As you breathe out, say “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”
—St. Symeon the New Theologian
James Finley describes the boundless nature of God’s mercy:
What does it mean to ask Jesus Christ to have mercy on me? It’s to ask God to have mercy on me in the waywardness of my ways. I know by my own actions that I’m not true to the person I really am called to be. I know this in my weakness, so I ask Christ to have mercy on me. At the very heart of this prayer is the heart of Jesus because God is love, and when love touches suffering, the suffering turns love into mercy. Jesus is like a field of boundless mercy…. There’s an infinite love within us that we can in no way whatsoever increase—because it’s infinite. God is infinitely in love with us. But just as we can’t increase it, we can’t threaten it either. We’re an infinitely loved, broken person. In acceptance of the brokenness, the infinity of the love that shines through the brokenness gets brighter and brighter.
There’s a moral imperative to do our best not to continue with things that are hurtful to ourselves and others. You have your list, and I have mine. That’s important. But grounded in us is in an inner peace that is not dependent on the ability to overcome the hurtful thing. St. Paul had a thorn in the flesh and asked God to remove it, but God said, “Leave it there” (2 Corinthians 12:7–10). The thorn is the teacher, the place where it isn’t looking good, if this is all up to you. But it’s not up to you. It’s up to God giving Godself to you as infinitely lovable in your brokenness and incompleteness. This is experiential salvation. [1]
CAC faculty emerita Cynthia Bourgeault illustrates God’s ever-present mercy:
The story comes to mind of the little fish swimming up to its mother, all in a panic: “Mama, Mama, what’s water? I gotta find water or I’ll die!” We live immersed in this water, and the reason we miss it is not that it is so far away but, paradoxically, so close: more intimate to us than our being itself.…
[Mercy] is the water in which we swim. Mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God—and the light by which we know it.…
The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional—always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we, too—in the words of Psalm 103—“swim in mercy as in an endless sea.” Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love. [2]
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5 For Friday John Chaffee
1.
“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone.”
- Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk and Activist
This is an important thing to remember as someone who leans toward introversion.
Starting in college, I tried my hardest to be extraverted… So much so that I ended up winning Homecoming King my senior year. Goodness, that is wild to think about. The problem was that it was not fully or truthfully who I was… but I didn’t know it then.
Following college was 20 years of working in church jobs that demanded a kind of extraversion or social mode of being. I would leave events and feel utterly exhausted, oftentimes taking naps before waking up to get myself a dinner.
It was somewhere in the last 8 years when I realized that all of it was to teach me to have a healthy rhythm and balance between solitude and community. When one is overdone to the exclusion of the other, we can get rather bent out of shape.
In some respects, I had to learn that my need for solitude was not a result of anti-social behavior while also learning that just being in front of crowds did not mean I necessarily had community.
If love is our true identity, then it can only be found after solitude shows me my true self, and that true self is seen and celebrated by a community (not a crowd) of other true selves who also wish to be seen and celebrated.
2.
“To be spiritual is to be a breathing being…the opposite of spiritual is not secular…it’s suffocation.”
- Padraig o Tauma, Irish Poet-Theologian
I had the good fortune of meeting Padraig a few years ago at St. Joseph’s University near Philly. He was stateside doing poetry readings and it was delightful.
There is something about the arts that does a better job, in my opinion, than theo-logic at describing God/faith/the spiritual life/death/etc. Poetry just seems to unlock something within me in a way that other disciplines do not.
3.
“By learning you will teach, by teaching you will understand.”
- Latin Proverb
Let’s be honest, many of us do not fully understand something until we accidentally find ourselves having to teach it.
Then,
The teaching itself unlocks different aspects of what we thought we learned and we come to understand it on a completely new level.
Now, I can say that I thought I understood Christianity but that is not the full picture.
However, after living enough of life and having to teach it in a classroom setting where students can push back, debate, or dialogue about it, I admit to have learned so very much by being a teacher of it. Sure, giving sermons is good and fine but that is still in a monological mode of delivery (at least in white churches).
And, I do not doubt that there is still an infinite amount more for me to learn by teaching. If anything, teaching has helped me in my own formation more than I can probably comprehend.
4.
“When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”
- Mark 2:5
This story has shown itself to me a few times over the past two weeks and I do not know why.
There must be some alchemy, some teaching, some wisdom about it that is beckoning to be learned/integrated by some deeper level within myself. After all, the stories that grip us, grip us for a reason.
The setting here in Mark 2 is that there is a paralytic who wants to be healed by Jesus, but there is a large crowd that is obscuring or blocking the way. There is no statement that the paralytic man has faith at all, only that his friends have faith. The friends then conspire to bust a hole in the ceiling and lower their friend down into the crowded room to where Jesus is.
In essence, someone who cannot help themselves is helped by those around him and Christ allows the one without faith to be the beneficiary of the others who do.
Honestly, this story walks all over the lines we commonly draw.
Perhaps that is why we chose to record this story for future generations after it happened.
5.
“The church of Christ ecumenically embraces the whole inhabited earth. She is not a tribal religion, nor a Western religion, nor a white religion, but the church of all humanity.”
- Jurgen Moltmann, German Theologian
Jurgen Moltmann passed away this week on June 3rd at 98 years old. He is considered an important voice in the world of Christian theology. Why? Because he was one of the first theologians to seriously engage theology in the aftermath of WWII.
As a 16-year-old German, he was forcefully drafted into the German army in 1943 and became disillusioned with nationalism, violence, and war. Then, he was kept as a POW for several years after the war during which he was gifted a copy of the New Testament. This eventually paved the way for him to study Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others.
Jurgen Moltmann’s book The Crucified God shook me. It takes up the topic of God in a way that continues to inspire me. Moltmann’s thesis in that book was that God is not Aristotelian (omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent) in the way that we conventionally think. No, that understanding of God is incompatible with Jesus, who suffered and was able to be affected by the world around him.
Rather than standing at an impassible and unchanging distance, the Christian God enters into pain, suffering, and death with the Creation.
In light of the concentration camps, brutalities of war, and the death toll of the Holocaust, Moltmann’s contribution to the world of theology was like a fresh breath of co-suffering love and hope.
This past week on the internet I have seen nothing but positive statements about this pastor-theologian, who seems to have been as quality of a person as was his contributions to theology.
