Tall Monastic Guy: My identity as the enemy...

June 15, 2012

My identity as the enemy...

Justin’s mind was just blown. In his short time of hanging around the chronically homeless that we serve at Network he’d been prayed over and blessed on two separate occasions by a man named Ed. Ed is poor in every which way imaginable and he’s not afraid to let his poverty show. So, imagine the look on Justin’s face when after a short interaction Ed asked to pray for him. Through Ed’s meaningful petition and pleas Justin was overwhelmed with a mystical sense of genuine blessing.

This isn’t the first time I've witnessed this.

Last fall, Jamie was holding the Anything Helps sign in an exercise of solidarity with panhandlers. A homeless man gently stopped to pray with Jamie and offer her the $2 he had to his name. Jamie was left stunned in a paradigm shattering shock and disorientation.

With the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was speaking to an audience of desperate and hopeless folks. The poor in spirit, those who are mourning, those who were meek, merciful despite their hardships, those who sought peace rather than war, it was these humble and hurting who received the challenge to bless those who persecute and oppress them.

Myself, Justin, and Jamie... you the reader, didn't fit the description of those in attendance. We're middle class, college educated and resemble the authorities and powers far more than the hungry and tired ones standing in position to receive the beautifully poetic charge Jesus issued.

I have spent most of my existence living the assumption that we were the ones receiving those blessings and charged with the challenge to love our enemies. And while I am poor and powerless in my own unique ways I am realizing even more profoundly that I am that enemy of whom the other has been challenged to love despite my inconsiderations and affluence that perpetuates the bleak circumstances of the poor.

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With more provocative and beautiful thoughts surrounding the angle in which we read scripture...

Please, check out this post : The Sin of Heterosexism

Posted at 01:38 PM in Access, missional/incarnational, Ryan's ruminations, Street Psalms | Permalink

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Words make Worlds...

"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