August 21, 2007

Piety

Piety has never been my long suit. At least not the kind once said of a 19th-century prelate that “makes of religion a tragedy and the movements of one’s muscles a solemn ceremony.” I suppose neither has religion for me ever been an end in itself, rather a means not to be taken too seriously, and a variable one at that, for the occasional attempt to move and shake spirituality’s unmovable and unshakeable freight.

But the Daily Office, a product of religion, is a case in point. If I don’t read it daily, the usual and familiar collage of experience in me comes unglued. I’m not sure what this is about, but something maybe spiritual and bamming around looking for a circuit.

It’s like this. There’s wake-up, surprise and latent gratitude at another new day, ablutions, coffee, slump, especially slump. At this point, when the slump is over, could come any number of things. Dressing. Shaving. The New York Times. The cybermail which is rarely for me and is mostly lists with endless threads about whether Macs or PCs, Albs or Surplices. Then Breakfast, the movable feast. And somewhere in that geriatric olympiad, the Office — and, of course, writing.

The snag comes along about here. Will it be writing or will it be the Office? If the Office has been regular at some point in this mini-saga for the past few days or weeks, writing, with a bit of prompting like staring at a blank screen and fiddling with settings and throwing in a game or two of solitaire, comes along fairly well. If I’ve been an off-again-on-again liturgical slacker for a time, the muse says forget it, Buster. And I come up with something like about right now.

But then, I read the Office and my daily dose of Buechner this morning, and I haven’t read them for two weeks. I’ve been off-line and grousing, instead, grousing over the way internet service providers and their damnable Please-Hold-While-We-Entertain-You-With-Another-Of-Our-Endless-Kenny-G-Off-Pitch-Soprano-Saxophone Serenades have their way with me. Interruptions like this get me out of the habit when the habit is what I need most. And, of course, I should remember that if you play more than one note on a soprano saxophone, the second or third one will more than likely be out of tune, anyway.

August 17, 2007

Surgery

Pent 12/15C (Lk 12.49-56)

Luke said that Jesus said, “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth?” (Lk 12.51a) and Matthew added, as if for good measure, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Mt 10.34).

From the way these two figured it, the Prince of Peace had had it. “You want peace? I’ll show you peace.” Anybody who’d thought it was all rock and roll from there on out had to have got another think coming. It reminds me of the critic whose ire was also up when she reviewed a complete dramatic production in only one sentence. “The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it.”

Peace and justice and love makes for splendid scenery, indeed. And there’ve been moments of late when we can almost sense its breaking through into action. But then we Christians can’t handle it and get in front of it to make our point. Like Gandhi said, “I’ve no brief with Christianity. It’s the Christians I cannot abide.”

If Jesus doesn’t just plain zap us soon, then it makes one wonder if he’s even paying attention. No, I take that back. It’s just that maybe you can, but I simply cannot understand grace and love. I know it couldn’t be the sweeping paternalism and mindless offers of tranquility that masquerade for so much of the Christian religion in our day and time. It’s certainly not the schmarmy patronage and goody-two-shoes father-knows-best-ism of the Anglican Network panderers. But I trust and I’m confident the scenery of the Good News is back there somewhere if these pretenders would just clear the stage.

Dorothy Sayers lamented how this Jesus is so often made into a “household pet for little old ladies and pale curates,” reminding us of those bucolic portraits that line the walls and counters of so many so-called “Christian” bookstores. I can’t imagine Jesus would have a lot of patience with his peace being conjectured as such a serene, chicken-soup caprice of the gospel.

Peace on earth and good will to all? Were the angels smoking dope? Prince of Peace? Is this simply a misnomer? “The peace of the Lord be with you… ” Is it all mere liturgical fakery?

Well, yes. Until we realize, as Frederick Buechner put so well. “(T)he contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle but the presence of love.” Our new Presiding Bishop hails us so often with the ancient Judaeo-Christian salutation “Shalom” which means the fullness and strength of having everything you need to be wholly and happily yourself. Maybe Jesus is suggesting that if not a sword, then at least a scalpel and some major spiritual surgery to bring that to pass.

The church can be such a presence and simply and devastatingly recall us to the beautiful scenery of loving God and neighbor and self, then firmly remind us to let God… let go, and then get out of the way, singing the old hymn that got it so right. “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing — the marvelous peace of God” (1982 Hymnal # 661).

August 16, 2007

Direction

Once on a rare retreat to a Community House on the nearby Cumberland Plateau, I was “assigned” to Sister Mary Anonym, a charming and witty woman then in her eighties. In my best feigned innocence, I asked if she might tell me what is a spiritual director.

With a candor that not only instantly found me out, but also startled my preconceptions, she said that she had no idea what is a spiritual director, that she didn’t much care, that she was not one, and that she was certainly not mine.

“Spirituality” is larger than life these days. Book stores provide for it whole sections. Some people even turn to the church for what they believe will be a “spiritual experience.” Some go so far as to seek “spiritual direction” as an aid to having one. The usual misunderstanding of the “spiritual awakening” said to be the purpose and result (but truly, the surprise) of 12-step programs causes almost as much concern and consternation in some people as the addiction that got them there.

All this is unfortunate, for it relegates spirituality to a single knot on the “rosary” along with others like mind and body and emotion, rather than the encompassing whole of them all. It is further to be regretted when the church buys into the whole idea and apparently gladly accepts its role as spiritual director, qualified or not. It is only a matter of time and grammar before the once-again equation of spirituality with religion, a presumption that is one of the big cripplers in 12-step programs.

When religion and spirituality are fused, people look for holy things with holy names, holy people with holy costumes, and we only too gladly turn them up in every apse, nave, and icon. Imagine the malicious notion of one person being more reverend (or less or most or right) than another or there being any order holier than baptism, itself. Surely God is amused.

When the word became flesh and the veil over the Temple’s Holy of Holies was frazzled, all of creation, no longer just some part of it, was revealed to be the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual reality it had always been, mitochondria and all.

Neither spirituality nor religion are the church’s primary business. Humanity, human being, human rights, peace and justice are. It’s been hammered into us that, somehow, to be human is bad news. Actually, sayings like “I’m only human” and “to err is human” are copouts, and what is more, an insult to God. For to be human is the greatest gift. It is what God imagines us to be and thus gives us the freedom and grace to become. Some spiritual direction, I’d say.

August 3, 2007

Con Job

Lewis Thomas, scientist and award-winning essayist, contends that our planet earth is most like a living cell (”Lives of a Cell,” Bantam). The atmosphere is its envelope, all the insides — animal, vegetable, mineral — inseparably interdependent. Gabriel Walker’s new book, “An Ocean of Air — Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere,” (Harcourt) strikes a similar vein and is about every breath we take to make that cell do its work.

The review of Walker’s book in today’s New York Times (p B30) begins, “As a metaphor for absence and nothingness, air has performed admirably for centuries. It has pulled off one of the great con jobs in human history, concealing endless complexities behind its bland, transparent facade… (Walker exposes it as) a restless, electrically charged, dynamic superhero, entrusted with the sacred mission of protecting our planet, nurturing life and even, when looked at from a certain angle, making love possible.”

“Charged… dynamic… sacred mission… making love possible,” indeed. Perhaps even beyond Thomas’s imagination. But not beyond Jesus’s, who had some thoughts, himself, around this “ocean of air.” Happily for the way languages work, the same words include breath and spirit and wind, and even more imaginatively, forgiveness, reconciliation, community and even a pretty good way of talking about God.

Holy Spirit. Not for “absence and nothingness,” but for presence and somethingness, and so far as old querulous Nicodemus was concerned, a rather unpredictable con job herself.

August 2, 2007

Stuff

Pent 10/13C [Eccles 1.12ff,2.18-23; Lk 12.13-21]

A few years ago when CP and I remodeled a major part of our home, one of the things that had to go was the garage. It never was much of a garage anyway when it came to cars, but when it came to stuff and getting things out of sight and out of mind, it was a splendid example of ingenious irresponsibility

It’s now a handsome kitchen and library of which we’re also irresponsibly proud. But then, without the old garage, there was still all that stuff which it had previously contained quite handsomely.

The rich man in the parable this morning brings all this to mind. Certainly not because of his wealth, but mainly because he got rid of his stuff by building a barn, and we got rid of ours by building a shed. Not really…

He stored his plentiful crops. We stored our plentiful stuff. You know — the mower, the backhoe, the old paint cans and plant food, the Christmas tree stand, assorted old tools, and, of course, the left overs of my once upon a time career as a geologist, ie, the box of my favorite rocks. It’s the one the movers always ask, “do they go?”

The propers this morning are altogether discomforting for pack rats. That old cynic who wrote Ecclesiastes thought everything is just blowing in the wind. But still, he’s accumulated a lot that’s very valuable to him, and he’s anguishing over whether it will be inherited by a wise person or a fool. He knows surely that it’ll be a fool and got by somebody who didn’t work for it at all, let alone work as hard as he did. I worry like that. But I figure that most of our stuff will just be thrown out.

It’s not all that easy to get rid of stuff and even harder to think that somebody else might not appreciate it at all and might not want it around as much as we do. We churchers can learn a lot from that, not just about our own personal rat-packing, but about the incessant need some of us have to live in the past and to turn the church into a kind of religious and institutional warehouse with a St Whosit Storage Pod on every corner complete with Mission Statement.

All this is not to belittle the past. Far from it. John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath has a character ask an important question, “How will we know it’s us without our past?” We need to remember and to be reminded always that we are the spiritual children of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, of Isaac and Rebekah, and of Jacob and Leah. There is no way to live into, appreciate, and understand our Christian heritage without that past, no way to keep track of who we are. But neither is there any healthy way merely to live only with the past, for to do so is to lose track not only of who we are but of who we can become.

Paradoxically, if all we do is live in the past, of course, there will be no past for us. It will merely turn in on itself in a kind of moebius strip of being, one of those two-dimensional bands with no beginning and no end — and no depth. We’ll not be creating our past. Our past will be recreating us.

Our faith tradition says of human being that we are imagined by God to be free to choose: to love, to create, to reason, to live in harmony with all of creation and with God. Such imaginative choosing creates the past. But such imagination, as well, opens us to the future. That perceptive Roman Catholic nun Sister Joan Chittister put it this way, “Nothing we do changes the past. Everything we do changes the future.”

The church will only die if, like the cynic in Ecclesiastes, it doesn’t  live in the present and trust the future. And like the rich man storing up his past, it will simply commit suicide from overdosing and suffocating on itself. Rather must the we see in these stories today the truth also seen by the Zen poet who wrote: “I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of those of old. I seek the things they sought.”