We Don’t Know What We Are Doing

Brian McLaren (One of Richard Rohr’s CAC) invites us to an imaginative experience of the painful reality of scapegoating that occurred on Good Friday: 

Let’s imagine ourselves with the disciples just before three o’clock on this Friday afternoon. A few of us have come together to talk about what has happened over the last twenty-four hours….  Why was there no other way? Why did this good man—the best we have ever known, the best we have ever imagined—have to face torture and execution as if he were some evil monster?   As the hours drag on from noon to nearly three o’clock, we imagine many reasons…. Jesus has told us again and again that God is different from our assumptions. We’ve assumed that God was righteous and pure in a way that makes God hate the unrighteous and impure. But Jesus has told us that God is pure love, so overflowing in goodness that God pours out compassion on the pure and impure alike. He not only has told us of God’s unbounded compassion—he has embodied it every day as we have walked this road with him. In the way he has sat at table with everyone, in the way he has never been afraid to be called a “friend of sinners,” in the way he has touched untouchables and refused to condemn even the most notorious of sinners, he has embodied for us a very different vision of what God is like….   If Jesus is showing us something so radical about God, what is he telling us about ourselves—about human beings and our social and religious institutions? What does it mean when our political leaders and our religious leaders come together to mock and torture and kill God’s messenger?… Is this the only way religions and governments maintain order—by threatening us with pain, shame, and death if we don’t comply? And is this how they unify us—by turning us into a mob that comes together in its shared hatred of the latest failure, loser, rebel, criminal, outcast … or prophet?… What kind of world have we made? What kind of people have we become?…  In the middle of the afternoon … even from this distance, we can hear Jesus, “Father, forgive them!” he shouts. “For they don’t know what they are doing.”  Forgive them? Forgive us?    Our thoughts bring us again to the garden last night, when Jesus asked if there could be any other way. And now it seems clear. There could be no other way to show us what God is truly like. God is not revealed in killing and conquest … in violence and hate. God is revealed in this crucified man—giving of himself to the very last breath, giving and forgiving.   And there could be no other way to show us what we are truly like. We do not know what we are do. If God is like this, and if we are like this … everything must change.

Our Differently Timed Spiritual Journeys from Need to Love

As a first time mom, I made lists of worries about my baby, but my pediatrician laughingly said, “Everyone should have a practice child!” After my second child was a few months old, I informed the pediatrician that it would not help at all, since my second child was absolutely nothing like my first!  God did not make us with a cookie cutter. We are born with very different ways of  both perceiving and responding to the world. But obviously we are ALL born as needy little babies and we’re all unfinished. Our lives are a spiritual journey from need to love. Some of us need a moment in time fairly early in life when we experience the unconditional love of God so we can cling to that love as a source of grace. Others are more logical and find the law to be a road map source of safety.  Some of us tend to trust the known and traditional, while others explore possibilities of all kinds. Over our life spans, our different journeys will finally challenge us to experience a very different way of being in the world than we are used to. It’s scary and we may resist it, but it will free us finally to recognize the validity of our differences. This is grossly oversimplified. But whether we try to lock everyone into a law and order path or an emotionally healing conversion with miracles, or a social justice focus, we are like the three blind men each trying to picture a whole elephant by one only touching its floppy ears, another feeling it’s large firm side, and the third just feeling it’s skinny little tail. We see through the glass of our inborn personalities darkly. We are loved, but we are unfinished. It’s a lifetime process and we start at different place, so it’s a circle, NOT a hierarchy.  And the journey isn’t to perfection, but to the balance of wholeness..  We are not only born unfinished, but some of us get broken along the way. The journey of Jesus is also OUR journey and he is with us every step of the way whether or not we recognize him.  He fleshed out BOTH the Love of God for us, and the Way for us to become loving. It’s a process that will include loving those like ourselves, those who seem strange to us, those we consider spiritual lepers, and not only our enemy, but even our own Religious Leaders” who want the power to control us just as His once did him.    “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” Those words of Jesus ultimately will sum up our spiritual journey from need to love.

When we try to limit the Spiritual journey to the phase we are in, it creates a toxic religion for others.  The timing is different because we started at different places.  But we are ALL unfinished. So it’s time to begin trying to understand those on different pages, for our own sake, as much as theirs.

Accepting That there are Other Ways of Experiencing and Seeing Life

Two quotes from Wendell Berry the poet, farmer, author, and protestor that resonate for me:

 War, he suggests, begins in a failure of acceptance. He writes of exchanging friendly talk with Trump voters at Port Royal’s farm-supply store, a kind of tolerance that is necessary in a small town: “If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher.” Without this, we risk conflagration.

“A properly educated conservative, who has neither approved of abortion nor supported a tax or a regulation, can destroy a mountain or poison a river and sleep like a baby,” he writes. “A well-instructed liberal, who has behaved with the prescribed delicacy toward women and people of color, can consent to the plunder of the land and people of rural America and sleep like a conservative.”    

My Sermon from the Molehill

Reflections on David, God’s favorite, the ancestor of Jesus, and seemingly the most unlikely choice to fight a giant.

David reminds me of my Irish ancestors: he’s a fighter, a poet, a musician, a dancer, and a charismatic leader, who both loves and lusts.  Love and lust are opposites.  Love puts the other first. Lust uses the other.  David actually loves Saul. To me the most amazing thing about David is that though Saul repeatedly tries to kill David out of jealousy, David continues trying to reconcile.  Why?  Because when David was just a youth, he often sat with this powerful man playing calming music when Saul was conflicted and overwhelmed by depression.  David understood Saul.  He knew his inner struggles that caused him to overreact.  David finally had to turn against Saul, but he did not hate him. He was able to love someone who was violently and illogically against him because he understood him.                                                                                                      And after decades of obeying God, when David sinned greatly and tragically, God taught him through consequences. But God still loved David tenderly and totally. Because God understands our humanity.                                                               The most fundamental and difficult challenge Christians face is to understand our enemies. We may be called to vote against them, but we are not called to hate or belittle them.  We are called to love them and the only way we can do that is to understand them. And while that takes both caring and effort, what it mostly takes is humility. Jesus not only showed us it can be done, but he calls us to do it.  We start by loving our neighbor as much as we love ourselves. In Jesus day, our neighbor was the person most like us.   But Jesus also calls us to love the stranger, to even become vulnerable by inviting them into our safe place, our home. To top that, Jesus also began to call us to love others more than ourselves. That’s a whole other level of love.  It’s the kind of love we reserve for our family.  Finally, on his cross Jesus not only forgave his enemies, but he asked God to forgive them.  Because he understood that they did not realize that what they were doing was evil.

 Our Prayer: God, our Father, we are small, like David.  We also have both strengths and weaknesses.  Give us the grace we need to fight the enemy within us. Give us understanding of those we perceive as enemies outside us. Help all your children find a way to work together to bring about your kingdom, not ours, on earth as it is in Heaven. God, you are the source of our lives and the grace that sustains us. We praise you and give you thanks.  We lift our hearts and minds to focus on you, so that we may see your glory and know your love with both heart and mind.  We offer our lives to you in thanksgiving.

LISTEN UP! BOTH REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS

My husband and I were as different as both and when he died we had been married a month short of sixty years. For about twenty years we gave marriage preparation talks about differences in spirituality, values, interests, focus, family influences, and problem solving techniques. One of the first things he always said was, “I don’t understand Eileen at all, but I accept her as she is.” But he also valued my mind and gradually I helped him outgrow his Southern prejudices. He helped me to understand the need to temper ideals with realism. In this life, we can only inch toward the perfect. And we learned to work together well enough to raise five both intelligent and kind kids who are totally different from each other and also from one or both of us. And they are all awesome.

If we do not accept our differences as gifts and learn to understand each other and use our differences for the good of all, America will not ever be GREAT or KIND, never-the-less both. We, BOTH SIDES, are destroying America because we will not let go of our need to win in order to struggle to learn to work together. And the first thing we have to learn is how to dialogue (express and listen) without demonizing each other.

Several decades ago, Julian and I were given the task by our Diocese of creating materials for a six weeks class on Capital Punishment. He was 100 % for capital punishment and I was 100 % against. As we both read through all the materials with statistics and stories of people being executed and later through DNA found to be innocent and the large majority of them being black, Julian began to change his mind.

At the same time a friend of mine’s sister was murdered and decapitated and buried without her head, which was never found. The white man accused of the murder (with plenty of evidence) had already served time for rape and torture once, been released, and attempted the rape/murder of another woman a second time, and again served time, but was paroled. He was obviously mentally defective. He had chains connected to the metal floor of the cabin of his truck. Some years before this, my son and his wife had been giving this man rides to work, not knowing his history. When my son changed jobs, his wife had driven the man to work alone. This issue was now up close and personal for me.

I decided our justice system was defective and I wanted people like this man to be kept on death row. And that DNA and all the groups protesting Capital Punishment would manage to deter the death sentence for innocent people. But the insane wouldn’t be allowed to rape, torture, and kill again.

Most issues just aren’t simple or clear cut. And there are no perfect people, so no perfect systems or solutions. We aren’t God and this isn’t heaven. But our best bet for improving things is recognizing that there are two legitimate sides to issues and to work together to come up with a still imperfect, but better way to handle them at least for our times.