We Awaken in Christ's Body

We awaken in Christ’s body, even as Christ

awakens our languishing bodies. And look!
My poor hand is Christ, the very hand of Christ.
And look! He enters my foot, and becomes
without conclusion, me. I reach out my hand and, full
of wonder, my hand becomes Christ, becomes
all of him—for he remains indivisibly whole,
without separation from his eternal holiness.
I take one step, my foot advancing, and look!
He is revealed as a flash of lightning, there
proceeding with my lowly foot.
Do you think I blaspheme? Then open
your heart to him, and receive the one who is ever
opening to you, and opening ever so deeply.
If we love him as we say, we wake up
in his body, even here, where our own bodies, entire,
every lash and atom, the honored and the dishonored,
are realized as his, are realized as him. And look!
He makes us—at long last—utterly real, and everything
that is hurt, all that has appeared to us as dark, as broken,
diseased, shameful, ugly, irreparably torn
is in him transfigured, and is revealed as whole,
lovely, illumined with and by and in his light.
And look, we rise from our long sleep, bearing the beloved
with our every step.


--Saint Simeon the New Theologian, 10th century

The Paradox of the Cross and the Eucharist

The cultic division between the religious and the profane is potentially abolished in faith in the Christ who was profaned by crucifixion. Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with “sinners and publicans,” must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the “highways and hedges” of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are members of the same denomination.  

The Christian Church can reintroduce the divisions between the religious and the profane and between those who are within an those are without, only at the price of losing its own identity as the Church of the crucified Christ …. 

It is the godless, forced out by the church, who recognized the inner distinction between the reality of the cross on Golgotha and its cultic representation within the church. Thus for the faith which believe believes in and celebrates the representation of the crucified Christ as a reality in the sacrifice of the mass, it is also indispensable to be aware once again of this inner distinction. 

 

--Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 44-45. 

Meditation on "Give us this day our daily bread:

Praying for our daily bread is asking to be reacquainted with our vulnerability, to learn how to approach not only God but each other, with our hands open. So to pray this prayer with integrity, we need to be thinking about the various ways in which we defend ourselves against the need to open our hands. We cannot fully and freely pray for our daily bread when we are wedded inseparably to our own rightness or righteousness, any more than we can when we are wedded to our own security or prosperity. And perhaps this explains why the Lord’s Prayer at once goes on to pray for forgiveness – or rather for the gift of being forgiven as we have learned to forgive. 

The person who asks forgiveness has renounced the privilege of being right or safe; she has acknowledged that she is hungry for healing, for the bread of acceptance and restoration to relationship. But equally the person who forgives has renounced the safety of being locked into the position of the offended victim; she has decided to take the risk of creating afresh a relationship known to be capable of involving hurt. Both the giver and the receiver of forgiveness have moved out of the safety zone; they have begun to ask how to receive their humanity as a gift.

Forgiveness is one of the most radical ways in which we are able to nourish one another’s humanity. When offence is given and hurt is done, the customary human response is withdrawal, the reinforcing of the walls of the private self, with all that this implies about asserting one’s own humanity as a possession rather than receiving it as gift. The unforgiven and the unforgiving cannot see the other as people who are part of God’s work of bestowing humanity on them. To forgive and to be forgiven is to allow yourself to be humanized by those whom you may least want to receive as signs of God’s gift; and this process is deeply connected with the prayer for daily bread. 

-- Rowan Williams (1950- ). Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life, chapter 3.

The Meaning of Incarnation

... Jesus is the one in whom God's relationship with us attains perfection. In Jesus, unity with God takes a perfect form; here humanity has become God's own. That is the fundamental meaning of the incarnation, of God's becoming human.... The point of incarnation is therefore, as it was for the early Greek Fathers, the perfection of humanity; this is human-centered Christology  just because it is an incarnation centered one. By way of this perfected humanity in union with God, God's gifts are distributed to us-- we are saved-- just to the extent that we are one with Christ in faith and love; unity with Christ the gift-giver  is the means of our perfection as human beings, just as the union of humanity and divinity in Christ was the means of his perfect humanity. United with Christ, we are thereby emboldened as ministers of God's beneficence to the world, aligning ourselves with, entering unto communion with, those in need as in Christ was for us in our need and as Christ was a man for others, especially those in need.

--Kathryn Tanner (1957- ), American Episcopal theologian and professor, in Jesus, Humanity and Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology, p. 9

Love is the essence of life

'And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.' Wonderful as our faith is, it will be of no further value when we stand in the very presence of God. Necessary as hope is in a world where we need every source of courage we can find, it is of no further application in the age to come. But there is no replacement for love. Love is the essence of the life of the age to come. And it is the element in our life here and now that already brings us most certainly into the presence of that new and blessed age.

-- L. William Countryman (1941-  ), Episcopal priest and professor of Biblical Studies, from Calling on the Spirit in Unsettling Times: Anglican Present and Future, 2012, p. 16.

Scriptural reference: 1 Corinthians 13:13

The Worship of the Universe

Whose ear has ever heard how all trees sing to God? Has our reason ever thought of calling upon the sun to praise the Lord? And yet, what the ear fails to perceive, what reason fails to conceive, our prayer makes clear to our souls. It is a higher truth, to be grasped by the spirit: ‘All Thy works praise Thee’ (Psalm 145:10). We are not alone in our acts of praise. Wherever there is life, there is silent worship. The world is always on the verge of becoming one in adoration. It is man who is the cantor of the universe, and in whose life the secret of cosmic prayer is disclosed.”

--Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, 82

At the River Clarion

1.
I don't know who God is exactly.
But I'll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a
          water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices
          of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck the stone it had
          something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing
          under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me
          what they were saying.
Said the river: I am part of holiness.
And I, too, said the stone. And I too, whispered
          the moss beneath the water.

I'd been to the river before, a few times.
Don't blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don't hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don't hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it's difficult to hear anything anyway, through
          all the traffic, and ambition.

2.
If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck.
He's also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then
          keep on going.
Imagine how the lily (who may also be a part of God)
          would sing to you if it could sing, if
                    you would pause to hear it.
And how are you so certain anyway that it doesn't sing?

If God exists he isn't just churches and mathematics.
He's the forest, he's the desert.
He's the ice caps, that are dying.
He's the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.
He's van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert
          Motherwell.
He's the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing
          their weapons.
He's every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politican,
          the poet.
And if this is true, isn't it something very important?

3.
Of course for each of us, there is the daily life.
Let us live it, gesture by gesture.
When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?
And should we not thank the knife, also?
We do not live in a simple world.

4.
There was someone I love who grew old and ill.
One by one I watched the fires go out.
There was nothing I could do

except to remember
that we receive
and then we give back.

5.
My dog Luke lies in a grave in the forest,
          and she is given back.
But the river Clarion still flows
          from wherever it comes from
                    to wherever it has been told to go.
I pray for the desperate earth.
I pray for the desperate world.
I do the little each person can do, it isn't much.
Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves.

6.
Along its shores were, may I say, very intense
          cardinal flowers.
And trees, and birds that have wings to uphold them,
          for heaven's sakes--
the lucky ones: they have such deep natures,
          they are so happily obedient.
While I sit here in a house filled with books,
          ideas, doubts, hesitations.

7.
And still, pressed deep into my mind, the river
          keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its
                    long journey, its pale, infallible voice
                              singing.


--Mary Oliver, (1935- ) from Evidence: Poems, 2009

Crazy Jane on God

That lover of a night
Came when he would,
Went in the dawning light
Whether I would or no;
Men come, men go;
All things remain in God.

Banners choke the sky;
Men-at-arms tread;
Armoured horses neigh
In the narrow pass:
All things remain in God.

Before their eyes a house
That from childhood stood
Uninhabited, ruinous,
Suddenly lit up
From door to top:
All things remain in God.

I had wild Jack for a lover;
Though like a road
That men pass over
My body makes no moan
But sings on:
All things remain in God.

--William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)