good friday

... a retroactive reflection, please excuse the mis-timing, I promise I’ll post some resurrection later…

For good Friday in my home congregation this year we had a healing service. I’d never thought about the idea of having a healing service at that point in holy week, but in thinking about it, I found it makes a lot of sense. I think we all find ourselves wounded by passion – most obvious in the week containing what we call Christ’s passion. What is this word, passion, “something forceful that comes from within and exceeds and overruns you”?

I recently read an incredible essay entitled “Passion-Binding-Passion” that played with notions of how we play with passion, submission, and subject/ivity in our spiritual practice. What is it that binds us to God, to one another? Is it pleasant, painless, easy, simple? I don’t think so. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, painful, difficult, complex. What is it that keeps me in a faith community that is not always a comfortable fit, that sometimes rubs me the wrong way? What keeps me at a school that sometimes feels like it squelches more than gives life? What is it that keeps one loving people who are difficult to love?

Passion.
Binding Passion.
Streaming passion that cannot be contained.

Passion, com/passion, is what I could feel in the room when we had our healing service on Friday night. I was filled with love for the people who were gathered there and a deep feeling of wanting to pour out that passion, and to offer ministry and healing. We had prepared the space intentionally with multiple stations for meditation, one for intercessory prayer, one for healing touch, and one for administration (a sacrament of anointing and laying-on of hands). We also taped a labyrinth onto the floor, and I enjoyed the journeys I took in and out of it, going deeper into a relational space, and surrendering myself more and more to the work that God was calling me to do that night.

It is nights like that when I remember why it is that I’m doing this academic theology work, it is a deep and abiding sense of calling, of knowing that something larger than me is at work in the world, turning my attention beyond myself to the rest of creation. There is a deep and all-consuming love for the world that rests at the centre of my soul, and I think that love was placed there by God… or maybe that’s the place where God and I meet and entwine…