Love

This scientist had this theory, that there is a force in the universe that binds things together: proton to electron, moon to globe, and solar to system. It is a kind of cosmic gravity that pulls everything together. If there is an energy in the universe that impels separation, then the energy mentioned above is the elasticity that allows the accordion of our expanding universe to stay intact enough to make its music.

This scientist called this force "connectivity."

Connectivity hits every note on the scale of life. We have different words for it. Connectivity between peers we call friendship. Connectivity expressed genitally we call eros. Connectivity between mother and child, father and child? Call that maternal love or paternal love.

Connectivity between our physical bodies and food we call hunger.

On every level - physical, astronomical, social, biological, chemical - connectivity operates.

Alongside all these ties that bind the universe together, isn't there something else? A yearning and a pulling and a longing at the heart of everything for wholeness and harmony and union? The scientist didn't talk about this force.

I think we would call it Divine Love.

Gregory Mobley
Associate Professor of Old Testament

Gracenotes on Virginia Tech

Tuesday night, American Idol began with a somber word of condolence from Ryan Seacrest to the grieving members of the Virginia Tech community and to a nation baffled by the violence that took place there. He used the expression, "tragic events," without further explanation. That is all well and good: it is a family show, after all. And it's Ryan Seacrest, for heaven's sake.

But one is left to wonder about the best way to categorize and characterize such acts of inhuman cruelty as Sunday morning looms ahead of us.

Should we call the murder of 32 and the suicide of one "tragic" when the event was not accidental? Are words like "horrifying" or "unspeakable" too soft? Are combinations of such expressions*"unspeakably horrifying tragedy"*too hyperbolic?

What we have before us is a case where a person who was diagnosed to be mentally disturbed, and known to be deteriorating psychologically, gained access to weapons that never should have been within his reach. He did something so terrible that words do not suffice. We must, at times like these, rely on symbols that come from our traditions: Symbols that transcend words and capture our emotions so that we might begin to see the light of healing.

People look to churches and other faith communities to provide them with words, but words are not what we most deeply need in times like these. As Gilbert Bond stated in his Jonathan Edwards Society lecture here earlier this month, in the midst of trauma, we find recourse toward new life through the symbols that capture our pain and help us to break the cycle of trauma's silencing.

The prayer I pray for Virginia Tech fails to arrive at words. Therefore, I offer:
Cross.
Tomb.
Displaced stone.
Wonderment.
Scars on hands and feet that do not, will never, disappear.

Editors note:

Two members of the current ANTS student body, Andy Edwards and Debra Dunnington, are graduates of Virginia Tech. Keep them in your prayers.

Sarah B. Drummond
Assistant Professor of Ministerial Leadership & Director of Field Education

Prayer for Yom Ha-Shoah

The following prayer was used in an ANTS chapel service on April 17, 2007 where we remembered the Holocaust. Following this prayer, the assembled group from ANTS walked in silence to Berenson Hall of Hebrew College where we joined their community in a joint worship service.

"The Holocaust confronts us with unanswerable questions. But let us agree to one principle: no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children."
Irving Greenberg, "The Shoah and the Legacy of Anti-Semitism, pp. 25-36 in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky et al. (Boulder. Colorado: Westview, 2000).

(worship leader; congregation)

Let us pray,

Our Father, who art in heaven:

Remember the burning children.

Hallowed be Thy name,

Even if this blessing we direct toward Thee is voiced by the tongues of moral cowards who remained silent while they were burning children.

Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Among the many mansions of our Father's house, there is no crematorium for burning children.

Give us this day

The very day that was denied to the children and grandchildren of the burning children.

our daily bread.

The very bread that was never tasted by the children and grandchildren of the burning children.

And forgive us our trespasses

against the ancestors and descendants of the burning children.

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

In the ledger book of atonement, there are no entries for those who did not live long enough to express the divine gift of freedom through trespass, such as the burning children.

Lead us not into temptation,

The temptation of imagining that we belong to a family that did not include, and would not participate in burning children.

but deliver us from evil.

The unspeakable evil of burning children.

For Thine is the kingdom,

"No earthly Reich or Reign or Empire has the authority of life and death," so echo the silent screams of the burning children.

and the power,

"And the power, die Macht, that makes free is surely that of love, not of work camps," protest the unheeded cries of the burning children.

and the glory forever.

Still: We dare to blend the strains of our praise, the faint embers of our faith, and the best of our feeble love in solidarity with the prayers, pleas, and laments of the burning children.

As we make now sacred pilgrimage from this holy place to another, let us walk in silent fellowship

with each other,

and with all our sisters and brothers on Institution Hill, Jew and Gentile,

and with the companions we vow to never forget, never again,

the burning children.

Gregory Mobley

Associate Professor of Old Testament

Prayers

A Prayer for Easter

Hidden Singer,
who taught the birds their songs,
and whispered melodies into the ears of musical geniuses,
come by here,
so that we might hear the strain of your harmony through all the discord.

We have gathered here, whether we thought of it or not,
to join our voices to that happy chorus that the morning stars began,
when that first sun broke to light a world that was very good
on Creation Morning.

We have gathered here, some of us bruised, others buoyant,
seeking comfort from death and giving thanks for life,
and more than that,
to celebrate your triumph over the grave on Easter Morning.

We have gathered here to join hands and voices
as one cell of a greater body of Christ, the quick and the dead, on this morning.

If there be any hand that trembles,
may it be steadied by the hand of another as we channel to each other
the steadfast love of God that moves among us.

If there be any voice that falters,
may its faint praise be folded within the enthusiasm
of those here inspired by the Holy Spirit to sing loudly and boldly of a hope that
cannot be trumped.

Even though we are past Good Friday, we have not forgotten,
and there is something in us that still trembles, trembles, trembles.
We tremble because two millennia after the first Holy Week,
it too often appears that nothing has changed, that we must relive Holy Week every week:

betrayals, denials,
brutality, injustice, the abuse of power by those in authority
the scapegoating of innocent victims in order to achieve social unity
the violent insanity of mobs
the cowardly silence of bystanders

But then the scriptures we read today take us to a dream that a man
named Isaiah had,
about how on the very peak where humans do their worst, on that very
mountain, the LORD will remove the shroud and wipe away every tear
and prepare a table for a reunion of all peoples.

And then the scriptures we read today take us to the testimony of three women
who had fretted about a burden, a weight, a stone so heavy that they could
neither budge it nor bear it,
only to find it rolled away, rolled away, rolled away.

And we relive that Easter morning, and that gives us the courage
to walk away from all the tombs that litter our world confident that death is not
the end.

O Creator who blew the breath of life into the lungs of Adam, hear our silent
exhalations as our petitions, that you would continue to let us borrow life from Thee,
and that you would abet and undergird every goodness we attempt to do.

A Prayer for the Week after Easter

Dear God,

Give us the courage to live as if this morning were Easter morning.

Give us the vision to live as if this morning were the First Morning.

So that we would be in the world but of the world,

fully engaging the present but as if the creation rules applied:

as if it is possible to live in harmony with the natural world,

as if it is possible to live without oppressing someone else

as if it is true that Love will win out in the end.

And in between the First Morning and the Last Day, we vow to remain faithful
even when we cannot see.

Forgive us one additional request. Occasionally, unexpectedly, over meals,
during walks, as you did to your disciples in the days after Easter, could you,
now and then, appear to us?

Amen.

Gregory Mobley
Associate Professor of Old Testament