"Allegiance...................."

”The incarnation is not a thirty-three year experiment by God is history, a one-shot, physical incursion into our lives. The incarnation began with Jesus and it has never stopped. The ascension of Jesus did not end, nor fundamentally change the incarnation. God’s physical body is still among us. God is still present, as physical and as real today as God was in the historical Jesus. God still has skin, human skin, and physically walks on this earth just as Jesus did. In a certain manner of speaking, it is true to say that, at the ascension, the physical body of Jesus left this earth, but the body of Christ did not. God’s incarnational presence among us continues as before.” – Rolheiser, “The Holy Longing”

When I look at our flag, I do not see merely red, white, and blue, but those who gave themselves to the utmost defending that for which it stands. I do not see stars and stripes, but the basic principles originally set down in a preamble to a constitution. If our politicians appear to have forgotten values brought forth out of, not just a holy Book, but an inner well that connects us all, and if, indeed, much of our population no longer anchors its soul in the Gospel, that doesn’t change the horizontal umbilical cord connecting us as a nation. I’ve got to believe such “hook in our belly” is what took responders up into buildings about to crumble that day. When we lose respect for each other, when all that matters is “me”, we deny the very roots of our existence. Insert Christ and one can improve on that; but the addition is a personal choice, not a demand. Not God “bless” America; rather God “save” America from ourselves. God save a Church that, in many ways, seems to have either lost or confused that which the above author states. He and I could yet hold different views of what “incarnational presence among us” actually means, but he goes on to say that the Body of Christ “is not something that represents Him, but something that is Him.” Faith is not an adoption of moral works. It is an infusion of the resurrection in terms of our knowing His reality in all that we are and attempt. The journey is a stumble down the path, our humanity still part of the package; but any outreach, any witness, must come forth from a vertical flow that spills over into another man’s willingness to receive. The “sword” belongs to the Holy Ghost. May He defend us from our enemies and search our hearts with the same blade……