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June 28, 2018 - May 30, 2019
What gets translated in Scripture from the Greek metanoia as “repent” means “to go beyond the mind we have.
It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.
become. The Choir, at the end of its living, hopes to give cause to those folks from the Westboro Baptist Church . . . to protest at their funeral.
I eventually learned that shaking one’s fist at something doesn’t change it. Only love gets fists to open.
It seeks an investment rather than futile and endless incarceration.
writes, “To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.” We have to “lose” and “leave”—“unless the grain of wheat dies . . .” The kinship of God won’t come unless we shake things up—to “lose the earth you know”—to bark up the wrong tree, and to propose something new.
What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?
It is anchored in the truth that all demonizing is untruth.
” Oscar Romero wrote: “A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what gospel is that?”
A theme that runs throughout the entire biblical narrative is that God enters our midst to upset the status quo
The Magnificat, in Luke’s gospel—where the powerful are brought low and the hungry filled with good things—was seen as so subversive that the government of Guatemal...
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our own holy longing for the mutuality of kinship—a sure and certain sense that we belong to each other?
Once the following of Jesus becomes a strain and a dour, odious task, a “dangerous” job (“somebody’s got to do it”), it’s lost its way. Once discipleship morphs into the deadly serious and unsmilingly grim, would it not be safe to say that we’ve wandered far from the gospel’s delighting heart?
Yet Gospel Kinship always exposes the game, jostles the status quo in constant need of conversion, because the status quo is only interested in incessant judging, comparisons, measuring, scapegoating, and competition. And we, the Choir, are stuck in complacency.
Beyond cure and healing, Jesus was always hopeful about widening the circle of compassion and dismantling the barriers that exclude. He stood with the sinner, the leper, and the ritually impure to usher in some new remarkable inclusion, the very kinship of God.
God thinks of us even when we don’t think God’s there.
Like a caring parent, God receives our childlike painting of a tree—usually an unrecognizable mess—and delights in it.
Such things don’t shake your faith—they shape it.
Emmanuel: the name that means God with us is not moving the dials and turning the switches but tenderly holding us through it all.
” I believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.
Nothing is outside the realm of sanctity, for the world is infused with God’s presence.
for the world is steeped in God.
Grace indeed is everywhere.
Sainthood, and therefore holiness, has been presented in an inaccessible, antiseptic way. “Saintliness” has become a far cry from “sainthood.”
We settle for the look of holiness rather than the likes of it.
Slipping on my shoes, boiling water, toasting bread, buttering the sky, That should be enough contact With God in one day To make everyone “crazy.”
Being alert to the sacred in our midst is a choice that gets more meaningful as we practice it.
doing tiny, decent things possesses a great power. It is a world-altering holiness in which our truest selves long to participate.
“And awe came upon everyone.” It would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.
Awe compels us to try and understand what language her behavior is speaking. Judgment never gets past the behavior.
My wounds are my friends.
how can I help others to heal if I don’t welcome my own wounds?”
We are at our healthiest when we are most situated in awe, and at our least healthy when we engage in judgment.
Standing at the margins with the broken reminds us not of our own superiority but of our own brokenness. Awe is the great leveler. The embrace of our own suffering helps us to land on a spiritual intimacy with ourselves and others. For if we don’t welcome our own wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded.
“I don’t want to belong to my wounds.
Kinship asks us to move from blame to understanding.
It isn’t simply that being poor means having less money than the privileged; it’s that being poor means living in a continual state of acute crisis.
The “monsters at the margins” are constantly under threat and they breathe in shame with every breath. They understandably think that their only recourse is defense and survival. When we conspire with God to move toward this transcendent awe, we are left with only a gentle touch, a tender laugh, and “survivor brain” gets soothed as never before.
“Who was it?” From behind the sports section he said, “Jesus, in his least recognizable form.”
Richard Rohr was right: “We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” How do I open it—to live fully in recovery without self-medicating; to find my own light by walking through my own darkness; to love my kids more than I hate my enemies? Take a big ol’ bite, even if you don’t know exactly how to open it. Leap, and the net will appear.
And when you have enough, you have plenty.
“How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?”
“No . . . all he smells IS stink.”
Our children are loaned to us. They belong to God, and they will return to God. Don’t waste one day in not loving them.”
See something. Say something. They’ll believe you. The time for any of us to be returned to ourselves is now. The ground beneath our feet is the Kingdom of God, the Pure Land. It’s not around the corner, it is the corner. Kinship is not a reward bestowed at the end. It’s here, it’s now, it’s at hand and within our reach. And this moment is the only one available to us.
In Advent time, we are reminded over and over again: “Stay awake.” This is not a warning that death is coming but a reminder that life is happening. Now . . . is the day of salvation. We see as God sees: with amplitude, wideness, and mercy. The only moment left to us to participate in this larger love, this limitless, all-accepting love, is in the present moment.
“If you’re humble, you’ll never stumble.”
It is liberating to be brought back to one’s insignificance. We are allowed to abandon the pretense that we are more than we are and find comfort in knowing that we are enough. We hand over our self-dramatizing intensity and the need to get the seat of honor and find the thrill that is in our “place”—in the last row and worst seat. “Sell your cleverness,” Rumi writes, “and buy bewilderment.” Like Jesus, who emptied himself, this humility keeps us from clinging to power and our own cleverness. In our raw need, we find our true selves and discover the misery there is in ceaselessly needing
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“Do they mean to tell us,” he asked, “that the life of the man who killed a cop is worth more than the life he took?” Well, no. Not more, but the same. To think otherwise is to mire ourselves in the opposite of kinship, in a world where not everyone belongs.
having a “light grasp” on life prepares the way for cherishing what is right in front of us.
