Module Three: Rest

Allowing the participant to explore how rest and pause create space for life.

The Mystic Way of Evangelism, chapter 3, "Broken Bread and Poured-Out Wine"

After you have completed the above, choose one of the the following:

  • Sallie McFague on Loving God and the World on Homebrewed Christianity

  • Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, excerpt:

    The affirmation of one's essential being in spite of desires and anxieties creates joy. Lucillus is exhorted by Seneca to make it his business "to learn how to feel joy." It is not the joy of fulfilled desires to which he refers, for real joy is a "severe matter"; it is the happiness of a soul which is "lifted above every circumstance." Joy accompanies the self-affirmation of our essential being in spite of the inhibitions coming from the accidental elements in us. Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous Yes to one's own true being. This combination of courage and joy shows the ontological character of courage most clearly. If courage is interrupted in ethical terms alone, its relation to the joy of self-fulfillment remains hidden. In the ontological act of the self-affirmation of one's essential being courage and joy coincide. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, pg 15-16.

  • “The Broken Ground” from Wendell Berry: New Collected Poems, pg 29

  • “A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert

In the story of the Prodigal Son, the Forgiving Father, and the Envious Brother, one gets a sense of the ridiculousness of grace.

Claiming your inheritance is to pronounce your parent dead. It is an act of crucifixion. For the prodigal to return to his parent was a gesture of resurrection. A radical act. An act that implied that grace is more potent than death.

Would I return? Or would I insist on striving to heal my own wounds and feed my own longings—even if I must sit with pigs and murder my parent to do so.

Likewise, refusing to acknowledge resurrection, to measure the cost of grace, is to misunderstand the nature of love. Love is an unbounded explosion, expanding into the world, unbalancing our surety, breaking our knowing, and forcing us into a wider, deeper, thicker joy. A joy that defies happiness. A joy that resides within journey and longing and suffering.

Grace is the essence of God which speaks into us all that is meant by the Divine. The Spirit of Christ is already within you. All that is the Divine has been yours since the Word spoke being into existence.

And that is ridiculous.

That is the stuff of hilarity and dancing. That is a parable for a Kingdom of Children. Laughing, rollicking, confounding children. Of which the Community of God is made.

What does insisting on a life of unbroken production say about who we functionally believe God is?