October 31, 2005
Pumpkins
Don’t you go and tell now that Hallowe’en is really the eve of All Saints Day — one of the big bellringers on the Christian calendar — or the next thing you know, the ACLU will put out a contract on anybody lighting up pumpkins on the Court House Square.
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October 29, 2005
Pointing
Once upon a time past, we had for a while the “Evil Empire.” More recently, it’s been the “Axis of Evil.” It seemed in each of these times only too easy to forget that when pointing, there are always three fingers pointing back at the pointer.
Perhaps all this may be somewhat better understood in Scott Peck’s “People of the Lie: the Hope for Healing Human Evil,” p 129. He says of evil that in addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, evil would specifically be distinguished by:
a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle…
b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury…
c) pronounced concern with a public image and a self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives…
and d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking at times of stress.
I suppose it’s only coincidental if any of this strikes us as familiar. Nevertheless, we might use more care, lest we get the point.
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October 28, 2005
Planning
I don’t know about your town, but the streets in our town stay about the same. Occasionally and in a frenzy of public service, the maintainers fill the potholes with enough gunk to make potbumps. But as for planning, except in subdivisions (if you can call that planning), the byways remain the same.
City planning is an oxymoron on a roll bulldozing old, many of them quite charming, single-family houses and running up new multiple-unit condos in their place. Nobody, least of all the builders and rapacious investors, seems much to take into account the fact that for each of these dwellings the number and size of the lots available for razing-then-raising is inversely proportional to the number of automobiles (read SUVs) required to service them. More and more new spreads we see, some with as many as three stories and four garages.
In the face of all this, hardly a week passes that CP and I aren’t prompted to wonder out loud and even sometimes in each other’s presence whether we could do without a second car. (Growing up, neither of us came from a family with more than one, often with holes in the floorboard.) We even thought about keeping a record of when it might be something of an annoyance to have only one, but we never seem to get around to it. We probably ought to be embarrassed, but denial always somehow preempts logic.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina or Rita Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
October 27, 2005
Servanthood
He who is greatest among you shall be your servant (Mt 23.12).
Christian faith is not always the same, if anywhere near or ever the same, as the Christian Faith. To confuse the two is one of the more profound blunders of Christian churches. The one is deeply subjective and freighted with risk and humility. It has no place nor need for crippling circumscriptions like “orthodoxy.” The other is often so uncongenially certain and too often filled with pride. It is often in blind obsession to orthodoxy, an obsession that has always compromised the church as, indeed, it does so in these very times.
Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space in which day by day we are all involved, stumbling, trying to appear as if we have good sense. The truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it is to be found at all, not in the Bible or the Church or Theology — the best they can do is point to the Truth — but is to be found in our own stories.
It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to stay in constant touch with what is going on in your own life’s story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives, for to say that faith is not some institutional doctrine is not to say that it is not corporate or communal. If God is present anywhere, it is in our stories. If God is not present there, then we might as well forget the whole thing.
Our Baptismal Covenant literally turns on our answer to that same question that stands at its center and is phrased like this. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” That is where we find the stories, that is where we find faith.
And that is where we find what Jesus means by true greatness when he says, He who is greatest among you shall be your servant. I hope it is not lost on us in today’s gospel accounting that Jesus chose the religious establishment and its frequent fixation with puffery with which to contrast his words about servanthood.
From the religious standpoint, servanthood tends to mean a lofty ideal all right for the Scout movement and isolated from the so- called real world of win/lose. From the secular perspective, it is often seen only as “servitude,” a condition imposed on women and racially different groups by male-dominant cultures or self-imposed by both men and women out of fear of their own power.
The kind of servanthood Jesus seems to imply is neither of these. Rather is it the way of fulfilling the human longing for peace and the planet’s need of preservation as the theater of all life. It is the kind of leadership that is needed to make the world safe. It is always a two-way exchange, never as subjugating dominance and never as a unilateral and preemptive arrogance. It not only influences, but is also open to influence. It acknowledges and respects the freedom of another and seeks to enhance that other’s capacity to make a difference. It is a paradox — for it gains by giving.
Just as God could say of Jesus as his son in whom he is well pleased and for us to listen to him, thus showing us what he means by being human. So might we hope Jesus can say of the church as what he means by a community of servanthood, leading others into creativity, productivity, and, best of all, bonding people into communities of caring. We can have no greater ministry to the society and to the world in which we are called.
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Note: To Frederick Buechner on faith and story and to Bennett Sims on servanthood — thanks for the better parts of this preachment.
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October 26, 2005
Alfred
One of the remarkable things about the saints is not their holiness, their “sainthood,” whatever that is, but that they help convert “remind” and “remember” into transitive verbs. [A transitive verb (I had to look it up to be sure) is one with a direct object, not one that just is.] We are the direct objects of the saints.
They anchor us in a kind of spiritually rich and moving genealogy. Traditions that don’t have them or recognize them are only the poorer for it and are stuck with mere numbers or streets or subdivisions after which to name their churches, names that don’t much remind them of anything save some entrepreneur out to make a buck.
An old ninth-century Saxon king is on today’s liturgical calendar. His mum called him Alfred. He became king at the tender age of twenty-two, not exactly a time currently known for any serious leadership skills. He not only defeated the Danes and saved southern England, but persuaded their leader to get himself baptized.
Among his other doings, he cleaned up after the Vikings, those burleys like in the current TV ads for a certain credit card. He also made the classics available practically on all the newsstands. One of his comments passed down to remind us went, loosely quoted, something like this: “It is a very foolish and wretched person, indeed, who will not increase their understanding while in the world.” A pretty good reminder for not a few of us.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina or Rita Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
October 25, 2005
Knowledge
This is for sure the age of specialization. I had a problematic ankle a while back, so I told my doc who said see an orthopaedist. So I called one for an appointment. The person on the other end of the phone asked, Which ankle?
Waltzing down our driveway from h___ with an overload of recyclables the other day, the bin forgot its place, started leading, and over we both went. I banged up my right arm and right rib cage and left some skin. So I told my doc, and he said get an x-ray. I got the radiology bill in yesterday’s mail. One radiologist for the arm, another one for the ribs.
Reminds me of the specialist who said she’d learned more and more about less and less until she finally knew all there was to know about nothing. Next thing, it’ll be the gerontologist who’ll probably ask which decade.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina or Rita Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
October 24, 2005
Knowledge
I was at some Naval Air Station near Treasure Island getting exposed to Link aerial navigation trainers when across the bay in San Francisco, the United Nations was being formed. On my first “flight,” I missed Hawaii by more miles than the trainer had “gas” left in the tank. Fortunately, it was only practice.
The United Nations, whose founding we celebrate today, was — and remains — about as real as it gets when it comes to a way to navigate the perils and the changes and chances of this mortal life of international relations. It’s not for practice, you better believe.
It was created, I’ve always thought, on the premise that if we could just find a way to invite everybody to the table to talk things over, we’d discover that any communication is better than none and that telling the truth is better than lying and that in every war there are always two losers and that getting over ourselves and getting a life is really maybe why we are here.
Addendum: So far, one of the truly rare times we’ve come closest to making the UN work like we’d hoped and planned was back in 1960 when Nikita Kruschev wisely chose bamming his shoe on the podium over bamming one of his nukes down the throats of the rest of us.* Too few seem yet to realize even with that goofy example how ludicrous we are and how easily still we could shut down the planet. From the way things look, we probably will sooner or later, more than likely simply by ingloriously running out of air.
(*It is rumored that there’s no photographic proof of this, nevertheless, just the mere idea beats the bomb. There’re very few snapshots from biblical times lying around, either.)
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina or Rita Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
October 21, 2005
Rubs
We have a King George III chair, an elegant piece of furniture that when one is seated thereon makes one feel as royal and maybe a touch as daffy as was he for whom it was named. Trouble is, in recent years, it’s got downholstered.
After a week or so of CP’s looking at swatches from the upholsterer, “we” finally picked a fabric that will go with just about everything in the house, most importantly, the throw and not-so-throw rugs. The names of the fabric patterns are almost as exotic as those of lipsticks, fingernail polish, and cars. But the really intriguing little bit on the backs of their labels is the so-called “double rub” number. With the different fabrics, they range from 3,000 to 90,000, but without any suggestion whatsoever as to what they might mean.
“How do you know how well a fabric will hold up?” Google asks. I don’t, I thought, except maybe my jeans. “There is no scientific method of finding out,” it assured, “for every household will use or abuse furniture differently. But there is a standardized test… which involves rubbing a wire mesh screen back and forth over a sample fabric. A double rub is one motion back and forth. It is estimated that 3,000 double rubs equals one year’s worth of use.”
We were impressed that the fabric we chose will endure 90,000 double rubs. And we are comforted that our combined weight, height, and age — except maybe if we sat on each other’s laps too often — will surely not prevail. And we are further relieved that so many double rubs should spare God keeping track of our down-sittings and up-risings so that she can tend to the other, less measurable and demonstrable of our increasingly geriatrophied foibles (Psalm 139.1).
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina or Rita Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
October 20, 2005
Neighbor
Pentecost 23/25A (Mt 22.34-46)
On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets (Mt 22.40).
The Pharisees got testy again and asked Jesus to give them one commandment, said they’d settle for the greatest. No problem. For good measure, he gave them two, said they were both alike, anyway. Love God with all you’ve got, and love your neighbor with anything that’s left over, well, maybe more.
But he didn’t stop there. Not only were these two the greatest. They were the onliest. For all the rest literally hangs on them, he added, the whole complicated Judaic canon and its historic prophetic application.
It was a timely and critical encounter. It remains a timeless and critical encounter. The law is not only what distinguishes us as a nation. It is all over the news, as well.
Take the Ten Commandments. One might well presume they were included as also depending on Jesus’ twofold summary about love. It seems, however, that so far as the courts are concerned, they have a life of their own. There are only ten, but it took the Supreme Court 138 pages of opinion to decide whether displays of these commandments belong on public property. Okay to sit out in the front yard of the Texas state capitol, they said. Not okay in a Kentucky courthouse foyer. Something to do about “borders,” the long decision allowed.
Then there’s Iraq. Like the Victorian father who took his son out behind the barn and said he’d beat the love of God into him if it took all night, we’re standing on one foot and the other, cane in hand. We’ve got Iraq by the scruff of the neck wrestling with how to make a working constitution weave law and religion, sex and ethnic pride into one practical bundle.
But there’s more. Our senate has just confirmed a chief justice who has said the Bible has no relation at all to his reading of the law. And now the same body is wandering the halls of Congress nonplused over Harry, wondering whether she’s ever read much of anything else but the Bible.
Looking around and if we sort of took a poll, we’d find that most of us are probably not all that familiar with either the Bible or the Constitution, anyhow. Even though a lot of us say we believe in God, heaven knows, you can’t just make somebody believe in God, let alone love God. Yet the whole thing still stirs up a lot of folk.
But back to Jesus and the Pharisees and the Great Commandment. Remember, there are two parts, both alike, so even if a body doesn’t believe in God or even whether there is a God, everybody, whether they like the idea or not, must at least acknowledge that there’s such a thing as a neighbor. And then when we somehow find out that to love one’s neighbor doesn’t mean we have to like one’s neighbor at all, just that we have to give a fair shake and to say what we mean and mean what we say and to tell the truth most of the time and be honest and not cheat and to work at all this, maybe we’ll have a leg up on at least one of the Great Commandments, and maybe have a bit more self-esteem ourselves.
God will wait and, I suspect, be mightily pleased to see what could turn out to be a general, and maybe even gradual improvement over how we all over the place suddenly start getting along. And if we begin that in our families and with our kin, then down the street, and even in the churches, it might just take hold.
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October 19, 2005
True
In writing, I try not to stack the deck unduly but always to let doubt and darkness have their say along with faith and hope, not just because it is good apologetics — woe to the one who tries to make it look simple and easy — but because to do it any other way would be to be less than true to the elements of doubt and darkness that exist in myself no less than in others.
I can’t remember who said this, but when I saw it, it was obviously important enough to me to put in my journal where I found it copied there carelessly and without annotation. Mea culpa. But mea pleasure, as well.
For one of the more difficult things in life is to be true to oneself. Why am I who I am? Have I chosen that am-ness, has my environment and those who people it chosen me for me? Are we in this together? Is the me always we? How much freedom has entered into my choosing? Why do I judge, even condemn smugly, those who are not like me?
Our Judaeo-Christian tradition makes much of choosing, affirms, even, that the freedom to choose is what it means to be human, to be created in the image of God, to be a creature of God’s imagination. Makes me believe that when we imagine are we most Godlike, for we have the mind of Christ within us.
Maybe with God, it’s always rock and roll, always faith and hope and never doubt and darkness. Or else why would God have told Moses, “I am who I am”? But not so with God’s son who seemed never to be spared both doubt and darkness, yet could still say, “Before Abraham was, I am” and thus be true to himself enough to show us the Way.
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