We seek to ease the pain of alienation and rejection, and to promote reconciliation between the church and any individual oppressed because of sexual orientation.

The goal of RCC is to educate ourselves and our church community to the existence of unexamined prejudice, as well as to the consequences of injustice. We will work to put an end to discrimination toward gay and lesbian people, their families and friends, by building bridges of cooperation and understanding within and outside of the church community.

Visit our RCC page to learn more about this ministry.

Greetings, everyone!  As part of our new website, we’re going to have blogs from staff members.  I’m going to start the ball rolling here with several reflections I’ve written on various topics.  Some are very formational; some are me thinking too much, as I tend to do, but please check them out and comment all you want!

Enjoy!
Paul

For a while now, I have been intrigued—emotionally touched in a mysterious way—by emptiness.  Whether it’s an empty room in a house, just a floor and walls and a window to let light in, an empty field on the side of the road, unplowed, untouched, or white space on a page, emptiness speaks to me.

Those of you who have seen my office know that there isn’t much in it.  I like my desk clear, and the tables around me empty of papers and things.  In all honesty, I have trouble thinking when there’s clutter around.  It’s freeing, isn’t it, to be unconfined by things and thoughts?  To be free to dream.

Just the other day, Cindy Bernardin shared with me a story about an empty room in her former house, dubbed it “the room with no furniture.”  It was a room of pure potential.  When Cindy threw a party, the room became the party room.  When her kids’ friends came over to play, the  absence of “stuff” in the room let their imaginations run wild.  The room had the potential to be anything—to become whatever they dreamt it to be.  And when the family of Joel, a friend of Cindy’s son—also a Biblical prophet—was remodeling their house, Joel told his parents that he, too, wanted a “room with no furniture.”

I think this sense of childlike wonder—this dream of what can be—lies at the heart of my own fascination with emptiness.  Perhaps there’s something very sacramental about emptiness.  Perhaps emptiness is a window through which we can discover something about who God is, and—since we are created in God’s image and likeness—who we are.  God is the very essence of potential.  Everything that can be is fulfilled in its truest form in God.  And that includes us.  This window to seeing God allows us to reflect on our own lives, to consider how we can fulfill the humanity into which we are created.

Perhaps emptiness is also a window to seeing how God sees—not a bunch of fallen, broken people who can’t seem to get their lives together (though we might certainly feel that way at times!)—but a people of potential, a people ready to be filled with what we really need—with grace.  With love.

This season of Lent is about self-emptying.  It’s about potential.  It’s about change.  It’s about letting go of all those things that clutter our hearts and minds and letting God’s transformative grace fill us.  Lent is about becoming radicals—revolutionaries—people who give without counting cost, fight for goodness heedless of wounds, who labor for the kingdom without thought of reward!

This whole self-emptying idea has been around a long time.  Since the time of St. Paul, theologians use the Greek word kenosis to talk about it.  Kenosis begins with Christ, alone and wandering through the desert for 40 days, giving all he had to the people he loved, dying on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, in fulfillment of his potential—in fulfillment of God’s plan.  Likewise, our Lenten fast is about kenosis—about really reflecting—really fasting from those things that fill our lives (probably not chocolate, potato chips, or coke!)—so that we can be filled with God’s grace, transformed by God’s love, and fulfilled in our humanity.

Lent is the time to find that empty room.  To climb to the mountaintop and leave this world behind, so that we can see what can be—a world transfigured and renewed.  And to do that, we’ve got to give it away.

It’s Advent.

Supposedly a time of peace and hope, it’s also the time when the media bombards us with consumerist propaganda—“Buy this! You need this!” they say. These voices remind of one of my favorite lines from Assassin’s Creed II, a video game that I just finished playing. In the background of the gameplay, shopkeepers shout something like, “I have things you don’t even know you need!” This, among many other lines, humorously and sarcastically captures an element of contemporary culture that pervades the Advent experience—and simultaneously contradicts everything that Advent is all about.

What is this season about? We hear things all the time—watch…wait…be prepared…the light is coming…prepare the way of the Lord…make room for Jesus in your heart—but what do these things mean? At tonight’s liturgy—the liturgy of the Second Sunday of Advent—two elements of the readings struck me hard.

The first, from the fifth chapter of the Prophet Baruch, reads: “For God has commanded that every lofty mountain be made low, and that the age-old depths and gorges be filled to level ground, that Israel may advance secure in the glory of God.”

The second passage from third chapter of Luke quotes Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

So what is this season about? The standard messages of Advent, to watch and wait, to prepare and make room for Christ’s coming are all fine, but the fail to capture one vital element because they are all about us. These notions are about what we do. But if Advent is about Christ’s coming, then it must also be about what God is doing for and in and among us.

To me, these Scriptures define Christ as the Great Equalizer, the one who comes to make all things equal—to make all things ONE—to flatten mountains and fill in valleys, to straighten crooked roads and make the rough places smooth. To make all things equal. To make all things ONE.

So often, I think we think of these words as mere literary jargon, beautiful images—but just images—that describe the God’s power. But it can’t stop there if Scripture is truly the inspired word of God. For, God is the very essence of perfect self-giving, and the essence of self-gift cannot merely seek its own glory. What is implicit in these images is a call for each of us, a command that we must take to heart and live on this Advent journey and beyond.

For, the passage from Baruch says, “God has commanded” that the mountains be made low. Who’s going to do the making? Who’s going to fill the valleys? As I said, this isn’t all literary mumbo jumbo. Scripture itself is sacramental, and the command of God is revelatory; it tells us what we must work toward. Christ came to Equalize all things, to level all people, to “raise up the poor and tear down the mighty” as Mary says in the Magnificat, not because might is in itself flawed or evil, but because we are all called to this profound oneness, this profound Equalization—this unity in Christ Jesus.

As the hymn says, “In Christ there is no east or west / In him no south or north.” There is only Equalization—there is only oneness. So, we must participate in this Great Equalization that God has commanded—we must make the rough places plain; we must give up the mountains of certainty, wealth, power, and conviction on which we stand.

Even when we’re right, if what we believe keeps us from loving, from living in full union with all our brothers and sisters—whether rich or poor, whether they live in mansions or have no homes at all, whether they smell bad or are gay or straight or have had abortions or believe in God or not—we are not participating in this Great Equalization for which this Advent calls. We are the ones who by God’s grace reveal—in our LOVE—the “salvation of God.”

Why must we watch? Why must we wait? Why must we prepare? Because to do so is to change our own hearts and lives so that we may more fully serve God, that we may more fully make all things and all people ONE.

And why do this? Baruch tells us that it is so “Israel may advance secure in the glory of God.” If we as Christians to advance in God’s glory—in an Irenaean sense, to be fully human, to fulfill our humanity, to live in the glorious divine image in which we were created.

In practical terms, it’s easier to walk a straight, flat path than it is to try descending the steep paths into valleys—which might include rough ground, deadly dropoffs, and slick descents—and climb mountains—where we run the risk of being pinned beneath avalanches, falling off cliffs, or not receiving enough oxygen to our brains!

This symbolic language, then, provides a very real challenge for each of us. We who can walk the valleys and scale the mountains must raise the valleys, bring down the mountains, and straighten the paths, that all people—whether in the throes or anxiety, depression, sin, shame, guilt, glory, power, or selfishness—may be able to dwell together in full Communion with God and the fullness of life in Christ Jesus, who came that “we may have life, and have it to the fullest!” (John 10).

So what’s it going to take to get us there? It seems to me that emptiness is a place to start. We are often a people—in the midst of the voices of advertisers telling us what we need, commercials showing images of families that are perfectly happy all the time (beyond what’s really possible!), and the noise of malls and Christmas songs in our ears—who fear emptiness, fear spiritual and material poverty, fear silence, and fear being left alone. Yet those things are integral parts of Advent, integral parts of creating a world of unity, light, peace, and Equalization.

For the great kenosis, the great emptying of Christ, who took on the role of slave to Equalize all things (free us from sin, for sin is of excess), is the model we must follow, the straight path is that leads to emptiness, so that we may have the fullness of life in Christ, who makes all things ONE, who makes all things equal, who brings to fulfillment the plan of God that unfolds before our eyes each moment.

Let us watch. Let us wait. Let us give it away, tearing down the mountains, raising the valleys and straightening the paths that lead us to the fullness of life.

As Rory Cooney wrote, “When we stand together / to stand against hell / the name of this people / is Emmanuel.”

Remember. God IS with us. So hope. Trust. Live. Love.

Seriously. Bear with me, now.

Meet Sluggo the Slug. One night, Sluggo packs his slug suitcase and decides to go on a slug journey across the back patio. Being a slug, he thinks it’s quite the expedition, but really it’s just a quick jaunt across the pavement.

Sluggo has a point of origin, from which he begins his journey. And he has a point of arrival, where his journey ends. Everywhere in between, he leaves a trail of thick slime—sticky, gooey stuff—the evidence of Sluggo’s very existence, the telltale sign that “Sluggo Wuz Here,” which he secretes as he goes from his origin to his destination.

And that’s where Sluggo is like God.

Just as Sluggo had his point of origin, in God there is the Origin, the Alpha, the Creator, God the Father, who made all that has been, all that is, and all that will be. And at the end of the journey lies our destination—the Firstborn of Creation—the Omega, the Christ, the Redeemer, God the Son, who in the fullness of time will retrace Sluggo’s slug trail and bring all of Creation back to its Origin. And the thick, gooey slime, the trail left behind when Sluggo moved from Point A to Point B is the very stuff of Creation; it’s the trail—better said the sacrament—the sign left behind as God moves through our universe and penetrates our experience.

We dwell in the slime. But the slime isn’t a bad place. It’s not icky slime. The slime itself is a gift.

Still, in the dark, the slime is just slime, just gross goop on the patio. But when light hits the slime, it changes. It glimmers; it shimmers. And that sparkle in the slime, that glitter in the goop is the Holy Spirit, the light of the resurrection, the indwelling of God in Creation, the abiding presence of the Creator and the Redeemer in our very experience. The light is God’s transcendent, universal Love, and when Love is present, Creation shines.

As the light moves and the slime glitters, so God moves in the eternal perichoresis—the dance of love—and when God moves in us, the slime that is our experience twinkles with God’s presence, shines radiantly as we engender unity, as we cultivate peace, as we bound beyond boundaries and let Love—that is the essence of God—transform us.

Delving Into Full Humanity
It’s easy to forget that Jesus was human. Really human. Fully human. Movies so often portray Jesus as a stoic, serious, overly dramatic man who stands apart from the rest of humanity, a sort of ultra-non-conformist who has little to do with the real experience of human life. These cinematic portrayals present a Jesus who is more a divine being in human form—someone ultimately conscious of his own divinity—than someone who actually lived the hurts, sorrows, fears, temptations, joys, and intimate moments that we experience. As we approach the great liturgies of the Triduum, which extensively celebrate the fullness of the Paschal Mystery, it occurs to me that the truest, deepest understanding of the Paschal Mystery lies in first understanding—as much as we can—that Jesus was indeed fully human and fully divine.

Although it might seem like a ridiculous point of departure, don’t forget: Jesus pooped. Jesus threw up. Jesus bled. Jesus wept. Jesus faced temptations, not only in a desert encounter with Satan, but in everyday life. Jesus probably had the flu, coughs, sneezes, diarrhea, you name it. Jesus might’ve broken a bone (he didn’t have magic Messiah bone tissue). Jesus walked around barefoot or in rough sandals through hot sand. He probably had blisters on his feet. And he probably smelled bad. He probably didn’t comb his hair. He did not have blond hair and blue eyes; he looked like a middle-Easterner. He suffered, not only the agony of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (double entendre, perhaps), but suffered the loss of friends to death, the betrayal of Judas, followers who didn’t “get it”—like Peter, whom he called both “Satan” and “Rock”—and much more. He drank and ate with his friends. Others accused him of being a drunkard. If we’ve experienced it, Jesus probably did, too. That’s full humanity. If we are going to enter fully into the Paschal Mystery, we have to start there.

And at the end of his life, in the fullness of fullness, Jesus died. Not a “natural death.” Not a painless death. Jesus was executed—it’s capital punishment. Jesus died at another man’s command and at another man’s hand, because of “crimes” he supposedly committed. We humans subjected an innocent man—our Savior—to capital punishment through a “system of justice,” and somehow, we have found the ability to turn a blind eye to the fact that we still do the very same thing when we execute others today. We might say, “Oh, at least lethal injection is more humane than crucifixion.”

But the underlying reality is that we do to others what we did to Jesus. How many other innocent lives have ended in the same way? And if the person is guilty, does it really make any difference? When we consider that we have one command: to LOVE, the act of intentionally ending of another’s life in punishment seems quite out of place. Condemnation is the enemy of love, for as John 3:17 says, Christ did not come to condemn, but to save. Now, before anyone argues that this article is really a rant against capital punishment, I’ll get back on track, but I felt compelled to mention this correlation, one that’s easy to overlook in our climate of politicized religion, one in which being Christian too often means belonging to a particular party or set of ideas (some of which might actually contradict everything we believe!). The important point here is that Jesus’ full humanity led to death, because if Christ had not died as we all will die, he could not have been fully human.

Christ, then, existed fully in the world, but he was not of the world. It’s what my friend Robert Feduccia has said so many times: “The glory of God is man fully alive” and “Jesus could only redeem what he took on.” Christ was “fully alive” in his full humanity, but he did not give in to sin. Why?

A Channel of God’s Love
So, what about the other part of Jesus’ nature? What about being fully divine? What does that mean? I don’t have the answer, but I do have a few ideas on what Christ’s divinity is all about—like everything I write, these are only ideas; they aren’t even necessarily what I think (most of the time, I don’t know what I think, I just think).

Anyhow, understanding Christ’s divinity is necessary if we are to understand the fullness of the Paschal Mystery we celebrate in the Triduum. For about a year now, I have been very interested in the question of Messianic Consciousness or Divine Awareness, the question of whether Jesus actually knew that he was the Messiah. Consider that for a minute. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe, in spite of all the healings and works, words and wonders, he didn’t know that he was the Messiah.

But how could Jesus be the Messiah without knowing it? As the Son of God, perhaps Christ’s divinity manifested in one simple way: through loving surrender. “Surrender” is a popular word in modern Christianity; often, we talk of “surrendering” or “conforming” our will to God’s will. But often, this idea shows up when we talk about accepting things that we don’t want to accept. Like sudden death or national tragedy. “I guess it was just God’s will,” we say, as if God’s will is somewhere “out there” where we can grasp it, or as if God “lets things happen” so that we know him. Quite the contrary, God’s will is clear. Jesus told us what it is: to LOVE. We encounter God really and truly present in our midst every day, in love shared, in conversations, in creation, in the fullness of life. And when we experience that, we encounter what might be the very “stuff” of Christ’s divinity.

Because Jesus is Christ, the Son of God, perhaps the state of “surrender” in which he lived was not something he thought much about. Perhaps the nature of Christ’s divinity is that Christ dwelled in that state of full accord with God’s will of LOVE for our world. In such a state, temptation has no power; sin has no hold, for always choosing love means never choosing sin. Thus, Christ could dwell in the fullness of human experience but always choose God-love—without thinking about it, for he was what he was created to be! In short, he existed in love and called us to do the same.

This line of thinking could explain the so-called “miracles” of Christ, too. Jesus was not a magician. He was not a “miracle worker.” He didn’t say “poof! You’re healed!” Rather, Jesus says, “Your faith has saved you (or healed you)” or “Your sins are forgiven.” It is by the faith of those he encountered that miracles transpired; it is by the acknowledgment of the presence of God so truly in their midst that God was able to “break in” to human experience, to venture beyond the realms of what is rationally “possible” and allow the unexplainable to occur. This is important to consider, because we—as a product of God’s freely given love—have free will. Christ, in his surrender, always spoke and acted in love. But it is only when others could sacrifice their will and humbly and honestly say, “I need you. I want to be well, and I recognize God in you” that it could happen. God is all around us; Christ is the channel by which God breaks in; when we humbly say that we need God, we unite ourselves to God through Christ; perhaps that logical train of ideas explains how Christ’s miracles could have occurred.

By existing in oneness (full surrender) with the perfect love of God, Jesus carried that transforming love everywhere he went; when others recognized it and believed, God entered into our world and worked wonders. And maybe that’s what canonized saints—although sinners—sometimes encountered. Perhaps through their moments of total surrender, they allowed God to “break in” and transform human experience in inexplicable ways. They, for a moment, were as Christ—perfect channels of God’s grace in our world.

Sin, of course, is the antithesis of full surrender, the rejection of God’s will (choosing things other than love) and leads to separation, to anger, to anxiety, to fear, and to all those things that prevent us from living fully as Christ lived fully. When we sin, we create a barrier between ourselves and God, a barrier that prevents God from being able to “break in” as God broke in through Christ. This is the inevitable sin that I’ve written of before, the sin that is a natural byproduct of free will, which is a natural byproduct of love freely given.

And That’s the Paschal Mystery
So, then, Christ was fully human and fully divine, a person who lived as a human but by his divinity possessed the propensity to be sinless, for he lived always in the perfect love in which we were created. Jesus suffered. Jesus died. And he rose again to free us from our sins, to give us access to the sinless divinity in which he was born; he restored us to oneness with God, but our human propensity to sin obstructs that oneness. By subjugating that propensity, we—like so many before us—can become true channels of God’s love; we can be, and indeed we are, the means by which God continually breaks into our world.

The liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday celebrate in absolute fullness the entirety of this, the Mystery of our Faith—the Paschal Mystery. At every Eucharist, the bread and wine—the fruit of the earth and work of our hands—along with our offerings of time, talent, and treasure, are not simply symbols. They are the very “stuff” of human experience. They are the work we do every day. They are the gifts that God has given us.

And when we return those gifts to God and pray over them, when those gifts become the Body and Blood of Christ, we consecrate not bread and wine but our very beings to life in the service of God and all of humanity. We dedicate ourselves to being channels of God’s perfect love.