Monthly Archives: July 2025
The Broken Body of Christ
OUCH!
The Power of the Cross
Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and purpose.
Christ sends us to proclaim the gospel simply, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.
Jesus died and rose for all, but many want a savior who is about power for this world, this life.
The power of the cross is the resurrection, which shows us that this life is not all there is.
The power of the cross is that it is the ultimate expression of unconditional love for us imperfect, unfinished people.
The power of the cross can free us to die to our self-centeredness, our self-righteousness, our false sense of superiority, our judgmental spirit, our delusion of infallibility. These are the mindsets that twist our belief that we belong to the people of God into the blinding sin of pride. The power of the love of God expressed in dying on the cross can free us from our blind spots of pride, so we can become peacemakers.
The Broken Body by Eileen
Reflecting on the Body
You, the hand, I, the foot
Christ, the head, perhaps the heart
Someone else, the hidden part,
I let the scriptures
Flood my mind with images.
Then suddenly one image
Is so harshly real,
I gasp aloud.
I see a person staggering
And stumbling toward me,
Arms flailing, head jerking
Back and forth in spasms,
Body parts all pulling
Different ways.
This then – reality
Christ’s earthly body now.
Forgive us! Eileen
OUCH!
Love and Money
Reflecting this morning on the various people I’ve known up close, from the very affluent to the seriously poor, I recognized decades ago that the rich consider themselves above the law, and at the level of the extremely poor or racially segregated, the law often does not work in their favor.
The middle class has been the lawkeepers. The middle class is systematically being wiped out.
I am a liberal born-again Christian. Yes, we do exist.
I see the life of Jesus as fleshing out the WAY for us. His actions clarify His words. That’s what His being the “WORD” means. And like us, His life was a journey of being challenged to Love. It started with His mother teaching Him, at twelve, to consider others’ feelings, not just show off His brilliance. Then she literally forced him, at thirty, into risking the leap to doing miracles, out of kindness for a family running out of wine for their child’s wedding reception.
We then hear him questioning whether he should heal the child of the Roman enemy’s soldier, but he chooses to love. He worked through pretty much every kind of person being a challenge to love until on the cross he could pray, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do” for those that got Him tortured and killed. Then, even when he felt abandoned by God, he trusted and said, “Into your hands I trust my spirit.”
This opening up to loving those close to Him, until He could love the worst of those putting law over love, is the pattern of growing from need to Love for all of us.
So how do we learn to love like Jesus? Understanding why they are like they are and recognizing that if we had lived their life, we too might be like them. Understanding frees us to forgive even the oppressors, and forgiving frees us to Love, though we still work for the oppressed, the poor, the prisoner, the leper, the sinner.
If we follow the history of famous achievers, we recognize that very few of their children were achievers.
Achievers, whether Presidents, Generals, Scientists, and those who become ridiculously rich, are usually men whose time and lives were spent achieving, not loving…..even their family. And their children inherited their money, but not necessarily their brains, ability, or even their perseverance.
What their children have then is money, and money gives both pleasure and power, but not a sense of either responsibility or achievement. They either spend their lives on one or both pleasure or fighting to gain power.
Look at Trump. He literally acts like a spoiled child. Because that is what he is. Likely, he did not receive a father’s love, affirmation, motivational challenges to do good, or any sense of self-worth other than through his money. His journey from need to love never even began. He is, literally, a lost child in a scary world filled with other rich people and governments with power. He does not see the BIG picture, and he has probably never even had much chance to know, nevertheless care, about people with different kinds of lives.
This doesn’t mean we don’t work hard to stop his short-sighted and destructive choices. All it means is we don’t hate him any more than we would a child with misunderstood ways of coping in the world.
Hating him, attacking him personally, alienates him further from the people he doesn’t understand. Attack the choices he makes. But let’s get over our self-righteousness. I am eighty-eight, and I spend nights recognizing the mistakes I made in being there for others, even those I loved, both in what I did or said and in what I didn’t do or say because they were different from me. I did not understand their strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, life experiences, or wounds.
That’s what old age is about. Learning to walk humbly with our God, by knowing we are loved, no matter what, because our heavenly Father has the knowledge, understanding, and the freedom to love that our parents didn’t and we also don’t.
Good Reminder for our Present Times
Two Sides of Darkness
It is very important, friends, not to think of the soul as dark. We are conditioned to perceive only external light. We forget that there is such a thing as inner light, illuminating our soul.
—Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle
Richard Rohr describes periods of darkness, confusion, and struggle as necessary for our transformation and growth:
Experiences of darkness are good and necessary teachers. They are not to be avoided, denied, run from, or explained away. Even if we don’t experience clinical or diagnosed depression, most of us will go through at least one period of darkness, doubt, and malaise in our lives. I hope during these times we can reach out to someone—a therapist, spiritual director, friend—to support us. And when we feel strong, may we be the shoulder someone else can lean on.
There’s a darkness where we are led by our own stupidity, our own sin (the illusion of separation), our own selfishness, by living out of the false or separate self. We have to work our way back out of this kind of darkness with brutal honesty, confession, surrender, forgiveness, apology, and restitution. It may feel simultaneously like dying and being liberated.
But there’s another darkness that we’re led into by God, grace, and the nature of life itself. In many ways, the loss of meaning here is even greater, and sometimes the loss of motivation, purpose, and direction might be even greater too. It really feels like the total absence of light, and thus the saints and mystics called it “the dark night.” Yet even while we may feel alone and abandoned by God, we can also sense that we have been led here intentionally. We know we’re in liminal space, betwixt and between, on the threshold—and we have to stay here until we have learned something essential. It is still no fun—filled with doubt and “demons” of every sort—but it is the darkness of being held closely by God without our awareness. This is where transformation happens.
Of course, the dark night we get ourselves into by our own “sinful” choices can also become the darkness of God. Regardless of the cause, the dark night is an opportunity to look for and find God—in new forms and ways. Neither God nor goodness exist only in the light but permeate all places, seen and unseen. It seems we have to “unknow” a bit every time we want to know in a new way. It’s like putting your car in reverse in the mud and snow so that you can gain a new track and better traction.
Periods of seemingly fruitless darkness may in fact highlight all the ways we rob ourselves of wisdom by clinging to the light. Who grows by only looking on the bright side of things? It is only when we lose our certainties that will we be able to deconstruct our false images of God to discover the Absolute Reality beneath all our egoic fantasies and fears.
Sex as Grace for the Spiritual Journey
My spiritual journey through disillusionment with my Christian denomination eventually took me through a study of World Religions, reading the whole bible, visiting various Christian denominations, and finally at 30, being challenged to say this prayer: Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, I accept you as my Savior and Lord. Take my life and make me into the person God created me to become. The result of that was being suddenly overwhelmed with joy from the sense of being loved tenderly, totally, just as I was “without one plea.” It gave me openness to grace that has not only brought unquestionable miracles, but also strength to deal with the extremely heartbreaking parts of my life that come without miracles.
Now, at the age of 88, I have become convinced that life is a spiritual school for learning to love our imperfect selves, then not only those who love us, but those who frighten and even hurt us, and ultimately God, when we are suffering and feel abandoned, just as Jesus did.
I can look back on my journey and see Micah 6:8 playing out. What God has taught me slowly is to “seek justice, love mercy,” and now in my old age to learn to “walk humbly with my God.”
My main activity now in sleepless nights is reviewing both my outer and inner life over all those years. I have gone from denial, to cringing, to trying to do something better than my younger self has managed to do, to finally accepting that we all are unfinished, imperfect human beings, even at the moment of death. And we were not all dealt the same hand, so we can’t judge anyone, even ourselves.
I was married to my husband for almost sixty years. We were total opposites in personality, upbringing, and even what we valued in life. It was not an easy journey to unconditional love for either of us. And though as humans, we never reached perfection, we grew in love and in understanding. I think for most people, marriage is the best school for learning to love like Jesus did.
God made sex pleasurable so that early humans, who did not know how we made babies, would procreate and increase. Early humans lived short lives and married early. The world, cultures, people, and the needs involved in spiritual evolution have changed.
Sex as pleasure is still part of the journey, but the need to populate the earth isn’t.
However, I have discovered that part of the spiritual journey is experiencing a oneness with all people, with nature, with the universe, through the Spirit of God in all of it.
Three times I have experienced this life-changing understanding.
The first was when cooking out with the young boys in my husband’s and son’s Indian Guides group’s campout. All the fathers went to sleep before the kids, so instead of going back to my in-laws’ nearby country house, I stayed there, sitting in a lawn chair all night, keeping the fire going and pulling the sleeping boys back when they wiggled close to it. Just before dawn, the night sounds stopped. It was like the earth was holding its breath. Then, as a pale light tinted the edge of the world, the chorus of the day sounds began. I suddenly experienced a sense of total oneness with it ALL. It was not only joyous, but mind-blowing. I am one with everyone and everything. Hating them is hating myself. It was the beginning of a long process of learning to not judge or hate, even when I must fight to stop actions I consider destructive. Our universe and everything in it are one because we have the Spirit of God within us.
The second time was when I walked alone at midnight in a freshly fallen snow to the top of the hill behind our house in our “Winnie the Pooh Hundred Acre Wood.” The silence was profound, and the sky was thick with stars, more than I had ever seen. At first, the magnitude of it all made me feel tiny and insignificant. But then I realized that even though smaller than a pinpoint in eternity, I was like a tiny spot in a beautiful painting. A spot that would have left an empty white space if I wasn’t there. Again, I was transformed by that feeling of oneness with all that glory!
The third and last time I have felt this oneness was when my wonderfully kind husband came home late from work wanting to make love. I usually was delighted to make love, but this night I just didn’t feel like it. As I hesitated in responding, the thought hit me that he may have had a terrible day and needed not only the pleasure, but the affirmation of being loved that way. So, I chose to be responsive and affirming. When I did, I experienced a sense of total oneness with him, which after a few moments morphed into that sense of oneness with everything and everyone, including God.
Sex is part of having an intimate, life-changing relationship. Like other things, it can become an addictive escape from loneliness or a need for affirmation. Using others, even for mutual pleasure, is not love. But it’s human. We all do it, even in marriage. But as part of a commitment to loving a partner, it can be spiritually life-changing.
There are many ways of experiencing sexual pleasure. The difference isn’t in the “how”, it’s in the “why.” And that goes for all genders and combinations.
Sexual pleasure started as practical. Our choice now is between using it just for pleasure, like eating pie, or as part of our journey to becoming able to love someone more than ourselves. And that can connect us to the Spirit of God within and all around us.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 