How strange it must have seemed for the world to go on turning after the death of God the Son.
The Holy One, who brought life and life abundant, now crushed by death, buried and sealed away under the earth.
They wrapped his body in linen, anointed with aloe and myrrh, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, men who had wondered at him from afar.
They sat at his tomb, the women who loved him, supported his ministry with the work of their hands, women who had been called by name and given a voice by him.
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Tag: Christianity
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They didn’t know Sunday was coming.
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Standing with our Catholic brothers and sisters
I have been thinking the past few days about the grand jury report from the Attorney General’s Office in Pennsylvania about the abuse of more than 1,000 children by Catholic priests.
A handful of the accused men moved to Florida, and died or live on not far from my own home.
I am not Catholic, but I think those of us who call ourselves Christian should be grieved by this report – as human beings, of course, but especially as adherents to the way of Christ, who displayed his divinity by laying down all his power.
The video of a few victims who testified to the grand jury is heartbreaking. A woman states she can’t hear the word “God” thinking of the man who abused her. The report states other victims wound up “addicted, or impaired, or dead before their time.”
One recalls the savior’s words, “It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble. ”
It might be easy, for those of us who aren’t Catholic, to distance ourselves.
Many of my fellow Protestants already speak as if Catholics were of a different faith altogether, or at least a very twisted version. They preface things they disapprove of by noting, “He or she is Catholic,” whether or not the specific complaint has anything to do with Catholicism as a whole.
This saddens me, as my own faith has been so greatly enriched by experience with denominations that don’t look like the one I was raised in.
Exposure to just one denomination is perhaps like viewing a single-colored thread, when you could take a step back to view the big, glorious tapestry that is the Christian church in all her many colors.
While I don’t agree with all the tenets of Catholicism, they are my brothers and sisters, and I believe there’s much to be learned from their saints and thinkers.
The Prayer of St. Francis is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful prayers out there:
Lord make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
And where there is sadness, joy.O divine master, grant that I may
not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand.
To be loved as to love,
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.More recently, I have been moved and inspired by Pope Francis washing the feet of refugees and denouncing the death penalty. The faith of Dutch Catholic Henri Nouwen has been a comfort to me, insisting, “Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.”
And of course, it can’t be understated, that the Catholic church was the only Christian church before we splintered in so many directions.
So the point of all this is to say, simply, to my fellow Protestants, let us grieve with our Catholic brothers and sisters, who surely feel betrayed by the leaders who used their power for harm.
And let us commit to hearing and seeing victims of abuse in our own places of worship. We know this is not solely a Catholic problem.
Does your church have a policy outlining their procedures on abuse allegations? If you don’t know, ask.
We can only fix problems we’re aware of. We can only aid in healing when we recognize the wounds.
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Divine Melancholy & Divine Joy
Melancholy has been my friend, since childhood. I am drawn to grey seascapes and misty mornings. Sad endings to books and movies often resonate more than happy ones.
An exchange from one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who (yes, I am that nerdy) sums up my natural feelings quite well when Sally Sparrow says:
I love old things. They make me feel sad.
Kathy: What’s good about sad?
Sally: It’s happy for deep people.I would argue, even, that there is a Divine Melancholy that comes from seeing the deep truth of our world. Our wide, great earth is irreparably broken. We have been irreconcilably cut off from our Creator, the source of all love.
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2017: Devotion
What I love about winter in the north is the way the backdrop of snow and cold highlights every hidden beauty. Visiting my parents’ house, I took a walk in the woods I grew up playing in and stopped at everything that caught my eye – berries, bright red like the world’s own Christmas ornaments, thorn bushes with green and purple branches branches bound together, rich brown stripes on mushrooms growing like shelves on fallen trees. Even in the cold, dead winter, there is enough small grace to take the breath away.
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Antidote to wind-chasing
Adulthood is a rhythm I’m trying to work out, and there are days it feels like a song hummed on some spring morning and other days it grinds inside my ears. With my first grown-up job, I am reminded how much of life is repetitious—I drink my coffee, go to work, come home, eat dinner, pack a lunch for tomorrow, go to sleep and restart again. Grocery shopping and laundry replay week after week.
Then in the news I hear of all the ways and places the world has split open to bleed. Our black brothers killed, attacks on police, Baghdad bombed, crowds mowed down by a truck in Nice. Bloody summer once again.
What can I do? My daily routine is shabby at best.
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Incarnate Words
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post pondering how God speaks. It’s still a topic I find endlessly fascinating, and fairly recently, I read Frederick Buechner’s memoir The Sacred Journey, where he says,
“If God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks. Someone we love dies, say. Some unforeseen act of kindness or cruelty touches the heart or makes the blood run cold. We fail a friend, or a friend fails us, and we are appalled at the capacity we all of us have for estranging the very people in our lives we need the most. Or maybe nothing extraordinary happens at all—just one day following another, helter-skelter, in the manner of days. We sleep and dream. We wake. We work. We remember and forget. We have fun and are depressed. And into the thick of it, or out of the thick of it, at moments of even the most humdrum of our days, God speaks.”
This sounds quite nice, and is certainly something I would like to believe—that God speaks and is present in all things, but I would be the first to admit that in my own life, I rarely sense it. What does it really mean to say that God speaks?
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in praise of liturgy
Earlier this year, I felt as if my heart and head both broke open, and everything of myself fell out. People told me I should trust in God, cry out to God. But I didn’t have much to say to Him. There was nothing I wanted. I had no plans or dreams to seek wisdom about. And while I knew I had things to be grateful for, there was nothing I particularly felt like giving thanks for.
Then I discovered liturgical prayer. In his book Water To Wine, Brian Zahnd lays out the liturgy he prays each morning, and it’s been extraordinarily helpful to me. Zahnd says this about prayer:
“When it comes to spiritual formation, we are what we pray. Without wise input that comes from outside ourselves, we will never change. We will just keep praying what we already are. A selfish person prays selfish prayers. An angry person prays angry prayers. A greedy person prays greedy prayers. A manipulative person prays manipulative prayers. Nothing changes.”
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Empty God, in the desert
Did you know, Lord, that you could feel this – emptied, depleted in the wilderness?
Does the voice of the tempter sound just like your own, insisting, if you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. Do you stretch a hand toward them, trembling, wondering if you can fill yourself and end this hollow torture?
Do you remember that other voice, booming as you rose from the glistening Jordan, skin dripping wet, when the Spirit descended dove-like upon you, and your Father claimed you as his own?
Then that same Spirit drove you into the desert; you wandered forty days and nights. Did you know this world you gave life to could blister your feet and turn a blind eye, deaf to all your needs? Can you hear your Father in these dry stones, or do you perceive only silent, cloudless sky?
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God Revealed
Lightning split the sky open in a long streak of white, and thunder echoed like the whole earth cracked within its depths. My brother and I stood outside to watch as rain pattered against our hoods and soaked through our shoes.
At the end of the storm, a cloud drifted across the shining street and above the house, moving with speed and glowing orange and white and silver tones. It looked like it was painted with curved brush strokes. It looked so close we could touch it, but even if we could ever reach so high, we would touch only particles of water. We could never grab hold.
I thought of the story in Exodus of God going before Israel as a pillar of cloud in the wilderness. Is this how he seemed to them, so close but so out of reach? So breathtaking, yet completely unknown?
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Longing, belonging
I was sitting on the deck at my parents’ house in late September or early October, crying, and the only thing that seemed to help was reading John O’Donohue like a prayer. I skipped around in his book of blessings, reading out loud, hoping to bless myself.
Some words I’ve come back to over the months since then are these, the first stanza of For An Exile:
When you dream, it is always home.
You are there among your own,
The rhythm of their voices rising like song
Your blood would sing through any dark.