September 30, 2003

Proof texts

A little girl attended a Church of Christ vacation Bible school in a small Texas town on the Gulf Coast. She won first prize at graduation for memorizing the most Bible passages. The story made the front page of the local weekly, not because she won, but because she was an Episcopalian.*

We’re not all that well-known for our prowess with the Scriptures, except, for whatever it’s worth, we read them aloud in our public services perhaps more than any other church. Even so, it seems only lately there’s been an increase among us in the use of “proof texts.”

It’s only natural to want to be right about what we claim and believe, and there’s probably no better place to find affirmation than in the Bible. Whether or not it ever changes anybody’s mind one way or the other doesn’t seem to matter or do anything but challenge the zeal and frequency of the provers.

I personally wish we’d put a stop to this sort of thing. If others begin to suspect that we’re not only becoming more inclusive and more loving but more religious … well, the little Texas girl was cute and I’m sure made her parents proud, but after all, we’ve got a reputation to uphold.

*I’ve a strange feeling this OoN has been sent before, maybe recast a bit. If so, mark it up to geriatrophying, for it probably won’t be the last time.

September 29, 2003

Deodara

The Sweet Olive* tree of previous appearances here is now in the “nearer presence of its Lord.”

There’s now a Cedrus deodara standing easily twice as tall (10′) where Olive stood before. It’s an impressive plant. Its lower branches bend downward, then up again. Branchlets are densely pubescent and droop down at the tips. The bark is dark brown, sometimes nearly black, smooth on young trees, becoming fissured with age.

The tree has an overall feathery, whorly look about it. Though quite unlikely where we planted it, it can grow up to 150′ tall and have a 40′ ground spread. Deodara were once an important source of timber in India.

It makes quite an event of reproduction. Male “banana-shaped” (honest) catkins produce clouds of yellow, wind-blown pollen in early spring. The bluish-green female cones are egg-shaped (OK, cool it) and release little seeds with papery wings. Like baby kittens, we don’t yet know which we got, but expect it’ll be quite a show when the time comes. We’ll let you know.

And, oh yes. Olive, remember, was also called “devilwood.” In Sanskrit, deodar means “timber of the gods.”

*Note to new readers: Previous OoN pages reported a devilwood tree in our yard being moved around from a showy location out front to an also-ran spot in a backyard cistern. Some of us had grown rather fond of it in the process of its trek (it actually got fan mail). It was hauled off in ignominy in a brush pile last week. As you might understand, this was not easy.

September 27, 2003

Schism

Scott Peck wrote that “fighting is far better than pretending you are not divided.” The pastoral theologian Reuel Howe always contended that even hostile communication is better than none.

Nobody but the dimmest pretend these days that the church is not divided. Surprisingly, a lot of people act like it’s the first time. Christians prefer to call anger “righteous indignation,” but the effect is the same. Anger is both fear and the response to it, the attempt to recover one’s balance when anxiety gets realized in-your-face.

It’s common to use the family metaphor when talking about the church. It’s appropriate, but it shouldn’t just stop with the sweetness and light of Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving dinner. These human systems are like the kinetic art of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Tweak one, and all the rest shimmer and swing before they settle down again. But none break away, not if their creator’s original intention would be kept intact.

There’s a lot of evidence around that God wants us in relationships, communities, Holy Communion, Holy Spirit, and whatever. We’ve not been all that stewardly about God’s yearning, nor all that penitent about our lack of it.

So what goes around, comes around. We’re hard after a split. Self-righteousness is no prettier now than it’s ever been. Charges of schism and heresy abound. Maybe it would help to remember at a time like this that schism is distinguished from heresy in that the separation involved is not at basis doctrinal. Heresy is opposed to faith, schism is opposed to love.

Divided Anglicanism, Orthodox Anglicanism, Mainstream Anglicanism. Let the oxymorons abound and tend for themselves, and lets go ahead and have a good, cathartic, family fight. But let’s not forget that any way you look at it, the whole thing’s so tacky.

September 26, 2003

Disbelief

It is easy to be lulled into a kind of take-for-granted, here-we-go-again listening to the cyclic pattern of readings from scripture that calendar the seasons of the church’s year. But just as we may be so tempted, there come these startling two-by-fours between our eyes like this morning’s gospel with its unorthodox paramedic casting out demons and its catalog of emergency surgery for the morally lapse (Pent 16/21B, Mk 9.38-43,45,47-48).

These extraordinary stories and others like them about walking on water and being swallowed by fish and turning water into wine at best may strike most of us not only as quaint, but perhaps even absurd. For those who feel they must believe in the inerrancy of scripture, they have to be absolute nightmares. Maybe Paul had this sort of thing in mind when he called the gospel a scandal and a stumbling block to the Greeks and Jews and surely would have included us if we’d been standing around.

But because we are so shocked — and rightly so — our preoccupation with the lack of any convincing fact about them can lead us to risk overlooking what may be any possible convicting truth within them.

So why is it that the obvious consensus of the faithful down through the centuries is to tell these stories over and over and over again? What is there about them that makes a difference? What is there about them that we can believe, that somehow, we must believe? If we are to take comfort in them, how can we?

The 18th-century poet Samuel Coleridge suggested a way. He called it the “willing suspension of disbelief.” He spoke of that childlike ability to believe that is born firmly in each of us, that characteristic which Jesus likened to the presence of the kingdom, but which so often withers as we grow older and are taught that the world of imagination is simply not all that reliable.

The power of Coleridge’s phrase, the “willing suspension of disbelief,” is the conviction that not only disbelief, but belief, as well, is a matter of choice. And that by virtue of God’s creative imagination of us into human being, we are free to choose. Faith, itself, is a choice. It is primarily an act of the will. Just so is the choice to rid ourselves of what may be a clutter of disbelief.

We live in a time when few of us will to believe what we do not already understand or what we have not experienced or what does not meet our own personal criteria in order even to qualify as “experience.” Most of us have not been swallowed by a fish. Most of us have not walked on water, even if in certain moments some of us leave the impression rather that we think we could if brought to the test.

But like Jonah and Peter, for example, who were faced with these things, all of us have been afraid and more than likely will be again. All of us have eyes and hands and feet that haven’t always been morally impeccable. All of us know someone whose faith we are convinced is “less” than our own, but whose faithfulness casts out demons again and again, demons that we can’t even lay a hand on. Our fear to believe, to choose faith, can often be one of our special scandals and stumbling blocks.

We live also in a time when fear of almost any kind is our enemy, when to triumph over fear or even simply to hold fear at bay has become more important than to understand fear. A growing part of our own beloved church is making the strangest of choices in these times, judgments clearly grounded in an obsession with being right and a profound fear of being wrong.

As a nation and as a people, we’ve spent billions to conquer fear, to make ourselves secure from our doorsteps all the way to outer space. This anxiety about a hostile environment without can only create in us a hostile environment within. We greet strangers with at least a mild suspicion, if not more. Addiction, a most singular form of fear, is rampant, not only addiction to chemicals, but addiction to power and to control. Wherever such addiction resides latent in our genes, as the evidence increasingly suggests that it can, fear inevitably drives it out of hiding and into control over us.

Perhaps, then, it may help to suspend our disbelief when we realize that these ancient stories are not so much about controlling fear, but about understanding and naming fear and about understanding the gravity of our moral behavior. We inherit these stories and hear them over and over that we might understand, not that we might better describe or define or convince or demonstrate through research, but that their message might have meaning for us, that it might make sense and become a part of us, that it might ultimately overcome our fear or at least cast it into a manageable perspective.

Just as the will to love precedes true loving, so can the will to suspend disbelief create an environment for believing. One can choose to free oneself of the notion that something must be demonstrably and factually clear before it can be considered true. To open ourselves to that possibility is the meaning and can be the beginning of our spiritual awakening.

Jonah and Peter were rescued because they believed God was accessible even under the most outrageous conditions. Jesus affirmed the man casting out demons even though he was not a card-carrying member of the discipleship. Perhaps that’s the message, the answer, the understanding, even the healing value of a willing suspension of disbelief.

September 25, 2003

Navels

A once and dear friend of mine had a remarkable way of putting things in their place. With a mere aside, he’d say, “that’s about as useless as an extra navel.”

That simple phrase always struck me as a most thorough of put-downs. I cannot imagine anything so terminally unique that even a simple duplicate would be, so to speak, terminally redundant.

Early on in life, I suspect that most of us were not simply curious, but also circumspect about navels. If they were to be regarded at all, such concern remained private and relegated to the growing list of all the curiosities of childhood. Later on, we would learn that “navel-gazing” was society’s synonym for “goofing off,” the worst of all crimes against the Great American Work Ethic.

What a simple, insignificant little dofunny, smack dab in the middle of everybody, obviously, we would learn, oblivious to all the sexual distinctions and conflicts we make between ourselves, completely impartial to left brains and right, quiet, unassuming, rarely getting any attention at all save the occasional visit from an industrious chigger.

But the truth is we could learn a lot from navels, not only what an essential function they represent, but now that we don’t seem to need them at all, how they may be more important than ever.

For what, indeed, in our complicated anatomy could be a more important reminder of what being human is all about?

Environmentalist claim that everything on this planet and more than likely in the entire cosmos is connected in one way or another. The chaos math people tell us that even when a south Pacific butterfly flutters by, a frontal system over middle Where’sit suffers a mild shudder in one way or another.

Lewis Thomas, the perceptive biologician, suggests that if the planet earth is like anything at all, it is most like a living cell. I don’t recall his saying so, but if the earth is so alive, perhaps even it has a navel, as well.

So far as I know, nobody’s ever found one, but it’s not a bad idea. It’s probably in a place heretofore undisclosed or perhaps deliberately obscured and protected with other weapons of mass construction.

But come to think of it. the Big Bang being what it was (or is) suggests its own kind of connectedness, a kind of cosmic navel where the whole universe once got its nourishment and DNA instructions to go ahead and do its thing with a careful eye for the living commonwealth of everything, so much so as to make sure all the rest of us got our own personal reminders.

One navel each, though quaint and though plenty, yet possesses infinite value. Perhaps it might be a kind of anatomical icon recalling the words of the ancient prayer — “keep us ever mindful of all the changes and chances of this mortal life” — the one essential, unique, and simple reminder that somehow we are all irretrievably connected. Maybe navel-gazing’s not such a waste of time after all.

ps. Whether or not Eve and Adam had one is a question best left to the neo-natal theologians.

September 24, 2003

Patriot Act

Most of what I write is marginal, that is, I try to keep it from running off the page. The machine takes care of the left, but I have to flip a few switches in order to line up the right, that is, to justify it. Or I could simply leave it uneven like now.

Justice is often uneven, the Lady’s scales tip now and then. The new Patriot Act is supposed to remedy all that. Apparently, however, it was inadequate. The Attorney General, who defines things like this for us, says we need a sequel, Patriot Act II, to make it easier to justify his department’s behavior in matters that currently aren’t all that easy for them.

For one thing, the AG’s taken a renewed interest in our reading habits. Just when we’re trying to teach all those children how to read rather than leaving them behind, now we have to keep track of all the stuff they’re getting into with their newly-alerted curiosity.

The Justice Department figures that librarians are naturals to help out with this. Librarians have a long and honored tradition of respecting our reading habits and ensuring our privacy. Not to worry, says the AG, his department says it has not used its power to demand library records a “single time.” Yet.

We have to rely entirely on his word, however, for the current Act precludes librarians even to admit they’ve been asked. The American Library Association has complained, of course, and provoked the AG to charge them with being caught up in “baseless hysteria.”

Some of my best friends are librarians. Actually, CP is a librarian and also my wife. Up until now, she’s never chosen hysteria for an outlet that I know of, but if ever she did, I can testify emphatically that it would be neither baseless — nor unjustified.

September 23, 2003

Bugling

“Due to the shortage of trained trumpeters, the end of the world will be postponed.”

It was only a graffiti, but being a trumpet player, I took note. I could use a gig, but not that one, thank you.

Then, the other day the news reported that a device has been invented that not only replaces humans, but also lays them to rest. It’s a bugle discretely fitted with a battery-operated conical insert in the bell that plays the twenty-four notes of taps at the flick of a switch. All you do is hold it up to your face, turn it on, and try to look like a bugler — no chops, no breath, only hands.

What brings all this to pass is the plethora of us WW II vets reaching our 80s and dying at the rate of 1,800 per day. By law, we’re all entitled to a funeral with a flag, two flag-bearers, and a bugler. But there’re only 500 official buglers in the entire American military, most of whom are attached to busy post bands. Bugling, once an art for the dying, has become, instead, a dying art.

The digital device was developed under Pentagon guidance by a firm now mass producing it at $525 per. The music reportedly sounds fainter and less crisp than the real thing, but has a haunting faraway quality appealing enough to cause a few to dab their eyes (a sometime accomplishment of my trumpet playing).

Sixty years ago on a naval air station, the PA system woke us up with the scratches of a 78-rpm record that got us out of bed and almost to the flight line before reveille even started.

Sixty years ago!? Maybe I should re-up as a bugler and, in turn, release a real one before the fake bell tolls for me.

September 22, 2003

Dirt

“Gardeners have the best dirt” is stitched on a throw-pillow in an upstairs rocking chair in our house.

We live on a steep-enough hill, terraced at several levels with low, stone “pretty-good” walls. “Pretty good for a home owner,” a professional stone mason said, and we’re proud to report.

The stones are all local, four- to five-hundred million years old, left there by some old Silurian and Ordovician oceans. They don’t make much dirt, being dense with calcium carbonate and full of fossils. Mostly what they do is make the hill steep. Thanks to CP (aka C), the good, growie dirt comes from Home Depot and other entrepreneurs and is used wisely. Lots of it over the years, hauled up the hard way in wheel barrows, a sizable amount washed back down whenever the heavy rains come, like yesterday.

But nothing like Isabel’s recent landscaping of the Outer Bank. The news reminded me those banks are old river bed deposits strung along and left high and dry in another ice age that moved the east coast a few hundred miles farther east. Now, it’s coming back home.

The idea and importance of stewardship got started in a garden and seemed intended for the rest of the planet whenever the gardeners found out there was one. TAKE WHAT YOU NEED (with exceptions) Eden’s signs said. USE WHAT YOU TAKE. “Need,” not “greed,” was the operative word.

It takes an Isabel to remind us of that distinction that we are stewards, not owners, and welcome to that extent. We’ve got all the dirt we can use, a lot of it, the very best. Like Adam and Eve, we forget at our peril, and the gates get closed.

September 19, 2003

Leadership

The disciples apparently weren’t satisfied that they may be on an inside track with Jesus, they wanted to know who was going to be the greatest when they got wherever it was leading. So Jesus pulled a child out of the crowd and said the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven were people like this (Mk 9.30-37; Mt 18.1-4).

Children aren’t necessarily better than other people. But like the child in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, they are not only cut out of the same cloth, but just apt to be better at telling the difference between a put-up job and the real thing.

The disciples wanted to talk about leadership, so Jesus talked about leadership. He says in effect to each of them and to each of us and to this church and its leaders, that anybody who wants to be first must be last and not only last, but last of all, and furthermore, servant of all. And while we’re at it, he says, lets start with the children, for whoever receives a child like this, receives me and not only me, but the one who sent me, and thus has already arrived at the top. Because the top is the bottom.

It’s about priorities. In Jesus’ time, children had no legal rights and no privileges guaranteed by law. They were totally defenseless and totally dependent with absolutely no social standing.

This fact of New Testament life plugged in to Jesus’ analogy draws a sharp contrast for us to show that Christianity is not some pious admonition to cultivate humility or neighborliness (as it is so often taken to mean and as important as these are), but that it is a disturbingly revolutionary rebuke in the face of anything that even looks like the pretentious puffery that the church and the nation has so often made of it.

Jesus publicly scorns the legalism that separates people from one another and that perpetuates the lines of social and religious distance between the clean and the unclean, the rich and the poor. He has absolutely no use for a moralism that is in service to the exaltation of a spirituality of self-importance. All the compassion, courage, and risk of suffering which are the real measurements of personal and institutional worth are implicit in Jesus’ bold invention in this episode with the power-seeking disciples.

September 18, 2003

The service …

The Sisters of Constant Ubiquity each specialized in a particular ministry. Sister Mary Ecumenica it was who regularly visited the several religious denominations to learn more of their beliefs and practices.

One Sunday morning she arrived a few minutes before eleven at the local Quaker Meeting House, entered, and took her seat. The room filled with people. The hour arrived and passed. Nothing happened.

She nervously checked her watch. The sound of gentle stillness became almost overwhelming Fearing she’d made some terrible mistake, she turned quietly to the person next to her and asked, “What time does the service begin?”

Ever so gently, her neighbor replied, “As soon as the Meeting is over.”