disruptive grace

Following on from the last post…

“He told them still another parable: ‘The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.
Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable…”
[Matthew 13:33-34]

If Jesus is the exemplar of the reign of God, then he not only lived and spoke the truth of the kingdom, but he did so in the way and manner of the kingdom. His parables worked like small seeds, like yeast in dough: small and apparently inconsequential, unassuming, nonthreatening, unnoticed; and yet, as the reprocusions of them are worked out, as they find good soil, they grow, they grow in us and in our communities. This is the way of subversion, bottom up. Working inside out.

The invitation is there for us to be likewise subversive, still small voices in our communities, performing signs and telling stories, which work like yeast in dough, like mustard seeds in a garden.

The advantage of parables is that they allow us to think a-critically about the message conveyed. Parables by-pass our critical thinking, which tends to fight ideas head on. Critical thinking tend to assume only one idea can win, and so it fights for victory. Parables, however, invite us into their world and then leave us to explore the implications.

“Tell stories Christian” [Satine in 'Moulin Rouge']

If I asked you: “what do you want?” – how would you answer? How would I answer?

To get to know someone we will assume we need to know various things , “what do you know?”, “what do you believe?”, “what’s your job?”. We do this to investigate and evaluate people, socially, religiously and morally. But, what if the key question is “what do you want?” James K A Smith elaborates here:

James K.A. Smith – Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation from Calvin College on Vimeo.

Thanks to my brother Paul for the head up on this (again).

Thanks to my brother, I found this interview with the theologian Stanley Hauerwas. in this video he talks about his upbringing as a bricklayers son, his journey into theology, following Jesus and non-violence, the radical nature of having children, where are we ‘at home’, consumerism, life as gift, Christian-sentimental-”bullshit” [his words] and much more. It’s worth making time for.

‘She’s got her keys, money and fags’ ['Line Up' - Elastica]

[Note: for American readers 'fags' is British slang for cigarettes]

In my late teens a favorite group of mine sang of a girl ‘groupie’ going out on the town making sure she had her ‘keys, money and fags’ . “Keys, money, fags” became a personal catchphrase of mine at the time. Whenever I left the house, and particularly in the evenings, I would recite the motto, “keys, money, fags”, the list of essential items to have on my person outside the home, with these items I would be ok. The only flaw in the phrase being, I didn’t smoke, and didn’t carry any cigarettes. So in fact the phrase became, something like, “keys, money, fags… oh yeah I don’t smoke.” This mantra of sorts was complimented by a rhythmic patting on the various areas of my person which these items were located. Left pocket, right pocket, hands down and relax. “Keys, money, fags”.

During my mid-twenties a new object was added to the list of essential items, and so the motto became, “keys, money, phone” with corresponding body patting, — now more like a popular dance. A macarena. A modern man’s “spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch.” The later, of course, being a comical way of signing the points of the cross. Catholic school boy humour. Despite the irreverence, this gag marks our body with the way of Jesus, the way of self sacrifice, love, obedience, trust, and abandonment on God. A sharp contrast to my: “breast pocket, right pocket, left pocket, down”, the signing of the individual, marking the objects of self reliance. Keys, money, phone.

Habits and rituals shape us. The Jews place a ‘mezuzah’ on the door post of their house, a case containing the ‘Shema’. At each coming and going, they touch the ‘mezuzah’ expressing their love and respect for G-d. This not only helps define them as Jewish but also transforms them into people who are constantly aware of God. Every day I leave the front door and I mold myself a little more in the way of self. What person would I become if instead I marked myself with the way of Christ at each coming and going. What if I could risk forgetting my objects of self reliance? There but for the grace of God go I. Now there’s a good mantra.

I’ve broken a few rules which I set myself when I started this site. More recently I broken my intention not to blog on ‘church’ or ‘The Church’ etc. I find these subjects intensely interesting, but they’ve been given and a lot of attention on the web (and continue to be), and I don’t think I have anything to add which others haven’t already said. More importantly that was never supposed to be the emphasis nor the language of this site.

What I hoped this site would be is a recording and exploring of all this idea-stuff and this Love-stuff – with skin on, and made real in our world *. But, it’s not always easy to write about such things and sometimes its inappropriate. These are the lives of out friends, family and neighbors we’re talking about here, when it means the most – it’s deeply personal. Sometimes the stories are so mundane it would seem bizarre to record them, and yet these small stories, beautiful in there own overlooked-sort-of-way, are indeed part of something much, much bigger.

And so, I’ll point you to this wonderful post from the Mustard Seed, because at this time of year we remember that the Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood. The Creator became one with the created and this event was completely missed by those the world considered significant. The Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood, and so do we: The Reality of What We Do

I am very grateful for the reflective wisdom of Henri Nouwen and this collection on his meditations on the Church I find very helpful. Note that, Nouwen was a Catholic priest who lectured at many reputable Universities in the States, with a deep passion for justice particularly in regards to the (then current) situation in Latin America. Following this he went to serve as a member in a L’Arche community in Toronto for the rest of his life as a priest for the mentally handicapped.

Loving the Church
Loving the Church often seems close to impossible. Still, we must keep reminding ourselves that all people in the Church – whether powerful or powerless, conservative or progressive, tolerant or fanatic – belong to that long line of witnesses moving through this valley of tears, singing songs of praise and thanksgiving, listening to the voice of their Lord, and eating together from the bread that keeps multiplying as it is shared. When we remember that, we may be able to say, “I love the Church, and I am glad to belong to it.”

Loving the Church is our sacred duty. Without a true love for the Church, we cannot live in it in joy and peace. And without a true love for the Church, we cannot call people to it.

Meeting Christ in the Church
Loving the Church does not require romantic emotions. It requires the will to see the living Christ among his people and to love them as we want to love Christ himself. This is true not only for the “little” people – the poor, the oppressed, the forgotten – but also for the “big” people who exercise authority in the Church.

To love the Church means to be willing to meet Jesus wherever we go in the Church. This love doesn’t mean agreeing with or approving of everyone’s ideas or behavior. On the contrary, it can call us to confront those who hide Christ from us. But whether we confront or affirm, criticize or praise, we can only become fruitful when our words and actions come from hearts that love the Church.

The Authority of Compassion
The Church often wounds us deeply. People with religious authority often wound us by their words, attitudes, and demands. Precisely because our religion brings us in touch with the questions of life and death, our religious sensibilities can get hurt most easily. Ministers and priests seldom fully realize how a critical remark, a gesture of rejection, or an act of impatience can be remembered for life by those to whom it is directed.

There is such an enormous hunger for meaning in life, for comfort and consolation, for forgiveness and reconciliation, for restoration and healing, that anyone who has any authority in the Church should constantly be reminded that the best word to characterize religious authority is compassion. Let’s keep looking at Jesus whose authority was expressed in compassion.
So do what you do, and do it in the company and community of others. Together we can be the rag-tag followers of Jesus we’ve always been. Stumbling along, stepping on each others toes. Always having opportunities: to forgive one another, love one another and rub shoulders with those who any where else would be our enemy. But, in this community our brother is never our enemy, even when he acts like it (to quote early Vineyard-ers). We won’t always agree, we wont always understand one another, we won’t always get it right, but we must live faithfully and continue on, each doing what we believe Jesus has called us to do; not wishing to be the arm of this body when we’d make a perfect foot; nor disregarding others when we don’t understand their eye-like-nature or toe-ness, or they appear to be an arse * (sorry couldn’t resist it). Nouwen again:

The Garden of the Saints
The Church is a very human organization but also the garden of God’s grace. It is a place where great sanctity keeps blooming. Saints are people who make the living Christ visible to us in a special way. Some saints have given their lives in the service of Christ and his Church; others have spoken and written words that keep nurturing us; some have lived heroically in difficult situations; others have remained hidden in quiet lives of prayer and meditation; some were prophetic voices calling for renewal; others were spiritual strategists setting up large organizations or networks of people; some were healthy and strong; others were quite sick, and often anxious and insecure.

But all of them in their own ways lived in the Church as in a garden where they heard the voice calling them the Beloved and where they found the courage to make Jesus the center of their lives.

Paul posted a provocative quote from Dan Siedell this week. It offers a helpful continuation from my last post. The discipline of hidden-ness is important, but not to the extent of mediocrity, hidden-ness may be unseen, but it can still be a life will with love, passion, and compassion (‘to suffer alongside’) . The stories of old (and in fact all great art) stir our souls because they contain, as N.T. Wright puts it, ‘the echos of a Voice’ — echos that whisper of justice, relationship, spirituality, and beauty. Dan Siedell suggests this:

Let me suggest that neither “Christianity” nor “culture” per se make modern society uncomfortable. It is the self-sacrificial and uncompromising pursuit of greatness and quality in these practices, a life singularly devoted to them, which condemns the virtues of contemporary professional and personal life: compromise, mediocrity, and personal comfort that makes modern society uncomfortable.
…
Are we now too sophisticated, too enlightened, too iconoclastic to believe in the myths of great art, great culture, even the possibility of a great life devoted to Christ? We’re not humble. We’re cowards.

We need courage in this journey of culture making, just as we need humility, for we are never fully aware of the implications of our actions or our artifacts. What we do may be noticed by thousands, or by only our closest friends. We must continue to have to courage to continue and create. Dan Siedell again:

The production of great culture, great art, cannot be separated from the risk of failure. Most writers, musicians, poets, and artists do not produce great art, great culture, even if they enjoy successful careers. And even those poets, artists, and musicians who have, do not produce it very often. Do we have the courage to fail, to push ourselves to the point of failure, to assume we probably will fail to produce great art, great culture and still try? … Do we have the courage to produce culture that transcends those rules, which perhaps even changes the rules of the game, or render conventions irrelevant?

Herman Melville died convinced that Moby-Dick was a failure. And most of the literary critics of his time agreed with him. As we curry the favor of contemporary critics and book reviewers, bristle at negative reviews or fawn over those who praise us, it would be a useful exercise to read those initial reviews of Moby-Dick.

“Herman Melville died convinced that Moby-Dick was a failure.” – Yet he produced and published and allowed his novel to exist. He died, (I speculate) with perhaps many believing he had “no great thing… only small things with great love.” We must live likewise.

On that line, I stumbled on this prayerful poem attributed to Sir Fancis Drake this morning:

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wilder seas
Where storms will show Your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask you to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push back the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

This we ask in the name of our Captain,
Who is Jesus Christ.

Here’s to dreaming. Here’s to failing. Here’s to being unnoticed. Here’s to continuing anyway. Here’s to hpoe. Here’s to courage. Here’s to love. Here;s to lying in gutters and looking at the stars.*

“Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus.” **

* – with thanks to Oscar Wilde.
** – from Philippians 3

The temptation to be jealous of others spiritual adventures is great. Many of us want to do big things for God. Big things that people will talk about and remember. Yet we must keep in mind the discipline of ‘hiddeness’ (which itself is caught up with the disciplines of silence, solitude and service). It is in an understanding of the importance of hiddeness that Mother Theresa was able to say “We can do no great thing… only small things with great love.”

We live in a culture obsessed with success and ways of measuring success. But success, though not being a problem in itself, is not our calling (nor primary preoccupation). We are called to faithfulness and, by the grace of God, fruitfulness. It is in this way we contribute to the on going story of God. This sounds strange in a world of self help spirituality, but as Eugene Peterson notes the interesting thing about spirituality is that it is not primarily concerned about us or what we’re doing, rather it is concerned about God and what God is doing; and then it asks the question: ‘How can I get in on it?’ It is in this that we find meaning perpose and ultimately, pleasure. As one rabbi put it: I am one letter in a sentence, in a paragraph in a book God is writing.

We must bear this in mind, or find ourselves in danger of undermining ourselves or others, and species we not always great at getting it right. This quote from Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan made it into my in box recently: “We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race – we are a very unfair one.”

We need a vocation that is more that is not our jobs, but which makes sense of our jobs. (This is true how ever religious or irreligious I jobs appear to be). What we need is an all embracing sense of vocation that allows everything to have its proper place. If we do not have this we will end up rushing around from one activity to the next, doing the dutiful thing with no real understanding of what we are doing or why we’re doing it.

Here is a commendable vocation, which can operate in such a way. “We want to be the co-operative friends of Jesus living constant lives of creative goodness in the power of the Holy Spirit.” (thanks to T. Hunter)

With this vocation in heart and mind we can live rightly, peacefully, and powerfully with intention. Knowing when to rest, play, work and pray. Acting not on our own impulses or the circumstances we find ourselves in, but responding to the Spirit of God.