Posts Tagged ‘Identity’
A Transformational Response – Br. Lain Wilson
I have always heard about the fast-changing weather in the New Hampshire White Mountains, but actually experiencing it was something else entirely. Last summer I spent about a week up in the White Mountains, beginning with three days in the Pemigewasset Wilderness. We got up to the tent site shortly before dark, and had daylight enough to summit the nearby Mount Lincoln. The evening was clear and somewhat cool, and we could see for miles in all directions—but especially north and east, toward our goal for the next day’s hike.
This is some of the most stunning scenery in New England. So naturally everything changed the next day.
Fog settled heavily on the ridgeline, and we weren’t able to see much more than a hundred feet or so in front of us for most of the morning. Peak after peak passed with little more than a gray blanket enshrouding us, oppressive and damp. It was a stunning reversal. Whereas the day before I had measured my view in miles, today it was in feet—checking the granite rocks just in front of me, looking ahead for the next blaze, the next turning. This was the same landscape I had looked down out on yesterday, but it was as though I had been transported to another place entirely.
We all face challenges, seeming reversals of what we thought we knew, radical shifts in the weather of our lives. I had one on my hike, the disciples had theirs in their daily following of Jesus, and I’m sure you’ve had your own version—maybe a crisis at work, or a challenge at home, or a seeming block in prayer. If we’re being honest, we can face these each day as we are invited into fresh encounter: “New every morning is the love our wakening and uprising prove,” John Keble writes. What I think unifies these experiences is that they pose to us three fundamental questions: What am I doing? Why am I doing it? And who am I to be doing it? Read More
Gifts of Character – Br. Lain Wilson
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When we hear “south of France” today, we may think of sunny beaches or fields of lavender. A nice place to go on vacation. But in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the association was with heresy. Followers of a heterodox form of Christianity, whom history has come to know as Cathars, were prevalent throughout the region. Combatting their beliefs posed a particular challenge for a Church mired in its own problems. Actual combat followed the murder of a papal official in 1208: the Albigensian Crusade was a brutal war to cleanse the region of heresy.
This was the time and region where Dominic, whom we remember today, discovered his own vocation. He had been in the church his entire life, but it was during a trip through the region, before the outbreak of war, that he found his own gifts of preaching and teaching, and his personal asceticism meeting the Church’s need to engage, teach, and convert those caught up in heterodox belief. It is perhaps no accident that in his own life he modeled the very characteristics that were most highly prized by so-called Cathars in the region: he didn’t eat meat, he refrained throughout his life from sexual activity, and he voluntarily accepted simple, even rough way of life. Read More
Our Metamorphosis in Christ – Br. Keith Nelson
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Feast of the Transfiguration
Exodus 34:29-35
2 Peter 1:13-21
Luke 9:28-36
At its heart, the Feast of the Transfiguration is about the revelation of who God is in and through Jesus Christ – and in and through his followers as we are transfigured by this experiential knowledge.
At first, this innermost identity is like a “shared secret” among Jesus’ early followers: it participates in the elusive quality of light, something that cannot be directly named. But after the resurrection, the light of Christ is made manifest in word and deed by those baptized into Christ’s body.
In this way, the transfiguration of Christ is about who we are at our secret core; and about who we claim to be when we tell our full story in broad daylight. On this side of Easter, the Transfiguration is always a foretaste of Resurrection glory; silence dissolves into proclamation, with or without words.
There are two scriptural keys in the New Testament that illuminate our participation in Christ’s deepest identity as God’s Beloved Son.
The first is in the twelfth chapter of Romans, where St. Paul writes: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Read More
A Clear Witness – Br. Lain Wilson
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We remember today the southern African missionary and martyr Bernard Mizeki. Born in modern-day Mozambique, he came to the Christian faith while a young man in South Africa, where he was baptized in 1866 by Father Puller of our Society. In 1891, he traveled to Mashonaland, in the northeast of modern-day Zimbabwe, to serve as a missionary to the Shona people.
In the year of his death, 1896, rebellion against the British South African Company spread to the Shona people, and Mizeki resisted orders to escape to safety. Resentment and violence served as a backdrop to Mizeki’s own death that June at the hands of one of his adopted kinsmen, the tension between traditional religion and Mizeki’s work spreading the Gospel message coming to a tragic head.
Martyrs capture our imaginations. We may read about the great martyrs of the early church who endured shocking, inhuman treatment, and we can wonder at their strength of conviction, at their fearless resolve, at their seeming superhuman capacity. They were very close, in time and culture, to Jesus and his words from our Gospel lesson: “do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more” (Lk 12:4). As we read about these martyrs, it is easy for us to wonder at and admire them . . . and at the same time to handle them with a critical distance: then and now, them and us. Read More
God’s Pity – Br. Curtis Almquist
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Br. Curtis Almquist
If you have occasion to study a tapestry or quilt, where you can view both the front side and the back side, you often discover that though the front side may be more beautiful, the back side is more instructive and shows all the quite-hidden work that has enabled what is presented on the front side. That is a fact of life.
There is a word which surfaces in the Psalm we prayed a moment ago. This same word appears many times elsewhere in the psalter: pity.[i] The word “pity” comes from the same etymological root as our word “piety.” Pity is a holy compassion, and it begins with God’s piety. The psalmist cries out:
Have pity on me, Lord, for I am weak;
heal me, Lord, for my bones are racked.[ii]
The psalmist also proclaims:
[God]shall have pity on the lowly and poor
[and]shall preserve the lives of the needy.[iii]
Isn’t it so reassuring that God, as the master weaver, knows us: knows what we present “up front,” and knows from whence it all comes, our “back side.” Isn’t it comforting that God who created us, calls us, uses us, is thankful for us, knows us well, pities us with a loving compassion.
Today we remember our departed Brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist who, over the years, died in the month of May. We cherish these archival memories of our predecessors. God took pity on them, the complex and sometimes-tangled threads of their lives, and wove into them such amazing, distinctive, colorful, often complex and beautiful lives. We remember these departed Brothers both with amazement and with gratitude. We also remember how they give witness to God who looks on us all with such loving pity, and with such promise.
[i]For example, Psalm 9:13; 17:10; 25:15; 26:11; 72:13; 109:11.
[ii] Psalm 6:2.
[iii] Psalm 72:13.
You Are a Spice Rack – Br. Lain Wilson
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I’m sure most of us have spices in our pantries that just don’t get used that often. For me it’s fennel seed. I don’t really know what to do with it, and I’m happy using all the other, familiar spices.
And I’m sure that most of us can agree that cooking with just salt and pepper can be fairly boring.
As rich as the psalmist’s conception of God is, his descriptions of fellow people often feel a bit like salt-and-pepper cooking to me—simple binaries, like “righteous” and “wicked,” or types—the faithless friend. Of course, this isn’t what the Psalms are about; nevertheless, I often can’t help feeling a bit dissatisfied.
This morning’s Gospel reading displays a different dynamic. John describes the crowd as divided into at least three groups, in addition to the various authorities (who are themselves divided), and Jesus and his followers. This is a dramatic scene, with different beliefs, commitments, values, and desires demarcating the lines between and within the groups.
Nicodemus represents this. He’s a Pharisee and leader (Jn 3:1; Jn 7:50), who lays claim to “our law,” committed to both its authority and limitations. He’s also possibly a secret follower of Jesus, having come to him under cover of night earlier in the narrative. What he shows us here is not that his identities are exclusive, but that their coincidence, mixing, and expression make him an individual, set apart from the group. They give him agency, make him able to reach out, to speak for, to meet and relate with others in a different way. Read More
Mary’s Brain – Br. Lain Wilson
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What if this story is all about Mary’s brain?
The beats of today’s Gospel reading are familiar to most of us. Here at the Monastery, we recount them in the Angelus, which we pray before Morning and Evening Prayer. “The angel of the Lord announced unto Mary . . .” pause, “and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.”
So much happens in that pause. And what if it’s all about Mary’s brain?
Of all the young women God could have chosen, God chose Mary. And what is the first thing we find out about her? That she hears the angel’s news, is perplexed, ponders over his words, and questions him. The first thing we find out about Mary is that she responds to God by using her own God-given faculties of reason and intelligence.
Byzantine writer Nicholas Mesarites provides a cognitive description of this episode: “The word comes to the hearing of the Virgin, and enters through it to the brain; the intelligence which is seated in the brain at once lays hold upon what comes to it, recognizes it by its perception, and then communicates to the heart itself what it had understood.”[1] This then leads Mary to question the angel to determine the truth of the angel’s words. Only after she verifies the truth does Mary gives her yes to the angel, and to God. Read More
Becoming Whole; Becoming Holy – Br. Curtis Almquist
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Br. Curtis Almquist
Saint Paul writes about our “sanctification” as if we would know what he is talking about. In the original Greek, the generic meaning of “sanctification” is “the state of proper functioning.” To sanctify someone or something is to set that person or thing apart for the use intended by its designer. A well is “sanctified” when it is used as a source of water. A wineskin is “sanctified” when it is used to store wine. For us, eyeglasses are “sanctified” when used to improve sight. In the theological sense, things are “sanctified” when they are used for the purpose God intends. A human being is “sanctified” when they live according to God’s unique design and purpose for their life.[i]
When we wake up each morning, we can presume God’s presence, and power, and provision. We have been kept alive for as much as one more day to know God, and to love God, and to serve God as only we, uniquely, can do. [ii] We wake up each morning on a mission to bear the beams of God’s light, and life, and love as only we, uniquely, can do. It’s why we are still alive. Which turns life into such an amazing adventure. This is the core meaning of “sanctification”: living our lives according to God’s unique design and purpose for our life. Read More
Everything You Do Matters – Br. Lain Wilson
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Feast of Saint James of Jerusalem
When was the last time you wore a uniform?
I remember all the uniforms I’ve worn over the years, whether for sports or school or choir. They each signaled commitment, belonging, and interest, and equipped me for performance. I also remember something my parents told me: that when I wore a uniform, I wasn’t only representing myself—I was representing the group I belonged to. I took on the reputation of the group when I put on the uniform—and, just as importantly, my behavior contributed back to that reputation. Whose you are matters, and everything you do while wearing the uniform also matters.
I have these two themes, belonging and action, on my mind today, the feast of Saint James of Jerusalem. The early Church recognized him, as we do, as a brother of Jesus, as attested in our Gospel lesson. But he wasn’t just a relative. Other biblical texts, including our readings from Acts and 1 Corinthians, show that James was one of the leaders of the Christian community in Jerusalem. Nonbiblical sources, meanwhile, signal that James was not only one of but the leader of the Jerusalem Church, a figure of towering importance for a community that faced fundamental questions of identity and mission. In particular, James was the leader of the group that argued for continued observance of at least some Jewish laws by followers of Jesus, in contrast to leaders like Paul who advocated for the development of a Christian community free of requirements of the law. Read More
Make Your Gifts Your Prayer – Br. Lain Wilson
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Leviticus 23:1-11, 26-38
Matthew 13:54-58
A juggler enters a monastery. He soon discovers that, unlike the other monks, he’s not good at typical monkish things: he can’t cook, he can’t sing, he has terrible handwriting. The only thing he can do is juggle, and what use is that? In despair, he goes one night to a statue of the Virgin Mary . . . and juggles—offering to her, as his prayer, the only thing he has.
The medieval French tale of the “Juggler of Our Lady” imparts a familiar lesson: God gives us gifts that God wants us to use and to offer back in prayer and worship. Our reading from Leviticus this morning gets at something similar: “When you enter the land I am giving to you and you reap its harvest, you shall bring the first sheaf of your harvest to the priest” (Lev 23:10). This section of the reading is from the oldest layer of this passage, and significantly is directed not at the collective, or to priests, but to the individual farmer. “I have given you, as a gift, this land—you shall give me, as a gift, the fruits of that land.” Read More