In this quote from 'Spiritual Defiance' Robin Myers uses the term 'fleeing churches' appropriately.
People are not fleeing churches today because they have lost their deep hunger for a spiritual connection and participation in authentic spiritual communities. Rather, they are fleeing because so many churches now seem bereft of the very spirit that birthed them in the first place. If clergy want to find their people, they might try looking in coffee shops, in homeless shelters, among the young who have pitched their tents in parks to dramatize economic injustice. While we shop, salute, and worship celebrities and athletes, the world is falling apart. What we need today is a move to Occupy Religion.”
― Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance
Peace, justice and blessings to all.
Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise Without delayes, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With him mayst rise: That, as his death calcined thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and much more, just. Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part With all thy art. The crosse taught all wood to resound his name, Who bore the same. His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key Is best to celebrate this most high day. Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song Pleasant and long: Or, since all musick is but three parts vied And multiplied, O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part, And make up our defects with his sweet art. George Herbert, "The Temple" (1633) Paulist Press New York 1981.Christ is risenHe is risen indeed. AlleluiaThe Peace and Blessings of Easter be with you all. |
His spirit and his life he breathes in all
Now on this cross his body breathes no more
Here at the centre everything is still
Spent, and emptied, opened to the core.
A quiet taking down, a prising loose
A cross-beam lowered like a weighing scale
Unmaking of each thing that had its use
A long withdrawing of each bloodied nail,
This is ground zero, emptiness and space
With nothing left to say or think or do
But look unflinching on the sacred face
That cannot move or change or look at you.
Yet in that prising loose and letting be
A memory of Kreisler once:
At some recital in this same city,
The seats all taken, I found myself pushed
On to the stage with a few others,
So near that I could see the toil
Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth
Fluttering under the fine skin,
And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.
I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,
Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,
As we sat there or warmly applauded
This player who so beautifully suffered
For each of us upon his instrument.
So it must have been on Calvary
In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:
The men standing by and that one figure,
The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,
Making such music as lives still.
And no one daring to interrupt
Because it was himself that he played
And closer than all of them the God listened.
– R. S. Thomas, ‘The Musician’ in Tares (Chester Springs: Dufour Editions, 1961), 19.
