To seek Christ is to pursue a way in the endlessly expanding boundaries of your compassion. 

Even healing requires vulnerability.

I've not posted in a long time. I have cognitive limitations now which make essays difficult, even editing photos has become difficult. For the most part I post little meditations on a Facebook page, The Society of Jesus Compassionate. Going forward I will post them here as well, regardless of how short they are.

I'm grateful for all who have visited this place and hope you've enjoyed it.

Peace...
John-Magdalene

Meditations After Robin Williams' Death

Robin Williams' death has brought many hard realities to surface. A very wise social worker once said to me that the line between "can't" and "won't" is indiscernible with some people when it comes to healthy behavior or reasoning. Sometimes in people there is an internal mechanism which cannot ask for help; it's like that part of the brain is frozen and no matter how much you know you should ask for help, you just can't.  That's what all the good intention-ed people who say "ask for help" don't get. It's not that we're bad or lazy, or careless. It's not that we don't know to ask, or that we should ask, it's that we can't. It's like a diabetic being unable to process sugar, they want to, but they can't.  That's what is so fucking hard and so very fucking dangerous about this disease. That, and there is no cure. There are ways to manage it, but there is no cure for depression.

I heard a sermon recently that started really strong about the trouble with walking on water and sinking but then it dissolved into platitude, that "Jesus always finds you." It isn't that simple. It ain't so for everybody and it has nothing to do with all "you got" or "don't got" going for you and that's when it gets hard. It gets hard to experience and it's hard to witness. It's hard that not everyone is found by Jesus. For most who are sinking, Jesus doesn't show up unless we do, unless others are working to bring him into the world of the suffering. 

This is the hard sermon to preach but it needs to be preached. It's hard to preach about the times where God is missing and how to keep going on. Read the Psalms for more on that, "My God! MY GOD! Why have you forsaken me?"

It's hard to impress upon people that they really are needed to help those who suffer. It's really hard to preach that we need to be searching out those who are suffering. Often they are right there drinking coffee after the service in the parish hall. It requires great effort to notice and more so to exert the emotional effort, but we are needed. We are called. It's a sermon needing to be preached. Platitudes don't float in the place of abject suffering. Are we Christ in the world or not?

It's true. There are times of absolute powerlessness. There are times when you have no control over it, even while medicated, the thought pops into your head, "Just do it" and not in the Nike way, but the  go ahead and "check out" way. It's exhausting at times, deep down, deeper than bone deep, six feet under your feet deep exhausting, fencing with depression and suicide thoughts, and for some like me add to it, staying clean and sober. Sometimes you feel like you could just die for some deep sweet rest. 

I am blessed that there are people of grace in my life who have always loved me and been there reaching out, living God into me. When God's gone missing, it is relationships which are the holy connection and the only chance we have. If you know or love someone with depression, keep reaching out. Just call, say hi, offer to listen, just say I love you, you may just be the miracle of the day. When in times of great post-breakdown depression, everyday my brother Chris would check in and see how I was doing, the same with my societal Brother Mark, just checking in everyday. I had no pressure to say or do anything, they just checked-in and it meant the world to me. Don't underestimate the power of a simple, "You OK?" to break the deathly silence. It's kinda like speaking to someone in a coma, we may not respond, but it helps to hear your voice. Deeply. Thank God for them,  being windows of God's graces.

I suppose anyone reading this has someone in their life who loves them. I think at some level, beyond our bodies in this world, beyond the sub-atomic, beyond the quantum possibilities, everyone is loved by God- sometimes I wonder if I think this to make myself feel better and to let myself off the hook, placing responsibility for suffering squarely on the back of God who created all this possibility. 

There are so many people who are alone. Some will be reached. Far too many will not. It is for these that our fervent prayers should flow. Pray too for ourselves that we have strength to reach as many as we can. I have been blessed to have been touched and pulled back from the utter despair. I know there is a love and compassion which passes all understanding, that the greatest thing we can do to testify to God's love is too pour it out from ourselves, as freely as we receive it. It can be in volunteering at a shelter. It can be giving alms to someone on the corner as you wait for the light to change. It can simply be giving an open-hearted smile and glance, from the holy place within where there is no judgement but only compassion which doesn't fear the brokenness we all experience but shares it as reality communion, one broken heart to another. Maybe too the splendid miracle of a little mutual healing will occur.

I used to be around horses. I love them, riding them and relating to them. I can honestly say too that I loved mucking the stalls. I loved the earthy smell of horse crap. I loved shoveling it up into the wheel-barrow, then taking it out to the pile and spreading it out under the sunlight. Here's the thing, if I'd left the crap in the dark barn it becomes a source for disease and other bad stuff, but take it out and spread it in to the air and sunlight, something amazing happens, it becomes great food for the garden, spread it around the garden as fertilizer or with mulch, and man, will your garden ever grow! If you are like me, suffering with the great silent disease of depression, or just having the normal occasional bout, don't hide it in the dark to fester. For me and for others, and with some work, the muck of depression has grown the garden of compassion. Take it out expose it to the air and light.  If you can get help, or just find someone you can say to, "I think I may need some help."  Try and get things moving again. The sooner the better. 

Through Your Sacred Wounds, a Lenten pilgrimage to the Prodigal Feast

Part Five: Come Into The Feast

We have journeyed together, companions through Lent. We have seen Jesus coming into the world not to judge us but to heal us, not to condemn us as sinners but to embrace us as brothers and sisters in need of healing. We have come to witness the erroneous teachings which have persisted in the Church, about a vengeful God seeking to punish us with eternal torment. We have seen these teachings have no basis in either the language of Jewish Scripture, nor in the Aramaic, Jesus’ language, or in the Greek of Jesus’s generation. We know again that the loving Father could never intentionally harm his creation as he is loving toward everyone and his compassion covers all his works. In his own compassion and mercy, Jesus offers us this also, we know the Father’s love because we know his. We know too that our wounds are made holy and sacred in his wounds, as his healing wounds heal ours and teach us to heal others from the experience of our wounds.

Remember the prodigal son. He recognizes his wounds and with this humility returns to his father. His father embraces him as returned from the dead and prepares a feast for his prodigal and all in the district to celebrate the finding of what was lost, his son and his son’s capacity to return in humility and honesty, ready to work for his father. Remember too, the older brother who storms out of the party full of resentment, though he has always had his father’s promise and love and a place in his house. He still resents the attention given his wondering brother. Worse, he has no appreciation of his own true worth, in spite of the good life he has with his father and his promised inheritance as the eldest son. He judges and scorns his brother and father and in doing so, only casts himself out from the prodigal feast and out into the shadows beyond the celebration and party lights. The prodigal son ran from his father because he lacked humility and self-dignity.  His brother ran from the feast because he lacked humility in his self-importance.

Tomorrow we come to the great Easter Feast, which is none other than the great prodigal feast, to which we are all called, regardless of our circumstance. At times we are prodigals. At times we are resentful brothers. Regardless, our father is always waiting for us, the confused mixture of simultaneous saint and sinner, all embraced in God’s compassion, in the healing power of Jesus our brother. So come to the table and rub elbows with our brothers and sisters, whatever their condition. Come with wounds exposed to be healed by Jesus, your wounds to be transformed into God’s healing openings for each other. The Lord’s feast is the prodigal feast.

Rejoice! Be fed and go feed!

Through Your Sacred Wounds, a Lenten pilgrimage to the Prodigal Feast

Part Four: How Misinterpreting Hell, Leads to Misunderstanding God

The history of the Church's misinterpretation of the Old and New Testament words for what we think of as "hell" have had a monumental and disastrous impact upon our understanding of God and God's nature. In short, the words which we interpret as "hell" have no basis in the ancient languages in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, or the Aramaic language of Jesus, or in the Greek in which the New Testament was written. What is so disastrous about these misinterpretations is that they invoke a fear of God as condemning, judgmental and as a deity which would punish people harshly and eternally. These presentations of God as vengeful have no basis in the teachings of Jesus or in the epistles in their original context or languages (for a detailed explanation of these historic interpretations and misinterpretations please see (http://tentmaker.org/articles/jesusteachingonhell.html).

When we study the real words behind the interpretive ones we find that the intentional use of words in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek share no real shared meaning with our modern misinterpretations. Very briefly (and please use the link above for greater details) the concept of "hell" in ancient days didn't exist as a place of individual eternal judgement and suffering for souls after death. The ancients considered after death to be either nothing, simply where souls reside after death or a paradise, none of which reflected upon the earthly life of people but as predetermined as the "resting place" as cultural expressions. When the Hebrews of old spoke of judgement it was of the nation and it's kings and leaders. It was the same with Jesus as well. The other sense of judgement was in how a person affects himself by his mistreatment of others as being diminished of one's own self, or "eating one's self". I think this would have been Jesus' view as well, to treat others badly does more harm to the antagonist and is self inflicted. So it makes sense too that to live Christ's teachings would then bring "abundance". As well, the notion of a punishing God develops when states and religions become inter-tangled, as reported by Augustine,

"This seems to have been done on no other account, but as it was the business of princes, out of their wisdom and civil prudence, to deceive the people in their religion; princes, under the name of religion, persuaded the people to believe those things true, which they themselves knew to be idle fables; by this means, for their own ease in government, tying them the more closely to civil society. (Augustine, City of God, Book IV, p. 32, cited by Thayer, Origin & History, p. 37.)
Contriving doctrines to control people? Who would have believed it? Well, the Greek world did, the Roman world did, and evidently between the testaments, the Jews got involved, as well, as the concept of endless torment began appearing in the apocryphal books written by Egyptian Jews."  (Jesus' Teachings On Hell, tentmaker.org,)

It seems that the Church has suffered the same after Nicaea. Of course then the concept of afterlife as hellish judgement or or heavenly paradise, at God's hand, paints the perspective in which we then judge God's nature. Unfortunately our culture has transformed Jesus' God of mercy into a platonic imperial state projection of tyranny, a god no better than the nobles, wealthy and powerful.

So finally I had to decide which God I would believe in and honor, the God of mercy or the God of vengeance. Day after day, I choose to believe and honor the God of mercy. There is no perfection in vengeance, only in love. So to be in relationship with the perfect love which is God, is to be fearless in God's love and to love more perfectly, without fear and vengeance.This is for me divine logic of the highest order. For me this is the key which unlocks the doors of liberation, compassion and peace in the presence of Christ all around me. I think this was the goal of the Original Church which found itself splintered after Nicaea and forever after being constantly battered about in struggle between the unholy alliance of Church and state. The time for Christ's peace is with us now, in which the journey begins with choosing the Church of Christ's compassion and to bring this community of compassion and Christ's spirit to your church.

Through Your Sacred Wounds, a Lenten pilgrimage to the Prodigal Feast

Part Three: From a Wounded People to a Community of Compassion

So if I take the Gospel seriously, I have to acknowledge that indeed Jesus did not come to judge the world but to heal it, save it (Yeshuah- Hebrew, to make safe or be rescued. Salvare- Latin, to secure to heal). I read the Gospels and see Jesus teaching, healing and feeding. I don't see Jesus condemning. In fact when Jesus is called upon by the religious leaders to judge "sinners" and the "impure" as they do, he refuses, he instead defends the "accused"  from the condemnation of religion, instead Jesus forgives them the requirements of religious pretense and offers his healing words and touch. I think he does this as a way of stripping the religious of their presumptuous authority. Yes, he does chastise the religious leaders though and condemns them as moralizing hypocrites. Later these religious leaders would send Jesus to the cross. Here on the cross Jesus remains true, he forgives them and all of us for ages to come. When, for the sake of their morality and controlling power, religious leaders today seek to condemn the compassionate faithful, Jesus, still from the cross, defends the faithful from their attacks. In doing so, if nothing else, Jesus reminds us to not confuse religion for God. God did not require Jesus to be sacrificed, religion did. In the resurrection God establishes that God's loving power transcends religion's presumptions of power.

In the wounds Jesus receives innocently, at the hands of the immorality of power at work in the state and in religion, Jesus shares with us and suffers with us the wounds we innocently bear, the wounds of betrayal which begin soon after birth and continue through life. We are wounded by those who love us and those who we love. Jesus shares those wounds too. Jesus is betrayed to death by one so close to him, betrayed by abandonment of those he loved, except Mary Magdalene, betrayed by his people and the religion of his heritage, and betrayed by state's justice. These are wounds we all know and share with Jesus, our sacred wounds of betrayal. In the compassion of Jesus we can come to healing, healing found in sharing Christ's spirit in healing with each other. Jesus shows us that we can have courage to accept the hard truth of betrayal and its suffering in our lives. By his example, of his coming from the sorrow of his cousin John's execution, and his finding there compassion in the shared suffering of himself with humanity, to find a communion of compassion, to be moved to heal, teach and feed the multitudes (Mark 6:29-39). The nature of Christ's compassion can transform our defensive nature. We can be in Jesus' community of compassion, we can share and extend Christ's healing power. This is the great key to God's loving power for us and through us, by sharing as Jesus does, in the sharing of the communion of compassion in our vulnerability, rather than by our instinctive retreat into defensive reaction and condemnation.

Through Your Sacred Wounds, a Lenten pilgrimage to the Prodigal Feast

The Old Tired Confused Gesture 

If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.  Isaiah 58:9-10, Reading for the Liturgy for Ash Wednesday.

The pointing of the finger. I remember as a child hearing, "for every finger you point at someone, three point back at you."  Throughout The Bible the accusatory finger has haunted humanity and has set the distance of space between ourselves and God. In Revelation the evil one is given the name "The Accuser". In the Genesis story, the first sin committed in the garden is when the serpent accuses God, before Eve, of withholding from her and Adam, the full goodness they were due, by forbidding her and Adam from partaking in the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge between good and evil. She and Adam buy into the serpent's seductive words of accusation and eat the fruit. God then comes looking for them and finds them with fruit juice still on their faces, and asks them what happened. What's the first thing they do with the knowledge of good and evil? Adam accuses Eve of leading him astray, while also blaming God because she was given to him from God. Eve then blames the serpent. It is at this point God decides to evict them from the garden, not for eating the forbidden fruit, but for playing the blame game, speaking evil of another. 

Whole Christian theologies have developed which employ the blame game. Crusades, inquisitions, reformations, counter-reformations, witch trials in 17th century Salem, and even still today, as some ministers still teach a message which seeks to hang the blame of our disasters and troubles, on some particular folk, of some particular sin.  

Of course with the theological blame game, there can be found no justification for it in the teachings of Jesus. There is no where to be found in the Gospel where Jesus ultimately gives us permission to accuse one or another as the basis of our holiness, or with who, or who we are not, to be in fellowship with. To accuse someone of being less than worthy of God's love and fellowship, with God and each other, actually defies the teachings of our Lord, "Judge not." The Gospel of John proclaims that Jesus came not into the world to judge it but to be its healing salvation and calls us to follow his lead. To blame another, to speak evil, ultimately is to shirk one's own responsibilities to care for the hungry and afflicted. As with the serpent distracting Eve by his accusation of God, so it remains today as a tool to distract us from serving each other in humility and grace, and with God's compassion, to care for and mend the sufferings of the world. Jesus doesn't call us to blame and speak evil of the poor, sick and suffering for their lot, nor does he call us to speak evil of our "enemies"(!), but to instead discover God's joy in serving them, to testify to Christ's presence in the world, we in him and him in us. By serving Christ in the afflicted we point to Christ in them and each other. By loving those with whom we are in conflict, we point to Christ in them and each other. So when we point fingers at people, instead of it being an expression of accusation, let it be an expression of encouragement pointing to Christ in everyone.

Through Your Sacred Wounds, a Lenten pilgrimage to the Prodigal Feast

Tardree Forrest, Northern Ireland

This Lent I invite you to give up something different than in years past. I invite you to give up sin for Lent, or rather give up everything you think you know about sin. This Lent I ask you give up all your preconceived notions about what sin is, how it works, what its causes and consequences are. I also ask that you take a different approach to the season of Lent. Instead of approaching Lent as a penitential journey of guilt, instead consider doing something different and approach it as a pilgrimage to healing and restoration. I ask you to explore, to take a bold vision of your transgressions and mine, to see beyond the transgressions, to instead see what lies behind them. 

When we think of healthy people, do we think of healthy happy people being the kind who would bring intentional suffering onto another person? How about healthy communities, or religions, or countries for that matter? No? What does it say then about people, communities, religions or nations which bring about intentional suffering onto others? What is the cause of transgression-- fear, envy, greed, or anger? Or is it something else entirely? Can we really believe that God, in certain circumstances, condones the sufferings we cause each other? What are the consequences of our transgressions-- is it the eternal suffering of hell fire and damnation, something else, or nothing at all?

This Lent I'm exploring these questions, and others, and ask that you join me with open hearts and open minds, and explore the possibility that we wound others because of our own wounds left to fester or be picked at. I suggest that your wounds are wounds which are made sacred with the sacred wounds we share with Jesus, the wounds of betrayal and of innocence lost. I suggest that our journey through these wounds lead us to healing, restoration and to the table of the Prodigal Feast. 

We will explore the parable of the Prodigal Son, which I think is the greatest explanation ever of the human condition, our brokenness, and the way through it, not just as a survivor, but as people who live life in the feast of gratitude, nourished by, and nourishing others, with God's love. We will also use the Lenten readings from the Daily Office Book (DOB), Year Two. This brings me to one last offering, if you don't pray The Office, I invite you this Lent to try to do it every day, at very least commit to saying one of them daily, like Morning Prayer or Compline for example. There are five offices to choose from and any one of them can fit into any time schedules. There is a great deal of comfort found in the constancy of the prayers of The Office which are also contained in the Book of Common Prayer.

Please be open to any questions which arise from these meditations and I suggest journaling or note keeping. I invite you to share any questions or observations which arise in the reading of these meditations. Thank you for reading and have a most blessed Lent.

The Abundance of Compassion

Sermon Berkley Lake Chapel
August 11, 2013
Matthew 14: 13-21
Psalm 145

“When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick… Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples… And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

“He had compassion.”  It sounds like compassion is a powerful thing.

Indeed it is, as the Psalmist wrote in Psalm 145, verse 9, to describe the nature of God, writing, “The Lord is loving toward everyone; his compassion covers all his works.”
Friends, compassion is a powerful thing and a big thing too, big enough to cover all of God’s creation.

But how is compassion different from love, or sympathy or empathy?
The word we use for compassion is derived from the Latin “compati” which means to “suffer in” and “suffer with”. For ancient Romans and Greek alike, as well as in Christian traditions which followed, compassion is also of the highest spiritual value and a virtue reflecting one’s development in spiritual practice and faith.

The ancient Hebrew word for compassion or compassionate is “Raḥmana” and carries some complexity to it as it has several implications which give depth to its meaning. Rahmana is one of the names of God, as Father of Mercy, and derives meaning which reflects pity, mercy, and the desire to provide relief to the sufferer. It also relates to an active forgiveness. What’s really interesting as well, and worth some thought, is that the origin for the word Rahmana is “Rehem” which means from the Mother and from the womb. We almost have the trinity represented in one word, Rahmana, which expresses a divine state of Father, Mother and compassionate action coming from the womb of God, like Jesus being born of Mary and the Holy Spirit.  All of which is to say, we are dealing with a word, which is in our tradition of scripture, a very powerful word.

Which brings me to one more aspect to this word compassion, in Hebrew Rahmana, also means “the revealed word of God.” One last thing to hold in your mind also as we consider compassion, is the Compassion Verse, Psalm 145:9, which is also the motto of our Order, this verse  is the turning point in the Old Testament, moving past a God seen to be vengeful to one who  manifests love and compassion for all of God’s creations. From here through the rest of the Psalms, the Psalms become songs of joy and praise. Past are the mournful cries and calls for vengeance mixed in with the first 144 Psalms, but now in the last five Psalms are the praises and celebrations of justice, music, spirit and dances. Now we can turn to the prophets of mercy, and compassionate justice. Now we can point to the Realm of Jesus. Compassion is a powerful, powerful thing.

Let’s return now to our reading from Matthew, but first let’s consider the first twelve verses of Chapter 14. In these opening verses we read of John the Baptist’s execution. John’s disciples come to inform Jesus of John’s execution and he immediately withdraws to a deserted place. One can only imagine what Jesus was feeling at the news of his cousin John’s execution: sorrow, anger, perhaps fear even, he might have wondered if he might be next. We can be sure that the death of his cousin left Jesus grieving, as we all have grieved at the loss of a loved one. So Jesus goes to a lonely place by himself, the place of grieving, sorrow and pain. Isn’t grief and sorrow a lonely place? I mean, who can truly experience my grief but me? Isn’t that what makes it so difficult to deal with, that we feel alone in our grief, that it is singular and alone and unbearable? Isn’t this why our natural response to our grief, pain and suffering is to deny it, to deny the pain we feel?

“Don’t wanna talk about it!”

“I’m not gonna cry over spilt milk!”

These approaches don’t relieve the pain, they just mask it, as do alcohol, drugs, anger, sex, depression, even religion: you know, the list of the responses of denial go on and on, right? Grief, pain, denial, these are spiritual and emotional hardships not to be born alone. They are to be shared. Jesus goes to a lonely place he knows all too well. We read he is always going off to pray in the silence and solitude, into the place of the heart where he can always find, Abba, Rahmana, the Compassionate Father. He gives, in honesty and truth, his grief to God, and God transforms Jesus’ grief from the very life giving center of God’s being, the Rehem, God’s womb. From here grief is reborn, transformed into compassion.

The power of compassion comes from the very real power of our grief and pain, transformed by love and God’s love. There are two very real things all of us, all humans experience: love and suffering. We think that they are at odds with each other, but I think that’s a misunderstanding. In Christ, on the cross, we see clearly where love and suffering come together, and if we can wait, we can see the resurrection of Jesus’ love and suffering as the New Life for us to live. The great power that God grants us is the power of love overcoming suffering, transforming our sorrow into the new life of compassion.

So Jesus comes from his lonely place of sorrow and he sees the crowd waiting and he is filled with compassion. With compassion, he heals all who are sick. With compassion, he feeds everyone, 5000 men, plus women and children, and there is food- left- over. From a few loaves and fishes over five thousand fed- and left overs. What abundance! I think this story is a story of abundance which is born out of compassion.

Jesus promises his followers that they “will have life and have it more abundantly,” Right? We have read God’s compassion “covers all his works” and we see this great compassion at work on the cross and in the resurrection. It’s been said that compassion is the advanced work in Christianity. I think this is true. It’s one thing, a wonderful thing, to be merciful, sympathetic and empathetic, and it’s another to be compassionate, because in being compassionate one integrates the suffering of them self, with the suffering of another. This is to join Jesus in the great vulnerability of the servant Jesus.

Being compassionate also requires us to dig down deep into ourselves to yield the great treasure of abundance which is found in God’s great gift of compassion. We dig down, we mine through our grief to recognize and collect the great treasure of a full and deep love, of God residing in us, so to heal us, to wash away the slag with our tears and God’s tears, revealing that this great gift is the one with which we follow Jesus, to care for everyone, without discrimination and beyond our comfort zone. This is an abundance which moves, and moves us, way beyond the borders of what we thought we were capable of.

This is the hope my Brothers, and someday, Sisters in the Society of Jesus Compassionate pursue and seek to share with the world, the hope found in Jesus Compassionate. We are evangelists for the compassionate nature of God. Remember the Hebrew word for compassion is Rahmana, which means “the word of God revealed,” so all who know compassion and seek to share it, in doing so also reveal the word of God.  We seek to extend God’s compassion for the world to take in, to join us as we grow in, and share in, this wonderful gift of God’s abundance. We seek to share our ministries from out of the gratitude for our lives in God.

We take it as a given, that like the bread of life, our lives will be broken, and for bread to gives us life it must be broken and shared, and for us to accept the bounty of life, we must accept that our lives will at times be broken and to share in it. Yet, we first come with prayer, and then thanksgiving; as it is from our brokenness we may learn compassion.

With compassion Jesus comes to us in the desolate place of our grief to heal us, and tells us to sit down, stop running he says, and he commands us to sit still, to sit still and let him love us deeply, as he feeds us with his bread, from which our deep hunger; our deep longing; our deep suffering; can finally be relieved.

The great 19th century Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher said of compassion, “Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.”  He’s right, because when I am compassionate with you, or you with another, we are both finding healing in the same single act of compassion.

Friends, I invite you to be relieved. I invite you to take the glorious journey where grief meets God’s loving presence and is transformed into compassion, abundance and joy, in all its giving’s and receiving’s, beyond all your imaginings, in the deep communion of our lives, and the life in God, through Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Mea Culpa

Dear friends,

It has been a long time! I apologize for being away so long.  Rather than blogging here I've been focused on The Society of Jesus Compassionate facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/TheSocietyOfJesusCompassionate?ref=hl

I will again post here as my personal blog in the future and post some photos from time to time as well.

Do visit our facebook page and when I do post something new here I will have a link to it from our fb page.

Thank you for visiting here and I hope it brings you some thoughtfulness and joy.

Peace to you,

Br. John Magdalene Agel, SJC

Easter 2013

"Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, 'I have seen the Lord."

The Gospel According to John, Easter 2013

This past year has for me seen many passings and dyings in my life. I have bid farewell to one community. I left a job. I left one home for another and had to leave it also. I've been on the move, having four residences since June and will be taking on a fifth in two weeks, and will move again and then, God willing, I will again settle down. I have lived under many shadows and faced many challenges. This past year I was again confronted by my being a childhood survivor of sex abuse.

This year has been decidedly different from years past. Five years ago my friend and priest encouraged me to return to the practice of the Daily Office and by implication to live an intentional life, which for me was to again seek Christ as the center of my life. This intention served me well and held me together when I lost my job in the Crash of 2007. I poured the time not spent job hunting into my spiritual health and growth. Eventually my intentionality led me to live in a vowed community. Two years ago I took vows. Last year, I realized my concept of spirituality was at odds with that community. Others came to the same realization in their separate ways which we realized when we shared with each other that we would not be renewing vows in that order. We realized we were all on the same page, or rather in the same book filled with unique pages being composed by different authors. So we formed a new community, The Society of Jesus Compassionate. We died. We were resurrected. We died and were resurrected joyfully!

My Brothers have been with me in the difficulty of the past year, helping me up when I broke down under the renewed weight of guilt and shame from my childhood abuse and how it had dominated my life, all of it, by having created an inner culture of deception and secrets. I was living as a shadow in the shadow lands.  I also had to come to terms with having been abused by the church as a young adult. Though these were similar, they were not directly related, but both of these disasters were bound by secrecy, and around which my whole life had been governed by deception. And there were the addictions which helped to smother the truth from myself. I’ve been clean thirty plus years and sober since 1995, but I had not come to healing until this year. Yes, I’ve been in therapy of some sort for 23 years now. And it was good, and is good. It gave me a healthy way to cope with and examine the aspects of my persona which were doing me harm, but it was not and is not healing. Healing comes from another source.  Therapy helped and continues to help me prepare fertile ground for the seeds of healing, it breaks the top soil. It some ways, the breaking of that top soil, was breaking away from what was done to me, and by whom, to begin understanding how I am being affected by it in my life. and how I can begin to effect my life from it.

Healing comes from another source. Healing comes from God. Healing comes from the immortal witness of Jesus Christ. Healing comes first to me as a light which first reveals the shadows and then begins to dispel them. Today, healing comes from beyond the grave. This Easter is the first day of healing from a risen Jesus who for a little while made himself lower than angels to live, suffer, die and then rise again on the third day, this day, so that we may know for ourselves, by his example, how to deal with the pain and death which comes with being alive. God, in God’s infinite love for creation and for us, gave his Son Jesus to be absolutely free to live and die as he chooses. God trusted Jesus and Jesus trusted God to manifest absolute love in the world as tangible and real. Jesus chose love, again and again, and in doing so exercised vulnerability. Jesus chose compassion, and compassion compelled him beyond his suffering to fill the needs of the world, to heal the sick, invite the outcasts, and to feed them all. There are seasons and cycles of life, some compressed, some which extend through a life time. Birth, life, death, resurrection; all of these make up the cycle of life. Yes, though we’re not taught to see this, resurrection is a part of the Cycle of Life? Don’t think so? Look around, all of nature proclaims it, life always wins! Death gives way to life, life give ways to death, and death gives way again to life. Life changes forms, but life persists. Our very presence now announces, from countless generations which have come before us, “Life always wins!”

Our lives change. Whether we like it or not, we do ride tides and currents beyond our control. And we die. Many times over we pass through veils of living and dying and the sooner one accepts that fact, the easier the living becomes. We fall, fail; suffer disappointments, and great sorrows of suffering, of heartbreak. We all too suffer the abuse of others, physical and emotional. We all experience tremendous loss when we lose someone in our lives, from changes and disagreements, from distance, and from death. Yet, we who find ourselves in Christ, in the Body of Christ can be resurrected, reborn into new being, a new creation.

How? It is something we can’t do alone as secluded in ourselves. We need help, help born of God’s compassion, found in Jesus, and found in each other. There are those who have walked this path, who have allowed themselves to be vulnerable to their own suffering, with which they can compassionately avail themselves to the suffering of others. There are people in my life who have helped me in my healing, who have given me the holy space between us, formed in safety and trust. My family, friends, my counselor, my Brothers, my priests and my confessor, all companions, have at different times revealed the Risen Lord in their love for me and their earnest desire for my healing, in their allowing me to be vulnerable to the dying in me, and to the life in me to come. From them, like Mary Magdalene, I have heard the call away from the tomb, I have seen the Lord.

The story continues. Life continues. Parts of my persona die and new aspects of my persona grow into fullness, where before there was before decay and illness. We can all experience the joy of a new life. These are gifts from God, to live and suffer, in our dying to the past and its anger, its fear and resentful delusions, and live again into a new life, like Jesus, always vulnerable to loving and healing, growing in us God’s gift of compassion, for ourselves and each other and for the community that is the world. Resurrection and compassion comes from knowing suffering, intimately, without delusion or deception. They come from embracing life’s sufferings for what they are as real, but not as the end, as the stopping place. Sufferings, and the deaths they yield to, are but transitory places, as  one part of the seasons of living which we can all move through, death, healing, love and joy, all pointing to resurrection.

God gives us the way to a life lived in full freedom, by the liberation of our hearts and minds to the healing which comes from the truth of ourselves as vulnerable creatures born to live and die and live again. We celebrate it every year and should celebrate it every day. Celebrate the pain which comes as the herald of new healing, found in God, and found in Jesus. Let the new fire of Easter be kindled in your hearts and let its light shine into the recesses of your hearts, minds and the whole persona of your life. Today, from beyond the shadows of our understanding, is the joy of our resurrection, found in the light and Resurrection of our Christ Jesus, our Lord of compassion. I have seen the Lord, and he is risen!

Holy Saturday

“Do you work wonders for the dead? *

will those who have died stand up and give you thanks?

Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave? *

your faithfulness in the land of destruction?

Will your wonders be known in the dark? *

or your righteousness in the country where all is forgotten?”

Psalm 88, Holy Saturday, Morning Prayer, the Daily Office Book, Year One

There are times when we are in the dark, when shadows engulf us. This is how it is for us. There are times, when despair is all around us in worries and in real trials of life. It seems that there is no hope, and that all we sought and cherished is slipping away. There are times of unspeakable suffering. We must face them straight on. Embrace the time. Sit with the trial, the despair, even embrace it, be vulnerable to it and learn your truth revealed in it. Enter into the silence. Own it, embrace it as yours. We know this is a part of the wholeness of our being. It is not an endless night we face, though moonless and deep in darkness, it is not without yet a light rising, just beyond the horizon, to meet us again. Though the shadows of hardship may cast a deep dark shadow over our hearts and our minds, and it may seem over our very being, Christ will rise again, and again, and again, to our need for the light within. God’s great compassionate gift is the heart we now possess, once immersed in God’s love, this new heart never forgets. We need only to sit, like Mary Magdalene, releasing our tears in the dark of the deadly night, resting in the silence, still trusting our hearts to remember and the light within to again emerge.

Good Friday

“For innumerable troubles have crowded upon me;

my sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see; *

they are more in number than the hairs of my head,

and my heart fails me.

Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me; *

O LORD, make haste to help me.”

Psalm 40, Good Friday, Morning Prayer, the Daily Office Book, Year One

Honestly when I look back on the 53 years of my life, I can’t begin to count the transgressions and the painful wounds I caused myself and others. Still this God I know is the one who always has the mercy of love to give to me, or to anyone willing to come to honest terms with themselves. Today is the judgment day, the terrible great day of reckoning, where you, I and all who came before us and follow us, are condemned  as worthy of love, God’s love and the love of each other. We are judged and our hearts are changed, our minds are changed, we forevermore are changed. Today shows us the way to The Life, Jesus shows us without vulnerability there is no love and without love there is no life. Remember the end of Advent and we sang “Emanuel!” as this Jesus was birthed, “God is with us!” From Epiphany, through Lent, and now on the cross in his dying, Jesus, God is with us, and in his compassionate prayers for us, he remains with us. Love is living with us. And we look to Easter when again Jesus, God is with us, remains with us beyond death. At Pentecost, Jesus will give his spirit to us to keep always. Then back with us in Advent, again reminding us we are expectant of God within us. Always God is with us. There it is laid out in our calendar year, ever present reminders that God is with us. In different forms represented by different seasons, yet all seasons saying the same, God is with us.

Today, Good Friday, reminds us that there are times when it seems God is gone from us, when our pain is so overwhelming, we have no sense of anything else. Yet, God does remain and like Mary, in the midst of our suffering, we can’t recognize the Master before us even as he calls our name, “Mary!” We again stare blankly at the presence who will not hasten to leave us, but instead he says our name, “Mary!” Until again we see.

Maundy Thursday

“If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’

then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones;

I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

Jeremiah 20, Maundy Thursday, the Reading, Morning Prayer, the Daily Office Book, Year One

I believe that there is in everyone an immortal soul, a body of consciousness which survives our human mortality. I believe it is the spark of God, the eternal life of all things and individuals, the first source of our perceptions of all that is innately good in us, which propels us to the virtues which include love, mercy, reason, beauty, the sanctity of the life and compassion, which are also personified in our hearts and minds by the image of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth.  I think here is where our individual personalities are conceived, in the creative tension in the relationship between our soul's known reality and the world's directed reality, all towards our individual expressions of life and its living. 

Therein is the struggle, the struggle between our Christ nature and our misdirected sense of survialism, out of balance and run amok constructing so many defensive walls which we think are built to keep ourselves safe from outside threat, when in truth they serve as prison walls. The Spirit in us, God’s breath, the first gift of our creation, longs to be set free, and we instinctively know that our true joy is to be found in living out that joyous love, but we resist because the first predicate of love is to be vulnerable. We know this and it burns like a fire, in our hearts, minds, bodies and eyes. There is a time when we seek to quench that fire by focusing on some obsession; work, money, success, fame, alcohol, sex, drugs, shopping, virtually anything. There are times when for some, the obsessions run very dark towards the absolute evil denial of anything good who acknowledge only their emptiness and pain. Then they seek to convey that lone thing they acknowledge, their utter self-absorption, through acts of destruction; physical, emotional and spiritual, either to themselves or others, seeking to be the last one standing, and therefore the only reality. 

Yet, the fire remains, the reality of the truth of our being. No amount of denial can quench it, and eventually, in this world or the next, we become weary of holding it in. How is the fire quenched? By the breath of God within you, the reality of who you are, who we all are. How do we deal with the defenses we've built? Let the breath of God blow them down.

“You will arise and have compassion on Zion,

for it is time to have mercy upon her; *

indeed, the appointed time has come.

14 For your servants love her very rubble, *

and are moved to pity even for her dust.”

This portion of this morning’s Psalm 102 is for me the real promise of God, to all who surrender their defenses, laid low to rubble and dust, when we accept that today, every day, is the day appointed to receive God’s compassion and mercy! For me this is the practice of living out the soul within, the great gift of who we are in the friction of our daily living. Every day we, out of God’s compassion, can look upon the ruin of what we were, and love the very cause of our ruin, ourselves who built the fortress in the first place, who saw the weight of vanity collapse it upon itself, into rubble and dust. Through God’s compassion we can love our desolation; we can again love ourselves, heart and soul. We can again complete the circuit in God’s love and again begin living the joyful life of vulnerability, for better and for worse, all healing in our shared love with God.

Wednesday Holy Week

"Blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD.

They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit."

Jeremiah 17, Wednesday Holy Week, the Reading, the Daily Office Book, Year One

The deeper we  prayerfully enter into our deeper selves, the deeper we enter into our true being, and we set deep roots by the silent banks of our hearts where forever flows the cool waters of Spirit. We learn to know the crises at hand, the tribulation, is just a harsh season which will pass by again and though it is a hot harsh wind blowing across the landscape of life, our roots are set deep and draw water from the cool waters of the ever present Life. We learn. We know. We love. We become more fearless the longer we remain, we offer the birds a roost in the cover of our branches and the fawn lingers under the cool shade of our limbs. Our roots run deeper still with every passing year, they run deeper and we are firm in the ground of Being.

Tuesday Holy Week

“…Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy

and the delight of my heart; for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts…

Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?...”

Jeremiah 15, Tuesday Holy Week, the Reading, Morning Prayer, the Daily Office Book, Year One

I have been blessed, graced, to know healing, truly, deeply and in a way which has left me both transformed and transforming, healed by the God of love and life. I too have known others who, like me, also know the shared experience, the truth of healing and the transformation born of resurrection. Though the cynical world’s voice would have us believe otherwise so to hold us bound to its misery, people can and people do change. These are the people who then are changed into the citizens of the world of hope and beauty.

Yet, there are wounds which remain, which persist in themselves it seems, to refuse healing. I am a survivor of sexual abuse. After many, many years of therapy and healing, I thought I had closed the book on the old wounds but I came to realize those wounds remain. A while back I was taking a required class for church leaders on child sexual abuse during which I again felt myself reliving the pain of that abuse, reliving it deeply and had to use every bit of will power to keep it together during that class until I had a chance to share it with one of my priests afterward. I was overcome with pain, guilt and shame. In the past, I had addressed the abuse as the feelings arose in therapy, or to try to understand periods of self-destructive behavior, or as a way to understand the “whys” of my addictions. But this time, I saw it not as part of the patchwork of living, but as the thing which propelled the arc of my life.

I don’t pretend to understand it all yet, but I do trust it now, to sit with the abused and wounded me, in the way my priest sat with me that day after the class. As she sat with me in our chapel, and listened, and held my hand as I cried my story out to her and to God, as she then prayed with me and over me, as she made the sign of the cross on my forehead with holy oil in healing and forgiveness (because I needed and wanted forgiveness), and as she put her arms around me and let me cry, and as she reminded me that I am God’s beloved child in whom God is well pleased, I can now sit with the abused child I was, and love him as he is. I'm even learning to not judge him.

God is compassion. When I look back at the chaos of my life, done to me and done to myself, I can offer no explanation of the mystery that brought to where I am, other than to say, I never quit believing what I had been taught early in life, that God will always love me unconditionally as long as I can remember this about God. So I kept trying to remember and kept searching for this God. The God I kept coming to was this compassionate God of unconditional love. True, I’d then start running away again, but the God of compassionate love kept calling me back. I also knew that for me there would never be happiness unless I answered that call.

These wounds still remain though, I must be honest. Yet, I am different. I have thought often of how the New Testament presents the Risen Lord as Jesus, with his wounds intact, and beyond Easter, as Jesus ascending to the Father, with wounds intact. Talk about mystery! Here is God presented as dead, resurrected and ascended, with wounds from beginning to end! Though this still boggles the mind, it does say a few things to me. While the wounds of Jesus remain, the man who bears the wounds is a changed man, a glorious human transformed around his wounds, who is at peace with his wounds and can offer healing through his wounds. “Through” his wounds can mean many things here, but they speak to me as a journey through his wounds, and that his wounds may be a portal through which he traveled to be resurrected and to extend healing to us all, to the history of the world. 

Perhaps, he traveled a resurrection journey of a new life, strengthened by healing, so to offer healing. The journey may be to the depth of human experience into the one thing all humans experience, pain and death. Sadly, I can’t say with certainty that all people experience much love on this earth. Maybe that is why Jesus’ wounds remain, to hold the suffering of those abandoned and those from whom love is withheld, to always remain connected to the suffering of the world until the release of death’s hold on us. Maybe this is why some of our wounds remain with us, to serve as the passage to the resurrections in our lives as a restored humanity, to keep us connected to those who suffer around us, to restore healing compassion to ourselves, so we may also may help restore love to this world.

Here’s the thing, none of this happened to me alone. The violations done to me were done by others. They've also been done to countless number of children. My journey towards healing didn't happen alone either. There were people involved with my healing, friends, family, therapists, companions and priests. These people helped open the doors for God’s healing in my persona; they helped create a space for God’s healing simply by loving me as I am, while encouraging me to be more. They were for me and are for me, the Body of Christ, formed too by the wounds of their lives. This is what they taught me, it is our shared woundedness, healing in God’s love for each other, which makes up the Body of Christ. As the body of Christ still bears his wounds, so too does the Body of Christ continue to bear its wounds, without shame, as a real offering to the world: Here, come join us, we are the same, come and share your wounds in our healing journey.

Loving God, living God: We pray our wounds not be a life killing end unto themselves, but rather, by Christ's loving guidance, that our wounds might be portals of salving grace towards our resurrection, into the living compassionate Body of Christ, and in healing service to this earth and humanity. Amen.

Monday Holy Week

“Thus says the LORD concerning all my evil neighbors who touch the heritage that I have given my people Israel to inherit: I am about to pluck them up from their land, and I will pluck up the house of Judah from among them. And after I have plucked them up, I will again have compassion on them, and I will bring them again to their heritage and to their land, everyone of them.”

Jeremiah 12, Monday Holy Week, the Reading, Morning Prayer, the Daily Office Book, Year One

Through God’s compassion, I am given the gift to deeply, rightfully and truthfully examine my heart and life for the evil which resides in me as my selfishness, and in my turning a blind eye to the evil which persists in the selfishness of the world. We are all given the ability to offer the truth of ourselves to God, to pluck them from our fearful hearts with compassion, and to restore our hearts to the compassion we inherit from God. Ultimately, there is nothing to fear about ourselves and lives that can’t be viewed as healing by God’s eternal compassion. We can be forgiven as we accept the offer of forgiveness, and we can forgive as well. We can come again to know the truth of our being as souls born of God’s breath. We can again come to the only joy and happiness which lasts, the joy of loving and being loved. We can again emerge from the shadows of our shame, driven by our ever-present fears, to again know the cascading light which is the comfortable knowledge of God’s eternal life for us and God’s equally eternal love for us.

Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you;

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim

and the war horse from Jerusalem;

and the battle bow shall be cut off,

and he shall command peace to the nations;

his dominion shall be from sea to sea,

and from the River to the ends of the earth.

As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.

Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;

today I declare that I will restore to you double.”

Zechariah 9, Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, the Reading, Morning Prayer, the Daily Office Book, Year One

Peace. Peace of heart. Peace of mind. Peace as our way into the world. Peace as our way through the world. Rejoice in this! Live in this! Compassion is the way of our God, which makes us prisoners of hope. Our hearts return again and again into our stronghold, the heart of God, in silence and in peace, and we are restored and even more.

We enter this Holy Week at once in the joy of our Messiah’s hope, and the promise of his peace, and then again we will face the tribulation of Jesus’ Passion, the tribulation God came to share with us in Jesus, not in supernatural terms beyond us as the mysterious Spirit beyond the veil of our world, but in Jesus who came to suffer death, our death, not even the quiet death of old age, but to suffer all human abuse and to die a senseless violent death, cut from the prime of his life. Yet as he lives and dies to the terms of human mortality, in his being tortured, in his being nailed to a cross, he does so in his terms, in peace, love and the compassion which promises paradise to a repentant killer by his side, and declares forgiveness to the humanity whose cruelty hung him and murdered him on the tree. In this peace of Jesus, in this compassion of Jesus, is the power of his Resurrection, God’s answer to the injustice, tyranny and death which marks the human life on earth; love does overcome and life is victorious over death. Are we willing to be prisoners of hope, to be vulnerable, to be compassionate, and to lovingly and peacefully take up our own fragile cross towards the promise of new life and new peace in the Resurrected Christ? It is my hope that we are able, in the peace of confidence, to again surrender and die to those things which restrain us from the fullness of our realization in God, the fullness of our humanity exemplified through Jesus, all to the joy of our resurrection, in new life and our new creation, fostered in God's ever-present offering of compassion. This week take to the place where life and death embrace each other as one in the mysterious dance of recreation, join in the dance, feel its rhythmic sway and pulse, to the eternal song of joy.

Have a blessed Holy Week to the joy of our Lord and Creator!

Loving God, grant us this Holy Week the wisdom and courage to see the truth of ourselves and our fears, that we may offer them up to you as a sacrifice,  so that we also may take up our crosses as prisoners of hope, as Christ peacefully bore his cross as a prisoner of human cruelty: Grant us strength in the hope, that as Christ died on the cross, so too may our fears die on the cross of our bearing, by knowing the assurance of his forgiveness, in his last life’s blood and breath, we too may again joyfully share in the Resurrection of our risen Jesus,  and in the fullness of his new peace. Amen.

Saturday Lent Five

“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

Jeremiah 31, Saturday Lent Five, the Reading, Morning Prayer, the Daily Office Book, Year One

Such is the great grace and wisdom given to us by God’s compassion: that we can come through our travails; we can be made new, should we but make our hearts available to God’s loving promise, a new covenant written in love and forgiveness. It may be difficult to accept, but we do know each other as ourselves, in our hearts illumined by Christ's truth, we are no better or worse than ourselves or the other. We are all variations on the same tune, at times we all hide in the shadows in our shame, and at times we dance in the light of our truest being; why is this so hard to accept? We are all music and harmonic discord made a symphony before God in God's loving Oneness. 

The questions which keep returning to me are: Am I willing to abandon the twisted security of the familiar bondage, the bondage of my heart and mind, bound in chains of anger, fear, doubt and shame? Am I willing to surrender and risk, trusting God to hold my heart and to write the perfect law upon my heart, and know the compassion of Christ within me? Am I willing to let go of the security of my perception of you, to see the Christ in you? Honestly, not always. Yet, the more I give of my heart to God, the more my trust grows, because the greater strength is gained in willingness to be vulnerable, and to have it affirmed in experience of God’s presence, through my vulnerability, as to the humility and the poverty of knowing the reality that our fullness of being comes only in the dependence of relationship, to the need of Christ’s love, and the need to continue to seek out and serve Christ’s love in each other.