Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Christian Spirituality

An Advent Poem

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality, Poetry

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

of the setting-free kind

truth
the setting-free kind if you know it
you should speak it
sing it like Mary did in the Bible: “God casts the mighty

from their thrones and fills the hungry with good things.”
but sounds of children’s growling bellies never score
in department store magnificat melodies.
doesn’t anybody get that “gentle Mary meek and mild” was

rasping out a revolution song? her belly swelling with
truth no one would want to hear: “God has scattered
the proud in their conceit. God has cast down the mighty from
their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” but how could we know? she was

“just a woman.” a teenager pregnant before her time and worse
pregnant before the wedding. what could a woman’s body
know? so somebody positioned her in a tableau and
left her there until Christmas day. then with

Mary attic-stored until the next cyber Monday
we sing instead Jesus loves me songs while our ears ring with
clatter from posturing pundits and politicians who can’t hear
the difference between the fickle-false fire of their own voices and

truth of the setting-free kind.

 

About Jill Crainshaw
Jill Crainshaw is a PCUSA minister and Blackburn Professor of Worship and Liturgical Theology at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. She is the author of several books on worship and ministry.… [Read more…] about An Advent Poem

Advent Three:  Crocus Blossoms in Desert Places

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

While searching a closet for Christmas decorations the other day, I pulled out a dusty wooden box, the shipping crate kind that has a lid. I had forgotten all about having that box, and as I coaxed it from its hiding place, I realized that I couldn’t even remember what was in it. When I lifted the lid, the ghosts of lifetimes past slipped out to hover over my shoulder as I explored the contents.

My grandma was a crochet wizard. During long winter nights, she sat in her blue recliner, her lap and feet getting cozier by the hour as her nimble fingers grew yet another “mile a minute” afghan. The box I pulled out of the closet held peculiar odds and ends of Grandma’s handiwork. A coaster half-finished. Bits and pieces of squares for a granny throw. A clear plastic bag stuffed with a rainbow of left-over yarn ends from projects long since completed.

My fingers lingered in the rows of each unfinished piece. For which niece or grandchild had she been wizarding this one? What design yet to be revealed had she been stitching?

I am the only person in our family other than Grandma who crochets. Grandma taught me when I was six years old. I guess that is why I inherited the box when she died. “If anyone will know what to do with all of these leftovers,” my mother said, “you will know.”

I’m not sure I do know what to do. Not with these forgotten but now found fragments and not with the fragments of things that seem to be slipping… [Read more…] about Advent Three:  Crocus Blossoms in Desert Places

Advent Two: Stumped while Seeking Peace in Zootopia

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse,
   and a branch shall grow out of his roots…

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
   and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
   their young shall lie down together;
   and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
   and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
   on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
   as the waters cover the sea.

from Isaiah 11:1-10.

Reading this text after scrolling through my newsfeed’s local and global headlines of ongoing incidents of distrust, rage, and violence, I wonder: how does this zootopia the ancient book of Isaiah describes work anyway? Can basic wilderness instincts change so that neither animals nor humans will hurt or destroy each other or the earth on God’s mountain? Where in these uncertain days is this life-generating mountain of Isaiah’s and the peace-loving creatures and people who dwell there? I can’t find it with my GPS, and I want to travel there, run like the wind to get there as soon as possible. I want to make a home there. I want to rub my hand without fear… [Read more…] about Advent Two: Stumped while Seeking Peace in Zootopia

The Gift

by Brettany Renee Blatchley in Christian Spirituality, LGBT

Life goes on whatever our place and circumstances: love, joy, pain, and loss all seem to join hands as sisters.

My father in-law is named Bill; twenty-five years ago we met when I asked for the hand of his youngest daughter in marriage. Bill is eighty-eight and in the point in his Alzheimer’s where he can barely eat, hardly moves, and rarely makes a recognizable utterance. We love Bill, one of the smartest and kindest people I have ever met. His wife Barbara, a bit younger, faithfully cares for him with the help of a full-time, at-home nurse. We think that this will be our last Christmas with Pop and one of our last with Mom…

…These recent years, I have kept a low profile around Pop as Mom has gradually witnessed me transition. I am the same person, only different: always as much a daughter-in-law as I was a son, maybe more: now I look, sound and behave more a daughter than their own daughter, my spouse…

Pop’s mind has been declining for years, though he was a much sought-after engineer until his retirement at seventy-eight–his work probably saved a LOT of lives, but only God knows.

…I never told Bill that I am transgender and that I needed to become myself: a woman. He has known me as the one he entrusted to love and help his baby daughter through all her life-long illnesses. I never introduced him to Brettany, to Renée: I did not want to make his confused days even more difficult. So I smiled, spoke and touched gently, and helped move, bathe, and change him.… [Read more…] about The Gift

Advent One: Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

What if there isn’t enough light?

The question became an earworm one morning after I skidded across the internet and ran into an intriguing sermon by Father Sean Mullen titled: “Is There Enough Light?”

Is there? Our world has been bedazzled quite enough by sparks and sparkle, glitter and glitz. But what about light, the hope-fueled kind our groaning eyes scan the darkening skies in search of during the season of Advent. We so need it—genuine luminosity—in places where spears of violence have extinguished the sun and fear has chilled even children’s bones. We need light and a lot of it to show us the way down the perilous paths that seem to stretch out before us.

Many Christian communities will hear words from Isaiah 2:1-5 on this First Sunday in Advent. A promise in these verses from the Advent lectionary is that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. After making this seemingly absurd prediction, the poet calls out across the centuries: “Come, let us walk in the light of God!” What a fierce and fiery light God’s light must be to be able to bend swords and spears so that battlefields become feast-making fields. This is Advent light? How are we to walk in such a light?

Perhaps “Will there be enough light?” is not the right question for our uncertain times. A more vital question to ponder may be how we, as God’s plowshare people, can find the courage to walk in and with God’s intense and… [Read more…] about Advent One: Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning

On Christian Culture Wars: Making Room at the Table

by Sarah Anderson in Christian Spirituality

In one of the very last chapters in the very last book of the Christian Bible, Revelation, after pages of confusing imagery and uncertain meanings, after plagues and beasts, after horsemen and scrolls, you find mention of a feast. But not just any meal. A wedding meal. An image that brings to mind long tables full of satisfying food, of rosy cheeks and emptying bottles of wine, of hearty laughs and settled hearts. It is—John, the writer of this cryptic book says—the wedding feast of the Lamb.

Something happens over a shared table. A bond over food is not a bond easily broken. As believers, we know the meaning goes as far back as 2,000 years ago, when a Jewish rabbi gathered His closest friends together, washed their feet, insisted on His certain death, and commissioned them to love another, to serve one another, as He had done them—over bread representing His body, over wine signifying His blood.

Food at the table has always meant more than a necessity. It is a tie, a connectedness that transcends the physical and becomes spiritual. 

In Acts chapter 10, Peter’s vision for the expanding church is one that includes a change in diet. In his dream he sees food—previously excluded to faithful Jews, as said by the God who led that wandering tribe—now suddenly, permitted, reveled in, and all that food represents, including the people behind it, the lifestyles surrounding it, the background emerging from it.

They’re in, God assures. Go, take this glorious… [Read more…] about On Christian Culture Wars: Making Room at the Table

Cracked Humanity

by Cherie Lee in Christian Spirituality

We’re sitting in a huge barn, an open kitchen to one side and a coffee service area to the other.

Running down the middle of the barn are three long, sturdy tables. Over to one of the walls, there’s a smattering of white handprints, reaching over each other to form a mountain.

My pastor stands in front of the group with a guitar.

We’re singing “Amazing Grace.” The group is 40% Iranian refugees, 40% reformed prisoners and 20% reformed-conservative-North-Shore-Christians (that’s my category, anyway).

Minutes earlier, we’d been sitting outside on picnic tables, eating fresh pineapple and watermelon, overlooking the 360 degree greenness of fields and flowers and vegetable patches and horses.

A baby sits on the ground watching a dog who’s watching a chicken.

The farm is a community organization, a place where the reformed prisoners come to learn how to farm, build furniture from recycled timber, rehabilitate race-horses at the end of their careers, as well as enjoy community with each other.

I’m sitting in this service, reflecting on a handful of frustrations in my personal life. Replaying conversations, events. Work run-ins. Sydney traffic.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / that saved a wretch like me.

One of the guys who had been in prison gets up and tells that after praying every day, he had seen his two sons for the first time in three years the day before.

My chains are gone, I’ve been set free.

That morning I had read a meditation by Richard… [Read more…] about Cracked Humanity

Why Letting Go Is Not Falling Apart

by Ronna Detrick in Christian Spirituality

A wise woman tells me she gets this strong sense that I am unable to really let go; like I’m afraid of letting my hair down.

I hear her words, feel the lump in my throat (a marker that truth has been spoken), and in my mind’s eye can already see the story, her story, the one I need to hear.

~~~~~

The town harlot. Marginalized, unseen, shamed, and scorned. And not one bit of that matters. Not to her. She leaves the margins and enters the fray – walking into a room full of men – the insiders, the censors, the judges, the jury. They look up from their feast, reclining, interrupted by the shock of her presence. Head held high, she ignores every incredulous face, sidelong glance, and whisper of contempt. There’s only one goal, one guest, one man that matters. No amount of shame or scorn will stop her. She will be seen.

And she will not bow or scrape. Not today. She will stand. Eye-to-eye, face-to-face, toe-to-toe with this God-man, this healer, this miracle worker, this Love enfleshed. Jesus.

So she did. Time slowed. Din silenced. Shame dissipated. Scorn dissolved. Only the two of them existed.

And maybe this is what enabled her next move: the visceral and complete awareness that this moment and this man were all that mattered, that she mattered.

She let go.

She wept. So much that she rained down tears on his feet. Then, in front of all her accusers – those leaders, law enforcers, and rule-followers – she let down her hair. Literally.… [Read more…] about Why Letting Go Is Not Falling Apart

Live the In-Between — It's the Part of the Story that Matters Most

by Ronna Detrick in Christian Spirituality

Once upon a time, long before women had volition or will as to who they married, a search commenced for the perfect wife. A servant was sent out – commanded to find a bride, but only from particular tribes, with particular lineage, holding particular pedigree. Perplexed as to how this would ever happen he prayed. “O God of my master, please give me success today. I will stand by this spring as the young women of the town come out to draw water. I will ask one of them, ‘Please give me a drink.’ If she says, ‘Yes, have a drink, and I will water your camels, too!’ let her be the one I am to select…”

As the story goes, this is exactly what happened. As she finished speaking the words he had hoped to hear, he adorned her with a gold ring for her nose and two gold bracelets. She took the servant to her family. Negotiations ensued with her father who finally asked her: “Are you willing to go with this man?” She replied, “Yes, I will go.”

The servant began the long journey back to his master with this young woman in tow. One particular evening, after days of traveling, she looked up and said, “Who is that man walking through the fields to meet us?” The servant replied, “It is my master.” She covered her face with her veil as the servant told his master the story of how he had found her. And the text says, “Isaac brought Rebekah into his tent and she became his wife. He loved her deeply…” ~ from Genesis 24

Tell the truth. Even if only for a brief moment,… [Read more…] about Live the In-Between — It's the Part of the Story that Matters Most

Grace in a Tin Shed

by Mark Darling in Christian Spirituality

Separation. Divorce. Failure. That’s how it goes, right? At least that’s how it did for me. Marriage was for life, for better or for worse, and people who got divorced just weren’t trying hard enough. They were failures. Second rate. Oh, I never would have thought of it like that, let alone articulated it, but somewhere in my subconscious that is what I believed. I judged people and I was wrong. But that was before the shed.

When you come from an inflexible, dualistic, rules-based system of beliefs it is difficult to see other possible worlds. Everything is either black or white. Wrong or right. You’re in or you’re out. You belong or you don’t. There’s no room for the gray, messy, unpredictable beauty of life. I was married. I was in the club. And then suddenly, yet not, I wasn’t.

For the first time in my life, without any fanfare, I found myself living alone in a tin shed in the middle of nowhere. A dark space that was sparsely furnished with borrowed items and a few meager possessions. No television, no internet, and intermittent phone coverage. I was alone with my thoughts: “I have failed. I am a failure. I AM FAILURE.”

Love found me

It is a disconcerting thing to be cut adrift from familiar havens into the uncertain waters of a new beginning. Of course I hadn’t perceived it as a new beginning, only as failure, loss, and uncertainty. Dualism doesn’t like uncertainty. It likes things that can be measured, counted, compared, relied upon. It likes rules. And… [Read more…] about Grace in a Tin Shed