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Holiness in Red

Holiness in Red

A gift appeared out my window this morning

A cardinal came to visit

Again

Nearly every day I take up this place for morning devotions he is there perched atop the brown entanglement of dormant lilac branches

against the backdrop of equally-drab pillars of oak and maple

leaning in the same direction as though trudging off in search of warmer weather

limbs devoid of their green leaves

which have long since gone into hibernation

If I’m lucky, I’ll “catch” him

For if I stare out the window looking for him, he is not there

Only when I resume my activity - and suddenly look up - can I hope to see him

showing off a splash of vibrant crimson

as if to revel in the attention he knows I’m giving him

As long as I stop what I’m doing and admire him he remains in all his regal dignity

More than once, I have reached for my phone – slowly, carefully, quietly –

hoping to record his presence for my own future enjoyment

But every time

as if sensing my movement through the glass barrier that separates us

off he flutters

We play this game regularly, he and I, and he is usually the victor

Once I did it though! 

I clicked at just the right time to provide proof of his elusive presence

Yet when I opened the photo app, I dejectedly pressed delete

Nothing of the majesty and beauty recorded in my mind and memory was present there

So... I will resume my position in this rocker again

And I’ll settle for watching and waiting

for his next appearance

For he is out there

just beyond the edges of my view

of this I am sure

Preparing to take up his familiar perch

Among the barrenness and brokenness that is my view

And bringing to them his uniquely creative burst of crimson

Perhaps I will “catch him” again

Michael E. Karunas

Monday, January 18

2021

Where are you from???

 In our society today (and certainly for the better part of the last century) we more transient than sedentary.  We are a people on the move.  Did you know that 10% of all Americans move every year!  Or that the average American moves over 11 times in their lifetime!!!  Me?  My family never moved when I was growing up.  I was born and raised in the same house that my mother lived in for 50 years.  But since I left that home, I have lived in the deep south, the Midwest and overseas in a former communist country in Europe.  I would say that I’m “from” Michigan but I’ve only been in Michigan on average 2 weeks a year for the past 30 years.  And I’ve spent 1/3 of my life in the state of IL.  Moreover, all the places I have lived have welcomed me and accepted me in such a way that I considered it a “home.”  So where am I from, really?  And where are you from?  

In some cases, we give away where we’re from based on certain things about us.  Our behaviors – customs, idiosyncrasies - and certainly the way we speak.  We can tell if someone is from the Boston or Minnesota or the South just by the way they speak.  When I lived in Magdeburg, Germany (a city of 400,000 people), you could tell what neighborhood in the city a person was from by their accent and pronunciation.

And... we probably make judgments about people based on where they’re from – for a whole host of reasons that have more to do with who we are than with who they are.

Jesus encountered something similar in his lifetime.  On the one hand, he was “not accepted in his hometown” (MK 6) because the people who knew him there (where he was from) couldn’t believe that HE might be the Messiah.  And in John 7-8, the religious leaders couldn’t believe he was the Messiah because he came from Galilee – and everyone knew the prophecy predicted the Messiah would come not from Galilee but Judea.

Of course, Paul would later say – in Galatians and Ephesians – that it doesn’t matter where you’re from!  As long as you profess faith in Christ, whether you’re Jew or Greek, or slave or free, or male or female, it doesn’t matter.  And yet, where we’re from means everything to us.  For wherever we have been – wherever we have called “home” – it has influenced us and shaped us into the people we are today.

So today – and this week – give thanks for the place you call “home:” the place you are “from.”  It is important and it should be important – to you and to the world God calls you to impact; bringing the perspective of where you’re from to reveal God’s goodness and love.  

The Road Slow Traveled

There is a difference between highways and roads – literally and spiritually speaking.  Highways (think: interstates) are meant to get us from point A to point B as smoothly, quickly and efficiently as possible.  It is evident in their very construction.  There are no sharp turns on interstates.  Nor are there sudden ups and downs.  Even in the mountains, effort is taken to alter the terrain in such a way that makes smooth driving on interstate highways possible.  Inclines, declines and turns of all kinds are much more gradual than sudden.  All of this allows for higher speed limits on highways which, in turn, enables us to arrive more quickly at our destination.  Which further means that the scenery through which the highway races is more difficult to take in.  Rather, it blurs by us almost as if it is in our way as we rush it by.    

The opposite, however, is true of roads.  The purpose of the road is to follow the terrain of the landscape.  The land over and through which the road ribbons is not altered at all.  Instead it forces the road into quite sudden ups, downs, rights and lefts.  Subsequently, we are compelled to drive slower on roads, in order carefully to navigate the changes that come.  Traveling on roads invites us to take in the scenery as we pass it by – the minute details of a life that otherwise blur and whiz by when we travel in interstate highways. 

Full disclosure: I’m more of an interstate guy when I travel.  I don’t mind driving long stretches and traveling by car in general.  But I also like to “make good time.”  But when Jesus says of himself in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” the word he uses for way is “road.”  As in... the equivalent of a dusty, gravelly road that meanders through the landscape following the terrain as opposed to manipulating it.  It is almost as though Jesus is telling us that the destination itself is not more important than the path taken to get there.  And that to find him in our walk of faith is to slow down and take in the simple and ordinary things around us that would otherwise blur by as we race past them. 

Robert Frost famously coined the term, “the road less traveled,” but here Jesus seems to say that the way to find him is by taking the road slow traveled.  And this is what Advent is – a slow journey over a country road to the manger in Bethlehem which allows us to take in the Word of God in a way not possible if we were racing through December from the first to the 24^th.  From a spiritual standpoint, “taking our time” is always preferrable to “making good time.”   

So as we continue our Advent journeys toward Christmas, may we consider ways that you can make “taking our time” a more significant part of the journey.  With all that is going on in our households, workplaces and the world that compels us to the highways, let us think about taking the road slow traveled.  It is, after all, the way to find the Christ we’re looking for at Christmas. 

Freedom!

One of the Protestant reformer Martin Luther’s more famous written pieces was “On the Freedom of a Christian,” from 1520.  In it, he asserted that through faith, we are “servants to none.”  Nothing else can be added to our faith as a requirement for God’s satisfaction.  We are, after all, justified by faith alone.  We are free, therefore, from all constraints other than faith.  And yet, once justified by that faith we are “servants to all.”  We are free to give and serve – not because in doing so we merit any favor from God.  Rather, we are free from any compulsion to be “good.”  We seek the “good” simply for the mere joy, pleasure and fulfillment it brings.

In my morning devotions, I read a reflection this week that offered a similar take on Freedom.  From the Jesuit tradition, it uses different phraseology than Luther, but strikes a similar chord.  That Freedom is associated with faith and turns us outward and not inward.  

If life’s purpose lies in getting what you want, as our culture insists, then freedom becomes a very big deal.  Freedom, we think, is what allows us to exercise our “inalienable right” to the pursuit of happiness.  With this view of freedom, it’s easy to feel threatened by constraint.  Our instinct is to resist it with all our might, for it impedes our ability to live the life we think we want.  Yet to maximize this kind of freedom requires that we minimize or even eliminate serious relationships.  For the more we rely on others or others rely on us, the less “free” we are to go wherever we wish to go, pursue whatever we wish to pursue, and do whatever we wish to do. 

Love, by definition, constrains us.  And in a society devoted to personal self-fulfillment, the cost of love often seems too high.  Surprisingly, freedom is a very big deal in the Gospels too.  However, here it means something quite different.  When Jesus says, “The truth will set you free,” (John 8:36) he does not mean free to pursue personal happiness.  When St. Paul says, “For Freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1), he does not mean we now have permission to satisfy our every impulse and whim.  Quite the contrary.  In the bible, the “free” person is the one no longer plagued by the burdensome quest for money, pleasure, possessions, social status and political power.  Rather, that one is “free” to pursue relationship; to pursue love.  With Christ.  And with one another. 

May we all seek this freedom!