Musings Along Life's Way: Love, Healing and Virginia Tech
Dear Friends,
Our theme for the Easter season, The Joy of Community, is well underway. For the six weeks of Easter we will be exploring the disciplines that are ours as a spiritual community. Last week, Andrew, our Ministry Partner in Covenant, led us as we considered what it means to be one body filled with many people of varied and diverse gifts. This week, we will consider healing as a community discipline. To do this we will be reflecting on Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13 -- the "love chapter."
We often think of healing as a personal thing. We get sick and we hope to get well. The question is this: Is "getting well" the same as healing? Jerry May, (whose book, The Wisdom of Wilderness we are studying in our 9:15 Sunday morning book study) writes about spirituality and health, noting that a deep spirituality is no guarantee of good health. He even suggests that faith sometimes invites people into lives of "greater disease, disorder, suffering and death." Asking why this is so he writes:
Things would, of course, be simpler if the spiritual life clearly led to better health. Then we could treat the life of the spirit, to quote the Christian Century editorial, "like a nutritional supplement or a leafy green vegetable." But things are obviously more mysterious than that. In my own lived faith, I feel certain that God does not want people to suffer, not now, not ever. So how is it that authentic spirituality can sometimes be bad for your health? My hunch is that it has to do with something that the contemplative strands of all the great religions proclaim: the ultimate meaning of human life is not health; it is love.
-- Shalem News, Winter 2000, "Is Spirituality Good for Your Health?"
Getting well is a personal thing -- the healing that we find in love is a "God thing" and a "faith community thing." Yesterday, 33 college students were gunned down at Virginia Tech University. This is a great tragedy. Today (Tuesday) I received an email from Meredith Jackson which included this from Kimberly Whitney, Minister for Higher and Theological Education with the national setting of the United Church of Christ in Cleveland:
In a faith that joins us a common people of the world that knows the holy by many names, in a faith that celebrates many cultures, races, and places linked interconnectively and relationally to a fragilestrong bluegreen earth.
In a faith that embraces creation unfurling in the cosmos, and the creaturely communities of bird and deer, brother water and sister rain; we pray, and we love, and we cry, and we support by gathering or pausing - invoking a holy silence in prayer even when there are no words.
That is the call of our faith
To be with one another in a solidarity of loving kindness and the work of peace that is God still speaking, through and with us.
The heart of prayer of the United Church of Christ in its many settings, including those of us in Cleveland, join with you in this time as you gather on campuses, in churches, in ecumenical and interfaith centers.
Her prayer is a prayer for healing, for a coming together of community in love, prayer and support. As we pray for the students injured and killed, as we open our hearts to the suffering of that educational community, as we feel the bonds of love that tie us to all of humanity, we sense the healing that is ours in love, that is ours as we are drawn together. In our prayer and support, we sense the need to reach out -- perhaps not as far as Virginia Tech (but, yes, this far, if that is how you are called to respond) -- but certainly to our fellow church members, to our friends, neighbors, to college students we might know. Our desire is to hold one another in a firm embrace -- that embrace is our higher calling, the call to love. Here we are healed, joined by the Spirit. See you on Sunday.
Love,
David
Our theme for the Easter season, The Joy of Community, is well underway. For the six weeks of Easter we will be exploring the disciplines that are ours as a spiritual community. Last week, Andrew, our Ministry Partner in Covenant, led us as we considered what it means to be one body filled with many people of varied and diverse gifts. This week, we will consider healing as a community discipline. To do this we will be reflecting on Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13 -- the "love chapter."
We often think of healing as a personal thing. We get sick and we hope to get well. The question is this: Is "getting well" the same as healing? Jerry May, (whose book, The Wisdom of Wilderness we are studying in our 9:15 Sunday morning book study) writes about spirituality and health, noting that a deep spirituality is no guarantee of good health. He even suggests that faith sometimes invites people into lives of "greater disease, disorder, suffering and death." Asking why this is so he writes:
Things would, of course, be simpler if the spiritual life clearly led to better health. Then we could treat the life of the spirit, to quote the Christian Century editorial, "like a nutritional supplement or a leafy green vegetable." But things are obviously more mysterious than that. In my own lived faith, I feel certain that God does not want people to suffer, not now, not ever. So how is it that authentic spirituality can sometimes be bad for your health? My hunch is that it has to do with something that the contemplative strands of all the great religions proclaim: the ultimate meaning of human life is not health; it is love.
-- Shalem News, Winter 2000, "Is Spirituality Good for Your Health?"
Getting well is a personal thing -- the healing that we find in love is a "God thing" and a "faith community thing." Yesterday, 33 college students were gunned down at Virginia Tech University. This is a great tragedy. Today (Tuesday) I received an email from Meredith Jackson which included this from Kimberly Whitney, Minister for Higher and Theological Education with the national setting of the United Church of Christ in Cleveland:
In a faith that joins us a common people of the world that knows the holy by many names, in a faith that celebrates many cultures, races, and places linked interconnectively and relationally to a fragilestrong bluegreen earth.
In a faith that embraces creation unfurling in the cosmos, and the creaturely communities of bird and deer, brother water and sister rain; we pray, and we love, and we cry, and we support by gathering or pausing - invoking a holy silence in prayer even when there are no words.
That is the call of our faith
To be with one another in a solidarity of loving kindness and the work of peace that is God still speaking, through and with us.
The heart of prayer of the United Church of Christ in its many settings, including those of us in Cleveland, join with you in this time as you gather on campuses, in churches, in ecumenical and interfaith centers.
Her prayer is a prayer for healing, for a coming together of community in love, prayer and support. As we pray for the students injured and killed, as we open our hearts to the suffering of that educational community, as we feel the bonds of love that tie us to all of humanity, we sense the healing that is ours in love, that is ours as we are drawn together. In our prayer and support, we sense the need to reach out -- perhaps not as far as Virginia Tech (but, yes, this far, if that is how you are called to respond) -- but certainly to our fellow church members, to our friends, neighbors, to college students we might know. Our desire is to hold one another in a firm embrace -- that embrace is our higher calling, the call to love. Here we are healed, joined by the Spirit. See you on Sunday.
Love,
David
posted by Online Coordinator at Wednesday, April 18, 2007
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