It’s All About Love As a Universalist, I read scriptures and myths to learn about being human. In the case of the Bible, I also learn something about our relationship with the holy, the mysterious, the I Am. Though a good story raises more questions than it answers, in scripture, I can discover insights that encourage my transformation into a better self. For me, the Bible is about love. God is love. Eternal love made life possible, and everything that exists reflects that love. We can pervert love into indifference and animosity, but God—or whatever we choose to call the essence of life—cannot. Thus, God’s wrath, vengeance, and chastisement must…
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Lessons from The Seven Ravens
The Stories of the Brothers Grimm The brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, collected their well-known stories from the oral tradition of the Germanic people. Their work went through many revisions before becoming the text we know today as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. When the brothers lived, their books were quite popular. Their compatriots bought almost as many of them as they did the Bible. Like the Bible, some of the stories are violent and crude, containing antisemitism and assumptions about gender roles and social stratification that we, in twenty-first-century America, may find offensive. This is true of folklore around the world. The oral history of a culture does not shrink from…
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Redemption and Resurrection
What Makes It Good? On Good Friday, a patient asked me, “Why do they call it good? Isn’t that the day Jesus died?” I was uncertain. Not about how a day of death and despair might be good. Seeds need darkness to sprout. Without death, there can be no life. When we lose hope, we can find new meaning. The descent into hell makes resurrection possible. Though I said something about that, it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He had his own Easter story, his own fall into the pit of illness and agony. He also had his own surfacing. Though not yet a resurrection, he could tell he…
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Seeing But Not Perceiving
Never Perceiving In the kingdom of God, the sick receive healing, the poor have enough to eat, and the weak are powerful. Yet no matter how much Jesus preaches about this kingdom, the disciples don’t get it. They want to know if they’ll sit at his right hand in heaven. They want glory and power. But Jesus called them to serve. In the Gospel of Mark, he must repeatedly admonish them to stop thinking about their own desires, stop seeking to be served, and strive instead to become better servants. As Geert Van Oyen points out in his analysis of the gospel, the acolytes want to fulfill “their own interests”…
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The Resurrection and Universal Salvation
We Love a Resurrection We talk about resurrection because we can’t bear for crucifixion to be the end of the story. Imagine if the Christian scriptures closed with the image of a broken and beaten Jesus, gasping his last breath in a torment of pain? Who would want to read about that? Even the minimalist gospel of Mark shows us the empty tomb. Of course, Jesus didn’t have a monopoly on suffering. Every day someone in the world dies in agony. Maybe they aren’t hanging on a piece of wood, their hands and feet thrust through with nails, but there are many kinds of torture. Some people suffer for years…
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Ash Wednesday and Opening Our Hearts
Ash Wednesday My mother, who died in 2015, has been turned to ash. The remains of her cremation sit in a box on a shelf in my room. The ashes aren’t her, nor do they symbolize some essence of her nature. Still, I’m in no hurry to spread them across the scattering ground at the cemetery where she bought a place to rest. One day I will do so, when I no longer need her quiet reminder that I am destined to end up as ash myself. Whether we are talking about the dust out of which the Hebrew God formed us or the carbon created in the belly of…
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Falling and Faithfulness
The Pain of Falling It hurts to fall. Sometimes, when the pain of falling is intense, we lose our faith. Part of what a chaplain does is to sit with those who have crashed and shattered. If we’re lucky, we can offer them the possibility of a way back home, to a new kind of wholeness. We invite them to see, in the distance, a glimmer of a path. Recently, I was struck by the intensity of the fear and agony described by one woman with whom I visited. She had been doing fine, her life drifting along like a lazy river. Now and then, troubles bubbled into a whirlpool…
