{"id":23648,"date":"2024-04-22T16:08:21","date_gmt":"2024-04-22T20:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=23648"},"modified":"2024-04-23T10:49:41","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T14:49:41","slug":"23648","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=23648","title":{"rendered":"Formed by the Desert"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"PARABLE BY M.D. RIDGE\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UCRxYjaVAI4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>David Denny and Tessa Bielecki direct the Desert Foundation, an informal circle of friends who share a love for desert land, people, and spirituality. Bielecki shares how she fell in love with the spaciousness of the desert:&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I grew up in New England, a countryside of lush green hills, singing streams, and verdant forests of oak and maple. In springtime I picked bouquets of wildflowers and in summer romped through the tall grasses full of daisies. When the trees turned crimson and gold in autumn, I gathered bundles of leaves and pressed them between the pages of my beloved books. In winter I built bonfires, skated on the ponds and went tobogganing down the steep hills.\u2026&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I first saw the vast magnificent desert of the American Southwest in 1966 and have lived there since 1967. It was love at first sight, the most dramatic epiphany of my life. It felt like coming home\u2014to myself<strong>. I recognized the outer landscape as a mirror of my inner soulscape.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The desert is the homeland of my heart. I don\u2019t find it barren as many do. I find the desert spacious, a perfect embodiment of what my Buddhist friends mean by&nbsp;<em>sunyata<\/em>, infinite spaciousness. My spiritual path is cultivating a heart as spacious as the desert: wide open to every direction of the compass, wide open to every creature that walks, flies, or crawls through it, wide open to every change in the weather: darkness and light, sun and rain, aridity and dew, heat, cold, and wind.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>St. Teresa [of \u00c1vila], who grew to become my best friend, called the human soul an interior castle. \u201cLet\u2019s not imagine that we are hollow inside,\u201d [1] she wrote. \u201cThe soul is capable of much more than we can imagine.\u201d [2] This infinite and noble spaciousness is what I learn from the desert. [3]&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>For Denny, the desert is not \u201cdeserted\u201d; it can lead to peacemaking and a fullness of life.&nbsp;<\/em>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Peacemaking happens best when we develop a way of life that includes an understanding of desert spirituality. That is, in addition to being geography and spirit, the desert, as I\u2019m fond of saying, has traditionally fostered hospitality, respect, and dialogue with the stranger. This spirit arises from various aspects of the \u201cdesert\u201d: a freely chosen dedication to humility, interfaith dialogue, and simple, ecologically sustainable living\u2026.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For many people, the desert is a place to avoid, a place of banishment or grief, or simply useless and vacant. In English, when we say that a place is \u201cdeserted,\u201d we usually mean that we find nothing significant there. But the Arabic verb\u00a0<em>ashara<\/em>\u00a0means to enter the desert willingly, for there, according to\u00a0<em>The Sacred Desert<\/em>\u00a0by David Jasper,<strong> \u201cIf one knows where to look, there are springs and wells of water and places of life.\u201d<\/strong> [4] That\u2019s why Isaiah 35:1 so aptly describes the heart of the universal desert experience:\u00a0<em>The desert and the dry land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.<\/em>\u00a0[5]\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td>Jesus Was Not a Straight Talker<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"auto\" height=\"15\" src=\"https:\/\/mcusercontent.com\/87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9\/images\/b66516eb-1f2d-8d90-0e02-d4223f78f6f7.png\">In the climax of the classic courtroom movie,\u00a0<em>A Few Good Men<\/em>, the prosecutor demands to know the truth and Jack Nicholson\u2019s character, Colonel Jessep, famously shouts back, \u201cYou can\u2019t handle the truth!\u201d Maybe he was right. Maybe most of us have a difficult time accepting the truth when it\u2019s presented to us directly. Emily Dickinson, the famous poet, seemed to think so. She said, <strong>\u201cThe Truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.\u201d <\/strong>Therefore, rather than speaking directly, she advises to <strong>\u201cTell all the truth but tell it slant.\u201d<\/strong>That perfectly describes Jesus\u2019 teaching style. Of course, he spoke the truth, but <strong>he rarely spoke it directly. Instead, he told it slant\u2014indirectly, subtly, and often hidden in a story that some people missed entirely.<\/strong> This week <strong>we are beginning a series exploring the parables of Jesus, but in order to understand these stories, we must first acknowledge the enormous gap between Jesus\u2019 context and our own; <\/strong>between the way he taught the truth and the way we do. Our modern, post-enlightenment culture expects clear, direct teaching. This is evident by what passes for acceptable preaching in most churches. We want a sermon to include three points (preferably alliterated) and practical, unambiguous applications. We hope to walk out of church on Sunday with more clarity, not more questions, about life and faith. If the pastor manages to do that we feel satisfied. If we regularly leave more confused than when we entered, the pastor should start updating his resume.Jesus\u2019 first-century Jewish context was very different. It was, of course, <strong>a pre-modern culture that embedded wisdom into stories more often than it delineated truths with bullet points<\/strong>. This is what causes us to misinterpret and mishandle Jesus\u2019 parables. Our instinct is to break his stories into their component parts and attach a clear meaning to each piece. We treat them as allegories or force them into a modern, didactic framework.The uncomfortable fact is that Jesus offered very little practical instruction in his sermons (at least as we measure practicality today), and<strong> he never preached a popular American \u201chow-to\u201d message. Jesus was not a straight talker. Instead, his stories were designed to challenge his listeners\u2019 assumptions and surprise them with unexpected, even offensive, revelations about God and his kingdom. <\/strong>Sometimes Jesus even intended to confuse them. More often, however, his parables began with an object, circumstance, or relationship that his audience was familiar with, and <strong>then he surprised them with a twist that turned their assumptions upside down.<\/strong>Dr. Gary Burge, a New Testament professor, describes Jesus\u2019 stories this way: \u201cThey are like a box that contains a spring\u2014and when it is opened, the unexpected happens. They are like a trap that lures you into its world and then closes on you.\u201dAs we look at Jesus\u2019 parables in the coming days,<strong> be prepared to have many of your assumptions about faith and God turned upside down as well.<\/strong><br><br>DAILY SCRIPTURE<br><a href=\"https:\/\/withgoddaily.us2.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9&amp;id=aa119530ab&amp;e=f52fc38132\">ISAIAH 29:15-21\u00a0<br>MATTHEW 13:10-17\u00a0<br>LUKE 18:31-34<\/a><br><br>WEEKLY PRAYERFrom William Temple (1881 &#8211; 1944)<br><br>O God, king of righteousness, lead us, we pray you, in the way of justice and of peace;<br>inspire us to break down all oppression and wrong, to gain for everyone their due reward, and from everyone their due service;<br>that each may live for all and all may care for each, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.<br>Amen.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Denny and Tessa Bielecki direct the Desert Foundation, an informal circle of friends who share a love for desert land, people, and spirituality. Bielecki shares how she fell in love with the spaciousness of the desert:&nbsp;&nbsp; I grew up in New England, a countryside of lush green hills, singing streams, and verdant forests of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23648"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23648"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23652,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23648\/revisions\/23652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}