Incarnation

The daily practice of incarnation--of being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh--is to discover a pedagogy that is as old as the gospels. Why else did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper?

Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World

Overload

In an age of information overload, when a vast variety of media delivers news faster than most of us can digest--when many of us have at least two e-mail addresses, two telephone numbers, and one fax number--the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God.


Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World

Photo: Steve Garfield

Epitaph

It says something profound about what we were meant to be that death, what it is and what it does, seems so outrageous, so unnatural, this destruction of our bodies, this severing of all ties with loved ones, this removal from the stage of the living. We recoil from death, we shrink from dying. And rightly so. Those who argue that death is just a natural part of life must not be acquainted with death. Death takes a human life, something that was created good and made in the image of the Holy Trinity, death destroys that life. Death takes a person, capable of love, capable of good, capable of astonishing acts of fantastic cooking (!), death reduces that person to nothing. Death erases, so that she who once was so alive and so present and so here, she is now no more. The voice that called or laughed or sung is silenced. The hand that helped or touched or caressed moves no more. The eyes that looked in wonder or wept tears of sadness or crinkled in a smile are closed never to open again. Death has taken my mom. Her voice I’ll never hear again. Her hand I’ll never hold. Her eyes I’ll never look into and wonder what she’s thinking.

No monuments. No highways named after her. No books or scholarly papers to achieve immortality in libraries and online databases. No companies that bear her name.

The only thing my mom appears to have left behind are a few lives, lives whose hearts have been touched, lives whose character has been influenced, lives who shared a laugh or enjoyed a meal or experienced something good. But given the fact that monuments will crumble, and accumulated treasure will waste away, given that nothing most people pour themselves into will last or be remembered, it could be that touching a few lives may turn out to be by far the most important thing.

Thanks, mom. Memory eternal.

Joseph Black, writing in a blog post on the death of his mother on the 16th March, 2011

No disembodied bodies!

God means to welcome risen bodies and not just disembodied souls to heaven's banquet table. The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.

Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World

Protecting ourselves

When the safety net has split, when the resources are gone, when the way ahead is not clear, the sudden exposure can be both frightening and revealing. We spend so much of our time protecting ourselves from this exposure that a weird kind of relief can result when we fail. To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live. Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World

Spiritual practices

Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it in that way--once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.

Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World

Just a body?

To suggest in the early goings of grief that a body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize it as it would if we were to say it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy. Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from the dead. What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than “just a shell,” he’d raised his personality, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches?

Thomas Lynch
The Undertaking

Place

Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are. When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, "Here, I guess, since this is where I am."

Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World

Worth

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbours worthy if anything can.

Thomas Merton
Letter to Dorothy Day, qtd. in Catholic Voices in a World on Fire

Where your treasure is...

No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.

Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World

Spiritual Warfare

Spiritual warfare, largely the frame Paul has in mind throughout Ephesians, comes to us in small and ordinary ways. The enemy is cunning — we often miss the small ways he attacks us because we are expecting noise and explosions.

As Paul notes, our trials come from both within and without. Inwardly we struggle to truly believe the Gospel: that I – even I! – am truly God’s beloved. Outwardly, we fail to accept and believe in one another. We accuse one another of faulty motivations and intentions without truly listening and understanding first. We become judges with evil thoughts. The enemy loves this! May we learn to put on the full armour of God, especially the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness – we must know in whom we stand or we will not stand for long.

Len Hjalmarson in a post called 90 Days, on the blog, NextReformation.

Works of art

Let me say, right off, that I believe a work of art is primarily concerned with the creation of beauty, whether through words, colors, shapes, sounds or movement. But it is impossible to read serious novels, poetry, essays, and biographies without also growing convinced that they gradually enlarge our minds, refine our spirits, make us more sensitive and understanding.

Michael Dirda
Book by Book

Greek and Latin, or Greek vs Latin

‘From the start Greeks and Latins had each approached the Christian mystery in their own way. At the risk of some oversimplification, it can be said that the Latin approach was more practical, the Greek more speculative; Latin thought was influenced by juridical ideas, by the concepts of Roman law, while the Greeks understood theology in the context of worship and in light of the Holy Liturgy. When thinking about the Trinity, Latins started with the unity of the Godhead, Greeks with the threeness of the persons; when reflecting on the Crucifixion, Latins thought primarily of Christ the Victim, Greeks of Christ the Victor; Latins talked more of redemption, Greeks of deification… These two distinctive approaches were not in themselves contradictory, each served to supplement the other , and each had its place in the fullness of Catholic tradition. But now that the two sides were becoming strangers to one another—with no political and little cultural unity, with no common language—there was a danger that each side would follow its own approach in isolation and push it to extremes, forgetting the value of the other point of view.’

Kallistos Ware in The Orthodox Church (48-49)

Avoiding the Dark

Avoidance of the dark periods of our lives does not necessarily improve our lives. This is especially true when we lose our ability to cope with, or effectively navigate through, the darkness because we’ve experienced so little of it for so long. There’s something to be said for being able to work with a worst-case scenario. The times through which we struggle in our lives make us better able to celebrate the brighter times that follow. They also make the struggle itself, if not easier, at least a more familiar experience the next time.

David Brown
"Snowed in" from catapult magazine

Answers

Things have changed. I still remain as convinced about Jesus as ever (most of the time - I still have my moments when I really hope we're not deluding ourselves) but I do experience a frequent tightening of the buttocks when Christians come up with easy answers to tough questions.

And prayer has become a complete mystery to me, and I don't mean that there are areas of confusion about it; I mean the whole subject has disappeared into a bank of thick fog. My problem used to be unanswered prayer - but now I'm more bewildered by answered prayer. Looking out at a world that screams with hunger and suffering, it stuns me that we in the affluent West get answers about anything at all, never mind reserved parking spaces. And yet....we do. God is interested in our trivial pursuits, though God knows why.

Jeff Lucas, writing to Adrian Plass, in Seriously Funny. (pg 12-13)