Ceremonial Bronze Doors, St. James Cathedral, Seattle

Do you ever wonder
what God was thinking
God
that casual calculated maker
of us
when He made
a blind man see
Flooded his world
with vision
A new horizon
of seeing the unseen
free to know and see
how wrong he was
about how the world
looked
back at him
Once blind
now seeing
how hard it is
to see
Remembering how blind
was so safe
and so
free.

Colin McArthur lives in Seattle and thrives when he is asking questions about the true nature of God.  He can be found on Twitter @colinjmcarthur, where you can find his sarcastic quips about weather and other conversation topics usually reserved for the elderly.

 

In the photo he carries her
As blood drips from her severed leg
Shattered by shrapnel
Extraordinary courage
Reads the caption and the Boston mayor
Says we are fearless
In the face of evil but in both
Of their eyes I see fear
I think this new day my son of the moments and
Years you have been your own only
Hero carrying your shattered self
In both of your eyes the fierce fearful
Resolve to carry on
From calamity
Both of your selves
Born into blood
Into the many selves you would need
Not only to carry but
Console and cajole and conjure and cling
The fear now
Held by another
One
With the fierce extraordinary courage to
Be

Scott Dewey is proud adoptive Dad of Crăciun Lingurar Dewey. Eighteen years ago today, Crăciun was born into a Roma (Gypsy) village in Romania. As a plaque in the Dewey home says, “God danced the day you were born.”

Christ is Risen. He is risen indeed!

Jesus calls us friend, knowing we will betray him. If there is an order to salvation, this is it.

“God is love” is a theological statement that is true to the core, but “God is friend,” this is the deeper mystery made real in Jesus. Friendship is salvation. All else is theological pretense and drivel. The Friend that dines with us, and washes our feet, also lays down his life for us. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends…I have called you friends” (John 15:13-15).

“You, heart closed up in a chest, open, for the Friend is entering.” Rumi

Hear afresh these words at the meal of Friendship,

On the night that Jesus was betrayed [by his friends from below, and arrested by his other friends from above], he took bread, blessed it, broke it, gave it to his disciples, and said, ‘Take and eat; this is my body, broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, blessed it, and gave it for all to drink, and said, ‘This cup is the blood of the new covenant, shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sin. Do this in remembrance of me.’

Dear friends of Jesus, we are forgiven—now—completely! May the great befriending of God break our heart’s wide open.

Christ is Risen. He is risen indeed!

“Start the drumbeat, everything we have said about the Friend is true. The beauty of that peacefulness makes the whole world restless…it is time to dance.” Rumi.

“From dust you were created; to dust you shall return.”

With those words, ashes were smeared on my forehead in the shape of a cross. For some reason the phrase startled me all over again. Maybe I just forgot exactly what gets said at the key moment this day?

The vertical thumb stroke: “From dust you were created.” The little bit of intimacy surprised me too. Brown eyes meeting mine, the press of another’s skin, the whispered voice. I felt myself flinch, before I relaxed into the word “created.” It is awkward but good, this alive created-ness, this being-touched.

Then the horizontal stroke: “To dust you shall return.” This last bit typically is the flinch-inducer. Not only the image of myself someday being sprinkled out of a tin can onto my favorite mountain meadow, but the word “shall.” That little word just kicks the phrase up a level of grave certainty. Whatever else will or will not be in store for me, my dusty endshall come.

Yes I remember this phrase well now, from many Ash Wednesdays. I didn’t grow up in a liturgical tradition, so I experienced it first as a young man in a church that nearly threw the pastor out for introducing the rite one spring. What were these dirty Catholic ashes doing in a Wesleyan church? Why this talk of death in the days leading to Easter, our great celebration of life? The scandal threw everything into a mess that spring, and some people left. It strikes me now that if liturgical folk were paying attention, the ashes of Lent might put us all into more of a scandalized mess than actually happens. We have just been told we shall die, and we file back into our chairs and fiddle with our programs? If the same message had just been delivered over the airplane intercom, would we quietly return to our seats, minds wandering to trivial stuff?

So it’s got my attention, this smear of ashes. But this spring, most surprising of all, the ashes mean for me freedom.

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A story I’ve told many times, but never written

Starts with me writing the letter K. I write it with blue ink.

It only stands for a nickname,

but it’s a glimpse of the transformation I long for.

A woven pen, with blue ink.

Simple and absolutely priceless.

From a dark corner of an infamous and forgotten prison

‘K’ spends the time of “his time” making crafts for sale.

And he wove it for me. Included my name on the weave.

Yes. My name with green thread.

They say that ink is a writer’s second blood.

And while I see the blue ink drying on the paper,

I can’t help think of the blood that covered the alleys

of his neighborhood, as I walked there so many times,

the same hands that shed so much blood,

have gifted me with one of my most valuable treasures.

A symbol that captures not only my heart for writing

but also a tool to give voice to the untold stories

that remain in the silence of those hard places.

This pen that is a constant reminder of why I do what I do.

Humbly, I hold it in my hands,

challenged by the privilege of seeing beyond.

Liz Herrera loves to learn, read, have a good cup of coffee and find creative ways to combine her passions: communications, urban ministries, social action and mixed media.  Liz is a journalist and has served alongside the team of CTM Guatemala since 2006 and worked for over 12 years among marginalized populations with churches and non-profit organizations. This poem was first published on her blog on November 20 2012.

He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts,
and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city
that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage
all it’s occasions shall dance for you.

Excerpt taken from WH Auden’s For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Written during World War II, the poem is about 1500 lines long, or 52 pages. For comparison: Shakespeare’s Macbeth is about 2100 lines long.

“Having the baby now…No time to get to the hospital…At the tea shop,” hollered the “Grandma” as she ran up the stairs past Iven to retrieve something from her room, looking understandably extremely anxious. We don’t know these neighbors well but have been trying to connect more, especially with the three younger children in their family of five – quickly becoming six – living in the tiny apartment that shares a wall with ours. The oldest of the kids who lives at home was nine months pregnant with her second baby and we had been greeting them with “Has the baby come yet?” for weeks already.

I took our own little baby Elian across the street to the sidewalk tea shop where the girl was laboring, in a lawn chair, just behind the tea cart. Her mom was hurriedly pacing back and forth on the street and people were yelling to get the girl in a taxi, while others hollered back, “there’s no time!”

I joined the small crowd of women gathered around her, trying not to be in the way, quietly praying and wondering if there was something I could do to help. One of my neighbors and I joked together about how little Elian had come to help encourage the baby that was getting ready to greet the world.

After just a few minutes a motorcycle pulled up with two men on it. Their police radios and first aid bag told me that they were some sort of official “first responders”. We had read a newspaper article recently (actually, on Elian’s due date) about how in Bangkok there is a special division of policemen on motorcycles that are trained and dispatched to deliver babies for women stuck in traffic. The guy they highlighted had just delivered his 42nd baby stuck in traffic.

My neighbor, however, didn’t even have time to start fighting the traffic to the hospital – less than a minute after the official looking guys arrived the girl started shrieking in a manner which told all of us that have given birth before that the baby was coming NOW. Most people started shrieking back and the men I had expected to come take control of the situation passed out two pairs of rubber gloves, said repeatedly, “better for the women to do it” and turned to walk the other way.

The woman who runs the tea cart looked at me and asked in Thai, “Tam Pben Mai? (Can you do it/Do you know how?)” I totally thought she was joking so I half laughed and responded with, “I don’t know how, but I can pray!!” She and one other girl I don’t know put on the gloves and several of us helped pull off the shorts and underwear of the laboring women, from beneath a sarong that was draped over her lap.

The girl’s shrieking made it clear that the baby’s arrival was quite imminent, and though I am sure everyone else there also recognized this, nobody did anything. Finally the younger girl with gloves picked up the sarong and sure enough revealed the head of a baby that had already emerged between his mother’s legs. She timidly put her gloved hand under the baby’s head and looked at me with terror, clearly totally overwhelmed. I thought, “this is ridiculous…someone needs to step in.” I turned to a neighbor and asked her to hold Elian, reached my hand out to motion for the tea shop lady’s gloves (who gleefully pulled them off and worked to get them onto my hands instead) and reached down to help guide the baby all the way out of his mama, and into this world.

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  ”All throughout the book of Mark, the disciples just don’t get it. They approach Jesus from a posture of hubris and show us that they don’t see straight. The literary counterpoint is the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, who sees rightly. Bartimaeus is blind. The disciples try to mute him. But his sense of hearing is strong.”

I may be a bit late to what’s been happening in pop music culture worldwide because of my recent transition to Duke but I am catching up on it now and I’ve been hearing a lot about “Gangnam style,” which is the title of a musical single by South Korean rapper Psy. Gangnam style is a Korean neologism that refers to the hip and trendy lifestyle of the Gangnam district of Seoul, Korea, which is supposedly the Beverly Hills of Seoul. This song was released on July 15, 2012, as the lead single of this rapper’s sixth album. Just to give you some sense of the buzz it has created—“Gangnam Style” debuted at number one on the national record chart of South Korea and as of October 23, 2012, the music video has been viewed over 530 million times on YouTube and is the site’s third most watched video and most watched Korean pop video. Guinness World Records has indicated that is the most ‘liked’ video in YouTube history.

There’ve been numerous parodies and reaction videos to Psy’s initial music video. Psy has demonstrated Gangnam style on Saturday Night Live, at Dodger Stadium, on the Ellen Degeneres show, and I’m contemplating whether to invite him here to Duke Chapel for a demonstration with the Chapel choir (I’m just kidding!) What’s drawn some of the most attention is the song’s dance moves which have been performed by different kinds of people all over the world. This musical phenomenon has been drawing and calling people to try out its dance moves. Just last weekend I saw a young man at the Duke football game against UNC doing the “Gangnam style.” I did not realize what I’ve been missing these last few months! Even Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and the British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon have been seen dancing “gangnam style”!  Who would have thought?! What we expect is not always what we get.

We expect the disciples to have their religious act together with every i dotted and every t crossed, to have every hair in place and to know the exact time to do the sign of the cross. We expect them to do what is right and what is holy and what is just and what is Christ-like. But in last week’s passage in Mark, we find something else out about the disciples. They just don’t get it. When Jesus asks James and John the same question that rolls off his lips today, “what do you want me to do for you?” we might expect them, disciples of Jesus the Christ, to ask for something admirable and deeply pietistic. Instead, they try to control the boundaries of God’s answer by telling Jesus to give them whatever they ask for and what they ask for is to sit at his right and left hand in glory. They want the Trinity to take in two more members and become a Holy Pentagon. They seemed to have been mentored by Joel Osteen’s book, Your Best Life Now. They want glitz and glamor and prestige and power. Didn’t Jesus just predict for a third time his death and resurrection? And the only thing that James and John can worry about is their own glory? Little do they know what they are asking for because as Jesus implies, the irony is that God’s glory is gory and his imminent future entails a baptism in blood. The disciples, those who are supposed to be in the know, a part of the gnostic insider clan of Jesus, are actually spiritually blind, blinded by their own ambition. All throughout the book of Mark, the disciples just don’t get it. They approach Jesus from a posture of hubris and show us that they don’t see straight.

The literary counterpoint this week is the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, who sees rightly. He approaches Jesus with a posture of humility. He asks for mercy as we do in many Sunday services in our communal prayer of confession (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy). His approach to Jesus is a correction to the distorted discipleship of James and John. Bartimaeus desires to be freed from an affliction; he’s not seeking authority or affluence. This man, an outsider in society, usually overlooked in the community of humanity, and whom people order to be quiet, like the disciples said to him, is the one who models Christian discipleship. The unlikely outsider understands over against the insider-information disciples. Two blind characters in Mark, the man on whose eyes Jesus puts saliva in Mark chapter 8 and Bartimaeus, frame the conversation about discipleship and the blindness of the disciples. These two blind men see with eyes of faith. This is the paradox of the gospel and it should always surprise us because what we expect is not always what we get.

Bartimaeus is blind. The disciples try to mute him. But his sense of hearing is strong. “When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out…” so that Jesus could hear him. I don’t know what he heard. I don’t know if someone said something to Bartimaeus. I don’t know if he heard the shuffle of Jesus’s feet or the tone of Jesus’s voice.  I don’t know if there was news coverage about Jesus. As far as I know Jesus was not one of the topics at the presidential debates. But Bartimaeus hears that it is Jesus without any mention of a sound in the biblical text. And because he knows who Jesus is, he cries out loudly for mercy on his misery.

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