Cranky, Beautiful Faith (Mid-week Message)

Cranky Beautiful Faith

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

October 7, 2015

I am writing this from Denver, where I am attending the annual conference of the North American Province of the Society of Catholic Priests.  The conference keynote speaker will be The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, a much tattooed and notoriously foul-mouthed ELCA emergent church pastor and founder of Denver’s House for All Sinners and Saints.  She has a knack for pithy, memorable ways of expressing deep truth. Her new book,  Accidental Saints: Finding God in all the Wrong People came out a month ago. Here are a few quotes from her first book, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint (2013) that I found particularly juicy:

 “God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings.” (p. 49)

 “There’s a popular misconception that religion, Christianity specifically, is about knowing the difference between good and evil so that we can choose the good. But being good has never set me free the way truth has… [Jesus] instead of contrasting good and evil… contrasted truth and evil.” (p. 72)

“There is simply no knowable answer to the question of why there is suffering. But there is meaning. And for me that meaning ended up being related to Jesus — Emmanuel — which means, “God with us.” We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.” (p. 86)

 “I think loving our enemies might be too central to the Gospel — to close to the heart of Jesus — for it to wait until we mean it.” (p. 115)

“Somewhere along the way I was taught that evil is fought through justice and might. … [but] retaliation or holding on to anger about the harm done to me doesn’t actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it.” (p. 149)

“Repentance in Greek means something much closer to ‘thinking differently afterward’ than it does ‘changing your cheating ways. … Repentance, ‘thinking differently afterward,’ is what happens to me when the truth of who I am and the truth of who God is scatter the darkness of competing ideas. And these truths don’t ever feel like they come from inside me.” (pp. 192-193)

“The greatest spiritual practice is just showing up. And Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of just showing up. Showing up, to me, means being present to what is real, what is actually happening… And it was her, a deeply faithful and deeply flawed woman, whom Jesus chose to be the first witness of his resurrection and to whom he commanded to go and tell everyone else about it.” (pp. 197-198)

See you Sunday.  Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+