February 10, 2005
Memorial
One of my librarian friends who reads OoN sends along this anecdote as a follow-up to yesterday’s Ash Wednesday reference to the Grand Canyon:
“I walked above the Grand Canyon carrying my saxophone one day. When I felt sufficiently isolated to take it out and practice, I stopped and put it together. I was a newcomer to the game. Neither my sounds nor the facility of my fingers were adequate, but I practiced for an hour, facing into the Canyon.
“From that experience, I learned that such a big hole swallows sound very nicely, leaving little for the ears. Even so, the vista was a wonderful thing to have before me while playing sax.
“Because I was just learning, I played very slowly, and the song was, of course, Body and Soul. When I finished and started to disassemble my instrument, I discovered standing behind me a couple of middle-aged women. I greeted them, and one of them asked in a thick German accent, ‘Is this a memorial service?’”
February 9, 2005
Ashes
Timothy Ferris, the science journalist, wanted to find a new name for the Big Bang, something more dignified, so he held a contest.
Nothing and nobody won. Somebody even had the gall to suggest it be called Genesis. And so it remains. The Big Bang.
But Stephen Hawking calls it the Singularity which, I take it, is about as unique as one can get. So is Stephen Hawking. So are you. So am I.
To think that an explosion of such magnitude could eventuate in you and me maybe just so it could get a spokesperson to make its case and name it, however mundane, causes one to get a real bang out of life — and God. A big bang, indeed.
These Ash Wednesday ashes — as insignificant as they may seem — tell the great story of our origin and our destination and of our connection with all the cosmos. But life gives us a chance to tell the even greater story of what happens in between that origin and that destination whatever it may be.
Maybe one message of the ashes is for us to get some pleasure out of this cosmic Fairy Tale while the getting is good. For that’s an even bigger message, I should think, than believing the silly in-a-cocked-hat notion that the Grand Canyon was spun off in a day or two.
February 8, 2005
Naming
It’s no wonder to me that God never wanted to give us her name. The rumor (and some would say fact) all through the Book we wrote together is that to know names is to control. I believed that once and have got a lot of homiletic mileage out of it. Now, though I may be wrong, I’ve come to believe that nothing could be further from the truth in these times.
To name something may not be to control it at all, but instead to divert attention from it, to empty it of all meaning at the same time leaving the illusion that we’ve endowed it instead of ourselves with power. This is especially true of government institutions and agencies (and churches, but there’s not room here for that).
Take, for example, the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Actually, it’s not created, it’s only named, for it is merely an amalgam of agencies and whatnot that were already created, brought together, and rendered generally impotent in the marriage. A recent news story reported that some twenty or so people have refused the offer to become director of the DHS. That so many have turned down the job may a new sign of hope in our present political malaise. Some of us will simply not go down that yellow brick road.
February 7, 2005
Dynasty
The Patriots won last night. The Eagles lost. Paul McCartney, even at age sixty-five, safely breasted this half-time simply by carting out his old hits and propping them up with light and sound and fireworks all together with a delirious drummer who seemed at times entirely beside himself trying to keep up.
Reassuringly, the teeners screamed ever so loud for Paul as their parents did for the Beatles forty years ago. After all, those tunes do remain singable, though quite a bit more so apart from all the noisy interference.
It was the Patriots’ third Super Bowl win. According to the sports commentators, this makes them a dynasty (and in a lot fewer years than it ever took the Chinese to come up with one). But dynasty is, I suppose, the right word.
Football is dynamite in our time, all about power. Violence is the name of the game — on the field, in the commercials, on the bandstand, certainly in the Super Bowl.
There must be a parable in there somewhere, even if I have to force one. The Patriot Act and all its restrictions has surely got more press of late than that good old American bird, so long a symbol of freedom.
February 5, 2005
Neighborhood
I realize ever so often how much I take the neighborhood for granted, how it just bams along, doing its thing, most of its gardens sleeping these days, as the Brits might say.
The electric folk ruined the trees a while back, and that lets in more of the sunset, but it also lets in more of the 18-wheeler rumble from the distant interstate. We got new, taller poles, of course, all made of trees, naturally. One of them down the street is leaning strangely as if it might want to go back to where it came from.
The folk across the street are divorced. Their nextdoors have adopted new baby Eloise to join forces with old baby Harriet. Marcus down the street has a very successful new musical in production and is writing an opera. Steve and Frances are gone a lot. Their older son has left the rabbinic, is selling real estate now, I presume still in God’s kingdom.
Can’t imagine how, but the folk next door seem to get by just fine without us. We did meet the father and a daughter Maryka just before Christmas. She lamented not getting Christmas cards like other folk, so I sent her one which, so far as I know, she never got. Portia has a new dog, Susan, and the two visit with us from time to time. Portia’s a birder, bands hummingbirds, of all things bright and beautiful.
Shirley travels a lot, visits grandchildren. Why, is a mystery to me. Everybody else but Terry and Brent (who’ve recently opened another branch to their swishy French bistro) and Joan are pretty snobbish. Probably university people doing post-grad work in aloofnopathy.
CP’s son (of long-ago teddy bear fame) spent a few days with us during her recent foolishness of heart. She got her second stent (and last, we trust) Wednesday. Ironic intelligence: The medics say she probably wouldn’t have made it at all if she’d not been in such good health.
Our friends Rebecca and Brian visited her in the hospital and brought her a real teddy bear. The charge nurse wondered if they’d wandered through pediatrics on their way up.
February 4, 2005
Listen
Transfiguration/Epiphany last
(Mt 17.1-9; Lk 9.28-36)
When the prophet Elijah was called by God, he searched for the evidence of that call in some spectacular sign — earthquake, fire, wind, thunder, lightning. How he finally got his answer is described in what I feel is one of the loveliest phrases in all of scripture — his answer was in “the sound of gentle stillness.” (1 Kgs 19.12 AV) And so is such a temptation for us. So often we look for signs, rather than listen for them.
The Transfiguration tells such a story. It would be hard to imagine a more brilliant scene than Jesus carrying on with Moses and Elijah — two dead guys of repute — and having his threads suddenly lit up like half-time at the Super Bowl, a wardrobe malfunction to end all wardrobe malfunctions.
We can’t fault Peter, James, and John for being overcome by the razzle-dazzle in such an ambiance and wanting to negotiate a more permanent arrangement. It was only natural. It is only natural with us churchers. Majestic cathedrals, fancy duds for ourselves, great music and liturgy, all pointing to us in the hope that maybe like those disciples, the world will want to negotiate and join up.
Well, it hasn’t exactly turned out that way. The Voice from the clouds up there on the mountain agrees, up to a point. “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased,” it says. The Voice, we presume, making such references, can’t be anyone else’s but God’s. But it doesn’t stop only with “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.” Something like that was announced when John baptized Jesus. But the Transfiguration story seems to suggest that there’s been an attention deficit in the meantime, almost as if that simple recommendation was not enough. For the Voice — that James Earl Jones Voice — adds a simple command. This time it says, “Listen to him.”
Witnessing takes at least two forms. The obvious one is telling the gospel story, telling our story, enacting our story, and making it as attractive as we possibly can. But the perhaps less obvious way of witnessing is to listen to the other’s story, the neighbor’s story, the world’s story, listening for God presence, for Christ in the other. Listening, giving audience, paying attention may be, after all, the most profoundly magnetic and winsome form of witnessing.
“This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”
In his little monograph, “Reaching Out,” Henri Nouwen rings changes on the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor as self. He calls our growth in fulfilling this commandment “spiritual maturity” and describes it as offering audience to self and to neighbor and to God.
That we don’t listen to ourselves, he suggests, results in our profound loneliness. Whereas, to give ourselves unrestricted, unconditional audience, Nouwen says, offers the most profound experiences of solitude, defining the difference between loneliness and solitude.
As well with our neighbors must be our gift of audience, of truly listening without condition, without planning our next speech, opening from hostility to a true and welcome hospitality. And finally does Nouwen say, we must offer such audience to God without condition, by opening up from illusions about God to prayer or put another way, by attending not to God as we understand God, but prayer as searching, enquiring of God to discern how God understand us and the ways in which he has imagined us to be.
In so many ways, we can be deaf. Through arrogance, vanity, compulsive talking, dismissiveness, aloofness, and so much more subtly through self-righteous obsession with always having to be right (and just happening to have the biblical text on hand to prove it).
The church is called to be a listening community, a community where such deafness can be healed. There is much in our corporate worship to hear. Great stories of our long family history. Thoughtful prayers. Better than average hymns. And, of course, each other with mutual greetings, exchanges, and catching up. But our good liturgy also offers us moments in certain of its parts when we can simply be silent, listening, reflecting on what or who we have just heard or seen, surely awed by the majesty of the possibilities of access to God. Surely, when James counseled us to be not only hearers, but doers of the word, he would be the last to suggest that such doing is altogether impossible without first hearing, without first listening.
The prophet Isaiah once admonished us in one of his more provocative ways to “Seek the Lord while he wills to be found… ” (Is 55.6a) Thankfully, God was more gently gracious to those who waited for Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and for those who wait for him here when he said, “This is my son, my Chosen, listen to him… ” in the sound of gentle stillness.
February 3, 2005
Basie
The great Count Basie orchestra played the Dallas, TX, fair grounds for a dance in the mid-1930s. It was for blacks only. Whites were welcome, but only behind a roped-off area uncomfortably distant from the band and No Dancing, only to listen.
That dancing prohibition didn’t much bother the budding jazz players among us, but the distance from the band was unconscionable. (We didn’t know that word then, but it was, anyway.) The band had Lester “Prez” Young on tenor in the sax section and Joe Jones on drums, two absolute giants in our young lives, plus many other fine players.
Little did we know — or care, for that matter — what a convincing model of community is a jazz band. Each member a part of the whole — all “sidemen,” but some soloists, some section leaders — and the whole together making a distinct sound, a “big band sound.” Each member with a unique and different talent, mutually respecting and enabling one another to grow and to enrich the whole. And, in Basie’s case, a band — even as its members came and went — that would always over the years have an identifiable sound to inform and shape the very jazz concept, itself, Big Band.
Mightn’t we churchers find a clue there? But, of course, No Dancing.
February 2, 2005
Fall
CP’s lived in our house some forty years and has only fallen down the 13-step staircase twice.
The second time was at four in the morning on a recent Friday. It was the result of cardiac arrest. Thanks be to God, medical attendance was prompt and efficient, and a stent spared any damage to her heart.
Not a bone got broken, but the massive bruises left her looking rather like the Tattooed Lady at the State Fair. She is at home now and well enough to have already placed her spring garden order. She gets another stent this very morning.
Her first fall shortly after moving into this same house, same stairs, but four decades ago was more a result of a failed balancing act of too many hands full of stuff in one hand plus a cup of coffee in the other. Fortunately, she was more dazed than injured.
Hearing her fall, however, her two-year old son came running from another room, stood staring in utter amazement, ran hurriedly back, then returned, gently and graciously offering her his teddy bear.
I wasn’t here for that one. All I could do when I found her this time was to check her vitals, then call 911 and our wonder doc who lives just around the corner. But even with all that emergency brass, we could have for sure used another teddy bear.