Category: Musings and Reflections

The Familiar is a Barrier to Our Imagining

It’s the first time I have really noticed that with the conclusion of Mark:6, a cycle completes. From beginning with the Jesus’ baptism by John, Mark moves very quickly into the nitty-gritty of Jesus’ ministry with a focus on how Jesus’ healing action alerts us to the power and operation of God in the world. Mark brings the cycle of Jesus’ actions to a fitting conclusion with King Herod’s political murder of John in the final section of chapter 6. However, there is more of that bit of the story next week.

If it’s not too crass an analogy,  Jesus’ tour through the Galilean countryside: calming storms, casting-out demons, healing the sick is the envy of the current presidential election bus tours being made by President Obama and Governor Romney. Oh, how they each might wish to make such an impact on the crowds as Mark reports Jesus making.

After a ‘successful’ tour  Jesus returns to his hometown where his family and former neighbors are scandalized by, what seems to them, his grandiosity. They are determined to put him back in his place so as not to have their small world disturbed. Is it their unconscious envy that causes them to react like this? Quite probably!

Yet, I think there is something else motivating them as well as their being driven by their unconscious envy. Jesus’ family and their neighbors seem encapsulated within a prison of the familiar. Jesus presents them with an experience that does not fit within the limitations of their world view.  They are open to miracles performed by prophets so long as they are happening elsewhere. They do not have the psychic space to recognize one of their own to be a prophet capable of revealing God’s power in the world. They are trapped within the limits of their own imaginations.

How are our imaginations limited? I invite us to take a deeper look at our lives. Can we notice how our attachment to what is familiar  inhibits and limits our imaginations? We live lives limited by our need for predictability and our minds seem only to recognize what they are somehow already looking for. My own experience is that it is not difficult for us to recognize this state of affairs.

However, let me invite us once more, this time, to take a broader look at our lives. Can we begin to notice those turning points of life where we  have somehow become open to something beyond the familiar?  We have  taken a risk and stepped out there! Maybe this has been a wonderful experience. Maybe it’s also been a difficult and possibly painful step to have taken. Yet, has taking this step not always resulted in an expansion of our living and imagining?

When our lives take an unexpected turn we are rewarded with an enrichment to our living. This enrichment results when we become open to the promise of there being more than we, if left to our own impoverished expectations, expectations carefully tailored by our need to stay within predictable limits, can imagine for ourselves.

We live in a world strongly influenced by something called the Human Potential Movement. Everywhere we see advertisements inviting us to realize our human potential by running with the wolves and diving with the dolphins. This approach to life tells us there are no limits to what and who we can become. The unspoken hitch is that we just need the money to do it. The picture of life extolled by the Human Potential Movement is to realize our fullest happiness and satisfaction. We are enjoined to become all that we have the potential to be. Fortunately, this is not the message of the Gospel.

God’s invitation to us is to risk opening to the process of becoming the person we were created to be. This looks dangerously similar to the invitation to realize our fullest human potential. However, God is not inviting us to throw caution to the winds and run-off to find ourselves. God invites us to step-out and to take a risk. The hallmark of this experience is facing up-to, and struggling within, the boundaries of natural limitations.

God invites us to move beyond the mere achievement of our own human potential. God’s dream for us is that we open ourselves to becoming more than we can imagine for ourselves through struggling within our experience of limitation. The Epistle and the Gospel  for today give us two quite different examples of how this works in our own lives.

The first example is an example of struggling within limitation. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul speaks about his struggle with his ‘thorn in the flesh’, which he tells them God has given him. I am not interested in wondering what the thorn actually was. How can we know? However, the example Paul offers us is one of struggling with a problem, a difficulty, a painful aspect of life that does not go away. The cause of Paul’s pain does not go away despite his fervent prayer that God take it away. This results in Paul coming to realize that it is through his weakness, his experience of painful limitation, that God’s grace fulfills and blesses him. He is healed through his being wounded. He is given strength to persevere, i.e. put up with hardship. He experiences an expansion of imagination, an expansion of the horizons that boundary his experience, i.e. some kind of mystical experience of acceptance.  Paul’s stepping-out and risking results in both strength and ecstasy transmitted through God’s gracing his suffering.

Taken alone we might think that Paul’s example is the only approach. However, Jesus in Mark’s Gospel offers a counterbalance. The limitation here is less personal and more situational.  When he goes home Jesus is not struggling with his own experience of limitation. He is facing the limitation of his situation caused by the lack of openness of others. What does he do? He does not use his unique access to God to overwhelm the limits of imagination in his hearers, i.e. blow their minds. He does not wow them with mighty acts.

Jesus accepts that the failure of imagination among his family and their neighbors places a complete road block to his ability to be a conduit for divine action. He recognizes the hopelessness of the situation and he redirects himself, taking a completely different direction. He sends his disciples out on the road. What has been his ministry alone up until this point now becomes theirs as well. Mark tells us that they work the same miracles as Jesus had been working.

Sometimes the need is to persevere and become opened-up through our acceptance of limitation thus allowing God to do in us, and for us, and through us, that which we cannot do for, or by, ourselves.  However, there are some situations where our capacity for living is limited and the needed response here is to walk away. We cease trying to change the unchangeable  and creatively move in another direction. The experience of being blocked opens up a new channel . As we begin to move in that direction, something beyond our imagining expands and enriches our reality.

The trick of knowing how to recognize which kind of limitation we are facing is one of spiritual discernment. Spiritual discernment is a process that involves asking for, and listening to, the wise counsel of others. We then take our own perceptions alongside the perceptions of others into a place of deep prayerfulness before God. This is a place both of openness and felt risk. Openness does not come without that disconcerting sense of risk. A sense of risk is one of the indicators that we are opening. Here we encounter a God who is always dreaming us into becoming more than we can possiblly imagine for ourselves.

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A Brit’s Musings on the 4th of July

There was some amusement among the congregation of Trinity Cathedral on Sunday when the Dean announced that Canon Mark was to give the 4th of July sermon. After all, what can a Brit have to say about rebellion against the lawful authority of the Crown? Well as it happens, the answer to the question is, quite a bit!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ….

The concept of “we the people”  does not spring fully formed out of the purity of the 18th Century air breathed in the 13 Colonies. That the Colonists could even hold a concept of ‘we the people’ places them squarely at the center of the long march of British political culture. The irony lies that in breaking with the Crown the 13 Colonies were simply asserting the ancient British right not to be taxed without representation.

I can only  trace in outline the roots of what made the American Revolution possible. For a more in-depth exploration I direct you, if you are interested, to a section of Charles Taylor’s great tome A Secular Age pp 196-207. For those who are overcome at the very thought I suggest you listen to the the first of Niall Ferguson’s lectures in the current Reith Lecture’s series at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/reith

The great events of the English Civil War, Great Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and it Bill of Rights, and the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 are but successive chapters in the same story. What connects them is that they are events that draw upon the idea of an “ancient constitution” embedded in a shared cultural belief the origins of which while obscured in the mists of time, yet persists in the common political awareness of the English people. This “ancient constitution” is the necessary ingredient that gives rise to the concept of  “we the people” . This is a concept unique to English and its successive British political and institutional culture.  The British historian of the Monarchy, David Starkey, traces the roots of this sense of an “ancient constitution”to the political structure of Anglo-Saxon England. In Anglo-Saxon society political power was dispersed to the local level. The country was divided into a series of units known as Hundreds. Each Hundred was autonomous and practiced a rough system of representative democracy. It seems that despite 500 years of monarchical centralization following the Norman Conquest this cultural memory of a time before, was never lost.

Resultingly, in 1642, after 20years of political struggle with Charles I the English Parliament asserted its right to govern alongside the Crown. The assertion of this right required the execution of the King. Yet, this was no 1917 Bolshevik action. It was an unfortunate necessity in the constitutional assertion of ancient privileges.

In 1688 the Glorious Revolution replaced the last Stuart King James II with William of Orange and James’ daughter Mary (William and Mary). The Glorious Revolution established Constitutional Monarchy along side the emergence of what we now recognize as Representative Democracy. This paved the way for a huge expansion in the representative nature in the institutions of British Society. The American Colonists brought with them this system of representative democracy based on elected assemblies. The parliamentary strata was the only form of colonial government. With the exception of the Colonial Governors, appointed by the Crown, elected assemblies flourished in the absence of the hereditary and appointed strata of king, Lords and Bishops,

At the core of this representative culture lay the axiom  no taxation without representation. When the 13 Colonies asserted themselves against the encroachment on their ancient privileges by an over bearing Executive Government they were simply asserting their right as British subjects to defend their ancient privileges against a swing of the pendulum of government in an oppressive direction. In this sense they were only following their parliamentary forefathers who had done the same in 1642 and 1688.

The English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the American Revolution all rest on a looking backwards to an idealized notion of an “ancient constitution” . This “ancient constitution’ was not only a harking back to a time out of mind . It persisted because it was based on notions of Natural Law and enshrined in the English Common Law.  In the absence of a written constitution the Common Law has always been the ultimate protector of the rights of the Englishmen against tyranny.  What the Founding Fathers did in writing the Constitution was to codify the spirit of the “ancient constitution”.

The Founding Fathers also drew on French political theorists for the Constitution and a new form of government based on separation of powers and checks and balances. However, the stable aftermath of the American Revolutionary period can be sharply distinguished from the more than 100 years of political blood letting which followed the French Revolution. The essential difference according to Charles Taylor between the French and American experience lay in the fact that unlike the French, the new Americans were heirs to a longer representative social and political tradition that found articulation in the unifying concept of  “we the people”.

“We the people” is an appeal and idealized order of  Natural Law, in the invocation of “truths held self-evident” in the Declaration of Independence. The (American) transition was easier, because what was understood as traditional laws gave an important place to elected assemblies and their consent to taxation. All that was needed was to shift the balance in these so as to make elections the only source of legitimate power. (Charles Taylor 197)

I believe the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution which followed it, can be seen as major advances in the long march of the British political tradition. In the years since 1776 we have seen on both sides of the Atlantic divergent developments in the culture of government. Yet, the broader culture of representative institutions based on a notion of  a people able to articulate their social and political relationships through notions of common privileges and obligations has remained and continues to link these two now quite different forms of representative democracy.

As a British Subject, I congratulate my American host culture. I  fully enter into the celebrations of the 4th of July  as an American celebration of a deeper political and cultural heritage held in common between us.

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Servants No-longer but Friends Part 2

In my recent blog entry Imaging Text I observed that as we move from the age of the printed word into the digital age it is images not words that matter. To be more exact its imaged words or word images that begin to matter more. No more powerful an word image is given to than when Jesus tells his disciples that they are now no longer servants but friends. The point of telling them this: is that my joy may be in you and your joy be made complete.  

We don’t talk much about joy these days. We seem to prefer the term happiness. Happiness results from a set of propitious circumstances. So we need things to be a certain way for happiness to result. By contrast joy is not dependent on a propitious context. This is my experience at Trinity Cathedral. Fewer among us are happy with being in relationship with the Church. Most of us are hungry for relationship with God, especially if we fall within the 20-50 age group.

If younger Christians who are principally driven by a need to find spiritual meaning in lives largely disillusioned by the world of institutions then the only joy will suffice to keep them connected to institutional Christianity. Eugenia Price quoted by Macrina Wiederkehr in her lovely Office Book Seven Sacred Pauses describes joy as being God in the marrow of our bones.

Jesus tells us that we are no longer his servants but are now his friends. The implication of this is rather interesting. Most of us seem less satisfied with an older notion of being religious, i.e. good Church People and serving the needs of the institution. What more of us are in search of is the relationship of friendship with God that Jesus is talking about to his disciples. The upside is that we are no longer servants but friends. The downside is that we are no longer servants but friends.

Friends have choices that servants don’t have. One of those choices is to put love of God before love of Church. How will the Church survive when fewer and fewer feel committed to it, in its traditional form? This is an issue concerning the renewal of our understanding of stewardship. As an aside, at Trinity our attempt to renew our sense of stewardship results in the gathering of a small group we now call the Stewardship Ministry Team. We are currently working through Dwight Zschaile’s latest book People of the Way: Revisioning the Episcopal Church.

What does friendship with God look like? On Thursday evenings between 25 – 30 people gather for Eucharist, shared meal and an evening devoted to what Benedict calls the school of the Lord’s service. The shape of the evening models the elements of spiritual practice _worship,  scriptural engagement, and common prayer- as understood in our Anglican Tradition. Our aim in Episcopal 201 is to explore and support one another as we develop patterns of daily spiritual practice. We are currently working in small groups using a model for Lectio Divina. We note the effect of the short scriptural text upon us and then attempt to connect this awareness with the possibility of an invitation from God concerning our situation over the next 3 – 5 days. We conclude with praying for one another. In this short prayer communication we offer to another valuable perspectives which they may have missed in what they were saying.

We come close to experiencing friendship with God when we encounter others similarly on the same path. The quality of this friendship does not need to be particularly intense. Yet, its quality communicates the feeling of joy that comes when soul connects to soul in an experience of mutual recognition.

This is the place to begin. Let’s trust that in due course other more temporal and corporeal priorities characteristic of loyal servants will emerge into our re-centered experience of ourselves as joy-filled friends of God.

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Servants No-longer but Friends Part 1

In early February of this year I was invited to preach at St Mark’s Cathedral, Minneapolis. My visit also coincided with a seminar day being given my Diana Butler-Bass a well known writer on contemporary  matters affecting the present day Church and the future of Christianity.

Ms Butler-Basse referred to the Gallup Poles on religious observance. The of the decade from 1999-2009 reveal over this 10 year period from 1999-2009 a marked shift in the way Christians identify themselves in terms of their self description as religious or spiritual.

In 1999 60% of those polled identified themselves as religious but not spiritual.  Whereas only  around 20% of people  identified as spiritual but not religious. A smaller number  under 10% identified as religious and spiritual.

By 2009 only around 10% identified as religious but not spiritual. Around the same proportion as in 1999 identified as spiritual but not religious. The biggest change was the those identifying as spiritual and religious which rose from 10% to 50%.

What is implied by this shift? In John15 Jesus says: I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

Prevalent among main-line Christians even as late as 1999  was the self image of being good servants of the Church.  They identified as members of the institution and served it generously through talents, time, and money. Yet, ask them if they felt a personal relationship with God, were they spiritual, they generally answered no. Spirituality was something best left to the clergy.

Looking around the community I serve at Trinity Cathedral I can clearly see the nature of this shift. While older members continue to serve the institution of the Church with dedication to tasks that need to be done, newer members are cautious about becoming what one X’er referred to as the $ sign in the pew.  At Trinity we are currently experiencing a blossoming of growth. On this coming Sunday, the Sunday after the Ascension no less, the Bishop will confirm, or receive, or reaffirm some 62 people into communion with the catholic faith. A good number of these are young people. Yet, well over half are adults, some 40 or so having recently passed through our Episcopal 101 preparation.

Many of these relative newcomers are not like our traditional Episcopal Church people profile. They tend to be younger than the average age of Episcopalians. They are not our traditional good servant material. They are not religious and are wary of becoming religious. They are predominantly spiritual seekers. Some are new to Christianity. Some escaping other traditions that no longer serve them well. All are seeking an encounter with Historic Christianity. A Christianity characterized by a depth of liturgical expression, a faithfulness to the historic diversity of Catholic Christianity exemplified in the Anglican Tradition, and a generous Christianity seeking to bring the deep wells of Christian spirituality into informed dialogue with the confusions and uncertainties of life in 21st century America.

Other more convicted Christians call the Episcopal Church ‘that easy religion’. A more acurate description is that we are a Church that refuses to offer easy answers to complex questions. And so those who are seeking, yet, not wanting to be mollified with easy answers that either fail to justice to the integrity of their search or actually do violence to that search, continue to come.

Back to John15 and Jesus’ reference to servants no-longer but friends. More in my next post.

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Being Loved Comes Before Loving

To use one of Jesus’ favorite preaching techniques, i.e. hyperbole, the art of overstatement, I feel that if all we had was John 15 then we would have enough to form the basis of Christian Community. THis is community based on the powerful images of the vine and its branches and the commandment to love one another.

Our society is blighted by the demise of community centered upon the doctrine and experience of the common good. The image of the vine and its branches offered by Jesus is a powerful reminder that communities do not fare well when they lose contact with  complexity theory notions of interdependence and interconnection. The recent success of  book and now the film The Hunger Games bears directly on this point. The horror of the society of Panem is speaking to us about our own society.

In the central section of John 15, Jesus offers us a succession of images beginning with: as the father as loved me so I love you, abide in my love. The image here is that of the mirror. The love expressed by God for Jesus is mirrored in the expression of Jesus’  love for us.  The Divine interplay of loving and being loved is likewise mirrored among us through God’s invitation announced by Jesus.

The most profound human experience of mirroring is that which takes place between mother and infant. Maybe it is for this reason that the central verses of John 15 are appointed for Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May.

My first training in psychotherapy was in the school of Object Relations Theory. This most British branch of Psychoanalysis replaces the classical Freudian concept that human beings are driven by their instinct for gratification with a belief that human beings are fundamentally object seeking. Object seeking is a particular psychological way of saying we are driven by a need to express and receive love.

The first object for the infant is the mother. This is an experience for the infant of resting-in, or of being loved. The infant rests-in the experience of the softness of mother’s touch, the sound of her voice, the way she smells. However, principally the infant rests-in the gaze of the mother’s eyes. In mother’s eyes the infant experiences itself in the state of abiding or resting-in in  love.

Abiding in love is a passive experience of just being loved. It is not an active experience of seeking love or loving. Abiding – resting-in being loved must come before the act of loving. Loving only becomes possible when we have first experienced abiding, or resting-in, love. Only then are we formed enough by being loved to express love in loving others. As Jesus is loved so he loves and this then extends into the human community.

The celebration of Mother’s Day needs to be more than a Hallmark sentimentality or a patriotic reference to motherhood and apple pie. Gendered mother’s are the conventional symbol of mothering.  But mothering is not confined to gendered mothers. Mothering is essentially an offering of love through the way we behold one another in love. This applies as much to lovers of any kind as it does to mother and child.

Our lives have been enriched by many experiences of resting-in being loved. I am suggesting that mothering transcends gendered mothers. Mothering is inherent to all human beings and is present in many different kinds of human relationships. What links the different contexts within which mothering occurs is that all mothering is an expression of God’s way of loving.

God is best imaged as the Trinitarian Community of lovers loving and being loved. Jesus’ words haunt us: as the father as loved me so I love you, abide in my love. Mothering is an expression of Divine love. So let’s abide, i.e. rest-in the experience of being loved. This is the gift we not only celebrate on Mother’s Day but which is given and received everyday.

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Imaging Text

Since the invention of the printing press words have overtaken images as the coinage for understanding our relationship with God. As we move further into the digital age once again words are giving way to images. It is no longer enough for the preacher to offer his or her listeners an exegeses of text based on a study of the meaning of the words. In the digital age as our modes of communication become increasingly image based preachers need to construct mental images from the words of the text. This is how Jesus taught and how spirituality communicated prior to the dominance of text.

John 15 has formed the content for the proclamation of the Gospel over the previous two Sundays. It is image rich and  this blog entry is the first of several entries in which I will be imaging the text of John 15.

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In Memory of Lisa Kennedy

On Thursday the 26th of April, my youngest sister Lisa passed from this physical life into the embrace of the love of God. This is my language and what Lisa would have understood a phrase like the love of God to mean is something that I don’t think I know. Always practical, my memories of Lisa are that she didn’t have a lot of use for conventional religious notions of an afterlife. Her energies were firmly focused on the life lived here and now, her children, her family, her job, and her beloved women’s hockey. I remember on a visit home some years ago Lisa turning to me and asking in all seriousness how many sports channels did I watch in England. The fact that I watched none spoke volumes about the difference between us.

Lisa was diagnosed at a relatively young age with breast cancer. The age of first onset seems to be a prime indicator of the likely reoccurrence of the disease. People marvel when I tell them that all three of my sisters have been diagnosed with breast cancer and that there seems not to be a family genetic explanation for this. I have reflected many times on how each of them, Lynette, Lisa, and finally Ali, came to terms with their cancer. Each did so in their own remarkably individual way. The way each has responded speaks to the depth of their character and dare I say the qualities of  their soul.

When we human beings are thrown into a life crisis, the walls which we build to protect ourselves from the storms of life begin to crack. It is only then that the quality of soul emerges. Through the cracks in the walls we are invited to change, to grow and to renew ourselves. In my experience it is soul-quality that connects me to the reality of life being lived-out against a backdrop of something bigger than what I can immediately touch, see, or know. The quality of Lisa’s soul revealed in her a deep commitment to life sustained by her enormous reserves of courage and love.

Stubborn, willful, bloody-minded are terms that come readily to my mind when thinking of Lisa. Yet, these are simply the qualities of her determined life-force that would brook no thought of easy defeat.  Over these last months as Lisa fought to delay the approach of her inevitable death, my mind has turned again and again to the Dylan Thomas poem that opens with:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Lisa bargained hard and won a space in which to prepare those she loved most for the time of her dying. For her, relationships were what mattered most. For me, the embrace of the love of God is simply a way of saying that in death the truth about what is most important in this life deepens. What is universally true is that relationships, be they good relationships or difficult relationships, are what most matter.  For me, God is not a solitary being. God is a community within which the interplay of relationships bring joy and delight. God is a Trinity – a Divine Community defined by relationships that share themselves with the life of the Creation and become the model for the way we are invited to live our own lives.

I am not sure what it is I should, or even am, feeling at the passing of my little sister. The distances of time, she was only 12 when I left home, and of location, my thirty years living in the UK, in many ways separated us from each other. At the end of her life in this world I remain separated, this time by immigration processes which currently restrict my ability to travel outside of my current home in the US.

Yet, these limitations of time and space cannot seriously inhibit the exercise of love. For the distances of time and the separations of location no longer inhibit Lisa and I. Lisa’s death acts only to strengthen and deepen my sense of  being in relationship with her. Despite my separation from others who mourn Lisa, I nevertheless rededicate myself to life lived motivated by the primacy of relationship. In this way I incorporate into my own life the priorities that Lisa expressed through her own living, loving, and gifting of love and friendship.

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Story, The More Than Truth.

The transition from Good Friday to Easter necessitates a dramatic change of gear. I am particularly thinking about my own experience at the moment. The great cycle of our Christian faith, which for liturgical Christians unfolds through the vehicle of the Calendar is unvarying. Yet, my experience of moving through the cycle, year by year, brings out different responses depending on what is coming-up in my own internal spiritual and emotional process.

With all the hoopla stirred up by the Republican Party’s presidential nomination process these past months, this Holy Week I became particularly sensitive to the political nature of Jesus’ challenge to the political and religious status quo of 1st Century Palestine (note my last posting).

The arrival of Easter Day bursts open the tomb of my existentially-rooted spiritual reflections and my sights are raised to the Divine Action in the drama. This experience is like the sensation I have every time I travel north from Phoenix on Highway 17. Being still relatively new to Arizona I am not sure exactly where it is but there is a point where after climbing up through a rugged and hilly terrain one arrives at a point where suddenly a huge plateau expanse opens-up to view. What strikes me each time is that this expansiveness is both a horizontal and vertical expansiveness. It’s not just a sudden widening of the horizon. It’s also at the same time an opening up of the depth of sky.

I am reminded that at the human level of Jesus’ road to the Cross what has been taking place is the necessary element of human willing co-operation that brings events to the point where God is able to act. God’s expression of deep love for the world is contingent upon a human participation in the sacrifice of love. Suddenly the horizon and the sky opens in breadth and depth leading to something that is truly unimagined by us.

We human beings are story-telling creatures. In an age when a narrow scientific paradigm has substituted explanation for narrative, Faith reminds us that the need to tell stories is deeply engrained in our human DNA. The right hemisphere of the human brain is the gateway for sensory experience. The left hemisphere of our brain continually performs an editing and cataloguing function that creates narratives to articulate the multilayered depth of our experience.

Easter involves recalling the stories beginning with the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis and moving inexorably through the stories of the Exodus, the Prophets, arriving at Jesus and the Cross and Resurrection. These are the fundamental themes of the shared Divine-Human story unfolding through a repeated pattern of divine invitation and halting human response.  On the whole the story shows that human beings prefer to hide in the safety of the familiar. Yet, every-so-often we become overwhelmed by the constriction of our timidity. At these points, often points of crisis in our lives, we find that we can ill afford not to open to God’s invitation to the new.

Easter burst open the tomb of my human-centered perspectives. The experience of the Cross and Resurrection confronts we with my love of the familiar. A familiar that deadens my awarenesses. I am afraid I have to be confronted by new life. It’s a surprise, because my tendency is to forget and return to making the same old choices always expecting different results.  So each time the promise of new life breaks open my self-centered-ness, I am truly surprised by joy.

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