Reflections on This Week

This has been a heavy week. I have had multiple (albeit small) emotional breakdowns.

It has been in part due to the preparation for leaving to Europe (tomorrow at the crack of dawn) and in part due to the amount of work we have been attempting to complete before leaving... but it has also been in part due to my ever increasing desire to understand how goodness is brought into our world, both in small (micro) and large (macro) ways... and how I cannot seem to draft up a single, simple answer for such a complex dilemma.

And alas, this has been my framework for most of my life. That for whatever kind of puzzle you got, you just stick the right formula in... a solution for everyone as the Indigo Girls sing. It's a hard thing to recover from.

My spiritual tracks, my neural paths, my very natural tendencies have been in a very long process of being dismantled and taken apart (whilst trying to hold them all in focus in a single glance)... and they just want to plant back down into a simple, consistent, cohesive understanding that allows for my own limitations, but explains how goodness is brought forth into the world.

And Bono says I'd join the movement if there was one that I could believe in... and I'd say the same.

This week has been all over the place for me emotionally, but it has birthed something new in me. I'm not quite sure of what it is... some blessing and burden, one and the same.

My friend Emma sent me this book entitled Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy and wow, it's rocking all my ignorance I had regarding globalized capitalism and it's many implications.

And I just saw V is for Vendetta and I am still working through it's implications.

Are there no poets, writers, screenwriters, songwriters who can teach of this revolution that comes by way of peace and love and self-sacrifice and not violence overcoming violence?

I am thankful for the Wachowski brothers imaginative efforts... social prophets in our own time. But is this only means of revolution... of healing humanity... of truly allowing goodness to be cultivated in this world... through a violent overthrow?

And all this during a week I almost forgot about... the week of my Master's final days. And what does the cross have to say about this? Everything. That there is a narrative that we can choose to be a part of that denounces violence as a means of bringing shalom into our world. That it comes through our death (self-critique/sacrifice), not through our taking of lives that inhumane governments will be dismantled... And it comes from our own self-awareness in this whole story.

Pick up your cross and follow me... the price of social non-conformity, the symbol of non-violent revolution... that this peasant first-century Jew did not lose in his death on the cross. Rather, he started (or fulfilled or started-again) a movement that I hope will come to fuller fruition in my life.

So what does the cross mean to me this Easter weekend? That we are called to help midwife the Kingdom of God into our midst... and that we are called to this in the most self-sacrificial of ways (even unto our own death). That this message that was at the core of Jesus of Nazareth's teaching (ie. Re-imagine your life/world! The Kingdom of God is at hand) is only realized when humanity realizes that we might have more to do with this than we thought...