The “performance principle” is a guiding mythology that, according to Richard Rohr, guides the first half of our religious lives. It is the mythology that suggests we are defined, more or less, by our achievement. It is also a mythology that is rooted in and propelled by fear: the expectation of punishment. Our achievements are meant to secure […]
The Gospel's Steady Work of Reversal
David Brooks’ most recent op-ed discusses the late career of Ernest Hemingway, how he became in his later years “a prisoner of his own celebrity.” Hemingway was a famous writer by 25 and by middle age he was simply “playing at being Ernest Hemingway.” Of course, this is where most of us might roll our eyes, and say […]
Simone Weil on the Cross
From Gravity and Grace.
“Christ healing the sick, raising the dead, etc–that is the humble, human, almost low part of his mission. The supernatural part is the sweat of blood, the unsatisfied longing for human consolation, the supplication that he might be spared, the sense of being abandoned by God. The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides!
“The cross. The tree of sin was a real tree, the tree of life was a wooden beam. Something which does not give fruit, but only vertical movement. “The Son of Man must be lift up and he will draw all men unto himself.” We can kill the vital energy in ourselves while keeping only the vertical movement. Leaves and fruit are a waste of energy if our only wish is to rise. Adam and Eve sought for divinity in vital energy–a tree, fruit. But it is prepared for us on dead wood, geometrically squared, where a corpse is hanging. We must look for the secret of our kinship to God in our mortality.
“We have to cross the infinite thickness of time and space–and God has to do it first, because he comes to us first. Of the links between God and man, love is the greatest…God crosses through the thickness of the world to come to us.”
Capon, Silverstein and the Foolishness of the Cross
A couple of literary meditations – one religious, one secular, both sacred – on this Sunday’s Lectionary reading, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, and the “foolishness” of the cross. First, from Robert Farrar Capon’s Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus: Direct, straight-line, intervening power does, of course, have many uses. With […]
Mama Liked the Roses (And So Did T.S. Eliot): Deciphering "Burnt Norton" - Part 2
Have you ever wanted to reclaim the past? In images, especially those of poetry, we possess a moment frozen in time. It seems so accessible the more detailed and the more sensuous a description we give it—such as Eliot’s ghostly trip into the rose-garden last week—and yet the permanence which it suggests is devastatingly illusory. […]
Go For It?
Sometimes I think those of us who love the church the most are also faced with the need to be its harshest critics. I was more than a little crushed to see this spin on the upcoming sermon series at our church (which will remain nameless). FYI, it is a large Episcopal church with a […]
Goodness Kills Love
At all events when, after many hours, the door was opened and people thronged in, they found the murderer unconscious and in a raging fever. The prince was sitting by him, motionless, and each time that the sick man gave a laugh, or a shout, he hastened to pass his own trembling hand over his […]
"She Is Love" by Parachute VA
A good friend of mine [shout out to Nate Lee] introduced me to this song. I love it. Because I’ve never encountered a song that echos the Love of the Cross so well. It doesn’t even matter if the “she” in the song is a “real” woman or the feminine that is wisdom (Prov. 8; […]
