The Little Friar

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking about how fellow Christians -- and sadly, sometimes, this even includes myself -- make God's Love so incredible/unbelievable. If you ask Christians to succinctly define God's agape , my guess is that the most common definition would be "unconditional love".  Consequently, Christians feel called to live out this unconditional love for the world.  As the Bible says, "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us".  We didn't have to get it all right before Christ, the Incarnation of God's Love, would embrace us and forgive us.  As Jesus prayed on the cross for those who killed him:  "Father, forgive them". In general, we think love is deep and wide.  So kindness/liking is superficial.  And yet, Christians say they love people while acting unkind to them.  That is to say, we Christians too easily turn love into a lie.  It's probably more accurate to say that God's agape ...

In thinking about verbs that bring love to be more tangible, here's the list I've come up with tonight: Listen Speak Give Pray Answer Share Enjoy Trust Forgive Promise

Hebrew text from Song of Songs 6.3 I've been critical of Fifty Shades of Grey already.   And I have no intention to change my opinion of the movie or the book.  Instead, I want to highlight how a robust engagement with Scripture itself can offer an alternative to the book and movie. Make no doubt about it, with the initial reports of sales coming in, Fifty Shades of Grey (the movie) was a box-office hit.  This weekend, tons of couples flooded through the doors of theaters to see the movie.  Most of those, in an attempt to celebrate "love". That, after all, is what the movie-goers on Valentine's Day were in search of.  Perhaps Eloise Mumford, who plays Kate in the film (Anastasia Steele's best friend and roommate), puts her finger on the fascination:  "It's a reality of our culture that people experience love and relationships in tons of different ways.  I think it's important to get people thinking about something they otherwise woul...

I have a confession to make.  I read Fifty Shades of Grey when it was released.  I did so precisely because it was so popular.  I've read my share of trashy novels, but the luster of hot literary lust lost its appeal as I grew older.  I read it only because the female friends I have were reading it and talking about it.  I found I was able to participate in conversations about redemptive sex precisely because I'd taken the novel seriously. That said, I thought the novel was horrible.  It was so poorly written, with little literary variety and value.  Its imagery was cold, the writing was poor and the plot was predictable.  Aware as I was of so many other books -- remember, I've read my share of trashy novels -- I just couldn't bring myself to read the second or third books in the series.  But I have read the first book. And I'm still not going to see the movie -- precisely because I know what's in the book. I've never really said any...

Recently, someone shared this on Facebook: There are several things that bother me about this picture. What it's meant to do, mostly, is to undermine the logical consistency of nonviolence.  It's meant to underwrite the idea that violence, by its very essence, is logically necessary.  We simply can't live without it.  To be human is to be violent.  So the picture poses a scenario in which a person like me -- that is to say a nonviolent pacifist -- can only vindicate violence when it hits close to home.  That we can't logically defend the idea of nonviolence in the face of a knife or gun. But, like I said, the picture bothers me for several reasons. First, it assumes that there are only two principal actors in any scenario.  This is a fault of modern Enlightenment thinking:  It's too individualistic.  Because it assumes that relationships between parties -- in this case, me and the guy with the knife -- play out in mechanistic ways....

This always seems obvious to me, but by way of reminder to others:  Holiness is loving others. Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.  The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery," "You shall not murder," "You shall not steal," "You shall not covet," and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command:  "Love your neighbor as yourself."  Love does no harm to a neighbor.  Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13.8-10).   For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Galatians 5.14). Holiness -- moral purity -- is loving others. To be clear, to handle a quick objection that some progressive Christians want to make of that claim, love is not synonymous with liberal tolerance.  Kindness and gentleness, still Fruits of the Spirit, per...

To think:  All this time I called myself a Christian.  But Christ lay dead in me.  I've  spoken in tongues with the Pentecostals, attended Bible study with the evangelicals, kissed icons with the Orthodox, worked for justice with the liberals.  But Christ lay dead in me.  I've gone  to church and said amen, I've sang the alleluias.  But Christ lay dead in me.  I've  prayed Christ’s words, I know them all by heart, I've even eaten the bread of life and drank his cup.  But Christ lay dead in me.  I've  kept the Lenten fast and kept the vigil, sang Easter hymns, said  Christ is risen .  But Christ lay dead in me.  I've  studied Christ, read books about him, and as if that weren't enough I'm writing some now.  But Christ lay dead in me.  With the gift of prophecy stirring in my chest I've climbed the narrow steps into the pulpit.  I've looked out on the faces of the waiting worshippers. ...

Ever since I was at school, the relationship between holiness and love has fascinated me.   Etymologically, holiness means to be "set apart", to create a social and moral separation between the "clean" and the "unclean", between the "holy" and the "profane".   So, typically, we think holiness and love go in two different directions.  Those most concerned with holiness tend to emphasize rules over love; think the biblical Pharisees.  For them, being holy meant withdrawing from sinners, and not  extending love and hospitality toward those one judged to be "unclean". Jesus resolves the tensions by radically rethinking what it means to be holy.  According to Jesus, loving God (the pursuit of holiness) is equated with loving your neighbor (the pursuit of hospitality).  This is illustrated time and again in the gospels where the Pharisees achieve holiness by moral and social exclusion and separation from tax collectors, sinners and...

One of the most annoying and silly tropes I hear from fellow Christians these days goes like this:   Hate the sin, love the sinner . The idea here is that we can, with surgical precision, make a cut between our affections toward human persons  and how we feel about their behaviors . But such surgical precision is untenable.  And we know this.  It's incredibility hard to not let a person's behaviors affect how we feel about him or her. That's because what this line fails to see: Sinners sin.  What matters isn't the sin.  It's the label.  If all you see is a sinner, you're seeing the wrong thing.  Jesus gets at how silly this mentality is.  Because Jesus envisions -- as I've written here before -- a holiness  that isn't afraid to get dirty .  Jesus embraces sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes.   Which is another way of saying Jesus got soft on sin.  When we love sinners, there's this really real sense that we see the ...

" I think the intention of love is the happiness of the beloved.  So love's intention is not to own the beloved but to have the beloved happy.  Therefore, love sometimes supports the beloved, and sometimes taking oneself back to let the beloved gain freedom.  So both actions are actions of love.   We are not loved because we are so beautiful and good, but we are beautiful and good because we are loved.   And this is true for interpersonal relationships, and also true with the relationship of God who is love, as we say with the New Testament.  And so he wants to see his beloved children on earth happy and joyful." -- Jürgen Moltmann

"What  makes us humans is, of course, being more loving.  And sin is a defect in this love.  To say that Jesus was without sin just means that he was wholly loving, that he did not put up barriers against people, that he was not afraid of being at the disposal of others, that he was warm and free and spontaneous.  That is what really lies behind the portentous sentence:  'He spoke as one with authority.'  It makes him sound so magisterial and solemn.  In fact it just means that what he said came straight from him warmly and immediately.  He was never looking over his shoulder at the textbooks and traditions." -- Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters

I'm reminded this morning of a quote from my favorite modern Catholic writer, Herbert McCabe.  He was a Dominican theologian who taught at Oxford.  (If you've never read his book God Matters , you're missing a real treat.) " The whole of our faith is the belief that God loves us; I mean there isn't anything else.  Anything else we say we believe is just a way of saying that God loves us.  Any proposition, any article of faith, is only an expression of faith if it is a way of saying that God loves us.   I think we have a whole society (known as the Free World) which is so structured as to destroy belief in love, to eat away at the confidence people have in each other, to replace friendship by competitiveness, generosity by domination and submission, community by national security, love by fear.   The Christian notion of God is based on a belief in a love which simply can never fail." (It's from his Faith Within Reason , pp. 33-34.)

Some years ago, as a pastor, I was called upon to give Ann a Christian burial.   I'd gotten to know her only months before.  So I needed to talk to friends and family, to get a picture of her life.  Ann, you see, had committed suicide.   This is Ann's story, and what she taught me.  Ann's father deserted her when she was 3.  Her mother filled his void with a number of temporary replacements.  But they always saw Ann as "under foot".  She was discarded.  Passed around family members, shuffled from town to town, school to school.  She made acquaintances.  No friends.  Not enough stability.  So at 17, she created her own stability.  She latched onto the first man who'd give her attention.  She married young, and poorly.  He abandoned her eventually, with four kids, no job, no home, no money.  Her dreams withered.  She survived as best she could.  Bad jobs, followed by worse ones.  Abusive bo...

Cinderella Ate My Daughter  is one of my favorite books of cultural and sexual criticism.  In it,  Peggy Orenstein laments how our culture naturally moves from such beauty-centered innocence as to such beauty-centered sluttiness as Take the phrase, sleeping around .  It's sounds innocent enough.  But the reality is something stark.  To quote someone from college, that time of life when sexual partners often number in the double-digits for men and women, "I cannot recall ever rejecting an advance, and I know I never felt good afterward.  On the contrary, I felt used and dirty, at once manipulative and manipulated.  I hated my reputation; I hated the sex".   It bothers me to see women objectified in this way.   Any  woman.  I've discovered over the years that most men don't get it -- this notion of objectification .  It was explained easily enough to me as a seven-year-old:  Only treat women as you would your Grandmothe...

Random thought:  Perhaps the greatest sign that a theologian is growing in grace -- the stronger one's theological convictions, the greater one's love for those who differ with you.  

It's 5.45am.  I've been awake now for 3 hours, after tossing-and-turning the two hours before that.  In all, it's been a restless night.   So many things have my mind racing.  Not the least of which, how to respond to certain situations -- I'll spare everyone the details -- that initially wanted to release my anger.  Now, I'm far more sad.  Responding in anger, I think, is easy.  Anger is the emotive response our culture does well.  We know how to respond in anger to those who abuse or mistreat us, or those we know.  Finding myself emotively angry, even if justifyingly  so in others' eyes, isn't necessarily wrong.  It's all in what we Christians do  with such anger.   Because, let's be honest, anger controls us -- controls me  -- in ways we hardly want to admit.  We are taught that our anger (along with our happiness) are truer, more trustworthy emotions.  I shouldn't deny them, sublimate or control them, be...

" God loves human beings. God loves the world.  Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world.  What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.  God establishes a most intimate unity with this.  God becomes human, a real human being.  While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings.  While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves real people without distinction.  God has no patience with our dividing the world and humanity according to our standards and imposing ourselves as judges over them.  God leads us ad absurdum [into absurdity] by becoming a real human being and a companion of sinners, th...

Several years ago, I wrote an article on the theology of marriage, sex and family (it can be found via a tabbed link on the blog front page).  A friend asked me to revisit those 9.5 theses and articulate them in the way I'd formulate them now.   I've been thinking and writing about the theology of marriage and sex for so long, that obviously my ideas should blossom and grow.  This is an accounting of any growth.  1.   Marriage is Christological before it is "natural" .  Marriage, Edward Schillebeeckx writes, is "reality secular by origin"; yet, as he continues, it "has acquired a deeper  meaning in the order of salvation in which we live".  Because creation is in and for Christ, and because the apocalyptic shockwaves of the resurrection of Christ radiate both backwards and forwards, marriage must finally be understood Christologically.  Although Jesus relativised marriage (e.g. Luke 18.29/Matthew 19.12), and although in the consummation there...