cairns

Today some of my public school fourth graders asked me what my favorite word is.  I thought what a strange wonderful question as possibilities ran through my mind.  I have about hundred of most things if you ask my top ten!  Lots of choices ran through my head – grace, love, etc. are too abstract for them to know what I really mean.  Public school is not the setting for deep explanations.  With the recent stress level, a few obviously inappropriate choices rolled across the list as well.

I finally asked if they were going to report me for not keeping church and state separate if I told the truth.  They grinned and said, “No!”  So, I told them if I have to limit it down to one favorite word it would have to be the name, Jesus.  They all smiled and a few of them said, “me too.”

It wasn’t PC, could be taken as exclusionary if I had any children of other faiths in the room, but it was big and small T true.  I just cannot lie, or deny.  I still believe it is the name above all other names.  I do not believe it is a synonym for other names of God, the force, or the universe.  Recently, some events of our lives have been out of control almost beyond survival levels.  But, I know this, I hope in this, I rely on this, I live through, in, for, and about this One, this Jesus.

peace

1 Comment »

Watched Hallmark Hall of Fame movie last night about a woman rescuing children from death at the hands of the Nazi’s.  After everything I have read, and all the places I have been privileged to go, I still do not understand two things about our relationship to “others.”

I will never understand, maybe in the head — but never deep within my soul, how one comes to see another as so different from oneself that they can be considered unworthy of life and grace.  I can imagine myself reaching that level in response to adult perpetrators of atrocities, that is why I choose to be a pacifist.  I know I could reach the point of being willing to kill.  But, I cannot imagine how one reaches the point of deciding that is the correct response toward the worst of us, let alone the least of us.

The other thing I cannot understand, as I try to help four daughters finish their journeys into adulthood, is how we ever claim to “know” the mind of another at all.  We all both share and hide even in our closest relationships.  We think we know what we observe, what we hear the other say, even what our own role in the relationship is.  But, the unknowns always exceed the knowns.  If we cannot be sure of the inner nature of those we love, how can we become sure we are correct about those we do not?

It is beyond me.

peace

Comments Off

Even after all these years in the midst of Easter weekend I hear the haunting tune, “I don’t know how to love Him..(questioningly) he’s just a man…He scares me so!”

I have walked with Him through wealth and poverty, safety, adventure, and danger.  I have celebrated, danced and mourned with Him.  And yet, I do not, cannot, KNOW Him, fully comprehend Him, grasp Him.  What is He doing when disease hits that does not respond to prayer (why does he linger while His friend dies?)?  Where is He when the road He sends me on becomes too steep, too hard, too far?  Where is He when real things my culture does not even acknowledge go bump in the night?  Where is He when evil grows  ever stronger and reaps so much destruction on both creation and humanity?  Where is He when our own children break the promise to grow as they have been raised?

In spite of all the nice things, reassuring things, promising things, Biblical things we preach, life is full of these Easter Saturdays when nothing tangible makes sense, when life does not seem survivable, where the soul experiences the dark night of loneliness.  I often feel closest to Him as He cries on Friday, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani!”

I am headed to a quiet place with my wife, away from all the confusion, and like the women at the cross, we will wait for tomorrow and ponder this man who transcends all we understand.

peace

Comments Off

I have been trying on several alternatives to the bloody demand for justice explanation of Easter.  I like this one.

God created humanity in God’s own image, immortal.  Within the garden was the potential to become immortal within our created flesh.  But, we chose knowledge of good and evil first and became mortal — we chose to know evil (death) and became subject to it in all its forms.  On Good Friday, Immortal God became fully mortal,  mortal to the point of real suffering, mortal to the point of an incomprehensible separation within the mystical union of the Trinity, mortal to the point of death in order to restore union with us.  It is a reversal that is the stuff of the great myths.  Immortality chooses mortality for love.  Except in the myths that is the end of the story.  Both lovers, now mortal, eventually die.

We await the miracle of Easter when the great reversal is itself reversed and the unity again includes immortality.  It is the story beyond all stories.  It is about love beyond all loves, not blind justice beyond all mercy.  It is the miracle which gives hope when all else fails.

peace

Comments Off

I was finally at church last Sunday and the pastor was going through the various people who were present at the cross.  He finally mentioned the women, but used them as examples of those who watched without hope.  I went back and read the accounts of each gospel and I do not see his justification.  Perhaps it fit his sermon purposes.  Perhaps it was the perpetual negative image of women that caused him to cast them as there but in a negative way.

I see the women at the cross as one of the many reversals of Easter.  Much of the Easter story is clear plot reversal of the story of the fall.  Man chooses to become like God — God chooses to become man.  We choose to follow our own will, the God/man Jesus issues the divine fiat in the Garden.  And in the original, the woman is lured first (a fact long used and abused by the male dominated church) then here at Easter the men flee and the women stand, stay with Jesus to the end (a loyalty seldom emphasized in the church).  But, the truth is that in the age of the church it will often be the women who stand, who observe and ponder, who keep faith while the male dominated leadership runs, fights, conquers, sells, and pronounces.

This Easter, part of my contemplation is the faces of the women standing at the cross after the future apostles have fled.

peace

1 Comment »