| Selections from "Rev. Rackley's Rack" I am glad
to be at Ascension and look forward to growing with the congregation.
Quotes to Inspire Your Spiritual Growth!
God is part of the human adventure. Through the Incarnation, God
manifests his identification with the human condition just as it is. Our attitude toward
God has to be governed by that revelation. Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God.
One finds God because one is already found by God. Anything we would
find on our own would not be GOD. Catherine M. LaGugna
Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become
impossible and your heart has turned to stone. Thomas Merton
Conversion is a process; it is not a goal, not a product we consume.
Christian conversion is, in fact, incarnational; it is worked out by each individual
within the community of faith.
We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the
faith God has in us. To let ourselves look at God, and let God look back at us. And to
laugh, sing, and be delighted because God has called us his own.
Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace.
Though we cannot know him we can love him. By love he may be touched
and embraced, never by thought. The Author of the The Cloud of Unknowing.
Each of our religions knows, in some form or another, the Golden Rule:
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This means that religion is
the enemy of exclusion and discrimination, of hatred and rivalry, of violence and
conflict. Pope John Paul II, Address in Jerusalem, March 2000
God is present not just in serenity, not just in spiritual achievement;
God is also present in failure and the utmost suffering, and he manifests himself equally
in each expression. Jesus' passion and death is the revelation of the heart of God. Thomas
Keating, Awakenings.
Theology really happens in relations between people. Because we love,
God is present. Thomas Merton.
The myth of the incarnation declares that it is the venture of becoming
fully human which is the greatest act of creation in which we can engage.
The Christian myth centers not on identification with a God who
journeys across the heavens, but on a God who is finally to be found nowhere else than in
one's own journey. Tad Guzie, The Book of Sacramental Basics. |
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 Easter and
Pentecost — The Reality of the Church
T he Season of Easter is at the very heart of
Christianity -- we are a people of the resurrection. And Pentecost is the culmination of
the Easter Story -- the manifestation of the Body of Christ. But what exactly does that
mean to us both individually and corporately? According to the stories in the book of
Acts, the early church, like our generation, struggled to understand what the resurrection
meant in both their individual and corporate lives.
The disciples of Emmaus were only able to recognize the risen Christ after their
ideas and understanding of God and the Messiah had been shattered. They had to let go of
their idealistic understanding of the Messiah and be present to the mundane and ordinary
events of their lives. Like these disciples, our tendency is also to forget that the
resurrection is prefaced on the incarnation -- that our physical lives can never be a
hindrance to the spiritual journey. To the contrary, our everyday lives are the stuff
through which we are capable of encountering and experiencing God. Christ was recognized
through the simple act of sharing a meal -- not because the scriptures were opened to
them. The holy is revealed through relationships -- enabling us to touch God as we reach
out to one another. Thus, it is our ideas and notions of God that result in our inability
to recognize and experience the risen Christ in our daily lives.
With the Feast of Pentecost the reality of Easter is truly conceived -- it is the
birthday of the Church. In a very real sense, then, Pentecost is a celebration of the
Incarnation -- the birth of the Body of Christ. As the Church we are called not only to
recognize the risen Christ in the world, but, more importantly, to manifest, or incarnate,
the risen Christ in the world. The Book of Acts portrays the incarnation of the Body of
Christ -- a community that shares all things in common, a people who dare to Love. There
is a beautiful African term used by The Most Reverend Desmond Tutu that expresses this
nature of the church: ubuntu. This African term, though difficult to translate
fully into English, means in essence, "A person is a person through other
persons." In other words, it is not, "I think therefore I am;" but rather,
"I am human because I belong. I participate, I share." Ubuntu captures in
one word the spirit and experience of the early church.
The mystery of Easter and Pentecost is that the risen Christ is experienced in the
ordinary, in the daily-ness of life. In short, Christ can only be known fully in community
-- that place where the incarnation becomes reality as we recognize Christ in one another.
Our parish is called by God to be ubuntu -- to incarnate the risen Christ in our
everyday world. Only as we reach out to all those whom we encounter will Easter become a
reality in both our lives and our world.
Ubuntu,
k
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Amen.
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