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LENTEN DEVOTIONALS
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Why Musings?
- The Musings Page will be a place to consider thought-provoking, evocative, sometimes polemical but not overtly political, writings, quotes, ideas, and poetry on the Christian life in all its facets: spiritual, religious, ethical, and practical.
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Christmas Oratorio
posted on January 7, 2012 by Musings
Yesterday was the Twelfth Day of Christmas. Today we reflect on the end of Christmas season with a poem by W.H. Auden.
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –
Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully –
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
— W. H. Auden
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Epiphany
posted on January 6, 2012 by Musings
From : Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals
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Filed under: Bible, Christmas
JOURNEY OF THE MAGI
posted on January 1, 2012 by Musings
A poem from T.S. Eliot as we reflect on the visit of the Magi to bring gifts to the King.
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death. –T.S. Eliot
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Imitator of Christ
posted on December 30, 2011 by Musings
From : Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals
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Filed under: Christmas, Community
Seeing Shepherds
posted on December 28, 2011 by Musings
Luke 2:13-14 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”
Copyright Daniel Bonnell www.BonnellArt.com
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Filed under: Christmas
Christmas Day, 2011
posted on December 25, 2011 by Musings
To you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is Christ, the Lord… (Luke 2:11)
Well, it’s almost over.
If your house is like mine, there is a sluggish satisfaction at the end of an eventful day. The living room and the dining room table both evidence the reality of abundance and generosity. Once again, we have wrapped ourselves in the familiar stories and traditions of Christmas.
Even our house of worship has the feeling of wearied fullness. When I left the sanctuary this morning, there were drips of candle wax in seldom-used pews and stacks upon stacks of bulletins waiting to be recycled.
We have embraced and encountered the mystery of incarnation – and, while we feel, somehow, closer to God and one another through that encounter, we still wonder what it all means…
Madeline L’Engle writes:
[My problem with Christmas] lies not in secularism, not in Santa Clauses with cotton beards, not in loudspeakers blatting out [inane] Christmas carols, not in shops full of people pushing and shouting and swearing at each other as they struggle to buy overpriced Christmas presents.
No, its not the secular world which presents me with problems at Christmas…it’s God.
Cribb’d, cabined, and confined within the contours of a human infant. The infinite defined by the finite? The Creator of all life thirsty and abandoned? Why would God do such a thing? (From “The Irrational Season,” Chapter 2)
And the answer, of course, is love.
Perhaps we will never grasp the what, or the how of Christmas. Those types of understandings are lost in the brightness of incarnation’s mystery.
But we can grasp the why. We know why God chose to enter the finite, human, real world in the person of Jesus Christ. It is because of love…the love of the Creator for the creation. The love of the Redeemer for those in need of grace. The love of the Sustainer for those charged with spreading this love to the whole world.
Merry Christmas!
Today’s Christmas reflection was written by Pen Peery, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Shreveport
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Shiver of Fear
posted on December 17, 2011 by Musings
We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear the God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Filed under: Advent, Christmas, Faith
Touching the Deep Places
posted on December 16, 2011 by Musings
The tamed piety of the conventional church wants an innocent baby who comes gently into our secure lives and keeps everything benign and friendly. It may be conventional and it may be tame, but it is not biblical and it is not Christian. Advent is about both hope and hurt; pain and risk, as well as excitement and joy, are part of the adventure. Christ comes touching those deep places our culture too quickly covers over with glitzy wrapping paper and “Frosty, the Snowman.”
Kyle Childress quoted in Sacred Seasons: Advent/Christmas 2011 by Seeds of Hope Publishers
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Locating Our Lives in the Abandoned Places of the Empire
posted on December 13, 2011 by Musings
Everything in our society teaches us to move away from suffering, to move out of neighborhoods where there is high crime, to move away from people who don’t look like us. But the gospel calls us to something altogether different. We are to laugh at fear, to lean into suffering, to open ourselves to the stranger. Advent is the season when we remember that Jesus put on flesh and moved into the neighborhood. God’s getting born in a barn reminds us that God shows up even in the forsaken corners of the earth.
From: Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Enuma Okoro in Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals
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Filed under: Advent, Christmas, Community, Faith
The Holy Spirit, Change, and the Status Quo
posted on May 13, 2011 by Musings
“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” John 3:8
Sometimes the pace of change in our world can take your breath away. As we approach Pentecost, we wanted to spend some time with the Holy Spirit, the future of the Church—universal, PC(USA) and 900 Jordan—and the subject of change.
It seems like everyone in the Church today is clamoring for change. Some want change that takes us back to 1960. Others want to see change around the edges: doing what we already do but doing it better. Some want radical change in the way we “do church.” Almost no one believes that maintaining the status quo is an option for the church.
The readings we have attached come from a variety of sources and perspectives. One looks at the church and sees that “Our system is perfectly designed to maintain the status quo.” Are there structural changes that need to be made to the church’s way of going about its calling? What might that mean for the way a session or church committee goes about its work? How do we create a space for the Holy Spirit to work in the church? A pdf of this article is at Structures or you can access it at http://pcusa-oga.typepad.com/mgbcomm/2011/05/from-the-the-mgb-commission-observation-deck-8.html
Brian McLaren challenges the church to think in terms of “refounding” instead of preserving, renewing or restoring. If we were to pursue that sort of change, what would it look like for our church? What would have to change? If change by its nature involves some loss, are we willing to choose change anyway? You can read more from Brian and McLaren and watch an interview with him at: http://www.pcusa.org/news/2010/12/10/brian-mclaren-looks-future/
If “refounding” is beyond our capacity for change, what innovations can we make in the way we carry out our calling? Does change require a change in our identity and understanding of our mission?
As we approach completion of the Fulfilling the Vision project, how will this essentially new facility affect our ministry? Will anything change upon completion of the project? If so, what should those changes look like?
Read the materials and reflect on the questions they raise for you and the church. Will the “Lord, the giver of life” yet again breathe life into the church as it did at Pentecost?
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