Today was a day of celebration and sorrow.
Leanne passed her Master's level thesis. I was able to see her defense. She did a great job.
The not so good news is that Leanne's grandmother passed away this morning. We are heading to Newfoundland tommorrow to spend sometime with the family.
peace.
This Easter I am doing something that doesn't come naturally to me. In addition to letting the metaphor of a miscarriage direct my thoughts on the suffering of Christ within the Trinity (see my previous post), I am meditating this Easter season on the certainty of the resurrection.
I have a confession. Meditating on certainty does not come naturally to me. I am a product of my environment. So although I would like to claim that my worldview is completely foreign to anything that postmodern philosophy, pop-culture and religion can offer, I am afraid that there are times when my doubt, relativism and deconstructive tendencies seem greater then they out to be. So because of my inclination to examine everything through a deconstructive process, this Easter I am going to claim the certainty of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Certainty is a word that I do not use all that often. As a follower of Christ, I do live with certainty in my life. Its just that I rarely call it that. So this Easter, I am going to seek to hear the certainty of the Easter story, allowing the claims of the historic Christian faith point me afresh to the person of Jesus Christ. I ask that God will allow the mysteries of the resurrection to supplement the certainty of the resurrection this Easter.
Ill let you know how it goes!
My wife Leanne, is writing a paper on ministering to people who have recently experienced a miscarriage and came upon an article by L. Serene Jones.
As Good Friday approaches I will use the following metaphor to help guide my Good Friday reflections. In the article, Jones provides a beautiful and provocative metaphor about what may have happened in the Trinity when Christ suffered on the cross.
What transpires in the Godhead when one of its members bleeds? Theologians like Moltmann and Luther have urged us to affirm that on the cross, God takes this death into the depths of Godself. The Trinity thus holds it. First person holds the Second, in its death, united with it by the power of the Spirit. But how can the living Godhead hold death within it? The tradition has told us that at this point in the story, our language breaks down, and we must simply ponder the cross and its mysteries.
Perhaps the tradition is right, but perhaps its imaginative resources have been limited by the morphological imaginations of its mostly male theologians. Perhaps what we find in this space of silence is the image of the woman who, in the grips of a stillbirth, has death inside her and yet does not die. Consider the power of this as an image for the Trinity. When Christ is crucified, Gods own child dies. For the God who sent this child into the world bearing the hope of Gods eternal love, this death is a death of hope, the hope that the people who see this child will believe. It is a death of a possibility that has never been, the possibility of true human community.
L. Serene Jones Hope Deferred: Theological Reflections on Reproductive Loss (Infertility, Miscarriage, Stillbirth) Modern Theology 17:2 April 2001.
Here are the links to a few to a few friends who are online
Scott Sharman scottsharman.blogspot.com
Ian MacLennan http://www.ianmaclennan.org
Friday night was a night of mixed emotions.
I had the privilege of attending the induction of Gene Haas to full professor at Redeemer University College. He offered a great address on a Creational Ethic, a topic that he recently written a book on.
Unfortunately, when I got home I was greeted with the news that my brother called saying that Stanley Grenz had experienced a brain aneurism and was not expected to make it through the night. On Saturday morning Dr. Grenz was taken to his maker. My thoughts and prayers are with the Grenz family and the many people who are mourning this untimely event.
Although I only had a few opportunities to meet Stan, his humour and graciousness left an imprint on my life. From the accounts of his life that I have read over the last few days and from what I hear from his colleagues, his life was consistent with his beautifully articulated theological reflections. He was a top rate Christian academic, theologian, writer and person.
For a number of years, I have had the privilege to dialogue with some great church leaders about the nature of church and community. A lot of our discussion emerged from dialoguing about some of the philosophic and cultural shifts that are going on as a result of postmodernism. For years I thought that part of my mandate as a church leader was to create a strong sense of community for my people. And to an extent that is part of the role of the pastor, but I also see how at times I have made 'community' idolatrous. I am not sure that community is a goal.
Parker Palmer writes,
"Our common life, our true community, or what Thomas Merton once called our hidden wholeness is found originally not in outward reality but in our inner life. [Community], which we normally think of as a sociological phenomenon, is in fact a contemplative act. It is a reaching for deep, inner insight about our connectedness with one another, with the world, with God's reality. It is a given. It is a knowledge that's in our backbone. There is no external ethic which can teach community."
These are just some thoughts.
The other question for is how community, contemplation, and phenomenology go together?
peace
