Posts Tagged ‘Truth’
Blinded by our Assumptions – Br. David Vryhof
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Br. David Vryhof
Poor Job. In the midst of a prosperous life, he suddenly meets with a series of calamities. His fortune disappears, his sheep and camels are stolen, his children die in a tragic accident, and he finds himself banished to the edge of the city, diseased and covered with nasty sores.
But Job’s suffering goes beyond these tragic physical losses. He also suffers emotionally because he cannot understand WHY this has happened to him. Has God abandoned him? Is God punishing him?
Despite all his troubles, Job refuses to curse God. His response is remarkable: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away,” he says, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
Three friends, learning of his misfortune, travel to see him and to offer comfort. And at first, they do just that. They cry out to God, they tear their clothes, they sprinkle ashes on their heads, and they sit in silence with him for seven days and seven nights. But then their patience runs out and they feel compelled to offer their opinions about WHY Job has suffered this string of tragedies. Read More
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
Pray Facing Death – Br. Luke Ditewig
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Br. Luke Ditewig
Today is our monthly requiem in which we remember the dead, the dying, and our mortality.
Psalm 139 says: “Lord, you have searched me out and known me.” Jesus knows everything about us, both what we don’t mind sharing and what we try to hide. Jesus knows our sitting down and rising up, our thoughts, our ways. Jesus knows all the places we’ve gone, all the journeys we’ve taken and where we’ve stopped to rest. God knows all.
But we try to hide. We often shy away from God by denying death, pretending God can’t see or that we don’t need to speak. We like to think “the darkness will cover [us],” but as the psalmist says: “darkness is not dark to you [O God]; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike.” Read More
Offered Humbly – Br. Luke Ditewig
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Br. Luke Ditewig
Aidan of Lindisfarne
In the seventh century, Aidan, a monk on Iona in Scotland, was sent to establish a monastery on Lindisfarne in northern England. Like Columba who led much missionary work out from Iona, Aidan led great evangelism from Lindisfarne.
Aiden sent monks out, two by two, into the neighboring villages and countryside. He gave two noteworthy instructions: First, travel on foot, not horseback. Second, do not carry a knife or any sort of weapon for defense. Travel then was very dangerous, so this was remarkable.
Aiden instructed ways to live like Jesus not simply speak about Jesus. Walking instead of riding, they went like their neighbors, as equals instead of with additional power and privilege. Without weapons to fight, they resisted violence with vulnerability. Aiden and his monks embodied the gospel, and they were well received. Offered humbly, good news spread quickly. Read More
Family Photographs – Br. Lain Wilson
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Today’s Gospel lesson isn’t about Jesus.
Rather, it’s not about the Jesus we have come to know, to accompany in his ministry with the disciples. Instead, it’s about another Jesus, one of memory, of presumption, and of misplaced expectation.
In the Rule of our Society, we understand as part of the practice of silence the honoring of “the mystery present in the hearts of our brothers and sisters, strangers and enemies,” a letting go of “curiosity, presumption, and condemnation which pretends to penetrate the mystery of their hearts.”[1]
We can see in our Gospel reading today what this looks like in practice. It is significant, I think, that the only references to Jesus’s “hidden years”—those years of growth and formation between infancy and baptism—in Matthew’s gospel (and Mark’s) is this brief encounter between Jesus and those from his hometown. It’s a relic of a silent period, a family photograph held in the hands of these people, who glance uncomprehendingly between it and the living Jesus standing before them. Read More
The Unclarity of Holiness – Br. Lucas Hall
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Br. Lucas Hall
One of my favorite films came out roughly five years ago. It’s called A Hidden Life. It’s a Terrence Malick film, if you’re familiar with him. One reviewer called it a “grand cathedral” of a movie. And I agree, because it’s very big. It’s about three hours long. It’s quite quiet, reflective. The story—It’s based on a true story—of an Austrian, alpine farmer, living in a small, rural village during the Second World War. He receives a draft summons to join the Nazi army, and he can’t. His conscience will not allow him to swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. He is told repeatedly that it’s merely a formality, that he can be assigned to non-violent, non-combat work. He could even be assigned to hospital work. He could help people, save lives.
No. He refuses over and over again. He is imprisoned. His wife and children are ostracized in their village. He is tortured, beaten, moved around from prison to prison to prison, interrogated. His wife is brought to him to try and convince him, remind him of what he’s giving up. Instead, she agrees with him, and encourages him, and says she will be with him, whatever he decides. So he stands firm. Ultimately, he is executed. That story has a clear hero, a clear main character, but what really struck me about the film was the way it ended with this man’s death. Because he, with a number of other prisoners, was brought to a place of execution, a military installation. It was a gray, cloudy day. They were sitting outside in a gravel courtyard area. One by one, they were brought into a dingy old building with a concrete floor and unceremoniously killed. It wasn’t a heroic setting. It was mundane, normal, dingy, depressing. And each of these people to be executed had no idea whether they were on the winning side or not. There was certainly no hint of it at the end of their lives, powerless against a much bigger foe, and ultimately killed. Read More
Captives to Truth – Br. Lain Wilson
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Feast of Irenaeus of Lyons
“And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness” (2 Tim 2:24-25).
I’m not sure “gentle” is how I’d first characterize Irenaeus, the second-century theologian and bishop whom we remember today. In his great work Against Heresies, he sought to combat the heterodox versions of Christianity that surrounded him in a point-by-point refutation of their beliefs. At the same time, he laid out a Christian vision that affirmed the authority of the apostolic tradition and succession, the goodness of creation, and the relevance of the Hebrew Scriptures, a vision that would largely carry forward into the era of councils and creeds and orthodoxy of subsequent centuries.
The heresies Irenaeus faced are different than those that face us, but I think he speaks to us today in two important ways.
First, the truth matters, and it is worth arguing for and defending. We, like Irenaeus, live in an age of contested truth. Irenaeus makes clear his intent to address this head-on in the opening sentence of Against Heresies: “Inasmuch as certain men have set the truth aside, and bring in lying words and vain genealogies . . . and by means of their craftily-constructed plausibilities draw away the minds of the inexperienced and taken them captive, [I have felt constrained, my dear friend, to compose the following treatise in order to expose and counteract their machinations].” 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.
The Scripture of Your Life – Br. Curtis Almquist
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Br. Curtis Almquist
Mark 7:24-30
This is a very old story. For more than 2,000 years people have heard this same Gospel story endlessly. Nothing changed. The same story. Quite boring, irrelevant… except for one thing. The only thing new or different is what’s going on for us, the hearers of the story. We, the hearer, are in a new space, like never before.
In our Rule of Life we say, “These hearts of ours are not empty vessels but inner worlds alive with images, memories, experiences and desires.”[i] God’s revelation to us will be a kind of synergy between what is going on with a very old scriptural story, and what is going on today in our own heart and imagination[ii]. And that creates a whole new story.
So we have Jesus in the region of Tyre, a town on the Mediterranean coast of southern Lebanon. A woman comes up to him. She is from Syrophoenicia, the Roman province of Syria. She is a long way from her homeland. Is she without a country? We don’t know. She may be without hope. She is certainly a person vulnerable and desperate or she would never, never alone have approached a man, a Jewish man, especially as she is a Gentile woman and a foreigner. Read More
Herod’s Perplexity – Br. David Vryhof
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Br. David Vryhof
In today’s very brief gospel lesson, we get a glimpse into the heart of Herod Antipas, the Roman Jew who was the ruler of Galilee and Perea during Jesus’ lifetime. This short text from Luke’s gospel reveals that he is both frightened of Jesus and fascinated by him. It calls to mind Herod’s relationship to Jesus’ forerunner, John the Baptist. We read in Mark 6:20 that Herod “feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.” We know the rest of the story, don’t we… John’s popularity posed a threat to Herod and he had John arrested and imprisoned. Not long afterwards, in a state of drunkenness at a party he was hosting, Herod made an extravagant promise to his daughter, which led to John’s beheading. It was a promise he deeply regretted. It is clear that he was both fascinated by John and fearful of John’s influence. Read More