Author: Michele Minehart (Page 3 of 311)

Buildings and Bushes Aflame

Buildings and Bushes Aflame

As the spires of Notre Dame went up in flames yesterday, several of my friends posted images of their memories there, from recent or long-gone trips to see the historic edifice built with such high intentions of bringing honor to God. Such a massive relic of history reaches deep and wide across our earth’s inhabitants.

It’s deeply saddening to watch such a work become destroyed. Beyond the religious implications, the building inhabited art and history in a way that can only be experienced, rather than described. The fact that so many take pictures in front of it but rarely describe it speaks to this idea. It’s a window into the soul of our collective past, a way of understanding the lives, beliefs, priorities and skills of our ancestors, which gives us a framework of understanding our own place in the world.

Ken Follett and I were on a similar timetable around 2008, because he managed to publish each volume of his historical series as I was ready to birth another baby. The night I labored for my first, I made a huge dent in The Pillars of the Earth, and managed to finish it while spending endless hours nursing in the following weeks. Each consecutive baby had their own massive novel (I had to move on to the Trilogy series before returning to the final installment of the Kingsbridge series this past fall). The early series focused on the process of building a massive cathedral in early England, amid monks and terrifyingly evil priests and goodnatured townspeople. A key character was named Tom the Builder, a come-from-nothing mason who unknowingly headed up the entire Building Campaign for the would-be greatest cathedral built in that time.

It was a gorgeous read of understanding the human element of building material structures as one reads about the structures of hierarchy within the larger picture of culture and religion at that time. LET’S ALL REMEMBER, IT’S A FICTIONAL ACCOUNT. But a satisfying consideration, filled with plenty of historical research on how cathedrals were built. He simply created human personalities to go with what we see standing.

Which might be why we feel so much grief over the Notre Dame. These buildings are more than the sum of the concrete and wood beams utilized in holding it upright. It’s more than the lives of the original builders, those schlepping excruciatingly heavy raw materials, or slowly and meticulously shaping, painting, cutting, and grouting. It’s even more than the people currently working and worshipping in such splendor. When we dig down deep enough, we ask, what makes a place feel so holy?

While traveling through India, we came upon countless small shrines, sometimes mere rocks set upright, alongside the road. The custom was to mark places when a person had a divine encounter – we see many examples of this throughout the early scriptures, like when Jacob built an alter after his ladder-dream, or when the disciples Peter, James and John experienced the transfiguration of Jesus and asked if they could “build three shelters.” We have these moments and we want to stay there forever, so we believe if we build a roof, God won’t leave. If we offer enough delicious food and wine and our best sheep, God will be content to stay nearby.

We humans, we’re funny little creatures.

Notre Dame doesn’t have a divine quality because God tends to favor particular architecture or require expensive and rare materials. Some might make a case that the book of Exodus includes the distinct building plans for a mobile-worship center because God has such preference for tent qualities, but I’ll maintain it’s backward – these elaborate features are for our own good and benefit.

God, I believe, is privy toward human nature. God, I believe, knows that when we put so much effort into something, we won’t abandon it. When we use only top-quality materials, when we spend hours weaving and dying just the right shade of cloth, or sculpting a design over the course of decades, God knows we won’t just decide one day that we like Sherwin Williams Agreeable Gray and paint over the whole thing one weekend.

The years – decades, lifetimes – that go into creating a place like Notre Dame ensures that humans will keep showing up. And that’s the key element of worship, of experiencing God. Not that God shows up: that we do.

These “thin places” where God feels most present isn’t the magical concoction of art and rare and valuable elements. Those rare and valuable elements shaped into sheer beauty remind us to look around if we want to see God.

The world is collectively grieving the damage to Notre Dame, and rightly so. We join with centuries of fellow humans who have graced the doors of the cathedral with expectations of finding the divine, whether it be ethereal or in the shapes and colors and design of the structure. Something about the place captures our attention and forces us to be alert to the fact that we exist in a world beyond ourselves. We grace these places and realize that long before we were imagined, someone picked up a rasp and riffler to try to bring shape and size to their experience, despite knowing such experiences cannot be contained.

The hope that lies on the other side of the Notre Dame is the knowledge that forever before us, humans kept showing up, anticipating a divine encounter. And still, humans will arrive at Notre Dame; but also, perhaps, to the ocean, Old Mission, and your very own kitchen table, knowing the Divine is waiting for us to pay attention.

For years I’ve been drawn to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words about where to find the divine, and it seems fitting in such reflections to return to it:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries

86. From ‘Aurora Leigh
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning  (1806–1861)

On loving your enemies

On US 23 heading south, somewhere around Marion, Ohio, you’ll find a large billboard saying, “Real Christians love their enemies.” After much thought, I cannot decide who paid for this sign.

Of course, nearly all practicing Christians could verify that Jesus give this command, to “love your enemies.” They might even name the chapter and verse. (Matthew 5:44). It’s part of Jesus’ greatest hits album, the Sermon on the Mount. (Luke’s version goes on, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. “)

What we fail to see in this whole exchange – and I must credit the billboard for being the first to make me consider it this way, so to whoever did pay for that, I’d like to express my gratitude – is that Jesus is both hilarious and wicked smart. He’s the same guy who answers questions with questions and speaks in parables with plot twists that leave jaws dropping.

We (or, until the last few months, at least I) read that straight up like a manual to my coffee maker, somehow believing that when we come into contact with contention, we are called to muster up love for the other person in an effort to change things. We think that when our enemies sense our “love” and “acceptance”, they’ll change.

In typical Jesus style, this was never the point. We don’t love our enemies for the good of the enemy. Our love may never change them.

But may our love change us.

Pueblo Yung writes in Inward, “unconditional love sees no one as an enemy.”

Jesus was a master with words and philosophy because when you get at the nature of love, we find that when we truly find love for a person, we cannot see them as an enemy. You cannot actually love an enemy. Jesus’ command wasn’t to be nice to them as an effort to get them on your side; Jesus actually wanted us to stop thinking of them as an enemy. And love is probably the only thing strong enough to change that way of seeing the world.

One of my favorite sections of scripture is a passage in Galatians (5), specifically translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message, when he compares living a life driven by selfish desires to the life of living “God’s way.” He says (emphasis mine):

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom.

But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

Of course, Jesus showed concern for the other; he loves our enemy before we do. But in this particular chapter of Adventures in Missing the Point, we fail to see that command – like so many others – was for our own good. It is in our own healing that we begin to heal the world. In our own sense of love that we begin to love the world. It’s from that place that we find we don’t have to live with enemies surrounding us.

The Mountain

If you follow the Christian calendar, this is the final call for the season of Advent, of waiting for God’s appearance. It comes about as we prepare to celebrate the birth of sweet baby Jesus in the manger, with a belief that God’s presence will return to earth.

This is perhaps my favorite of the theological concepts. Easter is the holiday of “redemption” but I find God’s action of taking human form far more redeeming to humankind. Surely, if God thought to don a suit of flesh and blood, we shouldn’t feel the shame in our shrouds. It’s been a long journey for me to reclaim this sense that our humanness is good, and nothing has helped me more than unrolling a yoga mat. That’s where I have strict orders to feel, to move, to be in this body previously declared as my foe.

Our bodies and our humanness were part of the original design, “and God saw that it was good.” The seeking of God – the less religious might call it Love or something less likely to invoke church trauma – is, I believe, a basic part of our human nature. The historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens that our species actually thrived beyond the capacity of other sapiens because of the evolved ability to tell a story. This quest for meaning and connection allowed us to become the dominating species of this earth, for both our benefit and, sometimes, bringing us to despair. Where can we find this sense of connection with the divine?

In ancient times, both before and during the time of Jesus, we find a belief and a practice of seeking out the divine by looking up – what writer Diana Butler Bass calls “the holy elevator” in her book, Grounded. People would climb the mountains to feel a holy presence, to the point where some mountains were seen as the literal dwelling places of God – and thus a building committee was formed, a capital campaign established, and walls went up for a new temple. People wanted access to the deities, so building a home atop the hill became common practice in many religions. The mountain was the place where humans met the divine. It was where heaven met earth.

Written into the narrative of the Jesus story (among other religious texts) is an arrival of the divine. But this version of divinity doesn’t land atop the mountain: this story begins in the basin, out back in the parking garage. And the divine meeting place doesn’t have gold-drenched altars; this holy collision comes with a sciatic nerve, a pre-frontal cortex, two lungs, a heart, and 10 toes. Being of Middle Eastern descent, I’d guess he arrived with an enviable mop of dark hair.

In the flesh. Covered in the flesh of his mother, the pasty vernix that kept him safe on arrival, that other mammals lick from the skin to allow for easy breathing. This form of divinity required a mix of proteins and carbohydrates and vitamin D and his mother likely fretted about her milk production because she had never nursed before – maybe he even had a tongue tie, we can’t be sure because the Mommy Facebook Groups didn’t exist yet.

There was a group of people 2000 years ago that believed that God would save them from their captive situation, and they believed that this God showed up unable to control his own bladder, because that is the plight of newborn creatures.

With the Jesus story of divine presence on earth, the man walked the known world leaving a trail of divinity that stuck like the glitter from a child’s Christmas craft even after he made an exit, remnants forever stuck to our existence, known to the scripture writers as spirit. Along his way, moving from common carpenter to master spiritual teacher, Jesus keeps pointing out the hidden divinity in all humans he meets along the way. His calls for peacemaking and loving neighbor aren’t just because the world works easiest when we’re all nice: it’s because he knows all people begin with a divine spark and get embedded in this earth with a body. Sometimes a covering of skin and opposing political opinions make it difficult to see that God makes a home in humans, not just the mountains. 

Among the million and one things that Jesus did showing up on earth, here’s the one that brings me to tears every time: this divine appearance means we no longer have to climb mountains.

We are the mountain.

You are the mountain.

The first yoga pose I learned to teach was Tadasana: mountain pose. You stand (or even sit) with the base of your body firmly rooted in the earth, growing and stretching up toward the heavens. You feel supported with the earth below you but you feel the spaciousness of your height. Turning your palms forward will gently rotate the shoulder blades, giving a sense of openness of the heart. If you close your eyes and draw your attention to it, you can feel the earth holding you down while heaven lifts you up. You’re connected to both places.

You are the mountain. You, your body, becomes the place where heaven and earth meet. 

No, you are not God. You bear God. You reveal God. Every day is a new opportunity to imitate our maiden Mary in miniature ways, allowing something that began with God’s breath to move through our bodies and into the world.

We no longer have to go to the mountain to know the divine. God made a home here, among us.  

 

The Life-Light was the real thing:
Every person entering Life
he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
the world was there through him,
and yet the world didn’t even notice.
He came to his own people,
but they didn’t want him.
But whoever did want him,
who believed he was who he claimed
and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
their child-of-God selves.
These are the God-begotten,
not blood-begotten,
not flesh-begotten,
not sex-begotten.

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.

John 1:9-14 (The Message)

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