Living as ‘beloved rescued ones’
Nancy Kennedy
Last week I met with a local Catholic priest, Fr. Ken Malley, who showed me a map of our county. He pointed out the six parishes and the geographic areas they serve. His parish, St. Scholastica, sits in the middle.
He began talking about beauty and rescue, quoting the Russian writer Dostoevsky, who said, “Beauty will save the world.”
I told him that at my church we talk about beauty as well — about making Jesus beautiful to others by the way we walk out our faith, sharing the grace and mercy and forgiveness we’ve been given.
A longing for beauty, for order and design, is primal. That’s why we gasp at cloud formations at dusk and tear up at sunrise. A lack of beauty brings despair — and we are a people severely lacking beauty.
So Father Ken and I talked about bringing beauty into our community, and I was all in.
He and I might disagree on some theological points, but as he said, we believe in the same creed.
Recently, his parish hosted a multi-week Bible study called the Rescue Project that drew 150 people on Wednesday nights to sit with strangers and talk about God’s Word.
The Rescue Project has four elements: Created, Captured, Rescued and Response.
We were created by a loving God for himself—to be in his family. We were captured and held captive by sin. Then we were rescued by Jesus and set free. And now we respond by living by grace, loving others because God loved us first.
He called it “living as the beloved rescued ones” and his vision is to cast out a rescue net to those who don’t even realize they’re being held captive and need rescuing.
“We’ve got good news,” he said. “We’re loved by God! He’s loving us first!”
I’ve never heard a Catholic priest talk like that. The priests of my youth talked about commandments and penance, bingo and rummage sales.
To be fair, maybe that’s all I heard.
But when someone who has been rescued, and then captured by the beauty of Christ, talks about it — you hear it. You listen.
Because you see something in them that looks like hope. Something you want for yourself.
I know rescue because I was rescued. I know hope because I once was hopeless — until beauty found me.
I know beauty because Jesus has made my life beautiful.
In 2008, a woman started a youth garden in her blighted Detroit neighborhood. People thought she was crazy to plant a garden in a “hell hole,” but as she taught kids how to grow vegetables and flowers, they began to change. They took pride in their surroundings. As more gardens were planted, seeds of hope took root.
Recently, a restaurant owner in Portland, Oregon, began serving free meals to families whose SNAP benefits were paused and couldn’t afford groceries. He said it would probably cause him to go broke, but he was going to do it anyway. When people across the world heard about it, they sent him money to help — more than $300,000.
That’s beauty too — people bringing the gospel into places grown ugly with despair and hate.
Little by little, God uses his people — the beloved rescued ones — to transform their communities.
“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” writes the prophet Isaiah.
Or as Father Ken said, “Without love and beauty, it’s just blah, blah, blah.”
Contact Nancy Kennedy at 352-564-2927 (leave a message) or email at nkennedy@chronicleonline.com.
