Out of Nowhere

CP and I attended our first concert in our town’s new megamillion-buck symphony hall last evening to the tunes of Ravel, some other composers we never heard of, and Branford Marsalis playing classical alto sax of all things. 

It’s not easy to concentrate on the music down there. Though the acoustics are splendid, the opulence gets in the way. Even the New York Times recently scolded us for that.

Less noticeable but no less important, the hall is about three inches too tall. CP is five-two and, in some venues, just a tad short to reach the ground when seated. We remedy that at home with rather attractive footstools here and there where needed. What, however, does one do when left suspended out in public for a couple of hours at some performance, no matter how intriguing, when circulation begins its inevitable distraction?

It occurred to us that there may be a potential cottage industry lurking herein. Why not devise an attractive portable, maybe needlepointed, footstool? It could be about the size of a purse or a small briefcase and capable of being inflated or unfolded just to fit the distance (S, M, L, XL)  between one’s feet and the floor. Our new hall has conveniently located wet bars where these could be offered as an additional courtesy, of course, for a small fee. Or it could simply provide adjustable seats to enhance the opulence.

OoN welcomes suggestions, designs, other ideas.

Pentecost 17/21B Mk 9.38-50

John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mk 9.38-40).

I suppose there’s a certain comfort in having an “exclusive,” in being the only one to know about something and to break the news and to claim the rewards. News media and especially their reporters understandably get a lot of mileage out of such exclusive stories.

Apparently, it was no different with the disciples of Jesus. They were the “in” group, the ones who’d been commissioned not just with a message, but with a unique authority to heal and even with a power greater than daemons. They were discovering grace, but embracing that novelty had a steep learning curve and was still not without a residual touch of merit — as, indeed, it is yet for us. They may well have been remembering painfully what it had cost them and what risks they’d taken and continued to take by throwing in their lot with this Jesus. So when they discovered they weren’t the only ones with this new mastery, that there were others in on the Jesus trail and who had apparently not made such sacrifices, one can understand how their noses got altogether quite out of joint.

Strangely, things are not a lot different now. We Anglican/Episcopal Christians tend to get a little smug ourselves from time to time. I’m speaking, of course, from my own bias, but not, I think, without reason. The early 20th century evangelist Billy Sunday called us the “sleeping giant of Christendom,” implying that we really didn’t know what we had in our tradition or even worse that if we did, we were not much about using it. Billy Graham once told a group of us clergy that his pattern and plan for mission was simply that defined in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Evangelism. He also wondered out loud why we never used it ourselves.

The present discomforts in our Communion which rend our hearts as well as our fabric seem not all that dissimilar from those that provoked Jesus’s disciples. The Archbishop of Canterbury his very self has said that we are not an inclusive church. That strikes me as but another way of saying that we are an exclusive church. When I hear that suggestion, even if only implied, I hear our Lord’s response to the disciples. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” This new gospel of God’s love is about God loving and including all, not just those who follow some strict doctrinal line or who stand in what we’ve made and called in these latter years an “apostolic succession,” what the disciples could easily have meant when they said the man casting out daemons was “not following us.”

I believe that as clumsy and messy as it is, the collegial polity in the American and perhaps the Canadian church is surely a way of achieving the healing justice and love that continues to be altogether consistent with “Jesus’s name.” It is an albeit ponderous way for seeking and serving “Christ in all persons, (and) loving (our) neighbors as (ourselves)” as we have committed to do in our Baptismal Covenant.

Just so does this story of the distraught and subsequently admonished disciples reenforce the very inclusiveness of grace and justice, healing and well-being that are of the gospel’s substance and that now rise to the nub of the church’s present malaise. The disciples wanted a corner on this ministry they’d risked their lives for. Who can blame them? Many of their latter-day successors — risk or no — today seem to think they should have one, too.

Perhaps it is another story at another time, but this is also a story about witnessing. Witnessing, not simply as telling our own faith, our own stories, but witnessing as pointing to wherever we see these same gospel signs by whatever name and “performed” by whomever, commissioned and ordained or no. Jesus was quite clear about that.

The New Testament scholar and Lutheran bishop Krister Stendahl once put it like this: Wherever, whenever, however we witness the brokenness of the world being mended, there is present the Kingdom of God.

The Dalai Lama was on the distinguished lecture tour down the road at the University of Buffalo when CP and I were at Chautauqua, NY, a while back. NPR’s local WBFO was frequently mindful of the news about his presence and his claim that peace is a good thing to be sought after.

Their announcers kept calling him the Dolly Lama, so often that if ever he’d been there before, which he apparently hadn’t, I’m sure they’d have had somebody sing how good it was to have him back in town. His presence also reminded me of Ogden Nash’s famed ode to lamas.

“The one-l lama, / He’s a priest. / The two-l llama, / He’s a beast. / And I will bet / A silk pajama / There isn’t any / Three-l lllama.” To which Nash appended the footnote, “The author’s attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as a three-alarmer. Pooh.”

It’s generally good for us to have folk like the Dolly and the Pope and Billy Graham to remind us that there are other options than violence by which we might consider living together. The Pope and Dr Graham, of course, have had their moments dissing people of other religions and having to apologize for it, but they no less have some credentials left for being more or less in touch with their serenity and telling us to get over ourselves and perhaps be a bit less flappable.

Speaking of peace, W’s having his usual defensive moments with Geneva’s inconvenient Convention. Not only that, but other heads of state challenging him to debate and suggesting that he’s not all that bright and has made a few mistakes, himself, must be something of a drain on him. At least Benedict and Billy have ‘fessed up to their mistakes (mostly, of course, when they have come to light). Having a conscience no matter how clean, I reckon, is to be preferred to having apparently no conscience at all.

Jesus didn’t leave all his moxey to one person. He left it to a community and he sent Spirit a plenty to keep it embodied, between the curbs, and focused.

One of my favorite things about the Episcopal Church is its pentecostal consistency in commitment to the practice of discerning God’s will in community among all orders of ministry — laity, deacons, presbyters, and bishops. We do this triennially in the General Convention, its lead-up, practice, and follow-up. We do it annually in the conventions and councils of the several dioceses. Indeed, when we set our minds to it, we even do it in vestries and standing committees. God willing, when we behave that way, every once in a while we actually accomplish something in this Anglican gift of ordered freedom.

Our theology of ministry requires that the whole church listen for the movement of the Holy Spirit. Such ministry is not relegated solely to the clergy or to a magisterium. The problem some have with our polity is that it is messy, time-consuming, ambiguous, and, of course, dare we say, democratic.

Increasingly, it seems, groups of American bishops fail to recognize or maybe even to understand this distinctively collegial characteristic of the very church through which they received their orders and to whose doctrine, discipline, and worship they swear allegiance. In their penchant for pontificating, they end up overlooking rather than overseeing (bishop = overseer, supervisor) canon law, the deacons, the presbyters, and the laity altogether. In fact, they seem to do whatever they can to avoid it all. What is worse, codependents to a fault, we let them, forgetting that denial and grandiosity are the twin diagnostic indicators of addiction, in this case, at least, addiction to power with an apparent disregard for any faithful meaning and understanding of authority — on our part or theirs.

As a consequence of this attitude, of course, they gather alone and in like-minded, reinforcing groups apparently without any thought to their true place in orders and to make unsolicited pronouncements on their own. Just so have two separate groups of bishops met this September in meetings provoked by the famed Windsor Report of 2004, itself largely only episcopal in origin and itself missing the point of our American polity altogether.

These are groups of bishops who have an opinion and who want you to know about it, and that’s just fine, but actually, they don’t decide anything. They aren’t the deciders. The General Convention decides things for The Episcopal Church. The bishops do not stand alone in such matters. They are welcome to lobby the church in whatever direction they wish just as those of us have done who have worked for the full inclusion of women in all orders of ministry and for gays and lesbians to have full participation in the church.

As it is, our view has prevailed within the rules of order and in the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church. These errant prelates keep trying end runs to achieve their vision. But that’s pointless, as there is no “body” that can enforce their desires except the General Convention. This is not to say the bishops have no place in ministry or that their place is not of critical importance. But it is to say it is only a place and of no more importance than that of any other baptised member or duly elected representative to our decision-making bodies.

We pray for their better understanding and fulfilling of their orders and, as well, for our understanding and wariness of their anxiety. But we pray, as well, for them to get back to their dioceses and to get to the work for which they were elected and ordained — stuff like spreading the gospel and building up the church in their place of business, healing the sick, feeding the poor, tending the prisoners, and all those other Jesus things. There are many pressing issues in their little corners of the world — a lot more than any one of them can manage alone — which need to be overseen, not overlooked.

A once and dear friend of mine had a remarkable way of putting things in their place. With a mere aside, he’d say, “that’s about as useless as an extra navel.”

That simple phrase always struck me as a most thorough of put-downs. I cannot imagine anything so terminally unique that even a simple duplicate would be, so to speak, terminally redundant.

Early on in life, I suspect that most of us were not simply curious, but also circumspect about navels. If they were to be regarded at all, such concern remained private and relegated to the growing list of all the curiosities of childhood. Later on, we would learn that “navelgazing” was society’s synonym for “goofing off,” the worst of all crimes against the Great American Work Ethic. What a simple, insignificant little dofunny, smack dab in the middle of everybody, obviously, we would learn, oblivious to all the distinctions and conflicts we make between ourselves, completely impartial to left brains and right, quiet, unassuming, rarely getting any attention at all save the occasional visit from an industrious chigger.

But the truth is we could learn a lot from navels, not only what an essential function they represent, but now that we don’t seem to need them at all, how they may be more important than ever. For what, indeed, in our complicated anatomy could be a more important reminder of what being human is all about?

Environmentalist claim that everything on this planet and more than likely in the entire cosmos is connected in one way or another. The chaos math people tell us that even when a south Pacific butterfly flutters by, a frontal system over middle Where’sit suffers a mild shudder in one way or another.

Lewis Thomas, the perceptive and self-styled biology watcher, suggests that if the planet earth is like anything at all, it is most like a living cell. I don’t recall his saying so, but if the earth is so alive, perhaps even it has a navel, as well. So far as I know, nobody’s ever found one, but it’s not a bad idea. It’s probably in a place heretofore undisclosed or perhaps deliberately obscured and protected with other weapons of mass construction.

But come to think of it. the Big Bang being what it was (or is) suggests its own kind of connectedness, a kind of cosmic navel where the whole universe once got its nourishment and DNA instructions to go ahead and do its thing with a careful eye for the living commonwealth of everything, so much so as to make sure all the rest of us got our own personal reminders.

One navel each, though quaint and though plenty, yet possesses infinite value. Perhaps it might be a kind of anatomical icon recalling the words of the ancient prayer — “keep us ever mindful of all the changes and chances of this mortal life” — the one essential, unique, and simple reminder that somehow we are all irretrievably connected. Maybe navelgazing’s not such a waste of time after all.

ps. Whether or not Eve and Adam had one, of course, is a question best left to neonatal theologians.

A 1916 advertisement for a library organizer and director in Northern Wyoming required that applicants “Must be able to get along with Western people, ride and drive, as well as pack a horse, follow a trail, shoot straight, run an automobile, and be able to rough it whenever necessary.”

CP’s a librarian. She likes to visit libraries. I like to take her with me when I visit libraries. It just seems safer that way. She’ll never tell the librarians about her Dewey-eyed past, so I wait until she’s back looking over the stacks somewhere, and then I tell them. It always makes a difference. For some reason, librarians inevitably size me up with a kind of jaundiced look. Just as inevitably, they change to a more welcoming attitude when they learn about with whom I am visiting them.

Having got away from it all and having forgot my houseshoes in this current shotgun vacation with cold floors, it was with great relief to find the Chautauqua Institution’s Smith Library. The librarians here look like they can not only shoot straight and pack a horse, but follow a trail, as well. The Smith Library is at one end of a quad, the bookstore is at the other.

There’s plenty literary about Chautauqua like always, and they’re not ones to let you forget it. When I was a child, I had a folding desk about the size of a laptop computer that was, when I think about it, kind of like maybe a da Vinci computer. It was designed to hang on the wall at about desk height, the front half folding down to make the desk top. This revealed on the back a paper scroll with all sorts of exciting pictures and legends. The desk that opened out was a chalkboard that also functioned as a writing surface. The whole apparatus was called a Chautauqua Desk. This was my first exposure to the word, a word and a concept that has fascinated me ever since. When I think about it, I suppose I might have been a librarian had I had enough moxey and the chutzpah to go with it.

Actually, I did come close. It’s no wonder to me that Jane Langton wrote in The Thief of Venice that to the poet Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand.

Changes in daily routines are more resistant in these later years. For one thing, I’ve been at it a long time, longer than I like to think, so I’ve cobbled together a kind of working plan. Then along comes serendipity like a chance to spend a span in another ambiance, a venue not of one’s own.

This time it’s a place by a finger lake in New York, a lake clawed out two million years ago by a glacier two miles thick and no telling how many miles wide in its hands and its reach. The tremendous pressure of its weight caused the ice to flow and form a massive continental ice sheet. New York state was pretty well covered. Due to long-term temperature changes, the southern edge of our “local” glacier retreated and advanced several times, scraping, pushing, and dragging huge volumes of rock and soil, scattering monster boulders (xenoliths) here and there. Glaciers have little respect for the property they gouge, taking one land’s good topsoil and moving it south toward another’s.

CP and I are in western New York state to enjoy a respite, as if all of retired life were not a respite. The finger lake by whose shores we respire is some thirty miles long, but narrow as lakes go.

The original Chautauqua Institution down the road a piece has a market corner on quaint. Take a collection of frame Victorians, some with as many as five floors, complete with intricate gingerbread in multiple colors, and you’re getting the idea. Take a resplendent library with a second floor devoted to audio — sheet music out of the twenties (Crosby and Ukulele Ike side by side) plus gramophones. The “largest outdoor pipe organ in the world” in an amphitheatre to match it is just around the corner. There’s even an “Episcopal Cottage” somewhere. CP and I toured the grounds including the lobby of the Athenaeum, a 19th century hotel ($300/day single), with conference rooms furnished with elegant pine Windsor armchairs. No folding stackables on chair dollies here.

Pulsing through the quaint, however, is a Wi-Fi system about as modern as one can get and available in the resident Smith Library to such as OoN. I like morals in these stories, but there’s too much bliss around here to find one, nor am I in the humor.

Of the two Hollywood castings for Moses that I know anything about, I’ll take Mel Brooks hands down over Charleton Heston.

For one thing, when Brooks’s Moses went up on the mountain to get the commandments, he actually got three tablets of stone with five on each. Then he dropped and broke one, so could deliver only ten to his desert-wandering colleagues, thus sparing us no telling how much guilt and low self-esteem over the centuries.

I’m remembering, as well, that Alabama court house rotunda version of the Ten that weighed more than a pick-up truck at 5,280 pounds. They couldn’t get any locals even to touch it, let alone move it, and had to go all the way to Georgia to find somebody strong enough — and maybe brave enough.

Perhaps it’ll occur now to the judge who was so enamored about it all that he could never fairly see the splinter in anybody’s eye when he couldn’t even see the decalogue in his own.

Biblical archeology is fascinating, don’t you think? Our seminaries never teach enough of it.

If “to ignore” means to refuse to take notice, then “ignorance” suggests a more or less continuing state of not-taking-notice. With that in mind, are we not curious ever that there just might have been some other way we could honor the 9/11 dead than by simply ignoring them?

Of course we’ve not ignored them. Our grief will take generations to run its course. It’s not the personal pain and anguish of 9/11, but the profound and singular opportunity of 9/12 in which we seem to be suspended as a nation by not taking notice. Those two dates are now metaphors seared into our national psyche, the one of the horror that was done to us and whose transgression continues down through time, the other, the horror that we’ve done to ourselves by not taking notice and whose transgression could well far exceed the effect and the memory of the other.

Oh, it didn’t look that way on 9/12, the date. It seemed momentarily like those deaths, both of the innocent and of the guilty might be a uniquely fecund source of an eventual reconciliation for the lot of us on this planet. We received more than just an outpouring of sympathy from our fellows, as profound as it was. We were offered a compelling identity, a one-of-a-kind opportunity to realize across and within all the gratuitous differences and barriers we’ve devised and, indeed, relished. We were offered uniquely the chance finally to know who we are as children of the created order and stewards of its mysteries, the very opposite of ignorance. It seemed as if suddenly there might be true joy in the midst of sorrow, and that we might finally embrace our calling of which the truth of the collective Myth of the Eden tells us.

It didn’t turn out that way. Indeed, from what we know now, it was already planned to be otherwise; 9/11 only triggered the urgency and, forbid the thought, the opportunity of what was at the very time in the minds and wills of our leaders. Far from our Founders’ humble acceptance of who we are, we were, instead colored and deformed by the zeal for vengeance resulting in the additional and continuing death of far more thousands in 9/12 than ever in 9/11, our own special brand of suicide bombing.

Murder and ignorance is such a strange way to honor the dead. Yet, even this, beginning at 9/12, is not beyond God’s grace and forgiveness. It only extends the distance by what may seem to our limited vision, an inconceivably immeasurable span.

My friend with the drinking problem and who doesn’t hear all that well called to say he’d finally worked the Program and now what should he do. I wondered. I hadn’t seen him at any meetings, but then he could have been attending across town. After all, he hadn’t asked me to be his sponsor, so I just asked him how he was feeling and what would he like to do now that he was abstinent.

He said, well, he wasn’t exactly abstinent right now, but that he had been a number of times, and, for that matter, it didn’t seem all that difficult or different. So I asked how long those times were. Not very long, he said, but long enough that he didn’t see much to it all or why everybody raved so about sobriety. So I asked him how many times had he stopped. And he said exactly the number of times the Big Book required. I told him I was pleased he had read the Big Book. He said he hadn’t exactly read it, but had been told pretty much what it said. So I asked again how many times he had stopped.

Exactly the number required, he said, like I am supposed to. And then he said he’d started again, but where could he go now? It’s a Twelve Stop program, didn’t you say?