a capital R. He says, ”I am of the persuasion that you can at once be a person who believes in contemporary science; and be a person of deep faith in God; that you can be analytical and empirical while remaining mystical and spiritual; that you can appreciate and value Newton, Einstein, Sagan, Hawking, and Darwin - and still be a committed follower of Jesus. I am making a case - or at least offering an invitation - that you accept what is Real as extending to the spiritual world - that it not be contained strictly within the material world. And I make that invitation to both the religious and the agnostic.”

As Part 8 in this walk down the Emmaus Road continues, Ronnie observes how an honest, humble telling of our own faith experience can invite Christ to join the conversation: ”These disciples find their friends. They begin to share their story with fear and trembling -  and Jesus arrives. It’s as if their speaking of him, invites him to join them...Meister Eckhart, a radical Catholic mystic from the Middle Ages, talked about how we can birth God into this world. He said, ’We are all called to be the mother of God. The Christ is always wishing to be born into the world! What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to the Son in my time and place?’ Thus, when you share your Christ experience, you are creating an incubating environment where Christ comes into that conversation.”

”How do you tell someone, how do you share with someone, your own personal experience with God? Sometimes this will be sharing with someone who is seeking - seeking answers - seeking God. It might be sharing with someone who is on the brink of losing faith, or he or she feels that ’just believing’ won’t work for them. And maybe you’ve had those encounters with someone who is ambivalent, even hostile to faith; and sometimes you might share with a fellow Christian, a fellow traveler, but your faith experience and his or her faith experience are so different, that you are like strangers to each other. How do conversations like these work themselves out?”

In Episode 7 of this series on the Emmaus Road, Ronnie takes on these questions and more, encouraging us to let God do God’s work within us, and step back far enough to let God do God’s work in others.

In Part 6 of ”The Path Is Made By Walking, Ronnie quotes Janet Hagberg, words that serve as proper commentary to the Emmaus Road experience of Luke 24: “Now we surrender to God’s will, but with our eyes wide open…for we have been changed. We sense a looser grip on ourselves and all we have believed, because our confidence is in God - not what we think about God. Our primary motivation in life becomes the desire to love and to live honestly. We acquire an inner peace and calmness because we grow into the full awareness that God truly loves us. We learn how to go about our lives with patience and freshness, a vitality that can only come from God. There is no striving, just evolving. The healing experience is so personal and so profound, we may find it difficult to express.”

How do we get this? Persistence. Muddling through. Surrender. Being melted down and re-formed. Anger. Tears. Shaking your fist or the middle finger at heaven. Kicking and screaming on the floor. Trying out atheism for a while. Shunning anything religious, spiritual, prayerful, or anything like you knew in the past. But if you are a person with a bent toward faith - if you are a person who discovers that the eternity planted in your heart cannot be ignored - you will begin to poke around in the ashes for the bones. You will begin to put the pieces back together, and maybe - just maybe - you will have an Emmaus experience: “Suddenly, their eyes were opened, and they recognized him…They said to each other, ’Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road.”

As this journey down the Emmaus Road continues, Ronnie speaks about the times when faith seems lost: ”Before you change, you will be confused. It’s natural. It’s to be expected. Once you are on the road, you will encounter roadblocks - intense seasons of questioning; dark nights of the soul; arrows shot toward heaven that never seem to hit their target. Janet Hagberg rightfully calls it, ’The Wall.’ You crash up against it and things go to pieces.

”It feels like you are losing your faith and possibly losing your mind...like everything you were ever told about God or believed about God is wrong... all your old prayers and Bible verses and routines that used to do the trick have lost their power. Your unassailable, bullet-proof solutions fail, and no amount of praying harder, believing more, reading your Bible, or rededication will remedy you. In the words of William Butler Yates: ’Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; anarchy is loosed upon the world.’”

With episode four of his current series, ”The Path Is Made By Walking,” Ronnie observes that Jesus challenged his fellow travelers on the Emmaus Road to do something almost impossible: To throw out what they had believed previously, and look at life, faith, and reality with a completely different point of view. He was invited them to change their minds - something so few of us are willing to do. 

(For the opening reference, the rabbit/duck image, see: https://www.ualberta.ca/science/news/2018/march/optical-illusion-gives-insight-into-how-we-perceive-the-world.html )