A Fresh Perspective

I believe that the living Christ (the one I call “Lord”) is more interested in our commitment to God’s covenant, than our veneration—a covenant that calls us to love God with the totality of our being and to love our neighbor (that includes the “enemy”) as ourselves. Jesus never encouraged his disciples to exalt him; he called them to follow him, to be his apprentices, to learn from him how to live in and for God’s kingdom, to trust “Abba” (the loving Father/Mother), and to embrace his cause and passion for justice and mercy, while living in humility. At one time, I had such an exalted view of Jesus and his divine status that it did me no earthly good. I could not touch or reach Jesus, because Jesus was so high and lifted up. (Sounds like a praise song doesn’t it?) I imagined Jesus as sinless, having never demonstrated a cultural bias, or acted in a selfish way, or entertained a single, lustful thought. He commanded the elements of nature, even walking on water. Well, I knew I couldn...

Wendell Berry’s novel, “A World Lost,” is the story about a family coping with the death of one of their own. In the final chapter, Berry reflects on the manner of man he was. This meditation gives way to a reflection on death as a pathway into the light of a more advanced spiritual realm. Berry writes, “I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment.” “And yet,” says Berry, “in suffering that light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, so are changed into what they could not have bee...