Hello All,

Hope you have been having a good week!

Due to the Superbowl, UCM will not be meeting this Sunday night. Enjoy the game with friends! And if you aren’t a football fan hope you will take time to do something you love to do!

Our next meeting will be Wednesday for our L3: Power of Purpose Weekly discussion, 12 - 1:15 pm with a free sandwich, Pyon Su Room 2108, Stamp Student Union.

Please email Rachel with your 2/16 Subway sandwich order by noon on Tuesday 2/15 at koehler@umd.edu (Veggie, turkey, etc.)

See below for a reflection highlighting some inspiring thoughts by the late Bishop Desmond Tutu and Richard Rohr on how we are each a “God-Carrier”

Blessings!

Chaplain Holly and Chaplain Intern Rachel

Each a God-Carrier (From Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, 2/9/22)

The late Bishop Desmond Tutu understood our interdependence with each other as part of what it means to live in the image of God:

God has created us, upholding us in being from moment to moment, providing us with our very existence. . . . Despite everything that conspires to deny this truth, each one of us is of immense worth, of infinite value because God loved us. That is why [God] created us. Thus our value is intrinsic to who we are. It comes with the package of being human. It depends neither on extrinsic attributes such as ethnicity and skin color nor on our achievement, however that may be computed. Our worth stems from the fact that we exist only because of the divine love. . . . [Richard: As Bishop Tutu told me when I met him, “We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!”]

We are each a God-carrier, a tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, indwelt by God the holy and most blessed Trinity.

To treat one such as less than this is not just wrong. . . . It is veritably blasphemous and sacrilegious. It is as if we were to spit in the face of God. Consequently injustice, racism, exploitation, oppression are to be opposed not as a political task but as a response to a religious, a spiritual imperative. Not to oppose these manifestations of evil would be tantamount to disobeying God.

God has created us for interdependence as God has created us in God’s image—the image of a divine fellowship of the holy and blessed Trinity. . . God has created us to be different in order that we can realize our need of one another. There is an African idiom: “A person is a person through other persons.” I learn how to be human through association with other human beings. . . .  [1]

Like Desmond Tutu, CAC teacher Brian McLaren sees the Trinity as offering a healing vision of the world, in which we create holy community that overturns categories of “us” and “them”:

This Trinitarian vision of God helps us imagine a relational universe of one-anotherness, community-in-unity, unity-in-community, being-in-interbeing, where benevolence toward the other is at home, and hostility toward the other is foreign, invasive, out of place. . . .

God-with-God in community leads us to envision God-with-us in community. And that vision in turn dares us to imagine God-with-them in community. And that expansive vision invites us higher still: to envision God-with-us-and-with-them in community. This approach to the Trinity need not be a litmus test used to legitimize us and delegitimize them. Instead, it can be a gift, offered to others like a poem, not an ultimatum—given not to require assent-leading-to-acceptance or dissent-leading-to-condemnation, but rather to inspire us to reverence otherliness as a theological attribute. At that moment, Trinitarianism becomes not only a healing doctrine but a healing practice. [2]

[1] Desmond M. Tutu, “My Credo,” in Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, ed. Clifton Fadiman (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 234, 235. Note: Minor changes made to incorporate inclusive language. 

[2] Brian D. McLaren, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World (New York: Jericho Books, 2012), 130, 131–132.