Archive for March 4, 2013

The Electric Word – Gospel Funk from The Relatives

March 4, 2013 / / One comment

 

Today we hear of a musical resurrection: I first came across this story on NPR, then on the Brooklyn Vegan and Heavy Light Records website.

In 1970, the Revs. Gean and Tommie West started a gospel group called The Relatives. The Relatives were Texas legends in the ’70s, playing genre-bending gospel and psychedelic soul and sharing bills with The Staple Singers, The Mighty Clouds of Joy, and The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi.  By 1980 the group disbanded, but a few years ago a Texas DJ and record collector contacted the group about a reunion. Now they’ve released their first album of original work in 30 years: The Electric Word on Yep Roc Records, and they’re on tour.

If you can’t catch The Relatives live, Heavy Light Records has put out a compilation of their obscure 45s from the 1970s, and they have a YouTube channel –so you can listen while you’re waiting for the CD to arrive in the mail.

 

 

Category: African-American, gospel music, music / Tags: , , , ,

Good gifts turned to evil

March 3, 2013 / / Comments Off on Good gifts turned to evil

The tragedy of sin is that is diverts divine gifts. The person who has a genuine capacity for loving becomes promiscuous, maybe sexually, or maybe by becoming frivolous and fickle, afraid to make a commitment to anyone or anything. The person with a gift for passionate intensity squanders it in angry tirades and, given power, becomes a demagogue.

Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk.

 

The story of the Fall is the story of created good turned to sorrow and evil. So many of our sins are this way, a good thing pushed too far or turned to selfish purposes. Our desire to protect someone becomes a drive to control them. We squander God’s abundance and it becomes waste. Our capacity for imaginative play becomes twisted with hatred and turns into torture.

If sin were only an invader, an isolated tumor that we could just cut out, it would all be so much easier.  Painful still, but clear. Instead, we find that to know ourselves and our sins we have to consider them, and understand the place in our journey where we turned aside. It’s hard work to comprehend this complicated mix of actions and motivations, and the good that remains can become yet another temptation to excuse it all and let it be.

But we cannot let it be. We will all be changed, but we must change ourselves too.

Category: sin /

Making friends of lust and anger

February 25, 2013 / / 2 comments

So what do you do when that quiet time you’ve set aside for introspection doesn’t make you peaceful and centered, but only seems to beat the grass and startle the snakes? In Bread for the Journey, Henri Nouwen writes:

 

…when we enter into silence we encounter a lot of inner noises, often so disturbing that a busy and distracting life seems preferable to a time of silence.  Two disturbing “noises” present themselves quickly in our silence: the noise of lust and the noise of anger. Lust reveals our many unsatisfied needs, anger, o[u]r many unresolved relationships. But lust and anger are very hard to face.  What are we to do? ….

 

Nouwen goes on to say that, rather than reacting in horror and immediately trying to quash our unruly impulses, we should instead turn these inner enemies into friends.

 

How do we befriend our inner enemies lust and anger? By listening to what they are saying. They say, “I have some unfulfilled needs” and “Who really loves me?” Instead of pushing our lust and anger away as unwelcome guests, we can recognize that our anxious, driven hearts need some healing.  Our restlessness calls us to look for the true inner rest where lust and anger can be converted into a deeper way of loving.

 

We must be merciful–even to ourselves. If we are not, we risk being unable to bear looking at our fallen reality, or if we do look, we may fail to recognize in ourselves God’s beloved.

 

Category: anger, Lent, lust, sin, temptation /

Forgiveness

February 24, 2013 / / One comment

 “Forgiveness” –a track from TobyMac’s album Eye on It, performed with Lecrae. 

 

 

Category: forgiveness, gospel music, Lent, music, popular music, video /

Felix Randal

February 23, 2013 / / One comment

 

Felix Randal
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

 

 

Photo credit:  reway2007, Creative Commons: A, N-C, SA

Category: blessings, death, ministry, poetry, suffering / Tags:

Led or driven?

February 21, 2013 / / One comment

First Temptation of Christ
from Champagne-Ardenne, France c.1170-1180
Victoria & Albert Museum

 

Each year as Lent begins we read the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. There are three versions found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew and Luke are similar, but for some reason, Mark leaves out all the specifics of the temptation and condenses the account to two verses.

There’s a lot to think about in this story and in the way it’s told, but the one detail that stops me every year is this: in Matthew and Luke, Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, but Mark says that he was driven.  Led or driven? Did he jump or was he pushed?

The Spirit in both these accounts is one I recognize.  Sometimes the Spirit leads you gently: reassuring you, beckoning you to step forward. Other times, he drives you like Jonah to Nineveh.  Don’t even try to ignore the prodding, the Holy Ghost is not going to let you be, and he won’t stand for dawdling either.  It feels like the difference between “I want to” and “I can do no other.”  Not that we always mind being compelled to action. There is a certain reassurance in feeling that God is actually telling you something specific, since he is more often vague in his communications.

But I wonder about Jesus’ time in the wilderness. Did he know what was out there before he arrived? And why is it that Luke doesn’t tell of angels ministering to Jesus (a nice, comforting detail), but says Jesus “returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee” making it sound like the Spirit drove Jesus out of the wilderness?

I guess for me, this one troublesome detail isn’t so much about Jesus and his preparation for ministry as it is about the Holy Spirit and the way God moves in this world among us, preparing us for difficult tasks ahead.  Sometimes he leads and sometimes he pushes.  But if we respond to the Spirit’s direction, then perhaps he will take us to the place we need to be, to learn what we need to know.  I hope so—even if it is a desert.

Category: Holy Spirit, Jesus, Lent, temptation / Tags:

Full Moon Silhouettes

February 18, 2013 / / One comment

Full Moon Silhouettes from Mark Gee on Vimeo:  a real time video of the moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, New Zealand.

 

How fortunate we are to live in such a world as this, and each of those silhouettes a child of God.

 

Category: Nature, video /

Joy in the Wilderness

February 17, 2013 / / One comment

     …in the shadow of thy wings I sing for joy.

 

 

Psalm 63:7b  –A Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah.

Category: psalms /

What if the next Pope were a nun?

February 16, 2013 / / Comments Off on What if the next Pope were a nun?

 

E.J.Dionne gives us a thought experiment today:  what if the next person to head the Catholic Church were a nun? Dionne says that

handing leadership to a woman — and in particular, to a nun — would vastly strengthen Catholicism, help the church solve some of its immediate problems and inspire many who have left the church to look at it with new eyes.

Dionne makes an interesting case, and even if he is as he says “running ahead of the Spirit on this one” (by which he means the Holy Spirit not the Zeitgeist), his column is worth reading and thinking about.

The Catholic Church (and I would argue, the Church as a whole) is perceived as having two sides: the rigid hierarchical, doctrine- and rule-enforcing side, and the compassionate, do-justice-love-mercy working in the world side.  How can the Church become a more unified, integrated institution and overcome this dichotomy?  A Catholic who loves the Church deeply, Dionne asks us to step outside our usual processes and, just for a moment, imagine something different.

For the Church, for our lives, it’s important to perform these thought experiments from time to time: to let our God-given imaginations roam a bit in contradiction of the typical; to look at all kinds of issues and problems outside the constraints of what we believe is possible.

Something to think about as we move through Lent, pondering our sins and hoping for resurrection.

 

Category: Catholic, Pope, women / Tags:

Word for the day: Shrive

February 12, 2013 / / 2 comments

shrive  (shrv)

1.  To confess one’s sins
2.  To hear the confession of a person
3.  To impose a penance on a sinner
4.  To grant absolution to a penitent

Middle English schriven, from Old English scrifan, from Latin scribere, to write
Words that come from the Latin scribere include scribe, script, scrivener, Scripture, manuscript, transcribe, ascribe, conscription, prescription, inscription, scribble, nondescript, post script, and shrive.
How curious that a single word should encompass the confessing, the listening, and the absolving.  Shrive is the word that binds the priest and penitent in the act of confession; together they do one thing.  That it comes from the verb “to write” reminds me of Revelation 20:15.
Category: confession, Lent /
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