Circling – A Poem

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Life is a circle.
It loops and it circles around again.
It circles back through the beginning
and around and down through the end.
What once was before
now circles round into trend.
God knelt down low and breathed
dirt to become man and life.
His breath circles back
to raise man out of strife
when Holy Spirit wind divides
dead heart from new like a knife.
What began in a garden
with successful tempting of man,
circled back to a garden
and the culmination of God’s plan.
Temptation was repeated
but this time was banned.
God’s love and God’s holiness
leads to God putting on skin.
His wrath pours out on sin,
His mercy pours it out on Him.
When wrath circles back to the cross,
it turns out that love wins.
When Word became flesh,
He climbed down into time.
He breathed our air and
turned water into wine.
One day Word will circle back
and earthly life will join the Divine.
Life is a circle.
It loops and it circles around again.
It circles back through the beginning
and around and down through the end.
What once was before
now circles into trend.
To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

 

photographs copyright Made Sacred 2020

edited from the archives

The First Step to Take Toward Justice

Justice.
justice
There are so many different voices crying out for justice right now.
There are so many different ways in which people are responding to those cries.
searching for justice
How should we, as Jesus followers, think Christianly about justice? How should we respond to individual as well as systemic injustice?
One thing is certain: We serve a God who concerns himself with justice.
God tells Israel through the prophet Isaiah to Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, and plead the widow’s cause, and through the prophet Micah, He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
In the New Testament, Jesus heals the leper, cares for the woman caught in adultery, and laments that the religious leaders tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.
We, then, as followers of this God of justice and mercy, must also concern ourselves with justice.
However.
It does not necessarily follow that we should submit to the path of the loudest and most popular voices.
There are many loud voices right now proclaiming the right way to think, to act, to pursue justice in our country.
Maybe they are right. Maybe this is the way God wants his followers to seek justice for the oppressed.
Maybe. Although it is rare that the path the world urges us to follow is the right path.
It also does not necessarily follow that every disciple of Jesus should walk the same path of fighting for the same justice for the same group of people.
We are the body of Christ. We are his hands and his feet and his eyes and his arms and his legs and…
We have different abilities and gifts. We have different passions and loves.
There are so many different kinds of people in need of justice in our world, in our country, in our town. People of color. People who are enslaved. People who are abused. People who are homeless, starving, mentally ill, without hope.
So how do we know? How can we find the right way? How in the world, how in this broken, grieving, noisy world can I know how God wants me to pursue justice?
be still
We stop.
We wait.
We must wait for God to fill us up with Himself so that it is His love and His compassion that flow out of us, rather than our own ideas about what ought to be done.
Springing into action is not our first step.
It is when we simply are still, keeping our gaze fixed on Christ through such habits as silence and solitude and lectio divina, that the Holy Spirit changes us and stirs us to His work.
Andrew Murray writes, It is when the soul becomes utterly passive, looking and resting on what Christ is to do, that its energies are stirred to their highest activity, and that we work most effectually because we know that He works in us.
As the Spirit of God dwells in us, we are more and more able to be led by the Spirit to do the work He has for us.
We cannot charge ahead and try to take the lead, but rather must wait on the Spirit to change us, to instruct us, to show us the way in which we should go. It is the Spirit’s role within the trinity to produce fruit, to bring every work to completion.
We see this in a beautiful way through the early Church.
God of justice
As you read the book of Acts, the Holy Spirit leads the Church in her various missions, sending people out as they are waiting on Him in prayer. He gives direction and the words to say, He produces the fruit that results, and the only thing the people do is to follow. The Spirit is the One who gives joy and spreads the Word.
The Holy Spirit does His work as He moves us to do our work. As we are still before God, we learn to understand how the apart from me you can do nothing is only the beginning of the I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
The Church is not a way to escape from this world. We follow the way of Christ, and he gave himself wholly for the life of the world.
God cares deeply about justice, and we should care deeply about what breaks the heart of God.
How do we know how best to pursue justice in our land?
Wait for justice
Not by listening to the loud, clamoring voices of the world, but by first listening to the still, small voice of God.
Only then can we work and fight for God’s kingdom rule to be done here on earth as it is in heaven.
I end with a quote from Father Alexander Schmemann. He is speaking of the Eucharist as communion with God –
It is the very communion with the Holy Spirit that enables us to love the world with the love of Christ. The Eucharist is the sacrament of unity and the moment of truth: here we see the world in Christ, as it really is, and not from our particular and therefore limited and partial points of view.
Intercession begins here, in the glory of the messianic banquet, and this is the only true beginning for the Church’s mission. It is when we ‘lay aside all earthly cares,’ when we seem to have left this world, that we, in fact, recover it in all its reality.
God has made us competent to be his witnesses, to fulfill what he has done and is ever doing. This is the meaning of the Eucharist; this is why the mission of the Church begins in the liturgy of ascension, for it alone makes possible the liturgy of mission.
Don’t flail blindly at the foe. Go and be still before God. Wait for him to send you out on his mission.
Our world needs you.
To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credit: Dove of the Holy Spirit by Gian Lorenzo Bernini; all other photographs copyright 2020 Made Sacred

What I Learn When We Are Apart

There is an old heresy that has circled around again and again since the beginning of Christianity.
the physical
It is the lie that creation, the physical world, is bad or, at best, unimportant. The spiritual alone is what truly matters.
the spiritual
I have seen this creeping into the Church in recent years (The Western Church, that is. I will not presume to speak about the global Church).
What we do with our bodies during worship is not important.
Being physically together is nice, but it doesn’t matter in the larger scope of things.
Watching church online is just as good as being in a building.
I confess that as an introvert, I find the draw of church online to be alluring. It is a lot less messy when you don’t have to face so many people.
I do know, however, that the Church is a sacrament, a place where the spiritual reality of God becomes embodied in the physical world.
embodied world
The whole of creation was originally intended to fulfill this role, created to bring man into relationship with God. The physical world would make the spiritual reality of God known to man; man would take the physical world into his body and live out the life of God to the world.
All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. ~ Alexander Schmemann
But then man chose to hunger for the world instead of God, to live the life of the world rather than the life of God, and the circle was broken.
Jesus embodied
The circle remained broken until Jesus came and once again offered up the embodied life of God for man.
Now the Church has become the means through which the spiritual reality of God enters the material reality of the world. There is no longer any need for temples or sacred places, for Christ’s Body, the Church, embodies the life of God to the world.
The Church now finds herself in the middle of a pandemic. We are sheltering in place and are unable to be together physically. Ever.
When you are not allowed to have physical contact with anyone, suddenly being together seems much more important.
It makes me wonder whether one way in which God will bless this time for our good, as he promised he would, might be to show us how essential it is to meet together in an embodied way.
Technology is a good and helpful tool, but that is all it is or should ever be. A tool. A substitute. We are embodied creatures and as such need embodied interactions.

Emile_Claus_-_Orchard_in_Flanders

C. S. Lewis used the metaphor of eating tinned fruit when writing about mistaking something necessary for what is best. Tinned fruit will feed and sustain you when there is a famine, when you cannot visit the orchard, yet the fruit loses much of its flavor and goodness in the process of being tinned.
In this season of shelter-in-place, we are being fed and sustained by our online communications, and our souls are grateful for it, but deep down we hunger for incarnate communion.
There is, of course, the opposite danger in being sustained only by virtual fellowship, and that is that we might acquire a taste for it. This we must absolutely guard against.
But do not let us mistake necessary evils for good. The mistake is easily made. Fruit has to be tinned if it is to be transported and has to lose thereby some of its good qualities. But one meets people who have actually learned to prefer the tinned fruit to the fresh. ~ C. S. Lewis
May we, the Church, in this time of being bodily separated, begin to understand and truly believe in the goodness of creation and the importance of our physical bodies.
May we continue to hunger for the fresh fruit of embodied fellowship rather than being satiated with tinned communication in the virtual world.
When this is over, may we recognize our incarnate communion for what it is – undeserved gift.
To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credit: The Last Supper from So-called Hours of Philip the Fair; Orchard in Flanders by Emile Claus

Lord, Have Mercy – A Collection of Prayer

Right now, I believe, mine is to be still and listen.
I offer, instead, prayers from others in hopes that they will help you find words to lay before God when your own heart is too weighed down to find the words yourself.
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy
Lord, help us assemble ourselves before you today through our acts of peace and reconciliation with neighbors near and far. Help us to teach the children in our communities what it means to be children of a God who loves us like a mother.
Give us discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that instead we may live deep within our hearts. Grant us anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may wish for justice, freedom, and peace. Bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen. ~ Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals
Prayer
O Father in heaven, who crafted my limbs to serve you and my soul to follow closely after you, with sorrow and repentance of heart I acknowledge before you the faults and failures of today. For too long I have tried your patience and too often I have betrayed your trust; yet you still want me to come to you with a humble heart, as I now do, imploring you to drown my sin in the sea of your infinite love.
O Lord, forgive me for:
My failure to apply to myself the standards I demand of others;
My blindness to the suffering of others, and the time it takes me to learn from my own:
My apathy toward wrongs that do not impact me, and my oversensitiveness to those that do.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit. Amen. ~ John Baillie
Peace
O God, who makest man to be of one mind in an house and hast called us into the fellowship of thy dear Son: draw into closer unity, we beseech thee, the people of all races in this and every land; that in fellowship with thee they may understand and help one another, and that, serving thee, they may find their perfect freedom; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. ~ Joost de Blank, Archbishop of Cape Town
Unity
O Lord, forgive the cruelties of men in every age,
their insensibility to others’ pain,
the deliberation which gives pain
to satisfy and to express
the evil that rebels from love’s surrender to others’ needs
to exalt itself.
O Lord, forgive the carelessness that passes by,
the blunted consciences that will not see,
or fear to see,
the wrongs men do to other men.
Most merciful, most loving Judge, Redeemer of mankind,
thou dost restore the fallen,
thou dost seek out the scattered sheep. ~ Gilbert Shaw
He is with us in our grief
To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: Grief by Bertram Mackennal; Prayer by Antonio Parreiras; The Anchorite by Teodor Axentowicz; Black Men Praying by Aymara Mejia; Prayer by Mednyánszky László