November 30, 2005

Pigeonhole

One of the neatest tricks we human beings are up to is our rarely ever questioned practice of parceling out life into pigeonholes and then creating the ornithologists to go with them. The docs do the body. The shrinks do the mind. The therapists do the feelings. And the parsons get whatever’s left over. We keep this up, as a geology prof of mine once said, and we soon know more and more about less and less until we know all there is to know about nothing.

Of course, somebody’s always trying to pull it all together as a whole, as if, maybe, we really are one person, connected, and what is even more, one global people, connected. So far, that idea doesn’t work so well even if old Paul did his best to convince us that eyes don’t walk any better than feet see.

One reason it doesn’t is that keeping us divvied up seems to make life so much more manageable (read manipulatable). Make the spiritual one of those pigeonholes, then equate it with religion, then claim that the inestimably wise notion of the separation of church and state means that religion, hence God, is a private, not a public matter and pretty soon, you’re in charge, but you’ve sure got a mess on your hands.

Whatever the religion, we are spiritual beings, and all the rest of us, the above-the-surface part that shows and thinks and feels is there to give the spirit some kind of handle on things. Start taking all that apart, and the mess is only compounded.

Take sex, one of the more graphic ways not only to make the connection, but to keep the connection going. It’s no wonder it gets a lot of market play in matters human and social, and, as fear replaces awe, a lot of strange behavior and rules build up around it.

Then, as if to simplify things further, one of the neatest spin-offs is to equate spirituality with religion. Religion, of course, being such a personal and private matter and there being the truly wise and generally misunderstood doctrine of the separation church and state at hand, it’s only too convenient and, of course “logical” just to throw religion — and religion’s God — out the window as irrelevant in matters political and moral. This, of course, removes one’s private God from public affairs altogether. “One nation under God”? Which one? No wonder folk get their flag in a twist.

How we can exegete the Judaeo-Christian tradition which has had so much to do with the great American political experiment and come up with such a crazy quilt is more than just passing strange, it’s stupid. But it’s mighty handy for them as wants to fool the masses. That public God of Jesus and the prophets and all their troublesome morality about justice and the poor and the environment and war? Where’s the pigeonhole?

November 29, 2005

Copy

I started typing early on in life with two index fingers and an old second-hand portable with a shredded ribbon. Then I graduated to a couple of Royal uprights that were always two or three model designs behind the current one. Final copies were always a maelstrom that would make fractals look like order.

Fantasy took me to those machines like I was Red Barber or Scotty Weston or H L Mencken or maybe sometimes Hemingway (who probably didn’t even use one). The clatter warmed my hearing. The pressure from the keys reminded me something approaching importance just might be going on here (and rarely was).

I kept three of them for some years after getting my first computer and word processor, actually after I discovered that ribbons, if you could find them, cost nearly as much as each of the (used) machines had when first I bought them. All the whiteout had crystallized by then, as well.

The cyberwhiz systems some three Macs later never cease to amaze me. The spellcheckers insult me when I type my initials JLD, and they smartmouth back, “OLD.” And redeem themselves when I type my bishop’s name, and they report “hireling.”

But when I got up today at five ayem with a pressing idea for a homily due tomorrow at a good friend’s requiem, put it in some decent kind of shape, and started to print… Aha! The printer announced “job stopped.” About noon and after several conversations with the printer people saying it was the computer and the computer people saying it was the printer and a lot of Kenny G’s off-pitch soprano saxophone elevator tripe while on hold (why can’t they play Mozart or Basie?), it all came together again.

I miss the old Royals that were mostly always there when I needed them. But it’s nice to have the same workable two fingers and the Apple. That bite out of it reminds me that at least if my copy is not original, my sin is.

[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to catastrophe relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]

November 28, 2005

Life

Advent is a fork in the road. And Yogi Berra’s wise counsel is that when you come to it, “take it.”

But there is more to our lives than putting one foot in front of the other. We talk as we go, we laugh and cry, we take another’s hand, we listen to another’s story. We honor their journey, a journey that is never just parallel to ours, but always intersecting.

In God’s economy, we can neither create nor stop the reality that life is connected. So far as we know, we may be the only part of life conscious of self. Somebody said that human beings are “so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about.” The commitment to be aware of this — and to see it as it is — remains an essential part of our being, our privilege, our responsibility, our vocation.

And so, here’s a footnote for those who’ve managed to tread this far:  Life is something to do when you can’t get to sleep.

November 25, 2005

Turkey

My trusty word book says that the bird we now call a turkey is actually native to the new world. The guinea-fowl was brought into Europe through Turkey and got its name that way. The American bird was thought to be a species of the same. When the difference was discovered, the name guinea-fowl was kept for the old-world bird, and the turkey was transferred to our Thanksgiving tables.

The annual White House turkey deferential reprieve goes back down through the years and quite a number of presidents. Any possible nepotistic symbolism seems more appropriate some years than others.

November 24, 2005

Reverence

Advent 1

We learned just now of the death of the last British soldier present in the trenches of World War I on Christmas eve in 1914. He was one hundred and six years old.  It was on this night that the Germans, only a few yards away, laid down their arms, began singing Silent Night, their Fatherland’s carol, as they climbed out of their trenches, then came over and exchanged gifts with the Allies. 

The next morning at sunrise, they began once again the killing.  Merry Christmas.

Only ninety-one years later, that extraordinary holy and silent moment we call Christmas is about to happen again. It is matched only by the extraordinary silent and holy moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment, this moment. I like to think that if only the world knew these things, if only we knew these things, really down deep knew these things, we might hold our breath –  and listen. 

For one, we might listen to how Wendell Berry, farmer, philosopher, poet, talks about place as the “informing ambience of one’s mind and imagination.” We might listen to how the church can be such a place, not just a latitude and longitude, but a true place, a metaphor of attention, a parable where truth trumps logic, an environment where the absurd happens, where the Word becomes flesh.  A place that so informs our minds and our imaginations, that so gives shape to them, that once again in these times we might come out of our trenches  to embrace our enemies, not only to bring presents to them but to be present to them.

Hovering now over all my thoughts with increasing frequency and poignancy in these times is this question: How might a human economy be conducted with reverence? How might we therefore show and practice due respect and kindness toward everything involved in such an economy — not only an economy of wealth or the lack of it, but more importantly, an economy of ourselves and our neighbors, and all that we are — our health, our education, our homes, our work, our environment, our religions, our many systems which we value so deeply and by which we live so intently? How might we show reverence for all the displaced persons in the world? 

Reverence seems somehow the password for this season. The reverence of Blessed Mary before God’s wishes for her. The reverence of garrulous old John Baptist when he beheld what for him was the Lamb of God. The reverence of the alien kings at the Epiphany. The reverence those World War I enemies had for one another.

We lack sorely this reverence. One only need to drive the interstate system or to walk in the shopping malls or to stand in the interminable lines of waiting to experience it. One only need attend to our government’s budgets to discover where is the reverence for the poor. There is no shame in the poverty Americans suffer today. The shame adheres to those who do nothing to change it. One only need observe the unilateral arrogance of our leaders toward other cultures and other languages, other voices and other rooms, the Other in whatever shape or form to ask  where is the reverence. 

Is it any wonder that, lacking such admiration and esteem, we are soon succumbed by fear? When we are afraid, we become angry, and we inevitably turn to violence and war. War. It is only a strange and simple little three-letter word that means not only strife and confusion, but quaintly enough, means as well to sweep away, to wipe out the other like some stain, with total disregard and even blindness for the fact that we never seem to learn that in war there are no winners, only losers.  

Reverence. An Advent sound of gentle stillness, a silent and holy moment can prepare us once again for such due respect and kindness toward all of life — and toward ourselves, for we are God’s beloved. The church can, the church must have a hand in this. We must turn from our  crippling narcissism to the practice of reverence. We must pray about it. We must pray for it. We must wish for it, for what is prayer, but such wishful thinking?

This, of course, if ever it happens, will be the ultimate maturation of our culture. Then we will no longer need preemption if, indeed, we ever did. For when we build such reverence, truly they will come. 

November 23, 2005

Plus

One of the more ludicrous things about us churchers is the way we tack titles on ourselves. Among the silliest is “reverend.” Our lack of schooling about our own language, especially its grammar, hardly shows any more obviously than in this misplaced word.

For one thing, it’s an adjective, not a noun or a title. That means it’s a modifier designed to tell you something about a noun or maybe another adjective. What on earth we find more reverend about one of God’s children than about the next altogether escapes me.

Then, as if just one is not enough, we’ve got to have levels. Right, Very, Most for openers, and don’t forget Venerable. For some reason none of them stand alone, and all require a “the,” as if a simple “a” suggesting not the only, but merely one among many is not more than enough.

And for heaven’s sake, don’t forget the pluses and where they go. In front for bishops, in the rear for priests, naught for deacons, and then one of the more outlandish practices rearing itself of late is the ++ for archbishops. For some, read “doubleplus,” for others, “doublecross,” depending on how one reads the Windsor Report.

One final insult, of course, is the phrase “Holy Orders,” for the clergy as if the holy order of Baptism for us all is not sufficient. And don’t even get me going on “born again” after one’s already been baptised, an affront to God if there ever was one.

Perhaps H L Mencken put it best of all when he defined an archbishop as a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Jesus.

[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to catastrophe relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]

November 22, 2005

Neighbors

In a previous carnation at a time when we had more need of one, we lived next door to our pediatrician. When the flu season would arrive each year, she’d come over and vaccinate us all around during happy hour. She preferred to give half doses a week apart, found that less troublesome for the recipient and just as effective. She didn’t believe in the germ theory, so she’d use the same hypodermic for the both of us, half to one, half to the other. We never caught the flu.

We trusted her emphatically, not only because she taught student doc wannabes across the way at the giant medical center, but largely because she kept a copy of Dr Spock in her glove compartment. Common sources, you know, reassure a certain kind of collegiality.

It’s still a good idea. Those of us who claim the same Holy Scripture as more or less our “normative tradition,” might well take note and keep a copy in our glove compartments. Maybe one day even, we might supply the hotel chains with a copy of the Book of Common Prayer.

[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to catastrophe relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]

November 21, 2005

Aha!

Charles Darwin strikes me rather like the sculptor who fashioned a lion by knocking everything off a great block of stone that didn’t look like a lion. One of God’s greatest gifts to us is the privilege — and the responsibility — to name everything and to shape some things, that is, everything but God. Which, of course, is as it should be.

Maybe God is pleased to be thought of as intelligent, surely an irony that is not lost on him. But I rather suspect she’s not all that sanguine about our presuming to know how exactly how she went about creating creation which might be construed as to name her. This bit about naming, what is it more or less than also discovering, a sort of endless scavenger hunt, as it were. One startled Aha! after another. And then with the names which, of course, is what science is all about — discovering and naming, unfolding and sorting out, and even harnessing on occasion, that is, when we don’t blow up the lab.

Is it not for God to know and for us to find out how it all came about? For the time being, why not just call it evolution? We’re no less secure afterward than before and maybe even a bit closer to discovering what’s happening. Surely a rose smells the same by any other name and, of course, has no fewer thorns.

November 18, 2005

Spectrum

On a recent Sunday after the celebration and when everyone else had gone out for coffee and cush, my five-year-old grandson Thomas, our family’s Autism Poster Child, walked over and stood behind the altar.

Apparently unaware that anyone might be watching and barely peering over the top, he raised both his arms as if in blessing. Then he moved quietly to the pulpit, stood, and raised only one arm as if to make some point known only to him. But that’s not all. When it is his turn to receive the bread at the Eucharist, he often “relays” a piece to each of the other four members of his family, only then taking one for himself.

In our blessed and necessary penchant for naming things (a hangover from an early Edenic privilege, I reckon), we call autism a “spectrum disorder.” I take that to mean that the way the world usually becomes for us is so disarrayed for a person with autism as often to approach sensual chaos. Such a constant and all-inclusive waking experience is surely beyond the imagination of any one of us whose senses are not so aligned.

So far as we know, we human beings may be the only creatures in our part of this vast and largely unknown universe — though we dare not presume it — who are commissioned and, I think, honored to be the occasions for the cosmos becoming conscious of itself. This might, I should think, give us the possibility and privilege of somehow knowing how intimately connected we are with the very elements which give us and all the rest of creation a life. I can only hope to mature into a more reverent stewardship before that reality and especially before those of us who through autism may have an even more acute participation in and appreciation for such mystery. Teach us, Thomas, teach us.

November 17, 2005

Serve

The Sunday of Christ the King

And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these… you did it to me” (Mt 25.40).

It was a radical idea then. It remains a radical idea through the centuries. Over and over again, Jesus likens the kingdom of God, indeed, the kingliness of God never to the royal purple of pomp and circumstance, but always to the simple cloth and chores of the commonplace. It is a message whose profound clarity obviously deafened the ears of church and state then and continues to deafen those who not only cannot hear and do not listen. But it remains the message of the Old Testament prophets that is of the essence of biblical morality and a message against which the gates of hell will not prevail.

Maybe it is of a truth that the perils of any given era seem to those whose times they are as the greatest perils of all time. Perhaps this is especially true for the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their God, a children whose prophetic sensitivity to justice may have never been matched. And perhaps it is especially tragic that we, those children and heirs, stand now our followings so sorely divided as even to be killing one another. And perhaps it is especially tragic that our united purpose and will may never have been needed more than it is now.

Who are “the least” in our time who are so intimately identified with our Lord in his? To whom do we minister that turn out again and again to be our Lord, himself?

If we believe that poverty in the world and poverty in America, the richest nation in the world, is morally unacceptable, then there is our Lord. If we believe that further tax cuts for the wealthy in exchange for budget cuts for social services for the poor and the working poor is simply wrong, then there is our Lord. If we believe that the “swords-into-plowshares” vision of the prophet Micah for national security is better than that of Donald Rumsfeld and company, then there is our Lord (Micah 4.3-4). And if we believe that social movements with spiritual foundations can truly change history, then there, as well, is our Lord. Then will we know where are “the least” and in whose midst stands our Lord. Then will we know.

One of the reasons for this nation’s founding was to rid ourselves from the secretive cabals of a lord-it-over empire and king. And one of the ways we have done that is through a system of balanced powers created for and given to those who would lead us by serving us. It was perhaps the best secular route we could ever take to provide such an authority.

It was not easy then. It has never been all that easy, though it may have worked better in certain times past. It is our calling as servant leaders to make it work better than ever before. Jesus beckons to us through the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the political refugee, the naked, the sick, those in prison, and indeed, those who are being tortured. However and whatever we do unto these least, we do unto our servant king.