the way to god is down

It is way too easy to be critical. These days, there are reasons to be critical of almost everything, and I find myself weary of all the –isms. I believe in a God that is bigger than discourse, bigger than constructs, and bigger than ideologies.

I do care about justice and abuse of power. I care about privilege and oppression, and I care about exploring how this is manifested in our culture and society.

But I’m pretty tired of our petty wars. I want to know one thing: Christ crucified. What does this mean for our world today? What does it mean for the refugee, the homeless, the mother stuck between welfare and a dead end job, the undocumented immigrant, the political prisoner, the tortured, and the victim of domestic violence?

I can’t get these faces out of my mind. The intellectual conversations and sermons we have so often erase them, and we remain as distant from their realities as when we began. Instead, we fight and work up rages about theologies, about ideologies, about abstractions.

Tell me: should we be fighting for a woman’s right to earn 100,000 or should we be living in solidarity with the millions of women oppressed by poverty, HIV, war, sexual assault, and the color of their skin? What would the latter look like? “Living with” and “solidarity” were not abstractions or token phrases for Jesus. Instead, every aspect of his life was lived in communion with the poor, oppressed and marginalized.

Sometimes the easiest way to answer life's unanswerable questions is to move closer to the ground.