So, despite not being sure that I was going to be having a summer Bible study for the last month or so, it looks like we will be having one for the Newman Centre - at least for May and probably June. I will admit I had thought it would be nice to take the summer off for Bible Study, but when faced with the fact that several of the regulars would still be around, and there doesn't always tend to be a lot of things out there in general for people wanting to develop spiritually as Catholics, I figured - why not? Besides, the topics is always a good one.
I told them that the focus for the summer will be on figures/stories in the Old Testament, which is something that I love! I grew up on the Bible, and the OT always fired my imagination with all of the wonderful stories, and characters, and themes - it will be hard narrowing down what we will be looking at! I figure regarding that, at least, I will require input from the people who already expressed interest in the Bible study: what are the stories or people they want to look at. It should be a lot of fun! Then again, how couldn't it be fun!
- Abraham, the knight and father of faith; so often wondering about that laugh when God spoke to him about the covenant - a laugh that is revelation, is paradox and so prepares for revelation, itself.
- Sarah, the matriarch of the faith, the mother of so many hopes and expectations along with Abraham
- Issac, poor Isaac; what did his heart and eyes see on that mountain alone with his father? How did that change him?
- Jacob! Wow, Jacob is definitely a story for the ages too! Lying, treachery, redemption, wrestling with God, heartache, love - it has it all! Even a heart-breaking love triangle! And then when he spends the night contending with the angel of God, it speaks so well to so many other such turns to God that have happened throughout the ages. God is external, something that can be dismissed, or at least not taken into oneself, on the periphery. Then, troubles come, there is tension, and God becomes more present. Then the night of wrestling, of searching and crying, and in the morning ... we are never quite the same again ...
- Joseph (the the coat-of-many-colours fame): bratty, arrogant Joseph ... or maybe we don't let him tell his whole story, maybe we don't listen to him carefully enough. I admit, I had problems understanding Joseph for a very long, until I re-read the story, letting myself try and understand Joseph, and then I caught a glimpse of a different Joseph. There, in the silence so easily glossed over, in what he never said and when he never said it, there seems to be something else going on - the person Joseph once was in transformed into something else. It's so easy to keep remembering the bratty Joseph, but isn't that more my failing to accept change in another rather than anything to do with Joseph?
- Moses, another 'wow' of a story. One of the few people to be given labels in the Bible that should make us pause, that MUST make us pause: Moses, the humblest man that lived. Moses, the leader of the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to a new life in the Promised Land. (sigh) If his story, if the end of his story, does not bring a tear or two to the eye, I don't know what will.
- David and Elijah, two of my favorites, with stories that are better and more poinant than the VAST number of books out there, without having to be book length either! Then there's Tobit, Judith, Job ... the list goes on!
All of that to say, I'm still trying to figure out what to focus on for the summer for the Bible study. Currently, I am thinking about 3 or 4 ideas, but more are welcome! They are:
- Looking at some of the women in the Bible that too often get glossed over, or are given too minor a role in first glances (Sarah, Rebecca and Leah, Naomi and Ruth, Esther, etc.).
- The prophets (major, and or minor)
- Moses - heck, he could easily fill the summer!
- The love stories of the Old Testament. Yes, sappy, but they tell us so much about human interaction and our relation to God!
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
A Reflection on Love (A little late for Valentine's
This used to be on the Newman website, but as I took it off (after Valentine's) I thought I would post it up over here. A little late, yes, but I am - once again - trying to be better about blogging.
Everyone has probably heard 1st Corinthians 13 at one point or another in their lives, especially if you've ever been to a wedding. So often it is presented as an example of the epitome of love with little explanation or attempt at a full understanding of what it really means. This is too bad, as without a full understanding the love presented in the chapter can appear as a passive love, a weak and pushover love, and worse, the idea and understanding of love that we've created in our own head can be thought to be the image of Christ.
Make no mistake, God is love and so Christ is love. Christ is the one being talked about in the 1st Corinthians passage, but not in the way it often seems to be taken. It seems in our culture that love – and God, too, as God is love – is often understood as something sappy, wimpy, without real strength. Oh sure, there are those moments of strength – like when we watch a movie and see someone sacrificing their life for their love or something like that – but for the most part love appears tepid, afraid of the others reaction, or else so relaxed and accepting that it would be hard-pressed to see how love really changes our lives at all. This is not the love of the Bible, the Gospels, nor 1st Corinthians, and so it cannot really be love at all.
Love is not wimpy. Love is not a pushover. Love is never simply ‘okay' with what you might do, because love wants the very best for you and not simply the status quo. The same applies to Christ. Jesus is not wimpy (imagine Jesus' hands: are they soft like a office worker, or calloused like a carpenter's?). Jesus is not a pushover, when one of his best friends tried to tell him what to do – that the friend knew what was best for Jesus – Jesus told him, “Get thee behind me Satan.” Jesus never said that the life someone was leading was “okay” or “alright”. Rather, he “came so that you[sic] might have life, and have it to the full”. If we are not increasing in that fullness of life, we are dying; there is no lukewarm response in Jesus – not ever, just look in the gospels.
It is in this context, in the context of Christ's life, that we must read and understand 1st Corinthians 13; that we must understand love. Perhaps that is part of the problem: we forget that love is a person, just as Christ is a person. If I treated other people, for instance my fiancee, like I sometimes treat God, I would be facing silence and tears that would demand from me a response. But how often do we forget about, or ignore God? How often do we demand from love something it is not?
Love is patient: yes. Love is forebaring and enduring: absolutely. But what does that mean? What does that look like? When we think of Jesus, the first image that comes to mind might be his words to turn the other cheek: “But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (interestingly Jesus never says anything about letting yourself be hit again, just to offer the other cheek, but I digress). Here's the thing: if Jesus is love, his life showing that love in its fullness, then we have to take that seriously. That means Jesus in the temple, making a cord of rope and driving the moneychangers out, must also in some way be an example of the patience and forebearance of love. For if Jesus is unpatient there, then Jesus is not fully love – Jesus is not God. Something is amiss: either Jesus is not who he says he is, or our understanding of patience is impoverished and we need to be taught by God what patience truly is. Considering how many times, and how easily, I know myself to be wrong, I believe it would be far safer to say that I have something more to learn about patience.
If we turn to patience as a person, it is even more borne out. Think of a really good friend, or perhaps a mother, who asks you to do something. In your exuberance, you say “sure, I'll do that!” Then you forget. A few days later you are reminded of what you said you would do. Your mother, if she is anything like mine, might be annoyed, but that doesn't mean she loves you any less: her love is patient. But if you are always forgetting to do things, she might be patient with you, but she probably wouldn't trust you too much. Love might be patiently waiting for you to get it right, but that doesn't mean you haven't just screwed up the relationship and need to do things to make it right. Love might be patient, but that says nothing about the relation you have with a person.
Love is kind: no doubt about that! It is so kind that it is willing to give of itself so that you might be the best person you can be. As 1st Corinthians 13 says later on about love, it “rejoices in the truth.” We often think of Jesus' kindness when he talks about children, or heals people: what about when he might seem a bit of a jerk? When he calls the Syrophonecian woman a dog (though in reality “puppy” might be a better translation); when he very publicly calls St. Thomas' (of doubting Thomas fame) bluff; or when he challenges St. Peter's words? All of these are examples of a hard kindness, not foreign to love, but part of it. That last one, especially, sticks out to me.
Peter: one of Jesus' closest friends. Tempetuous, tempermental, lovable Peter. After denying Jesus three times before Jesus is crucified, after the resurrection, after Peter sees the resurrected Christ, after Peter even jumps into a lake to run to the risen Jesus, Jesus' kindness extends to push Peter a little further than even he maybe wanted first to go. In front of some of the other disciples Jesus asks point blank, “Do you love me?” Twice Peter, equivocates; “You know I like you.” Then the third time Jesus asks, “Do you even like me?” still in the presence of others (I can't help but imagine there might have been some awkward coughing and glancing away going on here). Finally, Peter gets it, breaks down and acknowledges that Jesus knows his heart, in a way signalling finally that Peter is finally ready to give Christ fully his heart. Jesus' kindness extended to breaking down Peter, so that he could build him up again into something even better. That is love.
That is maybe another area that our conception of love gets wrong, that love is not persistent, not nagging or irritating. But notice chapter 13 – love is described as not irritable , it says nothing about it not be irritating at times, especially those times when it is looking after my best interests and is right, and I would prefer it wasn't. For me, it often revolves around trips to the doctor:
“You know, you might want to get that checked out?
"Psssh, it's nothing; I've had worse.
"Um, sure, whatever. You do realize you can barely walk, have been making sounds eeriely like those made by people with phenomnia, and had a delightful conversation with the wall yesterday.
“You mean that wasn't my late Uncle Charlie?
"No, that was feverish delirium."
"Still, I think I'm on the mend."
"Uh huh, I'll go call a cab and get your coat. Oh, and that's not your cat; you've been petting your toque for the last 20 minutes.”
I might really not want to go to the doctor; find any number of excuses not to go; but love is not found in saying “sure, it's all good”, but in the icy “fine, whatever; get pneumonia” that certainly is irritating, but is absolutely right and loving.
And here we get to a final key feature of 1st Corinthians 13 that is easily glossed over considering it goes so against much of what our culture says is right and appropriate. Love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Love does all that not because it is a doormat, but because it believes in you more than you might believe in yourself. It believes precisely that you can be better than you are right now. There's a moral judgement there, a moral judgement in a society that tries to keep those to a minimum: you are good right now, you are loved fully, but love wants you to be even better. You might never get there, might never be that much better, but love is waiting and willing to do all that it can, offer all the help and push that it can so that you do move forward – then it will rejoice ... and start gently pushing again. Love wants the best for you, and believes you can be better, even if you don't believe it yourself.
Think about it, really think: you probably remember the teachers in high school that just came in to work, maybe even forced you to do assignments simply because they wanted people to follow the rules. Then there were others, the ones that pushed you – maybe not teachers, but friends or parents – helping you in any way they could, and believed in you even when you didn't always believe in yourself. That often means being hard-nosed and making you look at yourself, or do things you didn't always want or like. Looking back, to which do you have warmer feelings? The ones who were passive, even if passive aggressive, or the ones that were active, maybe sometimes even forcing you to push yourself more than you wanted. Which showed love?
That is why love is never ending. 1st Corinthians says that love, faith and hope are all incredibly vital for us as people, and as Christians, but that love is the greatest. Why? The answer: love is never-ending, but faith and hope will pass away: you only need faith for that which you can't see, only need hope when there is more road ahead which you don't know. But love, love always wants for you greater love, greater everything – it is infinite. It is not a mere trite sentiment when in the old hymn it sings “when we've been there ten thousand years, bright shinning as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we've first begun”. Ten thousand years – sounds like a long time, but each of those days are filled with love, complete and total love. And each day, we learn, we expand to encompass that immensity of love a little more. God is infinite, God is love; each day of those ten thousand year we get to touch the infinite, touch God, a little more.
When I think of how little I really know of love in my human understanding, it makes me excited for the promise of those ten thousand years.
Everyone has probably heard 1st Corinthians 13 at one point or another in their lives, especially if you've ever been to a wedding. So often it is presented as an example of the epitome of love with little explanation or attempt at a full understanding of what it really means. This is too bad, as without a full understanding the love presented in the chapter can appear as a passive love, a weak and pushover love, and worse, the idea and understanding of love that we've created in our own head can be thought to be the image of Christ.
Make no mistake, God is love and so Christ is love. Christ is the one being talked about in the 1st Corinthians passage, but not in the way it often seems to be taken. It seems in our culture that love – and God, too, as God is love – is often understood as something sappy, wimpy, without real strength. Oh sure, there are those moments of strength – like when we watch a movie and see someone sacrificing their life for their love or something like that – but for the most part love appears tepid, afraid of the others reaction, or else so relaxed and accepting that it would be hard-pressed to see how love really changes our lives at all. This is not the love of the Bible, the Gospels, nor 1st Corinthians, and so it cannot really be love at all.
Love is not wimpy. Love is not a pushover. Love is never simply ‘okay' with what you might do, because love wants the very best for you and not simply the status quo. The same applies to Christ. Jesus is not wimpy (imagine Jesus' hands: are they soft like a office worker, or calloused like a carpenter's?). Jesus is not a pushover, when one of his best friends tried to tell him what to do – that the friend knew what was best for Jesus – Jesus told him, “Get thee behind me Satan.” Jesus never said that the life someone was leading was “okay” or “alright”. Rather, he “came so that you[sic] might have life, and have it to the full”. If we are not increasing in that fullness of life, we are dying; there is no lukewarm response in Jesus – not ever, just look in the gospels.
It is in this context, in the context of Christ's life, that we must read and understand 1st Corinthians 13; that we must understand love. Perhaps that is part of the problem: we forget that love is a person, just as Christ is a person. If I treated other people, for instance my fiancee, like I sometimes treat God, I would be facing silence and tears that would demand from me a response. But how often do we forget about, or ignore God? How often do we demand from love something it is not?
Love is patient: yes. Love is forebaring and enduring: absolutely. But what does that mean? What does that look like? When we think of Jesus, the first image that comes to mind might be his words to turn the other cheek: “But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (interestingly Jesus never says anything about letting yourself be hit again, just to offer the other cheek, but I digress). Here's the thing: if Jesus is love, his life showing that love in its fullness, then we have to take that seriously. That means Jesus in the temple, making a cord of rope and driving the moneychangers out, must also in some way be an example of the patience and forebearance of love. For if Jesus is unpatient there, then Jesus is not fully love – Jesus is not God. Something is amiss: either Jesus is not who he says he is, or our understanding of patience is impoverished and we need to be taught by God what patience truly is. Considering how many times, and how easily, I know myself to be wrong, I believe it would be far safer to say that I have something more to learn about patience.
If we turn to patience as a person, it is even more borne out. Think of a really good friend, or perhaps a mother, who asks you to do something. In your exuberance, you say “sure, I'll do that!” Then you forget. A few days later you are reminded of what you said you would do. Your mother, if she is anything like mine, might be annoyed, but that doesn't mean she loves you any less: her love is patient. But if you are always forgetting to do things, she might be patient with you, but she probably wouldn't trust you too much. Love might be patiently waiting for you to get it right, but that doesn't mean you haven't just screwed up the relationship and need to do things to make it right. Love might be patient, but that says nothing about the relation you have with a person.
Love is kind: no doubt about that! It is so kind that it is willing to give of itself so that you might be the best person you can be. As 1st Corinthians 13 says later on about love, it “rejoices in the truth.” We often think of Jesus' kindness when he talks about children, or heals people: what about when he might seem a bit of a jerk? When he calls the Syrophonecian woman a dog (though in reality “puppy” might be a better translation); when he very publicly calls St. Thomas' (of doubting Thomas fame) bluff; or when he challenges St. Peter's words? All of these are examples of a hard kindness, not foreign to love, but part of it. That last one, especially, sticks out to me.
Peter: one of Jesus' closest friends. Tempetuous, tempermental, lovable Peter. After denying Jesus three times before Jesus is crucified, after the resurrection, after Peter sees the resurrected Christ, after Peter even jumps into a lake to run to the risen Jesus, Jesus' kindness extends to push Peter a little further than even he maybe wanted first to go. In front of some of the other disciples Jesus asks point blank, “Do you love me?” Twice Peter, equivocates; “You know I like you.” Then the third time Jesus asks, “Do you even like me?” still in the presence of others (I can't help but imagine there might have been some awkward coughing and glancing away going on here). Finally, Peter gets it, breaks down and acknowledges that Jesus knows his heart, in a way signalling finally that Peter is finally ready to give Christ fully his heart. Jesus' kindness extended to breaking down Peter, so that he could build him up again into something even better. That is love.
That is maybe another area that our conception of love gets wrong, that love is not persistent, not nagging or irritating. But notice chapter 13 – love is described as not irritable , it says nothing about it not be irritating at times, especially those times when it is looking after my best interests and is right, and I would prefer it wasn't. For me, it often revolves around trips to the doctor:
“You know, you might want to get that checked out?
"Psssh, it's nothing; I've had worse.
"Um, sure, whatever. You do realize you can barely walk, have been making sounds eeriely like those made by people with phenomnia, and had a delightful conversation with the wall yesterday.
“You mean that wasn't my late Uncle Charlie?
"No, that was feverish delirium."
"Still, I think I'm on the mend."
"Uh huh, I'll go call a cab and get your coat. Oh, and that's not your cat; you've been petting your toque for the last 20 minutes.”
I might really not want to go to the doctor; find any number of excuses not to go; but love is not found in saying “sure, it's all good”, but in the icy “fine, whatever; get pneumonia” that certainly is irritating, but is absolutely right and loving.
And here we get to a final key feature of 1st Corinthians 13 that is easily glossed over considering it goes so against much of what our culture says is right and appropriate. Love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Love does all that not because it is a doormat, but because it believes in you more than you might believe in yourself. It believes precisely that you can be better than you are right now. There's a moral judgement there, a moral judgement in a society that tries to keep those to a minimum: you are good right now, you are loved fully, but love wants you to be even better. You might never get there, might never be that much better, but love is waiting and willing to do all that it can, offer all the help and push that it can so that you do move forward – then it will rejoice ... and start gently pushing again. Love wants the best for you, and believes you can be better, even if you don't believe it yourself.
Think about it, really think: you probably remember the teachers in high school that just came in to work, maybe even forced you to do assignments simply because they wanted people to follow the rules. Then there were others, the ones that pushed you – maybe not teachers, but friends or parents – helping you in any way they could, and believed in you even when you didn't always believe in yourself. That often means being hard-nosed and making you look at yourself, or do things you didn't always want or like. Looking back, to which do you have warmer feelings? The ones who were passive, even if passive aggressive, or the ones that were active, maybe sometimes even forcing you to push yourself more than you wanted. Which showed love?
That is why love is never ending. 1st Corinthians says that love, faith and hope are all incredibly vital for us as people, and as Christians, but that love is the greatest. Why? The answer: love is never-ending, but faith and hope will pass away: you only need faith for that which you can't see, only need hope when there is more road ahead which you don't know. But love, love always wants for you greater love, greater everything – it is infinite. It is not a mere trite sentiment when in the old hymn it sings “when we've been there ten thousand years, bright shinning as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we've first begun”. Ten thousand years – sounds like a long time, but each of those days are filled with love, complete and total love. And each day, we learn, we expand to encompass that immensity of love a little more. God is infinite, God is love; each day of those ten thousand year we get to touch the infinite, touch God, a little more.
When I think of how little I really know of love in my human understanding, it makes me excited for the promise of those ten thousand years.
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