Posts Tagged ‘God’

Truth and action.

{ November 24, 2009 @ 10:31 am } · { Eucharist, personal reflection, Sermon }
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There was once a young and gifted woman who set herself the almost impossible task of setting up a printing press so that she could translate and distribute the Word of God to the people.  Yet such a job would require a great deal of money, and so, almost as soon as she had conceived the idea, she sold the few items that she possessed and went to live on the streets, begging for the money that she needed.
Raising the necessary funds took many years, for while there were a few who gave generously, most only gave a little, if anything at all. But gradually the money began to accumulate.  However, shortly before the plans for the printing press could be set in motion, a dreadful flood devastated a nearby town, destroying many people’s homes and livelihoods.
Without hesitation the woman used all the money she had gathered to feed the hungry and rebuild lost homes. Once the town began to recover, the woman silently went back to the streets in order to start all over again, collecting the money needed to translate the Word of God.
Many more years passed, with many cold winters that caused great suffering to the woman. Then, shortly before the target amount was reached, disaster struck again.
This time a deadly plague descended like a cloud over the city, stealing the lives of thousands.
By now the woman was herself tired and ill, yet without thought she spent the money she had collected on medicines and care for the sick and orphaned.
Then, once the shadow of the plague lifted, she again went onto the streets, driven by her desire to translate the Word of God.  Finally, shortly before her death, this woman gathered the money needed for the printing press and completed the project she had set herself many years before.
After she had passed away, it was rumored by some that she had actually spent her time making three translations of the Word, the first two being the most splendid of all…
… What language are you translating the Word into?
Our mandate is double-edged: “We should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another.” Does not the whole of the gospel hinge on that one word, “and”? Believe… AND love.
I don’t know about you, but this terrifies me. Not only do I have to do more than think the right things (hard enough) or say the right things (sometimes easier), but I have to live rightly, in truth.
And I don’t even get to decide what that truth is – it’s love. And it’s not up to me what that action is – it’s love. Given freely, radically, generously, as long as there’s need for it… love’s circumstances might be flexible, they are likely surprising, but the mandate itself is not a puzzle.
We can stop asking what the “right” thing to do is… Which cause is the best? Where can I be the most effective? What if our resources run out? What happens when it floods, or the plague comes, Or (have mercy) institutions fail usand we have to start over, from the foundations?
God’s pretty clear on this one. We keep loving. In truth, and action.
We silently went back to the streets in order to start all over again.
You’re not here to be effective or successful.
You,… I,… am here to be faithful to the Word made flesh.
Because what we believe is a fabulous mystery, that we’re commanded to bring about the Kingdom when it’s already here… that we’re to reveal it and that’s all we’re to do.

This goal is already fact, God’s fact, the fact of grace and promise. No gap divides what God says from what God does. God’s Word is God’s action. And it, God, is waiting for us to see him in ourselves, here all along…
Truth and action… called to live in such a way that the Way, Jesus’ way, is read in the very fabric of our relationships to one another, to our fellow human beings, to Creation.
The sacraments, too, as Augustine says, are the “visible word” of God. They are the Word, enacted… and when we receive them, when we claim them, when we are saying we’re ready to welcome Jesus in his many disguises, that our hearts and doors and arms are open, that we’re gonna live out being bread and juice, that we too are the Word enacted, lovingly revealed, truthfully shared with all the world, not just talking about it, not even just theologically reflecting on it, translating it into just more speech, more words… but living it.
Then, then, we’ve finally translated the glorious Word in truth and action.
May it be so for you, and for me, and for all the world. Amen.

Front porch of the Kingdom.

{ November 21, 2009 @ 11:39 pm } · { personal reflection }
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I spent today painting windows and doors at a mission outpost in Cleveland.  Work camp, basically. The five of us who worked on those three windows and two doors for five hours weren’t superstar construction workers or even all that coordinated.  We weren’t exactly what you would call, “handpicked for success.”  One of us was really short.  One was not about to go on a ladder for money.  Three were blind.  But we painted and laughed and talked about the Obama administration and health reform and made jokes (mostly blind jokes… One, I admit was pretty bad and included singing the song “Three Blind Painters” to the tune of “Three Blind Mice.”  That got booed down pretty quickly) and told stories to one another.

And I kept thinking about how easy it is to write off one another because we size ourselves and everybody else up in one glance or one sentence and *know* everything there is to know about them in an instant.  And how alot of the time I assume God needs a particular type of person in order to build the Kingdom.  And how this is just plain wrong, if not sinful thinking.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about how eyes are the windows to the soul and that those windows we were painting, this motley crew, were windows onto the soul of God’s Kingdom.  How those doors were opening onto the porch of the Kingdom and inviting people in.  They were simply doors to rooms full of paint supplies and construction materials and those windows merely let in some light on our little breakfast room at the mission… but even five hours of work painting in a basement for the sake of a corner in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, builds the Kingdom.  It does.  Especially when in the process we get four new friends with whom I never would have spent a whole Saturday morning and afternoon, with whom I had the privilege of being thrown together, covered in paint drips and mixed up hinges and a seeing-eye dog named, of all things, Esther.

God, you’ve got to be kidding me.

 

Cleaning-woman God.

{ September 2, 2009 @ 5:07 pm } · { personal reflection }
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I interviewed with my district committee this morning in order to pass into the next phase of affirmation toward ordination in the United Methodist Church.  In the process of this interview, which included questions about my theology, my understanding of ordination, my own call to ministry, and the opportunity to list my own weaknesses, one of my committee members asked me a surprising question: Which is my favorite parable?  Anyone who knows me knows a couple of things: 1) I’m pretty into inclusivity.  In other words, I don’t really “do” favorites.  I kind of love everything.  2) I’m into hyperbole (see number one).  If I love something, I love it – it’s fantastic, amazing, incredible.  If I dislike it, it’s “That’s horrendous!” Or, at least until next time, when there’s an exception.  I’m sure it drives people crazy.  In fact, I know it does.  So, when asked, “What’s your favorite…?” I totally freeze up.  All of a sudden, my mind touches on a million options (or at least five), and I get the sense of being unfairly pinned down.  The thing is, in these situations, sometimes something about me really does reveal itself.  So it was this morning.  I sat quietly for a few moments, waiting for inspiration and thinking of the various implications of each of the parables coming to mind… and then just opened my mouth and worked with the first thing that came out.

One story that Jesus tells, right after the lost sheep and right before the famous “prodigal son” in Luke 15, makes my heart warm.  Actually, if this isn’t too weird, the feeling I get from that parable is the same body-sense I get from being in love – deep comfort, total clarity, exceptional hope.  It gets about two verses, and it’s in the form of a question… He says, “Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?”  What woman, indeed?

I’ve lost things.  Lots of things, big and little, important and insignificant.  People, too.  Ideas, hopes, opportunities.  But that coin, it represents something special.  Everytime I think of that parable, I think of that woman, sort of middle-aged, in the center of her simple house, standing with her hands on her hips for a moment or two, thinking.  Then, suddenly, on her hands and knees on that hard, dirt-packed floor, tearing things out of corners, throwing blankets, pots, living space-things behind her with intensity, even abandon, the other nine coins stacked carefully on her rough kitchen table, glinting in the lamp light.  Systematically but frantically searching for that little silver coin in the dark, dirty corner it’s rolled itself into.  It’s equal to all of the others she has, already waiting there collected, but that’s just it… it’s equal in value.  It, too, deserves to be sought out, found, shined on the hem of her apron and gathered together with the others.  To be put where it belongs, in its home.  Because what’s wrong with a lost coin?  One thing: it can’t fulfill its purpose, the thing it was made for.  Separated from its brethren, it’s not able to be as fully-what-it-is as it might be.  It’s valuable in its own right, even more valuable when gathered into its community.

Telling this story to the committee, I lost it.  I mean, big, rolling tears started pouring over my face and I felt the weird feeling of telling a story from the heart of the world.  Wondering what it was about this story, I realized it’s my gospel.  One line, in the form of a question.  Who, what God, would not do this, would not gather together each and every one?   The one in whom I am learning every day to trust would.  The God I know, realizing this little coin has been lost, has gotten down on her knobby, creaking knees in the mud and the garbage and scrabbled through with her bare hands looking desperately and intently for me, like parent looks for her child lost in a crowd, to bring me back home… un-distracted by anything not immediately related to the problem, disregarding any consequence other than that of finding, of seeking and finding.

There’s a poem that matches this sense of God for me, and it was envisioned by the 14th century Hindu poet Janibai.  It’s entitled, “You leave your greatness behind you.“  May you, too, feel with deep assurance that God has left God’s greatness behind, just for you, to show you that you are loved, coveted, and needed for the building up of the Kingdom.

Jani has had enough of samsara,/but how will I repay my debt?/ You leave your greatness behind you to grind and pound with me./ O Lord you become a woman/ washing me and my soiled clothes,/ proudly you carry the water and gather dung with your own two hands./ O Lord, I want/ a place at your feet,/ says Jani, Namdev’s dasi.

Ceasing and desisting.

{ May 31, 2009 @ 1:29 pm } · { personal reflection }
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With graduation from my Master of Divinity program behind me, I’m beginning to realize how easy it is to simply move on to the next thing.  This smacked me in the face particularly hard on the Friday night before commencement, when as friends and faculty congratulated me on my accomplishment, they each seemed incapable of leaving off the parting comment, “But, you’re not really done, are you?”  After all, I do have another degree to finish.  I have classes this summer, Annual Conference to attend.  I will be studying for the GRE, applying for some mission programs, attempting against all odds to learn some Spanish.  But… no one would simply allow me to rest in what I had already done.  More than anyone, I know what is left to do, what is ahead.  One day, even just an evening, would have been a lovely space in which to look at the last three years, breathe deeply, and exhale.  But we push one another into the future.  I’ve been thinking about this during the last week since graduation.  It’s why I haven’t written.

Sometimes, it’s simply a good thing to rest, to take a break, even from the things we enjoy.  It’s good to be present in what we’ve already done and not attempt to move into the next phase of the process.  It’s good to be still and view the past from this particular vantage point, take some stock, freshen up a moment before stepping out again.  It’s good to clear the mind of what’s already been by appreciating and revelling in how it has come to pass.  I worked all week at a job I enjoy, though it’s emotionally draining and often heartbreaking.  In that break, between graduation and gearing up for what’s to come this summer, I found myself rested, even in the difficulty of work.  It was, in an odd way, a vacation.  And this sense, of needing to take a week or so to simply do something else, use my mind and my hands in new ways, to engage my heart with kids who can’t read or do math rather than with books about theology or doctrine, I sought out a sabbath time.  And stumbled into the realization that I need to schedule this.  The word from which we get “sabbath,” shabbat, derives from the idea of ceasing and desisting.  This doesn’t mean to cease existence or to be lazy.  It simply means to stop the work you’ve been doing and to rest by being a different way for a time in order to appreciate, refresh, and return with a new heart.  I am very good at procrastination.  This is not shabbat. I am also an expert at doing exactly what I like because it feels fun at the time and I’d rather not be doing something else.  This, too, is not shabbat.  What I need is an intentional break, a setting aside of habitual work in an effort at habitual rest.  This looked like taking time from writing this week, and it also looked like appreciating my newly minted degree before diving into the next one.  It looked like building a garden outside my apartment yesterday and visiting with friends yesterday evening rather than striving to outline my presentation for Annual Conference next week. Because the work will always be there, and I can’t do it if I’m not connected and rejuvenated.  Pushing through it isn’t as helpful or as lovely, doesn’t speak to the appreciation I have for simply being alive today, as focusing on it at the right time, after a bit of rest.  Putting everything into perspective, getting a handle on where the priorities lay.  God never ordered anyone to work, but God keeps reminding us to rest.  To cease and desist.  To shabbat.

So here’s the plan.  I’m starting small but with commitment.  Thursday mornings are now unshatterably sacred.  They are mine, all mine… for time to simply be, with God, alone, in company with friends, however rest will look.  But they will be different from the rest of the week.  No procrastination, simply sheer existence without the purpose of accomplishment.  Until noon on Thursdays, consider me at rest, ceased and desisting.

#23: Disciplines of obedience.

{ April 27, 2009 @ 4:45 pm } · { ecology and religion, personal reflection }
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***This is the twenty-third of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “The Shalom Principle,” by Peter Sawtell, founder of Eco-Justice Ministries.

Blogging has become a discipline of obedience.  I blog not only because it feels good, because I find it easiest to untangle the knottiest of my tangled thoughts in the written word, shared with my friends and with strangers, but because there are so few things in my life to which I can regularly commit myself.  Most projects are temporary, my effort necessary only in fits and starts.  A beginning and an end, not enough time necessary to reach that point where I simply hate the activity, that point through which, if I pushed, I would find myself tipping over into rich accomplishment.  So I blog.  And, I’m blogging about ecology, using Holy Ground to frame my thoughts and reflections.  I’ve reached that point.  Gotta tell you.  I am reading about various perspectives on caring for our environment from positions of faith and conscience… and I’m sick of it.  So repetitive, a trial to come up with new ideas, new thoughts, sick of feeling guilty for not doing enough, for not living like a hermit in the woods, for having a carbon footprint.  But then I think of sustainability.  Sustenance.  Sustaining.  Keeping up with it, maintaining, balancing, bearing up, withstanding.  The problem isn’t, much like our current ecological crisis, a problem of the environment, it’s a human problem.  Our hearts need to change.  Mine does.  So little are we asked to maintain, to give up something to gain something less tangible but significantly more wonderful and valuable… that we give up too easily.  Our spirits flag, we get tired, we look for the remote, we distract ourselves from the real problem at hand.  Which is our lack of dedication to the larger picture.  The point isn’t to blog one more entry.  It’s to learn about myself and the earth and and God and my community in relationship to one another.  The point isn’t to have a smaller negative impact on the earth, it’s to turn, to repent, to rethink our thinking in such a way that our values become different at heart so that healing can begin.  Damn.  I hate when things come together.

#17: Thank you, thank you.

{ April 15, 2009 @ 9:15 pm } · { personal reflection }
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***This is the seventeenth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “This Good Earth,” by Brian McLaren.

yellow-magnolia2

I live in Columbus, Ohio.  I confess, my city does not boast the most stunning of natural vistas.  It doesn’t even really qualify as a very interesting city, as urban areas go.  But there are spaces and moments in this town that are worthy of thanksgiving.  Parks and streets and homes and skylines, all hunkered quietly down waiting for someone to notice the way the sunlight hits a corner or rain falls from a branch.  I was walking through Goodale Park last week and found my breath stolen by some magnolia trees in bloom, their fat, fleshy, up-pointed buds stretching out into the air.  I’ve seen magnolias whose main personality was pink, and those mostly white.  But in the center of this park, on this day, I noticed for the first time butter-yellow.  The flowers looked like buttered popcorn kernels, popped and waiting to be plucked up.  They were surprising and stunning, a special hope for spring in the cold wind.  And with Brian McLaren, I found myself singing again, a song of thanks to God who thought to make sun-bright magnolia blossoms to celebrate the coming of Easter and the first week of April, who makes surprises come out of even urban landscapes and old broken neighborhoods, who says, “Hold on, look around, and see what I’ve made today.”  Thank you, thank you.

Sunday’s comin’.

{ April 12, 2009 @ 8:35 pm } · { personal reflection, spirituality }
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I’ve been waiting for today for a long time.  Lent was not forty days long this year.  It was what felt like an eternity.  When we’re in periods of doubt, struggle, and painful waiting I think it always seems as though they go on much longer than the calendar measures.  But I believe in Easter.  A friend asked me two days ago why I think the resurrection is the central, essential, critical moment of my faith, a conversation I was not ready to have yet, on Good Friday, waiting in the dark knowing that Easter was coming but that the gulf between them is not forty-eight hours but an eternity, the weight of all the cosmos hanging in the balance.  I just couldn’t talk about resurrection on Good Friday, the day of darkness.  I think of it as the day God got sucked out of the world, though theologically, the image is probably more appropriately described as the day God got pushed out of the world. I’m not a particularly obedient person.  I suck at spiritual disciplines (and maintain that the word “suck” is a theological term).  I don’t listen well, I don’t have very strong will power over my personal habits and choices.  I choose not to obey.  I don’t use the word “promise” lightly.  Those who know me well know that I don’t make promises.  Part of the reason is that I often doubt that I will keep them.  But I trust that God does.  And I have known for months, through a very hard time in my personal life, that God promised me some Easter.

I needed the date, the calendar, to tell me when that would happen, because for months I’ve been working through some things I feel desperately bad and guilty for… and I needed a date on which I could say that I could stop punishing myself for them, could say that I had been taking on my own guiltiness long enough and could put it down in front of God with integrity and honesty and trust that God not only would carry those things for me, but already had been, for a long time.  For always, even.  Perhaps it’s a bit selfish, to need the symbol of the day itself rather than to recognize from minute to minute that grace is, has been, and will be, that God is so much love that there is not only no blame but no need for forgiveness.  But I’m human, and so are you.  God doesn’t begrudge us that.  After all, it’s sort of God’s fault (I say, smiling).  And we human beings tend to need symbols, the enactment of larger truths through the things of the world we can touch, see, smell, and taste around us.  So, today, receiving the bread and cup of communion, passing the peace and an olive branch to some people with whom I’ve been struggling, and singing “hallelujah!” for the first time in a long time.

Resurrection, the total, wonderful, mysterious thing we celebrate on Easter Sunday, is for me the culmination of the whole story.  It is the story.  Without Jesus rising from death, conquering the brokenness of the world made in love by God and shattered into jagged shards by the ones for whom it was created, the coming of God in Jesus means little to me.  The cross, where we revealed ourselves as needing oh, so much more love than we knew, just another religious teacher and convicted criminal executed by the state.  But in the light of this transformation from death to life, Jesus lying dead in a dark tomb and then suddenly present again in the world, there is something there was not before.

Hope.

The resurrection is hope.  It means that we can all become more than we think we are, more than we’ve been told we are, more than we’ve learned to be.  It means that God can bring us up out of the muck we’ve sunk ourselves into.  The muck we’ve dunked others into.  It means new life.  It doesn’t mean a do-over.  It doesn’t mean that all is erased or that the past doesn’t matter or that there isn’t justice for wrongs done.  After all, Jesus still had the holes in his wrists and side when he returned to visit with the disciples.  Those  marks just don’t disappear, though they may fade with time.  It’s a crucified Christ we look to, but one who’s ridden death into its own grave.  There is a strength in survival that just doesn’t exist when that survival doesn’t include struggle and suffering.

So it’s Easter today… the Lamb wins, Sunday always comes, Easter is.  We say, “Christ is risen” for a reason.  It happens over and over.  It happens yearly, weekly, daily… moment by moment and breath by breath and scar by scar.

Christ is risen, indeed.

#14: Breathing in, it’s Yah; breathing out, weh.

{ April 7, 2009 @ 11:45 am } · { ecology and religion, personal reflection }
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***This is the fourteenth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “Splitting the Sea…So What!” by Rabbi Zoë Klein.

Kabbalists imagine that the forgotten pronunciation of the name of God is Yah on the whispered in-breath and weh on the whispered out-breath, the whole name of God formed by a single cycle of breath, the awesome mystery of God’s name not separate from the mystery of breathing.  I don’t know about you, but I forget most of the time that I breathe at all.  It’s a mystery of the human body that we don’t consciously supply ourselves with what we need to survive from moment to moment.  Dolphins have to remind themselves to breathe.  Perhaps if we did, as well, we would remember more often where that breath comes from, its communion with the air of our environment, with the ruach, the Spirit that moves eternally around us, through us, shared amongst us, cycling within our bodies and given between ourselves and all of the living things on earth.  The whole world breathes in Yah and exhales weh, and we are only a moment in that cycle.

You’re not naked.

{ April 3, 2009 @ 8:23 am } · { personal reflection, spirituality }
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Things come together.  They just do.  Yesterday morning, catching up on my feed reader, I was happy to see that one of my favorite blogs had posted #512: Thinking You’re Naked.  Oh, good title, I thought.  Then I read it (go ahead, you read it, then come back.  I’ll wait.)

And was thrown to the floor.  I needed to hear it, shared it with friends, found that they, too, desperately needed those words.  Who told you you’re naked?  So the day before, writing about sin and suffering for my Julian of Norwich class, I had read this passage from her Showings, “I saw that [God] is everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us.”  Who told you that you’re naked?  Who?

The last year or so has been one of learning about sin.  I’ve always been pretty good, as we all are perhaps, at noticing other people’s sin.  By sin, I mean the ways in which they are *obviously* not in alignment with who I think God wants them to be… right? Nah.  More likely, with who I think I want them to be.  But, writing this paper, exploring, diving, drowning in Julian’s words of comfort and courageous challenge, I came to some understanding of what I’ve struggled with this year.  A heart-knowledge, not a head one.  For the first time, I felt like I was really worth something despite my faults, my errors, my intentional mistakes and unintentional hurts.  My sins against myself and the damage I have inflicted on others.
I read this:  “And so, in all this contemplation it seemed to me that it was necessary to see and to know that we are sinners and commit many evil deeds which we ought to forsake, and leave many good deeds undone which we ought to do, so that we deserve pain, blame, and wrath.”  Um, yeah.  That’s about right, I thought.  I’m unworthy, I’ll never get there, I’m not enough… I’ve got to admit as much as I hate the word, I’m a sinner alright.  And don’t we, when we’re “bad” deserve to be punished?  Don’t people, doesn’t God, have full justification for being terribly angry with us when we’re wrong?
Except, I kept reading (always a mistake): “And despite all this, I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never will be.  Because he is God, he is good, he is truth, he is love, he is peace; and his power, his wisdom, his charity and his unity do not allow him to be angry… God is that goodness which cannot be angry, for God is nothing but goodness.”
Uh, what?  I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t compute with… well, what I want to be true.  Is that weird, not to want God to be that good, that loving, that generous?  If God is, then I have to let go of some things, some stuff I’ve been carrying around that I’ve gotten pretty used to over time.  It’s gotten fitted to me, like an old coat or a familiar hat.  Except it seems that Julian, and God through her, are telling me that those aren’t the clothes I’m supposed to be wearing.  I’ve put on the wrong stuff.  Not only have I thought that I was naked, in seeing myself that way, I’ve tried to cover myself inappropriately.  Maybe I’ve been protecting myself from God’s anger, putting on what amounts to spiritual chainmail, when God wants me to wrap myself in God’s own warm, loving arms.  We all do it.  But whoever told you that you’re naked, and whatever you’ve done to try to hide it, know this: God is our clothing and our shelter, and will never desert us, no matter how naked we feel.

Most courteously and most tenderly.

{ March 20, 2009 @ 2:08 pm } · { Eucharist, personal reflection, spirituality }
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I’ve been submersed during the last month or so  in the writings of the 14th century English mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich as part of a class I’m taking about her life and spirituality.  Every week as part of class, our professor opens a half hour for us to meditate through art on a passage related to our learning.  A few weeks ago, armed with my sketchbook and some borrowed crayons, I showed up to this late evening class feeling raw and open-nerved after a fourteen hour day, an emotionally difficult weekend, and heaviness in my heart.  I rolled my eyes and felt a sinking pit in my stomach when I read the two prompts for meditation: one was about Julian’s vision of the bleeding Christ on the cross and the other was about mothers.  I was unprepared on all levels to think about either my suffering Lord or his relationship to mothering, parenting, provision.  In a word, I was feeling oppositional.

But, I had to choose one, or sit in my uncomfortable chair with my arms crossed for the duration.  So I picked the second one, hoping that some sort of lovely feminist vision would come to me, edging into my consciousness and having nothing at all to do with my recent struggles to understand myself within a larger matrix of the story of my own parents.

So, I read and reread Julian’s gentle words, “The mother can give of her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly…”  I thought about communion, and Jesus feeding us out of his own body.  I thought about the powerful experiences, at some times of total emptiness and at others of absolute peace and assurance, I’ve found eating at that table.  Finding sustenance there, despite my anger or doubt or conviction.  Then I read the rest of the meditation… “With what do you need Christ to feed you right now?”  Oh, no.  I very desperately didn’t want to reflect on that question.   But, actually, I didn’t have to.  I just began to color.  I need to engage some full disclosure here.  I have no artistic ability whatsoever.  None.  I appreciate beautiful things but don’t create them.  Especially with Crayola crayons.  But, keeping those words in my mind, “our precious Mother Jesus… feed you…,” here’s what came out:

Julian, Christ as Mother

I sat and watched myself draw this stunning, living woman, these gorgeous heavy breasts and tummy, this open posture and radiance.  And had no idea what the hell it meant.  But in order to honor Julian, you’ve got to sit with something for a while.  I mean, the woman had a vision of the Christ on the cross and meditated on it for twenty years before she wrote about it again.

My mother is not this image.  I don’t know this mother.  I know I want her to be mine.  What do I need Christ to feed me now?  This image tells me my heart is crying for comfort.  I want warm, luscious fullness.  Plenitude.  Her arms aren’t showing in the picture, but in my mind they’re plump and warm and full, and they’d probably fit right around me while I cry.  She’s peaceful, and that peace simply oozes out into the rest of the picture.  Christ is this woman.  He’s my mother.  I need one, right about now in my life, and this is the one I want.  Open, vulnerable, strong, and comforting.  Available, compassionate, and unafraid.  Thing is, I think I’ve got what I’ve been looking for.  It’s been there, in my heart, all along, just waiting for me to drop my defenses and pick up my yellow crayons.  I hope you find what Christ wants to feed you, too.  Amen.

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