September 28, 2007

Reminder

On Jim Lehrer’s News Hour the other night was the new (I think) poet laureate of the US&A, name of Simic. He’s from New Hampshire by way of somewhere like Poland with his brother and mother to avoid the “protectors” from the Dark Side.

He teaches writing at a university. He asked a class, What is poetry? A woman student answered, Poetry is to remind people of their own humanity.

Fancy that, I thought, for if I were to be asked, What is church? I would give the same answer. Certainly among many other things, but very importantly, if not primarily, church is to remind people of their own humanity. For that, after all these years, is what I’ve come to believe is church. God has taken from her abundantly fecund mind us spiritual beings and imagined us and called us human and set us forth and free to live up to what she plans for us, constantly to remind us that we are human, to commission/baptize us to show others how to do and be the same and always together, synagogued and, of course, unsynagogued. That, speaking theologically, like the tango, takes two — at least — and of whatever persuasion.

And sometimes, maybe lots of times, we get it all mixed up, thinking it’s really all about becoming spiritual and religious and centering prayer which is all right in its way, but when actually it’s mostly about becoming and human and eccentering prayer.

The tragedy is that in those times when we really start fulfilling that vocation and it starts to bloom in our life, church-of-the-other becomes puzzled with us, so we turn away from church right at the moment when church needs us most. There should be a verb form for church. I church, you church, we church. And churching, we remind, do we, that we do this in reminder of that One Whom God chose as beloved human. And so forth… because he said to.

September 27, 2007

Warning

Pent 18/21C Lk 16.19-31

“If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Lk 16.31).

Grace Cangialosi, a good friend and colleague of mine, recently reported via the cyberwireless about a two-page ad in the Washington Post magazine. It said that the Sprint cellphone people are promoting what they call, “A new class of cellular luxury — the world’s first $10.5 million phone — a limited-time offer for billionaires.”

Apparently fearful that even this might not catch a billionaire’s eye, Sprint threw in a bonus — buy a phone and get a private island all of one’s own. “When you’re in the business of dominating this quaint little popsicle stand called planet Earth,” Sprint suggested to its anticipated audience, “you need the technology that keeps you acting fast.” And then, the clincher, “Island offer is available only to the wealthiest one hundred people on planet Earth. Offer expires next Saturday.”

In the light of this opportunity, the story about the rich man and Lazarus in our gospel today literally screams out the reminder from the past that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This gospel parable is a story about warning and about how the security of wealth can blind one from seeing the handwriting on the wall. In this Sprint ad, a contemporary parable in its own way, one can rarely see the handwriting on the wall of the very environment that makes so much of all that wealth possible in the first place.

The offer, preoccupied with its own tempting expiration date, did not add, of course, that this planet Earth, this “popsicle” may well be on the verge itself of expiring, maybe not next Saturday, but a lot sooner than one might imagine. Further, had they been thinking at all, they may well have picked another metaphor than one that melts even faster than the glaciers themselves whose disappearance already shows how easily they could turn that island into a mere sandbar.

Characteristic of many like himself, the rich man had little use for Lazarus alive or dead save as a servant to make his life easier. Not because he was wealthy. It is not wealth that’s being disdained in this parable or even in the ad exalted, but in both, the use of wealth, the blindness and false security that wealth can so often cause. Such wealth prevented the rich man from heeding the warning of Moses and the prophets that had been there all along and, as well, prevents us from seeing all the warnings that remind us of the importance of our stewardship of life.

And it is these warnings that we so often do not heed and that cause us such inevitable anguish. The list is so obvious. Smoking. Environmental pollution. Diet. Exercise. Education. The balance of powers in our exemplary constitutional system. Over forty million of our fellows without even the meagerest health insurance. Our international geopolitical relationships. And additionally for us churchers, not only Moses and the prophets, but some two millennia more of evidence and experience down to our present time.

How easily does the wealth of our scripture and tradition and this experience distract us. Not, of course, in itself, but in how we treasure it, how we use it, how we learn from it, and what we expect from it. Do we use it to exclude others by taking from it what was only relevant in the past and making it relevant in the present against all evidence to the contrary? Or do we measure its value immersed into and enriching the way we value our times?

The rich man in the parable ignored Moses and the prophets and, indeed, as Abraham warned would neither heed even someone “risen from the dead.” We have this risen Christ in us and in the lives of all his faithful followers down through the centuries. How will we witness to him? Will we send our Lazaruses or will we go ourselves to tell it on the mountain by what we do as well as what we say, not only by our wealth of matter and spirit, but how we use it?

September 26, 2007

Customs

Walking around sox footed recently in the Halifax airport, I wondered whether the President of Iran had to go shoeless through customs like the rest of us. I remembered that Yasser Arafat was asked to hand over his six-shooter at his joint press conference with the president up at Camp David. But whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even had to go through customs when he came over was really not the point. (Although, if he did, he’d find that the Canadian customers must have gone to a better charm school than the New York crowd.)

That he came is what matters. I don’t know about him, but getting a chance to be interviewed by Christiane Amanpour would not be the least of my motives.

Nobody doubts that Ahmadinejad doesn’t have our best interests at heart or that he’s not alone on that subject or that he well may be lying through his teeth. Just keeping his image intact holding up his end of the Axis of Evil is hard enough. So it’s at some risk that he comes over here at all, especially with the crowds and their posters likening him to Hitler and their giving him only half the peace symbol and all.

But he came, whatever his motive. So he got lambasted by the president of Columbia University who from what was reported in the media apparently ain’t no slouch at castigating. At least he had a chance to answer with a tongue-lashing of his own and and go tieless if not shoeless to the United Nations. And believe you me, if that doesn’t beat suicide bombing and daily death reports and millions of refugees flooding out of Iraq and spending billions stuffing the pockets of the military-industrial complex and the foolishness of war in general, I don’t know what does. Even hostile communication beats no communication at all.

And then there’s that guy who flew over here with the fuse in his shoe and made me put my size 13s and all my hardware in those big plastic baskets. Wherever he is, I hope he bought Tupperware before all this got started.

September 25, 2007

Donairs

I had never heard of a donair until Nova Scotia. Even when I once helped raise money for an engineering school. We had donors and donees, but only the big givers assumed what one might call superior attitudes.

Up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where we’ve just recently been, we were wandering  a few blocks away from the Commons House B&B where we were staying. We were  looking for a place to eat dinner. We met a couple apparently on the way back, having found one. I would have been pleased with smiles and hellos, but CP sensed immediately with her well-honed set of perceptives that they’d been out to eat and wanted to know where. Sure enough, they’d been just around the corner at Tony’s, a pizza place, they said, and so should we. I’d no sooner recovered from the idea of a Canadian pizza, when they said they’d had “donairs” and recommended we do the same. So that was the beginning.

Tony is Lebanese, some 37 years in Halifax and in the pizza business. We ordered donairs which proved to be a sort of burrito complete with a Greek salad enclosed. When I started eating mine I ended with the salad on the side. Reluctantly, I recommend you might try one somewhere, maybe even eating it.

The folk who suggested the donair are from the Yukon Territory. CP asked them about Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. They told us that Eddy’s dog was named King.

It might even be worth a trip to Halifax if only for the weather (it was 91º the night we got back in our town). They ban smoking everywhere, have washrooms instead of restrooms, and give free bus rides on buses named Fred. The central city park is named “Victorian” and looks it, complete with band concerts in the gazebo and flowers only CP could name. Canada drives on the right side of the road (in your face, Mother Country). Nova Scotia has not a lot of use for Canada. Cape Breton has even less for Nova Scotia. Some things always remind us of Texas.

The manager of our B&B gave us directions to All Saints Cathedral on Sunday morning and asked us to say a prayer for him. We did. The Canadian Anglican congregation looked sort of like many, seniors, gray hair, few. The parson announced that the usual snack after church would be a covered-dish lunch instead. That settled for us where we’d have lunch. We could just follow the people to wherever it would be covered. First, we introduced ourselves to the cleric who proved to be another interim “while-we-are-looking” and thought he’d probably invite us to lunch. He didn’t. So as a sort of major hint we asked where there might be a handy walking-distance place for lunch, and he told us. Consistent with the ambiance, it is called Trinity’s.

The Titanic Museum (a Nova Scotian feature because NS sea farers had gone to the liner’s rescue) reported among other things that the old notion of Women and Children First at a shipwreck had not held on that occasion. The Titanic had more first class men in its life boats than third class children in theirs. Somehow, I was reminded of that on our return flight as we were herded into steerage, the airlines’ bread and butter that they seem to overlook. Indeed, there’re no free lunches on airlines anymore, either.

Of all the bumper-sticker type literature one finds on vacations, this one caught our eye: “Attention young adults and teenagers: If you’re tired of being hassled by unreasonable parents… Now is the time for action! Move out and pay your own way while you still know everything.” Time has gone long since that we’d have any use for that, but maybe you can get some mileage out of it. — The Accidental Tourist

September 20, 2007

Cape Breton

I haven’t seen a speedometer hovering around 100 since testing the North Dallas Expressway in my youth. To see one now even if in kilometers is on the edge of unnerving when hurling headlong meeting big travel buses winding the Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. My psyche will probably never catch up with the metric system, let alone in a rental car where the agency is only too ready to compare my count on dents and scratches alongside theirs at checkout time. It doesn’t help for sightseeing .

Anyhow, sightseeing’s what’s happening these past few days during OoN’s absence. CP’s done her share of it from the navigator’s seat and walked some of the trails I’d rather not chance. The geology is spectacular, largely scrambled igneous from the cast-off tectonic plates that Africa shed some gazzillion years ago. (Don’t ever try that sentence in Geology 101.)

Some travel jock wrote that Cape Breton is the most beautiful island in the world. I presume he’d seen most all of them. But given the professional tendency to hyperbole (which we parsons share), I’d say it was an understatement. There’s hardly a turn in the road that doesn’t anticipate some spectacle like if not a whale offshore then a whale boat waiting to take you to one. The road signs in the national park part of the island remind the driver that moose were here first, that they take no account of highways, and that they are pretty much the size of your car.

Unlike in East Texas, road signs are often in Gaelic as well as English. The Celts have seen to that. All the labels on the foodstuffs are in English and French. It’s not exactly the way the city council in our town would handle this with their attempts at grammaphobic ordinances.

A neighbor to our cabin near the Margaree River took us on a tour through the heavy undergrowth down by the riverside where the salmon fishing is rampant.

The libraries and B&Bs have WiFi and share it generously. The Margaree Library where I’m currently connected is about to close for the day. Peace and more later.

September 13, 2007

Curbs

Pent 16/19C Lk 15.1-10

There’s a certain sort of excess in Jesus that I used to find outrageous, but increasingly now find absolutely joyful.

He zaps helpless fig trees. He sleeps on the fantail of a boat in a hurricane. He feeds thousands with next to nothing. He praises a shepherd who’d ignore ninety-nine beetleheaded sheep just to go after one that’s lost. He heals. He admonishes. He predicts, and he indicts. He commends a poor widow who finds a lost coin and spends whatever others she has left just to celebrate. He makes one wonder whether the gospel’s not only about change, but also about small change.

And this is the son in whom God is proud and to whom God also wants us to listen? This is the one for whom we should seek in our neighbor? This is what happens when the Word becomes flesh? This is the Way? The Truth? The Life? The Christ?

Well… Yes.

It’s no wonder the tax collectors and sinners were curious. The prophets were easily enough ignored, but not this. They could identify with Jesus even for no other reason than his apparent profligacy, a certain kind of recklessness that in a way rather confirmed their own. And it’s no wonder the religious leaders and lesser satraps got even stiffer in their necks than usual. One audience with him, and all their careful religion school curriculum was either ready for rewrite or else down the drain.

Is there any conceivable message for us, his church, his disciples, those of us gathering together Sunday in and Sunday out in his name? Maybe. Perhaps the tithe is more like ninety percent than ten. It’s all finders-keepers with the rest.

But then… When God imaged us, was it not to be free to choose, to love, to create, to reason, to live in harmony with God and all creation? That’s not so difficult to imagine, now, is it? Except maybe the harmony part. No, but it’s often a total pain to make a go of it. Rather does it seem if we’re going to be “religious” at all, we’d prefer to make religion like, say, algebra’s “word problems.” Remember how in so-called grammar school we hated the word problems? Or remember how in penmanship we hated the pushpulls and the ovals? Did you ever erase the push-pull overruns off the tops and bottoms of the lines? Religion. Neat, at all costs.

What Jesus wants is faith, not religion. Risk, not certainty. He had no place to lay his head. Why should that be so important to us? Forget asking what would Jesus do. And start asking what would Jesus be. But for the time, maybe best keep it between the curbs. It’s wild and wooly out there, especially when the primates come to town.

September 12, 2007

Poetry

OoN began a bit over four years ago as a sort of unintended companion piece to The Covenant Journal, an occasional paper with dreams of one day becoming a quarterly. TCJ got started some eight years ago with the Baptismal Covenant as its imagined editorial policy, hence, its name. Since then, it has been called one of the best kept secrets in the Episcopal Church, a “samizdat,” by one learned churchman of our acquaintance.

Of late, TCJ has taken on an associate editor, a wider audience, and perhaps an even more inclusive range of opinions, but always with an eye to remaining Anglican to the core (whatever that means). The current issue, TCJ26, in what may seem a move astray, is devoted entirely to poetry and will feature nine poems all reflecting on the Baptismal Covenant. Hard copy goes into the mail next week. The website at soon after. The following is an advanced copy for OoN readers of the editorial suggesting why.

Poetry “When power leads us to arrogance, poetry reminds us of our limitations. When power narrows the area of our concern, poetry reminds us of the richness and diversity of our existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Some years ago when we first quoted these words of John F Kennedy in this journal, we had little notion that one day we’d devote an entire issue to poetry. He had in mind then the state, but the notion sounded altogether as appropriate for the church. The Baptismal Covenant has been and continues to be this journal’s basic editorial policy. And now that we think about it, it is a kind of poetry in itself, a metaphorical shaping and way of imagining the Christian life, not unlike the parables, the poetry of Jesus, were for him.

It should be no surprise that the fundamentalist/literalist mindset now insinuating itself into the Anglican Communion’s churches would want to change our traditional biblical theology-of-analogy into one ponderous confession qua covenant all the better to manipulate. This move is, indeed, as Kennedy wrote, a maneuver for power which leads to arrogance, narrows our vision, and corrupts our polities and mission.

Poet Rob Cogswell’s deeply spiritual reflections recall for us how poetry, especially the poetry of our Baptismal Covenant, can remind us of our limitations together with the richness and diversity of our existence all the while cleansing us as perhaps no fuller on earth can do.

September 10, 2007

Twig

It was paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould who said, “Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.” And it was Frederick Buechner who raised the ante when he said that “[Human beings are] so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about.”

If Gould is right, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he is, and given our place in the pecking order of all creation, is it any wonder that God talks with us at all? But the even greater wonder is that without any apparent question, we presume it to such a degree to think we’ve got enough leverage to redirect God along some orthodox path which she simply cannot avoid.

Or is God simply content to give us the benefit of doubt and just leaves well-enough alone? In only forty-eight hours, the weather has turned here from the most depressing of droughts over which we’ve next to no control to the balmiest of days all in the matter of a couple of inches of rain, water full of nitrogen with an in-your-face to our pitiful chlorinated attempts. Twig on a branch, indeed.

September 8, 2007

Symbol

I regret to inform you that English is no longer (nor actually has it ever been) the Mother Tongue of the Kingdom of God. Take Pentecost. When you add all the patois and gibberish and jargon and semaphore and shop talk since then plus the DNA which needs only four letters to say a lot more, you get the idea. And since the Kingdom is not even a place, but a relationship (according to the theologians), there’re surely more ways of communicating therein than one can count or even Berlitz can imagine altogether with the Spirit to make of them the greatest verbal collage of all time. Babel, if only you’d been more patient.

All this comes to mind because the New York City public schools have just announced that they plan to offer Arabic in their language curriculum this fall. Just the hint of this possibility set off the usual self-appointed Grammar Brigades rising to the protest faster than you can order a BigMac with the hortatory subjunctive.

It’s the symbols we live by that so often seem to drive us the most swiftly to the banana farm. And it’s the fact that they are symbols — outward and visible signs of something not so tangible, but no less real and maybe even more so — that our fundamentalist-literalist culture seems least to understand. All the flap about flags, for example, is a case in point.

In all its subtle catholicity, language is perhaps an even more powerful symbol than flags. For it is language and the literacy it enables that makes us human. And it is ignorance about language and its illiteracy subsequent that makes us violently something less. Lest Christians forget, it was the Word that became flesh, that just might have been God saying, “Let’s hear it for language!” As we embrace that Word are we, as well, all the more becoming, our mission all the more winsome, and our language all the more heavenly.

September 6, 2007

Cross

Pentecost 15/18C (Lk 14.25-33)

The historian Barbara Tuchman once defined war as the unfolding of miscalculations. It seems to me a definition that’s not lost much if any of its purchase.

It is likely that she had in mind the kind of war that had nations at each other’s throats hoping that the winner will be better off. Or maybe, at least, that the other fellow will be worse off, or maybe then settling for the satisfaction that he’s certainly not any better off, and finally, surrendering to the great surprise that whaddya know? Everybody’s worse off.

We’re in a war that’s not just wandering down that path, but charging. We were told at the outset not to worry, just to go shopping, that evil’s not going to be all that hard to whip. Then we were told just to go relax, it was over. And you know the rest. Ms Tuchman was right. We’ve kept on keeping on, one miscalculation after another.

Jesus warned us about something like this when he talked about discipleship and taking up one’s cross. He had some hard words for this supposed vocation. At the least it meant that whatever has been of great value to you — family, nation, health, job, life — forget it, even despise it in the doing. In other words, reach inside yourself and turn it all wrong side out. Then, you’ve taken the first step. Next, there’s that cross. Choose one. It will show the way.

The language of cross-bearing is corrupt to the core. Bearing a cross has nothing to do with chronic illness or trying family relations. Rather is it what we do as a consequence of commitment to Jesus. Not to a creed or a catechism, but to a person and to his way, his truth, and his life. It’s not even the popular and faddish, “What would Jesus do.” It is rather the totally commanding commitment to “What would Jesus be.”

The church nowadays talks a lot about discipleship, about “planting” churches to “make disciples” as if we’re taking on some sort of celestial gardening project. The church doesn’t talk much about taking up a cross, unless it’s one of those designer models in the parish book store. For if it does, if it makes that sacrifice and priority altogether clear, its Rotary Clubish prudential ethic days are over. Rather more often is the church steady into one miscalculation after another.

These hard verses in this gospel do not say that one cannot become a disciple, but that one cannot be a disciple apart from complete commitment to following Jesus. It’s not a part-time job. The call to be a disciple is all-consuming. It’s no wonder to me there are so few of us around.