Vespers Reflection

Yesterday, I had the privilege of giving the reflection during SOT vespers. This is the reflection I gave, the skeleton of which was my Christmas letter last year.

The passage was John 13:33-38.

Thanks to J. & L. for all their help.

A few years ago I was going through a really terrible break-up. I’m sure many of us have had them—the kind where you emerge three months later only to realize that you’ve inadvertently listened to every album The Cure has ever made, you’ve gained or lost ten pounds, and the Thai restaurant up the street knows not only your name, but your credit card number and order as well. In the middle of this intense bout of self-pity, I called a close friend. As soon as she picked up the phone I burst into tears. “I am completely and utterly unlovable, and I am going to die old and alone, crushed under a stack of 1st edition Tolkien and Arthur Conan Doyle, and feral cats are going to get into my house and eat me.”

After about 20 seconds of silence she said, “Kel, let’s be honest here. You’re going to grad school for THEOLOGY. You’re never going to be able to afford 1st editions. It’ll be crushed to death under stacks of newspapers.” I had forgotten that above all else, this woman is a pragmatist, and not necessarily the one to turn to for comfort. A few days later, I picked up my phone to discover a text message from her. It said simply, “Love is risky.” My heart jumped into my throat. More than my other friends’ insistence that the guy was a jerk and that I was better off, more than my mother’s concerned phone calls or my roommate’s homemade soup, these words cut through the blur of pain and frustration and abandonment I was feeling. Love is Risky.

Never has the riskiness of love been as apparent as it has become during my time here at the

School of Theology. As anyone who has sat next to me for more than five minutes could probably tell you, I am a Christocentric theologian, probably to a fault. But that Christocentricsm is a result of my deep appreciation for the riskiness of God’s love for the world, particularly as we know it through the Incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. While here, I think constantly about the riskiness of the Incarnation. I think about the beauty and—frankly—terror of a God who loved the world enough to say "yes" to torture and death. It seems to me that regardless of Christ’s foreknowledge of his glorification (upon which John insists) the Incarnation was risky. But it was a risk made out of the most perfect kind of Love. A love that calculates the messiness and pain and frustration of such a relationship and, having weighed all of these factors says: “I cannot help but love you.”

This, I think, is precisely what Christ is calling his apostles to in this passage from John. To love one another as Christ loves us is no small task—it is a radical self-gift—an act of complete and utter trust in the other person. We say: “Here I am—in my moments of transcendence and of brokenness. Here I am when I am full of excitement and life; here I am when I am stupid and tired and irritable.” And after giving the other that gift, we say: “I am willing to show you these moments and trust that you will love me. And I will do my best to love you both in transcendence and brokenness.” We say this with the acknowledgement that failure is not just possible but probably both for the lover and the beloved. This is a love for which we are made, a point Christ makes very clear in this gospel. Yet, while we are made for this kind of love, its riskiness is frightening—frightening enough that Peter runs away from it and its consequences—but this love is so encompassing that it accepts and envelopes us even in our inability to replicate it in our lives.

Someone close to me brought this all into perspective recently. We were talking about this passage in John and he said, “Kelly, love isn’t just an emotion. It’s a verb. Perhaps that’s Peter’s problem. He understands Christ’s love as an emotion—not as an action.” This is precisely the point of this Johannine passage. Christ’s love is an action, a pouring forth into the world which his disciples are initially incapable of understanding. They get the emotion of Love, but not the action. This is the riskiness of Christian love—of Christ’s love in this particular passage. Love is an action in the world—an action to which there must be an answer and an answer of which we are unsure when we love. And this lack of surety is exactly what is most beautiful about Christ’s injunction to love one another as he has loved us. It is as though in that one sentence he tells us—this is terrifying, and it’s going to hurt, and you don’t know where it’s going to take you—Love is Risky. But if you can embrace all of that, all of the frustration and pain and messiness, if you can somehow manage to do that, then you will finally begin to understand what it means to love one another as I have loved you.

Open Letter to the Roman Catholic Church

Dear Roman Catholic Church,

Hi. It’s me again. You know, the girl from the front pew at church? The one with the rosary dangling from her pocket and the rainbow ribbon on her jacket’s lapel? The one who, on occasion and following the spirit of the Vatican II documents has been known to disagree (respectfully, of course) with your teachings? I’m sorry to bother you again, but this week you’ve lightened my soul and appalled me in equal degrees.

It’s no secret that it was my radicalism that ultimately brought me back to you. I needed somewhere to root my advocacy, and I began reading liberation theology, feminist theology, and Dorothy Day. They began to introduce me to the Church not how I had experienced it to be, but what the Church can be, and is (sometimes). They brought me back to you. And once I was here, I began to understand that there’s so much more here than I can ever imagine.

I cried, often, during that first spell of time after my return. Usually during the consecration of the Eucharist and always without understanding why. Something about that action moved me in a way in which I couldn’t explain. It taught me to love the sacraments and the ritual memory which comes along with them. These are no mere prayers which we parrot every Sunday. They are actions which are imbued with deep memory and meaning, actions and rites which connect us to the Church of the past and the Church of the future. The Church, as I experienced it then, was a place of prophetic witness to the world—a place where all truly were welcome. You, were a place bold enough to say that there should be a dignity to the work we do, a preferential option for the poor, that we must care for the sick, the dying, the imprisoned, the spiritually destitute. We must be hope in a hopeless world. I am so grateful to you for showing me what a living witness can be—I still see it daily in the life of the Benedictines I know here in Minnesota, in the individuals who work in the Catholic Worker movement, in students and faculty at this graduate school with whom I live and work every day.

And yesterday, I saw you at your prophetic best. I attended an anointing for the sick. In a culture so terrified of death and dying, of the other, of communicable diseases, this was a witness I could not ignore. The prayers for those who were ill were not for miraculous recovery, but for grace, peace, and support from the community. And then the community laid their hands on the ill—effectively saying “You are not other. We are not afraid of you, but YOU ARE our brothers and sisters and will care for you as such.” The deep ritual action which occurred linked us—in our little community in Collegeville—to hundreds of thousands of other Catholics, from the institution of the sacrament to those celebrating in other parts of the world. I have rarely felt so connected to this community of believers as I did yesterday.

But then today I read the article in the Washington Post about the DC Archdiocese and I wept from frustration, anger, and sadness. How, how can you go against your own basic teachings about justice? Even if I could set aside your views on GLBT rights (and frankly, their humanity) how can you justify denying services to people unrelated to that community? The homeless man to whom you give a meal has little to do with this decision—and you’ll deny him that meal? How is that justice? How is that following your own teachings? How is that proclaiming a message of love, forgiveness, and justice to the world? How is that prophetic? If any of the Old Testament prophets were here, I can’t help but think they would call you to account for the utter lack of love, justice and mercy which you are showing.

I have stayed with you through anti-GLBT documents and through sexual scandal. I have defended you after Dominus Jesus and throughout investigations of seminaries and religious orders. I have done all of this because I have seen you at your prophetic best—as the Church who supports and cares for the marginalized. Who overwhelmingly witnesses a Gospel which calls us to account for our actions in the world. A church which declares that we can be better than we are—and that we can only realize what we were meant to be through our presence with the least among us. And now…I don’t know what to do with you anymore.

I think we’ve come to a crossroad in our relationship. You can either show me once again that you’re capable of being prophetic in this world—that you care about the Gospel, about Christ as the new covenant of love, forgiveness, peace, joy, justice, and care for the marginalized and oppressed—you can either begin to bear witness to YOUR OWN DOCUMENTS about justice and love, joy and hope or you can continue to rely on spreading vitriol and hatred based on the old covenant—on a few lines in the Old Testament and a corrupt translation of Paul—you can ignore your own comments about the place of historical-critical method and understanding the context from which those verses emerged.

If you chose the former I think we’ll grow together in our understanding of this wonderful, broken world and what it means to minister to it. If you chose the latter, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay with you. And I know that one person leaving probably isn’t the biggest deal to you, but I can’t help but feel that you’ll begin to miss us. Hopefully one day you’ll understand why we left, although I fear that by then it will be too late for you to regain your role as prophet and participant in God’s grace in the world.

I miss what we used to have. I do. Please consider the people you’re hurting and who you used to be.

With all my heart,

Kelly

Prayer

Prayer

Dear Lord,

The turkey dried out in the oven. The stuffing is half-finished and the squash is undercooked. The wine hasn't even begun to breathe and the pie crust turned out soggy. There are dishes in the sink, the floor must be swept, the table set, and the bathrooms cleaned. I would like to pause with you, Lord, if only for a moment. But the guests are due to arrive. And while you were always harsh with her, Martha's tasks were important too.

Fatherhood

Fatherhood
Matthew 1:20-25

The problem was that I believed her. Even before that guy showed up,
knowing all the whys and wherefores of our troubles. Telling me he was the same one
who visited Mary in the first place. I resisted the urge to punch him.
We were so happy before he showed up in a flurry of wings and full of glad tidings.
The trouble came later, when I began to worry about the baby. What if he glowed?
Or was born speaking? What would he have to say to other children?
What could you teach a boy who was supposed to be your son
but also, somehow, your savior? Certainly not how to catch a ball,
to say nothing of building a table or talking to girls.
I worried even more about what it would do to Mary—what would I do
With a savior-baby who killed her in childbirth? What if he caught
pneumonia and died? Or skinned his knees while running around the kitchen
But what concerned me most, what woke me in a panic late at night
was worry that this baby might change the way we were with one another.
And he did.