Justice, Beauty, Grace, and Other Big Words

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Praying for Justice

This Lenten season I’ve been in a small group that’s been reading the stories of Jesus leading up to the cross. Last week the story was the parable about the persistent widow, meaning a woman who had no financial means or societal protection since she was no longer provided for by a man. The widow repeatedly goes before a judge, a godless judge, and asks for justice. Give me justice! No! Give me justice! No! Give me justice! No! Finally, the judge is worn down by her persistence and gives her what she asks. He gives her justice. Jesus ends the parable by saying if even a godless judge will eventually reward persistence and give justice, God will certainly answer persistent prayers for justice, and quickly. In the group we wrestled with how some prayers seem never to be answered, let alone quickly, despite the apparent promise in the parable. We wrestled with the factor of time, persistence, why the waiting, how to be patient when to us “quickly” means a day and to God it may mean a thousand years.

The sermon that followed on Sunday focused on the same parable, and here the minister emphasized that this parable isn’t about any kind of prayer but prayers for justice. And the person needing justice isn’t just anyone but a widow, a character type used throughout scripture, along with orphans and aliens, to represent the powerless, those for whom justice is most lacking. The minister gave statistics for groups suffering injustice today: 27 million in human trafficking; 2 million kids in sex trafficking, with 1 girl per day taken from the Mall of America for that purpose, according to the FBI (disclaimer: at one time it was thought to be this number but it’s more complicated than this now with the use of cell phones and websites that lure and trap girls). Pray for justice, keep praying for these groups, he said. Don’t stop.

I went home and thought more about this, about how often I forget to pray for issues of justice, about the promise of quick responses to prayers for justice, and about those statistics. How easy it is to look at big problems and big statistics and see no movement. How easy it is to lack imagination for the effect a single prayer may have on the margins. But maybe the statistic for kids in trafficking would be 2 million minus 1 tomorrow because of my prayer this morning, and minus 10 the next day for 10 more people who prayed. Maybe that 1 or those 10 are indeed rescued quickly and miraculously. Maybe the number would be 4 million were it not for those who never fail to keep praying for justice. Maybe a prayer goes up and a girl who would have been tagged just inside the west entrance of the Mall of America instead is quickly and divinely shielded from the man who was about to tag her. The thought that a single prayer may indeed be answered quickly in terms of justice to a single powerless person creates urgency. There’s no time to waste, no day to skip.

 

Reading Stack: Image Journal and the Lexicon of Art and Faith

The current issue (75) of Image journal features a series of short essays on the “lexicon of art and faith” by fourteen past contributors. Each was given the assignment to think deeply about the big words that are part of that journal’s common lexicon: beauty (Erin McGraw); mystery (Robert Cording); art (Theodore L. Prescott); story (Brett Lott); presence (Julia Spicher Kasdorf); community (Kathleen Norris); human (Linford Detweiler); discipline (Jeanne Murray Walker); form (A. G. Harmon); freedom (Joel Sheesley); image (Matthew J. Milliner); incarnation (Martha Serpas); suffering (Robert Clark); word (Richard Chess).

Here are some excerpts from “The Word-Soaked World: Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith.”

Erin McGraw on beauty: “Once we’ve been in the presence of beauty, and once the more crotchety among us have batted down the strange resistance to feeling our hearts moved, we are forever vulnerable, limping like Jacob after the angel’s blessing. We know what beauty is, and from now on we will be seeking it or shrinking from it. Why should we hope to attain such a state? Why should we call it good?” You can read Erin McGraw’s essay on beauty in its entirety here.

Robert Cording on mystery: “Our time is marked by our supreme belief in Enlightenment rationality. We are all too ready to say that a word like ‘mystery’ is a nostalgia; we limit the meaning of ‘mystery’ to a quantity of the unknown, thereby opening the possibility that the inevitable acquisition of further knowledge will reduce that which is unknown and, in the future, erase the unknown entirely. A mystery is simply something to be solved--if not now, then later. But the biblical usage of ‘mystery’ (from the Greek mysterion) refers not the quantity of the unknown but rather to the quality of the known; it refers to awe rather than ignorance.”

Kathleen Norris on community: “We do not belong to a church because it’s a self-selected group of like-minded people with whom we feel comfortable. We are there because God has called us to a be a community of faith. We are called there by love, and are asked to love the people who are there, even if we may not like them very much. Hard as it is to believe, it’s this unlikely, contentious, and motley crew that God has gathered to be accountable, both to God and to one another.”

Joel Sheesley on freedom: “If freedom is something that we apprehend metaphorically rather than by definition, it means that we are ever probing to fully grasp its tenor. We are searching for it in every conceivable direction. We yearn for it. Saint Paul sensed that the whole creation is yearning for its liberation, its freedom signaled by the resurrection of Jesus and the hope of resurrection within all his followers. This freedom is no escape, but rather a reinvestment in a world undergoing transformation.”

Robert Clark on suffering: “With such words, whose etymology and resonances are so vast, so rooted and entangled, be careful that what you mean and what you intend (two more overlapping words) do not come to loggerheads. Do not tell me suffering is a blessing, for I will despair; do not tell me it is a curse, for I will despair again. Do not tell me either--since both imply God’s deliberation--for I will not know what to make of such a God at all.”

This issue also includes an interview with Luci Shaw, a poet, writer, adventurer, and overall lovely wise woman who has long been one of my role models.

Image is a quarterly literary and arts journal that publishes work that is “informed by--or grapples with--religious faith.” You can read more about it--and subscribe--here.

 

Giving Up Chocolate for Lent

My good friend Rebecca Kasperak has been a contributing blogger this Lenten season at the blog ExperiLent. In one of her recent posts about giving up chocolate for Lent, she writes, “Semi-sweet chocolate’s velvety texture, its minor jolt of caffeine, and my responsive endorphins light up my pleasure sensors for a brief respite and escape.” I couldn’t agree more. She goes on to examining the connections between craving and longing and grace, and suggests “cravings are arrows to grace.”

“I often approach God with a full heart and mind and schedule. I envision grace, without realizing it, as a gift that tops off my life, like non-dairy whipped cream, something partially hydrogenated that puffs up to fill in the cracks. Nothing obtrusive, you understand, but something that smoothes out the bumps. I often stumble over the truth that grace is a free gift from the consuming love of my life. This Lent, even though I’m giving up chocolate, I’m also trying to shed some hackneyed views about grace, to allow a healthy emptiness to set in, to not rush to fill it with other sweet things.”

You can read her whole post here: “Cravings crack open space – chocolate, emptiness, and grace.”

 

Final Word

Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood was first published in 1948. Edited by Mary Strong, the book is a collection of anonymous letters.

“The time has come for you to march against this tide of darkness and carry your lighted lamps quietly, steadily. Heal yourselves, your bodies, your characters; get out of this slough of indefiniteness and bewilderment; come in where you belong and give this tragic world the infinite qualities of the Spirit when you let it have its way with you as channels for joy, beauty, and truth.” -from Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood

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Even the rocks will cry out

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I heard a sermon a couple years ago that I still think about from time to time, as I did this morning when my notes from that morning popped up. In that sermon, the minister described a pseudo-baptism scene from the movie "Nacho Libre," starring Jack Black as a Mexican priest, named Ignatio, turned wrestler, named Nacho. Nacho wants his wrestling partner baptized before their match with “Satan's Cavemen” to better increase their chance for a win and so shoves his head in a bowl of water and declares a blessing. Disclaimer: I've never seen the movie, but this link goes to a clip of the scene.

The minister said this scene should tell us there is a better way for telling others about Christ than to push them into it. He gave the example of Philip in the story from Acts and went from there to cover much good and earnest theology about being a witness for Christ and about the movement of the Spirit.

But I couldn't stop thinking about the priest shoving the guy’s head into the bowl of water. Skipping past the false theology, past the adolescent sacrilege, what does it say about the hunger for a concrete splashing of grace, the reality of the place of baptism in the human narrative? It’s like finding a hieroglyphic or prehistoric drawing showing the offering of life for life.

Even the rocks will cry out.

Science needs wonder – don't we all?

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Believe it or not, the junior/senior high school that my sons went to graded on “sense of wonder.” Realistically, no one expects a seventh-grade boy to score too high in this regard, but by ninth grade the expectation is that this sense should be observable and growing, and by senior year, it had better be a palpable driving force. The theory behind taking the temperature of each young man and woman’s growing sense of educated wonder is that it is wonder that will keep him or her learning and discovering when teachers and transcripts no longer require it. Wonder will keep them pushing back the boundaries of what has been done or known by themselves or others, to go further and deeper, to uncover yet more in every realm.

Last month the New Statesman carried an article, “Why science needs wonder,” by Philip Ball, author of the soon-to-be published Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything.I hadn’t realized that "wonder" has historically been a controversial attribute, with a past false dichotomy between the kind of wonder that makes you curious and sends you exploring and the kind that makes you awed and speechless. In elegant fashion, Ball argues that science needs poetry and not just objective inquiry.

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Marilynne Robinson: "Like paintings, they render meaning as beauty"

Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead and Home,  has an excellent piece in The New York Times Sunday Book Review published yesterday, "The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible."

A number of the great works of Western literature address themselves very directly to questions that arise within Christianity. They answer to the same impulse to put flesh on Scripture and doctrine, to test them by means of dramatic imagination, that is visible in the old paintings of the Annunciation or the road to Damascus. How is the violence and corruption of a beloved city to be understood as part of an eternal cosmic order? What would be the consequences for the story of the expulsion from Eden, if the fall were understood as divine providence? What if Job’s challenge to God’s justice had not been overawed and silenced by the wild glory of creation? How would a society within (always) notional Christendom respond to the presence of a truly innocent and guileless man? Dante created his great image of divine intent, justice and grace as the architecture of time and being. Milton explored the ancient, and Calvinist, teaching that the first sin was a felix culpa, a fortunate fall, and providential because it prepared the way for the world’s ultimate reconciliation to God. So his Satan is glorious, and the hell prepared for his minions is strikingly tolerable. What to say about Melville? He transferred the great poem at the end of Job into the world of experience, and set against it a man who can only maintain the pride of his humanity until this world overwhelms him. His God, rejoicing in his catalog of the splendidly fierce and untamable, might ask, “Hast thou seen my servant Ahab?” And then there is Dostoyevsky’s “idiot” Prince Myshkin, who disrupts and antagonizes by telling the truth and meaning no harm, the Christ who says, “Blessed is he who takes no offense at me.”

Each of these works reflects a profound knowledge of Scripture and tradition on the part of the writer, the kind of knowledge found only among those who take them seriously enough to probe the deepest questions in their terms. These texts are not allegories, because in each case the writer has posed a problem within a universe of thought that is fully open to his questioning once its terms are granted. Here the use of biblical allusion is not symbolism or metaphor, which are both rhetorical techniques for enriching a narrative whose primary interest does not rest with the larger resonances of the Bible. In fact these great texts resemble Socratic dialogues in that each venture presupposes that meaning can indeed be addressed within the constraints of the form and in its language, while the meaning to be discovered through this argument cannot be presupposed. Like paintings, they render meaning as beauty.

Keep reading.

Report from a funeral

Songs sung this week by the hundreds gathered at the century plus–old church for the funeral of a woman who died too young included the classics, "How Great Thou Art" and "Great is Thy Faithfulness." A soloist and musicians performed a song I'd not heard before and one that many in the sanctuary had probably not heard before, at least not at a funeral: "Come On Up to the House" by Tom Waits. Here's a You-Tube video of the song. Similar to Scripture's encouragement to write God's words in your heart, this filmmaker choreographed the writing of Wait's lyrics on one's body. In this woman's eulogy, we learned how she had perfected friendship to an art and continued to put others first even as she endured a particularly fast and furious case of multiple sclerosis. Her husband, two daughers, mother, sisters, and parents-in-law (or parents-in-love as a friend of mine refers to hers) sat bravely in the first pews. The minister read from Romans how nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. He told a story that Henri Nouwen told, about how he asked a trapeze acrobat (Nouwen was a lover of circuses) how it is that a performer is caught by another after he or she lets go from one trapeze and flings him- or herself into the air. The acrobat responded that the flyer must only fly, stretching toward the catcher. The catcher then catches. Nouwen saw this as a metaphor for dying: letting go, stretching toward and trusting the catcher who is Christ. The minister spoke of it also as a metaphor for living, with our lives designed to soar, no matter how long or short the arc, stretching always toward the catcher.

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Photograph information: "Female acrobats on trapezes at circus," Calvert Litho. Co., Detroit, Mich.