Body of Christ, newly defined

A friend of mine at church has been suffering from kidney problems for many years -- she has been on dialysis for the past two years, a machine in her home which she has to hook up to every second day. She is courageous and has dignity, but even she was wearing thin from this. Last year she had to have one kidney removed. Because of her age, she would have waited ten years for a transplant tobecome available. Her husband wasn't a good match because he has lupus.

Her situation became somewhat known to our parish family.

A few months ago, I found out that Martin G, our quiet unassuming single library guy had volunteered one of his kidneys. When the social worker was doing his psych screening, she asked him whether he thought this would score brownie points with God. He told her that God already loved him, he didn't need to do something further to gain that reward.

Last Thursday they had the operations, and it was deemed a success on all fronts. Of course, there needs to e more time to determine how she will adapt to his kidney. Someone said, her blood, flowing through M's kidney, will give her clear urine and a new life.

It is a new, and really concrete, way of looking at the Body of Christ.

as time passes

It is Thanksgiving Sunday today, and I have been thinking about how we get caught up in certain things. Several years ago when my 15-year-old son was about 8, there was a great furore among Christian circles over the Harry Potter books -- were they occult and dangerous, or were they getting your kids to read. Which was the lesser of two evils?

It started me thinking about the role of parents in their children's discernment, which ultimately led to writing a book about making wise discernments with your teenagers (it has not been published, nor raised any interest, but that's another story). After an incredible amount of research and several rewrites, my son finally turned 13, but it was only in the past six months or so that I have come smack up into the face of the teenager, and can truly write and know what it's like.

And for all that research, and all that experience, the sum of it is this: love. Sounds simple, love them and they will turn out fine, but it's hard. When children know they are loved, they are more inclined to be good. When we spend time with them, reassuring them of their worth, they will know it when they hear that their Heavenly Father loves them and values them. When you really love them, your discipline is in their best interest and not out of anger.

St Paul really had it right on when he wrote:
1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. 11When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. 12Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

It's also incredibly difficult to follow.

I Married an Unbeliever...

A little over 20 years ago, I met a lovely man with all sorts of good ethics and honesty, but when he told me he was very anti-church and anti-Christian, I merely shrugged it off, secretly thinking that one day, one day..... I would change him!

Oops. Two decades later, and he's no closer to becoming a Christian, and I have to rethink what this means, especially with kids.

I've concluded the following:

1) badgering someone to become a Christian, whether he's your husband or the stranger on the bus, doesn't work
2) try to remember all the good things your spouse does, because good is of God. (and praise him or her for it!)
3) dump the moral superiority -- we've got nothing to be superior about. God forgave us (and continues to forgive us) when he died on the cross, and we continue to let him down.
4) don't barricade yourself into a tight little Christian group that your spouse has no way of joining -- when you entertain, mix things up and add a few non-Christian faces.
5) try to avoid being gleeful when something he'd done that is clearly non-Christian ends up failing
6) pray ceaselessly -- it worked for St Monica (whose son was St Augustine)
7) do not think leaving the marriage will make you happier -- even two Christians on the same page will find plenty to argue about
8) act with grace (love), speak with truth (boundaries, limits, etc.) at all times (at least when you're not tempted to lose your temper)
9) Jesus never talked about being a Christian in his parables, but he spoke lots about becoming fully human, and a little more divine by giving to the poor, treating your neighbour with compassion, planting good seeds, and so on

What about the kids?
For spiritually single women like me, the findings of recent studies on church attendance are grim. Although the numbers vary according to the study, it was found that when both parents take children to church, as much as 75 percent become attenders; if dads only take kids to church, that drops to 55 percent, but when it’s only the moms taking them, the percentage plummets to a mere 15 percent.

However, I’m not one to give up hope – and here’s why:

-- studies show that children derive their image of God from their fathers – since my husband is gentle, nurturing and ethical, I’m banking that they will continue to see God in a similar light
-- I try to be an informed Christian, so I can talk to my children about their faith as it relates to culture, helping them to discern difficult moral and spiritual issues
-- We attend a vibrant church, filled with children and youth, and alive with the Holy Spirit; I want my children interacting with real people who are Christian – caring, smart, holy, and fun
-- I send them to summer camp to nurture their connection to God’s created world and to a Christian community
-- I pray – a lot – to keep my relationship with God strong, and to ask on behalf of my children (and my husband) that they will come to know and love the Lord

Sacred Females

It's been almost a month since I last blogged. Too busy finding candidates for a recent TV contract on grooming shaggy men and making them worthy of their women. I am the first one to say my husband could stand some improvement, but if truth be told a lot of the women who nominated their men actually had greater need of sprucing up.

There was the woman who called the show and asked that we do something with her boyfriend of ten years, who has rotting teeth. His breath stinks, she wailed. After he got his teeth kicked in, he's done nothing with them.

What happened -- was he in a fight, I asked innocently.

No, I kicked him in the mouth ten years ago, she replied.

Oh. He must have done something pretty awful to warrant that.

I was behaving badly, she admitted. That's when I was drinking.

Since the producer insisted we follow up on this "love story" I chatted next with the man who said their issues were way deeper than a shave and a haircut and that he wouldn't go back to her.

That's just one example. There were many others.

This brings me to the Da Vinci Code, and the worship of the sacred feminine. And the Last Supper, since this is Maundy Thursday, and Mary Magdalene who is supposedly reclining on Jesus' right side in Da Vinci's Last Supper painting.

The way that Mary M is portrayed in the DVC (da vinci code) is about as conniving and manipulative as the lovely lady who kicked in her guy's teeth while drunk.

The gospel accounts portray Magdalene as worshipful -- not lovesick, not queenly and presiding over the table as the chatelaine -- but emptied out. When women are engaged in an intimate relationship with a man, they simply are not emptied out, unless there's an abusive or co-dependent thing going on.

I have more problems with the DVC than just that, however. First of all, the priory which worships the sacred feminine is ALL MEN! It's a brotherhood.

Secondly, the secret rituals which are supposed to cause the divine spark are ugly romping sex acts -- imagine this: a grey-haired overweight woman astride an old gray-haired man, in the midst of a secret society of folks chanting like Druids.

Contrast that to The Song of Solomon, with its spiritually erotic verse illuminating the heart that pants after its Maker. As a mom, I have never once considered myself the creator of my two kids -- and to confuse the divine spark that occurs when we search for God with the sex act is more than bizarre.

And now to the Last Supper. The metaphysical divine consumed by the merely human. Now that's intimate.

Who Among us Lives in Dogville

Finally saw Dogville last night. Didn’t sleep. Tossing and turning, gripped by its incredible power, and yet wondering exactly, what’s it all about.

Has anyone been in those kids’ playgrounds where all the imitation leather bags hang down, and you have to run around bumping into them, and finding the other kids in the maze of it all? The movie felt a bit like that – I kept brushing against pleather strips redolent of gospel stories, especially parable, feeling their sensation on my arms, prickling the skin, and yet the meaning eluding me because it is not obvious, and like parables it does not hit you over the head with the moral. We either have eyes to see and ears to hear, or we do not.

But it is also universally human – how do we act, sinful human that we are, when grace comes among us? Do we choose to embrace it and be changed by it, or do we say no to it? Everyone in Dogville is at once drawn to Grace’s purity, mercy, forgiving nature, and yet they come to despise her for it. Her beauty, both physical (which often signals inner beauty) and spiritual, shows their (and our) ugliness all the more.

Grace’s intrusion also shatters the cocoon of Dogville because it exposes them (and us) to something much bigger. Dogville, for all intents and purposes, is a “city” on a hill, and its residents are gripped in a grim puritanical existence, left to scratch like chickens in the earth. There is no joy, not much celebration, except when Grace first arrives. It believes itself impervious to the outside world, and yet it can be invaded, both by gangsters and thugs, and by Grace.

Her innocence, forgiveness, light and softness is there for all to partake of, and the townspeople of Dogville do just that. For the first few days they become changed, enlightened and cheered, on the verge of becoming an authentically caring community. And then something happens; mistrust sets in, they feel threatened by her, because they are afraid of the letter of the law. Instead of being transformed by Grace, they sink lower into their slum of the soul, end up attacking grace because they cannot view her as the spirit of the law.

(Some critics have accused Triers of hating women, but I don’t agree. Rape illumines the depths of degradation to which we can sink, that is to distort love by the use of force and power is the worst distortion of love possible.)

For most of the movie, I expected Grace was another “holy fool” like Bess in Breaking the Waves, and I struggled a lot with the ending where she diverges from that. The big difference between the movies, though, is Bess was driven by love, for her husband, and for his healing. Grace, on the other hand, may have such a driving force at first but not toward the end because what she thought was love, was only self-interest (Tom Edison wants to think and feel in order to write about it, but not to live it).

This morning, my bible reading was Luke, chapter 6. It was unbelievably apropos. How the crowd sought to touch Jesus for power that came out of him, and how those who were sick and filled with unclean spirits were healed; How the Pharisees were “filled with fury” when Jesus did something good on the Sabbath; this is also the chapter that deals with loving those who hate you, giving to those who beg from you, and blessing those who curse you, all of which Grace does. It’s also the chapter that talks about no good tree bearing bad fruit, nor a bad tree bearing good fruit.

There is an overriding sense of the gospels in this movie, though it’s impossible to pin down, and say this symbol stands for this, and so on. But Grace must make a choice at the end, as God did when Abraham begged him to save Sodom and Gomorrah; God agrees, providing there are ten good men, then three, then one in the city. When none can be found, the city is destroyed.

While Grace does make a beautiful and impassioned plea at the end about mercy and forgiveness, she must decide if this town is worth mercy. (By the way, Nicole Kidman is remarkable in this role.) Thomas Edison, Grace’s amour in the movie, who might possibly have been that one good man, turns out to be just as selfish and sinful as the rest of them, as distorted by life in Dogville. I’m not sure if Triers is also saying that culture will rub off on you (probably he is – after all Lot and Abraham made very different choices when they took up their land outside of Sodom and Gomorrah, with Lot choosing to be close to the city of sin, and Abraham preferring to reside a little outside its reach.)

But I do think he is saying a lot about the choices we make, particularly about whether we choose to accept grace or not.