My family and I were at Pike's Place Market in Seattle today. We went into a store full of Mexican art -- colorful tiles, decorated skulls and crosses, bright toothpick demons -- an interesting mix of the religious, the mundane and the morbid. A table in the middle of the store featured milagros or "miracles" -- tiny arms, legs, fish, animals and kneeling figures coarsely shaped from metal. A sign explained that people in Latin American countries often pin these figures to wooden crosses or statues of the saints to petition the saints for help or protection -- a symbolic act representing a prayer or an internal posture of the heart.
I was thinking about Oswald's comparison between being religious and being spiritually real in light of those milagros. The tiny pieces of metal pinned to a cross in and of themselves mean nothing. They cannot heal or protect. They have no inherent power. That's easy enough to see, but do I see that the same is true of my religious acts -- going to church, caring for the poor, carrying my Bible, listening to Christian music, writing this blog -- if they are not powered by a love for Jesus Christ?
"If we are going to be ready for Jesus Christ, we have to stop being religious (that is, using religion as a higher kind of culture) and be spiritually real" -- Oswald.
I have generally thought of today's Scripture passage in reference to Christ's second coming, but I love Oswald's use of it in a more everyday sense -- expecting Christ at every turn.
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