June 30, 2007

Immigrants

The governor of Texas, the state where I started what I thought at the time was growing up, was on the early news this morning talking about the current flood. A place called Marble Falls seemed among the hardest hit. It’s a pleasant enough town on the northern extent of the Hill Country and the eastern part of the central mineral region where all the marble comes from. CP and I stayed overnight there once in the best Hampton Inn ever.

As is a penchant of some Texans, too many I always felt when I lived there and since, the governor, searching for a way to describe the extent of the flooding, said it covers an area about the size of Oklahoma. If that is a simile, I think that he could have found a better one. I suppose it’s hard enough running a state that close to Texas without having to put up with such a comparison. It must be something like the Brits hearing more often than they want that England and Illinois are about the same size.

If they’re for people, borders, property lines, even fences strike me on the face of it as more or less an insult to God. I wonder that if the notion of having them at all and being so touchy about them doesn’t maybe come from our losing our lease in Eden. I’ll bet boundaries never entered Eve’s and Adam’s minds until they got shown the door.

Come to think of it, DNA says we’re all immigrants out of Africa, anyway. That we’re considered legal or illegal is only a construct of a misunderstanding of stewardship. The only boundary that much matters is the surface of the planet we live on. I’m not so sure that we really understand that, given the way we planted our flag on the moon, then started up a golf course. Then there’s the way we’re systematically dismantling our atmosphere here on earth. There’s no telling what we have in mind for Mars.

At least, the Star Trek saga has the good sense to include something called the Prime Directive which says that one mustn’t meddle in another’s affairs whatever and wherever, and which all the characters seem to take seriously enough. Might the governor of Texas begin watching some episodes and get the memo, maybe he’d show a little more tact and respect. On second thought, who are we churchers to talk?

June 29, 2007

Politics

Some stories are so easy, they’re difficult to tell. Like this one.

CP was director of our town’s public library system and its NPR station WPLN before her retirement a while back. Our current mayor recently announced an $800,000 cut in the forthcoming library budget, bringing about weekend closings in most of the branches. Knowledge of this caused some consternation around our household where the public always comes first, and the weekends would be the “absolute last and most stupid time to close.”

A few days ago, we were returning some books and DVDs to our customary branch library. As we were walking out the door, a young man met us, said he was a reporter with our town’s daily, and that he was doing a story on the library and its proposed closings.

Not knowing CP from Andrew Carnegie, he asked her opinion. (He ignored me. It’s usually like that. I’m slowly and reluctantly getting comfortable with it.) She told him and pulled no punches. He scribbled busily. When I told him who she was, she glared at me, and he scribbled even more swiftly. The story, including her quotes and a brief professional resumé, was in Sunday’s paper.

Tuesday, the news related that the $800,000 had been restored to the libraries, and that the parks and recreation budget had been cut by $800,000. The first response was in an email from a friend and former colleague saying how clever it was of her to “happen to be walking into the branch library on Saturday.” After a dozen or so more responses by phone, by email, and by encounter, her currently waning reputation as a machiavellian metropolitan department head was swiftly being restored. The director of parks and recreation has not called.

And all we were doing, honest, was returning a few items to beat the overdue fines.

June 27, 2007

Provocation

Time comes now and then and usually unsolicited when the continuing news about the destructive miasma worming its way around and through this Anglican Communion of ours reminds me harshly how very much I love this church and how very much I am embarrassed by it.

There are times when we come together as clergy that I cannot avoid the presence of an unexpressed, but no less nourishing and almost palpable connection across all our smugly self-styled orders, some of which we presumptuously call “holy” as if we were all that unique. We have together with all a common ministry of reconciliation, do we. The selfish divisions we work so hard to justify merely and only fly in the face of it, an insult to God.

I hope I am not so long in tooth as not to know how naive I can be about this sort of thing. Naiveté, once in earlier days a mortification for me, inevitably surges now in my later life and suddenly feels far more like a blessing than a curse. For if one is to be faithful, must not one also embrace this kind of wary unawareness as an essential vulnerability to remaining open to come what may?

Frankly, I am mad as hell over the shallow and destructive fear that permeates our beloved Communion. Are we so blind as not to realize how this surely provokes God, the one who creatively imagines our humanity and wants us to express it fully however clumsily?

At a celebration of the Burial Office the other day, I was reminded as we interred a “sinner of God’s own redeeming” that to paraphrase Pogo “we has met that sinner and they is us.” There seemed implied there for anybody yet breathing, “then if so, listen up and get a life while one’s still handy.” All this self-righteous hooliganism in which we are so mired these days seems so utterly tacky and so thoroughly unbecoming to whatever it is God has in mind for us — and we’re pretty sure what that is.

I realized that same evening when our jazz band took the stand for its weekly performance that the first tune we played was that old war horse, “Lady Be Good.” Maybe when I called it I was unintentionally praying to Herself of Magnificat Fame that for heaven’s sake, get us out of this mess.

June 26, 2007

Preservation

In his Little Red Book of Sayings, my friend and colleague Pepper Marts writes, “Bureaucracy’s chief sin is idolatry. Members of an institutional body are encouraged to idolize that body and put its welfare ahead of whatever the original purpose may have been. This assertion is equally descriptive of governments and their military services, of corporations, and of the Churches. The first victim of this institutional idolatry is always truth; the second is beauty.”

Idolatry is the bedfellow of addiction, especially the addiction to power at the expense of authority. Denial and grandiosity are the sycophantic servants of idolatry and addiction. All in the interest of self-preservation, this codependence often leads nations into meaningless wars and churches into meaningless civil wars. This is the dark side of an inquisitional religion that would cripple faith by rendering it not only memorable and manageable, but even more importantly — manipulable. The minute our books and our leaders get such vocational notions of infallibility or near so by putting their versions of orthodoxy out of reach and on ice, conflict is inevitable, and the gospel, its truth and its beauty, as Marts affirms, is always the loser.  

No wonder that when Jesus wrote, he wrote in the sand.

June 25, 2007

Extreme

George Orwell wrote more or less that evil in human affairs is simply idealism taken to any extreme. By “human affairs” I suppose is meant the ways in which we choose to associate and organize ourselves, eg, domestically, politically, ecclesiastically, et al.

If one must be a sociologist to understand this sort of stuff, deliver me. I am only an east Texas country preacher and a sometime cornet player. Anyhow, the notion has some considerable appeal.

Most of my experience in human affairs that, at least, I’d want anybody to know about, has been with the church. I’ve had some in the military, some in the academy, some in the government, some even in hospital administration, and I don’t experience much difference among the several in the ways they manage or mismanage themselves. We humans who make them up are, of course, the inevitable and unavoidable common denominator, skeptical at our best, cynical at our worst.

When one becomes an idealist at the expense of all else in any of these systems and takes that extremism to an obsession, some sort of dysfunction seems inevitable. Evil causes the most extreme dysfunction that I can imagine, and lying is its MO. Scott Peck wrote the book “People of the Lie” about this, the nature of human evil, and how lies, liars, and lying are the true axes of evil. He wrote that among others things, evil is at least “the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders.” I am chilled just to remember that book and how it tempts one, as he warned, to see evil most everywhere.

At any rate, there is in our culture a pervasive kind of deception and disdain for functional systems that often seems motivated by an idealism taken to the extreme. I think of the obsession to secrecy and deception in service to the efforts to redefine the executive branch of our constitutional government. And I think of an analogous disregard by some — both internal and external — of the parameters of doctrine, discipline, and worship that shape the canonical system by which the Episcopal Church would govern itself. That both share an idealism bordering on the extreme seems altogether obvious. The possibility of this extreme verging on evil always in some other system than our own somehow never seems quite so clear to us.

June 22, 2007

Change

Reinhold Niebuhr’s so-called serenity prayer is really a prayer about change with peace and courage and wisdom wrapped around it.

As we face change, maybe our hearts and our heads get a bit out of synch and have to play catch-up with all the new venues coming down. But they’ll regain their balance and their creative energy as before. They always do. They always have. That is the nature and endurance of the church, the rock of Jesus’s naming and choosing.

It is well to remember Isaiah and folk like Molly Ivins and to recall how with whatever capacities left to us we stand in their stead. We need but look to PB Katharine on the verge of an exciting and demanding new time for herself and for church women and for the church together with whom God will make all things new. It’s a damn shame. But come to think of it, it’s the same way God had to get Jesus born.

Pray, then, for the resources of serenity and courage and wisdom, reach deep into them, ferret them out, praying for what we know is right, then take our good and nourishing time to help make it so. God loves us in spite of us.

June 21, 2007

Organized

Pentecost 4/7C Gal 3.23-29

Major league baseball (like organized religion with beer) is a mass mechanism for the experience of hope and the deep contemplation of humility. (R D Rosen, New York Times, 21.8.01, p A19)

Anybody knows, of course, that Anglicanism is hardly an organized religion. Also that it is arguable just how well it offers a venue for either hope or humility. (And that some preachers will use anything for a lead.)

Whatever, somebody seems always itching to tidy up our ongoing American experiment in British piety — also known as the Episcopal Church — so that it at least seems bespoken. Think Nigeria, Anglican Mission in America, the Network and any number of other gatherings of bewildered bishops and congregations here and there who might be expected to know better. Some of whom might even try to hook a rheostat to the sunset.

In the face of all this, it is good that Paul reminded the Galatians of some things that we, ourselves, might be better off being reminded of — and practicing — today. He said, “Now before faith came, we were confined under the law… our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith… But now… through faith (we) are all (children) of God. For as many… as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek… slave nor free… male nor female; (but) all are one in Christ Jesus… heirs according to promise” (Gal 3.23-29 more or less).
Faith and law. The problem now is that we seem to forget Paul’s gently firm and comforting admonition from two thousand years ago. For we are in the same old bind between religion and faith that troubled the Galatians.

The Anglican tradition has managed this tension rather well over the years, if somewhat loose-handedly. But there are those of late who can’t seem to tolerate this way of following the Way. They just don’t seem to want let go and let God. They don’t seem to understand that the more they tighten their grip, the faster they lose it.

A crisis now and then is inevitable, maybe even necessary or welcome, but it doesn’t have to resort to ecclesiastic genocide. Anybody knows that religion in whatever form is always the more powerful and well-organized and lethal than is faith. It will continue its often desperate endeavor to control faith (ie, collapse the tension between the two) by rendering faith not only memorable, but, more importantly, manageable. It will use and attempt to justify almost any means at hand with which to do so — if not canon law, then canon lawlessness, whichever seems most convenient.

On the other hand, faith is usually too naive and indifferent for its own good up to the point of not even recognizing when it’s being used and patronized. Faith, like love, communicates by spiritual osmosis, not by systems. This reality frustrates and beguiles some of the Anglican satrapy and leads them into their present ridiculous behavior.

The security of church as institution and the uneasy wishful thinking of church as sacramental community is always caught in this impasse and has been at least since the 4th century Council of Nicaea. What was created at Pentecost to be a theater of expectation has often become at any cost a theater of the absurd. And we wonder why folks lose interest and why the established (aka organized) religions wane.

Like any other healthy, decision-making tension, the one between religion and faith is anything, of course, but soothing. The current lust after orthodoxy arises out of a climate of fear as it attempts to assuage and even appease such discomfort. During the middle ages, similar crises and their inevitable subsequent religiosity led precisely into the arms of the Inquisition. Today, that same intolerance for anything but “doctrinal purity” ironically creates a crippling and paralyzing climate in the very community whose true vocation is rather to love and to champion justice.

TEC’s often clumsy and sometimes maladroit search for grace through its collegial system of doctrine, discipline, and worship obviously irritates the purple socks off some prelates. Especially those who prefer organized religion over love and justice and inclusion and who have precious little patience for apostolic lip. Heretics aren’t often burned at the stake these days. But ignorance (”any ‘C’ student can become president of the United States”), together with threat, intimidation, indifference, exclusion, and enough dissimulation to cover some episcopal backsides, have effectively replaced the bonfires.

So what is one to do when an 800-pound primate knocks on the narthex door? Grab a valid baptism certificate, of course, and run to beat hell. Who knows when we may even need passports at the altar rail? And be sure and keep a copy of Paul’s letter to the Galatians at hand because beating hell is what it’s all about.

June 20, 2007

Churchiness

The Christian faith is more ironic than it is heroic.* There’s nothing like remembering that to help our stumbling along following the spin off a big church convention like last June 2006.

Irony always exposes pretense and foolishness and shows us the figure of the understated person (or event) that appears to be more than he or she (or it) is. On the other hand, the hero is the larger-than-life person (or event) that appears to be more than the human condition will bear: the champion, the invincible warrior, a lot of us clergy at all levels, the other pompous fools, eg Donald Duck. You can fill in your own list. Church conventions inevitably supply a long one.

On the other hand, the ironic person is given to understatement and is usually more than meets the eye. Think, maybe, Charlie Chaplin or Maya Angelou or Jimmy Carter. Anybody you’ve known whose unpretentiousness is downright annoying, who is a person whose humanity shines through like God’s having a field day, the more, in my opinion, congenial to the Christian faith. Our new PB-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori comes across as this kind of person. It’s no wonder she’s already scaring the purple socks off the pontiffs.

Just keeping these things in mind helps prevent — or maybe just stall — the crazy-making patterns church decisions so often take. Why we have to be so damn serious about ourselves never ceases to amaze me. Of course, it’s not only churchiness that provokes such behavior, it’s mostly everybody at one time or another. One needs only to look around the international geopolitical scene to observe how this so dominates as ultimately to kill thousands, obliterate a lot of real estate, and literally poison the rest of the environment.

The apparently inevitable ecclesiastical puffery that affects us as we go about our daily tasks it is that cripples our vocation to deflate, not to inflate and to contribute to this sort of thing. There’s no better place to start than with an honest look at the gospel’s irony viz-a-viz our own heroicism. The Baptismal Covenant stands on square one ready to lead us into this sort of search.

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*Charles Rice, “Eikon and Eiron: Faith as Imagination,” St Luke Journal of Theology, Sept 1989, pp 249-256

June 19, 2007

Poets

Garrison Keillor told me (well, not exactly, actually I read it in his online Writer’s Almanac)  that today is Salman Rushdie’s birthday. He also went on and said that Salman said, “A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

That catches my fancy because it strikes me as a fair description of the church’s work. Of course, and all the way back to Moses and Jacob, naming the unnamable is a place God’s never much encouraged us churchers to go, so now doesn’t seem like a time to start that up again. And it’s probably best just to leave it to the poets and to let them find out for themselves. But pointing at frauds, taking sides, starting arguments, and taking the world by the scruff of the neck to shape up and get a life, there’s a ministry to die for. And if we ever did something like that, we probably would. 

I never found it the kind of ministry vestries or most bishops seemed to care much for, generally wanting to avoid boat-rocking at all costs. But it  is the kind of ministry that the real heavy movers seem to relish and that now and then gets things done. God knows (if we don’t) that there is fraud and a need to stand for something and plenty of occasions to start arguments and opportunities to wake folk up to the realities of the times and get a life. 

Obviously, this sort of thing is not all that popular and can put quite a crimp in things like the Every Member Canvass. The Ayatollah Khomeini put out a contract on Rushdie for acting like a poet and caused him a bit of discomfort for a spell. All that finally faded. And I’d never expect our top gun the Archbishop of Canterbury to do such a thing, not exactly, but then he does seem to have a way of making a fellow feel unwelcome.

June 18, 2007

Grass

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world.” Rollo May wrote this as the first sentence in his intriguing book The Cry for Myth.

We enjoy in our Communion an appreciation and deep respect for myth, entwined with an authority derived from Scripture, tradition, and reason. Further, we have understood Scripture as a “normative tradition” which sets the parameters for all the rest. We may slip into idolatries from time to time. But we are not bound by verbal inerrancy, the idolatry that’s fundamentally insulting to God who in his image imagines us humans to be free to choose to become as he wishes us to be.

Our normative tradition includes a plethora of stories about eternity breaking into time, about creation from nothing, about seas parting so we can get by, about prophets assumed bodily into heaven, indeed, about heaven itself. We treasure that norm, that Scripture, so much that none of our many liturgies can be said not to be filled with its references.

To gather as church, to be church is to tell repeatedly our story at one family reunion after another, Sunday in and Sunday out, crisis in and crisis out, and never seem to tire of it or of rehearsing it in our creeds and prayers or of ringing changes on it in our homilies. Our myths are our ways of making sense out of nonsense. Our stories are our way of modeling families for families to become story tellers of their own of themselves.

I wonder has our world ever been more morally confusing than now. How refreshing would be a mooring, a centering, a remembering and retelling of our myth. It awaits our attention. God’s grace remains quite sufficient for us as a way, an energy of being and telling. Like in the mass feeding on the hillside, there is even much green grass left in the place on which to sit and make some sense (Mk 6.30-44). Who could ask for anything more?