NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

“We Christians say glibly that we are "saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus" but seem to understand this as some kind of heavenly transaction on his part, instead of an earthly transformation … We need to deeply trust and allow both our own dyings and our own certain resurrections, just as Jesus did! This is the full pattern of transformation.” Richard Rohr     I have a ‘Resurrection Story’ for this morning … well sort of! A computer had refused to turn on and so it was taken to the computer doctor. After a number of days the message was received that the computer had died and please come and pick up the ‘body’ for burial. However once it was safely home again, the owner decided that the computer could be resurrected with the help of running the ‘restore’ disc and some loving care. Now I would like to be able to say this story had a happy ending, but alas the next day found the owner in a store buying a new hard drive to replace the one that had die...

I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. - Genesis 9:11 If you were in church on the first Sunday of Lent this year, you probably heard this read from the lectern and maybe even preached on. This covenant between God and God’s people was so important to the writers of the Old Testament that there are actually two stories of the flood both intertwined in Genesis 9.   Martin Luther King Jr. took this story and updated it to his time, the 1960s, a time of racial unrest in America. “ It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence” He saw that the threat of violence had become overwhelming. If anyone tried to meet violence with more violence, they would in all likelihood be killed. And so the choice for violence would lead to nonexistence while the choice of nonviolence had a greater cha...

‘You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope. ’   -Thomas Merton We all know those people who say that they either can’t watch the TV news at night because they won’t be able to sleep or that they have given up following world events all together. Both these statements imply that if the hearers don’t agree then they, the hearers, are obviously not grasping the seriousness of the events or/and are lacking in empathy and compassion. Otherwise they too would be unable to watch. Yes, there are huge problems on the evening news. Yes, no one person can cure even one of them. Yes, it is imperative that we feel disgust and dismay at what we see. No, we can’t hide our heads in the sand and hope it will all go away. Because it won’t!! Perhaps we can’t do anything to stop the bloodsh...

There are many nuggets of wisdom in the writings of Dr. Seuss but perhaps none seem more obvious, but yet are more difficult to put into practise, than this one. After all, we spend our lives, once the innocence of childhood has passed, trying to be someone else. We try to be smarter, prettier, thinner, more interesting, kinder, …you name it, than anyone else. In that trying to be someone we are not, we lose sight of that person who we really are. That person who is so unique that there is no one like them in the whole world! A person who has insights and talents that are crying to be let out - and we keep them locked away because they aren’t good enough, because someone might laugh, because we might be seen as bragging, because we might be seen as wrong! And yet that person, with all those faults and strengths is who we are. It is how we are made to be! Teresa of Ávila actually said the same thing in the 1500s, she just put it a little differently… “ Christ has ...