Internship Day #3
During conversation time today with staff chaplains and the 3 other interns I was taken back to 1981. My 9th grade class took a trip to Rome from Vienna. En route we learned that John Paul II had been shot: we heard about it in a pizzeria in Florence. There was a definite sense of chaos as no one was sure whether the pope had survived. The people around us were more unsettled than we 14 year olds were. We were, in truth, more interested in getting some wine at the pizzeria and gossiping about who had bunked with whom on the overnight train ride south from Austria.
When we got to Rome and learned that the pope was okay but that we would not be seeing him in St. Peter’s Square, we headed to the Basilica for a tour. The Pieta was one of the first works I saw in Rome, and it had a powerful affect on me. I knew my mom would love it: I bought her a small copy which she would keep on her dresser for the rest of her life. Until today I had not thought about the Pieta for many years, but then I got to carry the image in my mind and feel that my mom was part of my pastoral wanderings. It was a comfort that hopefully spilled over to others.
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
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from Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1952 work The Irony of American History
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simplyorthodox:
The myrrh-bearers had brought funeral spices and ointments to finish committing Christ’s body to the grave. They were the first to see the empty tomb and were instructed by the risen Lord to bring the joyful news to the apostles. Sts. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are also commemorated on…
We have inherited a large house, a great world house in which we have to live together — black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu — a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.
~ Mary Oliver ~
God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.
spring song
the green of Jesus
is breaking the ground
and the sweet
smell of delicious Jesus
is opening the house and
the dance of Jesus music
has hold of the air and
the world is turning
in the body of Jesus and
the future is possible
-Lucille Clifton
You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.
Life addresses us moment to moment, and if we are listening and attending fully, we see that we are invited to participate in a call and response with life that leads to a deep and abiding joy. Second, when you truly listen to life you find yourself one with it. While seeing is restricted to the width of your vision, hearing is 360 degrees. Listening puts you in the center of things. My own practice is to spend time listening to all the sounds around and within me. Everything is given the same weight whether it is the thoughts in my head, the traffic speeding by my window, or the robins chirping on the roof. In time there is just listening and no listener. I have made room for all by emptying myself. This is listening as radical hospitality.
