Tuesday, September 5, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
You yourselves know very well
Concerning times and seasons, brothers and sisters, you have no need for anything to be written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
Hundreds of years ago, St. Francis offered what some, including Richard Rohr, call an “alternative orthodoxy.” Aspects include incarnation instead of redemption, cosmos instead of churchiness, poverty instead of perfection, the bottom instead of the top, the humility of God, and an emphasis on the union of humanity and divinity in Jesus instead of just his divinity.
But don’t just pick one of those. Which might be most important in 2023? How about, Rohr suggests …
… cosmos instead of churchiness? There is such a universal disillusionment with churchiness, which is the building and maintenance of churches and services. We’ve overplayed the church card for much of the last thousand years. It’s like the messenger overtook the message. Once we had divided Christianity into Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, all of the individual churches had to prove they were the one true church. All that did was preoccupy us with the churchy conversation, while taking our eyes off the cosmos, off of what was right beneath our feet, in front of our eyes, and the very whole of which we are already a part.
These last few weeks one of my favorite online pastor-poets, Steve Garnaas-Holmes, has been on a flying family vacation. His poems stretch my point of view in every which way, like state fair taffy before it’s been cut up and wrapped. Try this out:
What if
the light of the Resurrection was so bright
it blinded Jesus
and you have to take him by the hand
and lead him into your life
and show him everything,
notice every detail for him
with the most loving attention;
and with something other
than his big, gentle closed eyes
he touches
your life, your wounds, your friends,
and blesses them,
feels your tears, your silences,
hears your heart, your hope,
becomes familiar with the little stones
beside the way, the blades of grass,
the flow of your breath
in and out?
What if he doesn’t have to see,
because you are his body?
The poem, which you can listen to if you want, is called “Blinded.” Who’s blinded, how blinded? Jesus, me, all of us? Is this blindness maybe the best thing that ever happened to me, to wither up my ego and let me live a little before I die? Let me know how I need Jesus even when I forget I need him? How he’s there even when I have no idea?
Ok. Yes. All that.
Fr. Rohr, forever a Franciscan since his youth, has worked to know, and then to write about, truth. Like any honest apologist, he eventually returns to what he finds inside himself.
Religion is no longer a spectator sport, an observing of some distant, far-off truth, but it’s an observing of what is true in me.
And as is written on page after page in our Holy Book, our Bible, that truth is Jesus. Holy Spirit, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Live your life in me, and open the eyes of my heart.
I visited Sharon Hall in the Lincoln, Illinois hospital when she was sick and I was not. She ministered more to me than I to her, even if I was the official one. She asked me to read Psalm 27, her favorite.
The Lord is my light and my salvation, the Lord is my life’s refuge, and I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Of whom should I be afraid?
She recovered, although years later she did pass away, at peace and full of years. I’ll be in the hospital tomorrow, and I’ll be remembering Psalm 27 and my sweet sister Sharon, who reminded me for all the world of God the Mother in William Young’s novel The Shack.
Of whom should I be afraid?
(1 Thessalonians 5, Psalm 27, Luke 7, Luke 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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