the all vulnerable God rings true...

For the past 40 years, an incremental exploration of theological images for God has been taking shape and form throughout the West. As Richard Rohr recently wrote: "I think we are in the beginnings of a Trinitarian Revolution. History has so long operated with a static and imperial image of God—as a Supreme Monarch and Critical Spectator living in splendid isolation from what he (and God is exclusively envisioned as male in this model) created. His love is perceived as unstable, whimsical, and preferential." This is not new to Christianity as Frederick Buechner's The Faces of Jesus should make that clear. This brilliant and accessible visual testimony documents the way our understanding of the one we call Christ has changed.

What is new is the creative depth and breadth of the movement to ground the gentleness of Jesus as the most authentic living icon of God. Let me suggest that this movement includes: the post WWII work of German theologians like Jurgen Moltmann and Dorothee Soelle; the intuitive albeit it heavy-handed insights of the "God is dead" writers; the playful but profound words of Matthew Fox; much of the feminist/womanist schools; the best from Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan; the confessional theology of Barbara Brown Taylor, Annie Dillard and Kathleen Norris; much of Henri Nouwen's writing; the life and writing of Jean Vanier; Rene Girard; as well as Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault. All of these writers and schools of thought - and more - have been struggling to do three things simultaneously: a) link the mystical tradition of Christianity to contemporary living; b) construct and articulate an understanding of the holy that bears witness to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus; and c) dismantle the violent legacy of empire that has shaped so much of Christian history and experience and replace it with Christ's tenderness. Rohr put it like this:  

Humans become like the God we worship. So it’s important that our God is good and life-giving. That’s why we desperately need a worldwide paradigm shift in Christian consciousness regarding how we perceive and relate to God. This shift has been subtly yet profoundly underway for some time, hiding in plain sight. In order to come together in politics and religion, to take seriously new scientific findings in biology and quantum physics, and for our species and our planet to even survive we must reclaim Relationship as the foundation and ground of everything.

Specifically, we must reclaim communion with Christianity's earliest wisdom that confesses that: "God’s power comes through powerlessness and humility. The Christian God is much more properly called all-vulnerable than almighty, which we should have suspected and intuited by the shocking metaphor “Lamb of God” found throughout the New Testament." Indeed, the work of René Girard re: the revelation that Jesus as the Lamb of God exposes what history looks like from the perspective of the scape goat - a challenge to claim solidarity and salvation from the experience of the vanquished rather than the victors - is essential for a new ethics let alone the well-being of creation. (For more insights, please see: http://www.imitatio. org/brief-intro)

Poets, of course, have long claimed the freedom to cherish the tender God that Jesus reveals. I think particularly of Mary Oliver, Lucille Clifton, Denise Levertov. Pam McAllister, Scott Cairns and Carrie Newcomer. Musicians like Newcomer, Springsteen and Bruce Coburn do similar creative work. And now there is vigorous theological energy for tenderness:

When you experience God as all-vulnerable, then perhaps God stands in solidarity with all pain and suffering in the universe, allowing us to be participants in our own healing. This does not make sense to the logical mind, but to the awakened soul it somehow does. (Rohr) It certainly does for me...

The Gift - Denise Levertov

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.