Colossians 3:12-17

Christmas 1 - Year C

I am just beginning a conference level responsibility/opportunity with the Conference United Methodist Youth. After one meeting it is encouraging to say that the gifts/skills/behavioral outcomes of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience are alive and well in our youth.

It is tempting to assert that the knowledge of goodness is genetically present. The trick all along the way is to nurture such qualities in the midst of the curves that life tosses our way. As the questions come and important experiences pile up, it does become easy to let these virtues go as if they were nothing. One of the important works of community is to keep these choices in the forefront of our attention. Too often they are taken for granted or take second place in evaluating an event. In both cases they soon become invisible, even to ourselves, and domino-like take third place and then fourth, fifth, and, too soon, last place.

When we get caught up in the political process of winning one for G*D (as if G*D needed such) an appropriate antidote is the application of these manners.

What skills have worked for you as you find yourself evaluating this year for growth in wisdom and in years? Has your compassion quotient risen from January to December this year? how about the quality and the quantity of your kindness? the consistency of your humility? the depth of your meekness? and breadth of your patience?

Pick one and begin working on a manageable/workable plan to enhance it during this next year. To go into "resolution" time expecting to do it on the fly and have it stick, is silly at best and hypocritical at worst. Work as diligently at defining your resolution as you expect to at fulfilling it.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/december2003.html

There are a lot of lists about how we should be with G*D and one another. A shorthand might be, "Whatever you do, do in the way of Christ Jesus."

One of my favorite children albums (weep not for technology gone by, but for the loss of carrying good stuff into the next technology) has a song by Joe Wise with a line, "Do what you do do, well."

So here the day after Christmas we are down to it. How might this next year be the year of Peace and Justice and Joy and Wholeness and so much more? Consider the way of Jesus and join in where you can.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/december2003.html

Clothes are technologies of comfort and fashion/status. In this sense the experience of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience are techniques of love, are the clothing covering and revealing love.

Suppose we dream about the Emperor's New Clothes and find ourselves without the trappings of love, what then?

Here we might listen in to a direction that moves from forgiveness (13) to love (14) to harmony (14) to peace (15) to thanks (15). In the sequence of hope, faith, and love the greatest is claimed to be love. In the sequence here, is the greatest of these "thanks"?

Is this confirmed in everything we do being done with thanks?

- - -

ouroboros traced again
a path told from long ago
arrive, arrive it says

finally arrive at forgiveness
work your way up to it
dissolve the past

finally arrive at love
work your way into it
today never over

finally arrive at harmony
work your way through it
each touching every

finally arrive at peace
work your way under it
pass every understanding

finally arrive at thanks
work your way over it
raising each act

ouroboros traced again
each work claiming eternity
and simply rolled on

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html

First be swaddled with compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, and patient discipline.

First swaddle others with compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, and patient discipline.

Yes, that is two "first's". Most of us will find one first will takes priority over the other. Some can't give until they receive. Others can't receive until they give. We can get to both from either direction. Enjoy your process.

With verse 12 under our belts, we can leave the following redundancies to themselves and not get caught up in the subsequent "oughts".

It's good to know that this way of living can come out of a doo-doo manger mess or an event in your life today. Whether echoing from long ago and far away or brightly singing forth in this new moment, swaddle and be swaddled.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html

Behind every manifestation of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience is a participation in love, no matter how reluctantly or dismissive. Love here is defined as that which holds everything together - it is the graviton of spirituality.

This last paragraph on gravitons from Wikipedia indicates some problems:

”Most theories containing gravitons suffer from severe problems. Attempts to extend the Standard Model or other quantum field theories by adding gravitons run into serious theoretical difficulties at high energies (processes involving energies close to or above the Planck scale) because of infinities arising due to quantum effects (in technical terms, gravitation is nonrenormalizable). Since classical general relativity and quantum mechanics seem to be incompatible at such energies, from a theoretical point of view this situation is not tenable. One possible solution is to replace particles by strings. String theories are quantum theories of gravity in the sense that they reduce to classical general relativity plus field theory at low energies, but are fully quantum mechanical, contain a graviton, and are believed to be mathematically consistent.”

Likewise, most spiritualities containing love suffer from difficulties of definition, interpretation, and implementation. We go along thinking we understand love and can either fit it into a definition or recognize it when we see it. Then along comes death and all of a sudden we can see love where we never did before or a love we thought we could rely on turns out to as frail as everything else.

Return again to this unsentimental definition of love: that which binds everything together in harmony. Don’t focus on the binding together but the result of harmony. You may want to browse again The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/12/colossians-312-y.html