July 31, 2006
Words
There’s a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. I’ve never been convinced. I’m not a graphic artist, but I wonder whether that saying can ever be pictured. And I wonder just how much its validity might depend on what the linguistic programming people call our “dominance.”
One way to find this out is to listen to certain words they use. Say someone asks your opinion. If they’re visually dominant, they might ask, “How do you see this?” If they prefer audio, they might ask, “How does this sound?” or “What do you think?” Or if they’re the kinesthetical, touchy-feely types, “How do you feel about this?” Once you find this pattern and start using their preference, the conversation usually gets to flowing easier. It’s sort of like asking a clammed-up three-year old whether they’ve ever been stung by a bee.
Some more skilled than I in this sort of study suggest that these dominances determine where people sit in church. They say that the kinesthetics sit up front, the visuals in the middle, and the audios in the rear. This also affects the passing of the Peace in the Liturgy.
When the bishop overseeing Lake Wobegon ordered his churches to use the Peace, it caused quite a stir in the local parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. You may remember that the folks around there are by nature just plain shy. They emphatically didn’t like this new practice one bit. So their ever-thoughtful pastor Father Emil said that since there was no getting around the bishop’s mandate, they simply had to do it, but they didn’t have to make eye contact.
July 31, 2006
Words
There’s a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. I’ve never been convinced. I’m not a graphic artist, but I wonder whether that saying can ever be pictured. And I wonder just how much its validity might depend on what the linguistic programming people call our “dominance.”
One way to find this out is to listen to certain words they use. Say someone asks your opinion. If they’re visually dominant, they might ask, “How do you see this?” If they prefer audio, they might ask, “How does this sound?” or “What do you think?” Or if they’re the kinesthetical, touchy-feely types, “How do you feel about this?” Once you find this pattern and start using their preference, the conversation usually gets to flowing easier. It’s sort of like asking a clammed-up three-year old whether they’ve ever been stung by a bee.
Some more skilled than I in this sort of study suggest that these dominances determine where people sit in church. They say that the kinesthetics sit up front, the visuals in the middle, and the audios in the rear. This also affects the passing of the Peace in the Liturgy.
When the bishop overseeing Lake Wobegon ordered his churches to use the Peace, it caused quite a stir in the local parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. You may remember that the folks around there are by nature just plain shy. They emphatically didn’t like this new practice one bit. So their ever-thoughtful pastor Father Emil said that since there was no getting around the bishop’s mandate, they simply had to do it, but they didn’t have to make eye contact.
July 29, 2006
Canis
Canis latrans paid us a brief backyard visit this morning before it disappeared under our jaunty shed and left us wondering whether it may have taken up residence there. Out west where I saw my last one over fifty years ago, we called them coyotes and held to the TexMex pronunciation, ky-YOTE-tee.
The ranchers, whose bane they were, liked to argue about which was the smartest predator, the coyote or the wildcat. We were budding geologists in those mid-century days mapping the outcropping edge of the Permian Basin in the Salt Draw quadrangle [west of Pecos, east of Van Horn, south of the Guadalupe Mountains, north of the Big Bend Country] and gullible for all the west Texas lore we could swallow. One story told of a coyote chewing off its leg to get free of a trap. No cat would ever think of that, some ranchers claimed. We wondered, but never dared ask, if maybe cats were a tad bright for that sort of thing or were so arrogantly independent that they would surely figure another way. On either side of the main gates to some ranches, one could frequently see the hides of both hanging on the barbed wire [aka “bob war”]. There were usually more coyotes than wildcats.
Like jackals and wolves, coyotes are members of the dog family [canis latrans = barking dog]. Like ballet dancers, they are digitigrade, meaning they walk only with their toes touching the ground [ain’t Google grand?]. We’ve no idea what they’re doing in Tennessee. But having recently been reminded again of how the Canary Islands got their name, wonder whether there’re ever any over there.
As for our morning visitor, we now have an idea why all the neighborhood cats have gone, why the birds have come back, and whether all this is intelligent design or just happened.
July 28, 2006
Ring-a-ding
The newscasters say we’re sending bombs to Israel and medical aid to Lebanon. The president says that stem cell research is taking human life, and that killing 40,000 Iraqi citizens is promoting democracy. What are we supposed to do, smile, take up ironyng, and sing God bless America?
What, actually, does one, can one expect when asking God’s blessing? Bless the Israeli arsenal or the Beirut-bound sacks of beans, both with “Made in the USA” stamped all over them? Or bless us for writing more and more checks with less and less balance every day that passes? Do we ever wonder whether God might well prefer to bless us out rather than to bless us in? What manner of reaction do we expect of God to our incessant prayers that we hardly ever hear being made for anybody else but us and ours?
All the while, Let freedom ring! [except across the Mexican border] but don’t forget that the Liberty Bell is cracked already and thus making uncertain with the sound of one clapper clapping.
July 27, 2006
Walking
Pentecost 8/12B Mk 6.45-52
Once again, having fed all those thousands on such a slim budget, Jesus is needing some privacy. So he has the disciples shove off and go back across the sea.
Of course, and as in every dime novel since, “it was a dark and stormy night.” When it got good and late and the waves were up and the wind was stiff and the boat was half way to the other shore, along comes Jesus. As if feeding all those folk didn’t seem enough grandstanding for one day, he chooses not to rent a boat or to swim in the water, but to walk on it. Peter may be terrified by all this like the story says, but seeming never at a loss for an inappropriate idea, tests Jesus. “Lord, if it is you (test # 1), bid me come to you on the water (test # 2).” “Come,” Jesus says. And sink, Peter does.
That winsome novelist and essayist Madeleine L’Engle once said that if we believe as we surely do that Jesus was fully human and could walk on water, then so can we walk on water. It’s only that we forget how.
I don’t like to think of us that way. I like to think of us as a remembering, not a forgetting people. We remember every time we gather around this Table and celebrate Eucharist. We remember the Christ and we reaffirm the Christ in each of us and in all of us as a worshiping community. But I suppose maybe we are, as well, a forgetting people, and we forget a lot more than just how to walk on water. Of course, we should not overlook that we can be deeply grateful that when Jesus said “do this in remembrance of me,” he was at supper and not at sea.
Maybe L’Engle is right. But if she is, our forgetting how to walk on water, as exciting as such a skill may be, is but a symptom of something far greater. It means, in effect, that we’ve also forgot how to be human. After all, if Jesus is God’s prototype of what it means to be human, and he could do all these logic- and science- and gravity-defying things, then we’ve forgot a tolerable lot.
But then there’s not much sense in our anguishing over that when there’s something else that we’ve apparently forgot, and is much nearer at hand and altogether more doable in God’s human scheme of things. And the church’s spiritual rehab program is the place to go about doing it.
“Spiritual rehab” is probably a misnomer. “Human rehab” may be better. For with God’s imaginative creation of us, we are already spiritually rehabilitated enough. But given that kind of moxie by God, becoming human beings in the manner of God’s great, sometimes shaky, plan of incarnation may well be more doable.
But how? By choosing to be, that’s how. Here we are, charged with spiritual energies beyond our most fanciful conception. And here we are, suited out in all this human hardware whose very first gift as God imagines us is the freedom to choose. Our tradition tells us that to be created in the image of God means we are free to choose to be loving, to be reasonable, to be creative, and to live in harmony with God and all God’s creation. And God, in the giving, tells us also that we are also free to dump the whole gift down the trash chute. That we end up making a mix of all these favors and privileges is what makes the party so exciting.
But there it is and no less. Not a one of us who has ever tried these freedoms could ever claim that such an owner’s manual and job description doesn’t turn out altogether quite well.
On the other hand, the evidence not only suggests, but proves on the whole how unstewardly we are at all levels of our society.
We’re making a mess of the environment and giving everybody asthma. Millions live below the poverty level while millions more benefit on their backs from irresponsible taxation and corporate welfare. We restrict morality to the bedroom and exempt it from the Pentagon’s war room and the White House’s oval office.
All this freedom to choose started out and was quickly thwarted in Eden. It was redeemed in Gethsemane, once again reinvigorated at Pentecost, and set forth on the Way which is coming our way. When we get it all straight and get our humanity more or less up to speed, then maybe we can take a shot at that water again and show old Peter a thing or two.
July 26, 2006
Parents
Ss Anne and Joachim make the calendar today, not by name, of course, but by their presumed good fortune as the parents of the BVM. One wonders whether they knew Mary’s conception was all that immaculate [and by what evidence] or whether that strange notion was thought up down the line when Rome began tidying up the parameters of her life by rounding it off at the other end with their assumption of her Assumption.
When our children are born, we parents probably ponder mostly what kind of life they’ll have, not how their lives might affect ours. [As an aside, though almost in the same vein, Hubert Humphrey seemed to enjoy telling that behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.]
When my daughter and eldest son were in their late teens, early twenties, whenever I’d meet a new someone at church, they might ask me if I had a daughter. If I’d meet someone in a bar or at a cocktail party [where I was as often if not more], they’d usually ask about whether a son. I always thought it was rather peculiar, though I was pretty sure why. The two progeny in question take little joy in my telling about it which I don’t much any more.
Anne and Joachim surely had similar [maybe analogous is a better word] experiences as they made the rounds. As well, they must have had their moments wondering about their young daughter taking up with the old carpenter and telling that tale about meeting a matchmaker named Gabriel under such strange circumstances.
Later on, of course, they’d have every reason to be proud parents, as am I these days, though not quite for the same reasons. As well, not every set of grandparents can make their kinds of claims. On the other hand, I can’t recall ever meeting any who didn’t try a Hail Mary pass at it, anyhow.
July 25, 2006
Works
Tradition has it that James, whose feast is kept today, was the first of the twelve to be martyred. The New Testament letter attributed to him, considering its plethora of hortatory imperatives, mostly takes the form of a preachment. In fact, it’s a style that continues to pay the rent for some, if the eminently successful and carefully coifed TV evangelists mean anything at all.
With Peter and John, James was apparently on an inside track with Jesus, being chosen to witness both the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. Of course, that he slept through most of the best parts of both doesn’t commend him all that well.
He and Paul took conflicting spins on faith. For Paul, faith is the believer’s loyalty to the Christ, a way of life. For James, it’s mere assent to theological statements, pointless without works. Such perspectives remain very much alive today in all the self-styled wrangle separating the sheep from the goats.
Martin Luther’s disdain for James’s reflections preferred a Bible without him, casting his work off as an “epistle of straw.” On the other hand, maybe he’d have consented its being kept in the canon if only James had just replaced “faith without works is dead” with “don’t let the grace grow under your feet.”
July 24, 2006
Mending
The New Testament scholar and Lutheran bishop Krister Stendhal once put it this way, that wherever the brokenness of the world is being mended, there is present the kingdom of God. I find that most appealing and wonder often at its ramifications. I’m careful to note that he didn’t imply that if it’s still broke, God’s not there, only that God’s kingdom may not be there.
However you put it, there’s surely something to say for the relationship between God’s reign and mending or might we also say, healing. Healing, not curing [which is another story], but healing is what this is about. Being made whole, being complete, requires God, in this life, at least, to close the gaps that keep us short of being a bit more passionate for our pains, a little more alive, a little wiser, a little more beautiful, a little more open and understanding, to fulfill us, in short, to help us become a little more human.
Stendhal’s reflection seems also to say something about the Christian privilege and covenant to witness. So often, witnessing is taken only to mean telling one’s own story in faith, what one’s take or one’s church’s take on the Good News might be at any given time. All that is well and good, but, I’m sure you’ve found, not always so welcomed by one’s audience.
May not witnessing also mean something like that of a witness providing evidence in a courtroom. We churchers don’t seem to be much in the habit of looking outside our own institutional salvation-periphery for God’s kingdom. As much a part of the broken world as we obviously are, we imply — quite ludicrously — that one really needn’t look any further. Witnessing, if it would be at all winsome, is surely more than that.
Perhaps telling about the kingdom of God could mean telling about wherever we see the brokenness of the world being healed, wherever we see [whatever the labels] peace, justice, and love manifest, wherever people are becoming more freed up to choose, more loving, more creative, more reasonable, more in harmony with the creation, itself. Maybe, if Paul be correct, even more foolish, maybe even so foolish as not to let mere things like gender blind us to God’s reign, God’s healing in our lives and especially in the lives of others. There, we might say altogether recklessly, is God at work.
July 22, 2006
Quirk
Pentecost 7/11B Mk 6.30-44
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, Mark’s account of the Feeding of the Multitudes. 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.” (That sounded familiar. I’ve a hunch maybe 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 the 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, I’m sure, 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. And Jesus, too.
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 together every week, thankful or not, to celebrate thanksgiving, let it go, and get a life.
We have met the offering, and it is us. The bread and the wine and the 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 to see what we can do about it next. We are no different from the thousands gathered there on that hillside. Just like them, we’re 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 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 tens or 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.
July 21, 2006
Hackers
The Homeland Security Department people are looking for “cyber crime analysts.” Apparently, the terrorists are more than well-equipped with nerds who’d understandably rather hack, say, the computer systems of NASDAQ’s markets and throw our finances into even more disarray than to throw themselves into super markets wearing dynamite corsets. Seventy-two trophy virgins probably have little attraction for nerds, anyhow, when one would do. So, HSD needs some people who can head off this specialized terrorist threat at Cyber Pass.
Problem is that so many children have been left behind in our educational systems that there are never enough qualified counter-hackers to match or even dampen the risk, let alone speak and read Arabic or whatever. Then, not only those who are left behind deplete the ranks, but those who aren’t and who become school dropouts, seeming to prefer shelving bottled water at WalMart. And then, there’s always the brain drain, the bright guys and gals going overseas for better jobs and offshore tax advantages.
Strikes me that the very economy so threatened by all these possibilities might be the very source to meet the challenge. We need somehow to pressure the administration with all that largesse we’ve gained from corporate welfare to legalize some aliens rather than just to build walls that don’t keep them out, anyway.
And we might specially focus on those aliens who might be potential cyber terrorists. If we could get them to become cyber capitalists, instead, surely they’d better understand our quaint and, to them, alien ways. They might even join the Baptist Church. Homeland security, indeed.