Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

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Biorhythmic Resistance

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

“Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” –Deuteronomy 30:19

Whatever else people of faith make of this week’s Old Testament lectionary reading from Deuteronomy, I hear in these ancient words a call to embrace and embody life as gift, even during messy, difficult, and uncertain times.

My brief encounter with cedar waxwings the other day reminded me of how important this is. Waxwings are wonderful, mysterious birds. Here, where I live, their visits are brief. They come to our backyard for a few hours in February, and then they journey on. If we are lucky, we get to see them. I was lucky–blessed–to get to be near the waxwings this week.

How did the fleeting visit of these beautiful birds remind me of Deuteronomy’s call to embrace life? Political chaos fills my newsfeed and attempts to infiltrate every corner of my heart and head. So many people have so much to say about our current political realities. A colleague shared with me important wisdom about this. The danger, she said, is that we will begin to live by the new administration’s biorhythms instead of our own biorhythms of hope and grace.

I wrote this poem as a prayerful imagining of what kind of internal spiritual resistance is needed if we are to reclaim healthy heart and head space so that we can do our part to “choose life,” to cultivate communities of Gospel hospitality, healing, and hope.

 

The waxwings visited today.… [Read more…] about Biorhythmic Resistance

Answered Prayer

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

Dr. William Barber, II, is a hero. He wrote an op-ed this week following the National Prayer Breakfast. I have continued to think about his essay and about the powerful words he quoted from Frederick Douglass (1818-1895): “I prayed for freedom for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

****************************

“These times we’re living in
call for courageous people,”
the preacher said that day.
I am not brave.
Never have been.

Bravery is something to be
read about in storybooks
where quixotic heroes
ride out on prancing
stallions to do battle,
sabers flashing in
magnificent sunlight.

Bravery is something to be
prayed for in church
where harsh living
daylights must first pass
by saintly stained-glass
sentinels of bygone years
before being transmuted
into the kinder, gentler
beams that caress Sunday
morning’s bowed heads.

Isn’t it?

Or maybe we should
pray for freedom,
like Frederick Douglass did,
walking in faith
until our legs are braver
than our thoughts.

So, in this present cloud
of unknowing, being not
brave, we resolve, if
we can find the honesty
to do it, to live on
as best we can,
stringing together each
momentary breath
like pearls of hope to
place with the gentleness
of a lover around our
fear to name its wounds
as our own and journey on
not in spite of
but with it.

For out there, where the
times we’re living in
call for courageous people,
the groaning ground that
soaked up the… [Read more…] about Answered Prayer

The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: The First Sunday after Christmas

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

A heart-rending image appears in the lectionary for Sunday, January 1, 2017:
A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be consoled, because they are no more.
–Jeremiah 31 and Matthew 2

On the First Sunday after Christmas, mere days after the newborn Jesus has snuggled into the hay of the manger, our star-struck hearts and carol-drenched ears are startled to hear in the Gospel lectionary text Matthew’s horrifying story: “Herod sent and killed all the children who were two years old and under.”

What are we to do with this savage story? Read it in church even though the lights on the Christmas tree are still flickering in our sanctuaries just inches away from the pulpit?

Yes.

Though we may be tempted to avoid the images painted in Matthew 2, to seek safer seas or more beautiful shores from which to launch our boats as we begin 2017, we cannot. The silenced cries of innocents slaughtered in cities across the globe call to us. And through their pain—through Rachel’s weeping—God calls to us too as in this week after Christmas we pack up our nativity scenes to store them away for another year.

God became flesh—Jesus was born into the grittiest, most painful realities of human life. And that means that Christmas—Christianity—is far more than a temporary or sentimental escape pod from the world as it really is. God made Godself vulnerable to a world as… [Read more…] about The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: The First Sunday after Christmas

Christmas Day: And the Word Became Flesh

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

In the beginning … a Word …
          Danced
          Unfurled
          Unleashed

In the beginning … a Word …
          Sparked
          Ignited
          Illumined

Hope.
Peace.
Joy.
Love.
Life.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

But oh, how wordy we have become. Speeches and spin doctors. Tweets and tabloids. Debates and diatribes. Talk that says nothing but harms hundreds. So many empty utterances harass our eyes and ears, distracting us from the cries of our world’s most vulnerable ones.

Today, O God, we encounter again your Word in a manger. Not what we expected. Your Word in swaddling clothes. Your Word in an infant’s searching eyes. Your Word in a newborn’s reaching hands. Your Word in Aleppo’s rubble. Your Word in human flesh of every hue.

Give us wisdom, Earth-dwelling God, to talk less and birth your Word each day in our flesh and skin, in embodied tidings of hope, joy, peace and love.

Amen.

 

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… [Read more…] about Christmas Day: And the Word Became Flesh

Advent Four:  Lighting the Tiny Lights

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

“We are lighting the tiny lights.”

This is what a Franciscan friar said about living Advent in Aleppo.

Seeing all the violence in Aleppo and other places, I fear that Advent may bleed over into Christmas this year, and I do mean bleed. As we arrive at this Fourth Sunday of Advent, the Sunday when we light the candle of love, I am haunted…

A candle flame of love. Seems so small, a flickering candle. Not enough to combat the fiery explosions that bombard the neighborhoods of Aleppo where children once played soccer in the streets. The other three candles on the wreath shrink each week—hope, peace, and joy melting as time passes. And doesn’t it seem that they have diminished in our world—hope, peace, and joy—suffocated by the rubble as a Syrian city crumbles, doused out by blood running through the streets? Or is it that evil winds have chased their flames away, banished them to obscurity before Mary and Joseph even arrive at the stable? How can hope and love find the spark of humanity in this starless midnight where the most visible message flashing across the sky is a seven-year old’s tweet about her impending death?

When I was seven, I loved watching the Advent candles burn down lower each week until Christmas Eve when we would light the big Christ candle. As those other candles got shorter, I knew Christmas Day was coming closer. The Advent wreath does mean just that. The candles drip and melt, but they do so as we… [Read more…] about Advent Four:  Lighting the Tiny Lights

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

Seeing Christ in the Abyss

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Issues

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.  Luke 24:35 (NRSV)

What about their lives compels them to take the risk? Whatever it is, they do it. They climb onto unseaworthy vessels and head out into rough waters. Perhaps the persecution or poverty on their home shores makes the perils of rickety, overburdened boats seem small by comparison. Seeking sanctuary, they go.

The realities of migrating people today are harsh and deadly, and I have found myself thinking: Christ must not have been asleep in those vessels that have capsized in the Mediterranean in earlier this year, for he seems not to have awakened to rebuke the wind and sea. But another courageous voice did speak out: German Cardinal Ranier Maria Woelki broke Eucharistic bread from a refugee boat as he celebrated the Corpus Christi Mass last May.

The Washington Post featured these words from Woelki: “Someone who lets people drown in the Mediterranean also drowns God.” I don’t think Woelki was referring to the Christ of the Abyss, the famous statue of Jesus that was placed in the Mediterranean Sea in the 1950s, though the connection is striking. Since January, more than 1400 migrants have died in that same sea where the sculpted Jesus, arms lifted up from the deeps, offers a watery benediction. Woelki sought through his unconventional Eucharistic blessing at that boat-altar to lament refugee deaths and call for Christian actions… [Read more…] about Seeing Christ in the Abyss

On Saying Goodbye to the Night: Thoughts on Fireworks, Spaceships and Justice-Making

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

Where were you five years ago on July 4th? Nothing is recorded on my Google calendar for that date, and I don’t remember what I was doing.

A Google search uncovered some of the news that headlined on July 4th five years ago. The cover of Time posed the question, “Does the U.S. Constitution Still Matter?” Debates were raging on Capitol Hill over tax revenue and the debt ceiling. Environmental scientists warned of a creepy-crawly insect interloper from China, the ash borer, that had killed 60 million trees in 15 states. And NASA was one month away from launching a spacecraft named Juno into the cosmos on a journey to Jupiter.

Juno has been speeding through space for five years now on its way to Jupiter, more than 360 million miles away from the ground under my earthbound feet. I only know this because I happened to listen to NPR in my car today as I drove to my neighborhood coffee shop for an iced coffee and a few hours of writing.

Until I heard the NPR story, the only night sky spectacle I anticipated for this July 4th was the annual fireworks extravaganza scheduled for after the Winston-Salem Dash baseball game. Now I know that while fireworks engineers stitch kaleidoscopic colors into the night sky, scientists will be holding their breath and watching to see if their timing is perfect enough to sync Juno with Jupiter’s gravity on the first and only try.

As I type these words, NASA scientists are preparing to press… [Read more…] about On Saying Goodbye to the Night: Thoughts on Fireworks, Spaceships and Justice-Making