June 18, 2004

Organized religion

Pentecost 3/7C Gal 3.23-29 more or less

“Like organized religion (but with beer during the service), major league baseball is a mass mechanism for the experience of hope and the deep contemplation of humility.” (R D Rosen, New York Times, 21.8.01, p A19)

Anybody knows, of course, that Anglicanism is hardly an organized religion. Also that it is arguable just how well it offers a venue for either hope or humility. (And that this preacher obviously will use anything for a lead.)

Whatever, somebody seems always itching to tidy up this ongoing American experiment in British piety — also known as the Episcopal Church — so that it at least seems bespoken. Think Singapore, Colorado, Anglican Mission in America, the Network and any number of other gatherings of bewildered bishops and congregations here and there who might be expected to know better. Some of whom would probably try to hook a rheostat to the sunset.

In the face of all this, it is good that Paul reminded the Galatians of some things that we, ourselves, might be better off being reminded of — and practicing — today. He said, “Now before faith came, we were confined under the law… our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith… But now… through faith (we) are all (children) of God. For as many… as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek… slave nor free… male nor female; (but) all are one in Christ Jesus… heirs according to promise” (Gal 3.23-29 more or less).

Faith and law. The problem now is that we seem to forget Paul’s gently firm and comforting admonition from two thousand years ago. For we are in the same old bind between religion and faith that troubled the Galatians. The Anglican tradition has managed this tension rather well over the years, if somewhat loose handedly. But there are those of late who can’t seem to tolerate this way of following the Way. They still want to bask in the ethos. They just don’t seem to want let go and let God. They don’t seem to understand that the more they tighten their grip, the faster they lose it.

A crisis now and then is inevitable, maybe even necessary or welcome, but it doesn’t have to resort to ecclesiastic genocide. Anybody knows that religion in whatever form is always the more powerful and well-organized and lethal than is faith. It will continue its often desperate endeavor to control faith (ie, collapse the tension between the two) by rendering faith not only memorable, but, more importantly, manageable. It will use and attempt to justify almost any means at hand with which to do so — if not canon law, then canon lawlessness, whichever seems most convenient.

On the other hand, faith is usually too naive and indifferent for its own good up to the point of not even recognizing when it’s being used and patronized. Faith, like love, communicates by osmosis, not by systems. This reality frustrates and beguiles some of the Anglican satrapy and leads them into their present ridiculous behavior.

The security of church as institution and the uneasy wishful thinking of church as community is always caught in this impasse and has been at least since the 4th century Council of Nicaea. What was created at Pentecost to be a theater of expectation has become at any cost a theater of the absurd. And we wonder why folks lose interest and why the established (aka organized) religions wane.

Like any other healthy, decision-making tension, the one between religion and faith is anything, of course, but soothing. The current lust after orthodoxy arises out of a climate of fear as it attempts to assuage and even appease such discomfort. During the middle ages, similar crises and their inevitable subsequent religiosity led precisely into the arms of the Inquisition. Today, that same intolerance for anything but “doctrinal purity” ironically creates a crippling and paralyzing climate in the very community whose true vocation is rather to love.

ECUSA’s often clumsy and sometimes maladroit search for grace through its collegial system of doctrine, discipline, and worship obviously irritates the purple socks off some prelates Especially those who prefer organized religion over love and justice and inclusion and who have precious little patience for apostolic lip. Heretics aren’t often burned at the stake these days. But ignorance (”any ‘C’ student can become president of the United States” and maybe even a bishop), together with threat, intimidation, indifference, exclusion, and enough dissimulation to cover some episcopal backsides, have effectively replaced the bonfires.

So what is one to do when an 800-pound primate knocks on the narthex door? Grab a valid baptism certificate, of course, and run to beat hell. Who knows when we may even need passports at the altar rail? And be sure and keep a copy of Paul’s letter to the Galatians at hand because beating hell is what it’s all about.

June 17, 2004

Nonsense

St Augustine of Hippo apparently did such a good job originating original sin that nobody has thought up one since. Religion keeps working at the progeny, of course, all the while talking about conversion, but rarely ever itself taking part in it.

Religion is always trying to give a reason for things. This is what makes it seem so, shall we say, rational. But nothing in the beatitudes suggests that “blessed are the religious.” For generally, the more religious we are, the fewer risks we take, and the beatitudes are more or less about risk. Like any other process of arrested growth, this keeps us in spiritual adolescence.

The church’s vocation in all this is least of all, if at all, to preserve religion. Neither is it to preserve faith as doctrinal system or to propagate it (in the sense of making more of it), but truly to be a sanctuary, a safe house, in which one can explore the mystery of what it means to be created in the image of God, that is, faithfully to become the human being God imagines us to be. This is why the faithful always have more questions than answers, and the religious have more answers, especially to questions fewer and fewer are asking. This is probably what it means to mature spiritually (aka “to get a life”), to move from attachment to detachment, to become more loving, more faithful, more willing.

So what is conversion? What about the end run around pretense to nonsense?

June 16, 2004

Storm

We had a sizable black locust tree on our west property line that shaded the patio rather nicely on a summer afternoon. We don’t have it anymore.

Our town’s in an anticlinal basin (that’s geomorphology-speak for valley) that catches and protects culture’s persistent remodeling and replacing of the atmosphere. It also gets its share of thunderstorms and tornados. Even on the calmest days, our patio strangely enjoys a kind of venturi effect that makes for a comfortable breeze. When the storms come, that effect is doubled in spades.

The black locust, in its waning days, anyway, was wrenched in twain in last Sunday’s fierce electrical thunder storm. On the way out, it took with it a major portion of CP’s carefully manicured herb garden, an elegant patch of Broad Mountain fire pinks, and a screen of forsythias that made for good neighbors. It spared the house.

Indeed, those who’d lived next door for thirty years and moved away nine months ago, seeing the damage, would have promptly attended with chain saw in hand. Their successors, twenty feet away behind their kitchen picture window went about as if nothing ever happened. Our tree guys came early Monday morning, finished off the locust, stacked up the new firewood for next winter, and left the place looking, for sure, as if nothing ever happened.

CP’s baking one of her choice cheese pies for the new folk next door. The commandment only said to love.

June 15, 2004

Pledge

It’s not really God, it’s the preposition.

If the Pledge had not insisted on “under,” God would probably never have required eight* other supreme beings to hear his case. Even atheists need God if for no other reason than self identification, and nobody wants to rob them of that, especially in these perilous times of more or less arbitrary and capricious labels like “enemy combatant” hung on innocent passersby. *(Scalia recused, maybe to go duck hunting.)

What seems to have been overlooked is that the preposition “under” annoys a lot of people. It not only betrays an outmoded mediaeval mindset about space that quantum physics abolished a long time ago, it also suggests a kind of subservience that greatly troubles the ACLU and a lot of other self-sufficient citizens.

We’re a nation that has long rejoiced in thinking of itself as a melting pot of races and religions and all sorts of things. But in spite of our enduring even a civil war, a lot of us simply haven’t been melted yet. We’ve got our own special and sometimes even ethnic Higher Powers, and we’re never sure which one the Pledge means to put us under. Maybe if it used some other preposition like the rather harmless “with” and a name for God that is more familiar and consistent with our not-yet-melted state, the problem would never have come up.

After all, even the Old Testament folk had to be rather cagey about naming God. Jacob not only couldn’t get a word out of him on the subject, but got a busted hip and another name for himself just for asking. Even Moses had to settle for an altogether ambiguous “I AM WHO I AM and shut up and get on with the wilderness.”

The Supremes probably wish the question had never come up, the way they weaseled out only to get into the stickier domestic wicket of a child custody case and some theology even they know little about.

June 14, 2004

Viola

Niccolo Paganini had a fine (of course) Stradivarius viola. There was not much literature for the viola, it being more or less the black sheep of the viol family and the subject of all kinds of inside humor among musicians.

Anyhow, the great genius asked Hector Berlioz to write a concerto for it. Like most everybody else, Berlioz had little use for violas, reminded Paganini of that, and told him that since he was such a genius, he could write it himself. Finally, Berlioz gave in, bypassed a concerto altogether and wrote a whole symphony. After a poem by Byron, he called it “Harold in Italy,” a work said to be the longest viola joke in musicology.

CP and I have a friend who’s the principal violist in our local orchestra and apparently has a good sense of humor. So we went to hear him play Berlioz’ 40-minute study yesterday afternoon. He played it very well, what there was of it, for one can hardly call it much of a solo for the viola. Nobody laughed, of course, they merely applauded in all the wrong places, but neither could anybody miss the fact that Berlioz sure got the better of Paganini.

For those of you who aren’t altogether inspired now to get the CD or to catch the next concert of your local wire band that might include “Harold,” here’s one of the repertoire’s shorter viola jokes: How do you keep your violin from being stolen? Put it in a viola case.

June 12, 2004

Ambiance

Few places in my experience can even approach the ambiance of a hotel bar. There’s the piano player in the corner playing one ballad after another from the Great American Songbook. And there’s the gentle murmur of lonely people talking, sharing, homeless, seeking warmth, seeking to still their spirits with one more for the road.

It was such a place some seventy years ago that drew Bill W, a New York stock broker, past its doors over and over, yearning, until finally stopping at the lobby’s church directory to phone a strange parson in a strange land who led him to Bob S, an Akron, Ohio, surgeon. The rest is history, the rest is Alcoholics Anonymous.

Been there in that hotel and done that bar and all the places like it. Called a friend twenty-five years ago last night. The rest is history one day at a time, the rest is “My name is Lane D, and I’m an alcoholic.” It’s a new ambiance. Thanks be to God.

June 11, 2004

Forgivenness

Pentecost 2/6C “One who is forgiven little, loves little” (Lk 7.47b).

When asked by the press what mistakes he had made, the president could think of none. Try as he may — and the apparent anguish in his inner search seemed authentic — nothing at all showed up. From what Jesus told Simon at the dinner party, I suppose it follows — no mistakes, no need for forgiveness, not just “forgiven little,” but actually not at all. As well, that also suggests something about how much one loves. Next question?

Jesus is not unknown for quaint sayings, but this one equating forgiving and loving seems quainter than usual. Could it mean that if a person needs no forgiving, they’re exempt from the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor and whatever comes along? Or could it mean that a person is so much an overflowing slob as to be beyond forgiveness, so forget it with the loving? Or might it mean that a person simply won’t accept forgiveness either because he thinks he doesn’t need any or because he believes — or at least feels — he’s beyond God’s capacity to meet the challenge and his own capacity to love even himself?

It’s this capacity of God thing, this God-could-never-forgive-me-for-what-I’ve-done thing, that I run into most often in others and, I regret to say, in myself. And it seems it is this about us humans that is the point of Jesus’ parable. For there is little difference between being so good I don’t need forgiveness and being so bad as to remove it from the agenda. Both establish something about moral worth, the one, by looking down on those morally inferior (cf Simon), the other, by looking up to those whose moral superiority I can never achieve. Pridefully, both exclude God.

But perhaps the greater stumbling block in all this is how such selfishness renders us impotent to love. Precisely as one is self-centered, so is one incapable of loving. We who are forgiven little, love little, not because God short-shrifts us, but because as we are too proud to accept forgiveness, we are equally too proud to love.

A friend once asked me how things were going in my life. “Better than I deserve,” I answered. “My,” she replied, “you must have a very low opinion of yourself.” I was startled at her insight. It was the last time I ever answered the question that way. Further, her words continue to help me abolish the thought, as well.

Pride masquerading as humility is probably the worst kind. Paul put it to the Corinthians this way, there’ll not be another time, he’s saying, or a better time or a more appropriate time than now to put grace to work, so get a life.

The gospel is surely about sin. But the gospel is also about the grace and forgiveness of God. We risk losing sight of forgiveness, about the presence and grace of God in our temptation to dwell on the distance and judgment of God.

Forgiveness means to “let go,” or even to “send away.” We can think of it as a matter of self-protection, of refusing to let someone else’s real or imagined sin have power over our life or, as they say in AA, refusing to let someone or some thing live “rent free” in our mind.

It also means to set that person or thing free from me and my persecution or my wringing it dry with self-pity, especially if that person happens to be me. Forgiveness means I will not allow your sin to be an obstacle to my loving you. Forgiveness means I will not allow my sin to be an obstacle to my loving me.

“Accept the grace of God, but do not accept it in vain,” said Paul. For the one who is forgiven much, will love perhaps even more.

June 10, 2004

Caskets redux

With the death of our fortieth president, the display of flag-draped caskets for public servants has apparently come back into vogue, the Department of Defense policy prohibiting such displays for the military as “unwarranted and undignified” to the contrary.

The forty-third president, however, apparently affirms the DoD’s policy by consistently avoiding the funerals of the American casualties of the Iraqi war. On the other hand, he will undoubtedly not only attend, but assume a conspicuous role in the National Cathedral funeral where the fortieth president’s flag-draped casket’s display, after numerous previous exhibits, will be — and justly so — both warranted and dignified.

Perhaps such continued irony will no longer escape us. With equal warranty and dignity may we now properly recognize all who give their lives for us in service to our country.

June 9, 2004

Imaginary

Distinctions are sometimes made between the real and the imaginary. It seems a false distinction, one courted by western culture’s notorious incapacity to think metaphorically.

If anxiety has no basis in fact, it is no less stressful. The anger it provokes in response is no less controlling. The resentment and guilt that linger as a blinding afterglow are no less inhibiting.

It is only your imagination, some say. And you, of course, are only God’s.

June 8, 2004

Talent

Erma Bombeck is reported to have said (and probably did say) that “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 could say, ‘I used everything You gave me.’”

A cyberfriend of mine uses this for the “signature” at the end of her posts. It is a pleasant and challenging statement. I have repeated it and prayed it often and probably will even more, although I’m not all that sure about it.

I’m not sure, however, that I could ever say it about myself, and I hope God will understand. Indeed, if there’s anything to this notion about grace, God simply will have to by nature take me as I am and also accept that I haven’t used anywhere near all my talent. Very few people would disagree with that basic piece of theology, maybe with my estimate of it, but not it as whole, unless, of course, they’re still in their junior year in seminary where talent overflows with abandon.

I am reasonably certain in these late years (forty-nine of them soon to pass since presbyterial ordination) that I’ve missed all my chances to bring in the kingdom and may as well hang it up, sit back, and become a contemplative. Well, not reasonably certain, only faithfully so.