19. Yours Are The Hands

As we continue our stroll through the parables of Jesus, we look at the story of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:21-35) and our theme of embodied spirituality. In the Christian faith we cluster around a person – Jesus of Nazareth – rather than a book, or a set of laws, or a particular practice. Personhood, people, are important in our faith, for it is here we see the divine and the human working together. 

With this in mind, we consider how we choose movies to watch and books to read, the community of Taizé in France that lives out their embodied spirituality of welcome and love, the reason that French mystic Simone Weil did not join the church though she had profound understandings of Jesus’ presence, the delightful ways in which Anne of Green Gables prays at bedtime, and Naomi Shibab Nye’s wonderful poem, Kindness.

And hopefully we come to have a deeper understanding of the nature of the kingdom of heaven, which is all around us - if only we will get out of the way and stop blocking it at every turn, as did the unforgiving servant in our parable. The endlessly spirit of generosity that is the kingdom of God/Heaven already exists. Our job is not to bring it about, but to allow it to flourish - in ourselves and in this world.

Why must people kneel down (to pray)? If I really wanted to pray, I’d tell you what I would do, I’d go into a great big field all along, or into the deep, deep woods and I’d look up into the sky, up, up, up into that lovely blue sky without end and I would just feel a prayer.

— Anne of Green Gables, from the first episode of Anne with an E, Writer, Moira Walley-Becket