Door No. 3

In an interview with O.T. Scholar, Walter Bruegemann, Image Journal asked how him how he finds time to pray given his extraordinary output.  I’ve included some of his response here. “It helps to be a compulsive workaholic. That’s the down side. I understand now, through long psychotherapy, that my workaholism is compensation for what I have long felt to be the deficiency of my cultural background.  The other, positive side is that I find these texts energy-giving, so that for the most part my work does not take energy from me; it gives me energy to do more.  I haven’t got that all sorted out– the extent to which this is simply a working out of my compulsion.  My spiritual life is in some ways at the tip of my pen.  My writing leads my thinking and my praying, so I don’t separate my sense of study and prayer. I don’t commend this way of doing it to anyone else; that’s just how I’ve found it turning out in my life. If I understand prayer as presenting myself to be available for the presence of God, then I think of my work as doing that.”

“To be a good designer, you would need to have deep and far-reaching interests outside of the profession.” Stefan Sagmeister, Principal, Sagmeister Inc.      To be a good designer, you have to be able to figure things out both logically and surprisingly.  That’s by far the best part of design for me, when you have that idea about which you think, ‘Oh my God, This is going to work!” You don’t get that from slapping some type and imagery on a page and making it look respectable, and you don’t get it from making something outlandish without any particular agenda. You only get it when you combine logic and surprise. And it ain’t easy.”  Marian Bantjes, Designer, typographer, letterer   And a good designer offers Truth with thoughtful invitation. –KJS

As I sat before the sunny window of opportunity this morning, I read today’s Slice of Infinity keyed by Jill Carattini. She began by reflecting on Malcom Muggerigde’s image as a renowned journalist. He  (Muggeridge) once confessed, “There is something very terrible in becoming an image… You see yourself on a screen, walking, talking, moving about, posturing, and it is not you. Or is it you, and the you looking at you, someone else?”

Carattini goes on to say, ”The images we create, even our images of God, must be crushed by the creative God who moves and speaks, the one who spoke creation itself into existence. We are not the images we think we are. Thankfully, though sometimes painfully, God is continually at work shattering the images we fashion of ourselves and of God. The Incarnation, which we prepare ourselves to receive anew this Advent, is the greatest example. This is not the Messiah we expected. This is not at all what we imagined he would ask of us. Yet this man who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweat blood in Gethsemane is the very Word who was at the beginning of all things. Coming as a baby, Jesus brings us more of what it means to be human than we are yet able to emulate. Coming as God, he silences our questions of who God is–with a face, a hand, a Cross. We can no more mold ourselves into lasting icons than we can mold a lump of clay into a god that speaks. But we can be molded into the image of the God who lives, shaped at the hands of the God who sent him.”

God give us the courage to prepare ourselves to receive You anew

The story is told that the Reverend Howard Finster gave up preaching because nobody remembered a Sunday sermon. So he started reaching out to the congregation of the world through folk art and did so with urgency until age 84. He hand lettered messages his work and numbered each one. The Youth of Jesus cut-out that I own is numbered 8,140 and was completed on August 13th, 1988 just past midnight. His last message to the world was this: Upon the name of Jesus, even in your last breath, Pray the Lord’s Prayer, Pray without ceasing, Love one another, Forgive your brother, Win his love, Jesus is coming in great power and glory, Be ready to go.

“With tears in my eyes, I told them of the lost and needy millions still without Christ. Many appeared deeply moved. But when I asked for a show of hands for those willing to give their lives to Christ’s service, not one was able to say, “Yes Lord.”  Not one was willing to break out of the velvet cage of comfort and convenience to begin a radical life-style lived from inner reality that affects the world.”  Since when has obedience to Christ and His gospel become optional to Christianity?  What kind of church, culture, or ethnic group can produce a faith where obedience to God has become dispensable? This is the question I ask myself over and over.”  

Who threatens us?  Julia Esquivel, in her collection of poems Threatened with Ressurection speaks in a voice that we North Americans especially need to hear. Esquivel was an elementary school teacher in Guatemala, her native land, when her commitment to justice put her on the wrong side of Guatemala’s Fascist government, and Esquivel was forced into exile from the land she loves. Esquivel speaks from personal experience of many kinds of oppression: as a citizen of the third world, a Latin American, a woman, and advocate for children. The hope of her poetry is not facile but hard won. From Parker Palmer’s book, The Active Life 

They Have Threatened Us With Resurrection.  It isn’t the noise in the streets that keeps us from resting, my friend, Nor is it the shouts of the young people coming out drunk from St. Paul’s bar. Nor is it the tumult of those who pass by excitedly on their way to the mountains. There is something within us which doesn’t let us sleep, which doesn’t let us rest, which doesn’t stop pounding deep inside, it is the silent, warm weeping of Indian women without their husbands,it is the sad gaze of the children fixed there beyond memory, in the very pupil of our eyes which during sleep, though closed, keep watch with each contraction of the heart, in every awakening. Now six of them have left us, and nine in the Rabinal, and two, plus two, and ten, a hundred and a thousand a whole army witness to our pain, our fear, our courage, our hope! What keeps us from sleeping is that they have threatened us with resurrection,  because at each nightfall though exhausted from the endless inventory of killings since 1954, yet we continue to love life and do not accept their death! They have threatened us with resurrection because we have felt their inert bodies and their souls penetrated ours doubly fortified. Because in this marathon of Hope, there are always others to relieve us in bearing the courage necessary to arrive at the goal which lies beyond death.