February 28, 2006

Cycles

There are crisis liturgies that come only once in a lifetime — baptism, marriage, ordination, burial, and the like. And there are cyclic liturgies that repeat themselves through the years, for some, perhaps, ad nauseum — Christmas, Easter, anniversaries. But for others, with renewed meaning and vigor as our own personal and communal histories turn through our lives.

The Eve of Ash Wednesday may be one of these. A sort of ordered mad zaniness makes the substance of it, an hilarity over anticipating the rigors (for some, anyhow) of the Lenten shroud that covers ever so finely as the ashes to come. We call it Mardi Gras from the French for Fat Tuesday, and Fat Tuesday from using all the lard in the house for festive baking before the meatless Lenten fast. Some call it Shrove Tuesday in honor of the good riddance of old sins and the exciting anticipation of a journey into newer ones.

“New Orleans” is an almost instant thought integral to the image of this day. New Orleans, whose being was savaged almost beyond recognition only a few months ago, now suddenly bursts alive again with the mere thought of it, Mardi Gras. And throughout this planet of storms and quakes and floods and wars and incompetent leaders we all rejoice and let the jazz ring out. We are saints, our gospel tells us, and once more, we’ve done gone marching in.

February 27, 2006

Lamentation

At the height of the oppression of apartheid, so goes the story, South African government soldiers surrounded Desmond Tutu’s church with loaded guns across their chests. Calmly, he addressed them, and said, “Please join us, for you have already lost.” 

Something about this scene strikes me as startlingly similar to all those who now surround the church emblazoned with their own myopic focus on the gospel. They’ve no guns across their chests. But they’re no less armed with equally loaded and deadly threats arising out of a confusion apparently unable to distinguish between the authority of Holy Scripture’s normative tradition and that of even the best-intentions of pontifical councils. 

This spiritual apartheid neither reforms nor refreshes, but only cripples and diminishes our collegial capacities to respond to God’s Commandment to love and to God’s subsequent Commission to implement that Commandment throughout the world. One can only sense and fear a kind of adolescent hooliganism about it all that only retards a more mature response to what truly must be our Lord’s lamentation,  ”Please join us, for you have already lost.” 

February 25, 2006

Lots

St Matthias, the Also-Ran, had his symbolic fifteen minutes of fame on the calendar  yesterday. He’s the one the Apostles-Minus-One elected by casting lots to fill their ranks after Judas copped out. I don’t think I’ve ever run into anybody named Matthias or, for that matter, heard much else about him. Getting appointed the way he did, it is well, I suppose, that neither did Matthias ever hear of Einstein’s “relatively” certain assertion  that God doesn’t shoot dice.

I have to admire him on the face of it, though, for even if he did get in sort of as a petitionary candidate, filling in for Judas was probably not the easiest route to apostolic success. He anyhow had earlier credentials than Paul who came along later the hard way through a glass darkly and who often seemed a bit insecure and defensive about how valid were his own. 

The apostolic order, however, may be one of the better plans to come out of the early church, even if it has sort of been downhill ever since. Our bishops (aka overseers) are pretty much what these days we substitute instead. When you think about it, it’s still sort of a gamble the ways we choose them. In the long run, not many of them seem so aggressive or, as it is sometimes said, full of the spirit, but they do most of them make a pretty good impression so long as they don’t say too much. 

It would be good, however, if once in a while a bishop or even a house full of them  instead of being so preoccupied with what folk do in their private time would stand up and say “Enough!” about the way the church insists so often on pandering to the frequently less than relevant. Even the world then might take notice, but don’t cast lots on it.

February 24, 2006

Laugh

Bertolt Brecht said, He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news. 

A friend of mine wondered if Jesus ever laughed. That he always seemed to preach mostly good news might be distracting for he early on surely had a notion there was some bad  news down the line. Maybe he was too young to pick up on old Simeon’s forecast when he was playing catch with him in the Temple and driving his mum bananas (Lk 2.29-32), but given all his noticeable prescience at whatever age  you never can tell.

In Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” the monks all stay in a constant switch over whether or not Jesus ever laughed. They take some altogether drastic steps to make their point one way or the other. It’s never bothered me so much, save I can’t imagine, given us then and us now,  how Jesus could ever avoid laughing, if only sardonically.

He was surrounded with about the same quota of stuffed shirts in church and state we have going for us in these times, maybe even fewer, if one can imagine it, and if you pay any attention to them at all, such are always an inspiration for satire. 

Considering all the churchery type Dukes of Puffery charging about on the Dark Side these days with all their bad news, it’s never all that clear how they could ever really be serious about whatever it is they’re serious about. Of course, if we just don’t take them so seriously, the whole church and maybe even the world will be a lot better off. But they’ll always be the first to tell you anyway, long faces and all, that it’s no laughing matter and then probably quote you some Bertolt Brecht all the while singing “Mack, the Knife.”

February 23, 2006

Impressions

Epiphany last B Mk 9.2-9

DNA and anthropology have joined forces now to throw out the notion of “race” — for human beings, at least — as altogether arbitrary. Our puzzlement about all our other biological pigeonholes is probably not all that far behind.

The more we know about ourselves, the more we discover not only how drastically we’ve allowed impressions and appearances to deceive us, how indeed foolish has been our behavior and all those other ways of defining ourselves — our laws, our politics, our religion, our educational systems, maybe, as well, even the way we treat chimpanzees. All important to order our lives, but to order them is not to define them. Now that we know these things, the new problem is what will we do about them. Indeed, will we do anything?

Appearances were also deceptive for the three who went walking in the mountains with their leader. Even when they saw him in a totally different light, they still didn’t get the point. But then, the Voice — think James Earl Jones — “This is my beloved son, my Chosen. Listen to him.” Paul got it. “We are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another” was the way he put it.

Such a perspective seems altogether missing in the way we continue to fall for appearances, to lay so much stock by them. Whether we are gay or straight matters for our own personal identity and understanding of ourselves, for who we are. But the more fundamental fact is that whatever, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for [we] are all one in Christ Jesus” [Gal 3.28]. This is where our true identity lies, and as we grow into our vocation, into our humanity — which is God’s image for us — do we begin to reveal the Light behind all creation.

Appearances are deceptive. There are no ordinary people. We are all on the way to being glorified — if we will have it. Transfiguration reveals in Jesus the Light of God as it does potentially in ourselves and our neighbors in a totally new and different way. Whoever we are, we are called to be transparent to this Light, the Light which flooded through in Christ and thus “to seek and serve him in all persons” [BCP, p 305].

February 22, 2006

Presidents

The other day on Presidents Day, an editorial in The Arizona Republic reminded us that, “As a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Jimmy Carter deserves the admiration of all Americans, regardless of political affiliation.

“Most retired politicians pursue leisure activities or the accumulation of wealth. After leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter formed the Carter Center, and he has devoted all of the moneymaking potential of being a former president to the eradication of disease in Africa, spreading democratic values around the world, and raising public awareness of mental-health issues.”

In his new book, “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis,” Carter wrote for his lead, “Americans cherish the greatness of our homeland, but many do not realize how extensive and profound are the transformations that are now taking place in our nation’s basic moral values, public discourse, and political philosophy.”

The book is about his biblical faith and morals, the same sort of things Martin Luther King preached about. It is sad but no wonder that he has been much maligned of late and even called “clueless and classless.” We usually treat the prophets a lot worse, but then very few of them have ever been president of the United States.

Only Washington and Lincoln “made the cut” to get remembered on Presidents Day. Two hits out of forty-three times at the plate is not much of a batting average, but it does show a more impressive and less spotty sense of judgment than has our body politic the last few times around.

There’s a creeping unisex bubba mentality in our land, one possible result of our downhill slide in public education and, as President Carter said, “the transformations that are now taking place in our nation’s basic moral values, public discourse, and political philosophy.” All this makes the candidates we choose not only no surprise, but inevitable. Washington and Lincoln were hardly “C” students.

A cyber friend has for her e-mail signature, “Our poor show us who we are. Our prophets show us who we can be. So, we hide our poor and kill our prophets.” We seem often to forget who we are and certainly who our Founders thought we can be, but seem merely to settle for who we think we are and even that in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

February 21, 2006

Feet

A specialist has been defined as a person who knows more and more about less and less until she knows all there is to know about nothing. God may be such a specialist. You gotta hand it to her, for look at all she had to know about in order to create what she did out of absolutely nothing.

The Anglican Communion used to be like that, if you allow that it’s mostly this side of heaven and not all that organized. It was made up of a lot of autocephali each with just enough spiritual DNA in common to keep it all running. Actually, it seems a lot easier to concentrate on Jesus that way, without all the worrying about and fussing over orthodoxy.

Of course, there seem always the creeds to contend with. They’re surely more than nothing when it comes to anybody agreeing as to what they mean. But they would probably fall apart without Jesus, and, without Jesus, God would have an even harder time getting through to us, the prophets not withstanding.

I looked at a website the other day of a church that seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it too. I was looking because its rector is one along with three others scuffling to be the next bishop in what more or less used to be our diocese. His parish claims to have one foot planted in something called the Anglican Communion Network, an outfit that from the looks of it seems to be more interested in orthodoxy than God, certainly than people, and the other foot planted in the Episcopal Church in the USA, an outfit which seems more of the Anglican type, which is to say that it cannot agree all that much about anything but loving folk and even that seems at times up for grabs. If the Network continues its drift apart from the church like now, I should think that such foot-planting could get downright precarious.

Anyhow, when it comes to naming, I prefer “church” to “network” if only because it means being gathered together and not just tangled, which is what network suggests. The one requires dirt and boundaries to locate itself, the other, just lots of money (which, of course, is not all that bad).

God used dirt, but never bothers to say where it came from. Or maybe it was just playdough which is about as ubiquitous as one can get. I’m biased enough and a bit self-serving, however, to think that it came, would you believe, out of nowhere.

But if it’s any help, I remember Jesus claiming to have been around a long time even since before Abraham, but if he knew or cared not ever much talking about where the dirt came from. If anybody could have asked God, surely he could have, had he not been such a respecter of persons, a way of life, come to think of it, we’d do well to plant both feet on.

February 20, 2006

Memory

The New Yorker Magazine celebrates its anniversary sometime in February each year by running a picture on its cover of Eustace Tilley, a rather foppish aesthete, imagined to be, I suppose, a rather typical New Yorker. A number of OoN’s readers will surely know exactly when and why.

It’s the sort of thing one might ask Google back in the days before Google went to China and before Justice discovered it. But I’m leaving it up to somebody else to ask because I’m not so at ease as once I was with Google. Or, should I say, I exercise more care what I ask them, now that I know the Department of Justice has discovered them and is busier looking over my shoulder than after my liberty.

But whenever The New Yorker began, OoN began last summer three years ago and started its archive about the same time (www.covpubs.org) as proof. Unlike The New Yorker, we have no patron like Eustace to celebrate once a year, but we do have a Matron of Inspiration. Parson extraordinaire Barbara Cawthorne Crafton is she, but we can hardly expect her to confess it. We’d run her picture had we the cybersavvy and if, as well,we had a prissy caricature of her.

Anyhow, BCC, as Bob Hope might say, Thanks for the memory.

February 17, 2006

Prayer

An OoN reader wrote and asked about prayer.

I think of prayer more as being than doing. Paul’s “pray without ceasing” is a habit which can lead to a constant attitude, even if not always consciously so. Enclosed in that same “envelope” would be a willingness, especially, a willing of the good. A willing of the good when at all capable will more than likely lead one to do and to be what God wills. For example, rather than praying for miracles, praying instead for understanding, which is to find meaning. 

There is a constancy about God’s creation, but not an unchanging one. Evolution is more consistent with the way God does things and the way God is than, for example, intelligent design, which has a sort of static way about it. 

Prayer is one way of implementing faith. Faith, not as doctrine, but as a way of living, a willingness. It has been said that faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.

February 16, 2006

Faith

Epiphany 7B Mk 2.1-12

“And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and when they had made an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay… And when Jesus saw their faith… he said to the paralytic… ‘Take up your pallet and go home.’”

As Mark tells this short story about Jesus, one cannot but wonder at the bumptious chaos of the scene. The room is packed so that even the door cannot be opened. A preachment is underway, the audience is surely intent on every word. And suddenly somebody starts taking the roof apart.

Some scholar from the Jesus Seminar or the like would surely know about roofs in Capernaum at the time of Jesus and even how to dismantle one. I know nothing, but I am sure that when those four guys with a gurney came through, it must have made one helluva mess.

It is said that Mark wrote his gospel with urgency and almost as a brief. Perhaps that’s why he goes into no more detail in this tale about any damage control. All that aside, he surely means to remind us of the great power of faith, not only of our own personal faith, but of the faith of the community of which we are a part.

When we bring a child to baptism, such faith is in effect. When we sponsor someone to be confirmed, such faith is at work. When we promise to envelop and help sustain a marriage, a celebration of a new ministry, an ordination, such faith is always in play. As well, in the laying on of hands, in a simple phone call to a shut-in, in the intercessions in the prayers of the people, there is the kind of faith that can also raise the roof in the name of God.

It has been said that a sacrament is God offering his holiness to us. And that a ritual is our raising up the holiness of our humanity to God. This healing in Mark’s gospel, our next time that we gather around the Holy Table with our parish, is, as well, such an exchange.