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December 10 - December 13, 2023
I woke up from the anesthesia. God still had work for me to do. — So was this experience all faith in Jesus and assurance of God’s love for me? No. The next two weeks were as dark as any I have known.
know I live and die by the assurance that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, and in that Word’s hour of need what pain must God have felt!
But who wants a comprehensible God in the aftermath of an incomprehensible accident?
To think about death is an act of faith, a courage that the unknown is not empty, a belief that God is Love, and Love does not create and then abandon or annihilate. I can’t prove it. Sometimes I don’t even believe it. And then hope, the deep, innate faith, surfaces.
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
We are not to retreat from life, pinning our hopes on “elsewhere,” but to know that we will come to that final destination best by living fully here and now, be it through joy, or pain, or a mix of both.
Love is not so much what you feel as what you do, as I have learned in my own life, and often to my rue. When I am enabled to act with love, God will take care of my feelings.
We are homesick not so much for something that was, and was lost, as for something that will be, and is to be found.
A little child. Jesus said that unless we have the hearts of children we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Children love story and understand that story is truth.
One of the results of the Fall is that we have forgotten who we are, and so have forgotten how to be. Learning to be hurts. We can sing songs of happiness without knowing pain. But we can sing the joy of our creation and honor our Creator only from within the fire.
Love does not triumph easily or without pain, but story gives us the courage to endure the pain.
This is because Scripture is true. Truth is deeper and wider and much more demanding than many people would like, but Jesus promised that it would set us free.
Sometimes we are in situations where there is no right choice, and we have to make the choice which we prayerfully believe to be the least wrong, never forgetting that it is wrong.
And I remembered that Jesus did not carry his own cross all the way. He stumbled and fell under the burden of the cross, and Simon of Cyrene carried it for him. It is all right to ask for help. We do not have to do it alone.
For my seventy-two-year-old body to have survived all the trauma it did was enough to make me ask why God had spared me. Certainly my life was not saved so that I could turn away from the hard thoughts and relax into the easy ones. Certainly my life was not saved so that I could armor myself with self-protection and avoid controversial subjects that might antagonize some people if those subjects are ones which I believe God wants me to address. It’s often said that Americans want to be loved and are upset when people of other nations resent and even hate us, and I guess I’m American that way,
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I read him point three, which was one of the two points out of six that I could not sign. “Because of the Fall we are in such a state of sin and depravity that we are justly under God’s wrath and condemnation.” Point four said that the only way God could forgive us for all this sin and depravity was for Jesus to come and get crucified. “What this is saying,” I told the dean, “is that Jesus had to come save us from God the Father. I don’t believe that Jesus had to come save us from God the Father. Scripture says, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. The birth of Jesus
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God’s timing is more realistic than our own, or at least than my own.
We’ve had denominations spending years to formulate statements about sex, as though suddenly, at the end of the twentieth century, we could unravel what has been a tangle since Adam and Eve. We’ve had those who think they can make the definitive statement about homosexuality, or abortion, or life after death. But that’s not what true prophets do. True prophets point out problems, rather than offering easy solutions. They tell us that actions have consequences, that if we fall into sexual or any other kind of self-indulgence we will find that the price can be intolerably high.
Is this rather general fear of story not so much a fear that story is not true, as that it might actually be true?
And as for those seven days of creation, nothing whatsoever is said in Genesis about God creating in human time. Isn’t it rather arrogant of us to think that God had to use our ordinary, daily, wristwatch time? Scripture does make it clear that God’s time and our time are not the same. The old hymn “a thousand ages in thy sight are but a moment past” reprises this. So why get so upset about the idea that God might have created in divine time, not human? What kind of a fact is this that people get so upset about? Facts are static, even comfortable, even when they are wrong! Truth pushes us to
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“Please don’t underestimate the power of Christ’s love,” I implored. “You have no way of knowing what Christ was doing with your father during those weeks when he could not speak and tell you what was going on within him. If you believe that God is love…” “I do.” “Then trust that Love with your father.” I trust that Love.
I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.
Knowledge is changeable (as Adam and Eve found out), but truth is eternal. Therefore, any change in knowledge does not in the least threaten or affect truth. So let us trust truth, that truth that was incarnate for us in Jesus.
When I was a child God was God. Because the eight- or nine-year-old child does not think in terms of sex in general, neither did I in particular, and certainly not about God. God was All in All. God filled every single human need, be it for father, mother, lover, sister, brother, friend. Even when I became a “grown-up” I never thought of the God I prayed to as exclusively male.
The people of God are not all good and moral people. They do terrible things. But they know that they are utterly dependent on God, and if they do anything that is good, it is because God pushes them into it and helps them every inch of the way. They do not feel that they have to protect God from other people; they know that they fail God but they pick themselves up (with God’s help) out of the mud and try again. And they rejoice. David danced for God, leaping with joy around the ark.
If we read Leviticus with an open heart we will see that the message is not to burden people with an overwhelming number of laws, but to call us to be God’s holy people. The laws are there to help us, not to hinder.
Almost everything good can be abused, but that doesn’t make the original good any less good, and if it’s fun, it may well be joy in the Lord and in Creation, not sin. When we deny our legitimate pleasures we are denying the Incarnation, for Jesus came to affirm, not to deny. He enjoyed eating with his friends, and shared food is always sacramental for me. Even good food can be abused, and over-eating can cause all kinds of problems, but that does not mean that all eating is therefore wrong. The confusion of excess with moderation must please Satan enormously.
My theory is that the churches are secularizing, and they are jettisoning myth and ritual, the imaginative elements. The Bible is mined for statements to legitimate moral or political stances, but it is no longer taken seriously as something to stimulate the imagination and evoke the sacred.
Yes, we are meant to enjoy our faith; I do truly believe that. But our enjoyment involves acceptance of our mortality, of the Cross, and the even deeper wisdom of our immortality. Getting literal about the mighty acts of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ leads to dead ends.
My faith is not a magic charm, like garlic to chase away vampires. It is, instead, what sustains me in the midst of all the normal joys and tragedies of the ordinary human life. It is faith that helps my grief to be creative, not destructive. It is faith that kept me going through the pain at the very portals of death and pulled me, whether I would or no, back into life and whatever work still lies ahead.
When we limit God’s mighty acts to the possible we can castigate and sometimes kill other Christians because their understanding of Christ is not exactly like ours. We can be terrified of Roman Catholics and refuse to have any statues or images in our churches. We can deny ourselves the nurture of symbol and sacrament because their potency is fearful. Sometimes when I am asked if I am a New Ager, I reply, “No, I am an Episcopalian,” understanding that Episcopalianism is as alien to my questioner as the New Age! When we try to define and over-define and narrow down we lose the story the Maker
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Matter matters. That is the promise of the Incarnation. Christ put on human matter, and what happens to us is of eternal, cosmic importance. That is what true story affirms.
Because the hysterical need for a common enemy is an enemy of story. If the only way we can believe that our faith is valid is by accusing another faith of being false, then our faith is shaky indeed. Communism was a religion, a powerful religion while it lasted, but proving that it was a false religion (which it was and is) did little to affirm the love and joy of faith.
Why is peace, once again, a sign of the enemy instead of a sign of the Good News?
What upsets me most, I think, is that the anti-communists were against communism, rather than for democracy. And the Anti–New Agers are against the New Age rather than for Christ. Isn’t this being against rather than for the frame of mind which produces terrorism? Isn’t it, in itself, a kind of terrorism? The terrorists who blew up a plane full of people felt holy in their action; a religion that not only condones but commands murder of “unbelievers” is a fearful thing. As I read the Gospels, one of the strongest messages is for; for love, for warmth of heart, for that love which dissolves
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I suspect that the fear and condemnation of meditation comes because it is difficult for us to let ourselves go, to put our entire lives with absolute faith in a God we cannot in any way control. We live in a society which is sold on control, and tries to sell it to us. But the only way we can brush against the hem of the Lord, or hope to be able to work with our Abba/Amma in the telling of our story, is to have the courage, the faith, to abandon our control and to give it entirely to the Creator.
When we have moved through the first response of anger, it is replaced by grief, healthy grief. Real grief accepts that there is no security.
Too much Christian art relies so heavily on being Christian that the artist forgets that it also must be good art.
The first great story in the Bible, after the wonderful paean of praise to Creation, is a story of separation from God, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. It doesn’t really matter who was the first to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What is important is that in going against God’s wishes, they separated themselves from their Maker. Both of them.
Yes, indeed, let us beware of the cleverly invented stories that we see in television commercials every day, and let us look for that truth that will make us free, and that is frequently expressed in myth—true myth, not the cunningly devised fables (KJV) of floor waxes that are better than other floor waxes, or painkillers that will deaden all our physical aches, or all the other false promises that are constantly being offered a gullible public, and that the public (including Christians) far too often swallows wholesale.
Literalism is a vain attempt to cope with fear by quelling Scripture, attempting to make it more palatable, less wild and wonderful. Would the angels cry out “Fear not!” if there were nothing to fear?
In the fairy tale we find hope of interrelatedness, and sometimes this hope comes because fairy tales deal forthrightly with brokenness.
When we are children it is hard for us to allow our parents to stop being extensions of our own needs and to become people with needs of their own. At the same time that we are clinging to them with a false dependency, we are also struggling to separate ourselves. That is why many children have fantasies of being orphans or having been switched in the cradle. As one author noted, we can work through a lot of growing up by reading or listening to fairy tales.
One of our prominent politicians was caught with a young woman to whom he was not married. We were discussing this at dinner, and I wondered why so many politicians and statesmen have been wanton about sex. My son said calmly, “Mother, it’s not sex. It’s power.” And I think he’s right.
When we label a person a sinner, when we see only the monster, then we are unNaming, we are holding back that person from any hope of becoming whole, of becoming Named.
For the happy ending is intrinsic to the life of faith, central to all we do during all of our lives. If we cannot believe in it, we are desolate indeed. If we know, in the depths of our hearts, that God is going to succeed, with each one of us, with the entire universe, then our lives will be bright with laughter, love, and light.
Story helps us understand our humanness and our mortality. All grief is mourning over death—the death of a friendship, of a hope, of a career, of a marriage, of a love. If we try to circumvent the right and proper period of mourning, or repress it, then it will fester within us, and hurt both us and everybody we come in contact with.
Sometimes I cause my own grief when I discover that, unwittingly, I have made a human being into an idol, and when that person behaves like a human being and not an idol, I feel that my trust has been betrayed. No. It is I who have been the betrayer by refusing to allow for the normal fallibility of flesh and blood. The grief is genuine, but the result must be my farewell to the idol and my discovery of a human being who, on occasion, can be a Christ-bearer for me, as we are all meant to bear Christ for each other.
No one dares to grieve who does not dare to love, and love is always part of costly grace. It has been said that before we can give love we must first have received love, and indeed love is a response to love. To be a Christian and not to be a lover is impossible. We cannot grieve in any healthy way in total isolation—solitude, yes, but not isolation. Grief, like Christianity, is shared by the entire body. Nothing that affects one part of the body does not affect it all.
True mortification is to die to that within us which is selfish and self-willed, that which keeps us from each other and from God.
