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Listen to this, you who grind the destitute and plunder the humble, you who say,
“When will the new moon be over so that we may sell corn? When will the Sabbath be past so that we may open our wheat again, giving short measure in the bushel and taking overweight in the silver, tilting the scales fraudulently, and selling the dust of the wheat; that we may buy the poor for silver and the destitute for a pair of shoes?”
The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob:
I will never forget any of their doings. Amos 8: 4-7
A new day coming, change breathing fear and conflict down our necks, we bow before the gods of Scarcity and Me First. An old order, feverish, on its death bed, hollers, flails, clutches its bedclothes with restless fingers, and sees leering phantoms rise from its bedpan.
A cry rises up out of Egypt. Here in this land the child of Compassion once found safety from another ruler’s wrath.
“Let our people go!” rings out in Libya. Rulers tremble. Politicians abandon reason and rush to protect their interests. The homeless crowd the streets. The sick are told to leave their sheltered care and fend for themselves. And truth, which finds its voice, its shape, its story, its song in art,
is silenced
as the rich and powerful cling to their gold.
A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.
Tell them this.
Put down this.
Be still.
Or be stilled.
And Know who I Am.
And know this –
there are rules:
Love, serve, and trust God rather than trusting systems which exploit and destroy life in its many forms.
Take care of neighbors. Welcome, respect, and protect the stranger, the alien, and the orphan. Look out for the weak, children, women, and the elderly.
Don’t kill each other, or steal or tell lies about each other. Don’t be unfaithful to your commitments to each other.
Don’t engage in practices which exploit or prey upon the vulnerable.
Once a week back away from the system of anxious scarcity, production, and consumption. Stop working and rest. Do not allow your life to be defined by endless producing and doing, and no being.
and there are consequences:
I will not forget any of your doings.
Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth. Psalm 46: 10 NIV
.
With gratitude to the prophets, Joel and Amos, and modern prophet and Biblical scholar,Walter Brueggemann and his book, Journey to the Common Good
- Love and the Wind (theprayinglife.wordpress.com)
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- The Stranger (theprayinglife.wordpress.com)
Posted in Christianity, Contemplation, prayer, faith, Justice, sin, Spiritual Practices
Tagged Amos, Prophet, Psalm 46, Ten commandments, Walter Brueggemann
He went out, not knowing where he was going.
Hebrew 11:8
Waiting in the check out line, I indulge in my guilty pleasure – scanning the headlines of the National Enquirer. BILLY RAY RAGE: DISNEY DESTROYED MILEY CYRUS! GAGA-MADONNA WAR ERUPTS! I resist pulling an issue of Celebrity News off the rack to catch up on Tom and Katie. I save that for the beauty salon, when I am less apt to run into someone I know.
Back home as I haul in the groceries, my dog gives me a good sniffing, reading me front and back like a newspaper full of local scandals. All of us critters seem to be created with curiosity, as we wave antennae, bounce sonar, phosphoresce, and sniff out the news of our world and of one another, often shamelessly poking our snouts in our neighbor’s crotch.
Such knowledge – lurid, informative, or life saving – may empower, entertain, set us free, or provide our supper. Knowledge opens doors to invention, opportunity, and innovation.
The Bible understands that the highest kind of knowledge is knowledge, not of my neighbor’s stupid acts and reckless behavior, but of God. Knowledge of God is not for sale in the supermarket check-out line, but is given free through growing intimacy with Holiness. Knowledge of God flows from creation, scripture, people, even, sometimes, the check out line at Savemore, but, most significantly, from companionship and personal communion with the Holy One. Such knowledge and understanding develops through the exchange of love in the experience of a life shared with Christ through prayer. Like my dog, Elijah, one begins to know God, because I have sniffed at God long and often enough to recognize his scent.
Understanding of God is arrived at by literally standing under, that is to say, by lowering and humbling oneself. We stand beneath God, looking up, aware that we see only a portion of what is there. In faith we surrender to hints and intimations, glimpses and sudden dazzling displays of grace.
But inquiring minds want to know! We yearn to know where our lives are headed and to grasp with our minds what is and what shall be. We hunger to secure ourselves. We hitch ourselves up to institutions, college degrees, causes, and ideas. We cinch ourselves into relationships of aggression or hate, boredom or lust, dependency or bullying. We set our agendas and bind them to our foreheads.
Yet, deepening knowledge of God always asks us to trust. As we know God more, faith becomes the consent to knowing less and less about most everything else. As Oswald Chambers wrote, “God does not tell you what he is going to do – he reveals to you who He is.” Such not knowing is almost certain to make us really anxious.
Have you ever been asked to crucify your intellect, to kill that inquiring mind that has to know everything, understand and control everything, and be right all the time? Your life experience may lead to the painful crucifixion of your intellect. On this Golgotha, pinned by the circumstances of your own experience, you find that nothing you can figure out or find out or do can move you out of this impasse. You, left hanging there, can only wait, trust, and abide in love not knowing.
In a time of such acute unknowing we are likely to be filled with an overpowering panic and rising anxiety to secure ourselves with certainties, assurances, undeniable truths, and absolutes.
Now the Lord said to Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I shall show you.” Genesis 12: 1
Seventy five year old Abram and his wife, Sarah, showed a great deal of courage heading off on a journey on the word of the Lord alone without a clear destination. They had no maps, realtor photos of their new home, or contracts to wave before the querulous neighbors. They headed out in obedience under the cold moon and starry skies into a great unknown.
Though I doubt if it happened this way, I like to think of the old couple heading down the road to nowhere, waving their hats, urging the camels forward, and hollering, “Let ‘er roll!”
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss than upholstering a rut
James Broughton (Little Sermons of the Big Joy)
- The Fullness of Emptiness (theprayinglife.wordpress.com)
- Love and the Wind (theprayinglife.wordpress.com)
- The Amaryllis and the Evangelist (theprayinglife.wordpress.com)
Posted in apophatic spirituality, Christianity, Contemplation, prayer, faith
Tagged christ, God, Hebrews11:8, James Broughton, National Enquirer, not knowing, Oswald Chambers, Religion and Spirituality
This day
my cup is
empty,
my page
blank,
my mouth absent
of speech.
Here – receive the fullness of this emptiness:
the bottom of a pail
falling,
the obscurity of a veil
lifting.
Stillness,
carrying you rapidly
down an endless river to nowhere.
This is the best I will ever have to offer.
Take a drink.
Be filled.
This is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of his will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God.
And then to wait in peace and emptiness and oblivion of all things.
- Love and the Wind (theprayinglife.wordpress.com)
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- The Amaryllis and the Evangelist (theprayinglife.wordpress.com)
- Embarrassing Prayers (theprayinglife.wordpress.com)
Posted in apophatic spirituality, Christianity, contemplation, Prayer, Spiritual Formation, spirituality
Tagged emptiness, fullness, kenosis, letting go, seeking God perfectly, Thomas Merton
The Praying Life 