By Kelly Moreland Jones
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28 Mar, 2020
Dear Kelly, What would happen if you did not save dying for the end of your life? Love, God That is the lingering question of my seminary journey and the current lament of my Lenten life. For the record, I do not recommend going to seminary during middle age, particularly if life as you know it is pretty dang good. Especially if the definition of good involves words like ordered, controlled, prestige, or power. If you can foresee a global pandemic crushing your last year then you might *really* reconsider. Here’s what I’m trying to say: God may take you on a journey that calls you to die to the “good” life you have known forever. And then you’ll have a choice. Die to the life you’ve known and live in the one God has prepared for you… The one God has prepared you for... …Or… Go back to the former “good” life, live a lie, and die later. Some context… That question arose from a reading in my Pastoral Care class a couple years ago. The author suggested that we imagine the whole of our lives as a cyclical process of living, dying, and being resurrected to new life. The challenge was to imagine doing that before our physical deaths… to imagine burying whatever wasn’t life-giving and following Jesus into a new, resurrected existence. Interesting, I thought. Also, impossible. Fast forward two years and we arrive at the present pandemic stage of history. Like a lot of you, I’ve tried to calm my nerves by reading. Because I enjoy punishing myself, I picked up Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver followed by Glennon Doyle’s Untamed . (If you are expecting juicy gossip in this next paragraph, then you’re gonna be really disappointed…) Barbara renewed my appreciation for the interconnectedness of all living things – the Earth, insects, plants, animals, humans – and love in all its passionate, perfect forms. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful book. I loved every page of it. The problem was that I read it while being quarantined from the community I need most in this world. (It may be important to recognize that I sucked in every ounce of air in the room after I wrote that last sentence…) Then there’s Glennon’s book... I’m still processing that impact. Here’s the passage that is screaming loudly to me right now: “(Kelly,) There are two orders of things: There is the seen order unfolding in front of us every day on our streets and in the news. In this visible order, violence reigns and children are shot in their schools and warmongers prosper and 1 percent of the world hoards half of all we have. We call this order of things reality. This is the way things are. It’s all we can see because it’s all we’ve ever seen. Yet something inside us rejects it. We know instinctively: This is not the intended order of things. This is not how things are meant to be. We know that there is a better, truer, wilder way. That better way is the unseen order inside us. It is the vision we carry in our imagination about a truer, more beautiful world – one in which all children have enough to eat and we no longer kill each other and mothers do not have to cross deserts with their babies on their backs. This better idea is what Jews call shalom, Buddhists call nirvana, Christians call heaven, Muslims call salaam, and many agnostics call peace. It is not a place out there – not yet; it’s the hopeful swelling in here, pressing through our skin, insisting that it was all meant to be more beautiful than this. And it can be, if we refuse to wait to die and go to heaven and instead find heaven inside us and give birth to it here and now. If we work to make the vision of the unseen order swelling inside us visible in our lives, home, and nations, we will make reality more beautiful. On Earth as it is in heaven. In our material world as it is in our imagination.” (Untamed, 65) My dying seems inextricably tied to the birth of a “better, truer, wilder way.” Yours might too. Love, Kelly