Radical Nakedness

Last night I attended a talk and question and answer session by Mirabel Starr, who wrote Wild Mercy among other books.  She is "interspiritual" - meaning that she embraces many religions and finds great meaning and depth in everything.

She talked about Christianity and the season of Lent and said that it is a time of  'letting in the pain of the world."  "It is engaging in the austerities placed upon us and experiencing radical nakedness."

One of the texts today is the story from Acts of the Centurion who asks Jesus for healing for his slave. He comes to Jesus in complete humility - sending first the Jewish elders because he was an outsider as a Roman.  Then he sent friends because he did not want to trouble him "I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, therefore I did not presume to come to you.  But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed."  He also understood the authority of Jesus.

There is no entitlement here - just a powerful man humbly asking an itinerant rabbi to heal his beloved slave.   Is this a picture of radical nakedness?  Maybe.

For us, we live in a very broken world and in so many ways we see and experience pain.  I wrote yesterday about the coronavirus and that is just one example.  Mirabai last night talked about the "exquisite impermanence of the world."  I would also say - the painful impermanence of the world.  Part of that is people die and we age. I'm back at grief again especially these days as I prepare to leave the home that Chuck and I shared for 16 years.  Not always easy.  Nothing stays the same.

But it is Lent as we remember the one who comes before us and shows us a way of radical nakedness and faith and love in the face of pain and change and  hate.

I am really interested in what is coming today in the workshop with her.  But for this morning I live in gratitude for the gift of faith.

May the God who knows your GRIEF bless you with the gradual awareness that there is no dying that cannot be transformed into life beyond imagining.

May God rise and be revealed to you in your loss just as surely as the flower emerges from the dying seed and the butterfly from the abandoned cocoon.

May this ever faithful God be with you and gently stir hope into your grieving.

May the FAITHFUL God bless you.

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