Sunday Echo-Remix 06-08-2008

Sunday Echo-Remix is an Echo because it re-presents some of the content of the Vox Dei Community Sunday gathering – and a Remix because we are invited into playing that content against and with other content to form something new from both.

This morning, we had a panel discussion with three women from our community who just returned from Assisi, Italy – made famous by a 12th century man who came to be known as “Saint” Francis. We used their experience in Assisi and the backdrop of Jesus’ sermon in Luke 6 to think more broadly about what it might mean to follow Christ in our place in history. Here are some ideas we touched on:

• Honor and Shame systems – This is another way of talking about ’story’ or ‘frameworks’ in which we live and find our identity. In the days of Francis, the local honor/shame system said things like: to be a man, you must be dominant physically, achieve sexual conquests, and be a socialite. In following Christ, Francis embraced a different narrative that led him to being a non-violent, chaste beggar. Francis took Jesus’ teaching to literal (almost absurd in some cases) applications that resulted in a life that looked very different from the typical man of his day.
• The international setting - People from other countries tend to know all about American politics, but we remain largely ignorant of their governmental issues. This reveals one of the ‘frameworks’ we live in that we are blind to – a story that tells us we are at the center, or that it is normal that others would know about us while we have no need to know about them.
• Assisi – The town itself has a quality one could call ‘preserved’. I wonder if the preservation of Assisi is a way of saying “something really important happened here.” For example, Italian children are encourage/expected to make a pilgrimage to Assisi as part of their journey into adulthood.
• Gifts and Wounds – in our first half of life, we learn about who we are and how things work by developing and using our gifts. In the second half, we have learned all we can from success, and we must embrace our wounds in order to find transformation. I wonder if caring for this process together in community might be something we could develop language around. Instead of relegating this to shallow language like “midlife crisis” (which hardly gets at the depth and significance of the reality), perhaps we could walk more deeply with one another through intentional transitional seasons of life.

There is so much more that we could learn from our three pilgrims, but this was a good taste of a longer conversation. I’m happy to get to relive their adventure vicariously through conversation and storytelling.