If Devastated

"Well, we are all realists to a greater or lesser degree, and there is therefore no avoiding the fact of our complicity in the death of Jesus.

Like the apostles we evade and refuse and deny and escape when the cross becomes a serious possibility. Terror of involvement, fear of failure – of hurting as well as being hurt – the dread of having our powerlessness nakedly spelled out for us: all this is the common coin of most of our lives.

For beneath the humility of the person who believes he or she knows their limitations is the fear of those who have never found or felt their limitations. Only when we have travelled to those stony places of the spirit where we are forced to confront our helplessness and our failure can we be said to know our limitations, and then the knowledge is too late to be useful. We do not know what we can or cannot bear until we have risked the impossible and intolerable in our own lives.

Christ bears what is unbearable, but we must first find it and know it to be unbearable. And it does not stop being ours when it becomes his. Only thus can we translate our complicity in the death of Christ into a communion in the death of Christ, a baptism into the death of Christ: by not refusing, by not escaping, by forgetting our realism and our reasonableness, by letting the heart speak freely, by exposing ourselves, by making ourselves vulnerable."

―Rowan Williams, "Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today"

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Dear Kate,

Let's play "fill in the blank" this morning: If _____, I will be devastated.

Now go on, play it.  It's the easiest game I can imagine, for hump day or Monday or any day.

Because--need I say?--we are so easily devastated.  And we push our language to its limit to make sure heaven could hear it: traumatized, stigmatized we are, our life is left colonized, victimized and paralyzed by oppressions of yesterday, today, and many more tomorrow.  Whereas to us God is unknowable, Evil is only an unknown, yet-to-be-known.  It will come for you.

"Everybody must get stoned," a well-known line from Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 And #35."  People often thought the song is about getting high, though Dylan insisted he has "never and never will write a 'drug song.'"  In 2012 he told Rolling Stone magazine: "These are people that aren't familiar with the Book of Acts."

Yes, in this life, "everybody must get stoned," devastated, to death, more often than always.  The questions are: For what?  Who for?  Why?

There are people that aren't familiar with the book of life, though claim to be writing it everyday.  They somehow believe they should escape unscathed, and any good news should speak their illusion into reality.  Well, there's Costco for that, but who is going to renew your membership after your funeral?

"What is the meaning of life?"  The most fundamental human question; yet, interestingly enough, I have never heard it being asked, in church or anywhere, in so many words.  It would be too embarrassing, wouldn't it be, to sound like a child?  Let's just all assume each other a mature adult, that we all "get it," and that living is an effective execution of the assumption.

The moments "in which one’s soul is shaken with unmitigated concern about the meaning of all meaning," we try our best to run away from them.  Some people meet God in a burning bush; most would just put it out and feel lucky having done it soon enough, for their own sake, for the safety of their family, for the air quality of the world.  Some would piss on it and laugh.

Please read today's quote above, slowly, prayerfully.  Burning words.

Yours, Alex