Advent with Abi -- Love as Perichoretic cHesed

Today I finished the 33rd and final lecture in Baxter Kruger's The Big Picture series.  Took me about five weeks. Wow ... thanks so much, Baxter, for sharing your passion! Now I need to go back and re-read all of his books -- I have a much better perspective for them now.

It has been through Baxter's goal to make perichoresis a household word that I found the perfect pairing for making cHesed a household word:  make them a household phrase!  :^)  I have already blogged about that some.  Please see this post.

But for today, as we begin the second week of Advent, it is time to talk of Love.  But the full, deep love that is perichoretic cHesed.  The eternal love that Father, Son and Spirit -- the blessed Trinity -- dwell in together.  Love that is other centered and self-giving ... the eternal reality out of which came Creation, and it's crowning glory, Humanity.

As Baxter has hammered into my brain over the past year, to say the name of Jesus is to say that the Trinity and Humanity now dwell together. Forever.  Begun before creation, incubated in the Old Covenant, brought forth from the virgin Mary, hammered out as the babe grew into a man, shown to those who had eyes to see in the years of open ministry, Jesus was fully God and fully Human.  The only fully human person ever to live. And in his willing death at the bitter hands of his fellow humans, Jesus entered fully into human darkness -- felt all the pain and agony and loneliness and blindness -- and took creation down with him in death.  He did this so that the Father could raise us up with Jesus from the dead and so that Jesus could take us home to our Father's side with the Deed of  Adoption signed in his own blood.  Done deal.

This is the Gospel.  The Good News.  The news that too many have not yet seen in their blindness or heard above the deafening cacophony of their own ideas about who God is and who they are and who others think they are supposed to be ... and how are they going to find a way to make it through another dark and lonely day all on their own....

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It is all good and well to talk about the love of the Trinity being other centered and self giving.  But I believe that there is a richer concept that comes to us from the Hebrew language -- just as the beautiful word perichoresis comes to us from the Greek language.  If you know anything about me, you know that this concept is hidden in the gem of cHesed ... merciful loving-kindness.

You could read quite a long time on my blog if you looked up all the posts on cHesed...which would not be a bad use of time.  I have mentioned before that there are many things I've written about over the past seven years that I would need to tweak considerably.  And cHesed needs a bit of that as well.

I have begun this tweaking with this labeled and colored version of the ancient Celtic Trinity Knot.

Just as we see the interpenetrating, looping reality of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you will see the ring of gold that encircles them.  I have labeled this ring with the three descriptors of cHesed:  love, grace and mercy.  But underneath these three are three others: submit, serve and lead.

To say that Father, Son and Spirit live in an unbroken dance of love -- so much so that the foundational description of God is love -- is saying much more than the western mind has generally had the tools to grasp. This has led me on a twenty year quest to, as it were, redeem the word "love" from the too-often shallow usage to which western civilization has adhered.

Trinitarian cHesed is a Love of deliberate affection that submits its wants to the needs of the beloved ... it is a Grace of unmerited favor that serves the best interest of the beloved without thought of repayment ... it is a Mercy of kindness mutually owed that initiates and leads the beloved in ways that move toward the accomplishment of their mutual goal.  In this circle there is no competition or hierarchy or envy. Their's is a unity of such togetherness that the only way to describe it is to say that these Three are One!

It is descriptive enough to show us what it actually means to say that God IS Love.  That the Trinity have lived in this amazing relationship from all Eternity ... and that They have desired to share this love in and through their creation -- and especially in Humanity.

Their desire to share their love with Humanity was so strong that the Father's Eternal Son decided that, for the remainder of Eternity, he would live as the Human Man named Jesus ... Emmanuel -- God with us!  And in this form, Jesus entered into a New Covenant with God as the representative of Humanity ... resulting in our Adoption -- joint heirs of God with Jesus.

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While I am yet a long way from distilling this down, what I hope to leave you with this week is the assurance that this cHesed -- the merciful loving-kindness of Father, Son and Spirit -- is the gift that God has been showing Humanity from the very start.  And that this gift has been permanently given to Humanity in the New Covenant in Jesus.  You and me -- we all are already completely loved and adopted by Father, where we may dwell with him and Jesus in the fellowship of the Spirit.

May you have eyes to see this love all around you in the beauty of Creation -- in the heavens and on the earth and in your adopted brothers and sisters all around you.

May you have ears to hear this Good News of love and adoption in Jesus ... all ready finished and just waiting for you to recognize.

May you rest -- truly rest and relax -- in this knowledge of God's love made flesh in Jesus. This is the only healing balm for your soul sickness.  Nothing else matters if you are blind and deaf to the Love Song of the Trinity.

Be blessed, adelphoi -- brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus.  I am grateful to have your fellowship on the journey in the Kingdom.

Abi

Advent with Abi -- Hopeful Expectancy

Hopeful Expectancy.

Powerful bloggers are proficient at the use of hyperlinks. It comes from an aversion to saying what has already been said. I get it. I've done it.

I've blogged on the important difference between expectation and expectancy.  I could link to it. Or you could search my blog, if you wanted to know what I've said about it.

But what I think has changed so much these past seven years -- and this past year, especially -- that I don't necessarily want to point backward.

Expectancy is the reality of living in Kairos time -- the Eternal Now.

If you are a planner, this can be the ultimate frustration.  Because waiting is getting harder and harder in our times.  Our Chronos time ... that we track with watches and calendars and the time it takes for our browser to load the page we want to read ... is a brutal task master.  We are never at rest because we are always looking to our next whatever.

We have forgotten how to be present in the moment.  We have slipped from expectancy to expectation. From life to death. Do you feel the death grip of expectation on someone you love -- or yourself -- choking the life out of your moments day by day?  Can those expectations really be that important?

As I begin the process of pondering Advent's first week, I do so with with a hopeful expectancy that has been slowly growing over the past 10 months.  So much pondering preceded the birth of Jesus so long ago. Not all of it was hopeful...sadly.

It is the same today for many.

But I am hopeful because of what I have been learning -- or relearning? -- about Father, Son and Spirit. How their Eternal Three-in-One reality is always active everywhere and cannot be thwarted.  They are the quintessential waiters. But their waiting in not empty or wasted, because they are always busy together -- even while they're waiting for us to wake up to the stunning knowledge of who we are in them, so that we may join in their faithful and quietly joyous work.

Father, Son and Spirit live in Hopeful Expectancy -- in Kairos Time.  I am choosing more and more to live in that reality with them.

May you be drawn into their hopeful time today, and be warmed by the bonfire of their love.

Be blessed!

Abi and Brokenness....

Updated...see below!

I have written about Oprah a couple of times.  I have tremendous respect for her, although I do not agree with everything she says or does.  That's normal, I think.  If you have problems with Oprah, I humbly ask you to suspend disbelief (J.R.R. Tolkien's lovely term) long enough to hear what I'm saying.  You'll be okay.

Anyway, today's lead article in her Spirit Newsletter struck me as timely.  It came as an answer to a fervent prayer.  It is not perfect, either; but it gave me several bits of encouragement.  These I will share with you. Some come right out of the article, others are my thoughts that came from reading.  Please read the original article first, if you haven't already ... the rest of this post will still be here when you get back.  Go ahead; it's not very long.  ;^)

Here's the stream of consciousness that made me get out my pen and paper and capture some thoughts:

• Everyone is broken from time to time.  Um, this would resonate with the abbess of the purple martyrdom.
• Breaking is necessary for enlargement.  I could write an entire series on this profound thought.
• Enlargement comes by being present in all ways, in all directions. I struggle with this and I am astounded by the variety of ways this little gem keeps popping up in my journey.
• Being present is the practice of holding nothing back.  Dr. Brown would call this part of the courage that comes from being wholehearted.  Her thoughts have been echoing Dr. Kruger's thoughts, especially his teaching on the "I am not..." problem, which she states as "Never enough."  Profound.

He then gives four steps to finding wholeness and health and growth:

Accept the weather

• It is what it is....
• Every "crack" is an opening
• ...The Light of Jesus, there in the deepest darkness in our souls, shines out through our cracks.  Makes me think of this passage.
• ...What is opened is always more important that what breaks us.
• ...Don't get stuck in your list of legitimate grievances.  Yeah, this is very big.

Lean into the tender places

• Letting the wind of life rush in and tough the tender spots is the beginning of resilience.  This is very deep and I'm still processing it....

What kind of "part" am I in what kind of "whole"?  This is the whole "identity crisis" issue, right here!

• My response:  I am a daughter of the Heavenly Father, sister to Jesus, the Father's Eternal Son, and dancing partner with the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Blessed Trinity.
• This Truth is foundational and is what has been undermined by the "I am not..." and "Never enough" curse of human culture.  Sigh...it is pernicious!
• When blinded by the pain and darkness, I need to remember to look for the Light shining through those broken, cracked spots.
• ...Embrace what can emerge by allowing Jesus to clean away the broken bits.
• ...Sometimes we emerge like those beautiful Oriental bowls that have been repaired with gold....
• ...Sometimes we emerge like butterflies struggling to escape from their cocoon. Transformation is often mistaken for rejection or heresy by those who do not have eyes to see what the Spirit has been doing.

Look beyond the broken

• In each of us, the Holy Spirit has planted a unique seed.  Different seeds go through different processes of germination.  They remain dormant until the time and environment are right ... the fullness of time, as it were.
• ...what is too dry for some is just right for others
• ...what is to warm for some is not hot enough for others
• ...what is nutrient-dense to some is too rich for others

Sometimes I think I am one of those seeds that need a hot fire to neutralize my cocoon of enzymes and allow the seed to germinate.  Yeah, burning down the forest is not a good time. but if that is the only way to awaken the sleeping life inside my soul....

Be blessed as you persevere on your journey.  

• May the Light shine through the cracks of your broken heart. 

• May the Light that is in you overpower the whispered evil of the "I am not...never enough" that has flourished in your darkened soul.

• May the sweet burn of the cleaning pool restore you to your True Identity after Aslan's powerfully sharp claws have torn away the knobby dragon hide that imprisoned you.  Love C.S. Lewis!  Do you know Eustace?  (And, yes, I will forever be sorry that they did not put that powerful scene in the movie of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader....)   Update:  you can listen to the chapter here!

• May the great I AM embrace you in Their cHesed and gently lead you into Their Great Dance.

Year Seven Begins!

Well...I was so busy listening to Baxter and Paul and John from the Open Table Conference, that my Sixth Blogiversary passed on October 19th without my notice.

It is impossible to express what an important thing it has been for me to write my wee purple posts here in my little corner of the Interwebs, as my friend Bill Kinnon would say.  Whether or not it has been of use to anyone else, I cannot say...but it has been good for me to process my journey.

I am in such a different place, in just about every way, than I was back then.  But that is the whole point of a journey, isn't it?  To travel from where you are along the meandering path that life takes is how we participate in the life of God in Jesus.

There is quite a bit of dancing along the way.  I've gotten a good deal of use out of my purple dancing shoes. ;^)

Be blessed, precious companions!

Abi and Perichoretic cHesed

You've listened to me talk for quite a while now about Dr. C. Baxter Kruger. I just listened to the recordings from the North Carolina Open Table Conference (from Labor Day weekend) ... and he said that it has been his goal for the last few decades to make the Greek word perichoresis a household word. Well, I have had a similar goal these past 15 years -- to make the Hebrew term cHesed a household word.

Baxter defines perichoresis basically as mutual indwelling without loss of identity. He goes on to say that perichoresis is the reality of the interpenetrating relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They are three who have always been one -- they are "in" each other without becoming each other.  They are so together that they can only be described as One.  The Trinity -- three who are one.

From all eternity they have dwelt together -- and together they dreamed of sharing the wonder of their life -- which Baxter calls The Great Dance -- together with us...even before the Cosmos was created!

The great Good News is that, after all the years of waiting and wading through the chaos of human blindness and darkness brought on by The Fall, in the fullness of time, they accomplished their dream of our adoption in and through the Incarnation of Jesus, the Father's eternal Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Through his death, burial, resurrection and ascension, Jesus has gathered all of humanity -- indeed, the entire Creation -- and brought us with him into their relationship. We are in Jesus -- and they are in us.  Done deal.

Many people do not yet know this Good News.  This does not change the Reality, however!

Baxter suggests that the relationship that is perichoresis is one of altruism -- other-centered, self-giving, mutual submission.  But I believe that it is in describing the actions of this relationship that the beautiful concept of cHesed serves more fully.

Most often translated as loving-kindness or mercy, I define cHesed (following Dr. Mont Smith) as looking out for the best interest of the other, according to the covenant. While that may sound like altruism, it is a much richer concept.  cHesed was too rich for just a single Greek word...and so the Septuagint and the New Testament use a variety of words to describe the covenant keeping attitudes and actions of cHesed -- love (agape) as deliberate affection that submits to the need of the other, grace (charis) as unmerited favor that serves the best interest of the other, and mercy (eleos) as kindness mutually owed that leads the other toward success.  And that not all there is to this beautiful concept....

Who knew that they would merge, these two foundational words!?!  Below is crude drawing of what is known as the Trinity Knot.  I have colored and labeled it to help me get my brain around this ... and perhaps help you see what I'm talking about more clearly.

I can't tell you the number of different diagrams I've played with these many years to try to capture the essence of cHesed. Now that my mind has been reconnected with the Good News of the Blessed Trinity through the beauty of perichoresis, it was obvious where cHesed fit.  Thank you, Baxter!

We will have plenty more to unpack, don't worry!  But this weary abbess is finished for today....

Be blessed ...

Abi and Individuality

I was re-reading an old post ... and it occurs to me that I have changed so much over the past few years, that many of the things I've said in the past ... well, they just don't represent what I think now.  I leave those old posts up because they are part of the process through which I journeyed to today.

In the crazy world of American politics, I keep coming back to freedom and the individual.  There is a great deal of deeper thinking that needs to go on that has been bypassed, IMO.  And part of what I've been processing lately about perichoresis -- thanks to C. Baxter Kruger -- speaks to the reality that I think is too often missing from the conversation:  being fully part of the covenant community without losing one's individuality.

Too often today, to be part of whatever group is being hailed as essential, individuals are asked to lose their voice -- so that another can speak for them.  When someone represents us, they are to represent our voice, not supplant their voice for ours.

I believe that each and every individual is known and loved by our Triune God -- Father, Son and Spirit. Their voice is unique and valued.  Their own creativity is necessary. When someone proposes to silence the voice of the individual for the good of the community, I start to see the old red flag rise....

The changes I have made are actually quite subtle ... as if the purple hue of my cHesed glasses has changed slightly, or perhaps the prescription has shifted.  I have, really, moved toward God as I have moved away from religion and institutionalization.

Any talk that moves toward more religion or more institution ... and this includes more government ... seems like a move away from God.

Our young Republic is at a huge crossroads.  I hope we do not abandon our Constitution.  I pray there is a way forward that brings together all people of good will and sound mind to reason together without vitriol. Because I'm really so done with the name-calling and the straw-man arguments and the spin-meistering.

People of good will.

People of sound mind.

People willing to reason together.

People without vitriol.

...all coming together to find a way forward.

I know it is possible.  I pray that more will desire the same thing.  I trust God's love for all of Their creation as it spins in time, second by second.

Thy will be done -- on earth as it is in heaven.  If heaven is where God dwells, then heaven is right in our midst, because Jesus has taken up residence in every human heart -- and he has brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him.

May this Good News spread.  May it cause us to recognize the light of Jesus in each one we meet.  May our love for Jesus inspire us to love one another.  May the great revolution of cHesed/perichoresis begin!

Be blessed....

Abi and Gossip....

I don't have lots of time to read blogs...and even less time to comment...but I do when the Spirit brings up something in me that bubbles out.  So, after reading an interview by Frank Viola with the author of a book called Resisting Gossip, this was my comment.  Go ahead and read the post first.   ;^)

Interesting. But I think there is much more to gossip than Matt’s definition: “bearing bad news behind someone’s back out of a bad heart.” 

I think that sharing someone’s good news behind their back can be gossip, whether out of a bad heart or not. Maybe the five different heart-level motivators he talks about would shed some light, but I think the root of this is not so much jealousy as it is brokenness and shame — the whispered evil of the “I am not…” lie that they have believed about themselves — that looks to feel better by focusing on the lives of others rather that let the love of Jesus heal their own broken heart. As C. Baxter Kruger says, we tend to have the lid to our own “garbage can” duct taped down, lest anyone see us for who we really are and reject us. What we need to see is that Jesus is already in there with us in our mess — and he’s brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him. Our darkness is not dark to him…we have nothing to fear from our loving Triune God who has already dealt with sin in and through Jesus. We just don’t seem to be able to believe it…and so we cry, at best: “I believe. Help my unbelief!” At worst, we are overwhelmed with guilt and shame — unwilling to receive the adoption Jesus died to make real for us…struggling under the burden of the expanded lie that whispers: “I am not ___________, but I can be if I _________________.” So very sad…. 

I have become persuaded that a lot that passes for “prayer requests” in group meetings is actually a form of gossip. I link it to what I call a culture of voyeuristic pride — we make other people’s business our business because we want to be seen as “in the know”. I’m all for transparency, but we have to be self-disclosing in real relationships — not “spiritual journalists” looking for a “scoop.” I suggest to my children, and those in my sphere of influence, that we don’t want to have a conversation about someone that we’re not willing to have with them. Or that they have not specifically asked us to share on their behalf. I tell my children that we need to let people tell their own stories so that they can provide the proper context — and clarifying questions can be asked, if necessary. 

So, if we hear something about someone, we need to ask the person telling the story to please stop speculating behind their back and go directly to the source. Then we need to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to give us wisdom and discernment as to whether it is even appropriate to get involved. If we believe God is asking us to intervene, then we need to find a way to approach the person and gently share what we heard and ask for clarification — face to face. This usually requires a level of relationship that can bear speaking and hearing the truth in love, which is not all that common, unfortunately. 

Everything comes down to right relationships, doesn’t it? First, our relationship with Father, in Jesus, through the Holy Spirit … and then, out of the security of God’s love, with those around us. And nothing gets in the way of relationships like guilt and shame and condemnation and judgment. Lord, have mercy — give us eyes to see your Good News! 

Thanks for letting me ramble on. Glad to see some light shed on this shadowy area.
Be blessed….