Easter – resurrection – death = life

I struggle – I struggle with time, I struggle with getting things done, I struggle with being effective, or at least thinking that I am.
I am a priest. I pray, and I try to make my life into an act of prayer so that everything I do is prayer. Easier said than done. In a lot of ways I think I fail miserably at this, but it is such a great ideal to hold on to – I think that is largely why I stopped drinking, and smoking cigarettes, and drugs – although simply cutting those things out, doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t find other things to take their place. So again, I struggle. I struggle with my own prayer and life, striving to be relevant, engaged, active and living out my faith.
I have recently had the “fortune” of reading and digesting some feedback – ultimately I take this personally (especially when I see my name printed on paper or when things are addressed to me), all the while knowing that I shouldn’t. What I find I need to remind myself of is that when we are in the business of dealing with faith, spirituality and religion, it becomes very personal and often private and intimate for people. I don’t mean intimate in the sense of behind closed doors with your lover, I mean that it is close to the very fabric of our being. When we start talking about these things we tend to slip very easily into the dualistic “black” and “white” territory without taking into account the variety of ways of approaching and talking about all this. In response to an email I received I tried to clearly identify what it was that I believed. In the response I got back, I was asked why I was lecturing the person on basic Trinitarian theology (ask me if you don’t know what that is). Somehow, me trying to explain and express where I am came and what I believe, was perceived by this person as telling them what it was. It is tricky trying to remember and take into account perception when trying to explain and establish where you are, especially when there are no points of reference.
So in day to day life – where does that leave us? We all have the things we do – are they divorced from any thought even of being more than just physical actions taken.
As somebody in the midst of “the Church,” and a mainstream liberal one at that, struggling for a voice of relevancy and active engagement in everyday life, I recognize that the struggle is less between what is and the perception of what is – what is, at least in what I believe is, that Christianity, the story of Jesus, the Good News etc. does continue to have things to say and is relevant to every day life in terms of relationships, how we treat each other, how we treat ourselves, how we treat the earth around us, our attitudes, thoughts, prayers, actions – everything. The disconnect comes when we gather as corporate community to engage in worship, to engage in corporate prayer, to engage in teaching and learning, to engage in dialogue, and when all of that is not able to connect and or address things happening in our daily lives.
What does it mean to die, so that we can live?