May 31, 2004
Wishful thinking
I am a veteran of WWII, and I’m lucky that I never got shot at (but once when we forgot to turn on the IFF system), and that I never shot at anybody else. I never joined the American Legion or the VFW when it was over. The only veteran’s parades I ever marched in were in my high school bands for WWI vets. I enjoyed the full and considerable benefits of the GI Bill, and I’m mighty grateful for that.
I’ve no brief with Memorial Day, I think it’s a splendid idea, but I do not especially celebrate it. The lives given to make it possible are legion and precious and altogether worth celebrating, but the wars that took them are not. I wish we would not call the monuments “war memorials,” but “peace memorials,” instead.
I wish we would not define peace in terms of war, but war in terms of peace. I wish we would not define peace as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice. It will take far more than wishful thinking to make all that so.
May 28, 2004
Pentecost
Nothing in the Beatitudes suggests that “blessed are the religious.” Maybe it’s because the more religious one is, the fewer blessings one needs because religion is all about security and being right and decreasing the risks one takes.
On the other hand, the more we let our spirit loose from our religion, the riskier things get. Pentecost was a kind turning or breaking point between religion and spirit. Jesus had been hammering away trying to bust up that union now for a few years and not without a lot of risk to himself and here came the Holy Spirit at his behest to blow it all out of the tub.
When it happened, everybody got drunk on it (they don’t call that stuff “spirits” for naught) and wailed away in a linguistic whirlwind. For once, they communicated and chummed up pretty good. But it didn’t last long.
One of the worst things about a hangover is facing whoever your liable to wake up with. They rarely ever look as good as the night before. So ever since then, we’ve be building more religions to keep us between the curbs and the spirit at arm’s length.
It’s good for us to celebrate Pentecost, to remember that ordered chaos out of which we came and where we got a glimpse of what Jesus wanted us to see and to be, carrying on in our own tongues about the “mighty works of God” (Acts 2.11) . The church needs Pentecost maybe worse than ever right now. It seems to be becoming more and more religious and throwing up barriers against anything that looks like that smoke and mirrors fiasco reported in the Acts of the Apostles.
Generally, the more religious we are, the fewer risks we take. On the other hand, to mature spiritually (to live, grow, awaken) is to move from attachment to detachment. The more loving, the more risks. The more inclusive, the more need to cover your rear
A collegial style of life seems more becoming to a church than a hierarchical, pontifical style. It’s about community, and community is that possible state of grace to which we are called and that allows us to live in and sustain the inevitable tension between religion and faith.
Faith is the way spirit moves among us. Faith questions, religion answers. Religion patronizes. Faith cares. The church’s vocation is least of all, if at all, to preserve religion, nor even to propagate faith (in the sense of “adding” to it), but to be faithful, to be a sanctuary in which one can explore what it means to be human, that is, to discover the mystery of what it means to be created in the image of God, as well as to witness to other communities or sanctuaries where such creativity can happen.
True conversion moves us away, then, from pretense to nonsense. The tragedy of religion is that it must always make sense of the world, that it seems so, might we say, rational. Maybe that’s where original sin came from, being reasonable.
One of the more profound things a church can do by being a church, a people, is to become a “somewhere” one can find a sense of “place,” a locus in the chaotic, madding crowd not for some brain-dead serenity and liturgical lethargy, but where chaos can be discovered as not all that alien to life, but indeed perhaps even quite central to life, where women and men and children can dare to discover who they are and be content to be who they discover, where all can connect and exchange their deepest searches into the wells of human imagination and spirit and offer them to one another with God’s comfort and joy and confidence.
It sickens me to hear some of our leaders speak as if the world would be “without” God if it were not for the church whose task they perceive is somehow to “bring” God to the world. Far from that, “church” is where people who may be thought of as “places-where-God-is” share those places in reverence and awe and jolly good hilarity.
A church marquee up in Denver, Colorado, counseled, “If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans.” Pray let us be a Pentecost church where we can be not afraid to tell God our plans.
May 27, 2004
Blog
The NY Times Thursday “Circuits” section reports not only the latest cyberations, but sometimes on the psyches of those of us who’re hooked on their manifestations. This morning’s edition says we daily email pontificators are bloggers, and that we are obsessed and addicted and ignore our families with our craze to make ourselves heard or read or whatever.
And all the while I’d thought I was fulfilling not just another addiction, but a dream come true to become a writer. But maybe it’s only the old east Texas country preacher once removed wandering around in me somewhere wishing he had some pews and a pulpit six feet above contradiction.
“Blog” (short for weblog, I suspect) has little appeal as a name for anything. It certainly doesn’t appeal to me. But if it just comes down to publishing, I prefer the self-serving and embarrassing “Vanity Press” a lot more.
May 26, 2004
Daemons
Maybe spirit works best incarnate with some levers to pull, some pedals to push, and a crowd to stir. That seems to be the scene at Pentecost, although at first it seemed to some a drunken orgy. Well, they don’t call that stuff “spirits” for naught. After all, alcohol, I understand, is an Arabic word meaning something like spirit.
And spirit seems altogether neutral. Just because something’s “spiritual” doesn’t drape it with all those schmarmy, pious hearts and flowers. The daemons in this morning’s gospel (Mt 8.28-34; Mk 5.1-20; Lk 8.26-39) were, of course, often among the first to recognize Jesus for who he was and to quake at the sight. “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?”
Facing the inevitable, they, needing those levers and pedals, opted for the pigs and off they got sent only to drive the herd over a cliff and into the sea to drown. Understandably, however, the little town of Gentiles, hence, the pork, probably depended on that for more than just legislative padding, asked him, nay, begged him please to leave the neighborhood.
It was this scene that led the sage poet Dorothy Sayers to comment about what little regard Jesus apparently had for other people’s livestock. It is this scene, as well, that might remind us that “spiritual” is not always sweetness and light, and that we’d better hope for Jesus and an alternate route for the daemons when they begin to nag at us.
May 25, 2004
Bede et al.
About nineteen and a half years ago, CP and I had completed our pre-marital counseling (very redundant, but necessary, canonically and otherwise) and had got the episcopal nihil obstat. My fellow presbyter who’d done the run-up for us had counseled that our marriage would be a total train wreck (an ISTJ w/an ENFP) in a few weeks or months, but had turned us loose anyhow.
In the meanwhile — or before all this, actually — it was no secret that we’d got ourselves a few wooded acres with a comfortable old log house up on the end of a nearby plateau that the natives called Broad Mountain. The bishop, of course, knew about our impending marriage and asked us at a casual encounter — after a wedding, actually — were we enjoying our new retreat, how come we’d not set a date, and mightn’t we set one now?
He got out his appointment book. The Feast of Saint Bede loomed on his calendar, and today is our nineteenth anniversary, a venerable journey for anybody as long in the tooth as are we.
May 24, 2004
Jazz
A fan asked the great Satchmo Armstrong, “Pops, what is jazz?” His answer first came in that gentle smile and then this penetrating comment, “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”
Walking along his seldom traveled road, Scott Peck observed that one could not find a better metaphor for community than that of a jazz band or, he added for good measure, a basketball team. Music lovers don’t have to play jazz to appreciate it. But we do have to live in community, for that is the way we’re made. Consequently, Peck’s analogy and Armstrong’s response do us a remarkable favor.
They turn us away from simplistic definition to thoughtful understanding, from dehumanizing diagnostic statistics to spiritual enrichment and discernment, in other words, to the very ways and movements that make community work.
If this seems enigmatic to us, it may be because in our society we often seek truth as if we expect to find it and with such language as not to recognize the “answer” when we get it.
Like true community, jazz is inseparably cross-cultural. It mixes western instruments, harmonies, and melodies with African rhythm, phrasing, shaping of sound, and musical conception. No wonder it arose in an international seaport on the Mississippi delta before it headed north to Kansas City and Chicago and on to New York for even more transfusion.
In “The Jazz Book” (Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, 1981), Joachim Berendt suggests that jazz differs from European music in three basic elements, all of which serve to increase its intensity, and each of which enhance the metaphor of community.
(1) Jazz relates uniquely to time, but is not necessarily confined by it. (2) It centers around a basic melody and chord progression and yet retains the spontaneity and vitality of musical production released by improvisation. (3) It allows and expects a sonority and phrasing which reflects the individuality of the performer.
Musicians discover quickly that there are no secrets in a jazz band. Each player’s skills are obvious and accepted, but there is always encouragement and room for growth.
The musical “rules” are not broken without reason and consequence. Very much as in community, they become less casual or optional and more restrictive as the size of the group increases. That there’s a comfortable upper limit to the number of musicians playing jazz together may be a reason why large orchestras seem so ponderous when they attempt it and often feature a smaller, more cohesive group to help keep them on track.
Maybe Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, writer, and village prophet, has size and cohesiveness in mind when he admonishes us for using oxymorons like “global community.” And maybe it’s why the Harlem Globe Trotters basketball team never meets a stranger as they glide all over the planet to the jazzy strains of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” combining the best of both Scott Peck’s metaphors.
Dave Barry, the satirist, has a rock band made up entirely of published writers. He reports that one time when they were performing, a rumor came across the band stand that there’d a been chord change. Sound familiar?
May 21, 2004
Prayer
Easter 7C Jn 17.20-26
John’s Gospel on this eve of Pentecost offers a part of Jesus’ so-called “high-priestly prayer.” He asks that the work which he is about to leave be continued in the world. He asks that we be given the same authority that is given to him, the authority of truth, the authority of love, and he asks that we might become one as he and his Father are one in order that through us — as once through him — the world might then know indeed who is among them.
This, of course, is the language of grace. The religious always recognize it, even claim it as their own, but only the faithful understand it and know from Whom it comes.
Most prayer is not only directed to God, but expected to be answered by God. But not this time. To be sure, this great high-priestly prayer is offered to God… but the startling reality is that answer depends not on God, but on us.
Is prayer ever answered? Talk about irony.
That God would leave so much in our hands, would so be so willing to commission us, should not now at this late date surprise us. After all, if he understands himself as a shepherd who would abandon ninety-nine nearsighted sheep to go after one or as a vintner who would pay a full day’s wages to a picker who worked only half an hour at sundown or if his son could drop off for a nap on the fantail of a boat at sea during a hurricane or if he’d commission an internal revenue agent named Matthew to take more interest in your salvation than in your taxes. Looking at all that, then we become merely the latest installment on that splendid wild and crazy ride down kingdom road of irony.
An apocryphal story recounts some angels talking with Jesus. They ask what are his post-Ascension plans for commissioning someone to carry on his work, just who are to be his heirs, the ones to tell the story. He answers that he’s called out a small community, one we might imagine and hope like the one up at Lake Wobegon where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average.
The angels fall into a respectful silence. Then one blurts out, “Is that all? What if they fail?” “Yes,” Jesus answers, “that’s all. That’s my only plan.”
No other plan. Only the grandest plan of all. A loving community of reasonably foolish people imagined into free being by God to be respectful of him and his creation, and, of course, imagined equally as free not so to be. A plan in which God waits… waits for us to say “Yes.” Waits for us to become a community bound by love, not agreement, by covenant, not by canon law, by hope and faith, not by race and neighborhood, by compassion and service and mission, not by budgets and canon law, by humility and even in conflict nourished by mutual respect, not by the simple merit of circumstance, and certainly not by orthodoxy, but simply by the grace of God for those who let go and let God.
Such is the language of grace. So let us not merely become proficient in that language, but let us come to understand that language. Let us not be satisfied merely to be a religious people, but let us become a faithful people, and let us dare to risk ourselves as Jesus’ only plan and, ironically, as the answer to his prayer.
May 20, 2004
Memory
The FBI is investigating “brain fingerprinting” in the hope that it will prove a more accurate alternative to lie detectors.
Unlike discredited lie-detecting techniques which measure changes in breathing, heart rate, and other variables to determine if suspects are trying to deceive their interrogators, brain fingerprinting is designed to discover if specific information is stored in a person’s brain. Some are concerned, of course, that such a procedure might be used coercively to intrude on one of the most private and intimate of human spheres, a person’s memory.
At this commencement time, however, a lot of parents and other benefactors — let alone college faculty — may welcome an opportunity such as this to discover if there are any residual side effects of their considerable investment over the past four years.
May 19, 2004
Oaths
I’d just completed a tour flying bombers in Uncle Sugar’s Navy during the Great Middle War (aka WWII) and was back in school where we veterans were suddenly faced with signing a Joe McCarthy loyalty oath to prove we weren’t communists. The GI Bill was a nice reward, but the oath was a slap in the face.
There’s something distasteful about oaths. That we have to use them at all testifies to that about us which most of us prefer not even to recognize, let alone admit.
Our Judaeo-Christian tradition says that Human Being as a figment of God’s imagination is about freedom to choose: to reason, to create, to love, to live in harmony with all of Gods’ creation and, of course, with God [BCP p 845]. Why those choices need also sometimes to require an oath is downright insulting, surely to us and probably to God. But they do.
Because there’re always the questions, How come we don’t? And how can we turn it around and live in harmony, etc, etc? [When we can really answer that, we’ll be home free.]
But there’s help for all this. “Our help is in God,” it says. That’s not all that far from “So help me God” which happens to be a big piece of The Oath folk are usually asked to take after presuming not only to know the Truth but the Whole Truth, as well. That, of course, is some presumption on the face of it. Maybe only God would be spared taking an oath about that.
May 18, 2004
Mystery
Brian Greene’s new book, “The Fabric of the Cosmos,” (Knopf), describes the three parts of physics needed for making the story of cosmogony and cosmology understandable: 1) The second law of thermodynamics about order slipping always into chaos with only a few puzzling exceptions, 2) Einstein’s general theory of relativity which “writes the tune to which the universe dances,” and 3) quantum mechanics, about as impractical a practical idea as anybody ever came up with.
Reconciling these three into one Theory of Everything, a task based on the conviction that they simply must be and are, indeed, somehow reconcilable, is what leaves scientists totally frustrated, no matter how hard they try.
There are now several mathematically sophisticated and wildly imaginative proposals to pull this off, but they all face a fundamental defect. There’s no way to test them by comparison, and this kind of uniqueness, ie, “nature has no choice,” is anathema in this business. So guess what? Absent a lab routine, scientists are now pointing to descriptions like “beauty” and “elegance” as a way out.
Three-in-one? Beauty? Elegance? Mystery? Now there’s a novel idea.