Our Sanitized Lens - September 12

Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 56, 57, [58]; PM Psalm 64, 65; Job 40:1-24; Acts 15:36-16:5; John 11:55-12:8

This past week, I launched my reading group again after a three-month summer hiatus.  We read a variety of books, usually nonfiction, but not always, and ranging on any number of unusual topics. Not all are religious and yet we trust God to be a part of the conversation and help us to discern how we can see God more deeply in the beauty of the world. 

I selected our September Book from a list published by Time Magazine, a collection of poetry by critically acclaimed author Ocean Vuong titled Time is a Mother. The paragraph describing the collection and the litany of acclaimed authors and sources recommending it led me to believe it would be the perfect choice to kick off our fall series.  Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.  

As I started to work through the first poems, I wrote my class to warn them of the haunting, vivid, and visceral language that I found so shocking.  I told another that I wouldn’t have selected this collection if I had read it before, which is also true. It’s painful, dark, and yet also beautiful and touching.  As I slowly read each poem, I am being forced to wrestle with powerful images that I’d rather not see.

And yet, as I read the Scriptures appointed for this morning, I am struck that the setting of the story is when the Jewish people are making their way to Jerusalem before the Passover to purify themselves, an annual tradition of sorts.  Their reason is the focus on cleanliness and being both physically and spiritually clean, an attribute of how they understand holiness and purity.  And I am left wondering if my own uncomfortableness with such shocking and vivid imagery that captures the pain and loss of someone’s very human experience is an attempt to see the world through a sanitized lens, my own focus on holiness and purity. 

The world is painful and broken.  Saint Stephen’s likely understands this as much as any community could.  I think we are tempted to come to church sometimes to escape this reality, to find beauty and peace that stands in stark contrast to the pain and agony of the world.  The reality of God’s love breaking into this world is not the absence of grief, pain, trauma, or agony, but taking the reality of the world and making it holy.  We can’t purify ourselves, and we don’t need to, because Christ has redeemed the world. 

The world is complex.   This is the world that Christ breaks into to make holy and redeem, and not a sanitized version of what we want to see.  Maybe this understanding of the power of Christ can let us sit with the pain and discomfort of the world in new ways.

Faithfully,

John+

Questions for Self-Reflection:  What stories of the world are painful for you to sit with?  How can God help you to see that reality with new eyes? 

Daily Challenge:  Read a piece of poetry.  I suggest the Poetry Foundation as a good source.