May 14, 2004

Yard Sales

Easter 6C (Jn 14.23-29)

It is not all that easy to know God’s will, either in general, or in specific. Some folk have less trouble discerning it than others and sometimes seem altogether blasé about their gift as if it were a skill and usually say so without hesitation. I’m not one of them.

And it’s too bad. It’s only natural to expect the clergy to know God’s will. It’s mostly our doing, for we usually lead them on. It’s tempting for us not to have some handy answer when asked or even when not asked. So, in wrestling with this problem about knowing God’s will only recently, it suddenly dawned on me something that is clearly God’s will.

God’s will is to have yard sales.*

For one thing, if only to remind us of how bountiful is God’s creation and how important is our stewardship of it. For another, to remind us once more of how much more blessed it is to give than to receive. But most of all are yard sales God’s will for our children and our neighbors.

Our children might show more gratitude — or any gratitude at all, for that matter — if they realized what a blessing for them is a downright inclusive, widespread, whole-section-of-the-city yard sale. If they’d only think of the attics and closets and garages and sheds and old trunks and mildew and moths and mold and respiratory systems that are emptied and cleared and cleansed by yard sales, maybe they’d catch on. Never mind the nostalgia and the tears and the withdrawal pains and simply forge ahead. It sets good examples for us members of the Greatest Generation to behave this way.

Life as I know it and hear about it from others in these days, with my memory still more or less intact, seems to be a process of accumulation. Not only the accumulation of things, even though most things eventually wear out, and those that remain tend to have value only in the stories they suggest. Not only an accumulation of wealth, as nice as I suspect that that is, because wealth is slippery and, even when clutched, seems scant comfort in the night. Maybe it is good that we accumulate friends, but because some of us live so long, and also thanks to mobility, changes in our lives, and the just plain wearing out of persons, friends become fewer and farther between.

But we do accumulate. What we accumulate seems to be memories. Events, stories, faces, happy memories, sad memories, moments that make us grimace after all these years, and some moments that make us smile.

We become more and more — not necessarily more accomplished, or more secure, or more content, just more. We know the words to more songs. We remember more lines from movies. We have seen more dream cars, watched more double plays, held more hands, kissed more babies, cooked more macaroni, shed more tears, lost more dreams, paid more bills, endured more insults, enjoyed more kindnesses, said more prayers.

One of those prayers is for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Some perceive that gift as a prize to be won, perhaps even a sign of accomplishment. Some look for powers, like tongues or prophecy. Some see the Spirit as proof of worthiness. Some long for energy, enthusiasm, passion. Some want to lose themselves in the great spiritual rush of it all and make life one big mantra.

There are a lot of memories in all this. Jesus talked of remembering. He said the Spirit would come to teach us, specifically to help us remember all that he said and did. What he said suggests to me that life would be to us like layers of paint that turn the portrait from some splashes of color to the shapes of persons or places or things.

Jesus told lots of stories, and he said that life would also be like stories, that life is a story and a pretty good one if we’ll listen. Like the story of a wasteful son and a forgiving father, like the kindness of a Good Shepherd that would find us in our dark nights of the soul, like the story of the Samaritan woman at the well who became the first functioning apostle. Stories that we would hear and later tell over and over. Stories that would enrich us and perhaps nourish others.

All this accumulation is not all intellectual or susceptible to memory; nor is it all experiential or even noticed. The story of Jesus and the stories he tells just keep shaping us, like the tender and understanding love of a spouse. We become more. Not necessarily more happy or more holy. Just more of who God knows us to be and wants us to become.

Not all that the Spirit would teach us is easy or pleasant. Knowing Jesus tends to make people ask more questions, dare more doubts, see more injustice, touch more wounds, risk more choices. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would be a Counselor who would teach us all things that he has said to us and bring them to our remembrance as they need to be remembered.

And then Jesus said he would leave us peace, his peace, a peace torn out of living, a peace that would leave our hearts neither troubled nor afraid. A peace that is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice. He spoke of his leaving. We call that leaving his Ascension. We remember it again this Thursday, forty days after Easter like Ash Wednesday was forty days before. And then comes again that explosion of a day we call Pentecost when our apostolic founders seemed drunk with the joy of it all. That day when the Holy Spirit embraced them and inspired them and set them afire just like the Holy Spirit can embrace us and inspire us and set us on fire.

It is all this and more that we accumulate as we mature in Christ. And it is all this that we must give away to make room for more. And it is all this that is the reason why it is God’s will that we have yard sales.

May 13, 2004

The Electric

Our town sits in a more or less 500 million year-old anticlinal basin so it can lead the nation collecting pollution, keep us asthmatics from losing our focus, and provide a comfortable living for the allergists. As well, it is blessed by a wealth of forestry and spring bloomers to die for all struggling to make their way.

Some of those trees — many of them majestic oaks (Quercus shumardii et al) — formerly lined our street and helped fend off and collect the particulates. That was until the Electric decided our street was a splendid route for their new and greater power lines.

The big, leafy oaks that grew too close to the street are now in the arms of their Maker. Their taller, straighter, rootless, leafless, progressive, creosoted kin replace them and bring the power for the mechanical air which the old oaks previously conditioned all by themselves.

May 12, 2004

Dialing

Heaven only knows what goes on in all those gizzards of Remote Access Programs when they’re charging about feeling and reaching and searching and hooking up with their mother lode internet servers.

What’s really quaint is that in all the tangling jungle of their obscurantist jargonese there keeps recurring that old-fashioned word “dialing.” Trouble is, dialing is hardly ever what they mean and certainly not what they do. Even though “dial-up” programs have become old-hat in favor of light speed, if they were ever anything, it wasn’t dialing. The word is about as appropriate as asking Ernestine to do her one-ringy-dingy, two-ringy-dingy routine to keep us connected.

All this stuff was once called “cybernetics” long before Al Gore and the internet and was considered mostly about control and communication not only in machines, but in animals, as well. Some call it the Science of Effective Organization, others, just plain old General Systems Theory. It’s actually been around long enough now to have its own reductionists and traditionalists. Whatever, the once inclusive idea about steering and direction is about as busted up into confusing denominations now as the churches.

It’s comforting, though, when the wheels are whirring and deferring to all our chatter, to imagine a sort of silent “pocketa-pocketa” surrounding us and to wonder what on earth is Walter Mitty thinking now when we need him most?

May 11, 2004

Evil

Clinton Quin (one “n,” please) was bishop of Texas late 1920s-mid 1950s. He would sometimes introduce himself, “I’m Mike Quin. I work to beat hell.”

It’s a noble vocation for us churchers. One way to help might be to sharpen the definition. Hell and evil may be presumed to have a lot in common. Evil’s a term being used these days with more or less reckless abandon. As an opener and so we can have some notions we can disagree with, Scott Peck gave some diagnostic characteristics of evil a shot in his book, “The People of the Lie.” Here’s what he wrote on page 129.

“In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, evil would specifically be distinguished by a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle, b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury, c) pronounced concern with a public image and a self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives, and d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking at times of stress.”

That’s what we’re out to beat, and now that that’s perfectly clear, let’s start at home.

May 10, 2004

Mistakes

We heard “take ‘em out” a lot in the early days of Iraq and roll. We heard “crusade,” but only briefly until somebody pointed that there actually was one and that the implications weren’t all that salutary. Then there was “axis of evil,” a grievous claim cast about almost with caprice and without any clear relevance.

“Consequences” was another favorite word, usually with a hissss at the end for emphasisss. Then, of course, some of the captives in our present embarrassment got to be POWs and keep their ensuing Geneva conventions intact, but others were simply, rather carelessly, and without explanation, called “enemy combatants,” hence, citizens or no, summarily stripped of all access to their human rights.

Take a certain amount of that sort of shenanigans in the highest echelons of “leadership,” and what do you expect lesser satraps to be about in their more limited spheres of influence? With human dignity and compassion more or less figures of speech for use during political campaigns, no wonder such terrorizing animal house behavior as we’ve recently witnessed runs the entire chain of command, up and down.

Next time somebody asks about whether any mistakes were made, maybe one might come to mind. With apologies to Pogo, the Wonder Possum, maybe we has met the mistakes, and they is us (with a little help from the Supremes).

May 7, 2004

Disciples

Easter 5C “By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (Jn 13.35)

So far as Jesus is concerned, the last thing card-carrying Christians need is to carry a card. If there are any credentials required at all, love will do.

Loving one another is not only what makes us disciples, it’s what makes being a disciple about. It’s what makes us who we are. No amount of grandstanding, breast-beating, ecclesiastic gerrymandering, confessions, or decades of evangelism can take its place. Love. Thass all.

So what does it mean for us to love one another? And how on earth will anybody, presuming they should much care one way or the other, ever know whether we do or don’t? How can they tell a disciple from a devil without a program?

Our founders were mighty smart to separate out the religious and the secular institutions in our nation, to make them — and to insist that they remain — unbeholden to one another. Church is not state and vice versa. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to the both of us.

And they were smart, as well, not to talk a lot about love. What they were after for a change was a just and open and fair society and a government that could pull it all off. The church was welcome to help out, but the church was also welcome to stay out.

We churchers would look a long way before we’d ever find a political system more conducive to or nourishing of our own self-understanding. We’d also look a long way before we could embrace such an experiment with the full empowerment of our stewardship, both to enable and coax it along whenever it wavered and to indict and admonish it whenever it erred and strayed.

But the best way and, indeed, the only way to embrace this herculean ministry, of course, is to be such a society ourselves, then to do it, to model it, to make it so attractive folks simply can’t resist. It is to take this ministry far more seriously than we take ourselves. It is to realize that loving one another in any kind of institution or even communal way is to practice justice and fairness and civility in our common allegiance and worship.

Well, good luck. We’ll get back to you later when we winnow out the “bad guys” to purify the remnant. We’ve got a serious problem going on here. Folks are loving one another, but they’re not doing it by the book, that is, Your Book, of course, but as we interpret it.

So all the while this grand experiment in justice our founders imagined and birthed has come upon what may be the worst of times in its two centuries, where’s the church? Championing justice? Loving one another? Modeling fairness and acceptance and inclusiveness? Calling the hands not only of our nations leaders back to the premises of our founders, but tending to our own, as well? Indicting those claiming God’s name as their own apologetic? Nope.

Where are these disciples when we need them most? How can we tell a disciple from an inquisitor? Well?

May 6, 2004

Nest

The upstairs bathroom window was barely open, but enough to let in the Carolina wren. She’d flown through three weeks ago and staked her claim on the white wooden shelf above the toilet.

Wedged between a bottle of Caladryl lotion and a box of Crest teeth-whitening strips, she sat on a nest of twigs and moss. The nest was soon filled with four brown-spotted eggs.

The other family that lived in that suburban home soon realized the bird was there to stay. So they went quietly about their business, brushing their teeth and taking showers. They left the window open and tried to keep from bumping into the nest. The wren left when they came in, perched on a nearby maple branch, and firmly admonished them until they were gone.

The family’s two children were recently off to college, effecting the inevitable parental withdrawal pains. Ms Wren probably wasn’t aware of all that when she moved in, but as it turned out, she made a pretty good pastoral call, anyhow.

Like C S Lewis said, joy is rather a surprise.

May 5, 2004

The Pitcher

A seasonal OoN in tribute to the Great American Game…

THE PITCHER
by Robert Francis

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at.

His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.

May 4, 2004

Change

Grandpa was upstairs in bed in a coma and not expected to live much longer. Grandma sat beside him day in and day out. One day, she called to her grandson to come sit by grandpa while she went downstairs to do some cooking.

After a while, the pleasant aroma of ginger cookies came wafting up the stairs. Grandpa stirred, raised up on one arm, and asked his grandson to go get him some of grandma’s cookies.

A few minutes later, grandson came back upstairs and said, “Grandma says you can’t have any. They’re for the funeral.”

God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.

May 3, 2004

Columbine

In CP’s wildflower gardens, the columbines bloom now in those delicate dove-like clusters for which they’re named.

The columbine is Colorado’s state flower, therefrom the name of the Denver school whose terrible tragedy we remembered and mourned so recently. The soft, sad ululation of the dove has always evoked an association with mourning. Indeed, their coveys are sometimes called a Dule of Doves, a corruption of the French deuil, for “mourning.”

Ironically, Columbine was also the name of Ike Eisenhower’s presidential airplane, partly because he claimed Colorado his home, but even more I like to suspect because this war-weary five-star general so championed the doves of peace and so cautioned against the hawks of the military-industrial complex. Not so with his successors who’ve named their big jets by the somewhat less than dove-like “Air Force One.”

And not so with the wrenching and bellicose shredding of our national fabric for which we mourn, indeed.