Thinking about St Mary Magdalene in todayâs reading.
Sheâs the first one to wash someoneâs feet.
Not Christ.
Not the twelve.
Her.
She approaches with perfume, kneels down, takes the saviorâs feet. Tenderly washes them, perfumes them, dries them with her hair.
St Matthew tells us that she was preparing him for his death, anointing his body with oils fitting a corpse. He also tells us that she anointed his head with the oil as well. Mimicking our chrism during confirmation.
She anoints Jesus and washes his feet before he does the same for the disciples.
Apostle to the apostles, the first to see the resurrected Christ and spread the good news, St Mary Magdalene took the posture of Christ and specifically took the posture of his role as priest. And when others criticized her, Jesus told them that her actions deserved praise, not condemnation.
I donât have a profound statement here. Just something to meditate on. Itâs what stuck out to me during morning mass today.
Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven
Blessed are the meek for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice for they shall ave their fill.
Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution of justices' sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly for my sake.
Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets that were before you.
--Matthew 5:3-12
I say today. Technically weâre minutes into Monday here, but bear with me.
Itâs vocational week or something at our church so she of course spoke about her own vocation, and something I liked was that she mentioned she hadnât personally seen anyone like herself as a vicar. Female, younger than 50. Before her, I hadnât had a vicar that Iâd truly connected with. I wonder if she knows that I see a leader of the church who is like me - young, female, neurodivergent - and that she inspires me? Iâm way too embarrassed to say that to her face though.
Anyway, she said how God does not want clones. God made diversity for the sake of beauty. And thatâs true. The Bible tells us of the lost sheep of God and the love of God that is the prominent message. Which is why it absolutely completely fucking BAFFLES me that people then use Christianity as like an excuse for being homophobic? Or transphobic or racist or any iteration of hate. How can you say that? How can you say that God wants you to hate anyone??
He made them. God made me a neurodivergent woman who loves women. God made us all who we are. By hating a person for who they are, are you not hating God? I just donât understand how you can peddle that kind of nonsense?
In truth, I wouldnât consider those people true Christianâs. Donât get me wrong, I absolutely pray that they may be led onto the right path, the path of the Lord. But theyâre on rocky ground at the moment because your God who hates me cannot be the same as my God who loves me. They are the lost sheep, not the queer community.
Anyway. Iâm not sure where I intended to go with this. I guess I just thought itâs been a while since I posted my own thoughts.
I donât think anyone reads these and thatâs fine. But if you do happen to be reading this, I hope you know that God loves you because you are His creation.
"Christ Breaking a Rifle", by Otto Pankok, ?1955? (German, 1893-1966).
Pankok was declared a 'degenerate artist' by the Nazi party, and often depicted people marginalized by German society in his work, notably the many Roma and Sinti women who served as his models for his collection of woodcuts depicting the Passion of Christ. "Christ Breaking a Rifle" was created as part of the German movement against re-miliarization after the horrors of World War II.
like most queer christians and progressive christians, i have Complicated Feelings about paul. but a seminarian at my church, a nonbinary disabled and Deaf lesbian who was married and had children with their late wife, recently talked to me about their love to paul, and their main point on how we should approached paul touched me deeply:
"i read paul as myself: a disabled, Deaf, nonbinary lesbian who has known constant suffering because of it. i read paul as myself, because paul is me. persecuted, hated, and afraid. just as i fear the world and its treatment of me, paul feared the world and its treatment of him. just as i face violence and hatred, paul faced violence and hatred. paul's words come to us from prison, from threats of violence, from fear, and yet also from a place of love. paul's fear as a christian are my fears as a disabled queer. even if paul's words hurt at times, they come from the same places of both fear of the world and love for the world that mine do. we are one in the same."
Do you ever go for a walk and everywhere you look you see God? In the leaves, the gravel, the clouds, the grass. In the people walking by, and in their dogs who strain their lead trying to greet you. In the puddles left by rain, in the lingering petrichor, in the cool air flowing into and out of your lungs. Everywhere, everything- all Him.
Normalize falling behind in worship. Normalize not constantly being at 100%. Normalize needing to take a step back in order to keep moving forward. Normalize being imperfect. Normalize being human.
Whenever I come across a verse that I am particularly struck by, I like to put it on a bracelet. I do this for a number of reasons. One is that the act of making bracelets, or any jewellery, is soothing to me. The initial creativity when picking out the beads and colours and charms, and then the soothing repetitive motion of stringing the beads onto the elastic. Another is that I like to have these verses close to me on days that I feel I need to have God just a little bit closer to hand than usual. And another is that itâs a good time for me to be with God, to meditate on the verse and what it means.
The bracelet I made today is Isaiah 43, verse 18-19: âForget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.â That translation is from the NIV Bible. Instead of just meditating on how I interpret the verse, I wanted to do some research on what it actually means, and this is what I found.
Whilst generally identified by a superscription as the words of the 8th-century BC prophet Isaiah ben Amoz, there is evidence that much of it was composed during the Babylonian captivity and later. Johann Christoph Döderlein suggested in 1775 that the book contained the works of two prophets separated by more than a century. While few scholars today attribute the entire book, or even most of it, to one person, the book's essential unity has become a focus in more recent research. The newer approach looks at it as a two parter, so 1-33 is warnings of judgement, and 34-66 is judgement has already passed and restoration is now in progress.
The wilderness that Isaiah refers to here is essentially Babylon, and the deliverance that has taken place for the people of Israel to overcome Babylon. It mirrors the exodus from Egypt, when God provided a way through the red sea, especially within the line about âstream in the wastelandâ, with the connection to water further reminding us this other example of God protecting his people. For the people of God, who have escaped Babylon, this is a message of hope.
But it can be a message of hope for us as well. The word of the Lord does not stay in the tense that it is written. For then, for now, for future; it is true. Our wilderness will not be the same one that Isaiah speaks of; it is so extremely unlikely that we will have to be delivered from Babylon. But in our lives we will have to be delivered from suffering, from illness, from pain. These things may only be short lived, but the past has a funny way of haunting us. Yet here is the word of the Lord, telling us to forget the past. âForget the former things, do not dwell on the past.â
God is hopeful. God is new, God is doing a new thing for all of us every day, and all we must do is to perceive it, and perceive His glory. We are being invited to join Him on this new journey of transformation, and He will lead us out of the wilderness, be it metaphorical or literal. Probably not literal, but I donât know your life, so maybe!
So when I look at my bracelet, it will remind me that there is a way out of the wilderness: the way is God.
The black and the green beads represent the wilderness whilst the leaves represent the newness that God brings đ«¶đ»
I notice alot of my followers on here skipping these posts just to mess with my lgbt ones, suspiciously the white popular ones.
Heres a not so friendly reminder, as an lgbt metis person, i dont give a single fuck what your blog is themed or if this is too painful for you to look at. Reblog this post. Reblog this post with the sources of the 751 children who were found.
Your compliance and silence as well as the compliance and silence of your ancestors is what allowed these schools to open and kill first nations children. The children of MY people.
Dont follow me if you cant reblog this post or the one with sources to your political blog or your most popular blog. Add trigger warnings if you must but if your political blog is only focused on the harms you personally face like being lgbt then you need to see some bigger pictures and stop being afraid of angering your racist mutural or actually saying some shit about racism. If you can reblog some antifa graphics or add blm to your bio to be a surface level ally, you can reblog some sources on the genocide first nations people faced and still face today.
Iâd like to add this photo I took last night in Victoria of the statue of Captain Cook. Though I myself am not indigenous, I 100% agree that these murderers, kidnappers and rapists shouldnât have huge statues and plaques that decorate them and say how âgreatâ they were.
Hereâs another photo of the legislative assembly from yesterday. Later on there were more items, candles and signs at the memorial, as well as a big poster with 1505 painted on it but I didnât get a picture
People need to see this. Not just quickly glance at the photos and keep on scrolling. They need to see this.
I had seen the first picture of the church, but not the second.
I went to a âCancel Canada Dayâ event and burst into tears - not because I was surprised to learn of the unmarked graves (survivors told us they were there. Our government pushed it aside, and we let them), but because seeing all the people gathered in mourning drove it home: They. Were. Children.
This is my countryâs legacy - and itâs not history. The last schools closed during my lifetime. My Father went to school with students who lived at the local residential school, after it was changed to a boarding house (read: holding centre) for indigenous youth who went to local schools.
They were all children, injured, abused, and killed in my countryâs attempt to erase them. I want the world to see this and hold the state accountable to *active* reconciliation> I mean we could at least truly adopt UNDRIP in action instead of words for godâs sake.
here you can read an article about a survivor of the church and some of the things he experienced to help put into perspective how awful and just how recent it was
I find it deeply unsettling that my fellow Catholics IRL and online are trying to downplay or invalidate the magnitude of this or nitpicking the details. Discomfort as a catholic does not equal their suffering. It never will... Implying that it does is a gross misunderstanding of where privileges lie and the notion of responsibility.
This next part is for my fellow white Christians and especially fellow Catholics. Listen to this proud heretic, I beg you:
How can we sit by and claim to believe in a benevolent god and bring this to its house? allow this to happen in "his" schools, hide the sin in the sacred soil of its green earth to be forgotten? Do you think god forgot these children? Justified their abuse and murder?
If you're a Christian and are feeling hesitation about this protest, I want you to know, god is not standing in that church making justifications; God is not giving shallow apologies for the violence; god is not in the buildings in Rome trying to mitigate a PR disaster. God doesn't care about PR.
God is on the steps, mourning. God is in the hearts of those people who are speaking up. God lives in their justified rage and solidarity. And God lies there, to this very day, in every unmarked grave, remembering.
Truly, don't you see? That we crucified him again? And that we do it all the damn time! We do it with the support of the genocide in Gaza. We did it with the murder of George Floyd. We do it every time a black trans woman is murdered. When an impoverished person starves or freezes to death. When a disabled person falls in the name of an insurance company's profit margins. When children are collateral for the institutions that espouse a supposedly benevolent god... The god of the institution is not, cannot be, fundamentally the same god whose sons, daughters, and nonbinary children were crucified. Those listed here, and many many more...
As christians we best remember that blood is on our hands. Don't try to wash it off and forget. God doesn't forget.
When Saint Augustine said âevil and sin doesnât exist, itâs just an absence of goodâ and when Saint Julian of Norwich said âsin doesnât exist, everything is love and charity, we just struggle to perceive and embody that love and thus suffer pain and despairâ and when Jesus Christ said to be perfect as god is perfect means to love everyone and when Saint Hildegard said all are sick and feeble and rotting and inherently worthy of love and care and do you see the connections love is everything love is all there is, sin is what happens when we suffer because we do not love and do not allow ourselves to be loved and itâs fixed by restoration of the sinner to the love which never leaves them it just lingers there until they are ready to accept it. The great commandment is love. We are loved and we ought to love. Care community charity affection support interdependence THESE are holy and these are what constitute everything and our oneness in god who is love. The attributes of God arenât separate. Godâs justice is love, his holiness is love, his righteousness is love, his power is love, his knowledge is love. He loved us so much he became us so that we could become one with him in a way creation never could otherwise. Thatâs why sin entered the world. Thatâs why the cross happened. So that creator and creation could become one in love through the remedying unification of the passion, like when you have to cut a section out of a tree and cut a branch in order to graft it on so that they become one and begin producing fruit.
The body of Christ is like Van Akenâs tree, which grows forty different types of fruit after a process of careful grafting, tending and growth. Look at itâitâs beautiful. That is our relationship to God through Christ.
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