On meeting St. Catherine of Siena just this morning

Today is the feast day of Catherine of Siena. The Mass at noon today was in her honor. She lived in the Tuscan city of Siena in the late fourteenth century. At age five it is told that she had a vision of the great martyrs in the heavenly courts all at the right hand of God. This vision among many others were so poignant for Catherine that she wished to dedicate her entire life to Christian service. She was one of twenty five children. It was not uncommon to have many children in those days because of the persistent death toll of the Black Plague which terrorized all of Europe. She learned to read and write, and wrote many letters to priests and bishops exhorting them to a proper Christian life of service, challenging the abuses of the institutional church. The town of Siena was divided as to whether she was a mystic or a fanatic. Perhaps the two are close kin.

Catherine became a member of the Dominican order and gave her life to helping the sick and dying. Legend goes that God offered her the stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ, but she refused declaring her unworthiness; that her joy found in her work was her just reward. She died from exhaustion at the age of thirty three.

I met her quite by surprise this morning early. I was at a hospital visiting a parishioner. The family and I were waiting outside the patient's room, and this patient was requiring around the clock nursing care. The nurse came out into the hall, and one of the family members said to her, "Gosh you are really earning your paycheck this week." To which this tall, dark-skinned, wise-eyed soul said, her eyes profound and fixed on ours, "I thank God for this work every single day!"

Here is one who has given herself to a vocation that many won't or can't do. She has learned the secret that in God's economy we find joy and purpose and life at the margins of our world...where there is disease and death...where there is poverty and indignity...where there is violence and injustice...There we meet the Christ and the response, the reward is joy. I looked at her hands and saw the hope of our world just there...hands which offer themselves in loving sacrifice, recreating once again, and each day, the universe. I didn't have to ask her name; I already knew, and I thought to myself, I hope she gets her rest, for we will need her for far longer than thirty three years. Blessed Catherine pray for us.

Of Improvisation and Particularity

I write here in Austin Texas at the library of the Seminary of the Southwest. It is about seventy degrees outside at about 20% humidity. We don't know about twenty percent humidity in Mobile. My sinuses are confused. There's not a cloud in the sky and around noon we took a drive into the Texas countryside mainly in search of barbecue brisket...but also the landscape: random breaks of wind tossed mesquite; siverado sage; cacti in full bloom... red, yellow and orange....old native cemeteries along this ancient trade route etched among the sandstone trap rock...there a grotto carved into the rugged landscape with the figure of the Virgin of Guadeloupe inside....She the God of Mexico then and now, long before the white man God...Mexico, the name of this very land just some one hundred and seventy years ago.... Then, the Mexican Hat, Indian paintbrush...bluebonnets in and among the roadside culverts would have been called by very different names.

None of these species of plants flourishing along the way could even survive in the climate of Mobile just six hundred miles away at roughly the same latitude. If one wanted to bring camellias, sasanquas, hydrangea, ginger lilies; bananas; elephant ear to central Texas...the things that grow without effort for us...one would be sorely disappointed...they would wither and cease to exist. Both out of context.

Life adapts to the particular; Life forever an improvisational enterprise....setting its roots taking into account the context of its engendering. The life force forever mindful, conscious of the incomprehensible iterations in time and space of the particular beauty that shapes its improbable destiny...a destiny not pre-ordained but still becoming in mystery, in particular contexts...not as a sweeping universal reality....but a reality intimate and close and particular...the end of things in this particular becoming always a speculation about which God Godself can only wonder and marvel and dream and hope.

Resurrection is the name, within our particular religious and cultural and socio-economic heritage, that we give to this life force that forever renews itself within the most improbable circumstances....this is the life force that in every particular cultural and socio-economic context, every corner of human community, brings dignity and mercy and justice and nonviolence and new hope by whatever name it is given....Its gods have many names around the world...the Virgin of Guadeloupe, she the earth mother...Krishna, the go between of earth and heaven...the Tao in its enlightening aesthetic....different manifestations according to the particular milieu, that is its own fertile soil...the matrix within which truth and life may flourish... myriad means of redemption...but still wherever there is dignity brought to bear...wherever justice and kindness... wherever sacrifice for the greater good...there is life and life abundant, and the world, in one particular at a time, is raised into its fullness....life always improvising a way...being always engendered anew....by any faith...by any name....but for us, in our particularity: Christ is risen and in our significant soil...all is made alive.

Of the Holy Cross

At one time I had a Celtic cross that I wore around my neck, just for two or three years or so. I remember a college friend asked me that if Jesus had been killed by firing squad, would I then wear a gun around my neck...or an electric chair, or a guillotine or a hangman's noose...I found the question disturbing and distasteful; but over the years it's a point well taken. Crucifixion was the punishment practiced by the Roman Empire for seditionists...enemies of the state. It was a particularly gruesome way to die, because it was meant to be observed by the public as a deterrent, lest anyone else got any rebellious ideas. It was terribly painful and the onset of death was a slow asphyxiation as the lungs gradually filled with fluid....and crucifixions occurred outside the walls of the city meant to shame the victim and the victim's family...It was dehumanizing to say the least.

The saving act of God for the world was not this demeaning and shameful death of God's son; but that as the raised community of the faithful, and the goodness that we bear as followers, imitators of Jesus...the saving truth is that this goodness can stand against and even overcome such shame and brutality... and must... We stand with our God in a solidarity of non-violence, peace and justice. This goodness, which is the kingdom of God in its very becoming, will transform the brutality and dispossession and shame that surely abounds. Salvation then is living the faith passionately serving the other. The crosses we wear around our necks this Holy Week, whether figuratively or literally, are the outward and visible signs that violence and injustice are ever present....and it is ours to stand against them no matter the cost...It is what we are made for...to make Holy the cross wherever we come upon it.

And let us remember all the crucified...all the shamed and victimized...We as the body of Christ are a living, life giving sacrifice for them...We who are resurrection life...life called forth out of the very darkness itself for the world's transformation...life that is borne by all of us who stand at the empty tomb...life that raises the world's dead...Resurrection life is Jesus' legacy for the church and all people of conscience...and that life is ours to share, for it is real and it is alive, and it will change the world...and it will transform the brutality of the cross into a profound and resilient joy.

The Passion of the Christ

During my last year of seminary Mel Gibson's movie the Passion of the Christ was released about this time of year, right around Holy Week. I had read reviews and I knew I probably wouldn't like it, but I felt if I were going to critique its theology, it would probably be good form if I saw it. So I went by myself...just me and a few others scattered in the theater.

The movie began with a techno-Arabic/Hebrew/Semitic musical score...an eerie otherworldly chanting the backdrop for one of the most gory movies I've ever seen...slow motion torture in strobe-like rhythm...and more blood than one can imagine...I left after about thirty minutes; and I thought about the pervading theology of the Passion, the crucifixion of Jesus, in our western culture: the theology of Substitution, that goes something like this: God loved us so much in spite of our innumerable sins as humankind that he sent his son to be tortured and killed to pay the penalty for all of us; Jesus' death the ransom for all of our sins so that we may have eternal life...What kind of God would that be? As I left the theater whatever remnant of atonement theology still around in my consciousness, I left there in the seething dark.

God does not require blood. The crucifixion in the Gospels is an unveiling of the brutality of power gone wrong...an unveiling of imperial injustice...the murder of an innocent man. God does not require blood. God requires passion for our world...Jesus the model...Jesus the archetype. Jesus and the community that followed Jesus cared so much for their world, cared so much for changing the world for the better, cared so much about calling out the injustice that beset them... that it got them in trouble, got many of them killed...So the theology rightly goes like this: God so loves the world that God calls all people of conscience, as God called the Christ, to love passionately their world even if it means risking one's life...That we live solely for our sister...that we live solely for our brother...that we live as God lives...in an utter predisposition of sacrifice....sacrifice that saves; sacrifice that brings eternal life in earth...eternal life meaning living in the presence of God here and now... not in some otherworldly supernatural existence...but living our lives as they are truly and forever meant to be...to live in the presence of God is to be fully human...fully human like the Christ....fully human...passionate for our world.

Like our brother come before us, we are called to go with Passion into the Jerusalems of our world...into the places of indignity and dispossession, loving our neighbor, which we are told is the same as loving God...let us go not counting the cost whatever that cost may be....then will the sin of the world be cast off...we, the people of passion, the living atonement of the created order....At our coming then will even the rocks and stones cry hosanna in the highest...blessed be the coming of the Lord.... at last.