A Spirituality that grows life, joy and peace

-
The Vanishing Point
A pastor in the Southern USA started her own church because, as a Lesbian, she had begun to feel that whatever her graces, however strong her faith, her acceptance in her Protestant congregation would always hinge around her sexual orientation. I heard an interview with her as I drove home from a meeting in Langham, and I'm still pondering an intriguing point she made. Our sacred texts—The Bible, The Quoran—should never have had back covers put on them, meaning that if these texts are inspired by God—as she believes—does it follow that their contents were all God had to say?

“I'm not represented in scriptures,” she said, “and there are any number of life situations people face that simply didn't exist or were ignored when the scriptures were declared complete.” She has a point; how often have we debated moral issues by extrapolating from scriptures what we think they would say if written in our time? We call it discernment, but that exaggerates our competence in bringing about unity of faith and purpose: our “discernment” rests on the foundation of our pasts, earlier convictions, solidarity with those sharing a similar worldview.

Her church has become a place of asylum for refugees from the world of addiction, anger, neglect and loss. “A spirituality that doesn't grow life, joy and peace is poor indeed,” she said (or similar words; I was driving, I don't write things down while driving.) Her parishioners testified that she is a pastor who meets and loves everyone with a depth they've never before experienced. She has become an island of sanctuary for many. She gets pain, really gets it.
What this pastor practices is what some have called primary justice. It's the application of the Old Testament witness, of Jesus' reiteration, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: peace rests on a foundation of righteousness and justice. When we confuse righteousness with piety, we repeat the error of the scribes and the pharisees whom Jesus rebuked repeatedly. Whether or not we carry our Bibles to church every Sunday is irrelevant to the definition of righteousness; how we enable the poor, the hungry, the widows and orphans, the despised and the imprisoned are all at the core of the righteous life lived.

There are efforts to applauded as well as failures to be mourned. Through numerous NGOs, restorative justice is slowly catching hold in limited settings. Through education and development training, poorer nations are being helped along a path to primary justice: equality, self-sufficiency, fairness and freedom.

What is God's word for the Twenty-first Century? Let's all think about it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Democracy or bust

-
Image
  Politics . You can tell how people relate to this word by the way they use it. “I’m not much interested in politics,” for instance, equates it with the day-to-day news about our current government, elections, party dynamics, etc. A narrow definition.                By whatever word we use, it’s clear that the setting and enforcing of the principles under which we form community—and function as community—existed before the word was coined. In families, in schools, in workplaces, on the roads, in the economy, the making and respecting of agreed-to behavioural expectations in a community is the necessary defense against chaos.                How behavioural expectations come to be, how they are altered, how they are enforced … and most importantly by whose authority … is fundamental. The “benevolent dictator” model has a long history: give...
Read more

Do I dare eat a peach?

-
Image
  All the talk of Joe Biden’s unfitness for the position of president of the USA must have others of his age—80 plus—wondering about their own fitness. Most of us octogenarians are well aware of our physical limitations, I think, but mentally? How can I know, for instance, if the lines I’m writing are logically sound, or if they fall somewhere between inane and gibberish? How can I know if my diminished capacity can be trusted to make such a judgment? And what if my friends are too kind to tell me when to close my laptop? Hearing an aging loved one tell the same stories to the same people every day has the able-minded nodding knowingly and cluckingly (that’s a word, isn’t it?). We’re obviously too kind and too hip not to know that people experiencing obvious dementia deserve to be “handled with care,” and we’ve devised places and strategies to preserve for them whatever dignity is still possible. But it’s not dissimilar from the pain-relieving, ointment applying, chair-exercisin...
Read more

Stories We Live By

-
Image
  David Brooks, writer, philosopher and journalist, said in a recent speech to the Aspen Ideas gathering that the current divisive, belligerent mood among the people of earth can’t be attributed to our real-life situations. We have space, food, water, shelter, healthcare enough for everyone, and more. We don’t fight because we need to, he said, but because we carry stories in our heads to which we respond. It's clear that he doesn’t mean story in the same way I meant it when I published a collection of short stories , but there’s something to be gained in connecting the two, particularly when behaviour is guided by, for instance, The Holy Bible , or the Quran , each telling a story by which adherents understand life and by which their actions are governed. Scientists, as a rule, act according to a very different story of life, their exploration guided very much by the saga of evolving nature and the incontrovertible principles that govern all things. Our stories —I think Broo...
Read more