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RSSBack Issue: February, 2012It’s Lent and I’m TiredPosted February 22nd, 2012 by Jen in features, holidays, religion8 Comments » Lent is here. I will wake up at 5 a.m. for the next 40 days and that, my friends, may create some cranky mornings. Six a.m. is my usual wake-up, and that extra hour is like three to me. (Coffee is still in the picture, though.) I wondered if sleep was a strange thing to give up for Lent, and I found that others have chosen this, too, well, at least one, and I imagine there must be others. This morning, Ash Wednesday morning, I didn’t quite make it…5:30 a.m. was the best I could do, but tomorrow morning is a new chance. A sub-theme for me will have to be allowing myself grace for Lent. I love sleep. I hate waking up early. It’s a sacrifice for me and I had to choose this because I most dreaded this, but I long for this discipline at the same time. I hope to focus that extra hour in deeper prayer, worship, reading the Bible, being disciplined spiritually and maybe even get a jump on the dishes or laundry? Yes, I do want to get some laundry done, and in fact, that’s the second thing I did this morning, after reading Luke 18 and praying I could be as persistent as that widow. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and continues for the next 40 days leading up to Easter. It mirrors the 40 days Jesus fasted in the wilderness and speaks of his great sacrifice and asks us to sacrifice, too.
It’s not just Catholics who observe Lent. It’s Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, other Protestants, even non-religious people (like this fellow who abstained from forwarding jokes and silly links to his friends). I’m not Catholic, but love so many of their liturgical traditions, and my own church doesn’t celebrate Lent, but really, this should be a very personal observation, in my opinion, and forgive me for revealing what I am privately doing. (!) Are you wondering what you can do as a sacrifice? Find an undisciplined area of your life and tackle it. It really doesn’t have to be this exact 40 day period, but it’s nice to know that you are in union with so many others, and perhaps that thought is motivating? Do you talk too much? Try disciplined silence for Lent. Do you gossip? Let no ill word be passed along this season. Are you gluttonous? Then fast. Are you too sedentary? Then exercise. Do you drink too much? Give up that extra glass of wine. Are you addicted to social media? Forego Facebook. Do you love your Starbucks latté too much? Pass it up and pass the money to a friend in need instead. I was born of two very undisciplined people into a chaotic and unstructured home and I’ve been mad about it ever since. I’m convinced that I missed the disciplined and organized genes and have to work harder than everyone else as a result. But yet I’m obsessed with people who are regulated, ordered, accomplished, self-sacrificing. There’s that Proverbs 31 woman, and then Susannah Wesley who was up early enough to pray for two hours and then spend six hours of her day home schooling ten children, and you know how I love Bonhoeffer. They all share qualities of extreme discipline, self-control, and a desire for obedience to God even at a high cost. Maybe Lent is my chance each year to take one step closer to a disciplined and timely life? (I do hope that by Easter, I will have formed a new 5 a.m. pattern that sticks, that leads to better time-management habits.) I know, it’s not about me. It’s not about me. I have to repeat that for my own sake. It should be about emptying myself and making room for God, sharpening my mind to better know the fullness of Him.
Technorati Tags: faith, Lent, spiritual discipline  The Staggering Relevance of BonhoefferPosted February 4th, 2012 by Jen in features, germany, history, persecuted church, politics/world news, religion9 Comments » Bonhoeffer’s been dogging me for decades and sometimes I do wish he’d back off, because he’s always reminding me that anything of value has a high price. I’m a tight-wad, I don’t like to pay high prices. Perhaps you’ve not been introduced to Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Today is his birthday, and 106 years ago he entered the world, along with his twin sister, Sabine, in Breslau, Germany, bringing great joy to Paula and Karl Bonhoeffer, and eventually there would be eight children who had the most lovely and nurturing family a child could hope for. Above the west entrance of Westminster Abbey in London are 10 modern martyrs – Bonhoeffer’s statue is among them. In the briefest of words, Bonhoeffer was a theologian, a pastor, a writer, a Christian, a prophet, an anti-Nazi spy. He was executed on April 9, 1945 in a German concentration camp for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, just days before liberation of that camp. But I’d like to talk about why we should be concerned about Bonhoeffer in the 21st century.
Exactly why is he relevant to such a degree that people are still writing biographies about him and giving talks and holding congresses? Germany in the 1930s and 40s is challenging to comprehend — the Nazi and Jewish issues, of course, the role of the church, and I wonder how to extrapolate from those times without finding a Nazi behind every overreaching government act. The state of Bonhoeffer’s world was that the German Christian church looked the other way as Jews were being carted off for “resettlement in the East.” In Bonhoeffer’s last great work, Ethics, though unfinished he considered it his magnum opus, he rebukes the church for her grave offenses against humanity and allowing herself to be subjugated by the Nazi regime:
Could this not have been written ten minutes ago, as Metaxes said in an interview? What are today’s burning issues? I ask, as I seek to find Bonhoeffer’s relevance. Abortion is one. I’m not comfortable addressing this contentious subject. Every person I know has been affected by this, either she has personally had an abortion or knows someone who has. And so who wants to go around telling a woman she is a negligent person, a selfish creature, a murderer? Not me. I vaguely, then rather insistently, wondered if Bonhoeffer ever had an opinion on the topic of abortion or the right to life. I discovered in his book, Ethics, what I was looking for.
Bonhoeffer considered many facets of abortion, including the pastoral care that necessarily should be involved:
He further speaks to extreme cases:
I’m amazed at the specific issues Bonhoeffer addresses with regard to abortion, and it all leaves me little room to wonder what Bonhoeffer would say today in the 21st century. As Eric Metaxas said, Bonhoeffer is staggeringly relevant. He further makes it clear that the right to life is not based on the qualities of the individual.
I read all this from Ethics just yesterday and my head fell into my hands and I wept. I almost didn’t want to know; silly, it’s not like Bonhoeffer’s opinion would change my mind, I had concluded when I was very young that abortion was an injustice. But have you ever experienced knowledge that suddenly unloads responsibility? It was this, and I wept, and I couldn’t even allow myself to grasp the entirety as I would have literally fallen to the ground from the weight of it. I don’t want to become a radical, oh, at least not any more radical than I already am. It’s dangerous to be radical. It’s so much safer to be non-radical, at least on this side of Heaven. Bonhoeffer was a radical of sorts by all accounts, and he paid for it with his life, with a a piano wire around his neck as he dangled naked in the courtyard of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp in Germany. And yet he is my hero, and has been for two decades. Someone gave me The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer when I was in my early twenties, and that was my introduction to this compelling man. I read bits and pieces and the words just sat smoldering in the recesses of my mind for twenty years. I do gravitate to the edge of costliness, but to actually take the leap, like Bonhoeffer, is not fully in my nature.
So from the beginning of my life as a committed Christian, I’ve had in the background of my thinking, always, the cost of discipleship, which is of course clear in the teachings of Jesus, but made so visible to me by Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was continually accused of being a single-issue fanatic in his time. And why? He vehemently opposed Nazi interference in the church and so was stripped of his pastoral license and forbidden to speak in public or print or publish. He then helped Jews escape to Switzerland which led to his first arrest. Don’t we look back from our vantage point and not see this as fanatical at all? We are not allowed the privilege of seeing our present from a future viewpoint, and that’s why I spend all this time with Bonhoeffer, searching and probing for relevance and truth to help myself, and maybe spare myself from death of conscience. But I’ve come to realize there are rarely single-issue fanatics. There is a vast underpinning of philosophies and moralities that find expression in a single-issue, and start digging and you will find the true breadth of it all. Bonhoeffer’s extensive writings demonstrate this theory, and the complexity of what appears to be a single-issue begs to be examined. Five years ago, on the anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s execution, I wrote an essay exploring Bonhoeffer’s call to the church, a call to action for times when the state is involved in illegitimate actions. I said I’d write more later. And here it is, it took me a while. I quote again from Bonhoeffer’s writings in Ethics, scathing words to the church in his day relating to the Jews, but equally applicable and significant for the unborn in our day:
Bonhoeffer, oh, could he have known that he would suffer to the last and to the fullest, with Christ and with the Jews and the undesirables? I do think he knew, and he intentionally chose the way of the cross.
May I leave you with some resources for you to further examine the relevance of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to your world? Following are some links (which have been of immense help to me) to books, essays, videos, blogs, all of which either directly speak of Bonhoeffer, or involve current issues to which his principles could be applied. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas
Technorati Tags: abortion, Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas, Ethics, Jewish question, Nazi Germany Why Claire Berlinski is AwesomePosted February 3rd, 2012 by Jen in politics/world news0 Comments While Claire tells me exactly what is going on in Syria at this moment in totally understandable and frank terms, FoxNews thinks that today’s best world news is that a school principal in Trinidad puts students’ heads in toilets. Truly, nothing about Syria on Fox’s main page as I write this. CNN does have a story on their main page, but I really don’t like CNN and they fail to mention possible outcomes, they title their story including the words “bold and exhilarating” which is sort of inappropriate for the situation, and they seem to think diplomats or the UN might be of some use here. CNN says the U.N. Security Council is drafting a resolution to “put more pressure on Syria,” while Ms. Berlinski says:
Ms. Berlinski does honest risk assessment and thinks of a plan–slim chances of anything working but at least she’s thinking.
Thanks, Claire. While I think she’s rather crazy and radical to choose of her own volition to live and write from Istanbul, isolate herself from friends and family, continually place herself in bodily danger, and insert her opinion at her peril on explosive Middle East politics, she’s pretty awesome. |
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