We went to Emmaus Way (www.emmaus-way.com) last night, and there is never a time I come away from there that I don’t feel wrenched in some way, reminded as with something sharp of who I am and what I am to be. It is good. It is so good, always.
This faith I share with so many is hard. Hard. I experienced again this weekend the reality of Karl’s words, posted in my last entry: Jesus says his yoke is easy and his burden is light, but his burden is a cross. This daily dying, this deliberate choosing of the hard thing, the thing that means death to me– What is convenient about that? Where is the salve? the oversight? the willful blindness to pain? I am sitting in death today, in many ways. I am not comforted, right now, by my faith. I am not comfortable. No.
Christianity, or anyway, the act of following Jesus, might not always be effected in active ministry to the poor and needy. It might not always look like saving the whales or the environment. And sometimes I wish it were for me, right now, those things, because then they would be tangible with, sometimes, lovely, tangible results. But Christianity, or anyway, the act of following Jesus, is always effected in death to myself, to my pride, to my rights, to my privilege, to my justification.
Last night Alli Rogers was our guest artist at Emmaus Way. She played the guitar and sang beautifully and simply of this very act of death, of this very Life we hope in, of the worlds we straddle with our faces up, tears streaming, eyes fixed on Jesus.
It’s more a choice than a feeling
It’s more of a wound than a healing
The act of believing in you.
