Tag Archives: risk

Does God protect us? : The music sends a message

A life in the Spirit, Music, Spiritual direction, , , , , , ,

During my four years In college, I was in a choral practice every day, Monday through Friday. I think I loved every day — at least I do now, as I look back on it. I learned a lot about much more than music, but it is the music that keeps rising up to bless me.

On Friday, the music was there to meet me as soon as I woke up. I was startled awake because of a dream. I won’t tell you all of it, but the part that woke me up was about being on a straight road going very fast and then realizing I had fallen asleep. When I jolted awake, I did not know where I was. I eventually found out I had gone to Maryland in my dreams!

I know how this actually feels because I did fall asleep once when we were driving to San Francisco for the weekend from So Cal – back in the day when all-night things were pretty normal. I fell asleep at the wheel and woke up just as I was about to enter an overpass curving over a railroad track. I still remember the feeling of shock and terror, then relief.

I definitely felt protected by God in my dream and in my experience.

Does God protect us?

In my dream, though, I felt a bit ambivalent. Was I protected? Honestly, my unconscious was having an ongoing intellectual discussion just before I woke up.

But even before I opened my eyes, a song came to mind. It was a solo I sang in college. We performed Honegger’s King David, which is a rather difficult, not-too-melodic drama. I did not really get it. But my director often gave his ignorant protégé solos which were over his head and labored to help me perfect them. He had one good reason to deploy me: I actually felt what was behind the sacred music. We were in a secular setting and he was surrounded by music majors who cared more about Honegger’s technique than his motivation. I never got the technique that well —  my mentor had to mark my scores with endless instructions. But I did get the faith.

I realized years later that the little solo he gave me in King David was really half a solo. A new, older tenor had joined the choir who read music like I read the newspaper, and he wanted a solo in the piece. My director did not want to disappoint him, so he gave him the first half, which was more like an intro to my second half, which might be the most melodic measures in the whole work.

My one line was a soaring moment of assurance God gave David in his old age. Essentially, it was, “You’ll be OK even though Absalom has upended your kingdom.” Whether Psalm 121 is really about that, who knows? I didn’t even think about it. I just sang,

He will not suffer thy foot to be mov-ed,
for he is on high, watching above.
The Lord who is thy keeper neither slumbers nor sleeps.

That one line of music has stuck with me my entire adulthood. It pops up at just the right time, over and over.

To hear the pro sing it, you’ll have to scroll to section #21 “Psaume” at about 54:00

I’m not sure I can promise what you want

Again, and again in my life, especially when I feel threatened, that one line of Psalm 121 comes to me in a song. I’m thinking about it today, but I normally don’t. It just happens.

In my dream, God protected me. He kept me. God is my keeper, even in Maryland.

Intellectually, I would not defend that God can be relied on to keep me from flying off an overpass and into Bakersfield. But in my dream, I definitely felt God had protected me when I woke up in Maryland. I told God as we pondered together, “I don’t believe you constantly protect me,” because my experience tells me otherwise, and I cannot justify why God would not protect everyone who is abused by more than I have been. But I also said, “I do believe you watch over me and suffer with me,” since inexplicable grace happens and I feel God suffering with me and comforting me, heart, soul, mind and strength.

Practically, the fact is, I risk and imagine further risks almost every day under the assumption I am protected, that my future is in God’s hands. I prayed, “Your lack of slumber is the eternity in which I wake and sleep and defy death.” God being with me and me being with God is what is safe, not being kept unharmed. Escaping harm is exciting and comforting, too, but it is kind of the surface of things. One day I will, in fact, die. I will then only defy death because I am with God and God is with me. God will not keep me from the “harm” of dying. When I finally die, Jesus will take my hand and lead me into the fullness of eternity.

Feeling the confidence to live the risky life we all live is better than avoiding the troubles I fear. I think the world has so much trouble right now there will never be enough avoidance to deal with it!

But I can promise grace will happen

I have had the blessing of faith my whole life which has allowed me not to worry too much about my safety. But I have many clients, especially those who have been traumatized, who struggle every day with how God did not save them and how they can’t save themselves. They’ve flown off the bridge from which I was saved.

I can’t make a promise God will keep them, like the psalm appears to promise. (But let’s be clear, Absalom had already raped his father’s concubines in public, so David’s foot was mov-ed a lot!). Even so, I do have evidence that gives me hope that even the more damaged, distressed people can find security.

Grace happens all the time. It is as hard to explain as waking up just before you were going to fly over a guard rail. For instance, once a client had a vision in which a significant spiritual figure met them while they were meditating. The person saw themselves crouching in the dark, and the spiritual figure put a hand on their shoulder and said, “You are not a loser,” among other things. When I heard that, I did not reply with a therapeutic “That’s interesting.” I yelped with glee. I welcomed that extraordinary experience and was shocked at the same time. I saw it coming about as much as I expected to fall asleep at the wheel.

God comes to meet us all the time. Jesus knows we need the immediacy. We need the ongoing incarnation of his truth and love. He said, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” As sure as the angels instructed the shepherds, God watches over us.

Having trouble believing angels talk to shepherds? Look up in the air, more. Look beyond the limits you have imposed on the sky’s boundary. Help is on the way. If you don’t see it, it may already be here. At least I know God is here.

The way of significance: Our Lent pilgrimage through the media debris

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, , , , , , , , ,

Is it just me, or does your mind sometimes seem like a collection of sound bites and tune fragments stored up over decades of media saturation? My brother told me that even though his voice changed, with age, from a remarkable tenor to a mundane baritone, he was still a valuable member of the cover band because he could remember complete lyrics to all the old songs. (He also plays several instruments, I must add!). The rest of us are stuck in an ever-growing collection of undifferentiated mental debris — reminiscent of the Pacific Ocean plastic “gyre” I am fond of talking about, bits of stuff floating around in our heads.

The pandemic is waning (Lord, hear our prayer), but our media consumption is probably not. Entire new islands of media pollution may be forming right now! I know I have been filling my limited brain capacity with even MORE stuff. I think two favorites, Hillbilly Elegy and Nomadland were a lot like Lent — somewhat depressing subjects, calls to change and grow, and road trips. In the case of Lent, our “road trip” is like drawing back the curtain on a movie about our spiritual pilgrimages and seeing whether we are actually moving or, alternatively, trapped on screen, appearing to move by watching images move.

Can I keep moving through this mess?

I am trying to stay on pilgrimage, even though it is perilously easy to permanently stay at my latest point on the map. The courage it takes to keep growing is daunting. Wandering around with godless Frances McDormand in Nomadland felt vicariously heroic, free and honest. I did not like her or her life, but it sure looked more authentic than staying trapped in some subdivision like her prospective mate ended up. I have felt trapped a lot during the pandemic and it is easy to just stay trapped until someone sounds the all clear. Don’t you periodically wake up and see yourself sitting in your cage munching fake food, listening to fake news and fake exposés of fake news and inexplicably funding Netflix? We need to force ourselves onto our personal pilgrimages for Lent.

My Lent book, Passion for Pilgrimage: Notes for the Journey Home by Alan Jones, is helping me stay on the road. And, in my case, it is helping me write an elegy for my own past, as I move on into what is next. In the chapter I just read, “The Road that Leads Nowhere,” Jones is highlighting how our many choices as Americans has basically ended up with us not making any choices. He says, “We get lost spiritually precisely in proportion to the casualness of our choices.”

Does being in the band have meaning or am I just filling up my time? Should I explore my past and figure out how I got on the road I am on or just watch others doing that on the screen? Is the terrible thing I am experiencing pushing me out on the “road” or shall I push that energy back inside somewhere? Shall I keep writing this blog or decide I need more readership to be relevant? Shall I let the Lent story draw me into the eternal story about going home or shall I just stay trapped at home? You can tell I think everything I have talked about so far is filled with significance.

It always takes risking significance

Jones says, “Our smallest actions and decisions can be fraught with significance and have serious consequences, [because] the same energy that made the sun and the stars came into play, and the result was you. You matter and your choices matter. If you lose sight of that, you get frozen and lost. You are not an accident. To discover that is already to have recovered enough passion to turn you away from a dead end and toward life.”

I rarely think relating to Frances McDormand or Glenn Close on the screen is a dead end. Although their stories were filled with roads to nowhere, they are helping me with Lent, as we speak. Getting something out of the screen rather than it just sucking the the life out of us is hardly automatic. Christians often hide the fact that we are in the screen’s “tractor beam” just like everyone else, being dragged places we might not choose if we were more conscious. My cell group always has great suggestions for what to watch next; it is one thing we all know. None of us need to risk significance, we can just sit there and make choices with our remotes.

The series I have been recommending is another import on Hulu from the Brits, Larkrise to Candleford. The show is about a village girl and her townie relative experiencing the 1890s as everyone begins to move into the modern age. All the innovations of the next era crowd into village life and cause people to choose about things they don’t want to think about. As a result, people hang on to the past or jump into the future, with poignant personal and relational consequences. What I like about the series most, however, is how we can watch people from the past take their lives seriously. We let people from the past do these things we long to do. I like shows like Larkrise (calling Call the Midwife) because I long for the characters’ experiences. The past is clearer in memory than it was when it happened, so nostalgia is comforting. But I honestly think more people in the past felt their lives had meaning and their choices made a difference. Such significance seems harder than ever. Wasn’t it just last week that Trump claimed he won the election at CPAC? Didn’t Republican Senators just extract compromises in the Covid Relief Bill and then all vote against it? It is hard to take life seriously in a reality like ours.

Choosing against our illusions is hard

We make fun of people in the simpler past. But we also suffer from a twinge of envy when we weigh our lightness against their heaviness. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera says people in the past engaged in “something and not nothing; hard not soft; risky not safe; productive of long and dire consequences, not immediately dismissed in a cloud of smoke from a cigarette ironically name ‘True.’”

I can still remember the jingles of True cigarette commercials from my first stage of media saturation as a child. Of course, they are on YouTube:

My book for Lent and my latest show choice challenge me to be true and make true choices. Shall I do something hard (like have a serious marriage) or stay soft? Shall I do something that is meaningfully part of God’s creation or keep acting like what I do has no consequences as long as I do not harm someone else according to the law? Shall I just accept the absolute b.s. of almost every TV commercial or get furious that “True” cigarettes were and are an abomination that subvert the very word “true” and disgrace the Way the Truth and the Life?

My father died of emphysema and my mother chronically suffered from the effects of second-hand smoke. Fortunately, smoking and the addiction and health disasters that go with it are on the decline — but not fast enough for me. American cigarette producers got thwarted at home so they marketed worldwide. Worldwide tobacco use and addiction is just now reaching a peak and heading for decline. True cigarettes were introduced in 1966 when I was twelve. My Dad was at the height of his cigarette smoking. I was just beginning to refuse to collude with his habit. There are a lot of choices I had to make or avoid. I wanted Dad to love me. But I did not want to accept cigarettes to procure that love. I made many compromises I am still pondering and repenting.

Lent is a great season for repenting, which is basically a choice to go another way, to go home. Lent is a season that lures us out on the road, away from our addictions and resistance, and makes us susceptible to cooperation with God’s grace. As a result of making any of these true choices, we’ll probably uncover many of the false ones that tie us up, especially in our relationships. So we will repent and even feel better.

We try to get by with unhealthy habits, especially in unhealthy relationships, by not making a choice or by choosing everything. We don’t really want to do anything that has “long and dire consequences” like refusing to be codependent with someone who is killing themselves spiritually and otherwise or like making the commitment to hold a church together. To do so, we would need to risk going against the flow. What has society created? — a no-fault, guiltless world. How do policemen keep killing people with impunity and governmental grifters get away with breathtaking corruption? How is it that it is so easy to blame and hard to forgive?

Even in the church, reconciliation often means not having to say you’re sorry because no one will admit you (or they) are that wrong or even that significant. We avoid conflict by not recognizing anything for which repentance is required. That makes for a very soft response to an increasingly hard world. Are we getting used to being little Trumps demanding our right to choose whatever we want – even if it does not exist? I know it is terrible to imagine, but are we little Trumps starring in our own show, making up our own reality, and daring everyone to tell us we lost the election? Did we watch TV long enough for that to be a possibility?

I hope not. That’s why I wrote to you, since you are the kind of person who steps into Lent every year and lets it take you somewhere true.

There is going to be risk: You’ll worry, but don’t fret

The Mission,
Our church is going off the high dive in any number of ways.

But don’t fret, OK? There is probably no way not to worry; but we can at least avoid fretting.

Do they still make graduates of swim lessons go off the high dive as part of the final test of their capabilities? Have insurance companies banned high dives for regular folks altogether? (I don’t go to the pool like I used to).

Boomer fret
“High Dive” (1947) from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post is in the collection of Steven Spielberg and on exhibit at. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The big plunge was my final exam when I was done with my third year of lessons. I did not crawl out onto the edge of the diving board when my turn came to leap. But I felt almost exactly like Norman Rockwell’s painting. I was scared of heights then, too. My friend Jeff, pushed off from the back rails and leapt out into the center of the pool, which added to how ashamed I felt for being such a “scaredy cat.” I’m glad I did not die from my flood of emotions before I hit the water! I have to tell you that I eventually made a wonderfully awkward dive off the board before the summer was over, but I would not do it again.

I hope none of us feel like we, the church, are that boy, our present situation is that diving board, and the pool is the mess that is about to drown us. But it would not be surprising if we did. Our church has been pushing us all off the edge for some time, now. I won’t even go back over the “second act” we launched into a couple of years ago; we are still swallowing that change (and benefiting every day!). But just last year we penned a daring map and proceeded to do most of it.  We are way on down the road. We are off the edge and into the deep end.

We do not listen to cautionary tales about the perils of doing what God calls us to try.
  • A new building came up for sale but we did not buy it, we bought a different one down the street. We were in motion and God could steer us.
  • We wanted to get out of 1125 S. Broad because it seemed just as cheap to own a building. Then we decided we wanted both buildings. Not only did we want to preserve our store where it is at, we wanted more room for a new childcare business and events opportunities.
  • At the same time, we planted a new congregation. It’s like when you got a new job, moved, and realized you were pregnant. Not that easy.
  • What’s more, we entrusted brand new pastors to lead the newly-birthed congregation! Not that easy. They have experience with Jesus and Circle of Hope — but very few people are ready to plant a new congregation! And the way we do it has its own difficulties, since it comes complete with people, some settled in their ways, with it.

The other day, Paul Kohl told the Leadership Team:  “I want to talk about the strategy of 1125 S Broad (metrics specifically) and 2214 S Broad as per our agreements. If we were ascending Mt Everest we would be in the death zone, not enough oxygen to sustain life; we need to keep moving until we reach our objective and return to where we can breathe.”

You can always rely on Paul for an apt metaphor. He means we need to get our businesses rolling to sustain our buildings before the cost undermines our capacity, among other things. We took a risk and are at risk.

One of our proverbs says: Following the Spirit is risky business, calm seas do not make good sailors.

I often think it is important for the leaders to keep teaching us good sailing habits. Lord knows the seas of the world are not becoming calmer.

So I am writing this today hoping your basement did not flood during the downpour, your marriage does not feel like it is disintegrating,  your children are not sick, your car is running, your job is secure and you are not too upset over the latest disaster in the society — so you feel free to take a risk. If you do not feel like it, then I hope you can trust God, since we are already in the pool.

I keep quoting the King James Bible these days, where Psalm 37 starts out: “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.” That verse can be extended from its immediate outlook on the constant disparity between the rich and the poor, to give us some encouragement for facing other difficulties and injustices.

We can decide not to fret and keep risking because God is with us and the Lord will bring the world to right in the end and is already at work in us and others who follow Jesus.

  • Don’t fret when you confront the inevitable risk of following something larger than your own fret.
  • Don’t fret when you confront the inevitable temptation to follow what you are afraid of (actually trying to avoid it; but running away is still being led somewhere).
  • Fret = to heat or inflame oneself. Don’t get flooded with your fiery emotions. Or when you do get flooded (which you probably will, maybe before this day is over) , take some time to settle down before you do something unworthy of you.
  • Don’t let someone steal your joy. God is trustworthy and you are not in charge of the end of things.

Paralleled with “don’t inflame yourself” in this verse is “don’t burn with jealousy.” So this verse is all about getting burned. Someone or some situation is going to try to light a match to you, don’t let them. Douse it with that fountain of living water waiting for just the moment you need to use it, or jump into the sea of grace surrounding you! (Take that metaphor, Paul!)

I think we are going to worry because things are hard and the world is pretty dark, and inexplicable things do happen to nice people. I am worried about a number of things right now. I am not a stone, nor do I want to become one to get by. I want to worry and not sin. I equate the sin with the fretting, with the unchecked burning, with the faithless flaming.

So when troubles set us off, let’s step back and trust, not become paralyzed or over-activated by our worry and end up fretting or throttled up or down by injustice. We are following someone greater than us whose plans are larger than ours. And that’s not only OK, it is salvation.

We need evangelized: 3 things that show it

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evangelized rodents

Every day, I need evangelized. Like Paul said of Abraham, the faithful friend of God:

“He did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:20-21).

I am also not wavering. But I need to be strengthened. I need to be fully persuaded that God has the power to do what he promises. This strengthening and persuasion happens every day.

To be honest, we, as a church, need to keep the spark of evangelism stoked among us and through us or we might “waver through unbelief” like Paul fears the Romans might waver (or why bring up Abraham, right?). If Paul looked over our church, he might be writing a letter to our leaders and to all of us when he saw the kinds of things we do rather than persuading people that God has the power to do what he promises through Jesus Christ.

Here are three things we tend to do these days that show we need evangelized — no judgment, just things to think and talk about.

We manage lovelessness

This week, all sorts of people are going to bring out the four horsemen in their relationships at home, in your cell and with the leaders. We are going to be tempted to manage the symptoms of their lovelessness rather than teach a better way. Rather than reconcile after our teaching causes conflict, we will be tempted to keep things calm by not confronting the life-sucking lack of love and keeping our mouths shut. We try to manage the lovelessness. This managing rarely succeeds and the territory of the loveless expands rather than stays in the boundaries we set. Basically, we spawn a dysfunctional family like that from which many of us came.

The dysfunction is easy to see when we elevate new leaders (and we often do that, don’t we?!). The loveless test them. We have four relatively new pastors, new Cell Leader Coordinators, new Leadership Team members, and new Cell Leaders. Many tell me similar stories about people who are covenant members  and so have already agreed to love their leaders, build the church, give money, follow the Map, etc., etc. and yet cause an argument in every meeting they attend, or refuse to attend the meeting because they are hurt or mad. The temptation is to manage their lovelessness rather than insist on reconciliation in honor of Jesus.

We need evangelized. We can’t love unless we are attached to the mother/father love of Jesus.

Ahem. Beat Pittsburgh and Lancaster (but not Dallas!)

We stick with principled theology without the motivation of the Holy Spirit.

In our case this “principle-based” theology is often a breed of Protestantism that has an “imperial gaze.” What I mean is, almost all of us grew up in a church that was fully a part of Eurocentric/American thinking. [Consider Migrations of the Holy]. A common way we think about what is right, therefore, can be subsumed under the heading “perfecting democracy” or “giving a voice to the voiceless.” Many people think goodness is mainly about distributing the limited “pie” of social power, power we think we have or power we think we need in order to get by. The church is still seen as part of the imperial system and not actually an expression of the alternative to that system, an expression of the “voiceless” Jesus. Basically, our theology can lean into being an accommodated, if idealistic, element of America Inc. [Consider The Economy of Desire]

You can see this theology among us when we try to act in solidarity with people we have stereotyped by singing their music or by appropriating their culture in some way, even when they are not part of our community and not consulted. The imperial gaze roams the earth looking for people to conform to its superiority, looking for experiences it has not yet consumed, and looking for people it has not yet exploited. Solidarity with people we know and love is elemental to the gospel. (We had a Dia de los Muertos observance last week complete with Aztec dancers — the leader of the troupe being part of our church!). But learning someone’s culture for the sake of novelty or faux inclusion is not the gospel. Perfecting democracy and advancing human rights is not the gospel. Speaking up for people who are oppressed is certainly an expression of Jesus followers who love others. But such speaking does not save people, Jesus does that.

We need evangelized. We can’t be free of our self-interest and grasping for power unless we are empowered by the Holy Spirit and humbly submitted to obeying God’s call.

We acclimate to the inflexibilities of an established community.

I know this is all sounding negative, but I suppose some people in Rome thought that what Paul wrote to them was negative, too. Many of us are more committed to nothing being negative than we are to a practical life in Christ — we might even be “devoted” to our anxiety! Thus a great number of us might not be able to take any of the spiritual risks that mark a person who trusts God — or we might theoretically approve of “risk” (see the previous point) but leave the risk-taking to the “risk department.” Thus we have trouble adapting to our changing neighborhoods. We can’t imagine investing in the future of our mission. Some don’t listen to the possibilities of a troubled marriage. We might never invite people to our meetings because we predetermine how difficult that might be for them and never even find out what they really think about us. We end up, basically, living behind the walls of our “settlement” and are no longer an expansive, journeying tribe of pioneers.

We have been able to see this trait among us this year as we have disrupted the homeostasis so much! On the one hand, we have weathered the self-imposed storm well. We added new pastors, new leaders, changed my role around, planted a new congregation and are now contemplating new buildings! Amazing! All these things would cause any organization to stumble around like they just entered the dark living room after shutting off the bathroom light in the middle of the night.  On the other hand, we lost 50 people, we did not meet our financial goal (yet), and we ran into how stuck some of are individually and how slow to change our system can be. And, like I said, every time we tried to do something new, we encountered conflict (see point one). Such problems are to be expected, but they certainly present a challenging way to grow! Change brings out the best and worst in people.

We need evangelized. We can’t evangelize, can’t confront the long-term intricacies of transformation unless we know we are eternal and have a living relationship with God.

Life is hard. Being truly alive in Christ is even harder, it seems. We feel anxious about our lives. We react with avoidance of suffering and frantic acquisition of comfort. We need evangelized! So Jesus says about all the things he told he disciples the night before he went to the cross:

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

And Peter, who totally choked on his huge anxiety when Jesus was being tried and executed, wrote:

“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

And Paul, who wrote such challenging things to the Romans, ended his letter with:

“I myself am convinced, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge and competent to instruct one another…”

He did not think they were wavering.

“…Yet I have written you quite boldly on some points to remind you of them again, because of the grace God gave me to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles. He gave me the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:14-16).

He knew they needed as much persuasion as they could get because life is hard. And being truly alive in Christ is even harder, it seems.

Stop the Repression

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Sometimes it looks like the only “safe place” we can understand is the self-protected heart-space we keep free of outside influence.

Sometimes we extend the idea of “having good boundaries” so far we can no longer get out of ourselves and express the love of Jesus.

Meanwhile, God has violated the boundaries of space and time to come to us in Jesus. Today in the liturgical calendar, he is in the heart of Jerusalem teaching us how to live. Nevertheless, self-protection, self-discovery and self-protection seem reasonable to us. But those reasons rarely lead to strength, tenderness or faithfulness, just more self-ness. Stop the repression!

Your poor child

barbed-wireA woman who was abused as a child finally felt like she needed to cut off her mother. She was an evil woman who would rather destroy her daughter than admit her husband had abused her.* For years the daughter “set appropriate boundaries” and “took care of herself.” These are such basic recommendations from psychotherapists that they have become cliches.

She applied their teaching and definitely experienced more peace and less anxiety as a result of keeping her mother at a distance. But she did not become more gentle or experience much joy. She was supposedly loving herself, but the way she did it cost her the thrill of giving herself to another. To maintain her new defense system she had to continuously reaffirm the necessity of protecting herself. She was like North Korea, expending costly efforts to maintain big weapons while the heart of her country starved. Hardening her heart to her mother’s horrible life did transform her from a passive, frightened pawn. But the hardness also moved her toward being an angry, tough woman who, ironically, was willing to destroy her love rather than let down her defenses – a lot like her mother.

Our abusers have no qualms about remaking us in their image. Evil has no reticence about expressing itself through us. Jesus wants to stop their repression. Love requires we lose the ways we have been saving ourselves in the face of what threatens us and find our true selves in relationship with our Savior. Then we might even gain the strength to undo the evil done to us.

Love feels so risky to the abused

Our network talked a lot about this risky love last week, here and there. We are trying to figure out how to love and it hurts sometimes. We are especially afraid of abusers and evil people who don’t mind telling us we are fools to follow Jesus, who ignore us, or who aggressively impose their Christ-less ways as if they were moral, even while they tell us to not be so aggressive. We are tempted to be passive in order to not be a nuisance or to cut them off contemptuously, or become like them in other ways.

When I see Jesus in the center of Jerusalem today, teaching in the Temple courts in full view of people who are plotting to kill him, people who can’t see the peace he would bring to them, I take heart and keep learning the lessons of love. His objective is obviously to bless people, not just make sure he is not abused. He refuses to live in fear. He is not so dominated he maintains some semblance of peace instead of being his true self. To love is to be more committed to the other person than we are to the relationship, to be more concerned about their soul than with whatever comfort not rocking the relational boat might bring to us.

We need to honor the dignity and admit the depravity of the ones we love in order to truly love them. We cannot love if we distance ourselves or overlook the damage of another’s sin; neither can we love if we fail to move into another’s world to offer a taste of life. Like Oscar Romero, we might have to sacrifice personal comfort for the sake of helping another experience their own longings and need for grace. The risk to love like Jesus is worth it. We need to stop the repression dominating us and stop the repression of others to experience the freedom and fullness of self-giving love.

Yesterday was Oscar Romero’s martyr’s day. Let me leave you with a quote from him, since he inspires me to risk love like the Lord’s, even though I have been abused, even though I am afraid, even though others might be evil and I might prefer evil in some ways, too.

 romero    I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, “Thou shalt not kill.” No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.
      The church preaches your liberation just as we have studied it in the holy Bible today. It is a liberation that has, above all else, respect for the dignity of the person, hope for humanity’s common good, and the transcendence that looks before all to God and only from God derives its hope and its strength (Last Homily).

* freely adapted from The Wounded Heart

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