Chocolate sign by sophisticat morguefile
By Gil George
This year as I engage with lent during my recovery from a challenging season of life, I have been led to give up abstraction and take on presence. Abstraction has a few definitions, and I am speaking primarily of allowing ourselves to be diverted to a general idea or quality rather than an actual person, object, or event which leads to the state of someone who is not paying attention to what is happening or being said. To illustrate what I am getting at I would like to tell you a parable.
While on a deep sea fishing trip, some men came upon a family that was clinging to a crudely constructed log raft. When the family saw the boat approaching they began to call for assistance and the fishing boat drew nearer. When the fishermen saw the raft they immediately began questioning the construction of the raft, discussing the knots that were used, the type of wood, and that the raft obviously needed a bit more buoyant wood. Eventually they drifted past the family and continued their fishing trip while discussing the principles of raft building. Later, when the mother of the family and the surviving child were picked up by the Coast Guard they asked through their translator why the other boat kept going past them.
This is the danger of abstraction that the church and I have to address in ourselves, that allowing ourselves to be distracted by issues puts others’ lives in real danger. I have to confront the desire for self-protection that pulls me away from engaging others’ lives. I have to ask myself who I might be passing by when my care could be the difference between being “lost at sea” and someone reaching a “safe and dry” shore. During this Lenten season, I am laying issues like the nature of biblical authority, whose interpretation of the will of God is valid, and what constitutes sin aside and am instead taking on being present to others no matter what. I would like to think that I will be successful at this intention, but old habits are hard to break, and I am in the boat, not the raft. I don’t have the urgency of being forsaken driving me. I am not in danger of death.
That is the truth that God is leading me in, that my calling is not to debate abstractions, but in the words of the old chorus I’ve Got a River of Life, to be a channel for the river of life that flows from God’s Spirit. The truest test of the strength of my faith then is not in whether I can win all the spiritual debates, but whether I have a river of life flowing out of me that makes the lame to walk and the blind to see, that opens prison doors and sets the captives free. Are we ready to step away from the abstract spiritual debates that bring more wounds and distract us from God’s mission and instead be present to those who are wounded and hurting no matter the cause or cost? I don’t know if I am, but with God’s help maybe we can let go of the deadly distraction of abstraction together.
This afternoon I am posting a special prayer that has come out of my reflections this week. I love the Palm Sunday parade that will take place in so many of our churches this Sunday, but I am also reminded that this parade is the beginning of Jesus walk towards the cross and his triumphal entry is actually a walk into the most radical and subversive week of his life. My thoughts constantly return to what I wrote in a post a couple of years ago:
Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem was obviously headed for a collision with the powerful Roman empire – a collision that would cost him his life and change history forever. Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem may have begun with crowds shouting Hosanna but it ends with Good Friday and shouts of “crucify him”. It doesn’t end with a gold crown but with a crown of thorns. (Read entire article)
This was the week that literally changed the world. I encourage you to take some time each day this coming week to sit quietly and contemplate the last journey of Jesus life. Immerse yourself in his pain, but look beyond that to the resurrection. Remind yourself that the focus is not death but resurrection. What comes to mind as you think about this? What subversive steps might Jesus ask you to take in order to follow him to the Cross and beyond? Are there ways that you need to resist the wealth and power of our culture in order to follow? Are there new ways that Jesus is calling you to be a change maker?
Quilt Square by Kathie Hempel
During this season, perhaps more than any other I think of those who have pilgrimaged before me and taught me about God. Those who have made sacrifices, and recorded their experiences, so I might know him.
As we celebrate the ultimate sacrifice made by God of his son Jesus, I am humbled by the others in my own life who walked the walk and set the best examples of love in action.
I remember my Aunt Mildred. My Dad’s sister was one of five girls in a family of 10. She lived to be 102 and five months. Her gift was one of tenacity and great humor. I remember visiting her in the nursing toward the end of her life and her telling me about how all the girls had to make a slip before their 12th birthday. I remember her demonstrating how she had hand-hemmed the slip and even though she held no material or needles you could tell how meticulously each stitch had been placed.
Oh, she could be ornery. Got in her head one day she was not sure she wanted to be around for her 100th birthday. “You’d better be here! I am driving 3 hours just to take your picture and you’d better show up. Besides I can just picture God looking down and saying: ‘that Mildred Vanstone. She is a wonderful Christian woman and she surely belongs here. But I have to think of the others. If only she would stop complaining.’”
A little while after I got home from that visit I got a call from my cousin, her daughter, Dorothy. “What did you say to Mom, Kathie?”
I was caught and had to admit, rather sheepishly, to the conversation. “Oh that explains it. I could not figure out what got into Mom. She was always complaining thinking staff was stealing her candy and bossing them around lately. When I went in today she was asking them how they felt, about their families and offering them her candy. I think she is trying to nice her way into heaven!”
Here the woman who I saw modeling the Christian family walk for all my life, showed that it is never too late to die to self. Her daughter and I had a wonderful laugh and obviously Aunt decided to stay around a few more years just to be sure. I never heard her complain again.
My friend of 33 years, Joan, was another one of my mentors in what a true understanding of God’s love can do. She had survived alcoholism and her physician husband, who had her committed so he might philander. Shock treatments had not dampened her spirit. When she finally mustered the courage to leave the abuse, she worked hard and long to forgive him. The settlement from the marriage, she had let her lawyer invest for her, she never saw. The lawyer stole it all. She forgave him too.
Joan showed me that forgiveness was so much more than words. It was action. It was something you did in person so the other could see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice. She said, “can you imagine that Jesus spent his last moments on earth forgiving those who had placed him on the cross and included the thief beside him, inviting him to join him in heaven? How little then is it for me to forgive those whose intent was to harm me.”
She was rewarded with the love of her five wonderful children and many more like myself, who called her friend. To the very end, she welcomed all who needed a moment of her time and her wisdom. Her generosity with her love and forgiveness was at a level I pray to achieve.
In the center of my dining room table cloth there is a single block of a very old quilt. It was one Aunt Mildred and her sisters sewed by hand when they were very young girls. It is all that is left after years of keeping generation after generation warm. The stitches are perfect.
These are but two Christ-centered models who join many who to me are “strangers in high places,” as Og Mandino refers to them in his book Mission Success, who have enriched my own walk with Christ over the years. These “strangers in high places’ include authors of the New Testament, the Desert Mothers and Fathers, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, C.S. Lewis, Oswald Chambers, Evelyn Underhill, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton and so many more.
Those who gather in this space continue through their writings to pass it on. May all these voices never be silenced and continue to live on through each of us.
As we draw to the end of this Lenten period, it is my prayer that we never forget those who showed us, by example, what Christ suffered to give us. May we do the same.
Photo by Kate Kennington Steer
Just hearing the question ‘what do you hunger for?’ is in itself enough to spark a
mini-cascade of doubt, and a landslide of panic and guilt in me. My mind immediately recalls Micah’s words about hungering for justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with my God. Am I?
At the back of my head I hear the excited murmur of a crowd on a hillside near a lake called Galilee in anticipation of the bread being handed round, and I become the small child offering my packed lunch – a paltry amount in the eyes of the world, the total sum of my riches in my own.
Would I?
It doesn’t take much to cast my mind back forty years and recall the first picture of a starving child I saw of my own age and the dawning understanding of the unequal distribution of the world’s resources and my own role in changing how I conspicuously consume a disproportionate amount.
Do I?
I fear I have failed, too often, to walk this Way of radical difference. I struggle to understand what difference I can make when so much of my life seems small, and is lived from bed. But the question ‘what do you hunger for?’ is a crucial one, for the answer cannot come from my place of guilt, doubt and panic, the place where my ego flies rampant in its destruction. The answer, if it is to be of any ‘use’, in other words if it is to be a true reply, must arise out of a heart voice not a head voice.
I am only haphazardly successful at hearing this whispered urge. But I am learning to recognize it as the voice that still speaks the same reply when all my desperate bewailed ‘I can’t’s run out of steam. I am learning to trust it as the heart voice that speaks the same prayer written over and again in my journal: ‘Lord, may I see.’ ‘Lord, give me eyes to see.’ ‘Lord, open my eyes’.
This prayer in all its variations, stills the guilt that leads me to question over and again where I give my tithing; it stills the despair that questions the use of signing an online protest questionnaire as a useless drop in the ocean of all that is unjust in this world; it stills the panic that fears I am a cop-out, that I have no service to make, and that the important radical healing work of the kingdom is happening elsewhere when all that has happened in my day is my struggle to pray for those I know and love.
This prayer speaks my heart voice, and my heart voice is my uniquely authentic voice given me by my Creator.
What do I hunger for? For the gift of vision, to see true the world around me, to see God in and of all created things, people, times and places. For I know that right seeing leads only to one thing in me: a brimming over need to communicate what I see in image and word. I want to shout God in colour and line and texture and form. I want to whisper God in poem and blog and essay. I want to proclaim God is in every detail, celebrate God who is in every moment. I hear my certain call as an artist, and sensing this vocation again quells all my doubts.
What do I hunger for? That, by Grace, I may be the means of bringing one person to see their loving God in the here and now. And that, by Grace, that person may in their turn, bring another face to face with their Lord. That by this chain of seeing, we may learn to recognize the coming Kingdom, and do our utmost to usher it in.
Today’s prayer is one I wrote a couple of years ago as I sat at mother’s bedside during her final illness. It has been revolving in my mind again over the last few days as Tom and I have said goodbye to yet another beloved member of our family – our golden retriever Bonnie.
In light of this it seemed very fitting to me that our theme for these last few days of Lent is DEATH and DARKNESS.
We like to turn away from death. Yet so often death in the form of a lost job or failed expectations is necessary for God’s newness to emerge. Sometimes when we look back we are aware that God has been prompting us in new directions for a while but the security and comfort of the old holds us bound. God in love and compassion forces us to die and let go.
Jesus says: If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it. (Matt 10:39)
Jesus did not cling to life. He needed to die for God’s new world to burst into being. And in the midst of his death the dreams and hopes of all his followers were put to death too.
But they too needed to die so that the new reality God wanted them to give birth to, a world of abundance, and wholeness and completeness could emerge.
The journey of faith is a cycle of birth, growth, fruit and death. And in the place of death we often find the seeds of new life – the longings and desires of our hearts that we have suppressed because change and radical newness threaten our comfortable status quo.
Like Jesus we endure death so that we can enter into life. We endure the loss and heartache that comes with losing people and things we love and look beyond to the new world of God. The center of the Easter story is resurrection not crucifixion. I think sometimes we forget that. We run away from death and yet in some ways we cling to it too.
Two questions emerge for me from this reflection. First: What does God want to put to death in your life that you are still clinging to?
For those who feel they are in a season of death: What are the seeds of newness God is planting within you during this season? What are your dreams and hopes from the past that might be birthed into something totally new at this time?
Skulls by Derek Olsen
By Derek Olsen
In the fourth chapter of his Rule, the chapter describing the spiritual tools for good works, St. Benedict calls his monks to “keep death daily before your eyes” (RB 4.47). In doing so—as with so much of his wise teaching—he was not expressing a new thought, but collecting and condensing spiritual wisdom passed down by broader humanity. This phrase comes through Cassian and the anonymous words of the fathers in a path that must also include the great Roman Stoic Seneca whose Letter 1 is a meditation on time and death.
Some of my favorite images of my favorite saints give this spiritual principle visual expression. Caravaggio’s St. Jerome sits at a desk on which a skull in prominently on display; in Zurbarán’s haunting “Saint Francis in his Tomb,” the cowled saint stares down at a skull cradled in his own hands. Many works of renaissance art include this motif to infuse a remembrance of mortality into the scene.
On my desk, I go one better than this. Seriously. They have one skull; I’ve got two! Unlike the skulls depicted in art, no one would suspect that either of mine are the real thing, though. Mementos of by-gone Halloweens, they both originally had candles in them, long since melted away. One is white ceramic; the other, black cut glass. They each have names. Each morning when I come down to my office to start work, I say hello to them, and think on a psalm passage.
In our spiritual tradition, the remembrance of death has multiple themes running through it, multiple spiritual purposes. Perhaps if I were a saint, one skull would be sufficient for me to grasp them all within a single object, but I’m not. Hence, I have two to remind me of two crucial principles.
The black cut glass skull is named Justin, a single name simultaneously indicating two pop stars. When I greet him, I think on Psalm 90:3-5: “You turn us back to the dust and say, ‘Go back, O child of earth.’ For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past and like a watch in the night. You sweep us away like a dream; we fade away suddenly like the grass.” To me, Justin represents the fleeting, fickle, illusory desires that we chase in this world: fame, fortune, beauty, power. These are the lusts of this life. At the end of the day, they are fundamentally meaningless. A prayer book collect asks for grace to love things heavenly, the grace that “while we are placed among things that are passing away, to cleave to those that shall abide.” Because the grand scheme of things is great and grand, and we—no matter who are—are quite infinitesimally small in the midst of it all.
However, if taken too far this theme can drive us into a Gnosticism that denies the goodness of our created world, and an overly heaven-focused gaze that misses the opportunity to embrace things that abide even within our incarnate life: love, mercy, justice. So, after I greet Justin, I turn to the other.
The white ceramic skull is named Thomas, and is specifically named for Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominic theologian and author. As I say hello to Thomas, I think on Psalm 90:12: “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” Thomas represents the potential for goodness, for light, for flourishing that we possess if we have the discipline to structure our existence meaningfully. Our time may be short when viewed from God’s perspective, and we have no idea how much of it we have been allotted. But in that time, we have opportunities for love and joy, and—furthermore—to share that love and joy with those around us, all those whom our lives might touch. We have a duty to embrace our God-given gifts to continually point towards the reconciliation of all created things back to God as accomplished in Jesus Christ.
Although a learned academician and disputer, Thomas Aquinas wrote his principal work, his great Summa Theologica, as an introductory textbook, an primer for beginners. I think of all the things he could have written—could have focused his brilliant mind upon—and that likely might have been a lot more fun to write. And yet, what wisdom, what humility, there was in choosing a basic textbook as the pinnacle of his work.
Lent reminds us of our common mortality. That we die; that we will die. Meditation on mortality is not terribly in vogue these days. And yet, I find my simple ritual a helpful daily reminder: the life we’ve been granted is brief in the grand scheme of things—so make it matter. Let us number our days, however many or few they may be, that we might apply our hearts to wisdom, to peace, to love.
“Joy Is Measurable” by Funkybug. Used with permission
By Esther Hizsa
“I’ve told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature. This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you.” John 15:11 (The Message)
The seven-year-old downed his third tiny glass of grape juice and licked the last drop from the bottom, oblivious of the perfect purple ring around his lips. Perhaps it was his eager grin as he went for the fourth glass that prompted three women to spring into action. The older woman, horrified with what the boy was doing, let out a mild shriek and reached out to stop him as his mother stepped between innocence and offence. She knelt down and spoke kindly to her son. Meanwhile, the third woman, who saw the incident unfold, turned her attention to her elder and moved into her line of sight.
“Millie,” she said, smiling. “It’s okay. It’s o-kay. I know how you feel. The communion elements are sacred, but to him, they are just little glasses of grape juice.”
Within minutes Millie was calm again, the mother relieved, the boy unaware a crime had been committed, and my friend, who interceded, was satisfied.
When she told me what happened, I could easily imagine it all taking place–especially since the boy was my grandson, Hadrian, and his mother, my daughter, Heidi.
As I thought about the incident, I saw how each player reflected God’s character. I loved my grandson’s delight in finding wonderful gifts laid out for him. Like a mother hen with her chicks, my daughter protected her son from wrath and, like Jesus, she got down on his level to enlarge his understanding. The older woman was passionate to preserve the sacredness of the Lord’s Supper, which had been given at great cost. Meanwhile, the peacemaker saw the pure intentions in all three hearts and, like the Spirit, brought reconciliation to her community.
At first, what stood out for me in this story was the way Heidi was with Hadrian. I love how God comes between me and the critical voices and protects my child-like desire to savor every drop of life.
But later, I saw myself in Millie. It’s humbling to think that God has had to intervene between me and the recipients of my criticism. Yet, I also see God smiling at me the way my friend smiled at Millie, inviting me to be gentle with myself.
As you envision this story with God, I wonder what you see.
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