A Quote from Martin Luther King

“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Fear Yourself

"Never lose your self-respect or grow too familiar with yourself. Let your own integrity keep you righteous. You should owe more to the severity of your own judgment than to all external precepts. Avoid what is indecorous, not because others will judge you harshly, but because you fear your own prudence. Grow to fear yourself and you will have no need of Seneca's imaginary witness."

Source: The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián. Trans. Christopher Maurer.
 (Seneca's imaginary witness is your own conscience.)

Death of a Friend

A friend died last week. Actually, she was a co-worker friend. I found out by means of a yellow stickie note attached to the front of my shared computer. I had to read it several times. I thought it was a mistake. I thought I misread the name. I thought "How can this be?" Things were fuzzy. I felt confused. Disoriented. I walked around the hospital wondering "How did this happen?" I felt unnerved.

I sat with another friend, co-worker friend, who expressed disbelief and shock. She needed my ear, my heart. I sat with patients, who expressed disbelief and shock and who cried and cried. They needed my ear, my heart, my presence. I had nothing to say. I sat with their pain and wondered "How can this be? How did this happen?"

There are no easy answers to the death questions. And they were asked by my friend, by my patients. The "why?" the "what now?" And I had no answers, so I gave none, at least no easy ones. Mostly, I sat, I listened, I ached, I felt the pain of the death moments. And I realized that this is what "God with us" is all about. Presence. Presence in the death moments of life.

God is present with us. Moving through it all side by side in the mess of life. Not fixing it. Not giving easy answers that make us feel worse. Not patting us on the head with a patronizing smile. No. Instead, there is God ploughing the rocky row, mixing the manure, and getting dirty right along with us.

Somehow, that is comforting.

I think that is what I did for my friend, for my patients. I walked the rocky row with them. Saying little. Fixing nothing. Patting no one. I joined them. I offered my presence and my pain. Comfort.

Another Reflection on the Gospel of John

Jesus and John

As I continue reading in John, I am fascinated with what I am noticing. For this post, I plan to write about the “weirdness” of Jesus. Just a warning so that you have time to exit and go somewhere else in the blogging world.

As I was saying, Jesus strikes me as odd, bizarre, weird. Now it could be that it appears this way because John omits bits and pieces of the conversations that Jesus has with people. But it is so odd that it probably did indeed take place as written. Otherwise, John is a poor storyteller and makes Jesus look like a weirdo. Either way, Jesus seems to say weird and off-the-wall things.

Now I have heard preachers try to explain this weirdness, but they make a lot of assumptions. And who, really, can get inside Jesus’ head by means of a few words on a page and speak for half an hour about something that is just too weird to explain. I’ll tell you what I think. I think Jesus’ weirdness is scary, so they have to make up some rational explanation so that Jesus doesn’t appear to be munching mushrooms when his disciples weren’t looking.

Now, I am not trying to be disrespectful here. I am just saying that some things Jesus says are way out there—downright weird. And for the record, “weird,” according to the dictionary, is “strange, bizarre.” So there you have it. Jesus says weird things. And in John, I have noticed these weird things.

The text that really got me thinking about this is in John 4. This is the story of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. The first weirdness occurs following an intense dialogue about water—who will draw it, who will drink it, where it comes from, well water, living water—basically, it has to do with water. Jesus brings her to the place where she wants the living water and asks Jesus to give it to her.

He then says, “Go get your husband.” What? They were just talking about water. She wants this living water. And Jesus changes the subject completely and randomly (although, I am sure it made sense in his head), tells her to get her husband. Weird. Of course, if you’ve read this chapter, you know that the conversation takes a few more turns, and by the end of it, they are talking about the Messiah. And then Jesus declares that he is the Messiah. But they get there by way of the husband. Now that is bizarre.

The second weirdness occurs when the disciples come back with food. They urge Jesus to eat. After all, he was tired and needed to rest. They figure he needs some nourishment to revive his energy. And what does Jesus reply to their urgings? “I have food. You just don’t know about it.” The disciples are confused. I would be confused. Then Jesus starts talking about sowing and reaping, fields, sowers and reapers, laboring, and getting paid. Weird.

It is as though Jesus ignores what his disciples are saying. And I imagine that Jesus got the kind of stare people have when they are envisioning something in their own minds and begin talking about it with a sort of flat affect because they are mesmerized by their own visualizations. I don’t know. Maybe I'm the only one that does that sort of thing. It just seems weird for Jesus to start talking somewhat off-topic.

And what really gets me is that nobody seems to care that Jesus is weird. They let him be weird. They even go along with his weirdness. I like that. And I like that Jesus is weird because I identify with weirdness. It gets people’s attention, makes them ask interesting questions, and prevents a certain comfortableness with the way things are.

I’ll be looking for more of Jesus' weirdness. It keeps me asking questions and prevents me from getting too comfortable with who I think Jesus ought to be or with what others have said about who Jesus is.

A Reflection on The Gospel of John

St. John the Apostle

 Recently, I began reading the gospel of John for my morning reflection. I got stuck on chapter 1 verse 5. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." I felt confused by this. It seems to me rather obvious. I felt curious. What does he mean? John writes as though darkness is an entity with power to act. Could darkness ever overcome light? Why would John write such a thing?

No, I did not grab my Greek New Testament or my lexicon or any reliable commentaries or read through the entire gospel immediately to get the context of this statement. Instead, I sat with it that morning. I have been sitting with it since that morning. And here I am writing about it. Yes, I have read further in the gospel, and yes, I go back and reread that statement to discern how it fits with what I am currently reading.

But at present, it wants to stand alone. It wants to challenge me in some deep place, a dark place, a mysterious place with no name as yet. In my journal for that day's reading, I wrote "the darkness within me cannot overcome the light that is within me." I don't know, but I am thinking that this is mystical language. And of course, I would because that is what I like and prefer. Metaphors and analogies. Vague concepts and spiritual innuendos.

It could be that John simply meant something like "flip the light switch and wah . . . lah . . . darkness gone." But it appears otherwise. John gives darkness power to do something or to not do something. In this case to overcome or not overcome. To overcome light or not.

I like this switcheroo. John seems to be telling me (and certainly, I am personalizing this, and surely, it reflects my inner state of being at present, but nevertheless), he seems to be saying that what is dark in me will never overcome the light in me. Contrary to what I might believe about my life's circumstances or my own abilities, contrary to self-incrimination, self-accusation, or self-darkness, these things will not overcome the light within me.

They will not overcome what shines in me. They will not conquer that which gives me life. But of course, this is what John says in the verse preceding this one. Life is light. The key to this overcoming business is belief. I saw that John says something about this in verse twelve. So in my mind, I can either believe the darkened things about myself or believe the lightened things.

Seems to me that John would like for me to believe that Jesus came to enlighten me so that those self-darkening thoughts and feelings would no longer overcome me. Doesn't mean they no longer exist or that I can pretend they don't exist. It means that they won't do-me-in, they won't choke-me-out, they won't sink me like a chain around my neck in the middle of a swamp.

Instead, there is a steady burning light that doesn't go out, doesn't succumb, doesn't submit. Its source is eternal, fueled by heaven. In John's words, its name is grace and truth, grace upon grace. Grace lights me up, and the dark things that would like to throw me into despair have no power to do so. That is a powerful bit of lighted information. Something I don't want to forget.