January 7, 2006

Anatomy

The big annual Trinity Institute at That Parish up in The Apple is running a conference the end of January called the Anatomy of Reconciliation. I looked that up in Gray’s Anatomy and couldn’t find anything, but it set me to wondering how creatively indeed are we churchers to come up with such compelling phrases.

Anatomy’s a fair enough term. Our favorite metaphor of the Body, of course, goes way back. And Paul was long into eyes not walking and feet not seeing. Let alone Jesus who was altogether cavalier about what shape bodies were in — dead or alive — and apparently didn’t give sepsis a thought when it came to one’s eyes.

Medical school curricula include a course in gross anatomy where they cut everything up into pieces to examine the parts, but just sort of leave it be whenever they finish without much thought of putting it back together again. Same thing’s true with an autopsy, only with apparently more keeping track.

But the anatomy of a reconciliation? Heaven knows, if they’re going to take one apart up there, I sure hope they know how to get it back together. After all, that’s what we need, not more lab work. We’re getting cadaverous enough as it is.

January 6, 2006

Kings’ X

As the story goes, they were very wise, even smart enough to be kings. On top of that, they must have had an unlimited personal line of credit. Surely they spent a bundle on the gifts they brought and then left in hardly the kind of place where they’d usually stay overnight. In addition, they read stars and altogether well enough to find their way across a perilous desert and back home again.

It’s when they got home that makes me wonder what on earth they must have said. That they found the one who made the very star they followed, the Ruler of the Cosmos, helpless on a bed of straw in a manger? When they began telling something like that around the courtyard, being a king and having executive privilege and all must have come in mighty handy.

No offense. But somehow, the record carefully neglects letting us know how it all came out back in their own precincts, save that history shows the Orient waited a lot of centuries before it ever heard the Good News.

You and I go to the manger every year and don’t seem to find it all that hard to locate. Just now, we’ve been once again. We’ve seen the star and borne the gifts, even if we do have a way of giving them to everybody but the one whose birthday we claim to be celebrating. We’ve made a lot of the usual fuss, often with considerable inconvenience and at great distances, and, heaven knows, we’ve spent a wad ourselves.

Like the three kings, we’re back on familiar ground again, settling down pretty much to normal. Yet if we will, we, too, have a whale of a story to tell all about what we found in a manger.

But unlike those royal magicians, we don’t have executive privilege. We can’t expect people to believe what we say all just because we say it. We learned long ago — or should have — that nobody believes much of anything until they are shown.

We’ve found the King of the Universe at Christmas, we tell them, and he’s that baby in the cow stall. He’s the Word, the Prince of Peace, and he became flesh and moved in. But nobody much listens. Nobody pays attention. Nobody, that is, until all our talk and song and tinsel and light itself becomes flesh. That’s when God’s peace and justice and good will and joy to the world comes alive in our time.

January 5, 2006

Wages

It is a measure of how we care for one another with our “voodoo economics” (Bush 41 sure got that right) that we have to legislate a minimum wage. It hasn’t been changed in over nine years, is still not much over five bucks an hour, and our leaders, comforted with their fat pay and fringes, still squabble about the merits of it all. We should have known in the constant flurry of dyslexia, that what they really meant all along was “conservative compassion.”

Ironically, all this comes at a time when we have got so out of joint about proper Christmas greetings and about our being a Christian nation. Nothing in that gospel gives credence to whether or not what one merits counts much to  God, but that his grace in the Christ child is what gives real substance to this season and is boundless for us all. 

Pity the poor CEOs who only make four or five hundred times as much as their troops all the while basking in their tax dodges and simply cannot even keep faith with their company’s retirement commitments. Would that our lawmakers make as much fuss over that and then turn their patronizing to legislating maximum wages, as well. Merry Christmas, indeed.

January 4, 2006

Celebrate

Celebration means to affirm, to remember, to expect. It is our way of connection in the great adventure of human being.

Celebration affirms the present. All these recent Christmas gifts are not called presents for naught, for they are creations of a new connection, a new past, a shaping of a new future.

Celebration remembers the past. Memory is one of greatest sources of happiness and suffering. It is to make the past neither a source of misery nor pride, neither a prison nor a false escape from responsibility, but a way to connect with all those who lived their lives in order that we might live ours. It is not a pious thought, but a new participation.

Celebration expects the future. The past offers an important and valuable word, but not the last word. Neither is the present the ultimate moment of satisfaction. The future can be the search for promise, the raising of consciousness, the expansion of what we learn from the past and the present, the filament of faith that connects us to the unknown.

Celebrate.

January 2, 2006

Seconds

And so, thanks to the clockers and the earth’s wobble, we’ve suddenly got another second time around to contend with and maybe live it up a little longer. Sammy Cahn and Jimmy van Heusen wrote a tune about times like this. Quincy Jones arranged the socks off it. Count Basie nailed it. Frank Sinatra sang it. It goes like this:

“Love is lovelier, the second time around Just as wonderful, with both feet on the ground / It’s that second time you hear your love song sung / Makes you think perhaps that love, like youth, is wasted on the young

“Love’s more comfortable the second time you fall / Like a friendly home the second time you call / Who can say what brought us to this miracle we’ve found

“There are those who’d bet / Love comes but once — and yet / I’m oh so glad we met / The second time around”

Second, anyone?

January 1, 2006

Emmanuel

One of the profound truths of the Eden myth is that it puts ourselves into our place in nature. As we realize and embrace this truth do we have a real hope of reaching a better understanding, and appreciation, of ourselves and of our stewardship. 

Creationists seem to yearn toward affirming something like this and get kudos for trying, but they get it all wrong. Our commission to name our creature-colleagues in the Garden does not give us permission to master them as if we were somehow separate from them, but to remind us that we are inseparably and integrally part with them, and that we are their servant leaders. Ironically, God makes us the intelligent designers, the shapers, and especially the caregivers for both ourselves and the myriad of our fellow creatures from the mitochondria to the Milky Way and beyond.

If Christmas teaches us nothing else, it affirms how radically material is the religion we call Christianity. Emmanuel, God with us, Word become flesh, our flesh. We are — so far as we now know — the voices of this universe and its apologists. We are God’s fellow conversationalists and workers. We share the gift of that Word, that language, that naming, with one another in our vocation to love God and neighbor and self. 

May this New Year, beginning once again in this season of God’s incarnation with us, so command our attention that the forbidden Eden-fruit which we ate contained not only the knowledge of evil, but as well, the knowledge of good. It is the gift of that good that was in us all along that God redeems in his Christ. If there be any rejoicing in these times, let it be that we yet have the opportunity and the privilege to give that good away ourselves. What better way might we share with God in his gift of peace and good will and justice for all?