11-04-21

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHING
November 4, 2021
This past Tuesday, I shared at staff meeting a quote from Father Richard Rohr (from his Daily Meditation on July 7, 2016). He wrote:

We keep praying that our illusions will fall away. God erodes them from many sides, hoping they will fall. But we often remain trapped in what we call normalcy – “the way things are.” Life then revolves around problem-solving, fixing, explaining, and taking sides with winners and losers. It can be a pretty circular and even nonsensical existence.

To get out of this unending cycle, we have to allow ourselves to be drawn into sacred space, into liminality. All transformation takes place here. We have to allow ourselves to be drawn out of “business as usual” and remain patiently on the “threshold” ( limen, in Latin) where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown.

This resonated with me as I have a real bad habit of trying to push past those places “in-between” where nothing appears to be happening, but in fact, a lot is happening. It may not be measurable in the traditional ways of measuring, but I think about my grandmother baking pies. If I got up early enough, I would see the kitchen lined with ingredients, different utensils, pie plates (pie birds) and a whole host of things I didn’t know how they might be used. By the time I usually got up, the pies were in the oven and the kitchen was now a prep area for lunch. I usually saw only the final product without understanding the full extend of work involved. Of course, my grandmother had the specific goal of pies. In threshold moments along the faith journey, the goal – at least from our vantage point – is vague at best. We might speak of God’s dream, but the specifics are unknown. Maybe the “in-between” time is like God’s kitchen where God’s final product is difficult for us to imagine with the many ingredient on the counter unassembled.

Gracious God, I trust you to always be at work within me and around me for the sake of your vision. Even when the space I find myself appears to be on a pause, you are never on a break from loving and shaping me for the sake of your kingdom. Amen.

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