November 15, 2003

Psalm

A kindergarten teacher talked with his students about the 23rd Psalm and its vivid images. At the end of the class, he asked if anybody might want to learn it by heart for next time. He was surprised that all volunteered.

The next Sunday, he asked if any had learned the psalm. One little girl raised her hand.

Hesitantly, she came to the front of the class, turned, and said, “The Lord is my Shepherd. That’s all I want.”

November 14, 2003

Credentials

“False Christs and false prophets will arise and show signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect” (Mk 13.23a).

Hardly a day passes that some among us doesn’t claim special knowledge and insight, special skill to interpret scripture, special wisdom that’s superior, special authenticity with the apostles. Are they true? Are they false? Whatever, our Covenant asks us to seek and serve Christ within them, to love them as ourselves.

The signs and wonders seem never to cease. There’ll be a mega-church, and it will be “right” on all things if only we’ll listen and do likewise. Our Covenant asks us to seek and serve Christ in them all, to love them as ourselves. Is Christ there to be found?

How can we tell, by what “credentials”? Perhaps first by remembering what Jesus asks of us, his disciples, there we might find a clue — the ability to serve, the ability to forgive one’s enemies, the ability to invest talent redemptively.

Finding that in another, could that not be the Way to him, as well as the One we seek? Not finding them, perhaps then, revealing and offering them, that they may truly *become* in the one where we seek as well as in ourselves.

November 13, 2003

Information

The University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems just published a report, “How Much Information? 2003.” It estimates that in 2002 we human beings stored about five exabytes of new information on paper, film, optical or magnetic media, a number that doubled in the past three years.

An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. Most new computers nowadays have hard drives of from forty to 100 gigabytes in size. Five exabytes is equivalent to all words ever spoken by humans since the dawn of time (sermons, too?).

It all makes me wonder just what is information. Is it just talk about talking, thought about thinking, words about writing? Is it all just self-referential? Probably so. Fredrick Buechner defined human beings as “so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about.” But that leaves a humongabyte of nature with its own kind of DNA-to-DNA information swapping unaccounted for.

Librarians, for example, aren’t librarians (or even Dewey-eyed) anymore, they’re managers of information services which is mostly about data and its stacks of accumulation. But then, there’s the whole new science of information theory which, I gather, is about the way all the cosmos (including parallel universes) hangs together all tied up in strings and the owner’s manual that goes with it, more or less to keep quantum mechanics from being so slippery that even Mr Gigawrench maybe couldn’t fix it.

Ambiguity abounds. The reporter who reported on this report wondered about the precise pattern of autumn leaves in his pasture and whether that, too, would be information. The Berkeley folk said “no,” unless he took a photograph of it (preferably digital). Whatever, I think it is as is, shifting in the daily breezes, waiting impatiently for us to re-byte it with the leaf rake.

November 12, 2003

Players

Artie Shaw led his big band with a clarinet. So did Benny Goodman. Their groupies near and far kept up a running commentary about who was “best.” Even today, they’ll give you an opinion.

Shaw, never one for self deprecation, was interviewed once on the subject. He was asked what was the difference between his and Goodman’s playing. “That’s easy,” he answered, “Benny plays the clarinet. I play music.”

That, of course, is a matter of opinion, but it’s a no less telling story. Just ask, and we’ll tell you in a flash who plays church and who plays gospel.

November 11, 2003

Sine nomine

The brilliant story teller Madeleine L’Engle writes of a friend who despaired of seeking help for addiction, especially from the church, and turned to the comfort of a twelve-step program. When asked why, her friend replied, “Because this program knows who is the enemy.”

The writer Toni Morrison said that it is words that “fend off the scariness of things with no names” and that ease the burden of oppression. In the end, she continued, it is words that enable us to make some sense of our existence by allowing us to stand aside and narrate it.

Any who aspire to be responsible stewards of human being know that without words to name our fears, we remain subject to the illiteracy of violence in all its manifestations, and we can never be able to tell our stories, the truest form of evangelism. This is not only especially true for our vocation as keepers of the Covenant, but also for those with whom we engage in the healing art of listening and telling.

Even Friedrich Nietzsche, a most unlikely exegete for any comfort in matters such as these, once reminded us in what seemed a moment of his despair, “I fear that we will never get rid of God so long as we have grammar.”

November 10, 2003

Stent

A new device is on the market, a kind of tiny metal scaffold that props open a cleaned-out artery and is drug-coated so as to discourage further clogging. It’s commonly called a stent. It’s had lots of hype of late, but it’s not working.

As it turns out, the ingenuous little appliance is found to encourage, rather than discourage clogging. The government disclosed recently that more than sixty people who’ve received the procedure have died. (Interesting that the government *discloses* rather than *reports*, thus making us wonder whatever else it has stuffed in the closet.)

That aside, its non-generic name is quite illustrative of the intriguing and sometimes thoughtless art of styling products, especially the fruits of medical research and practice. This one’s called a *Cypher*.

November 7, 2003

Small change

Jesus’ story of the widow’s two copper coins keeps us mindful that the gospel’s Good News is not only about change, but even about small change, as well (Mk 12.38-44).

In this story, Jesus warned us about the scribes, not only because they were guilty of bad doctrine and wrong-footed politics, but because they were mean, and they were small. They trivialized their positions of respect in exchange for small favors. At a time when people needed large and noble spirits, they were petty.

Widows in Jesus’ time were south of anybody’s poverty line. Widows in our time own a major portion of the country’s wealth. As impressive is this story, it’s not about widows, it’s about giving.

Money is the eighth sacrament. It’s the leverage that turns our society. That churchers are using it one more time to control and protest is only an embarrassing symbol of how disoriented is our stewardship and how illiterate is our telling of the good news.

Jesus’ widow hadn’t the foggiest whether she dropped her coins in the fountain of healing and service or down the drain in ecclesiastical arrogance and greed. Jesus knew. And that’s what matters. Jesus knows.

November 6, 2003

Snakes

Some parishioners called one balmy afternoon that there was an hysterical woman staggering around in their back yard, into the sauce, and screaming that she wanted to commit suicide. Would I please come and do something about it? Sure, I thought… and even went.

Their property backs up to a bluff with a long, sheer drop into a very deep lake. There is heavy underbrush along the brow of the bluff, passable, but formidable.

The woman seemed serious about jumping, but somehow had not got around to it by the time I arrived. I asked her why she didn’t go ahead and jump or else let me take her home, so she could leave these poor, frightened people alone.

She was insistent, but apologetic, said she would have jumped before I got there, but that she was afraid of snakes.

November 5, 2003

Understanding God

Someone was grousing about 12-step programs being too religious and thus, of nothing worth for atheists.

A nun was sitting there, nodding her head. When she spoke, she said that as long as she had been confessed, she’d never been able to take the third step, that is, to turn her life and her will over to the care of God as she understood God.

Only just now, she said, was she becoming tentatively aware that she had been trying to make that commitment to her understanding of God rather than to the God of her understanding.

Have we ever wondered how much of our liturgy and our theology and our ethic and our sexual mores, even possibly our idolatry, at their very best and most faithful are shaped unavoidably only by our understanding of God?

November 4, 2003

Potting Shed

We’ve a shed in our back yard that we built to hold what was in the garage before the garage was turned into a kitchen and a library. It sits at a casual angle and, unlike most sheds I’ve seen, has a side porch that gives it a jaunty look.

It’s mostly a potting and tool shed, but it contains a box of rocks that has puzzled movers over the years. “Do you want to put these rocks on the truck?” they always ask. “Yes,” I say, and without explanation to their stunned expressions as they heft them aloft.

The rocks are part of my master’s thesis, samples referenced in the work to illustrate the outcrops along the western edge of the Texas Permian Basin. They are pieces of the Rustler Formation, a dolomite, with its lesser Culebra member, overlying the Castile Formation, an anhydrite gypsum. Collecting, identifying, and geologizing them meant a lot to me, and I should not like to lose them.

[Trumpeter Erskine Hawkins’s early 1940s big band was best known for the hit “Tuxedo Junction” before Glen Miller ever heard of it. He had a lesser known, but equally exciting tune called “Dolomite.”]

I worked as a geologist for the Texas Highway Department before entering seminary under Bishop John Hines. Someone asked him once what I’d done before. He said that I broke rocks for the state.