May 31, 2005

Regeneration

I flew four-engine bombers for Uncle Sugar’s Navy during one of the great misunderstandings (aka WW II). I never got shot at or even had a crash landing, nevertheless, I got into Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation by default. It was on the mere technicality of being the right age in the right era and having read enough ‘Daredevil Aces’ magazines and Tom Swift mysteries not to know any better. Forgive me, then, if I dare to flaunt those ‘credentials’ every once in a while.

Brokaw writes about that generation as if there were no other and certainly as if such could not be at all without there being a war or two within its life span. Memorial Day needs at least an octave to commemorate that properly and to remind us not only that hardly any generation has ever been spared a war, but also that, as heaven well knows, their service is beyond invaluably and incredibly selfless.

But what if there were also memorials for peace? Times when the world would no longer be in denial about and no longer tolerate genocide? What if there were those memorable eras when the hungry were actually fed, the naked clothed, the cup offered, and all the millions covered by health insurance in the sure and certain knowledge that the givers were not the point, but the receivers? How about honoring not only the greatest generation, but also a greatest regeneration when, for whatever reasons, our enemies are loved rather than killed.

Do we churchers really, honestly believe that our deciding what is orthodox and what is not is more important in God’s eyes?

May 30, 2005

Memorial

The inevitability of war as an alternative in the human scheme of things is a brutal sign of our failure. It is not only a failure in our human relations, but a failure, as well, in our individual vocations of human being and an insult to God. It is especially a sign of the failure of us churchers to assume the true ministry to which we are called.

We set aside a national holiday to remember the millions of us — let alone the millions of our enemies — who have died in our wars. We build monuments to war and rarely, if ever, to what might have been even a tenuous time of peace in between. We even define peace as the absence of war and never war as the absence of peace. That we do so even furthers the tragic irony of thus enslaving our lives that we might be free. And yet, we must, for we can certainly do no less.

We can surely do more. We churchers can return to the Way by ceasing our incestuous wrangling over and among ourselves and by realigning all that energy with the passion of Jesus for justice and peace. We can unilaterally relinquish our political privilege and exemption so to disentangle ourselves from the not-so-subtly seductive stroking of our so-called faith-based initiatives. We can assume the rightful sacrifice of bringing a devastating prophetic indictment against a culture whose very nature is to make war.

Then perhaps we can turn the hearts of our leaders and ourselves to find new ways to rechannel our wealth from guns and selfishness to grace and selflessness for the benefit of all rather than the beneficence of a few. What a Memorial Day would that be.

May 27, 2005

Will

Subtle, maybe not so subtle, are the liturgy’s proposed responses where commitments are involved.

One of the most glaring signs of this is in the marriage vows. Society’s “I do” is the prayer book’s “I will.” Everybody knows you do or you wouldn’t be standing there nervous and uncomfortable and having spent all that money to get there. It’s whether you will or not, whether you will take it from here to eternity that matters. This is what all human commitment is about.

And so with the Baptismal Covenant, with ordinations, graduations, and with anything else worth writing home about. Faith, commitment, intention, even love, especially love, are acts of the will. They are choices, not submissions, they are proactive, not reactive. Ironically, truly to give one’s word is to keep one’s word.

In the gospel for today, hear Jesus, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 7.21).

“Hey, you over there in Amen Corner, Listen up, whatever holiness you think you’re up to is pointless until you walk the talk.” To do the will of the Father is first to will the will of the Father. The will, the human will, is the passport at the Pearly Gates. For just as the will is the key to kingdom, so is the will the key to being human. “What does it mean to be created in the image of God?” asks the catechism. “It means that we are free to make choices,” free to will, it may well have said. And if we are truly free, we are free either to be willing — or to be wilful, and there’s the catch.

Will, like spirit, is one of those neutral words. Our will may be that about us that is most God-like or it may, as well, be that about us that is most daemonic. We may be willing, or we may be wilful. It is not only true of us, but true of the nations, as well. By virtue of the way God imagined us, we are free to be either. Otherwise, our freedom to choose, which is the mark of God’s image in us, means nothing. [An interesting aside: The very word Islam means surrendering to the will of God.]

The fundamental problem with the act of surrender is not knowing how the individual will relates to the will of God, the mysterious “Someone” or “Something” to which one might be fortunate enough to have an opportunity to say Yes. So what is “the will of the Father”?

Once in my earlier and even-more-pretentious-if-you-can-believe-it years as a priest, I asked one of our church’s outstanding theologians, “How does one know God’s will?” Without hesitation or any of the pontifical pondering I might have expected, he said, simply, “Trust your hunches.”

Trust my hunches. That was hardly the answer I expected — or wanted. But the years have seasoned its meaning. If, indeed, I am one whom God imagined into being, where else might I look but inwardly into my own intuition, into my own imagination, into my own creativity? And if I have been to any degree stewardly with this freedom, with these gifts, with whatever it is that I might believe that God would want me to choose, how even better prepared might be my intuition — having already been there and done that?

So how do we know God’s will? Trust your hunches. But maybe we’re not so intuitive and maybe we’re more needful of external rather than internal evidence. Maybe it’s harder for us to imagine. Maybe my imagination and I are not all that compatible. Maybe I somehow got the crazy idea along the way that imagination and fantasy and myth are not to be trusted at all, but are simply phony. Too bad, but it happens.

Well, then, just look around. There’s a lot of evidence. Look at the way creation works best — connected. Look at the way people work best — connected. Look at the way your body functions best — connected. And look at the way it all works worst — disconnected.

Look at what might be God’s will — that we not only see how intimately involved we all are in God’s world, but that we act accordingly. If all this around us is God’s will, then we can be willing not only to share in it and enjoy it, but to be stewardly about it, to enable it, to join in harmony with God in the management of it all and of ourselves. Maybe Eden is a myth, a story, maybe so. But whatever, Eden is yet the story of our lives. Surely after all these centuries we’ve gotten a leg up on Eve and Adam? But then, maybe we haven’t.

May 26, 2005

Gender

I got up this morning and looked out the window and it hadn’t snowed overnight. But then I hadn’t expected it to. It’s near the end of May, and besides, we’re in the wrong planting zone.

I’ve always thought that “it” is not a very poetic word for things like weather and seasons and precipitation, but we Americans have somehow got stuck with it. Other languages seem to enjoy the irony of being sexier because they have gender. The Italians or the French maybe would look out the window in the morning and say, “She didn’t snow last night because she’s only May.” Or maye they wouldn’t. It’s pretty certain that we wouldn’t. Not known to lay much by grammar, we frequently use gender for sex, either ignorant of or not especially being impressed by the fact that gender is mostly for words, and sex, for people.

Sex is only for some people, of course. Increasingly, we Episcopalians have to look to our bishops to find out exactly whom. It’s too bad. I’d like to presume that most of those who become bishops never anticipated that sex might one day be included in the “faith, unity, and discipline of the church” when they signed on to guard it and all.

Somehow, though, they seem to have come to relish the idea. Considering the way they talk it about all the time, it’ll more than likely be included in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral one of these days.

May 25, 2005

Seventy

Later on this year, a friend of mine will be seventy years old. He’s thinking about retiring and wondered if I might have some bit of counsel about that to assure him that his world was not coming to an end. He was implying that mine had not.

He has his own business as a computer programmer. He’s a mathematician, a polyglot (German, French, and, of course, English, or else I couldn’t have presumed to understand him), a world traveler, a farmer, a rare automobile fancier and rebuilder, a practicing churchman, a benefactor, and perhaps best of all, an accomplished musician. He may have a hobby or two. We didn’t really get into that.

He’s also a life-long bachelor. I told him that seventy had never had it so good.

May 24, 2005

Rehab

Ninety-five pound, five-foot-two CP finished a while back the first phase of her cardiac rehab program. She’s now well into the long stretch of its graduate “school.” She’s also back to gardening with zeal in our currently fine late spring weather.

When her doc learned that, he told her absolutely no more of her previous hefting of 40-pound bags of topsoil and fertilizer. Heedless of his admonition, her phys-ed nurses just yesterday hiked her upper-body exercise dumbbells to six-pounds each (the men get the two-pounders). For good measure, they increased the speed on her thirty-minute treadmill “stroll” and raised the grade to four percent, the kind for which even 18-wheelers down-shift and take seriously.

“Rehab” is an interesting notion. Perhaps the less stewardly side of it is that we take it for granted there’ll always be something there to rehabilitate. On the other hand and without any doubt at all, it’s an admission of hope, and hope gets a major piece of St Paul’s attention as a runner-up among equals.

May 23, 2005

Violence

Seventy-one years ago today, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in an ambush as they were driving a stolen Ford Deluxe along a road in Bienville Parish, LA. The sedan was so full of bullet holes, it looked like a colander on wheels. It toured the regional fairgrounds on the back of a flatbed truck like this for years afterward.

The public animus of crippling fear, fascination, even admiration, toward these two and their fellow bad guys — John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, et al — swept across the Southwest of the early 1930s like the poison of a nuclear fallout. Hardly a day passed that their murders and robberies didn’t make the headlines. Commerce ground to a standstill.

Frank Hamer was one of the Texas Rangers who participated in the ambush that literally shredded Bonnie and Clyde along with their car. At the time, he and his colleague became public heroes.

Some twenty years later, I was given the opportunity to interview him in his home. Ironically, he seemed a gentle man. He sat with his back to the corner of the room so that he could face all the windows and doors. He said that he did this everywhere. He held in his lap a large, loaded six-shooter.

Violence and its bedfellow fear never cease, it seems, ever so effectively to work their revenge, even internationally.

May 21, 2005

Stunted

I’ve no idea who made the following comments. All I know is that I didn’t and sure wish I had.

Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting prisoners are precisely the sort of tasks that the president of the United States continues to reject as budgetary priorities. He apparently ranks them, in terms of governmental commitment, well below tax cuts for the wealthy, militarization of global politics, reliance on foreign fossil fuels, and draining Social Security coffers. Perhaps most insidiously, his description of religion as “a personal matter” insulates his refusal to engage in such charitable acts from the censure of a religious, or any other, community.

If religion truly is “a personal matter,” if the “great thing about America” is the freedom of worship (and not, for example, the freedom to take one’s deepest commitments into the public realm on issues of war and peace, care for the needy, and so on), then we retain only a stunted version of what a robustly religious polity might look like.

Such a truncated religious sensibility runs counter to a deeply American, and deeply religious, tradition of charity, compassion, inclusion, and justice.

May 20, 2005

Riddles

Trinity Sunday

“It takes a mighty big stigma to beat a dogma.”

Dorothy Sayers said it. She was British. She was also a theologian, a mystery novelist, a poet, and a Dante scholar. So she knew, it’s safe to say, what she was talking about, whether I do or not.

She could have been talking about Trinity Sunday, the only time in the entire liturgical keeping of time that a dogma assumes front stage center and elbows all those majestic events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost to the wings.

Preaching on Trinity Sunday makes me feel like the heart attack victim that called for a priest who, on arriving, moved the gathering crowd aside, knelt beside her, and asked, “Do you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” With great effort, the stricken woman addressed those surrounding her, “Here I lay dying, and the Father is asking me riddles.”

Dogma, that’s doctine with legs, seems always to be faith’s more or less futile attempt to make sense out of nonsense. Whereas faith, not unlike love (and they’re not all that different), is about as exposed a position as a person can take and with very little reason to support it. It’s like getting caught with your hand in life’s cookie jar. It makes you feel like you need some kind of excuse. Dogma, on the other hand, gets you out of hock and with an alibi.

I suppose it is not without purpose, then, that on this Sunday dedicated to a major piece of Christianity’s hard drive, there is appointed in the propers that grand and eloquent story from Genesis to wrap a security blanket around the whole idea (Gen 1.1-2.3). It reminds us that we are put here to mind God’s creation, to give the universe something to talk with, to give God someone to talk to, and to give us somebody to talk about (after Frederick Buechner).

And further, Genesis says that whatever we do about it, even to the making of enigmatic riddles, God thinks that it is good and makes us unconditionally in God’s image. Which is to say that we and all the rest of us — and them and it — are gently and lovingly shaped and brought forth with cause out of the unfathomable depths of God’s ingeniously rich imagination.

And not as mere clones. But as beloved sharecroppers in whatever may be our capacity in all this exercise in fertility. And that, beloved, is very scary stuff. So scary, and yet, so enticing, that right off, we blew it out of the garden and have needed the safety belts and air bags of doctrine and dogma ever since.

Doctrine, dogma, whatever, serves us well. We want everybody to buckle up. But never, we are reminded — and warned — at the expense of our imagination and worship. Such insight is perhaps no more obvious than in the turn of phrase at the heart of the collect for Trinity Sunday, as we pray, “Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity… ” (BCP p 228) We acknowledge doctrine. We worship God. For it is thus as we imagine that we are most godlike, most as God creates us to be, incarnating our spirit into human being and leading us forth to walk the talk.

May 19, 2005

Leaves

The late winter wildflowers now begin to make way for the early springtime tamer ones. I am more content to admire them and to share in CP’s pleasure midwifing them, than I am to identify them even when they bloom. But what truly amazes me is the people who actually know them only by their leaves, whatever the time of year.

Leaves pretty much function alike, I suppose, collecting and sculpting the photons for nourishment, caring not one quantum whether they be particle or wave, so as to board the osmotic railroad and keep the whole process underway. Leaves may function alike, but they sure don’t look alike. Even if they’re heedless of whether we notice them (I’m not so sure of that), their elegance is only a fraction of their essential gifts to the life of flora and fauna.

On the other hand, trees are easiest to identify by their leaves. Somewhere I read that trees communicate, especially when they’re in trouble. If one gets a varmint, the others somehow know and shift their chemistry into homeland security for themselves, maybe for the imperilled one, as well, for all I know.

“Consider the lilies,” Jesus said… to you and to me and to the primates and to the church and to the world. Oh yes, and to the military-industrial complex.