worship

Worship can be oriented correctly to God, yet not engage the worshipping community - then it is no longer worship but performance. On the other hand, worship can engage the community but not be oriented to God - that is simply self-congratulation.

via St. Aidan to Abbey Manor

thoughts

Can we be honest and admit that a large part of the Old Testament is nationalistic rather than theological in character?

There’s a difference between believing in the Bible and its power to transform, and believing the Bible as a sort of rulebook containing normative behavior and rules for all cultures and times.

labyrinth

via St. Aidan to Abbey Manor

question

What good is it to me,
if Mary gave birth
to the Son of God,
and I do not also give birth to him
in my time and
culture?

Meister Eckhart

seeking the pearl

Consider the story told by Timothy, a patriarch of the Nestorian church. Around 800, he engaged in a famous debate with the Muslim caliph in Baghdad, a discussion marked by reason and civility on both sides. Imagine, Timothy said, that we are all in a dark house, and someone throws a precious pearl in the midst of a pile of ordinary stones. Everyone scrabbles for the pearl, and some think they've found it, but nobody can be sure until day breaks.

In the same way, he said, the pearl of true faith and wisdom had fallen into the darkness of this transitory world; each faith believed that it alone had found the pearl. Yet all he could claim - and all the caliph could say in response - was that some faiths thought they had enough evidence to prove that they were indeed holding the real pearl, but the final truth would not be known in this world.

of dying, and living

This week my uncle died. His death has affected me far more than I would have expected, because I see echoes of my life in his. It is tragic to have to say that someone wasted their life, but in his case, it is the harsh truth. After a point in his life we could only see sadness, dependence in many forms, and wasted potential.

So where are the echoes? I see in myself a fear of fulfilling my potential, of living. I often find myself stuck in negative and self-destructive patterns of thinking, of feeling angry and blaming others. Of always finding excuses.

I don’t want to be him. I don’t want to look back at my life and see all the paths not taken.

Maybe then his life was not wasted, if it is pushing me to act, and to change.

May he rest in peace.

a sculpture of christ with swings and a slide

I found him like a fossil in the rock,
in the slab, waiting to be broken out.
Others I’ve chiselled have burst from the blocks
like genies from lamps, and one creature sprang

like a jack from a box. But not this one:
I took back the stone like flesh from a bone
while he dozed, sleeping it off on his cross.

The council bought him, stuck him in the park,
as out of place as a dog in a church.
The simple people came, told him secrets,
dressed him with flowers and polished his face,
put sweets in his mouth and gave him a name.
That’s when I saw the thing these hands had made.

from The Dead Sea Poems, Simon Armitage

of calmness

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my

being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport

in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of

unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down

and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal

mildness of joy.


Moby Dick

forgiveness

Forgiveness, as an act of love, is felt, not achieved. It can be given, but it may not always be received. It cannot be bestowed as either a triumph over another person, or as the means to secure their humiliation or acquiescence.

It is most healing, most profound when it grows out of humility and realism, a hard-won sense that, whether you are entirely to blame in these events and I am blameless, there is in each of us insufficiencies and imperfections that can be our greatest teachers.

You may not recognise forgiveness even when you have experienced it, for what we are seeking to know better is subtle, difficult to define, multi-layered and contains an element of magic. You will, however, feel it in your body. Something – very nearly a ‘thing’ – has left you. You are no longer carrying the load you were; you have put it down. Anger may have given way to sorrow or regret. Rage may have flattened out into indifference or pity. Into what seemed black and white has crept a little grey. ... You are more available to other people and a great deal more available to yourself, yet you think about yourself less, and less anxiously.

Can I do it? Can I let go of that hurt and simply forgive? I would have to acknowledge that my behaviour in the past contributed to leading us to that point. And maybe more difficult, I would have to agree to be a bigger and more generous person, a leader, because that’s what he needs from me. He needs my approval and support, and I can’t ask the same from him. He is my brother, but perhaps I need to be like a mother to him.

Can I be generous, even when faced with someone who cannot give?

kidane mehret

Our church hosts a large number of congregations, and services are often taking place simultaneously in different spaces. There is an Ethiopian Orthodox congregation, and today they were celebrating a special feast that I found out later was Kidane Mehret, Covenant of Mercy, which honours Mary. I wish I had had a camera to take pictures of the women (the vast majority were women) after the service; some of them were dressed in beautiful white outfits with gold trim, and I was told that they were the choir. Nearly all of the congregation were wrapped in white over their normal clothes.

I could find any photos of Kidane Mehret celebrations in my brief online search, but I did find this lovely slideshow on YouTube, not of the feast but of the Kidane Mehret Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Shawnee, Kansas.