Meditation on Christ’s words: whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood will have eternal life.

Christ, why this cannibalism? Do I really have to eat you? Your words are offensive and disgusting: eating your flesh, drinking your blood.

I confess that my inclination is to spiritualize what you ask for. Let's make this about believing the right things about you, or about the pursuit of some sort of warm religious experience of union and bliss. Show me a pathway away from your flesh and blood. Show me an escape from the human condition you entered. Show me how to avoid the sweaty, stinky, bad-breathed, farting, hard-faced, arm-crossed chests of the people who are your body. Show me a way to escape from the homeless with their signs at the freeway exits; the gangsters driving their booming cars; this aging body; the moldering grave; the death of those I love and those I fear; the horror and brutality of the murderous human condition: from your tortured corpus on the Cross.

But, you say, "I am the bread of life." You call me to open the mouth of mind and heart wide, to take in and chew on the realities of the human condition you entered and loved and saved. Eat my flesh! Take all this in, swallow it, digest it, excrete that which is mere waste, and live on the rest.

Christ, if the only escape from you and all that you entered is soul death, then give me the grace and courage to eat--your flesh, the flesh of us all. Eating you, I chew on eternal life.

The Truth Shall Make Us Free

We know that torture was done in the name of the United States of America.

But we don't know enough yet, not if we want to be set free from evil that, corporately, we did.

I am seeing the need for the very opposite of the usual politicized hunt for convenient scapegoats. I look for our president and other leaders, both political and religious, to find ways for the citizens of the United States of America to know who did what and when. We don't need to hear justifications or excuses. And though there probably need to be prosecutions (since we are under the rule of the law), pointing fingers of blame as though any of us are thereby exonerated, will not get us where we need to go.

We the people had hears but we didn't hear;
we had eyes, but we didn't see;
we had voices, and we were silent.

If that weren't the truth, the atrocities of the torture would not have been allowed. Now we must hear, see, and find our voices once again.

We the people must be led to face the truth head on, accept corporate responsibility for the evil done, and allow ourselves to be led to lament and I pray, humility. Only in this way will we as a people grow into maturity.

Mature people know: only the truth, the whole truth, the real truth, unadorned with pieties and excuses, can set us free.

The Head and the Body are One

Taking direction from St. Paul, it is common to claim that Christ (crucified and risen) is the head of the church, his body--a very organic, biological metaphor.

Some theologians assert that as the body of Christ, the church is the presence of God on earth. Considering that the church is most definitely a slow-moving, often curmudgeonly, and frequently sinful and fractious entity, claiming it is the presence of God (or the risen Christ) can seem daring, if not blasphemous.

I think of the statement the New Testament character Nathanael (John 1) made when excited friends had announced to him that they had found the Messiah (the Christ), "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?!"

Often those in the first bloom of their welcome into the Church are thrilled. Later, disillusionment may set in, as the sorry reality of congregational life seems anything but the presence of God.

But the Apostle Paul, dealing with his troubled congregations kept seeing them as, and naming them as, the body of Christ. Most remarkable.

What if we look at things this way: the head is the seat of consciousness, of will, or intention, of setting direction. True, the head, that is the brain, is most definitely also body, but body with a special function, and a wise head will pay attention to body language.

The body (the church) in all its various parts and expressions will do well do recall, as best each part can, that the head is greater consciousness, knows more of what the realities are, knows what the overall plan is, and directs the body--not the other way around.

Mini versions of this metaphorical example can be pondered: parents and children share a common flesh and family structure, but parents always (one hopes) know more about the overall scope of the world and helpful and necessary responses to it. Another example: anyone who's ever held a key leadership position in an organization, especially a large organization is in some sense the "head" of the organization, and knows more about (has a greater conscious awareness of) the issues, policies, and politics inherent in that organization--and may be privy to some aspects of the organizational life that much be carrried quietly and not shared with everyone).

So with Christ as the head of the church. Our faith is not in our believing, but in the faithfulness, wisdom, and purposes of Christ, whose vision and consciousness of the whole picture (even the cosmos) so far exceeds ours that humility is our only wise option. Wise also to live trusting that the head, the Christ, pays constant attention to the pains, moods, dysfunctions, illnesses, efforts, sorrows and joys of the body, and leads it forward in helpful, healthful ways, even when it sometimes is a painful thing.

Nazareth is the incarnation of the Christ into real humanity in real time and in full reality, just as it is, with a future yet unseen.

In these trying times, try Psalm 73

Outrage and anger toward the smart guys at the top.

Worry and anxiety in the loss of job, home.

Rage, rage, rage.

But is that the best we can do?

Read Psalm 73 for a profoundly helpful piece of spiritual direction.

For a real hoot, read it in Eugene Peterson's The Message.

Ponder.

What if there were no malls?

I am thinking of something that I believe Harvey Cox suggested sometime ago: the real religion of at least the western world (and now, perhaps more globally) is money.

If that is the case, then malls, especially the newer ones, are the cathedrals to the great god money. Jesus warned us about “mammon”, asserting that one cannot worship both the real God and mammon (projected as a god with the inherent powers and blessing of money, wealth, shadowed by greed and avarice and dedication to piling up ever more).

Consider then our existence in 21^st century if there were no malls. What would people do? What would we do if we lacked the pilgrimages of shopping? How would we spend our time on Sunday afternoons—or mornings for that matter?

Our lives are so intertwined with the economic system—including the ever-present hype of advertising—that we would have a hard time figuring how to live without it. Our purpose and self-image are produced and given purpose by it; or, if our circumstances are not affluent, we may rage against the weight of oppression and marginalization we experience.

Whether well-off or poor, the warning in this scenario is the great danger of becoming utterly lost in a wilderness of human invention, slyly encouraged by the "god" mammon: the system of this world. We become lost in the sense of having lost our way, and our true life and true community, because even though some of us still show up for "church", in daily life we've forsaken the mystery of the Divine One who is the heart of everything.

We can turn around and head back home! In this time of economic convulsion, of mammon's shock and awe, there is the possibility for more than outrage and hand-wringing and despair:

“Return to the Lord your God, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…”

Quadrinity?!

In his work on Quadratos (a made up word, signifying something fourfold) Alexander Shaia brings to our attention that it is no accident of history that the canon of the Scriptures includes four gospels. He notes that from ancient times the fourfoldness of creation and of the work of God was self-evident. Indeed, Irenaeus insisted that there must be four gospels, exactly, because this is how God works: the divine pattern is always fourfold.

Pondering this the other day I was thinking, how odd then, that Christians developed the doctrine of the Trinity! Why not a "quadrinity"? But no, the long tradition of the church insists on the one-in-threeness of the divine mystery.

Then I thought about Rublev's famous icon of the Trinity. Many have commented on how the figures in the icon are clearly in communication with one another, and yet the figures are arranged in a way that faces outward toward the viewer--an openness, an invitation, a sense of welcome. Thus the pray-ers of the icon are invited into communion with the Holy Three. The deep koinonia of the Trinity becomes a gift to us all.

If so, then those who pray the icon, i.e., the church, complete the Trinity. And thus the Trinity becomes "quadrinity", now and forever. Amen.

Prayer, Psalms, Openness to the mystery of God

Prayer is many things:asking, begging, pleading, lamenting, cursing, praising, thanking, murmured or shouted into the great mystery called God.

The Psalms model the diversity of prayer, and, it occurred to me today, something more. For all their variety of expression, the Psalms share not only a sense of divine reality, they also share an evident openness to God. Their honesty (so very human) is shocking to some of our pious notions about what prayer should or should not be. But such is their openness. It is as though praying like a psalmist is a matter of a no-secrets radical openness. After all, God already is well aware of everything anyway, so why not let your guard down and get real!

Such (radical) prayer is less about requesting this or that of God, and more a matter of baring one's soul with a sense of God's mysteriously reliable and merciful presence, and that presence in and of itself is worth everything, is what fills the "hole in the soul."

"As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God." (Ps. 42)