So, I am taking this course on theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas. The last time I quoted him, it had to do with what God intends to make of us, and my personal wish that God would be a bit less ambitious.
I can't say that what struck me tonight made me feel any better:
"Discipleship is quite simply extended training in being dispossessed. To become followers of Jesus means that we must, like him, be dispossessed of all that we think gives us power over our own lives and the lives of others. Unless we learn to relinquish our presumption that we can ensure the significance of our lives, we are not capable of the peace of God's kingdom."
Really, I would just like to go back to the kind of life where words like that did not reverberate, resonate, or re-anything at all.
I can't say that what struck me tonight made me feel any better:
"Discipleship is quite simply extended training in being dispossessed. To become followers of Jesus means that we must, like him, be dispossessed of all that we think gives us power over our own lives and the lives of others. Unless we learn to relinquish our presumption that we can ensure the significance of our lives, we are not capable of the peace of God's kingdom."
Really, I would just like to go back to the kind of life where words like that did not reverberate, resonate, or re-anything at all.
I just don't know if I buy it that God allows our suffering to make us better. I think it's more like that verse that says the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Bad things happen to all of us. Hopefully they make us better,but they can also stun us so deeply we never fully recover. Maybe we will just not be better till we get to Heaven. One thing for certain, these kinds of losses bring us to our knees and keep us there.
ReplyDeletePraying for the gift of deep comfort for you.
Ugh. I was reading yesterday, the preface (the long, long preface) to "The Romance of the Word" by Robert Farrar Capon. He describes in very vague terms an experience he had in which, as he says, he died. Not, he suffered, he grieved, he struggled, but he died. And his subsequent experience of resurrection. To which I mentally replied, uh, no thanks. That sounds godawful.
ReplyDeleteI always cringe when I hear the old "God never gives us anything we can't handle." Always said by those who have never been given anything they couldn't handle.
That Hauerwas is a hard, hard quote. And yet there is a part of me that remains hopeful that it contains some truth-- the hope of the peace of God's kingdom.
Blessings, friend.
me too. I'd like to go back to a time when I had no idea what being "dispossessed of all that we think gives us power over our own lives and the lives of others. Unless we learn to relinquish our presumption that we can ensure the significance of our lives, we are not capable of the peace of God's kingdom..." really means. yeah. cuz right now I'm thick in the dispossessing phase without any sense of the "peace of God's kingdom" part...nor how this is supposed to be discipleship building...
ReplyDeleteOh... I was typing out a response and it got WAAAY off into something I better take a look at first!
ReplyDeleteI think that means you made a good post.
But I'm not sure I "like" where I was going!
Cindy
Hmmm....This is a theological expression of the spirituality of "letting go."
ReplyDeleteI'll be thinking about this for a while yet...
Oh, I don't like this truth, but I thank God that someone is telling it where we can read it and access it! If not, we might otherwise feel so unbearably alone and WRONG. We are not alone, but -as you know- the world is broken in so many places.
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