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.
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