March 31, 2006

Bells

A fabulous array of elements make up the cosmos and connect it intimately as if it were some living cell. Indeed do they move through the aeons and the ether suddenly to merge in their midst into us, of all people, both fervently aware of self and wondering enough to discover and know that the me is indeed we, all sorts of we’s, animate and inanimate.

We call it creation, a loaded word that implies a maker, a mind, and the abounding evidence that it is so. We can’t with integrity turn away from it. Like all of what we call life, it is made in cycles and helices and with a peculiar language of its own, telling our story, as it were.

T S Eliot put it rather profoundly like this: “The dance along the artery / The circulation of the lymph / Are figured in the drift of the stars.”

But the stars are not all that drift, for so do the massive undergirdings of our planet, the one of which we’re all made. Whenever they break and crush in their growing pains, so do we, sometimes hardly even noticeably, sometimes catastrophically. That this earth can consume us in its orgies as it often does wreaks heartbreaking tragedy, for we are as profoundly sentient as it seems not to be.

Our calendar today recalls Poet John Donne. He is a recall that we Anglicans, who make such long claims and have such short memories, can use recalling about. He pondered thoughts not altogether unlike this and yet with a startling rhythm of his own. No one of us is an island entire of itself, he told us, but “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, no. 6)

And just to think, if I’d never heard of Ernest Hemingway, I may never have learned about that bell at all.

March 30, 2006

Hunches

Lent 5B Jer 31.31-34

Shortly after my seminary days, I had the privilege of serving on a conference staff with Norman Pittenger, one of our church’s outstanding theologians. Even more impudent then than now, I played a game of stump-the-professor with him. Never mind who won.

I asked him, “How does one ever know the will of God?” Rather than stumble around, pondering and harrumphing, as I hoped he might, he quipped instantly, “Just trust your hunches.”

That’s a hard charge for those of us “from Missouri,” who have to see the evidence, who think intuition is for the birds. But it wasn’t for Jeremiah.

He stood in the biblical tradition that one’s heart is the seat of knowledge, the place where the hard choices are made, that one’s heart is the source for spiritual energy and courage and the ultimate storehouse where fundamental allegiances are kept. And he was apparently giving this tradition a lot of thought.*

But be that as it may, alongside that notion was this other tradition that gave immutable certitude, as well, to an external law of life and covenant given by God to Moses and developed over the centuries, both literally and virtually graven in stone.

On the other hand, Jeremiah’s hunches about God’s will were keeping him up at night. He was already convinced that nobody ever invites a prophet home to dinner more than once. And he knew full well that the old legal, hard-nosed approach never did much good, anyway, and that God was suggesting a radical change, if only he’d listen. So he stood up in the marketplace, took the risk to threaten his already shaky reputation, and shouted…

“Behold, the days are coming, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant… not like the covenant which I made with (your) fathers… my covenant which they broke… ” But now, “I will put my law within (you), and I will write it upon (your) hearts; and I will be (your) God, and (you) shall be my people” (Jer 31.31,33b).

Well, we apparently got the word.

On Ash Wednesday in every Lent, the special collect asks God to “create in us new and contrite hearts” (BCP p 267). And Matthew’s gospel reminds us that where our treasure is, there will our heart be also (Mt 6.21). And as if all that is not enough, today’s collect prays that “our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found” (BCP 219).

In this wartime Lent, we are called once again as followers of the Way to search even more deeply into our hearts where love and God’s law are inseparable, into our hearts where love is commitment, not mere disposition, and into our hearts where love is a deliberate act of the will, not a mere responsive feeling. And where most importantly — if Jeremiah is to be believed — God’s covenant with us is written and can nourish and grow.

In these same hearts, we all pray fervently for peace. Some, not without considerable risk, march and demonstrate for peace. The covenant God makes with us, together with the Incarnation that brought that covenant to fulfillment in his son, not only calls for peace on earth, but in its shocking scheme of things, asks us, as well, both to love and to pray for our enemies.

I thought, how refreshing to be reminded in a time of so much ill will that we truly are people of good will who strive for a government of good will, and how it dare us not to take notice of the irony that these enemies for whom we now pray, together with so many of us, are also children of Abraham, and that we are systematically killing each other and decimating the very spiritual homeland that God gave to us all.

After 9/11, the mystic Thomas Keating spoke of an “ocean of grief” that swelled out in its wake. And what is grief, but a broken heart, not broken only over our loss, but even more deeply perhaps over a broken covenant which God writes inside. On the death of John F Kennedy, Senator Pat Moynihan spoke of the Irish words that apply, as well, to us Christians. “There’s probably not any point in being (a Christian) if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.”

All this fear and grief only heightens our sensitivity to the horror and the hunger and the pain and the injustice that go on somewhere in our world every moment of every day. It only intensifies the need for what we do as the church all the time. If what we are doing here day by day is not relevant, even more relevant now, then it is never relevant at all.

We are people living in this covenant community trying to discern and to do God’s will. We are not of one mind. We have not a common understanding of these complex issues. Nevertheless, we come here again and again to be shaped by the gentle touch of God’s peace.

Let us, then, realize that our hunches and our hearts are often one and the same. Therefore, let us remember that in every choice we face we must steadfastly will the good as we understand it and put ourselves into the hands of God to be shapen at God’s pleasure, then it is altogether likely that trusting our hunches will open our hearts and reveal God’s will. Then will we know a peace that is not the mere absence of war, but the presence of love. After all, Lent is an affair of the heart.

*In both Old and New Testament, the heart is the seat of wisdom (1 Kgs 3.12) and thought and reflection (Jer 24.7, Lk 2.19), the instrument of belief (Rms 10.10) and of will, the principle of action (Ex 35.21) which may be hardened so that it resists God (Dt 15.7; Mk 16.14). Heart is the principle both of virtues and vices, of humility (Mt 11.29) and pride (Dt 17.20), of good thoughts (Lk 6.45) and evil (Mt 15.19).

March 29, 2006

Hurdle

My annual physical, one of life’s little hurdles, generally took up most of the morning yesterday. I’m sure you know the drill. 

The nicest thing about my experience is mostly my doc whose main claim to fame is not only his competence, but his lack of pretense and his gentle sense of confidence-instilling humor.  Why more in that profession can’t come by those virtues is beyond me. 

But we parsons should talk.

We do pretty well in the stuffed shirt department of life ourselves. Is it that we, when serving, only serve to make the served more vulnerable and often too easy to dupe, maybe even to intimidate? Perhaps it’s exactly when we make ourselves seem so indispensable that we make others seem so dispensable. It’s no way to run a railroad — or a clinic. Or a church.

Physical exams aren’t often a time of much bodily comfort, anyway. That is apparently unavoidable. But they don’t have to be simultaneously a time of such emotional discomfort. Our vocation is to  help take the edge off another’s anxiety in whatever ways we are given. Simply by being competent and unostentatious as a human being may be one way quickly to realize and to serve the Christ in the other. 

Duke Ellington put it rather well. “T’ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” 

March 28, 2006

ED

It’s not all that comfortable for OoN to sound off in lamentations and probably an imposition on our readers, but the possibilities for the currently realized electile dysfunction in Tennessee have been roaring in like a freight train for at least ten years past, and I’m weary with it. Covenant, the journal and alternative press which I edit and publish (covpubs.org), has been reporting on this creeping miasma right along over that time, but in spite of that, still an embarrassingly too many act like it’s a big surprise.

The indifference of the laity and the intimidation of the clergy have generally allowed all this to happen.

It’s not the nominees. They’re a generally reasonable lot, some seemingly distracted by an Anglicanism distorted from their side of their fuchsia-colored glasses. It’s no doing of theirs, that’s just the way they are and choices consistent with the Network fellow travelers on our Search Committee, our Standing Committee, and our bishop. They’re very generous to stay this long, and I wouldn’t be too discomfited to see them begin to withdraw.

I suspect we’ll not get past the scheduled the May 6 scheduled “third go” at electing without adjournment. Perhaps we could head this off by some attempt at, but not likely, reconciliation among the presbytery with political common sense as its goal. We’re in a sadness of times here, a testimony to inadequate an episcopal leadership and cloning deployment compromised by denial and grandiosity and a parochial myopia, the Great Commission blinding many to the Great Commandment.

March 27, 2006

News

Karl Barth once said of Christians that we  should keep the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. Which is to say, I suppose, to be simultaneously attentive to the Word and the world. I suppose he’d probably agree that could be anybody, but would be inescapably true of any follower of the Way in what William Temple called the most materialistic of all the religions.

Having both the news and the Good News in hand, though, is one thing.  Reading, learning, and inwardly digesting, as the old collect prays, is quite  another. 

Our president is said never to read the newspapers, but to depend rather on someone else to let him know what he needs to know. I wonder if, as well, he follows the same principle regarding the Bible. As cozy as he seems to be with the religious right and considering some of the decisions they both make, it’s only logical to speculate on whether that’s where he gets his word on the Word, as well.

At least one understanding of what it means to be created in the image of God is to be free to choose to live in harmony with all of creation and with God. Somehow, the president may have been spared such notice. Anyone who claims that not enough science is in on global warming and simultaneously recommends teaching Creationism and Intelligent Design as a science has clearly missed out on some biblical truths about stewardship and incarnation here and there. Maybe especially that one laid down in Eden, of all places, the one about gardening.

March 25, 2006

Annunciation

She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.

He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. “You musn’t be afraid, Mary,” he said.

As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl (Lk 1.26-35).

[Frederick Buechner, “Peculiar Treasures,” Harper & Row, l979, p 39]

March 24, 2006

Underground

NBC is obviously pro-choice. A while back when they aborted their new series “The Book of Daniel” it recalled for me when once upon a time, a Mississippi cousin of mine whose church was of a fundamentalist persuasion wondered and asked if I ever watched ABC’s NYPD Blue.

Then he told me that a prominent parson of a similar species, but of a neighboring village, had “convinced” the area ABC TV stations not to carry the Blue. My cousin said that he and some of his fellow communicants were very disappointed and mighty curious as to why and so would especially like to watch it, anyhow.

In the grandest of southern tradition and ecumenicity, it took us only a couple of minutes to organize a reverse Underground Railway. Together with the unbeknownst help of Uncle Sugar’s Postal Service and some six-hour video tapes, we were soon in business. Well, not actually “in business,” for there was no transaction of any money of a monetary nature, only cousinly love and the thrill of underhanded daring and hooliganism.

Shortly thereafter and way down south in Dixie, a weekly, shades-drawn viewing session of Sipowitz and company had started for them as knew the familiar password, ••••••••, the same one we all use.

March 23, 2006

Bread

Lent 4B   Jn 6.4-15

I left a call for my old friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk and asked him for some counsel about this Sunday’s gospel, John’s account of the Feeding of the Multitudes (Jn 6.4-15). It’s never been all that easy for me to talk about miracles, especially that one, the only one recounted in all four gospels. Quirk can talk about anything with impunity.

He called back shortly, and I had barely said hello, when he pronounced, “It is true that we do not live by bread alone. But it is also true that we don’t live long without it. To eat at all,” he said, “is to acknowledge our dependence — both on food and on each other.” He went on, “It also reminds us of the other kinds of emptiness that not even the Blue Plate Special can touch.” (I’ve a hunch Fred  Buechner put these words in the Canon’s mouth.)

“That’s great,” I replied, only to be interrupted. 

“When old Screwtape (he always liked C S Lewis’s name for Satan)…  when old Screwtape challenged Jesus in the Wilderness to turn the stones into bread, he was told to get lost, to stop insulting God. When Jesus’ disciples challenged him to feed a few thousand families out there in the boonies whether or not there were any stones around, he took a kid’s basket of carp and some bread, fed the whole lot of them, and had more left over than he started with.”

Then Quirk added, “Why did Jesus refuse a simple miracle in the wilderness with the Devil and readily fulfill one in the country side for the multitudes? Why?”

“Maybe,” I dared answer, “maybe he was clearer about the purpose of his life at the later time?” 

“No,” the Canon roared. “Where did you ever get such an idea? What matters is that both stories are there and most importantly, they’re about bread. And once again they remind us that to eat at all is to acknowledge our dependence — both on food and on each other. And that it also reminds us of all of other kinds of emptiness that not even the Blue Plate Special can touch — the poor, the starving, the millions without health insurance, the….  

“Eating,” the Canon was in full lecture mode now, “even when you’re alone, eating is a corporate act. You don’t make that food all by yourself. It’s a global economic affair. It’s a family affair. That’s the way the Holy Spirit works. That’s the way Jesus works. Out there with Satan,” he added, “it wasn’t a matter of eating. It was a matter of grandstanding, and Jesus wisely would have none of it.”

The rest of our conversation was more gossip about what happens to priests when they become bishops, a kind of bread neither of us had yet tasted and never would. Frustrated, we hung up.

Our conversation about bread reminded me that whether or not we’ve ever yet seen that what we do around this table every Sunday is exactly what Jesus was doing out there with that crowd,  surely we’ve seen it now. For both are miracles, not so much the kind that create faith, but the kind that our corporate faith, itself, opens for God by grace to create. Miracle, indeed.

We bring faith to this table. Maybe it’s not all that commanding or noticeable to us or to anybody else in our lives, maybe there’s not even much piety in it, but it’s there or we wouldn’t be here. One of the startling things about this eucharistic life in which we, the church, center ourselves and which we embrace is how similar it is to all the rest of our life and especially to our relationships and, indeed, to this story about feeding the multitudes. 

Life seems always richest when we’re  thankful, even, I’ve found, when we’re thankful for the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. In the first few months of beginning to recover something of my humanity through learning to live a Twelve-Step program, I was consciously thankful and talking about it to the point of annoying others. But then along came an unfortunate disappointment, and I was into a plague of the “poor me’s” in a New York minute. Finally, a friend said to me, “You have been so thankful that the rest of us are getting nauseated hearing about it. If you really mean it, why not try being thankful now for whatever this is that’s so terrible?”  AA calls it an “attitude of gratitude.” I’ve never seen a time when it doesn’t accomplish miracles in itself. Such a capacity for thanksgiving is, indeed, of the substance of the “spiritual awakening” of which the twelfth step speaks.

The celebration of the Eucharist, just as Jesus’ celebration with the loaves and the fishes embodies such an attitude of gratitude. Eucharist means grace, it means thanksgiving, it is why we come here together every week, thankful or not, to celebrate thanksgiving and get a life of it.

We have met the offering, and it is us. The bread and the wine and the offering of money are us, our nourishment, our sustenance, a microcosm of us — our loves, our companionships, our families, our parenting, our children, our work, our loneliness, our joys, our sorrows, our anxieties, our angers, our guilt, our resentments, our pleasures. All are brought into the presence of the Christ to be blessed and received again. We are no different from the thousands gathered there on that hillside — also gathered with Jesus.

The story continues. Watch the similarity with what we do in this place. Jesus took the loaves, and first, gave thanks. We sometimes call it saying grace, another meaning of the word eucharist. Then he broke the loaves and shared them. He would do this same thing again with the bread and the wine in the Upper Room, saying the very words we say here, and again on the road to Emmaus. And again, in a very few moments with us.

And further, Jesus is always apt to come into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon — of all places — not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but at supper time or walking along a road, or in the person seated next to you. He never approaches from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and in the midst of the questions that real life always asks.

Our vocation is to pattern that life that’s shaped in the Liturgy in our own way. To take and receive it as it comes to us. To bless it, which is to give thanks for it. To sacrifice it, which is to recognize that it is already made sacred. And to share it. Just as with the thousands gathered there and with the hundreds who gather here. That is to make eucharist, to share in a miracle. 

That is the miracle. It is to acknowledge our dependence — both on food and on each other. It also reminds us of the other kinds of emptiness — in us and in our families and especially in our society and in the world, the kinds of emptiness that even the Blue Plate Special can never touch.

March 22, 2006

Blugh

I understand how the neologism “blog” derives, but that doesn’t keep me from hearing it as an unfortunately ugly word with an offhanded and breezy ring to it that has no appeal to me at all. I am sure it has its purpose, but it’s purpose is not mine. Blugh on it, anyway.

On the other hand, my almost-daily albeit short essay (now there’s a word I like) would, in my case, at least, be next to impossible without e-mail. I can’t imagine taking out my old manual “desktop” (we never called it that before cyberwobble talk) Royal which I sorely miss, then writing, addressing, and mailing 700+ copies of Out of Nowhere In to Somewhere all over the place five or six days a week and keeping up-to-date track of it, as well.

That said, there’s the matter of content. OoN is not the usual, heaven-forbid churchy, tuna-casserole supper type newsletter. Nor has it apparently ever bothered me all that much to be impeded by the Who-am-I-to-be sounding-off-like-this syndrome.

Nevertheless, if reader response means anything — and it surely does to me — the little homebound domestic gardenly and neighborly pieces usually get more response than the wannabe Tom Friedmans and Maureen Dowds. (Except from CP who’s not all that fond of the comments she gets at the grocery and elsewhere from folk who ask about some matter she’d up till then presumed was altogether private.)

Anyhow, I must confess that there’s an investigative reporter pleasure — albeit armchair — that comes from the temptation to make pontifical commentary on matters of state and church. These two institutions and their leaders so often seem yet in some adolescently stumbling awe over the treasures that have been placed by grace in their hands that it is hard not to comment on why they treat with them like the ne’er-do-well inheritors of some megabucks estate.

Succumb to that, and the “who-am-I” bit kicks in. Then I’m always reminded of my seminary theology professor’s marginal note on a paper in which I apologized for taking issue with the great Archbishop William Temple. “On you, Denson,” he wrote, “humility is unbecoming.” But then, humility among those of us — whether professional or just blogged down — who presume to write these things is never all that noticeable, becoming or not.

March 21, 2006

Taxes

H & R Block may be a private enterprise paradigm of compassionate conservatism. Every year about this time, their ads assure us little guys how they can save taxes for us. How they can help keep our money in our own  pockets and away from any further collateral damage being done by the U S Department of Defense.

It was with some considerable surprise then and, indeed, shock, when I learned the other day that those Worthy Helpers are in trouble for being something less than efficient with the very thing they claim so much skill about — the fees we pay them. But even more ironic, the IRS is also after them for, of all things, being megabucks  behind in the payment of their own income taxes.

Not just to let this pass, maybe there’s a new ministry here for the church. Let alone that the tax behemoths themselves need a lot of TLC, what about our own? Might we gain some  confidence by simply extending more pastoral concern to our own congregations by helping them save their money rather than always asking them for more for this project or  that? 

One way of looking at it is that we’re already anyway a sort of Spiritual Health Maintenance Organization (aka SHMO). So now, this would only be to extend that kind of holistic care one more step. We could even keep it comforting and  familiar and simply call it H & R Flock.