outWORD by Matte Downey

Image from veteranstoday.com I have been teaching a mini-series in our faith community dealing with the three interconnected loves found in the answer to the question, "Which is the most important commandment?" Jesus' reply is this: "You should love the Eternal, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second great commandment is this: Love others in the same way as you love yourself. There are no commandments more important than these" (Mark 12:30-31, The Voice). You can find a summary of my first talk on loving yourself  here . Now I turn my attention to what it means to rightly relate to our neighbour, or to the other. It is imperative to remember that we cannot neatly dissect these three relationships; how we relate to ourselves is directly related to how we perceive God relates to us and likewise, how we relate to others is directly related to how we believe God views the other. If any one ...

Buds on a tree this morning I saw my first bud on a tree today.  Well, not exactly my first, because I have seen them before, but it was my first sighting this year.  It has been an extended winter and it feels like the whole earth is straining to catch a glimpse of the spring sun and feel its warm, nourishing rays again.  I know I am.  Today I was reading G.K. Chesterton and Kathleen Norris.  Both of them have developed a gift for seeing the playful and holy presence of Christ in moments that many of us dismiss as mundane and ordinary.  Chesterton writes about the sun rising every morning in response to the call of the Spirit of God to "Do it again!"  He calls this repetition in nature a theatrical, heavenly encore.  Similarly, Norris speaks about the mindless tasks of laundry and washing dishes as invitations to enter the temple of "holy leisure."  She says there is sacred potential ...

Dean and I attended another funeral this week.  This has been the third one in three months, all of them colleagues of his at work who succumbed to some form of cancer.  At the same time, I have been reading a book by Kathleen Norris and a few days ago, I read the chapter in which she describes the prolonged illness and subsequent death of her husband.  In addition, for the past month or so I have been reading a chapter from Job every morning.  While this may all sound a bit depressing, I don't find it so.  In fact, I find it grounding. Though I don't believe we should be fixated on pain, suffering, and death, I do think that acknowledging it as a part of life is necessary for mental and spiritual health.  Our contemporary western culture subtly tries to remove all trace of discomfort from our everyday lives.  Pain can easily be remedied by any number of pain relievers; sickness and death for the most part ar...

Yesterday I was on the subway going downtown for an appointment and read another chapter in Acedia & Me by Kathleen Norris.  I have been reading bits and pieces of the book here and there (it requires some digestion after reading, so one can't race through it) and found the stories she told about her husband's troubled adolescence and his mid-life suicidal tendencies incredibly honest and touching.  Then Norris hit me with a chapter that landed squarely between my eyes and poked at the complacent spots in my life.  Mixed metaphors AND conviction!  Ouch! To get a bit of a background on acedia, read the first post  I wrote on it.  I won't go into detail about its definition here, but in the chapter I read yesterday, Norris deals with the aspect of acedia that refuses to take responsibility.  You may want to stop right here.  It gets pretty rough.  The story of shifting responsibility o...

While in Waterloo, Ontario to attend the Canadian Theological Society's annual conference last week, I picked up a few books, one of them being Kathleen Norris's Acedia & Me .  Sometimes defined as sloth or associated with depression, acedia is a word that, though commonly used by the ancient monks, has not found a prominent place in contemporary spiritual language.  Norris describes what acedia looks and feels like by writing about her own experience.  Basically, acedia is an absence of care.  Norris writes:  "The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so.  When life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding, acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine: you know the pain is there, yet you can't rouse yourself to give a damn." (p. 3)  Monks knew this affliction well.  They called it the noon-day demon because the temptation usually made an appearance around midda...