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 I want to know despair, loss, and death like a bird knows gravity. Without such knowledge, there is no speed, or daring dives, or smooth turns on outstretched pinnions. Without the dangerous downward force, there simply is no flight.
Such knowledge is never instinctual, it must be learned. I must be like the fledgling standing on the edge of the nest, making the commitment to fly, but instead falling. Feeling for the first time, the darkness taking me, resisting frantically, fighting in vain. Before I can truly know the other force — hope, love, and faith that, like air, support and lift – I must wrestle awkwardly with pain, accepting failure and embracing loss’s grip on my life. Learning to fly is really about letting death and life work together. A bird is mature when he can use gravity as well as wind. Both can be used to propel. Their balance produces grace and beauty that stirs the imagination. That is why we cannot know the life Jesus offers apart from the context of death into which he was incarnated. That is why finding ourselves begins with loosing ourselves. That is why transcendence is found, not to disattachment and isolation from the dirty, hurting world, but in true solidarity with those who die so many small deaths daily. And here is perhaps the most intimate meaning of the cross. Jesus entered into death to make his life impervious and eternal and to sow this life broadly into all those who must one day return to the soil. He knew that the only way to live with us all, was to leave his disciples on that hill watching him return home. It was his conviction that the only way to save those you love is to give yourself up for them. Jesus was showing us the art of living by dying. When you hear the thousands of near-daily calls to die in so many ways, faith will always heed that call and fall into that gravity. But faith too knows that such a death, done in response to the call of God, done to make real our destiny and God’s glory, always results in resurrection — in God’s life catching us as we fall so we may soar on his grace.
Original content by: http://blog.thetruthtree.com/?p=6.
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Scott Bartchy is a radical. He believes in a subversive system that embraces those on the fringes of our society and seeks to establish a new way of life that goes against the status quo.