May 5, 2008
Connections
Verlyn Klinkenborg is a writer and a farmer. He wrote the other day about his farm, the animals who live there, and about how connected are they and he and we. He added, “I am stunned by the human ability to think of one’s life as a thing apart.”
He’s probably stunned a lot, as am I. Perhaps one of the highest gifts we’ve got by virtue of our creation and by virtue of Who it is we claim imagined us into being is our own imagination and its potential for creatively returning the favor, a favor which just might be one of the higher forms of worship.
When it comes to us humans, instead, we make up races and thus use them so to separate ourselves without considering maybe this is one of God’s masquerades as trickster just to see if we can work our way out of the maze and turn it into a labyrinth, the one with no apparent way out, the other with no apparent way in save to discover ourselves.
A maze is defined as a “tour puzzle” in the form of complex branching passages through which the solver must find a route. A labyrinth has an actual through-route and is not designed to be difficult to navigate, despite the common use of the word to indicate the opposite.
I wonder has it occurred to us that maybe the only prayer we’ve the power and the privilege to answer is the prayer Jesus prays to God that we may all be one (Jn 17.1-11, yesterday’s gospel) as they are one, which is pretty much One, I’d say, and apparently a prayer Jesus couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, himself. Instead, we prey… on all the ways we can find to separate ourselves — race and sex to name a couple — but also put considerable energy and hostility into creating even more — language, nation-states, Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, war, family names, immigrants.
Perhaps worst of all for us so-called churchers and other kinds of God-lovers, some of the very ones Jesus prayed about, we dream up religions and religions-within-religions (aka denominations, and the like). First, insulting God, and then tripping along our merry way to condemn each other to some horrible fate for not coming over to the other side as if it were ours.
Please, God, I hope you’re laughing. And Jesus, keep on praying.
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