Addictions

Good morning all of God’s tenderly loved children!  And that’s all of us.  Good old Paul is still trying to shape us up in Romans. He not only says no quarreling, but to make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.

Well, pooh! I’ve given up alcohol, stopped smoking, and as an 86 year old widow my chances of gratifying my fleshly desires are beyond slim. During Covid I switched to a low carb diet, so I even had to give up my addiction to jelly doughnuts. And to top everything off, in the last two years I’ve come to understand those I oppose politically. I think my addiction to feeling I’m right and anyone who disagrees with me is not only wrong, but bad, is my toughest one to get over. But feeling right and virtuous and judging those that disagree as evil is the definition of self-righteousness. And that was the sin Jesus pointed out most often.  It ends up making us push each other to extremes until we become blind to the need for balance.  Even old self-righteous Paul admits we all see through the glass darkly. Nobody knows all the truth and nothing but the truth…but God. The worst sin is pride because we are blind to it. Here’s  a repeat of the poem I wrote when reflecting on the “Body of Christ” in the scriptures.

The Broken Body

Reflecting on the Body,

you the hand, I the foot,

Christ the head and the heart,

someone else the hidden part,

I let the Scriptures

flood my mind with images.

Then suddenly an image

is so harshly real, I gasp aloud.

I see a figure staggering

and stumbling towards me,

arms flailing, head jerking

back and forth in spasms,

body parts all pulling

different ways.

This then, reality:

Christ’s earthly body now.

Lord, forgive us!

Resurrection through Connection

Richard Rohr describes how it’s possible to experience resurrection before we die: 

We don’t need to wait for death to experience resurrection. We can begin resurrection today by living connected to God. Resurrection happens every time we love someone even though they were not very loving to us. At that moment we have been brought to new life. Every time we decide to trust and begin again, even after repeated failures, at that moment we’ve been resurrected. Every time we refuse to become negative, cynical, hopeless, we have experienced the Risen Christ. We don’t have to wait for it later. Resurrection is always possible now.  

The resurrection is not Jesus’ private miracle; it’s the new shape of reality. It’s the new shape of the world. It’s filled with grace. It’s filled with possibility. It’s filled with newness.  

The resurrection is not a miracle story to prove the divinity of Christ, something that makes him the winner. It’s a storyline that allows us all to be winners. ALL! No exceptions! There’s no eternal death for anybody: ALL are invited to draw upon this infinite Source, this infinite Mystery, this infinite Love, this infinite Possibility. Spiritually speaking, we live in a world of abundance, of infinity. But most of us walk around as if it were not true, operating in a world of scarcity where there’s never enough. There’s not enough for me, there’s not enough for you, there’s not enough for everybody.  

And so we hoard it—Spirit, Love, Life—to ourselves. We hoard grace, we hoard mercy. We don’t allow ourselves to be conduits through which it pours into the world. Truly, the only way we can hold onto grace, mercy, love, joy—any spiritual gift—is to give them away consciously and intentionally. Once we stop acting as a conduit, we lose them ourselves. That’s why there are so many sad, bitter, and angry people. Disconnected from God, we choose death. We ourselves contribute to negativity, cynicism, anger, and even to the oppression of other races and religions. In that state, it’s always other people who are wrong.