ministry of reconcilation

Today I am lead to consider reconciliation. I am tempted to say that I am more familiar than most with fractured communication and estrangement, but I think it more truthful to say that these are aspects of the universal human condition. Every plate is filled with a helping of estrangement. Without exception, I imagine.

Our first estrangement is from God and we are not reconciled until Christ stands between the people of earth and the Person of Heaven and propitiates for our sin. It seems that once the fundamental reconciliation is begun, we cannot help but long to be reconciled with ourselves, with nature and with other people.  I long for these reconciliations and the restitution of our prelapsarian glory. Don't you see it sometimes? Doesn't it make you sure that you will see it again? I long for the coming of the Kingdom in truth and fact and in the recesses of my heart.

I'm wondering if this unsheathed longing is a fundamental aspect of my observation of Lent this year. I'm hoping to consider it as Easter approaches and I'm hoping to consciously submit myself to this longing for the restoration of the human relationships I've lost. I will pray about this fervently and see what will come of it.

St. Paul writes in 2nd Corinthians 5 about the "ministry of reconciliation" granted to every believer who has been/is being/will be reconciled to God through the work of Christ. It's a mystery ministry and I'm not sure what it means. But I like that idea. I like the idea that we can at once show other people how we were reconciled to God and participate in that reconciliation in some way.

The more I think about the riches of God and the idea that we as believers are co-heirs with Christ the more I am absolutely gobsmacked at the earthly power we are afforded and with my own complete inadequacy. I feel like an ant with a really large sword.

The Bells of Highlands UMC

This day began with an explosion of the scatological variety, last-minute ironing and burned breakfast. I'm not a "morning person" on the best days and by "morning person" I mean that I sometimes find it difficult to wake up at 4:30 am which is when the alarm clock rings. (So, don't get all judgmental on me you sad wake-up-at-seven sacks.)  I felt anxious and harried and it was difficult to keep my composure and stay in the moment. But when I went outside with the trash, I actually heard the bells ringing at the Methodist Church about a mile away. They rang for an unusually long time and I lifted my hands in prayer to receive that blessing that must have been borne on some strange wisp of cloud. I came inside a different person.

Christ was. Christ is. Christ will be. Present in the moments. A fully-attentive father. Amen.

Olivet Mantra

I hired a landscape designer who came with her graph paper and fancy pen and sketched a plan for the Quintessential Southern Cottage Garden. My excitement knows no bounds.

I am concentrating on my life as the papier-mâché that I form around the values of simplicity, joy, and beauty. Beauty is the superlative of godliness.  God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.  

My life isn't simple, but I strive to pause to savor the pleasure of simplicity as a sort of meditative practice. Form in function. And art in a pot of strawberry preserves or a sleek pimento-stuffed olive (or five) bobbing languidly in a martini of the filthy variety. 

Hawks. Wind. Mystery.

Photo from here.

This morning, I stepped outside and saw my broad winged hawks surfing the currents between the television towers on Red Mountain. They aren't all that common in Birmingham, but I often see these two on the mountain. I think they pick up some of the smaller birds who hit the guy wires on the towers.

The wind is whipping across the mountain today. We're gonna have some weather.

The hawks and the wind are messengers and to me they say that I am seen and known and useful. 

I am amazed at the mystery in the world.

What the Refrigerator Said

When you live in a 100-year-old house, you're not just living in your house—you're living in the house built and re-built over the years by the people who lived there before you. You'll find little quirks everywhere. In our house, for example, there are notes written on the basement support beams from an apparently absent-minded carpenter who built a table in 1954. (He dated his notes. Maybe thinking of the moment I would find them?) I found a bag of pipe cleaners and a very strange antique key taped under a shelf in my butler's pantry. I found a strange little poem wadded up and stuffed in the door. At one point, I think we even shared the house with the original owners, but that's another post. What I want to write about now is the refrigerator.  When we bought this house (our first) we were thrilled that it came with a REFRIGERATOR! We didn't have any extra money and didn't want to have to buy one for ourselves. Well, six years and two babies later, we're still living in our little house and we're still living with our little fridge. But she isn't the hard-working help meet she used to be. Now, she's more like a cranky grandma who likes to freeze your kale or let your cream get glumpy depending on what direction you shoved the milk jug. So, I start to wonder if refrigerators, like cocker spaniels, take on the personalities of their original owners. I start to wonder if this particular refrigerator had an abusive childhood.

Yesterday, as I got myself geared up to make a delicious Orange-Banana-Wheat Germ smoothie, I realized that my delicious Greek yogurt was frozen solid. (And I have no doubt that this was caused by a less-than-precise restocking of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, but that too is another post.) Dammit. I said. Dammit yogurt. Dammit fridge. Dammit real-estate market. Dammit President Obama. (But, I didn't of course, blame Wall Street. That would be silly. It isn't their fault.) Suddenly, I heard in my spirit, the voice of Jesus whispering to the tempest of my emotions and I complied to His suggestion. Thank you fridge. I said out loud.  Thank you for this opportunity to be inconvenienced. Thank you for this speed bump.  In my heart I said, Thank you for this opportunity to learn. What do you have to teach me refrigerator? I am willing to hear. 


I think the point that Jesus was making is that all of those little sandpapery inconveniences we experience on any given day (my cable is out! my tire is flat!) are opportunities for refinement. And we need to submit to them. Yeah, like face them head-on and ask what they have to offer. Because I believe, I really believe, that they have lessons to teach. So I shouldn't gloss them over. I should give them an opportunity to re-direct and refocus. I'm going to try and do that from now on. But I warn you now, it's probably going to make me late sometimes. And through this, I start to see what a truly pernicious sin it is to complain. It's rejecting the teacher of your circumstances. I'm going to try and stop complaining, even to myself. And, after all, those of you who know me know I don't have much to complain about anyway.

I'm going to take this posture of learning into my study of scriptures, too. Yesterday, the suggestion was planted in my mind by a radio program to really spend some time wading through Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Sounds great, right? But it is an incredibly difficult text. (And this from a lover of difficult texts.) For me, the problem of reading scripture is always compounded by these simple facts: 1) I'm reading in translation 2) I'm reading completely out of cultural context and 3) thematically, well, Jesus is just kind of all over the place.  If I were reading Scripture to teach or write about, I would be scared. But I'm reading it as a map for life, so that's not scary—it's terrifying. As I do my first reading this morning, I think of myself flinging the bulk of my body against a hard metal grate. I may pass through this grate into understanding, but I ain't gonna do it in one piece. You see what I mean? My worldview is going to be fragmented when I'm finished. Yet, there is Jesus peeping from the corners coaxing me like a mama coaxing a baby off the first step of the swimming pool ladder. Come on, He says. You can do it. I'm right here. The water is warm. You've just never done it before.

So, I think I'm going to try. I hope you'll read my rambles as I continue to struggle with this passage and with my household appliances. For each struggle has it's purpose in Life and Godliness. And Home Economics, I'm sure.

May the Lord of Peace Himself give you peace in every way,

susan

Seventy times Seven

Christ and the Penitent Sinners. Peter Paul Rubens.

Then Peter came up to him and said "Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As may as seven times?" Jesus said to him "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven." Matthew 18:21&22

Peter might have thought he was being generous by being willing to forgive his brother seven times, but it seems that Jesus had more in mind. As always. Jesus has more.

For years I've prayed that God would help me understand what it really means to forgive someone. I've never heard a definition that sounded right to my soul. But I think it has something to do with being willing to follow Christ into and through his process of redemption. Maybe it has something to do with taking metaphorical hands off the wheel and allowing redemption to happen. Like grass growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. And knowing, really knowing, that Christ is redeeming the world. And being glad that love doesn't have to do with punishment or fear. 

So, today, I ask Jesus "Lord, how many times to I have to say I'm sorry to my brother? As many as seven times?" And Jesus says to me, "I do not say to you seven times. But seventy times seven." 

I've long prided myself on my ability to admit when I'm wrong and apologize (I hope you can read the irony in that idea). But I don't like to apologize more than once. Once should do. If I apologize once and you don't forgive me, that's your problem. And if you ask me to apologize twice, I might beat the snot out of you. Well, not really, but metaphorically. Unless I haven't had my coffee. 

But the proverbial rub seems to lie in the fact that sometimes it needs to be said more than once because it needs to be heard more than once. And sometimes, I've got to suck it up and apologize. Once. Twice. Three times. One hundred and forty-four times.  It feels like dying. And it is. It's dying to the belief that I deserve forgiveness. That I am capable of doing it right. I don't and I can't. And sometimes, I need to be sorry about it and say so. More than once.

I think about the Christian life and how it often feels like the Christian death. Death to what feels like living, but is really leading me to spiritual death. I wonder if at the end of my life, I'll think "This is death? I've done this a hundred times." I hope so.

Mystic Chickens

Chickens on the Porch Kristen Reitz-Green

                                                      

The summer we left Red Mountain Church, I hauled one of our dining room chairs out on the back porch and sat in the shade eating Girl Scout cookies and reading every single cult-escape narrative in the Social Sciences section of the Birmingham Public Library. One day, months later, if finally dawned on me what the heck I was doing. It's funny how our brains and emotions team up like that but keep the conscious part of our minds from understanding until we can handle it. Maybe, that's what denial really is. (Or, maybe it IS a river in Egypt.) 

Evelyn Underhill writes that one of the most important aspects of the mystical life is drawing every shard of our fragmented identities together into One Unified Whole and then learning how to focus the mental energies of that singular identity on the contemplation of one overarching Other. I picture myself, leaning off the porch, calling "Chick Chick Chick! Come home, chickens!" And seeing every birdbrained aspect of my identity come rolling out from under the porch, off the doghouse, around the side of the barn looking at me with  little red combs a-jangle like "what now, pops?" It's a daunting proposition.

I am feeling especially fragmented. And when I feel like this, I want to look at something wise and knowing and I want to pull myself together with someone else's string. I want to hear someone tell me what to do when A happens to B and yields C.  The jumbled prose of my life clunks along and drags like the fiddle in a Hank Williams song and I want it to SNAP to attention like a Marine Recruit and transmogrify itself into some kind of mathematical equation. It's funny that the more my brain gets like that the more I want some kind of Totality to tell me what to do. Ironic I suppose, because when I look back on those times I almost hear the buzz of the real potentiality of my naked identity hopping out of the self-crafted crate of conformity I've stuffed it in and running around the yard (with it's head off?).

And the problem I invariably encounter—whether it be with Catholic theology or Quiverfull ideas of submission and family or even the Holy Bible itself—is that I connect all the dots and still can't quite tell what the picture is supposed to be. No one, I think, is in my tree. So sometimes I just sit and look at one leaf of the White Oak tree outside my window and I call hard to that overarching Other and I wait for him to tell me what to do. And sometimes he does. But sometimes, I make that mystical connection that we've all made by accident around the fire at camp or on the front porch with friends or listening to music or contemplating the nature of a really good dog, and I do feel transported to some kind of liminal place between the earth and where He is. And it's then, if I can be bold enough to say it without being accused of deifying myself, (God forbid!) that I'm really at home inside my soul.