Today we enter a new section in "Let the Bones Dance" called 'Triage for the Church.'
Sacred communities cannot rest in triviality; their very nature is to flourish in the infinite resources of proximity to God. Church is gathered for a sacred purpose: to cultivate conditions that enable our lives to be tangled up more and more with God. Sacred communities can be bold in this divine gift of purpose. And sacred communities can find humility in our constant need to interrogate just how robustly we embody this purpose. Sacred communities embody feeling and its mode of operation with the same impulse toward zest that our particular bodies do. Our bodies hold the wounds inflicted by triviality. So does the Body of Christ. When we cut off layers of our relationship with God in order to protect the ways we have always done things, we hare this Body. When we deny our deep connections to everything that is, this Body suffers from ruptures of relationality. The Body of Christ is diminished when feeling is thwarted. Once again there is at least one great line in the above quote. Church is gathered for a sacred purpose: to cultivate conditions that enable our lives to be tangled up more and more with God. Being so tangled up with God means we are more and more tangled up with others. To be tangled up means we are taking the time to see what is going on and how we will come out on the other side of the entanglement. Maybe, as we are more and more tangled with God our lives take on more and more of the character of our God because we have come so close and have to deal with who this God is and who we become when we claim that we are God's beloved. When we are superficial and we are consumed by the trivial our lives - our wounds are never exposed and shared. We then - whither for lack of a depth of community that is like that good soil image in the parable. We must not fear questions that bring us to the brink of what is unknown and uncertain. For there, in that wrestling and being tangled up with God, we come away with a bit more of what the character of God's beloved is to be. Connection: Lives tangled up more and more with God is not walk through life with language that we can use to give people the image that we are walking with God. Rather it may be that as our lives are tangled up - we are more likely to feel free to rest and watch and step forward into new life. When we are broken and in need of healing, O God, you enter into our brokenness and we are never alone. In your presence comes the deep healing that builds the Beloved Community. Amen. |
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