Liminalescence

Earlier this year, the famed Celtic author John Phillip Newell came forward with a startling announcement that he was relinquishing his status as an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland. In this courageous and transparent podcast , Newell does go into why he was now part of a vast "diaspora" of those who left the church of their birth. What was even more compelling was how he went on to express his nine "spiritual yearnings" that comprised his newly articulated "Yes!" So after writing about what has become my "no longer" in the previous blog entries, I now intend to move in the positive realm of where I'm heading to live out my "now becoming."  For the past few years, I've tried hard to make room in my spirit for those who hold different spiritual temperaments from that of my own. I'm now ready to give myself that same permission to worship in a way that allows me to honor my deeply inherent inclusive nature. At my ce...

                                                                                                 Why did Jesus come? Was it to simply enter into the institutions of man and be as good a Jew as he could be? Indeed not. Rather, the gospels indicate that Jesus sought to reform, purify and call God's people back to true fidelity, just as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had done time and time again all throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. It is thus my contention that Jesus is the greatest example of loving dissent ever found in all of Salvation History. Ok, I need to ease back a bit so as to reassure my concerned Catholic brothers and sisters that I am not about to go rope-a-dope on Mother Church. Truly, I love the church and have a strong desire to...

Last Supper, by Polish artist Bohdan Piasecki. Bohdan painted this scene of the women, men and children celebrating the Passover together, as Jesus ate his last supper. Each of the 22 figures are clothed in traditional Jewish garb, rather than the Italian Renaissance gear seen in one of the world's most recognizable paintings, Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper. It was a Sunday morning at the 8:30 AM mass, some where in the mid-1970's when an older priest was filling in at my home parish of St. Boniface in Monee, Illinois. A primal realization about my identity became apparent when it was time to distribute communion. The priest called for a Eucharistic Minister to come forward from the congregation to assist. Much as she always had in the past, one of the matriarchs of our community stepped forward when the silence was rudely punctuated with an emphatic "NO! No women." The visceral shock that was held by the collective members in the pews was so palpable that I knew...