- Whatever else a life of faith is for,
surely it has something to do with making sense of the world.
- All you have to do is spend a little
time with one or two brand new humans, as I have been privileged to
do with my grandboys recently, and you realize that tenderness and
ferocity are equally present in all of us, long before
self-consciousness is fully developed. Little boys are as ready to
snatch something they happen to want away from you as they are to
offer it back to you with great delight. And copious amounts of
saliva are only a problem for you, by the way, not them.
- All you have to do is scan the
headlines to realize that the world is as full of atrocity as it is
of breathtaking beauty and acts of unreasonable generosity. There is
as much brilliance in the world as there is banality. There is as
much kindness as there is meanness.
- One of the best things about babies is
also true about old folks. Because they aren’t up to doing a lot of
things the rest of us do, they get to sit on the sidelines and play
a lot. Because their minds are either crawling up the craggy
mountain of complex thought or sliding down the slippery slope on
the other side of acuity, they are not given the responsibility to
figure out how best to run the world. They don’t have to long for
order in the midst of chaos. They don’t have to deal with
randomness. They can just sit and marvel and take delight in sounds
and sights and incessant movement itself. Sabbath comes
naturally to them. It is their main way of being alive.
- Not so for the rest of us. We are very
busy most of the time, and often very fretful about our busyness.
There are all those things to do. There are all those things to buy
and sell. There are all those places to go, and all those people to
see, and all those skills to master. There are all those deadly
dead-ends to try to get ourselves out of.
- Did you know that in 1996, after a
gunman massacred 35 people at a resort in Australia, the national
response to the horror was to ban the possession of automatic rifles
and shotguns? Gun owners turned in 650,000 guns to the government,
for which the government reimbursed them. Since then, gun deaths in
Australia have been cut in half. The country’s per capita gun crime
rate is a tenth that of the United States. (Christian Century,
5.29.07:5)
- The shooting at Virginia Tech left 33
people dead, and there hasn’t even been a serious debate on gun laws
since. Not even from those who are quite fond of using the phrase
"culture of life". Where are the voices of faithful people helping
us make sense of this?
- Did you know that thousands of women
are brought to the biggest cities of not only the countries of the
world, but our country each year, on the promise that there will be
husbands waiting for them who can provide them with the good life,
only to be sold into sex slavery and forced to do unimaginable
things for interminable lengths of time? (AP, 5.27.07)
- Did you know that Rupert Murdoch, the
media giant who wants to buy the Wall Street Journal, owns both the
Christian publisher Zondervan, which publishes Rick Warren’s The
Purpose Driven Life, and Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting
Network, as well as British Sky Broadcasting, with 7.2 million
subscribers, which specializes in pornographic channels? (CC,
5.29.07)
- Where are the voices of people of faith
who will help us make sense of these kinds of things?
- Well, if the voices of faith are too
often sadly silent, there are always the babies and the old folks to
pay attention to. There is something quite important that can be
learned from them. There is something to be said about the power of
play to restore us to sanity. There is something crucial about
taking time off from trying to run the world, about stopping what
you are so frantically busy doing long enough to see things the way
"useless" people see them.
- Rev It Up is going to take a small
sabbath break starting next week while we go journeying across the
land. We will join many of you in Philadelphia for FCC’s mission
trip there, we will spend a week with thousands of other members of
the United Church as it gathers with its invited guests for General
Synod and a 50th birthday bash. All along the way, we will be
talking with people of faith who are finding ways to make sense of
the world, and we will do our best to play as much as we can.
- Perhaps, if God is so inclined, we’ll
even have our breath taken away a time or two.
- May you find time to accomplish
absolutely nothing before we meet on these pages again.
Reflections
on Faith and Life