good and evil

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous,
barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new,
marvelous, intoxicating.”
- Simone Weil

franciscan blessing

May God bless you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within your heart.

May God bless you with holy anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom, and peace among all people.

May God bless you with the gift of tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, or the loss of all that they cherish, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and transform their pain into joy.

May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you really CAN make a difference in this world, so that you are able, with God’s grace, to do what others claim cannot be done.

from http://www.allsaintsbrookline.org/prayers/prayer4.html by way of http://blog.hackingchristianity.net/

sermonizing on hunger

I preached the following sermon today. Perhaps a little long for a blog post, but I liked it, so I’m sharing it. HA.

Also, for beautiful insight into this week’s lectionary reading from John, see Jan Richardson’s latest entry in her blog, “The Painted Prayerbook”. The entry is entitled “The Gastronomical Jesus” and was a huge inspiration for me this week: http://paintedprayerbook.com/

Today’s theme, “Come to me and never be hungry” comes from a scripture in the book of John.

John 6:35, 41–51

35 Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

41 Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ 42They were saying, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’ 43Jesus answered them, ‘Do not complain among yourselves. 44No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45It is written in the prophets, “And they shall all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

More than any of the other gospels, John is more theological treatise than narrative story. Repeatedly the writer expounds in metaphors on who Jesus is, and doesn’t just tell us what Jesus does. Jesus, says John’s author, is a vine, a door, the bread of life. These metaphors are rich and varied, and one could possibly argue that who Jesus is, is a pretty locked-down notion in John. In fact, a common understanding of the book is that it was written by a very exclusive Christian community that was very concerned with who were insiders and outsiders. The book is riddled with extreme opposites: life and death, light and dark, up and down, and the positioning of those opposites in contestation with each other. The book of John served as a theological explanation of who the community saw themselves to be, and who Jesus was for them.

So although the book may seem to have a fixed interpretation, the beauty of scripture is that it takes on new meaning and new interpretation all the time. Each time someone new picks up the Bible, each time we read a passage, new understandings and meanings unfold before us. This can be a dangerously wonderful thing! Metaphors especially have the potential to bring forth multiple meanings. And so even though this scripture is very didactic and fixed, because it uses these beautiful, rich metaphors of bread and hunger, it means that many possibilities for understanding lie inside of it. In fact, all of the metaphors in John (light, bread, vine, door) actually, I would argue, can be used to free and release the interpretations of who Jesus is, rather than locking those interpretations down. Poetry has an amazing gift for opening multiple, new, unfolding understandings of things, and can rarely be solidified into singular meanings. And the book of John, I would argue, with its plethora of metaphor, is more poetic prose than it is narrative.

And so, since it is poetry, it means we can play with it, it means we can tease new understandings out of it, and it means we can let it loose on our own minds, hearts, spirits, and bodies to transform us, inside and out. So let’s turn loose this lovely food-centric, metaphor-rich passage about bread and hunger and see what happens.

‘I am the bread of life.’ says Jesus, ‘Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’

Let’s first talk about bread. Bread is one of the most universal metaphors in human language and understanding. In many different cultures bread is used poetically and narratively to point to something that is totally and completely ordinary and yet also without which we would not survive, something extraordinarily important. Our lives depend on bread, on daily bread, in fact. To live, we must eat, to eat is to live. This is not a complicated thing to understand. I’m certain that all of us, at one time or another, for whatever reason, have experienced the physical pain that hunger for food creates in our bodies. I can think of mornings when I’ve woken up with a stomach growling for sustenance, or times when I’ve been so busy that I’ve forgotten to eat until eventually my body screams “HEY!!! SHANNON!!! TIME FOR FOOOOD!!” Though I will admit that those times when I’ve felt those hunger pangs, food was never more than a few hours away.

There was only one time when that was not the case, and that was when I participated in a fast-a-thon at camp last year. We went for 36 hours without food (though there were, unfortunately, still food smells to tempt us!) but this too was a case where the end was definitely in sight, we knew that at the end of that timeframe we would be eating. That experience was intended as a mere brief glimpse into the life of hunger experienced by so many, too many, in fact, people around the world. For too many people, the satiation of their physical hunger is not hours, but days, or even an indefinite timeline away. And satisfaction is not guaranteed for those individuals, but is subject, often, to factors beyond their control.

And, though purely spiritual interpretations of this scripture are possible, I would say that when we contemplate what the other gospels teach about real food and real physical hunger, and the needs of the least, the poor, a physical, literal interpretation of hunger as being what is satisfied through Jesus, is possible. For who, today, is Jesus, is Christ for us? We, the church, are now Christ’s body (which is what our Ephesians scripture in the call to worship today taught us, that we are members of one another’s body, and that we ought to be doing what we can to build up the body), it is we who are called to do the feeding, to be the bread of life, to serve the poor, to be the flesh that gives life, just as Jesus’ flesh gave life. And this is not just for those who are among us, but for all, for neighbour and stranger alike.

Bread becomes a living, life-giving metaphor for the physical needs of the world that God calls us to be a part of bringing justice for. Bread can also be an important reminder of our own physical needs as well. We are not merely spiritual beings (as the gospel of John would perhaps sometimes appear to be telling us), but physical beings with physical needs, physical hungers. Our bodies are the body of Christ in this world and ought to be fed accordingly! We also know that physical and spiritual hunger can intertwine and are deeply linked. Anyone who has deliberately eaten or not eaten in times of deep emotional turmoil can attest to this (and I’d guess that most, if not all of us have had such experiences of physical hunger and spiritual hunger being linked).

Let’s turn even more towards this hunger metaphor, slightly away from bread. For hunger is an interesting thing. There are lots of types of hunger, and lots of things we can be hungry for. Depending on who we are, where we are in the world, and what stage of life we’re in, we are probably, all of us, hungry for something. Whether it is our next meal, a good stimulating conversation, the touch of a person who cares for us, or the voice of God in the wilderness of our chaotic lives, we all hunger. Hunger for that which will feed us spiritually, not just physically, is perhaps an even more complicated hunger than our physical ones. And even physical hungers outside of food, for the touch of another person, for rest and relaxation, for fresh air and sunlight, these too are profoundly intertwined with our spiritual lives. As Auntie Gwyn and I strolled through some wetlands yesterday we talked about how spending time in quiet, beautiful, natural places is so refreshing for our souls.

I believe that all human souls long, hunger, desire something more, something bigger than themselves. I believe that longing is for union with God, and I believe that that union is always a lot closer than we think. It doesn’t take a complicated spiritual or meditation practice to discover that each of our bodies are rooted in God’s body, that each of our hearts are part of God’s heart, that each of our minds are a part of the divine wisdom that helps to shape the universe. When we discover that we are part of the divine, that we are steeped in the burning layers of the divine, I think we can find that, as Jesus says in this scripture, we are no longer hungry, for we have tasted the bread of life, the divine sustenance.

beauty through heat

Last week at church camp I got to play with porcelain and leaves. A class was offered on making porcelain pieces using found natural objects. It was a lot of fun, and the picture above is of the pieces I made, a necklace and another leaf that I’m not quite sure what I want to do with yet.

It was a fascinating process because we all started out with a bunch of leaves and some liquid porcelain, and ended up with these gorgeous creations. In between, I was doubtful that the strange-looking, rough, plain white leafy-looking things that we all had would turn out to be anything close to the beautiful creations our instructor/mentor Linda had as samples. Painting-on grey-looking glaze that was supposed to turn into beautiful colours felt like an act of faith, since the glaze didn’t really look very exciting.

And then everything got fired, in a kiln, at extreme temperatures.

And it was all transformed.

Out of the kiln came these spectacular, lustrous, brightly coloured, variously beautiful pieces of art, with dark veins and glossy ridges and spectrums of colours. For me, these leaves became a metaphor for the community we created during our week at camp.

We all arrived looking fairly plain and ordinary, like those white, rough, unfinished leaves, but with some hard work together, the glaze of community life together and then the fiery heat of Divine Love, we became beautiful, shiny, new creations, each spectacular, each unique, each transformed.

saints herald

I am now participating in a group blog called Saints Herald. It’s a group of young adults in the Community of Christ church who have something to say about their church.

Come on by for a visit: http://saintsherald.com/

prayer

…Be awake to the Life
That is loving you and
Sing your prayer, laugh your prayer,
Dance your prayer, run
And weep and sweat your prayer,
Sleep your prayer, eat your prayer,
Sweep, dig, rake, drive and hoe your prayer,
Garden and farm and build and clean your prayer,
Wash, iron, vacuum, sew, embroider and pickle your prayer,
Compute, touch, bend and fold but never delete your prayer.
Learn and play your prayer,
Work and rest your prayer,
Fast and feast your prayer,
Argue, talk, whisper, listen and shout your prayer,
Groan and moan and spit and sneeze your prayer,
Swim and hunt and cook your prayer,
Digest and become your prayer,
Release and recover your prayer,
Breathe your prayer,
Be your prayer.

From Life Prayers by E. Roberts & E. Amidon

salvation through kinship

I have been watching a lot of this show – Big Love – lately, and have been thinking a lot about the ideas around salvation that its characters and their context(s) have. In case you are not familiar with it, it is a show about a suburban polygamist family, with three wives living in houses side-by-side, each with their own children, and the husband going back and forth between the houses. The wives share the responsibilities for cooking, caring for one another’s children, and home-keeping. It is about their struggles with their pasts, their struggle to fit-in and appear “normal”, their struggles with the complexities of their relationship, and their attempts to be faithful to “The Principle” of plural marriage that they feel is their spiritual and religious calling, by way of their own interpretation of the tradition of Joseph Smith. (sideline: this show fits surprisingly well into the current milieu in the US and Canada of self-created new-age type religious or spiritual pursuits, where the only authority is God/higher power/divine energy and then the self to interpret, with no accountability to traditions or other persons.)

In many ways, more than anything else I think I would sum it up as being a show about desire. There’s the sexual side of desire that’s depicted – both for the adults and the teenagers in the show. There’s the consumerist-culture aspect of desire that’s depicted in one character’s compulsive online shopping and subsequent gambling compulsion. There’s the desire for success in business and enterprise that the husband in the show is constantly pursuing. There’s a desire for family and meaningful community that I think hooks the desire of the viewer as the idealized shared suburban home-stead is depicted. There’s a desire for acceptance and love that every character seems to be pursuing. There is also a desire for salvation, for eternal life, that characters often remind themselves and each other of as being the primary reason that they are engaged in this often difficult and complex family grouping. I think these various desires, their honest depiction and the forthright way they’re addressed, are what really make the show compelling – who among us can’t identify with desire, misplaced or otherwise, and the problematic pursuit of its fulfillment?

In many of the churches that trace their history to Joseph Smith (“Restoration” traditions, if you will, named for their pursuit of restoring Christ’s church to a perceived earlier and more accurate form), one’s salvation rests heavily on or in one’s family. If one isn’t at least married, and hopefully with children, one is risking one’s mortal soul. In Big Love we view an extreme playing-out of this situation, where the reward of ruling a planet comes to men who have multiple wives. But even in the more socially-acceptable, non-polygamist “regular” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, family in the here and nowis essential to one’s everlasting life later on.

I would say that in my denomination, which comes from the same Restoration tradition, there are still lingering idea(l)s of the necessity of family for salvation. I know many single people (including myself) in the church who have experienced pressure to find a (heteronormative) relationship and get married – even when that pressure is presented as seemingly “well-meaning” assumptions. I also know several married couples who have experienced pressure to have children, regardless of their own desires or abilities to include children in their family circle. Of course, people would never tell one another that their lack of spouse and family is a threat to their salvation, but nonetheless I think these pressures are the residue of the family-as-salvation formula that is found in the early Restoration churches.

While it’s problematics are clear to me, the salvation-through-kinship formula has a certain amount of pull on my own desires. For me, the two primary problematics are: the focus on salvation as something for the afterlife, rather than a work God is carrying out here and now; and the heteronormative assumptions about family that the formula prescribes. Both of these, I think, can actually be unbound from the tradition by using the tradition itself in creative and redemptive ways!

The idea of salvation as only being something for the afterlife is one that can even be taken apart by the Gospels, where Jesus talks about the “Kin(g)dom” that is already among us as well as being as-yet-unfulfilled. Joseph Smith had a focus on the importance of place and attempting to live here and now as if we are in God’s promised future – “Zion”. The heteronormative family-form prescription can, I would dangerously venture to suggest, be taken apart with the tradition’s most problematic and often embarrassing practice of polygamy. Now, let’s be clear, polygamy is not an ideal! Its assumptions about male patriarchal power, female submissiveness, and hierarchical placement of wives all make it very troublesome. However, what I am saying is that it is a way of having a non-normative family whose formation is grounded (ideally!) in the pursuit of a spiritual calling, a call to live in communion with others, rather than the pursuit of relationships and family for personal gain.

These thoughts of mine are still in their infancy, and I recognize their dry, tinderbox character that could easily be ignited by carelessness. However, I think it is high time we started talking more openly about how our sex lives, family lives, and desires influence and relate to our salvation, or our perception of our salvation. Perhaps by reclaiming the idea of kinship, of communion as location for salvation, and being more conscious of our desires and their both positive and negative pulls on our lives, we can move forward in paths of Christian discipleship that stand more strongly in the face of a far too individualistic and materialistic culture.