A Pope, A Wave, and Italian Beer

A Pope, A Wave, and Italian Beer

(John 13:34)

We bivouacked in front of a tan-camouflaged, armored, military Humvee parked on Philadelphia’s City Avenue. That’s a stand alone image right there -- an intimidating military icon in a tree-lined residential neighborhood, here to protect The Pope, an iconic symbol of world peace. 

Our family and friends positioned ourselves where the police officer thought that if anywhere this might be the place where Pope Francis would see Lindsay. Or at least see Lindsay's wheelchair.

The Pope tossed a wave from the rear window of the black Fiat as it floated by, the 25 MPH motorcade making its way by us as he left his overnight residence at the seminary. 

We had left our car in the neighborhood behind St. Charles Seminary and walked 2 miles along beautiful, tree shaded streets and past expensive suburban houses. I helped Lindsay from her chair so we could climb down the train station steps, we walked along through the tunnel under the tracks, and trudged back up the other side. We found an opening in the security cage and crossed to the city side of the invisible social/racial/economic/cultural divide this street can be.

After the wave, we left by another way. 

Around the southern edge of the seminary we walked up and down hill, on sidewalk and on grass path. Stopped at a traffic light coming out of the residential neighborhood where our car awaited us behind the gated seminary, a friendly man in shirt and tie opened his car window. “Were you trying to get into the seminary?”

The tightly–held security reins wouldn’t let us very close. “Well, we got to see him in his car as he came out,” I replied.

“He’ll be back at 9:30 tonight for dinner. Tomorrow morning he leaves by helicopter to visit the prison.”

“Oh, are you working at the seminary?”

“Yup. We’re making dinner for him tonight. Right now I’m headed out to get beer.” He shrugged a smile at Lindsay and me, “What can I say? The Italians want beer!”

The light turned green and off he went on his holy grail mission. One can only pray that he found some of Philadelphia’s craft beers rather than Italian beer. Wine maybe, but they don’t do beer so well.

Yet for me, there it was, the message of this weekend in that brief encounter. This was not just about a spotlighted Pope on a pedestal with a  message of justice and dialogue and compassion which challenged political progressives and conservatives alike, but it was also a room full of his entourage with sleeves rolled up, gathered at table, eating pasta … and drinking beer.

Pope pedestal aside, the Jesus message is still shared among faithful followers gathered at table, eating, drinking, laughing, praying, planning, discerning. With the security nets down, the pageantry reduced to a whimper, and the Pope safely in Rome, can we still live the table message that Jesus left us?

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus said at that Last Meal – maybe of pasta and beer, but certainly of laughter and prayer. "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” (John 13:34) 

Can’t be more clear than that table message. Seems like that’s the heart of Pope Francis’ words and actions. I pray it’s at the heart of mine.

© Copyright 2015

James F. McIntire
All rights reserved.

I Sing the Life Eternal

Durham Cathedral, Durham, UK 2015

I Sing the Life Eternal   (John 6:56-58)        

 (with deference to Walt Whitman and Billy Joel)

I sing the life eternal,

Life before beginning

Life alive now,

Life continuing then,

Beyond all breathing

All beating

All believing

Of it.

I sing the life eternal,

Not of the “Body Electric”^†

As so the poet

Sings.

No,

I sing

Not of the beauty

Of the shell

Which holds me

Or the touch,

Or fascination,

infatuation,

Of the body

I live in,

As so our poet.

I sing of a moment

of knowing

That life

Begins

When I let it begin.

“The life eternal,”

says the One I Trust

with life itself.

“The life eternal,”

of which

I sing

“lives in you

In the consuming of

What keeps life in each

Body Electric.”

Yes,
"All things please the soul —
but these please the soul well." ^†

In the very sustaining of life

Is found

the life eternal.

“That which brings life,”

breathes the One I Believe,

“the bread, the wine, the love –  

in that

I Am,  

the life eternal.”

My life eternal

Begins

With a first breath

Or even before,

Promised the Believe-ed One.

In the breathing

of those who bore me

Who touched

This Body Electric

at its beginning

breath.

Or even before,

Nurtured in a womb,

Love keeping me

Afloat

Safe

Nourished

Sustaining my life

Without me knowing.

I sing the life eternal

Not a requiem

Composed for my grievers.

which I will never hear

But the soothing lull

Piercing my

Soul

Filling my womb

My cradle

My life.

Song sung

At the beginning,

Before and throughout,

All life in my living.

“I promised I would never leave you”

Sings another poet

“Someday we'll all be gone
But lullabyes go on and on...
They never die
That's how you
And I
Will be.”^††

So also

The Poet of Life

A promise

Of life going

On and on

Which never ends.

A remembering

Of love between

Words shared.

A remembering always.

A promise fulfilled.

Yes,

I sing the life eternal

Beginning  

Before

It’s beginning;

It ends

At never.

“Abide in me” –

I trust, I believe,

From beginning to

Never ending. –

“As I do in you.”

Now

Then

Eternally.

I sing the life eternal

Bread of the Living God

Abundant life,

Forever life

Sustained in me

Shared with you

Alive in us.

I sing the life eternal,

Life sung from beyond me,

Into my life,

From the Living One

Who lives beyond me

Who lives within me

Who lives beyond

All believing

Of it. ^†††

© Copyright 2015
James F. McIntire
All rights reserved.

^†Walt Whitman. “I Sing the Body Electric.” (1855)

^††Billy Joel. “Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel).” (1993)

^†††John 6:56-58 (NRSV) – Jesus said “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living God sent me, and I live because of God, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

Of Scams and Ramps

Of Scams and Ramps
(Genesis 27-28)

“What a schlemiel!,” Jacob smugged to his mother after he had pulled the wool over the old man’s eyes for the final time stealing the birthright from his unsuspecting hairball of a twin, Esau. “I can’t believe he fell for it.”

Rebekah wasn’t sure if the schlemiel was her son, Esau, or her husband, Isaac, but either way her scheme had worked. Just like the good ol’ days when Jacob had grabbed hold of Esau’s heel as they came through the birthing. “Couldn’t get ahead then so this is your last chance,” she whispered in his ear. But now what? Esau wanted him dead, he knew he couldn’t hang around, so Jacob hit the road with the blessing he had just stolen.

The greatest scam of all time.

Jacob, son of Isaac and Rebekah, grandson of Abraham and Sarah, had conspired with his mother and knocked his twin brother Esau off the family pedestal. As he was looking back over his shoulder running from Beersheba, hoping to land in Uncle Laban’s lap, hunted by his brother, haunted by the family feud, he stopped to catch his breath in the middle of nowhere which became for the Supplanter the center of everywhere. It turns out it was one of those thin places in our life-knowledge, one of those awesome places between heaven and earth where the veil is momentarily pulled back and the God-presence is revealed. Taking a stone for a pillow for his weary head he fell fast asleep, and dreamed.

So this is how God would speak to this deceiving son and brother? By this vision in sleep? Isn’t that a scam shame?

Jacob dreamed. Jacob found it within his haunted and hunted self to name that place, Beth-El, the House of God, because "How awesome is this place!,” he said, “This is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:10-19)

Jacob's dream at Bethel is what we have named “Jacob's Ladder,” reaching up into heaven. But, you see, steps will get us nowhere and especially not into God’s presence. Steps separate the here-and-now from the Presence. Steps segregate the non-climbers from the pretenders.

So let’s dream a little deeper. The original Hebrew of the story uses the word sulam here, the only place in Torah where the word is used. As such, it is a word without singular meaning (as in “ladder”) but rather one which opens the imagination. At its root it means “to lift or cast up” or “to escalate.” †

Sulam is not the proverbial stairway to heaven of our childhood’s song, "We are Climbing Jacob's Ladder." It is more accurate to translate this mysterious word, sulam, into the English word ramp. What Jacob dreamed we can’t know for sure, of course, but from the use of this particular word we can guess that he dreamed of a Mesopotamian ziggurat, a tower made from earth, a tower built by royalty to glorify themselves, built as temples of greatness reaching into the sky where the gods lived. To gain access to the top, to the gods, builders would build not a ladder straight up the side of the tower but instead a ramp that encircled the outside until it climbed to the climax, the Greek word for the same ascending concept.

"And Jacob dreamed that there was a ramp set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it." (Genesis 28:12)  Jacob's Ramp.

The mythical Tower of Babel was a ziggurat. We the people decided that we would build a city with a tower in the middle that would reach into the sky so that we could "make a name for ourselves." God didn’t much like that, though, and the tower fell along with our unity and our hopes and, as the story goes, we were segregated across the face of the earth. (Genesis 11)

Ah, but we don’t give up so easily. Like Jacob trying to make a name for himself as he ran from reality as fast as he could, so are we committed to building for ourselves towers that will get us closer to the God-presence.

“This one will finally get us there!,” we proclaim at the groundbreaking of a new cathedral headed into the sky, “A few more steps up and we’ll be at the peak and we’ll be able to peek in.”

So we’ve done over and over again as we’ve mixed bricks and slime, stones and stained glass, spires and steel. We’ve built our places of worship looking up, looking to heaven, looking for God, who will surely praise the name we’ve made for ourselves marveling at our upward mobility. Notre Dame, St. Paul’s, Westminster, St. Patrick’s, Hagia Sophia, Reims, Chartres.

“Oh how we reach out to God up there; oh how we’ve made a name for ourselves.”

Yet when we build like that we circumvent the very foundation of that which Jesus’ message reminded us. God is not out there somewhere but right here with us. Emanu-El – God-with-us – is the root of all that Jesus-followers proclaim. God-with-us, not God-up-there-somewhere. And when we build our towers to make a name for ourselves we exclude those who Jesus invited to the table, those who can't climb stairs, those who can't see stairs, those who feel like they can't get access to God, those whom history has tried to tell us are not worthy of “God-up-there.”

God forgive us this scam we have perpetuated. God forgive us for imagining that God is out there, up there, not here among us.

The Jacob scam was what sent him on the run and brought on that beautiful dream of a ramp to the God-presence. We have perpetuated that scam by building our steps and platforms and towers to “heaven.” God forgive us our scam. It is a scam shame.

What has become clear is that as long as we will accept these stories as access metaphors then we need to accept that as God speaks to Jacob in this dream, God has a different metaphor in mind. God lets Jacob know that angels, messengers of God, are ascending from earth first and then descending to earth second, and doing so by way of a ramp. The challenge is whether we can surrender our scam and build that God-way also.

“We are / ascending / Jacob’s ramp.” Let’s sing it like that. “We are / ascending / Jacob’s ramp.” Jacob dreamed of a ramp reaching to God with angels ascending into heaven and descending to earth. God is accessible by way of this ramp.

What a great image. And what it means for those with limited access when it comes to steps and stairs and ladders or those with limited emotional access to worship buildings or those who have been systematically denied access to worship for all these centuries is liberation. It means that despite what we as human beings have done regarding the physical shape of our places of worship, God will not limit anyone's spiritual access.

When we begin to create physically accessible worship spaces – as maybe we are finally doing – we create access to the God-presence which is here-with-us on this level plain.

© Copyright 2015
James F. McIntire
All rights reserved.

†“Balashon – Hebrew Language Detective.” www.balashon.com/2006/07/haslama.html; Yitzhak (Itzik) Peleg. “What H’slm Jacob Saw in His Dream.” http://lib.cet.ac.il/Pages/item.asp?item=9156&kwd=6342; Walter Brueggemann. “Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching,” pp. 242-244.

She Is

Who she is 

Is she who is.
She is who –

She is –

will be
has always been.
 

The I Am

named her

from the fiery branches
of a tender embrace;
a smoothing voice,
in a worldly wilderness.

The Word who

raises the valleys,

who levels the uneven.

"You are as I Am,"
came the spark of inspiration
expired from that 

ethereal,

never expiring, 

Flame.

Beautiful

as a fabled
Linden Tree Isle,

which lends its name.
Strong 

as prayers

prayed for
She who is.
Weak 

as faith

that prays.

Alive

as that

Burning Presence

burning within each.

She is who knows.

Who knows what it is.

The I Am

The I Be

The I Exist

No,

She does not do.

No,

She does not speak.

No,

She does not

but

BE

Who she is.

The I Am 

claimed her,

named her,

and each of you,

and me,  

claimed,

named,

proclaimed

To be.

Nothing more;

Nothing less

Than

Blessed.

As am I –

And you –

By all that has been

once the Prologue

Bespoke

And Became.

She is me

As much as I am her

As much as I am of,

And she is of,

And you are of,

The I Am.

“Do not doubt

Only believe”

The non-expiring Logos 

expires.

“Live life

Eternal,

Abundant,

As You are in

The I Am.

Alive in me,

As I am alive

In The I Am.”

“Go, then, be.”

She knows.

The I Am,

Breathed.  

© James F. McIntire

All rights reserved.

2017

A Leg to Stand On

Dad’s leg popped off mid-air one day. He laughed so hard I thought we’d never get him up off the floor. He was playing the net in a friendly volleyball game, he jumped to tap the ball back over, and his leg popped off mid-air. He crumpled to the floor cussing and laughing contagiously. He strapped it back on and the game resumed.

As the result of a plane crash in the Pacific during World War II, his left leg had been amputated below the knee. By the time I knew him, he had had some 15 or so years to master the art of using a prosthetic leg – a “wooden leg” we called it, though by then it was mostly plastic.

I grew up being very confused about why other dads had two legs. My dad only had one leg, so that's what all dads should have. Even now when I’m older than the old man was when I was a kid, to see a man at the beach with two legs poking out the bottom of his bathing suit seems unnatural to me. What was normal was walking down the beach with dad, having him lean against the life guard stand to take off his wooden leg, and then stash it there against the stand while he hopped down to the water line and dove in. I now realize that when you have only one leg there is very little hesitation about the temperature of the water, there’s no dipping your toe in to test the frigidity factor. When it's balance versus water temperature, balance invariably loses, and you dive. 

Memories of dad's wooden leg are filled with every imaginable emotion. I remember dropping a little blue plastic Mary Poppins figurine into the ventilation hole in the side of his hollow leg and his anger and hidden laughter in taking it off and shaking it until it came back out that quarter-sized hole. I remember him convincing me during a trip to Florida with my high school marching band that he wanted to come down one of those tall water slides at Water World and that I would have to follow him up all those steps and carry his leg back down while he came down the slide – I remember feeling proud, not embarrassed as one might expect of a teenager, as I made my way down those steps with his leg under my arm. I remember the panicked fear in his voice as he called for me to run and get my mom to take him to the emergency room the night that he felt something in the knee of his good leg tear as he was crawling into the back of our pick-up truck – how incredibly anxious it must have been for him to have his good leg temporarily incapacitated because of surgery. I remember the surprise in his face when he wore an old wooden leg on a whitewater rafting trip and when he was tossed out of the raft he discovered for the first time that his leg floated and that it had a mind of its own when it came to floating in the same direction as the rest of his body.

I could fill pages – stories about ice skating and bike riding both of which he did without any problem, or his determination to try downhill skiing although he never got to, or the rainy, 17-mile Boy Scout hike that he led us along the Lincoln Trail through Washington, DC. My dad's wooden leg never slowed him down. No doubt it was sometimes frustrating and felt like a burden and I am certain that there were times when it caused him both physical and emotional pain, but he rarely let that show. His determination and courage and faithfulness – and his wooden leg – taught me well.

One of the most important lessons was that so long as you can maintain faith in God and believe in what you're doing you will succeed. Maybe that sounds too much like a Mike Brady, TV-dad cliché, but what he taught me was that in my faith I have a leg to stand on. It's not as if he took me aside a la “The Graduate” and gave me unsolicited advice: "Son, if you're gonna succeed in this life here's what you have to do ..." No, I learned it more subtly by watching the example he lived in front of me. 

Dad never complained about the things he couldn't do or couldn't have. He, like Job, refused to curse God or anyone else for the loss of his leg. He always seemed to have time for me and the endless band concerts and plays and Cub Scout projects that filled my schedule. He always had time for church – not just Sunday mornings but weeknights at a Trustees meeting or Saturday morning crawling inside the boiler to patch a crack so we had heat on Sunday or each year cutting down from a donor’s front lawn the biggest Christmas tree you could imagine and standing it up in our huge Sunday School auditorium.

And he always had time for what he thought God wanted him to do – leading us in Sunday morning worship at Boy Scout camping weekends, challenging those that refused to accept the appointment of a female pastor to our local church, fighting for my sister's youth group to be able to hold a Coffee House with rock music in the basement of our church in the 60's, willing to loan money to a Jamaican colleague at work who no one else would treat fairly, inventing ways to raise money for a new roof at church or to meet its struggling budget.

A leg to stand on. There was something so fundamental to my father's faith that it taught me that no matter what happened, I could always count on God to be with me and when that leg didn't seem like enough, I could always "lean on the everlasting arms" whenever I needed. It's taken me quite a few years and some real soul searching to understand what that fundamental piece of his faith was, but I think that I now know. That foundation of his faith was what gave dad a leg to stand on in a world that would just as soon knock him off his feet. 

Rabbi Hillel the Elder was a great Talmudic sage during the early years of Jesus’ life, born in Babylonia in the first century BCE. One famous account of Hillel (Shabbat 31a) tells of a Gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism but only if he could find a rabbi who could teach him the entire Torah while he, the prospective convert, stood on one leg. Hillel accepted the challenge and while the man stood on one leg, he said: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this – go and study it!"

A scribe offered Jesus a similar challenge, "Which commandment is the first of all?" "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength" and "love your neighbor as yourself," Jesus answered. (Mark 12:28-34)

Those two commandments are equal in weight and importance, those two are more important than any burnt sacrifice, though they might require some other kind of sacrifice – the offering of one's selfishness and idolatrous attitudes – those two are beyond anything else that you might think God would have of you. Love of God and love of neighbor is so founda­tional to faith, so fundamental, that learning and living those commandments brings you "not far from the kin-dom of God," says Jesus, and that’s not such a bad place to be.

Love of God and love of neighbor was the foundation of my father's faith. That's the leg he had to stand on. And that's now the leg I have to stand on. 

Maybe Jesus and Hillel had a different message about how to best summarize God’s requirements of us, but they each knew it was fundamentally short and sweet, brief enough that it created for us a leg to stand on. “Love God, love neighbor, love self” or “Do as you would have done to you.” A leg to stand on.

In his novel “King Jesus,” Robert Graves tells of an old tradi­tion that claims that Jesus walked with a limp. Imagine the implications of that tradition. Picture in your mind the Jesus that you know and add to that picture a limp. Jesus makes his way around the country­side and cities of first century Israel walking with a limp. In a world where those with physical disability were cast aside, is it possible that this teacher had trouble walking? 

In a world where the powers that be look for ways to knock your legs out from under you, is it possible that the one who answered so that "no one dared to ask him another question" only had one good leg to stand on?

There is something so central to faith in those command­ments that maybe that's the only leg that Jesus needed. “Love God, love neighbor, love self.” Drop mic, walk away. In that simple commandment there is surely a leg to stand on.

That's what my dad was trying to tell me by living his life the way he did. If what I do stands on that leg, on that core princi­ple of faith, then surely my efforts will be close to the kin-dom of God and will be a faithful response to God's call. Not that I can justify every move I make by claiming it is for God and my neighbor, an argument which has been used to try to justify the Nazi death camps and racism, sexism, ableism and every other kind of –ism, but rather that if it is truly a faithful response standing alone on love of God, neighbor, and self, then no one will dare ask another question and no one will be able to knock that leg out from under me.

You only need one leg to stand on to take on the world.

"Man with a wooden leg escapes prison," writes James Tate, "He's caught. They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river to get to the field where he must work all day on one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn't want it. His escape is all planned. It requires only one leg." 

You only need one leg on which to stand to make your escape from the prison bars of the world and to get close to the kin-dom of God.

© Copyright 2015
James F. McIntire
All rights reserved.

Flirtgangelism

London pub, 2014

“So, you know, Bud Light isn’t really a beer, right?”

“Really?,” replied the server who had just shown me the beer list – bottles and drafts – and then told me $2 Bud Lights were the evening special.

“Nah, it’s basically just water.”

“Well, I guess that explains the ‘Light’ part. I don’t drink beer, so I wouldn’t know. Now hard liquor, I could tell you.”

It was the usual restaurant banter that my wife, Lydia, in one sentence claims is flirtation and in the next tells me it’s a wonderful gift that I have. Evangelism, basically – immediately engaging in a conversation with a stranger who I know nothing about simply because she is another of God’s children. 

Flirtangelism.

By the end of the night, I knew her name is Crystal, that she is 30, married for less than a year, and is now 7 weeks pregnant. The first child of an only child of an only child. Everyone is thrilled.

So she’s not drinking at all these days – not beer or hard liquor. I heard about her intolerable morning sickness and that she’s been told to keep saltines by the bedside so she can eat them before getting out of the bed as soon as she wakes up.

“During my pregnancies,” I slipped into the exchange, “Graham crackers helped.” She gave me that baffled look of confusion that often is the response to my random statements.

Pregnant, little, middle aged, white man – cognitive dissonance flashed across her face.

God is in these moments. Be they flirtations or evangelism or ramblings or profundity. God is in these moments because it is in each other’s faces and through our small interactions that we can today experience God. A beer in the bar, a baby in the belly; a smile, a word – God is there.

Will I ever see Crystal again? I told her I would stop by and check on how she’s getting along. The place is within walking distance of my house but I rarely go there. Will I check in on her?

Maybe. Maybe not. Yet, whatever, God is there.

In that small exchange this week, God was there. In each encounter we have with another person, we experience God who lives in our lives.

© Copyright 2015

James F. McIntire

All rights reserved.

In the Image of Rocky

In the Image of Rocky

(Exodus 3)

  

Shraga Weil, "The Burning Bush"1990  Serigraph 

Rocky was a young adult when I met him for the first time at a conference in the early 1990s, a young man with intellectual disabilities living in Kansas. As I ate lunch with Rocky one afternoon he insisted on telling me about his job in a rapid succession of spoken thoughts.  He told me that it was a great job, that he loved it and that he went to it every day, he said he made friends there, he worked hard, he earned good money, and he got up early to get there.  And if I hadn’t figured it out by that point, he let me know that it was the most important part of his life. Finally, in the split second that it took him to catch his breath, knowing that it might be my only opportunity to jump in, I did. 

“Rocky,” I asked, “what is it that you do?"

He paused for a moment, gathered his thoughts, looked me straight in the eye and with all sincerity he said, "I do … what I do."

That was the answer. There was no better way for Rocky to describe not only what he did for his job but also to say who he was, what he was about, and how he lived his life. "I do what I do," he said, and as soon as it hit my ears, I heard in my head the words of Moses when God spoke to him from the burning bush. "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you, and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?"  God said to Moses, "I Am Who I Am.” (or "I will be who I will be"). (Exodus3:14)

"I do what I do," said Rocky. "I am Who I am," said YHWH.

The truth of those statements is reality for each of us, not just for Rocky, in that they describe who we are in this world. – I am Who I am, I do what I do.  There is no need to even try to define God, or us for that matter, any further than that basic phrase. God knows what it means to "do what I do" because God is one who knows what it is like to quite simply be, to exist, to be the one who is called, I Am.  And God created us in that very same image of God – b'tzelem Elohim in Hebrew, Imago Dei in Latin, in the image of God in English – we are created in the image of the one who is, simply stated, I Am. You and me and Rocky in the image of God.

Martin Buber, renowned philosopher and theologian, a person of influence in the revival of the Hassidic movement in the middle of the 20th century, was convinced that the only way for people to know each other and to know God is through intimate relationships.  In his seminal work, I and Thou, he writes:

The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That which has being is there, nothing more. The eternal source of strength flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds, nothing more.

When Moses stood at the burning presence of the Hebrew God, YHWH, on that mountain, he experienced ever so briefly that very same word of revelation. I Am was there in front of him –

and beside him and behind him and surrounding him. And if Moses got the message clearly he began to understand in a new way that this One in whose image he and everybody else has been created was explaining to him what Buber reminds us, "That which has being is there, nothing more."

Isn't this what Imago Dei and b'tzelem Elohim is all about? Isn't this what God means by I Am?   Isn't this what it means for us to be created in God's image?

Until we are ready to recognize in each other, whatever our ability, the reality of that description – I am who I am – then adding ramps and elevators and bathrooms to make our buildings more accessible for those we look at as other than I Am, is an absolutely useless process. Until we realize that each one of us has been created in the image of God and that we are who we are simply because God is one who knows what it is like to be – nothing more – until we realize that fact, we will never be truly accepting of each other.

Jean Vanier, founder of L'arche communities where people with and without physical and intellectual disabilities live side by side, wrote that “Interior growth is only possible when we commit ourselves with and to others.” We cannot grow spiritually until we are willing to allow others to grow as well and otherness is no longer defined by whether or not a person can walk or speak or hear or see or think or learn as quickly as I can. We cannot limit our circle to those who are just like us if we want to move beyond where we are spiritually and until we submit to the needs of others and allow them the opportunity to grow as well we will never grow.

For those with what society has labeled as disabilities, for their families and their friends, their doctors and advocates, their teachers and therapists, their pastors, priests, rabbis and imams, the reality is that those statements – I am who I am or I do what I do – describe each of us. No need to try to define it any further.

God knows what it means to "do what I do" because God is one who knows what it is like to simply be, to exist, to be the one who is called, I AM.

© Copyright 2015

James F. McIntire

All rights reserved.