An Icon of Mary of Walsingham
Originally uploaded by Chaplinesque.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
After the Epiphany
I've been bad! In that I haven't written for so long. Partly that is because my routine is different over holidays, partly because the creative urge is currently occupied elsewhere with some new projects taking time, but I didn't mean to let this blog go silent for such a long time.
The last time I wrote was just before Christmas and I wrote something about waiting to be surprised. It came in the middle of the Eucharist, looking to my right and watching the people come to eat the body and blood of God as if it was an everyday right, something they were created with every right to do whenever they wanted; which is of course exactly right and wonderful to see!
It reminded me that, even though we arrange it within the architecture of holiness, there is, in the middle of the Eucharist, something wonderfully everyday: the just plain stuff of consuming the reality of God's love and presence and outpouring creativity in every moment of life, and probably much more beyond that. The reality of communion with God is both so beyond all understanding and closer than any mediation, radically here and there at the same time. Does any of this make sense?
One more time I am reminded why I am no kind of fundamentalist: I believe - and it is at the centre of my hope - that Jesus is the word of God for me, but this is no written down, codified, connect the dots and win the prize, kind of word, it is more a word spoken in particular moments, a word carried by a warm breath from the face of a loving, forgiving, challenging friend or stranger. The surprising gift of the conection with the God of the universe, opened, enligthended, pointed out in the particularity of an instant in time, in a consistency of newborn caring truth. It is not easily understood, still less easily thematised into a systematic or dogmatic theology, though these exercises can help mightily in preparing the ground for the gift of grace. But in that moment looking at the meeting place at the altar, where people came from many places to take part in, consume the deep truth of who they are and what they're about, I was reminded one more time that the world is full of gift. Thank God. Have a great new year!
The last time I wrote was just before Christmas and I wrote something about waiting to be surprised. It came in the middle of the Eucharist, looking to my right and watching the people come to eat the body and blood of God as if it was an everyday right, something they were created with every right to do whenever they wanted; which is of course exactly right and wonderful to see!
It reminded me that, even though we arrange it within the architecture of holiness, there is, in the middle of the Eucharist, something wonderfully everyday: the just plain stuff of consuming the reality of God's love and presence and outpouring creativity in every moment of life, and probably much more beyond that. The reality of communion with God is both so beyond all understanding and closer than any mediation, radically here and there at the same time. Does any of this make sense?
One more time I am reminded why I am no kind of fundamentalist: I believe - and it is at the centre of my hope - that Jesus is the word of God for me, but this is no written down, codified, connect the dots and win the prize, kind of word, it is more a word spoken in particular moments, a word carried by a warm breath from the face of a loving, forgiving, challenging friend or stranger. The surprising gift of the conection with the God of the universe, opened, enligthended, pointed out in the particularity of an instant in time, in a consistency of newborn caring truth. It is not easily understood, still less easily thematised into a systematic or dogmatic theology, though these exercises can help mightily in preparing the ground for the gift of grace. But in that moment looking at the meeting place at the altar, where people came from many places to take part in, consume the deep truth of who they are and what they're about, I was reminded one more time that the world is full of gift. Thank God. Have a great new year!
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