Out of Nowhere

Charles Hartshorne (pron. Harts horne) used to live in a house along the six-block walk from the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, TX, to the Red River Cafe. His being a process theologian who was the most noted interpreter of Whitehead’s philosophy got him a faculty berth at the University of Texas, Austin.

He was also an ornithologist and wrote a book about it. It is said that he bought his house inside-sight-unseen (and told his wife about it later) because it was by a heavily-wooded creek that’s on the flyway of some kinds of birds.

CP and I made the walk to the Cafe quite a few times these past weeks mostly because of the cook’s skill with oatmeal and poached eggs, the east Texas swing band off-pitch ambiance, and the availability of the New York Times. The route over and back passes underneath magnificent live oaks with great gnarled limbs punctuated by lichen and cantilevered to unimaginable reaches, by a charming little city park, and then across the creek.

The Hartshorne home has recently been razed in favor of what a neighbor called somebody’s “dream house,” now partially finished and daily, courtesy of the builders, contributing its detritus into the flyway creek. Big, coal-black grackles with swallow tails screech and grate their calls as if to signal their protest that “progress” is taking place here.

At its heart, most theology, like most fiction, is autobiography.

That is, most of what we think about God or don’t think about God and about what God does and doesn’t do and should do and shouldn’t do and about what we and God do together and don’t do together, all this, when push comes to shove, is shaped and affected by the story of our lives. Plain and simple, it’s autobiography.

It’s a mistake and unfair to put theology in ivory towers or behind altars where it’s safe and inaccessible. Theology belongs in kitchens and bedrooms, SUVs and traffic jams, beer halls and soccer games where it’s vulnerable and in-your-face. Underneath all the doctrines and liturgies and catechisms, that is, the “religious stuff,” we always find an experience of flesh and blood, a human face smiling or frowning or weeping or covering its eyes for the glare.

That’s one reason it’s so good to keep a constant eye out for those faces in our family history in that public library we call the Bible. Take these stories: Here’s cousin Jacob in a dirt fight with heaven knows whom, and here’s the gutsy widow that reminds us of Aunt Maudie banging on the court house door (Gen 32.3-8, 22-30; Lk 18.1-8a).

Further, the Book of Genesis makes no attempt to conceal the fact that Jacob, among other things, was a crook who twice cheated his lame-brain brother Esau out of his inheritance and at least once took advantage of his old father Isaac’s blindness to play him for a sucker. We know next to nothing about the widow save that she was perhaps more enduring than endearing. We can be sure that God was rather fond of both. Knowing that may just hold out some hope for us. Knowing that is really sermon enough for any Sunday.

These stories and God’s response to them tell us about faith, that faith, too, is radically autobiographical. Like a two-by-four between the eyes, these readings tell us that faith and perseverance are not all that different, that faith, unlike a neat system full of big words, is more like wrestling with God and banging on doors and maybe finally getting some sort of results, even if not always exactly what we wanted.

The collect today puts it rather much the same way if somewhat more delicately when it prays God to help us “persevere with steadfast faith…” (BCP p 235). For God does not always come to us in pillars of cloud by day or fire by night, easily recognized and free of all ambiguity. God meets us in circumstances we have to try to explain in other terms, and without the persistence of a Jacob or a widow who would not let go, we may abandon our struggle for faith because it does not appear to be faith as we had imagined it. Jacob and the widow and even the old non-believing judge remind us that the persistence and the tenacity itself is faith.

For faith is like life. It is purpose made incarnate. It is better understood as a verb, than as a noun, as a process rather than as a possession, as on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all, as risking being wrong, as not always having to be right or orthodox, as a journey without maps.

We remember as well to our benefit that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; doubt is an element of faith, and that faith comes not as a result of understanding, but that faith is, itself, a way of understanding and of giving meaning to our lives.

One of the things that has hounded the church through the centuries is that it gives too much attention to its religion and not enough to its faith. It doesn’t take disciples by right belief, it wins disciples by faithful living, by being a community that people simply finally cannot resist cozying up with.

Of course, it’s easier to pay more attention to our religion than to our faith. For one thing, it’s not nearly so risky. Religion offers the false comfort of easy answers, faith raises the discomfort of hard questions. Faith secures the vision that protects religious conviction from becoming religious delusion. Finally, faith enables an environment that is less judgmental and more forgiving and in which love can mature.

Like the widow pestering the unjust judge and like Jacob contending with God, we mumble and curse and try another path because these snares keep snagging our hems or bruising our feet. But we try another path and keep stubbing painful toes until, finally, we pay attention and then can ask, What’s the message in all this?

For one thing, it tells us that control is an illusion, and perhaps we might try gratitude rather than mastery and power. I got an omelet in a restaurant the other day that was as tough as shoe leather, but remotely edible. I groused about it, privately, but I’d have been better off had I simply been grateful for food and whatever nourishment there was in those tired eggs.

Be grateful for work. Work gives shape to the day, and many wish they had it. Be grateful for people. Each is interesting in his or her way and teach us new things. Be grateful for love. How lonely it would be not to miss anyone, not to have someone to telephone or to be telephoned by.

And be grateful for God. Distress in our homeland will not go away soon. Evil forces are arranged against us. I hesitate to be so presumptuous as to use that word “evil,” because warfare rarely pits good against evil. Warriors have values and codes and limits. Spreading anthrax is not the act of a warrior, however, but of an enemy of life itself. God is strong against such enemies.

Faith and love give us access to that strength and to our potential to use it. They allow us to persevere and to endure and perhaps even to understand.

I was told recently of an Episcopal parish that includes among its actively pledging, attending, and serving people, a group whose members have one other important thing in common — they do not believe in God.

I wondered, when I learned of it, if perhaps after all we have finally and truly become an inclusive church.

Then I thought, what better place for atheists to be, both for themselves and for all the rest of us hangers-on, than in a church where they may not only freely challenge the appropriated theology just by their mere presence, but where we might learn that the God of our understanding is altogether more prodigious than our understanding of God.

Christ Chapel at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest actually faces east. The cross, probably some twelve feet tall and made of welded steel plate, is planted outside.

It is visible in the woods through a randomly designed stained- and clear-glass wall behind the chancel/sanctuary. It has three arms, curved, so that from whatever perspective, it and two of its arms seem almost to reach toward the viewer.

Unlike so many of its kind passively mounted or suspended against a wall as silent symbols, the Christ Chapel cross, as was our Lord’s, is planted in the world. It speaks proactively toward us, challenging, beckoning, inserted redemptively into God’s creation ever so much as we churchers can and must be, in our better moments, of course.

The other day, a friend suggested that when she loses something or misplaces it, she panics until she finds it. She said that is a control issue and nailed me without even trying. It was unwelcome news to me, for I’d rather thought I was above that sort of thing.

I’m in residence at my seminary for a couple of weeks. My email program is completely incompatible with their DSL, and I’m forced to use the website, instead. It is clearly for me not user-friendly. I have lost control.

I missed sending OoN yesterday. It was bad enough not being able to connect with all you devoted readers, but my control issue went off the charts trying to reach all those 800# techies and then deal in some totally foreign tongue with the help they offered.

I am not serene, nor do I accept these things I cannot change. I don’t need any courage, because I can’t change anything. I was introduced along with the two other fellows yesterday as visitors who could bring the wisdom of our long experience to bear in the seminary’s life. Please don’t tell them — or anybody else, for that matter.

Pentecost 19/23C

In a Doonesbury comic strip a while back, Mike is on a jet to New York, nervous, praying to “get a grip on himself.” A part of his uneasiness comes from the fact that his seat mate is dark, wears a turban, has a mustache, needs a shave, and is talking on the phone about cash, a rental car, and a motel.

Overhearing all this, Mike panics, confronts the man, and says in uncontrolled frustration, “Okay, look! I’m trying not to profile here.” The man, interrupted, says into the phone, “Hold on a moment, will ya, mom?”

As different as we think we are (and we can come up with some doozies), we have a lot more in common with one another than we have in uncommon. The DNA people say now there’s no such thing as race.

The story about Ruth and Naomi we’ve just now heard in today’s propers is about families, families not all that unlike our own. It is one of the better known and more heartwarming stories in all the Bible saga of our spiritual genealogy. Even though Naomi is a mother-in-law, she mothers her sons’ wives no less, even all the more. To read once again this poignant tale of tragedy, love, and loyalty can be a comfort in our own time of fear and anxiety, anger, and vengeance (Ruth 1.8-19a).

The confusing and tormenting events of these times drive deep down within us and test the spiritual bedrock common to all human beings, challenging us to be present to and to listen to others. We’ll need to share again and again our continuing consciousness about 9/11 and our more recent reactions to war’s escalation. Change has perhaps never been so dominant and demanding. In this season of terror, our family and community saga is even more important as it risks getting lost in the maelstrom and downplayed as unimportant.

The gospel story tells of lepers, people who were accustomed to being rejected. These had heard of Jesus and rightly suspected that he’d treat them differently. So they cried out, moving in closer than the safe distance required by the law. Jesus heard them and responded with healing words and with his usual drawing near and touching (Lk 17.11-19).

We consider well his and Naomi’s examples of warmth and reception, listening and healing. For of all times, this is not a time for keeping a safe distance from other people. It is a time to draw near, to listen, to touch, to offer an embrace.

This spirituality we all share in God’s creative imagining of us, in whatever form or shape, makes of us a common family. It calls forth from us our imaginations and reaches in to our own loneliness, pain, and grief. It can enrich our faith and become the key to discovering and appreciating the grace that today’s collect reminds us “precedes and follows, making us continually given to all good works” (Proper 23, BCP p 183).

Imagination, after all, is one of the most important ways that our faith is implemented and made incarnate. Can we not imagine, then, the healing bond that faith complimented when Ruth said to Naomi, “Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God… ” (Ruth 1.16b) and when Jesus said to the leper, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well” (Lk 17.19b).

Somehow the present inconveniences brought upon us by our current inward obsessions and squabbling pale beside these words of Presiding Bishop John Hines addressing the General Convention in Houston, Texas, thirty-four years ago.

“Against even the worst of possibilities, must be set the inescapable obligations of Christians, that the Body of Christ must be prepared to offer itself up for the sake of the healing and the solidarity of the whole human family, whatever its religious or racial identities. Especially must the Body of Christ risk its own life in bearing and sharing the burdens of those who are being exploited, humiliated, and disinherited!…We simply can no longer afford churches whose real mode is a ‘vanished’ universe. In a world of sometimes agonizing change the church cannot be less than the ‘radical minister of change.’ God willing it should be more than that, but it cannot be less — and still be faithful to the God who makes all things new.”

In the big band swing era, it was not uncommon for the leader both to front the band and also to play an instrument as a soloist. Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman were both clarinetists and led two of the hands-down best bands.

There seemed always to be running arguments and polls in the music magazines about who was best. Each had their very vocal fans. In an interview one time, Shaw, who was never short on ego, was reminded of the ongoing comparison and was asked his opinion about it. “The answer is simple,” he said. “Benny plays the clarinet. I play music.”

How refreshing it might be for us churchers if we could just get over it, admit that the gospel really swings for everybody, nobody ever listens alike, and some even hear the music.

The big yellow neighborhood cat that hangs out around the bird bath and feeder was being obnoxious again. He was in one of the flower beds pawing and wrestling with something, his hind quarters in my direction. I figured he’d caught one of the finches and was quickly dispatching it.

So I looked through my binoculars only to see that he had caught nothing, yet was carrying on like he was doing the east Texas two-step. Ever so often, he’d bat at a plant, then rub it with his jowl, then shinny alongside of it, then wander away rather aimlessly.

We don’t dance much, let alone do the two-step, but we do try to run a twelve-step shop on account of my onetime more wayward days. It wasn’t until I watched the feline intruder’s behavior that I remembered CP telling me she’d recently transplanted some Nepeta cataria (aka catnip) in the yard.

She said a friend gave it to her, and that gardeners always plant each other’s gifts, as it would be insulting not to. I suggested AlAnon. She said for me to take my own inventory and work my own program.

In our keeping of liturgical time, today honors Francis of Assisi. Of all the saints, he is probably the most popular and admired, but the least imitated. Two monks were walking along discussing that very matter when their conversation gradually shifted into the question of which of all the monastic orders might be most favored by God.

So they took their question in prayer before the high altar of St Peter in the Vatican. From dawn until early twilight, they knelt there, waiting and praying. Just as the sun’s rays through the majestic stained glass began to wane, there appeared faintly a small white card gently floating down and landing on the steps just within their reach. Hastily, they took it up and read there written upon it, “All monastic orders are equal in the eyes of God.” It was signed, “Jesus Christ, SJ.”