2005-02-17

Gedichtje

"Maar langzaam, bijna heilig, stond ik op,
gaf mijn gezicht een hand
en ritste mijn gedachten dicht.
Dit is mijn dag, wist ik.
Menno Wigman"

posted by Peter Wierenga @ 10:06 0 comments

2005-02-10

The Leprosy Doctor - Christianity Today Magazine

Eerder al schreef ik over 'Hoe mijn geloof de kerk overleefde' van Philip Yancey. Ik vond het een inpirerend boek. Misschien omdat ook mijn geloof de kerken die ik steeds weer zie en ervaar steeds weer moet overleven.
In ChristianityToday een korte reflectie van de auruer over een van de 13 hoofdpersonen uit het boek: Paul Brand

The Leprosy Doctor: Paul Brand showed how to serve others sacrificially and emerge with joy.
By Philip Yancey | posted 10/23/2003

WE MADE an odd couple. When we first met, I was a punk in my mid-20s with bushy Art Garfunkel hair. Dr. Brand was a dignified, silver-haired surgeon characterized by proper British reserve. We went on to write three books together, and I now view the ten years I worked with him as an important chrysalis stage of my faith.

Wounded by the church, plagued by doubts, I had neither the confidence nor the ability to write about my own faith. Yet I could write with utter confidence and integrity about Dr. Brand's faith, and through that process his words and thoughts became mine too. As I helped him find his voice, he helped me find my faith.

In the movie Manhattan, Woody Allen tells a woman, "You're God's answer to Job." He explains that when Job complained about how awful the world was, God could say, "But I can still make one of these." Paul Brand served that role for me. As I struggled with the injustices of this world and the imponderables of theology, I could look to him as a shining example of what God had in mind with the human experiment.

Our conversations knew no limits. Dr. Brand quoted long passages from Shakespeare, exegeted Greek and Hebrew phrases from the Bible, discussed thrilling new discoveries about DNA, pointed out with childlike excitement birds and plants in India or the bayous of Louisiana where he practiced medicine. He had known and consulted with some of the great figures of the last century: Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi. He had received prestigious medical awards and been appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

Dr. Brand said he felt guilty because he merely answered my questions and a few years later a book would emerge. I responded that all I did was ask questions, research, and write up the answers, whereas he had spent a lifetime serving leprosy patients, some of the lowliest people on the planet.

The conversations that stand out sharpest to me now are those in which he told of his patients, "nobodies," many of them from the Untouchable caste. When he began his pioneering work, he was the only orthopedic surgeon in the world working among 15 million victims of leprosy. He and his wife, Margaret, also a physician, performed several dozen surgical procedures on some of these patients, transforming rigid claws into usable hands through tendon transfers, remaking feet, preventing blindness, transplanting eyebrows, and fashioning new noses.

He told me of his patients' family histories, the rejection they had experienced as the disease manifested itself, the trial-and-error treatments they underwent as doctor and patient experimented together. Almost always his eyes would moisten and he would wipe away tears as he recalled their suffering. To him these people were not nobodies. They were made in the image of God, and he devoted his life to restoring that image, badly marred by disease.

I often felt like James Boswell, who tailed the great man Samuel Johnson and loyally recorded every morsel of wisdom that fell from his lips. Brand's daughter Pauline once thanked me for bringing some order to "the happy jumble of my father's life and thoughts." Little did she know the role her father played in bringing some order to the unhappy jumble of my own life. As I compare the person I was in 1975, on our first meeting, and the person I am now, I realize that seismic changes have occurred within me, with Dr. Brand responsible for many of those tremors.

Deprived of my own father in infancy, I received as an adult from Dr. Brand much that I had missed. He helped set my course in outlook, spirit, and ideals. I look at the natural world, and environmental issues, largely through his eyes. From him I also have gained assurance that the Christian life I had heard in theory can actually work out in practice. He proved it is possible to achieve success without forfeiting humility, to serve others sacrificially and yet emerge with joy and contentment.

I last saw Dr. Brand on June 29, as he lay in a coma after a fall. Bleeding had destroyed much of his brain, and he never regained consciousness. His body curled toward a fetal position and his eyes had lost their brightness. Even so, his one good hand sought out my hands, his fingers running up and down them as if examining them. A week later, he died.

Simone Weil said imaginary evil, such as that portrayed in books, television shows, and movies, "is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating." I saw real good in Paul Brand, and it was indeed marvelous and intoxicating. You need only meet one saint to believe, to silence the noisy arguments of the world.


En in een interview, veel eerder gepubliceerd schrijft Yancey ook over Brand: God's Astounding Laws of Nature
"I like to think of God as developing his skills," said Dr. Paul Brand.

posted by Peter Wierenga @ 11:04 0 comments

Reflecties: Songs from the Soul

Reflecties: Songs from the Soul

Whoever sings prays twice.
Attributed to Augustine, quoted in Brian Wren, Praying Twice

Before the message, there must be the vision, before the sermon the hymn, before the prose the poem.
Amos N. Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination

To listen to the music or to sing a chant is to do something that has no practical purpose; it is just celebration and praise; it is just tasting of the joy and beauty of life, the glory of God.
David Steindl-Rast, Music of Silence

My benedictine community is a singing community. Maybe that's why we're a community at all, come to think about it.
Joan Chittister, Listen with the Heart: Sacred Moments in Everyday Life

Singing is discovered and invented, it is born at times when there is no other possible way for people to express themselves—at the grave, for example, when four or five people with untrained, clumsy voices sing words that are greater and smaller than their faith and their experience.
Huub Oosterhuis, Prayers, Poems and Songs

It is not you that sings, it is the church that is singing, and you, as a member … may share in its song. Thus all singing together that is right must serve to widen our spiritual horizon, make us see our little company as a member of the great Christian church on earth, and help us willingly and gladly to join our singing, be it feeble or good, to the song of the church.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

If I sing let me sing for the joy
That has born in me these songs
But if I weep let it be as a man
Who is longing for his home.
Rich Mullins and Steve Cudworth, "If I Stand"

The best imagery [for God] is that which is capable of being sung. Next to silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible mystery is music.
W. Paul Jones, Teaching the Dead Bird to Sing

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth's lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?
Robert Lowry, "How Can I Keep from Singing"

posted by Peter Wierenga @ 10:58 0 comments

Reflecties op werk en activeit

Reflecties op werk en activeit

Christianity Today, September 2003

When we are not living up to our true vocation, thought deadens our life, or substitutes itself for life, or gives in to life so that our life drowns out our thinking and stifles the voice of conscience. When we find our vocation—thought and life are one.
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction.
Dorothy Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

Persistent depression is only too clearly the sign that a man is living contrary to his vocation.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art

It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty. To go to Communion worthily gives God great glory, but a man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Principle or Foundation"

One person's definition of leisure: the opportunity not to avoid responsibilities, but rather to redefine them so that work and play become one and the same thing.
Don Scheese, Mountains of Memory

We are probably intended to embark upon a new work, or a new dimension of an old work, every seven years. This suggests the Jubilee cycle which incorporated the understanding that the seventh year, like the seventh day, marked the completion of a work, and that even the spent land would need a period of rest before being able to yield new fruits.
Elizabeth O'Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope

The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

One can understand what play is only when one also knows what work is.
Karl Barth, Final Testimonies

We must not grow weary of doing little things for the love of God, who looks not on the great size of the work, but on the love in it.
Brother Lawrence, quoted in Weavings

Those who rhapsodize about the joy of labor are likely to be persons who are not obliged to do much of it.
Karl A. Menninger, "Work as Sublimation"


Lord, let me know clearly the work which You are calling me to do in life. And grant me every grace I need to answer Your call with courage and love and lasting dedication to Your will.
"Vocation Prayer," Saint Meinrad Prayer Book

posted by Peter Wierenga @ 10:51 0 comments