Sermon: The Christ Between You and Me (John 18:33-37), Nov 25, 2018

Sermon: The Christ between you and me

Text: John 18:33- 37

Our scripture reading today challenges us to ask, Who is Jesus? Who is Christ? 

In today’s story, Pilate tries to figure out who this Jewish man is, whom the peasants call ‘king’ and the Jewish authorities want dead for fear that this social threat might overturn everything they hold dear. He might, both sides say, become a king in the future, overturn the social hierarchy, the old political and religious order, and lead the peasants to revolt. Pilate releases his feeling of responsibility, absolving his morals and conscience with the excuse that, “Well, I am not Jewish. I have no relation to their political controversy.” His concern about the identity of Jesus is utilized only to measure personal loss and gain, and to find out, “Is he a social threat to the Roman Empire?”. He fails to link his concern to the deeper questions, What is his Kingdom like? What is the Truth? (In their dialogue, Jesus said to Pilate, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”) and finally, Who belongs to the Truth? 

Today, I invite everyone to engage with our questions, Who is Jesus, Who is Christ, through the lens of interdependence. 

By the way, thank you, many of you, for asking how my last week was! It was my study leave week, and it was great, and I gave a lot of you the same answer, but I was a little shy to say it in a more colloquial English way, like “It was a blast!” It really was a blast, because both from reading and experientially, I learned a deep truth which seems to be everyone’s truth, (‘everyone belongs to the truth.’), and the truth is that we are inter-dependent. This may sound easy, but it is very profound, a fundamental truth. Please let me tell you more. 

Some of you might have read my reflection which I shared in the most recent newsletter about my mom and me, the story of us linking arms. As I wrote down each paragraph in the story, I went a little deeper, revisiting the emotions that I (and my mom) had neglected, and then I had an epiphany: I discovered that I tend to experience love and express love when I feel that I can and want to let myself be dependent on another person for certain things, and let others depend on me. What’s at work here, in this voluntary opening of one self to the other? It is our solidarity based on mutual dependency and the trust that we can call on the other person’s acceptance; we need it, we desire it, and, more importantly, being able to be dependent is a beautiful thing, not a sign of weakness. Very human. We all begin our lives with dependence. Interdependence begins with dependence. Our own life and the survival, health and well-being of our human race, our earth community, really relies on our ability to let the other depend on our care and to allow ourselves to depend on the other’s care. In relationships of caring and dependency, we truly learn to become a whole, secure, healthy people. (Ha Na’s ad lib on a baby and her mother/parent/grandparent/others) Only through this continuous, repetitive, fundamental condition of inter-dependency, can we learn who we are. We grow. We fill up with the vital energy of faith and this ability of deep-engagement grows the community of people inside and out.  In relationships of caring and dependency, we do not easily break into ‘me’ and ‘you’, with the ‘me’ and the ‘you’, as exclusive, self-sufficient, fully independent, separate two selves. (In today's story, Pilate was not able to find the fundamental link between Jesus and himself.) If we don’t take it for granted, our ability to let ourselves be dependent on one another, and to let others trust our care in their need of relationship and support is incredibly human or creaturely, (think about the mother and baby whales) and it shows immense strength.  

What really made last week a blast started with one article, written by Jonathan Herring, Oxford Law professor. (I was impressed, thinking, "Wow, an Oxford Don, the representative of the most formidable ivy tower in the English speaking world teaches this!") : “Health as Vulnerability; Interdependence and Relationality”. Being truly thought-provoking, this 12-page article helped me really understand the fatal limitations of individualism, and inspired the desire to overcome it. The article makes many great points, but today I would like to focus on vulnerability and care, because this lens of interdependence will, eventually, lead us to see the church as the People of God, the Body of Christ. The people of God (The Old Testament), the body of Christ (The New Testament), is more than just the collective sum of independent individuals who have faith. Truly what we profess with these expressions is that we are the care community, and our essential energy and vitality must come from solidarity-based, interdependent, crazy and courageous love for God, our neighbours and ourselves. The church is not the special, elected group to whom God has guaranteed salvation; I would like to invite everyone to consider the church as a microcosm. 

The whole world, the macrocosm should see us as a model for how we love one another, how we love the creation, how we love the Creator. If we do not do loving well, we are not doing the microcosm, the model, well. Then, the question for us is, how do we belong to the truth? How do we listen to the voice of Christ?

Our society in general seems to praise independence (mobility, finance, etc.) more than anything, and tells us that we have to keep this pretense, this facade that “We are independent.” The default concept of self in this model is that each one of us is/should be an essentially independent adult person, able-bodied, self-willed. Then, this model which understand health as being independent, free of illness and free of impairment, persistently isolates and excludes disability, our emotional need of interdependence, and the understanding of health as embracing vulnerability. Our indigenous kins have held this vision and faith for a long time that health is the social, emotional and cultural well-being of the whole community, not just the physical well-being of an individual. 

However, the good news is that even secular care professionals have begun to understand and research and promote a vulnerability-centered view of the self, instead of the self-sufficient, autonomous self. In this view, not only a certain percentage of people are vulnerable- we all are. This new view says, first of all, our bodies are ‘profoundly leaky’. In fact, “Our bodies are constantly changing with new material being added to them and old material being discarded. By the end of each day we have lost a whole host of cells and grown new ones. By our deaths there is little of us that is biologically the same as when we were born. Further, our bodies are not all human. Inside they are dependent on a wide range of non-human organisms." The truth is our bodies are deeply dependent on other bodies and our environment. 

We are called to be the People of God, and that really means shalom, peace, which is not the same as security. Peace and security are two different things. In shalom, we, who make the People of God, who become the body of Christ, are one vulnerable self, the self who lives the truth of interdependent care, love and solidarity. Our default being is not a superpowered, able-bodied self, free of illness, free of impairment. The bodily fleshy natures of all of us make us all vulnerable. Deep emotion, which flows in us, moves in us, and so changes us, makes us all vulnerable. 

When we ask the questions: Who is Jesus? Who is Christ? What is his Kingdom like? What is the Truth? Who belongs to the Truth? One key to answer these questions seems to be that we really need a new model of self and the community. Our faith and hope is to become a beloved community, and when we do so, our relationship sparkles, marked by the interdependency between you and me who learn to receive, learn to give such starry human qualities: gratitude, love, acknowledgement, emotional support, solidarity and care. 

What I would like to stress here is that in the community of beloveds, there are no divides, or distinction, or even separate roles between caregivers and those who are cared-for. Those who receive. Those who give. Those who are spiritually more competent, those who are less. Those who are more professional in giving. Those who are in the laity. The beloved community must teach, by experience, its members true self-worth, everyone’s equal, diamond self-worth, which is born of God, guaranteed by God. If we neglect certain people to feel any extent of self-doubt that they are not 'yet' or not good ‘enough', we are doing the community care work, Christ’s calling, only in half-measures. We all are inter-dependent, we are mutual, we make this solidarity of equals, the beloved community of equals, together. Every one of you has already participated in this mighty task. That’s the whole point of becoming a Godward community. It is distinct, because its sharing love must be inspired by our inherent self-worth, Christ-like love. In the beloved community, we do not easily break into ‘me’ and ‘you’, because the vulnerability of the one becomes the vulnerability of the other, and in the same sense, the health of the one becomes the health of the other.

Who is Jesus? Who is Christ? We sing that Christ has no body but ours, and God calls us, the body of miraculously delicate, interdependent selves, (Hosea 2:23; Paul quotes) “Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’ and he [sic] who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’”  Amen. 

Pre-Advent Message, 2018: The Story of Linking Arms

Pre-Advent message, 2018

Rev. Ha Na Park, Immanuel United Church, Winnipeg

On Dec 1st, everyone is warmly welcomed to our annual Pre-Advent Dinner. We have a fun plan for all who attend to have an opportunity to listen to one another’s Christmas stories. I hope these personal stories from our own childhoods will lighten our hearts like candlelight. 

Now, the following story of mine is not about Christmas, yet this story speaks to me of the hope which, as we sing in VU 220, “shines as the solitary star.”

A week ago, I recalled some memories of my mom, and pondered friendship and "touch" in the context of a little piece of Korean culture that I have missed deeply in the past few years. I would like to share this story with you in this Newsletter, as my Advent message. 

Last week, I remembered two events which I never thought of as being related until I was reading about one psychological theory: CEN (Childhood Emotional Neglect). But once I could understand these events as two interrelated episodes, I saw what I had been missing deeply for a very long time.

Childhood emotional neglect (CEN) happens when a child’s feelings or emotional needs are under-responded to by a parent or caregiver. These moments of neglect could be subtle, invisible and unmemorable, but they may affect how we feel, or don’t feel, certain things, even when we become an adult. Some of us grow up with the long-term effects of CEN and may even suffer from a constant feeling of ‘running on empty.’

When I was in Grade 8 (in Korea), I withdrew from school for one year due to a health issue. I was one of the highest-performing students at school and had just had my first (and last) accompanied piano performance with a Japanese young adults Orchestra in a nice concert hall in the city. While I was trying to fulfill many goals, I was successfully meeting everyone’s expectations, but didn’t really look after my emotional needs - no one in my family did. One day in March, I felt nauseous and experienced shortness of breath and low energy; these symptoms continued throughout that year. In the meantime, the left side of my body, from my leg to my face, became numb. As a result, I couldn’t walk.

While I was on that one-year break from school, my mom and I went to the swimming pool as often as we could. I swam alone, while my mom, who couldn’t swim, watched me. I always liked water; whenever I immersed myself in the water, I regained my energy. Right after swimming, the circulation of my left leg improved, and I could walk for an hour without limping at all. In that year, not only did I swim regularly and take Oriental medicine every day, I also got an assessment in a mental health hospital as well as several psychological and medical tests, including an MRI.

One day, my mom and I were walking down the street after swimming. As usual, I was linking my right arm with my mom’s left arm, slightly leaning on her. Then, my mom tried to ‘unlink’ my arm from hers, gently pulling my arm away, saying, “Ha Na, the doctors told me that you might have a ‘dependence’ issue. You need to try not to be dependent on others, even when you are walking”

I took her advice. I don’t remember what my feelings were at the time. It was a ‘subtle, invisible, unmemorable’ rejection. I think, after that, I didn’t try walking arm-in-arm with my mom.

Where I grew up, girls, young women, and especially mothers and daughters walking arm-in-arm was so natural. That was what we always did; most of the time, my friends would link their arms with mine, and if they didn’t, I would. That’s what close friends did, and how we showed our friendliness, affection and support for one another. Even in high school, some friends would still link arms and expect others to do the same for them.

A couple of years ago, long after I left Korea, I began to miss that physical contact which in Korea we call “Skin-ship”, which was so natural among friends — holding hands, walking with arms linked, standing very closely to each other, sharing that close space. These touches were considered to be something ‘essential’, expressed in friendship.

A few years ago, living in Winnipeg, I began to silently wonder, what do I miss? I have a Korean friend, a few years younger than me, who I met in a circle of local Korean ministers and their friends. After one Thanksgiving dinner, where we had a celebration at the park, she walked close beside me and linked her arm with mine. Inside of me, I wanted to respond naturally to her sweet gesture of intimacy and friendship, but my body was very rigid, like a stick or a rock. I was unhappy about my stiffness and wondered sadly if I had become too accustomed to Canadian personal boundaries to enjoy her friendly ‘skinship’.

I had almost forgotten about all these incidents, until this past summer, when I went to a big outdoor water park with my mom. My mom, now a Grandma, enjoyed swimming so much with her grandsons and me. (She took swimming lessons in her sixties to overcome her fear of water.) When there were only two of us - my mom and me - walking together, in swim suits, side by side, talking and laughing… I thought, “Oh, I can’t waste any minute of this precious time. I want to show my love for her.” and reached my right arm to her, linking it with her left arm. And I said, “Mom, I am so happy that we are swimming together and you swim with the boys. I missed walking arm-in-arm with you. That’s what mothers and daughters do in Korea all the time, even when they are shopping… I envy them doing it because we are far apart in Korea and in Canada. I love you.” Saying that, and after a couple of minutes, I gently unlinked our arms. However, I was very happy that I linked arms with my mom for a minute, and I hoped that my mom felt the same.

What I had been missing, emotionally, for a long time was the natural Korean way of being close to each other among friends, allowing each other to physically touch by linking hands and arms, because it was how we showed, “You are my friend.”

This Advent, I invite you to imagine God as Mother (or Friend, Father, Sister, Brother, Aunt), understanding God as the Ground of Being-in-Relationship. 

As we wait for Christ to be born, I hope that we may be able to take some time and ponder our deep spiritual and emotional needs that wait for our care and attention and Christ’s visit. 

It is natural for us to experience a certain level or a certain kind of emotional and spiritual estrangement from God, either long-term or temporarily, and for us to endure the “dark night of the soul”. But remember, in even the darkest night you are not totally alone. The stars in the sky are the crown that dignifies you. 

God has never left you alone. God is the Ground of Being-in-Relationship. 

One important aspect of spirituality is that it helps us to learn that real and true relationships are based in mutuality: needing and being needed by another. Nobody lives alone; everyone is sustained by others. I can say something to you only when you listen. I can respond only to what you ask me, or tell me about. 

Need is the soil of life, from which relationships blossom. 

The role of spirituality is that it helps us to walk with our arms linked with God again. 

(I use the verb *walk and *"arms linked" here with the critical reflection on the ablism embedded in this metaphor.)

Remembrance Sunday sermon: Building a Cathedral, (Mark 12:38-44), Nov 11, 2018

Sermon: Building a Cathedral  

Text: Mark 12:38-44

Remembrance Day is a very special time for me.

I remember H, the worship committee chair at my first congregation, came to me and gently asked me to include God Save the Queen during the service on the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day - which we simply called Remembrance Sunday. This was 2013, so I had been in Canada for seven years. I responded, “No.” I didn’t understand why Helen would even ask for a pro-monarchy anthem that week. In those early years of my ministry and living in Canada, I wasn’t able to empathise with H’s respect and love of British Monarchy, or her loyalty to a distant ruler. Since 2013, I have been privileged to preach on war and peace, sacrifice and loss, and hope, on a number of “Remembrance Sundays.” I admit that I’ve had a huge learning curve through the years! My time in Canada has taught me a lot – about a lot of things. Time builds understanding. Time really plays an invisible, yet powerful role in helping us understand the hidden meaning in things, in the same way it helps us become a good friend to somebody. “Time” - how much we have known a person - does its magic. Time matters. 

What I’ve learned over the years, every November, is that I need to spiritually and pastorally engage with my people, and to do so, I must “lay down” my perspective and beliefs, and being “disarmed” from those belief systems, listen and share my humanity and emotions with my church members, equally. Of course, when I first started my congregational ministry, in 2013, I was not very well aware of this need to engage on an equal footing. 

In those early years, there was one pertinent belief statement that really puzzled me and made me wonder. It was a major conflict which I really had to wrestle with and fight to find clarity of thought, before I produced my sermons on Remembrance Sunday. I remember what I said in 2015. Here it is. “I wonder what it really means when we say, ‘For they have sacrificed their lives that we may live in this country peacefully or that we may be free.’ This belief seems to originate from our Christian confession that Christ has bled and died on the cross so that God forgives our sins and saves us.’ (Atonement theology) 

My puzzlement lands on the word, ‘freedom’. When we say, ‘we’, who do we refer to? Who is free, when, even with our best intentions, the real face of war never allows anyone to be free. Who is free, when others suffer?” This statement seems to me to assume that military conflicts occur overseas, outside of our national borders, and the sacrifices outside keep us inside, safe and free. I struggle with this statement: first as a Christian who believes in Jesus’ choice of non-violence and proclamation of the reign of peace, and secondly as a Korean, who, even though I didn’t personally experience the Korean War, indirectly witnessed and lived with the old, destructive and divisive remnants from the war itself and from the Cold War. These have been huge obstacles to the advancement of democracy, harmony and peace in the land of Korea. They are powers that still oppress those who fight for the rights and dignity of poor people or even the ordinary people who are forced to sacrifice their rights for their land and their country’s peace to their own Korean government and to the militarized agenda of the US, which still has about 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea.

The following is part of the reflection I shared in 2013, describing the Korean War. “When killing has occurred, when wounding has occurred, we have not killed the unknown, the ‘other’; we have killed and wounded one another, our brothers and sisters. Koreans call the Korean War “Our Great Tragedy of Mutual Killings of One’s Own Brothers and Sisters.” (the literal translation.) The North and the South still point guns at each other on the 38th parallel; Russia and the US and their allies used Korea for their proxy war, and the US, Russia, Japan and China would never really want to see in their eyes Korea (I do not like saying two Koreas, and am still not used to saying Two Koreas.) succeeding in Reunification, as what they want is not peace, but the Korean peninsula’s geo-political advantages. The US continues to build military bases in South Korea despite the people’s desperate, decades-long grassroots protests. The phrase of their sacrifice overseas and our freedom in our land does not translate comfortably into Korean, or into the languages of many other vulnerable countries. All are wounded. All are hurt. There is no hero. The others were not unknown – they were our own brothers and sisters, with our shared blood. We try to love but it is so hard to reach out while we hold a weapon in our hand.”   

That was my truth. It still is, but “time” has slowly brought me to a more generous space where my own defensive walls break down, I become more understanding and take time before I speak, with my eyes fixed on revolutionary patience… which is, “laying down” my own defence system and rigidity. Instead of using the primary lens of my life experiences, I began to look at the young people and their families in our past (in Canadian history) who were just like us, ordinary folk who loved their life and had dreams to pursue with passion and commitment. These ordinary heroes gave up their education and interrupted their careers and families, to act upon their belief in freedom, faith in God, and for justice and goodness for all people. On this day, we truly unite in silence to remember them, their sacrifice and courage.

Now I am in the third chapter of understanding Remembrance…, whose title may be, “Yet I Still Believe in Peace…” On this day, we remember that, as we prayed in the Call to Worship this morning, in the 11th hour, on the 11th day, in the 11th month, 100 years ago, in 1918, we “lay down our weapons.” This is what we are called to remember.

Because I believe in peace, and we should, in this world, still globally militarized, believe in true peace even when the true meaning of and search for peace are confused with ‘security’. “The peace negotiators who travel to Geneva or Stockholm are men who act like business agents.” Dorothy Solle says, in “The Window of Vulnerability.” “For the negotiators, peace is a business — good when it is successful and promises satisfaction to both sides”, the worldly powers. 

Many of us say, “Of course, we want peace.” However, if we truly examine what we say, honestly and with compassion, peace in our terms may actually be the hope of the middle class, of the Group of Eight highly-industrialized nations (called the G-8), which can send out their troops to other parts of the world — mostly, the places which can gain us geo-political advantages. Does our reference of peace in Canada also mean insuring the security of our nation, our class?

Maybe Remembrance Day is when we go deeper than a national ideology to the Christian spiritual root of non-violence. Understanding violence and non-violence is my next goal - my fourth chapter - to truly enhance the right and dignity of my life. It will be a conversion. It is a passion for the impossible. Some may think that embracing non-violence is too foolish or naive. But maybe we haven’t really sufficiently explored spirituality, trained ourselves and studied the mechanics of non-violence. It may sound unrealistic and irrelevant — “OK. For civil disobedience, to fight for equality and democracy at home, for such causes of a relatively minor scale, non-violence makes sense. What about world peace?” In response to this imagined question, my response would be, the near-impossibility of the task shouldn’t convince us to forsake searching and studying the politics and spirituality of non-violence and our conversion to peace… If “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way (Mahatma Gandhi)” is true to our emotional and spiritual realm, if civil disobedience can bring a change to our social paradigm, in principle, it should be true in relation to building world peace as well. 

Peace through peace is truly a giant work, and most human beings, like me, haven’t really trained ourselves or been encouraged by our public system to really think about it, not to mention, embrace it. Society wouldn’t encourage it. But Jesus would, in the Gospels. Maybe, the starting point of thinking about all of this - peace through peace - is realizing how it seems an impossibly gigantic work to do, but believing that it is never too late to start, it is never useless and fruitless to do the work of peace. In my past few sermons, I introduced Dorothee Solle a few times, and the concept of Revolutionary Patience, and here, I would like to leave you with a luminous excerpt from Solle: “Once, when I was particularly depressed, a friend and pacifist from Holland told me something very beautiful: ‘The people who worked to build the cathedrals in the Middle Ages never saw them completed. It took two hundred years and more to build them. Some stone-cutter somewhere sculpted a beautiful rose (the image on the screen); it was his life’s work, and it was all he ever saw. But he never entered into the cathedral. But one day, the cathedral was really there. You must imagine peace in the same way.” For building a Cathedral-sized peace, time matters. To sculpt a beautiful rose, just one, like the “two coins” of the widow in our Gospel story, is the starter.

Sermon: Revolutionary Patience (Ruth 1:1-18), Nov 4, 2018

Sermon: Revolutionary Patience

Text: Ruth 1: 1-18

Preparing for this reflection, I had two purposes in mind. First, by choosing this beautiful, beloved passage of three women, especially of Ruth and Naomi, I wanted to include certain interpretations that may not be familiar to us. Second, the story of Ruth illustrates spirituality which I believe is able to guide us when we go through struggles and suffering in our lives and in today’s world.

In today’s story, the whole family of Naomi moves from Bethlehem to Moab because of a famine. The father, Naomi’s husband, dies. The sons marry Moabite wives. Years pass, the sons die, and three women are left widowed with no children. Our story begins with the predicament of the three women: Naomi and her two daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah. In this society, there were only three ways a woman could be valued: as an unmarried virgin in her father’s household, as a child-producing wife in her husband’s household, or as the matriarch of a multi-generational clan of descendants. As widows and without children, Naomi, Ruth and Orpah are on the margins, without status, not to mention they are in deep grief. Naomi recognizes that they have limited options for relationships and for ‘security’ in such a society. Naomi acts rationally, telling her daughters-in-law not to follow her back to Bethlehem but instead to try and find husbands in their homeland of Moab. We are told that Orpah kisses her mother-in-law goodbye and that Ruth clings to her. 

At this point in the story, (and this way of engaging the story originates from Queer Commentary) Ruth ‘comes out’ and declares her true feelings for Naomi. In words that have traditionally been repeated in countless wedding ceremonies, (and we really cherish Ruth’s words, because they are so beautiful and meaningful regardless of when we say or hear them.) Ruth speaks to Naomi: “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die - there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” In her words of devotion Ruth names her relationship to Naomi in a way that crosses the boundaries of age, nationality and religion. By expressing her heart like this, in such a genuine, intense and passionate declaration, Ruth refuses to accept the status quo of a society that limits and defines their existence as worthless, empty and marginal because they are unmarried and childless. Verse 16 in the first chapter of Ruth is truly a blessing, covenant, creed, hymn, poem and declaration of human dignity. 

My own reflection, my own commentary on this story of Ruth and Naomi is this: Ruth doesn’t just try to stand grounded in her dignity, to not to be overcome by the brutality of her reality; she rises above her restrictions and her limited options. She rises above the floodwaters of her own bleak situation, with her inner power and strength, and makes her choice. But what exactly do I mean by “rising above”?

I have been thinking about the meaning of ‘rising above’, and my conclusion is that in any society there’s a certain social paradigm that the society expects us to live by, conform to, and whose norms, expectations and rules we are meant to accept. Then, if we don’t fit the paradigm or if we are not going to produce what society generally considers to be a ‘good life’, we could be shunned or forced away from the center of society – in other words, oppressed. 

On the margins, the further we are off from the standard and norm, the more we are ‘being pressed’, and that is what oppression means. Here, to rise above may mean that we choose a direction that might liberate us, rather than press us down to be diminished, and the direction could be … not just the sides (the margins), not the line (the centre)…but ‘above’.

To rise above means that Ruth thinks and goes beyond her social paradigm (‘beyond what is’). Ruth chooses uncertainty, makes herself insecure, opens herself to anxiety, and a relationship which would, for her, be ultimately liberating. Ruth chooses dignity. She chooses integrity. Dignity is the name for the part of God that lives in us. God in everyone is the foundation of human dignity. I remember the quote I wrote in my journal a while ago, “That human dignity is not created by us, but exists before us.” It does not depend on someone else’s agreement, or society's, or the states’, or the ism's (such as heterosexism or capitalism). It is not diminished by poverty, by physical disability or by any kind of oppression. Because, (another quote) in our journey, “We do not set out as those who seek but as those who have been found.”

Here, I wish to introduce you to the spiritual practice known as “Revolutionary patience” hoping that it is useful when you depart on the journey of rising above, carrying it in your “spirituality backpack.” When I first encountered this expression and learned about it, I was going through an emotionally painful time. These two words and just a couple of introductory sentences helped me to feel that hope was about to rise like the dawning sun – and it did. It really became a revelatory concept for me. For a while I used it as my mantra to recite and to remember. Before I learned about revolutionary patience, when I went through conflict, agony or confusion, I tended to try to analyze what I was experiencing. I felt like I needed the analysis and comprehension about why something was successful or why something else didn’t work well. I needed an ‘explanation’ and analytical understanding on every matter to feel that I have not simply lost - I can work on things again to make them better - perfect. I tended to theorize my experience because my intellect was my comfort zone. 

Even though critical thinking is an important part of reflection, later I learned that Christ invites us to be on the cross, or to be more correct, to be on the passivity of the cross, let yourself be, for a while, in one place, still, and contemplate on the brilliance and the beauty of the stars in the sky of the dark night of the soul. 

Learning the revolutionary patience of Christ (like Martin Luther King Jr. did through choosing non-violence) and seeing things through the window of vulnerability, we learn to trust that, even though we may feel powerless and vulnerable now, some day we will bear fruit through the revolutionary patience of non-violence, peace, justice and staying in relationship with others and with the earth. This staying power is patient; it is passivity, but not acceptance of defeat. This attitude of life, revolutionary patience, is also called faith, never satisfied with an unjust status quo but clinging to (like Ruth clung to Naomi) the wisdom of celebrating our partial and flawed victories.

Because life in the struggle must be joyful and our task in life shouldn’t feel like a Sisyphean grind; it should celebrate that love wins. It should celebrate that life is not about success and is not measured by the result (i.e. material gain, apparent progress or visible success) but by the amount of love it have expressed. 

Seeing Ruth rise above, we remember that Christ is the Risen One. Ruth was loyal and preserved her and Naomi’s dignity (the presence of God within them) through adopting revolutionary patience in order to continue celebrating the joy of life. What the spirituality of revolutionary patience teaches us is, “Do not depend on the hope of results” but start hoping more and more, not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work we are called to do. “Success is not a name of God” (Martin Buber), but love is. Peace is. Justice is. And dignity, which is the God in everyone. Therefore, sisters and brothers, rise above. Be revolutionary. And as you are, bravely, take revolutionary patience in the journey of the cross, both your own and our world’s.