In our time, the beast is money, racism, and domination.
The way of the beast is not the way of Jesus.
This coming Sunday I will be leading worship in our very multicultural church here in Chicago. And it happens that we are making our way through the book of Revelation, and chapter 13 is our surreal text this coming week.
I confess that it has been quite a while since I’ve read through the whole book of Revelation. But chapter 13’s account of the dragon and the beasts made sense to me immediately as I reread it today.
When you are thinking and praying every day about a genocide involving bombing, sniping, and starvation of children, women, and men with your country’s tax dollars,
and the many people around the world who care have not been able to stop it,
putrid beasts with ten horns, seven heads, and seemingly boundless power seem appropriate as representations of such massive evil.
One of the beast’s heads has been killed but the wound has healed over? I picture it flopping on its neck as the beast lumbers along, one of its dead eyes open and staring.
I wonder whether some of the heads have one horn and others two. Horns in scripture are symbolic of power and strength. The power here is utterly malevolent, and it has multiple manifestations.
We already know from earlier chapters that evil is conquered only by the Lamb who was slain—that is, by Jesus, through whom God entered our suffering and went all the way into death and hell for the world’s salvation. In chapter 13 the writer warns us that the evil of our day (the time of the original audience, but also our own) will sometimes be so vile and entrenched as to seem invincible. But Jesus’ victory-through-suffering still stands, and we must stay centered in that Love.
Because our congregation includes a whole range of literacy and education levels as well as multiple languages, after Revelation 13:1-8, 10b is read, a couple of the pastors and I are going to read out the following explanation in English, Nepali, and Kinyarwanda:
In every culture there are stories of dragons and other beasts: powerful forces that are hard to understand and to oppose.
Revelation 13 uses the language of beasts to picture the powers of this world.
This beast has seven heads and ten horns. It is scary!
The writer of Revelation is showing us the powerful evil in the world system.
In our time, the beast is money, racism, and domination.
The way of the beast is not the way of Jesus.
We are surrounded by the beast and its power, but we choose the way of Jesus.
We choose peace and justice, endurance and faithfulness.
When we pray for Gaza, Congo, Sudan, and other places where people are suffering, we are praying against the beast.
It is a long, hard battle, but Jesus triumphs through his life, death, and resurrection.
Before the ruin when the sea was green breaking to white and children chased each other when the sun was life and they picnicked: olives, hummus, bread
After the ruin with my sister I walk among giants of rock on the south coast of Oregon Angels, old and black, chant their subduction the clash of volcanoes, islands and small continents shoved up against the continental plate
In Gaza the ruin has not ended With no thought of beaches hounded children crouch in tents Their parents seek just a little flour for bread
Dear angels of subduction we set our hands on your vast shoulders we ask for your strength we pray against ruin
Before we rose, in the daylight of Gaza bombs rained on the camps and demolished demolished one father, four children in a tent
One mother is left and she has no feet
What is this world What is this crashing What raided the house of our belonging left doors swinging on broken hinges What suffocates us all What ruin
Dear sentinels, dear Old Ones we are not strong like you we need our feet we need gentleness and food Dear God in heaven come to the beaches of Gaza and the tents, come now
Tell us how we live in this bombing or far away from it with helpless hands
I walk out to one of the giants lean against its ancient bulk A wave rolls in over my feet How do I live
Good Friday worship can awaken a whole raft of emotions: love, gratitude, sorrow—and sometimes rage. In the final weeks of his life, Bonhoeffer wrote, “Christians stand by God in God’s hour of grieving.” What does that mean for us now?
I walked home from church last night in a hot rage. Actually there was a mess of emotions—tender desire to stay awake with Jesus in his suffering; gratitude for the creative devotion of those who had crafted a series of sensory meditations to help us do that; distress over the loss of a beautiful Palestinian girl-child, which I had learned about on social media earlier that evening, and a beautiful Palestinian boy-child’s loss of limbs.
And fury at the broken promises of my country.
In eighth grade I was in the USA with my family, and in home room at Milburn Junior High School that year we were shown jerky films of skin-and-bones survivors of Nazi concentration camps. I will never forget those naked forms of human beings, beloved of God, starved to barely-aliveness. Barely able to walk, weighing barely enough for gravity to hold them to the earth. Those films came with solemn assurances that now we had the United Nations, we had an international system to make sure the Holocaust would never happen again.
Habiba and Mahmoud would beg to differ. The very country that claimed credit for stopping the Holocaust is now supplying the bombs raining down on the tents where their families are taking shelter. And that very country has been blocking the United Nations from putting an end to the genocide.
And it is my country. And many, many of us around the world are desperate to stop the violence, and thus far we have failed.
So I have no Easter platitudes to offer. I will go to church again on Sunday morning, and I’ll take joy in the resurrection story—I will cling to the hope it provides. But in my heart, until Israel’s crazed violence against the Palestinian people and land has been brought to an end, I will keep trying to stay awake with Jesus. Because Jesus is suffering with Mahmoud, and with Habiba’s bereft family, and with all of Palestine.
Habiba’s name means Love. She was killed on Good Friday.
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My book has launched! Anyone who has caught sight of me here or on other social media in the past couple of years knows that for a while I’ve been writing and thinking about the medieval Christian mystic Julian of Norwich and creating botanical art to accompany key excerpts from her writings. Now these meditations are available in a lovely little collection published by Anamchara Books.
The work has been a beautiful journey for me: it involved not only learning a lot about Julian but also learning digital art techniques—some via online classes, some by trial and error. All writing is discovery, and this writing led me into my pain and failures but also into breathtaking experiences of the immense and tender love of God.
What does it mean to be “oned” to God? For me it has meant centeredness in God’s steady presence, release from nagging anxieties—and also new freedom to act in public solidarity with God’s beloveds who are suffering. The song that God sings over us is a song of suffering-with, of being-with. It is for sharing, for as Julian says (in Ellyn Sanna’s paraphrase), “The happy comfort revealed to me is big enough for us all.”
In my recent meditations on the writings of Julian of Norwich, I have relished her prolonged contemplation of Jesus as our Mother: how he gives birth to us twice, in creation and on the cross, and how he tends us day by day.
Who describes Jesus’s mothering of us better than Julian? My botanical illustration is of serviceberries on a tree near my home.
Julian’s trinitarian theology is clear and sound: the three Persons are One, and what is done by any of them is done by the one God. What one Person is, all three are together. Thus in other places she writes that God is both Father and Mother.
To my sorrow, I remember as a young adult scoffing along with a friend who had visited a “liberal” church where prayers were often addressed to “Father-Mother God.” Now I think such forms of address are true and rich, fully consonant with scripture and various strains of Christian tradition.
In my own prayer life I have tended in the past couple of decades to opt for “God”—usually “dear God”—as a gender-neutral term of address. But I’ve been longing for something warmer, a phrase that expresses more of who God is to me, to us.
Daneen Akers makes an excellent case for switching to “Mother God” and ditching the male terms and pronouns altogether. Of course she’s not the only advocate for this; on the page I’ve linked, you can download a helpful PDF she put together quoting other thoughtful Jesus followers who have made this change.
Somehow my heart has been wanting a term that clashes a little more, calling attention to itself, yet one that could come to feel natural on my tongue. This past weekend I hit upon “Mother Lord,” and it feels just right. Lord has a feudal feel, but it’s what the biblical translators continue to use, and its Aramaic equivalent was what the first disciples called Jesus most often. I like retaining this familiar title because it conveys honor and trust and glory. And I have used it all my life.
As a child I called my mother Mommy, and as a teen I switched to Mom. Mother feels different, larger. It speaks of intimacy and belovedness, respect and dignity. Our Lord is Mother to me and to my mother and father, to all generations of humankind. She is our Source, giving us life, tending us, challenging us, calling us home.
“Mother Lord” makes me chuckle a little, and it seems to hold my whole ongoing journey to know God more.
Giving God names that reflect our awe and affection is a very scriptural thing to do. Have you come up with a special name for God? I would love to read it.
For a few years now I have been pondering the words of Julian of Norwich, the medieval woman who at age 30 received a series of “showings” or revelations of the love of God. She dedicated the rest of her life to praying through these visions, asking God questions about them, deciphering their meaning. In fact after she wrote them down, she began writing them again as she understood more.
Julian moved into a small anchorhold–a monastic cell built against a wall of St. Julian’s Church in the city of Norwich, England. Another woman lived in an adjoining cell and took care of her practical needs so that Julian could live as an anchorite, mostly in solitude for prayer and writing but in the afternoons receiving visitors who came to her porch window to seek her counsel.
I feel a great kinship with Julian, not because I possess comparable wisdom and dazzling intellect but because I too have had deep experiences of God’s love. Julian’s insights speak to my heart. They are carrying me through these years of terrifying climate change and pandemic and war and the violence of white supremacy. Julian is an older sister who holds my hand, grieves with me, and helps persuade my anxious body to rest in love.
The title I chose for this post is from an extended meditation on a brief vision Julian received. A lord (remember, she lived in medieval England) is sitting on a throne with a servant nearby. The lord asks the servant to take care of a certain task, and the young man leaps up to obey–but immediately stumbles and falls. Instead of berating him for his awkwardness, the lord descends from the throne and kindly takes his hand to help him up.
Julian is fascinated by this parable/vision and spends several pages interpreting it. The lord, of course, is God, and the servant is the paradigmatic human being, Adam. The first sin committed by the first humans in the book of Genesis has long been called “the fall.” But Julian is moved and astonished to see how gently God responds to Adam’s offense. This was not the God portrayed in most church sermons in her day.
Julian shares other insights as she digs into this parable–too much to explain here. What I’ve been carrying around in the notes app on my phone is one phrase: within the lord she sees “a great refuge, long and wide and full of endless heavens.”
Every time I read it, I must stop and take a deep, glad breath.
God is some kind of a river, some kind of a sky, some kind of a forest in which every vulnerable created thing is welcomed and protected.
My last post hinted at the wild conversations that can happen with children when bedtime is filled with songs, stories, and prayers. My own kids shared a bedroom for years because of a tight budget, so our bedtime ritual involved them together. Many of our most important conversations happened during those years.
No topic was forbidden. My children’s defenses would be down, and sometimes they’d blurt out rather extraordinary things.
Claire: Why do angels always carry torches?
Mom: I didn’t know they did. Have you seen an angel?
Claire: Yeah, the other day I ran around the corner of Andrew’s house and there was an angel.
Mom: Oh wow, did you talk?
Claire: Yeah. I told him I was sorry for saying bad words.
As a missionary kid and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship alum, I’m stuck for life with an internal theology monitor. My invisible antennas went up as my daughter spoke. Claire’s angelic encounter seemed to pass scriptural tests: it was unexpected and it prompted repentance. I couldn’t recall any Bible story book illustrations of angels carrying torches (for Brits, flaming torches, not flashlights). But the mental image is beautiful, and completely consonant with biblical imagery.
After singing Christmas carols, before we trooped up to their room for the rest of bedtime.
It was at bedtime that my children told me—together—that they’d decided they wanted to be baptized.
It was at bedtime that they told me they hoped a family member traveling abroad would die instead of coming home.
It was at bedtime that they told me they’d conferred with each other and agreed that they hoped a family member traveling abroad would die instead of coming home. I held in my shock and did not reproach them but asked why. Their answer was a revelation to me, helping me understand that the family environment needed to be made safer for them.
Some years later, when my kids had their own rooms, Graham and I had a bedtime conversation and prayer very like that in Isaiah and the Worry Pack. It was a God-encounter for both of us. A week or so later, I asked him how his sleep had been. “OK,” he said. “If I’m having trouble sleeping, I just run a mini-version of ‘The Worry Pack’ like a video in my mind.”
That was when the thought came to me that perhaps someday I should make our experience into a book.
Claire was in junior high when she told me at bedtime that some peers at school made fun of a disabled classmate and she had joined in. Later, on her own initiative, she had apologized tearfully to the girl, and they became friends.
Finally, there were the daytime conversations that emerged from our bedtime sharing. One fall afternoon when Claire was three, we were driving in the neighborhood and I called her attention to a small maple tree whose leaves were afire. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” I rhapsodized.
Claire burst out from the backseat, “I love God!”
Bedtime talks and readings had formed her to see the world theologically, as made and sustained by God.
My children were no more creative than the children in your life are; they had no more capacity for entering God’s presence than your children have. So as you wake up to God’s love and learn new, fruitful ways to pray, share your experiences with them. Of course what you share needs to be at their level, and it needs to connect naturally with their lives and struggles.
There’s no telling what new adventures you’ll have together. And sometimes you’ll find your young ones leading the way.
Praying with children is one of the most important things we can do to foster their life with God.
My kids and I prayed before meals throughout their growing-up years, and spontaneously anytime they were hurt, frightened, or sick. But the most important time for prayer was bedtime. After I read a picture book or a middle-grade book chapter to them, and a Bible story, we took turns praying. Then I sang something peaceful as they drifted off to sleep. This practice calmed and nurtured all of us and bore sometimes surprising fruit.
Our routine was modeled on my own experiences growing up in a large family with missionary/teacher parents.
Prayer in the Land of Gorings
Not all those early experiences of prayer were nourishing. Our dad would periodically decide to lead family devotions following breakfast. It always fell flat—I can’t remember a single time that morning devotions didn’t feel awkward and pedantic, with Dad posing schoolroom-type questions that failed to engage our lives or our struggles. The practice always petered out after a few dutiful stabs at this perceived obligation.
Bedtime prayers were a whole other story. For years—beginning in our eldest sister’s infancy—little Gorings gathered in PJs each night for the enchantment of a poem or two read aloud, followed by a story or book chapter, a Bible story, humorous songs and a hymn or two, and finally prayers. It was our warmest time together; it grew our imaginations and helped to form an indelible family culture that keeps my siblings and me deeply bonded to this day. We have all remained in the faith.
Arrayed in our pajamas just before going to bed and starting the nightly ritual. That’s me on the left. Three more siblings were yet to come! And then my parents adopted two more when the rest of us had grown into young adults.
Bedtime is best
What makes bedtime a particularly rich time to pray with our little ones? I think there are a couple of reasons.
First, as they become sleepy children’s normal defenses go down. Especially if the parent is unhurried and attentive at bedtime, children may get in touch with tender or sad feelings and blurt out things they’d not say in daylight.
It is a gift just to find words for our feelings and experiences. Then they can be brought to God in prayers of thanksgiving and petition.
Two favorite photos of my kids in childhood
Second, bedtime is a natural time to think back on the day and look forward to what is coming. Cindy Bunch’s Be Kind to Yourself (IVP, 2020) wasn’t around when I was a young mom, but if it had been, I’m pretty sure I would have used its simple examen questions—what’s bugging you? what’s bringing you joy?—to help my kids articulate hardships of the past day and places where they had sensed God’s presence.
Kid-friendly prayers
Prayer with children can take other forms too. My picture book Isaiah and the Worry Pack (IVP Kids, 2021) models an imaginative way of meeting God through guided imagery. It’s based on an experience my son Graham and I had together one night when he struggled with some big worries. Jared Patrick Boyd suggests ways to pray Scripture imaginatively with children in Imaginative Prayer (IVP, 2017).
Memorized prayers can be helpful too. When I was a child, we often recited “Now I Lay Me.” Its mention of death would make it off-putting to many parents nowadays. But falling asleep is entering another country, mysterious and affording children even less control than they have over their waking hours. Maybe it’s not so bad to provide our kids a prayer that contains their fears within a little rhyme that expects God to hold them in both waking and sleeping, living and dying.
Some lovely prayers to read and perhaps memorize with kids—in daytime as well as at bedtime—can be found in Traci Smith’s Prayers for Faithful Families (Beaming Books, 2020). And a great resource is coming soon from IVP Kids: Little Prayers for Ordinary Days by Tish Harrison Warren, Flo Paris Oakes, and Katy Hutson (2022).
Singing as prayer
Singing can be a prayer practice too, of course. I adopted my daughter Claire at age one after she had suffered serious neglect and starvation in an institution during her first six months of life. As she grew, she became especially fond of the hymn “Children of the Heavenly Father.” For years she requested it practically every night, along with prayers that she wouldn’t have bad dreams.
Claire at 18 months, now in the US, with my mother, Susy Goring, who had literally rescued her from death.
Years later Claire was at the National Registrar’s office in her birth country, Colombia. She’d entered to apply for her identity card so that her dual citizenship could be recognized. An encounter with the director of the new digital population database led to an amazing bonus: printouts of the birth, ID, and death records of her birth mother!
Holding these documents, Claire wandered out onto Plaza Bolívar toward the national cathedral while waiting for a friend to complete an errand of her own.
Then from inside the huge church she heard music—the organist at this Colombian Roman Catholic cathedral dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus began playing a Swedish Lutheran hymn, “Children of the Heavenly Father.”
Claire told me later that her heart began pounding in surprised awe. But she was also flooded with peace. Even though she’d just learned that she’d never meet her birth mother in this life, she might be able to track down other members of her biological family, now that she had her mom’s documents. And the hymn reminded her that the gentle, attentive Father she had met in bedtime prayers would be with her. All along God had been bearing her, as the hymn says, “in his mighty arms.”
Note: I have many stories of funny and extraordinary conversations about God that arose out of prayers with my kids. Too many to tell in one post! So I welcome you to subscribe (above right, next to the title of this post) if you’d like to read them in the coming weeks.
As Isaiah & the Worry Pack‘s launch day draws near–just 11 days from now!–I’ve been happily busy with writing and interviews about this book, worry/anxiety experienced by children, prayer, and my kids’ books more generally.
I’ve thought again and again of an experience during Lent 1991 in a little church in West Chicago. I had been introduced to guided-imagery meditation before then, through books and a therapist, but on this Wednesday night it changed my life.
My first (sad and abusive) marriage had ended, and I still wondered whether divorce was one of the worst sins, essentially a departure from the faith in which I had grown up. I had moved my kids across the country, and now I was in a church service with a bunch of strangers. The woman at the front invited us to close our eyes and participate in a prayer exercise called Garden of the Heart.
Picture your heart as a garden.
Mine isn’t even full of weeds. It is a patch of dry, hard, absolutely barren dirt.
My heart was rather like this barren ground at Abu Simbel, Egypt. Photo from Creative Commons.
Where are you in the garden?
Right in the middle, lying prostrate with my face in the dirt.
Now Jesus comes into the garden. What does he do?
I suppose he picks up a hoe and starts poking at the dirt to break it up for planting.
No! I see Jesus. He is right beside me on the ground, face down in the dirt.
I cried and cried that night—healing tears. God had come into my devastation, my life’s failure, and instead of hurrying to fix things was mourning with me.
My inner desert had become a place of intimate encounter—a garden for the sprouting of something beautiful, unforeseen, and utterly wild.
Preorder here! Or through your favorite local or online bookstore.
This story was in my heart for many years–& I had written it down, but that was long before I had learned what I now know about picture book structure & pacing. I’m a late bloomer with picture books, but I keep thinking, I am so glad each book has come out when it has. Each needed to ripen in its own way.
Isaiah & the Worry Pack grew out of my years of seeking God intensely, partly because I just wanted a more experiential faith, & partly because my marriage was failing & I was in deep pain. I delved into practices of contemplative & charismatic prayer, & God drew near. Of course God had never left, but now I was learning how to listen & to see with the eyes of the heart.
I will write more about the experiences of those years in other posts; for now I just want to say that my own spiritual search nurtured my children’s spiritual lives too. One night my son, aged 10, & I had a meditative prayer experience together very like what the mom & son experience in Isaiah & the Worry Pack. It didn’t preserve him from all anxiety thereafter, but the guided-imagery prayer became a tool for him to use on his own when he was struggling to sleep.
In the story, Isaiah & his sister & mother are living far away from his father, just as we were. Kids in single-parent households are not doomed to become disconnected from God because of the trauma of separation or divorce. I feel pretty strongly about this!
I haven’t seen a picture book like Isaiah & the Worry Pack out in the world! I hope you will get copies for the young ones in your life, & I hope it deepens their own life of faith.
Ruth Goring 