November 28, 2003

Advent

The cosmologists tell us that if we look through the great Hubble
telescope floating weightlessly out there around us, not only may we
see all the way out to the edge of space, but as well, to the edge of
time. The reason for this is that space and time are two sides of the
same coin and are actually created simultaneously and inseparably in
such a way that one simply may not exist apart from the other.

This new old season of Advent returns each year, quietly, gently,
without store-window decor or newspaper ads and, thank God, with
absolutely no mall or elevator music dedicated to its cause. But it
is to pity.

For Advent, ever so much as its partner Christmas which gets all the
press, suggests something in our human becoming, our maturing that is
very important not to overlook. That “something” is very similar to
these new notions we’ve learned about time and space.

The stories from our family history we read through these days ring
changes over and over on two great biblical themes of expectation:
Blessed Baptiser John’s anxiety and Blessed Mary’s baby. Advent
collects and points to the mysterious union of matter and spirit,
Word and flesh, caught up in the star-crossed saving event of
Christmas which brings the great themes of judgment and redemption
into focus.

What is created in the image of God is, as well, now redeemed in the
image of God, assuring us, in a way very similar to what we’ve
learned about the universe, that finally never again need we — nor
can we — separate the one from the other.

November 27, 2003

“Grace happens”

A college chaplain friend of mine turned out a counterrevolutionary bumper sticker that reads, “Grace Happens.”

Celebrating Thanksgiving Day in the churches, as some do, seems altogether redundant. After all, every Sunday and every other feast day is, for us, a Day of Thanksgiving, a Eucharist, a time and place to “say grace.”

There’s nothing so newsworthy about thanking God. Everybody’s doing it. But there’s all the “news that’s fit to print” about God’s thanking us with God’s grace. Around the Eucharist table, around the Thanksgiving board, grace happens.

November 26, 2003

Turkey

A family down the street once had a pet turkey named Tom that would escape from his corral ever so often and assume command of the neighborhood.

You can say what you will about turkey IQs, but this one took no guff from anybody. Cats and dogs were completely intimidated. The rest of us kept our distance whenever he came out for a stroll.

He soon took a liking to a walnut tree in our backyard. Roosting high on one of its branches, he’d waggle his wattles and gobble his grating cry whenever someone seemed to threaten his authority, day or night.

All this worked well for him until one day when the city held its annual hot-air balloon festival. As the gentle breezes so ordained, a half-dozen wonderfully huge and colorful balloons with their basketed passengers huffed and puffed their way by barely above the housetops near Tom’s tree.

Turkey that he was, he tried to join them, and we never saw him again.

November 25, 2003

Senseless

A story is told that one of the older nuns in a community was suffering from chronic confusion and loss of memory. From time to time, she would wander through the convent emptying people’s mailboxes, striking up strange, but pleasant conversations, collecting items from the sisters’ bedrooms and giving them to others.

The community sponsored a school. One day, one of the teachers was called to the phone and left her mid-term exams and grade book on a table in the community room. When she returned, they were gone. A frantic two-day search began, notes left on the bulletin board, pleas made on the public address system.

Finally, somebody thought of the wandering collector. There, buried under her laundry, were the grade books and the tests, all studied and corrected. Everyone had got an A.

Nowadays, they say, when sister wanders the halls, passersby bow inwardly to her. Through her seemingly foolish actions, wandering and reminding all by her presence not to fear the final judgment, they discovered a new sense of themselves, that there are, finally, no record books, and everyone makes an A. “There is no end to the birth of God,” wrote D H Lawrence.

Perhaps, what appears most senseless can often seem most meaningful of all. Life fills to overflowing with opportunities to make the senseless meaningful to an irrationally rational world. We might but grasp the moment.

Sometimes we are senselessly poetic, and the world is charged with a moment of beauty. Sometimes we are senselessly tender, and hardened hearts begin to melt. Sometimes we are senselessly nonjudgmental, and we see through a glass darkly into the nature of life.

What if we became senselessly vulnerable and reduced the defense budget? Might the world know less fear? What if we were senselessly forgiving and abolished the death penalty? Would children understand respect for life? What if we were senselessly generous and created a new welfare system that gave the poor a fighting chance? Might our own hearts be softened?

When Jesus forgave the adulterer, a senseless kindness brought the self-righteous to self-knowledge, a senseless grace embraced both accusers and accused and changed lives, a senseless justice confronted an oppressively sexist system and challenged all to do likewise. We are surrounded by the seemingly senseless: the mystics, the poets, the clowns, the so-called irrational and impractical, those who are “different.” They are there, writing something in the sand.

November 24, 2003

Children

My old friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk lives in one of those long-time neighborhoods that’s gradually getting a new lease on life. Families with children are moving in, remodeling their houses, and most of all, the environment. There are children everywhere.

We were having coffee and a Danish in our local bookstore’s comfort zone the other day, as we often do, when he asked, “Don’t you think it’s altogether possible that kids were different during Jesus’ time than ours?” He’d never married, but did have a few nephews and nieces that were all grown by now. I was not accustomed to his ever talking much about children. He went on.

“Looking around and watching most kids behave like they do nowadays and recalling Jesus saying they’re what the kingdom of Heaven is like just doesn’t make the idea all that attractive anymore.” Then he recalled one of his favorite theologians. “Mark Twain always said that if Christ were here now, there’s one thing he wouldn’t be, and that is a Christian.”

“Children are quite probably the reason,” said Quirk. “Kids must have been different then. Nowadays, they’re hardly civil and don’t change all that much for a couple of decades. Otherwise,” he continued, “why would the Church need to waste so much time and spend so much money on what is rightly called Youth Work? “

November 21, 2003

Servant leadership

The leadership of today’s church suffers from a chronic case of whiplash. Nothing reveals why so well as the timeless gospel story of Christ, the servant king.

That story reminds us in these present fires of institutional stress that true leadership is servant leadership, that it never causes or embraces schism, but only exposes the divisions already there, opening them to the reconciling work of servanthood. Our present trauma forces into the open that our central problem is the authority of leadership. It is no longer possible for leadership to commend itself alone with external credentials, with “orthodoxy,” with “churchmanship” (whatever that now may mean), or even with “the Bible says.”

Authority must rise from deep within the character and quality of a person’s soul, for without an evident depth of integrity, the authority of election or ordination in and of itself simply does not carry weight for most people, church or otherwise.

The single largest segment in our religious population is made up of what the pollsters call the “decoupled” — those who cherish a belief in God, but no longer attend or support a church. One reason for this is that spiritual and moral mediocrity in leadership inevitably receives mediocre response and respect in return.

Bennett Sims, in his splendid book on servanthood, asks us to consider in a contemporary mode the paradoxes that result from the irony of the servant king in the very heart of the gospel, an irony he discovered when he first became bishop of Atlanta.* He is convinced that there resides even now in the church the kind of servant leadership essential for a redemptive ministry to take hold and flourish. For Christian faith is ironic, not heroic, as some would make it, and thus makes considerable demands on our imaginations.

Assume a position of leadership, he suggests, and give its powers away. Take authority, but never use the instruments of coercion you possess. Embrace and include the weak and the unappreciated; honor them and allow them to make decisions. Refuse the crown unless all are crowned and do not glory in the trappings of office.

Listen often; pontificate never. Disdain competition and refuse to win if there are losers. When you encounter fear or anger, do not nurture it or use it to your own advantage.

Ask embarrassing questions when in the presence of venerated hierarchies. Insist that those over whom you may have authority claim their freedom and exercise it joyfully and creatively, even permitting them to fail. When confronted with hate and fear, venture love. Bear pain rather than inflict it. Risk everything in the pursuit of your calling.

“Everyone who is of the truth, hears my voice,” Jesus said (Jn 18.37). The church and its congregations cannot expect the world to get the drift until it, itself, is deeply embracing servant leadership and modeling this kind of ministry for all to see.

*(”Servanthood: leadership for the third millennium,” Cowley, Cambridge, 1997)

November 20, 2003

Massachusetts

A local newspaper’s religion editor asked…

What are your thoughts on the Massachusetts court ruling (in favor of same-sex marriage)? Will your congregation respond in any way? What does your faith have to say about this matter? Does this make you optimistic or pessimistic about the direction of the nation?

I answered…

The church is honored that anyone wants its blessing, especially those who wish their already demonstrated and enduring friendship (aka companionship and love) to be offered sacramentally and to be blessed — same-sex, different-sex, or no-sex — and received again. It would be well if the church and the secular world might catch up (and on).

On the other hand there’s this — some marriages already take more than their couth amount of license.

About the direction of the nation? I was already pessimistic about that. Maybe Massachusetts can lead us. God bless them.

November 19, 2003

Rue

It’s a lovely little plant whose delicate greenish yellow flowers make little show. Trouble is, we’ve never known its name until the other day when CP was walking a friend through her garden. Suddenly, he stopped, reached down to the little anonym and said, “Look at that fine stand of rue.”

Rue, I thought, when she told me about it. Sorrow. Regret. What a name for a plant. My curiosity set me to work discovering that it’s a herb (*Ruta graveolens*) and, like many such, with a tale to tell.

Next to wormwood, rue — Shakespeare’s “herb o’grace” or, more colloquially, herbygrass — is the most bitter of plants. The 16th-century herbalist Thomas Tusser recommended the two for strewing in sick rooms: “What saver be better, if physick be true, For places infected than wormwood and rue.” An aura of mystery hangs about the bushes, that strange, acrid scent of the blue-green leaves seems to conjure past associations with witches, magic, spells, and incantations.

I discovered further that rue has always been counted a prime herbal antidote to poisons and plagues, as well as to the less material, but no less malevolent evil eye. I never thought much about the Eye until the other day when a colleague told me that because of the stir following my church’s recent momentary surrender to grace, it was now considered by some to be a cult. What better place, I thought, to lay in a supply of rue. We may need it.

November 18, 2003

Spiritual direction

Once on a rare retreat to a Community House on the nearby Cumberland Plateau, I was “assigned” to Sister Mary Anonym, a charming and witty woman then in her eighties. In my best feigned innocence, I asked if she might tell me what is a spiritual director.

With a candor that not only instantly found me out, but also startled my preconceptions, she said that she had no idea what is a spiritual director, that she didn’t much care, that she was not one, and that she was certainly not mine.

“Spirituality” is larger than life these days. Book stores provide for it whole sections. Some people even turn to the church for what they believe will be a “spiritual experience.” Some go so far as to seek “spiritual direction” as an aid to having one. The usual misunderstanding of the “spiritual awakening” said to be the purpose and result (but truly, the surprise) of 12-step programs causes almost as much concern and consternation in some people as the addiction that got them there.

All this is unfortunate, for it relegates spirituality to a single knot on the “rosary” along with others like mind and body and emotion, rather than the encompassing whole of them all. It is further to be regretted when the church buys into the whole idea and apparently gladly accepts its role as spiritual director, qualified or not. It is only a matter of time and grammar before the equation of spirituality with religion, one of the big cripplers in 12-step programs.

When religion and spirituality are fused, people look for holy things with holy names, holy people with holy costumes, and we only too gladly turn them up in every apse, nave, and icon. Imagine the malicious notion of one person being more reverend (or less or most or right) than another or there being any order holier than baptism, itself. Surely God is amused.

When the word became flesh and the veil over the Temple’s Holy of Holies was subsequently ripped apart, all of creation, no longer just some part of it, was revealed to be the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual reality it had been all along, mitochondria and all.

Neither spirituality nor religion are the church’s primary business. Humanity, human being, human rights, peace and justice are. It’s been beat into us that, somehow, to be human is bad news. Actually, sayings like “I’m only human” and “to err is human” are copouts, insulting to God. For to be human is the greatest gift, what God imagines us to be and thus gives us the freedom and grace to become.

Spiritual direction, indeed.

November 17, 2003

Separation

It is life-threatening suddenly to be separated without notice by death from a child or a spouse or a friend. The finality polarizes us. The denial and grief leave us speechless. Our hearts stab us from within.

Our anger and guilt embarrass us. The “what if’s” and the “if only’s” blind our vision. Memory’s images swim in our minds, indelibly permanent. No amount of comfort can stem our devastation.

And then comes the time when our corporate celebration and offering of the life and death of one whom we love and remember can for a moment possibly turn us away from that pain and use its energy in another direction. It takes us below the surface of all that we allow to separate us from one another and reminds us perhaps like nothing else we do of how deeply connected we are.

This liturgy we celebrate at the death of a loved one, this Burial Office Mass, begins our healing by the joy of that membership in one another and in the certainty of St Paul’s great assurance that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rms 8.38f).