Practice Resurrection

“It is no accident that a culture such as ours, which is alarmed by challenges to its self-evident superiority, is confused about the past...  And it is a major irony that a culture determined to affirm diversity is so poorly equipped to understand the difference embodied in its own history, the distance between past ages and ours.”

― Rowan Williams, "Why Study the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church"

*******

Dear Kate,

The "most vulnerable ones" among us, I will tell you who they are, and you won't need any scientific research to attest to my claim.  (And if any scientific research has been done to that end, we don't want to know about it.)

The "most vulnerable ones" are the those who don't know their history.

Last night I bought a bottle of Canadian whiskey, heady, potent stuff, and, according to the marketing team, it is "a pure expression of rye whisky; more complex and characterful, this pours medium gold. Aromas of sweet fruit, herb and spice, with vanilla, toffee, pepper, cedar smoke and banana on the nose. The sweet, creamy and warm palate is balanced by rye spice flavours followed by a long finish showing dried fruit, honey and ginger."  Wow, my senses have been served just by reading the words, and now it's just a matter of taking its world in, in my world with friends and family, our many facial orifices channels of many wonders.

What if the two worlds, the whiskey's and mine, hitherto unbeknownst to each other, are to go deeper in their interaction, beyond the immediate sensual pleasures, "complex and characterful" as they are?  What if I am to know how the whisky is made? walk on the land where the fruits and herbs and spices grow? see the sweat of the harvesters' face as I feel mine running down my back?  What if the two worlds are one, together, their complexities and characters woven into one destiny, unfolding in unison?

"Nah, it's too strong for me; let's mix it with pop."  Knowing not the past, we are bound to desecrate in our here and now, and who knows what's that going to do to our future?

Look around us, what do we know?  If I am driving a car, all I need to know is that it moves for me.  If it doesn't, a Lexus is as good as a door-stopper (garage door), and someone owes me an explanation, an explanation I will surely get once I opened my wallet.  We care about nothing other than the thing's usefulness, to me, and everyone is bound to be desecrated into everything when I know nothing about anyone, including ourselves.

Resurrection time soon enough, and what do we know?  We don't care to know much.  If we do, we want to know how it works (for me, of course).  If the classic atonement theology is too bloody for my state-of-the-art religious sensitivity, I will want some cakes made out of blood scabs to soothe my soul, answer to my every disappointment in life, ultimately inevitably landing myself in court to put God on trial.  (Wait, haven't we done that already and He lost a son for losing the case?)

We live in a very thin culture, and the "last bloody hills" on which we fight each other are really mounds of overgrown, not much underneath the messy superficiality.  "Liberty," "equality," "justice," we toss these words around as if everyone by now should know why the hell they are heavens that can't wait and we must do the necessary things to put an end to history, with a moral authority to judge everyone before us, for the sake of everything after us.

A crazy story I told you just now, isn't it?  Well, that's the story we are living in now, words we speak to each other and ourselves everyday.  We might not care about His-story, but history will catch up to tell on us.  It will speak about our society's massive and thoroughgoing disintegration, our Christian heritage burned at stake even as we hold on to its skeleton like a scaffold on sand.  We are utterly vulnerable to our collective self-destruction.  Exaggeration?  You'll see.  I am just trying to help you avoid seeing that.

What's there to do?  I've been asked this question many times recently.  As if we don't know.  I think we know, I truly do.  Know your history, how about start with this?  Know your story, the drama in which your destiny unfolds.  Ask questions.  Go deep.  Turn off your phone, your tv, throw away your laundry list, and immerse yourself into the deep knowing of people and things.  Read your Creed and ask why our church is not reading it.  Go out; it's spring.  I can continue but no one can prescribe your destiny: you must go and seize your resurrection.

We are more than half way done now, Kate.  Don't throw your second half away.

Yours, Alex