Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

jill crainshaw

Summer Solstice Epiphany

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

[Ed. note: this post was written on the occasion of the summer solstice: June 21, 2018, but applies equally well to all the long-light days of summer.]

I do not understand why some of our nation’s leaders are doing what they are doing.

Because I do not understand their actions, I have gained even greater clarity about why I do what I do as a theological educator at Wake forest University School of Divinity.

Let me explain.

Today is the summer solstice in the U.S., a day when the sun shines longer than on any other day of the year. Hostile and violent forces are at work in our world today to keep hurting people from knowing the hope and warmth of life’s light. We need these extra hours of sunlight to seek how to live God’s Gospel truth in our times. We need a summer solstice Epiphany.

What is a summer solstice Epiphany? The ancient sages in Matthew 2, commonly known as the wise people in the Christian Christmas story, followed a God-flung orb of light to Jesus’ birthing place. Many Christian traditions have located the story of the sages’ journey on day of the liturgical year in January known as Epiphany.

The word “epiphany” means “manifestation” or “a striking appearance.” We cannot wait for another January to look for God’s light to reveal a way for the human community to journey toward justice and renewed hope. We need to ask now what the manifestation of God in Jesus means in a world where so many fear for their lives, where too many innocents are… [Read more…] about Summer Solstice Epiphany

remember you are dust

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

Embed from Getty Images

Wednesday, February 14, was Ash Wednesday. Many Christians in my community attended worship and left their sanctuaries with ashes smeared on their foreheads to mark the beginning of a Lenten season of reflection and repentance.

On Wednesday, February 14, a gunman shot and killed students and teachers in a Florida school.

This Sunday, the first Sunday in Lent, we hear ancient Gospel words:  “and immediately the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness” (Mark 1). The wilderness is too real in our world—in our hearts—right now. May God have mercy on us as we seek our way.

what prayer dare we utter when
unspeakable horrors silence
songs of children paralyze
tongues of poets we stumble over
all that remains—unspoken—

perhaps some ancient tree will
whisper wisdom into this unending
night—wilderness people do not
recognize its edenic lyric we
are dust to dust we will return we

are all dust and we are all creating
this mad mad world imposing
premature imprints of mortality on
unblemished foreheads of children
turned to ash in our clenching hands

save us creating one from this fickle
foolishness why do we sacrifice innocent
blood to the thirsty ungroundedness of
our being we flinch gritty truth marks
us we are exiles in our own homes

holding our breath as tongues of fire
consume what really matters—save us
open our mouths to exhale the ashy
smell of repentance make our bones
remember we are… [Read more…] about remember you are dust

Shattering Snow Globes

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

Reflections for the First Sunday of Christmas

shattered globe

womb-water gushes out

mingles with sacrificed innocence

in war-wilderness streets

mama and daddy smuggle their

baby across jagged borders

feet pierced by fractured pieces

of heart-pondered dreams

escape into broken reality

birth half-remembered blessings

beneath the light of a new moon

Anna and Simeon. Their faces map all that they have seen of life. Luke tells us Anna is 84 years old. People have come and gone in her life. Life and death have danced together and then danced some more as the earth has spun and spun again on its axis. Yes, Anna and Simeon have seen and heard and felt in their bones the hopes and fears of many years. Then, when Mary and Joseph appear in the Jerusalem temple with Jesus, Anna and Simeon burst forth in a Spirit-seasoned duet of praise.

After everything they have encountered over many decades—after all that has gone awry in their lives and world—how do they know that this stable-born child is “destined for the rising and falling of many in Israel” (Luke 2:34)? What recognition stirs in Simeon to release from his spirit letting-go lyrics about his own mortality, his world-weary soul settling into a serene certainty about the future as he looks into the untested face of Jesus? What story still to be sung does Anna hear in the rhythms of Mary’s pondering heart? What truth does she imagine that baby holding in those tender, tiny… [Read more…] about Shattering Snow Globes

Advent Four and Christmas Eve: Wrinkling Time

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

“Have you seen the baby Jesus?” the headline of a small-town news bulletin asked several days ago. Someone stole the baby Jesus from a local church’s outdoor nativity scene. Mary is still there pondering and keeping all of these things in her heart. The shepherds are still watching in wonder. Cows and donkeys are gathered around. But the manger is empty. Jesus is gone.

Jesus disappears from manger scenes more often than I knew. “Baby Jesus theft” even has a Wikipedia entry. Sometimes sheep or other figures are stolen from outdoor nativity scenes, but most of the time, the thieves take the infant.

In an interesting turn of nativity theft events this season, a figure of Mary holding the baby Jesus was taken from an outdoor display at a church in Bancroft, Ontario. A donor replaced the stolen figure with a new one that “worked,” but was not an exact match. Soon after, the original was returned. Now, the scene in Bancroft has “doubled down” (as the news headline announces), featuring two figures of Mary holding Jesus.

While I lament the vandalism of Christian icons and worry about the violence that accompanies some of the acts, reports of nativity scene thievery have caused me to reflect on possible meanings of empty mangers. This Advent season, I have found myself skeptical of too-nostalgic waiting and restless for the arrival of God’s promised reign of justice and peace. Realities of pain and suffering in our communities have stirred for me the question: How do we… [Read more…] about Advent Four and Christmas Eve: Wrinkling Time

Rock Us Into Joy

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This third Sunday in Advent (December 17) is Gaudete or Rejoice Sunday. But not much joy can be seen or heard in Jesus’s childhood home of Nazareth this week. Leaders there have quieted some of the usual Christmas celebrations in protest of President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Protests and violence have broken out in Bethlehem as a result of the decision. Photographs of both ancient cities show smoke-filled streets and angry protesters.

Nazareth and Bethlehem are not the only places in our world where conflict, violence, and uncertainty are daily realities. These realities—the depth of so many people’s suffering—have made this season of Advent, the season of waiting, a melancholy one for me. I am weary of waiting for justice to prevail in places where people are hungry or homeless or in fear for their lives.

So, how do we celebrate Rejoice Sunday in a world so burdened with sorrow? One of the promises of  Advent and of the Gospel story is that joy and sorrow sometimes hold hands. As headlines shout disturbing, heartbreaking news, people in Christian communities continue to hold on to the countercultural, radical, and subversive promise that somehow, even in smoke-filled streets of protest, the hopes and fears of the years meet and are transformed by God’s unending love.

So, joy? Joy for me on this Rejoice Sunday is present, but it is a quiet joy, a leaning forward and looking back—a persistent moving toward hope while… [Read more…] about Rock Us Into Joy

Advent Two: Preparing a Way

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality, Poetry

To announce and encourage a season of waiting seems preposterous to me sometimes. Too many people suffer through enforced waiting every day, and every path they try to take through their life’s wildernesses is blocked by human wreckage. The lectionary Gospel reading last week from Mark spoke of stars falling from the heavens, and for some people that image is not a metaphor. Some people’s skies are empty of signs of hope, and they can’t see a way through the darkness.

Yes, the realities of racism, violence against women, food insecurity, political unrest—so many painful realities that people face into everyday—make it hard for me to light the candles of Advent and sing hymns of waiting. We have waited long enough.

I wrestled with these thoughts as the prelude began in my church last week on the first Sunday in Advent. Then, with no rehearsal or liturgical prompting, three children formed into a circle at the front of the church and began to dance. Their innocent joy reached out into the sanctuary and, for a few moments at least, quieted my restless spirit.

As we enter into the second week of Advent and hear in the lectionary “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way,’” I am still restless for Gospel justice and peace to come soon. But those dancing children sparked in me a new imagining. Perhaps the sacred Star-flinger who sequined the skies in the beginning with light is now sowing stars into hungry and thirsty wildernesses by… [Read more…] about Advent Two: Preparing a Way

Advent One: To Watch Again Another Night

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

Advent One: Isaiah 64:1-9
Up there. In dusk’s dimming sky. What did the Isaiah poet see that long ago night? Stars wheeling out from their daytime hiding places? Cosmic spheres twirling across a vast celestial ballroom dance floor? Or did the poet see only a sky empty of light? What did that ancient wanderer wonder that stirred such heart-rending words: O that you would tear open the heavens…

Rip through the veils that shroud your light, O God.

Place your feet yet again upon our earth and tremble the mountains as you walk in our midst. Be here. Right here.

These texts for the first week in Advent—they are sublime, in an ethereal sort of way. And grim too. Not much warm Christmas nostalgia in Isaiah. Rip open. Quake. Boil. Tremble. These are words to begin our high holy season? Where is gentle Mary and her lullabying voice? What about the twinkling stars that lit the shepherds’ way to the manger? Where in these verses is our tasteful Advent aesthetic?

And yet, our ancient wondering wanderer offers up bittersweet Advent truth. Even if we had a substantive theology of lingering, even if we knew how to wait—we are tired of waiting. What we really want is for God to rip open the veil and let God’s cosmic light bear down on every place where injustice and its power brokers try to hide. We yearn for God—to boil, quake, tremble. Hopeful expectation and starry-eyed wakefulness don’t do it for us anymore. Not when justice has been delayed and denied. When streets… [Read more…] about Advent One: To Watch Again Another Night

A Blessing for Holy Week Journeys

by Jonathan Gaska in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jonathan Gaska and Jill Crainshaw.

So Holy Week begins.

As I celebrated Palm Sunday with my congregation this year, I wondered: what way do they make, these palms that dance and wave to the sounds of our laughter, joy, and singing? What dust do they stir up? Or sweep away?

Dust. And ashes.

We began this journey all those weeks ago in dust and ashes. On a Wednesday. In the middle of the week. In the middle of chaotic lives. And we have traveled far since Ash Wednesday. Perhaps our eyes have been captivated by the promise of new light that awaits us, and we have journeyed in hope. Or maybe we’ve stumbled along the Lenten way, uncertain of what lies ahead or fearful of what we are already carrying in our hearts. Or perhaps, like Jesus, we’ve traveled through frightening wildernesses not of our own making. Lenten geographies—life geographies—are unpredictable at best. And too many geographies in our world are littered with blood, bombs, and the bones of those vulnerable ones caught in the crossfire of competing powers. These geographies—our geographies—groan for the touch of healing feet.

Then, as it does each Lent, Palm Sunday arrives. Bright green fronds sweep out in front us in congregations across the globe to make a new way. We turn our feet toward sounds of rejoicing: “Hosanna! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!” But even as our feet dance along the Palm Sunday parade route, we know: the rejoicing songs hold… [Read more…] about A Blessing for Holy Week Journeys

Dust

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

I am dust; to dust I shall always return.
But don’t assume as you disturb my rest

with your omnipotent kitchen broom that
I am mere debris to be swept up and away.

Remember. We are interfused, you
and I, suspended in each other,

vestigial particles of endless galaxies,
diminishing and becoming, deposited

but for a moment amid yesterday’s dinner
crumbs and dog hair. Tomorrow?

I am cyclonic, demanding skeletal trees
to dance with me through dry valleys;

or I am breathed out by destructive
detonating demons only to settle, leaden,

on a sandal-sheathed foot severed
from the child who sat at grandma’s

table while she cooked the evening meal.
But I am also the cadence of the soil, eternity

dug up in a spade and sown with ordinary
mystery. Still, don’t assume I am magic either,

or that you are, except when in a distant
sun-soaked garden we tango with the departing

light and time’s muted colors bend onto our
backs and we carry life across ancient seas

to fertilize the future. Remember. You are
dust; to dust you shall forever return.

 

Dust was in the news this week. Popular Science reported that dust from Asia might be fertilizing sequoias in California. In stark contrast, another headline from this week reads: “Inside Mosul, a huge blast, then screams, dust and horror.” Bombs flattened houses on a street in Mosul, and citizens were buried beneath the rubble.

Across the globe in Las Vegas, a dust storm… [Read more…] about Dust

Remember: A Lenten Call to Embodied Justice-Making

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

Ash Wednesday liturgies mark the beginning of Christianity’s yearly Lenten journey by emphasizing penitence, introspection, and human mortality. Last week, many people in Christian communities observed Ash Wednesday by receiving ashes on their foreheads. I participated in three Ash Wednesday liturgies this year. By the end of the day, I found myself focusing on how important it is that the ashy sign of the cross we carry out into the world on our faces after an Ash Wednesday liturgy serves as more than a symbolic and too-soon forgotten reminder of our personal mortality or of our individual spiritual disciplines or relationships to God. Even as we are called in the Ash Wednesday liturgy to remember that we are dust, we are also called to remember that the ashes of human mortality and fasting are imposed on too many people by systemic forces that overwhelm and oppress.

Three remembrances were stirred up for me this week and will trouble my feet as I travel this year’s Lenten road. Trayvon Martin died five years ago, on February 26, 2012. How can I receive a cross-shaped symbol of mortality as a liturgical action without repenting in dust and ashes for my part in constructing a world where too many people still do not count all black lives as beloved? And what about the ashes from those ceremonial flames that have burned at the Standing Rock encampment? How am I, as one who lays my head down to sleep in Winston-Salem, North… [Read more…] about Remember: A Lenten Call to Embodied Justice-Making