Spiritual readings "Greetings from Whittier Presbyterian Church"
Sept. 2001
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Harry Potter Musings |
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Vengeance in the Psalms |
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Scriptures for Terrorist Attack |
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Hatred in the Psalms |
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New Life out of Grief |
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A Psalm of Lament |
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Listening for God |
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Gil Bailie letter in response to Sept. 11, 2001 |
How many of you have ever read a Harry Potter book? Catherine M Wallace, author most recently of “Motherhood in the Balance: Children, Career, God, and Me”, Morehouse Press, writes of Harry’s growth in the virtuous life in the July 18-25 issue of the Christian Century Magazine. She says
“Harry….must learn how to trust and whom to trust. Although Harry obviously has what moralists call a fundamental option for the good,” he needs to learn that exercising this option fully requires cooperation with others. The virtuous life is necessarily social; evil has only accomplices, not community—which it reliably destroys.”
That closing sentence is what got my attention: “The virtuous life is necessarily social; evil has only accomplices, not community—which it reliably destroys.” That distinction between community and accomplices is a crucial one. It is helpful for us as we grow into mature responsible adults. As we grow from adolescence to adulthood we must learn this distinction. There are plenty of older people who are still struggling with this growth as they wrestle with addictive or abusive behaviors. Virtue creates community, evil destroys it. Great insight.
Grace and peace to you,
Geoff
During the month of August I began praying the Psalms again on a daily basis, at the behest of my spiritual director. Doing that one will run into the difficulty of the cries for vengeance in the Psalms. See Ps 137 or 109 for examples. Anyone commenting on the Psalms addresses this seemingly incongruent element of scripture. Here are the words of Walter Brueggemann in his book “Praying the Psalms, ” Saint Mary’s Press/Christian Brothers Publications, Winona, Minnesota, 1986.
“The most troublesome dimension of the Psalms is the agenda of vengeance. It does not fit very well in our usual notions of faith, piety, or spirituality. The Psalms explore the full gamut of human experience from rage to hope. Indeed, it would be very strange if such a robust spirituality lacked such a dimension of vengeance, for we would conclude that just at the crucial pint, robustness had turned to cowardice and propriety. The vitality of the Psalms, if without a hunger for vengeance, would be a cop-out. But we need have no fear of that. There is no such failure of nerve no backing down from this religion on the brink of stridency. Thus the expression of vengeance is not unnatural, unexpected, or inappropriate.”
I have found that praying the psalms over the years, crying for vengeance and all the other emotions of this great book, have broadened and deepened by spirituality and my relationship with God. May you find the same for yourself and your relationship with God.
Grace & peace
Geoff
In the light of events in our country and world today, let the words of scripture speak to us.
O
God, you have rejected us, broken our defenses;
you
have been angry; now restore us!
You
have caused the land to quake; you have torn it open;
repair
the cracks in it, for it is tottering.
You
have made your people suffer hard things;
you have given us
wine to drink that made us reel.
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
May you find the comfort and peace of Christ in your life today, and may you reach out and share that comfort with someone around you.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
Watching the events in New York and Washington of these last days, we experience a variety of feelings. Among those feelings is hate. Most of us “religious” people find hate to be something very difficult to admit or deal with. Psalm 137 contains one of the most blunt expressions of hate. Here are some words of Eugene Peterson about this emotion from his book “Answering God; The Psalms As Tools for Prayer,” Harper & Row, 1989
“…our hate needs to be prayed, not suppressed. Hate is our emotional link with the spirituality of evil. It is the volcanic eruption of outrage when the holiness of being, ours or another’s, has been violated. It is also the ugliest and most dangerous of our emotions, the hair trigger on a loaded gun. Embarrassed by the ugliness and fearful of the murderous, we commonly neither admit or pray our hate; we deny it and suppress it. But if it is not admitted it can quickly and easily metamorphose into the evil that provokes it; and if it is not prayed we have lost an essential insight and energy in doing battle with evil.”
We are all forced to confront events and images that we can compare to nothing we have experienced before. Only God is large and deep enough to contain what we have experienced. Let us take our experiences to God in ever deeper prayer.
Grace & peace
Geoff
How can God bring new life out of the suffering, destruction and pain that we see around us in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11? God has been at this job for millennia and will not give up now, nor is the size of the task to big for God. Here is how Walter Brueggemann talks about the process of grief and how new life may come out of it. This comes from his book “The Prophetic Imagination,” Fortress Press, 1978,
“We do know from our own pain and hurt and loneliness that tears break barriers like no harshness or anger. Tears are a way of solidarity in pain when no other form of solidarity remains.
This tradition of biblical faith knows that anguish is the door to historical existence, that embrace of ending permits beginnings……The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.”
Facing pain and grief is difficult for most of us, but our faith needs to inform our emotions in such situations. As painful as it is, we need to face squarely our grief and take it to God. May you find God’s help in these difficult days.
Grace & peace
Geoff
Ann Weems is a writer of some talent who has written a book of Psalms of Lament, by that title, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995. Her son was killed on his 21st birthday and her grief resulted in part in this book of psalms of lament. Weems has the gift of capturing the spirituality of lament psalms but using modern language and forms of expression. Here is one, Lament Psalm Twenty-five:
O God, what has happened to your creation?
What kind of world is this that the innocent die?
Where is your hand that it does not stop the killing?
How long will you watch while the world calls you names?
How long will you wait while the river of blood floods your streets?
Will you let the innocent die and the guilty go free?
Will the guilty laugh cruelly in the streets, while the innocent lie cold in their graves?
O God, where is your holiness in the face of this hell?
Bind the guilty, O God, and free the innocent to live in your presence.
Open their graves, and take them to your heart.
Kidd their cold lips and let them live forever I your eternal shalom.
O Holy God, I am stunned that you sit by while the innocent cry to you.
Where is your righteous anger?
Where is your powerful hand?
Why are your enemies allowed to desecrate your creation and slaughter your children?
O God of mercy, I am on my knees!
I beg you to bring peace out of this chaos.
Divide the Red Sea once more and save your people.
Come from your heaven and scoop the little ones into your arms and hold them against the terrors of this world.
O God of justice, stop these plagues,
and stoop to comfort your people,
for you, and you only, are our refuge.
Our prayers may frequently have sounded like this lately, as well they should. May you find the strength and comfort that God holds for you this day and in the days to come.
Grace & peace
Geoff
See the web page for a link to Terrorist Attack Response Help.
We are under pressure from the insistence and persistence of the story of current events with all their tragedy and pathos. To see our way into God’s future we need inspiration from God. We need to be listening for what God is saying.
In his book “Finally Comes the Poet” (Fortress Press, 1989) Walter Brueggemann talks about the way we listen for God. In speaking about God’s story versus the stories in the world around us, he makes reference to I Corinthians 1:25, paraphrasing it to say that God’s fictions are truer than the facts of men. He adds:
“From the great narratives of Israel to the prophetic poems to the testimony of early Christians, the singers and storytellers spoke dangerously about dangerous matters, about new possibilities. The …(world)…heard only fiction, but it was a “fiction” more powerful than facts.”
God has spoken in the past and we need to listen for what God is saying to us now. For some of us, the press of current events brings a new clarity to the Bible. May you find that clarity and a sense of God’s comforting presence in your life today.
Grace & peace
Geoff
Where do we find help for a millennial sized disaster? I continue to be fed by scripture as I read with what I have come to call a new clarity. Here’s another source of powerful help. This comes from an email I received from a friend who knows Gil Bailie. Gil Bailie runs a program called Florilegia and has written a book, “Violence Unmasked”
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In the end, Christians should remember that Christ is the Lamb slain
since the foundation of the world, a truth the anthropological meaning and
sacramental realism of which we have yet to fully understand.
Christ is mysteriously co-crucified (to use a Pauline term) with each and
every victim in history. What you
do unto the least of these, you do unto me.
Christ literally died on every floor and in every stairwell in the World
Trade Center towers, and in every demolished office at the Pentagon.
Christ died on every airliner hijacked on Black Tuesday, just as he will
very likely die anew in the mountains of Afghanistan when those maddened by all
these innocent deaths go hunting for their murderers.
For the least of these, whose deaths Christ insists on sharing, are the
morally despicable as well as the materially deprived and physically tormented.
I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
If you would like to read the whole statement, go here:
http://www.whitpresby.org/gil_bailie_letter.htm
Bailie goes on to recommend prayer, humility and gratitude as antidotes or helpful activities to the stresses and the swirl of demands upon our faith these days. I strongly recommend you read the whole article, then go get his book. That is just what I have done.
Grace & peace
Geoff
