January 31, 2007
Quercus
Our young secondhand volunteer oak (Quercus shumardii don’t we hope) started its life probably at the courtesy of some squirrel, sprouting between the edge of the asphalt paving down front and next to the stone wall holding up the front yard. It’s about six feet tall. So I asked our landscrape (sic) guy if it could be transplanted to a less hostile environment. He said Yes, but wait until the fall. So we did.
It’s got a splendid berth now in the front yard close to the connecting line to the sewer, a choice and fecund place to be. Trouble is, the transplanters were not able to save much root, so they overdosed what was left with roothelper, then crossed their shovels for wait-and-see time.
What we’ve waited to see our majestic Deodar (of previous OoN fame) do, it doesn’t seem to be doing. It’s several years old and approaching maybe twelve or thirteen feet tall. In its homeland India, it grows to 150 feet with a spread of forty. Over there, it’s called the “timber of the gods.” I don’t know what gods, or whom gods, either, but if I knew what kind of liturgy they prefer, I’d try it. Gold and frankincense, perhaps not, but maybe myrrh would offer some encouragement. Deodar’s greenery seems paler than earlier on. Maybe the new oak across the yard might inspire it, that is, if it lives.
As I reported earlier, our neighborhood fauna is on hard times thanks to the bulldozers on the once-removed lot-around-the-corner where they used to live. The builders have discovered the massive, foot-thick slabs of Devonian (or is it Silurian?) dolomitic limestone. They’ve brought in what must be a twelve-foot jackhammer hooked on to an oversized backhoe. Now, they’re busting up the rock (shaking up the neighborhood) to make a massive corner pocket retainer to level off the slope so they can build some multifamily, multi-SUV family dwellings to join our happy hood and further crowd our streets.
Our Hillsboro-West End (say HWEN) neighborhood association together with our city councilwoman Ginger are working on an ordinance to prevent this sort of thing. It’s too late to do much about the mess around the corner and the one down the street. But we’re counting on the Deodar and the Q. Shumardii to leave them in the shade.
January 30, 2007
Waltzing
One of my favorite (probable) heresies is that our tradition’s claim that we are created in the image of God really means that we are imagined into being by God. And subsequently that when we, too, imagine we might be closer to doing God’s will, to being most Godlike, to having the mind of Christ within us than maybe at any other time.
Imagination is the way faith takes shape, the way faith is implemented. Like faith, imagination is mostly a risk. It is to be human, to imagine is. To say that I am “only” human as some kind of a cop-out or to say that something is only someone’s imagination is to insult God and God’s way of getting things done.
PS. So why church? Church is the safe house, the safe community where we can practice being human, where we can take on feats of imagination, of being faithful. Church is not where we go to get more spiritual, but to get more human, where we can risk human being and human becoming and taking it all out into the world from time to time for the world to see and feel what it’s like to waltz with Matilda, for God’s sake.
January 29, 2007
Enemies
Who on earth would ever want to love a terrorist? Or hug a loaded suicide bomber? Who needs a friend or a relative when you’ve already got enemies like that?
On the other hand, that frequently enigmatic Paul said loving your enemy would heap coals of fire on his head. It’s a pleasant idea, but really, he ought to be ashamed. Maybe he was behind the door when Jesus said to love your enemies, and just plain to love them whatever the result, whatever the cost, certainly not with burning embers in mind — and certainly not to kill them.
Jesus loved his enemies. And look where it got him. Such behavior was not a very good example, but a very good excuse to skip that commandment, if, indeed, that’s what it was. He never seemed to qualify it that way. But, I regret to say, he did say it. And I take it that most of what he said or even what he was said to have said can certainly be considered to be rather important.
Father Emil at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility up in Lake Wobegon was faced with a somewhat similar problem when the bishop ordered all parishes to pass the peace during the liturgy. It was not the sort of thing DNA-ed introverts cared much about doing anywhere, let alone in church of all places. So, like any respectable parish priest, he found a way. Pass the Peace, he told his flock, but you don’t have to make eye contact.
And remember, the kind of love Jesus talked about is not so much a feeling as it is a choice, maybe even an “act as if” and then stand back and see what happens.
January 29, 2007
Enemies
Who on earth would ever want to love a terrorist? Or hug a loaded suicide bomber? Who needs a friend or a relative when you’ve already got enemies like that?
On the other hand, that frequently enigmatic Paul said loving your enemy would heap coals of fire on his head. It’s a pleasant idea, but really, he ought to be ashamed. Maybe he was behind the door when Jesus said to love your enemies, and just plain to love them whatever the result, whatever the cost, certainly not with burning embers in mind — and certainly not to kill them.
Jesus loved his enemies. And look where it got him. Such behavior was not a very good example, but a very good excuse to skip that commandment, if, indeed, that’s what it was. He never seemed to qualify it that way. But, I regret to say, he did say it. And I take it that most of what he said or even what he was said to have said can certainly be considered to be rather important.
Father Emil at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility up in Lake Wobegon was faced with a somewhat similar problem when the bishop ordered all parishes to pass the peace during the liturgy. It was not the sort of thing DNA-ed introverts cared much about doing anywhere, let alone in church of all places. So, like any respectable parish priest, he found a way. Pass the Peace, he told his flock, but you don’t have to make eye contact.
And remember, the kind of love Jesus talked about is not so much a feeling as it is a choice, maybe even an “act as if” and then stand back and see what happens.
January 26, 2007
Biography
Ellen Goodman is one of my favorite columnists.
She wrote a piece once about how one’s biography affects one’s opinions, either as ballast or as barrier or perhaps both. She had the U S Supreme Court in mind and how peculiarly this notion works there among the justices.
She wrote that, for a long time, people believed that the best opinions on every subject were the products of a “detached intellect,” what philosopher Thomas Nagel described as the “view from nowhere.”
Now, I’m impressionable. I’ve been accused of believing only the last thing I’ve read or heard. There may be some truth in that, but if so, it’s not altogether comforting. For example, is the name Out of Nowhere simply a humble stab at objectivity or some latter-day ex nihilo, junior-grade, a prideful try at preëmpting God?
Frankly, I never know what my subconscious is up to when I write (or most any other time for that matter). But I do remember an assignment in seminary to review the great William Temple’s Gifford Lectures, “Nature, Man, and God.” I took issue with something the bishop had said and more or less apologized for doing so. My professor wrote in the margin of my paper, “Denson, on you, humility is unbecoming.”
That said, I may as well admit that Out of Nowhere is always out of somewhere, most often from my heavy-handed biographical bias, and thus, grossly misnamed… something like when we speak of The Faith, as if there were no other, or of Holy Orders for us clerics, as if the plain old Baptismal Covenant were some sort of pagan enterprise that doesn’t really matter all that much.
January 25, 2007
Like it is
Epiphany 4C
Epiphany doesn’t offer enough pizzazz for a shopping season.
So its symbols [whatever they are besides kings riding camels back home and wondering how they could ever explain where they’d been and what they’d seen] don’t attract shoppers any more than they annoy the ACLU. The irony of God is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in creating us human beings in the first place and then choosing us as an icon, a window, through which can be seen not only God and ourselves, but through which, as well, the whole universe gets a crack at expressing and understanding itself. Epiphany — aka “tell it like it is.”
Epiphany maybe lasts too long. On the other hand, we’re already half way through, and Christmas, with all its sweetness and light, is out of sight and out of mind for most of us. Now we can get back to nitpicking our great Scriptures and arguing about our tradition and the usual unreasonable foolishness about our reason, the third part of all that’s holy.
The Nazarenes took their hometown boy about as seriously. But when he stopped preaching and went to meddling, their neighborly tolerance was out of the question. There he was, in the synagogue of all places, reminding them of something they should have learned in kindergarten. They probably never called it Christmas and Epiphany, of course, but it was “show and tell time,” nevertheless.
January 24, 2007
Stories
Nobelist writer Jane Smiley came to our town last evening and charmed us all by talking about, of all things, writing. She said 9/11 shut down her muses so emphatically that she took up reading, instead. She started with Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” and read another 129 books following, all in the chronological order of when they were written, before she started writing again. His accounting of the Black Death had a lot of influence on her subsequent mindset to the written page.
The effect of all this was that her work became the rewriting of some of the books she had read, changing the date, the place, the names of the characters, and plunging on ahead. Showing that this is what many of the great writers have done, she then recounted a cycle of who followed whom followed whom followed whom until it began to seem as if there may well have been only one book somewhere back in time plunging through different “carnations” that accounted for all the libraries on earth.
I wondered if maybe the Bible is that kind of book. It includes just about every cycle and saga and fix a person could get caught up or get into in trying to follow their bliss together and with all the kinds of literature such a spiritually biographical whirlwind could ever produce. We do an injustice to the people who inform it, that is, shape its life, when we take their tale to be any more infallible than ours. To be sure, they were inspired to tell us where they’d been and what they’d done and Whom they’d followed, and we trust they were candid about it, but not any more so than are we when we so set our hearts and minds. God’s the same for them and for us, allowing herself to be filtered through our being and becoming to one another like she does, every life a novel, a story told as it goes, facing the changes like the prayer says with serenity, courage, and wisdom, all figuring in our personal scheme of things.
It took 9/11 for Ms Smiley to slow down and read thusly to inform her story-telling. And what a majestic way she’s come to do it. Maybe there’s enough day-by-day chaos somewhere in the world to slow us down to read. We don’t have to start with Boccaccio. Adam and Eve and Moses and Isaiah will do for openers. And then we can go on to John Baptist and Jesus and those ragtag disciples, discover again how that story came out, and then start refreshing and telling our own.
January 23, 2007
Pretense
John “Honest to God” Robinson, the British bishop who brought such fresh air into the church in the 1960s, often said that the pulpit is too much already six feet above contradiction. These words come back today as we remember Bishop Phillips Brooks, one of the church’s outstanding preachers for whom pretense was poison.Would that it were so for more in these times. Servant leadership, both in church and state, seems almost a thing of the past. Episcopal arrogance and the clones such a posture raises up among the presbytery approaches pandemic stages altogether contrary to our Anglican collegial heritage. This same sort of hooliganism has, as well, infected our national heritage of checks and balances that is so often disdained in these times.Brooks was said to be a moderate churchman, not given to puffery. One of his choice bon mots was said to be, “Orthodoxy is, in the Church, very much what prejudice is in the single mind. It is the premature conceit of certainty. It is the treatment of the imperfect as if it were the perfect.”A probably apocryphal, but no less real story is told of an occasion when he was to speak at a parish fund-raiser in one of his more “high-church” congregations. He arrived in the rector’s study attired in a dark suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. The rector lamented, “Bishop, I’d so hoped you’d wear your clericals on this occasion.”"By all means,” the bishop replied. Then, opening his brief case and taking out a black tie, he promptly re-vested.
January 22, 2007
Wonders
“Never question the truth of what you fail to understand, for the world is filled with wonders.” Somebody said that, and I’m glad they did.
For me, to understand something is for it to have meaning, maybe to grasp an edge on its purpose even if its purpose is merely just to be. There, I went and said “merely” without realizing even that that in itself is a failure to understand, an insult to whatever wonder whose wonder and truth I may be failing to see. And that is for “wonder” not to have meaning for me. Which is not so and about the silliest idea anybody could ever have, anyway.
Wonder and curiosity make the world turn, mine especially, and are a reasonably good yardstick for the maturity. Folk who aren’t curious are noticeably short a few cards in their deck, particularly when they end up in positions of leading the rest of us sometime lemmings somewhere.
The miracle of being is itself perhaps the world’s chief wonder, one of the ultimate mysteries, the conditions for it, we’ve learned, so delicately balanced out in the space/time continuum as they are. How careless we’ve become with it all.
We’ve another lot in our hood being razed to make way for another house, hence, more traffic, and all with no attention either to the access to or the condition of the streets — here and beyond. This particular lot was the remnant of what was once a few years ago a magnificently wooded hill that housed a scout camp and numerous other of nature’s critters who’d made their homes there over the years. A couple of great horned owls who occasionally gave a hoot to each other. A fox or two and a coyote who helped wandering cats and dogs watch their Ps and Qs more carefully. And some hawks who kept the squirrels and rabbits in in order.
I can’t imagine what possesses so-called “planning” commissions who seem to plan more where their next tax buck is coming from than to have any concern for the truth of what they don’t understand. Indeed, are they wonders whose truth I seriously wonder about.
January 20, 2007
Juxtaposition
The State of the Union speech and Groundhog Day this year each come within only a few days of the other.
Air America Radio took note of this coincidence and pointed out that “It is an ironic juxtaposition of events that the one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication while the other involves a groundhog.”
OoN reports this if for no other reason than that we feed off irony and are constantly alert to it however and whenever it comes down. Indeed, it is refreshing even to find it elsewhere than seemingly always somehow involved in the church’s frequent obsessive obfuscation with itself.
Also, we do not wish to be unreasonably pedantic, for it may be unfortunate that some, if they catch Air America’s insinuation, may be offended and see this as a misunderstanding of the proper use of irony and as an altogether appropriate if unfortunate comparison. The leaders of the nation — and of the church, as well, for that matter — seem so constantly into the gravitas of life. Further, they seem so burdened by their reading of it and with the making of decisions about it that an occasional injection of how ludicrous we both must seem to outsiders could possibly be a source of comic relief. But then, it may not.
There’s little we can do about that, save savor the moment and take full advantage of getting to use a fun word like juxtaposition even in the same sentence with irony. As you might imagine, we’re rather pleased and invigorated whenever such a word becomes flesh.