Last week brought our "Beatitudes for the Weird" series to a close. Here is the live stream from my weekly Sunday evening: "Small is Holy" on FB. Here, too, is my written text celebrating Krista Tippett and Padraig O'Tuama as two advocates for revolutionary grace. This coming Sunday, Transfiguration Sunday in my tradition, we'll consider the symbolism of the mystical mountain time before the descent into the silence of Lent. Please join me if you can @ 4 pm.
Every week, as I sit down at this desk to ponder why the words of ancient Scripture might matter to me and maybe you, I almost always experience the surprise of grace: it could be the grace of Jesus in the text or the grace of the sunlight upon the snow just outside my window; sometimes it’s the grace of a poem recently found or wonderfully rediscovered, the grace of a song or two that speaks to my heart, or simply the grace of silence. At the start of this week, knowing I would be wandering within the wisdom of Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama, I found myself singing once more a song Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote back in 2011 called, “Why Shouldn’t We?” I heard it first in a motel somewhere along the road – and loved it. But, as too often occurs, I lost track of it only to have it pop back into consciousness 11 years later as a gentle answer to one of my prayers. It goes in part like this:
I think the refrain, why shouldn’t we, expresses the heart of Jesus in St. Luke’s gospel for today: Why shouldn’t we act beyond our reptilian minds and learn to love our enemies? Why NOT be a person of grace rather than retaliation? What would it look like to imagine and then incarnate our deepest dreams of freedom, solidarity, and? You may say I’m dreamer… but I’m NOT the only one who wonders what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding. Why shouldn’t we, indeed. Poet and theologian, Padraig O’Tuama, put it like this in his poem: the facts of life.
This evening I want to share three essential take-aways with you from the appointed text as amplified and adorned by the insights Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama. They are two of my go-to wisdom keepers who, alongside Alana Levandowski, Richard Rohr, Parker Palmer, and Carrie New-comer, I often turn to in my quest to keep my heart and mind open. Their humor, humility, honesty, and humanity shine like a candle in the night for me.
And I’ve found that I need their guidance and integrity to help me stay grounded within the God’s grace. Once, while driving home from L’Arche Ottawa at about this time of year, I heard Ms. Tippett interview the lyric poet, Gregory Orr. His work was new to me while his anguish was all too familiar. In the middle of their conversation, as I cruised through the washed out frozen greys and browns of winter along Interstate 81 in upstate NY, Orr offered this qualification to his agnosticism which I heard not as negation but rather a brilliant contemporary proclamation of faith: “To be alive: not just the carcass, but the spark” he said. “That’s crudely put, but if we’re not supposed to dance... why all this music?”
Oh, Precious Lord: do words get any BETTER than that? I think NOT. Since that
day I’ve been indebted to Krista Tippett’s weird, blessed calling to celebrate the linkage publicly and creatively between science, spirituality, and the arts. Both she and O’Tuama give shape and form to Carpenter’s refrain: Why Shouldn’t We? So, pray with me now as I use a prayer from the Corrymela com-munity that O’Tuama once shepherded: God of our comforts, O God of our discomforts: give our eyes the sense to see when we've had too much. And give our arms the strength to share a load no one should carry. You came to us when we didn't care and now we fear you'll go. May your peace not come with easy security, but with questions that really dig in and make us whole. In the spirit of all that is holy: Amen.
There are three grace-filled insights from today’s gospel according to St. Luke that strike me as simultaneously radical in practice and revolutionary for culture. Sadly, over the years they’ve been obscured, diminished, and domesticated by sentimentality and bourgeois piety. But they once turned the world upside down in South Africa under apartheid and did much the same thing when incarnated in our own Civil Rights movement during the 60’s – so why shouldn’t they do so again? You see, matter how rigorously we’ve tried to render these words tame, reducing them to an emasculated Golden Rule or guide to a fair and balanced return on investments, God refuses to repeal the revolutionary, nonviolent love that is the essence of grace in lives lived authentically. When Jesus told us to, “Be merciful, that is generous with compassion, as our spiritual Father is merciful,” he was NOT asking us to play nice. He was advising us to quit keeping score so that our world might be saturated with blessings instead of blood lust and revenge. I want to start at the conclusion of this text and work backwards to describe the interrelated truths woven in to the tapestry of a grace-filled spirituality.
· First, Jesus insists that living into the way of the Lord is NOT about fairness: “If you do good to just those who do good to you, where’s the grace in that” he asks? Let’s be clear that he did NOT say, “where’s the credit in that” as contemporary English Bibles put it. That reduces revolutionary love to a commodity that can be doled out according to equity. Rather, Jesus speaks of charis – GRACE – the compassionate tenderness God freely distributes beyond all calculations and quid pro quos. Grace is NEVER fair and ALWAYS trumps karma for grace is love “above and beyond gratuitous giving.”
· We tend to limit the focus of grace to, “the unmerited, saving love of God” – which it is – but it is also “at the same time, the love Jesus calls us to live out, not as gods or angels, but as ‘child-ren of the Most High,’ human beings created in God’s image.” That means when we live and love without keeping score, “being merciful, just as God is merciful, we’re embodying what theologians call, ‘the imago Dei” as our flesh incarnates God’s spirit. And just so that we don’t miss this truth, Jesus restates it three times: “If you love only those who love you, what grace – charis – have you?”, or better still, “what grace is there in that? Like a drumbeat, he says: What grace is there in that? What grace is there in that? What grace is there in that?” (SALT resource)
Telling those who gathered then – and those who gather now – that grace is how God’s children take on the image of their heavenly Father and Mother, Jesus said that that loving gracefully is how we practice charis – and the more we practice the better the image of God’s Charis” becomes flesh within and among us. Bible scholars want us to know that this is Christ’s “critique of reciprocity (for even sinners take care of their own!) Being “fair” is precisely what God’s love is not… God’s love goes above-and-beyond reciprocity.” The educators at the SALT Project suggest that in this passage Jesus is: Recommending an “unfair” kind of love, an extravagance that benefits not the one who benefits you, but the one who opposes you; or indeed, that gives more to a thief than the thief takes in the first place! There’s a playful spirit of hyperbole darting in and out of these ideas, as if they’re designed to evoke a kind of absurd, ecstatic state of generosity, a state of pure mercy, a state of grace.
Social scientist, Peter Steinke, offers some perspective on the subversive nature of gracious love writing that: when human beings first experience a threat, “self-preservation has more relevance for survival than self-awareness. ”Long before we could ever talk or think, we called on automatic processes for survival. We call on them again and again. Besides, they act faster than the thinking processes. When we are anxious, we act before we think. The Automatic Pilot joins forces with the House of Emotion and dominates. In a reptilian regression our behavior is not mediated through the neocortex. Anxious, we are apt to lose objectivity and civility. We are in a position to be neither responsible nor loving… (for) reason and love are best served in times of calm. In periods of intense anxiety, what is most needed is what is most unavailable: the capacity to be imaginative."
Or to use the words of Jesus: our commitment to live as children of the Most High, humble and human fonts of compassion baptized into the heart of grace,” who strive to live beyond naked self-interest. That’s one of the reasons, I believe, both Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama share weekly radio broadcasts and podcasts. They know we all need times of quiet contemplation, sanctuaries of serenity, where we can calmly listen to the ideas of radical love, think about them, and then discern ways to practice and implement them into our everyday, ordinary walking around lives. In her first book, Speaking of Faith, Tippett wrote: “For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well to understand the whole story of religion in our world.”
In the first interview I heard between Ms. Tippett and O’Tuama, he spoke of walking the 14 stations of the cross every day for years: “I find in them the hope to live courageously when everything, even your own self, fails. In the midst of the difficulty of the time the Stations recollect, I find echoes of a life lived well, a life that was open to the surprise of the unexpected, the truth of a story. I also hear echoes of the impulses towards my own violence and blame mechanisms.” So, every day, he practiced looking for grace in the suffering of the world, owning the agony as well as the solace, and feeling from the inside out what it meant to consciously become a child of the Most High God. O’Tuama incrementally discovered while walking the stations of the cross that this was a spiritual discipline beyond words. An embodied prayer. Each of the 14 traditional stations of the cross do have stories to go with them, of course, words from, “the journey of Jesus from his condemnation to his death,” but they are presented with “images that give us stopping points for our consideration.”
“This points to a need in people,” O’Tuama notes, “to put chapters and stopping points to stories of devotion and meaning. To freeze the frame like this helps the person to put themselves at the heart of a text or in an unnoticed corner of the story or even an ignored point of view. By taking the stories of our tradition and putting personal stations to them... a dialogue between the individual and the story takes place and something called prayer emerges in the thin places between the person and the story. We encounter the heart,” he adds, “the place where the wisdom we didn’t know can greet us… and we can greet that which we call God.” One of the prayers O’Tuama crafted for his retelling of the stations of the cross says: O God of the accused and the accusing, who made the mouth, the ear, and the heart of all in conflict. May we turn ourselves towards that which must be heard, because there we will hear your voice. Amen.
We believe in things that we cannot see:
Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?
Hands that heal can set a chained man free:
Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?
We believe in things they say we cannot change:
Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?
We had heroes once and we will again:
Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?
So come on darling, feel your spirits rise;
Come on children, open up your eyes
God is all around, Buddha's at the gate,
Allah hears your prayers, it's not too late
And we believe in things that can't be done:
Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?
Lift up your heart, put down your gun:
Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?
Come on darling – come on children -
God is all around, Buddha's at the gate,
Allah hears your prayers, it's not too late – why shouldn’t we?
I think the refrain, why shouldn’t we, expresses the heart of Jesus in St. Luke’s gospel for today: Why shouldn’t we act beyond our reptilian minds and learn to love our enemies? Why NOT be a person of grace rather than retaliation? What would it look like to imagine and then incarnate our deepest dreams of freedom, solidarity, and? You may say I’m dreamer… but I’m NOT the only one who wonders what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding. Why shouldn’t we, indeed. Poet and theologian, Padraig O’Tuama, put it like this in his poem: the facts of life.
That you were born - and you will die.
That you will sometimes love enough - and sometimes not.
That you will lie – if only to yourself. That you will get tired.
That you will learn most from the situations you did not choose.
That there will be some things that move you more than you can say.
That you will live – that you must be loved.
That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.
That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg of two people who once were strangers – and may well still be. That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good and sometimes better than good.
That life is often not so good. That life is real and if you can survive it, well, survive it well with love and art and meaning given where meaning’s scarce. That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.
That the structures that constrict you may not be permanently constraining. That you will probably be okay.
That you must accept change before you die but you will die anyway.
So, you might as well live and you might as well love.
You might as well love. You might as well love.
This evening I want to share three essential take-aways with you from the appointed text as amplified and adorned by the insights Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama. They are two of my go-to wisdom keepers who, alongside Alana Levandowski, Richard Rohr, Parker Palmer, and Carrie New-comer, I often turn to in my quest to keep my heart and mind open. Their humor, humility, honesty, and humanity shine like a candle in the night for me.
And I’ve found that I need their guidance and integrity to help me stay grounded within the God’s grace. Once, while driving home from L’Arche Ottawa at about this time of year, I heard Ms. Tippett interview the lyric poet, Gregory Orr. His work was new to me while his anguish was all too familiar. In the middle of their conversation, as I cruised through the washed out frozen greys and browns of winter along Interstate 81 in upstate NY, Orr offered this qualification to his agnosticism which I heard not as negation but rather a brilliant contemporary proclamation of faith: “To be alive: not just the carcass, but the spark” he said. “That’s crudely put, but if we’re not supposed to dance... why all this music?”
Oh, Precious Lord: do words get any BETTER than that? I think NOT. Since that
There are three grace-filled insights from today’s gospel according to St. Luke that strike me as simultaneously radical in practice and revolutionary for culture. Sadly, over the years they’ve been obscured, diminished, and domesticated by sentimentality and bourgeois piety. But they once turned the world upside down in South Africa under apartheid and did much the same thing when incarnated in our own Civil Rights movement during the 60’s – so why shouldn’t they do so again? You see, matter how rigorously we’ve tried to render these words tame, reducing them to an emasculated Golden Rule or guide to a fair and balanced return on investments, God refuses to repeal the revolutionary, nonviolent love that is the essence of grace in lives lived authentically. When Jesus told us to, “Be merciful, that is generous with compassion, as our spiritual Father is merciful,” he was NOT asking us to play nice. He was advising us to quit keeping score so that our world might be saturated with blessings instead of blood lust and revenge. I want to start at the conclusion of this text and work backwards to describe the interrelated truths woven in to the tapestry of a grace-filled spirituality.
· First, Jesus insists that living into the way of the Lord is NOT about fairness: “If you do good to just those who do good to you, where’s the grace in that” he asks? Let’s be clear that he did NOT say, “where’s the credit in that” as contemporary English Bibles put it. That reduces revolutionary love to a commodity that can be doled out according to equity. Rather, Jesus speaks of charis – GRACE – the compassionate tenderness God freely distributes beyond all calculations and quid pro quos. Grace is NEVER fair and ALWAYS trumps karma for grace is love “above and beyond gratuitous giving.”
· We tend to limit the focus of grace to, “the unmerited, saving love of God” – which it is – but it is also “at the same time, the love Jesus calls us to live out, not as gods or angels, but as ‘child-ren of the Most High,’ human beings created in God’s image.” That means when we live and love without keeping score, “being merciful, just as God is merciful, we’re embodying what theologians call, ‘the imago Dei” as our flesh incarnates God’s spirit. And just so that we don’t miss this truth, Jesus restates it three times: “If you love only those who love you, what grace – charis – have you?”, or better still, “what grace is there in that? Like a drumbeat, he says: What grace is there in that? What grace is there in that? What grace is there in that?” (SALT resource)
Telling those who gathered then – and those who gather now – that grace is how God’s children take on the image of their heavenly Father and Mother, Jesus said that that loving gracefully is how we practice charis – and the more we practice the better the image of God’s Charis” becomes flesh within and among us. Bible scholars want us to know that this is Christ’s “critique of reciprocity (for even sinners take care of their own!) Being “fair” is precisely what God’s love is not… God’s love goes above-and-beyond reciprocity.” The educators at the SALT Project suggest that in this passage Jesus is: Recommending an “unfair” kind of love, an extravagance that benefits not the one who benefits you, but the one who opposes you; or indeed, that gives more to a thief than the thief takes in the first place! There’s a playful spirit of hyperbole darting in and out of these ideas, as if they’re designed to evoke a kind of absurd, ecstatic state of generosity, a state of pure mercy, a state of grace.
Social scientist, Peter Steinke, offers some perspective on the subversive nature of gracious love writing that: when human beings first experience a threat, “self-preservation has more relevance for survival than self-awareness. ”Long before we could ever talk or think, we called on automatic processes for survival. We call on them again and again. Besides, they act faster than the thinking processes. When we are anxious, we act before we think. The Automatic Pilot joins forces with the House of Emotion and dominates. In a reptilian regression our behavior is not mediated through the neocortex. Anxious, we are apt to lose objectivity and civility. We are in a position to be neither responsible nor loving… (for) reason and love are best served in times of calm. In periods of intense anxiety, what is most needed is what is most unavailable: the capacity to be imaginative."
Or to use the words of Jesus: our commitment to live as children of the Most High, humble and human fonts of compassion baptized into the heart of grace,” who strive to live beyond naked self-interest. That’s one of the reasons, I believe, both Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama share weekly radio broadcasts and podcasts. They know we all need times of quiet contemplation, sanctuaries of serenity, where we can calmly listen to the ideas of radical love, think about them, and then discern ways to practice and implement them into our everyday, ordinary walking around lives. In her first book, Speaking of Faith, Tippett wrote: “For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well to understand the whole story of religion in our world.”
In the first interview I heard between Ms. Tippett and O’Tuama, he spoke of walking the 14 stations of the cross every day for years: “I find in them the hope to live courageously when everything, even your own self, fails. In the midst of the difficulty of the time the Stations recollect, I find echoes of a life lived well, a life that was open to the surprise of the unexpected, the truth of a story. I also hear echoes of the impulses towards my own violence and blame mechanisms.” So, every day, he practiced looking for grace in the suffering of the world, owning the agony as well as the solace, and feeling from the inside out what it meant to consciously become a child of the Most High God. O’Tuama incrementally discovered while walking the stations of the cross that this was a spiritual discipline beyond words. An embodied prayer. Each of the 14 traditional stations of the cross do have stories to go with them, of course, words from, “the journey of Jesus from his condemnation to his death,” but they are presented with “images that give us stopping points for our consideration.”
Serendipitously, I discovered that the prayers we use for our L’Arche Ottawa Good Friday stations of the cross are from O’Tuama. His witness is akin to the spirituality of L’Arche where the practice of refusing reciprocity and replacing it with gracious love if foundational. That’s the first insight.
A second has to do with practicing this spirituality of refusing to keep score. Jesus wants us to know that grace simultaneously encourages inner integrity and self-respect within people who have long been abused, hurt, oppressed and/or subjugated; and releases extravagant love into cultures too long driven by possession and violence. Grace is both an antidote to cruelty and greed as well as a spiritual discipline that strengthens self-esteem, inward resolve, and humble dignity. In St. Luke’s gospel, Jesus answers the question: how then shall we live saying:
Love your enemies: do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you, and offer those who strike, beg, or steal not retaliation but rather a startling form of assertive, flip-the-script giving. Here’s my other cheek, not just the first one; here’s my shirt, not just my coat (knowing that most people in Jesus’ audience wore just those two garments, a coat and a shirt); and here’s what you stole from me — keep it, it’s yours (Luke 6:29-30).
Without qualification, Jesus teaches us to: “love our enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). And this last idea, “expecting nothing in return,” is the key as, “Jesus challenges his listeners to love not as a strategy for gain, a quid quo pro, but rather for the sake of love itself, for the sake of the beloved” and one another. (SALT Bible resource)
You may know that Padraig O’Tuama, an out gay theologian and poet, once worked as the director of the Corrymela Community in Belfast, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community. It was founded in 1965 just before the so-called “Troubles” erupted again in public. Corrymela physically brings together people who have long mistrusted and even hated one an-other. The intent was: “not to seek to undo the differences but… slowly in the gathered space of cups of tea, shared meals, fireplaces, discussions, debates, disagreements, arguments and prayer to find new ways to name old pains.” O’Tuama put it like this: Listening is a sacrament when the topic is important, when strife divides people in small places, the sacrament of listening is vital. So many people in so many places in the world have difficult relationships with difference. We seek to practice the art of hospitality in the places of hostility and in so doing practice kindness in places most in need of kindness… we do this being shaped by the witness of Jesus who uncovered the hollow heart of victimization.
As a young, gay Irishman, O’Tuama knew what victimization meant from the inside out: both his Roman Catholic culture, and the evangelical sect he lived with for a period of time, loved his wit, his intellect, humor, and love but hated his sexuality. They even forced him to undergo sexual conversion therapy which is cruel, violent, and abusive all in the name of God’s love. In time, O’Tuama cried bullshit: bullshit on abusive religion, bullshit on the violence inflicted on the vulnerable in the name of love, and bullshit on all the spiritual traditions that degraded Christ’s commitment to grace. He distilled his new trust for Jesus alongside his rejection of religion in a poem from his book “readings from the book of exile.”
I used to need to know the end of every story
but these days I only need the start to get me going.
God is the crack where the story begins.
We are the crack where the story gets interesting.
We are the choice of where to begin – the person going out?
The stranger coming in?
God is the fracture, the ache in your voice,
God is the story flavored with choice.
God is the pillar of salt full of pity,
accusing God for the sulfurous city.
God is the woman who bleeds and who touches.
We are the story of courage or blushes.
God is the story of whatever works,
God is the twist at the end and the quirks.
We are the start, and we are the center,
we’re the characters, narrators, inventors.
God is the bit that we can’t explain –
maybe the healing, maybe the pain.
We are the bit that God can’t explain,
maybe the harmony, maybe the strain.
God is the plot, and we are the writers,
the story of winners, the story of fighters,
The story of love, and the story of rupture,
the story of stories, the story without structure.
O’Tuama, Wink, and Thurman maintain that Jesus wasn’t speaking hypothetically when asked: how do I love my enemy? He knew his people had been degraded by Roman occupation troops. His answers, therefore, assert a grace-filled moral jiu jitsu that resurrect inner dignity and incarnate outward freedom into what once looked like a no-win situation:
· Specifically, Jesus taught that if a soldier struck you across the face in an act of degradation you could retaliate – and be imprisoned. You might ignore decide to ignore the violence and internalize the shame. Or you could offer your other cheek as an act of resistance born of inward integrity.
· The same follows for the command to carry the pack of a soldier in the occupation’s army - one of many indignities relished by the mercenaries. Jesus advised loving non-cooperation that refused both denial and retaliation with grace. You have no power over me. You may order me to carry your gear for a mile but I choose to carry it for two because I am a child of the Most High God living into the image of my calling.
This was part of the spirituality shared with the resistance movement of South Africa that contributed to the collapse of apartheid. It is what Dr. King and others shared, too as they trained the real freedom convoys to dismantled Jim Crow segregation throughout the American South. And this is what Padraig O’Tuama incarnated in his recovery from the religious poison of homophobia as one of Northern Irelands healers and peacemakers: he practiced sharing love with himself so that he could share grace with others. Krista Tippett does much the same thing with her ON BEING radio projects. She vigorously searches and researches living examples of real people incarnating grace in this time and space. Serendipitously, her show this weekend welcomes two American Buddhists discussing how to love our enemies. She put it like this in her third book, Becoming Wise:
Spiritual humility is not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself. The questions that can lead us are already alive in our midst, waiting to be summoned and made real. It is a joy to name them. It is a gift to plant them in our senses, our bodies, the places we inhabit, the part of the world we can see and touch and help to heal. It is a relief to claim our love of each other and take that on as an adventure, a calling. It is a pleasure to wonder at the mystery we are and find delight in the vastness of reality that is embedded in our beings. It is a privilege to hold something robust and resilient called hope, which has the power to shift the world on its axis.
Tippett moved beyond the rigidity of her Southern Baptist literalism to celebrate compassion. O’Tuama deep sixed the fear, shame, and violence of Irish homophobia as foundational to real conflict resolution. I see them as celebrants of a 21st century spirituality which refuses to keep score. It chooses dignity over debasement and love over the multiplicity of ways hatred can infiltrate our hearts, traditions, and culture. Tippett often says: Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes a spiritual muscle of memory. I believe she’s on to something when she says:
The spiritual energy of our time, as I've come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades - law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions...they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and religion’s traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an in-effectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this the “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present.
There is a playful, tender invitation in today’s words from Jesus that encourages us NOT to make his insights into LAWS in the narrow sense – never “a dour list of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” – but more like a “provocative artist painting pictures of love, icons” of the stations of the cross that we can embody every day.” Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama show us that God is kind to the ungrateful and gracious to all whether we deserve it or not. They contend that because we are made in the image of God, nourishing and practicing gracious love is how that image matures within us. This embodied prayer is not only how we experience intimacy with the holy now, but how Thy will is done on earth as it is already done in heaven. My affirmation of faith today is clear:
Come on darlings, feel your spirit rise;
come on children, open up your eyes.
God is all around, Buddha’s at the gate,
Allah hears our prayers, it’s not too late
Why shouldn’t we – oh, why shouldn’t we.
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