Category Archives: Ramblings

A ramble through the week.

Healing

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God heals. We pray, your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Surely, in the healing of minds and bodies and deliverance from oppression, God is healing. In the mystery of God in all things, upholding all things, God is present in a way that wills only good, that brings light and life.
This is the aroma of God, and we see it in the healing ministry of Jesus who says, if you don’t believe in me, believe in the works that I do. Through community, care, and prayer, followers of Jesus embody this. Followers of Jesus are distinctive only because of love, love of God, and love of those around them.
And so in history we see collections for the poor to feed and clothe them, rescuing of the destitute especially children caringbforbthe sick and teaching, and, as medicine develops, hospitals, and in recent times schools for children.
Visiting the sick and clothing the naked is a work of humanity, as is caring for the indigent and those in prison. Jesus calls us to his perfect humanity, accountable to the light he has placed in everyone. He is light, and we are called to be light. God is not divine deodorant. We are his holy aroma recreated and formed by the renewal of our minds. We are called to be holy as he is holy; to be fully human. Kindness and compassion make us truly human.
The place of gathering for those on this journey, the holy place, is a meal, a table where life is shared in its fullness in all circumstances. A meal that encompasses Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection. The mystery of faith is, being in Christ, being fully human as Jesus was and is, resurrected, making all things new. All creation is in Christ from the beginning, and Jesus reveals this truth, as he is so are we redeeming, redreaming, all things.
This is our religion, our worship, that causes us to sing and praise and to enter the quiet place of intimacy with God. In him, we look with the eyes of Christ and in all see Christ.



God is ever healing, drawing all creation to the good. Miracles happen, but the miracle of the human endeavour is to be celebrated. What we see in medicine today should bring us to our knees in praise and thanksgiving. Medicine in all its forms expresses the miracle of the light within. Humanity expresses itself in healing and curing. Jesus is revealed in our care for the sick and oppressed and in the advances of science. This is the life we are called to. He is not revealed in turning away from the goodness of science to a spiritual desert of disappointment. Does God heal in miraculous ways? Yes, look around you.
People experience the extremes of genetic collateral, physical attrition, and just plain bad luck. All is in God’s hands but is not God’s will. Jesus’s answer is to put in our mouths a prayer that asks for God’s will to be done and in our minds a will to cure.
Does God intervene? Only in love. We are to pray constantly, expressing compassion and kindness for those afflicted and in need of saving. Open your eyes, love wins. Do not be put off by the charlatans who profit from your disappointment. It’s not your fault.

Before Moses died on the borders of the promised land, he said,

‭Deuteronomy 31:26 NRSV‬
“Take this book of the law and put it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God; let it remain there as a witness against you.

He then wrote down a song, and in it, he sung,

Deuteronomy 32:3-6 NRSV‬
For I will proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God! The Rock, his work is perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God, without deceit, just and upright is he; yet his degenerate children have dealt falsely with him, a perverse and crooked generation. Do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you?

https://bible.com/bible/2016/deu.32.3-6.NRSV

To Christians, this sounds familiar. Jesus had come down from a mountain where his true glory had been revealed, but in the meantime, his disciples had not been able to cure a fitting boy, and the disciples wanted to know why.

‭Matthew 17:17-18 NRSV‬
Jesus answered, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him here to me.” And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly.

https://bible.com/bible/2016/mat.17.17-18.NRSV

https://bible.com/bible/2016/deu.31.26.NRSV

Jesus words seem to say we are at fault when there is no healing, How much longer must I put up with you? I’m not sure this was directed at the hapless disciples.
Jesus has just communed with Moses, who saw how the people had failed and how they would fail despite the law. He had also communed with Elijah, who in the time of Israel’s deep apostasy did many miracles. I feel that Jesus was constantly bringing the people back to Moses; the heritage they were so proud of, what they felt defined them. We see the practices of the way of the law angering Jesus, and here, he reminds them of the prophecy of Moses.
Jesus heals the lad and then teaches the disciples about faith. I believe he was drawing a contrast, reframing the song of Moses, anticipating an end to the curse of the law and healing the lad. I think Jesus words and healing were a parable; the disciples would see Jesus recalling the song of Moses and speaking out frustration at the way of the Law, then there was healing, then joy, a new way that always was the way, a revelation of the true way..
Afterwards, the disciples wanted to know why they were not able to deliver the boy; their expectation must have been that they could, but nothing happened. Had they not healed people and raised people from the dead?

‭Matthew 17:20 NRSV‬
He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”

https://bible.com/bible/2016/mat.17.20.NRSV

Does this mean their lack of effectiveness was their own fault? What was the lesson? Your faith is less than tiny, but tiny faith can alter stuff. You can read this all as a rebuke or as playful teaching. It was the demon that was rebuked, not the disciples.
The whole incident is redolent with hyperbole. otherwise, he would be denying his own faith. We learn there were occasions Jesus himself was unable to heal.
We have been taught to feel bad about our lack of faith, but Jesus is telling us we don’t need much and encouraging us, not telling us off. Read it again, seeing Jesus after coming down from the mountain, and overjoyed that life was coming, acting out the song of Moses, then healing with a huge smile on his face. Keep coming to Jesus and asking.



Does suffering cease? Only through love, and if our tiny faith does not prevail, we can trust in that love and draw on it, as Jesus stands with us in our anguish. We bear in plastic shopping bags a fullness beyond measure, and yet death and destruction stalk our daily lives and evil picks off the innocent. I hope Jesus is frustrated with that, and we see that he is. I am.

We are to seek the good of all in our actions and in our prayers. This is our work. A prayer for healing is an act of love. We can not be other than fully human in our spirituality. Sometimes, our prayer is a groan, and in this groan, the Spirit knows deeper than we can know what to pray. Every prayer drives the cosmos forward in Christ. We need to realise the power of Christ in us, the light we bear and shine out.
Our hope is that all is in God’s hands. We are taught that hope is not what is seen. Hope, faith and love are our virtues; a growing faith that breaks through the wall of transactional childish ways into a deep trust; a real hope which prays with all our humanity, sure that God is love.
Do not become slaves to events, people, and places but worship in spirit and truth. Do not be those who naval gaze, but become those who act to bring unrelenting good into this held but broken creation.
My dream is that we will break through to a place where we don’t hold God to account for not healing: a place where we can integrate all creaturly experience as being held in Christ.
It is good to ask the question and wrestle with it, but don’t give up praying and meeting together, losing hope. God is healing, and our prayers are effective: God is sovereign in and through love and only in and through love. Love is difficult. All creation, the good and the bad, is perfected in love. Wrestle. Imagine. Dream. We should see more healing, and it is frustrating, but don’t give up or concede a vision of a good and powerful God.

My hope is that we will share spiritual practices that deepen the life of service and maybe take a few up. But I think they are best done together and voluntarily. I think they then feed the multiple personalities and dispositions of the gathered who can choose what to do in their daily life. Only do not then leave the table.
To be authentic, the body of believers minister Christ to those around them in eating together, walking together, and listening. We model a non transactional way where people come and do life together because they are being met by Christ. We resist framing people’s experience of God and killing it with practices.
It is enough that they want to be there. Church is voluntary, and leadership in the body is in teaching, facilitating and guiding; providing the fuel. There is also judgement, routing out hypocrisy and exposing harm, which Jesus shows is directed towards the powerful and is uncontroling.


There is a life worth living, and it first draws us inward to the secret place, and we are cleansed. We become in our lives faithful to Jesus, the one who lived died and rose again, revealing God as Father, Son, and Spirit: Christ for all. In this life God is healing.

The silence of the teacher.

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God appears silent, distant, disengaged. Our hope is he is really there. The fact that we even consider him is because we believe  we have experienced him, not in our reason alone, but in his felt presence. We may have been told about him, but unless we have encountered him, he is not there.

As a friend, it would be a deception to try to persuade you; truth, beauty, and justice are everywhere, but so is ugliness, suffering, and despair. In fact, the goodness that is creation is concealed by death. Every particle operates to preserve itself, and even life itself is selfish. The vastness of space, though awesome, appears empty and threatening, and life is cruel. Yes, at the heart of trying to know, there is falsehood and deception in ourselves that leads us from seeing things as they are. Can we ever know we have encountered God?

For God to be true and good, he, in his very essence, must be uncoersive love, not insisting on his own way and a fountain of forgiveness. How else are we to be saved, except if God is not steadfast in love, ever drawing us to himself? Truly, he speaks out creation in chaos, and the sound of his voice is sheer silence. He speaks out new creation in the chaos of our lives, and we only know this because we love as he loves us. We love as our hearts teach us to love.

As a teacher, I am careful not to leap in with the answer when a pupil has a problem. I hope they will look again and, if I do well, I guide them to see their own solution. Sometimes, I try to figure it out with them, not taking the lead.

When I don’t give an answer, they may get frustrated and may even doubt whether I can solve the problem. My silence is intended to spur them on to solve it for themselves.

It’s a matter of growth. When they were new to the task, they needed help, but they need to get beyond my help. To progress, they must engage and trust themselves, disrupting what they already know. My silence is necessary if they are to progress and move further than I can lead.

God is ever present, ever knowing and anticipating our every breath, holding us. We can be reassured that we are held. Moment by moment, he is pouring out self giving love.

Love empowers us to be true to God, trusting that even in his silence, he is guiding us so that we are freed to do his will. Daily, we set our plans before him, seeking to obey his command to love. His presence, known or unknown, enables us to walk in truth, beauty, and justice, and we grow to recognise his voice in all things. Truly, we become like him.

Our goal is to walk with him, unhindered and unfettered. In this veil of death, the promise is beyond the horizon, and everything senses its draw, groaning for it to be revealed. It’s a call back to the garden of Eden, a paradise lost. From the Chaos of our first parents’ sin in a creation made very good, our present creation is formed in death. This is not a point in time but in a reality formed in anticipation; we are in an altered state of being, which from the beginning knew the lamb that was slain yet was very good. And so, out of the very real loss of paradise, all creation carries the mark of death. Eden is beyond myth, it is the mystery revealed on the cross of Christ that drives us to the consumation of all things in the fact of the risen Christ, now and forever in the coming new creation when heaven joins earth once more in our resurection in him.

‭John 15:13-17 NRSV‬
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.

I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

https://bible.com/bible/2016/jhn.15.13-17.NRSV

Of relics, intersex genetics, and transgender identity

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Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
1 Corinthians 6:19‭-‬20 NRSV

https://bible.com/bible/2016/1co.6.19-20.NRSV

Are trans people ‘on a sacred journey’?

The bodies we have, I believe constitue ourselves, our lives. They are not just animated containers. The scripture above would speak to followers of Jesus about how their conduct in their bodies matters. Being a follower of Jesus is more than doing no harm to others it includes doing no harm to our selves. There is no body spirit divide and in harming ourselves we harm the sacred other. So what does this mean if you suffer body dysphoria; what if the body you have causes you pain because it does not match the gender your brain is telling you you are? Biology has got it wrong.

I want to approach this through relics and the facts of science, to establish the sanctity of material and of life, the twists of religion and the twists of genetics.

Relics are material remains of the life of a person. They can be body parts. When they are body parts or even whole bodies, I sense within myself an offence at their veneration. Something deeply human, to honour the dead, has been overcome for the sake of religion, parading their remains. Or has it? The sanctity of a person residing in their material being is a deeply human reaction; we honour bodies and ashes. An unburied body is an offence. We visit graves and, some sense the presence of a person at a grave side. Personally I am overcome at the graveside of my sister. Maybe to offer people the experience of the presence of a person through relics is acceptable. I am not convinced but am prepared to accept it is a human reaction to the same feeling I get on being at the grave.

The relics of Christ would be his clothes, his blood and the water that streamed from his side, elements of the cross and his burial cloths but the Bible speaks nowhere of these being collected to be venerated or admits such a practice. But there is a human  instinct to invest the material remains with the essence of the deceased. Photographs, pew seat covers, vestry brooms all have significance and if they belonged to a holy person, well…

Jesus is recorded as emotional, he ate and sweated and was physically mature.

In the words of the notorious Ezra Pound,

Oh we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.

Ballad of the Goodly Fere

Ezra Pound – 1885-1972

In all ways Christ identified with humanity, even in death. In death the material of his body remained to be resurrected, the first fruits of a new materiality, fully human but glorified, a new creation subsuming the old, the old creation wholly the new, is how I see it. So in his death and resurrection, for me, Christ reveals the mystery of all creation, the sacredness of all matter. We breath the air Christ breathed. His dead body was not just a skeleton, flesh and fluids it was the person of God, incarnate and dead. This for me is the holiness of Easter Saturday.

Paul teaches that identifying with Christ involves a physical infilling of the Spirit, an earnest of our future resurrection so that we are a new creation. He pictures our bodies as a temple of the Spirit, bringing what was to be into what is now, endowing us with the new materiality of the resurrected Christ. Part of our experience of life is the putting off of the old body and the putting on of the new.

All bodies are imperfect and subject to chance and time. No doubt some bodies are formed through choices made or marred by self harm or collateral damage. None are beyond redemption.

The number of people born intersex is between 0.02% and 0.05% and arguably 1.7%. Let’s take the low percentage of 0.02%. Today there were potentially 385,000 babies born today, so there were potentially 100 intersex babies. About 0.1% of babies are born with Downs syndrome, another chromosomal variation, so about 600 could have been born today. Every 3 seconds someone is said to be diagnosed with dimentia around the world. Each is a person. Each made in the image of God. As a Christian, the sanctity of life is important, and mercy killing, abortion and end of life occupy a sacred space.

The poet David Hodges, a Cistercian Monk taking the voice of a lady, identifying with a feminist agenda, writes,

If it’s a mistake
it has no rights,
let it die
don’t incubate it.
Stick it in
a plastic bucket,
it’s not human
if I don’t want it.

From Protect the Human in Watching for the Wind by David Hodges

I don’t like this poem, but the phrase, it’s not human if I don’t want it, is haughnting. My reaction to thus phrase confirms flesh is sacred to me; having choice doesn’t change the fact that a life has been lost and instinctively I feel the flesh should be honoured. My baby brother died very early in life and the practices of the times means he has no grave, yet he is memorialised in our family. I feel deeply that no life should be extinguished because it is less than perfect and all flesh that housed human life has dignity.

Medicine is allowing us to preserve life outside the womb earlier and earlier and share organs. Hopefully this is not leading to a brave new world where the womb is dispensed with; every intervention carries a risk of misuse. Organs can be harvested and bought. But, for now, it’s a true observation that we dispense with life and are controlling its coming into being in what seems to be an irrational way in the name of rationality.

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27 NRSV

https://bible.com/bible/2016/gen.1.27.NRSV

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:27‭-‬28 NRSV

https://bible.com/bible/2016/gal.3.27-28.NRSV

It’s only humanity that is so specified as being male and female in Genesis. Some fish swap gender as do worms, slugs and snails. Male bees, wasps and ants develop from the unfertilised eggs of females enabling the female genes to perpetuate.

I have written elsewhere of the miracle that is Jesus, formed from the flesh of Mary yet fully human. A harmonising of the Genesis story admits that humanity was formed male and female and became man and woman. The Fall story illuminates the consequence of division and Paul shows how Jesus restores peace. I personally can’t see how the writer of Genesis had gender politics in mind. I do see however that in God male and female coexist. God is beyond gender. Jesus’ humanity is beyond genetics.

To use Genesis in the debate on transgender identity does violence to its writing. Paul writes,

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16‭-‬17 NRSV

https://bible.com/bible/2016/2ti.3.16-17.NRSV

What is the reproof, the correction, the training for righteousness in Genesis 1 and 2? It certainly is a challenge to the patriarchal culture of the day and so it seems for today. I believe in the plain reading of what it says and who Jesus is. All humanity is made in the image of God, however formed. Isn’t the story of the Fall an indictment of binary thinking, the knowledge of good and evil being the foundation of sin. Jesus commands us not to judge with the authority of Genesis. 

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.
Matthew 7:1‭-‬5 NRSV

https://bible.com/bible/2016/mat.7.1-5.NRSV

In the transgender debate this is for me a key scripture along with 1 Corinthians 6 . Jesus calls us to a high standard of righteousness; he takes the high ground in all disputes on the law from divorce to property. It is strange how we in the name of grace cheapen Jesus’ words. Jesus  commands us to Love and not judge and calls us to a purity that would cut off our hands and rip out our eyes rather than lust, would cast ourselves into the sea with a weight round our neck rather than abuse a child.

We really have lost it when our only care is the integrity of our liturgy, the preservation of our hierarchy and power. Jesus calls us to a higher righteousness. Transgender people suffer because they feel their biology has let them down. They have a genetic mismatch in their minds.

Our only response to one another as Christians who follow Jesus must be to be with those who find blessing in the midst of destitution and hunger and thirst for the righteousness that does not judge and loves to the point of loving its enemies.

Currently we are sullying the message of the Jesus by engaging in the politics of transgender identity rather than acknowledging the sacred journey we are all on from brokenness to wholeness, immersed in the rule of God. Nobody I hope is advocating that we are called to anything less than love, anything less than humility, anything less than faithfulness: Jesus is our righteousness, and we are saved by his faithfulness.

Are we really saying that someone who is LGBTQ+ is less worthy than any of us; or anyone who is not male or female, or suffers from gender dysphoria, or has a mental disability or dimentia. Read Matthew 7 again and pray with me for God’s mercy; it’s so much more complex.

The relics of St Theres of Lissieux are seen as an ikon to a knowledge of Christ. I don’t agree and something in me cries out against such a theology. At a tender age Theres felt called to be a nun and as a nun she felt called to be a missionary. She suffered deeply physically and mentally and at one stage maybe lost her faith. However she saw in her suffering a way to heaven from where she would shower petals of love on all. She died very young. The little way she left has encouraged many to  faith in Christ. Her words are her true relic. Her youthful wilfulness and dogged self identifying as a nun, who would never marry, was decided by her at the age of 15.

Mary, we believe, could have been 14 when she conceived Jesus. Her willingness to accept the word of the angel brought Christ into the world. This is not normal. Theres was not normal.

We should be very wary of excluding or dismissing what we see to be not normal. We are called to compassion,  to be a source of hope and light. To wade into the argument on transgender therapy with scripture is not necessary. We should keep our arguments in the sphere of protecting the weak and vulnerable. If we exclude the weak and vulnerable our voice is not Christian.

When the woman caught in adultery was brought to Jesus, he again took the high ground as regards the law. However, in executing his judgement, we only see mercy. Jesus states that though she had transgressed, he did not condemn her. He let’s her depart with the word, not to sin again. He entrust her with a high calling. Let us go and do likewise.

https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/transgender-intersex-sex-chromosomes

https://www.littleflower.org.uk/her-life-in-lisieux-carmel

Seeking God.

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As we seek after God, what we know will lead us. Even if we start with God is Love, our experience of love will form our thoughts. If our confidence starts with the assertion that what is revealed in the scriptures is sufficient for us to trust God and the promise of God found there is true, who we are in our reading will dictate our path to seeking the Holy.

Holy means beyond knowing yet close, a place of presence, an encounter with mystery. Both love and holiness are the exercise of goodness. Love wills the good and holiness is presence of good. Again our culture and experience, our character and history will define our experience.

That is why I believe silence and stillness to be part of our quest after the divine. That’s why I believe that faith begins with the appreciation of beauty, goodness and justice. What warms our hearts in the moment, what blazes unexpectedly, the arresting presence is the beginning and end of faith. The faithfulness of God in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus are my beginning and the stillnes and silence strip away the rest, all other thought is purified by the presence of the mystery of the birth, death and resurrection of God in Christ.

The experience that defines our quest after the knowledge of the Holy begins with encountering the end of experience, declaring, here I am before the person and voice of God speaking into our need to know.

When is now for the church?

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Where are we in history? We are promised that as followers of Christ, we will move from glory into glory. The censuses tell us there are fewer of us declaring ourselves Christian though. What’s gone wrong? The self proclamation of belonging to a church or faith system is diminishing and seemingly the system is diminishing in power and influence.

The picture to me is more complex than the statistics suggest. In history the instituted church has done its work it appears to me, and has served its function. Could it be we are in a new phase that won’t appear in a census and this phase has been quietly fermenting all along.

I see the church as having established a culture, a core understanding of mercy, beauty, selfless giving, forgiveness, restitution as justice, care for the poor, care for the widow, a common commitment to fairness for everyone. Where Christianity has been central to a society, the secular society is different. The incarnation of God in Christ has led to the embodiment of godliness and enabled pluralism and equality. Where the word of Christ has been preached we find the habitual virtues of faithfulness, hope and love as expectations.

By faithfulness we mean, that we rest in the faithfulness of the Divine who is righteous and true to his promises revealed to people close to his heart. There is truth. By hope, we live in the light that all will be well and all manner of things will be well; all is not lost in the troubles of the day. God is with us in trials, in pain, in disappointment, to hold us and sustain us. By love we understand a willing of the good for all in a non coersive, self giving, enemy loving way poured out to all. The rule of God is exercised through communities of people gathered in love.

Society that has this foundation of love born of the words of Jesus, has this root may hedge it around with laws and institutions. Democracy and the rule of law with an independent judiciary and a free press exist where Christianity has been. Christian society’s life blood is the heart of the people moulded by the word of Christ. The estates of nations are instituted by God. Christianity may have moulded these but the institutions are not God’s rule.

Is the new phase where those who draw succour from Christ bring life, without the rod of power? Could it be that in this phase we see the irrepressible growth of the truly catholic church? Is this where the glory increases, where the kingdom of God is revealed to be not of this world, where speaking truth to power is not having power?

A call to practice.

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To find stillness, to rest in who we are, to know ourselves… As we rest and everything falls away, we find the good; we are resting in our being, our wellbeing. In all circumstances, for a moment, we can know good. For a moment we are found.

In our knowing we find ourselves in the presence of a person beyond knowing; a person beyond naming. The moment is not empty, and we know goodness.

To find the stillness we need to stop and open our eyes, stop and listen. The stillness creates longing and draws us to good. We are filled to will the good in every circumstance, called to the fulfilment of all good. As we become aware, all attachments fall away; everything that binds us becomes plain and we find the beginning and end of all things. And so wholeness is opened to us.

In Christ this wholeness is named, the beginning and the end, who teaches us to call the one beyond knowing, Father.

For this he died and in him we die to all our lacks, all our attachments, all our false hopes, as we trust in his goodness, his loving embrace.

We are not ashamed of this good news of grace. In the moment, in all circumstances, though we are of the soil and to the soil we will return, we find wisdom. Our senses are alive and life calls us to be fruitful, to draw from the fount of all being, draw from the living wellspring, draw from Christ, and filled, pour ourselves out.

In this being, all is redeemed, all pain, all suffering, every tear is grounded in joy, earthed in a radical sense of purpose: to love.

Come Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us!

Wholeness

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Catholic means whole; the entirety. To be catholic is to be part of the ever flowing fulness of creation and to embody all in one reality.

My friend Peter being confirmed in the catholic church.

The word catholic attached to the church seeks to express its fulness, its finality, the embodiment of Christ in creation being all that there is. A catholic church is a church that encompasses mind, body and spirit and brings meaning to everything.

In history this wholeness became centred around the bishop, the embodiment of apostolic succession around whom the people gathered. Soon the heavenly hierarchy of angels and archangels achieved its earthly equivalent in the order of bishops, priests, monks and the layity, each afforded its place, each expressing a misunderstood truth, once again obscuring the mystery of the incarnation.

Sadly this system became sanctified and an unholy order was established. The gifts given for the upbuilding of the church became a structure upholding the state and the status quo, so that slaves remained slaves and tribes were separated, patriarchy established. Culture took over and the message of catholicity was lost, a shadow of its original meaning becoming simply another word for universal; permission for men to engage in power struggles; an excuse for men to engage in conquest and colonisation.

Catholic goes beyond the universal and expresses the all that is in all, the fulness of God present in space and time, the body of Christ.

We are so wedded to the visible church, its hierarchy and forms, we miss the coming of Jesus. He is to come and he is here.

Would that we would open our eyes and see Christ not in the picture and the frame but in the reality, the truth and the life, the way we are being invited to live. God is love and in the catholic church heaven is found on earth.

Abundance

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For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. http://esv.to/Rom5.17

Each one of has come into this world through the anxiety of separation, formed by less than perfect contexts. Though each of us is conceived from the beginning as good by a good God and eternally loved by him, we are parented in suffering by fallible parents. In God there is abundant grace and in Jesus God the deliverer is revealed. By his life, death and resurrection we know the perfect revelation of God, Father, Son and Spirit. By turning to him in life we receive healing and forgiveness. The light within us leads us to the light of life, to abundant life in Jesus our anointed savior.

Of cursing and millstones

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21 I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand.
22 If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!
23 The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you.
24 My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen. http://esv.to/1Cor16.21-24

I don’t know if like me verse 22 leapt out for you. I wonder, given how high minded and judgemental the gathering at Corinth was, if this was Paul’s terse summing up of the message of love: if it doesn’t look like love then it isn’t God.

Jesus often referred to those gathered to him as little children and said to those chosen to lead that it would be better to tie a millstone round their necks and be drowned than cause one of these to fall. It can be easy to ignore the messages of cursing and drowning as mere hyperbole; bigged up, but not serious. But look around you.

It seems to be the wile of those in authority to wield it for the sake of position and power. How many are scattered and divided from the flock for the sake of an idea or being right?

I myself lament the showing of the yellow card, the last chance, to others. I can only pray: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner, and seek to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.

The lost sheep was part of the flock and the prodigal son a member of the family. We have a job to do.

Deep calls to deep

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By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. http://esv.to/Ps42.8

It’s hard not to feel detached, separated from the community we love. The ever-flowing divine community, God, Father, Son and Spirit proclaims his love for us and sings over us. In these times, to love and to praise are our prayer causing us know God in the normal, yes, looking forward to a time of festival and being together, but living the life God has given us today in it’s fullness.