November 30, 2006
Anxiety
Advent 1C
The cosmologists tell us that if we look through the great Hubble* telescope floating weightlessly out there around us, not only may we see all the way out to the edge of space, but as well, to the edge of time. The reason for this, we’ve learned, is that space and time are two sides of the same coin and are actually created simultaneously and inseparably in such a way that one simply may not exist apart from the other.
This new season of Advent returns each year, quietly, gently, without store-window decor or newspaper ads and TBTG with absolutely no mall or elevator music dedicated to its cause.
It is to pity. For Advent, ever so much as its partner Christmas which gets all the press, suggests something in our human becoming, our human maturing that is very important not to overlook. That “something” is very similar to these new notions we’ve learned about time and space.
The stories from our family history we read through these days ring changes over and over on two great biblical themes of expectation: Blessed Baptiser John’s clarion call, an anxiety for all, and Blessed Mary’s baby, an anxiety of her very own. Advent gathers both these in one and points to the mysterious union of matter and spirit caught up in the star-crossed saving event of Christmas. And Christmas brings the great themes of judgment and redemption into focus.
What is created in the image of God is, as well, now redeemed in the image of God, assuring us that finally, in a way so strikingly similar to what we’ve learned about the universe, never again need we — nor can we — separate the one from the other.
*
November 29, 2006
Sobriety
A story, true:
A very inebriated woman staggered across the back yard of a suburban residence one balmy afternoon and caught the attention of the older couple who lived there. She looked quite helpless and disoriented. The yard backed up to a steep bluff overlooking the edge of a deep lake. Fearing for her safety, the couple went out to see if they could help.
The woman resisted forcefully and said she wanted to kill herself by jumping off the cliff into the lake. They were able to distract her long enough to phone their priest and to ask him to come and help.
“Why did you frighten these people?” the priest asked the woman. “Why didn’t you go ahead and jump?”
“Because,” said the woman, “I’d have to walk through all that underbrush by the bluff. There may be snakes. I’m afraid of snakes.”
And an opinion:
Neurosis has nothing to do with how one behaves or how one suffers. It has nothing to do with the fact that the psyche, the self, is infused with contradictions. Rather is it primarily the failure of the capacity to attend to the truth about oneself, whatever it may be, with an awareness free of emotionalism, a capacity that the great spiritual masters called sobriety.
November 28, 2006
MO
“Unilateral” and “in-your-face” have more or less been our international relations MO for the past six years. So why not, as a gesture of peace, unilaterally hand over all our considerable stock pile of armament and all other deadly hardware to the UN for safekeeping and eventual disposal? And then why not invite everybody else to the party to do likewise?
I realize this would cause widespread and severe withdrawal pains. It might well put the NRA out of bidness, or maybe it could open a chain of skeet ranges for the gun-deprived and dithering old quail hunters. And then, there could always be Shooters Anonymous. “We admitted that we were powerless over blowing up stuff… ”
We could almost instantly simplify the military-industrial complex. Those munitions guys have been on welfare long enough, so we could put them on unemployment comp until they can find a more respectable line of work. When we get out from under paying for all those bombs, we could pay back China and Japan and erase the national debt overnight. We could have instant universal health care, even for the Third World. There would be daily TV reports on how many lives were saved. And just think what banging all those AK47s into plowshares could do for the family farms?
And then for heaven’s sake, we could stop having to go barefoot at the airport, and of all things, we might even find a way to raise the minimum wage.
November 24, 2006
King
The Sunday of Christ the King
And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these… you did it to me” (Mt 25.40).
It was a radical idea then. It remains a radical idea through the centuries. Over and over again, Jesus likens the kingdom of God, indeed, the kingliness of God never to the royal purple puffery of pomp and circumstance, but always to the simple cloth and chores of the commonplace. It is a message whose profound clarity obviously deafened the ears of church and state then and continues to deafen those who not only cannot hear, but do not listen. It remains the message of the Old Testament prophets that is of the essence of biblical morality and a message against which the gates of hell will not prevail.
Maybe it is of a truth that the perils of any given era seem to those whose times they are as the greatest perils of all time. Perhaps this is especially true for the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their God, a children whose prophetic sensitivity to justice may have never been matched. And perhaps it is especially tragic that we, those continuing children and heirs, stand now our followings so sorely divided as even to be killing one another. And perhaps it is especially tragic that our united purpose and will may never have been needed more than it is now.
Who are “the least” in our time who are so intimately identified with our Lord in his? To whom do we minister that turn out again and again to be our Lord, himself?
If we believe that poverty in the world and poverty in America, the richest nation in the world, is morally unacceptable, then there is our Lord. If we believe that further tax cuts for the wealthy in exchange for budget cuts for social services for the poor and the working poor is simply wrong, then there is our Lord. If we believe that the “swords-into-plowshares” vision of the prophet Micah for national security is better than that of the president’s Department of Defense, then there is our Lord (Micah 4.3-4). And if we believe that social movements with spiritual foundations can truly change history, then there, as well, is our Lord. Then will we know where are “the least” and in whose midst stands our Lord. Then will we know.
One of the reasons for this nation’s founding was to rid ourselves from the secretive cabals of a lord-it-over empire and king. And one of the ways we have done that is through a system of balanced powers created for and given to those who would lead us by serving us. It was perhaps the best secular route we could ever take to provide such an authority.
It was not easy then. It has never been all that easy, though it may have worked better in certain times past. It is our calling as servant leaders to make it work better than ever before. Jesus beckons to us through the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the political refugee, the naked, the sick, those in prison, and indeed, those who are being tortured. However and whatever we do unto these least, we do unto our servant king.
November 23, 2006
Turkey
A family down the street had a pet turkey named Tom that would escape from his corral ever so often and assume command of the neighborhood.
You can say what you will about turkey IQs, but this bird took no guff from anybody. Cats and dogs were thoroughly intimidated. The rest of us kept our distance whenever Tom came out for a stroll.
He soon took a liking to a walnut tree in our backyard. Roosting high on one of its branches, he’d waggle his wattles and gobble his grating cry whenever someone seemed to threaten his authority, day or night.
All this worked well for him until one day when the city held its annual hot-air balloon festival. As the gentle breezes so ordained, a half-dozen wonderfully huge and colorful balloons with their basketed passengers huffed and puffed their way by barely above the housetops near Tom’s tree.
Turkey that he was, he tried to join them. We never saw him again.
November 22, 2006
We have a new flat-screen LED TV on which Diana Krall on the Tony Bennett show last night looked like she’d gained at least sixty-five pounds. I can’t believe that she has in so short a time. When we met her on her Nashville tour, what she gained more than anything was mostly my attention.
Maybe it’s the flat screen that tends on occasion more to be a fat screen, or maybe it’s a fat-making screen. Take pro-football linemen for example. But Tony Bennett looked more or less the same.
Frank Sinatra said that Bennett is the best. I think the secret to them both is in the swinging. They know when the back-up band and the tempo are right, and they play them for all they’re worth. Bennett may really be the best, for he’s perfected not only the tempo, keeping it always “in the pocket,” as jazz players like to say, but also the way he uses what’s left of his 80-year old voice. He speaks and sings the words, always seeming to know exactly when to do whether, and never letting the melody line leave one’s listening mind. The beat, the tempo, the “pocket” mesmerizes all that for us. There’s nothing phony about it. Performance is always corporate, collegial, if you will.
Just like our preachers could benefit from tending to more standup comedians, maybe we churchers just need to attend to more jazz. It’s the difference between listening and just hearing. Fat chance.
November 21, 2006
Skin
All the participants in the Plasticization Exhibit I visited last summer are life-size volunteers without their skin. Nobody said how they volunteered or how willing they might have been. I hope they just volunteered through the medium of their last wills and testaments to be done with as the plasticizers chose and not some other way. At any rate, it’s quite a sight wandering through the exhibit and realizing just how much our skins cover up and contain. Watching the watchers had its moments, too.
One volunteer guy is shown walking along in his sub-wherewithall carrying his skin over his arm like a topcoat which, of course, it is, sort of. Another is going through the motion of serving a tennis ball complete with racket in hand. Still another is riding a skinless horse.
Some churchers have protested the morality of this sort of thing as taking away from our dignity as human beings. Maybe so, but the way we allow so many to go hungry and sick and spend all our money on killing people seems a lot more indignant to me.
Our skins are the largest organ in our bodies. They’re said to be “in” and not “on” I suspect because our bodies start on the surface of the skin, the epidermis, and not underneath where what’s called the dermis and the subcutaneous fat, the part that makes us lumpy.
Skins are very efficient. They not only keep all our working parts from getting all out of order and spilling out in disarray, they help regulate body temperature, and perhaps best of all, they provide us with a sense of touch. I just wish mine wouldn’t stretch so much. I don’t especially need a bod like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’d frankly settle for looking maybe more like Robert Redford.
All this is suddenly on my mind because I had an appointment with the dermatologist today to check out some recent intruders. He was mighty thorough and, I’m pleased to say, said I had pretty good skin for a person my age. I don’t know why people always seem to have to add that qualifier — for eyes and teeth and even cornet playing. Whatever, I’m glad I’ve got a skin that’s still reasonably intact and holding the rest of me together. Having seen those plasticized folk is enough for now.
November 20, 2006
Boredom
Boredom is a personal insult. Somebody said that at a Twelve-Step meeting one time. I suspect they meant that boredom is that state of affairs not only when one cannot stand the company one keeps, but when one cannot even stand to keep one’s own company, no matter who’s around. Maybe it’s something like being alone in a crowd.
I am not often bored. Neither because I haven’t been a lot in the past nor because my own company is so hands-down charming that I can hardly stand myself, but because I’m curious and there’s always so little time. There’s just out and out too much to learn out there for in and in not to gain in here.
Which brings me to books. Even our own library, as limited and pathetic as it may be, yet strikes my curiosity a blow most every time I walk by any of the several places it’s shelved. It’s not easy to avoid. It reminds me most not of what I know, but of what I don’t know, and then it is always barbed with intentions, those paving stones to you know where.
Marriage affects libraries. Especially the collections of two curious people the second time around and who’ve been around for a while and have not-so-gently entered into what has been called an intercultural exchange. Merging libraries is something like merging curiosities, especially those of a librarian and a parson. But one must always use care whose books are mixed with whom’s.
One of my favorite word stories is about a little boy who lived in a town not actually on a map, but in a Broadway play by William Saroyan. It’s called “The Human Comedy.” A scene shows him in his public library wandering alone away from his older sister, back into the stacks. Rows and rows of books tower over him in long, dark, seemingly ominous shelves. He looks up in wonder, considers them carefully, and says in almost breathless awe, “Words, millions of words.”
Even God must have thought fondly of such when she chose a special one to become flesh that finally caught that old evangelist John’s attention. Now who could possibly be bored in a situation like that?
November 18, 2006
Hild
If our new Speaker of the House went looking for a patron saint (which I’ve no reason to think she is, only that in her best interest, she might), she couldn’t improve on Hilda, Abbess of Whitby. Hild, as she was known by her friends, gets her fifteen minutes of fame today and has a resumé, as they say, that any CEO would die for.
She, too, ran a “double monastery,” women and men in adjoining quarters. She had saints and poets among her boarders and a few prima donnas, as well. Whitby Abbey hosted a major seventh-century conference about whether they’d follow Celtic or Roman ecclesiastical customs, Hild, opting for the Celts. Talk about influence, to this day, I don’t know of any basketball team called the Romans.
She was the advisor of rulers as well as ordinary folk. The influence of her example of peace and charity extended beyond the walls of her monastery. It is said that “all who new her called her Mother, such were her wonderful godliness and grace.” And all that was nearly 1400 years ago, a few centuries long before checks and balances.
Now, I ask you, what more could a Speaker want?
November 17, 2006
Jazz
The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra came to town last evening and bent the air in our concert hall clean out of shape. You can’t have music without air to resonate or pluck or beat anymore than you can have life without spirit, and they proved that, doubled in spades.
God breathed an Adam out of clay maybe because the clay was there and he needed to get it out of the way. There’s a lot to be said for the notion that our lives don’t begin until we start breathing, for we’re sure a goner when we stop. And then, it’s what we do with all that air in between once we get some. Adam lost his lease on Eden because of the way he shaped his clay. We’re fast losing our lease on this planet because of the way we’re shaping ours.
A jazz band models community as well as anything I can think of, unless maybe it’s a basketball team. All the members know their and their neighbor’s limits and skills, respect them, then shape that “lay of that land” to something more and different than what it was before they got it. It’s called ad libbing, improvising, playing “at liberty” the basics we’re given in the melody at hand.
“Here’s your life,” God says, “there’re lots of tunes out there. Here’s your freedom and here’s your ‘ax.’ Let’s hear some improvising, but keep it between the curbs, er, the chord changes.”