Diocesan
Life Columns
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Bishop Paul's writes a monthly column for the Diocesan Newspaper, Diocesan
Life, edited by Communication
Minister, Bill Lewellis.
For more features from the life of our diocese, check Diocesanlife....ONLINE; and Bethlehem
News.
Always
and Everywhere
Look for the Spirit - embrace chaos
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Diocesan Life, July/August 2003
In Genesis, the Spirit hovered over the chaos in order to create. Ezekiel sees
God reconstituting Israel in the valley of dry bones. On the cross and in the
tomb, Jesus passes to a life that fills all things. To look for the Spirit sometimes
does mean to embrace chaos, not denying its pain, but looking for what is beyond
the pain.
Have you ever been so overwhelmed that you wished you did not exist? Have you
thought about killing yourself just so the agony would stop? Did you ever trudge
through the day as though you were half-dead?
I'm not talking about the medical condition of depression. I'm talking about
the pain of reality, times when it sweeps over you because loss is real or circumstances
threatening. What gave you meaning and joy is ripped away; there's an emptiness
at the core of your being. Can you remember a time like that?
In his "dry bones" vision of the battlefield - Israel's unburied dead
scattered around, bones lying bleached in the sun, picked clean by birds and
beetles, Ezekiel speaks of the experience of being dead, "being clean cut
off" Then, there's the startling image of the reconnection of the bones,
and sinew, and muscles.
The message of Ezekiel's final chapters is that God will not give Israel back
who and what they have lost.
What is gone is gone. God will make them new, give them a new and different relationship
with their maker and one another, and meet them in a new and mind-blowing temple.
The move from chaos to connection is complete when the bones have God's own spirit
in them.
Not even God, it seems to Ezekiel, can make something new without the loss of
what is old. This is true for individuals and churches. We know it when we think
about our history.
The valley of dry bones - total emotional and spiritual chaos - is a hard place
to be. If you have experienced profound grief, you know that. Some of us deny
our feelings. Others repress nagging thoughts that our life may not be all we
pretend it is. We fear the emotional and spiritual chaos that may follow if we
face things as they are.
Life and growth do not come from denying reality or suppressing feelings. Life
comes from recognizing and embracing chaos. Embrace the chaos. In Genesis, the
Spirit hovered over the chaos in order to create. Ezekiel sees God reconstituting
Israel in the valley of dry bones. On the cross and in the tomb, Jesus passes
to a life that fills all things
To look for the Spirit sometimes does mean to embrace chaos, not denying its
pain, but looking for what is beyond the pain. Where do we hear new words and
experience new life? Has it not been in our times of loss - of what we relied
on, of what we liked doing, of what gave us power?
What is God's track record in this regard? Fisherfolk become apostles. Galileans
speak words that change the hearts of sophisticated foreigners. Slave girls become
prophets. Little movements transform the world.
We might think of Rosa Parks igniting the civil rights movement by just not giving
up her seat on the bus. We might think of Stonewall and people refusing to hate
themselves anymore no matter what people tell them.
In our current Northeast Pennsylvania economy, we might recall that some people
get fired and go on to rediscover themselves and their potential, but not without
pain. We might think of the changes we have experienced when we dared to look
deep inside ourselves and ask questions we had avoided for years.
We are tempted, as individuals and as a denomination, to limp on through life
with things not quite making sense, coming to church more for support than challenge,
more for comfort than restoration, more to feel good than to feel propelled to
what is new. We will settle for getting by even if there is no zest. That's living
on in a permanent state of spiritual disability, surviving but not reaching potential.
Do you want better marriages, better faith, better lives? Embrace the chaos.
Look for the Spirit. To enter the life of the Spirit with all our hearts is to
look for doors to open, to embrace challenge, pain, or chaos and let them be
where God creates and re-creates.
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