Monday, 15 July, 2002

The lead piece is from "Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris. In this book she takes many of the words and images of the faith and attempts to put some reality and life to them.



MEDIEVAL

The mentality of this age seems so rigid, and hat of the medieval era so elastic by comparison, that I find it faintly annoying when people use the word "medieval" in a pejorative sense, to mean hopelessly old-fashioned or narrow minded. The contemporary passion for polarizing, for placing all manner of people and things in tight categories of our own devising, would no doubt strike the thirteenth-century person as pathetic... It is inconceivable today that a Roman Catholic nun might receive papal permission to go on preaching journeys through Germany, and use the opportunity to lambast the clergy for negligence in their pastoral duties. But when Hildegard of Bingen preached in 1163 in Cologne Cathedral, she used gender-bending metaphors that would have been understood by her listeners as rooted in the Bible and in the Christology of the early church. Lamenting that the great, flowing milk of divine beneficence had all but dried up in the hands of the church, Hildegard said, "Woe to those who are given a voice and will not shout, woe to those who have breasts and will not nurse God's children. If Jesus wept over Jerusalem, Hildegard castigated Cologne.



Norris goes on to wonder how our generation - our century - will be looked upon in six hundred years. Will our obsession with race and gender seems odd to them...even backwards? Will we be known as the century that turned warfare from the battlefield of warriors to the streets of civilian populations? Sometimes it seems to be so ingrained in us that we point fingers at the "other" as a good example of the way things should not be. We're right...they're wrong. This is the way...that is not. Sometimes I see this thinking even in the liturgy of the church in our society. On more and more sign boards in front of churches, there is the clear distinction between traditional and contemporary styles of worship - blend the two...never! People within the same church are not allowed to hold opposing views on issues of the day, interpretation of scripture, or liturgical style. Living together with differences is not tolerated let alone nurtured and honored. It is so "us and them"...it will be interesting to see if we come to a point in the church where we allow and tell people that it is alright not to "love those neighbors."



Connection: We will not destroy ourselves by reaching out beyond our closed minds. The Jesus of the gospels seemed to have quite a habit of doing that again and again. Sure, he is killed for doing it...but he still calls us to follow him in that way of open love and discourse.



Lord of All Time, teach us to look beyond ourselves and our time that we may be able to see how your eternal reign embraces all times and all people and you continue to call us to trust in you alone. Amen.