Historical Setting: Lindisfarne of Northumbria, 793 C.E.
As we walk with the visitors to the causeway, I’m hearing more divisive talk of the old debate. The patron I walk with tells me of a monk at Jarrow who wrote a book of the history of these people affirming the singular righteousness of Rome. It’s written as history but it includes a biting commentary on this place. Dressed, as I am as a monk with a crown for a tonsure, this chatty fellow assumes I fully agree with the Roman pope’s edicts. But the division between varieties of monasteries still seems a raw issue here.
Once I was a victim of this controversy, (Note: Blog post #44.5, May, 2023). Yet, it still seems trivial to argue over uniformity of external matters among Christians. It is what it is.
Dear God, your love is all around, never failing us. Thank you.
If God answers this prayer, it is simply to tell me, “You are welcome to love me uniquely as you do.” And I believe God heard my prayer and I am beloved too.
If the spiritual nature of Christianity is a love relationship and we have so many models for love and they are all varieties and experiences, nearly always beautiful and gracious, rarely uniform and orderly, then… why do brilliant, respectful and holy people persist in finding a singular rule for religion. There are many varieties of holy metaphor of love in our earthly ways of family. Even though each person comes as an infant into some sort of relationship of family yet one familial pattern is never the same as another. There is no orderly sameness of love among siblings and parents — brother to brother — mother to child, sister to father — and on. There is no particular righteous order on earth as it is in heaven. Love takes many forms. One person’s love is never the same even within a relationship. Love is always many faceted and often disorderly and usually completely unique and yet we are always calling it love regardless of how it is not exactly what another would call love. So, over and over again, I am befuddled by our human controversies demanding a singular righteous way of being Christian.
I’m just wondering, or maybe I know, and this prayer is simply my prayer of gratitude to thank you for letting me love God and everyone else in my own way. Dear God, thank you.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 