Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church
1948 The Alameda
San Jose, CA 95126
San Jose, CA 95126
I was asked recently for an example of what I write about when I journal. Most of it is private, unshared, and destroyed after a time (I think journals are generally private places where we go to share out thoughts with ourselves). This is something, however, that is sharable. I wrote it while I was on study leave recently.
[This year I am reading “The Violence of Love” as a meditation resource. These words of Archbishop Oscar Romero were compiled and translated by James R. Brockman, S.J.]
Three short years transformed Archbishop Oscar Romero from a conservative defender of the status quo into one of the church’s most outspoken voices on behalf of the oppressed. Though silenced by an assassin’s bullet, his spirit – and the vital challenge of his life – lives on.
I offer his words to you for your meditation, as well.
God’s program to liberate the people is a transcendent one. Transcendence gives liberation its true and definitive dimension. I suppose I repeat this idea too much, but I will keep on saying it. In wanting to give immediate solutions to immediate problems, we run the great danger of forgetting that immediate solutions can be mere band-aids and not real solutions. A genuine solution must fit into God’s ultimate program. Whatever solution we may decide on – for better land distribution, for a better management of money in El Salvador, for a political arrangement suited to the common good of Salvadorans – will have to be found always in the context of definitive liberation.
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Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is an in-house “fixer” at one of the largest corporate law firms in New York. A former criminal prosecutor, Clayton takes care of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen's dirtiest work at the behest of the firm's co-founder Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack). Though burned out and hardly content with his job as a fixer, his divorce, a failed business venture and mounting debt have left Clayton inextricably tied to the firm. At U/North, meanwhile, the career of litigator Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) rests on the multi-million dollar settlement of a class action suit that Clayton's firm is leading to a seemingly successful conclusion. But when Kenner Bach's brilliant and guilt-ridden attorney Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) sabotages the U/North case, Clayton faces the biggest challenge of his career and his life.
In The First Christmas, two of today’s top Jesus scholars, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, join forces to show how history has biased our reading of the nativity story as it appears in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. As they did for Easter in their previous book, The Last Week, here they explore the beginning of the life of Christ, peeling away the sentimentalism that has built up over the last two thousand years around this most well known of all stories to reveal the truth of what the gospels actually say. Borg and Crossan help us to see this well-known narrative afresh by answering the question, “What do these stories mean?” in the context of both the first century and the twenty-first century. They successfully show that the Christmas story, read in its original context, is far richer and more challenging than people imagine.
(from the dustcover of The First Christmas)