Interrupted by God. Tracey Lind
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Название: Interrupted by God
Автор: Tracey Lind
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Изобразительное искусство, фотография
isbn: 9780829820713
isbn:
Foreword
In his book, Ministry and Imagination, the late theologian Urban Holmes suggested that the spiritual imagination is an act of pilgrimage whereby the hungry soul goes “outside the city” to find God’s presence. Leaving the city in order to see God is an ancient Christian practice, one that can be traced back to the fourth century. As the faith became increasingly conflated with imperial Roman values, faithful believers who could still imagine a life of intentional spirituality made their way to the countryside and desert where they hoped to better envision and practice a way of life in God.
Today, “the city” embodies the system of what is, the religious patterns and institutions with which contemporary Americans live—the accepted way of doing things, approved faith narratives, and proven programs of piety. Although such ways of being may be popular or pragmatic, much of what currently passes for Christianity has lost the power of imagination. It cannot connect people to God’s transcendent beauty, embody Christ’s love and justice, or open the heart to peace and wholeness. For the vast numbers of Americans, the Christian way of life differs little from a middle-class, white, suburban, and politically conservative way of life. Giving into the power of that “city” has flattened Christian identity, theology, and spirituality into narrow—and often materialistic or exclusionary—categories. Yet, amid this loss of imagination—or perhaps because of it—a deep spiritual longing pulls the hearts of many seekers and believers who dream that there exists a clearer vision of God and a healing way of life. It may well be that, in these days, Christians again need the ancient wisdom of imagination and pilgrimage. Only by traveling beyond the contemporary city to the edges of society can pilgrims finally see the deeper meanings of life experienced and promised in the good news of Jesus Christ.
Tracey Lind’s book is a series of suggestive and episodic meditations on life at edge of the contemporary city, visual images captured in her own photographs, from which she unpacks spiritual and theological meaning. Unlike the ancient Christians who fled their cities to find faith, Tracey Lind stays in the geographical city and discovers God in the homeless, prostitutes, immigrants, and even in graffiti, rundown buildings, and urban garbage. Through the camera lens, interwoven with the insights of spiritual imagination, she moves beyond what St. Augustine called the “City of Man” to the often-elusive City of God. In this grace-filled pilgrimage, she invites others on a journey to see God’s city with her—opening a compassionate and compelling vision of Christian faith that is transcendent and welcoming to all.
The good news of Interrupted by God is that seekers and believers need not imitate their ancient ancestors and flee the geographical city in order to see God and practice faith. And unlike her liberal Protestant forebears, Lind does not envision a God who is indistinguishable from the world and the secular social order. Thus, the spiritually hungry need neither completely forsake nor fully embrace the city. In these pages, God emerges as a God who is both in the world but not of it. Spiritual wholeness—with all its creativity, passion, and imagination—is a pilgrimage of seeing and living into this truth.
In a final flourish of paradox, Lind confesses to being an “evangelical universalist” as she powerfully reclaims a distinctive and loving way of life in and through Jesus Christ. In doing so, she joins her voice with the voices of others who are beginning to proclaim that a new way of being Christian is arising, a way that finds God’s truth in the shadowed edges of light beyond the borders of the city. Lind testifies that God, indeed, is alive—a being of infinite personal, transforming, and challenging love who can be found everywhere and may be known through the intentional exercise of spiritual imagination. Sometimes the most remarkable pilgrimages are simply walking outside the door of one’s own house and seeing the world through the eyes of God’s spirit.
Diana Butler Bass
Alexandria, Virginia
Author of Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community and Broken We Kneel: Reflections on Faith and Citizenship
Preface
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
Come to the edge!
And they came
And he pushed
And they flew.1
—Christopher Logue
The English poet Christopher Logue aptly describes what happened to me one cold January day in a McDonald’s restaurant on Forty-second Street in New York City. I was interrupted by an unfamiliar voice that called out to me from within the depths of my soul. It probed and prodded, provoked and persuaded, pulled and pushed at all that I was and all that I hoped I would become. “Come to the edge,” the voice said. “No, I am afraid.” “Come to edge,” it insisted. So I went to the edge. The voice pushed, I flew, and I’ve been soaring ever since.
As an Episcopal priest and dean of a major urban cathedral, I live at the center of an established church and privileged society. Yet in my very being, as a child of an interfaith marriage, a lesbian, and one who has spent a great deal of time with the homeless, I belong to the edge, to the fringe, to the people who are never certain if, when, or where they fit into the great scheme of things. Staying close to the edge, I see all kinds of things that I couldn’t see if I only lived in the center of safety and privilege.
A journalist once asked me what it is like to live with “double vision.” As a person who lives in the center but is drawn to the borderlands and boundary waters of the margins, I see the truth of life in various shades of grey. There is no black and white. Nothing is absolute, and there is always opportunity for something new to emerge in both the darkness and the light. As St. Paul, a spiritual ancestor whose life and vocation was also interrupted from the edge, once said, “Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).
Over the years, I have learned to claim the edgy religious, sexual, social, economic, and political paradoxes of my existence and of those whom I have encountered in my daily life and ministry. As a person of faith, I have searched for the good news and truth within those paradoxes. This book is an attempt to speak honestly about the paradoxes that call me from the center to the edge and back again.
The stories and photos I’ve included here illuminate gospel truths and divine revelations from my perspective on the edge of exclusion and embrace. In the introductory chapter, I explore the question of passing or dying for my faith, of claiming or denying the essence of myself. This question, asked of me over three decades ago, was my first interruption from God, and the search for its answer has afforded me frequent glimpses of God from the edge.
In the chapters that follow, I introduce you to Lisa, the homeless Christmas angel; Siah, the infant hope of her ancestors; Mike, the child who understands the wisdom of the wind; Sally who feasts on communion remnants; the Garbage Tree on Ellison Street; Yvonne, the Good Friday СКАЧАТЬ