Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Eucharistic Prayer H1N1



-t

2 comments:

John said...

Wow! What mockery! But of what?

Of Christian sanctimoniousness?

Of secular sanitary rituals?

Of our God-given fear of illness and death and our biologically inborn need for a measure of certainty and control over it?

Of the inescapably fallible choices we make about where, how, and in whom to place our faith?

I laughed. I squirmed. I thought – which is, no doubt, what was intended by this ingeniously in-your-face parable.

The choices we make about where to place our faith depend on many things - including the ways that are modeled for us by those we look up to. We can refuse, as some do, to believe that the danger exists. We can believe that our faith confers some kind of immunity from suffering and death. We can deny the limits of our personal power, or that of modern medicine, by compulsive purification and avoidance of human touch. We can pull back in dread or despair, giving up on faith in any form – burying ourselves alive. We can place our faith in medical science, only to discover its inevitable errors and limitations in its never-ending quest for better answers. We can place our faith in Someone to hear us, hold us, and show us a way of facing and accepting what we cannot know or control as completely as we would wish. We can look to Jesus, who was there, himself, in that excruciatingly painful, powerless human place– and survived it to be with us through the Valley of Death.

I don’t think he would mock our fear because he knows beyond a shadow of doubt what it feels like.

Having said all that, I suspect he’s also able to laugh at himself and the way we sometimes portray him.

Thank you for giving us food for thought about these holy mysteries…

John said...

Wow! What mockery! But of what?

Of Christian sanctimoniousness?

Of secular sanitary rituals?

Of our God-given fear of illness and death and our biologically inborn need for a measure of certainty and control over it?

Of the inescapably fallible choices we make about where and in whom to place our faith?

I laughed. I squirmed. I thought – which is, no doubt, what was intended by this ingeniously in-your-face parable.

The choices we make about where to place our faith depend on many things - including the ways that are modeled for us by those we look up to. We can refuse, as some do, to believe that the danger exists. We can believe that our faith confers some kind of immunity from suffering and death. We can reject the limits of our personal power, or that of modern medicine, by compulsive purification and avoidance of human touch. We can pull back in dread and despair, giving up on faith in any form – burying ourselves alive. We can place our faith in medical science, of course, only to discover its inevitable errors and limitations in its never-ending quest for better answers. We can place our faith in Someone to hear us, hold us, and show us a way of facing and accepting what we cannot know or control as completely as we would wish. We can look to Jesus, who has been there, himself, in that excruciatingly painful, powerless human place– and survived it to be with us through the Valley of Death.

I don’t think he would mock our fear because he knows beyond a shadow of doubt what it feels like.

Having said all that, I suspect he’s also able to laugh at himself and the way he is sometimes portrayed.

Thank you for giving us food for thought about such holy mysteries…