Today’s scripture readings began at home and continued in church.
Some people abstain from looking at the morning newspaper before they come to church to worship. They say it’s a practice that protects their minds and hearts from being stained by reports of violence, and more violence. Violence sells newspapers. It’s also a fact. I read the paper as I drank my morning coffee before I headed to church.
Today’s lead stories in the Boston Globe: One detailed more mass shooting in El Paso Texas and Dayton Ohio; another was about a man who buys then runs "sober houses" where recovering addicts get support and safety while they recover from the disease of addiction. Many of these places are unsafe, unclean, and extremely costly. Families of addicts empty their wallets and bank accounts in hope. Residents are instructed to stop taking any and all prescribed medications and “find a Higher Power.” Death happens, because God fails. Not only is this bad and errant theology, it is CRUEL THEOLOGY, motivated by greed camouflaged as health care treatment.
I longed for hope and different headlines. In church I heard more of the same about human behavior. AND, I also heard the voice of God speaking tenderly through the Old Testament prophet Hosea (11:1-11) about loving Israel as a parent loves a child from birth—embracing, leading with “cords of human kindness, bands of love,” teaching the child to walk, and, even when the beloved turns away, refusing to “execute fierce anger.” Why? “I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.”
Nowhere is there a suggestion of divine abandonment or wrath. These are human fears only.
In Luke’s gospel story (12:13-21) there is a dispute about dividing the family inheritance. Money again! Someone in the crowd wants Jesus to instruct a brother to divide the family inheritance. Ah, the inheritance! Jesus replies: “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” Then he warns them to guard against “all kinds of greed”—ALL kinds.
Then Jesus offers a parable about a rich man whose harvests are so abundant he has no place to store it all. He, notably, does not think of sharing but decides to build larger and larger barns to lay up his goods, saying: ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ Oh, how familiar this sounds today. This is not what I was hoping for. I felt as if I were reading the daily news reports. Are we in America now storing up every privilege, every claim to greatness, every imperialistic ostentation, every violent strategy (war), even reiterations of policies that equate compromise, aka diplomatic dialogue, with appeasement, aka losing?
What is God’s policy? Jesus tells the self-satisfied Soul in the parable what God, Creator of all wealth, said to the greedy Soul: “You fool! This very night your life is demanded of you. And the things you have prepared whose will they be? So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
It is left up to each one of us and all of us collectively to discern what being “rich toward God” means. (One of my ways is to counter cruel theology, even if it’s in scripture. It breeds spiritual poverty.)
May I gently suggest you remember who taught you to walk? Who let you fall down and who picked you up to try again with tender encouragement—all your life. Who loves you in spite of yourself?
Life is short. We do not have much time to gladden the hearts and minds of those who travel the way with us. So be swift to love and make haste to be kind. Be rich toward God, O my Soul. Be rich.
Showing posts with label Hosea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hosea. Show all posts
Sunday, August 4, 2019
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Ash Up for Ash Wednesday—AND Choose Life
So many avid Christians use Lent as an opportune lead-in to-Easter season to take off pounds, exercise more, get healthy—or at least prepare to fit into the Easter outfit they’d planned to wear for their twice-a-year visit to Jesus.
I suggest instead: take on new ideas and practices that delight, sort of like the famous Eden “apple.” You won’t die, so grab for life. I swear it’s just what God ordained in the first place.
Here’s a witty and wise message from the late May Sarton—great poet and contemplative thinker. This is in her little 1981 book of meditations The House By the Sea, April 29 entry.
Sarton has taken a “heavenly” train journey down the Hudson to NYC where she heads for Bloomingdales’ to find some summer shorts and jackets . . .
“. . .as usual, in total despair because I wear a size 18 or 20. I was shunted from floor to floor, on each seeing exactly what I needed. ‘But, oh no madam, we only have sizes 8 to 16. Try floor 3 . . . ‘Finally I managed to find a pair of very expensive jeans to garden in and a couple of shirts on the unchic, sad floor for half-sizes! Meanwhile, two thirds of the women going up and down the escalators were obviously not size 16! Why do we lie down and allow fashion to dictate our lives and to humiliate us? I think the Fat Panthers (emulating the Gray Panthers) had better launch a crusade—large posters showing gaunt, thin women looking tense and one hundred years old beside round, rosy, happy women might be a first attack.”
I can’t resist the next entry, which Sarton calls her “other experience in New York.”
“After my discouraging rove through Bloomingdales’ I went to a small French restaurant, Le Veau D’Or, took refuge there during a thunderstorm, having bought a book to read—an ideal one, as it turned out—Helen Bevington’s Journal of the Sixties. The place was jammed; my table faced the door; I could observe people as they came in while I sipped my drink and it was good not to be waiting anxiously for ‘one person,’ to be free, no entanglements, no little thread pulled taut inside me, so that in an hour there I had the feeling of a whole holiday and enjoyed myself immensely.”
Whole and holy holiday. Must’ve been Passover or Easter—and both.
I wish I’d known this woman, so compatriot with my own soul.
Please notice that Sarton’s journal is spiritual writing par excellence— high, wide, and deep—looking beyond, all around, and within, all at once.
In order to escape the term spirituality getting lost in a mush of eclectic meaninglessness, we ought to honor it by making Spiritual Writing a genre in its own write, or rite.
* * * *
Oh, and I do love that Pope Benedict, a pontiff with whose every word and pronouncement I have strenuously disagreed, has, with his reasonable recent decision to retire for age and health reasons, defrocked the Roman Catholic Church of its hierarchy-of-being delusions, and clothed it in humility.
As our President said last night, we are all in this together, and if we don’t act in bipartisan ways we will decay. I for one will not again vote for any local or national candidate with extreme partisan politics.
It’s the beginning of a new day. Carpe diem! And as the prophet Hosea says: Walk humbly with your God—yourself and your neighbors.
I suggest instead: take on new ideas and practices that delight, sort of like the famous Eden “apple.” You won’t die, so grab for life. I swear it’s just what God ordained in the first place.
Here’s a witty and wise message from the late May Sarton—great poet and contemplative thinker. This is in her little 1981 book of meditations The House By the Sea, April 29 entry.
Sarton has taken a “heavenly” train journey down the Hudson to NYC where she heads for Bloomingdales’ to find some summer shorts and jackets . . .
“. . .as usual, in total despair because I wear a size 18 or 20. I was shunted from floor to floor, on each seeing exactly what I needed. ‘But, oh no madam, we only have sizes 8 to 16. Try floor 3 . . . ‘Finally I managed to find a pair of very expensive jeans to garden in and a couple of shirts on the unchic, sad floor for half-sizes! Meanwhile, two thirds of the women going up and down the escalators were obviously not size 16! Why do we lie down and allow fashion to dictate our lives and to humiliate us? I think the Fat Panthers (emulating the Gray Panthers) had better launch a crusade—large posters showing gaunt, thin women looking tense and one hundred years old beside round, rosy, happy women might be a first attack.”
I can’t resist the next entry, which Sarton calls her “other experience in New York.”
“After my discouraging rove through Bloomingdales’ I went to a small French restaurant, Le Veau D’Or, took refuge there during a thunderstorm, having bought a book to read—an ideal one, as it turned out—Helen Bevington’s Journal of the Sixties. The place was jammed; my table faced the door; I could observe people as they came in while I sipped my drink and it was good not to be waiting anxiously for ‘one person,’ to be free, no entanglements, no little thread pulled taut inside me, so that in an hour there I had the feeling of a whole holiday and enjoyed myself immensely.”
Whole and holy holiday. Must’ve been Passover or Easter—and both.
I wish I’d known this woman, so compatriot with my own soul.
Please notice that Sarton’s journal is spiritual writing par excellence— high, wide, and deep—looking beyond, all around, and within, all at once.
In order to escape the term spirituality getting lost in a mush of eclectic meaninglessness, we ought to honor it by making Spiritual Writing a genre in its own write, or rite.
* * * *
Oh, and I do love that Pope Benedict, a pontiff with whose every word and pronouncement I have strenuously disagreed, has, with his reasonable recent decision to retire for age and health reasons, defrocked the Roman Catholic Church of its hierarchy-of-being delusions, and clothed it in humility.
As our President said last night, we are all in this together, and if we don’t act in bipartisan ways we will decay. I for one will not again vote for any local or national candidate with extreme partisan politics.
It’s the beginning of a new day. Carpe diem! And as the prophet Hosea says: Walk humbly with your God—yourself and your neighbors.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
