Denise
Autumn 1990
Resurrection Farm newsletter
The great truths of Christianity are mostly always paradoxes. “To lose your life is to save it.” “Even though he dies, he will life forever.” “Blessed are they who mourn.” Jesus was the God-man, the victim-savior, the died-risen. To be a follower of Christ is to be able to believe two apparently disparate things. To know that we can be right and at the same time wrong and so can our brother. And that we can argue politics and morality and theology and economics, but we need always reverence the holy otherness of the people God puts in our phat each day, and love them because he loves them, and us.
Jesus was a person of reconciliation. In Himself, he reconciles earth to Heaven, creator to creatures. It is our call as his followers also to minister reconciliation to an alienated and fear-filled world. In our relationships with people and with the social and economic fabric of our common lives, we are called to be reconcilers, too. As St. Francis said, “Where there is hatred, let me bring love.” And to bring God into place, or time, or relationship is to bring at least the possibility of peace, mercy, and love.
If there is something or someone we feel personally defensive or hostile toward, perhaps that is the direction our mercy and peacemaking should reach. Whether we feel distrustful of republicans or democrats, communists or authority figures, Muslims or atheists, let us be free to speak our minds in a spirit of kindness but also be open to hearing the mind and heart of the other, and the songs of reconciliation that the Spirit sings over us. We are all human after all. We are all born, rejoice, grieve, fear, and want to be loved. Even among the most alienated, there is always common ground.