Noticing Beauty
For Reflection Roundup each week, we gather news stories, notable pieces, and other important items for Christian leaders today. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but may not concur. Here are 10 things worth sharing this week.
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If your biggest news is about an interesting insect whose path you crossed on your walk, then you’re onto something.
1. Tsh Oxenreider, on her blog The Commonplace, shares “Why We’re Required to Find Beauty.” It’s a fair point when living in a world where the daily news is all about war and how our environment is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. Oxenreider explores the writing of C.S. Lewis, WWI veteran writing amid WWII, and finds him reflective on our duty to participate in the plight of what ails our fellow inhabitants of the world. Lewis finds these causes worth dying for, yet differentiates what we choose to live for. If, in life, all we wrap our thoughts and conversations around is what is going badly, our negative perspective expands. Oxenreider’s point is that, while there are so many difficult circumstances in today’s world, it’s more important than ever to take time for what is going well, to “photograph” the good with our cameras or simply with the words we choose to bring to another’s ears.
2. For the Christian Chronicle, Cheryl Bacon is in the midst of a special project on “Where Have All the Churches Gone?” Noticing the closure of roughly 200 churches between 2014 and 2021, and joining with scholarly writers, Bacon wonders what besides the pandemic is going on here. “What has happened to the churches – to the people who used to populate the pews and to the pews and the buildings that housed them?” she asks. Bacon seeks your help as she gathers responses and formulates data. If you would like to participate, you can do so here.
3. Writing for Religion News Service, Karen Swallow Prior shares “Language is hard: Are you sure they mean what you think they mean?” As an English teacher, Prior has witnessed the effect of the evolution of the meaning of words on her students’ writing over time, which serves to reinforce her argument that we must “treat words – our own and those of others – with care.” She reminds her readers that language is created by God, who reveals through a living, active word. Among created things, both language and people have loving permission to change. Prior’s heart in writing this piece is for listeners to seek understanding and not to simply react or judge on what we think we’ve heard.
4. For the Transforming Center, Ruth Haley Barton writes “Holy Week: Practicing the Most Sacred Rhythm of All.” Here she shares a conversation in which she engaged a group of young ministers’ questions about the disorienting, dark, thirsty-for-living-water moments on the journey that is the spiritual life, where everything seems to come undone, where all falls into question. There are times when our trust comes on to the table for the slicing and dicing of sharp doubt. Ironically, we emerge from these very seasons with greater faith than before. Like the ministers with whom Barton conversed, though, we want to avoid the pain of such a time. She reminds us that Jesus asked for the same permission while he consented to enter suffering on our behalf. Holy Week provides an opportunity to hand ourselves over to what is sure to be “the next level of faith and life.” We won’t know how it feels to shed our own over-protectiveness until we allow it.
5. Liz Cooledge Jenkins writes “Praying the Imprecatory Psalms Is an Act of Nonviolence” for Sojourners, building upon a Christianity Today piece by Tish Harrison Warren. Jenkins endorses Warren’s admonition that we pray words from Scripture that ask God to intervene in world circumstances that incur God’s wrath. Jenkins further reminds readers that these circumstances are not only present in the injustice of the war in Ukraine, but they also rear their ugly heads in all types of oppression occurring for decades. Both writers invite us to pray for God to intervene. “God, break the teeth of white supremacy. Tear out the fangs of misogyny, O Lord! Let police violence vanish like water that runs away. May healthcare systems that exclude the poor be like grass that’s trodden down and withers.”
6. Writing for her own blog, Letters from a Catholic Feminist, Claire Swinarski shares “Thank God We Have a Hell.” A recent comment by one of my students has made Swinarski’s piece difficult to let go. When asked about what they might say when writing a Pauline-style letter to a church, this student replied, “We need to talk more about the fact that hell exists.” Whether or not I agreed in the moment, Swinarski speaks to a conversation that younger Christians want to have. For them and for Swinarski, this conversation goes hand-in-hand with questions surrounding free will and the goodness of God. She writes, “If we don't have free will – what kind of cruel, evil, terrible monster would make us live through this suffering? If God’s just going to overrule everything anyway and force us to choose him?” For God to be good, the freedom not to choose God must be real, and there must be a real alternative. These are important conversational exercises, especially for our young adult brothers and sisters.
7. Yonat Shimron shares “These 5 clergywomen found each other 12 years ago. They still text every day.” for Religion News Service. If the opposite of burnout is support, these women have discovered what will facilitate enduring ministry in a way that’s both life-giving for them and healthy for the church. Sharing fellowship roles at the same seminary connected them initially. The ecumenical group encourages one another through daily texts and monthly Zooms, and sees one another for extended periods of renewal as they can. Ministry life is full of confidences that can leave a person feeling isolated. Each minister needs a space to process the ministry of God in and through their own life. Support is especially needed for women filling roles in churches where a female ministry presence is new. One woman, ready to leave ministry, found the crucial support she needed within this group. These women said, “yes” to the gift the Lord gave them in one another. Who is a gift to you? To whom are you a gift?
8. Sheryl Fullerton shares a lovely piece on what is the ordinariness of congregational life. Writing for the Christian Century, her “The wonderful ordinariness of congregational life” is sure to incite readers’ own reflections and maybe a few convictions. Fullerton’s writing reveals choosing congregational life after pursuing other options, as well as diminished aspects of worshiping in Christian community due to the pandemic. Both situations have created an openness to others and a deep appreciation for what “is” – whatever it may be – that shines through in this piece.
9. In anticipation of Earth Day, Samuel Wells’s “Let Earth and heaven agree” is very much worth the read. Writing for Faith & Leadership, he explores the possibility of a silent spring, inspired by the conservationist Rachel Carson’s book of the same name. Could this really happen? A look at the recent environmental news addresses this question, but what does this have to do with the practice of Christianity? Much, Wells suggests. As Christians, we are active participants in the restoration of all things and people until perfection comes along with a new heaven and a renewed earth. Wells reminds readers that Earth Day is a day to remember our work here on earth, to pray, and to enact the mission of God here on earth as it is in heaven until the two are rejoined.
10. This image … today’s diaspora.
