This Week

This week at praxis...You've Got Mail

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, 
but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, 
whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he 
also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God's 
glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, 
and he sustains all things by his powerful word. 
When he had made purification for sins, 
he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, 
having become as much superior to angels as the name 
he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.	   
----Hebrews 1:1-4



The more difficult problem for a feminist scholar, however, 
is that the central experience of Joan's life was her voices.  
A heroine who bases the direction of her life on paranormal visions, 
who defends the truth of her divinely-inspired messages until death, 
is not easily understood by the present-day women's movement.  
In our day, persons who hear voices are considered mad.  
And yet it is not only inadvisable, it is futile to study 
Joan without considering what she maintained was the central 
experience of her life. 
----Anne Lleewellyn Barstow, Joan of Arc: Heretic, Mystic, Shaman

 

A blur of romance clings to notions of "publicans," sinners," "the poor," 
"the people in the marketplace," "our neighbors," 
as though of course God should reveal himself, it at all, 
to these simple people, these Sunday school watercolor figures, 
who are so purely themselves in their tattered robes, 
who are single in themselves, while we now are various, 
complex, and full at heart.  We are busy.  
So, I see now, were they.  Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? 
or who shall stand in his holy place?  There is no one but us. 
There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on 
the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, 
a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have 
come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead 
- as if innocence had ever been - and our children busy and troubled, 
and we ourselves, unfit, not yet ready, having each of us 
chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impuse 
and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, 
unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved.  
But there is no one but us.  There never has been.  
There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; 
there has never been a generation of whole men and women who 
lived well for even one day...So.  You learn this studying any 
history at all, especially the lives of artists and visionaries; 
you learn it from Emerson, who noticed that the meanness of 
our days is itself worth our thought; and you learn it, 
fitful in your pew, at church.	
---- Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Once a little boy came up to me and said, 
"I saw the ladder that goes up to God."  
I closed the book that I was reading, 
which happened to be The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 
by a fierce sixth-century monk, John Climacus, 
and I listened.  The boy told me that the ladder 
was by his treehouse and that God had come halfway down.  
God's clothes were covered with pockets-like a kangaroo, 
he said, and we both laughed.  
Even God's running shoes had pockets, he told me, 
full of wonder, and we laughed again.  
He told me that God carried food in the pockets to feed all the dead birds and the dead people.
...Revelation is not explanation, and it is not acquired 
through reading John Climacus, or anyone else.  
It is the revealing of the presence of a God who 
cares for all creatures, even a little boy who lives 
on a ranch in a part of America that has often been 
called "Godforsaken."  A boy whose dog has died, 
and who needs, and receives, divine consolation.
----Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace:  A Vocabulary of Faith




Questions:


	In what ways did God speak to people in ancient times?
	How can we trust that it is God speaking to us?
	Medieval mystics met death and heresy charges for claiming their 
	own revelations of God.  Kathleen Norris listened well to the little boy's
	revelations; someone else may not have.  
	What dangers are there today in sharing a vision of God?