A Post For The Last Day Of The First Month Of The Year

LOOKING BACK AT what I've posted here since the start of December, when things have gone back and forth between falling apart and ineffectively trying to pull it back together while responding to provocative responses, it does make some kind of sense that I didn't realize as it was happening.  I've had a few recurring fevers this past two months so some of that might have had something to do with it, too. I'm not told that it's long-Covid but whatever it is, it gets weird.

Rejecting both the vulgar materialism of Republican-fascism and the would-be elite materialism of the often academic, secular alleged opposition to that, a lot of what I've said about egalitarian democratic politics and why I think that everywhere we have made any kind of an approximate approach to that is intimately bound up with the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as those are an actual force in Peoples' thinking and political positions has both enraged and confused People.  

Well, a lot of this starts out confusing and some of it People have been trying to figure out for thousands of years. And a lot of it isn't going to be to our liking.  What we like most is usually a big part of the problem to start with.  That's just how these problems are.   

A lot of it is because even most English language college-credentialed people seem to know an ideologically distorted view of the evils of history in which churches are blamed for a lot that they certainly weren't the major forces in producing, some of them are complete fictions but as the movie said, "print the legend."   A college education ain't what it should be in easily 9 out of 10 cases.   More like 10 out of 10 when it's a media figure.

A Rule For Having A More Edifying Life: Listen To Lectures, Not Sit-Com Reruns

One of the great benefits of being online and, especially, having access to many recorded speeches, lectures, interviews, discussions and, don't think I've forgotten, radio-dramas, is that when I'm depressed I can listen to someone like Walter Brueggemann who, thank God, has been much recorded and much posted.  With him, with others such as Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Johnson, the late James Cone, those who participate in Catholic Women Preach,  Rupert Sheldrake (I listen to lots of youtubed lectures) I can always find something to listen to that addresses my condition.  And almost inevitably I find something I've listened to is directly, though not always explicitly, relevant to the political issues I've dealt with.  That's not a surprise because from Exodus to Revelations, the Bible is intimately tied up with economics and politics in a far more exigent and demanding and direct manner than secular politics.  My recent detour into the political thought of Hannah Arendt and those associated with and sometimes disagreeing with her reminded me of how, for all of their many virtues, there is always something that falls flat in a the secular-academic approach to those same issues. I love those thinkers, I've spent so many of the hours of my life with them but as they determinedly cut out God from their academic discourse - like good modernist scholars - they can never quite seal the deal in the end, at least for me.  I have come to the conclusion that to get to the promised land, you have to make choices that can't be made within that secular, scientistic, materialistic, atheistic framing.

That came to a head during the question period from a 2011 interview discussion on the nature of evil that Walter Brueggemann participated in at Elmhurst College.  I'd downloaded it and listened to it before, maybe I've transcribed a bit of it before, though I don't remember if I posted it or not. But listening to it to pick myself up - it's a discussion of evil - these two questions and responses jumped out at me. So, with my not exactly verbatim transcription.

Questioner 1:  In was interested in your rejection of the Greek philosophers' definition of God as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.  And what I want to ask then is from that I gathered that God is not all powerful.  There's some limit on His power.   And I just wonder if you could say more that's verified in both the Old and the New Testament.

Walter Brueggemann: Well, it says of Jesus in, I think it's Luke 4, "He came to Nazareth" . . . I'm not sure it's in Luke 4, somewhere in the synoptics . . . " He came to Nazareth and he could do no mighty works there because of their disbelief."  And I think there's ample evidence in both Testaments, that God, in some texts, has to deal with the world the way it is, and cannot wish it away.  I think that the power of God was assumed everywhere in the Near East.  But that's not the Biblical question, the Biblical question is is God faithful.  And they struggle a lot with the faithfulness of God.  So, I think that's a more interesting question than the power of God. I think you can point to texts that claim God's power and you can point to texts that doubt God's power but I don't think Israel is preoccupied with that question, I think it's the question of fidelity. So you get, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Which is an accusation to God about God's infidelity. And I think that's everywhere.

I'll jump in to note it's nice for me, who has such a hard time remembering chapter and verse to see that someone as good at this as WB does too.   But more so  because the answer I gave a while back about the barroom atheist chestnut, the challenge to a believer about the paradox of God being all-powerful enough to make a rock that's too big for God to pick up seems to me to go farther (the next questioner kind of gets there too) because the atheist challenge seems to miss several things:

A. We live in the cosmos that God created, in which God set the conditions of possibility and the limits of what is possible.  Everything about us, all of our thinking comes from our experience of that universe with its pre-set conditions, that that imagined scenario is a paradox is a product of our experience of God's choices in making things as they are.  What would seem to be a challenge to God's ultimate powerfulness works even better as a demonstration of God's ultimate power.

That we can imagine that paradox, imagining something that could not be internally true because it pits one imagined ultimate display of ultimate power against an inconsistent imagined ultimate display of ultimate power would, within the idea that God is all powerful and that, as the Bible puts it, we are created in Gods image would certainly mean that God is able to imagine things being different from how they are but for God's own reasons which God doesn't completely share with us, God didn't choose the cosmos to be like that.

I think what's missing from this is human beings imagining that we're equipped to get that, to understand why God doesn't set things up the way we like them. You can choose not to like that and choose to decide there is no God because you don't like it and the fact that all of us are creatures within a cosmos in which we are not the ultimate point of everything, that our material bodies are as much a part of that as a sparrow's or the grasses that dry up in the wind, but the secularists don't even get as far as the hapless Job in understanding why bad things happen to good people.  Which gets us to the thing that really got me excited in my egalitarian predisposition.

Questioner 2: You were talking about . . . this follows up to what you were just saying. This idea of making a choice between the goodness of God verses the power of God as a way of bringing some understanding to when we don't understand why bad things happen to good people. I know I've heard it in the Christian circle that I'm a part of. That when I cannot understand or trace the Hand of God I must trust the Heart of God. Which I think gets back to His goodness. But you raised as an example of that the Book of Job.  When Job is crying out, trying to understand why it seemed the Hand of God had turned against him, God had abandoned him and then God responds to him. And almost dares him, "Where were you [when I laid the foundation of the Earth . . .  ]"  How does the Sovereignty of God fit into this paradigm that you've set up, the Goodness of God verses the Power of God as a way of understanding.  And also the free will of man.  I think that plays into this idea of when Jesus could do no good work there because that element of faith that is needed on our part for God to be able to function and do what He does.  So I'd like your thoughts on the idea of sovereignty and also the free will of man.

Walter Brueggemann: Well, I think that the whirlwind speeches at the end of The Book of Job are deliberately enigmatic. What I know is that God is a terrible pastoral councilor because Job comes with all of these aches and pains and doubts and angers and, you know, God is supposed to say, "How are things going?"  And God says, "Let me tell you about the hippopotamus I just made."  So I think it is probably a tilt at God's Sovereignty but it isn't quite spelled out that way, it says, "I'm not gonna discuss this with you!  I am not interested in your aches and pains so quit talking to me about that!" So, I think God is portrayed there as fairly abrasive . . . is not terribly amenable. . .

It should be remembered that Job is a story that is supposed to represent and teach us something about unearned suffering - I think elsewhere Brueggemann says it is a reaction against the idea that suffereing is earned in parts of The Law.  This is a human explanation of things, inspired, I think, because in so many ways it is honest that God is not going to tell us, at least in this life, about why everything is as it is.  It's a confession of the limits of even revealed religion that religion doesn't have all the answers anymore than physics or chemistry or pure or applied math is ever going to have them.  It's really rather funny how the "theory of everything" atheist ideological cosmologists are just the flip side of the joker card of pretetious religious fundamentalism, in the end.  Both of them have a tendency towards a rigid determinism as a response to the mysteries and exigencies of human experience.  I don't think it's any accident that Republican-fascism is so tied to the antiChrist of vulgar materialism as expressed by the American antichrist of "Christian nationalism,"  and that the would be secular left is so impotent to oppose them.

Getting to the heart of things:

Now I don't know about free will.  I'll tell you a joke from Columbia Seminary where I taught which is very Calvinist.  Long time ago Dr. Geer was lecturing on double-predestination - this is Calvin voodoo - and he saw a student sleeping in class so he went up to him and said, "Define double-predestination!" And the student said,  Oh, Dr. Geer, I did know but I've forgotten. Dr. Geer said, "Holy Jesus, the only person in Western Christendom who understood and he has forgotten!"

I just saw . . . what's it called?  "Adjustment Bureau?" with Matt Damon which is about free will. And the movie sort of says if you love enough you'll have freedom against God's will. Well, I don't find that a very helpful way to talk about it.

I think when you talk about God's Sovereignty and human free will you have to talk about a covenant. You have to talk about a dialogical relationship   in which both parties are free and both parties are bound. And it's like any serious relationship, it's a matter of working that out which never ends in complete sovereignty or in complete freedom but it is the enigma of fidelity. And I think that's the primary set of Biblical faith. And, you see, if we had understood that dialogical fidelity is the defining set I dare to think we wouldn't have gotten into all of the patriarchal abuse of Women, we wouldn't have gotten into the silencing of Gays, we wouldn't have needed to get into enslavement of Blacks because dialogical freedom means that both parties are always at risk and I think in the Bible that's true of our relationship with God in which both parties are free and both parties are bound and it has to do with working it out. Does that make sense? . . . Then I'm lucky.  

This has so much in it for further understanding of both the problems of having a truly egalitarian society, legal and political system and, most problematic of all, economics - as Brueggemann gets in his list of those who are in great need of equality - that I am going to present it as tying the past two months here together.  And Brueggeman, with all of his experience and intellect and honesty, admits that he doesn't have more of a framing to understand it than the author of Job seems to have for the aspects of it that she or he was dealing with.  

I do think he's farther along than anything I've read in the best secular political thinkers I've read. They are often extremely good on narrowly defined issues, Arent on lying, on the Eichmann trial, but I don't find anyting, not a single thing, that will advance us on equality and justice and on farther than that to mutual fidelity and care which is what will give the reluctant, the skeptical and the scared the motive to enter into that kind of dialogical freedom in which you have to give up some of what you want to live in justice with others.  Which is why so many on the secular left have been diverted into some horrific positions such as supporting some of the most evil governments in the history of the world, giving Nazis a chance of making their history repeat itself perpetually (on the idiotic idea that Marxism would, thus, have a chance here),  even more so our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy,  the evils of the "first amendment rights" of the addiction industries to lie us into things like the opioid addiction epidemic, the porn industry, etc. Secularism has had such bad results that I am ready to say they match the evils of established religion if they don't already out-match that other evil we should never try again.

I tried European, 18th century style secular liberalism and it doesn't do the job. It's worse than ineffective, it has helped get us to the discrediting of the traditional form of American liberalism which arose to struggle against the evils that Brueggemann listed.

Paul Said It Best, Even With The Theoretically Best Texts We See It All As Through A Glass Darkly

WE ALMOST NEVER ADMIT that the act of reading texts written by other people is, inevitably, an act of interpretation.  The plain facts of what the act of writing and reading written and hearing heard words is proves that.  You hear a series of sounds and, if you know the language sufficiently, your mind resolves those into concepts which produce either coherent thoughts or incoherence. If you are learning a language, you can listen to a recording of something, something which, at first, totally goes over your head but which, with repeated hearings, gradually becomes clear. The text hasn't changed, your ability to interpret it has.  And different people will come up with different understandings of it, usually not seriously different, sometimes very consequentially different.  I doubt there's anything to be done about that, it's going to be the same no matter what, though I don't think all interpretations are the same, certainly not those which end up harming People and other living beings.  Do unto others what you would have them do unto you and by their fruits you will know them are the safest rules to follow in judging the validity of all of this and those rules have the most impeccable provenance, no matter what the repute and provenance of the claims are.  That Augustine or Calvin or "St." Pope JPII said so makes no more headway with me than if the good woman at the feed store down the road said it, frequently, less so. I can see who is more likely to do good.  

The same is true for significant marks made on a surface, paper, clay, sand, etc. Only with written texts your mind will translate those into unheard sounds which are then resolved into ideas.  I do not have the experience of language without having the experience of hearing, I would be extremely interested in how someone who learned language while entirely deaf would explain their experiences of that. Though I would only be able to imagine something like what that was like no matter how hard I tried to understand it.  

When the language isn't one you know as thoroughly and familiarly as the mother tongue you learned as a child and have been gaining familiarity with it your entire life and exposure to its literary culture and daily use, the necessity of interpretation should be admitted up front.  A translator who, ideally, is trying to make what those words say make sense to themselves and to those to who they want to pass that message - NOT THEIR OWN - to, owes it to their audience to admit that all of it goes through that filter which is even with the best of intent as capable of producing distortions as well as elucidation.  

Even for versions and dialects of your mother tongue, older modes of expression you are not fully familiar with, things will be imperfectly understood if not maliciously and evilly used by intent.  One infamous passage of English language translated scripture like that is when Jesus is made to say to his followers to let the kids in to see him,  telling those kid-haters (I think they were all patriarchal type males) "Suffer the little children," sometimes even failing to finish the sentence " ...to come unto me  for such is the Kingdom of Heaven. " He was telling them to put up with the kids not to hit them.  Which is sometimes used by sadistic assholes to claim Jesus said beating kids was morally good for them. That one of the examples of that which I heard on TV was an Irish Catholic priest in charge of an elementary school shows how even someone who had to have read that enough to understand the passage twisted and distorted an unfortunate translation for his own hateful ends.  Despite what is often said about the "literary value" of some translations, that shows how dangerous translating more for the sake of literary effect than meaning can be.*  To tie that in with a recent post, that kind of thing is bound to happen when only unmarried men or other exclusive, small cliques, have ultimate power in an institution. Though there have been many married men and women who are as big assholes of that type.

For us when it comes to The Bible, for the entire modern audience, even those who have studied the languages of the Scriptures for many years, all of Scripture, even when read in the original languages, are, in effect, an interpretation, probably as much so as a translation is.  I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to say that the only persons who had access to the full meaning of the original were those who wrote it AND IN MANY CASES THEY WERE INTERPRETING WHAT EYE-WITNESSES HAD TOLD THEM, PROBABLY THAT HAPPENING IN ARAMAIC, the author of Luke's Gospel and Acts explicitly says that's what his writings, a whole third of the New Testament canon was based on. For the bibliolatrous Fundamentalists who might be reading this, not even the writers of Scripture could have had access to that mythical pure, inerrant version of the KJV imagined into Hebrew, Aramaic and genuwine Koine Greek because they, too, relied on what other people had written down.

Even before that, when it's Scripture which is full of many different things but most importantly what is claimed to be divinely authoritative Statements and Commandments, that act of interpretation starts with those who authored the Scriptures, the Prophets, the Gospel Writers, the Epistle Writers, the story-tellers, those who authored other texts that were, then, collected by others and made part of the canon of Scripture, were interpreting their experience of encounters with God or divine inspiration or their commentary, ideas on, enhancements of and, in some cases rather clear ideological bending, of what previous authors produced. As I've said recently, I think some of what they put in it should have been left on the cutting room floor. Some of that Scripture has produced not only bitter and painful fruit but a full measure of evil.  

As it happened, in a project I've been working on for myself, as an exercise, of translating Luke and Acts into what I hope is very clear and simple Piron-style Esperanto.  In addition to several modern "simple English" translations,  I've been consulting the original texts in Greek** to the best of my inadequacy.  I have also been consulting the translations made by the classicist, philosopher and, I guess, theologian David Bentley Hart whose knowledge of the Greek Language is unusually large for someone making such a translation.  His long and essential preface material and post-script material are extremely enlightening on many issues upon which he exposes his own biases and reasons for doing what he did with rather stunning honesty as part of his critique of the efforts of others.  Though what, I'd say,  is more fairly called his orientation instead of "biases" are as someone familiar with the Greek language from the most ancient pagan texts and up through the relevant period of the early centuries of Christianity and as a quite independent member of the Orthodox branch of Christianity.  

I can't claim to anything more than being a self-taught somewhat poor reader of the Koine Greek of the Bible who has become extremely skeptical of, especially, the influence of Augustine and his followers in Western Christianity and who has read, mostly, Gregory of Nyssa and a few of the other Greek theologians in English translations.  Gregory, especially, led me to understand just how much of the most horrific part of Western theology, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, were based, not on what the texts closest to the witness of Jesus in person say, the Greek Gospels, Paul, James, . . . but on mistranslated and the late-in-life psychological fixations of Augustine and others who either disregarded what the Greek texts say or who could not even read them built on inferior Latin translations and, then built on that sand, instead.  

In his Post Script, he goes into one of the most serious Western distortions of Scripture which has had little but terrible consequences for both the psychology and culture and theology of Western Christianity, things such as God eternally damning to the most horrific pain those who sin even mildly or, in the most pathologically developed aspect of that distortion, those who God merely chooses for eternal damnation before God creates them for that fate. Among the other things I can see that came from that was that kind of atheism which rejected that God and, even more so, the evil cartoon of Jesus that, for example, the minor British poet Stevie Smith slammed Christianity over it:

Is it not interesting to see
How the Christians continually
Try to separate themselves in vain
From the doctrine of eternal pain?

They cannot do it,
They are vowed to it,
The Lord said it,
They must believe it.

So the vulnerable body is stretched without pity
On flames forever. Is this not pretty?

The religion of Christianity
Is mixed of sweetness and cruelty.

Considering Smith's major theme was her pathological fixation with suicide, which she fulfilled, I have to wonder what place the decidedly grim view of Christianity she fashionably took played in that.  I did like the radio play and the movie, which is probably about as much of a reason anyone remembers her apart from her slamming Christianity over those grim and unnecessary  doctrines.

The American Fundamentalist fixation with the devil, fire and brimstone sermons, those Halloween Hell Houses which you have to conclude is a cover for them obsessively and sadistically enjoying the idea of the majority of humanity going to eternal punishment by their god of hell (I don't see how the idea of an eternal hell where Satan under whatever name they give him is in charge doesn't posit him as an all powerful god with different aims). Even when I was a child, I couldn't square that with the claims that such a God who would pointlessly torture souls eternally, without any hope of salvation, could possibly love such creatures he created. Either God is love or God makes creatures for eternal pain, in which case God is hate.  If God does not make us to be able to understand how God could be both at once, that's certainly not our fault. That mainly Western God would be more of the ultimate dyspeptic Al Capp, a nasty son of a bitch.  

And speaking of the devil, Augustine and his ilk are, as well, I think the inspiration of the myriads of modernist decadents and atheists who revel in so much of amorality and evil, while they share in a human weakness that Augustine, and Calvin had.  Certainly a fondness for sadistic hatred, especially for those who are the least among us, was known before Western Christian patriarchs invented that, the precedents in many classical literatures and histories show that. I would go so far as to say that it is the psychological inspiration of every act of human and animal sacrifice, even that authorized by monotheistic religion.

I think it's reasonable to ask how much of Augustine's and others introduction of that into Christianity was a residuum of his previously held paganism.  

Modern atheists would object to me pointing out that their predilections are a cultural result of the most twisted aspects of Western church orthodoxy and, in English speaking countries, probably France, too, one of the most developed aspects of that in the predestinarian parts of Calvinism.  I read the meditations on God eternally roasting even unsinning babies who died without benefit of baptism made by those august fathers of Western Christianity and it is impossible to not conclude that they very much like and enjoy that idea. They seem to positively groove on it.   In the process it is impossible to not conclude that they have issued the most outrageous slanders against Jesus, against God that it is possible to make, one which Stevie Smith rightly rejected though, a good but decidedly minor member of the 20th century Brit smart set, she never seems to have been introduced to the idea that maybe the large majority of Western Christians simply didn't understand what the often complex and often obscure texts say.  David Bentley Hart concludes is discussion of it with this:

But the texts do not actually say any of that, and again, the absence of any hint of  such a notion in the Pauline corpus (or, for that matter, in the fourth Gospel, or the “Catholic Epistles,” or those very early doctrinal and confessional texts the Didache and Apostles’ Creed, or the writings of the Apostolic Fathers . . .)  makes the very concept nearly as historically suspect as it is morally  unintelligible. Moreover, to read back into these texts either the traditional view of dual and in some sense synchronously eternal postmortem destinies  or the developed high mediaeval Roman Catholic view of an absolute distinction between “Hell” and “Purgatory” would be either (in the former case) a dogmatic reflex rather than an exegetical necessity or (in the latter) an act of simple historical illiteracy. But I leave it to readers to reconcile the various eschatological passages of the New Testament with one another, or not, as they choose; the most I can do is offer an observation about two of the greatest and most brilliant Church Fathers of the later fourth and early fifth centuries. The Greek-speaking Gregory of Nyssa, who was a universalist and who simply assumed the purgatorial view of the gehenna, was able to unite all the various biblical images and claims in a fairly seamless synthesis in his writings, omitting nothing known to him as Christian canon. Conversely, the Latin-speaking Augustine, who took very much the contrary view, was far more selective in his use of scripture, was dependent on often grossly misleading translations, and had to expend enormous energy on qualifying, rephrasing, and explaining away a host of passages that did not really conform well to the theological system he imagined he had found in Paul’s writings. This is, if nothing else, instructive.

This rather rambling answer to a horrified reader who doesn't like where I'm going could certainly be better but I'm dealing with some ongoing issues.   I hope to get back to commenting on the insanity of U.S. politics this week, maybe saving this topic for weekends.

* In going through my language exercise, I've come to the conclusion that the  currently raging war between the "dynamic equivalence" and "formal equivalence" theories of biblical translations is rather pointless.  Even the most "formally equivalent" translations is saturated by the same actions as are defined by "dynamic equivalence".  I can compare that with my evolving ideas about singing opera in the languages those are written in as compared to using a good translation into the language the majority of the audience can understand.  If it's a bad translation then it may as well not be understood, if it's a good translation that tells you what's going on, what's being said, while not doing too much violence to the music, that's certainly preferable to not understanding what's being said, what's going on and the whole story behind the thing.  Which reminds me of, when he started setting the decadent poetry of Stefan George in The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Schoenberg remarked that he realized that, though German was his first language, he had never really thought of the meaning of some of the Schubert songs he'd known since his childhood.

Luckily, for us, we don't have to try to make it fit in with a preexisting melody.  I wouldn't think of touching the Psalms to try to make singable texts, though the Magnificat and other Canticles are hard to get into a form that I really like.

Which could get me back to some of the preface material of DBH in which he proclaims his shock at the radicalism of the New Testament which, though he'd long been able to read the Greek texts, he didn't really appreciate till he had to try to figure out how to say it in modern English.  I will say that though he confesses his doctrinal predispositions in what he concluded, I'd trust his to be fairly free of conscious or unconscious twisting of meaning to conform to any church or theological ideology.  I can't claim that I think about these Scriptures in the language of DBH's translation but it has become one that I look at more and more when trying to figure out what the Koine text means. At least he's up front about where he's coming from.

** We don't have 'THE ORIGINAL' Greek texts of either of those, or, in fact, of any part of the New Testament, we have editions which choose words and sentences and passages of the oldest and some later manuscripts which don't always agree in many details and, at times, more serious parts of Scripture.

Dusan Bogdanovic - Sonatina Homage to Haydn

 

 

Daniella Rossi, guitar

An upside down, turn your world around, reigning of justice

 

 

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Beth Ford McNamee

In today’s readings we are given an invitation to become a part of God’s reigning of justice. An upside down, turn your world around, reigning of justice. Where the lowly are raised up, the blind see, the hungry are fed, and the imprisoned are set free, the psalmist proclaims. Where God chooses the foolish of the world to shame the wise and chooses the weak of the world to shame the strong, Paul tells us. Seek justice, seek humility, the prophet Zephaniah exhorts us. Seek humility that no human being might boast before God. Seek humility, for we are in Christ Jesus, the wisdom of God. Seek humility, the very ground and birth of our being from God's fierce and tender love, a radical love that does justice, a justice that we are called to work for with others, especially learning from those on the margins.  

When I hear Jesus inviting us to see ourselves as part of God’s upside-down reigning of justice, I think about my time as a Jesuit volunteer in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Before arriving, I had read about poverty and oppressive systems, but it’s difficult to describe what happens to your heart when people you’ve only read about are now your friends, neighbors and students. When the people of global statistics are kids showing up at your gate gleefully calling out your new Swahili nickname “Beti! Beti!” ... And your neighbors are inviting you, “Karibu (Welcome),” and gesturing to you to “Kula,” (Eat), Beti, and just like that you’re sharing a meal. When global health and HIV/AIDS are no longer numbers but a teacher whose hand you held as he was dying. When your high school principal years later becomes one of the many Jesuit martyrs, giving his very life for the community he served. When your heart breaks open in tears and joys over and over again.

I hear Jesus saying “blessed” to my Tanzanian friends, neighbors, and students. You are blessed. I love you. I am with you. I’m inviting you to my reign of love and justice. You are blessed when you cook ugali and invite others to your meals over and over again. You are blessed when you carry water from the pump. For your hunger and thirst will be satisfied. You are blessed when you study by kerosene lamp and put your head down on your desk the next morning because there was not enough for breakfast. For your education is ufunguo wa maisha, (the key of life). You are blessed when you prepare the food for the mbsiba (the funeral), where mourning is loud and visceral. You are blessed. I love you. I am with you. You are a part of my reign of love and justice.

When I hear Jesus inviting us to see ourselves as part of God’s upside-down reigning of justice, I think about the university students and the community partners I serve with here in Philadelphia, now twenty years later. I hear Jesus saying “blessed” to my students. Not hashtag blessed. But deeply, authentically blessed. You are blessed when you march for racial justice on campus and in our city. You are blessed when you feel overwhelmed by anxiety and your classes and you find it hard to leave your room. You are blessed when you are changing your major, trying to figure out what you’re doing with “your one wild and precious life” (Mary Oliver, The Summer Day). You are blessed. I love you. I am with you. You are a part of my reign of love and justice.

I hear Jesus saying “blessed” to our community service partners. You are blessed when you mourn with those who have lost loved ones to gun violence. You are blessed when you pour countless hours into trauma informed education, tutoring, and mentoring. You are blessed when you are hungry and when you are able to eat in a loving, dignified space. You are blessed when you show up, marching in the streets and the ballot boxes for a more just society. You are blessed. I love you. I am with you. You are a part of my reign of love and justice.

Consider your calling, Paul says. Can we show up for this upside-down reigning of God? Can we place ourselves in spaces where we are not trying to be first, best, or boasting before God and others? Can we place ourselves instead in marginal spaces, place ourselves in humility before the sacredness of one another, to become people of authentic encounter, kinship, and relationship?

Consider your calling. God is calling us as my Tanzanian neighbors did to me, “Karibu” (Welcome). Welcome to your calling. Welcome to your calling that is blessedness, that is humility, that is fierce and passionate love, that is encounter, kinship, and relationship, that is collaborative and creative restructuring of our societies. So that the oppressed are set free, the lowly are lifted up, the mourning are comforted, and the hungry are not hungry in the first place. So that we may celebrate and join together in the Eucharistic banquet where no one is outside of God’s overflowing, abundant, and compassionate love. For this, let us rejoice and be glad!