The body of Christ

Today as I was praying the rosary, my mind began to wander to all the rich symbolism of the Catholic church. I remembered a healing service I went to at Holy Family last year. The Franciscan friar leading the service took a host, and put it in a special display called a Monstrance. It is for them a way to look at the real body of Christ and adore him. The priest then held the monstrance in front of his face, hiding behind it and a shawl that represented Christ. We were then invited to pretend we were touching the hem of Jesus' garments as we touched the shawl and asked for healing.

The Catholic view of the bread being the real body of Christ is so compelling. In it's presence you are literally able to be with Christ physically like the first disciples were. What if we viewed the church, the body of Christ, as being his real physical body in that way? O Lord so indwell and transform our bodies, so that if someone wanted to see what it was like to touch you, they only need to touch us, or to hold on to you they would only need to embrace us!

The Future of the A/G

I have long quipped that I would stay with the Assembly of God until they kick me out. I am a bit out of the ordinary. While I still hold dear our distinctives, I am a little too liberal politically, I am a neo-traditionalist (I like the power of liturgy and the richness of vintage devotion), I am a mystic, and I no longer consider myself a dispensationalist. I have desired to see the day when my generation comes to the fore and see what the A/G will look like. Will there be a place for me in it? I have always asked that question hopefully.

With the resignation of our current general superintendent, I suddenly feel that moment upon us and I am a little afraid. How will it come out? What will it mean. The announcement was a little sudden, Elaine and I hadn't planned on going to General Council as our church can't afford to send us. So now we are left out of the process of picking the next leader of our movement. I turn to the Lord in prayer and must trust him. I am greatly heartened by the messages and prayers posted on futureag.blogspot.com Thank you so much for the effort!

Sunday Blues

I think I figured out how to classify the Sunday afternoon let down I always feel after preaching. Its like post-partum depression.

Italians make the most beautiful espresso machines

My dream machine! La San Marco

6 years today!

Isn't there something unsettling about church tax seminar presenters who like their bling?

Crap!

So much to say, so little desire to say it.

Every time I see my blogs, I think crap. I really should write something.

Bounded

In a new country, amid new conditions, Prince Andrew found life easier to bear. after his betrothed had broken faith with him - which he felt the more acutely the more he tried to conceal its effects - the surroundings in which he had been happy became trying to him, and the freedom and independence he had once prized so highly were still more so. Not only could he no longer think the thoughts that had first come to him as he lay gazing at the sky on the field of Austerlitz and had later enlarged upon with Pierre and which had filled his solitude at Bogucharovo and then in Switzerland and Rome, but he even dreaded to recall them and the bright and boundless horizons they had revealed. He was now concerned only with the nearest practical matters unrelated to his past interests and he seized on these the more eagerly the more those past interests were closed to him. It was as if that lofty, infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above him had suddenly turned into a low , solid vault that weighted him down, in which all was clear, but nothing eternal or mysterious.

How often have I felt this way? I find myself frustrated with Prince Andrews many swings. Just as he seems about to touch something significant and larger than himself, something sends him back to the base life of the crust of the earth. Yet this passage rings so true to me. Those great experiences of the boundless Eternity seems so easily eclipsed by the daily work of living.

A story about "War and Peace"

On the Pratzen Heights, where he had fallen with the flagstaff in his had, lay Prince Andrew Bolkónski bleeding profusely and unconsciously uttering a gentle, piteous and childlike moan.

Toward evening he ceased moaning and became quite still. He did not know how long his unconsciousness lasted. Suddenly he again felt that he was alive and suffering from a burning, lacerating pain in his head.

“Where is it, that lofty sky that I did not know till now, but saw today,” was his first thought. “And I did not know this suffering either,” he thought. “Yes, I did not know anything at all till now. But where am I?”

I love this image of Prince Andrew, having been hit by a cannonball looking upward at the infinite sky sensing something he had never known before. Something above himself, something all embracing.
I remember the first time the infinite blues struck me. I was on a band trip to Kansas city. I was perhaps a bit of a loner. I felt out of place, I wasn’t that great of a sax player. I felt that I always was a detriment to the whole instead of apart of the beautiful sound that it produced. I wandered outside the hotel and sat myself under a tree on a patch a grass where some other kids were talking. I laid my head back, and there it was. For some reason for the first time I had a sense of perspective, I could see how the blue stretched for miles above me. It absorbed me. I stared at it, wondered at it. My breathing slowed and I savored that I was filling myself with that infinity. Infinity embraced me. I too must have been moaning a childlike groan. I remember my reverie being interrupted by a girl asking if I was all right, and if I wanted to join their group. I said, “no, I’m just looking at the sky.”
I wonder if Prince Andrew will catch the spiritual significance of that day like I did. Or like Switchfoot put it in their song 4:12,

You said,
“I’m so sorry I’ve been so down.
I started doubting things could ever turn around.
And I began to believe that all we are is material.
It’s nonsensical.”

So you walk outside and everything’s new
You’re looking at the world with new eyes.
As if you’d never seen a sky before that’s blue
As if you’ve never seen the sky in your whole life

“It would be good,” thought Prince Andrew, glancing at the icon his sister had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, “it would be good if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to Mary. How good it would be to know where to seek for help in this life and what to expect after it beyond the grave! How happy and calm I should be if I could now say: ‘Lord, have mercy on me!’… But to whom should I say that? Either to a Power indefinable, incomprehensible, which I not only cannot address, but cannot even express in words—the Great All or Nothing—“ He said to himself, “or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Mary! There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all important.”

We leave Prince Andrew to die, but I wonder if that is all we shall hear from him, all that he will find in the infinite blue.