outWORD by Matte Downey

Much of the thinking and writing I have been doing for the past year or so, especially in academic settings, has to do with how hierarchy is embedded in our theology and ways of structuring communities. To me, that's not a good thing. One of the papers I presented on the topic last year was titled, "Toppling the Divine Hierarchy: How Trinitarian Thinking Shapes our Communities." Essentially, I argue that our penchant for hierarchies, both within and without the church, reflects more about our human constructs and desire for control than it does about the character of God. Defining God as the Lord Almighty, King over all, the being at the top of the cosmic heap, positions power (not love) as the primary attribute of the divine. The idea that sovereignty is the supreme characteristic of God is found in statements like, "God is in control," and the theological omnis: omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. When commenting on the book of Revelation, I have hea...

William Blake's illustration of Job 40:15 Image from wikipedia.org These days I am spending a lot of time in the book of Job. It is not as depressing as it sounds. There is a compelling story, a cast of interesting characters, a lot of impassioned and honest dialogue, some amazing poetry on the subject of creation, and a good number of philosophical and theological questions to ponder. Readers of Job looking for solutions to the problem of suffering or seeking to justify God's goodness in the face of unexplained tragedy are inevitably disappointed. This is not a book of answers; it is a drama. And it is a good one. I don't know about you, but if I were to read a book or watch a movie about someone whose life was easy and everything worked out well, time after time, I would toss that boring book in the corner after the first chapter or two, and I would walk out of that trite, simplistic movie. Because life is hard, we know it is, and a story with nothing but innocence a...

Table of food: Christmas dinner with my family I try to live by the motto that life is not about issues, but about relationships.  As a result of this, I don't engage much with hot topics or comment much on world events or what's on the news.  Frankly, I usually have very little to add to the conversation, other than to ask God for grace, help, healing, and wholeness.  Coming down on one side or the other of an issue is never that helpful, I find.  However, a few things I have read lately about how some Christian groups are condemning, excluding, and judging certain people have pained me deeply.  As a result, I have begun to do some thinking about how we treat others.  And by "others" I mean those whom we disagree with, those whom we don't understand, those whom we don't like, those whom we think are a blight on society, etc. You know who I'm talking about.  Since I profess to follow God, I believe that I should learn how...

Winter tree in Saint-Laurent.  Jan 28 2013 I am facilitating a spiritual formation course on Tuesday evenings based on the book, The Good and Beautiful God .  Basically, the book deals with aligning our perceptions of God with the God that Jesus presents in the New Testament.  It is a well-structured study with accessible language, group learning, and a spiritual discipline exercise (the author calls it soul-training) at the end of every chapter.  This week we were to spend 5 minutes in silence every day and take some time to observe creation. Sounds simple, and I basically do these two things most every day anyway.  But, as always seems to happen, the very week I am to practice these disciplines and write something about them, my schedule is turned on its ear.  I was working as a conference assistant for 3 days which meant early mornings and long days inside a classroom downtown.  In addition, I had a house guest for 4 d...

I was attacked by a nasty bout of food poisoning this week. Once your body senses that there are evil toxins in the belly and kicks into eject mode, there is just nothing you can do to stop the process. I won't turn your stomach with the details.... well, maybe just a few of them. I have to admit that some of the them were kind of funny. The first wave of nausea hit while I was sitting in a meeting on Wednesday evening. After a few trips to the bathroom it became clear that staying in the meeting was not an option. Since I was there with Dean, I couldn't leave, so I dragged myself out to the car and lay down in the back seat. By this time I was throwing up every half hour. When the urge came, I would open the car door and grace the street with my stomach's rejects. We were parked in a residential neighbourhood which meant that every so often people would pass by walking their dogs. It was uncanny how often my stomach's upheaval coincided with the dog walkers. I ...

I love to sing. Not everyone loves to listen to me, but I have always loved to sing. I started to play the piano around the age of 5, and was soon improvising and writing my own simple melodies to sing and to play. The ability to hear and sing different harmonies was encouraged by a musical grade school teacher and ever since then, I have preferred the tension and sweetness of two or three voices to one. I sang second soprano throughout high school and college, that middle voice that is often the hardest to identify in a musical piece, but the one that is in the closest proximity to the other voices. On occasion, I was thrust into the soprano role, just because I could hit the notes, even if they were a bit on the light and airy side. I never had much strength in my singing voice, and this frustrated me as well as various musicians and soundmen who had to compensate for my lack of volume. I always wished that I had more power in my singing voice. In some ways, it seemed so different fr...

I don't know about the rest of you, but as a creative person, I have a recurring fear. And that is that I will never have another creative idea, or come up with anything worthwhile to say or do again. I fear that I only have so much in my creative bank account. Since creativity basically means that you never do the same thing in the same way twice, the pressure mounts with every task that comes my way. When I am faced with a another paper to write, a talk to prepare, a presentation to give, a picture to paint, or a blog to compose, there is often a gaping void that taunts me. There is a chaotic formless flurry of scattered bits that I can't make sense of. On Sunday, the void visited me again. I had a presentation to prepare for Monday night and when I jumped out of bed, the dark chaos was waiting. Fortunately, I was doing a presentation on Genesis 1-4 and the first thing that came to mind was: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and vo...

For: The Institute of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies , St. Stephen's University , Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt A few weeks ago I woke up singing this phrase over and over: I Love This Body. Those are not words that would normally come out of my mouth, so the fact that I was singing them in my sleep made me think that perhaps I should also be saying them while I was awake. To be honest, these words make me uncomfortable. I don't really go around saying, "I love my body," and yet it is the most intimate, miraculous, and mysterious gift of God that I experience every day. One need only read any medical writings to get a sense of how intricate this marvellous synergy of tissue and bone and blood and muscle and all kinds of other good stuff is. Plus, it is intertwined with a unique personality! This body is my most constant reminder that God loves me and is as close to me as my next breath. Every day that I wake up and breathe an...

For: The Institute of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies , St. Stephen's University , Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt One of the recurring thoughts that I came across in my readings this week was that worship is a response. It is the appropriate reaction to encountering God, to experiencing his love, to living on his earth, to viewing his creation. What exactly that response looks like is hard to pin down. We think of majestic songs, intimate whispers, loud shouts, bowing down, sacrifices, caring for the poor, submission, exaltation, crying and laughing and jumping. All of these can be appropriate, but what is appropriate today, right now? Today, after a week of reading theology texts and doing assignments for three courses (this one plus two university courses), my thoughts are fuzzy and scattered. I can't remember what I think about every aspect of the Trinity or my humanity or what all the names of the theologians were in the 20th century...

For: The Institute of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies , St. Stephen's University , Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt This week we had to put together a brief statement that reflected our worldview or the big story as we know it. Here is my attempt: It all begins with God. This originator - beautiful, awesome, complete, and communicative in himself and all he does - liberally sprinkles his living and breathing compositions into time and space. Of these, the one that carries his likeness, his breath, and joins in his project of growing a loving and glorious holy community is mankind. In the middle chapters of this story, the lovee (that would be us) wanders away from the lover (that would be God), deciding that life needs to be explored on her own terms. Disaster ensues. While everything that the original Lover touches brings life, everything that moves outside of that love starts to decay. But listen, this Lover, he cannot be thwarted. He pursue...

For: The Institute of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies , St. Stephen's University , Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt I am grappling with a few concepts in my own personal systematic theology right now. The first issue I am not sure about is the concept of the Trinity, and the second one (creation 'ex nihilo' or out of nothing) just popped up this week. I am not questioning whether these are true or not (okay, I am but just hang on), more like whether these are adequate concepts for us today. Each people group in their own place and time has to find language and concepts that relate Truth to where they are at. This is not relativism; this is the beauty of eternal Truth taking some concrete form in our human world and being able to touch every person at every point in time. Some ideas that were explored and explained centuries ago still find a hold in our day and time, but others do not. If anything, I feel that the concepts of trinity an...