October 31, 2007
Saints
In God’s holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. Those handkerchiefs are called saints. [Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Harper & Row, 1973, p 83]
Some of us, of course, are simply not into handkerchiefs. But we do have a great fondness, say, for the Gross Domestic Product. As it happens, Halloween, which, as you know, has something to do with the saints also turns out for everybody to be the most lucrative of all our holidays.
So, instead of handkerchiefs, how about the economy? Even the ACLU looks the other way if an occasional witch or pumpkin shows up in the courthouse rotundas.
But we need the saints for more than the economy, as out-of-synch as it is. We need the saints to connect us with all who’ve gone before, all who have “been there and done that.” We need the saints for their community of caring and example. We need the saints for those times like now when we can only whistle in the dark in fear for what lies ahead both in church and state — which don’t seem all that separated at the moment. And what is more, we need the saints for the truly significant moral dimension they add to our lives.
We live in a time of great moral challenge, a time which calls for the very finest in us and in our leaders. And yet, we compromise that challenge and risk by dividing our church and our nation with lesser, self-serving, and even trivial understandings of morality in order merely to assuage our ill-informed fears. And every time we compromise that challenge, we betray God’s Great Commandment to love.
When we so conceive and diminish our ministry, we send an embarrassing message of equivocation to a world in moral crisis. It is a message from a church that seems constantly preoccupied with itself and its purity. It reminds me of a high school band leader once telling me to elevate my trumpet and quit playing navel serenades. It is a message from a church that claims to be a keeper of the moral flame and to be a fellowship of the kind of love that casts out fear. With that as our witness, we distort both our message and our purpose for being. So, if some want morality so often on the agenda, let us talk about morality.
We live in relative wealth and comfort while a large part of the world is literally starving and crippled by disease.
How do moral people deal with that?
Unimaginable wealth and devastating poverty exist side-by-side in our own country, in our own neighborhood. Millions live in hunger, have no adequate health care, and have an education system so crippled it can hardly prepare them even to cope with life, let alone be leaders in a modern society. We do little to amend it or even to admit it. But we do spend a few thousands right across the street every other week or so for quite a different purpose.
How do moral people deal with that?
We are systematically dismantling the environment at the pleasure of a few and thus vitiating it for generations to come. We carry out our multilateral relations with unilateral arrogance. We are crippling our great constitutional heritage of checks and balances at the risk of terminating the voices of the people.
How do moral people deal with this?
A church selfish for its own prerogatives and its own ill-informed sense of morality can be neither prophet nor pastor nor priest with such shallow credentials. On the other hand, the church needs its very finest people, people of the caliber of the saints, women and men of courage to lead with integrity, to bear the light Jesus brings into the world, to root out our priggishness, and as the old country preacher said again and again, to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”
This is a time for servant leaders who care deeply for us and for all, regardless of religious commitments or lack of same. We need leaders who are unafraid to be accountable and to stand for justice and peace, and who do not hide behind the grandeur of their moralistic puffery.
The All Saints season is a time for the celebration of such ministry. It is a fitting and traditional time in which we baptize new members and join with them and their sponsors to renew our own Baptismal Covenant. This covenant commissions us to march with all the saints in this historic apostolic fellowship. It dares us to risk error and to know we are forgiven and reconciled. It charges us to proclaim the good news, to walk the talk, as our colleagues in Twelve-step Programs unceasingly remind us. It directs us so to know for whom we search as we discern and serve Christ in all persons. And it reminds us of one of the greatest needs in our time, to strive for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being.
How do moral people deal? To live out this covenant is the way moral people deal.
We are an episcopal church, and some of us are not ashamed of that, even if maybe a little too proud from time to time. We choose women and men from among us as bishops with the hope not always realized that they will be servant leaders, with the terrifying task to be our chief priests and pastors, and to have the chutzpah to speak prophetically for us in our time to a world in moral crisis.
Sometimes, this actually happens. We made a new bishop up in New Hampshire not long ago, and there’s been a bit of a stir about it, not because the candidate didn’t meet all the canonical and other legitimate hurdles, but perhaps because he is honest and open and a leader and a servant, and that is always frightening. Let us never lose touch with our fellow churchers in New Hampshire in our prayers.
One last word about bishops from two of ours, words about us all, as well, about priests and deacons and the indomitable and long-suffering laity.
It was Frank Griswold who said: “The bishop belongs to all. Let no one be scandalized if I frequent those who are considered unworthy or sinful. Who is not a sinner? Let no one be alarmed if I am seen with compromised and dangerous people, on the left or the right. Let no one bind me to a group. My door, my heart must be open to everyone, absolutely everyone.”
And John Hines, my own beloved mentor, himself once presiding bishop: “A bishop’s job is to keep his church family on the firing line of the world’s most desperate needs and to learn to accept the exquisite penalty of such an exposed position.”
Let us join with and celebrate the saints and play Drop the Handkerchief along with God.
October 30, 2007
Ten
Of the ten congregations I’ve “served” over the years — serially as layreader, deacon, priest — one eventually became a beauty parlor, one a funeral home, one a cathedral, one was a collegiate chapel “absorbed” by the church next door, two were razed, and four remain more or less as they were in one carnation or another. I know of none did the kingdom arrive as I had once vainly expected — or depart, I hope not.
I know about these. I’ve often wondered out of all the marriages God has solemnized at my aegis, how many have dissolved in one way or another, how many have “worked…” how many dead folk the undertakers, grave keepers, and I have put away have made it on to wherever they’d hoped. And ever so often, I wonder about that baptism — and the babe now grown up — in which I forgot the blessing of the water, a prayer that has got to be one of the neatest and more memorable in the BCP, a doozy one has to work on to forget.
At this Halloween time, I wonder how many haunts remain in those places, especially the beauty parlor and the funeral home. Actually, though, I suspect there about as many as at the cathedral. Whenever I need a count, I just remember it comes to about as many as were there before, during, and after my tentative tenures. Just imagine, all those saints, couch-potato-ing it through eternity.
Church just bams along regardless of how hard we work to impede it or define it or exclude or include folk from it. That might tell us something if only we’d listen instead of talk and fret so much.
October 29, 2007
Acts
Nothing makes an insurance company get religion any faster than a hurricane or a fire. When all those claims for all that property start coming in, all those resident theologians start coming out. And suddenly there is proclaimed that, premiums or no, your policy holders certainly can’t be held responsible for what clearly are Acts of God. And to hear them tell it, Acts of God are far more prolific, inclusive, and handy, if a bit less constructive, than they were during the first week of Genesis, chapter one or two, take your choice.
Trouble is that all this freedom we claim we’ve got from God along with the stewardship it implies has got a lot of scientifically well-informed people thinking otherwise. Suddenly, it’s altogether possible that we, not God, are behind the wind and the fire. We’ve browned the woods and warmed the seas and “paved” the way for chaos. Our faith-based leaders, as certain as they seem to be that we have absolutely nothing to do with all this and as religious as they claim to be, are all the sudden torn between their altars, the one before God, the other before their benefactors, aka, the corporate welfare crowd. Is all this an act of God or an act of us human beans? Who can we blame now?
October 26, 2007
Music
The Archbishop of Canterbury came to the Big Easy to visit with The Episcopal Church’s bishops and wonder what they were of a mind to do about their dilemma that had been handed them. It is a pity that it took sex to get him over here, but it is fine that he came to New Orleans where he could have, if he would have, maybe he did have heard some jazz and find out what Satchmo meant when he said, “Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.”
Jazzers talk about a band being “in the pocket” when a tune they’re playing has a tempo that really swings, something close to what Armstrong said about jazz’s source, its vitality, its endurance. As I’ve said here before and probably will again, there’s a model in this distinctly American take on music that we churchers might do well to emulate.
Music is not only a melody and a tempo, but also a system of harmonies called chords and chord changes, but it is more. Jazz is a good illustration of that “more.” The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz, when asked What is music? put it this way. Music is little dots, some black, some white, he said. Anybody can play it rather like a stenographer might turn shorthand into words on a typewriter. But, he said, this is not music. Music is what’s behind the dots, where the heart reaches inside and reveals what is there and then plays. That is music.
We’ve a liturgy, a scripture, a tradition, that anyone can “play” and many do, much like a stenographer might type. We sometimes may call that rendering worship or even service.
October 25, 2007
Bouquets
Pent 22/25C Lk 18.9-14
“When I have arranged a bouquet for the purpose of painting it, I always turn to the side I did not plan.” — Renoir, to Matisse
I came across these words as a kind of suggested “text” for a book on space photography. They were meant, I think, to emphasize the profound beauty of nature beyond earth, a beauty quite beyond anything we humans might have to do with arranging. Perhaps that kind of beauty of earth one sees in those remarkable photographs taken from our moon. (Timothy Ferris, “Space Shots,” Pantheon, 1984)
Much of what we undertake today seems exceptionally preoccupied with arranging and rendering “bouquets.” We classify people and institutions into molds, into systems, political or economical, social or religious, geographical, sexual, or racial. And then we exalt our own notions and constructs. We are anxious about order and authority, defining and redefining it.
In the process of such introspection, we do not often stand beyond and reach for perspective. We do so at the risk of compromising rather than appreciating the beauty of the creative gifts of God or nature or whatever, rather, I suppose, like the story of Adam and Eve, denying its stewardly commission in the Garden.
This does not seem to me to be the purpose of the religious life. But then, what is?
The Gospel (pharisee & publican) this morning tells of two such purposes. The one is to be bound like the Pharisee into a neat and rigid and above all Religiously Correct system in which, ultimately, there is only security and no risk at all. The other is rather like the tax-collector, and that is to confront and embrace and often be overwhelmed by the devastating ambiguity of one’s own human being.
To be human, we’re taught to believe, is to be created in the image of God. A very important way we can look at that affirmation is not that we are visual clones of the Almighty, but that rather are we imagined into being by God. Our tradition suggests further that this means we are set free to choose, and that freedom of choice is the purpose of our humanity and thus our religion as we understand it. God’s imagining of us grants us the freedom to choose: to choose to love, to choose to reason, to choose to create, and to choose to live in harmony with God and all God’s creation. (BCP p 845) Nowhere in that short litany is there the suggestion that these personal and deeply intimate choices must be right, only that they be free, untethered by “oughts” and “shoulds.” That is the kind of freedom that more or less defines freedom. It is the risk that always comes with grace, both God’s and ours.
I’m skeptical of the fixation with and insistence upon rightness that pervades so much of our political and religious thinking and policy-making. I am struck by the theme of those who seem to need an Anglican Covenant as if our faithful following the Way has somehow become a pejorative, a move for us to become better masters rather than better colleagues and companions on this journey, searching, stumbling, risking, adapting.
Spiritual maturity, I believe, may be assessed not by how right we are, but by how freely we live into and become our human being as God imagines it — how well we live with change, how clearly we make our choices, how imaginative we ourselves are, how vulnerable we are willing to become, and how committed we are to these goals even as they lack the clarity we might desire. It is a vain heart, I think, that wastes itself in the oxymoronic pursuit of righteousness, for righteousness, by its very nature, comes least of all when it is pursued.
Let us not overlook that both men in our parable came into the temple to pray, the one, to “amen corner” apparently just to review for God his resumé, the other to the back of the bus, as it were, to take stock of his sins. Only one seemed truly aware of why he was there and what might be found there with which to begin his healing.
I’m aware that today’s collect speaks of faith and hope and charity as much as gifts, as well as goals. It speaks of God’s promise as accessible only through love. Perhaps as we arrange, step by step, our lives, as did Renoir his bouquets for the purpose of ordering them, even striving to become more faithful, more loving, more hopeful, yes, even more righteous, may we not turn them around to that side of us we did not plan, that just fell into place, and there find new beauty, even new freedom, in the view beyond of the One who first imagined us.
October 23, 2007
Cards
In order totally to waste over an accumulated forty-four hours and heaven only knows how many before my computer started counting, I’ve won 135 of its solitaire games and lost 1,216 for a batting average of .111 with a current streak of thirteen zips at bat, a best streak of four wins, an average score of eleven out of a possible fifty-two, and an average playing time of two minutes per game. My muse reminded me that they call this game solitaire obviously because no fool would be caught doing it in public.
Gerald May, the shrink, says that addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human choice (Addiction and Grace, Harper & Row, p 24). Our Judaeo-Christian tradition claims that being free to choose is what being human is all about. Addiction cripples freedom, especially the freedom to choose, says May. Maybe addiction has something to do with our becoming human?
Human becoming is what God has in mind for us. You fill in the gaps. Thinking like this is uncomfortable, but it simply has to be done if St Augustine is ever to be anywhere near correct in his depraved notion of our depravity and St Siggie is to be frustrated. Fortunately, I am not at all sure that God thinks we’re so depraved as we are just plain limited and vain and self-centered going around with some crazy notion that God loves us in spite.
That reality-for-me gets me off the inordinate guilt hook more often than not. Especially whenever I stop by to check to see if the solitaire application is still there. There was a time, though, when my addiction had a larger umbrella that included more than merely manipulating playing cards. I suppose that periodic reminder does open the channel for grace now and then. Moving cards rather than cars around for sure hasn’t caught the attention of the DUI people yet.
October 22, 2007
The sardonic
Frederick Buechner says of Reinhold Niebuhr, one if his professors at Union, that he (had)… a deep-cut, sardonic mouth.(1)
Buechner goes on to say that Niebuhr had a nose quick to sniff out the irony and ambivalence of things in general and of piety in particular… an eye sharp to perceive that the children of darkness are apt to be not only wiser but often more appealing and plausible than the children of light. This reminds me of how much I miss Niebuhr and what he could do for our times. But I miss the sardonic even more.
We’ve irony a plenty, though few seem to identify it, appreciate it, or even to be aware of it. The sardonic seems even more remote. H W Fowler in his comments on humour (that’s Britspeak for humor) says of the sardonic that its motive is self-relief, its province, adversity, its method or means, pessimism, its audience — quite obviously — one’s self.(2)
The children of darkness — both in church and state — are not only wiser and obviously more appealing and plausible than the children of light. One need only to consider the multitude of candidates for our next president, all self-promoting “children of light.” No one of them of either party seems to grasp the irony of these times, let alone, the sardonic. They take themselves so seriously that the work to which they claim to be called and that surely demands more attention than themselves rarely gets attended in the least except perhaps tangentially lest “the children of darkness” suddenly catch on.
In the “light” of all this, I am more than pleased to see Stephen Colbert running for president. Colbert, as you know, is the arrogantly brilliant shaker and mover of The Colbert Report (pron. Colbare Repore) on Comedy Central, the TV channel which often pushes obscenity to the point of absurdity(3). He has just this past week announced his candidacy, although he’s running only in his home state of South Carolina. If anybody’s any more in touch with the sardonic, which is to say any more disdainfully and skeptically humorous and derisively mocking thus better equipped to be president than Colbert, then show me the gate.
As Fowler rightly said of the sardonic milieu, we live in adverse times, times in which one must often resort to pessimism if only for self-relief. The children of darkness are obviously once again having a ball. It makes a person wonder whether in the last, to cynic or swim.(4)
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1) Listening to Your Life, p 32, Harper Collins, 1992
2) Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2d ed, pp 252f, Oxford, 1965
3) Comedy Central also sponsors The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, another medium through which “fake news” reports often offer more accuracy than any of the other, graver sources.
4) After reading this, if you suddenly feel the impulse to grin sardonically, beware! The L. herba sardonia, plant of Sardinia, was poisonous and was said to have twisted the face into a contorted grin during the death-throes.
October 19, 2007
License
I read license plates. Especially do I read those that are not all that obvious, but reveal some unique and creative warping of symbols into words which I take to challenge my deciphering skills. The writer Toni Morrison said that language is what makes us human. Maybe she doesn’t read license plates.
I was struck by one yesterday. Keeping within the seven space limit and without any double entendre or need for deciphering, it said, simply, WBYEATS. But it wasn’t that so much as it was the implied literacy of it all.
Advertising a poet of William Butler Yeats’s caliber on the back of one’s car is not all that common around our town. We tend more to things consistent with Music City USA, Buckle on the Bible Belt, and the like. Of course, there is the thing about our also claiming to be the Athens of the South prompted by our life-size copy of the Parthenon in Centennial Park and the number of higher education institutions per capita in our population. Even so, if we only had major league baseball instead of football, hockey, and so many sockermom-driven SUVs, I’d feel better about it.
But I should complain. Driven as I am to continue producing all this stuff almost daily from out of nowhere, I occasionally take poetic license myself.
October 18, 2007
Faith
Pent 21/24C (Gen 32.3-8, 22-30; Lk 18.1-8a; BCP lectionary)
At its heart, most theology, like most fiction, is autobiography.
That is, most of what we think about God or don’t think about God and about what God does and doesn’t do and should do and shouldn’t do and about what we and God do together and don’t do together, all this, when push comes to shove, is shaped and affected by the story of our lives. Plain and simple, it’s autobiography.
It’s a mistake, unfair, and insulting to put theology in ivory towers or behind altars where it’s safe and inaccessible. Theology belongs in kitchens and bedrooms, SUVs and traffic jams, beer halls and soccer games where it’s vulnerable and in-your-face. Underneath all the doctrines and liturgies and catechisms, that is, the “religious stuff,” we always find an experience of flesh and blood, a human face smiling or frowning or weeping or covering its eyes for the glare.
That’s one reason why it’s so good to keep a constant eye out for those faces in our family history in that public library genealogy we call the Bible. Take these stories: Here’s cousin Jacob in a dirt fight with heaven only knows whom, and here’s the gutsy widow that reminds us of Aunt Maudie banging on the court house door (Gen 32.3-8, 22-30; Lk 18.1-8a).
Further, the Book of Genesis makes no attempt to conceal the fact that Jacob, among other things, was a crook who twice cheated his lame-brain brother Esau out of his inheritance and at least once took advantage of his old father Isaac’s blindness to play him for a sucker. We know next to nothing about the widow save that she was perhaps more enduring than endearing. We can be sure that God was rather fond of both. Knowing that may just hold out some hope for us. Knowing that is really sermon enough for any Sunday. (But we preachers often never know when to stop when we may be ahead.)
These stories and God’s response to them tell us about faith, that faith, too, is radically autobiographical. Like a two-by-four between the eyes, these readings tell us that faith and perseverance are not all that different, that faith, unlike a neat system full of big words, is more like wrestling with God and banging on doors and maybe finally getting some sort of results, even if not always exactly what we want.
The collect today puts it rather much the same way if somewhat more delicately when it prays that God help us “persevere with steadfast faith…” (BCP p 235). For God does not always come to us in pillars of cloud by day or fire by night, easily recognized and free of all ambiguity. God meets us in circumstances which we have to strive to understand in other terms. Without the persistence of a Jacob or a widow who would not let go, we may abandon our struggle for faith because it does not appear to be faith as we had imagined it. Jacob and the widow and even the old non-believing judge remind us that the persistence and the tenacity itself is faith.
For faith is like life. It is purpose made incarnate. It is better understood as a verb, than as a noun, as a process rather than as a possession, as on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all, as risking being wrong, as not always having to be right or orthodox, faith is a journey without maps.
We remember as well to our benefit that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith, doubt is a critical and essential element of faith, and that faith comes not as a result of understanding, but that faith is, itself, a way of understanding not as defining, but as giving and finding meaning to our lives.
One of the things that has hounded the church through the centuries and once again in our time is that it gives too much attention to its religion and not enough to its faith, not its doctrine, for heaven’s sake, but its faithfulness. It doesn’t make disciples by right belief, it wins disciples by faithful living, by being a community that people simply and finally cannot resist cozying up with.
Of course, it’s easier to pay more attention to our religion than to our faith. For one thing, religion’s far simpler and not nearly so risky. Religion offers the false comfort of easy answers, faith raises the discomfort of hard questions. Faith secures the vision that protects religious conviction from becoming religious delusion. Finally, faith enables an environment that is less judgmental and more forgiving and in which love can mature.
Like the widow pestering the unjust judge and like Jacob contending with God, we mumble and curse and try another path because these snares keep snagging our hems or bruising our feet. But we try another path and keep stubbing painful toes until, finally, we pay attention and then can ask the theological question, What, finally, is the message, the meaning in all this?
For one thing, it tells us that control is an illusion, and that perhaps we might try gratitude rather than mastery and power. I got an omelet in a restaurant one day that was as tough as shoe leather, but remotely edible. I groused about it, privately, but I’d have been better off had I simply been grateful for food and whatever nourishment there may have been in those tired eggs.
Be grateful for work. Work gives shape to the day, and many wish they had it. Be grateful for people. Each is interesting in his or her way and teaches us new things. Be grateful for love. How lonely it would be not to miss anyone, not to have someone to telephone or to be telephoned by.
And be grateful for God. Distress in our homeland will not go away soon. Evil forces are arraigned against us and, as well, even infect our leaders. I hesitate to be so presumptuous as to use that word “evil,” because warfare rarely pits good against evil. Warriors have values and codes and limits, although that is often difficult to discern. Spreading weapons of mass destruction is not the act of a warrior. It is an act of an enemy of life itself. God is strong against such enemies.
Faith and love give us access to that strength and to our potential to use it. They allow us to persevere and to endure and perhaps even to understand.
October 17, 2007
Evangel
CP and I spent the last weekend on our recent Nova Scotia trip in Halifax, its capital. Sunday we attended the 10.30 am Eucharist at All Saints Anglican Cathedral. During the announcements, the interim parson informed us that instead of their usual coffee and cush after the liturgy, they were serving a covered-dish luncheon. I decided that this settled where we would eat and that, as had become our vacationing custom, we’d not have to ask around for where was locally recommended.
My plan was simply to follow the crowd (seated in some 80 of the approximately 800 available seats) to wherever the Sunday board was serving. I found that that was not CP’s plan.
CP’s plan was to get in the exiting line, shake the hand of the parson standing at the front door, tell him we were visitors from the US&A, and thus more properly possibly be invited to lunch. We did just that. How nice to have you from so far away, he said. Nothing happened along the line of an invitation. So she, instead, and in one of her better attempts at demure, asked where he might recommend that we have lunch. Yes, he replied, there’s a nice restaurant just across the promenade from the Cathedral. Thank you, she said.
The restaurant was only a short walk from All Saints. Quite in keeping with this alluring ambiance of evangelism, we found it was Trinity Café. We couldn’t, of course, resist the eggs St Benedict.