This Week's Meandering Thoughts

This Week’s Meandering Thoughts

By a more than normally tired Dan McDonald

 

            I worked a 72 hour week this last week which means my reading and writing opportunities have been limited. The week included International Women’s Day and among the things I thought about were an accomplishment, an article, and something said by women.

            One famous woman, with an unrepeatable accomplishment celebrated her eightieth birthday this week. Valentina Tereshkova was a Russian Cosmonaut and was the first woman to fly in outer space. Like many Russians born in her time, her father was killed in World War II, and her mother raised the family working in a factory. Tereshkova earned an engineering degree through a correspondence program, learned to fly, and took up parachuting, all of which helped her win the ability to become the first woman in outer space. Growing up in the Cold War, we saw the Soviet cosmonauts as rivals to our astronaut program. Looking back a half century later, we can see the bravery and diligence of the explorers who rode into space in a thinly protected air bubble within an environment that apart from the air they carried with them would have been instantly fatal. It seems to me that whether Russian or American these space explorers added to our human knowledge of the universe while multiplying our imagined concepts of what was possible for our humanity.

            One blog caught my attention and spoke to my understanding of life. Heather Caliri wrote a blog wonderfully entitled “Peace is a tough-britches choice”. Caliri is one of my favorite bloggers. Her blogs consistently speak to me about the realities of living the Christian life. Her content and writing style help balance my tendencies to be long on philosophy and short on practicality. There is depth of thought joined to living out the thoughts in her blogs.

            In this piece on peace – I realized that Heather Caliri had come to the realization that the peace we often seek in the Christian life is something that should be a foundation to how we live and not merely a goal for our lives. God, in sending His Son into our humanity came to bring us peace. We are given a state of peace which can then permeate the energies and activities of our lives. Our ways in which we experience the peace God gives to us differs, but Christian peace works better as the way of our lives than as a distant goal of our lives if we get everything right in our lives. God’s peace is as much the reality and way of a Christian life as the fruit of a Christian life. Fruit is the DNA of the seed fully grown. Peace is part of the DNA of the Gospel which we are called to believe and live out. In Heather’s blog you see how she learned to recognize that living in the peace God gave to her requires her to honor and cultivate the gift bestowed upon her. She has to guard her peace in a personal way keeping in mind her own unique personhood, gifting, talents, and idiosyncrasies. The gift of peace turns out to flourish best in our lives when we do diligence and make tough-britches choices.

            I felt a connection to how one of my turning points in life helped me more enjoy and better live the Christian life. Many years ago I realized I had a horrible attitude towards life. I was seeing the Christian life primarily as one of obedience to the dictates of living a holy life. We never think we are the fundamentalists, or the ones living a legalistic life. If I feel free to drink beer, how can I be regarded as a legalist? Even our proofs of being free from legalism can take on a checklist mentality. For me the turning point came when I began to see the implications of Christ’s incarnation. Christ became human to enable us to fully recover our humanity. To realize that redemption was about exploring, discovering, and living my humanity fully resulted in a wonderfully liberating awareness that the Christian life should be a journey of an ever deeper and enriched exploration of our humanity.

            In reading Heather Caliri’s blog on peace, I more fully realized how peace, the peace given to us by God in Christ, is integral to that beautiful process. I think I have often thought of peace as a reward for a good life. But in the Gospel peace is part of the entire DNA of the Christian life from its sowing in the proclamation, to its taking root in our believing, to growing in grace, to the completion of bearing fruit. If we were riding the peace train, I have often thought of peace as the fruit, the caboose of the train following everything else. But as I read Heather’s blog I thought of peace as the rails that bear the weight of the train and enable us to progress smoothly in the journey. We have been called into a state of peace, to live in accordance with the peace given to us in the Gospel, and to seek to be peacemakers as we have been granted peace. Heather’s blog shows us her personal way of cultivating the peace God has given to her in her life. It requires tough-britches choices.

            It seems to me that if we want to see the peace that we cultivate within us become part of the peacemaking we are called to do, a statement by Brittney Moses made on Twitter this week just might be the perfect corollary to take us from protecting and cultivating the peace God has given us, to understanding where others are in order that we might be peaceable and ready to be the peacemakers that bless others. I need to fully fathom Brittney’s description of the human beings around me. They aren’t just like me. We share the fullness of our human natures, but we are unique from one another in basic and personal ways. It is sort of exciting to realize and explore the uniqueness. If we begin to believe that no one else is ever exactly like us, we begin to realize our need for listening, for dialogue, and then for sharing in our differences and exploring the bonds of our shared human natures, created uniquely in the beyond our comprehension image of God. I leave you with Brittney’s words.

 

            For me this week, Valentina Tereshkova’s accomplishments spoke to me about the wonderful possibilities of human life. Heather Caliri’s blog helped me realize that I have truly been called to peace in Christ, and Brittney Moses’ words have given me an insight into how I can live in peace and living with others might be better prepared to be a peacemaker. Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons and surely daughters of God as well.