My Believe Out Loud Piece – Advent: The Practice of Active Waiting
Advent season is upon us! In my latest piece for Believe Out Loud, I share my reflections on the attentive waiting that shaped the Advent seasons of my childhood and how it informs my outlook today, especially as we celebrate a year of incredible progress for the LGBT community.
Here is an excerpt from the post which can be found on Believe Out Loud’s blog:
Graceful, attentive waiting is a joy that requires practice and patience.
It nurtures a deliberate sense of time and anticipation. It offers a period of reflection that is connected to a heightened sense of promise. It is active in both spirit and body. At the end of this momentous year for the LGBT community, we would do well to nurture the spiritual discipline of waiting as we both look back and anticipate a new future.
I encourage you to continue reading this post and to offer your own reflection. What does the Advent season offer to you this year?
9 Responses
THOUGHT PROVOKING
What if the position of homosexuals & heterosexuals
were reversed?
Why can’t we have a society in which homosexuals accept that they fall short of the norm, rather than tearing down norms merely to feel good about themselves? Why can’t we have a society in which homosexuals are grateful to the heterosexuals who gave them life and glad that others are carrying on their families and their race as a whole?
Dear why (It would be sweet for me to have a real name),
I confess the questions you have posed here are hard for me to answer as they seem to me to arise from some unstated presumptions.
For example, what are the “positions” you are suggesting might be reversed? I am assuming it has to do with the concept of a “norm” but I don’t know that for sure. I can’t answer until what might be reversed is made clear.
Why, all the LGBT people I know are grateful to their parents for their lives and also glad that people have families. Many of them have families themselves and are amazing, loving parents. I don’t know any who tear “down norms to feel good about themselves.” Do you know any personally?
Since you identify as “why,” it might be helpful for you to answer your own questions and then we, understanding you better, could respond. Is that possible?
I look forward to hearing from you. Peace, Janet
Human knowledge can hinder comprehension of the bible, “if we listen to the Gospel with a new question in mind, we may well hear a new answer; but by doing so we move away from the divine norm…” , which basically says that human ideas and wisdom can deform and change the meaning in the Word of God which again compares human wisdom to the wisdom of God which cannot be put on the same level. Theologians regard the bible as: “theologically one,… discern in it a central concern, … interpret Scripture in the light of tradition, or reformulate the message in contemporary terms, they still agree that the Bible is the norma normans non normata. It is the only place where divine truth is present to human life”. Would you not agree?
WHY = Because do people really now who they are in a name.
Exactly. Without the validity of scripture, anyone can stand in the pulpit and say: Listen to me, not to the Bible for a new wind is blowing…..
How can you be a Reverend? 1 Corinthians 14:34 – Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but [they are commanded] to be under obedience, as also saith the law.
1 Timothy 2:12 – But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.Women do have gifts of ministry, but I don’t see a precedent in the Bible for women being ordained as Pastors or Elders.
I don’t find an example of it in the Bible and whenever I challenge you to produce one they just change the subject – because the pattern of hundreds, if not thousands of Ministers and Priests in the Bible, all of them were men.
Or, they simply dont answer…………..