When God Decided To Invent

When God decided to invent

everything he took one

breath bigger than a circus tent

and everything began

When man determined to destroy

himself he picked the was

of shall and finding only why

smashed it into because

- E. E. Cummings

It is our nature to want a reason for everything.  We want to know the cause, we want to know the purpose and we want to know where it is all going.  We want to know the “Why?”

And so we search.

We do not handle the “because I said so” of a parent very well; we seek the hidden meaning in each of life’s circumstances and look to crack the code of purpose when life’s movements leave us baffled.

In our frantic pursuit of the "because" we find only Anxious Thoughts and Sleepless Nights.

Yet some things are just as they are; no moralizing needed, no hidden meaning and nothing to decode.  Simply:

Is & Shall

This is the space where exhilarating wonder and breath-holding terror collide.  This is the space where we learn to swim in the deep end of life and are buoyed by the mystery of God.  This is the place where we are most alive.

Relating Beyond Our Differences

In her 1984 work, Sister Outsider, author and poet Audre Lorde writes:

...we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.

How has the Church responded to human/cultural differences in these three ways (ignore, copy, destroy)? How might the Church develop new patterns by which relationships between different people groups can be fostered?