May 2009
Through voluntary displacement, we counteract the tendency to become settled in a false comfort and to forget the fundamentally unsettled position that we share with all people. Voluntary displacement leads us to the existential recognition of our inner brokenness and thus brings us to a deeper solidarity with the brokenness of our fellow human beings. Henri Nouwen, Compassion
Dear friends,
As you can see, Word Made Flesh recently reworked their visual identity. New logo, new website, newness all around. I really love the new logo, and its connection to a number of different images has been proposed, including seraphim, a phoenix, or any of the many references to birds in scripture.
One of my favorite of these references is to doves, and I have quoted it before. Psalm 55:6 cries, “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove. I would fly away and be at rest.” This is my regular cry for my friends in prostitution, and recently has been my cry for myself. Over the past two and a half years, problems with my landlady have escalated to the point where I needed to move out for my peace and personal sustainability. I began to look for a new apartment where I could “be at rest.”
I wasn’t the only one moving. My coworkers the Bakers had to move down 2,000 feet in altitude to the capital city of La Paz for Andrea Baker’s high risk pregnancy with twins. My coworkers the Goertzens decided to move into a smaller house with a garden option. So when I finally did move into Baker’s old apartment, there was also general community displacement. We’ve all had to ajust to what this new placement means for us as a community.
And one thing it’s made me think about with voluntary displacement. Henri Nouwen, quoted above, talks about voluntary displacement as the decision to move from places of comfort to the places where God is calling us, often the broken places and the hurting places. It doesn’t necessarily mean a geography change, but in my case, changing apartments is helping me reevaluate how I’m living and inviting people into my life, and why.
In my Easter service, we talked about Jesus in Hades right before the resurrection. This must have been Jesus’ ultimate act of displacement. He was the farthest from comfort that he had ever been, and ever could be. And yet, it was this displacement that was the staging point of his ultimate victory.
In Christ,
Cara Strauss