April 9, 2004

Our Stories

Our family tradition as the children of Abraham is told through an assemblage of stories.

Like none other of our liturgies, the Easter Vigil gathers these stories of our heritage together in one celebration that consecrates our birth into that heritage through our baptism and again renews it through our family reunion in thanksgiving around this holy table.

Over and over, we come together to tell these stories. Some actually took place in time. Some probably did not. Nevertheless, all of them are true. For myths and stories and family remembrances are always true. We cannot live without them. We dare never to try.

These stories are true because they seek meaning rather than fact. They are true because they seek understanding rather than explanation. And they are true because they, like the carillons in bell towers, ring changes on the three great melodic themes of our biblical tradition.

We are created in God’s image, that is, we are as God imagines us to be. God’s gracious love for us is completely, totally unconditional. And our lives in faith have no other purpose save simply to be all that we can be.

The humorist Erma Bombeck said it like this: “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I have not a single bit of talent left and can say, ‘I used everything You gave me.’”

That Jesus could offer his life that way on the cross is what makes Good Friday good. That we can strive through faith and his grace to do that in our own lives in our own ways in our own stories is made possible in this Eucharist and in this community with all the others who have gone before. For this is where we consume such love that we may be consumed by it.

April 8, 2004

Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday

Memory may well be the only way we know who we are.

When we lose it, as Alzheimer’s devastation can attest, our world disintegrates. Every morn when we awaken, we must reinvent our “wheel.” We are known, but we do not know. We forget, but we are not forgotten, for so much of us exist now only in the memory of another.

So it is with those who follow the Way from Jesus to the Christ. Come back to this moment. Through scripture and our family history, remember that we are the children of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, as many as the stars, as many as the grains of sand.

Come back to this moment. Through symbol and story. Through the cross, through color and chorale, through holy community and Holy Communion. See it, hear it, be it.

Do this — in remembrance. Not like a class reunion to celebrate nostalgia, as sweetly painful as is the sound of it. Not to rehearse our anecdotage, as boringly painful as is the drone of it.

For we’re here not merely to share a memory, but to answer a mandate to remember — and not by some lowest common denominator of passive aggression, but by lifting high the cross of aggressive passion. “Do this,” our Lord commanded on the very eve of his crucifixion, “in remembrance of me.” Do this in remembrance that we — and the world to which we are called in service — may know and not forget.

April 7, 2004

Color

Way back before aviator Charles Lindbergh told the truth about the Luftwaffe viz a viz us and was still a hero, I discovered we had the same birthday. I was five years old and would fantasize about flying airplanes which I actually did a few years later in WWII only to find out flying was more fun as a fantasy.

The birthday thing actually interested me more. What if, I dreamed, Lindbergh one day gets a red-letter day on the calendar? You can take it from there.

My spiky liturgical calendar has a whole week of red-letter days to symbolize the Passion, and frankly, I think it looks great. White for the rest of the month somehow pales until St Mark gets his twenty-four hours of fame on April 26th and then only having been bumped by the adjacent Sunday.

Originally, there was a relation between coloring something and attempting to get it out of sight. The word is cognate with one meaning “to hide,” hinting at camouflage, but only hinting.

Now, color’s just the opposite. It’s all the hoopla at a ball game. It’s the way we know how much anxiety the homeland security people expect of us at any given time. Musicians have a clavilux that plays both light and sound, reminding us that both make waves. Color even had some racial relevance, we thought, until DNA came along and spoiled it all.

And of course, there’re the cardinals, the hinges on which the Vatican swings and whose robes name the color and which color is for the birds. The relevance of all this? Ask the folk over in St Louis where baseball season just began.

April 6, 2004

CAGE

So I asked my personal physician one time to define for me an alcoholic. “Somone who drinks more than his doctor,” he said.

It was a few years ago, and anybody who pays attention should have learned a lot more about chemical dependency, addiction, and abuse since then. Looking over one of those abominable medical history questionnaires the other day, however, I’m not so sure. It’s no wonder to me why medics so often miss the diagnosis and that over half of all hospital admissions are somehow alcohol related. No self-respecting alcoholic (pardon the oxymoron) will ever give an honest answer to those check-the-blank questions about one’s quantity, kind, and frequency of drinking.

The more clinicians learn about addiction, the more they can learn about taking patients’ histories, even if, in the last analysis, alcoholism is one malaise that’s ultimately diagnosed by oneself. There are diagnostic criteria, and they work fairly well.

Think CAGE and ask yourself — or your doc, for that matter — the CAGE questions.

Have you ever attempted to CUT down on your drinking and other drug use? Do you get AGITATED when someone asks you about your drinking or other drug use? Do you ever feel GUILTY about your drinking or other drug use and subsequent behavior? Do you ever drink or use other drugs as an EYE opener before noon?

If you say Yes to two or more, you can save yourself all the psychic energy denial takes and use it at a twelve-step meeting.

April 5, 2004

Irony

My cosmopolitan friend Nina writes about the April-Fool-in- Moscow OoN:

“The elevator joke is by now a (wonderful) oldie. My Russian heart rejoices to be reminded of it. The context for it is that during the decades of the Soviet period, elevators all over town were chronically broken, and people (including old grannies) struggled up as many as six and even more flights of stairs with their satchels of groceries.”

I am delighted to be filled in on how this story may have got started. I never tire of its delightful irony. It often reminds me to turn to the useful schema on humor in H W Fowler’s remarkable Dictionary of Modern English Usage [pp 240f]. He writes of irony that though it aims for exclusiveness with an inner-circle audience, it does so by a simple statement of facts which, of course, is not without mystification. Take, for example, that stunning incident when Jesus tells his disciples why he teaches in parables (aka puzzles).

“And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, he said, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand’” [Lk 8.9f]. It takes, perhaps, one more leap to discover that Jesus, himself, is a parable whom to understand does not create faith, but requires it.
Thus it is of irony that it so eludes and keeps itself so teasingly out of reach but always in sight.This — as well as with Jesus — is God’s way, for it is of God. Indeed, there could be no more profound instrument of evangelism than the unfathomable, magnetic, and mysterious irony of the gospel.

Unfortunately and unlike the disciples, we hardly ever even ask, let alone understand.

April 3, 2004

Education

The Kenyan government declared a year ago that primary school education would be free through grade eight. Enrollment swelled virtually overnight from 5.9 million to 7.3 million.

Among those enrolling for the first grade was Kimani Nganga Maruge, an 84-year old great-grandfather. On the first day of school, he put on some gray knee socks and blue trousers that he’d cut off above the knee to resemble the short pants worn by school children all over the country and showed up. When the school mistress realized he was serious, she gave him a seat at the front of the class so he could hear better.

Among his many new experiences, Mr Maruge is learning to read. He says this will help him determine whether the preacher at his church is actually following the Bible. If this sort of practice should ever catch on over here… We think we’ve got problems now?

April 2, 2004

Molecules make love

Palm Sunday Lk 19.29-40

“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”

That cry was all the Pharisees needed to shift into red alert. They smelled treason, and they knew the consequences. If alone for their own sake, they warned Jesus to tell the people to cool it, only to hear in response –

“I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”

That simple claim could be the most overlooked and unsung song of perceptive wisdom in all the events and words that surround us during our celebration of Passion Week.

Bennett Sims reminds us in his book on servant leadership that the quantum theorists are certain that there is a caring pulse of energy that animates and interconnects all the entities in the cosmos. Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, outraged his time when he said that “molecules make love.” This, of course, got his books banned as a consequence. (The notion of “making love” and who or what does it never seems even now to sit all that well with the orthodoxers.)

In Jesus’ time, it might have been seen all along that the created order in all its facets always knew and recognized in their own way who and what was present among them. The daemons, the bread and fishes, the storms, winds, and waves, the human maladies, the fig trees, Satan itself in the wilderness, all were on to what happened when the Word became flesh.

No wonder Jesus could say that if the crowds were silent, the very stones, themselves, the seemingly most inert and mute of all creation, would burst forth in adulation. We call it atomic energy, but by whatever name, it remains Benedicite, omnia opera Domini — “O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord.”

If the events we celebrate during this Passion Week tell us nothing more, they remind us once again how inseparable we are one from the other and from the very stones along the way. They may be inert, they may seem to have no freedom at all, but when it comes to efficiency and presence and endurance and dependability — and even to praise — we can learn a thing or two.

And furthermore, my loverlies, we mustn’t ever be all that sure what those molecules are up to.

April 1, 2004

April foolishness

I’m told that the Russians celebrate April Fools Day rather like many celebrate Mardi Gras. Parades. Costumes. Gala contests. Appropriate foolishness.

One year, down in the Moscow financial district, there was seen a large banner draped across the massive bronze entrance doors of one of the tall office buildings. It proclaimed, “Our elevators are broken. Please use the ones across the street.”