June 18, 2006
GC 08
The jazz band backing up the Eucharist this morning flew in from Houston, TX*, last night, but their instruments didn’t. Trumpet, sax, trombone, drums, keyboard, bass were all purloined from some already closed music store in time for the big Sunday morning celebration. Ya gotta have muscle. A lot of Beethoven, Bach, and come-to-Jesus jazz moved the churchers ever so much as did the PB’s sermon. Actually more, if you count visually. [*Ed. bias: Rather inordinately proud this was a Texas band.]
Yesterday, had the honor to speak to the Geranium Farm-Out of Nowhere noon brunch at the Hyatt [speech follows]. Met the head knocker of Church Publishing, Inc, told him he has a manuscript CPI had requested of me, and I’d submitted. He said, “What’s it about?” I said, “Irony and Imagination.” He said, “Aren’t they all?” I was encouraged. Another Great American novel idea down the shute.
The House of Bishops is meeting this morning to elect the Episcopal Church’s 26th presiding bishop from one of their seven nominees who include the first woman ever to be so nominated. Once that’s done, they’ll announce their choice to the House of Deputies and ask for their concurrence and the to the world. There’s a resolution lurking around somewhere that would change all this and give the House of Deputies equal authority in this periodic election. It’s time. The PB’s no longer merely just the chairman of the board.
My seminary constitution and canons prof might have been proud that I got to explain to my press colleagues [The Covenant Journal and OoN never had it so good] how voting by orders works in the House of Deputies. The Director of Communications for the Episcopal Church in the US&A had deferred.
A thousand or so attended the Integrity Eucharist night before last at Trinity Church and heard a pastorally prophetic sermon preached by the Bishop of New Hampshire whom, the night before, you may have seen on Larry King. He didn’t seem at all to be the “abomination” his fellow priest David Anderson thinks him to be. When asked by Larry King why he stays in TEC, Anderson says it’s because he “loves a good fight.” +New Hampshire says “love your enemies, anyway.”
A spokesperson for Integrity said of their mission: “Our deepest desire is to testify to this church and to this communion what we know of the saving grace of God in Christ Jesus present in our lives, our vocations and our relationships.”
As a whole, this Big Fat Anglican Wedding is a pretty good show for a much better cause.
GC08 is more than likely the last post from comedy central Columbus. We’re off on the yellow brick road to Gnashville, TN, in the early bright tomorrow, mixing our metaphors as we go.
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Writing as a Means of Grace
an address at a brunch
by Lane Denson
A story is told that one of the older nuns in a community was suffering from chronic confusion and loss of memory. From time to time, she would wander through the convent emptying people’s mailboxes, striking up strange, but pleasant conversations, collecting items from sisters’ bedrooms and giving them to others.
The community sponsored a school. One day, one of the teachers was called to the phone and left her mid-term exams and grade book on a table in the community room. When she returned, they were gone. A frantic two-day search began, notes left on the bulletin board, pleas made on the public address system.
Finally, somebody thought of the wandering collector. There, buried under her laundry, were the grade books and the tests, all studied and corrected. Everyone had got an A.
Nowadays, they say, when sister wanders the halls, passersby bow inwardly to her. Through her seemingly foolish actions, wandering and reminding all by her presence not to fear the final judgment, they discovered a new sense of themselves, that there are, finally, no record books, and everyone makes an A. “There is no end to the birth of God,” wrote D H Lawrence.
Perhaps, what appears most senseless can often seem most meaningful of all. Life fills to overflowing with opportunities to make the senseless meaningful to an irrationally rational world. We might but grasp the moment.
Sometimes we are senselessly poetic, and the world is charged with a moment of beauty. Sometimes we are senselessly tender, and hardened hearts begin to melt. Sometimes we are senselessly nonjudgmental, and we see through a glass darkly into the nature of life.
What if we became senselessly vulnerable and reduced the defense budget? Might the world know less fear? What if we were senselessly forgiving and abolished the death penalty? Would children then understand respect for life? What if we were senselessly generous and created a new welfare system that gave the poor a fighting chance? Might our own hearts be softened?
When Jesus forgave the adulterer, a senseless kindness brought the self-righteous to self-knowledge, a senseless grace embraced both accusers and accused and changed lives, a senseless justice confronted an oppressively sexist system and challenged all to do likewise. We are surrounded by the seemingly senseless: the mystics, the poets, the clowns, the so-called irrational and impractical, those who are “different.” They are all there, writing something in the sand.
I’m not altogether sure why this parable intrigues me so, save it affirms for me in a rather indirect way the senselessness, the nonsensicalness of faith as a response to grace. The writing of the Out of Nowhere series has become for me a way of expressing that through irony and imagination, the very ways, I believe, that God creates. So, I ceased looking for the rational a while ago. It was too frustrating, and I found myself inevitably pandering. Hence, writing as a means of grace, as a means of welcoming grace.
Obviously, writing not only uses, but also develops language facility. Writer Toni Morrison claims that language makes us human. Writer John Evangelist said the Word became flesh. I think he not only meant what we call incarnation. I think he also meant that the Word enhances and suits, adorns and embellishes flesh. For example, when we discovered DNA, we discovered something like God’s autograph. DNA is the language that informs, that gives shape and function to human being. It was there all the while, of course. Its discovery is one of grace’s markers.
Then comes the real pleasure. If we’ll let it and trust it, together with DNA, imagination moves in. Imagination is wishful thinking implementing faith and welcoming God, embodying the mind of Christ, affirming commitment, daring to be vulnerable, and just as DNA shapes us, imagination shapes our world. When we speak of being created in the image of God, we’re saying that the Word is God’s private system for imagining human being. For to be created in the image of God means, at least, to be imagined into being by God, to be the creature of God’s imagination, to be told into being, to be God’s “once upon a time.”
By virtue of God’s creating us, we are spiritual beings, breathed, inspired into being as was Adam. Our vocation in response to this gift is not so much to become more spiritual. Our vocation is to become more human, to fulfill God’s desire for us, God’s imagination for us that as our Catechism says, we be set free to choose: to create, to love, to reason, and to live in harmony with all of creation and with God. Our vocation is to embrace that freedom ex nihilo, Out of Nowhere.
The profound irony of our faith as Christians makes considerable demands on our imagination. As our imagination is the very instrument, the implement of our faith, it leads and opens the way for faith to reach out and see through Paul’s glass, Paul’s icon darkly. It serves our imaginations well. We are, indeed, ourselves, icons.
This becoming human, this fulfilling God’s image for us, is, of course, and as well, a spiritual quest. It is a quest for meaning, integrity, memory; a quest to understand the mystery of vocation and to communicate it in a way that others will, if not understand, will at least respect or forgive. It may be sudden, as in a conversion, or it may merely be gradual, even gentle with a mild shock here and there. But the quest is incarnate. God created humanity, but a humanity free enough even to defy the divine will. God woos us and therefore takes her chances on winning or losing and will finally prefer to let someone be lost rather than to interfere with the sacredness of the human person.
Jaroslav Pelikan* puts it this way. In the beginning was the word. The very first act of God in the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible is to speak, and in the Greek tradition, the word for “word” and the word for “reason” are the same — this declaration affirms that the act of communication is at the very center not only of human existence and its origins but of the mystery of the Divine Being itself.
He continues. Human beings, being created, according to that first chapter of the first book of the Bible, in the divine image of a God who has no face, participate through the divine image in the mystery of the Divine Being by themselves reflecting those capacities of the Divine Being that lie at the center of self-revelation through their own imagination analogous to God’s creative imagining. And those capacities are two, but finally they are one: the capacity to love and the capacity to communicate. For in the beginning was the word.
I need to say this again for my sake if not for yours. We are not human beings whose vocation is to be or to become more spiritual; we are spiritual beings whose vocation is to be or to become more human. This is God’s wish for us. It became for me an understanding not only of our vocation but of the church’s, as well, as the community to enable and facilitate that vocation. It also clarified how religion as that corporate human endeavor to render faith both memorable and manageable can actually compromise that vocation by affecting the environment, the instrument, that is, the church, God gives us to bring it about.
In a 12-step meeting, a nun was talking about how difficult it had been for her in her recovery to take the third step, to turn her will and her life over to the care of God as she understood God. It was not until she realized that she was trying to make this commitment to her limited understanding of God rather than to the unlimited God who transcends her understanding. We do not often realize how our insistence on orthodoxy is such a stifling barrier for a person whose faith is pressing around the edges of her growth to fulfill God’s image for her, to recover and to fulfill her humanity.
Another marker for me has been Reinhold Niebuhr’s so-called Serenity Prayer which is not a prayer about serenity, but a prayer about change and about choice, two more of the markers in our spiritual growth toward humanity. How well we cope with and incorporate change and choice and the courage and wisdom with which we engage them is a significant measure of our maturity. The 12-step program is thus a paradigm for anyone’s life of faith leading toward spiritual awakening, it is a paradigm for the process of becoming fully human which, of course, is the goal of what is called recovery. It is a way of describing the Way.
The Baptismal Covenant is the church’s five step program, the model of what it means to be a Christian, to incarnate the Christian life, to be a pilgrim on he Way. It is a spiritual quest.
One of my true joys is playing jazz. Our band was playing that grand old standard “Out of Nowhere” one night. When I got home, I sat down and started writing.
*Jaroslav Pelikan, “Writing as a Means of Grace,” in Spiritual Quests: the art and craft of religious writing, ed William Zinser, Houghton Mifflin, pp 85-101, 1988.