Quoting Richard Rohr
“Jesus is the universalist par excellance, always making the outsider the heroes of his stories: the non-Jews appear as those with more faith and more compassion, the sinners become those who are saved, the women better than the men, and as he continually puts it, ‘the last will be first’.”
“God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.”
“People who have really met the Holy are always humble.”
“Faith is a journey into darkness, into not-knowing.”
“The nature of the contemplative mind is ‘to love one’s enemies.’ Those are the people who will change the world.”
“We do not think ourselves into a new way of living, but we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
-Richard Rohr
The Invisible are (NOT) getting by in America
The Working Poor: Invisible in America and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America are two books that should be read back to back. The Working Poor is written by Shipler, a Pulitzer Prize winning author. His book takes an in-depth look at what is happening in many of the places that we have lost sight of.
This guided and very personal tour through the lives of the working poor shatters the myth that America is a country in which prosperity and security are the inevitable rewards of gainful employment. Armed with an encyclopedic collection of artfully deployed statistics and individual stories, Shipler, former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer winner for Arab and Jew, identifies and describes the interconnecting obstacles that keep poor workers and those trying to enter the work force after a lifetime on welfare from achieving economic stability. This America is populated by people of all races and ethnicities, whose lives, Shipler effectively shows, are Sisyphean, and that includes the teachers and other professionals who deal with the realities facing the working poor. In seeking out those who employ subsistence wage earners, such as garment-industry shop owners and farmers, Shipler identifies the holes in the social safety net. “The system needs to be straightened out,” says one worker who, in 1999, was making $6.80 an hour, 80 cents more than when she started factory work in 1970. “They need more resources to be able to help these people who are trying to help themselves.” Attention needs to be paid, because Shipler’s subjects are too busy working for substandard wages to call attention to themselves. They do not, he writes, “have the luxury of rage.”
Where Shipler leaves off Barbara Ehrenreich picks up with an inside look of the lives of the working poor. As an undercover reporter Ehrenreich enters the real life stories of so many Americans who are not getting by.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity — a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich’s perspective and for a rare view of how “prosperity” looks from the bottom. You will never see anything — from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal — in quite the same way again.
Ehrenreich offers a sharp critique for those of us in the church that should give us pause…
The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful “amens.” It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. I would like to stay around for the speaking in tongues, should it occur, but the mosquitoes, worked into a frenzy by all this talk of His blood, are launching a full-scale attack. I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher’s metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole.
I highly recommend you finding these books in your local library… they are both easy, entertaining and informative books that will change the way you see the poor in America.
God of the Moon and Stars
Here is a video that Eddie Gibbs showed at the Ecclesia National gathering. What do you think?
This has also be posted by Bob Hyatt and Todd Hiestand and probably a few others that were at the national gathering.
U2’s Magnificent Risk
Stand up, this is comedy
The DNA lotto may have left you smart
But can you stand up to beauty
Dictator of the heart
I can stand up for hope, faith, love
But while I’m getting over certainty
Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady-U2’s Stand up for Comedy from No line on the Horizon
After putting in NLOTH to listen to for the first time, I fully expected to hear a song that would be the next “Where the Streets have no Name”, the next “Pride (in the Name of Love)” or the next “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”, but that song never came. I wasn’t sure if this album as a whole was going to be a hit. In fact, I’m still not sure that it will be to a larger audience. However, I have found myself mesmerized by this entire album. It is the kind of album that grows with each listen, with each phrase unpacked. The music, which is the catalyst of these lyrics, is where the real risk kicks in. With each song seeming to build on the next, this is not an album of pop songs, but rather meaningful songs that build on of the best U2 albums (IMHO).
Here is a great article in the New York Post: Last Gang in Town
Lent as Discipline
Discipline is the creation of boundraries that keep time and space open for God - a time and place where God’s gracious presence can be acknowledged and responded to.
-Henri Nouwen
picture by Sterling Severns
Shrove Tuesday Prayer
Re-posted from last year
READ 1 Samuel 5
We remember the long dark nights of Ashdod;
They were long because you stood
in the Philistine place passively;
They were dark because the gods of the Philistines
seemed to prevail.
And now we face the long, dark days of Lent:
to ponder your strange passivity
to hold deep the suffering of Jesus
to grasp afresh our fragile morality, that we too will die;
to move beyond ourselves to notice the raw loss
connected to your absence,
We name the brutality among us;
We make the greed so close to us;
We see the poor, the homeless, the exploited,
while we enjoy the easiness of the leisure class.
And then - dark and long - our eyes shift back to Ashdod;
We wait, a heavy edging toward hope,
not yet as light as hope,
as heavy as absence.
We pray in the name of the crucified. AMEN.
Shrove Tuesday Prayer is taken from Walter Brueggemann’s Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth
Photo by Sterling Severns
Adding something for Lent?
Wednesday starts the Lenten season which always raises the question: What are you giving up for lent? But what if we were to twist that question and ask… what would you add for lent?
Lent is not all about giving things up. It’s also about adding good things to our lives or to others’ lives — the kind of good things that follow on what Jesus asks of us, especially that which relates to what we’re giving up. Try these:
- Reconcile yourself to someone you don’t like, or even hate or did something bad to, or just intentionally stayed away from.
- Do acts of kindness for people, just because the opportunity’s there; give them little tastes of God’s love.
- If you haven’t taken the time lately to be in a refreshing, natural spot, do so. Even if it’s a brief stay, even a half-hour or so, try it.
- Take some time to study about what causes poverty. Follow the threads as far as you can. Not only does it better help you serve Christ, but you also add into yourself a useful education in economics, sociology, and biology.
- Study, meditate, and pray over one or two Scripture passages for each day, through a daily lectionary (assigned Bible readings for each day), the Daily Office (Scripture-based devotions for set times of day), or devotional booklets or email lists.
- Check out your ethnic heritage. How do Christians in it mark the season? There are, for example, Irish carghas and Italian quaresima traditions that may be helpful to you.
- Attend special worship services. Perhaps it’s a liturgical church’s daily morning or evening prayer service (Matins and Vespers). Perhaps it’s a Wednesday Lenten service. Or maybe it’s time you started going to a Sunday morning services every Sunday, at least for the season.
- Try to find a new way every day to bring to mind Jesus’ death on the cross, and why it happened.
Since many of my friends come from different faith traditions and denominational experiences, I’d love to know how you obseve Lent or if you do at all? Do you plan to give up or add anything during lent? If so, what is it that you are giving up or adding?
The Gods Aren’t Angry
Last night a group of guys watched The Gods Aren’t Angry, which is basically a sermon on steroids (running time 1:30). The basic premise of the talk/lecture (which it really is more like theater) was to wrestle with the questions:
- Where did the first caveman or cavewoman get the idea that somebody somewhere existed who needed to be worshiped, appeased, and followed?
- And how did the idea evolve that if you didn’t say, do, or offer the right things, this “being” would be upset, agitated, or even angry with you?
- Where did religion come from?
Here is the quick overview:
In the earliest civilization, they named the gods who controlled the cycles of life (sun, moon, rain, the hunt, the crops, new life…).
These gods where distant and were often temperamental… at times withholding their help causing droughts, floods, famine and infertility.
To make the gods happy they offered sacrifices. To gain approval of the gods the sacrifices had to get bigger and better (grains, small animals, larger animals, babies).
Ingrained in the human consciousness was the idea that it was never enough. They could not know where they stood with the gods.
Abraham comes out of this culture by the call of the divine (this God was coming near… not separate and distant)
This God revolutionizes the course of history by not demanding the son (Isaac), but instead, providing a substitute.
This is a God who is near and provides and wanted these people to know that there was a way to know you had peace with God.
Religious rituals continue and are co-opted by those in power… to keep the system benefiting the powers that be. Often through violence.
Jesus places himself against this system by taking on the altar through non-violence and renders the sacrificial way of life null and void.
All this so that you and I can know that we have peace with God, that he provided a way to know that God is not angry, and that no more sacrifices are necessary to earn God’s favor.
The only sacrifice that is now required, is a “living sacrifice!” Twisting the idea of sacrifice which is about death, killing, violence. But, rather about offering your life to help others know that they too have peace with this God.
This God is a God of LOVE!
—-
The history, research and in-depth study of the ancient texts add more than I had time to pass along here. Unfortunately, I have left a lot out. However, I would encourage anyone who has been beaten down by religion to grab a copy of this and if you would like to borrow mine… you are welcome to it
Consumerism and the Eucharist
One of the rhythms of my life over the last three years has been participating in the Eucharist on a weekly basis. Recently, this discipline has taken less of a role in the new community that I find myself a part of. We have yet to start our official community gatherings hoping that this would help people in the community to re-imagine “c”hurch. The thought has been that much of the ways in which we define church is wrapped in the Sunday gathering (time, energy, finances…) often to the exclusion of the mission that the “C”hurch has been called to. We have been slow on creating this gathering in hopes that the people of the community sole hope of spiritual formation is not just seen as being about what happens on a Sunday. Our hope is that people would not just consume the Sunday gathering.
This past Sunday we participated in the mystery that is communion. I was reminded that in consuming this meal, it actually becomes anti-consumeristic.
Although consumerism is often equated with greed, which is an inordinate attachmnet to material things,… [consumerism] is, in fact, characterized by detachment from production, producers, and products. Consumerism is a restless spirit that is never content with any particular material thing. In this sense, consumerism has some affinities with Christian asceticism, which counsels a certain detachment from material things. The difference is that, in consumerism, detachment continually moves us from one product to another, whereas in Christian life, asceticism is a means to a greater attachment to God and to other people. We are consumers in the Eucharist, but in consuming the body of Christ we are transformed into the body of Christ, drawn into the divine life in communion with other people. We consume in the Eucharist, but we are thereby consumed by God. - Willian Cavanaugh
Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire by William CavanaughWhat is your favorite Henri Nouwen book?
I just finished Peacework by Henri Nouwen and it quickly has become one of my favorite books that he has written. I like it because you see a different side of his writing. Not only did he touch the soul in the ways I have become accustomed to, but you get to see his activist side. He spends most of the book speaking of resistance to the “powers that be.”
The word that I want to make central in these reflections on the daily life of the peacemaker is the word “resistance.” As peacemakers we must resist resolutely all the powers of war and destruction and proclaim that peace is the divine gift offered to all who affirm life.
The book was written during the cold war before his passing, so it speaks mostly to the arms race. I would have loved to have read an updated version with his thoughts about living in a post cold war world. Regardless, it has much for us to hear today and I highly recommend it.
Here are my top 5 favorite Nouwen books:
1. The Return of the Prodigal Son
2. Peacework
3. Can you Drink the Cup?
4. The Wounded Healer
5. In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership
What is your favorite Nouwen book and why?
Recent Comments