-
Walking on Water: Celebrating Risk and Failure
In rereading the miracle of Jesus walking on water, I notice a couple of things I hadn’t before. The first is that the water Jesus walked on was stormy. The image I had in my head previously was of Jesus walking across smooth waters, the light dancing across the little ripples. But no, Jesus traversed wind and waves, apparently without any trouble. The second thing I notice is that Peter, not Jesus, initiated the whole walking on water fiasco. Peter challenged Jesus to prove himself. And Peter answered Him and said, “Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.” Matthew 14: 28 I admit…
-
The Axis Mundi: Why Christians are Revolutionaries
The term, axis mundi, isn’t used much in common parlance. Just so we are on the same page, I include the Wikipedia definition which is accurate enough for my purposes: The axis mundi (also cosmic axis, world axis, world pillar, the center of the world, world tree), in certain beliefs and philosophies, is the world center, or the connection between Heaven and Earth. Nearly every major religion has such an intersection. The Old Testament has Mount Zion where Moses saw God. Jacob’s ladder is also such an intersection. Mount Kailash is sacred to the Hindu, the Innuit create totem poles, and even Feng Shui attempts to orient the home towards the sky in a practice called geomancy. Christianity…
-
The Danger of a Mask: The Judas Flaw
The reason nearly every horror villain wears a mask is that a mask can turn anyone into a monster. Not every mask is monstrous, of course, but the moment we begin to hide our true face, the moral slide has begun. In an American literature course I once taught, I asked the students to choose the one poem that really hit them during the class and write on it. Most of them chose We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar: We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes… They each wrote about the same thing; how every day they had…
Healing Through Art & Words
