Believing the Best in Love: Week 3 Preview
THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT
Scroll to the bottom of this post to find today’s lectionary reading and collect. You can see all the previous Lent daybook 2019 posts here.
In February 2018 I was honored to speak at a couple events for Christ Church in Austin on how the discipline of Lent forms us to love. I led the group of artists and art-appreciators in an exploration of how the rhythms and disciplines of lament, confession, forgiveness, healing, prayer, hospitality, and generosity can form us as artists and people. Through the five Sundays of Lent that lead up to Holy Week, I’ll be sharing on the blog the background notes I used to prepare that Austin talk.. It’ll also give me the opportunity I haven’t taken before to share, in real time, some background to the images and music I select for the daily devotional posts.
Gigantic Picnic on the U.S.-Mexico Border, JR
“On October 8th, for the last day of his huge scaffolding installation on the Mexican side of the border between the United States and Mexico, (anonymous French artist) JR organized a gigantic picnic on both sides of the fence. … Hundreds of guests came from the US and Mexico to share a meal together. People gathered around the eyes of a Dreamer, eating the same food, sharing the same water, enjoying the same music (half ot he band on each side). The wall was forgotten for a few moments.”
Source [H/T: Plough Weekly]
There are no short cuts to agape. It must be embodied with the sustainable, life-giving postures given us by our Creator, exemplified by Jesus, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Humans are plagued with the tendency toward artificial poses of love, which in the end deplete us and those we encounter. The only manner of movement for true agape is made up of a cruciform posture. In the greatest paradox of all, love is shaped by the cross.
If we use the poetic summary of agape in 1 Corinthians 13:7-8 - love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things - as our paradigm for embodied agape, we can consider the contrasting, artificial postures of love as a range of options, with the most extreme responses at the ends of a spectrum. In order to develop into the movement of agape, we can counter the attitudes and actions of un-love with specific spiritual disciplines that train us toward cruciform, life-giving love.
Love Believes All Things: is ever ready to believe the best about every person
Artificial Postures: Range between superficial inclusion and aggressive exclusion.
True Embodiment: We make space to believe the best of every person through practices of hospitality.
Aggressive Exclusion: 1 quotation & 1 book excerpt
I Am A Man, Memphis, 1968, Art Shay
“So often when we say 'I love you' we say it with a huge 'I' and a small 'you'. We use love as a conjunction instead of it being a verb implying action. It's no good just gazing out into open space hoping to see the Lord; instead we have to look closely at our neighbour, someone whom God has willed into existence, someone whom God has died for. Everyone we meet has a right to exist, because he has value in himself, and we are not used to this. The acceptance of otherness is a danger to us, it threatens us. To recognise the other's right to be himself might mean recognising his right to kill me. But if we set a limit to this right to exist, it's no right at all. Love is difficult. Christ was crucified because he taught a kind of love which is a terror for men, a love which demands total surrender: it spells death.” ― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray
A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L'Engle [YA science-fiction in the “Wrinkle in Time”]
(*notes: Meg, Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe discover that Charles Wallace's "drive of dragons" is an extraterrestrial "cherubim" named Proginoskes (nicknamed 'Progo' by Meg) Echthros = Greek plural meaning "The Enemy", in A Wrinkle in Time is referred to as the 'Black Thing' or 'Powers of Darkness' rather than 'Echthroi)
"'Not everybody is able to see me,' he told her. 'I'm real, and most earthlings can bear very little reality. But if it will relieve your mind, I'll dematerialize.' he waved a few wings gracefully. 'It's really more comfortable for me not to be burdened with matter, but I thought it would be easier for you if you could converse with someone you could see.'
The cherubim was there in front of her, covering most of the star-watching rock, and then he was not there. She thought she saw a faint shimmer in the air, but it might have been the approach of dawn. She could feel him, however, moving within her mind. 'Are you feeling extremely brave Megling?'
'No.' A faint light defined the eastern horizon. The stars were dim, almost extinguished.
'I think we're going to have to be brave, earth child, but it will be easier because we're together. I wonder if the Teacher knows..'
'Knows what?'
'That you've seen an Echthros.'
'Progo, I don't understand. What is an Ecthros?'
Abruptly, Proginoskes materialized, raised several wings, and gathered her in. 'Come, littleing. I'll take you some place...and show you.'...'...Come.' He drew her further in to him.
She found herself looking directly into one of his eyes, a great, amber cat's eye, the dark mandala of the pupil, opening, compelling, beckoning. She was drawn towards the oval, was pulled into it, was through it. Into the ultimate night on the other side. Then she felt a great, flaming wind, and knew that somehow she herself was part of that wind.
Then she felt a great shove, and she was standing on a bare stone mountaintop, and Proginoskes was blinking and winking at her. She thought she saw the oval, mandala-eye through which she had come, but she was not sure.
The cherubim raised a great wing to sketch the slow curve of sky above them. The warm rose and lavender of sunset faded, dimmed, was extinguished. The sky was drenched with green at the horizon, muting upwards into a deep, purply blue through which stars began to appear in totally unfamiliar constellations.
Meg asked, 'Where are we?'
'Never mind where. Watch.'
She stood beside him, looking at the brilliance of the stars. Then came a sound, a sound which was above sound, beyond sound, a violent, silent, electrical report, which made her press her hands in pain against her ears. Across the sky, where the stars were clustered as thickly as in the Milky Way, a crack shivered, slivered, became a line of nothingness.
If this kind of thing was happening in the universe, no matter how far away from earth and the Milky Way. ...
'Progo, what is it? What happened?'
'The Echthroi have Xed.'
'What?'
'Annihilated. Negated. Extinguished. Xed.'
Meg stared in horrible fascination at the rent in the sky. This was the most terrible thing she had ever seen...She pressed close to the cherubim, surrounding herself with wings and eyes and puffs of smoke, but she could still see the rip in the sky.
She could not bear it."
Granada War Relocation Center (also known as Amache, near Granada, Colorado).
“The camp was one of ten in the nation created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration under the authority of Executive Order 9066, which followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941. The Executive Order incarcerated Japanese-Americans during World War II following their forced removal by military authorities from the West Coast. This action was justified as “military necessity” and greatly influenced by racist sentiment and wartime hysteria, compounded by intense fear of Japanese terrorist attacks or espionage against the United States.”
Superficial Inclusion: 2 quotations
“Truth-telling is difficult because the varieties of untruth are so many and so well disguised. Lies are hard to identify when they come in the form of apparently innocuous imprecision, socially acceptable slippage, hyperbole masquerading as enthusiasm, or well-placed propaganda. These forms of falsehood are so common, and even so normal, in media-saturated, corporately controlled culture that truth often looks pale, understated, alarmist, rude, or indecisive by comparison. Flannery O’Connor’s much-quoted line ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd’ has a certain prophetic force in the face of more and more commonly accepted facsimiles of truth - from PR to advertising claims to propaganda masquerading as news.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
“...there is no question that precision is difficult to achieve. Imprecision is easier. Imprecision is available in a wide variety of attractive and user-friendly forms: cliches, abstractions and generalizations, jargon, passive constructions, hyperbole, sentimentality, and reassuring absolutes. Imprecision minimizes discomfort and creates a big, soft, hospitable place for all opinions; even the completely vacuous can find a welcome there. So the practice of precision not only requires attentiveness and effort; it may also require the courage to afflict the comfortable and, consequently, tolerate their resentment.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
What’s required for embodied agape? Practice a hospitable imagination.
Pope Francis kisses the foot of a woman at the Don Gnocchi Foundation Center in Rome on April 17, 2014. AP
The Washing of the Feet, Cerezo Barredo
Make space for divergent opinions
Make space for meaning
Make space for listening
Make space for conversation
Make space for reading outside your tradition
Make space for curiosity
Make space for pausing
Make Space for Divergent Opinions: 1 prayer, 3 quotations & 1 poem
A Benediction for Generosity: “Dear Father, you who have given so much to me, give one thing more, a generous heart. Amen.” - Bob Benson, Disciplines for the Inner Life
“Tell the truth, but tell it slant...' is Emily Dickinson's advice....I've been struck by how often slant is confused with bias - as though having a point of view, a set of assumptions, or a firmly held opinion is in itself unscrupulous or unfair. And as though neutrality is the mark of fairness or truth.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
“If the “Christian right” would acknowledge the existence of a Christian left, the community of believers might be able to deliver a lively witness to the capaciousness of our faith in spirited (and I used that term advisedly) debate.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
“Precision means attending to the ways the word is used, not merely to some notion of how it should be used. It means humbly inquiring what the user means, and then listening.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —”
Party at St. Matthew's, Frank Murphy, Jr.
Make Space for Meaning: 1 quotation
“To make sense of plastic on the mind and to develop a resistance to the perverse patterns that will otherwise run our world for us, I believe an activity of this sort - by way of a blog, an especially redemptive conversation with a coworker, a water coloring or a playlist - is absolutely crucial. It can be done. And when we do it, we begin to see things we didn’t know. We have to try to make sense. We have to make time for artful analysis, which is the way we clear a space for the possibility of sanity. It is an outlet for honesty.” — David Dark
Christus und Nikodemus, Fritz von Uhde
Make Space for Listening (vs. passive hearing): 1 quotation
“The difference between hearing and listening is significant...Listening well means knowing when to interject questions, when to redirect the conversation, and, more importantly, in what terms to interpret the other's narrative. It means recognizing that the speaker is making purposeful choices, consciously or unconsciously, and considering what those purposes might be. It means accepting the tension between making judgments and withholding judgment as the other's story or line of reasoning unfolds. It means hearing and noting the omissions. And it means listening not only through the words spoken, but to them.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
Make Space for Conversation: 2 quotations
“Conversation is an exchange of gifts. Native American tribal wisdom teaches that when you encounter a person on your life path, you must seek to find out what gifts you have for one another so that you may exchange them before going your separate ways. This seems true even of daily encounters with those we know well. We come into one another's presence bearing whatever harvest of experience the day has offered, and we foster relationship by making a gift of what we have received.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
“When we converse, we act together toward a common end, and we act upon one another. Indeed, conversation is a form of activism - a political enterprise in the largest and oldest sense - a way of building sustaining community.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
Shema, 2014, Meg Hitchcock. Letters cut from the Koran, 14 × 11 in. Deuteronomy 6:4ff.: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.”
Make Space for Reading: “Read outside your tradition!”: 1 excerpt & 4 quotations
“When we asked Eugene Peterson in our "Biblical Spirituality" class many moons ago what we could do to deepen our spiritual life, he said just that: Read outside your tradition. For me that meant reading anything beyond the small circle of 20th century evangelicalism: AW Tozer, Oswald Chambers, Elisabeth Elliot, Yancey, Packer and whoever the community deemed spiritually legit, such as Lewis and Tolkien, and most of the classics of literature. Most. But not Catholics. Not Orthodox. And probably not anybody during Medieval Christendom (wasn't that the dark ages?).
So that's where I started: with the "not's." I dipped my toes into Nouwen. I lingered over Kallistos Ware. There were the Vatican II documents. There were the mystics. Suddenly Christendom became scarier and more fantastic than anything I ever knew. I grew quieter on the insider. I felt my smallness. My mind began to understand why I believed what I believed, though it also grew increasingly frustrated--so much I couldn't comprehend!
Slowly I felt my spiritual skin thicken, become healthier, more resilient. My eyes became bionically far-sighted as I began to see so much more. Issues that had agitated in my early college days no longer bothered me. I discovered all these kindred brothers and sisters in the 18th and 11th centuries I never knew existed. The 5th century felt like it was down the block instead of a million miles away in a fog of vague otherliness. It was other, but not that other. I found my tribe: my Great Tradition family.
If I could tell artists only one thing to improve their art I'd tell them this: study the classics in your tradition. And as much spare time as you have, study the classics in other artistic traditions. They will teach you everything you need to know to become a deep artist and a skilled artist. They will help you find your place in the large community of artists that stretches across time and place. What we need is a rich imaginative soil. The classics will till that soil over time.“These conversations - with brothers and sisters in Christ and with those who do similar work - are the nutrient-rich soil in which we take root and grow. In conversation we are sustained by the wisdom of those who have gone before us. We are also empowered to discern how we will face the challenges of both the present and the future. Reading is essential to this conversational way of life, as we often cannot literally converse with our forebears or with those who are following similar vocations in other places. We read as a way of listening to the wisdom of others. The conversation continues as we reply to this wisdom in our own context. Externally, we reply to our reading as we discuss it with our church or work community.” - W. David O. Taylor, “TS Eliot On the Role of Tradition in Art-Making”
“Reading, reflecting, conversing, learning, working, binding together: these are the ways in which our communities - church, neighborhood, and world - begin to mature and flourish. This interconnected life is the joyous and meaning-rich end for which we were created. This is humanity fully alive!” — C. Christopher Smith, Reading for the Common Good: How Books Help Our Churches and Neighborhoods Flourish
“[Poems] train and exercise the imagination. Trained imaginations are what we need most at a time like this. That is what will enable us to reach across cultures and understand each other, to think of new models and modes of organization that might work better, and to wage peace, because the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
"Reading widely and well shapes and forms our character. It cultivates virtue." - Karen Swallow Prior, “Practice the Christian Virtue of Reading Promiscuously”
Solitary Confinement: Punished for Life
Make Space for Curiosity: 1 personal anecdote & 2 quotations
Nothing has taught me better an appropriate sense of curiosity than the practice of noticing without judgement. You can listen to some of my experience with this practice here.
“More than ever, I’ve come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.” — Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
“Curiosity. It was Oliver Sacks who first made me reflect on curiosity as a form of compassion. An ingenious and creative neurologist now well-known for his “clinical tales,” he begins his work as diagnostician and healer with the implicit question ‘What is it like to be you?’” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
Make Space for Pauses: 1 spiritual practice & 3 quotations
Each Friday in Lent, we’re practicing selah with the Psalmist. In my training as a spiritual director, I’ve discovered one of the best gifts I have to offer others is the gift of companioned silence. Our world is aggressively noisy. While I’ve found that silence is one of the most fruitful spaces to hear God speak, it’s also provides physical, emotional, and psychological benefits. It can be as simple as saying, “let’s pause and pick this up again in a few minutes”.
“The best listeners I know pause over words. ‘That’s an interesting way of putting it,’ they muse, or they ask. ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’ The consciousness that every word is a choice, that each word has its own resonance, nuance, emotional coloring, and weight informs their sense of what is being communicated. This kind of listening comes close to what we engage in when we listen to music...A good listener loves words, respects them, pays attention to them, and recognizes vague approximations as a kind of falsehood.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
“But the high play of witty conversation can degenerate into exhibitionistic banter if it is not tempered by an opposite and perhaps even more important virtue, which is the capacity to hold one's peace, to wait to pause for thought, to consent to shared silence. Words need space. Witty, weighty, well-chosen words need more space than others to be received rightly, reckoned with, and responded to. That space, the silence between words, is as important a part of good conversation as rests are a part of a pleasing, coherent musical line.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
“The silences in conversation honor and support the words they carry, as water supports the vessels that float on it. Only in silence can the "listening into" take place - the pausing over words, meanings, implications, associations - and the waiting - for the Spirit to speak, for the right response to a surface. At its deepest level, good conversation holds a balance we seek in prayer between speaking and listening, waiting for the unplanned, epiphanic moment that comes unbidden in the midst of what we thought we were pursuing. Those silences also distinguish substantive conversation from idle chatter that fills all the "air time" available, often as a protection against the silences in which a new thought might take us where we're not sure we want to go. When silences are allowed, conversation can rise to the level of sacred encounter.” ― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
Maria D. Michael, a Lakota elder from San Fransisco, embraces veteran Tatiana McLee during an emotional forgiveness ceremony at the Four Prairie Knights Casino & Resort on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on Monday.
Josh Morgan for The Huffington Post
Meditations and practices for the coming week
The daily office lectionary for the Book of Common Prayer will continue through Jeremiah and Romans for the Old and New Testament readings while we remain in John for the Gospel readings. In the Gospel accounts we hear Jesus again and again make every invitation possible for those with ears to hear to accept him as the Son of God, the Messiah. And we watch the religious leaders again and again ignore, refute, and revile Jesus’ authority. it’s as if the volume is being raised decibel by decible as we head toward Jesus’ arrest in the Garden. Each day the Psalms offer an emotional honesty, lament, and proclamation of God’s faithfulness to keep his covenant with those who love and follow him.
I’ve tried to suggest one practice a week that can fit along with whatever other fasts you may be undertaking this Lent. There’s merit in committing simply to one fast for the entire forty days. For example, we give up processed sugar and alcohol and then fast from one meal on Fridays. Traditionally, the Church sets aside Lenten Fridays, the weekday of Jesus’ crucifixion, to abstain from eating meat or to a partial (one meal) or whole fast (24 hours without solid food). You can read more about this tradition and its spiritual implications here, here, and here.
Sometimes we need a little help imagining what a fast can look like and how it might produce good fruit in our lives. Each week this Lent, I’ll share one specific suggestion for fasting one habit in order to feast on a corresponding practice. You might decide to stay with that fast for the entire forty days, or you might choose just one or two days to try what I’ve suggested.
Fast preconceived notions (judgments).
Feast on a hospitable imagination instead.
This week, ask the Holy Spirit to make you aware of the times throughout the day that you operate out of preconceived notions (judgments) about Him, others, and yourself. Make the time at least once a day to stop what you’re doing and practice a hospitable imagination in one of the following ways:
Make space for divergent opinions
Make space for meaning
Make space for listening
Make space for conversation
Make space for reading outside your tradition
Make space for curiosity
Make space for pausing
Sometime this week, share with us one way you’ve practiced a hospitable imagination and what the experience was like for you. You can leave a comment on the blog, Facebook, Instagram, or reply directly to this email.
On Saturday we’ll connect with An American Lent from The Repentance Project. It's God's kindness that leads us to repentance, and in His kindness and provision for reconciliation, He invites us to make confession and ask for forgiveness on behalf of not only ourselves but our forefathers and mothers.
I’ll highlight a few of the reflections that most caught my attention, but you can subscribe to receive daily reflections from An American Lent.
Lent 2019 on Spotify:
Songs for Everybody (Note: In the voice of Lent, a few of these songs contain language and difficult themes. They're marked "explicit".)
Add any of these playlists to your account by clicking ‘Follow.’
Third Sunday in Lent - Fruitful
Today’s lectionary readings & prayer: Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
“Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
Love One Another, Laura James