Jesus Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Saying yes to all of life, letting all of it in -- that is festivity's sustaining source. But there's the rub. Few of us can say yes to anything for very long. We live, after all, in an intensely mobile culture of fast food, faster cars, disposable diapers, and planned obsolescence. . . .
Given such cultural conditions, the Christian celebration of "the blessed Pentecost" (the 50 days) will strike many as mad indeed. Fifty days of surrendering in joyful faith and love as the Spirit of God takes possession of our lives! Fifty days of mystagogy, of walking with the neophytes ever more deeply into the baptismal mysteries of death and resurrection. . . .
A season of Christian festival is a time of intensified consciousness, finely tuned awareness, awakened memory. The great fifty days of Pentecost are... an invitation to explore more deeply "the weather of the heart," to awaken our memory of God's presence and power in our lives, to look more closely at all the rich and varied textures of creation. In short, [Easter time] is a season for learning how to say yes in a culture that wants to keep on saying no.
"Bending Toward Justice"
At St Columba we know the call of discipleship implies something more than personal devotion and repentance. In the words of Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." By opening ourselves to Jesus' invitation, we become his instruments of justice, his tools for "bending toward justice" and helping to build the Beloved Community. It is that image of Christ on the Cross that speaks boldly and eloquently of that bending, bending toward God's will, bending away from white privilege, bending toward those who cry out, hungering and thirsting for justice-justice-justice.
Come and join us in this endeavor of justice and compassion and liberation!
" We are the ones we have been waiting for."
And we believe that God is making a way out of no way.
Let us go and make the good and prophetic trouble we are called to do!