Getting Naked Beneath the Armour

There is a naked time in between taking off the armour of old hates, hurts, disappointments, resentments and wounds and putting on the armour of Christ. That naked time can make one feel really vulnerable and scared. But God waits patiently until the armour of baptism in Christ truly lies against naked skin.

Galatians 5 guides us to be reminded about law versus love. Law seeks human balance and human retribution. Law is a covenant conditionally made, sealed in the Old Testament with circumcision. The new ordinance in Christ requires the whole law summed in a single commandment "love your neighbour as yourself" (v 14); it does not excuse you from loving the neighbour who might have hurt or offended you; it does not excuse you from loving the neighbour whose offense you may have imagined.

"By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another." -from Galatians 5. We do not have self-control when we are controlled by our reactions to old hurts, old protective ways of thinking and being, when we have on old armour that pre-dates our birth in Christ.

Ephesians 4 offers some further insight into what it means to be born new in Christ ... and likens this new life to a process of growing up. It is not a binary thing: yesterday i was a scumbag but today I'm born again and I am no longer a scumbag. It takes time for the old scumminess to wash off ... leaving a clean and shiney heart. It takes time and effort. Jesus sets for us an example, and when we are called to Him, part of taking up our cross and following Him is having the daily bath, washing off the old scumminess with the daily new scumminess that wants to attach itself to us every single day. Each day, like we eat food and breathe to live, we must tidy house a little in Christ to draw closer and closer. It is a process, not a moment. God waits for us patiently in each moment.

We live in a world and time of legalistic balance. Jesus teaches us how to unbalance the scales, matching hate with love instead of matching hate with an equal portion of hate. Think about what would happen in the world if a nation that felt attacked by another nation offered AID instead of WAR? Suppose the USA had said "lets love up those people who bombed our twin towers instead of following their example of hatred" (read between the lines - I don't subscribe to anything US media puts out there but is a point I'm trying to make). Suppose last year, instead of sending in troops, the Jamaican government had sent in a peace keeping force of brothers and sisters in Christ into Tivoli Gardens? Or better yet, sent them in with food and money ... with AID to dis-arm the most effective control that any don might have had over the area? For future reference, if everybody got some education and opportunity up in the place, do you think they would barricade up again and cause another state of emergency again? If we are Christians, we are called upon to model this unbalancing method. It is kind of ayurvedic in it's nature.

Reminds me of how most women who wear bras learn how to remove their bras from under a t-shirt or blouse without taking the t-shirt or blouse off. I don't think our baptism in Christ means we put on an armour that displaces all other armour. It's more like we pull on an armour over whatever else we had on. But as we get more comfortable (or uncomfortable as the case may be) within the Christian armour we realize we can take some of the other stuff off ... and kindof pull it through a sleeve like a bra being taken off after a long day!

Getting back to Ephesians 4, I like this part: "We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love." - this part says to me, don't be afraid to take the bra off, for you have a bigger armour and a bigger more able support system in Christ!

More importantly though, this piece of Ephesians reminds us of the part we have in a bigger body, and brings me back to the reflection on the roles of the various parts of the body. Who, but Christ, can join and knit together all of us so that, in unison we can promote the body's growth in love? The analogy of the community of believers to the body of Christ repeats in the New Testament (and I think has some presence in the Old Testament too) anyway it is a *critical* analogy for us to embrace ... for different parts of the body have different roles.

When we go to scrub ourselves of old scumminess that followed along with us into our lives in Christ, we might encounter places where we think we are mucky because other Christians do not act, think, believe or feel in the same way we do ... I struggle with this a lot and the biggest challenge of the struggle sometimes is knowing when to stop scrubbing. Sometimes we have gotten down to our skin below the armour in Christ. And where skin meets armour, is the person God meant me to be as an individual. Resentments, hurts, angers can be scrubbed away. But muscle, sinew, skin, and armhairs can stay :) We must not try and scrub off our skin, our selfness entirely - for God has designed each of us individually to be exactly ourselves. The Bible is not telling us to be cookie cutter, but to take our place within a body in which each part plays a role for which it is uniquely designed.

So God gives us a heart, at birth we have it. In the course of life it might get hardened. Jesus is like heart tenderizer ... he is here to help undo some of that hardness of heart, to help re-balance the body that has gone out of whack (eg grown lumps in the neck etc). With Jesus, we can have the courage to love, whereas otherwise we might have tended to want instead to be safe and secure with hardened hearts impervious to the beauty of giving and loving. It's pretty cool.

Ephesians 4 also reminds us that different parts of the body have both positive and not so positive uses. The thing is not to chop off a hand that once stole, or a mind that once ruled the entire body ... but rather to bring the parts into harmony with each other - or balance (again something which ayurvedic practices, traditional chinese medicine, traditional Aboriginal spiritual practice and many aspects of Buddhist meditation focus on - balance and wholeness).

"Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear." (v 26-29). Jesus not only tenderizes the heart but gives us permission to use our hands, our mouths, our minds for honest labour, building each other up, helping, healing, caring, in short "loving our neighbours". I think I like this Ephesians 4 quite a bit.

I like the visual of the armour for two reasons: it speaks to protection and safety which we are assured of in faith ... the armour of Jesus is the refuge and fortress which Christians take in the Lord. (Psalm 91). It is also the suiting that allows us to go out into the world of human checks and balances and create a new imbalance by pouring out our own love, manifesting by our faith and action in and through our faith, the image of God within us ... we are guaranteed in Psalm 91, we are guaranteed protection:

"For he will command his angels concerning you

to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the adder,
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot."

We are assured that it is safe to get naked under the armour of Christ, and to go out into a world where hate balances or overbalances love, and pour out the love of Christ made manifest in us, in our armour - to pour it out into the world.

Phone numbers page

• Janaki Bandara 876-xxx-yyyzz
• John Doe 654-uhn-jstt

(this is a test page to help Vivian look at options for posting her phone list).

On the Struggle to Let Go

God it is so easy to turn away from you when I don't want to accept the thing you have given me, that path that you gently nudge me to walk.

You have walked me along a journey God,

walked me down a path through nothingness ...

You walked me through a process of letting go, of home, of relationship, of financial stability, of loved ones, of family.

You walked me through a relationship where a business grew into prosperity, and the status symbols of success began to appear ... then there was a junction, an ethical junction that called me to respond from the visceral knowledge of what is right ... but you prepared me Lord, you prepared me to let go of trappings by bringing me in my journey to Christ.

My life such as I knew it fell apart.

When I dropped to my knees and put my very face to the ground,

your own self-made bridge: Jesus - He is the one who came to me,

whose hand I took and stood up again, on legs scarce capable of supporting me.

You brought me from a huddled lump on the ground,

weeping,

wanting death,

to a standing, running, breathing, live-loving place again.

God you brought me through Jamaica in 2009,

through the summer of 2009 with all its angers, griefs and unsureness.

You brought me to seminary: through scripture unfolding, through a clinical understanding of my own spiritual journey - from the first memories I have of myself -

a child digging dirt in a yard talking with you while making mud-pies.

You brought me with love God,

out of the church street home of James and Ange, clothed in love and friendship, to my home with the Arnolds ...

To my own home again, replete with space, light and love.

I do not misunderstand you God;

YOU are my faithful, loving providing God:

Your arms,

Your hands,

They hold me in all times and in all places.

When I struggle to hold on to a thorny branch,

A rotting branch, a breaking limb...

You wait patiently to catch me -

To envelope me into a new reality, a reality more bountiful and enriching than the old -

a new reality that will teach me about abundance in ways the thorny, breaking branch could never do.

My muscles are puny, weak, irrelevant things beside the strength and rigour you offer.

The thing I hold on to is always less than,

will always be less than the glory you have in mind for me.

The peace I seek to make for myself in the world

cannot even begin to measure up to YOUR PEACE that surpasses all understanding -

the peace that goes beyond mortal, somatic, bodily assurity and rests

like a gently landed dove on the deepest places of the soul.

You have blessed me God indeed ...

you have provided me with dreams and visions along the way that I may know with surety your presence in my life.

You have lifted my darkness with light,

obliterating my ignorance with dreams of humming birds, hanging flowers, and the diligence of the nectar-loving small bird that cannot pierce but must surely, slowly and laboriously make its way to your sweet love by crawling into the very heart of the flower, footstep by footstep.

You have shown me God how you see people, all people, as light,

regardless of the darkness they hold within.

You have shown me love - your love -

with gentleness and joy you have taken me as your beloved one

when I was most broken and depleted.

No fences, roads, heights or depths separate me any longer from you God.

You love me even when I am a brat who holds stubbornly to my own way, my own will,

after praying into the night on bended knee,

earnestly,

for your will in my life!

You smile the faithful, knowing smile of a patient father who knows my tantrum arises from the fears of my own terrifying experiences of hurt, heartbrokenness - at the hands of mortals, egos, whims and false realities,

mere facades of the popular common readership and audience.

You present me with a path and a lamp at my feet, and you patiently, faithfully await the passing of my fearful clinging to the old, thorny, rotting, broken branch to which I cling -

my feet dangling in mid-air with nothing against which to find purchase.

Blood runs down my arms as the thorns pierce my foolish, faithlessly clinging hand.

I cry, kicking the air in my frustration.

I am foolish God ... so foolish ... and my foolishness prolongs my suffering.

Wormwood smiles a satisfied smile, for I so effectively torture myself by hanging on.

Your fingers brush the tears from my cheeks,

your free hand moved the hair off my forehead, out of my eyes - my sweaty, desperately clumping hair.

Your lips kiss my forehead with an assurance:

you are there.

Even in my fucked up, foolish, fearful, faithless, unwillingness to let you,

you are there.

You whisper in my ear: "my child, my daughter, your hands are bleeding, your muscles aching because you hold to the false security of a thorny, rotting, broken branch. I know you. You are my beloved. Hold on until yu are ready to let go. I am here for you. My own bleeding hands will dress yours when you are ready to let go. Or when you weary of fear and simply cannot hold on to your false security anymore. I am here my beloved; I am here."

I feel your gentle exhalation against my ear.

The patient sigh of a loving father,

waiting for His child to come to her dimwitted senses.

I know without a doubt that you are there,

with a journey more abundant in blessings awaiting me.

I know you will give me the time to recuperate.

You will build me up for the journey you have in mind.

I know your will in my life will bring me to my fullest flowering in your image and likeness.

I know you see me as light;

I know you see all your broken, wounded, patched up, fucked up children as luminous light, your own light, each and every one.

I know only you can bring me into being the light you see in me ... only in oneness with you can I lose the noneness of me.

Thank you God, for loving me so, for loving me as I hold hardheadedly to the old, thorny, broken branch, as I pray for the courage to let go.

Thank you God for being my patient, loving, understanding God

my God who gets me,

the God understanding of me.

Foolish Child of a Loving Father

I do not misunderstand you God - you are my faithgful, loving, providing God; your arms, your hands, they hold me in all times and in all places. When I struggle to hold on to a thorny rotting limb, a breaking branch, you wait patiently to catch me - to envelope me into a new reality, a reality more bountiful and enriching than the old - a new reality which will teach me about abundance in ways the thorny, rotting, breaking branch could never do.

My muscles are puny, weak, irrelvant things beside the strength and rigour you offer.

The Common Experience

I had an experience yesterday: my heart was full of the pain of my family, the families of others, my pain, the pain of others. My heart was full even of pain of people who had died before of family members who had died with stories untold, apologies unspoken, loves not experienced. For a small period of uncontrollable sobbing, I felt like the pain of so many hurts:

accumulated wrongdoings,

inherited poverty of love and circumstances,

ill-treatment and abuses

the negatives ... these coupled with the positives:

the healings,

the courage to do the healing work,

the forgiving,

the returning to,

the letting go of ...

I felt like all these were literally trying to surface and gain release through me.

It was a difficult and embarrassing experience. Made bearable by two main things:

(1) that I had been praying for sometime for God to use me as a channel of His will in the world, and to make me a clear and open channel for His purposes.

(2) that the people around me while I had this experience were supportive, kind, loving and patient with me.

This does not negate the fact that I felt (and still feel) more than a little weird about the whole thing; more than a little embarrassed; more than a little overwhelmed.

Physically the experience was like having a shrapnel bomb explode right in my heart. There were splinters flying everywhere - the splinters were like pieces of my own life, pieces of the lives of others - the painful pieces, the parts that could not be expressed, the parts that had never been allowed to be expressed. The shrapnel was both visual and experiential ... I could see snippets of lives, like snapshots - or single frames from a movie... Frames in which love, forgiveness, self-esteem, shame, abuse, punishment, hatred, anger - all of these were in play simultaneously. The frames were flying every which way inside, and like shards of glass they pierced me from the very inside of my heart.

Physically, as I sobbed, I felt heat radiating from me... from the top of my head, out the soles of my feet. I had on a scarf and I felt like it was choking me. It was hard to breathe because the physicality of the experience was so powerful. It was frightening. My heart hurt and my breathe hitched. Emotionally, I felt this heartbreaking sadness, the sadness of knowing all sides of the picture, the sadness of knowing all the reasons for the inherently fucked up nature of the human condition - not knowing in an intellectual, analytical way, but knowing as in the Hebrew sense "yaw dah" or "yada" - knowing through all one's perceptive capability, knowing viscerally, knowing beyond linguistic capability to articulate ... the knowing of the soul.

It was the sadness of knowing how full the world is of love, yet how unevenly it is all spread around. The sadness also of observing what happens when love is spread unevenly - like peanut butter on bread, the parts that don't get spread are unpalatable, we want to leave them on the plate, throw them in the garbage. They (seem to have) nothing to recommend them.

Except people who don't get love are not disposable like un-peanut buttered bread ends. We may not choose to eat them, and wisely so - those dry and crusty bread ends might choke and kill us. But, whereas they may be disposable in the eyes of humankind, they are not disposable in the eyes of God. Poor God has to find somewhere to put the bread end people who did not get any love. Whose very poverty of love or circumstance has made them evil, wicked, pitiable and harm-mongers in this world. God also has a whole other project cycle to deal with - somehow finding a way into the hearts of those who are damaged by the unloved ones, so that the cycle of unloving can stop ... so that hurt, damaged parents can stop raising hurt, damaged children; so that hurt, damaged partners can go into new relationships with new hope instead of old crust scabs of hurt that in turn create new damage, new hurts, new scars in new relationships.

I felt the enormity of the common experiences of pain and suffering; at the same exact time I felt the enormity of the common experiences of hope and love. The experience was really a hard experience to have. But it was also a powerful experience to have, and a blessing. I believe it happened because I was open to it, because I had prayed for exactly such an opening of my own heart.

What did it yield other than a pile of used Kleenex and a high sense of embarrassment and self-consciousness? It yielded a deepening of my compassion, a deepening of my soul's understanding of this human condition that we all live - with all it's pains and agonies, with all it's beauties and blessings. It also yielded a drawing closer to God in faith, because I got a glimpse as through a tiny tiny opening or keyhole, I got a glimpse of the enormity of the work at hand, and the exquisiteness of what happens when we are able to be open to the workings of a world that is so much bigger than us.

Each of us is like a bookmark in time - one hand reaching back into our pasts, the other reaching forward into our future. We all have the struggles of negotiating through painful histories into hope-filled futures. It becomes somehow easier when we do this with others - in koinonia - in community.

The common experience is both pain and pleasure, both love and hate, both forgiveness and anger. If we are courageous on our journey, the common experience will yield growth, and we can break the negative cycles of history and make peanut butter sandwiches of which no crusts need be thrown away.

Perfectly Fallen

If there is such a thing as obsessive compulsive seasonal condition I suffer from it in the fall. The beautiful majesty of perfectly fallen leaves is like a rain of tangible perfection just waiting to be picked up, handled, observed, admired. I have to stop and look, admiring God's passionate display of life passing onto death.

I walk a few blocks to the Route 7 bus stop. On that walk, I pass under a massive maple tree whose edges have started to turn the promising yellow, orange and red of fall. It's a signal of what is to come, and it begins like the blush of a shy virgin preparing to join with her first love. Before long, this modest blush turns into a raging, passionate flame of a tree, whose perfectly falling leaves are like the virgin throwing off her clothes, readying for the passion to come.

I couldn't resist picking up a leaf yesterday, it was so perfect: each single vein visible in highlighted red against the fading orange and yellow that had once been green. So beautiful. So perfectly fallen. Holding it's flawless majesty in the palm of my hand, I caught sight of divinity:

Like the perfectly fallen leaf, whose fall must precede the interlude with winter, whose death and decay will create compost for the new season of growth, so too must we each experience fall - the opening gambit in the cycle of renewal

In our fallen state, though we may feel ugly, failed, exhausted, worn out - we are still the beautiful children of God.

From our fallen state, God picks us up and holds us in the palm of His hand - a loving father still able to see the perfection of design and purpose in each and every one of us.

The God of my understanding suffers from an obsessive compulsive condition that knows no season; it's name is Grace.

The Sower Reframes History.

How much of where we sit spiritually is a function of our history? Do we see ourselves as worthy of God's grace, or as displaced from access to grace due to history? Do we nurture each other in love, or do we perpetuate the rocky soil and fallow ground experiences of others?

During the "down-time" of the week when Tivoli was under fire, I was mostly unable to sleep. I read a lot during that time, and one of the articles I read was about the systematic "breaking" of the African slave, to make the slave more pliant for the plantation economies. We think "history" and we think "a couple of hundred years ago", but the imprint of that breaking process continues to clothe the souls of our post-emancipation population.

In examining what exists now against the backdrop of the history of slavery and christianity, the following was observed: many women of African descent in the lower socio-economic bracket of the greater Kingston area have moved here to find work - often having already had a child or two in the rural parish from which they hail, usually children out of wedlock. Mothers often have children from at least two fathers. The fathers have often been (and in many cases continue to be) mentally, physically abusive and unfaithful to these women. The fathers often have no vested interest in the act of parenting - seeing themselves only as sperm donors, financial or material providers, burying their own emotional and spiritual needs in liquor, smoking, carousing.

Like clockwork, I see the imprint of the methodical, systematic damage on the family unit harkening from slavery days, and on the man-woman relationship. Loyalty and faithfulness are not relationship expectations; commitment, of the form marriage is built on is not an expectation; without such commitment, the entire family unit dangles like an unanchored boat in a tumultuous sea, threatening to capsize with every passing infidelity. The women experience physical violence with fists, board, machete, half-brick all endured with a sense more of expectation than of shock and abhorrence. The sensibilities of these daughters of slavery have not been freed from the expectation of physical abuse and violence as a systematic part of their relationships and their very lives.

The men experience the expectation of financial support, often without the emotional and spiritual support that would be part of a healthy relationship. They are seen only as providers, not as partners. In turn they behave as providers, demanding through violence and unfaithfulness that which they cannot seem to negotiate within their relationships: caring, love, affection.

Bear in mind that for a considerable time in the history of African slavery under the white European colonist, slaves were kept unbaptised and unexposed to the teachings of Christ, for to baptise them would have been to make them equals to the whites, equals under Christ, "neither male nor female, slave nor free" could have existed if all were presented with the pathway of grace. The delineations between slave and free were critical, to blur that line would have upset the apple cart of plantation economics ... so destruction of family and isolation from Christian spirituality became the prongs of the devil's fork that continues to stab us today.

Amidst all that has been cast asunder in the potential magnificence of the intimate male-female relationship, amidst the violence and hopelessness of families adrift,a beautiful thing has happened here in Jamaica. Seeping through the bedrock and cast concrete of systematic destruction of the family unit, seeping through is the word, love and grace of God. Fortunately, because Jamaica is NOT a country in which there has been institutional theological bleaching, these descendents of African chiefs and empresses turned slaves have learnt through whatever schooling, and whatever community involvement, about God. Everybody here had an auntie or granny, if not a father or mother who took them to church - and somewhere in there they understood on some visceral level that God is grace - so the seed had a chance to fall on them. In their hearts there is a yearning for connection to that which is identified as divine. Such a simple human yearning ... like a familiar song calling us home to the arms of a loving father.

The thing is, the Bible also teaches things that are converse to the "teachings" of slavery ... the Bible supports and encourages relationship in marriage, identifying "adultery" as sinful. So many of these women, though yearning for the grace of God made available to all through Christ, feel ashamed to step up to the table of God's grace because they are unwed mothers, have had children, sex out of wedlock - the anti-family ethos of slavery having taught them to earn their worth through their sexuality and child-bearing without the supporting family structures and marriage in place. The same reality applies for the men - their sexuality has become an armour through which they feel grace is held aloft, separated always from cooling the beautiful dark skins with the blood shed for them. This did not just happen without cause or reason - this is the result of the colonial manifesto for control exercised through the destruction of self-esteem and family (the hearth and cradle of self-esteem), the systematic destruction of the black enslaved.

When emancipation happened on paper, it did not happen on the soul - hundreds of years later the imprint of slavery remains. That human choice to damage humans has to be consciously undone by the human choice to repair and heal humans, in love.

The practical execution of theology in many Jamaican churches has done nothing to encourage many of these people subject yet to mental slavery with chains from history. Many churches still preach that one must get one's own house in order before entering the house of God (complete rubbish in my humble opinion since Jesus so specifically ministered to those whose houses were in disarray, perhaps as example to us to meet people where they are and walk with them, since he came heal the broken and as disciples we are encouraged to take up the cross and follow him). Anyway, the seed is fallen, but the ground has been made barren so to speak in our case by the teachings that supported slavery. Those teachings have ripped away the topsoil and planted in it's place thorn bushes. Those teachings have become the harsh sunlight that rapes the seed of the moisture necessary to germinate. Who is the sower here? And who takes responsibility for helping the seed to spring up from the unfriendly places created by the hand of man?

See for yourself, clearly, the intentionality of all the dots that create the connections that are at work - preventing the seed from taking root- and consider these dots against the parable of the sower (Mt 13:3-9 // Mk 4:3-9 // Lk 8:5-8 // Gospel of Thomas Logia 9)... where the seed falls on a rock, on barren soil, in places where the sun would scorch it, or thorns would choke it - those in the house of the Lord have a responsibility as their brother and sister's keeper to make the barren fertile; to shelter from the sun, to chop out the weeds and help the fallen seed germinate and take root.

The best asphalt on the road to emancipation from mental slavery is the teachings represented so well in scripture. The path of the disciple is as that of a farmer, supporting the germination and flourishing of all the seed, even those fallen in the harsh ground of man's making. Is God the sower? Or are we? Where we have dominion over harsh and unfriendly soil, can we not make it more suitable to supporting the germination of all the seeds of humanity?

Our modern world, our technological and educational advantage, our claims to awareness, our access to information - don't these oblige us to work towards increasing the fertility of barren soils, towards sheltering the seeds that threaten to die of sunstroke, towards watering the parched, and chopping out the thorn bushes, so that more of the seed strewn about can take root, grow strong, and prosper?

How many mustard seeds need to germinate to shelter all the birds of the world, shade all the weeping and broken-hearted, and feed all the world's hungry?

Can you help a seed, maybe a mustard seed, in barren circumstances, to take root, push up shoot and ultimately bear fruit?