Tag: church

Posted in family life

a run-in with special needs services

Posted on by kristinabean

A few weeks ago, while I was nursing Aubade in the mom’s room just off of the church sanctuary, I received a text on my phone asking me to please come to where I had dropped Rondel off for class.

This was highly disconcerting. I have known for years that Rondel struggles sometimes in the class environment; I’m not sure if it is the structure, the people, or the noise, but something about it can be difficult for him. Some weeks he’s protested about having to go to church at all, and threatened to hit or kick the other kids; some weeks he’s come out of class and told us about all the things he didn’t like. Other weeks he’s come out full of excited news about the toys he played with or the snacks he ate, however, so it has never been all bad. And this particular Sunday I wasn’t expecting anything to happen, because Rondel had told me on the way in that he was going to do well in class and was looking forward to the story.

When I reached his classroom, a woman I’d never met before introduced herself to me as the leader of the special needs branch of the kids ministry at our church, and told me what had happened: Rondel, perhaps overwhelmed by the chaos of class, the lack of individual adult direction and attention, or the noise of the worship music portion, tried several times to run away from the classroom. Since the kids were in the big music room at this point (all the older classrooms come together for a worship time in the middle of the hour), this woman had been present as well and had assisted Rondel’s classroom leaders in keeping him safe by taking him to the sensory classroom until he was able to calm down. By the time she showed me to that classroom, Rondel was happily and calmly playing with one of the pastor’s daughters, a sweet little girl with autism.

This triggered a cascade of events. Rondel’s teachers told me that they are normally able to accommodate him in the regular classroom because they typically have three adults and one can focus more on helping Rondel cope with the structure, the stimuli, and his own emotional reactions. Apparently this week it was especially difficult because there were only two adults in his classroom, and while the adult to child ratio was the same, they weren’t able to give him the focused attention he needs. So while this is the first time he’d actively tried to run away and needed to be diverted for his own safety, he doesn’t handle the classroom environment like most of the other children can. I’m sure that was hard for his teachers, and I’m equally sure it was hard for him, and was contributing to his complaints about church. Something needed to give.

J., the woman who directed the special needs ministry, set up a meeting with us the following week and asked us to fill out a questionnaire online. After talking it over, we agreed that for now we’d like it if Rondel could continue going to the sensory classroom each week, so that he could still hear the story, learn about God, and engage with other kids, without the stress and discomfort of the normal classroom getting in the way. The last thing I want is for him to associate church with anxiety and stress – and if he’s having to work that hard at emotional regulation the whole time, he’s not going to be learning anything else anyway. Eventually we’d like him to try to integrate back into his regular classroom with a “buddy” – a designated adult volunteer who helps prepare him for class beforehand and stays with him the whole time to help him with focus, impulse control, emotional reactivity, stimulation, and so on. We’re waiting for a few more volunteers though; I think we’re the third family in line for a buddy 🙂

In the meantime, I’ve already seen a marked change in Rondel on Sunday mornings. I asked him which classroom he’d like to go to and when he answered that he’d prefer the sensory classroom I asked him what he liked about it. After describing the swing and how he can push himself, the beanbags that he can crash into, and the Duplos he can build with, he said, “And I like the other kids there.”

I’ve never heard him say that about a group of children before, besides his cousins.

In just two weeks with this ministry my little social boy, my hypersensitive extrovert, had finally found a place where he could be himself around other kids and still fit in and make friends. He had gone from threatening to hurt and fight with the other kids to telling me how much he liked them, even remembering one of them by name.

I don’t know how all of this will play out in the long run. It’s made me simultaneously more worried and more reassured – worried, because what if something is wrong inside Rondel’s brain that is going to make his whole life more challenging for him; and reassured, because it feels like validation of what I’ve been feeling Rondel’s whole life, that something is just a bit different for him, and because I know there are people on our side in this, rooting for him and supporting him. Whatever does happen in the future, however, Rondel and I are abundantly blessed in this moment to be receiving the unconditional love – giving, serving, and non-judgmental – of the body of Christ through our local church. And for that I am unequivocally thankful.

Posted in family life

on the first day of Advent…

Posted on by kristinabean

Thanksgiving pictures will be up a little late because I forgot my camera at my in-laws’ house and will have to wait a few days for it to be returned (my FIL fortunately works fairly close to our house, despite living rather far away – I don’t envy his daily commute).

However, life in our house has moved on from Thanksgiving to Advent with what feels like incredible speed. The downtown area where we live is fully decked out for Christmas, with a whole street blocked off for a three-story Christmas tree, photo ops, and continuously-playing holiday music. Even our church this morning (to my disappointment) was fully decorated and singing Christmas carols all service long, and I honestly felt overwhelmed by it all. I love Christmas – don’t get me wrong! – but I love Advent even more, and the abrupt switch from ordinary time to Christmas, without the slow build-up and growing anticipation of Advent in between, made me feel like Christmas was just being dumped on me at the expense of the specialness and wonder of it all. I can’t remember feeling like this in the past; for some reason I am just not ready for Christmas this year, and I’m hardly even ready for Advent. I need time to live the lamentation and longing of Advent, to prepare my heart for the unbelievable joy and promise of Christmas… maybe I just need to spend time alone in the daily readings for these next few weeks, immersing myself in the pattern and calling of the Church.

For now, though, I did bring out a few decorations and the Advent wreath (and discovered that I only had two whole candles, one purple and one rose, along with five or six candle stumps… ah well, our Advent may be interrupted by the baby anyway!). I had hoped to do the Jesse Tree this year with the boys, but I didn’t find/make a set of ornaments I liked in time, so we’ll just be reading the stories without the visible accompaniment. I did find a great children’s Bible with beautiful, well-written stories that are still short enough to easily add to dinner and the Advent candles, so we’ll be using that for our Advent readings as a family and keeping the Jesus Storybook Bible in regular circulation with our picture books – Rondel has been choosing it for his bedtime story for a few weeks now, and I don’t want that to stop! Anyway, this is our new one:

cogsb

The illustrations are done by different artists from around the world, and represent different artistic styles as well as different ethnicities and cultures – and they are all absolutely beautiful. I’ve read quite a few of the short (two to three page) stories on my own, and read the first one tonight at dinner; I’m looking forward to the rest! I’m especially excited that Ruth and Esther are both included here, as they are not in the Jesus Storybook Bible.

One thing that gave me hope for the season in the face of my own lackluster feelings so far was Rondel’s reaction to helping me pull out some preliminary Christmas decorations, and finding our nativity set amongst them. My plan was to introduce the characters slowly throughout Advent, like I did last year… but Rondel spent the whole afternoon playing with the people (pretending they were random Bible characters like King Darius and Daniel because we haven’t read the Christmas story for a while!) and chose the baby Jesus for his bedtime snuggle toy tonight. So that was significantly sweeter than my well-laid plans would have likely been, and a gift for me to see his delight in the season even if it isn’t rolling out perfectly and liturgically correctly. My goal is to meet him in that joy, and make the most of the Advent time we have before our baby comes, instead of morphing into my inner curmudgeon…

I hope your Thanksgiving went well and that you are entering Advent with a more Christ-centered and joyful heart than I have had so far!

Posted in musings

to the “difficult” kids

Posted on by kristinabean

From eighth grade through college I volunteered every Wednesday night with the Awana program at my church, with the K-2nd grade kids. I loved it for so many reasons 🙂 But what I came to realize through that experience, as well as through the summers I spent as a camp counselor, is that my favorite children were almost always the difficult ones, the trouble-makers, the strong-willed and stubborn kids, the insecure and struggling kids acting out without even knowing why. They seemed to live in turbulent waters, when most of their peers were coasting by around them; the behaviors that should have been perceived as a plea for attention, connection, and love all too often simply served to push other people away from them. And I loved these kids, and sought to connect with them, and trained my defensive instincts in their behalf.

Then I became a mother, and one of these kids was my own child.

And I realized that no matter how much I had cared about those other kids, and gone through hard things with them and for them, I had never come close to loving them like I love my son. I had stood up for them against the negative perceptions their behaviors had led to – but I had never felt that primal physical rage in their defense that I feel when someone makes even the slightest off-hand comment disparaging my child. I wish I had loved them better. I wish I had been a fiercer advocate for them; I wish my heart had been more easily broken for them, my life more freely poured out for them. Because I know now, and I knew then, so I had no excuse, that most adults will see the negative behavior and never look past it to the child who may be scared, overwhelmed, overstimulated, uncomfortable, and just simply in need of love and guidance.

When does your heart bleed, as a mother of a needy child, a socially awkward child, a child who doesn’t fit in without that extra love and care?

– when you watch your son “playing” with a group of peers, and they’re all busily climbing and digging and talking and investigating the world, and he’s sitting on the side just holding a toy and watching them, trying to figure out what’s going on, like they all know this social script that he’s never heard of

– when you come to pick your child up from Sunday School and he’s trying to break into a circle of kids building, to be part of the group, and one of them says, “oh good, he’s going home!” when she sees him running to you

– when you glance at the activity/story pages coming home with your son and the only personalized comment is that he played with his tongue.

In the moment I read that comment I knew only two things:

  1. Since when does an adult who claims to love and represent Christ think it is ok to fixate on a “weird” behavior that a child has to the exclusion of all that child is as a person created in the image of God? Also, did they think they were enlightening me or something? Believe me, random childcare helper, I know my son better than you do. I know that he licks his hands when he’s overstimulated by the noise and chaos of a group of kids, when he’s trying to figure out social cues, when he’s excited by everything going on around him or worn out from processing a hundred different things at once. You don’t need to fill me in on that piece of information.
  2. One callous and ignorant comment is not sufficient justification to leave a church, no matter how strongly I wanted to in the visceral rage of my first reaction.

I just want the world to know that the kids who seem different or difficult are beautiful, funny, intelligent, sweet, unique individuals – just like the ones who fit in, make friends easily, listen well, and charm you with their good behavior. You just need to see them for who they are, to see the person who needs and struggles and wants to be loved, instead of stopping at the outward web of odd or negative behaviors.

Posted in musings

“closed-hand” issues and confusing terms – a quibble with my pastor

Posted on by kristinabean

In church on Sunday our pastor was distinguishing between what he called “closed-hand” issues (what C.S. Lewis might have termed Mere Christianity, the essential doctrines of the faith) and “open-hand” issues (points that aren’t clearly taught in Scripture and about which Christians are free to disagree, like the details of the end times or evolution). I was nodding along with him, as this is familiar territory for me, expecting him to take it in a truly ecumenical Lewisian fashion, when he suddenly burst out sola scriptura as a core, essential, inarguable tenet of the faith.

Excuse me?

I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, and suggest that he simply meant to say that Scripture is inerrant and authoritative, the primary guide for our faith, because I don’t think any Christian group through the millennia of the Church would disagree. But what he actually said was that Scripture is the sole authority for the faith and for Christian living – and that is not Biblically taught and was not held by the Church for the majority of her existence. Logically, this makes sense. The Bible can interpreted in a million ways, some of them drastically different and leading towards widely varied ends, so as a sole authority it doesn’t seem to be very well-suited for keeping either orthodoxy or orthopraxy intact. There has to be some way to determine which interpretations are valid and which are heretical, and since Jesus is no longer living on earth to deliver those kind of judgments, it would make sense for the authorities within the Church, led by the Holy Spirit, to have that kind of authority.

If the Church isn’t led by the Holy Spirit, than to trust her authority and direction on the interpretation of Scripture would obviously be a dicey matter, no different than turning to any random person on the street and following their opinion. But we do see in the Bible Jesus promising to send the Holy Spirit to remind the apostles of everything He taught; we see the Spirit coming down with power and transforming the apostles and other believers; we see the early church following the decisions of the apostles as to which laws and traditions to live by. Was that just because they didn’t have a written Bible yet? Did all those councils and traditions and oral decisions become unnecessary once the Bible was assembled? Considering the number of heresies and divisions that have arisen in the 16 centuries since then, I don’t think so. We still need a person, or people, led by God, to clear up arguments and prevent error from creeping in to our understanding of the inerrant Word.

So please be more clear, pastor, about your terms and definitions. Please try not to exclude the vast majority of Christians throughout time and space from your tight definition of the “closed-hand” issues one must believe to be truly Christian by narrowing down the broad historically-accepted truth into your Protestant doctrine, which may or may not be true (I’d love to hear your arguments for it!) but which is most definitely not universally believed by even the great Christians of the past.

Posted in musings

thoughts on transgenderism – my first attempt at writing through this from a Christian perspective

Posted on by kristinabean

There are some things (both moral and doctrinal) about which the Church is incredibly clear and precise – things like the nature of the Trinity, or the objective sinfulness of abortion. She paints those pictures with clear lines and well-defined forms, even through the layers of human or divine complexity that color them.

There are other things about which she is largely silent, leaving the murky watercolors to be lived out in the conscience-informed prudence of her members. These things include education (where there are basic principles within which parents are left free to make decisions according to their wisdom and personality), housing choices (urban or rural? large home or small? bad neighborhood or good? – the choice may be a matter of obedience to God’s leading for an individual, but is never universally proscribed), career paths (let’s just say that some things are automatically excluded and that’s about it), and so on. These are things that touch a myriad of moral principles, but are not themselves defined or regulated in a binding way.

And while homosexual behavior falls solidly into the first camp, the Church having defined it as inherently disordered, transgenderism is just as definitely in the second camp. There is no official position, no magisterial teaching, no long history of tradition draw upon from the writings of the Fathers. We are left to figure it out on our own, to sort through the various principles that are at play, and to decide in the circumstances with which we are presented how best to behave as a follower of Christ in a shattered world. We cannot naively assume that everything is positive, nor should we cynically believe that everything is negative. We should not blow with the winds of extreme gender theory and deny that male and female have any real meaning, nor should we deny the reality of what most transgender and intersex individuals face by claiming that they are all perverts or performers. After all, if our reason and will can be weakened or damaged by sin, and if we respond to this brokenness not by throwing out our understanding of the importance of reason and will but by giving our support and love to those who are affected, why wouldn’t sexuality be the same? Can we give them the benefit of the doubt and believe what they say about their own experience? Can we acknowledge that maybe the general brokenness of creation has touched the link between their bodily and interior genders, and left them feeling incomplete or out of place?

I totally understand all the gut reactions most people have to transgenderism. It just feels strange. It feels especially strange when someone who has been living as one gender for years announces that they really identify with the other gender, because we don’t see the journey of growing self-awareness, suffering, and courage that have to build up in order for such an announcement to take place. You want to claim that their new identity must be a lie because otherwise your whole previous relationship with them feels false. You see their gender-typical body and wonder how in the world they can feel like the other gender. You feel like your own experience of your gender is being stereotyped and patronized by people who have no genuine understanding of it (especially when people like Jenner try to reduce femininity to fashion – I have serious trouble believing the authenticity of that transition, to be honest with you, because he/she doesn’t seem to understand or value womanhood as anything beyond physical appearance and sexual objectification). But those gut reactions, and the celebrities that fuel them, can’t address the moral and philosophical principles at play.

Can we find a way to embrace the “both-and” tension in this area, as Catholicism does in so many areas? Can we praise and value masculinity and femininity as the duality created in the image of God, without demonizing those who fall in between or are dealt aspects of both? Can we continue to see the beauty and mystery of the two sexes, both in marriage and society, but still make a space for those who, because of the fallenness of the world, don’t fit neatly into that dichotomy? The transgender individual is a human being just like us, called to holiness, called to Christ; he (in the universal sense) is our brother, for whom Christ died, for whom we are supposed to live, that he might know Christ and come to heaven in the end. How can we say we have truly loved him if our rejection pushes him away from the Church and away from Christ?

Posted in musings

marriage, celibacy, chastity, and grace

Posted on by kristinabean

When it comes to sex, it seems that there are two very different basic mindsets: the Church’s ideal of chastity and the more pragmatic secular view of our culture. In the first, sex is part of the covenant of marriage, a way in which two people develop intimacy and practice mutual self-giving, and the means by which new human life is created. Sex isn’t about pleasure-seeking, or about fulfilling physical urges, but rather about offering one’s whole self to another, under God; the married individual has no more permission to lust after or use another person for personal pleasure than does the unmarried. And of course, considering all these boundaries around the understanding and act of sex within marriage, sex outside of marriage is not allowed at all, and celibacy, in which the individual dedicates his or her self-giving toward Christ and the Church rather than to a spouse and family, is honored and encouraged.

In contrast, our culture today tends to view sex as a means to enjoy ourselves – preferably with another person in a loving relationship, but not necessarily so. Sex is divorced from child-bearing as much as possible, so that physical pleasure can be had without the fear and burden of unwanted pregnancies. Masturbation is accepted (although never seen as the ideal) because how can making yourself feel good, without affecting anyone else, possibly be a bad thing? People have sexual needs, after all, and to deny them the chance to satisfy those needs is damaging and unrealistic, just as it would be damaging and unrealistic to expect people to go without eating or drinking. Even among Christians, this idea that people have physical sexual needs (as opposed to desires) is prevalent, with the result that marriage is turned into a vehicle to sexual fulfillment rather than a chance to give all of oneself, even one’s sexuality, to another person. While most Christians, looking at the example of Paul, admit that some few people are called to celibacy, the thought that large numbers of people might be called and equipped for it is simply bizarre.

There’s a third camp out there, probably the largest one to be honest, that ascribes to the ideals of the Church but denies (typically not in so many words) that those ideals can be lived out in a fallen world. Marriage provides the release for the sexual urges our sinful minds are unable to control, and thus the encouragement of celibacy opens the door for secret sexual sin as men (primarily) are left to burn with passion without an acceptable outlet.

What this third group omits from their understanding of sex and chastity is the efficacy of God’s grace for His children. I will grant that if we were simply left with a law to follow and no grace to help us follow it, and if that law specified heterosexual monogamy as the only acceptable setting for sex, than we would want as many people as possible to be happily married so that their physical drives wouldn’t lead them into sin. (Or, of course, we could seek to change the law so that those drives that aren’t satisfied in heterosexual monogamy could also be fulfilled… that is what our culture does, building off of the Christian misunderstanding of marriage as an outlet for sexual need to paint the whole concept of marriage itself as a constraining and damaging force on human sexuality.) But the whole beauty of the faith is that we are not left on our own with just a law to obey: we are given the ability to obey it, by grace, through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us. His righteousness is transmitted to us, not just as a legal covering, but as a reality that begins to transform us body and soul. Do we doubt the presence and power of His grace?

God has called all of His people to chastity, whether within marriage or out of it, and His grace will enable us to live chastely if we seek it. He doesn’t command and then leave us to obey on our own, but gives us His own life – Christ Himself living in us – that we might walk in righteousness. For some, that means the continual giving of oneself to God through giving oneself to another person in marriage, sexually as well as in all other areas of life, as marriage becomes the occasion for self-sacrifice, mutual submission, and radical service; for other, it will mean the continual giving of oneself to God through sacrifice and service to God’s people, giving up the pleasure of sex, the joy of biological children, the happiness of monogamous love, to be able to focus more completely on the work of God and to be free to serve God’s people wherever and whenever the need arises. Both paths are hard, and both are made possible by the free gift of the grace of God, who desires us to obey and gives us the ability to obey in Him.

(For a really good talk on this, in the context of celibate priests in the Catholic church, check out Father Eric Bergman’s talk at the Institute of Catholic Culture. He is a married priest, having originally been Anglican, so he has an interesting personal perspective on it!)

Posted in musings, quotes

stay with us, Lord – praying for faith

Posted on by kristinabean

In a world that is culturally distant from God, in a society that tends toward individual isolation and values independence, self-sufficiency, skepticism, and cynicism, it can be hard to remember that God is always present with us, and even harder to feel that presence throughout the day. The urgencies and immediacies of each each moment cloud our awareness of Him, and focus our minds on the temporal and fleeting instead of the heavenly and eternal. The brokenness of our world makes it harder still to remember Him as a God both powerful and loving, because the pain of death, oppression, fear, war, terrorism, unemployment, sickness, and so on seem far more real and relevant than His high and unknown redemptive plan and purpose. Those things we see, are forced to see, time and time again; God, we have to take on a bit of faith.

And the Church, in her wisdom knowing how difficult it can be to rely on this invisible faith when the world we see is devolving into chaos and darkness, gives us these beautiful, simple prayers.

Christ rose from the dead and is always present in His Church.
Let us adore Him, and say:

Stay with us, Lord.

Lord Jesus, victor over sin and death, glorious and immortal,
Be always in our midst.

Stay with us, Lord.

Come to us in the power of Your victory,
And show our hearts the loving kindness of Your Father

Stay with us, Lord.

Come to heal a world wounded by division,
For You alone can transform our hearts and make them one.

Stay with us, Lord.

Strengthen our faith in final victory,
And renew our hope in Your second coming.

Stay with us, Lord.

(from Thursday’s Liturgy of the Hours)

That is what we pray for – His presence, His power, His love, His healing and transformation in our broken world – and it is what He has promised in His Word, so we know that one day, someday, our prayers will be fully answered and redemption fully brought forth. And in the meantime we pray for the faith to hold fast to Him when our sight and understanding fail.

Posted in musings

suffering and the music of the church

Posted on by kristinabean

I wonder if much “early” Christian music (well, it lasted long past the early years of the Church!) was some variation of chant because the Church was so aware of the brokenness of the world, and the chant allowed worshippers to lift up their voices in lament, in solidarity, in supplication, and, ultimately, in a hope devoid of false optimism. The tones of traditional chant are so haunting, so melancholy, and yet so natural to sing to – almost as natural as speaking – and I think those qualities reflect the way in which early Christians saw the world. They were close to its pain, suffering with it and for it and because of it, oppressed and persecuted, a misunderstood minority, laboring for the vulnerable and cast out, weeping with Christ for a world that they saw destroying itself. One cannot simultaneously be saving babies from abandonment to the elements and skipping around like nothing is wrong with the world; one cannot see friends and loved ones tortured and killed for their faith and still think that this life is a fountain of roses and rainbows.

So their music was born of the pain they saw (pain stemming from unredeemed sin in the world), the pain they felt (pain born of their own jarring disconnect with the culture around them), and the pain they remembered (pain that Jesus had endured on their behalf). It should be no surprise that it was a sorrowful and melancholy music, a music of prayer and supplication, of lament and mourning; we should expect that even their joy and hope would be colored by the sorrow they felt for a broken world and the pain they knew at their own persecution and suffering in that world. I wonder how we could re-introduce this spirit of worship (not necessarily the style) back into our Christian worship today, which (at least in the Evangelical circles I’m familiar with) tends to be buoyant, cheerful, excited, and positive. I don’t think those are bad things by any means – I think the church has much to be thankful for and much reason to give praise to God – but I do think that it tends to be the focus at bit too much of the time. Our constant obsession with the positive leaves us isolated when suffering comes, because we have never seen our community mourn together over the simple, everyday, sorrows and struggles of life in a fallen world. Instead, we see that the “Christian” thing to do is to give praise no matter what, to focus on the blessings no matter what, and to deny the pain and the brokenness.

There’s obviously a balance that’s needed, on a theological as well as a musical level. It is good to be reminded of the larger purpose and beauty of God’s plan when life is hard and things hurt; it’s not so good to feel like the worship service is a pep rally and our pain is out of place and unheard even by God. It is good to enter into the sufferings and laments of those who broken and hurting; it’s not so good to be left feeling that there is no cause for hope or joy or celebration in this life. But maybe if we learn from the Church throughout the ages, in all her many traditions, we might find a way to better balance the tendencies and weaknesses of our own age.

And now just for something incredibly beautiful and uplifting, even if you don’t think chant is your type of thing 🙂

(I’ve been learning a lot more about chant tones, notations, and how to chant prayers from David Clayton through his website The Way of Beauty and especially through his talk to the Institute of Catholic Culture, which, incidentally, I would highly recommend as a source of information about the history and theology of the Church from Biblical to modern times.)

Posted in musings

meditations on the season of lent

Posted on by kristinabean

“Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against your soul.” – I Peter 2:11

Today begins a season of abstinence in the Church – a time set apart to deny the flesh and aim for holiness. While we should of course be seeking to live our best for God every day, the changing of the seasons brings us a reason to say “today” and implement a change or a discipline that will draw us nearer to Christ, similar to how the arbitrary changing of the secular calendar year naturally leads us to make resolutions and changes in our lives. But while our New Year’s resolutions often focus on things like diet and exercise that will make us healthier, happier, and more successful, our Lenten intentions should focus on changes that will make an eternal difference for our souls: changes that lead us to God, that point our hearts and our minds upward.

Lent is a time for setting aside the things that we turn to instead of to God for solace, distraction, or pleasure. It is not a time for denying the goodness and value of those things, but rather a time for remembering the greater goodness and value of God Himself, and for pursuing that greater good. So, traditionally, we fast throughout Lent, and abstain from certain types of food, not to say that food is bad, but to say that we will sacrifice even this basic bodily comfort for God, that we will endure the discomfort of a few missed meals in order to break away from our bondage to the flesh and set our wills toward holiness. Where we would find ourselves snacking in a moment of boredom or anxiety, we are instead faced with an open space of time to turn toward God in prayer or meditation. Where we would typically satiate our hunger immediately and unthinkingly, we are instead given an opportunity to offer up our discomfort to God and remember His inordinate, extravagant, willingly-borne suffering for us.

Food is the universal fast of the Church because it is a universal need of human beings, and as such touches each of our hearts and bodies in various ways. But as individuals, it is also good to examine our lives and see what thing or practice might be serving a similar role, and which would thus be a good spiritual practice to abstain from. For me, this year, it will be sweets and iPod games, because I have noticed myself turning to both those things for pleasure, entertainment, comfort, and distraction instead of taking the needs and desires of my heart to the Lord. Instead of playing a game while I wait for the light rail, I can read the Bible on my iPod, pray, or simply meditate on Christ. Instead of turning to cookies in the evening to wind down and relax, I can turn to Jesus and give Him my worries and struggles from the day. So these are small things, and simple things, but things that will be difficult for me and that will force me to cling to the grace and presence of God – which is ultimately the whole point of Lent.

We serve a God who is holy, and He calls us to be holy as well. And yet our inherent tendency is to enjoy the feasts and festivals of the faith – the high celebrations of Christmas and Easter, the joyful commemoration of the Resurrection each Sunday, even the expectant hush of Advent – while ignoring the fasts. Is it any wonder that the celebrations themselves tend to lose their power and their wonder for us, when we have sought to fill every day with pleasure and never let our hearts meditate on the sorrow and suffering of our Lord and His call for us? Is it surprising to us that we can no longer feel the exquisite piercing joy of celebrating the Incarnation and the Resurrection when we have closed our ears to the darkness of Good Friday and the hard road of obedience that Jesus modeled for us? We need a time to look upon the evil in our world with open and unflinching eyes, to mourn the sin and suffering in our families, communities, and nations, to sit with the bereaved and the broken, to understand the burdens of injustice and oppression, without instantly drowning our uncomfortable feelings in platitudes or mind-numbing distractions. Lent is that time.

Come with the Church into the heart of the world’s pain. Come suffer with her as she seeks to understand and bear the hurt of all the lost and broken souls wandering through this vale of tears. Come walk with our Lord through His sorrowful Passion, which He endured for our sake. Come, enter into Lent.

Posted in musings

the eucharist

Posted on by kristinabean

I’m hungry for it.

I sat in church Sunday night and sang the Advent songs and read the corporate prayers from centuries past and listened to the pastor preaching on the redemptive hope God brings to the most unlikely people and my heart was filled with a deep ache, a powerful longing, a thirst and a hunger.

They called us up for Communion and they didn’t say what they normally say – that the bread and the wine represent the body and blood of Christ. No, they quoted Jesus and said that it is His body and His blood and I thought, “I wish it was.”

The nature of the Eucharist was (and maybe still is) the strangest of all Catholic doctrines to me when I first encountered it; like the disciples in John 6, it almost made me want to turn away because it is so hard to understand and accept. We’ve had centuries of Christians trying to explain it away when maybe we should be taking it seriously… I thought maybe I would just forget about it and instead study the other points of difference, and wait to see how God would move.

And sitting in a Protestant church, I felt an incredibly deep hunger for the presence of God – to feel Him in me, tangibly, here and now, because here and now is where and when I need Him, in my weakness and in my sin. Broken, I need His wholeness; thirsty, I need His living water; struggling, I need His grace. As I sat there, I hungered for His body, broken for me, for the true Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I’m not even sure if I believe it yet, intellectually, but emotionally my heart was telling me that I need it.

Sigh.

Show me Your way, Lord, and light my path with Your Word, that my feet might not stray from the truth. I know that You are true, and righteous, and holy; draw me near to You.