August 31, 2007
Will
Today, August 31, is the birthday of my son Will who died in January 2001 at the early age of 43. He was never so sophisticated as his parents and siblings supposed he might have been, even should have been, but he was probably more himself than I have ever been or will be. I didn’t know that then, and it’s taken all these years since for maturity to catch up enough with me even to suspect it now.
One of my more poignant memories of him would be the times he would phone me long distance and always say when I answered, “This is your son.” There were two others, and we all sounded a lot alike, but he would know that I would know that he wanted me to know. I always felt it a judgment call in which I would come up wanting.
We both suffered the family malady of generations past and present, not alone, but more severely it seemed than any of the rest. There were times when it would eat us alive and brief times when it didn’t, but it always lurked just off stage, obscenely patient. With him, it finally won. With me, it yet remains and reminds one day at a time… “This is your son.”
August 29, 2007
Flags
So the Russians have claimed the North Pole and planted their flag up there. I can’t imagine why they’d want to do something like that unless it reminds them so much of home or maybe Santa Claus. Perhaps time will tell. After all, we were so bold as to plant a flag on the moon. Apparently all you have to do is get somewhere and then plant a flag where nobody else has planted one, and you’re in. A flag under ice at the North Pole should be as good as one on the moon that has to be propped up for lack of any air to wave it. Like Ms Stein might have said, a flag is a flag is a flag. All this business about flags and constitutional amendments about flags and boundaries and borders and state lines seems altogether ludicrous to me, anyhow.
God never really signed Eden’s title over to Eve and Adam for anything more than sharecropping, although the reward for even that was more than the usual pay. When they couldn’t get that much straight, whatever lease they might have thought they had got terminated. It was God’s all along and still is, of course, the whole bumptious lot of it. It was only when Jesus redeemed it and then sent the Spirit to sweep out the left overs that we got promoted from sharecroppers to stewards, and that’s about it.
Like Adam and Eve and all through the millennia in between, we continue to confuse stewardship with ownership. Even that old attempt with Jubilee years never seemed to get it through to us that the land (aka creation) is God’s not ours, and that nobody’s an immigrant unless everybody is. So if there’re going to be any walls built or fences put up it’ll not be for people unless God does it.
Flags are nice and colorful and heraldic and salutable, but lets face it, they’re probably just an insult to God and nothing much more. For in the last analysis and in spite of any claims made otherwise, God is the Decider, not some lesser flag-waving satrap here or there with nothing more than what turn out to be delusions of grandeur.
August 28, 2007
Nonsense
Today is the feast day of St Augustine of Hippo who apparently did such a good job originating original sin that nobody has improved on it since. Religion keeps working at its progeny, of course, all the while talking about conversion, but rarely ever much taking part in it.
Religion is always trying to give a reason for things. This is what makes it seem so, shall we say, rational. But nothing in the beatitudes seems to suggest that blessed are the religious. For generally, the more religious we are, the fewer risks we take, and the beatitudes are more or less about risk takers. Like any other process of arrested growth, religion often keeps us in spiritual adolescence.
The church’s vocation in all this is least of all, if at all, to preserve religion. Neither is it to preserve faith as doctrinal system or to propagate it (in the sense of making more of it), but truly to be a sanctuary, a safe house, in which one can explore the mystery of what it means to be created in the image of God, that is, take the risk of the faith to become the human being God imagines us to be.
This is why the faithful always have more questions than answers, and the religious have more answers than questions, especially to questions fewer and fewer are asking. This is probably what it means to mature spiritually (aka “to get a life”), to move from attachment to detachment, to become more loving, more faithful, more willing. Or, as Dorotheus of Gaza said, trusting so in God that what is happening will be the thing you want and you will be at peace with all.
So what is conversion? What about an end run around pretense to nonsense?
August 27, 2007
Works
Today is the birthday of Mother Teresa, born in the city of Skopje, Macedonia (1910). Her father was murdered when she was seven, and her family fell into poverty. She was educated by Irish missionary nuns and decided to follow in their footsteps. Her first assignment was in Calcutta, India.
One day, she found a woman dying in the street and sat with her, stroking her head until she died. That experience inspired her to found a new religious order, the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, devoted to anyone “unwanted, unloved, and uncared for.” By the time she died, the order consisted of more than 5,000 nuns and brothers, operating more than 2,500 orphanages, schools, clinics, and hospices in 120 countries, including the United States.*
Her letters and journals have recently revealed that for the final decades of her exemplary life she had lost all touch with God and with her faith, and that to bear this was of considerable agony for her. Yet in no way was it apparent that this affected either the diligence or the results of her work with the poor.
It does raise, however, not only something of the ambiguity of the word “faith,” but the travesty we churchers can often make of it. Every chance it gets, religion seems to stifle faith. Perhaps one of its more subtle ways is its often successful attempt to make of faith, itself, a religion, to make a deeply subjective personal commitment, capacity for perseverance and risk into a rigid system of right and wrong. Some religious orders, ever so much as churches, are are especially capable of this sort of thing.
One only has to look over on page 845 in the Book of Common Prayer and compare that neat and innocent, albeit bold, title there, “An Outline of the Faith,” as if faith can actually be outlined. Then compare every bishop’s ordination vow to “guard the Faith.” If that doesn’t scare the beejeebies out of the purple as it surely should out of the rest of us, then we’re simply not paying attention.
The religious establishment in Jesus’ day similarly put their dogma ahead of his faith, and subsequently, of course, his humanity. How easily they and we forget how inseparable are his kind of humanity and faith. Perhaps you’ve noticed how the practice continues, how it has apparently never been out of vogue, and how it remains so firmly planted today that it threatens the very life of the community that has helped give it the freedom which it so misuses. It was that milieu that forced Jesus to say that even though all else has its place, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8.20).
Recalling that saying of Jesus’s and hearing this news about Mother Teresa, I remember another Theresa, the Saint of Lysieux, who surely had something like this in mind when with such spiritual insight she wrote, “If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.”
When those times come that we cannot accept ourselves for some self-imposed reason, or for some so-called orthodoxy that equally imposes and that rejects God’s forgiving grace for all and prevents our own wholeness, then we have turned against this “freedom (for which) Christ has set us free.” But if we can love ourselves — and our neighbor — in spite of all we know to be unlovable about the both of us, if we can will to bear serenely that trial of being displeasing to ourselves, indeed, even if we “lose” our faith, especially that systematized faith of which we’re so proud (but often cross our fingers about during the Nicene Creed) then we will indeed be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter where the Son of Man can lay his head. We may even be for Jesus… a church.
Mother Theresa received the Nobel Peace Prize for her true compassion with the poor and the sick and the dying. She has wisely been beatified by Rome. She will probably be canonized, they say, once an appropriate miracle can be found and attributed to her.
If her servant leadership, especially under such wrenching spiritual duress, is not miracle enough, then perhaps the fact that her image once actually appeared on a sweet roll from one of our town’s local bakeries will suffice. And if even that is not sufficient, at least she should be credited with finally turning around that oft quoted and embarrassingly challenging saying from that stuffy old St James that “faith without works is dead.” After all what has she done but show us that works without faith is altogether alive and kicking to beat hell?
*Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.”
August 25, 2007
Mode
Terry Holmes puts it well and helpfully when he says that Anglicanism is a mode of making sense of the experience of God… or that it is a particular approach to the construction of reality or to the building of a world. Maybe he means it’s an icon, a window, an experience of God as disclosed in the person of Jesus, the Christ. (Holmes, “What is Anglicanism,” Morehouse, 1982, p 1)
The third step in Twelve-Step programs reads, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him(sic).” It’s not an easy one, but neither, to put it mildly, are the Steps, themselves, all that downhill. It’s a lot clearer when one takes the Third, I’ve found, to get our understanding of God out of the way and to turn our attention to the God of our understanding. When I realize there’s a lot more to God than even I could possibly let on and whatismore understand then I might get that straight and become a follower and not an impediment.
So with Anglicanism and with any of us who claim its kin. Jesus is the Way and the Truth and the Life, or, at least, he said he was, and it’s a good place to start on whatever way we might have in mind and hold dear. Anglicanism, Christianity, for that matter, is a way to the Way, not the Way in itself. We could do a lot worse than somehow to incorporate the Third Step into our Anglican manners and let God… so we could have some better footprints to follow than we’ve somehow been able currently to come up with. Then maybe it’ll not be so scary and contentious out there, and maybe we’ll start serving God and not some orthodoxy, no matter how catholic.
August 24, 2007
Surprise redux
Bartholomew was probably as surprised as the next guy when Jesus chose him as an apostle (Mt 10). Nevertheless, there he was without a miter to his name, charged with a nonstipe job to heal sick Jewish dropouts and raise a few from the dead, including cleansing any who were leprous and exorcising any daemons that got in the way.
It was a tough and dirty job, but it was one that Simon, the Samaritan sorcerer, was willing to die for and more than likely wished he had (Acts 8.18-21). Anyhow, it all helped start what we get so carried away with that we now call it “apostolic succession,” only with a few added puffery and trappings and not so many exorcisms. We seem to prefer and claim the mainstream and avoid the creeks and rivulets where those other itinerant mendicants loved their Lord and prayed and preached and settled for a little apostolic success now and then.
They did, however, most of them, just like old Bartholomew, end up getting called a “saint” and with their own red-letter day on the calendar. But for whatever that’s worth, it sure cost them a bundle, let alone those cross dispositions and all.
(This rerun is turning into an August 24 St Bartholomew’s Day special, but so far, nobody’s picked it up as a DVD.)
August 24, 2007
Surprise redux
Bartholomew was probably as surprised as the next guy when Jesus chose him as an apostle (Mt 10). Nevertheless, there he was without a miter to his name, charged with a nonstipe job to heal sick Jewish dropouts and raise a few from the dead, including cleansing any who were leprous and exorcising any daemons that got in the way.
It was a tough and dirty job, but it was one that Simon, the Samaritan sorcerer, was willing to die for and more than likely wished he had (Acts 8.18-21). Anyhow, it all helped start what we get so carried away with that we now call it “apostolic succession,” only with a few added puffery and trappings and not so many exorcisms. We seem to prefer and claim the mainstream and avoid the creeks and rivulets where those other itinerant mendicants loved their Lord and prayed and preached and settled for a little apostolic success now and then.
They did, however, most of them, just like old Bartholomew, end up getting called a “saint” and with their own red-letter day on the calendar. But for whatever that’s worth, it sure cost them a bundle, let alone those cross dispositions and all.
(This rerun is turning into an August 24 St Bartholomew’s Day special, but so far, nobody’s picked it up as a DVD.)
August 24, 2007
Surprise redux
Bartholomew was probably as surprised as the next guy when Jesus chose him as an apostle (Mt 10). Nevertheless, there he was without a miter to his name, charged with a nonstipe job to heal sick Jewish dropouts and raise a few from the dead, including cleansing any who were leprous and exorcising any daemons that got in the way.
It was a tough and dirty job, but it was one that Simon, the Samaritan sorcerer, was willing to die for and more than likely wished he had (Acts 8.18-21). Anyhow, it all helped start what we get so carried away with that we now call it “apostolic succession,” only with a few added puffery and trappings and not so many exorcisms. We seem to prefer and claim the mainstream and avoid the creeks and rivulets where those other itinerant mendicants loved their Lord and prayed and preached and settled for a little apostolic success now and then.
They did, however, most of them, just like old Bartholomew, end up getting called a “saint” and with their own red-letter day on the calendar. But for whatever that’s worth, it sure cost them a bundle, let alone those cross dispositions and all.
(This rerun is turning into an August 24 St Bartholomew’s Day special, but so far, nobody’s picked it up as a DVD.)
August 23, 2007
Journeying
Pentecost 13/16C (Lk 13.22-30)
Sister Mary Anonym was meeting with a small group of us some time ago, reflecting on a forthcoming episcopal election in our diocese. She mused, “What we really need for a bishop is someone who, crosier in hand, will walk afoot throughout the entire diocese, teaching and journeying toward the see city.”
“Fat chance,” someone said. “Not so fat bishop,” chortled another. Maybe the Sister had Luke’s morning story in mind.
“Jesus went on his way through towns and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem” (Lk 13.22).
Maybe not. At any rate, her counsel is both ancient wisdom and, for the fortunate, refreshing daily discovery. Its practice, of course, is not all that likely.
But it is an admirable way to consider ourselves and our lives in Christ, whoever we are. A life of teaching and journeying. Sharing by word and by deed as we move through each day in a manner not unlike our Baptismal Covenant’s reminder… continuing “in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers” (BCP p 304).
Teaching and journeying. They are so much a pair, these two. Anyone alert to life’s journey, a word meaning so much “life’s dailyness,” and in the least curious about it, cannot help but learn, and then teach. A fellow writing friend and colleague has got herself a new pacemaker and not without considerable fear and discomfort. Yet, she’s given it a name and she writes about it, typing temporarily with only one hand, and she celebrates the joy in such things, learning, journeying, teaching.
Not so long ago, I got a new acrylic lens in each eye, only six millimeters in diameter, “pacemakers for vision,” replacing what God put there in the beginning and I clouded over by my ribald longevity. I’ve not named them, but my friend inspires me to. So far, they are only Left and Right, each with its impressive little descriptive note to accompany it and to be kept on my person. Seeing now the world suddenly has new life — the cosmos, the newspaper, the Book of Common Prayer, the laptop (the omnipresent laptop!). Teaching and journeying.
It is not easy for some of us to learn that life comes only one day at a time. It is so easy to forget the wisdom of Sister Joan Chittister that “Nothing we do changes the past. Everything we do changes the future.” Journeying — and journaling, its close companion — can always ring changes on that counsel. It is a foundation stone in twelve-step programs, warning us to honor, but not to live in the past, to create a new past as we change the future, and, for good measure, to walk our talk one day, one journey, at a time.
Jesus learned, affirming and reaffirming, keeping patience with us, long-suffering with us on his way to his ultimate suffering for us. In his walk, as in Luke’s accounting, someone will inevitably ask, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” It is not an uncommon wonder. And it is not uncommon that he answered with a story, a stern and challenging story. “Strive to enter by the narrow door… ” How might we answer such a question?
I remember one way. A priest turned to see a man standing in the doorway to his office. The man said, “Reverend, I want to be saved.” For his effort, and, as well, for his risk, the man was treated to a 30-minute lecture on the proper use of the word “reverend.”
I was that priest, one and the same, albeit then a very young one full of himself and expecting daily to bring in the kingdom single-handedly. I hope that we might improve on that, teaching and journeying. I hope that I have.
August 22, 2007
Umbrage
The trees and other plants in our town are foundering on sunshine. The irony is perhaps never so obvious as in watching them burn to death on the very source that feeds the chlorophyll that is their life. There’s a sadness in our common identity, reminding me how surely we will one day join together even more intimately when then we’ll watch together. Dust to dust and all that jazz.
Strangely, we’re not yet short on water or gardeners or landscapers. It’s that we’re short on stewards. So few seem to care. Though these kin of ours are living beings typically lacking locomotive movement or obvious nervous or sensory organs and possessing cellulose cell walls, they are yet connected with us in all God’s little acre. It is only too easy to forget that they are alive in much the same way that we are alive, writing their stories with the same DNA alphabet. But there they are, trapped wherever they volunteered… or we volunteered them.
No way to umbrage, east or west.