Microbes, stardust and the body of Christ

Cecelia Asberg and Rosi Braidotti ask us to consider that:

“…the sheer number of microbes that inhabit our bodies including bacteria, viruses, protists or parasites, exceeds the number of our bodily cells by up to a hundredfold.”[1]

We pray for a better world. We gather to share in the body of Christ and we ask God to deliver us from all the evils of the world- inequity, hunger, war, climate change, illness including mental illness. Atheist friends tend to portray prayer as escapism, asking to be saved instead of doing something about it. Personally I don’t think it has to be an either or.

Even though God is not magically going to fix everything, we have been told “ask and you shall receive” and in any case years of telling little boys to put their socks in the wash, telling students to hand up their papers, telling employers I need to be paid in a timely way, telling governments to fund things properly have trained me in the not-so-subtle art of nagging. Like all the others God too gets to hear my perspectives on what would make the situation better.

Like a mother nagging a seven-year old to put things in the wash, I need to be involved in the work I am promoting, and this I think is the point of the first reading. Being religious and going through rituals won’t in and of itself achieve either my personal holiness or the more crucial aim of a better world. Our hearts and our over-worked, over-fed, over-stimulated bodies are hurting and the first reading tells us how to heal. First attend to the needs of the hungry, the poor, the oppressed and then come to God. Not that God is demanding some sort of tit for tat, but like babies copying their parents’ facial expressions, in doing the things that are the work of God we identify with her. We become like her and she recognises us. I like to think that even for God love is more than duty-of-care, I like to think that God too feels the ecstasy of recognition when seeing a loved one.

God does not force herself on the world or onto our lives, we invite her in by collaborating in the agendas of the kindom, we show our desire for God’s love and God’s action and then prayer is connection.

Corpus Christi reminds us that the Word of God is embodied. Embodied literally, living with a body, in a body, as a body.

We’ve been affected by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and we try to spiritualise everything – men in the past idealised the triumph of mind or spirit over body, something that was harder for anyone born with ovaries and a womb. Some of us spend a large chunk of our lives bleeding monthly and end up expected to look after the bodies of everyone else. Is the work of the philosopher superior? Someone has to bake his bread and weave his clothes. People who “rise above” their own bodies end up exploiting the bodies of others.

Jesus’ last supper was physical- bread and wine shared by bodies gathered around the table. Hands touched the bread, feet were washed, eyes met. The smell of sweat, the fear of approaching death, the light-headedness of confusion. Each of them breathing, the physical act of forming words that hang in the air between them.

Even in what we think, what we know and how we feel our bodies are implicated-  the endorphins when we move capably, the oxytocin when we spend time with the people we belong with, the dopamine to help us still our racing thoughts. When our bodies or minds don’t get what we need they fail each other. Some people need medication for “mental illnesses” meaning the stresses of their actual, lived reality have drowned out the body-mind’s capacity to renew itself.

We all need food. We all need rest. Our ears need to hear bird-song and the voice of the beloved.

Like Jesus after the last supper, we don’t always get what we need.

The second reading debunks a “prosperity gospel”. Being a follower of Christ does not mean endless feasting and celebrating. If we are going to exclude then we may as well not bother (I suspect this goes for churches as well as individuals).

A sacrament is more than just a celebration, perhaps we don’t have to be ascetic but neither should we use religious reasons to overconsume. A sacrament is an interruption to “business as usual”, more than permission to feel good or to escape from our daily reality.

Jesus who had multiplied the loaves and fishes, who had provided the wine (echoing Wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures), who had healed, and loved, called and sometimes condemned sits down to dinner, having completed the work asked for in the first reading. Sunday is a time to reflect on, feed and sometimes refocus the good we do in the rest of the week. We all have homes to feast in, yes, but God also notices the homeless person who is not feasting who we might walk past on our way to church. The body of Christ, broken, splintered by inequities.

We live on a planet that may be dying, and that also is the body of Christ. This planet gives us life- makes our breath and grows our food. We are, and we are called to be earthlings, bodily creatures of bread and wine and water (wind, and stone, and fire). Just as we are called to tend the humans who are missing out, we are also called to grow flowers to feed the butterflies and to refrain from plastic so that fish would have homes. Bodies move upon the earth and in the air and water. Bodies that are all kin to us, bodies that are Christ.

Bread comes from wheat, wine from grapes, food needs insects to pollinate it. Human lives need bread and roses. Christ’s body, like all bodies needs a complex eco-system to support it. We gather to celebrate Eucharist, to thank God for our lives, our bodies, the opportunity to restore right relationship with each other and our planet. We are able to break bread because of earthworms and bees and butterflies, because of the lifecycles of plants and animals, because of tides and weather patterns and our cosy, life-supporting atmosphere. We came from stardust but we are not ready as a species to return just yet.

We are here to share and heal. We are the body of Christ.

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[1] Åsberg, C., & Braidotti, R. (2018). Feminist posthumanities: An introduction. In A feminist companion to the posthumanities (pp. 1-22). Springer, Cham. 

The temple that grew legs and danced away.

I have a life full of writing and my blog is suffering for it, but I want to try to be loyal to something that was so life giving when I had so little.

I look at the lectionary as one who does not know what to believe and yet prays to “something” and endeavours to live life as a prayer. What is life as prayer? To me it means looking for the joy and integrity in each day trying to detox from anything that causes despair. I don’t do it so well but I think maybe trying in and of itself is a type of prayer. I do not feel far from Godde. She curls up secure in herself like a purring cat. She eats my food like my colleagues at a party last night. She pours me a wine and waits for me to make the first move like someone who is afraid of ruining my learning by telling me what to think.

I need to stop and wait and let the students draw their own conclusions better I am too opininated. I need to trust.

I look at the second reading? What would it mean to be a temple? Which bodies get to be temples and which get destroyed? I think of the young mother and her three children burned this week by the children’s father. Burning destroying. My body is a temple but so are the temples that are other people’s bodies. I may be the priest within my temple but I am not Godde. I do not destroy animals or people to feed myself. I must consume less (Gaia eleison) I must consume with more thought and restraint (Lamb of Godde have mercy). We’re not supposed to deceive ourselves into destroying temples of Godde. Driving poor people closer to the edge (suicide) or failing to respond with compassion to refugees is destroying the temple. That Godde is life is not the point. It is not for us to fight the life and liberation message of the Word of God. The Spirit means our potential to be imbued with Godness. Can we open the temple to that?

My children are generous. I had a celebration for something I have written last night and all three of my children agreed to attend and listened to my mentors and colleagues. We are church not as individuals but as community (most of those people are atheists I think but that is not the point). We make wonderful things happen by paying attention to each other. My eldest son summed it up, we are here not just for ourselves but to make it better for everyone. Nevertheless I think the gospel is hostile to women or to anyone who is already underprivileged and taken advantage of (workers as well). If management asks me to go a mile I ask for a contract because they are trying to exploit us all. This is an ethical stance. A blind application of this gospel (that was written in a place and in a time) to all situations is wrong. In capitalist, white-supremacist patriarchy (hooks) we need to stop going the extra mile for our oppressors. Save your extra mile for the ones you mentor, for the ones who are poor, for the ones who need the relief, help and guidance.

I go the extra mile at work all the time but I don’t do it for management (and I try to hide from them how willing I am, how enthusiastic I am to do this work). My colleague went the extra mile and helped me get into a conference.

So I don’t know how to follow my faith anymore, my faith in the church is so dented by their misogyny and child abuse and inability to show empathy or to listen or have any humility. I hear a call still, isn’t that mysterious? I believe in people and I said so last night. I believe that in the most evil circumstances, trapped in oppressive systems we can exercise our agency for rightness and goodness (justice and caring). I’m reading ethics (academic not faith-based) and I am struck how ethical frameworks come back to justice, caring (hesed?) and a need to be open/learning/reflexive (walk humbly).

The words of Micah are not in the lectionary every week but I return to them again and again. I will endeavour to live them and I ask this of Godde in return:

Fill my steps with joy. Lead me to the places and people where love is. Make it all have been worth it.

Beloved Wisdom hear our prayer!

I haven’t Blogged much lately. I’ve been thinking about writing things but work just keeps me too busy. But I was on the roster at church this week and managed to throw together a reflection on the readings. I used these first reading, psalm and gospel and added in Marina by T.S. Eliot (an old favourite of mine as regular readers know) as the 2nd reading.

I spoke without having written down my thoughts, because now that I teach and lecture that seems easier than reading…but later I reconstructed more-or-less what I had said. I also used a “Eucharistic prayer” that I wrote back in March but hadn’t had an opportunity to use today. It’s been sitting in a cupboard at church with noone aware it exists. It focusses on the earth.

Here  is my “reflection” on the readings:

I grew up with a “face value” reading of today’s gospel which I didn’t (in retrospect) find very helpful. In this way of thinking the Pharisee was wrong for thinking so highly of himself, whereas the tax collector was to be emulated as being humble and not thinking well of himself. I cultivated my low self esteem carefully, thinking it was virtuous to do so. It became self-hate and was quite a toxic thing to live with. I want to be careful today not to repeat the same mistake, to look with a more nuanced eye at today’s parable.

Parables are not simple surface-level morality tales anyway. They are meant to deeply challenge us, to niggle away at the things we think we know and invite us to come deeper, experiencing otherness rather than analysing it from the sidelines. Our experience of a parable should be a long journey of learning not a point of revelation or answers. Today’s section of the journey will be looking through the lens of the first reading. When the lectionary gives us groups of readings it is an invitation to consider them together and in light of each other.

So I will look back on Sirach. This reading is about God being responsive and empathetic to the plight of any who suffer from not being heard or having their needs disregarded.  God desires justice and will advocate for the widow and the socially, materially or emotionally vulnerable. The reading also has teeth- although I don’t like the violence sometimes present in the Hebrew scriptures I feel there is a risk when we sanitise our tradition too much. God break’s scepters, acts with anger and destruction toward those who hold unjust power. From our vantage point in a wealthy, overconsuming, exploitative country we would do well not to sanitise this part of our faith out.

But the focus is certainly comfort for the oppressed. God is not neutral is clearly taking sides here. This is consistent with a 20^th century Catholic teaching that used to be spoken about more- that God has a “preferential option for the poor”. God is present in the relationships and angry at the inequities of our social world.

So if we take this social justice focus back to the gospel, how to we view the two men in Jesus’ parable? The pharisee is not wrong to think well of himself and his achievements, but he is displaying a faith that is performative rather than relational. His focus is on impressing other people, comparing himself and feeling superior to others who he can pre-judge at a glance. He has filled in all his spiritual KPIs but become separated from other human beings.

The tax-collector has no such shield against the world. He has come to God with his vulnerability, his knowledge of his own failings. I am probably projecting a modern-day understanding onto him if I talk about his awareness of privilege, but I will try to explore that idea in view of what tax-collectors were and did in Jesus’ day. The Roman Empire used to impose taxes on the people- these could be crippling, and the men who collected them added their own fee to the tax they collected. They were hated in part because people hated paying the taxes, but also because many of them may have added on an exorbitant fee and so enriched themselves.

A tax-collector then might be caught between the competing demands of his family (who will struggle or starve without his income) and the injustice and imbalance of the empire’s taxes and perhaps his own added fees. He is caught up in a system of injustice and oppression, not just caught up in a web of dependency but maybe even benefiting from it. We know this too, that although there is much that is wrong with the world these days we are often the ones who benefit from the inequitable distribution of wealth and the exploitation and demonisation of others. The tax collector brings his awareness and his worry to God, not able to find answers but showing a willingness to let God inform and infuse his life for a better future. Jesus says that he rather than the escapist priest is the one “justified”.

What does this mean? How does it help to be “justified”?

What is it that we come to church for?

Dare we be honest and less than shiny before God…and what does this look like?

If God listens to the poor and oppressed, what is our role in all of this?

There are no answers in the back of the book, but we can reflect on these challenges and share our thoughts with each other.

Homes for all and the kindom of Godde.

OK so it is homeless week. It’s a week to think about people who don’t have it easy. Let’s not make it a week of congratulating ourselves for a small or moderate amount of tokenistic charity but let’s make it a week for reflecting on the systemic reasons for homelessness. Let’s acknowledge the sin of inequitable ways of being in the world and let’s heed a call to repentance (transformation, revolution). This is the agenda I shamelessly bring to my frienemy the lectionary. Let’s see how that pans out!

Abraham prays to Godde in a way that I really admire in the first reading. You can call it bargaining if you like, I call it advocating. “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? “is a valid question to my mind. Godde is responsive to Abraham in this reading, there is a failure to break out of the kyriearchal model of punishing and using power over. Much as it is tempting to want Godde to act this way toward the unjust (remembering that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was inhospitability rather than imposing anachronistic interpretations to do with sexual orientations), much as we sometimes want Godde to be our powerful super-hero that sorts out the bad guys this flies in the face of our experience of our socio-political world.

So, beyond the superficial blind allies, what do we have here? We have Abraham role-modelling for us a gritty and honest relationship with Godde, an ethic of care toward his relatives. Since that time we have had Jesus pushing the boundaries of our kinship, asking us to open up our familial care to “others” (which makes it tragic when Christians feel the need to judge or exclude their own). I seem to hear sarcasm in Abraham’s humility in arguing with “the Lord”. I feel that Godde would appreciate the sassiness of this encounter. Refocusing on the homeless we need to be both this persistent and this audacious in pursuing better outcomes.

One of my fears for my own old age is homelessness. I have not accrued much super and the world is becoming less forgiving of elderly people who are not rich. So being that homeless person in my imagination (the one I hope I never get to experience for real) I read the psalm.

“Though I walk amid distress, you preserve me;
against the anger of my enemies you raise your hand.
Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me.
Your right hand saves me.
The LORD will complete what he has done for me;
your kindness, O LORD, endures forever;
forsake not the work of your hands.”

Do homeless people get to feel this? Can they feel a radical presence? I try to do small acts of solidarity as I walk through town, I try to smile or say “hello” to street people as they are possibly future me (you’d be surprised how many are very well educated). I do succumb to beggars when I am able, it’s a problematic question of what the right thing to do is, but I don’t work hard enough on changing the political scene to feel completely guiltless about other people’s poverty. I try to be the “kindness” in the psalm not the “enemy”.

It frightens me that people can “walk amid distress” and walk and walk mile after mile, year after year with no relief. This applies also to the refugees on Manus. If we are going to discuss homelessness then the way our society ignores, trivialises and victimises Indigenous people and disabled people in particular needs to be mentioned. The number of older women finding themselves homeless is a set of questions we should be demanding answers to. “Distress” in our society is unevenly distributed according to race, class, gender and non-heterosexuality. All these people are the work of Godde’s hands. Godde lovingly created the beloved Indigenous, disabled, queer, poor woman that we discard (or any other). When we forsake the work of Godde’s hands we are deeply insulting Godde.

Christe eleison.

In the second reading we have all been baptised into the life of Christ. This is not about drawing boundaries around an exclusive community or imposing membership processes (such as human celebrations of particular models of baptism), it is about Godde’s sacramental claiming of us all into a radical dignity and equality, nailing to the cross anything that obstructs us from perfect love. Love flows to us and calls to us, it loves us into being better if we only become aware of it. The first step (if we take a sacramental approach) is not striving to do good deeds or to weed out sin, not to fill in some sort of spiritual KPI.

The first step is becoming aware of the love that Godde has for us…for our world…for people…for non-human creation…for the yearning in us to be love. I am Christian because I believe that even this awareness is transformative, that we will learn to desire lovingness as a basis of our life if we let ourselves be aware, barefoot on the ground of our being (Godde). When we are motivated by desire not duty, we work a lot harder. Trust me this is almost always true 😉 Awareness of Godde builds in us a desire to be infused by Godde’s presence and to do good not as “work” but as a creative and free expression of who we really are. The tragedy of violence and abuse is not only that the victim suffers, it is also that the perpetrator is not being their authentic and free self. Nevertheless, anger is often the appropriate response to abuse. Within myself though, I can try to hear the voice of Godde more strongly than the voices of my detractors. I can try to speak out of the freedom of being absolutely beloved and affirmed to be love.

I am not claiming that I have achieved this, but it’s a direction.

To return to the homeless person, we must be motivated by genuine love and solidarity to make social world’s where people have their material needs met. We must work harder for the good of each other instead of letting suspicion and envy turn us into hoarders of wealth. If we are working hard for love not duty, we will feel less angry if someone else benefits from our work. Sacrament then is a key to social change.

Into the gospel. I hope the focus on sacramentality has adequately prepared us to really pray with Jesus our prayer-coach. There is a lot here and I don’t feel able to cover it all sufficiently. I will drop a link to last time I covered this in case you need more.

Jesus is telling us to shamelessly bring our authentic needs and agendas to Godde. How sad that this example of how to pray has become just a set of words we recite in a hurry a lot of the time instead of an exemplar of how to construct our own. Sorry Jesus, for all the plagiarism. Jesus’ prayer is balanced, there is an acknowledgement and awareness of Godde and Godde’s agendas and a flowing over of Godde’s agendas into our interests as earthlings. “Your kindom come” because we are your kin and everything you do will make us more free, and more real. But Jesus also reminds us to be persistent if we feel we are not getting an authentic answer.

This seems to me to be a two-edged sword in that on the one hand it validates our nagging of Godde as part of right relationship, but what is also implicit here is the idea that when we have the power to grant someone’s need of course as decent human beings we would do so. When we, as decent human beings encounter the homeless, we will open the door and give food and recognition. When we, as decent human beings witness systemic abuses we will speak out and act for what is good. When our government refuses to even attempt to save the only planet we can live upon, we will pester and pester not only Godde but humans. We will demand decency and humanity from those in power, we will never become cynical enough to stop demanding what we need (our bread for tomorrow). We will never become cynical enough to give up on a vision of Godde’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven”. We will never have our head too much in the clouds to hear the gritty voices of reason on this material earth beloved by a gritty dirty-sandalled Jesus.

In todays world, hope is a necessity we must search and work hard for. We focus on the needs of those who do not have what they need. We take back our power as members (through baptism) of Godde’s kindom. We seek a fairer, more hopeful world, transformed by love.

 

 

 

Not finding it in the lectionary this week

Edit: When I wrote this I was unaware that this week is reconciliation week. I feel a bit ashamed that I was unaware but I think some of my points work for that occasion. At church we reflected of reconciliation week, the need to decolonise, the recent arrest of the Catholic archbishop of Adelaide for covering up child abuse, our desire to move away from any model of church that is a “boy’s club” (a man said this), and our tears and love for the people suffering the fall-out of these toxic cultures. I also reflected on the fact that in the week gone we celebrated Pansexual and Panromantic visibility day and that people whose love is outside the box (but respectful, equal and between consenting adults) show the dance of the Trinity in their being.

The idea of “chosenness” that comes through in the first two readings and the psalm this week seems cosy and comforting but it actually if we look closer deeply problematic.

I speak with the anger and bitterness of the outsider- chosen last at team sports, excluded from games and parties and a child, ganged-up on, teased, criticised, harassed, written on with pen and then punished by parents for being written on. I speak with the pain of the eldest child in a large and dysfunctional family- although my feelings of being replaced and passed over were not (I now as a parent myself realise) a completely accurate reflection of reality, the feelings were real. I speak as the child who couldn’t speak English, the teenager who wore hand-me-downs from old people, the young single mother in a primary school where everyone else seemed to be comfortably middle-class. I speak as someone who has suffered mental illness, mild alcoholism, chronic dysphoria around sexual identity.

The minute someone is the “chosen people” you are also creating outsiders, the excluded ones, the ones who do not measure up. I felt this only on a gut level as a child – something about the presumed “chosenness” of the people of God (and lets not blame the Jews this idea is just as rife in the so called “New Testament”) something there seemed a bit off, even when I was a pious little child who assumed my inability to grasp this idea as “fair” and my desire to feel empathy for the ones who were not “chosen” was something I had to try to repress or grow out of (I spent my childhood repressing many things and got quite good at it, not so much now).

I speak with the amusement of the queer, feminist, deconstructive, almost post-Christian (except God doesn’t quite let me slip away). I speak as the outsider who no longer tries to fit in and be “normal”. My hermeneutic of suspicion is triggered by this first reading where we are supposed to believe that no one else ever experienced God until it could be done in the proper patriarchally approved and religiously institutionalised way in the correct sort of fire. This is what the Christian missionaries believed, the ones who worked tirelessly to aid colonialism, at times putting a slightly more benign face of it with gifts of food and clothing but nevertheless destroying cultures and families in the name of this great and good and only Lord and his structure of “rightness”.

Because if we are right then the others are wrong. If we are chosen then the others are rejected. If we have the only and one truth then the others have nothing of value.

And so it begins.

The gospel on this occasion gives no relief. Jesus is the proper rubber-stamped figurehead of the new world-order they worship him repressing their doubts and he commissions them to go out and reach everyone with his marketing message. We can try to cosy up to this, try to read the commissioning as preaching a gospel of liberation and justice, because that fits our theology it fits who we know God is and who we experience Jesus as.

What/who we know experientially and sacramentality is all we really have.

But the church has not necessarily read it this way, when they have seen “make disciples of all the nations” that has fed a deficit view of nations that are not already Christian and an expansionistic mission. Many missionaries no doubt meant well and some were kinder than secular colonists (mind you these colonists also would have considered themselves “Christian”) but this expansionistic mission did huge harm to many people, including perhaps my own people in Latvija colonised by German “Lords” and including certainly Indigenous Australians taken over and used as slaves by the English.

All of this was considered a faithful reading of today’s gospel. All of this is the shame I feel if I admit to anyone that I am a “Christian”.

I am not finding life or Godde in these readings (though perhaps a wiser preacher at church will glean something). I wanted to reflect on the Trinity, on difference and loving “other” or “thou” within God. I want to reflect on the diving dance “peripatesis”, as I learned at theology college the movement of the Trinity is in and out and through and around each other. There is love and beauty, there is relationship and great complexity at the heart of God.

Let’s leave behind colonialist traditions after seeing them for what they are and realising we will be called to account as a culture. Let’s reflect on how we are invited into the peripatesis of the Trinity, the respectful and madly joyful dance of God, the eternal turning toward the other. We are the image of God and as such are called to turn to the image of God in thoughtful listening like Jesus in prayer, in admiring love like the creator at Jesus’ baptism, in nurturing care like the spirit who flows in and through Jesus to the world.

I was hoping that the feast of the Trinity would remind us that “Wisdom has built a house” and invites all to celebrate. There is room then not to colonise, but to meet on equal terms the “others” who are not “Christians” but may have met Wisdom in another place because she likes to get out there- she is no enclosed victim-lady. Wisdom of course, the pre-existing companion of God the Creator is the one embodied as Jesus in the “New Testament”.

But if the lectionary has let me down, then I will dance right out of it to all of scripture and to the ultimate aim in life to understand and heal others. And I will pray:

Father, Mother, Creator of all, Midwife of each life that comes into being. Teach us to know ourselves in your image and see each other in your image. Teach us reverence for all your creation, showing us how to nurture seeds and stones and polar ice caps better. Thank you for naughty kittens and waddling penguins. Thank you for the clever things humans say. Thank you for the richness of which we see only a part. Call us deeper into the connection and love at the heart of your creative work.

Jesus, Christ, Wisdom, Sophia, Son, Word, Mother-Hen, Vine, Way, Truth, Life. As Wisdom you have the eye for detail and for joy. As Jesus you showed unbelievable courage and commitment. You are the one who seeks to protect, heal, scold, reform, feed, teach, guide, send-out and suffer for us and for all creation. You feed us your body and blood, you call us to honour what we eat and to live. Death cannot claim you because your nature is to live always. You bring us transformative possibilities and radical hope but nor without hard work and possibility of suffering also. If the whole world would love you then we would find newness of life. We will seek you and we will find you if we seek with all our heart.

Holy Spirit, dove, flame, fire, love, flow. Giver of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, reverence and respect of God. Pour out your gifts to us. Show us the Creator and the Word in our lives. Help us to read the gospels in the right frame, receptive to your Wisdom and closed off to hatred and abuse. Inspire us with life, fire us with pregnant possibilities like Mary pregnant with the Christ. Remain with us when we are troubled or suffering or even in death. Bring us back to our vocation to love. Bring us back into your presence giver of life.

Trinity of God may I see the love poured out in you each to the others and may I live my life in divine dance, seeking to connect as you connect, seeking to unconditionally love as you love, seeking where the hope is and strengthening there. May my life find meaning, joy, love, peace in you.

Amen.

 

She calls me (I have been lousy at answering lately): Pentecost

Sometimes I find other people challenging. I am tempted to avoid conflict, challenge, discomfort, potential criticism, giving offence and just trying to be radically self-sufficient (which if you know me at all is a laughable concept). I try not to emotionally “need” anyone (also laughable). I am an introvert, I could disappear forever into a rabbit-warren of books and writing and be perfectly happy…except it doesn’t really work that way.

Too little time being “bothered” by other people’s expectations and needs and opinions and ideas and blah blah blah blah can be even worse than too much. I become less and less productive. I can’t see the point of doing this or doing that. Why get out of bed? Why get dressed? why move? Why write things no one really wants to read? Why bother? Why breathe? Why be?

This is not a recent thing for me, but I have been at the extreme of the keeping-people-out cycle and sure I did it for my own protection but it hurt me more than it healed me. My longest-term friends are people who have been patient with my various inabilities to engage at various times and I am grateful for them. I will never be someone who can cope without the possibility of retreat and some alone time but I have learned that too much is as bad (or worse) than not enough.

Just when you thought none of this has anything to do with Pentecost, let me circle back to the first reading. Because for an introvert like me, a severe critic of the church, someone who often disagrees with what we are told to believe…there is a surprising truth in the first reading. The Holy Spirit did not come to atomised individuals, each locked in the safely self-perpetuating labyrinths of their own minds. She waited until they were all together, each having to deal with their own impostor syndrome, their own insecurities and awkwardness, each other’s loudness and stupidity and potential to be irritating and the way they all rubbed up against each other and had to constantly watch and redefine boundaries and feel left out or bored or angry or overwhelmed.

They were all “in one place together” an introverts nightmare and it gets worse, because the Spirit prompts them to reach out to OTHERS and include those who speak different languages. Significantly (and I have probably said this before) she did not work on the hearts of ears of the foreign listeners to change them so that they could understand, she changed the preachers to be heard and understood in people’s own languages. I believe this is something the church gets wrong very often. We say “here is my message now you change to understand it” instead of saying “how can I learn your language to preach love and good news in?”.

Obviously it is disingenuous to pretend that no change at all is demanded from hearers of the true gospel. I am not saying we should be preaching “Keep on competing and exploiting and buying and meaninglessly celebrating nothingness with you novelties and toys that you don’t even really like. Keep on overeating and trying to kill emotional pain by distracting yourself with addictions and fixations and replacements for real life. Keep on denying climate change and protecting borders and trying to return people to narrow and rigid “values” that never worked to begin with while you overwork and turn up your entertainment too loud and invest in brighter lights and flashier baubles and prettier words and hold up social media as a flattering mirror (beauty mode) to avoid facing your own damn loneliness”

I am not saying we shouldn’t call people (ie ourselves) to change.

But what if we stop sweating the small stuff, like what religion someone is or what sexual orientation. Many churches find such an idea controversial but I wonder if we could get further by finding the humanity and good intention in each other.

George Monbiot in his book Out of the Wreckage, asserts that altruism and a desire for connection is intrinsic to human nature to the point that humans are defined by these things. No other animal wants to do acts of kindness and generosity for no reason at all, but humans again and again over centuries (and in some truly horrendous situations) have been observed doing irrational things for the good of others, sometimes strangers, often completely peripheral to their own lives. That is a beautiful thing to be defined by and Monbiot is very persuasive about it.

If I read the bible about how Godde has walked with human-kind and how Christ became embodied with and in and for us then Monbiot’s idea makes perfect sense. He writes from a secular perspective but the eyes of faith see evidence also that he is right. Then I won’t listen to the people who tell us that kindness is about projecting the ego (or something) or that generosity is about passive-aggressive self interest or such nonsenses that try to deconstruct human relationships to transactions and affective bonds to something market-based. Those sorts of thoughts are strong now, they drive our politics. It never fails to amaze me that people can strongly advocate a “Christian” hegemony and a neoliberal one together as if Christianity did not specifically contradict the politics of self-interest and the reduction of the human person to a unit of the market.

But the Spirit has never been about units at all. She flows between and around us when we relate to others. She inspires us to LOVE to truly love each other and ourselves.

So the second reading continues with a celebration of difference, but also of connectedness (what good are severed body parts?). The gospel finishes the glory and triumph of the Easter season (alas over so quickly) with a reminder of the Risen One standing among us giving peace and breathing into us Spirit. It matters how we treat people. It matters what we label and call out as “sin” in ourselves or others. It matters what we let slide. Let’s think a little more about living an Easter reality, alive with the Spirit and attune to the needs and goodness of each other.

Let’s sing the traditional Pentecost sequence, or find our own:

 

Come, Holy Spirit, come!
Shed splendid radiant light
Come, Mother of the poor

show us how to better share the treasures

you have already brought us.

Shine in our hearts

let our intrinsic worth and desire to love

burst forth.

 

You love and cradle us,

comfort us and draw us out of despair,

inactivity, disengagement

be welcome in our souls

dancing within and setting us dancing.

Refresh us, for we are made for

more than toil or labour

show us how to refresh each other,

give us coolness in the heat

of our passions- anger, fear, desire, disgust.

 

Beautiful light that is Godde

shine within our hearts

let us be beacons of you to each other.

Let us forget our addictions

and know that only your light, your dance

can fill us.

 

Without you we have nothing

(but you are with us so we have all).

Heal our wounds, our strength renew

on our dryness pour thy dew

wash the stains of guilt away

(washerwoman God we know you in the waters)

bend the stubborn heart and will

melt the frozen, warm the chill,

(cast down the mighty from their thrones

and lift up the lowly)

guide us so we don’t jump off a cliff

and take so many species with us.

 

Give us the intrinsic reward of knowing you

let us remember that it is about love

not just saying “Lord. Lord” and bending a knee.

Pour out your gifts, your joys, your inspiration.

Make us embodiments of every radical hope,

make us reckless in generous love,

make us beautiful and light-filled

like YOU.

Amen. Alleluia.

Instead of a reflection, a poem

I felt like today’s readings were more or less a repeat of what we have already been doing. I know there must be new insights in them but I wasn’t feeling it this week- it just felt like “this again”. Any newness of life at the moment seems hard-won, though my garden more than likely appreciates the rain. Just about the only thing that made me pray this week, happened at karaoke while I was singing “Better man” by Robbie Williams so this is one of those weeks when I focus on an extra-canonical reading.

“…I fear the cold, feel I’m getting old before my time.

As my soul feels [it may have been “heals” but in my case definitely “feels”] the shame, I will grow through this pain, cause I’m doing all I can to be a better man”

Readers who know me well, will question the “man” but I leave it in as a provocation. And reflecting on positive shame and the dryness of my spiritual well this week, prompted a short piece from me:

Des(s)ert(ed)

 

All praise to the risk takers.

 

Capitalism gives us all the world

if only we kneel down

and worship

bread made from stone.

(See e.g. Luke 4:1-13) But God I’m doing all I can, to be a better “man”. Amen.

 

 

Healing, not just pain relief.

Drudgery. Slavery. Pointlessness. Job is feeling pretty negative about life. I have felt squeamish about getting into these readings because of my own battles with depression, my own difficulties with finding a work life balance which works for me and my children and the many depressed people in my life. I have been constantly struggling to feel hope for myself, my situation and the situations of friends who don’t even have enough to live on…let alone the people on Manus Island.

I am reluctant to grapple with the negativity of Job, on top of the negativity around me. What if I simply give a nod to the fact that scripture acknowledges depression and discouragement as part of the human condition. Acknowledges them but does not accept them- there is no acceptance in Job. Job complains, in so many other parts of the bible people complain when things go wrong. At time there appears to be a moralistic tone taken against this complaining (murmuring, whinging) and yet it continues.

Humans suffer.

Humans complain.

Humans make stories even about their suffering.

With relief I turn to the psalm where God is healing the brokenhearted, rebuilding Jerusalem, regathering Israel. I am going to wallow in this hopefulness verse after verse as God heals the brokenhearted (don’t we all want a little bit of that?), binds up wounds. God’s healing goes out to more than just humans, s/he is on first-name basis with every star in the sky. At this point I am cheering and calling for God to come into my world/s of work and friendships and politics and the larger world of the environment. Bring this healing and comfort! We all sorely need it!

The psalmist seems of the same mind, breaking into an ecstatic that God is “great”, “mighty in power” and unlimited in “wisdom”. Well, you’d hope so wouldn’t you? It ends on a very interesting two-liner that is echoed also in the Magnificat

“The Lord sustains the lowly;

the wicked he casts to the ground.”

 

Granted it does not explicitly state that “the wicked” is a synonym for “the privilege and powerful” however the structure of this triumphant challenge comes across as a reversal of the worldly status quo (especially if with Job we are approaching the psalm really disenchanted to begin with). If we are lowly then God will sustain us. If someone is wicked (including us of course) then they will be thrown down.

 

The dangerous temptation here is to rest in the cosiness of this psalm and think therefore we can let all the evil and injustice go on in the world because God will fix it all. As far as personal morality goes, that may well be a great strategy- leave it to God to decipher and change people’s interior life (and stay open to being called to change ourselves and to greater compassion and understanding). But as far as we see people deprived of food or dignity, left out in the scorching streets to fend for themselves or locked up in muddy unfinished gaol-camps we can’t simply shrug and say “ho hum God’s really nice and will fix it”.

 

I’d take this psalm as comfort and a safe space to let go of our anxieties and depressions but not as an escape-hole from the world. We rest for our Sunday meal, our happiness with this healing, fixing God and THEN we are empowered to learn from this God how to bring healing and fixing to others. We are God’s children not God’s puppets. We are apprentices not patrons for the master-craftsman of healing and justice that is Holy Wisdom. What God is, we must yearn to become and what God does we must learn. We may not be perfect and powerful and all wise like God in the psalm but we were created in the image of God, inbreathed with God’s breath and then called and sent to touch each other with God’s blessing and healing.

 

There is so much more in the second reading and gospel but I have already used too many words. I think Bernadette Kiley’s book on Mark has something on the gospel that I couldn’t improve on. If you have had enough of my words you may just want to repray the beautiful psalm. Or pray with me…

 

God of rebuildings and gatherings,

 

Teach us how to stop fracturing and undoing our human relationships and our place as part of the earth. Teach us to plant and nurture, to walk in bare feet and feel love again for our brokenhearted, blue and beautiful earth. Teach us to heal.

 

Show us that we can build tables instead of walls and we can bring people in to sit around the table of grace. Motivate our societies to be less about the miracle of some technology for the privileged 1% and more about the miracle of feeding the 5000. Indulge our curiosity toward the stars, but remind us to reach our arms up to embrace and appreciate the beauty of the stars not to colonise and exploit even the most distant and powerful things in our universe.

 

Surprise us with a different sort of greatness and power, than the one that must build walls. Show us the wisdom where power lies in sustaining the lowly. Be our unlimited wisdom that shines hope even into these days of suicidal politics toward climate change and conflict. Cast the wicked down from their places of power over others, give us back ourselves. Cast down the wickedness in each of us. Throw out our fearfulness and apathy and greed. Re-orient ourselves toward radical and trusting love.

 

Heal us as we praise you (and when we can’t) for we are the broken-hearted.

Call, and call, and call, and call again until we learn how to listen.

 

You are our hope and the Wisdom which is balm.

Be very near.

When Jesus comes, the status quo is “greatly troubled”

Happy epiphany! Lectionary readings for the day can be found here. 

We live in a world, where it is supposed to be “common sense” to blame the refugee, the foreigner and the welfare recipient for hard times.  Firstly, these times are actually not all that hard if we are not a refugee or welfare recipient ourselves; secondly such as they are, they are caused by choices the government makes to support and shore up the rich rather than the poor.

It is not the person from a war-torn or flooded country that is taking funding away from public hospitals while allowing multi-national companies to use up the natural resources of the country without contributing any tax! It is not the injured breadwinner, the single mother, even the shiftless artist who is stripping funding from public schools to fund pointless and dehumanising plebiscites, give free money to the now foreign-owned propaganda machine and the mining companies; or who is tying our economics to outdated and inefficient coal and scoffing at new technologies that are proven in other parts of the world to work. And as far as “family values” go…it is not the loving and accepting parents of the trans child, it is not the two women bringing children up together that are telling us that compassion is a luxury we cannot afford and that everything needs to be ruled by the dispassionate, uncaring market…the values of the market are the values we now follow as a society. It seems we have a new God.

I reject that God and all the victim blaming and mathematically unsound “economics” such thinking brings with it.

I look for a star in the east, the new hope and I try to be like the magi. The magi got pulled out of their comfort zone, to go to a culture they knew nothing about and to find a poor (perhaps) and seemingly insignificant family that had had a baby. Sure in terms of the gospel, we are meant to nod and smile, this is “proof” that Jesus was someone special but the fact is that God is full of these sort of proofs, that in fact every foreign and poor and displaced baby is “special”. Each one is the hope that this world has.

Gold, frankincense, myrrh- these are material resources, worldly wealth for the “kingdom of God” after all. That is to say, our “spirituality” is not just about being “spiritual” and praying and feeling good and some sort of inner “niceness”. There is a practical dimension to our travelling with God and to the foreign baby, God. God demands an easier life for the poor- real gifts, real help, real earth-rooted and material signs of love and dignity.

Individual acts of “charity” may not change the world, but they change a life or three and they show a commitment– yes God we will go out of our way, yes God we will allow you to help yourself to the goods of this life, yes God even our “worldliness” is centred on you. It starts with the generosity I can show toward others in my life or in my networks and it flows from that to an attitude of acceptance and love, a desire to advocate for Jesus wherever s/he lies, whatever manger, whatever sheets- and let’s face it at times he is not the poorest of the poor either, his life is not the meanest of the mean but he needs something from us other than judgement and a turning away. When Jesus the refugee manages to get a decent job, to get into a decent school, wear fashionable clothes or buy a mobile phone you get people saying “see how easy it is for ‘them’- too easy” but Jesus is still asking us for acceptance, for love, for equality.

When Jesus the single mother can afford a haircut or a glass of wine or is given a nice handbag for Christmas, then she does not fit our idea of abject poverty and we may think that welfare payments are “too generous” that she “has it easy” that she is not suffering enough to deserve support or dignity. But the idea that Jesus lived in a stable in Bethlehem and froze in rags, though picturesque, is probably wrong (houses had mangers in them). Jesus was crowded, displaced, his parents had an uncomfortable journey and much stress (especially once Herod wanted to kill their child) but they may not have been so “respectably” poor.

The poorest, the homeless and the literally starving need our generosity and our support but so do the merely depressed or merely struggling or merely locked out of promotions…the lonely, the under-confident, the disorganised, the depressed, the apathetic and the uneducated. Jesus has needs and is not here to gratify our vanity by showing credentials, being the deserving poor- safely, tamely in a corner that we can define and get out of. Jesus is one of us and will irritate us with poor life choices and a less than warm manner at times!

I struggle to feel emotionally charitable to some of the people that I see on Facebook- I want to judge, condemn, block or destroy with reason many of the people who tell me they are fearful of Muslims for example, or of allowing children to be trans. Then there are the people who don’t understand that their inadequate dole payment and unsatisfying and underpaid work is because of the way we have structured society- not because of these “others” who also want something, who also have needs and families. Jesus is sometimes distant and foreign and hard to spot. Jesus challenges me, frightens me.

Like Herod when I hear of Jesus it will probably be in a context where some power or privilege I have is at risk. Like Herod the temptation is to pretend to help, but really to undermine.

But power and authority, do not always act as Herod. I can be pretty critical of bishops and church leaders, and with reason but occasionally they surprise me.

Today, according to the bishops is the beginning of Migration week in the US Catholic church. I’m in Australia but I like their idea and I will with them pray and reflect on how I can companion, support and advocate for migrants and refugees better. Even though the bishops are asking people to pray, there seems to be an underlying message here of a larger conversion toward better compassion  and acceptance. Prayer is suggested as a foundation for who we are as a people.

Baby Jesus,

I pray with Magi, with bishops, with the powerful, the foreign to me and those who search. I pray ready to travel, ready to receive people from other places.

I begin my year of travelling, searching, loving you in the world and within my own heart. Like la Befana from the children’s story I have been busy with trivial things that the world judges me on, but my heart yearns to be part of your miracle. Like her I know that seeking later is better than never. Like her I have the wisdom to see that every child can be gifted in your name and that every act of generosity is a step on the journey to you.

Like the magi I can be distracted by the Herods of the world- powerful people and their propaganda. I can look in the wrong places but I will eventually find. I can use the wisdom in my own life, in my own culture because every person and their culture are created in your image.

Baby Jesus, show me what to do to support those who are out of their own homes, those who search, those who are looking in the wrong places, those who only wish they could be in the safety of their own home. Help us build a world where you (or the “least of these”) will be welcome and safe in any corner of the earth and the earth itself is respected and healed.

We have seen your star, we come.

Amen

 

 

 

 

 

 

Impostor’s prayer

I have impostor syndrome. Do you? Apparently it is common. People feel they are not proper parents and professionals and all sorts of other things too every day. At the moment I am trying to be a parent teacher, activist (small time), liturgist (small time) and academic (not yet really started). I feel I can get none of them right at the moment.

I will get back to writing longer more reflective posts but I was encouraged that quite a lot of people looked at my blog today and I decided to share my thinking even when there is not a lot there. So pray with me if you need to (otherwise pray for me)…

 

Dear God please grant me the awesomeness to get some shit done and done properly. The unconsciousness to not think about it in my sleep time. And some time to be freely neither awesome nor unconscious. Amen