Chaos and Harmony, Part I “Origin Stories”

I’ve always had a fondness for origin stories. I remember when my big brother gave me Stan Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics for graduation. I loved reading “Issue #1” of The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Spiderman, Thor and Dr. Strange, the first five in the legendary Marvel stable of superheroes.

But what I found I loved even more was reading of how Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel, fills in the backstory of each new creation. He was trying to carve out a living, of course, in the growing world of young adult comics. And he was competing with the more established DC brand. But his new creations weren’t just shrewd marketing: Stan was as playful as he was savvy.

What would it be like, he wondered, to have a superhero team without a secret identity? Crazier yet, What would the world do if a teenager was given super powers? He answered his own curiosity with the FF and your friendly neighborhood Spiderman (also the first superhero to be located in a real world city: Manhattan).

I found out that many of his creations grew out of his own childhood interests. The Hulk, for example, is his version of the misunderstood Frankenstein Monster. Thor brings to us his interest in the ancient world of Norse mythology and a chance for a comic book character to speak Shakespearean and still be cool. Dr. Strange emerged from an old radio program favorite called “Chandu the Magician”.

Origin stories inform us of what we long to know about any character of interest: How did they come to be who they are? Their origin – in the case of Marvel the origin of their superpowers – continues to haunt or drive them the rest of their lives. This is why we might enjoy the adventure of Spiderman’s second and third movies, but if you don’t know how his newfound power contributed to his uncle’s death you don’t know Spiderman. Not really.

So what if the character of interest is you?

We all have our own origin stories rooted in family history and circumstance. We all have those moments where our “superpowers” (gifts, passions, character) seemed to be birthed. But even those don’t fully explain us. There’s more to your story because it’s rooted in a much deeper origin than your birth.

To find that deeper place we go back to The Origin Story found in the Book of Origins, Genesis. It is there we get to read “Issue #1”. And it is there we get to see some of the playfulness as well as the savvy-ness of our Creator. He sets the stage for our becoming by telling us what happened In the beginning…

The Rhythm of God

I am one of the most un-rhythmic people I know - my life is like reading a good book but you keep losing your place. I need a book mark, and a way to remember what I’ve read and where I am in life. Maybe you are like me.

Others are rhythmic to a point of tedium. T.S. Eliot writes of his regimented rather than rhythmic culture in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is spread out against the sky
like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go through… streets that follow like a tedious argument….

To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Do I dare disturb the universe?

For I have known them all already, known them all:
have know evenings, mornings, and afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

How do you measure out your life? Meetings, weekends, parties, dates, nights out, nights in, vacations, classes, holidays, sports… I’m not sure if any of these are much more nurturing for the soul’s rhythm than coffee spoons. At least, by following these lesser rhythms, we don’t have to worry about disturbing the universe.

Jesus, however, the Ultimate Disturber, seemed to judge his culture based upon their chosen rhythm. Using a dance analogy, he scolded the “keepers of societal rhythm” for their lack of imagination and unwillingness to join in the rhythm of God:

To what can I compare this generation?
They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others:
We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.”
(St. Matthew 11:16-17)

Jesus’ generation did not hear God’s rhythms. Whether John the Baptist’s mournful tune and Jesus’ party mix, they simply didn’t dance. They just sat there and measured out their lives in the first century equivalent of coffee spoons. They followed a societal rhythm that was leading to them to death rather than life.

It seems that whatever dictates our rhythms has claim on our soul. If your driving rhythm is work, then work has your soul. If your driving rhythm is a relationship, then that has your soul. To live by a rhythm other than God’s is like trying to learn to dance without listening to the music, doing the polka to Earth, Wind & Fire.

To what shall I compare this generation?

Those who seek to follow the ways of God have always found and nurtured God’s rhythm in life. Embedded in our design and brought to consciousness in the generation of The Exodus, our Sacred Scriptures offer us three Divine Rhythms:

I am going to rain bread from heaven for you,
and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for the day. (Exodus 16:4)

Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor and do all your work.
But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord... (Exodus 20:8-10)

Three times in the year you shall hold a festival for me. (Exodus 23:14)

In these Divine Rhythms we find our soul: a daily rhythm to remind us of our dependence, a weekly rhythm to offer us rest, and a seasonal rhythm to instill in us hope. May we find ourselves as we dance mightily within our Holy Design becoming dancers and poets of the soul and not simply mindlessly keeping in step with the latest rhythm.

Soul poets embrace hope that God’s rhythm – unlike our own – is always on time, always in perfect measured beat to his purposes.
– Joy Sawyer, Dancing to the Heartbeat of Redemption

God Bless the Cougher

This morning, I almost said “God bless you” to a young woman coughing. It was an involuntary impulse that was only narrowly averted by voluntary restraint. That got me thinking…

Why do we say “God bless you” to a sneeze but not a cough? A cough is routinely the vocal evidence of an illness. It could be the visible result of an invisible killer, like tuberculosis. It could reveal a person who should be home in bed but is forced to be in public (is this case, serving me coffee) because they can’t afford to miss work lest the baby starve! Disease! Poverty! Outside of the benign tickle in the throat, the tell-tale cough has a sordid story, to be sure. I think we could make an easy case for blessing the cougher.

Now, a sneeze may be a symptom of something sinister as well, but it is often produced by too much pepper. It doesn’t matter, though; the blessings come freely without judgment. That is my point. Like my 6 year-old son who demands a “Bless me!” response after every sneeze, who wouldn’t want to be blessed when they coughed as well as sneezed?

Offering a blessing is a wonderful thing. Given the opportunity, I oblige my son and the stranger in the airport with equal enthusiasm. When else do you offer such positive words to people you’ve never met? That’s why I think we ought to include coughs in our blessing repertoire. Maybe we could say “peace be on you” instead, but it offers the same kind of welcome sacred response.

Why stop at coughs? What about hiccups? Burps are clearly too unsocial (at least in the West) to provide such a holy opportunity with a straight face, but hiccups have potential. We’re already armed with a host of cures to try. Why not offer a blessing instead?

We’ve all heard the etymology of the “God bless you”. Apparently superstitious theologians of the middle ages thought that the sneeze opened the soul’s door for some roaming demon to enter. This naturally warranted the blessing of God for protection. There was no dichotomy of body and spirit in those days. The sneeze threw back the curtain and reminded anyone within earshot that blessings were desperately needed and the words offered by the immediate community were the ordained vehicle. It wasn’t about good health but about the human condition and the chance to participate in another’s salvation, if you will. They were actually protecting the souls of their sneezing comrades.

We don’t buy that anymore, of course. We bless the sneezer to be polite not to fight evil. But even that is rare chance to offer something to a stranger as well as a friend; a welcome opportunity for words that mean to bless, comfort, and connect.

Who wouldn’t want more of that?

Incarnational Stream: Writing

Richard Foster, founder of Renovare
On the “Incarnational Tradition” from his Streams of Living Water.

Here we come to the most fundamental arena of the Incarnational Tradition: the arena of everyday life. It is the place par excellence, in which we make visible and manifest the invisible realm of the spirit. To move into this sacramental way of living, we must take deep into our heart and mind Paul’s words, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (Colossians 3:17)

The most basic place of our sacramental living is in our marriages and homes and families. Here we live together in well-reasoned love for everyone around us. Here we experience “the sacrament of the present moment,” to use the phrase of Jean Pierre de Caussade. C. S. Lews wisely observe, “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life.”

Work is another everyday place – perhaps the most substantive place – for incarnational living. By “work” I am referring not merely to our job; I am referring to what we do to produce good in our world. I am referring to our vocatio, our vocation or calling. Now, I really must bear down on this point of our work as the place for living sacramentally. While some have a special calling to pastoral or priestly work, the calling for most of us is smack in the midst of the workaday world. This is where people desperately need to see the reality of God made visible and manifest.

The third place that we learn to live sacramentally is in society at large. Here we bring the reality of God to bear upon cultural, political, and institutional life. We work to life our culture, not just through the commonsense moral standards of decency and honesty, but through art an literature and drama, justice and beauty and shalom. We nurture “the good, the true, the beautiful” throughout society – through the person-centered caring of the schools we run, through the beauty of the parks we build, through the entrepreneurial empowerment we offer the poor, through the imaginative and redeeming literature we write, through the ecological sensitivity we bring to land use and development, and so much more.

The Incarnational Tradition underscores the fact that God is truly among us in the warp and woof of our very earthy existence. God is not distant, nor is he disinterested. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins. We, you understand, are not alone. God stoops to our needs and allows himself to be glimpsed in the material world.

Evangelical: Writings, Charles Spurgeon

Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) Baptist Preacher, England
Known as the “Prince of Preachers”, Spurgeon helped shape the culture as well as the church of 19th century England. (He also founded a theology school and an international charity that helps families and children.) The sermon excerpt below is based on the familiar evangelical text, John 3:7, where Christ tells a religous leader, You must be born again. Regardless of your own history with that language, take another listen...

Sermon title: “Every Man’s Necessity”

WHEN men are perishing all around you it would be cruel to waste time in attempting to interest their minds or to amuse their fancies. We must do something more practical and give earnest heed to their pressing necessities. Is it famine which slays them? Let us feed them. Is it cold? Let us supply them with covering. Is it disease? Let us administer medicine. When the case is urgent, we confine ourselves to necessities and attend with our whole heart to that which must have our attention. That which may can wait, but that which must demands our immediate care.
Now, the spiritual needs of men are urgent and among them the most pressing is their regeneration—they must be born again or they are lost! Therefore, at this time we will dwell on this topic and give it our whole consideration, letting other interesting matters wait till this most weighty business is happily over. This is a must and we must press it upon you at once with our whole heart! Our earnest desire is for a great ingathering of souls to the garner of salvation, but in order to this they must be born again. We have had many of you hovering round about us like birds around the fowler, but you are not, as yet, taken in the Gospel net. This state of things cannot content us—we need to see you decided for Christ and truly born again.

You have long been hearers, but, alas, you remain hearers, only, and are not “doers of the Word of God.” We do not want the fault to lie with us—if you continue unsaved it shall not be because we have not preached the Gospel and kept to preaching it and preached it as a matter of life and death! Again, then, we aim at the one point, the point of absolute necessity—“You must be born again.” We trust that if one arrow does not reach the mark, another may. At any rate, we will continue driving at the one target—the conversion of your souls. O you who as yet have not been brought to know the Lord, may the Holy Spirit guide the arrow at this hour! And now we will have a little simple talk about the great experience called regeneration, or the new birth, without which no man can see the kingdom of Heaven, much less enter it.

Evangelical: Personal Story

The Evangelical Tradition is a "Word Centered" life. We come to understand ourselves as formed and sustained by God's Sacred Word, The Bible. Below, Bobbie writes of her first encounter with The Word in college. Notice her places of connection and see if the mirror your own.


By Bobbie Jo Morrell

Living across the hall from Drusha brought me into contact with many of her other friends. They were an odd bunch; smiling a lot, carrying big leather bound Bibles around, and when they met me, they really looked at me—and still smiled. They dressed like yuppies (it was 1983), and seemed to call themselves “Navigators.”

I watched them curiously, cautiously, out of the corner of my eye—trying to figure out what made them different. One day it struck me like a blow: they were all Christians! Could that have something to do with it?

Being a scientist by training, I sought out source material to research this Christian thing. It was difficult to look nonchalant ambling through the church library in search of a Bible. Surreptitiously I began to read, beginning—of course—in Genesis.

I believe some of those “navigators” were a bit alarmed at my starting there, but in the Old Testament I found an amazing adventure: The world was created in a glorious symphony of words; the earth flooded, then saved; plagues fell on Egypt; the Red Sea parted and a pillar of fire led the people through; Joshua and company crossed the Jordan dry shod, and the sun stood still for them at his prayer.

Here was a world like JRR Tolkien’s world! Good and evil—danger, courage, and victory—magic: good and bad. The Bible showed me a world like Middle Earth, with a difference: I sensed strongly that this world was real, true—and I could be a part of the story if I wanted to. A beautiful, attractive thought—hadn’t I wished for just such a thing? But I found it also rather alarming.

In the middle of my reading, Drusha (to whom I had confessed my research) suggested reading Matthew together. That way I could learn about this Jesus person, too. I agreed: and the same thing happened here: prophecies were filled, prophecies were spoken; fish and bread multiplied profusely, mysteriously; the hero walked on the boisterous sea as though it were the smoothest highway. This man, this Jesus, really seemed to know who he was and what he was meant to do. Again, a real adventure was being offered to me. Would I join in?

But there was also a difference here. This story was about a bold rescue mission deep in enemy territory. Real danger—torture and death—was necessary to forge the passage out of the prison for those trapped. And I began to see that I was one of the prisoners that Jesus had gone to such lengths to rescue. While somewhat comforting, it was really alarming.

For weeks I wandered along this razorback ridge that I’d somehow ended up on. Both sides of the ridge were dark, frightening. Down one side was the darkness I knew: drinking, despair, death. The other was even more impenetrable: the darkness of the hope of the possibility of hope.


Parts of me longed desperately to walk into that dark hope, but most of me was terrified of it. Yet I knew a time would come to choose my darkness.

Social Justice Writing

Offered by Rachel and Lauri


Reading: Read through the following, a prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.

This prayer emphasizes peace and reconciliation through self-sacrifice. A key word used here – instrument – can have several different meanings. In Romans 6:13, Paul uses the word instrument to refer to a weapon. Using this understanding in the context of prayer means that we are to be “weapons of peace.” This kind of instrument is active, not passive. It is on the offensive, working for peace, for justice, for shalom. It can work only in the power of the Spirit, in concert with the “whole armor of God” (Ephesians 6:10-18). Paradoxically, its strength is made perfect in weakness, in surrender, and in obedience to the will of God.

St. Francis’s whole prayer is a paradox. It shows us how in God’s economy everything is upside down. Jesus set the example for us, and the Little Poor Man of Assisi followed in his footsteps. His prayer illustrates this upside-down life in the kingdom of God. In the world we strive for our rights; in the kingdom we relinquish what we believe we deserve and seek the lowly place. In the world we strive for power; in the kingdom we embrace a life of service. In the world we strive for self-fulfillment; in the kingdom we die to ourselves.

But these are not negative things. Francis himself is known for his joy and most of all as one who overflowed with love – love for God, love for people, and love for every part of God’s creation. These are the things that make for peace.

Read the prayer again. Reflect on how contrary its teaching is to the dominant mood of our day. And yet the words are so true. Think of times in your life when you found it true that giving led to receiving, that pardoning brought you freedom, that dying to self gave you new life. In the light of these great truths, dedicate yourself to live, like St. Francis, against the tide of contemporary culture.

The Prayer of the Heart:

Lord Jesus, the world is so filled with destruction. I despair at it and I condemn it. And yet I too take part in its destructive ways – belittling, defaming, slandering. Have mercy, O Lord! Forgive, O Lord! Make me an instrument of your peace. Amen.


Adapted from Songs for Renewal by Janet Janzen and Richard Foster.