A Hard Blog Entry

The past few days I have been haunted by a conversation I had about the war in Syria.  The conversation began around the "did they or didn't they" argument about chemical weapons that may have been used there on Tuesday.  But during the course of the conversation, I became aware of the extent to which rape is being used as a weapon of war by both sides of the conflict.  In fact, many of the refugees that have reached Turkey and Jordan have reported that it is the risk of sexualized violence against women and girls that compelled them to flee their homes even more than the fear of guns and bombs and lack of food.

It's nothing new of course.  Sexualized violence against women has been a feature of warfare since Biblical times (see Judges 21).  And it's been heart-wrenchingly common in our modern era as well...from the Korean "Comfort Women" of WWII to Bosnia to Rwanda.  Syria isn't even the only place this is happening right now, today, as the conflict in South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo continues.

What does this have to do with Henri Nouwen?  In our reading for today, he references the idea that in some times and places and cultures, suffering has been justified by claims that it is the "will of God."  If God is omnipotent, then instances of suffering must exist because God either wanted it that way or God didn't care enough to change the circumstances.

Nouwen dismisses this argument, reminds us that we were created for joy, and calls us to look for the presence of God amidst suffering.

Denis Mukwege is a Congolese gynocologist who has been forced, by necessity, to become an expert in treating victims of sexualized violence.  He has worked to help women recover from the physical and psychological injuries they've experienced, and then has helped set-up networks to ensure that these women who have lost everything are not exposed to further abuses by their poverty.  His work has earned him an assassination attempt and threats on the lives of his wife and daughters.  He fled the Congo after the attempt, but returned to the country this past January.  Women, many of whom were his patients, raised the money from their meager wages (less than a dollar a day for most) to send him a plane ticket to come back.  He now lives in a hospital with security provided by rotating groups of twenty female volunteers who are unarmed, but never leave him unprotected.

God is present amongst great suffering.  I pray for many things for the people of Syria, and one is that they have a Denis Mukwege.

Helping Each Other on the Journey

I don't know about you, but I find myself so very easily distracted these days, just as Nouen describes.  It's easy to fall victim to a kind of helpless despair as we read the papers and see what goes on in this world. It is difficult sometimes to keep an eye on Easter, to know that no matter what happens, all will, somehow be well.  As Palm Sunday and Holy Week approach I think it is ever more important to be aware that we are not on this journey alone.

When I walk into St. Albans's on a Sunday morning I truly feel surrounded by my fellow-travellers - some old timers to this church, some new, all at different stages of their faith journey.  If I feel too weary or distracted to say the prayers, I know there are others there who will be saying them on my behalf. Perhaps nowhere during the service do I feel as close to my fellow parishioners as when I put the communion bread into their hands.  This is such a sacred moment for me, and, I hope, for the ones receiving the bread.  We are connected.  We are in this together.  We listen to the wonderful stories of the Church every Sunday and we break bread together.  There is much to be said about the Church today - and not a lot of it very good.  But at her best, the Church is there for us with solace, story, companionship, and the assurance of the Eucharist.

All food indeed for the journey.

He's Got the Whole World in His Hands

I love the bit in this morning's reading when St. Francis suddenly saw the whole world in God's hands, and wondered why God didn't drop it.  What a thought - God just dropping the world! I imagine there are times God would like to do just that; we human beings do manage to screw things up so badly sometimes that I wonder if God wouldn't like to say, "you've had chance after chance and I'm fed up with the lot of you," and then just drop the world into oblivion.  Poof!

Well, God doesn't work that way.  God loves this world, warts and all, and doesn't give up on it, or on us, God's frail and faltering people.  God craves intimacy with us, the kind of intimacy he shared with Jesus; and God, like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, waits patiently for us to enter into that intimacy.  God watches for us as we journey on that road to intimacy, as we come to know that everything, everything comes from God, and that the greatest of these things is love and closeness, whether in times of sorrow or in times of joy. Through silence and prayer we can learn to weld this knowledge into our hearts.  Through service to our fellow human beings we can learn to feel this in our bones.

God won't drop this world; God loves it too much.  Perhaps as I write this God is rejoicing in the snow that is falling here in New England.  We may not be rejoicing a whole lot as the snowplows block off our driveways yet again, but we can also say to ourselves, "boy this snow is beautiful.  So beautiful."

Audrey

In our first passage from Nouwen for today, he indicates that it is "false ways of obtaining love" that keep us bound to anxiety and violence.

It's amazing how easily we can get ourselves confused.  It's not even that we are confused about what love is, instinctually we already know that.  It's the false way of getting there...a way that is inauthentic to what the love actually is when it is graciously and freely bestowed.  True love can't be coerced or demanded, you can't get there by anything other than honest means.

It's like what our prayer for the day says.  Taken from Psalm 25, it points out that "Integrity and generosity are marks of Yahweh."  Seeking love in a way that compromises our own integrity is is one of those false ways of getting there.  But if we can get there, if we can experience genuine love of others and genuine love of God, then we are taking steps on the journey for each of us towards new life.