January 31, 2008

Listen

Epiphany last (Mt 17.1-9; Lk 9.28-36)

When the prophet Elijah was called by God, he searched for the evidence of that call in some spectacular sign — earthquake, fire, wind, thunder, lightning. How he finally got his answer is described in what I feel is one of the loveliest phrases in all of scripture. It’s the KJV’s “still small voice,” but it’s translated far better in the early 20th century American Version as “the sound of gentle stillness” (1 Kgs 19.12).

Theologically, even biblically, we’re “from Missouri.” We want evidence. It is a great temptation for us to look for signs, rather than to listen for them.

The Transfiguration tells such a story in today’s gospel. It would be hard to imagine a more brilliant scene than Jesus carrying on with Moses and Elijah — two dead guys, even though of considerable repute — and having his clothing suddenly light up, a wardrobe malfunction to end all wardrobe malfunctions.

We can’t fault Peter, James, and John for being overcome by the razzle-dazzle in such an ambiance and wanting to negotiate a more permanent arrangement. It was only natural. It is only natural with us churchers. Majestic cathedrals, fancy duds for ourselves, great music and liturgy, all pointing to us in the hope that maybe like those disciples, the world will want to negotiate and sign on.

Well, it hasn’t exactly turned out that way. The Voice from the clouds up there on the mountain agrees, up to a point. “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased,” it says. Our usual presumption is that it can’t be anyone else’s voice but God’s, and maybe we think James Earl Jones. But the Voice doesn’t stop with “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased,” as when John baptized Jesus. The Transfiguration story this time seems to suggest that there’s been an attention deficit, almost as if that simple recommendation was not enough. For the Voice adds a simple command… “Listen to him.”

Witnessing takes at least two forms. The obvious one is telling the gospel story, telling our story, enacting our story, and making it as attractive as we possibly can. But the perhaps less obvious way of witnessing is to listen to the other’s story, the neighbor’s story, the world’s story, listening for God’s presence, for Christ in the other. Listening, giving audience, paying attention may be, after all, the most profoundly magnetic and winsome form of witnessing and evidence there is.

“This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”

In his little monograph, “Reaching Out,” Henri Nouwen rings changes on the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor as self. He calls our growth in fulfilling this commandment “spiritual maturity” and describes it as offering audience to self and to neighbor and to God.

That we don’t listen to ourselves, he suggests, results in our profound loneliness. Whereas, to give ourselves unrestricted, unconditional audience, Nouwen says, offers the most profound experiences of solitude, actually defining the difference between loneliness and solitude.

As well with our neighbors must be our gift of audience, of truly listening without condition, without presumption, without planning our next speech, opening from hostility to a true and welcome hospitality. And finally does Nouwen say, we must offer such audience to God also without condition, by opening up from illusions about God to prayer or put another way, by attending not to God as we understand God, but prayer as searching, enquiring of God to discern how God understand us and the ways in which he has imagined us to be.

In so many ways, we can be deaf. Through arrogance, vanity, compulsive talking, dismissiveness, aloofness, and so much more subtly through self-righteous obsession with always having to be right (and just happening to have the biblical text on hand to prove it).

The church is called to be a listening community, a community where such deafness can be healed. There is much in our corporate worship to hear. Great stories of our long family history. Thoughtful prayers. Better than average hymns. And, of course, each other with mutual greetings, exchanges, and catching up. But our good liturgy also offers us moments in certain of its parts when we can simply be silent, listening, reflecting on what or who we have just heard or seen, surely awed by the majesty of the possibilities of access to God. Surely, when James counseled us to be not only hearers, but doers of the word, he would be the last to suggest that such doing is altogether impossible without first hearing, without first listening.

The prophet Isaiah once admonished us in one of his more provocative ways to “Seek the Lord while he wills to be found… ” (Is 55.6a) Thankfully, God was more gently gracious to those who waited for Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and for those who wait for him here when he said, “This is my son, my Chosen, listen to him.” (Lk 9.35b)

January 30, 2008

Gravitas redux

Plumb lines are the simplest of tools for harnessing a phenomenon so mysterious and so complicated that even the most brilliant astrophysicists are yet quite to understand it.We call it gravity. Earth life would be even graver without it. Space cadets, professional basketball players, and ballet dancers seem simply to ignore it. They simply float. Aristotle said it is why stuff falls and then went on to something more interesting. Newton devised a formula and measured it. Einstein in one of his major league moments thought it caused by something like a curved-space ball. The quantum folk imagine itsybitsy gravitons charging all about in its service, but they’ve yet to catch one.A plumb line is literally a string with a hunk of lead (plumbum) or some other heavy object tied to one end. Used properly, it keeps things on the straight and level. Just take hold of the loose end and let the whole thing dangle until it’s still. When it stops, you’re more or less in touch with the center of the earth and on the upright with a lot less effort than usual.God took it for a remarkable metaphor and liked it so much she used it to show and tell the prophet Amos what she had in mind for errant behavior. Amos claimed not to be an engineer but a tree surgeon, and that he had no idea what to do with it. As the story goes, he ended up doing it, anyway (Amos 7.7-15).Lasers have pretty well replaced plumb lines of late, so the metaphor may be lost on this quantum generation. But the church, enamored as it sometimes can be with past matters of great gravity and sometimes even mystery, must surely remember.Anyhow, God has not forgot. Her same old plumb line just swings there as it does, ignoring Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle ever so silently, purposefully, and, of course, certainly.

January 29, 2008

English

The award-winning Borowitz Report recently broke the news that the White House had announced that the President’s State of the Union address would be simulcast in English. When OoN’s investigative reporter enquired of this, she was told that this breach with precedent is apparently to show support for those who are urging that English be made the national official language.

Previously, the Administration had resisted this growing movement arguing that the such last minute translations would impose an undue burden on the presidents’ speech writers and voice coaches. Watching the speech last evening and as it turned out, apparently the announcement was a fig leaf of somebody’s imagination, as there was no evidence of any use of English at all, save, perhaps in the rebuttal following.

As well, a late news item reported that the frequency of sitting and standing reps throughout the address, especially on one side of the aisle, gave all those who so participated a free pass to skip all other congressional gymnastics in hopes that until Valentine Day when their heart rates should be back to normal.

January 28, 2008

Aquinas

Theology is the study of God and God’s ways. Anytime you slice a golf ball into the woods and mutter or shout an oath that somehow involves God, conscious or no, you’re a practicing theologian of a sort like my father was when I caddied for him and got my earliest religious education. Or at least, you’re into prayer as blessing. Since you probably missed the fairway, however, maybe sometime you’d better consider centering prayer.

Thomas Aquinas probably never played golf, but he was reportedly a practicing theologian. He really got on a roll when he discovered Aristotle along with God and gave him a run for his money. My being an East Texas country preacher and all, I never found that quoting him in my sermon on a given Sunday morning was all that popular.

A further result was that for the same reason Rome took a considerable liking to him and called him Doctor Angelicus, a title with which you can do whatever you choose. He was a Dominican, so he made the Franciscans uneasy. Some Anglicans lean his way, but they’re not the kind one usually finds on vestries. Though as you’ve no doubt heard, we, being broad minded, like to be fair, so we’ve given him a day on our churchy calendars, and today is It.

On the other hand and for all we know, dung beetles may study us and our ways and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated. One hopes that God feels likewise.
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Note 1: The part herein about God and beetles and us is from Frederick Buechner’s “Wishful Thinking” published by Harper & Row in 1973 on page 91. The rest comes from my earlier childhood education.

Note 2: On a previous subject, viz the sardonic, a reader writes, “I worked once in a veterinary-type laboratory. There was a term used there — risus sardonicus or sardonic grin, the look a dog gets on its face just before throwing up.”

January 25, 2008

The sardonic

Suzanne Pleshette’s recent obituary recounted her beauty and her husky voice, then it added that she was “best known for her role as Bob Newhart’s sardonic wife on television’s long-running The Bob Newhart Show.”

I can never remember enough about sardonic ever to get facile with it and always have to look it up. Webster beats around the bush, settles by saying that sardonic and satire are synonyms, an equation I don’t find all that helpful. No less a language guru than H W Fowler in his Modern English Usage (Oxford, 1950, pp 240f) is all too shrewd to dare anything so defining as a definition. But he does have a way of getting around it so as to leave enough loopholes for some prosaic license. First he classifies humour (aka Britspeak) along with seven other varieties — wit, satire, and sarcasm, invective, irony, and cynicism, then lists sardonic all by its lonely, but not without singling it out as “the sardonic.”

Once being done with that and, as I said, offering no definitions, he suggests that a “sort of tabular statement may be of service against some popular misconceptions.” These tables are for each entry its “motive or aim, its province, its method or means, and its proper audience.” For example, irony’s aim is exclusiveness, its province is statement of facts, its method is mystification, and its audience is an inner circle. Following the same pattern, satire aims to amend a province of morals and manners by accentuation for an audience of the self-satisfied.

The sardonic, Fowler suggests, aims for the self-relief of adversity through pessimism for an audience of ones own self. All this is well and good, I suppose, but I’ve wrangled with all these for some time and never been all that satisfied. Not content with Fowler, I asked another pro.

Louie Crew, an erstwhile emeritus and highly honored professor of English at no less than Rutgers University, wrote back that he’d “give it a try,” and ventured, “With sardonic humor, the humorist seeks personal relief regarding the object of his/her humor. Sardonic humor arises out of adversity and is used by pessimists mainly by directing the humor at herself/himself.” Like any good teacher and just to make sure I might finally get it, he illustrated with an example: “‘No, I think that too might be misunderstood,’ Rowan Williams said to himself in New Orleans as he put down his shaving mug and razor.”

I wondered if that’s not rather like saying “the jokes on me,” but still not with much certainty. Then it dawned on me that Crew is enough of a rascal to make it so.
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Note: For those who may be puzzled by all this sudden pedantry: Williams, the rather daemonically-bearded Archbishop of Canterbury, met recently in New Orleans with The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops which it probably seems to him has not often understood him all that well.

As for Ms Pleshette, that must surely have been what she was up to, as well.

January 24, 2008

Establishment

Epiphany 3A  (Mt 4.12-23) 

God and the devil are walking along the road together. God sees something lying there and picks it up. The devil says, “What’s that?” God says, “It’s the truth.” The devil says, “Give it to me, and I’ll organize it.”

Matthew tells the story of Jesus selecting his disciples. It’s a story of both good news and bad news. The good news is to witness the apparently willing surrender of all that these men held dear — work, family, perhaps even their lives — for the uncertainty of whatever it might mean to follow Jesus, the kind of news that might inspire and embrace us all. What Paul called “fools for Christ.” The bad news is to witness what are probably the first steps, albeit nascent and even unintentional, in the attempt to organize truth.

A colleague of mine once introduced himself. He said, “I am a member of no organized religion. I am an Episcopalian.” Don’t we wish. Nevertheless, there is a strange and uniquely Anglican spin on the Gospel and its servant, the church, of which we might just remind ourselves from time to time. It would go something like this:

Perhaps our most important and distinguishing mark is corporate prayer, with thanksgiving (we call it Eucharist, another word for it) at the center of our worship. All that we do and the way we attempt to understand what we do grows out of our corporate worship, powered by grace, implemented by faith, gratitude with legs.

We discover God’s will for us in Scripture. But also in tradition, as says one of our prayers, “joining with the heavenly chorus, with prophets, apostles, and martyrs, and with all those in every generation who have looked to (God) in hope.” We take this Scripture and this tradition and reason we strive to find the meaning in these things. All this is brought together for us in the shape of the liturgy, the work of the people, so that we can share and contribute mutual trust with our inheritance.

We distrust judgmentalism. We have no use for  biblical literalism or for the arrogance of election and predestination. All we need do is look to our times to discover how these presumptions always lead to division, then hatred, then alienation, and what we presume to call just war. On the other hand, we embrace inclusiveness, we strive for moderation, we welcome toleration.

We live comfortably with ambiguity and eschew the premature conceit of certainty. We argue. We fight. But then, we come together once more for Common Prayer and Eucharist. For this is our way. We seem actually and rather quaintly to prefer a kind of vagueness and imprecision. We practice a generous and forgiving orthodoxy, an ordered freedom that often drives our fellow Christians bananas. Indeed, we are the oxymoron of the Christian endeavor and view of things.

Don’t we wish. Well, you might say that this description is a model of community to which we all might well aspire. There is a delightfully redundant diversity with a graced pragmatism about it all. As is often said of us, we proceed by the way of  “probable persuasions.”

Frank Griswold, Bishop Katharine’s predecessor as presiding bishop, claims as his rule of life these words once spoken by a Roman Catholic archbishop from South America:

“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.”

This, of course, must not only be true for our bishops, it must also be true for ourselves as individuals and as the church. Only our fear can prevent us from being such a community, and certainly not our capacity for welcoming  and affirming diversity. If I must choose, and I hope never to have to, I would choose without question an uncertain church that is loving over a loveless church that is orthodox.

So thanks for listening. For your patience, here’s a blessing from the Franciscans, one you’ve seen here before, but once again simply because they had it so right. 

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen

January 23, 2008

Pretense redux

John “Honest to God” Robinson, the British bishop who brought such fresh air into the church in the 1960s, often said that the pulpit is too much already six feet above contradiction. These words come back today as we remember Bishop Phillips Brooks, one of the church’s outstanding preachers for whom pretense was poison.

Would that it were so for more in these times. Servant leadership, both in church and state, seems almost a thing of the past. Episcopal arrogance and the clones such a posture raises up among the presbytery approaches pandemic stages altogether contrary to our Anglican collegial heritage. This same sort of hooliganism has, as well, infected our national heritage of checks and balances that is so often disdained in these times.

Brooks was a moderate, unpretentious churchman, not given to puffery. One of his choice bon mots was said to be, “Orthodoxy is, in the Church, very much what prejudice is in the single mind. It is the premature conceit of certainty. It is the treatment of the imperfect as if it were the perfect.”

A probably apocryphal, but no less real story is told of an occasion when he was to speak at a parish fund-raiser in one of his more “high-church” congregations. He arrived in the rector’s study attired in a dark suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. The rector lamented, “Bishop, I’d so hoped you’d wear your clericals on this occasion.”"By all means,” the bishop replied. Then, opening his briefcase and taking out a black tie, he promptly re-vested.

January 22, 2008

Limits

“Addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire.” Gerald May wrote this in his splendid book Addiction and Grace. It’s a real wake-up call, because it bypasses chemistry as essential to the definition and goes straight through habit and action to the compromise of the freedom to choose.

As the freedom to choose is central to the Judaeo-Christian tradition’s understanding of what it means to be a human being, addiction’s habit and behavior has obviously got other ideas. It’s an insult to God, and it probably never goes away.

That’s one reason addicts are always into present and not past participles, about recovering, not recovered, about being and not has been or will be. And that’s why what one is recovering is their human being, awakening and releasing the spirit that drives it, the freedom that goes with it, and nothing less than the options all this opens up.

An addict that’s really on a roll can take every fellow human being — any and all that can be reached — along for the ride. You don’t need a ticket. All you have to do is fall for the malarkey (there’s a better word for this), believe the denial and grandiosity, respect the office, but give the office-holder a pass. Before long, a whole nation and all its treasures, its political systems, its money, its credit, its reputation, indeed, its very freedom to be itself and be loyal to its heritage can soon go straight down the tube.

January 21, 2008

Finish

A fellow listserver writes:

“Dr Phil proclaimed, ‘The way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started and have never finished.’

He continued, “So, I looked around my house to see all the things I started and hadn’t finished, and before leaving the house this morning, I finished off a bottle of Merlot, a bottle of Zinfandel, a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, a bottle of Kaluha (sic), a package of Oreos, the remainder of my old Prozac prescription, the rest of the cheesecake, some Doritos, and a box of chocolates.

“You have no idea how good I feel right now.”

I was convulsed and thought probably he was, too. But then it made me think about Canon Quirk, if you don’t know, the Canon P D Quirk, a one-time mentor of mine and, I sometimes think, an all-time friend. It wasn’t the stewardship of getting things finished what would have done it for the Canon, it was the notion of “Inner peace.” If anything would get him going, it was that.

I’ve reported before in this venue how Quirk disdains centering prayer and the so-called inner peace it’s supposed to provide. But I’ve reported not without consequence. Once when I suggested how could an eccentric such as he ever care for anything so balanced and purposeful and — centered, I got, if not hate mail, nonetheless a stern scolding about what was about me did I have in for centering prayer. Nothing, actually, only some seem to make quite a living at it.

I don’t know how Quirk feels about Dr Phil, but I can imagine his saying something like “Dr Feel” and then chortling about it. But my internet correspondent came closer to a Quirkian litany than I ever could. Such a household-remnants shopping list as he counted off also has great meaning for some of us alcoholics, of all people. If anything, the ones I’ve known can’t stand seeing unfinished stimulants just sitting around, lingering. How could anyone just walk away and leave a drink unfinished? It’s not that Quirk is, as they say, and so far as I know, a friend of Bill W’s, but he is one to appreciate not so much balance as order, and I am sure he would admire a person finishing all the things once started.

This disturbed him about me and frequently tested our friendship. He could never understand my excuse that being a Myers-Briggs P except, as I said, in certain matters, makes it next to impossible for me to measure up to his J, our preferences being, as it were, something I always thought rather biblical, like seeing through a glass darkly.

I wonder what Dr Phil might do with that?

January 18, 2008

Wonders

I was reading, and I read, “Never question the truth of what you fail to understand, for the world is filled with wonders.”

And I remembered that to understand does not mean to be able to define or even to describe or least of all to codify or to systematize or orthodoxilate. No, to understand is for something to have meaning, for there to be a connection between me and the other if only a faint filament draws us together and reminds us of how ultimately and finally inseparable is all of creation. A connection that enriches the both of us.

It is only too comforting when faced with something that doesn’t have meaning for me then to question its validity, its truth, that because it has no meaning for me it is therefore not true. This way, I miss the wonder-filled world altogether. Too many of us make that mistake. It’s at the root of red state/blue state, let alone all the silly squabble breaking up that old Anglican gang of mine.

We’ve got a couple more local clerics chasing the greener grass in Africa or the Cone or somewhere that’ll pay their pension and pulling out on the rest of us as if we have a bad case of liturgical leprosy. Neither of them have ever taken home any prizes for their judgment skills, so nobody should be all that surprised at their behavior now. One only wonders what they were thinking about when they thought they had a “call,” whenever that was in their past. Like the farmer’s lad out plowing one day and seeing the letters GPC formed by some clouds and thnking it meant Go Preach Christ, only to have his parson tell him it may well have meant Go Plant Cotton. Where was that parson when we needed him most?

Like whoever it was who said, never question the truth of what you fail to understand, for the world is filled with wonders. I sure have a few.