July 19, 2006

Signatures

Signatures from here and there…

To some it is Napoleon, to some it is a philosophical struggle, to me it is allegro con brio. — Arturo Toscanini

We could learn a lot from crayons: Some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, some have weird names, and all are different colors — but all have to learn to live in the same box.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof BS-detector. — Ernest Hemingway

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I have not a single bit of talent left and could say, “I used everything You gave me.”
– Erma Bombeck

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living. — Mother Jones

Live the change you want to see in the world. — Mahatma Gandhi

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup! — anon

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. — James Madison

The church is like a swimming pool, with all the noise coming from the shallow end. I launched out into the deep end of the pool and have found comfort and nurture ever since. — Vanstone

Strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.

July 18, 2006

Grace

This story was on the cyber wire the other day:

A young family went out for dinner. Their six-year old son asked to say grace. He said, “God is great, God is good, and we thank God for this food. And we would thank God even more if Mom gets us ice cream for dessert. And justice for all. Amen.”

Along with laughter from others nearby, a woman remarked, “That’s what’s wrong with this country. Kids today don’t even know how to pray. Asking God for ice cream! Why, I never!”

Hearing this, the lad burst into tears and asked his Mom, “Did I do it wrong? Is God mad at me?” As she held him and assured him that he had done a terrific job and that God was certainly not mad at him, an elderly man approached their table. He winked at the lad, and said, “I believe that God thought that was a great prayer.” “Really?” the boy replied. “Cross my heart,” the man said. Then in a stage whisper, he added, “Obviously, the lady never asks God for ice cream. A little ice cream is sometimes good for the soul.”

Mom ordered ice cream around for her family at the end of the meal. Her son stared at his sundae for a moment. Then he took it, and without a word, walked over and placed it in front of the woman. With a big smile he told her, “Here, this is for you. Ice cream is sometimes good for the soul.”

July 17, 2006

Table

The Archbishop of Canterbury has done gone and come up with a proposed protocol for who sits at the head of the Anglican table and who sits at the foot. And not only that, some criteria, as well, even for who gets invited to dinner and gets a chance to shuffle around for a place card with his (or maybe Katharine’s) name on it.

The seating arrangement is, I understand, to be determined by what one might call, in keeping with the mood of the times, doctrinal chastity. It’s not altogether clear who’s to make such a determination or what might be the evidence. But having done that, perhaps the place cards could be arranged by a color code for the inevitably different shades or, as is often said, blushes, but there shouldn’t be any problem finding volunteers.

The Archbishop must have the sympathy of all and perhaps even the prayers of some if he should succeed in initiating such an undertaking. On the face of it, this new head-to-foot approach will surely be intimidating, perhaps even for him. After all, if I recall correctly, Jesus had some thoughts about seating at dinner parties. In the end, though, Dr Williams will, himself, simply have to choose, another Anglican first and an inevitable reappraisal of what was once called our “bonds of affection.”

July 14, 2006

Preachers

I grew up for a while in small central and west Texas towns on the front edge and in the middle of the Great Depression. In more ways than one, they were like in Larry McMurtry’s movie, “The Last Picture Show.” Church, when there was any in our family, was mostly Sunday School for me, a place of exile for an hour or two of childhood misery and discomfort. The most I knew about preachers then was off-color preacher jokes, shiny blue serge suits, and long wind.

I was already flying bombers in Uncle Sugar’s navy during the Great Middle War (aka WW II) when the altogether mindless, but disarmingly rather attractive notion of becoming a preacher took me square between the eyes. I suppose it was partly the fear of dying in a shot-up and crippled airplane in the Pacific Ocean and partly the charisma of a base chaplain whom I found out later was an “Episcopalian,” a word that had never much before entered my vocabulary. Kids ought to be told about the Episcopal Church, but not until they’ve grown up a while and been something else long enough really to appreciate it.

So what about preaching? Even a couple of dozen years after becoming one, I didn’t much care for being called “preacher.” I figured it was so little of what I did that it certainly didn’t cover much and mattered even less. But now that I’ve been at it for a few decades, I’ve an entirely different perspective. I’ve never owned a blue serge suit — or even a black one. I’ve heard (and told) my share of preacher jokes, and I suppose maybe even been the butt of a few, myself.

Not long ago, I read these words that Frederick Buechner wrote about preachers. They speak well a perspective it’s taken a while for me to learn. We live now in a time, he wrote, when scientists speak of intelligent life among the stars, of how at the speed of light, there is no time, of consciousness as more than just an epiphenomenon of the brain. It is a time when doctors speak seriously about life after death, and not just the mystics anymore but the housewife, the stockbroker, the high-school senior speak about an inner world where reality becomes transparent to a reality realer still.

The real joke of it all is that often it is the preacher who, as steward of the wildest mystery of them all is the one who hangs back, prudent, cautious, hopelessly mature and wise to the last when no less than St Paul said of us to be a fool for Christ’s sake, no less than to be a child for one’s own and for the kingdom’s sake.

Let the preacher, then, tell the truth… Buechner continues… and finally preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that “catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears,” which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.

July 13, 2006

Gravitas

Pentecost 6/10B Amos 7.7-15

And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people… ” [Amos 7.8]

Plumb lines are one of the simplest of tools for harnessing one of the most complicated of phenomena, a phenomenon so mysterious that even the most brilliant astrophysicists are yet quite to understand it.

We call it gravity. Earth life would be even graver without it. Space cadets, professional basketball players, and ballet dancers seem simply to ignore it. They just float, instead. But not so with rest of us.

Aristotle said it’s why stuff falls. Then, he went on to something more interesting. Newton devised a formula and measured it. Einstein thought it caused by something like a curved-space ball. Heisenberg and his fellow quantum mechanics imagine that little bits called gravitons charge all about to make it so, but they’re yet to catch one.

You can make your own plumb line by simply tying a chunk of lead or some other heavy object to one end of a string. [Plumbum is the Latin word for lead.] Used properly, a plumb line measures the straight and level. Just take hold of the loose end of the string and let the weight gently swing to and fro until it’s still. When it stops, you’re more or less in touch with the center of the earth and on the upright. It’s a comfortably reassuring place to be, until you realize how much you’re actually on the tilt.

God took the plumb line for a remarkable metaphor and liked it so much he used it to call Amos’s attention to show and tell. But Amos, who wasn’t especially interested in giving up his tree surgery franchise for whatever it was God had in mind for him, claimed that he was not all that much of a techie and not in to metaphors, anyhow. He claimed he had no idea what to do with the plumb line, but as is so often the case with when God asks something of us, he ended up doing it, anyway.

Lasers have pretty well replaced plumb lines these days, so the analogy may be lost on this quantum generation. But the church, enamored as it often is with matters it considers of great gravity and even mystery, surely must remember. Strange, this story about Amos’s call coming again for us at a time like the present. Once again, maybe God is calling for an Amos and may already have just now chosen one. Let us pray that we not fail to see the forest for the trees.

July 12, 2006

Unity

It is not uncommon for people to wonder whether prayer is ever answered. Actually, I suspect that Jesus is one of them. When he asked God that we be one as he and God are one, that strikes me as a prayer that, a couple of thousand years later and since it’s more or less up to us, he’s wondering will ever be answered [Jn 17].

We do sometimes get around to talking about it. Unity, we call it, and its a prime subject these days in the midst of all this current Anglican foolishness. Foolishness, mostly because Anglicanism’s the last place anybody ought to start looking for unity. Just the fact that some undertake such a search and act like such a thing is possible should be evidence aplenty right off they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. Old Queen Elizabeth settled that a while ago, and there wasn’t a lot of unity in how she settled it. Actually, when you come to think about it, it was a moderate — albeit a bit tense — kind of inclusiveness. And it’s inclusiveness which, as we say out west, is more like “the cowboy way.”

Some still insist on something they call “Anglican orthodoxy,” which is about as foolish an oxymoronic combination of words as one could ever imagine. And then they turn to the Lambeth Conferences and lately the Windsor Report to back up the claim, when neither of these even approaches Holy Writ no matter how hard some try to drag them kicking and screaming, as they say.

We’ve got already in the 1979 BCP a reasonably useful combination of gospel notions in what we call the Baptismal Covenant around which we can gather theologically I should think without too much difficulty. I realize I beat that horse a bit much for OoN’s readers, but I can’t come up with anything better and would be a fool to try.

Frankly, I suspect God would be rather pleased with a life that tried to keep between the apostolic curbs more often than not, asked forgiveness rather than permission when jumping them, set some examples in the interest of the Good News now and then, found and served his son in others, and gave justice and peace a nod from time to time. Even God, we claim, rather seemed to prefer unity as one in three and I don’t imagine ever expects us to get that close.

July 11, 2006

Rage

The news media and some internetters have been carrying on lately about a new psychiatric condition. It’s called Intermittent Rage Disorder. They`re very excited. How excited? Somebody was so excited, they simply threw literary taste and caution to the winds and wrote, “In other words, it’s all the rage.”

Makes me wonder what with a name like that [it’s kin to Latin’s rabies] and with rage and disorder all on the same line, has it been included in the DSM, the owner’s manual shrinks use to order the disorders and help keep track of place, direction, and billing hours? And also whether there might be such a thing as a mittent rage, one that goes on all the time.

I have a mildly mittent rage, myself. I’ve found that, like the tango, it usually takes two to rage, a cause and an effect, to go all the way. We’re hardly ever without some cause these days surrounded by 24/7 cable reports reminding us of one geopolitically or ecclesiastically stupid thing after another, any one of which can make for good raging.

Sleep, of course, is an opportunity for intermittent rage. Sleep, and maybe when one is in church kneeling at the Mysteries. It’s not as easy to blow one’s stack while kneeling, especially with the cross in view. But with the opportunities for rage starting up again as soon as those recesses of sleep and prayer are over, to what else can a person expect to look forward?

Some compensation might be that instead of looking forward all the time, one might try looking backward once in a while. One way to do that is to take up some sort of habit of studying spiritual genealogy. The Bible’s a good place to start. If you don’t have one, check in to a motel and borrow one of Gideon’s. Try remembering that we are grains of sand who got started with Abraham whom God told that his progeny would be as the grains of sand or the stars in the heavens [cf Gen 22.17 et al]. Frankly, I tried being sand once and found being a star much to be preferred. But take your choice, it’ll get your mind off things temporarily and maybe spread out your mittents. Another way, of course, is to open a window and throw literary taste and caution to the winds.

July 10, 2006

Metes

Curious, the word “meditation.” I would not have thought it cognate with “mete,” but there it is, no less than my Webster Collegiate is convinced there’s a certain amount of merit in the idea. A meditation is a kind of mete, a focus of thoughts, a reflection, a pondering, indeed, a sense of measuring neatly as in metes and bounds and not all over the place like this is already becoming.

Perhaps a meditation is not unlike a melody shaping itself around and through a progression of chords or an improvisation shaping itself around and through a melody, the chords flowing underneath it all to guide one along within a certain envelope of their sound. Good lyrics can do that. The great jazz tenor sax player Lester Young said a knowledge of the lyrics is essential for good improvisation, musical meditation. [There’s a new book now about Cole Porter’s classy lyrics, by the by.*]

Folk sometimes kindly, I suppose, refer to these OoN pieces as meditations. Though I rarely think of them that way, I reckon it is fair enough to call them that. For me, they make up a kind of journal of my more or less daily measurings, and that, of course, is what a journal or a journey is about.

Perhaps they are too short to be called essays, though I’d like to think there’s no measure to which a piece of writing must adhere in order to be so called. The cyber lexicon for which there seems little mete or bound has put forth the unfortunate term “blog,” standing, I am told, for “web log.” I should roundly dispense with that word if ever I had the opportunity. It is so tacky.

As it is, though, there is for me what some might call a spiritual air [pun unintentionally intended] about a meditation, though I wouldn’t want to go all schmarmy about it. Spiritual, of course, is a vastly misunderstood word, more inclusive than the narrow way some would take it, but a valuable and useful one, especially with its connotation of breath and particularly of wind. I am willing to confess there is a certain windiness about the OoNs, what some might easily and without any objection from me call “hot air,” and perhaps that is not an altogether inappropriate synonymically spiritual suggestion about these occasional easy pieces. Whew.
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*Robert Kimball, ed, “Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics,” American Poets Project/The Library of America, 178 pp, $20. See review in NYTimes Magazine, 9vii06, p 8.

July 7, 2006

Warden

Canon Ted Weddell was Warden of the College of Preachers (now aka the Cathedral College) during WWII. Every week in those days, a group of twenty-five clergy were cycled through their curriculum requiring not only quarters, but also three squares a day. The wartime food rationing in effect presented enough of a problem that the College had to appeal to the Ration Board for relief. On so doing, its name somewhat puzzled the officials.

Finally, when they asked Weddell about his title “warden,” they found a solution. On their forms, they simply renamed the College “Ecclesiastical Penitentiary,” thus finding an entirely new category to satisfy their guidelines.

Prison environments present little choice for the inmates day-in and day-out. This is hardly the sort of thing God seemed to have in mind when creating us humans for whom bearing her image means rather singularly the freedom to choose. Anglicanism, thanks to Elizabeth’s settlement, uniquely among churches makes every effort to embody precisely such gospel freedom, such an environment where being — and becoming — human can not only be encouraged, but can flourish.

Such a notion is not only rare among the world’s religions, but ironically so among the churches commissioned by the very gospel that makes that claim about God. A church without any such moral wiggle room seems to us no church at all. Any move away would be subject to considerable suspicion.

Ironic, then, it is that the Archbishop of Canterbury himself through his Windsor Report seems to be proposing just such a move. Such a church defined by his notion of a covenant seems on the face of it inherently contrary to anything common to the tradition which created his office in the first place. The Episcopal Church in the USA, with its multifaceted democratic polity, remains altogether consistent with an Anglicanism that understands moral choice as a struggle rather than a checklist. It offers an arena for such human struggle and eschews any move to provide a settlement of such a critical manifestation of our vocation from on high.

People who don’t want to continue in this grand tradition of Hooker and Elizabeth should not do so. People who cannot abide this kinds of ordered freedom are strongly advised merely to run elsewhere for their comfort. And then we simply need just to leave one another alone. On the other hand, perhaps Canterbury’s penchant for such a covenant as the Windsor Report suggests is only a veiled attempt to allow him to claim old Canon Weddell’s title as one of his own.

July 6, 2006

Relationship

Pentecost 5/9B Mk 6.1-6

“And Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.’ And he could do no mighty works there… and he marveled because of their unbelief.”

Nobody pays much attention to a homegrown prophet. You can stand on the courthouse square and blow out your fuses all day long, and if everybody knows you grew up in the shadow of that same old courthouse and used to throw their paper route, they may be “astonished,” but they’ll just keep on walking. For just like it takes two to tango, it takes two to get anything like any so-called “mighty works” going.

Even prophecy, if it makes its mark, requires an audience. And not just any audience that stands around, but one that pays attention and either gets mad as hell and throws stones or else signs up for the duration and joins in the scrap.

This little story Mark tells about Jesus going back to his homeland and teaching. But many more stories like it in our Judaeo-Christian tradition and in our own lives as part of that tradition, also repeat this theme to tell us something very special and unusual about God and those who speak for God.

God is not established in our lives with the help of a dictionary or even by a course in systematic theology, but through a relationship, whether one of hostility or of hospitality, yet, a relationship. It takes faith to do that in any creative way — God’s faith in us and ours faith in God. Such faith can open in us an imaginative consciousness and a willingness to risk laying our lives on the line. We simply cannot assume that God is any more accessible to us than we make ourselves accessible to God. God’s imaginative creation of us is built on that kind of freedom.

The story of old Blind Bartimaeus that Mark tells about later on is a case in point [Mk 10.46-52]. Bartimaeus cried out to Jesus for mercy. We cannot be absolutely sure how he wanted that mercy to take form and shape, but simply that it was overdue and he knew this Jesus was a prime source. Heaven knows he could use some simple mercy in his life in very much the same way as can we in such critical times.

But mercy turned out to be more. It was not a laying on of hands or even a handout. It was simply Jesus stopping to listen. It was Jesus paying attention. Jesus said, “Call him.” Jesus told his disciples to put aside their sense of urgency, to stop and to listen, to enable the beggar’s cause, to encourage and to respect him as a fellow human being in need. There’s the miracle, the reaching out that’s in reach for every one of us.

In fact, Jesus never even touched Bartimaeus. Healing moved between them rather in the conduit of the faith that connected them, that enabled them to share in the willful meeting of anguish and drouth with willful nourishment of compassion and concern. It was this that made them whole in relationship.

We have a similar exchange whenever we celebrate together in our churches a baptism. Obviously, we must never discount our faith as sponsors (whatever happened to that lovely word “godparents”?) and as parents, but also as the community surrounding the sacrament as we are asked for our support and commitment and, indeed, for our faith. We can take with us that exchange in that moment of grace along our own Jericho roadsides when we pray for others and even in those challenging moments when others are not all that enthusiastic about our praying for them.

“‘Go your way,’ Jesus said, ‘your faith has made you well. And immediately (Bartimaeus) received his sight and followed him on the way’” [Mk 10.52].

With his renewed sight — and with our renewed insight — we can also remember that Bartimaeus, even though offered the option to go once again his own way, chose Jesus’ way, instead. That kind of miracle is readily available with the prayer, “Jesus, have mercy.”