Monthly Archives: March 2015

We confess easily, in this Lenten season, that Christ suffered and died.  With various understandings of atonement emphasized,  we confess it easily because we understand that Christ’s suffering brings us at-one with our Creator.  What is more difficult,  is that suffering is also required of me as an individual person of faith.  I suffer to know how to respond to a weary world with faithfulness.  I suffer to know how to meet the needs of my neighbors, enemies and friends.  I suffer when congregations experience loss or become disoriented.    I suffer when my denomination engages their process of discernment. And my denomination engages their spiritual practice of discernment with rigorous regularity.

This process of discernment is not for the faint of heart. Though it might be imagined many ways, as pictured above, our discernment begins in worship where we are illumined by scripture and tradition with the help of the Holy Spirit.    Worship, then, informs our awareness giving rise to  the organic and constructed prayers of day life.   In dialogue and discussion, worship and prayer arrive to particular moments of awakening and consternation within the wider world.    These conversations engaged with intention (or the ones that we simply overhear), lead us again into prayer and reflection.  All of this a preparation for the votes that Presbyterians do to acknowledge their simple and super majorities and also their minorities.  Minorities and majorities then return to worship together, giving themselves, again to work of the Spirit.

Yesterday was another day of voting with in the privileged agony of being Presbyterian.  Throughout three decades of discernment, our denomination worshiped, prayed, discussed, prayed, voted and returned to worship around the subject of human sexuality.  Insistent returns to this cycle confess we will not be rushed nor will we be inert.  For many, even of differing points of view, it was an important day.  Some celebrated and jumped to their feet in praise.  Others sat with quiet stillness, reading or listening to the news.  Our attention focused on the decision to change the definition of marriage, traditionally understood between a man and a woman, to an understanding of marriage between two people.

A portion of Christ’s greatest suffering was among three leading disciples in the garden who could not keep vigil with him.  Knowing the story of Gethsemane, we strive for vigilance.  It requires our ability to stay awake and abide within the agony of our discernment process.  A vote does not a denomination make. I have reminded myself of that over the last three decades.  But votes do ask us to mark and continue our journey. Votes  show us the state of our denomination so that we may worship, pray and engage one another with vigilant love.  It is the work within the agonizing cycle of discernment that allows a denomination to build momentum.  It is momentum that allows for intentional spinning outward toward a dynamic and waiting world.  The disciples found their vigilance in the midst of suffering so, perhaps, we will as well. Such is the community that follows The One who was undeterred by certainty, uncertainty, and suffering.  In his suffering we are made whole. Let us not take that tension lightly.

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Increasingly, I am humbled by a truth.  The truth is that where I stand, my perspectives, my religious beliefs, and my personal convictions within those religious beliefs are, in important ways, beyond my reasoned control.  I have moments when I rage in argument against “the other side” or perspective.  There are moments of frustration or even competitive despair.  But I have noticed that I used to do more raging, I had more frustration and despair in the past than I do these days.  Perhaps I am just getting older.

Increasingly my frustration and raging are replaced by a fascination with “the other side”.  “The other side” of opinions, beliefs or inclinations does not always persuade me.  For that reason, the fascination is strange.  The fascination leaves me in a strange place.  Even as I cannot control my perspectives or opinions, I find that I cannot help, at this point in my life, being so interested in the space between two arguments.

I stand, in the space between two arguments and on either side, I see individuals of such complexity and sensitivity that it sends me to a mystical place of contemplation.  In that place of contemplation, there is a wish that each person could be recognized for their depth and celebrated for their particularity.  The wish continues that no one would have to suffer.

Yet arguing and suffering are sure parts of the human experience. As they are unavoidable, suffering is the common experience to greater or lesser extent on both sides of an argument.  How romantic it would be to be a revolutionary, a prophet even an activist!  There are others who are carrying this energy well and I have to admit that I am  a bit jealous.  I believe that activist energy is part of who I am.  But I stand in a primary energy that is quite different.

The energy is something like a leveraged pull.  From the foothold of Reformed Christianity, I pull on polarities to see how long a  venn of relationship might hold the overlap.  Some of the overlap is generous, some is imperceptibly slight.   But sometimes, in the acquaintance, those on two sides of an argument remember and find their way back to the venn.