A Post from Rachel Matthews - Gratitude is what I feel for Hagar. I am grateful that she is remembered in our Lenten study today because there are so many women that have experienced alienation, abandonment, and the powerlessness of social structures that support her only as long as it benefits the benefactor. God knows that woman. God cares for that woman. Scripture gives her voice. The Word is powerful. I think about young women who fell in love, may or may not have gotten married, had a child and whose very sense of self was beginning to blossom in the relationship with the other only to find that relationship broken through divorce or betrayal. Her Self then is grows in relationship with bitterness and rejection. Love is a much better partner. Self for women, as I understand women’s development, grows in relation to others as a part of how she is made, in connectivity so what she is connected to impacts the very core of her identity: her family, her partner, her work. Here in this text with Hagar we see the power of a relationship with God who does not abandon and stays with and even gives life to her part in the creation of life, her son. A whole nation comes from this relationship with God. She is not alone and bitterness does not have to take root. And, then there is this connection with the text we all experience brokenness and alienation. Here is just one more example of how God helps us feel not alone. The older I get the more I trust that it is true. Thank you, Hagar, for sharing your pain with God.
Betty Hollister writes Judi assured me this week would be easier—more about a journey, maybe even something as simple as a walk in nature. Ok. Maybe. I admitted to her that even though I didn’t “like” the week of “Solitude and Struggle,” it did make me think, and I liked that. And, the thinking, of course, didn’t stop this week. Monday’s lesson reminded us how Jesus sought solitude by walking away from the crowds after periods of “greatest exertion or emotional distress. ” That made complete sense. If Jesus, fully human, but also fully divine, needed time alone to talk to His father and renew his strength to heal the next in line or preach to the next crowd that made complete sense. Even Tuesday’s suggestions about labyrinth walks to “get lost in God’s creation” made sense to me. Then, I read about the “blue-gray-green monks” who turned that color due to hardship and fasting and Mary of Egypt who wandered for decades alone in the desert “burned and bleached by the sun.” A
Thank you, indeed, for Hagar. I, too, am grateful that this passage shows us how we are not alone. I also appreciate our author not mincing words about what exactly happened to Hagar; yet she is not known as a victim at all. I love Hagar's name for God: God who sees. God loves us, cares for us, God hears.While bad things do surely happen in this world, God does see and respond.
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