Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

The Renaissance of Syriac Spirituality: the Forgotten Sibling - Ron Dart

See also Ron Dart and Abp Lazar Puhalo on "Syriac Fathers & Syrian Crisis" here:

Lessons from My Maple - Eden Jersak

I’m enjoying the show Maple is putting on these days, she features prominently from the window in my kitchen, dining room and living room.

She is glorious ... all those colours, and how she changes from day to day! How different light catches and highlights different shades and shapes and shadows.
What I’m appreciating today is how these two photos show us how black and white thinking is detrimental to our faith and to how we relate to God.

When we get stuck in ruts of judgment... black and white ... good or bad ... yes or no ... saint or sinner ... we lose the colour in life! We’re left with hard lines of varying greys, even though we believe we’re sorting things into black and white.
But Jesus put the colour back into faith when he taught his disciples and those who have ears to hear. He took the black and white law and starting messing with it. He summed up ALL the Laws that explained how we are meant to live and treat those around us by saying this ... “Love your neighbour as yourself!”

That summary of the Law puts all the colour back into how our faith is worked out, how we demonstrate it, and the personal touches each of us might put on how that looks.

It also allows us to relate to God in a much more fluid and creatively free way. No need to check the rule book, just a permission slip to engage in loving our neighbours which includes everyone on our planet!

Consider asking God how you might tag-team to share some love today. Put some colour back into our world!

Loitering with Jesus - Kenneth Tanner

Loitering with Jesus

The leaves of this Japanese maple in our front-drive are not “useful” to me but I love beholding them.

In the church we are in the habit of asking, “What difference does this make for me on Monday morning?” or “How can I make use of this in my day-to-day life?”

The contemplation of God and of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ is good for you and for the world. It does not need to lead to anything “practical.” Loitering with the person of Jesus is beneficial all by itself.

To behold Jesus, to hear his words, and attend to his actions in the gospels are enough.

Yes, taking a walk or riding a bike is good for your health but if you are only walking or riding a bike to aid your well-being, if you’re not enjoying these acts of being in and of themselves, you are missing out on the best part.

Trust leaders who invite you simply to ponder the Word made flesh, who beckon you to contemplate God and humanity by and in Jesus Christ without a to-do list. No applications.

What you can learn from such teachers is that God is present and at work in you, in the creation, and in your circumstances (that’s a very good thing); that God is the active agent in the world’s salvation; and that your gracious participation in his words and acts begins with dwelling in and with him in stillness of heart and mind.

Sometimes we need to trust that the sheer meditation on God that John (and the other gospel witnesses) grant us is enough; that there does not have to be a “So what?” or a “What now?”

Just ponder the mystery.

There can be an unhealthy fixation on utility that we need to recognize and address, in this and in many areas of our lives.

“Is this useful or instrumental” *can* deny the legitimacy of wasting time in the wondrous contemplation of God and humanity that the person of Jesus affords us.

Nothing could be more relevant to life and how to live it than contemplation of the person who is both God and human.

Servant Leadership in the Public Square - Ron Dart

Andromeda's Vulnerable Creator - Kenneth Tanner

Our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light-years away. She dwarfs our galaxy and contains a trillion stars.

 

The energy that fuels all of those stars and has kept them in a spiral for 13 billion years is measurable, but who has the instruments or the time? The best we can do is make estimates.

 

Our witness and wisdom says that a first-century baby born to a peasant Jewish teenager, a baby whose stepfather was a carpenter, is the One who spoke this galaxy into fiery substance and perpetual motion from nothing.

 

And our tradition claims that this human is the One who spoke another hundred billion galaxies into existence from no substance that existed before...*ex nihilo* in the ancient tongue.

 

One of the stories about this human tells us that on the night before he suffered for the cosmos he created, that he loves from eternity before his own life, he took a towel and a basin of water and washed the feet of his friends.

 

You cannot wash someone’s feet without getting low to the ground, on your knees.

 

In the world of his time, the host of a meal would not be the one to wash the feet of his guests. This was the task of a servant.

 

What does it mean that the One who creates all stars and fuels their fires, is on his knees, serving humans?

 

Let me suggest that it means that most human projection of what it means to be a god or the God in the history of humans—and most human imagination of what it means to be powerful—is deeply mistaken.

 

One makes oneself vulnerable to wash feet in a world without proper sanitation and waste removal but this detail about humbly kneeling and scrubbing who knows what from smelly feet is not nearly the lowest place this human goes or will go to love the cosmos.

 

This human who is God descends further still, down into death, entering by his own terrible death into the death of every human, for every time the one human nature we all share dies we die again, and he dies again with us, and further still: he descends into all our hells.

 

Athanasius says that he keeps falling further than our hells and his descent is not slowed until he is beneath the deepest falling human, down to the edges of non-existence, to rescue us from the non-being from which we came and to give the one human nature we all share permanence.

 

He is not stingy with his kind of existence. He wants his fellow humans to participate in his never-ending divine life.

 

He gives humans not the permanence of Andromeda but his own permanence, and with all humans somehow gives the cosmos the gift of his eternity.

 

The name of this human who is God is Jesus Christ.

No Analogies, Please. Encounter! - Kenneth Tanner

Forget about explanations and analogies for the Trinity. Please instead take them hand-in-hand, then walk his students or disciples down a dusty path to the Jordan.

 

There, among the tall reeds on the bank stands Jesus, who has also just walked there from Nazareth, his feet tired, sore, and dirty.

 

Jesus wades in ankle-deep. The cool, flowing water is soothing. From here he watches his human brothers and sisters descend one by one, waist-deep, faces drawing near to John the Baptist.

They are entering the water to be cleansed, to repent. Jesus has no need for the cleansing, or the change of heart and mind, and yet here he is, his human face set toward suffering encounter.

 

Bonhoeffer says that Jesus does not ponder his perfection or feel his superiority but rather expresses solidarity with everyone gathered to be made well, to amend their ways, by—what wondrous love is this?—presenting himself for baptism, too.

 

As he approaches John, the Baptist recognizes not only the body of his cousin, with whom he played as a child, but Isaiah’s lamb, the One who takes away the sin of the world.

 

John is reluctant. He does not see why Jesus needs this ritual because he does not see the cross in this watery moment, does not understand that Jesus is already, here In the murky waters of the Jordan, descending into chaos, darkness, and death, taking on himself the sin of the whole world.

For every moment in this story is a story about the cross, and as a story about the cross is also a story about resurrection but only after it is a story about torture.

 

This is not a God who remains on the banks of the river, uninvolved and aloof from the pain of existence, but who joins us in our predicament, participates without sin in the deaths we each of us bear about in our bodies, especially in the moment of our deaths—all the preparatory ones and the last and final one—is baptized for us and with us.

 

Unlike the other gods we project and handcraft and make wishes for, this God is a baptized God. He identifies with us so that he might identify us with him.

He also rises out of the waters. He does not stay in the grave. And as he comes up out of the chaos and the darkness, he is in prayer. Perhaps he prays among other things, “Father forgive them.”

 

And here I want to loudly encourage the catechists, pastors, Sunday School teachers, and theologians of the church: forget your distorting analogies and torturous explanations and help your students and disciples have an *encounter* with the Living God!

 

Like this:

 

Jesus comes up out of the cool, flowing, murky waters, and as he prayers, we are told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that there’s the sound of avionic movement, there are wings, feathers, and mystery as the Holy Spirit “alights” or “rests” on the Son in the body of a dove. Perhaps she rests on his shoulder?

 

Do you see and hear the rustle of divine wings on the air?

And this is not nearly all.

 

We are told that the sky is torn, a rip occurs in space-time. And through the tear in existence, there is suddenly a Voice: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

 

The majestic voice proceeds from the invisible Father who dwells in light so bright no one can approach him. And yet here is his Son with whom he is One God with their Spirit, who does not wait for us to approach him but who has approached us, who touches his human brothers and sisters and heals us, who looks upon us with compassion, who embraces us in suffering, who dies with us, that we might ever live.

 

The Father and the Spirit *reveal* themselves in this moment that the Son draws near to every human who has ever lived or ever will live, just as they reveal themselves in the transfiguration and at the cross.

 

The baptism of the human God does not separate Jesus from any other humans, nor any humans from any other humans, but draws every human into Love’s triune fellowship. And this why I trust that the Father is pleased with the Son, as he always is.

 

Why on earth would you use a symbol when you can *enter* the story of God with humans, the story of God as a human, a human with a Spirit that rests on him, a human with a Father who loves the world so much that he sent him, not to condemn the world but that the world through him might live.

 

Why make an analogy or explanation when you can live this revelation of the triune Love?

 

*thanks to Taylor, Drew, Jason, David, Ryan, Josh, and Todd for prompting this from somewhere deep in the Covid-jaded heart of this mere human that sometimes still feels like he has something pressing to say to anyone that might still be listening