Advent Discussions: Marlena Graves

Join us each week of Advent as we share bonus content from friends of Dwell, each reflecting upon their own Advent journey and life with God in and through Scripture.

Week 3: Marlena Graves

Marlena is a writer, deep thinker, and speaker who is passionate about the eternal implications of our life in God. She is a lover of beauty – especially the beauty of her family, others, and creation. Marlena is a justice seeker—trying to overcome evil with good. In addition, she seeks answers to these types of questions: What does abundant life look like (John 10:10)? If God is good and we are his deeply beloved children and safe in his kingdom, how then should we live? Marlena deeply believes that spiritual formation and justice should never be separated. She is most concerned with those who profess to follow Jesus but speak and behave so unlike him. She includes herself in the mix and therefore seeks to bridge the gap between what Christians profess to believe and how they live. She speaks regularly to congregations, university campuses, and to retreatants about the implications of following Jesus. Marlena loves to laugh and be around others and then recover in silence and solitude! 

Visit her online at marlenagraves.com.

Seeing Light in the Darkness

Finding Joy in Stillness and Silence

Scripture as Reorientation to Reality

Bonus Audio Content:

The Way Up is Down

Transcript: As I read the Gospels, I compared and contrasted the life of Jesus with the way that the American church in particular presents itself to itself and to the world, primarily the evangelical church, because that’s where I’m most familiar, but I would say, I could see this in the three branches of Christianity. A lot of the times we present ourselves as seeking celebrity, how many people attend your church as being the most important thing, and a lot of what I would say is (it) mirrors the American culture, the American dream, like health and wealth, and the church seems to reflect our American culture. Of course, I’m not speaking for every church or every Christian, but what’s being communicated to the public. And I just never have seen that in the life of Jesus.

When his brothers (or maybe cousins depending what stream you come from in Christianity) said to him, no one who wants to make something of themselves stays in secret. Why don’t you go to the festival and make a name for yourself. And in Matthew 4, when Satan tempted Jesus to jump from the high pinnacle of the temple, do something magnificent, Henry Nouwen talks about this, do something magnificent, make a name for yourself. Jesus was never like that, he told the devil to flee from him and those temptations.

I think we have believed that fame is what makes us important: fame, wealth and power.

And Jesus, he totally, just absolutely dismissed those. He did not seek to be the most powerful religious figure. He was not born in a palace. He almost shunned anything that distracted from the message, repent for the kingdom of God is near. He’s near. Jesus is near. And so I just wonder, what’s the big contrast?

I think of Philippians 2. Jesus gave up everything, his power, and if you want to say fame, but his control of all things to become a human being. He divested himself of glory, so that he could say, “Not my will, but yours be done.” And I think that’s the way up is down. And the Bible talks over and over about how God will uplift the meek and the humble, but the arrogant, and the people that put their trust in riches or fame, he will not look to. And I don’t mean that God will ignore these people, but what I mean is the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and the humble, the people at the bottom of the societal hierarchy are the people that God is drawn to and spends time with.

The Poverty of Jesus as a Path to Joy

Transcript: When I think of poverty, I’m thinking about several things: poverty of spirit, but also maybe it could be material poverty. But if we impoverish ourselves of everything in us that’s not of Christ, we make room for God to be in our lives, God bearers like Mary. If our life is too full of godless things, and godless postures and godless obsessions and orientations, there’s no room for God in our life.

We kind of chase after things that we know, but we keep falling for it, that don’t fill us. I love the Sermon on the Mount: the pure in heart will see God. Rich Mullins has a song where he said that too. And I heard this story by Fr. Henry Reardon in Chicago. He was driving somewhere, like a long journey, and his windshield wipers stop working in the winter and so he had to drive with his family and then wipe off by hand the windshield wipers because they kept getting mud from the snow and he couldn’t see. In the Bible, Matthew 6:22, another one of my favorites, Jesus says, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is good, your whole body is good.” And so, when we fill ourselves and our lives with that which is not of Christ, that which is not good, true, and beautiful—the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, like the Bible says—when we dwell on things that are not of God, we get full of it.

Having Eyes to See

Transcript: Whatever you spend your time on, whatever you focus on, you’ll become like that. I think it’s in Habakkuk, it says we become like the things we love. And our time, how we spend our time kind of tells us what we love, where our treasure is, Jesus said. So I see it as like, where does joy come from? I think when we are purified and cleansed of our sins, and again, I just say that which is not of Christ, that which leads to death, when we’re cleansed of those things we can see better, like Jesus talks about in Matthew 6:22. And I think it can give us joy, because we see that those things don’t satisfy, we see that as we practice the life of Christ in our lives, how it manifests itself in our lives, that we see that goodness.

This morning, I was driving back (I’m in a Ph. D. program), I was driving back from school. I had taught a class at the university, and last year at this time, I would call my mom and she would call me (“How did class go?”), and my mom just died on June 27 of 2021, and I was really sad. Like, I really missed my mom, I did this, like, a couple weeks ago, I was gonna call my mom, like, I can’t call my mom, I can talk to my dad, but I can’t call my mom. And then I saw a little butterfly a couple of times. The monarch butterfly, I saw it flying up by a light, when I was stopping at the light, then I was traveling down the highway. I’m like, “Some monarch butterflies are out.” And I was just thinking about all things being made new and that I’ll see my mom someday, that there’s pain right now, but I took joy in a little monarch butterfly, it was the grace of God to me today. And I think having eyes to see brings joy. Because if we just see the world from the world’s perspective, we’re gonna see everything we don’t have, or everything that’s wrong, we’re not going to be able to see the good and true and beautiful that is bursting all over, but we have to have eyes to see it.