May 17, 2006

Ears

Canon Quirk phoned the other day. I could hardly hear him. I wondered if it was his flaky wireless service, but then I remembered that ever since he’d heard about Uncle Sugar’s current and pervasive eavesdropping campaign, he’s talked in a whisper, whether on or off the phone.

He sounded like Marlon Brando doing Don Vito Corleone. I told him I couldn’t hear him very well. He said that was all right, that the way things are now, he wasn’t even sure he could trust me, his long time student and friend, to hear what he was talking about. Then he added, but needn’t have, that he never was sure whether or not I ever listened to him anyway. It was clear, though, that he wanted to know what I thought about this latest governmental patronizing. I didn’t know what to say.

I remembered back during the Great Middle War (aka WW II) all the posters in public places, especially in bars, that showed Hitler with his hand cupped behind his disproportionately enormous ear, listening. And then there were those others reminding us that loose lips sink ships. But these were more or less always in patriotic red, white, and blue and designed to warn us against our enemies listening in on us, not against our listening in on them. I never saw a poster showing Uncle Sam leaning toward you with a huge, deformed ear as if he were listening in on us of all people. But then, we hardly ever thought of him as maybe being our enemy, a little dotty, perhaps, maybe sometimes nosey, but always as our friend.

On second thought, maybe it’s different now. Maybe Quirk has a point.

May 16, 2006

Shocking

This reflection on Sunday’s propers, the source of which I know not, came in on the wire yesterday. Ever so slightly emended, herewith:

“I was shocked, shocked! to read Acts this morning and realize that Philip took unilateral action to include an outcast eunuch (Acts 8.26-40). Who in the world authorized him to circumvent Deuteronomy 23 which excludes men with genital disfigurement? Did he check with the rest of the apostles? Was there a council? Were there thirty years of discussion? Was there a vote by orders?

“Apparently not. There was water nearby and so, violating the scriptures and without an authorized liturgy for the purification of the permanently outcast, Philip just baptized the eunuch. In the same passage in Deuteronomy, the children of illicit marriages are excluded to the tenth generation. No purification or restoration is possible for that. Who changed that and was it done unilaterally too?

“A shocking Sunday morning. Like Jesus told old Nicodemus, the Holy Spirit just blows around, willy-nilly. Hasn’t HS heard about councils and reception and making sure everyone is on board with these kinds of massive changes?

“Who is in charge of informing the Holy Spirit on proper Anglican process, anyway?”

May 15, 2006

Mom

As Mother’s Day winds down, I’m reminded of during the Great Depression when my mom made beer. They called it home brew. After a day of bottling, the caps would blow off during the night and sound like maybe the shootout at the OK Corral. When she eventually found a mixture that didn’t explode so much, the whole family slept better.

I was proud of my mom’s skill. So much so that I bragged about her to the neighbors. This was pretty early on in my life and provided an occasion for me to learn about what I would later discover was something like stand-up comedy. I found that I enjoyed the local neighborhood publicity, and that if I said certain things in a certain way some people seemed to think that I was pretty funny and maybe even smart. I don’t know for sure, but maybe this had something to do with what was later on more formally considered to be a “call” to the ministry, an undertaking where one gets to do stand-up a lot and on a regular basis.

Anyhow, the thrill was short lived. When word of my successful performances got back to my folks, they weren’t nearly so proud of me as I had hoped they’d be. Instead, I got grounded.

The home-brewing stopped altogether. We got rid of all the yeast and the crocks and the bottles and the bottle-cappers and any signs of there ever having been my mom’s home-based industry that I was so proud of. For you see, this was not only during the Great Depression, it was also during the Great Prohibition.

May 12, 2006

Showtime

CP was observing from the library end of our kitchen when the storm had its way with the truly monstrous, ancient, and tired old oak tree (Quercus shumardii) in our neighbor’s yard. The “branch” that came tearing off was two feet in diameter. The gaping scar it left on its parent trunk as it fell is five feet long and two feet wide. It spanned some eighty feet, topping out with enough force to do $1800 damage to our two old Hondas.

The insurance company, the folk with the red umbrella, said it was showtime, that it was an act of God. Not many people get to observe an act of God firsthand, Moses, maybe, and a few others. CP could be hard to live with after this. When she regains her composure (aka control over her nervous system), we’ll see.

Fifty-two years in these orders, and I’ve never seen an act of God that I was anything more than just suspicious about, but then, maybe I’m never in the right place at the right time. All I know now, with no thanks to seminary or episcopal gatekeepers or fellow presbyters, but only to the insurance agent, is that God has acted. I’ve got a busted red umbrella to show for it. Take care. The next appraiser you meet may also be a theologian.

May 11, 2006

Will

Easter 5B Jn 14.15-21

It’s Mothers Day.

And what Jesus said to his disciples in today’s gospel selection reminds me of my mom, more or less. Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14.15). My mom never quite said it like that. Rather did she say, “Whether you love me or not, you will keep my commandments.” Usually with a knowing, but no less firm smile on her face.

Somehow, it sounds like the kind of passive-aggressive codependency that shrinks frown on, but all the while simultaneously thrive on. As for my early family life, I have little trouble connecting up to my mom’s interpretation. On the other hand, I can’t very well at all associate it with Jesus. Nevertheless, there it is, and right smack dab in the middle of Mothers Day 2006.

But that’s not all that Jesus said. And I’m not all that convinced it’s quite the way he said it. He knew already, like many of us take a lifetime to learn, that love is a choice. Love is an act of the will. The vows, the covenants we make as Christians are not “I do” vows. They are “I will” vows. One of the ways, one of the very important ways we love one another is with our wills, our choices, our making and keeping commitments. The reason for this is that “willing” has staying power, continuity. “Doing” just shows up for the occasion and goes its way for another day.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” Jesus said to his disciples. You make that commitment now in the immediacy of our relationship, and you choose to keep it for the duration. That’s what loving is about. That’s what our relation is about.

These parting words are initiating words. Jesus establishes a relationship for his disciples with himself and for us with himself and through them that can be sustained only by the spirit to make us whole and to keep and direct our wills in him. In him we experience a spiritual awakening now — and again to come wholesomely for the church at Pentecost. You might say that once committing ourselves to Jesus in our baptism, we begin the recovery of our basic humanity in which God created us.

Keeping Jesus’ commandments to love God and neighbor and self sums up the law, completes it, as it were, and opens to us the collegiality of the Holy Spirit. We don’t recover alone. We recover in community, for that’s where Spirit resides, nourishes, and sustains us.

Jesus’ little homily in this morning’s gospel is his prelude to Pentecost. What you work out with your mom — and your shrink — is more or less up to you. I hope God smiles on it.

May 10, 2006

Oxymoron

I have a hard time equating being faithful with being orthodox, ie, with my faith measuring up all that well with “The Faith.” Maybe that’s a sign of my unfaith, maybe it just reaffirms that faith is something of a risk, anyway, and so it always has room for doubt. Faith seems to me inevitably and irretrievably to be pretty subjective. Such a notion as the faith has often left me more than puzzled.

Whatever, that old oxymoron “Anglican orthodoxy” keeps rearing its miter in all sorts and conditions these days. And it’s no wonder. If bishops want to hang on to their purple shirts, they can’t get around having to vow to “guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church.” Whether they know much about any of these things or not, they have at least to act like they do. As it is, their guarding sometimes leads less to unity than division, and their undisciplined traipsing across other bishops’ diocesan boundaries can get altogether reckless.

Andrew Greeley, novelist and Roman Catholic loose cannon, offers excellent counsel for all those of us so anxious to purify the Anglican communion. “Search for the perfect church if you will,” he said, “when you find it, join it, and realize that, on that day, it becomes something less than perfect.”

Jesus summed up the Beatitudes with reflections on the Decalogue and something like what jazz players call a “turnaround” and others might call a “zinger.” He said that in the last analysis, all we need do is be perfect like God is perfect (Mt 5.48). On the face of it, that’s something of a challenge to most and a good enough excuse for some not even to try.

Greeley’s point is well-taken. But it was a dark and stormy night when “perfect” came to mean “without flaw” and not something more like making and keeping one’s commitments, like maybe “to follow through” and, as some say, to “walk the talk.” Such is not easy, of course, but it’s not impossible, and it strikes me as rather Anglican on the face of it.

He also wrote, “The question is not whether the Catholic leadership is enlightened, but whether Catholicism is true. A whole College of Cardinals filled with psychopathic tyrants provides no answer one way or another to that question.” Greeley said it, not I.

May 9, 2006

Algorithms

The battle of Lent is well over, Jesus and his simple gospel have won it for us once again, and Easter is almost gone. Maybe now we can get back to the really complicated stuff like orthodoxy, people’s sex lives, and other fantasies.

I’ve heard that one way to move that sort of thing along is to get ourselves an algorithm. My handy Dictionary of Modern Thought says that an algorithm is a “procedure for performing a complicated operation by carrying out a precisely determined sequence of simpler ones.” I have, of course, not much of a notion what that’s all about and shall proceed now to prove it.

I do know that there’s a lot of plain old simple gospel stuff we have a way of making more and more complicated, but usually the hard way by beating people over the head with it. There must be somebodies out there who can “do” algorithms with one hand tied behind their back. I should hope that these are they whose ecclesiology could be trusted not to go berserk into some mediaevalist pontifical two-step of the kind that derails God’s penchant for doing new things. But that may be asking too much.

I was discussing this idea with Canon Quirk, and he said he thought an algorithm was the kind of tempo some presidential campaigns have taken.

May 8, 2006

Dame

“There is nothin’ like a dame,
Nothin’ in the world,
There is nothin’ you can name
That is anythin’ like a dame!”

It is more than likely that Rodgers and Hammerstein didn’t have Dame Julian of Norwich in mind when they wrote that “South Pacific” song for lovesick sailors to sing with such gusto. And it is quite a bit more than likely that few would have that song in mind when thinking about that obscure fourteenth century anchorite.

Terry Holmes, in his singular “What Is Anglicanism,” says she’s a prime example of what he calls an Anglican consciousness. She had a demonstrated capacity to embrace and accept what our senses tell us even when that does not fit into neat categories. “Sin is necessary,” she says; but immediately adds in her best known words, “All will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”

A further illustration of that consciousness is her ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, a way of seeing beyond the common sense reductions of the cynic who can only see the outer appearance. The commonplace ideas of a culture can be elevated to illumine the meaning of God in a new way.

And in a further illustration of Anglican consciousness, she made the startling statement that, “Jesus is our true Mother,” that the Christ thinks like a woman, is caring, intuitive, receptive, and open.

One might easily say that those who are so perplexed and in turmoil throughout the Anglican Communion today as we celebrate Julian’s feast can find a reconciling word in her capacity to see with beyond the orthodox into the paradox which life more truly is. There is surely nothing like that Dame, nothing in this world, nothing you can name that is anything like that Dame.

May 5, 2006

Symbol

Ask somebody to define symbol and you’ll probably get all kinds of answers and illustrations except the most obvious symbol of all — words. We don’t often think of words and language as symbol.

The reason for this may be that words are more often spoken than written, heard than seen, and thus the notions to which they point, of which they are signs, are lost. The flap about burning flags is back on the congressional radar again and illustrates our illiteracy about symbols. It comes from an inability to understand a symbol as something that finds its meaning beyond itself, whose presence is irrelevant, save to recall, once that relationship is established. One wonders if such silliness as amending the Constitution about it is not but one more effort to avoid the accountability of the stewardship that true governing demands.

The kinds of religion, for example, that consider their written scriptures verbally infallible and inerrant do a gross disservice to words. John Evangelist might well wonder at such a practice, having delivered himself of so profoundly beautiful an illustration of Word as symbol. The scriptures are collections and combinations of words into the stories that the people of God strive to tell of themselves and their God and of how they’ve been faithful and unfaithful to that relationship. Life is story, and as story, is made up of symbols.

Story is portrait, not photograph, process, not product, continuing, not terminal. Story is “once upon a time,” and can be anytime, but ultimately has no time. You never get behind when you are in such a process. It is like a portrait that is never finished, but only suspends a moment in life. Life is always now. So it is that gifts are always presents, not pasts, or futures (except maybe on Wall Street).

Story as parable is instrumental to accomplishing a goal. Crises in story are like hinges on a door. The people, the places, the events are the occasions for the crises. Once we enter a space with “do you remember the time when?” the “time whens” start, and the search for identity begins.

Our ancestors came largely not as fortune seekers, but as identity seekers, identity maintainers, shapers, and for to find a sense of place. The crises in their search came at the intersections, the turning points. Merely to seek fortune was to turn back on identity, and that is when the story stops.

When we read our scripture and honor our flag, this search for identity through our spiritual genealogy is replicated in our own lives. They help us to discover who we are and for Whom we are called out.

May 4, 2006

Doorway

Easter 4B / Jn 10.1-10

(Warning: I’m certain I’ve worn the following story almost threadbare, but it’s so good, I can’t resist it.)

When our youngest son was about three, he would sometimes come in from play and, if no one was in sight, stand facing inside through the doorway and call out, “Hey, somebody, I love you.” I suppose shrinks might want to go somewhere with this, but for our family, it was always a quick, albeit sometimes only temporary fix for whatever was our current dysfunction.

The church, like the sheepfold in John’s parable of the Good Shepherd, is to be a safe house, a place where one can seek wholeness to become the human being God imagines us to be, receive love and care and compassion, and learn, if necessary, the meaning of a redemptive trust. These things, at least, and not judgment and condemnation and orthodoxy, comprise our ministry to and with and for one another.

Jesus speaks of himself as “the door” in this story before he speaks of himself as the “shepherd,” I think he means that we must come into this relationship, this “family” not through convention or respectability or because it is “the thing to do,” but through him, if it is to be a place of nourishment at all.

We have no right to call others to adopt our traditions or to follow our manner of life. It is too easy not to move much further than just to assume that what seems to us good must be the will of God. We make our plans for God’s work, even ask God to prosper them. But they may be seriously flawed with our prejudices, our ignorances, and our shortsightedness. We so want to be right and can never see in advance that the way to final success often lies through an immediate failure.

How then may we avoid these things?

Again, by coming through Jesus as “the door.” Why do we this pastoral work and exercise this influence with others? Through love of power or fame or repute or partisanship and the desire to win adherents for our own special bias? Nothing can give us the credentials for the sacred responsibility of deliberately influencing another except that we approach that other through Christ as the door.

This means at least three things: 1) to come to the task and every part of it in prayer, 2) to refer all of our activities to such basic guidelines as those laid down in the Baptismal Covenant, and 3) to accept whatever happens as nearer the will of God than our own planned outcome would have been. It is this “door” that opens both into the “fold” and out again to the world.

In the aftermath of the horror wrought every day in this world, our minds and hearts are filled not only with searing pain but with searing frustration of how we may truly shepherd a peaceful world. We’ll quite rightly tighten all the rules, stiffen the penalties, ban the guns, trust no one, and hope, knowing all the while that this, too, will fail.

I remember the irony of a war hero like General Dwight Eisenhower, when he became president, naming his presidential airplane not with a militaristic aphorism like the current “Air Force One,” but instead, as “Columbine.” The word means “dove,” the worldwide symbol for peace. And I remember how when he left office warned us to be wary of the so-called military-industrial complex and its lust for power and control. And I remember today how we’ve never learned that lesson and are paying today with our money, our environment, our health, and our lives as a consequence.

If there is any answer to this agony run wild, any peace, any justice, it is here, in sheepfolds like the church is called to be, where all of us and our children can know how deeply we are cared for and what treasures we are, where Jesus is the doorway in which we all can stand, both looking and looking out, and say, “Hey, somebody, I love you.”