the cracks are showing

Yesterday, I was talking to a friend and she introduced me to the French term "le non dit" which means that which is not said. One of the theories in certain streams of medicine is that when we repress and internalise traumatic and painful situations, leaving them unspoken and undealt with, they eventually emerge and manifest themselves somehow in the body.  If we run with this theory, then various pains, diseases, and maladies might be related to the dis-ease and unhealthy state of our minds, souls, and relationships. I can testify to the fact that when I have been wronged or have wronged another person and there is tension in my relationships, my digestive tract is affected.

I watched a video this week where a musician was talking about the story behind one of his songs, The Lord is My Shepherd. He said this:

"I think one of the hardest questions I have had to answer for myself is 'What am I going to do with my pain?' because pain is just a reality of life. I remember going through a really, really dark season. I was flying home from some event, and I was thinking of all the places that I have taken my pain, because I had only recently become aware of it.  And I'm like, oh, that season where I checked out in a television series for a week, yeah, that was probably where I was taking my pain. And I just said, 'Lord, I don't want to do that. I want to find real healing. I want to find real redemption in this, and I realise that the only place that I can find that is going to be in you. And I want to take my pain, when I'm in pain and my heart's hurting, I want to wait on you. I want to find you.'"   [1]

In our contemporary world, we have so many ways to avoid or "manage" our pain. One of the reasons that the first monastics retreated to the desert caves was in order to come face to face with their demons and temptations, not hiding from their broken humanity. They recognised that when they brought the place of their greatest need and deepest pain to God, his strong and loving spirit became manifest.  Their concern was not primarily for their physical well-being (which is a bit of an obsession in our current age). Their desire was to be transparent and honest before their Creator, knowing that he was the only one who could rescue them from their pitiful state.

And perhaps this is the first step in healing: to admit that we are pitiful, we are sick, we have maladies that we are not aware of, that things are not good. Theologian John D. Caputo says:

"If we could admit how bad things are, that would be the beginning of something good, of a kind of radical honesty with ourselves. … To confess the wounded, fractured condition of our lives – that is who we are! And that would be the beginning of wisdom in deconstruction, of something good.”[2]

Yes, let's get on the road to something good.

the photo: a cracked pot on my balcony that I tried to fix

[1] Jeremy Riddle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxx7YBuObAI

[2] John D. Caputo, After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 128.

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go...

Esther's protest

I have been hesitant to write anything here pertaining to the student protests in Montreal, partly because I didn't believe I had any solutions to offer and partly because I just wanted to stay out of the controversial mess it has become. Besides, I have studying to do. But this weekend, something changed. I read the book of Esther. First, some background: the unrest started early in the year when a group of students decided to protest the tuition hikes proposed by the Quebec government ($325 a year for the next 5 years). Seeing that tuition rates have been frozen for almost ten years, it seemed reasonable to the government to increase them to reflect rising costs. This did not sit well with some students, and they organised an ongoing protest in which students were encouraged to boycott classes and refuse to hand in assignments. It has now grown into a movement which has staged several organise...

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ C...

outWORD by Matte Downey

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