go beyond

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

_______________

What is the latest on the news?

Another shooting

Another angry white guy with a gun

Killing innocents

Leaving bloody bodies behind as he laughs

And posts evil on facebook

Add this on top of

The latest lie

Or latest rabid tweet from our liar in chief?

Another tax cut for the very rich?

Another protection removed

Another assault on the planet earth

What is next?

More Christians justifying hate and greed?

Everything seems to be running down

Down

Down

Where are the good people?

Where are the faithful people?

Christ is not ambivalent

Love!

Give!

Be generous!

But the people who claim God

Seem to be the worst

Full of destructive intensity

Willing to destroy the earth

Erase protections for the poor

Exclude the strange

Oppress the vulnerable

Its enough to make God cry

It is enough to make me despair

Some say this is the way of the world

This the way it has always been, and the way it always will be

Some suggest (most those already on the right) that we fight fire with fire.

We put guns in the hands of teachers,

we wall up our borders,

we exclude the immigrant and refugee

we respond to hate and violence with hate and violence.

How has that worked?

I struggle to remember

That this  is not the way God designed the world.

And I vow

Compelled by the Gospel

And Jesus

And the Sacred that lives with in me

To counter these narrow, closed, violent, hateful ones

who believe they can shape the world their way through abusive and deadly power.

As Richard Rohr has noted,

Albert Einstein once wrote

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. One experiences oneself . . . as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of one’s consciousness. . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

We are call to embrace not exclude

To love not hate

To heal not destroy

We are called drag the Kingdom of God,

However difficult that task is

Into reality

Into this world

Into this time

We are to be the place where earth and heaven meet

This is what it means to be a Sacred Child

“. . . God is a beggar of love seeking to be love at the heart of this evolutionary creation; yet God cannot enter into our world without us.

Our challenge today is to stay the course of love in a world that resists love,

fears love, and rejects the cost of love.” (Richard Rohr)

God who is love

Is always seeking to move in our souls

Always seeking to fill us with the kind of love

Shown by the Muslim in Christchurch who greeted his killer

With the words, “Hello Brother”

This fight is beyond me, beyond you, beyond us

But it is not beyond God

Who enables us to go beyond

And imagine and create a world worth of love (Rohr)

“Christian life is birthing love into greater unity;

it is our contribution to a universe in evolution.

We point the way to something more than ourselves,

something up ahead that we are now participating in,

where heaven and earth will be renewed (Revelation 21:1). " (Richard Rohr)