The Wild Reed: Questions "as the Light Shifts and Wanes"

Tuesday, December 08, 2015

Questions "as the Light Shifts and Wanes"

I'm having a hard time getting my thoughts together for an Advent post. But thankfully my friend and fellow blogger William D. Lindsey remains as thoughtful and erudite as ever. I was particularly moved by his "Advent meditation" of yesterday, one that can be read it its entirety here. Following is an excerpt.

Watch and be ready: the time is at hand.

The big challenge, it seems to me: how to find hope in a world in which the darkness is rising, and in which the super-rich have ever-increasing ability to turn almost any political event, but, in particular, mass shootings committed by people of the "wrong" religion and culture, to their own advantage? As if they are yoked in a symbiotic way to the attackers, feasting off the carnage the attackers produce, ready to reap a harvest of hate that will yield more power and control for those who already have immense power and control at their disposal . . . .

How to find hope in a world in which the pastoral leaders of major Christian churches choose to talk — shouldn't this make us weep when it doesn't send us into fits of laughter? — about pornography and same-sex marriage as the dark rises, as portions of the globe now flood due to changes in the climate that threaten the very existence of life on this planet? Changes that have happened precisely because of that immense power and control of economic elites who beneft from exploitation of the natural world and of fellow human beings . . . . How to find hope in churches that have so trivialized their spiritual traditions that they have now become merely cultural adjuncts of affluent values, preaching a gospel carefully tailored to the needs of the comfortable while never seeking to imagine life beyond the pale of comfort?

These are the questions I ask myself as the light shifts and wanes, and now I offer them to you.