the furious longing of god
I was recently invited to join the members of the TheOOZE Viral Blogger Network. You can learn more about the Ooze online community by following the link listed in my blog’s Links list. Each month, Ooze viral bloggers select from a list of books of interest to Christian thinkers and pilgrims and agree to submit reviews on their own blogs and on the Ooze website. For my first review, I chose, and read in a hour, a new book by Brennan Manning, entitled, the furious longing of God.
Exactly at the midpoint of Brennan Manning’s book come these words:
Until the love of God that knows no boundary, limit, or breaking point is internalized through personal decision; until the furious longing of God seizes the imagination; until the heart is conjoined to the mind through sheer grace, nothing happens.
Nothing happens. Nothing that matters happens in you. Nothing that matters happens through you. Nothing happens to transform you, to heal you, to wake you up to the dawn of the life God has in store for you.
Brennan Manning wants something to happen. Brennan Manning wants something to happen for you. And so he pulls out all the stops — emotional, rhetorical, poetic — to push you and prod you and upset you and compel you to open your eyes and heart and soul to see the love, the real and powerful and vibrant and furiously intense love, God has for you.
But that’s not quite right. It is God that wants something to happen in you! Brennan is merely trying to serve as the messenger, to point, to reveal, to pull back the curtain, to try to express what cannot be rightly expressed, but to hint at it poignantly enough to bring us to look for ourselves.
If the book has a fault, it is that sometimes Manning’s “cuteness,” his toying with language to try to stretch it to say what cannot be said, his use of stories about himself which are mostly rather unflattering, sometimes get in the way and may be distracting, making us think about him instead of the One to whom he points.
And, yet, I cannot really fault him for the way he has done the book. You can’t get at personal relationship impersonally. You cannot hint at, point at, the transforming love of God by being scholarly. You have to get personal. You have to be, not just the teacher, but the messenger, the one who can say, “Can you see what I see?”
The book is not scholarly, not an essay or a treatise, but more a collection of reflections and meditations and prayers and poems. I did appreciate, however, Manning’s frequent use of quotations from other authors, from other Christians, from other pilgrims. One of my favorites was this ironic observation from Gerald May:
The entire process (of self-development) can be very exciting and entertaining. But the problem is there’s no end to it. The fantasy is that if one heads in the right direction and just works hard enough to learn new things and grows enough and gets actualized, one will be there. None of us is quite certain exactly where there is, but it obviously has something to do with resting.
And then there are the lines from Rich Mullins’ song, The Love of God, one of the sources for the title of Manning’s book:
In the reckless, raging fury
that they call the love of God.
That is the relentless refrain of this book: open yourself to the love of God for you! The essence of our faith is not about what we can do for God, but about what God has done, what God is doing for us. It is a book about God, a book that hopes to lead you, the reader, into God’s embrace, a book that urges you and entices you, not to know about God, but to know God.
It is there, in the embrace of God’s love, that our wounds are healed, and it is there that we may become healers, instruments of God’s peace … which is our intended vocation!
turning the page on torture
It is sad that it has taken a change in administration to begin to turn the page on torture. A categorical ban on torture is an American value, not a debatable value of one party or another. Perhaps we were in so deep that there was no way out … other than repentance. And repentance doesn’t come easily to politicians.
But it is heartening to watch now as we do turn the page. I applaud the order passed down to all CIA interrogators directing them to comply with the guidelines of the Army Field Manual. And the decision to release the memos authorizing and defending the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” is necessary and healthy if we want to clear the air and move on as a nation. Confession is the first step in repentance!
And it is confession because we must “own” together what we have done to “protect” ourselves, so we may be able to “disown” it now and move on. That’s what I see the Obama administration doing: not releasing the memos to bring shame down on the heads of Bush administration officials, but to bring shame down on all our collective heads for allowing and condoning torture. They are acting against not political rivals or even a rival ideology, but against torture itself.
That is why I can understand the decision not to prosecute officials of the previous administration. It’s not about exacting punishment or discrediting rivals, but about reversing course. It’s not about the swing of the conservative/liberal pendulum. We need to be free of the kind of thinking that allowed us to tolerate or excuse torture. And we need to embrace that commitment (once more) together.
Let’s move on, disown torture, and commit ourselves as a nation once more to an unwavering defense of basic and inalienable human rights … for all people!
A week ago, the bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee released their report on the Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody. Doug Muder has a very good summary and analysis of the report on his blog, The Weekly Sift. He reviews the findings of the report which refute “layer by layer” the common arguments used to defend the practices of the past eight years:
It’s not torture …
Even if it is torture, it’s not policy …
Even if it is a policy of torture, it’s legal …
Even if it’s illegal, it’s necessary …
Even if it’s illegal and unnecessary, it only hurts people who deserve it …
Even if it’s illegal, unnecessary, and hurts innocent people, it doesn’t hurt ordinary Americans …
Even if it’s illegal, unnecessary, hurts innocent people, and makes us all less safe, no one should be held accountable …
The article is worth reading in its entirety … if only to be sure we are well-enough informed that we will recognize the truth of what we have done as a nation and be ready to turn the page!
easter sunrise
a meditation for good friday 2009
On the way they met a man named Simon, who was coming into the city from the country, and the soldiers forced him to carry Jesus’ cross. (Simon was from Cyrene and was the father of Alexander and Rufus.) They took Jesus to a place called Golgotha, which means “The Place of the Skull.”
Wait a minute! Back up! The father of Alexander and Rufus? Who are Alexander and Rufus? And why are they important enough to mention right in the middle of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion? No other gospel writer mentions them.
There is only one reason I can think of for including them in the story: the people for whom this gospel was intended knew them! Alexander and Rufus were members of their community! Alexander and Rufus were Christians!
This story, Jesus’ story, is not about something that happened to some foreigners in some distant land. You know Alexander and Rufus? Their father was there when Jesus was executed! Their father was the one who was made to carry the Roman cross on which he was hung!
This story, Jesus’ story, is not just about other people, not just for other people. It’s about you! It is for you! It is your story too!
They took Jesus to a place called Golgotha, which means “The Place of the Skull.” There they tried to give him wine mixed with a drug called myrrh, but Jesus would not drink it. Then they crucified him and divided his clothes among themselves, throwing dice to see who would get which piece of clothing. It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. The notice of the accusation against him said: “The King of the Jews.” They also crucified two bandits with Jesus, one on his right and the other on his left.
It seems this execution was no big deal to the Roman authorities. This was no high level display of Roman superiority, no high profile execution of a well-known subversive. He was crucified … among a group of thieves! He was put to death as a petty criminal!
His was not a martyr’s death, but a common death, a death any of us might suffer, deservedly or undeservedly, literally or emotionally, at the hands of those who would judge us.
He was judged unworthy, undesirable, expendable, unwanted, and he paid the ultimate price of rejection by humanity and by God.
So when we are judged unworthy, undesirable, expendable, unwanted, when we are rejected, undeservedly by our peers or deservedly by God, we can know that Jesus has been there too. He shares our lot with us, and we share his lot with him.
With him, we die, and with him … You know the story is not yet finished! Jesus is not a martyr, but a savior!
People passing by shook their heads and hurled insults at Jesus: “Aha! You were going to tear down the Temple and build it up again in three days! Now come down from the cross and save yourself!”
In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the Law made fun of Jesus, saying to one another, “He saved others, but he cannot save himself! Let us see the Messiah, the king of Israel, come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him!”
And the two who were crucified with Jesus insulted him also.
They all insulted him. Even the thieves insulted him! What could possibly prompt a dying criminal to insult a man who shares his fate?
Insecurity. Fear. Threat. Jealousy. They are all threatened by what they do not understand and jealous of what they are unwilling to give up, what even a dying man is unwilling to give up … his pride. To accept what Jesus says, to embrace who Jesus is, we must give up our pride. We must admit what we are, admit what we do not know and what we cannot do. We must admit … we need him.
We need him. We need him. Jesus, our deliverer. Jesus, our savior. Jesus, our Lord!
earth hour
It is one of those gimmicky, celebrity-driven, feel-good, substance-lite events … But at least it’s something. At least it makes us stop and change our behavior, even for an hour, and think about our individual and collective impact on our earth, God’s earth.
So, are you turning off the lights for Earth Hour 2009? It’s tomorrow night, March 29, 8:30-9:30 pm (local time)!
ash wednesday
Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day in another season of Lent. This banner will hang in our sanctuary tonight as begin our Lent together with an evensong service, Marty Haugen’s Holden Evening Prayer, and it will remained displayed throughout the season.
I very much like the artistry of the banner: the twisting, sharp-edged, thorny strands winding around and overlapping the cross; the cross itself placed starkly and simply in the foreground; and the path, the path receding into the distance at the upper right corner of the banner.
It speaks of pain and of suffering, the cross and thorny strands draw the eye first. And the cross stands at the head of the path. You cannot take the path without going through the cross!
But the path does not end at the cross. The cross stands at its beginning. You must go through the cross, you must pass through suffering, but the path leads somewhere else, to the place of hope, to the place of life, to the place where the One who hung from the cross now is, a place not yet seen, but surely promised!
