tchotchke \CHAHCH-kuh\ - knickknack, trinket
An English word apparently originally from Polish by way of Yiddish.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
A planned attack
In this morning's dream, Jodi (my former choir director) and I were plotting with a small group to assassinate the POTUS by suicide stealth bomb. There was some sort of experimental, high-tech explosive that Jodi was to smuggle through the airport to our destination in a pair of travel support hose (we were only bothering with the airport because there was some sort of trip or delegation planned that we were to be a part of), and sure enough got it through undetected. When we arrived at our destination and got in our limo, I expected we were to pick up the target, but we really were just being transported to the hotel where the actual bombing was to occur. We checked into our room, and got a visual on our target (who was now Fr. Cy Middendorf, God rest his soul) down in the lobby, but he wasn't going to be there long and that wasn't where the attack was to occur because of the collateral damage. We were in a tiered conference room when a couple of obvious undercover homeland security agents were hovering us to catch us in the act, so they could charge us with attempted terrorism rather than merely conspiracy. But it turns out that we were actually trying to thwart the attack ourselves, and were just playing along with the conspirators. We split up and shook our agents and I was quickly walking through the halls of the hotel looking for Jodi by trying to find the correct elevator where the attack was to occur.
Dreams are freaking weird.
Dreams are freaking weird.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
My Substitute
A basic part of Christian theology is the idea of sacrificial substitution: Christ bore the burden of our sins so that we could be set free from it. Some of us come to a personal understanding of this concept that fills us with an abiding gratitude to God for his gift of atoning salvation, which drives our life in a very different direction. As a result we begin to participate with the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives, who directs us into very different pathways than we'd otherwise follow and transforms us into very different people than we would be on our own.
I'm getting a different glimpse into this than I've ever had before, one with which I must be very careful because of its potential to lead me back to an emotionally unhealthy place. Yet I think it is not only worthwhile to give it appropriate consideration, it may be a gift from God in this season of Lent.
Seventeen years ago, I received mercy I didn't deserve. At the time, I didn't really recognize how true that was. At first, at least, it felt unfair that my own actions to address the wrong I'd done led me at all into the legal consequences of my wrongdoing. I came to understand that entire cause-and-effect much better. Now, however, I find myself appalled by the sentence handed down against a dear old friend, especially in comparison with my own, when my own actions were so much more damaging than his were. When I was discussing this with my bride the other evening, she expressed how she is likewise taken aback, and couldn't help but point out the undeniable truth that what I did was so much worse than our friend's crime. She wasn't putting me down with that; it's just that the severity of our friend's punishment is more along the lines of what I deserved than what he did. Now as we exchange correspondence and I read his wife's posts of his e-mails detailing his experiences in prison - which is coincidentally located on what was part of an Air Force Base on which he once served at least a TDY - I can't help but get a clearer picture of what I deserved.
I know he isn't there in my place - I completely know this. As much as he loves me (and I him), I know that my friend would not have chosen to bear my penalty for me had he been offered the opportunity to do so. I'm confident that he doesn't blame me for the position he's in; when he expresses his anger about his current situation, it is anger at himself for the choices he has made, not over the social climate that played a role in his punishment being so much more extreme than he really deserved - a climate which one could argue all offenders have played a role in creating.
Yet still it feels as if, as a result of his incarceration, I am getting a deeper insight into and understanding of what it really means that Jesus accepted the penalty for my sin. The pain and humiliation of a crown of thorns is foreign to me, but my friend's separation from his family is real, and something I have experienced to a lesser degree. The flogging that Jesus experienced for my sake is a pain unlike any I have ever known, but my friend's fear of what his experience in prison might become is frightfully familiar. And the burden of bearing the world's guilt in the gruesome crucifixion on that cross is utterly alien to me, and so the idea that Jesus bore it for me has always been a little distant, but this feeling that my friend's place should have been mine helps me to feel more grateful than ever to Jesus for taking my place.
I'm getting a different glimpse into this than I've ever had before, one with which I must be very careful because of its potential to lead me back to an emotionally unhealthy place. Yet I think it is not only worthwhile to give it appropriate consideration, it may be a gift from God in this season of Lent.
Seventeen years ago, I received mercy I didn't deserve. At the time, I didn't really recognize how true that was. At first, at least, it felt unfair that my own actions to address the wrong I'd done led me at all into the legal consequences of my wrongdoing. I came to understand that entire cause-and-effect much better. Now, however, I find myself appalled by the sentence handed down against a dear old friend, especially in comparison with my own, when my own actions were so much more damaging than his were. When I was discussing this with my bride the other evening, she expressed how she is likewise taken aback, and couldn't help but point out the undeniable truth that what I did was so much worse than our friend's crime. She wasn't putting me down with that; it's just that the severity of our friend's punishment is more along the lines of what I deserved than what he did. Now as we exchange correspondence and I read his wife's posts of his e-mails detailing his experiences in prison - which is coincidentally located on what was part of an Air Force Base on which he once served at least a TDY - I can't help but get a clearer picture of what I deserved.
I know he isn't there in my place - I completely know this. As much as he loves me (and I him), I know that my friend would not have chosen to bear my penalty for me had he been offered the opportunity to do so. I'm confident that he doesn't blame me for the position he's in; when he expresses his anger about his current situation, it is anger at himself for the choices he has made, not over the social climate that played a role in his punishment being so much more extreme than he really deserved - a climate which one could argue all offenders have played a role in creating.
Yet still it feels as if, as a result of his incarceration, I am getting a deeper insight into and understanding of what it really means that Jesus accepted the penalty for my sin. The pain and humiliation of a crown of thorns is foreign to me, but my friend's separation from his family is real, and something I have experienced to a lesser degree. The flogging that Jesus experienced for my sake is a pain unlike any I have ever known, but my friend's fear of what his experience in prison might become is frightfully familiar. And the burden of bearing the world's guilt in the gruesome crucifixion on that cross is utterly alien to me, and so the idea that Jesus bore it for me has always been a little distant, but this feeling that my friend's place should have been mine helps me to feel more grateful than ever to Jesus for taking my place.
Universal prayers
"Lord, I have cried to you, hear me." This is a prayer we can all say. This is not my prayer, but that of the whole Christ. Rather, it is said in the name of his body. - St. Augustine
I think we sometimes forget, in our lamentations before the Lord, that we are not in this alone. Our needs seem pressing, and we can get our whole attention on them rather than on the bigger picture. I think that is both a gift to us and a shortcoming to work on. We're too small to embrace all the needs of our brothers and sisters throughout the world, to be cognizant of them, nor even in many cases to do anything about the ones we are. But by remembering as we face our challenges that we are united in our struggling with every one of our fellow members of Christ's body, perhaps our journey through this life's challenges can be less egocentric and more compassionate.
"Let my prayer rise like incense in your sight; let the raising of my hands be an evening sacrifice." This is generally understood of Christ, the head. - ibid.
I now understand better why we pray this at evening prayer. I never connected it before with its fulfillment in the raising of Jesus' arms upon the cross. And if we are the body, are not we, too, joined in this prayer with him, sacrificed, crushed in our afflictions for the sake of the whole body? It is both a prayer of triumph and a joining of our struggles with the larger desire of God to have all of his beloved children brought home to him.
A day late with this reflection, but maybe another later on today's readings . . .
I think we sometimes forget, in our lamentations before the Lord, that we are not in this alone. Our needs seem pressing, and we can get our whole attention on them rather than on the bigger picture. I think that is both a gift to us and a shortcoming to work on. We're too small to embrace all the needs of our brothers and sisters throughout the world, to be cognizant of them, nor even in many cases to do anything about the ones we are. But by remembering as we face our challenges that we are united in our struggling with every one of our fellow members of Christ's body, perhaps our journey through this life's challenges can be less egocentric and more compassionate.
"Let my prayer rise like incense in your sight; let the raising of my hands be an evening sacrifice." This is generally understood of Christ, the head. - ibid.
I now understand better why we pray this at evening prayer. I never connected it before with its fulfillment in the raising of Jesus' arms upon the cross. And if we are the body, are not we, too, joined in this prayer with him, sacrificed, crushed in our afflictions for the sake of the whole body? It is both a prayer of triumph and a joining of our struggles with the larger desire of God to have all of his beloved children brought home to him.
A day late with this reflection, but maybe another later on today's readings . . .
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Chances to grow
I know how hard our first ME weekend was for you. It's hard to believe it was 25 years ago. I keep thinking it was 1987, but I know it was just a couple months before Karen died, so definitely '88.
Of course I would love to make another weekend with you! Did you really think I wouldn't? Or I'd love to go to the regional conference with you this summer. I'm willing to do either, and I think that either choice fits right in with our determination to make our relationship a higher priority. And yes, darling, I'm willing to reschedule my plans for next month, if that ends up being the best weekend for us. My friends will understand. I'd still rather go to the one at the Cliffside Retreat Center in September; I think it will be a better environment. The rooms have private baths and individual heat/ac units, so those concerns are addressed. The only downside: twin beds!
I love you.
Of course I would love to make another weekend with you! Did you really think I wouldn't? Or I'd love to go to the regional conference with you this summer. I'm willing to do either, and I think that either choice fits right in with our determination to make our relationship a higher priority. And yes, darling, I'm willing to reschedule my plans for next month, if that ends up being the best weekend for us. My friends will understand. I'd still rather go to the one at the Cliffside Retreat Center in September; I think it will be a better environment. The rooms have private baths and individual heat/ac units, so those concerns are addressed. The only downside: twin beds!
I love you.
Except they'd never sing this
I'm feeling really Class of '57 today. Must remember the bigger story I'm a part of.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Striking the root of the matter
I just can't pick a phrase or two from today's second reading from the Office of Readings that particularly struck me. Usually I prefer the selections that are chosen from the early church fathers, which often resonate with their timeless truth. Yet today's reading from the documents of the Second Vatican Council kept drawing me into its own veritas as I continued to read. A couple of things in particular struck me, and I hope I'm able to capture them before my own thoughts obscure them.
Without God, the higher kind of life to which we aspire is obscured, taking the form of our mere dreams and wishes. Sometimes there is a sincere element of selflessness in this striving, insofar as we are able to understand and apply it. But what we understand to be the freedom to live this higher calling becomes instead an enslavement to the ideas, the dogma, that becomes an empty shadow of the true freedom we find only in living in God's love.
Without God, we do not understand our weakness and our sinfulness properly. Rather, we often mistake these characteristics as noble causes which we should embrace, or toward which we should strive. And the power of our own wants can become all the more consuming if we have no source we trust that might serve to steer us away from them. The unhappiness we experience in response to our failure to understand that our loving God is providing for our true needs ends up driving us toward more unhappiness, for ourselves and for those whom we are trying to love as well as we can.
These questions with which we grapple should serve to bring us to a relationship with God. Yet when we begin the struggle with an inner conviction that God cannot be the answer because there is no god, that indeed no rational person should believe in any form of god, they can indeed drive us to despair. By no means is this inevitable; there are undoubtedly atheists who accept their fatalistic position with an inner peace, but in my experience they are often driven off of their precarious peaceful perch when they encounter various sorts of upheaval in their lives or opposition to their point of view.
Yet faith in God does free us from our own inner struggle between sinfulness and righteousness, nor from our tendency to close off when we are hurt rather than reconcile. The battle wages within us even when we believe in God, even when we have a relationship with him that transforms us, and the efficacy of that transformation wanes when we fail to give ourselves regularly and with increasing consistency to this most perfect of loves. I cannot fully imagine the effect that not believing must have on that battle, and pray that I never will experience it.
Only the conclusion of this selection, its last three brief paragraphs, provide the proper context for the resolution of this conflict, and therein can be found the only way to approach it that brings life rather than death, selfless love instead of narcissism, grace and forgiveness in place of vengeance and judgment.
Yet none of these positive approaches is possible of our own effort. Only the Holy Spirit can manifest grace, and at our best we merely participate in and give ourselves over to this work of God.
Without God, the higher kind of life to which we aspire is obscured, taking the form of our mere dreams and wishes. Sometimes there is a sincere element of selflessness in this striving, insofar as we are able to understand and apply it. But what we understand to be the freedom to live this higher calling becomes instead an enslavement to the ideas, the dogma, that becomes an empty shadow of the true freedom we find only in living in God's love.
Without God, we do not understand our weakness and our sinfulness properly. Rather, we often mistake these characteristics as noble causes which we should embrace, or toward which we should strive. And the power of our own wants can become all the more consuming if we have no source we trust that might serve to steer us away from them. The unhappiness we experience in response to our failure to understand that our loving God is providing for our true needs ends up driving us toward more unhappiness, for ourselves and for those whom we are trying to love as well as we can.
These questions with which we grapple should serve to bring us to a relationship with God. Yet when we begin the struggle with an inner conviction that God cannot be the answer because there is no god, that indeed no rational person should believe in any form of god, they can indeed drive us to despair. By no means is this inevitable; there are undoubtedly atheists who accept their fatalistic position with an inner peace, but in my experience they are often driven off of their precarious peaceful perch when they encounter various sorts of upheaval in their lives or opposition to their point of view.
Yet faith in God does free us from our own inner struggle between sinfulness and righteousness, nor from our tendency to close off when we are hurt rather than reconcile. The battle wages within us even when we believe in God, even when we have a relationship with him that transforms us, and the efficacy of that transformation wanes when we fail to give ourselves regularly and with increasing consistency to this most perfect of loves. I cannot fully imagine the effect that not believing must have on that battle, and pray that I never will experience it.
Only the conclusion of this selection, its last three brief paragraphs, provide the proper context for the resolution of this conflict, and therein can be found the only way to approach it that brings life rather than death, selfless love instead of narcissism, grace and forgiveness in place of vengeance and judgment.
Yet none of these positive approaches is possible of our own effort. Only the Holy Spirit can manifest grace, and at our best we merely participate in and give ourselves over to this work of God.
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