Don't be afraid

'Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell. Can you not buy two sparrows for a penny? And yet not one falls to the ground without your Father knowing. Why, every hair on your head has been counted. So there is no need to be afraid; you are worth more than hundreds of sparrows.

Matthew 10:28 - 31

Needless to say, childhood in antiquity was very unlike today[1]. Childhood was often seen as a liminal period of life before adulthood and responsibility. And for the children of the poor, life could be, but was not always, harsh. Infant mortality in 1st century Palestine was close to 30% by age one. With a few exceptions, most Jewish families were poor, usually subsistent on essential skills, labouring, maintaining small crops, pasturing small herds of goats, fishing. Land was passed from generation to generation in a patrilineal and patriarchal society not dissimilar to their Roman overlords. Jesus' formation as a child was probably similar to others of his time.

Jewish parents were obliged to: Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.  Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:6 - 9).

Children then were definitely seen and not heard. They contributed to the economy of the family, through work, carrying water, firewood, shepherding and girls would, in addition, take their part in the daily preparation of meals. As a boy, Jesus would have attended his local synagogue where he would have studied under his rabbi (teacher) moving through the various levels until adulthood. Jesus would speak Aramaic, be literate in Hebrew and likely when engaging in commercial activities converse in Greek and possibly had a working knowledge of Latin.

Matthew recalls Joseph as a builder/carpenter (13:54f), while Mark refers to Jesus as carpenter (6:3) and it is thus possible to conclude that Jesus himself was a carpenter, apprenticed at a young age to Joseph - in addition to his studies and other duties.

Times may change, and the challenges of childhood and adolescence have become even more complex with technology, fragile familial/parental relationships, student debt, addictions of all kinds, mental health.

But every child should know that they are loved. Every child should hear that they are special. And while there isn't really a 'but' - not every child can or will be a princess or a prince. Someone will always have to clean up after them, and keeping princesses and princes happy and indulged is a terminal activity. It can't and won't last, but damage can be done. In modern parlance they have every chance of joining the entitled.

What indeed makes us special is not so much our marvellous humour, stunning good looks, our exceptional interpersonal skills, our improbably amazing cooking, our incredible artistic flair, but it is that we are known and loved by our God. Could there be anything more persuasive than knowing how much we are valued, and how intimately he knows us? Do you know how many hairs are on your head?

We need to know how we must build up strong generations of independent mind, versed in a diversity of cultures, skilled in engaging in broad conversations, deep relationships and inquisitive about our role in maintaining our fragile earth.

The one who loves us so much knows you through and through - and not in the sense that your every thought is spied on, but that body and soul (your whole being) is are taken up into his care. It is generous, unselfish, and prodigal.

Ask a parent who has lost a child. This goes some way to express the outpouring of love God has for each one of us. It is sweet. Incomparable. Painful. Joyful.

So, we seek to teach our children what is important, so let them contribute to the work of the home, show them the value of what you do in your job, give them the opportunity to expand their minds with a knowledge of languages and culture, aware of the patrimony of our sacred texts, honoured thinkers and writers, composers, musicians, engineers, scientists and leaders and to value learning itself, allow them to see what deep, loving relationships look like, how vulnerability and transparency are as necessary as strength and courage.

Peter Douglas

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[1] See: Reidar Aasgaard, Children in Antiquity and Early Christianity: Research History and Central Issues in Familia 33 (2006) pp 23-46.

Real presence

Brothers and sisters:

The cup of blessing that we bless,

is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?

The bread that we break,

is it not a participation in the body of Christ?

Because the loaf of bread is one,

we, though many, are one body,

for we all partake of the one loaf.

1 Corinthians 10:16 - 17

We ought be very familiar with the idea that as members of the church we are at the same time members of the Body of Christ. For 806 years the church has celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi (and since 1970 the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ), but in quite a different sense. In the middles ages there was a deep interest in the humanity of, and the physical body of Jesus.

The church’s understanding was heightened by the thinking of theologians who linked this physical sense with Jesus’ sacramental presence in the Eucharist. The Fourth Lateran Council, which coincided, perhaps not accidentally, with the introduction of this feast, extended the use of transubstantiation to the universal church: that is, at the consecration in the Lord's Supper the elements of the Eucharist, bread and wine, are transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus and that they are no longer bread and wine, but only retain their appearance of bread and wine. By the time of the Council of Trent this understanding had been defined with some clarity.

The desire of the faithful to give honour to and to adore Christ present in the Eucharist culminates in this feast day celebrated this Sunday. Many religious congregations, particularly of women, were founded specifically for the adoration of Christ’s Eucharistic presence.

Our Catholic understanding gives succour to, and nurtures our deepest desire to not only reach out to God, but to be comforted by a ‘knowable’, accessible presence. We extend that to ensuring that when we enter the church that we acknowledge that divine presence, described as The Real Presence, by genuflecting or bowing. This wonderful presence also provides a most wonderful invitation to each of us, drawing us to prayer, to relationship with the Lord, and indeed with each other.

Peter Douglas

White Christians are Theologically Compromised

8 June 2020 by Jeff Hood from his blog Engaging radical theology.

These are crazy times. Folk don’t know what to do…especially white folk. Within the white folk arena, there is one group that seems to have lost all sense they might ever have had on reality…white Christians. On the daily, I’ve been bombarded by bizarre statements/actions that white Christians are making/taking in the name of helping. These bombardments provide a textbook example of what things look like when helping hurts. I’ve tried to refrain from having this conversation. Initially, I dismissed white Christians as harmless…then…I started reading their theologically compromised bullshit.

“There are no white people in the Bible.  Take all the time you need with that.”

Just today, I saw/heard this quote at least a dozen times. Each time I encountered it, I thought about someone seeing it, thinking it was clever and excitedly sharing it. Of course, this is how dumbassticity spreads…and it is far more deadly than any virus.

“Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men. But race is the child of racism, not the father.”

-Ta-Nehesi Coates, Between the World and Me (7)

White is not an indubitable feature of the natural world.

White is a modern construct.

White is a sickness.

White is a child of racism.

White continues to be and will forever be racist…because white was created to oppress.

“There are no white people in the Bible.  Take all the time you need with that.”

Though white people created many of the modern categories of race…they don’t get to put that construct into an ancient text as if the writers would have had any idea of such a construct. It is yet another manifestation of racism/unleashed modernism.

On the other hand… While it is true that there are no white people in the Bible, the statement is misleading. There are no white people because the construct of whiteness as a racial category did not exist. The rise/racism of colonialism created more and more of a need for people of fairer complexion to use the racist category of white. With that said, taking white people out of the Bible is also problematic.

White Christians just don’t need any more encouragement to separate themselves from Biblical moral principles. They have been successful enough at that already. In fact, I believe we must always make sure that white people understand that the oppressors/marginalizers/haters in the scriptures are their kin folk no matter whether they are their skin folk or not.

So, I encourage people to be more concerned with how white people are acting rather than whether or not you can fit their modern construction of race into an ancient text.

Ok…I’ve taken all the time I need with this…

Stop putting this kind of ignorant bullshit out there. When you think something is clever…make sure it is theologically sound first. 

Maybe instead of sharing a bunch of shit there is a need to embrace the heat…and get your ass out in the street.

Jesus will meet you there.

Amen. 

++ In terms of our modern understanding of race, there are also no black people in the Bible…although they do live out Biblical principles (especially of love/justice/forgiveness) much better than white folk do.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/jeffhood/white-christians-are-theologically-compromised/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Christians+For+a+Better+Christianity&utm_content=43

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Baptist pastor, theologian and activist living and working in Texas. A graduate of Auburn University (BA), Southern.

Trinity dance

Brothers, we wish you happiness; try to grow perfect; help one another. Be united; live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.

Greet one another with the holy kiss. All the saints send you greetings.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of Holy Spirit be with you all.

2 Corinthians 13:11 - 13

I have spent the last few weeks of driving listening to Arthur Morey reading Fr Richard Rohr’s book on the Trinity, The Divine Dance (SPCK, 2016). The early chapters are poetic and heart-lifting – as if I were being raised to a higher level of consciousness about the way in which God reveals himself to me. His idea of all things flowing in and through God was like breathing longed for fresh air. I was easily reminded of that other poet, priest, theologian and teacher, Fr Tony Kelly CSsR and the course I studied on the Trinity at the Yarra Theological Union in the early 80’s. There was no way I could possibly capture his passion (from late Latin pati ‘suffer’) and enthusiasm (from the Greek enthous ‘possessed by a god, inspired). He taught us as if it were his life mission to instill in us an experience of being taken up into God. Each lecture was exhausting and exhaustive and the lessons learned there resonate still these 40 years later.

Goodreads’ hundreds of reviews rated The Divine Dance very highly, so I took a mighty battering on reading Fred Sanders’ excoriating review and my delight and pleasure was quashed. For a while. But not for long. Rohr is a popular writer and has an enormous ‘fan’ base. He draws people into the self, mystery, the other – apparently effortlessly.

A number of Trinity Sunday homilies I have heard were apologies. The Trinity – it was explained – was a mystery, and really, it’s all just too hard. Maybe it is, which is undoubtedly why Rohr has attempted to open the mystery, explore new metaphors (this is what rankled Sanders, along with some careless Greek translations). Even mysteries must be able to be entered into, be explored. Ultimately, the Trinity is the source of - and itself being - love. From the smallest electron surrounding the singular proton of the hydrogen atom to the Milky Way to the Laniakea Supercluster – home to a 100,000 galaxies among the billions of galaxies, this incredible love is present, urging every single particle in all of creation to celebrate its being in the presence of the Triune God.

Perhaps this is why theologians who write of the Trinity themselves are so drawn to poetry. The very idea of God whose love envelopes that one particle and yet majestically reigns across an incalculable and virtually infinite universe, is the greatest of love stories. Then to be incarnated in the person of Jesus, to live and die on this blue planet, to rise from death, to breathe the Spirit on and over all creation, is the panoramic view we are invited to see. And it doesn’t come without passion or inspiration.

Peter Douglas

Reason does not reveal the Trinity. The Trinity reveals itself to us.

by Terrance W. Klein. Father Klein is a priest serving in the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith

As a former Marine and an alumnus of Yale Law School, J. D. Vance was all but guaranteed a successful law career. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2017) has also made him a best-selling author. It records the rise of this young man out of the poverty of a Kentucky hillbilly family and into the highest echelons of American life.

Mr. Vance sets himself the challenging task of explaining the two very disparate worlds of his life—to each other. Having lived in both, he is convinced that the poor have no idea why life works so well for the privileged, while they, in turn, are baffled about what keeps generations of families in poverty.

Mr. Vance offers three insights:

1.    The poor grow up without roots, in fractured families and without networks of support.

2.    Moving frequently from one place to another, from one household to another, they do not develop the identity and the security that comes from knowing who one is.

3.    Seeing nothing of the world beyond their own circle of poverty, they lack any vision of how life itself might be different.

Reading the book, it is a challenge to keep track of the sheer number of homes in which Mr. Vance passed his childhood or the number of men his mother brought into his life. Some of them weren’t bad men, but the lack of roots, identity and vision would have destroyed his young life were it not for the woman he calls Mamaw.

His redeemer was his hillbilly grandmother, a baggy-jeaned and t-shirted smoker with a foul mouth. She took J. D. into her home during his high school years, giving him a stability his young life had never before known. Finally rooted in a relationship, he discovers who he was and who he could be.

Those three years with Mamaw—uninterrupted and alone—saved me. I didn’t notice the causality of the change, how living with her turned by life around. I didn’t notice that my grades began to improve immediately after I moved in. And I couldn’t have known that I was making lifelong friends.

How is it that some immigrant groups rise quickly from poverty and embrace the American dream? What keeps other mired in generations of indigence? A self-identified conservative, Mr. Vance is not opposed to government-sponsored assistance. He simply suggests that it cannot redeem those who are not rooted in stable relationships. If you do not belong, you have no identity, and if you don’t know who you are, you cannot imagine any existence other than the waves that carry you from one setback to another.

The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is not accessed through reason. Reason does not reveal the Trinity. The Trinity reveals itself to us, and reason can do little more than to curb our errant speculations about such sacred reality.

God is not some “thing” that we encounter in our world—not even an all-powerful, invisible thing. Likewise, the Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—are not three things that we find in the world. God, as Trinity, is the mystery in which our world rests, around which it aligns and toward which it strives.

God the Father, the creator, is the mystery in which our world rests. Pure existence, pure love, his is the relationship that grounds us in all other relationships. The Father is our origin. An origin is not something that we can see. We only know that we have one. We come from love. We are created for love.

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life (John 3:16).

The Son is our deepest, truest identity. In him, we know who we are: We are those who receive and return the Father’s love, through all the days of our lives. An identity is not something we choose and then become. No, we sense that the events of our lives and our responses to them form us into something already envisioned by another. Identity always comes from others. Ours comes from Christ and from his saints.

Brothers and sisters, rejoice. Mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you (2 Cor 13:11). The Spirit is the horizon that beckons to us. You never claim the horizon. Because we come from love and have been created for love, the Spirit is that ever-fruitful vista that opens before us. The Spirit, who raised Jesus from the dead, is our guarantee that love, which is our origin and our identity, is also our destiny. It will not exhaust itself.

The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity (Ex 34:6).

You might not fare all that well in defining the Trinity, but, by virtue of your baptism, you can share the Trinity with the world. That is what you have been called to do. If you have ever sensed that you were made for love, if you have ever felt capable of giving yourself away in love and if you still really believe that love will prevail, then you have known the Trinity in the depths of your own being.

The Trinity isn’t something we discover. It is the mystery from which we come, by which we live, and toward which we strive. The Trinity is behind us, within us, before us. Human life thrives in relationship, in identity and in destiny. When it knows these three, it has known the Most Holy Trinity.

First published in America on 7 June 2017.

Fatima Pentecost

I have said these things to you

while still with you;

but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit,

whom the Father will send in my name,

will teach you everything

and remind you of all that I have said to you.’

John 14:26

The Gospels quite unequivocally call for personal transformation in light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Those who are baptised are incorporated into the church community which sets out to witness that very same Gospel.

On 13 May, 1917 three young children, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto received a vision of Our Lady of the Rosary. She reappeared each month until October of that year. These young peasant children so convinced their families, friends, the clergy and finally the papacy itself of their genuineness that a basilica now sits where they received their vision. Over 1 million of the world’s faithful came to the 50^th anniversary of the visions to a celebration of the Eucharist presided over by Pope Paul VI. You have to remember that they were children. These children helped change of lives of so many, that it would be difficult to number them. Fatima is visited by millions each year. These people are transformed by of an act of faith.

The crowd that swarmed in the streets outside the disciples’ upper room were quite unlikely to have known what was about to hit them. In the room above them the disciples heard what sounded like a strong wind, and above their heads what appeared to be tongues of fire. Filled with the Spirit, they left their haven and began to preach the Good News and were able to be understood by people who spoke a multitude of languages. The first Pentecost. These people were transformed by an act of faith.

Pretty well every day our teachers and staff walk the corridors and grounds of our schools. There they meet children who have been fractured and broken by life, others for whom each day is a window to new experiences, there are others for whom school is a respite from tension and anxiety and there are others for whom it is a difficult, harrowing place. They sit side by side, play together, laugh at each other’s jokes, share lunches. Our classrooms and grounds are places where the church lives and breathes. This is where we pray and celebrate the life of Jesus. Bit by bit, lives are made anew, refreshed and transformed through the myriad of tiny acts of faith, by teachers, aids, cleaners, parents, children. Each day is Pentecost.

Feast of Our Lady of Fatima is celebrated each year on 13 May – a true sign that our young can change the world we live in for the better. Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, birthday of the church – a sign that true transformation is not only possible, but achievable. Come Holy Spirit.

Peter Douglas

Song to the Holy Spirit

Lord, Holy Spirit,
You blow like the wind in a thousand paddocks,
Inside and outside the fences,
You blow where you wish to blow.

Lord, Holy Spirit,

You are the sun who shines on the little plant,

You warm him gently, you give him life,

You raise him up to become a tree with many leaves.

Lord, Holy Spirit,

You are the mother eagle with her young,

Holding them in peace under your feathers.

On the highest mountain you have built your nest,

Above the valley, above the storms of the world,

Where no hunter ever comes.

Lord, Holy Spirit,

You are the bright cloud in whom we hide,

In whom we know already that the battle has been won.

You bring us to our Brother Jesus

To rest our heads upon his shoulder.

Lord, Holy Spirit,

You are the kind fire who does not cease to burn,

Consuming us with flames of love and peace,

Driving us out like sparks to set the world on fire.

Lord, Holy Spirit,

In the love of friends you are building a new house,

Heaven is with us when you are with us.

You are singing your songs in the hearts of the poor

Guide us, wound us, heal us. Bring us to the Father.

James K. Baxter, ‘Song to the Holy Spirit’, in Collected Poems (ed. John Edward Weir; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 572.