Skip to main content

Rend the Heavens: Advent Day 16

Rend the Heavens text: My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?” as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. These things I remember... Psalm 42:3-4

Prompt: Visceral

I still feel the impact of the text to me like a punch in the stomach. The words rejoicing at the results of the election, followed by words accusing me of being "intolerant" if I was not also rejoicing. My failure to accept what one believed to be the work of God caused maligning of my vocation, my work, all I'd ever done in Christ's name. I still feel the horrible weight of blocking a number and wondering what I needed to do legally to be protected. And who else might I need to protect?

Heavy, heavy hangs the head that remembers emails from another, telling me that a "bloodless election" was something for which to be grateful. As though the cries of those harassed, physically beaten, or killed before and after were nothing- just the background noise of democracy. 

Each cabinet name put forward feels like another brick, encasing freedom and truth and justice. I have no confidence in the confirmation process. I long for the days of a thumb in the scale, when the truth is that the scales of honesty, transparency, and community have been kicked over and beaten. 

There are people who look to me for good news, for hope, for food that is not tears... 

How can I tell them that we are now in the place for which we have been preparing to be? The place where we may give up our lives to gain our souls? The place where each taste of body and blood matters because our faith must deepen so that our actions become bolder and more fierce? The time in which we must become ever aware of having to account for our actions before the throne? 

Visceral, you say? Visceral, you ask? 

The body keeps the score of each spiritual punch, intellectual slap, psychological kick. And yet I rise again. The ultra-marathon of living the Way of Christ happens in the body, in the Body- one step at a time. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Religious Holidays in Anchorage

You may have read in the Anchorage Daily News about a new policy regarding certain religious holidays and the scheduling of school activities. If not, a link to the article is here . The new rules do not mean that school will be out on these new holiday inclusions, but that the Anchorage School District will avoid scheduling activities, like sporting events, on these days. The new list includes Passover, Rosh Hashanah , Yom Kippur , Eid al - Fitr and Eid al - Adha . They are added to a list which includes New Year's, Orthodox Christmas and Easter, Good Friday, Easter, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. The new holidays may be unfamiliar to some: Passover is a Jewish celebration, in the springtime, that commemorates the events in Egypt that led up to the Exodus. The name of the holiday comes specifically from the fact that the angel of death "passed over" the houses of the Israelites during the plague which killed the eldest sons of the Egyptians. Passover is a holiday ...

Latibule

I like words and I recently discovered Save the Words , a website which allows you to adopt words that have faded from the English lexicon and are endanger of being dropped from the Oxford English Dictionary. When you adopt a word, you agree to use it in conversation and writing in an attempt to re-introduce said word back into regular usage. It is exactly as geeky as it sounds. And I love it. A latibule is a hiding place. Use it in a sentence, please. After my son goes to bed, I pull out the good chocolate from my latibule and have a "mommy moment". The perfect latibule was just behind the northwest corner of the barn, where one had a clear view during "Kick the Can". She tucked the movie stub into an old chocolate box, her latibule for sentimental souvenirs. I like the sound of latibule, though I think I would spend more time defining it and defending myself than actually using it. Come to think of it, I'm not really sure how often I use the ...

Would I Do?

Palm Sunday Mark 11:1-11 One of my core memories is of a parishioner who said, "I don't think I would have been as brave as the three in the fiery furnace. I think I would have just bowed to the king. I would have bowed and known in my heart that I still loved God. I admire them, but I can tell the truth that I wouldn't have done it." (Daniel 3) To me, this man's honesty was just as brave. In front of his fellow Christians, in front of his pastor, he owned up to his own facts: he did not believe he would have had the courage to resist the pressures of the king. He would have rather continued to live, being faithful in secret, than risk dying painfully and prematurely for open obedience to God.  I can respect that kind of truth-telling. None of us want to be weighed in the balance and found wanting. For some of us, that's our greatest fear. The truth is, however, that I suspect most of us are not as brave as we think we are. The right side of history seems cle...