A Reflection Upon our Season of Fall
::::: A Reflection from the Youth Director :::::
Can you feel the earth tilt? I write within Tuesday, November 18, 2008. The sun set today at 4.45pm. How many falls and winters have you crossed into, and through?
This tilt and seasonal transition always beckons to me – it allows me to pause and deeply feel that I am alive today – right now. I feel the earth tilt – I see it dim into beautiful fields of golden brown. Does this season touch you to? Does it draw you inward? Quiet you? I want to feel earthy! I want to find the curve of earth within the arch of my foot.
Does this time of year awaken your senses? How can we embrace this season as a church community? This tilt, this transition, this dying – paradoxically they awaken our senses to look beyond ourselves to our natural surroundings, yet close us in to our inward sense of being. What do we, as an intentional community (the church; Koinonia, Ecclesia), do with these themes? Can we incorporate these moments of pause into our lives right here at Our Saviors? A word that helps me understand all this is:
::::: **WONDER** :::::
“We forget that both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge are deeply rooted in the soil of mystery. The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all.” (Coffin.)
::::: Why wonder? ::::: Why am I talking about this? :::::
“Wonder” and Christ share commonalities. If digested correctly they both have the same effect on us – they both grant us eyes to see outside and beyond ourselves – forming communities and individuals defined by an “otherness”. This otherness in turn gives birth to a new kind of life that doesn’t necessarily find security and answers, but rather wildness, love, mystery, and justice…a kind of raw desire for more days, more tilts, more love, more justice…the greatest of course being love. (1 Cor 13;13)
This season, this reflection, this kind of Christ also brings real sorrow – it guides us deep, where both our lovely connectedness and our deathly disconnect sit as equal, share a bed, seek a love affair.
The next season contains the possibility of “God with Us”…Emmanuel. Now there is a dose of wonder! The God of the Cosmos fully revealed in a baby out in the back-house, out of sight and mind - this life that we know births God from a womb. Flesh and blood here and now - incarnate. Rev. William Sloan Coffin writes, “wonder has an ethical dimension, it leads to reverence…wonder/reverence and knowledge must find each other, re-wed, and stay married.” (p4)
Where does this all lead us as a Youth Group and a Church?
::::: **SEXUALITY** :::::
This big scary word is our theme at Youth Group for the month of November. Our conversation will specifically include our gay and lesbian friends. We are also looking at homosexuality as a Justice issue throughout the lenses of Proposition 8 and the documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So”.
So, why am I talking about this? Why wonder? I hope we digest it and become full of reverence for life, and active in a Christ-type of Justice. Wonder and Christ will be hitching posts throughout the sex/god conversation. The story of the Good Samaritan is a good focusing point. Through this teaching we learn that ,
“…it was the heretic, the enemy, the man of the wrong faith who did the right thing while the two men of the right faith flunked.”
- Casey Bailey
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