July 30, 2003

Loaves and fishes

We expect 5,000 more or less at the big General Convention Eucharist come Sunday.

There’s something familiar about the number. But just to protect our flanks, we’ll have more than a few loaves and fishes to go around. Then, we’ll take what we’ve got and bless it and break it and share it, just like Jesus did… well, sort of.

Of course, that’s what he asks us to do with life, ours, and all the rest of creation. Take what we’ve got, thank God for it, sacrifice it (as in “make it holy”), and then pass it around. It’s so simple, it’s inconceivable. He asked us to do it, anyhow, and, in doing so, to re-member him in the world and to look for him in others.

Thank God he didn’t ask us to walk on water. There’s no telling how complicated we’d make that.

July 29, 2003

Sense of humor

Early medics thought that what they called “the humors” pretty well summed life up. We have four, they postulated. Too much or too little of one throws us out of balance, and we get sick. They considered health and a good sense of humor one and the same.

It was a good idea then, and it still is now.

For one thing, humus (don’t forget old Adam) and human, humility and humor have always had the same DNA. Instead of the smothering and ponderous sobriety so characteristic of our goings on, we churchers might well remember that we, together with God, are in the human-making business, and that that’s what humility and spirituality are all about.

Bob Hope had it right. His family, gathered around his death bed and giving him one more of the audiences he so dearly loved, asked where he might wish to be buried. “Surprise me,” he said.

July 25, 2003

Walking on water

Mark’s gospel this Sunday and last leaves the disciples — and us — sandbagged between two miracles: feeding all that big crowd with next to nothing in the pantry last Sunday and, as if that weren’t sufficient, doing that follow-up out there on the water (Mk 6.30-52).

Disbelief is one way to deal with miracles. It’s less risky. Belief, if you wish, leaves us out on a limb every time. Read on, if you dare.

The disciples were already in an emotional tailspin. Perplexed about the loaves, at sea in more ways than one, hearts all hardened, and suddenly, there’s Jesus, all ghostlike, walking on the water and obviously meaning to pass them by as if he didn’t want to be bothered any more. In the state they were already in, they were terrified.

There’s plenty of fear to go around these days without taking the additional risk of believing in miracles. Homeland insecurity and deception are the order of the day. The terrorists actually assume Fear as their altogether macabre team mascot. And the church, whose very vocation is to assuage fear by comfort and love, instead, is stalled in the headwind of its own preoccupation with self-preservation, too busy to pay attention.

Nevertheless, Jesus is not a ghost. Even if ever so often he might understandably like to pass us by and maybe remind us with Isaiah to “Seek the Lord while he wills to be found, call upon him when he draws near” (Is 55.6), he doesn’t. Rather does he say and does he set us free to listen, “Take heart, it is I; have no fear.”

Oh, and one more thing. That sage Madeleine L’Engle wrote a book called Walking on Water. She said that if Jesus was fully human, as we believe, and he could do that, then, so should we. It’s only that we’ve forgot how.

July 24, 2003

Primates

The primates are coming! The primates are coming!

First, it was only the monkeypox. So when the Homeland Security people stemmed that crisis, we naturally turned to them for help.

It had nothing directly to do with Gambian Giant Pouched Rats, we had to explain, but was no less severe as a potential corporate insider takeover by dot-orgs that would pale the dot-coms by comparison.

That was our first mistake. When Security realized these primates were actually people and only behaving like what their name suggested — and church people at that — they only naturally confused them with faith-based initiatives, turfed the whole thing to the White House, and left us in the hands of the EPA with all the other endangered species.

So what can we do when an 800-pound primate comes knocking at the narthex door? Grab a valid baptismal ID, of course, and beat the hell out. Isn’t that what it’s all about, anyway?

July 23, 2003

Wild olive

Lucy, who signs herself off as “the ‘wild’ flower lady of Holly Lake,” wrote a while back that the Out of Nowhere Devilwood Tree Saga “sounds like my kind of gardening with my kind of dilemma.”

I had reported on the devilwood’s progress in two previous memos that even with such an encouraging beginning, its future didn’t look all that bright. Now, the future has dimmed even more. What was green is now brown, what was pliable, brittle. It is difficult even to find the slightest hope.

The devilwood is also known among gardeners as the wild olive (Osmanthus americanus, if you prefer). It rarely needs pruning, for it has a pleasing natural shape of its own. Woodworkers say it is so tough that it’s the “devil” to work. It also holds up wonderfully well in gale winds.

When Lucy heard of its impending demise, she also wrote, “Greetings and sympathy for your poor little old sweet olive — don ‘t you like that better than devilwood?”

Names mean a lot in our tradition. Jacob got a new one in a wrestling match. Simon got a new one plus a set of keys by no fault of his own. One of the more exciting parts of Holy Baptism is to name a child with a blessing.

But we don’t stop there. We use names not only to bless, but to curse.

Some of our very own in whom we’ve entrusted the oversight of our spiritual nourishment have recently named us before the whole world as “confused, errant and disintegrating.” We’ve deserved such names largely, it seems, because we want to align some the church’s polity and liturgy, as clumsy as it sometimes can be, less with the security of religion and more with the risk of faith and love.

Strange, for it is that same lumbering and sometimes erring polity that gave these overseers the supervision and names and authority by which they presume to accuse us. Ironically, tradition has at times also named them “pontiffs” in honor of their calling as bridge-builders.

As Lucy suggested, maybe “wild olive” is a better name. So it is, for like the church, it stands up well in gale winds, has a reasonably beautiful shape, and is the very devil to change sometimes. And it also has branches to offer in the same peace and hope that once brought Noah to his knees in thanksgiving.

July 22, 2003

Common prayer, dancing

Common sense and a sense of humor, said William James, are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Might common prayer and a sense of humility be the same thing, moving at different speeds… a sense of humility, just common prayer, dancing?

Nothing so well defines Anglicans as the Book of Common Prayer. Through the cycles and the crises of life, it tells the world who we are and what we believe about ourselves and God. If we listen carefully, it can center us and protect us from letting too much distance show between our sense of humility and our sense of humor. Then may we experience the incredible lightness of being.

Common prayer dancing, indeed.

July 21, 2003

Language

John Evangelist, the writer, said that the Word became flesh, full of grace and truth. Toni Morrison, the writer, said that it is language that makes us human.

The DNA people take their intriguing double helices and make up a language with only four letters of the alphabet. It’s these “words,” they say, that when parsed a certain way for each of us not only become our flesh, but make us human, as well. Further, and probably much to the disappointed amazement of some, they now claim there’s not even such a thing as race.

Sure hope they leave sex alone, or else there won’t be anything left for us to make a fuss over. We churchers would simply have to get on with the business of grace and truth, and sex would be left only to the fig leaf of our imaginations.

July 18, 2003

Myths

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world.” Rollo May wrote this first sentence in his intriguing book The Cry for Myth

We enjoy in our Communion an appreciation and deep respect for an authority derived from Scripture, tradition, and reason. Further, we have understood that Scripture as a “normative tradition” which sets, might we say, the spiritual parameters for all the rest. We may slip into other idolatries from time to time. But we are not bound by the one that ascribes to that norm a verbal inerrancy fundamentally insulting to God’s and God’s imagining us to be free to choose “to reason” (BCP p 845).

All of which is to say — perhaps more round-aboutly than some would prefer — that our normative tradition includes a plethora of stories about “eternity breaking into time,” about creation from nothing, about seas parting for our passage, about prophets assumed bodily into heaven, indeed, about heaven itself. We treasure that tradition, that Scripture, so much that not a one of our many liturgies for worship can be said not to be filled with its references.

To worship in this church is to tell repeatedly our story at one family reunion after another, Sunday in and Sunday out, crisis in and crisis out, and never seem to tire of it or of ringing changes on it in our homilies. Its myths are our ways of making sense out of nonsense.

Perhaps our world has never been more morally confusing than now, at least for us it has not. Thus, there is a mooring awaiting our attention. Jesus fed five thousand plus with only a few loaves and fishes. His grace remains quite sufficient for us. And besides all that, there is much green grass in the place on which to sit (Mk 6.30-44). Who could ask for anything more?

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July 17, 2003

Devilwood tree (again)

The continuing saga* of the devilwood tree:

Today, Jason, the tree guy, paid a pastoral call on the devilwood tree that’s planted in the cistern.

Of its four more or less nascent trunks, two must go, two must be appreciably pruned. For these latter, there is hope. For these former, none.

We’ve not exactly done right by it, he said, gently. Too many moves (two) in too little time in too many environments (three). Most anybody could have told us that (and probably will now). Even we could have told us that. But we were so hopeful and wanted so to help that we went to meddling.

It reminds me of Youth Work. We’re so hopeful and want to help and get so frustrated that we go to meddling. Of the myriad of curricula, programs, ghastly music, attempts to establish identity across chasms-of-chronos-reaching-for-kairos and never finding any, there seems no end. They leave and come back on their own or don’t come back on their own, and that’s that.

And then there’s also that classic oxymoron Affirmative Aging. How, indeed, we manipulate life as if it comes not in ages, but in packages, as if it were not all-inclusive, as if all were not worth affirming, as if aging did not start at zero on the Great Graph’s x & y axis and set out to permute all its cycles, as if nobody ever seems to know for whom the bell curves.

Pray God that just as there’ll be no Church in the Kingdom, there’ll neither be Youth Work nor Affirmative Aging, and that even the devilwood trees and their keepers will be indefectible.

*cf OoN 1vii03 & 7vii03

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July 16, 2003

Koko

Fred Rogers wanted to meet Koko, the gorilla who had been taught American Sign Language and had watched “Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood.” When they met, the 280-pound gorilla gave the diminutive Rogers a big hug, then took off Mister Rogers’ shoes.

It is only too easy to think of a neighborhood more as a place than as a relationship, more realty than reality. In our better moments, we might even call it an outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual reality. Then maybe we’d be on to something.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t get General Convention off my mind. After all, to use a neighborly term, it’s just around the corner. I keep thinking of ways we can set aside religion’s protective security long enough to dare faith’s openness and risk, how we can embrace it as our Big Fat Anglican Wedding (there’s that word again) and accept it as the neighborhood God’s Great Commandment intends.

Perhaps Koko has a clue. Why not, just before each legislative session, give one another a big hug, then take off our neighbor’s shoes?

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