TimRoss's blog

Coach John Wooden, who piloted the UCLA Bruin basketball team to so many championships, is 98 this year. He eats at the same restaurant every day, writes his deceased wife a letter every month on the date of their anniversary, and keeps in touch with his many friends and admirers. Wooden stopped driving last year, and has had some health problems, but since he had two more years before his license expired, he recently decided he would live to 100.

"The church is a human institution; its hierarchy is human. We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so there is a great deal that is quite unsatisfactory about the church....Even so, I don't know an institution any better. In a cold-blooded sense...who else are you going to get to marry you, to name your child, and to bury you? And why do you want the church to do it?

So what does Easter mean for us, really? What hope does it give? What change does it make in our lives? I pondered this on Easter, as the death toll for our soldiers in Iraq passed 4,000 and our country entered the sixth year of war. I thought about it as I prayed for tangled families, met with hurting people, spent time with people who inhabit dark or dangerous corners of life.

In February, I will serve as spiritual director for another group of Pastors as we journey to the Holy Land with Emmanuel’s pastoral renewal program. Twenty ministers and missionaries have been selected to participate in this year’s pilgrimage. The program focuses on renewal of calling, spiritual formation, and pilgrimage to Holy Land sites. We will visit sites in Galilee and Jerusalem, and devote their afternoons to guided retreat and renewal. Several area ministers will be on this journey including our own Katy Lines.

A beautiful gesture of peace, connection, and good will was recently sent from the world-wide Muslim community to church leaders around the globe. Over the past three years, 138 Muslim clerics, scholars, and leaders from many different countries have written and endorsed a document called "A Common Word," which reaches out to Christians with a hand of friendship and common understanding. Christians and Muslims comprise over half the world's population, making endless war a mindless dead-end.

Earth

I heard the Irishman on the radio say,

only it didn't sound the way we'd say it:

commonplace, like dirt under the nails.

He held it on his tongue, "Air-th,"

as if it were the best place, like heaven:

spacious, intricate, infinitely rich,

with swells of color and cloud,

forest stipple and patches of swale,

the "r" rolling along like the hills.

As if it were the best word in the language, better even than love.

       Jean Keskulla, in Christian Century, June 26, 2007

    Where is your citizenship?  To what land do you belong?  It’s hard for most of us to imagine being citizens of any other country than the place of our birth.  We know the customs of our country; we all have a stake in seeing that our country is profitable and secure; we absorb the political opinions, habits, and preferences of our citizenry.
    Early Christians shook up their neighbors because they marched to the beat of a different drummer.  They refused to take their cues from the prevailing social culture of their neighbors.  The need to “fit in

I attended a candlelight vigil for peace tonight.  There weren't many
of us there.  Of those 25 who attended, perhaps half were Christians. 
I don't know what exactly made it a vigil...we weren't that vigilant
about anything...but I guess we did show up, met some people, signed up on a list, etc.  The woman who called us
together read a great piece by Garrison Keillor.  Allow me to reproduce parts of it...it was written in 2003...2003 for crying out loud.  Tell me what you think.
Garrison Keillor's Letter on the War

The opposition to this war is not about George Bush, or pacifism, or flabby
thinking by liberals, so much as it is a simple sense of dread at the thought
of the United States of America entering into a religious war against Islam.
The idea strikes Republicans and libertarians as well as Democrats, that our
crusade in Iraq may lead to a place we don't want to go, and that is the Fifty
Years War in which suicide bombers become a routine part of American life and
we are trapped inside a bad movie that doesn't end. A war that my grandsons
will dread as they grow old.

Hello from Jerusalem! Enjoy these accounts and pictures of our latest journeys.

Bethlehem

This trip led us into the West Bank, an incredibly troubled place. We passed the wall the Israelis erected...note the competing messages stuck on either side of the wall. I’ll write more about that at some point, but suffice it to say that things are difficult for the Palestinean inhabitants of Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank, most of whom are unable to travel outside their own home towns.

Jerusalem!
 
February 19, 2007-My Birthday!
 
Greetings all! We pulled into Jerusalem tonight, singing "We’re marching into Zion!" We are staying just outside the New Gate (new as in 1880's) at the Notre Dame Monastery and Guest House (which was finished over 100 years ago). Within half an hour of arrival, the priest in charge had taken us all to the roof on the fourth floor and underneath the chilly night sky oriented us to the city. Across the street is the city wall, built in the 1500's. We’re about a ten minute walk away from the old temple site, the Dome of the Rock, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, traditional site of the crucifixion. Bethlehem and Bethany and the Mt. of Olives are all in sight...and we take off early in the morning for our first real day in Jerusalem.