November 17, 2004

Naming

Nothing makes less sense of our existence more thoroughly than the widespread epidemic of violence and its bedfellow illiteracy. Both strike at the very ground of security. In their presence, no person is safe, for every person is homeless.

Nameless by its very nature, violence respects neither victim nor perpetrator, and there is no more oppressive burden than a fear one cannot name. Without a level of maturity that achieves an appreciation and facility for language and all the other symbols available to us for naming, we simply cannot stand aside and gain perspective on our stories.

That we lack this as a people is nowhere more apparent than in our systematic removal of the humanities from all levels of training and learning. The subsequent loss of such values and the language skills necessary to interpret them is a careless and abusive violence in itself that goes largely unnoticed.

Language is reality. It makes us human. Whatever is without language is as unknowable as the answer to the question of how we would feel had we never been born. Try, if you will, to argue that “a picture is worth a thousand words” by using only a photograph or a painting.

The brilliant story teller Madeleine L’Engle writes of a friend who despaired of seeking help for her addiction in the church and who subsequently turned to the comfort of a twelve- step program. When asked why, her friend replied, “Because this program knows and names who is the enemy.”

Even Friedrich Nietzsche, a most unlikely exegete for any comfort in matters such as these, once reminded us in what seemed a moment of despair, “I fear that we will never get rid of God so long as we have grammar.”

November 16, 2004

Remorse

My old Royal manual upright didn’t have anything like a hard drive, but it
was always there when I needed it, no matter how hard I drove it. Not so
with my iBook and its completely unjustified and altogether egotistical
name.

Writing as an original sinner, what I need is a meBook, not one that at the
slightest whim has to go into the shop for a geek week at the techies. That
was bad enough what with all my withdrawal pains, but then for it finally to
come home and be missing of all things its word processor (and after my
paying $85 to have everything backed up) was too much.

All that’s how come this OoN is in remorse code.

November 15, 2004

Prayer

I recently called up my old friend and mentor, Canon P D Quirk, for his opinion about prayer and whether our kind of country really needs a law so people can talk to God.

He said why ask him, that he was retired and didn’t pray as much as he used to, but that it was not because he no longer got paid for it, even though the money was never all that great, and even though prayer was more or less his major line of work.

I said that’s why I called him up, that having been in the same business, I was feeling ambivalent about hoping people might pray more than they seem to and also wondering whether forcing them to pray might not be altogether counterproductive, so what did he think.

He chortled some and asked did I remember the old story about the fundamentalist father who took his errant son out behind the barn with a stick of cane and said he would beat the love of God into him if it took all night.

November 8, 2004

Intact

Maybe it’s time to remember the old saying that the opposite of winning is not losing. It’s quitting.

The American political experiment’s grand system of checks and balances is still more or less intact. Those who incarnate it are still accountable to the rest of us whether they like the idea or not. Some have cushier job security than others, but they’re still answerable to us body politics.

Fifty million of us lost. That’s a fact. But neither we nor the nation quit, and the least we can do is to point that out from time to time.

November 5, 2004

Unexpected

Pentecost 23/27C Lk 20.27-38

Herewith some thoughts on Jesus and the Sadducees, an encounter and reminder for our time:

How easily we impose our notions and our experiences framed by this world on what God may have in store for us in a newer age. By doing so, we underestimate the power and authority of God.

Jesus’ encounter insists that we be open to the unexpected gifts of grace. We must take care lest our understanding of the past — including our reading of scripture and tradition — makes us unable to see new manifestations of God’s will. God is constantly making all things new.

As well, the story warns us against limiting the range of God’s grace as though some could be beyond it. If even the dead are not beyond that grace, then surely no race or social or economic status or even religion can escape it.

This refreshing news of the gospel in Jesus’ hands can and must inform the way we live together as a society of law and order. Our systems of government — and of churching, especially — are only consistent with that news in that they enhance and enable justice and peace, love and freedom. They are altogether contrary to it when they seek to restrict it by imposing our own limited understandings about the ways we must live together.

November 4, 2004

Oatmeal

“What will come of all this on Nov. 3? Some will pick up the morning paper and save it for a souvenir, and the others will wrap up the garbage in it.

“What will reconcile us is what has always restored our sanity, and that is the plain pleasures of the physical world, our common love of coffee, the world of apples, the movement of birds, the lives of dogs, the touch of skin. . . .

“Having worked ourselves into a fever over the future of Western civilization, we will now begin enjoying our oatmeal again, with raisins, chopped apricots and honey from bees that grazed in meadows of clover. The beauty of engagement is disengagement. You simply put on your jacket and walk out the door and find good health. There is no fever that a 10-mile hike can’t cure.” — Garrison Keillor, writer and recovering political partisan, 2004

November 3, 2004

Theology

I recently came across an interview with Yogi Berra in which he explains jazz. Being recently for a time at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest down in Austin, TX, where, for some strange reason, theology attracts more care and concern than jazz and also because today belongs to Richard Hooker, our favorite Anglican, I am tempted to wonder how Yogi might similarly explain theology.

An interview with him would maybe proceed something like this:

Interviewer: What do you expect is in store for the future of theology?

Yogi: I’m thinking there’ll be groups of people who’ve never met each other standing around talking about it all the time, not having arguments, but calling it something like disputations, something like between a batter and an umpire.

Interviewer: Can you explain theology?

Yogi: I can’t, but I will. Ninety percent of all theology is half improvisation. The other half is the part people think while others are thinking something they never thought with anyone who thought that. So, if you’re wrong, its orthodox. If you’re orthodox, it might be orthodox if you think it wrong enough. But if you think it too orthodox, it’s wrong.

Interviewer: I don’t understand.

Yogi: Anyone who understands theology knows that you can’t understand it. It’s too complicated. That’s what’s so simple about it.

Interviewer: Do you understand it?

Yogi: No. That’s why I can explain it. If I understood it, I wouldn’t know anything about it.

Interviewer: Well, let’s try another approach. What is process theology?

Yogi: That’s when what should logically follow happens either before or after you expect it. In process theology, you don’t discover things when they happen because that would be some other type of theology. Other types of theology can be process theology, but only if they’re the same as something different from those other kinds.

Interviewer: Are there any great theologians alive today?

Yogi: No. All the great theologians alive today are dead. Except for the ones that are still alive. But so many of them are dead, that the ones that are still alive are dying to be like the ones that are dead. Some would even kill for it.

Interviewer: Now, I really don’t understand.
Yogi: I haven’t taught you enough for you to not understand theology that well. And remember, watch out for forks in the road. They’ve never served theology all that well.

November 2, 2004

Choice

The fecundity of God’s great imagination that brought us into being may find no better metaphor than a garden. It’s no wonder that for Christians, the major turns in the long and joyfully tortuous saga of our relationship with God came on decisions made in gardens — Eden and Gethsemane.

The freedom to make those kinds of choices is part with our creation. Love. Creativity. Reason. Covenant in harmony with God.

Casting ballots is one of the ways. Perhaps there is no greater opportunity to reveal and witness to God’s image in us than that, our stewardship of the garden, this nation in which we live — and die.

November 1, 2004

Bats

A million or so bats share their place in the food chain along the Colorado River where it runs through Austin, TX. They live under a bridge and create a minor industry of bat hats and hand-held neon batons with which to shoo.

They come out every night at sundown and carpet-sweep the malingerers that drift just over the water’s surface and between the banks. It’s difficult to think of mosquitoes by the ton — or bats by the millions, for that matter — but that’s the way they do it down there.

We don’t function like that because we’re free to jigger the food chain in our own ways, buying with whimsy our enchiladas with chicken, beef, or cheese. But we could learn a thing or two from the bats. Collegiality. Purpose. Timing. Stewardship. Knowledge of and respect for our limits.

But not by driving like a bat out of hell on the interstates and scaring the daylights out of tourists trying to read the signs and keep between the curbs.