... our faith unerringly reflects our wider culture. For society at large is generally in denial of the difficulties and harsh realities of our lives. We don’t have a language to express the deepest struggles of our souls, our conversations are reduced to the most functional, to tweet-and txt-level. The more Facebook friends we gain, the less of ourselves we can articulate to them.
The theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, ‘As children of the Enlightenment, we have censored and selected around the voice of darkness and disorientation, seeking to go from strength to strength, from victory to victory.’ We shun negativity. We deny the failure of our attempts to control. And consequently, ‘much Christian piety is romantic and unreal in its positiveness’.
I suspect that many people regard today’s version of Christianity as irrelevant to them, not so much because they think its theology doesn’t match the insights of modern science, but more because they feel it has forgotten how to help them make a deep connection with a God who can meet them in their darkness and disorientation, a God who surely must have the power to treat the infections of today’s toxic mental environment.
But note the words of Rabbit in John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich: ‘Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need, the ones the dead have spoken.’ In particular, I suggest, they have the words of the Psalms. And the Psalms are not dry theological treatises, they are intense conversations, dialogues between faithful but sometimes struggling people, and the God who listens, bends, makes amends. ...
- My editorial in a couple of church / community magazines this month, Intense conversations with the God who bends. I'm preparing a series of Lent gatherings around Brueggemann's Message of the Psalms, and Wild Goose Resource Group's Sweet Honey and Hard Places.
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