May 31, 2006

Summit

Visitation of the BVM

Cousins Mary and Elizabeth had only recently discovered that with God, nothing is impossible. But just to make sure, they were having a prenatal course correction about this surprising turn of events. Actually, it was a lot more. Call it a pre-Gospel summit, for it surely left us with two markers just short of the Lord’s Prayer, itself, to guide us along the Way [Lk 1.39-56].

Elizabeth’s benediction affirming grace incarnate nourishes and comforts untold numbers through light and dark, sorrow and joy. Mary’s paean of thanksgiving and prophetic challenge ranks alongside the Old Testament worthies in calling the church away from its ongoing obsession with navel-gazing and self-preservation and back to its Great Commandment and Commission.

Has there ever been a time when following and implementing the Rosary and the Magnificat were more essential to our good health and judgment than now?

May 30, 2006

Shelter

Every chance it gets, religion stifles faith. Perhaps one of its more subtle ways is its often successful attempt to make of faith, itself, a religion, to make a deeply subjective personal commitment and risk into a rigid system of right and wrong.

Compare that neat and innocent, albeit bold, title over on page 845 in the Prayer Book, “An Outline of the Faith,” and the lesser title over which it looms, “commonly called the Catechism.” And compare every bishop’s ordination vow to “guard the Faith.” If that doesn’t scare the beejeebies out of the purple as it should out of the rest of us, then we’re simply not paying attention.

The religious establishment in Jesus’ day similarly put their dogma ahead of his faith, and subsequently, of course, his humanity. Perhaps you’ve noticed how the practice continues, how it has apparently never been out of vogue, and how it remains so firmly planted today that it threatens the very life of the community that has given it the freedom with which it is so careless. It was that milieu that forced Jesus to say that even though all else has its place, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” [Mt 8.20].

Saint Theresa of Lysieux surely meant something like this when she wrote with such great spiritual insight that, “If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.”

A dear mentor of mine once said that if I love my neighbor and hate myself, God help my neighbor. For when those times come that we cannot accept ourselves or our neighbor for some self-imposed reason, some so-called orthodoxy that rejects God’s forgiving grace for all and prevents our own wholeness, then we have turned against this “freedom (for which) Christ has set us free.” But if we can love ourselves — and our neighbor — in spite of all we know to be unlovable about the both of us, if we can will to bear serenely that trial of being displeasing to ourselves, then we will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter where the Son of Man can lay his head, indeed. We will be for Jesus… a church, a faithful people.

May 29, 2006

Pathos

For a moment the other day, when the president finally got around to remembering and admitting something other than the customary and innocuous “mistakes were made,” he limited his rare gaffe only to smart talk rather than dumb deeds. But even so, he said, his remarks were surely “misinterpreted,” thus taking the edge off his mea culpa by passing off at least a piece of the buck to somebody else. 

For the life of me, I cannot come up with anyway to interpret “Bring ‘em on” and “Wanted dead or alive” in some other way. I spent too much time at the Saturday morning movies growing up in west Texas not to savvy that kind of talk. Maybe there’s some shade between cocky and arrogant that might allow for a bit of nuance, but then nuance is not exactly the sort of sophistication one goes looking for in the oval office.

Yes, Abu Ghraib was mentioned and maybe shows up over in the dumb-deeds column of Bush’s admission, but even so, as he said, others did it. “The people who committed those acts were brought to justice,” he said. “They’ve been given a fair trial and tried and convicted.” None of the usual and prideful commander-in-chief talk on this watch. 

Along these same lines, our annual keeping of Memorial Day always seems to me more passive than active. Everything from the music to the monuments reenacts the past to the point of making me wonder whether or not we’ll ever begin to learn from the experience of that past and all the millions who died to teach us that war is always a mistake. Intentional, regime-changing war is even more so. 

I’m saddened for myself and for my colleagues in the Great Middle War (aka WW II) that the keeping of Memorial Day so often borders on glorifying that stuff rather than learning from it. That failure, that sign of our national pathology is eating us alive.

May 26, 2006

Yesterday

St Bede, the Venerable, an ecclesiastical heavyweight in his own right, customarily enjoys May 25 for us to remember him. Not this year. He simply had to move over and make room for Ascension’s thunder, which, in the manner and wont of liturgical heavies plain muscled him out so that he’s disappeared from my kalendar altogether, but not from my memory or my spiritual family tree.

Bede’s life spanned the late 7th through the early 8th centuries. He was a Biblical scholar and was known as the Father of English History. Most of his works have long Latin titles I would probably misspell and certainly mispronounce, so you’ll not even have to try. 

Interestingly, his works on English history owe their value primarily to such rare practice as his collecting information from those most likely to know, to his meticulous separation of historical fact from fiction and hearsay, and to his compelling vividness of description. Such accuracy and integrity apparently has never much leant itself to present-day scholarship, nor been of any use toward inspiring the more popular mass media demands (cf. da Vinci’s sudden fame as a mystery writer).

Even in a church sometimes longer on titles than on substance, not many get to be called “venerable,” save perhaps one of those lesser satrap Anglican archdeacons or like when the Romans accord someone the lowest of three degrees of sanctity, whatever they are. Personally, I think my old friend and sometime mentor P D Quirk secretly desired such a designation in the pantheism of puffery. After all, “canon” is pretty commonplace and often subject to all sorts of dark humor. Perhaps it might comfort Quirk to know that Bede, himself, received his esteemed title only posthumously and then almost a century following his demise. 

Coincidental to all this foolishness, yesterday’s May 25 is also CP’s and my wedding anniversary, the gathering felicitous years of which fast approach  something like venerable, themselves. Fred Buechner says that “matrimony is called holy because this brave and fateful promise of a man and a woman to love and honor and serve each other through thick and thin looks beyond itself to more fateful promises still and speaks mightily of what human life at its most human and its most alive and most holy must always be” [Listening to Your Life, p 141]. I should like to think he’d say the same about why any truly committed partnership can be called holy. I certainly can.

May 25, 2006

Vacancy

Ascensiontide  Mk 16.9-15,19f

When the people in the world of the Bible experienced what they called principalities and powers, they were discerning the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their time.

Few today ever consider spirituality that way or as anything other than some vacuous synonym for religion and as a more or less irrelevant matter left to its practitioners. A further phenomenon is to presume that if something is spiritual, it must therefore be good, thus risking our overlooking the daemons for evil that lurk not only in our societies, but also in ourselves. They, too, of course, are “spiritual.”  That we allow all this to happen is to our ultimate peril.

But we allow it anyway, even encourage it in our public education systems with their disdain for the libraries and the humanities, the arts and the world’s religions. That we do so has perhaps never been more obvious and reckless than it is today.

All this leaves an empty space in the way we live, a vacancy into which rush the daemons of denial and grandiosity, pleasure and distraction, violence and illiteracy, and whatever else is at hand, thus rendering impotent the possibility of any creative stewardship of our lives.

Something of that order is happening now in places like the middle east. Iraq and the whole miasma of that area is emploding, and we seem helpless to know what, if anything, to do about it, save regime-change by force, all the while in denial of the changes needed in our own house. This, I suspect, is a result of our misunderstanding, just plain ignorance, and, even worse, indifference to how these spiritual energies, these principalities and powers work in societies, certainly in our own, let alone in others.

Mark’s Ascension gospel reminds us of the hapless and frightened disciples demonstrating how the misery of their sudden emptiness does, indeed, love company. Jesus had filled that space in their lives. His energy fed their energy, his charisma gave them enthusiasm, his manifest power gave them courage, his teaching gave them direction, and his confidence gave them hope.

Once Jesus left, the little circle seemed vacant, tattered, needing to be repopulated and reenergized. What had seemed so vibrant with Jesus present now seemed cold and lifeless with Jesus absent. Doubt and fear rushed in to fill their hearts.

The gospel’s inherent irony is perhaps nowhere more poignant than in this scene. They’d already heard that something new and exciting had happened, but they chose not to believe it. Then, Mary Magdalene of all people and whom they knew only too well comes and tells them the good news of Jesus’ new life. Of course, neither did they believe her, even though they probably knew she’d been freshly purged of seven daemons of heavens-knows-what. Even so, the Magdalene was not your average soccer mom, but yet does she become the apostle to the apostles-to-become, and with little tribute to the rest of us males who stand in their succession and who so often miss the point ever so clearly as did they.

In our liturgical keeping of time, we stand in between this time when we remember Jesus’ return to his father and the Pentecost when we commemorate the gift of the Holy Spirit’s birthing the church.  Perhaps this, as well, can remind us of our empty spaces and call us to attend to how they will be filled.

Will we, as do so many, surrender to the usual crippled understanding of spirituality as merely another organized and irrelevant religion? Or will we welcome this Pentecost, embracing God’s Holy Spirit to renew us again as church, letting that presence fill the vacancy in our lives, get us past some of our present foolish diversions,  feed our energy, spur our enthusiasm, encourage and direct us, give us confidence and hope?

As we observe the eleven disciples in Mark’s story, we know that the work, the ministry, the caring, the healing, the teaching, the conflicts, the suffering, the sacrificing, the storytelling, the recruiting, the dying — is now theirs to bring into this space. They could not just follow Jesus as before. They themselves had to embrace Holy Spirit as did he to fill the space he once occupied. And it is to our eternal benefit that they did precisely that, thanks to God’s gift to them of the Magdalene and others like her.

It was like moving to a new home, into lots of promise and little warmth. It is like starting a companionship with someone who is largely a stranger, or starting a new job and knowing that all the sudden your resumé means next to nothing. We can either just stand there in our religious puffery or we can embrace Holy Spirit in hand and heart, and then go out into the marketplace, into the crowd, into the swirl of pilgrims seeking God. The Spirit did not fashion for the disciples a nest, where they could feel safe and comfortable. The Spirit set them on fire. The Spirit drove them into the wilderness and into the streets.

Dan Corrigan was a few decades ago one of our church’s more devoted and exciting bishops. In the old 1928 prayer book, there was no “dismissal” at the end of the Eucharist as there is now. So he would stand at the altar, pronounce the closing Blessing, pause for a moment… then, in his great, booming voice, literally shout at us…

“Get up! Get out! And get lost!”

May 24, 2006

Fence

There is a story about a scene in Hell.

It tells of a vast sea of some boiling substance, not water, something more viscous and clinging. Hundreds were suffering there, treading, barely keeping heads above the surface. Rather than merely being consumed and disintegrating, they were being flayed over and over again.

Suddenly, there came dangling down from above something of a filament, string-like. The nearest person took hold of it in desperation, and began slowly to be pulled upward.

All those around rushed to the scene to grab hold, others taking hold of them until a huge mass of human beings was being pulled slowly up and out of the scalding tempest. The person holding to the filament looked down, screaming and writhing to shake the others loose, so much so that the slender filament suddenly snapped, and the entire lot of them dropped and sank out of sight.

We’ve a Statue of Liberty, this land of ours, that tells us: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

There’s to be a tall fence built around it.

May 23, 2006

Housekeeping

This story recently came across the wire. Its principals have names, but it works as well with or without — and it gave me an idea.

At a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, a professor of law was requested to testify. At the end of his testimony, one of the Republican senators said, “Professor, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?”

The professor replied, “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

In our peculiar Anglican experiment, we don’t treat the Bible as the last word on everything. Slavery. Usury. Property ownership. Ironically, even on divorce. So why marriage? “To marry” is a neuter verb used for the joining of all sorts of things — ideas, metals, whatever. Indeed, our source of authority as we understand it, is an intimate marriage of Scripture, tradition, and reason, a sort of ménage a trois. [Steady, there, it literally means a household for three.]

So a couple of folk come along and say they will love, comfort, and honor each other to the end of their days. And not just when they feel like it or it is otherwise convenient, but for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health when they don’t feel like it at all, and it’s pain in the neck. And that they’d like to have their agreement, their covenant, blessed and documented. What could possibly be more extravagant? Here’s my freedom, partner, and don’t forget my burdens, too.

So what’s in it for me?

Each other, that’s what. Assuming they have any success at all in keeping these rash, quixotic, outlandish promises, they’ll never have to face the world quite alone again. Somebody for show and tell, for talk and listen, tolerate and test, confess and forgive, a place to practice kindness, loyalty, and love so that when you get it into better shape, you can give it away. Somebody to get through it with, side by side. An anchor for the neighborhood, a benchmark where to measure things.

Even God had friends. And then what is that strange notion of the Trinity all about, anyway. More trois, for heaven’s sake. And then, when Jesus turned the water into wine at Cana, what was that all about, perhaps it was a way saying more or less the same thing. Sounds like a pretty good way to run a railroad and, as some say, to keep life between the curbs and one off the streets.

And we want to limit that possibility to have more families like that to enrich our society only to a man and a woman? What about those “self-evident” truths about equality and Godly endowment with certain unalienable rights like Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, that’s why we have a government — and a Constitution to run it with and make it so. Who needs to start limiting that?

Well, I’ll swear.

May 22, 2006

Foolishness

If there is not some old axiom that says that ecclesiology is not an exact
science, there should be.

Surely it is easier to understand quantum mechanics than it is the church, albeit they have some things in common. Like the quantum notion might imply, one can neither locate the church’s position nor determine its direction at one and the same time. Which is to say that like the light which calls the church and the light which it is commissioned to follow and to reveal is neither wave nor particle all at the once, neither is the church institution nor congregation.

Perhaps this is why Anglicanism’s ordered freedom is both so winsome and coincidentally so frustrating. On the other hand, an oxymoron, according to and thanks to the Greeks, is something that is keenly foolish, and that on the face of it should be a delightful place to be and to be preferred over some others.

We’ve been led this way and that through the centuries tripping over our authoritative three-legged stool of Bible, tradition, and reason as if we had some idea, howbeit focussedly vague, of where we were and where we might be going. Heisenberg surely could have learned from us, and maybe he did. Anyhow, I’m glad old Richard Hooker did it first, for with a name like that, how could anyone resist a little foolishness now and then?

May 20, 2006

Prayer

I don’t remember that we prayed much in my family in my earlier years. When I was about seven, my mom caught her finger in the door once and muttered much to my surprise a four-letter word I had only recently learned. I was shocked. She was embarrassed, said something like when one gets older, one sometimes says things like this. It was not a prayer in any usual sense, but it was an oath, and that comes close, I suppose.

In the more formal prayers, like the collects in the several offices and for the Sundays, for example, we always seem to address God — usually implying his fatherhood (or her motherhood, if you prefer, as I increasingly for some reason do in that it seems only fair to change for a few centuries) — and then we add some one of her attributes or characteristics rather as if she didn’t already know that or maybe had forgot it and needed reminding. I think of this week’s Fifth Sunday of Easter collect that begins “Almighty God… ” and then qualifies or elaborates with “whom truly to know is everlasting life… ”

I wonder what that means, this knowing and living being so truly enmeshed, and as if that is what everlasting life really is, a super long trek into theology. Truly to know God is, I suppose, also truly to be known by God, a perfected kind of anthropology, perhaps. And that would certainly seem to have an everlasting and engaging aura about it.

That prayer seems sometimes pretentious bothers me, for it reminds me that prayer may unavoidably be more selfish than seems felicitous. My mother, with her finger smarting from the door, surely used a different liturgy, but it comforts me to think she had the same God in mind.

May 19, 2006

Friends

Easter 6B Jn 15.9-17

“What a friend we have in Jesus.”

I never did like either that hymn or the one about sunbeams. Let alone the hokey tune, the friendly lyric itself sounded like that if Jesus was looking for a friend in me, he had gone wanting. Later on, as maturity began to creep up on my blind side, I didn’t like the way it challenged me to get serious about what it means to be a friend. It’s like Jesus has never stopped challenging me. Maybe that’s what it means to be a friend. Somebody who never stops caring, like Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven.

Did the disciples, do we, truly realize what Jesus offers when he offers his friendship — “(All) that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you,” he told them (Jn 15.15b). The very intimacy he had with God, his Father, he was passing down? And then there’s Moses. It says over in Exodus that “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (33.11). And God says the same thing about Abraham, “Abraham, my friend” (Is 41.8). It is a staggering thought to be included in such company. But that is where we are if we are even halfway faithful to the apostles’ fellowship and teaching as we claim in the Baptismal Covenant of a Sunday morning.

The love of God. The mercy of God. The judgment of God. You take your shoes off when you think about that. But the friendship of God? (cf Frederick Buechner)

Nobody can be a friend alone, apparently not even God. Further, friendship is something far more about what we are than what we do. I can love you. I can even make you my beloved, but I do that altogether on my own, single-hearted. If my love is not returned, I’m in for some big withdrawal pain, a lousy hangover, and a longing for thou, for “I-Thou” as old Martin Buber might put it. But on the other hand, I suspect it’s not possible to befriend someone, and do it all alone and stand there slack-jawed, wondering at the incompletion of it, the where-did-it-all-go of it. I wonder if friendship is not the original tango two-step?

George Fox, the founder of the 17th century so-called Quaker Movement, actually preferred the thought of his followers as friends of Jesus. They called themselves The Religious Society of Friends and took their name from this same story in John’s Sunday’s gospel. The Quaker name came from Fox’s constant stirring up the status quo and frequently ending up in court. He told a judge once that he ought to be trembling before the Lord. The judge was not impressed, but just called Fox a quaker, instead. But “Friends” is the name that stuck.

I suppose one does not “earn” friendship or be “worthy” of it any more than one earns love. There are certain things in life that one wills, one chooses if possible to be, that nothing of any consequence can stem. At least two of these are to be loving and to be a friend, both sort of a part with each. Both imply profound risk. Jesus knew that, just as he knew from his wilderness testing by Satan that he had been born to risk. Not to put down carpentering, but to be more than a carpenter. Life is not an exact science.

We churchers are, I believe, to be about friendship, about friendship like that with Jesus and his friends. I have friends. They have me. I’ve had many friends over the years, some, with only that pale, at best cool translucency, others of impenetrable substance. Friends, the way Jesus used it, is not an “instead” word, some casual synonym for servants. Friends is an inclusive word. Servants maybe cannot be friends, but friends for sure must be servants.

What is there about “be” that makes love and friend change their meaning? Beloved, befriend. One of my colleagues signs off his email with “Be blessed.” It is a gentle command, an attention-getter, a question — it says to me, “Why don’t you allow yourself to be blessed?” For Jesus to call us friends is a blessing in itself. The old hymn “What a friend we have in Jesus” doesn’t sound even half so bad now as it once did.

If there’s nothing much else here, I’ll leave you with a tired old story.

Sister Mary Ecumenica’s assignment in her Order was to stay in touch with the “Others.” It came upon her in the keeping of this work to visit a Quaker Meeting. She arrived at the appointed hour, took her seat, and waited. Silence. Later, more silence. Later still, more silence.

Finally, thinking she’d made some indiscreet mistake, Sister asked discretely the person sitting next to her, “When does the service begin?” Only to hear the even more discrete answer, “As soon as the Meeting is over.”

And if that doesn’t charm you, don’t forget Cole Porter, who said these words that may have helped out old George Fox when he got too friendly with Jesus: “If you’re ever in a jam, here I am / If you ever need a pal, I’m your gal / If you ever feel so happy you land in jail; I’m your bail / It’s friendship, friendship / Just a perfect blendship / When other friendships have been forgot / Ours will still be hot.”