Coram Deo

As far as I can learn Coram Deo means "In the face of God". B is using this for his sermon for the Baccalaureate Service. As he reviewed his sermon this phrase caught my imagination...and it has been bouncing around in my head for hours.

Can you imagine what our lives would look like if we lived with the knowledge that we are living in the face of God? ...every moment, every thought, every action is within his line of sight... For me that thought has a most sobering effect. I have been trying to adjust the attitudes of my heart so that my actions, my words and my thoughts are all those I would not be ashamed of should they be exposed to the rest of the world. Even as I type this I have the sense that this is a dangerous confession. I have now opened myself up to further scrutiny...but the truth is that I have seen increasingly that my life is on display here. And if it is on display then I have to take responsibility for the message that it communicates.

I am reminded of the words of Francis of Assisi:
"Preach the Gospel always, and when necessary use words"

It's been interesting living in a community like this. There is very little that stays in the sphere of a private life. I think I have shared before how quickly information gets passed through the school and even the market place. I remember a woman, who wanted to work for us, coming to our house. It was amazing how much she knew about me...our family life...our food preferences. We live our life within a fishbowl of sorts.

Even today I think about how my character is on display with every interaction. I was listening to a sermon by Rob Bell. He was talking about the fact that every moment of our lives we are speaking something to the world around us about what we believe... The opportunity to speak about faith with words may not come, but the opportunity to speak with a life is available with every moment that we still have breath.

It's not that we should pursue a spiritualized lifestyle that involves vocabulary that is unfamiliar to the world around us...or that we live by limits so that we do not go to places where people are...or that by irrelevance we alienate those around us. But that we live with the reality of the life of the Spirit at the forefront of our minds. A friend of ours, Dr. Rajoo, often reminds us that we should be 'winsome'; and we should be attractive as opposed to be repulsive.

I wonder how limited we are when we rely on words to communicate. And yet as a society we have become increasingly dependant on words...telephones, mobiles, blogs, emails, sms... More often than not our conversations, at least in part, do not happen face-to-face. We are left to imagine or guess the expression of the other. And they are left to guess about ours.

I suppose all of this connects in my brain with the thought that the only way to build relationship is to be living alongside each other. And that the ony way to communicate the love of God to the world around us is to be living in the world loving as we go.

That quote by Francis of Assisi challenges me to be mindful of the things I communicate without words. To live Coram Deo challenges me to be mindful of the things I let my mind dwell on without awareness. And together I am working on learning to sincerely love. Living here and learning to communicate over and through the language and cultural barriers has pushed me outside of myself in ways I could not have imagined. And as I go back to a country with a language that I can converse easily in, I want to maintain the awareness of commincating without words and living 'in the face of God'.