Belated
Christmastime is quite busy for me, even if the day itself has traditionally been quiet. I have not had time to properly check lj in a while, and I am now at retreat, it is 5:50 in the AM and I am the only one still awake. I decided to devote this lovely time to a dedicated lj check..and this is what I found!:
"It's actually very dark when you think about it. The Virgin Mary probably wasn't very joyful and at peace, her blue robe just so, her hands folded in prayer, a plastic, permanent smile on perfect features. She had been an unwed, pregnant teen mother. Her fiancé nearly divorced her. After labor, she gave birth in a stable, full of dung and smelly noisy animals. She'd be... scared, wouldn't she? And unsure and terrified and in pain and pretty confused why all these shepherds kept barging into her already crowded stable and nearly waking the baby. The thing about Christianity that it is very, very human. Joseph didn't accept that his fiancé was pregnant. He was ashamed and wanted to divorce her. Jesus had temper tantrums and wept. Christianity is dark and bloody and lowly, but out of that mess, and out of fallen humanity, there is that spark of hope, that glow of the divine that brings us out of time into the eternal. It is humanity, and our chance at overcoming it.
And you can't ignore the Fall and celebrate the contentment of salvation. And there is no glorious redemption without a gruesome crucifixion.
...
I'll just be in the backyard, then, searching the sky for the star to lead me to the mess and the birth and the start of the Mexican wave that turns all of the world on its head. Someday, I hope, Christianity will be as radical as it was intended to be, and I'll wait for that love to overwhelm the world."
Oh Elyse Martin, I could kiss you! :D
"It's actually very dark when you think about it. The Virgin Mary probably wasn't very joyful and at peace, her blue robe just so, her hands folded in prayer, a plastic, permanent smile on perfect features. She had been an unwed, pregnant teen mother. Her fiancé nearly divorced her. After labor, she gave birth in a stable, full of dung and smelly noisy animals. She'd be... scared, wouldn't she? And unsure and terrified and in pain and pretty confused why all these shepherds kept barging into her already crowded stable and nearly waking the baby. The thing about Christianity that it is very, very human. Joseph didn't accept that his fiancé was pregnant. He was ashamed and wanted to divorce her. Jesus had temper tantrums and wept. Christianity is dark and bloody and lowly, but out of that mess, and out of fallen humanity, there is that spark of hope, that glow of the divine that brings us out of time into the eternal. It is humanity, and our chance at overcoming it.
And you can't ignore the Fall and celebrate the contentment of salvation. And there is no glorious redemption without a gruesome crucifixion.
...
I'll just be in the backyard, then, searching the sky for the star to lead me to the mess and the birth and the start of the Mexican wave that turns all of the world on its head. Someday, I hope, Christianity will be as radical as it was intended to be, and I'll wait for that love to overwhelm the world."
Oh Elyse Martin, I could kiss you! :D