Look beyond Herod to the Wisdom that threatens power.

It seems as if the lectionary, which we know was put together by powerful men who were currying favour with earthly powers (the church’s history is scandalous that way) has once more missed the point of the gospel, in the juxtapositions it chooses to highlight. In theological college we were encouraged to look beyond the short pericopes of the daily readings, to read each exerpt in it’s wider textual context and not to make assumptions based on shortened, decontextualised versions of a translation.

I am no scholar, and I won’t pretend to come out with some “right” version for all time, but I think it is worth engaging with the empiphany ethically, and given the colonialist message the lectionary (and many loud-mouthed Christians) try to steer us to, somewhat critically and deconstructively.

Because so much harm has been done by the missionary zeal, the form of “evangelism” which is not “good news” at all to people expected to give up their identities and bow to someone else’s religion which becomes perverted into economic relations of exploitation and a racist politics. And a brown little working-class baby, from an ethnicity which was oppressed by empire, has been used as a tool to further the sorts of oppressions, that Jesus grew up to oppose to the extent of offending and threatning empire and being put to death.

So Constantine was wrong, we do not need a new Christian empire and the magi are bringing not tribute but gift. They are not having their best extracted from them as a show of power, they are choosing to put effort and expense into showing generous love. Notice I am not saying “3 kings” or “wise men” because we actually don’t know that they were 3, or kings or men (I like to think they were wise enough to be drawn to Baby Wisdom).

Ok, so here’s the gospel story without assuming all the kyriearchal stuff about kings and tribute and colonisation:

There were these magi and they used their own spiritual practices which seems to have involved some star-gazing. So you can stop looking down on your friends who like astrology right now. You don’t have to believe what they believe but you also don’t have to force them to see things your way. It seems that Godde can speak/beckon through stars and practices other than Christian.

❤

So these Magi knew from the signs of their own non-Judeo-Christian spirituality that something significant had happened. Because they lived in a kyriearchal world their best interpretation of what/who had been born was a “king”. We too are limited by our social-political worlds and discourses. Logically they figured a King would be born in a palace, they went to ask Herod about him.

Herod knew that this “king” was nothing to do with him, was going to challenge or undermine him one way or the other. But he didn’t want to challenge these influential people and cause a diplomatic incident. Herod to me seems like the first ever political leader to label himself Christian: “I will do him homage”, without letting the Christ child actually transform his values or practice.

I do call out and judge the powers of the day. I think it is far worse to pretend to be “Christian” and still torture and abuse people, than it is to just be straight-forwardly evil. Not that torturing and abusing is ever admirable. There are little brown children kept in cages- large or small cages in this country, in other wealthy countries; and the leaders who allow this to happen are Herods. I feel unapologetic for judging people more powerful and privileged than myself (whilst acknowledging I have some responsibility not to support oppression).

So the magi, being drawn to wisdom finally worked out that Herod was not connected to the important star-baby and they found this unprepossessing child in a manger (or maybe a house by now) with his young mother and carpenter father. They brought him gifts that were rare and hard to come by, that sparkled and gave off fragrance. The world is a world of beauty; of stars and flowers as much or more than Herods and Emperors. They gave it to one who would not be able to reward them in this world; as a token of love and respect not as the “quid pro quo” of politics.

But being star-gazers they were also dreamers, in touch with unconscious, unarticulated truths. Something about Herod had given off red flags, they could not trust him. After meeting the real Wisdom at the heart of the universe, the herods and emperors are as nothing. You might say they practiced civil disobedience. They went home another way. They were not “converted” or brought into the fold, they remained Eastern magi and continued to find Wisdom in their own religion- because Godde can be present there too.

Please consider following some of the hyperlinks in this blog post to people wiser than me giving you more nuanced information but I leave you with a couple of questions.

How do we learn to focus little displaced baby Wisdom more and the narcissistic herods less in the lifestyle choices and politics of our everyday life?

Where is Wisdom, what start can guide us there? Are we going to abandon our every-day concerns long enough and generously enough to find the baby?

Happy epiphany

Rest ye merry

I didn’t post this on the 25th because I don’t actully want to ruin your Christmas. It’s been a hard year, we’ve all worked hard and most of us want to hold our loved ones close and not think any hard thoughts for a while.

But when I reflect on the words of many of the carols, on the messages about consumption, “beauty” (in the narrow and privileged sense), and the good life at Christmas I see a disconnect between the lavish and smug way we sink into our entitlement about excesses of food, piles of presents for the children to swim in, and new decorations year after year.

Our poor planet. Where is the Wisdom in this? Would the shepherds even be welcome at our table? Would the Herods of our modern world feel remotely threatened by the joy we claim?

I don’t want to think these thoughts, I want to rest but they come to me like a plaintive call by a widow to an unjust judge. They sit next to the pain in my heart where the church I grew up in consistently labels me as “sinful”, for my lack of conformity to the phallocentric world-view that is all too comfortable with inequities. I will speak my truth.

On whom “His” favour rests

The children gather with joy

so cute with garlands of tinsel and bells.

The Great King comes again

enthroned among us with many gifts.

We come to do him homage,

to receive his bounty and sing him songs.

We eat our fill and more,

laugh in contentment and rest full of peace

and one last piece of cake.

“Peace on earth” we say

deluded by our overfull troughs,

our beautifully decorated sties of contentment.

Behind barbed wire and in war-torn lands,

newborn again

scrawny wisdom without beauty, without majesty

wails her hungry plea

unheard among our joyful carols.

Zoecentric

Readings can be found here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062721.cfm

What I read for work affects how I read my faith, just as the faith I try to live informs my ethics and beliefs about the purposes of my work. I’m reading post-humanists at work and I found many crossovers between what they say, and this week’s readings.

I tend to find binaries problematic. I don’t fit comfortably into the supposed binary between male and female. I’m not allowed to be a male because of my body and I don’t manage to convince myself I am a female because that’s just not ever been an identity that’s worked for me- politically, sexually or in terms of how I can live with myself. I find the body-soul or body-mind or matter-spirit binary less than helpful which I have outlined before.

So when I am reading that the life-death binary stems from patriarchal philosophy and politics (and church) I am open to trying to understand this. Braidotti and others point out that the preoccupation to define exactly what counts as “human” and what counts as a “life” is ironically necrocentric- obsessed with death and loss.

They’d argue that much of the politics that has destroyed this planet comes out of necrocentrism- militarism, greed, the othering of humans who are different, the othering and exploitation of anything non-human. A necrocentric view of the world sees not what I would call an “image of Godde” but sees only resources and the need to cling to power, security, rights and compensations.

If instead we embrace a zoe-centred way of being, one than accepts our individual life-death as a small component of the larger dance of life we open ourselves radically to other people, animals, things, and ways of standing beside not triumphing over the other. Life proliferates around us but Barbara Bolt reminds us that we are charged with a responsibility to respond ethically.

How could I read all this without thinking of the first reading?

God our zoe-centric God is not about the power of death to define or delimit us. The world has beginnings and endings, cycles of renewal and love, capacity for life to continue or change after death. The molecules that make us up are intimately ours but close to timeless and will go out into otherness after our own cycle of being. These molecules will still be in the air, earth and water, embodying other beings after we are not the phallocentric, egocentric “I” anymore.

Another binary gets challenged in the second reading. Being rich or poor are constructions of a necro-centric society. Instead there are only ever 2 things. The need for a body’s bodily and emotional needs to be met, and our capacity to relationally respond to the needs of the other. Who are we consuming and who are we feeding? Regardless of our status and luxury we will not live forever. How do we embrace the life that we have today, and the rivers and rains which flow through our fluid bodies that supply our abundance without holding us accountable?

It’s not wrong of us to wish to prolong our life and be comfortable, but it is wrong to hollow out the other in serving the self. Instead we should acknowledge the way we are entangled with the other and relationally flow into and around the planet and all species including our own.

So we come to the gospel and the zoe-centric flows around Jesus as an important man comes to him to ask for healing for his daughter.

Mark’s gospel is full of sudden twists and turns so typically this life-and-death situation must be interrupted.

I’m bleeding currently as I do every month so I read this woman’s situation with horror.  Imagine 12 years of uncomfortable, wearying flow, always worrying about how you stand or how you sit, always dealing with the rawness and the smell and leaving embarrassing traces of yourself on your clothing and perhaps elsewhere. Imagine the laundry of those 12 years! The painful and despair inducing failed attempts to be cured.

 She touches Jesus and is instantly healed.

Unlike the failed doctors, Jesus does not take control of her body or her situation. He is a healer without agency, he is used and perhaps depleted like a river. His openness leads to her healing, there is a moment of connection and flow that he is not consciously the author of.

What can this mean about the nature of God? We are so used to centring the self-determining individual in our discussions of morality. Goodness we think consists of making ethical choices, virtue is cultivated through agency- that is what separates humans from other species.

What if God’s goodness is otherwise, a goodness-by-nature not a goodness-by-choice? What if God is good like a river or a dragonfly or wet soil? If no amount of WORK will ever PRODUCE a value for us or make us more or less the image of God that we already are. Perhaps then also plants, animals and the earth itself cannot be known according to instrumental measures such as somebody’s profit or quality of life.

But even this binary is flawed because the next minute Jesus seizes back his agency and calls out this non-consensual encounter. This human can’t just drain Jesus-as-other but must witness publically that something happened. If sacrament is encounter with God, then she has celebrated a sacrament in first touching Christ, then using her transformation for witness and as a nexus for us also to be called to touch and draw healing power.

I wouldn’t identify as “female” but I am woman enough to be rejected for ordination and I experience this call by Jesus as revolutionary.

He is saying “here she is, this rejected woman, deemed filthy and contaminating. She has drawn my power into herself and now must witness to it publicly.”

No bishops were consulted in the making of this vocation. Her faith has saved her (says Jesus). She is cured of her affliction (says Jesus). Which affliction? Just the bleeding or also the patriarchal framing of her body as unworthy and unimportant? As a disabled student reminded me this week- exclusion hurts more than the disability itself.

Meanwhile the little girl has died. It’s not Jesus’ fault but it’s too late. Jesus shows a naivety about this and is ridiculed for hoping when it’s too late. Binaries are important. Boundaries are important. Nothing can be done.

Boundary-transgressing Jesus calls the little girl back to life, touches and calls her. She responds to the call and is given something to eat. She becomes a foreshadowing image of a later scene in our faith-story, where the risen Jesus eats to show he is alive. She experiences the flow of molecules into her body, to live is to take in and release other.

This little girl, another SHE, becomes a witness to the zoe-centric power of Christ. She’s only a girl, in patriarchal terms not worth much. Jesus in reconfiguring social rules, is good news for those of us who have ever found ourselves on the wrong side of a boundary or trying to navigate a liminal position.

If the power of God is the life of the whole world and not just humans, how do we centre ourselves on that life without fearing death?

How do we open ourselves to ethical relationality and responsibility as mortal but zoe-centric beings?

What is the value of a body and a self or other? What is the life we are called back to today?

Åsberg, C., & Braidotti, R. (Eds.). (2018). A feminist companion to the posthumanities. Springer.

Doing not dreaming…beyond the “Self” trap

“Women’s theology from the Third World, like all feminist theology, puts great emphasis on doing theology. It is theology as an activity, as an ongoing process rooted in praxis, interdependent with and compassionately committed to life, justice, and freedom from oppression. It is not theology as a reified, academic subject with watertight categories, clear boundaries and sharp intellectual definitions totally separate from people’s experience” (Ursula King, 1993, 16-17)

I looked at the lectionary, but I think we both still need some time apart.

Instead how shall I DO theology this week? That’s a sensible question because I prefer to dream and intellecualise rather than do. What can I do that will make life have meaning? What will I do that brings Godde into my life, incarnates Godde?

Where are the places to care? Where are the places to resist? Where are the places to show-up? Where are the places to look after my own small family and even my own needs? How do I get past my insomnia and my waking nightmares, my heavy chest and tingling fingers and toes? Another anxiety attack and where is Godde?

Godde may be in the third world where people are less privileged than me. Godde may wish to hold the hand of the person who can’t leave the house for fear of racism (past and potential). Godde may be hiding in a wombat burrow while flames rage overhead. Godde might be in the small child I was that nearly killed herself for self-hate and loneliness. Godde may be on the page I wrote and sent to my supervisor or in my supervisor’s tendency to chat to me as equals not just boss me around. Godde might be in the overly picky colleague who was right after all, in the lentils I defrost for lunch, in a stack of notes to be signed for my son’s year 12. Godde might be hiding around the corner waiting for me to get off facebook and run to meet her. Godde might be travelling with the person I wish I was with. Godde might buy me a coffee and advocate for me to get work. Godde might demand I answer emails. I might be hiding from Godde because my anxiety is playing up. I might miss her…but surely she won’t allow that.

Reading on in the book edited by King, there’s a chapter by Asian feminist theologian Kwok Pui-lan and she seems to be speaking (writing?) into my recent passion for decolonisation. She talks about religious pluralism as an antidote to patriarchy and white supremacy and it seems to me to be an antidote also to the rationalist, liberal-democratic capitalist perspectives that make us all individuals…it calls to mind an opinion piece I read that speaks also into the research I am doing on early childhood educator and carer wellbeing. We are not sparkling intelligences each in an individual space where we create the world through our own autonomous and authoritative will. I reflect back on Grosz which I read last year. Humans are not just will and intellect, the body not just an inconvenient encumbrance to be pushed off onto women-kind, abandoned, neglected or overcome.

The body-soul mobius is deeply connected to earth and connected to otherness. We need to rediscover our own othered dimensions to help us de-other others including animals, plants and perhaps ultimately minerals too. Eating mindfully (which I do not do enough) might be part of this. I eat to feed my will but also to make it wait while I touch something present. Food has scent and texture and flavour it is not just fuel. I need to slow down when I eat this may reduce my incessant appetite that comes out as consumption- the drive to buy and own and even the drive to give.

(What did she mean by she needs to keep working so she won’t think?)

The tragedy of humanity (or one of them) is how often compassion is powerless. What can I do for Kopika and her family? What can I do for my casualised friends who suffer with me but perhaps worse? What can I do for a battery hen or a dairy cow? What can I do for a burnt koala? What can I do to keep my own children safe into a future I (the dazzling will and intellect) do not own. I am mortal, I am limited. Sometimes we seek to hide from this by exploiting and consuming everything around us. Sometimes we are too beaten down to want to truly live.

In that moment the Wisdom in which I still believe (a faith statement I did not expect to find in myself) says “come, slow-down, smell the rain, open your windows to coolness, breathe, taste me, be”. The church has grown a rigid shell (wills and intellects and patriarchal fear of not controlling) and is sick but will not admit it or ask for help. I can refuse to believe as an act of faith. I can believe as an act of uncertainty. I can love what I don’t agree with and reject what I used to think was all. I collapse with laughter seeing in my words still the desire to be a knowing, willing, sparkling SELF.

I will go and smell the basil if the possums have left me any and see what the teenager wants to do today. I will try to come off my intellectual high horse but even these games we play…all of it…is prayer.

Thanks be to beautiful Wisdom.

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Triptych of heart 1: Beloved Wisdom

Dear Wisdom,

And what of the aftermath? After the earth or at least the life of humans upon it?

What will our last days be like? Will you stay? How can you stay? It seems that you are not welcome in our houses of parliament, in what were formerly our places of healing and learning. It seems as if we would banish you. And yet…a person of hope may open a chink for you to squeeze in after all. Radiant though too often silenced, Wisdom.

After the depths are gone, after my kind has managed to erase itself from the book of life will you remember us? Will it have been worth it?  What will you do, will you recreate? Or will creation be better with humans gone? Were we a bad experiment after all? We thought we were so important. We thought we were everything. Dangerous vanity!

And yet I somehow hope in your love. What can you do though? We are a stubborn creation.

Out of the depths Wisdom, I pray for the hope, the courage, I pray for your whisper or the pull of your hand. My feet are sore and cold but there is still a journey, Lead kindly light, lead thou me on.

You were beside God when she fixed the limits for the sea so that the sea would not transgress, and yet the humans in their transgressing have even pulled the sea out. She transgresses now, released from the law of creation, she will destroy us because we abused her too long, the never-tamed sea.

You were always God’s delight little child, master craftswoman. You played upon the surface of the earth but what we do now is not “play” but violence and despair. How could you delight in us Wisdom of God? How did you ever delight in the human race? Can you still? Unblock my ears to hear your voice, my soul to feel your pull.

Do not abandon us, though we have abandoned you. Wisdom we need you more than ever!

Starring Wisdom and justice

33rd Sunday Ordinary time, year b      November 18, 2018      Stef Rozitis

Am off to use this reflection at church. I hope it will be OK
“A time unsurpassed in distress!” Sadly one of the themes of human history is this great distress. Persecution. Oppression. Dispossession. Disorienting change and now climate change confronts us. These times stare us in the eye and remind us how fragile we are and can make us feel horribly insignificant, even as though everything we do is futile. Daniel’s view of the end-times is horrifying, of course he was of a prophetic tradition where substances were used to aid the seeing of visions.

 
The point of consolation in all this is the wise who will shine brightly, those who lead many to justice being like the stars. I think of the turbulent world events, my hopes and often fears for a future for myself or my children. I think of times of great despair and desolation in my own life and of the bright stars, the people who come with consoling wisdom- not to trivialise or dismiss my fears, not to try to silence or repress the negative things we see and experience and our heart’s need to cry out against them- but just to show us God’s face amid the strife. To shine.

 
I could cry when I consider some of those stars, because the world does not always treat people like that kindly. I consider all my heroes- the people who speak out so courageously about human rights, the abuse that gets hurled at them. It’s well documented how in particular women who advocate for others get rape threats, or threats against the safety of their children “Those who lead many to justice” walk a risky path- they may lose their job, their security, their peace of mind.

 
After the psalm reminds us that we have everything we need in God, the second reading talks about how human religions are in some measure obsolete. This does not mean that we should not gather, that we should not break bread and word in memory of the real sacramental action of Christ’s being born into us; of facing our unsurpassed distress to its logical conclusion- the cross. I need to be here. It does however call into question the structures we build around our sacraments- the way we try to imprison some people in various identity cages(1) within overly rigid church structures, while simultaneously keeping people out- out of participation in this way or that, out of democratic leadership, out of allowing their embodied human experiences to inform theology, rather than iron-clad theologies limiting and labelling human experience in narrowing ways.

 
Whatever it is that we celebrate here together- the one we call Jesus has already acted. Wisdom has already set the table and prepared the banquet. We have no right to try to control the flow of grace in this direction but not in that. Sacrament is for all, and the sanctuary is our place to be- women, men and children and perhaps a broader sweep of creation too. The earth’s resources also are prepared by wisdom for all creation and for itself. The amassing of wealth in pockets while so many starve goes against Jesus’ sacrificial action of trying (in history and in the now as well) to open up heaven to the human heart, and open up the human heart to heaven. If all our sins are forgiven dare we enter a new and engraced way of being?

 
The gospel also speaks of dark and turbulent times, but of the coming near of God within these times. We see signs of what is coming. We are asked not to be naïve in our spirituality, or our politics, or our daily living but read the patterns and face reality with courage. Nothing is inevitable, nothing is sure, all things can pass away except God’s Word. The Word has already spoken to us today through the first two readings (and speaks through our hearts and bodies also). Wisdom and justice are the signs of the Word’s bright indwelling in a person, all sins are forgiven and we are free to be part of a new reign of God.

 
Some of the imagery in these ancient texts seems militaristic and kyriearchal to me and it took me a long time this week to look beyond that to the invitation in them. I look from the readings to my world, to the people who give wisdom, the people who lead me to follow justice in everything I choose. They are indeed like stars. The joy and love in my life is always from the goodness of others, from the beauty of someone who is radically oriented toward a redeemed way of being human. When I see those people at times devalued by the world, small voices in a growing clamour of consumerism, greed and corresponding hunger and desperation then I see also what my call is.

 
It is my call to be one of the stars for the people who are stars to me. The darkest night has beauty when we look up and see the pureness and twinkle of stars. We connect them together into pictures, we see them as constellations as relationships. The wise and justice oriented people in our lives, the true stars hold out their hands and call us to join them. Star to star we bring light to a world following the first and last star, the Morning Star, the Christ.

 
Let us sit now and think of the stars who have shone wisdom and justice into our dark nights. Let us think of the ways we are called by God to do the same; to lead others to the justice they thirst for and “shine like stars forever”. Let us know that no darkness is ever complete. Let us resolve to connect and support the networks of light, the communities of hope, the constellations of stars in the image of our loving and healing wise God.

 

1. Morley, L. (2013). The rules of the game: Women and the leaderist turn in higher education. Gender and education, 25(1), 116-131.

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.

 

Light

“whoever lives the truth comes to the light,
so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”

How do we live the truth and change direction always to be heading into the light. In the midst of the lenten negativity of the readings I am finding this questioning of the integrity of my own life. I want to smugly point to this good work or that moment of clarity in my life and say “see I am all about light” but the point of this reading is not to brag (nor to self-condemn) but to realise that we can’t and don’t live 100% light-illumined and truthful lives but we are always striving to “come to” a light which in its completeness is unapproachable (the bible is full of the transcendence of God just as much as the immanence).

No one person or organisation is fully “the truth” or “the light” none but Jesus of Nazareth perhaps in his claims to be one with Divine Wisdom herself. The best we can do is turn toward God, be influenced by the same Holy Spirit that lived perfectly within Jesus.

How do we know the light of God in a world where there are so many lights clamouring for us to follow them…lights of supposedly infallible authority (which over time reveal themselves to be contaminated with exploitative uses of power); lights of manufactured desires and the consent to turn a blind eye to injustice that go with it (that glitter at the peripheries of our privileged vision even when we strive to be better than that); the light of reason, “the enlightenment” all things rational, efficient, proven, positivist and ultimately reductive of the human complexity to a set of algorithms and chemical reactions?

We live in a dazzling cultural shopping mall of neon lights and fairy lights and lava lamps and light up running shoes and goodness knows what other lights that stake a claim on our need for security and soothing, our hollowness and anxiety, our preference for easy answers.

And God is not just one such easy answer.

The first reading tells us that God sends us messengers to urge us to turn away from the wrong and dangerous things we do. Which practices are “abominations” however? Ideas of right and wrong are hotly contested and each person feels that it is “everybody else” that is failing to listen to the word of God.

In qualitative research we talk about “reflexivity”, being honest about who we are, what our bias and standpoint are and why we might believe what we believe. Relexivity in practice can also involve looking at our own behaviour and habits to find ways to be as coherent as possible (morally coherent, intellectually coherent) when we are teaching or leading others. An obvious example of bad practice is adults using hitting as a punishment, while trying to teach a child to value peaceful and non-violent strategies to their problems; refusing to listen to honour promises while trying to teach the child respect and honesty…etc…One sentence that sums up this lack of coherence that I have heard actually used is “Don’t you fucking swear at me.”

These ways of teaching or leading show that I am more concerned with my own power over you, than with the content of what I claim to want to teach you. Jesus as the intimate, barefoot-walking word of God came to break bread with us and lie down on our earth and suffer dishonour and death in solidarity with those who seek liberation. Jesus did not just preach, but also modelled. The light in our lives is that which gives us more than escapist distraction, more than certain authority, more than a freaking display of colour – however beautiful- but the light comes to take us a step toward something permanent and another step and another. The light is something transformative of our darkness, more than a night-light for our terrors but a beacon to come closer and be healed (and sent out).

The second reading is that one about faith through grace and not works. It gets misused at times to claim that it doesn’t matter what we do, only whether we “believe” as if belief is a state you can switch on at will a magical spell against having to try to grapple with the real world. The flip-side of this is that we can never really be “good” or deserve credit for our work or our choices. I largely grew up with such a depressing view of my own unconditional unworthiness, even when I have done everything I can all the credit belongs to God and I should still do better.

The word “grace” should surely evoke something more full of joy and beauty than this scenario. We can agree with the reading, we do not “earn” grace, we are not “saved” (or loved, or called or come into being) through any work we have achieved. Life is a gift and the kindom of God also is a pure gift. This does not mean that God does not call us to also give, to be agents of grace to others (and to ourselves). Grace is like a light that can bathe our lives with holiness, that can slowly spread to banish shadows of fear and hatred. So we are always/already loved and saved but then we are caught up in the desire to grace the world, to grace ourselves just as a baby is already beloved before it can even make eye-contact or smiled, but this love bathes their sense of what it means to be and the baby is moved to want to participate in the family and learns all sorts of amazing things (how to sit up, how to form words, how to use humour) not because the baby only becomes human through these “works” or learning but because the humanity the baby already possesses drives them to desire to participate in connection and social agency.

It is the same with the kindom of God. We are loved and treasured no matter how fast or slow our “development” is within God’s call to us. We are called and challenged to participate as we become able, because it is only fair to do that and because it gives God joy and pride in us when we take notice of the work of creation and learn to dance it with her. Perhaps it is convenient to talk about “belief” as the ingredient that brings out our loving response to God but there is also a danger that belief becomes a talisman against having to really, deeply care and do.

Moses lifted up a serpent in the desert for everyone to look upon and be saved. We want it to be that easy don’t we? We want to ignore every other part of salvation history where the people continued to quarrel and contest the meaning of various teachings, continued to make mistakes and had to be called back again and again to look after the widow and the orphan and the foreigner. Symbols bring us together but it is the “together” not the symbol that enacts change. Symbols point to deeper truths, belief is one of those “works” that is incidental to the grace which really saves.

Faith is a relationship, an orientation not an act of will, a contract or a set of tick-boxes.

Seeking light this International Women’s Day I visit the grave of my mother and read the bible-verse that we decided summed up who she was for us and summed up also where she drew her wisdom and loveliness (as we saw it) from.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5)

God’s light is not a competing light display in the shopping mall of shallow dreams. It goes out to where the darkness is and stubbornly shines there. We look for the light in the parts of life we are afraid to face. We know the light will be there and we come to it. The darkness has not overcome it…not then, not now, not ever.

The light shines.

Hey, I know a lot of these rules/commandments are very sensible and I am not going to argue against people following them, but once again I am finding the authoritarian tone of the “God” in the text pretty difficult to deal with. Top down controlling structures of church have been less than helpful over the centuries.

Why do they do this to us in Lent? It almost makes me feel I should give up religion for lent. It’s all just “boss. boss, boss I am your bossy and narcissistic God and you should just do what you are told because you are unworthy”. And yet I am sure scripture has all sorts of wonderful transformative moments for a lent of really reflecting on how we should do better and doing it. I don’t think just telling us to obey cuts it though, look at the churches that are most strongly modelled on this way of relating to God.

With The Black-eyed Peas all I can say is “Where is the love, the love, the love?”

No, to do better at following God (following in the sense of a dancing partner or apprentice or small child with a heroic friend-adult) we need to be able to take responsibility for ourselves and our attitudes not just tick boxes and obey rules. We need to let a larger proportion of our life be taken over by God (by love, by compassion, by justice, by hope, by kindness, by wisdom). We need to teach ourselves to stop craving things that don’t really satisfy (hence we give up something for lent) and find the joy that is there in the things that DO satisfy (ie in God).

The other problematic thing about a set of commandments (and I believe Jesus alluded to this at at least one point), is that it can minimise the commitment that people are willing to give. So I can say “I am decent, I honor my parents and don’t commit adultery and whatever” and keep living off the plight of the third world, or the exploited worker in my own country without examining in more depth what the integrity of the kindom of God might look like.

In this context the psalm seems like more of the same- flattering this authoritarian and narcissistic God. “The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever”. Oh great! We’re now going to live fearfully again (which I know well from experience leads to parsimony).

I am going to try to read the second reading liberatively, for all that I have some reservations about always putting the cross in the centre of Christian life (I know we have tended to do this, I just wonder if it might be reductionist and problematic). In a world that wants unambiguous signs/proofs and flashy wisdom/instructions all we have is the experience of Jesus the human, the solidarity of Jesus God. Christ, the “power” and “wisdom” of God has been put to death in our human political structures that oppress others.

Jesus on the cross would seem to typify the victim, the failure but God can reverse the apparent. God’s foolishness can deconstruct what we know and God’s weakness can undermine the inevitable. There’s a hope in that when we are beginning to “know” that there are no answers and we are beginning to face that we have been powerful enough to destroy our own planet. It would be foolish to hope perhaps, weak to turn the other cheek…or would it? There is something about relationships that is more than you might think at first glance.

Then the gospel. I am not in the mood for bossy Jesus acting violently, it’s hard for me to read this right now. And yet I can;t help noticing what Jesus’ problem is- the church has been turned into a marketplace. The practice of religion has become reduced to “this is how you have to do it” so that people can make money by forcing believers to have to buy from them everything they need for the ritual.

In the modern day you might see how much this sort of thing has happened with education or other things that ought to have been relationships but have become “transactions” or “products”. Church in Jesus’ opinion should not be marketised, it should be about the wellbeing of the person and the community, a place of welcome and healing, learning perhaps. Jesus becomes really angry at the cynicism of a society that tends to see everything as “market”. This is a pre-capitalist society the story is set in, and so the parallels to capitalist concerns may be inexact but the general point is the same. God’s love is not for buying or selling or exploiting. Following the letter of the law in constricting ways that take the soul out of prayer is not the point either. There is no formula for grace and salvation and the individual should be knitted into her community not sold a part in a farce.

Loving Wisdom,

I am so tired. What words of consolation, inspiration, everlasting life do you have for me?

I am angry and jaded. What connections can I foster to be whole again?

I find it easier to follow instructions than to pursue a creative course through life. Sweep me up in a dance that you lead, teach me how to orient myself toward you in a trust that becomes confidence.

For all the myriad ways that I could, should or would be better- give me your love and your peace to find within myself the spark of my desire to be whole. Give me a moment of joy so that I may be filled with grace to keep trying. Give me vision to see and know the good in others that I may be inspired to emulate them.

I accept your love and your acceptance of me today.

Amen.