The Potter And The Clay by J. Lind.
When I’m part of the system that I swore off in my youth
The one that fed and clothed me, the one that gave me proof
When I’m crippled by resentment from my friends and foes alike
And severed by the scissors of someone else’s black and whiteI’m tempted to fall silent, to just pack my things and go
To live outside the system or to start one of my own
But I must seek the balance between sacred and profane
The player and the playwright, the potter and the clay
I grew up in a church that was so low it basically qualified as being underground.
For all that it was quite traditional.
There was general suspicion of the more ritualistic expressions of other churches (and perhaps a lack of awareness of our own rituals).
We would have insisted that anything that looked like a ritual was based in Scripture, not human imagination.
I see what I’d call the challenge that confronts churches that reject any sense of continuity with Christians from the last twenty centuries (apart from faith and the Bible) as they succumb to novelties that take them anywhere or struggling to invent actions that give expression to what Christians have already been practicing in other movements for generations past.
That’s why a thoughtful engagement with the gifts of the church is increasingly helpful.
Because traditions and rituals aren’t magic formulas. They are invitations to remember and share with those who have gone before.
They can’t be imposed. But if they are chosen they have their uses.
From Esau McCaulley’s book Lent – The Season Of Repentance And Renewal.
Stories and rituals pass on understanding. Jesus knew this. During his last night with his disciples he did not have them memorize a position paper on the meaning of the atonement; he gave them a meal–a ritual with set words and actions that immediately entered the life of the early church. This why Paul can say, “I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread…” (1 Corinthians 11:23). Paul refers to central aspects of Christian doctrine, like the resurrection and ritual activities, as things he received (1 Corinthians 11:23; 15:1-3). Both the ritual piety and the apostolic doctrines are part of our inheritance as Christians.Our discussion does not mean that ritual or even the Lord’s Supper is limited to a pedagogical technique.
Christians throughout the centuries have maintained that in and through things like the bread and wine of the Eucharist, God comes to meet us. Christ doesn’t just teach us about himself in the Eucharist; he comes to us and nourishes the weary believer. We can have both. Ritual is both a means of spiritual formation (we learn through repetition) and an encounter (God meets us in the act of worship and praise in the liturgy).Esau McCaulley, Lent – The Season Of Repentance And Renewal, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. 2022, pgs. 54-55.
Well, those were interesting rounds of football.
(Draws count as correct)
NRL (last round 4/8; season tally 13/24)
Penrith
Melbourne
Brisbane
North Queensland
Souths
New Zealand
Canberra
Cronulla
(Draws count as correct)
AFL (last round 6/9; season tally 6/9)
Geelong
Brisbane
Collingwood
Richmond
Footscray
Fremantle
Sydney
Essendon
Greater Western Sydney
The prevalent nature of handling dead bodies and conducting funerals in the west is not to handle them at all, nor to view them.
Those who view dead bodies observe that they look different.
The departure of life brings that change.
For those of Christian belief the soul has departed.
It is good to remember that the comfort of that departure should not give the impression that there is any less value in the body that remains and decays.
That body is no less meaningful, and remains precious.
Though the presence and committal of dead bodies is troubling and challenging to modern sensitivities, the magnification of loss and grief that accompanies death in which the body is consumed or destroyed leaving nothing for loved ones to commit or deal with points out a need that modern sensitivities suggest we don’t have.
From Thomas Lynch, co-author of The Good Funeral with Thomas G. Long.
Likewise, I’ve heard no few well-meaning, though misguided, people suggest that the body in the box, there among the gladioli, and hushed respects, was “just a shell” or “only the tent” or some other metaphor to minimize the loss. They mean, of course, to say that they believe our souls outlive us, that we are more than blood and bone and corporality. But to say that there is “something more,” albeit unseen, is not to say that what we do see is “something less.” The bodies of the dead are not “just anything or “only” anything else. They are precious to the living who have lost them. They are the seeing hard as it is that is believing, the certainty against which our senses rail and to which our senses cling. They are the singular, particular sadness that must be subtracted from the endless mundane tally of sadnesses that are the everyday history of the world.
Thomas G. Long and Thomas Lynch, The Good Funeral, Westminster John Knox Press, 2013, pg. 79.
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