My mother said that she never wanted to grow up.
That could be why she taught first grade all of her professional life and was beloved by her students. She was one of them. In her later years, she confessed with a laugh, she couldn’t quite “get” that she was the old woman who looked at her in the mirror! She felt so young, she said, despite her arthritis, macular degeneration, hearing loss, and aging body.
Now I know what she meant.
Reading Walter Brueggemann’s contrasting of Psalms 73 and 139 in an essay entitled, “The Cunning Little Secret of Certitude,” in his book The Covenanted Self (see a previous post), I remembered how Psalm 73 saved me from my own “dark night of the soul” that followed the ending of what I thought would be a lifelong relationship within weeks of my mother’s death in 1999.
After posting the link to my blog, Progressive Christian Reflections, last week on a number of Facebook pages, I took our dog Hobbes to the park, and began to wonder what I would write for my next post. I returned to find an e-mail that simply said, “Unsubscribe me. I had no idea that your blog was gay.”
Surprised, I responded, “My blog is not gay, I am.”
I then suddenly knew what my new blog would be about.
Surprisingly, Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan has found in a recent study that beliefs about such things as evolution and global warming are not necessarily based on ignorance, but often on a knowledge of the scientific facts that is wilfully resisted because of a person’s political or religious identity and affiliation.
In other words, engaging in what the economist Paul Krugman characterizes as “wishful thinking.”
“A People of Many Faces” is one of the more intriguing sections of Pope Francis’s The Joy of the Gospel, having to do with cultural incarnations of Christianity.
“We would not do justice to the logic of the incarnation if we thought of Christianity as monocultural and monotonous,” he writes.
It took Douglas Blanchard's painting "Jesus Preaches in the Temple" and Kittredge Cherry’s reflections on his series of 24 paintings of Jesus' life, The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision, to remind me that scripture says several times that Jesus taught in the temple in the midst of the Passion narrative.
There are movies that I can watch again and again with pleasure because they conjure up for me the "olden" times of my life.
The Birds and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? take me back to a quaint California of the early 1960s, my native state. To Kill a Mockingbird and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter take me back to books I enjoyed as a youth.
Both were transformative, not only at how I looked at race and disability, but how I viewed myself as an outsider.
Simply writing the title makes me feel over-exposed.
Just now walking our dog, Hobbes, I found myself contemplating my lifetime need for God.
I felt extremely lonely as a child.