My childhood was filled with instances of warm
welcomes. When I’d walk in the door of my grandparents home I remember being
drawn in by smiles of acceptance and an invitation to pull up to the table to enjoy
a big bowl of ice cream. I had no reason whatsoever not to trust my belonging
there. Their place was my place.
The fundamental
essence of the Good News is knowing full well that we are unconditionally welcomed. On the flip
side, not being welcome is our greatest fear. Henri Nouwen said, “It connects
with your birth fear, your fear of not being welcomed in this life, and your
fear of death, of not being welcome in the life after this. Everything Jesus is
saying to you can be summarized in the words, ‘Know that you are welcome.’”
In the 2004 comedy, Saved, Mandy Moore plays Hilary Faye, the zealous teenage Christian and upstanding leader of her high school christian sub-culture. There's this particular scene of the movie that sticks out to me as simultaneously ha-ha and haunting.
Upon kidnapping her friend Mary - the girl who got pregnant by her former boyfriend who is actually gay - Hillary aggressively attempts to fix her "backsliding" friend. Toward the end of the chaotic intervention, Hillary shoves Mary in the back then literally chucks the Bible at her angrily shouting, "I am filled with Christ's love!"
“If your heart stops, do you want us to try and bring you
back?”
The disturbing nature of the question sent Poss into
momentary flashbacks of all the near death experiences he’d endured. After
arriving back to the consciousness of the moment, he responded with a
resounding, "Yes, I want to be brought back!”
Poss made it through the surgery and is alive and well today.
Seemingly resurrected, he's been sober since August 23rd of 2011 and now housed in his own
apartment after roaming the Mile High streets for years.
Poss tasted the dust and now lives with the aftertaste of
resurrection.
Blue probably won’t be giving up coffee or chocolate during
the upcoming Lenten season. He already has a PHD in connecting with the
desolation and alienation of our Lord’s journey.
Blue is a Native American. As soon as he was eligible he
left his Cheyenne River Sioux reservation to enter the military in the late 70's. He devoted
seven years to Uncle Sam serving in Panama. Upon his return he utilized the GI
Bill to study three years at the University of Minnesota, but eventually the
multiple layers of PTSD, lack of family resources and minimal employment
options mercilessly caught up with him. Now, like so many of his Native brothers and
sisters he walks the stations of the cross through our Denver streets sleeping in alleyways and under bridges desperately thirsting for his
next drink.
I find that I have so much in common with those who are
searching for Bigfoot, Mermaids, and Extra-Terrestrials. (I should end the post
right there…) After my wife and I get the boys tucked in bed we occasionally
peruse the channels for some high quality television. Recently, my favorite
show has been Finding Bigfoot. After an episode, I’ve tried my best to
incorporate my new found passion for Sasquatch into recent conversations with
friends none of whom seem to share a similar level of intrigue.
Last week, Angie was caught up in an Animal Planet
documentary about the newly discovered evidence for mermaids. I’m pretty sure
the enthusiastic eye-witness accounts were compelling enough to convert her
into a believer.
Before moving out to Denver ten years ago I was a case manager
for mentally and physically disabled adults. Throughout the two years invested
in that job, I played many board games with my clients. There was one
particular individual who demanded we get at least one game of Jenga in before
getting to any serious conversation. He loved to play Jenga, but this man was
hopeless at the game. His hands were gnarled from birth. His tremors were such
that he’d be lucky to remove two or three blocks before the entire tower would
come crashing down time after time after time.
"Like every human organization the Church is constantly in danger of corruption. As soon as power and wealth come to the Church, manipulation, exploitation, misuse of influence, and outright corruption are not far away.
How do we prevent corruption in the Church? The answer is clear: by focusing on the poor. The poor make the Church faithful to its vocation. When the Church is no longer a church for the poor, it loses its spiritual identity. It gets caught up in disagreements, jealousy, power games, and pettiness. Paul says, "God has composed the body so that there may not be disagreements inside the body but each part may be eqaully concerned for all the others" (1 Corinthians 12: 24-25). This is the true vision. The poor are given to the Church so that the Church as the body of Christ can be and remain a place of mutual concern, love, and peace." ~ Henri Nouwen
In my years among the chronically homeless, I quickly learned that it's not wise to befriend everyone, however, there are certain encounters with individuals in which you just know you're being invited into more than the standard surface smiles and small talk.
For my friends Justin and Mandy, Ed represents that deeper invitation. They fell hard for this man. Since their first interaction they've shared many meals along with deep and meaningful conversations that translate into a bond that is as intimate as family.
About a month ago, Ed went into the hospital with an infection in his leg, shortly thereafter he caught pnemonia and then continued a downward spiral to the point which he'll likely pass through the thin veil at any moment now.
“I’ve been holding tension my whole life.”
This was a remark that a friend made in our conversation over breakfast this
week. The phrase has lodged itself in my mind due to the individual’s
credibility as a gay man who also happens to be a committed follower of Jesus.
Since coming out twenty years ago, he’s found himself at home in the thick
complexity of unresolved tension.
In general, tension comes to the surface
when we are faced with various elements of absurdity, irony, opposition, or
contradictions throughout our life experiences. Life throws these awkward
spaces at us all the time and in response we demand inner resolution to it all.
"It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up." -Richard Rohr
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be."
-John Wooden
"Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody."
- Henri Nouwen
"Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of spirituality begins where we are now in the mess of our lives."
-Mike Yaconelli
"But that doesn’t mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together." -Shane Claiborne
"Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." Albert Einstein
"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman
"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
-Dr. Martin Luther King
"Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful--- Christian community is the final apologetic."
-Francis Schaefer
"It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools."
Wendell Berry
"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than the particular country in which he was born."
-Francois Fenelon
"Ministry cannot be about maintenance, but it is about gathering, about embrace, about welcoming home all sorts of and conditions of people; home is a place for mother tongue, of basic soul food, of old stories told and treasured, of being at ease, known by name,
belonging without qualifying for membership."
-Walter Brueggemann
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are
not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to
being the particular poet or particular monk that they are intended to be by
God."
"In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted
to be."
-Thomas Merton
"God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God's been speaking through them ever since. So, if God chooses to speak through you don't think to highly of yourself."
-Rich Mullins
"We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us."
Mother Teresa
"I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self."
Henri Nouwen
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