daily life as life goes on . . .

A furious pounding of the keyboard on my laptop brings me to the end of the day.  I had inspiration to write the text for a sermon I am preaching on December 22nd at the Clearview Community Church in Kindersley, SK.

The theme is Love – the fourth Sunday of Advent.  In my past few weeks I have experienced funerals and new births.  Both have celebration combined with anticipation.  When a new child is born we are excited to see the next steps – the first steps.  When someone dies we are placed in the midst of the last steps.  Both usher in a time of uncertainty.

But love . . . where there is a full experience of love there is no fear.  Certainly many disparate emotions may rise and fall.  Certainly we will catch ourselves guarding ourselves “just in case”.  But the deeper we sink into love the less we need to try to control life or to be driven by every wind of insecurity.

How far can we sink?  I haven’t reached the bottom yet.  I’m not planning on stopping the plunge to the depths of love while realizing that I can’t force or cause or create love.  Somehow the ability to plunge into love is the ability to surrender my own efforts and let the love of Jesus take care of me. 

How far have you dived?  Are you choked up trying to go deeper?  Are you open to releasing that last breath and letting Jesus breathe life from his love into you?

This morning I awoke with the word “consistory” in my brain.  As some of you who know me will recognize – my brain does tend to wander and to gather all sorts of facts and fictions.

I thought I would test out this word.  Turns out this was a council of people who decided on such things as defamation and other moral rights and wrongs.  Used as an ecclesial court (church court) but also as a governing political court, the actual activity of these courts (although still in use as a laity court in some church polity) became non-existent a few centuries ago.  With the decline of their powers and the disuse of the laws governing these courts and their decisions, the whole area of the consistory came into “desuetude”.  As some explanations say – although these courts remained “on the books” they lost power because of a state of disuse – signalling that receiving a subpoena to attend a consistory for a “crime” had no power.

Got to love that word – desuetude.  I immediately saw two parts to the word –  “de” which is often used as a prefix to negate a noun, and the word “sue” which has legal implications of taking action against a party who has wronged us.  So . . . I guess because of desuetude you cannot go to the consistory to gain justice.  Put that into a sentence and fire the crowd up (or as we used to say in the old days – stick that in you pipe and smoke it, which really didn’t fire a crowd up but rather sent them out of the room because the smoke was too much!).

Today I opened my email to a thought on Church History (sponsored by Christianity Today).

December 6, 1273:  Following a tremendous mystical experience while conducting Mass, Thomas Aquinas suspends work on his Summa Theologica. “I can do no more,” he told his servant. “Such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw. Now I await the end of my life.”

Seems that no one knows what that vision might have been.  Aquinas was probably the theologian of his day – his written works are still read today.  But, in the end of life (which was not much longer after this experience) he stopped writing, lecturing and doing the academic thing.  He was still called on by others to give opinion and commentary.  But his great summary work of theology was just left suspended in mid-sentence.

A mystery to be solved?  The mystical experience was said to have taken place during Mass, a time where communion with God is expected and cherished.  Perhaps . . .

A “vibecession” has become a word in Canadian vocabulary.  This relates directly to the old word “recession”. 

Except, we thought we could quantify a recession.  We could talk about the lack of money people had in objective terms.  We set standards, as best as possible.  We could talk about the signs of recession and forecast the loss of jobs, spending power and general economic malaise.

But, economists have coined the term “vibecession” to mean our evaluation of a recession/depression are tinged by our own sense (our vibe) of what is happening.  We can be told objectively that we have reached certain standards of economic ability.  But, in what could be called a “me-cession” (and actually is called this), we determine our own truth about whether we are in a recession based on our own situations.  If you don’t have economic prowess or power, this is a “me-cession”.  And quite literally this will lead to a recession as people determine their own use of their economic “power” based on their own perception of the sustainability of the economy. 

Tell someone long enough, loud enough, and sincerely enough that they have no economic power and they will believe this.  Or, they will look at their grocery bill, utility bills and determine life is no longer prosperous.  Either way, forecasts of an upturn in the economy can be unhinged by a “vibecession”. 

PS (an old term for a thought after the thought):  This is in part a result of a society that has decided that their own truth is the truth for themselves – but in effect their truth vies with other truths to receive the transcendence in stating “what is truth”.  Which begs the question:  Does truth demand a transcendent “truth” or can we live with splintered “truths”?