“Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem” by He Qi
Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither; and in whatever he does, he prospers. Psalm 1:3
When I was 20 I went to Kenya to visit my sister and her family for about a month. It was my first international traveling experience, which I will never forget. Sights, sounds, and smells filled my senses and altered my imagination in profound ways. Acts of hospitality, the deep sense of community, and the ambivalence towards a utilitarian use of time all ensured that the white, middle-class suburban, college kid I was didn’t go home the same person.
One of the terms I kept on hearing while there was “mzungu.” Everyone I met repeated that term when I came into view. My immediate assumption was that it meant “white person.” I was correct in a sense; “white person” is its connotation.
However, what it really means is one who is always on the move, always wanting to see everything. There is a sense of constant swirling. It stems from the original Europeans entering Africa and “busily swirling around”. It is definitely a loaded word.
In many ways it still holds true today.
One thing I have learned over the past several years is the allegiance to the myth of productivity. We in the West, due primarily to the Industrial Revolution and technological boom of the past 100 years or so, are addicted to being busy in ever-increasing ways. Email, social media, and instant means of “checking in” have allowed us to take our offices with us in our pockets. People are literally working themselves to death in efforts to prove their productivity levels and the evidence of self-worth that comes along with them. It doesn’t take much to show this. Seeing the human as a machine has morphed from a metaphor into an identity.
Buying into the myth of constant productivity is a result of our seeking after growth and results. We think that if we are always busy, things will grow. Our businesses will grow, our intellects will expand, and our bottom lines will be blacker. Results will flourish based on how often and how long our noses are against the grindstone. “Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil” quipped Carl Jung.
I wonder how much of our result-driven busyness comes out of our formulaic attempts at growth. If we implement this guru’s wisdom here, align this methodology there, add enough pressure, and we’ll succeed. A + B = C. When this doesn’t pan out, we often give up or think we are not busy enough with the correct solutions to the problem.
The same postures and practices are found within the Church, the very community in which fruitfulness and growth cannot be coerced.
Perhaps it is from our fervent evangelistic outreaches. Perhaps it is our pursuits of justice. Whether we’re a megachurch or a church that fits in a living room, in many ways, we tend to fall into the trap of thinking fruit is always in season and that growth is always available. Again, we tend to bail out when produce is not easily seen.
If you are like me and the communities of faith I’ve been a part of, we tend to love the “whatever he does prospers” section of the above Psalm. We tend to think that we are infused with the power of God and as we do the things Christians do, we will find ourselves and our efforts bearing fruit.
Yet the natural world knows nothing of this. Seasons of produce give way to seasons of stagnation. Fruitfulness comes in harvest, yet is only possible after plowing, seeding, and waiting. Like the tree firmly planted, fruitfulness only comes in its season.
This reality is essential for those partnering with God in his missional movement of renewal. Despite our best efforts, we can formulate growth. We cannot read books, attend conferences, and listen to podcasts from “the experts” and expect growth to occur. Like the tree firmly planted, we are called to do just that: be firmly planted.
Staying put, working among others, and being present within the contexts we have been placed is the core of what it means to engage in mission. The supermarket mentality of fruit always being in season begins to fade into a farmers’ market reality of seasons as we remain rooted where we are. Constant swirling around and busyness will not bring about produce; it is the long, aching, persevering staying-put-ness that will. As we do this, we will see seasons of fruit come along with the seasons of plowing, seeding, and waiting. Discerning the different seasons is key. It will give us roots to see beyond the seemingly lack of fruit for the season of plowing we are in.
Seeing fruit comes to those who remain firmly planted waiting for its season.
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Other posts in this Lent series:
Moving Beyond Immediate (and) Affirmation or Why I Will Be Blogging Through Lent
“Divine Sorrow” and Remembering: Ash Wednesday
Longings, Presence, and Vulnerability: Day 2 of Lent
Being Led by the Gentle Voice of God: A Notebook and 3 Questions: Day 3 of Lent
Lent Around the Blogosphere: 10 Links: Day 4 of Lent
First Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Psalm 91 and Cliche: Day 5 of Lent
Humility, Place, and The Everyday: Lessons in Mission From John the Baptizer: Day 7 of Lent
Lenten Reflection and Fasting According to Joan Chittister: Day 8 of Lent
Jean Vanier’s “Seven Aspects of Love”: Day 11 of Lent
Second Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Suffering and Lent: Words from Joan Chittister: Day 14 of Lent
Third Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Fourth Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
The Difficult Place of Those Who Are Weaker – Jean Vanier: Day 27 of Lent
These are some wise, wise words from Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche Communities. As one who has worked with the less-abled for quite some time now, his insights into community have been invaluable. I strongly believe the following: those with disabilities have become a hidden population within our society and the Church has followed suit. In many ways, we have assumed influence comes from education and personal enlightenment. We have built communities where the voices, lives, and beauty of those who are seen as weak or are less-abled get relegated to our ministry life, but not our communal life. You are fine as the one we reach out to, but not as the ones we hold on to. Many factors go into this, but overall, in my experience, this has rung true. Vanier seems to agree.
The following extended quote is from his book Becoming Human, one of the books I am currently reading during Lent. If you are at all interested in community and belonging, this is a must read.
Those who are weak have great difficulty finding their place in society. The image of the ideal human as powerful and capable disenfranchises the old, the sick, the less-abled. For me, society must, by definition, be inclusive of the needs and gifts of all its members; how can we lay claim to making an open and friendly society where human rights are respected and fostered when, by the values we teach and foster, we systematically exclude segments of our population?
I also believe that those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us. When we do include them, they add richly to our lives and add immensely to our world.
Our society is geared to growth, development, progress. Life, for most of us, is a race to be won. Families are about evolution: at a certain stage, children are encouraged to leave home, get married, have children of their own, move on in their lives. But people with disabilities have no such future. Once they have reached a certain level of development, they are no longer expected or encouraged to progress. There is no ‘promotion’ for the disabled and what forward movement there is seems frequently to be either erratic or cruelly sped up: many move quite quickly from childhood to adulthood without passing through a period of adolescence; others age quickly. Our society is not set up to cope very well with people who are weaker or slower. More important, we are not skilled at listening to the wisdom of those whose life patterns are outside of the social norm.
There is a lack of synchronicity between our society and people with disabilities. A society that honours only the powerful, the clever, and the winners necessarily belittles the weak. It is as if to say: to be human is to be powerful.
Those who see the heart only as a place of weakness will be fearful of their own hearts. For them, the heart is a place of pain and anguish, of chaos and of transitory emotions. So they reject those who live essentially by their hearts, who cannot develop the same intellectual and rational capacities of others. People with intellectual abilities are excluded; it was never intended that they be included as equal partners with the powerful, you and me…We human beings have a great facility for living illusions, for protecting our self-image with power, for justifying it all by thinking we are the favoured ones of God.
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Other posts in this Lent series:
Moving Beyond Immediate (and) Affirmation or Why I Will Be Blogging Through Lent
“Divine Sorrow” and Remembering: Ash Wednesday
Longings, Presence, and Vulnerability: Day 2 of Lent
Being Led by the Gentle Voice of God: A Notebook and 3 Questions: Day 3 of Lent
Lent Around the Blogosphere: 10 Links: Day 4 of Lent
First Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Psalm 91 and Cliche: Day 5 of Lent
Humility, Place, and The Everyday: Lessons in Mission From John the Baptizer: Day 7 of Lent
Lenten Reflection and Fasting According to Joan Chittister: Day 8 of Lent
Jean Vanier’s “Seven Aspects of Love”: Day 11 of Lent
Second Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Suffering and Lent: Words from Joan Chittister: Day 14 of Lent
Third Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
it might be this:
Because you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.
Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
With the onset of Lent, Jesus’ time in the wilderness (Luke 4) becomes the plumb-line for the rest of our Lenten journey. Not only does it begin Lent, but it sets the overall tone for its duration. Jesus’ fasting and subsequent temptations by the satan are paradigmatic in their example and nature. Much has been said concerning this time and Jesus’ responses to the satan. Much has been said regarding the recapitulation of Adam’s temptation and Israel’s wilderness stories.
However, there isn’t much said about how place comes into play.
So, today when I read this quote in Craig Bartholomew’s Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today (one of the books I’m reading during Lent), it struck a chord. It is from Frederick Bruner’s The Christbook: Matthew 1-12:
Notice that the devil leads Jesus higher and higher: first from the wilderness and its rocks to the top of the temple and now, explicitly, to ‘a very high mountain.’ The Holy Spirit led Jesus down – into the easily misunderstood baptism of John, and then down still further into the wilderness of temptation. The Holy Spirit’s way is not so much up into the fascinatingly great as it is down into the ordinarily mundane and into the way of the cross and of suffering.
I find this eye-opening due its exposure of the constant downward mobility found within God’s story. From the opening statements of Genesis through to the Gospel accounts of Jesus and then culminating in Revelation 21-22, we find that the movement of God within the plot of Scripture is predominantly downward in direction. God descends into the garden and asks Adam and Eve, “Where are you?”. Jesus takes on flesh and blood and moves into the neighborhood. The city of God comes through the clouds and settles on the earth. All of these moves demonstrate the connection between God’s realm (heaven) and humanity’s (earth) and how the Divine stoops down to invade our time and place.
Again and again we find this downward movement in pivotal plot moments giving us an overarching picture of the manner in which God presents his love towards us.
We find this true here in Jesus’ temptation account as we see place pulling back the curtain a bit. As a result, both posture and practice are informed and molded in incarnational, self-emptying ways. The road to intertwining heaven and earth will not be through a spectacular power play from above. No, it will be long route of embodying love from the bottom upwards within the commonplace of the everyday.
What do you think?
Have you noticed the subtleties of place within the context of God’s story? If so, how?
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Other posts in this Lent series:
Moving Beyond Immediate (and) Affirmation or Why I Will Be Blogging Through Lent
“Divine Sorrow” and Remembering: Ash Wednesday
Longings, Presence, and Vulnerability: Day 2 of Lent
Being Led by the Gentle Voice of God: A Notebook and 3 Questions: Day 3 of Lent
Lent Around the Blogosphere: 10 Links: Day 4 of Lent
First Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Psalm 91 and Cliche: Day 5 of Lent
Humility, Place, and The Everyday: Lessons in Mission From John the Baptizer: Day 7 of Lent
Lenten Reflection and Fasting According to Joan Chittister: Day 8 of Lent
Jean Vanier’s “Seven Aspects of Love”: Day 11 of Lent
Second Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Suffering and Lent: Words from Joan Chittister: Day 14 of Lent
You might have felt it as a little child when your classmates laughed at you because you were cross-eyed or as a teenager when you were the last one chosen on the baseball team. You might have felt it when you were homesick in a boarding school or angry about non-sense rules which you could not change. You might have felt it as a young adult in a university where everyone talked about grades but where a good friend was hard to find, or in an action group where nobody paid any attention to your suggestions. You might have felt it as a teacher when students did not respond to your carefully prepared lectures or as a preacher when people were dozing during your well-intentioned sermons. And you still might feel it day after day during staff meetings, conferences, counseling sessions, during long office hours or monotonous manual labor, or just when you are by yourself staring away from a book that cannot keep your attention. Practically every human being can recall similar or much more dramatic situations in which he or she has experienced that strange inner gnawing, that mental hunger, that unsettling unrest that makes us say, ‘I feel lonely.’
Loneliness is a universal human condition. It is something that we all go through at one point or another. For some, the duration of their loneliness is longer than others. Regardless, if we are honest with ourselves, loneliness has been or is a part of our existence and has shaped our identities.
Henri Nouwen calls our attention to this aching aspect of our lives in an effort to move us deeper within ourselves. It is this moving inward that then allows us to move outward towards others and towards God. There is always overlapping and intertwining; each area is not cut off from the other, but always remain as a whole. Within his beautiful book Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, he urges us to transform our loneliness into solitude as we move inward; our hostility to hospitality as we move towards the other; and our illusion to prayer as move towards God. He says,
The more we come to the painful confession of our loneliness, hostilities, and illusions, the more we are able to see solitude, hospitality, and prayer as part of the vision of our life.
Yet, he urges us to begin with the transformation of our loneliness to solitude because “it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”
He is referring to our ever-present attempts to anesthetize our pain. We often times busy ourselves into chaos as we seek to run from our loneliness. If we can only work enough hours, drive the kids to enough practices, take enough courses. The inner void is constantly trying to fill itself with busyness.
If you are like me, you aren’t even fully aware of this busyness that is covering the loneliness. It becomes engrossing in many areas of our life until it becomes our life. The longing for wholeness drives us and also exposes our hopes. We don’t fill ours lives with that which we don’t think will fulfill our hopes.
So we recklessly seek recognition and success. We want to be known as the hard worker so we bury ourselves with work; we want to be recognized as the “Mother of the Year” so we buzz around town putting our kids in every activity we can; we want success as the scholar so we expend our time, money, and effort into multiple degrees. The examples are endless because this covering over of loneliness is endemic to humanity.
As we seek recognition and success as the anesthesia to our loneliness, we often do this to the rejection of others. It doesn’t take much looking around to see how even our most intimate relationships can be tainted by competition and rivalry. The loneliness within me pushes me away from others and their loneliness does the same to them. We build up walls of self-protection and self-defense in efforts of keeping ourselves safe. This comes at the detriment of community as we continually isolate ourselves. If we are not going to be recognized and successful, no one will.
Or we do this by throwing ourselves into relationships that we think will be the end all. If only we can find the perfect spouse. If only we can find the perfect social club. If only we can find the perfect church. The list goes on. Quickly these relationships devolve into groups of lonely people. Where their affinity once seemed to be the glue holding them together, they find strangers instead of community. Again Nouwen states,
Indeed, it seems that the desire for ‘final solutions’ often forms the basis for the destructive violence that enters into the intimacy of human encounters. Mostly this violence is a violence of thoughts, violating the mind with suspicion, inner gossip or revengeful fantasies. Sometimes it is a violence of words disturbing the peace with reproaches and complaints, and once in a while it takes the dangerous form of harmful actions. Violence in human relationship is so utterly destructive because it not only harms the other but also drives the self into a vicious circle asking for more and more when less and less is received.
Living out of our loneliness is what moves us in hostility towards the other.
This journey from loneliness to solitude starts with an awareness of what we have used or are currently using to cover our loneliness. Busyness and relationships are the avenues we walk down in our longing for recognition and success, and as such, are good starting points. Jean Vanier says we only become aware of our loneliness at times when we cannot perform.
Lent is a season where we can intentionally explore these longings and our loneliness through self-denial. As we deny ourselves activities, busyness, and, perhaps, relationships we are able to clear away the fog hiding our loneliness. The void we often fill becomes apparent as we find ourselves longing for recognition and success now denied. Perhaps these questions can help in this journey:
What do you busy yourself with?
What part of your life would cause you stress, anxiety, and pain if you couldn’t “perform”?
How is loneliness keeping you hostile towards others?
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Other posts in this Lent series:
Moving Beyond Immediate (and) Affirmation or Why I Will Be Blogging Through Lent
“Divine Sorrow” and Remembering: Ash Wednesday
Longings, Presence, and Vulnerability: Day 2 of Lent
Being Led by the Gentle Voice of God: A Notebook and 3 Questions: Day 3 of Lent
Lent Around the Blogosphere: 10 Links: Day 4 of Lent
First Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Psalm 91 and Cliche: Day 5 of Lent
Humility, Place, and The Everyday: Lessons in Mission From John the Baptizer: Day 7 of Lent
Lenten Reflection and Fasting According to Joan Chittister: Day 8 of Lent
Jean Vanier’s “Seven Aspects of Love”: Day 11 of Lent
Second Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Suffering and Lent: Words from Joan Chittister: Day 14 of Lent
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
My friends over at The Englewood Review of Books posted the following videos featuring renowned theologian and biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann. They are taken from The Episcopal Church of The Redeemer in Cincinnati for a series they are doing on Lent. In an effort to spread the goodness, I am posting there here as well.
As his normal self, Brueggemann is brilliant in these lectures/discussions on what Sabbath was and did in the context of Israel being in exile under the oppressive rule of differing – and yet stunningly similar – empires. Interspersed along the way, he brings to our attention what life might look like as subversive communities living within the Empire of our current age.
How do consumerism and productivism shape our identity – both communal and individual?
What does Sabbath have to do with the self, justice, and poverty?
How might we actually embody practices of economic subversion in our imaging of God?
This is eye-opening and challenging stuff. Watch, wrestle, and talk about it with your faith community. (There will be a Part 2 so check back in for that in a few weeks.)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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Other posts in this Lent series:
Moving Beyond Immediate (and) Affirmation or Why I Will Be Blogging Through Lent
“Divine Sorrow” and Remembering: Ash Wednesday
Longings, Presence, and Vulnerability: Day 2 of Lent
Being Led by the Gentle Voice of God: A Notebook and 3 Questions: Day 3 of Lent
Lent Around the Blogosphere: 10 Links: Day 4 of Lent
First Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Psalm 91 and Cliche: Day 5 of Lent
Humility, Place, and The Everyday: Lessons in Mission From John the Baptizer: Day 7 of Lent
Lenten Reflection and Fasting According to Joan Chittister: Day 8 of Lent
Jean Vanier’s “Seven Aspects of Love”: Day 11 of Lent
Second Sunday of Lent: A Prayer
Suffering and Lent: Words from Joan Chittister: Day 14 of Lent
