Slowly getting you caught up on these posts I share on Conversations Journal. Here is April’s post. Blessings and peace…R
Month: August 2013
Conversing Through Conversations, part 3
Here is my Conversations Journal post for March of this year. In it I touch on a favorite discussion: the spirituality of home. I’d love to hear some of your own thoughts and yearnings on this most powerful of topics.
Conversing Through Conversations, part 2
I continue the process of sharing with you delightful friends some of the work I’ve been doing at Conversations Journal. What follows, albeit a little chronologically disjointed, is my February Conversations Journal post. You can read it here.
Conversing Through Conversations
As any writer will tell you, “write, eat, sleep, write, rinse, repeat.” I am as much scripturiant* as I am anything else. Writing has become for me, prayer. Through it I expose my thoughts, first to myself, then to a watching (and sometimes unsuspecting) world. I like to think of myself as a diamond in the rough. Who wouldn’t given the many not so glamorous alternatives? Hence, my writing has a kind of…edge to it. Informative? Yes, I suppose. Transformative? Certainly for me. Honest? As much as possible. What that means is that one will find me easily enough hiding among my words,. But it’s what I don’t say and how I don’t say it that will, more often than not, give me up to those wiser than I who see through my cynical facade.
One of the ways I’ve been invited to live with a life-with-my-pants-down honesty is through a blog for which I’ve been contributing the past few months: Conversations. It has been refreshing to participate with some very fine people in plumbing the depths of the Christian spiritual enterprise together. This has been an honor and privilege for a guy like me – frequently disarming, leaning a little Southpark in my philosophical pathos and MLK in my political one, but polite when I need to be. Senior editor, writer, spiritual director and friend (well, so far at least!), Tara Owens, has taken a real chance on me. For this I could not be more humbled and happy.
For you followers of my blog(s), I am so deeply grateful and want to share with you the pieces I’ve proudly contributed to this fine blog and invite you to join me there even as you’ve done so faithfully here. Thus begins a journey of Conversing Through Conversations…part 1.
Hopefully, you’ll like my pieces enough to check out others and perhaps…subscribe?
*Scripturiant: (those possessing a compulsion to write)
Crazy Writer pic: www.bookpregnant.blogspot.com
Enter now this moon
Enter now this moon,
parading past the shades
wearing only dusky intentions.
Her cloudy slip billows past her knees
and brazenly reveals her starlit muse –
gift for these words.
*
One-eyed heavenly wink,
a gesture of good-will,
brightness of day gone by,
she bares her breast
to let the night suckle its way
once more to day.
*
Her pale, pocked face has no rivals
but spills herself out as offering:
love that looks for mood,
art that looks for food,
bedsheets that turn to brood,
all for the gift of a song.
Picture: www.layoutsparks.com
A Longing Still Being Fulfilled
It has been two and a half years since starting this blog. In that time, life has fashioned me just like it has you. I’m in the throes of developing a brand new website. I’ll keep you posted on that. Until then, I give you my very first blog post from this site that still rings true for me today. Please feel free to share with me your own thoughts, longings either fulfilled or not, hopes, dreams, frustrations…the works. Let’s do this life thing together.
Still in one peace…R
A thirsty now
What dark, forbidden thoughts
lie hidden, cringing in corners
left purposely unexplored, where only
the unbidden foes and uninvited guests
can plant their flags of remorse.
Pull back the shades but for a moment
and the nighttime pupils tear open
gasping again for shadows, but alive
once more to the potential of life-giving light.
What chaste and tender memories
are held at the bottoms of jam jars,
pie trays, rabbit cages and junk drawers.
Here, where time and dust allow
the mind to shade and dim what once
was bright, certain, immediate,
the mind can do its best work
of cinching a forever then
to a thirsty now.
The Old Rugged Cross: Rene Girard and the Resurrection of Substitutionary Atonement
I tend not to post theological pieces to my blog for a number of reasons. First, I’m an armchair theologian at best, preferring the wilder, more untamed waters of Christian spirituality. Second, I love to talk theology but tend not to enjoy the often carte blanche blanket statements in comments lines that indicate that someone truly believes they’ve got this one figured out. It cheapens theology in general and proves my point that all true theology is ultimately a lived theology. However, I’ve undergone sweeping theological and even philosophical changes in the past 30 years of my Christian journey that sometimes ask for clarification.
A favorite blog of mine: The Theological Wanderings of a Street Pastor which features the excellent writing of J. Barrett Lee, hosted the following expose of substitutionary atonement theory. This is just one of many ways I’ve been changing. Without more of my blah, blah, I instead give you his much deeper insights…
Friends and commentators from all over the theological spectrum have mentioned that I don’t seem to have given susbstitutionary atonement theory its due in my post from earlier this week, The Wrath of God and the Presbyterian Hymnal.
In that post, I leaned heavily on presenting substitutionary atonement as “cosmic child abuse” (an excellent turn of phrase I’m borrowing from Sarah Sanderson-Doughty). I wrote:
…penal substitution sets up a scenario where Jesus saves humanity from the rage (not the wrath) of an out-of-control, abusive parent. When all is said and done, the church gathers around a crucifix and hears, “This is your fault. Look at what you made God do. You are so bad and dirty that God had to torture and kill this beautiful, innocent person so that he wouldn’t do the same thing to you. Therefore, you’d better shape up and be thankful or else God…
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