From the Word Shop Newsletter, July 2008. Also, check out the Word shop online at companyofsaints.com and stop by next time you are on that edge of the continent!
"It's been ten years since I read Isaiah 49 and walked out of church, the wind slamming the door behind us; ten years since we left and walked into a church down the street just in time for the Gospel: "Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sins of the world." Since then I have bounced around, sometimes feeling like a kid who's left home to go off to college, sometimes rejoicing in the unity of those beholding and sometimes experiencing the heart ripping anguish of divorce. "Great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart," Paul said in regards to his people.
"It's been ten years since I read Isaiah 49 and walked out of church, the wind slamming the door behind us; ten years since we left and walked into a church down the street just in time for the Gospel: "Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sins of the world." Since then I have bounced around, sometimes feeling like a kid who's left home to go off to college, sometimes rejoicing in the unity of those beholding and sometimes experiencing the heart ripping anguish of divorce. "Great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart," Paul said in regards to his people.
"I grew up in a liberal, academic household. I remember my father refusing to sign the anti-communism loyalty oath demanded of professors in the 50's. We were pro civil rights, pro free speech, anti-war; nonconformists, effete intellectual snobs, hippies. What a shock it has been to watch so-called liberals move into behaviors I would have once attributed to "red-neck fundamentalists." I personally have experienced hate mail, book banning and up shutting from the liberal front. Those whom I'd expect to applaud a forum of freely exchanged ideas, suddenly can only tolerate ideas in agreement with theirs. Since when do liberals demand loyalty oaths like the Presiding Episcopal Bishop did while collecting delegates for her puppet diocese? Why have there been more priests and Bishops deposed in the last two years than in the previous 200 years of the American Episcopal Church? It is very odd.
Reading over a century of encyclicals on Social Justice, I was struck by how the church is unable to rest on the right or on the left. Instead she is always shifting, one foot in front of the other, arms swinging in opposite directions. The belly button insists that we should all just find middle ground, but the church is on the move, always has been. Right, left, right. Sometimes she looks quite drunk, staggering down the hall, bouncing off the walls. Sometimes she is drunk on the finest of wine. Meanwhile, some of us get bruised. This love stuff is not for the faint hearted."
"I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward." - Charlotte Bronte
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