Vinyl records are made by cutting grooves or ruts into the vinyl. The record (at this point called a lacquer) is placed on the cutting machine where electronic signals from the master recording travel to a cutting head, which holds a stylus or needle. The needle etches a groove into the record that spirals to the center of the circular disc. The imprinted lacquer is then sent to a production company, where it is coated in metal, such as silver or nickel, to create a metal master.
Our lives also operate in grooves. We operate a certain way, day after day after day. Sometimes our grooves — our habits, our ways of being — create beautiful music. Sometimes our grooves are more like ruts — they create sounds that are less inviting, even harsh.
Lent is a season in which we are invited to break out of the ruts we may have fallen into, by changing up our habits, and acknowledging that our lives, by God’s grace, do not have to fall into ruts that are etched in metal or stone.
We can be changed.
Invitation:
Grab a record, feel its edges, its grooves, its texture. Imagine the music it creates. Consider your own present practices:
— what are the grooves that create music? How can you nourish them?
— what are the ruts that you would like to get out of? Consider ways you can change your present practices. What are new grooves you could create? What space might open up if you change a current habit?
Records
Prayer:
God thank you for this life you given me.
I cherish the music you have allowed me to hear, as well as to create.
Forgive me for the ruts that increase the chaotic noise of the world.
Free me to live into grooves of grace that create beautiful music.
Music that sings of you.
In Christ, Amen.
Often ‘statements of faith’ are used as litmus tests to help someone determine whether people are ‘in’ or ‘out’, or whether or not this church ‘has it right’.
So rather than making a long list of what we do believe or don’t believe, we’d prefer to think of a table which gathers us together and invites us in...
So… a good night at the pub last Thursday. So intense it took me a week to attempt to relive it. A nice group – some friends from in town, some friends from out of town, some other friends…
The topics, shorthand, were setup as follows: man vs. wild, soul vs. body, and interpretation vs. facts.
"Quia de deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit, non possumus considerare de deo, quomodo sit sed quomodo non sit."
This is St. Thomas Aquinas' introduction to this whole Summa Theologica: "Since we cannot know what God is, but only what God is not, we cannot consider how God is but only how He is not."
At different points in my life, I've been pretty sure that we can know exactly who and what God is. We can define him quite precisely. We can come up with a list of attributes. We can name a bunch of names written in an old dusty language: "Jehovah Jirah," "Adonai," or "Yahweh." We have only a vague idea what those words mean, yet we feel quite confident using them. We pulled out the good book and felt we had not just a good handle, but a definite handle on who God is and what he is like.
Yet the further I travel on the road of faith, the more I learn about the divine mysteries, the more I realize it is just that: mystery.
Anthony de Mello recounts how the great Karl Rahner, in one of his last letters, wrote to a young German drug addict who had asked him for help. The addict had said, "You theologians talk about God, but how could this God be relevant in my life? How could this God get me off drugs?"
A Litany of Remembrance
O God,
we entered the world,
and our first instinct was to cry.
To cry for help,
for air,
for love.
We have forgotten, but you have remembered.
“What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say…”
– Paul Ricouer
“Really?” you might ask.
I think most of us have a hard time believing that. How could anyone make such a statement?
Surely the most important thing is what the author meant to say when he wrote it.
