April 25, 2008

Basie

Count Basie’s band is coming to town tonight, and today’s the Feast of St Mark. Coincidence. But maybe the two have a lot in common — minimalism and dynamics, to say the least.

Mark tells the same story as his synoptic colleagues, just notes the facts, builds anticipation, spares a lot of detail. Basie’s band has always followed the Count’s lead as a pianist — spare, appropriate, complete, special attention to what’s between the notes. Elijah’s “sound of gentle stillness” comes to mind (1 Kgs 19.12b, AV).

A music critic once likened the Basie band to the finer symphony orchestras with their equal attention not only to a uniform attack of a note, but as well, to its uniform release. Such ensemble playing — so utterly foreign to those who nowadays play amplifiers rather than music — leaves one with the sensation that a razorblade could be slipped between the notes.

Scott Peck often held up jazz bands and basketball teams as models of what he believed to be true community — people who knew one another’s skills and limits as well as how to incorporate them into an impressive whole often greater than the sum of its parts. In an age when some suspect pianissimo may be a variety of pizza at Papa John’s, any illustration of how churchers with a little imagination might be together is altogether welcome.

Let’s hear it for the One O’Clock Jump. Mark would surely have understood.

April 24, 2008

Connections

Easter 6A Jn 15.1-8

This gospel story of Jesus as the vine makes me think of the way Garrison Keillor closes out his daily Writer’s Workshop and his radio reports from Lake Wobegon with the salutation, “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”

The reason I see a similarity is because there’s something of what is called a “stinger” in both stories. For Jesus, it’s the fact that unless we abide in him, there won’t be any grapes. For Keillor, the reminder to stay healthy and to work hard is obvious, but pointless, if we don’t “keep in touch.”

For life is about connection, about being connected, about keeping in touch. We are created for that. We are created for community. One of God’s first reflections in the Garden of Eden as he imagined us into being was that we not be alone. Abiding in Jesus — and in one another — is a way of keeping in touch. And keeping in touch is the groundswell of the church’s ministry to ourselves and to the world. Maybe the image and metaphor of the vine and the vineyard is not all that useful in our urban time. But Jesus must have thought it of some value, and, as is said, what’s good enough for Jesus… If we can just bear the picture for a moment, the vitality, even the osmotic and, indeed, the cosmic power symbolized in the vine is essential if our ministry would bear the fruit of peace and justice and love.

So how come?

Some communities, some churches, do it by requiring members and potential members to believe alike, by requiring them to make and adopt a common confession. They’re actually called “confessional churches.”

The great negative energy in our beloved Anglican Communion which is currently driving us toward schism is the desire by some that we become that sort of church. When they speak of faith, they mean a system of belief, an orthodoxy that must be adhered to in every dot and tittle, a statement to which members must sign their names or else not be trusted, not make it as members, faith as an assent to a set of propositions. When they speak of a “people of faith,” that’s usually what is meant.

The disciple Thomas wanted something like that from Jesus. Early on in that first Easter, he asked Jesus to show him the way. And Jesus said, “I am the Way,” but he didn’t leave it there. He also said that just in case that’s not enough, I am also “the Truth, and the Life.” When Jesus said, “I am the vine,” that was probably shorthand for much the same thing. He was obviously not being literal in either case, but in both cases offering a powerful and energetic symbol of his life of peace and justice, healing and love.

This abiding, this keeping in touch is a way of faith which we freely choose to follow. It is a way of being a responsible branch of the vine and of bearing fruit. It is not so much contained in our belief or in truth as doctrine as it is in our will. It is not creedal life so much as it is covenantal life. It is not some sterile system, but a living, changing, and vital life in which we commit ourselves to that Way of peace and justice and love. Jesus spoke of keeping the Sabbath in this way when he said the Sabbath was made for us, not we for the Sabbath. The Sabbath is not something we’re tied to. The Sabbath is something we harness.

I wish and pray for a church like that. This Anglican Communion and our own ethnic spin on it in this land comes as close as anything I’ve seen or experienced. God gave us Holy Spirit so that we could continue and grow in such community, to abide in Jesus, that we could be well, that we could do good work, and that we would have a way to keep in touch, so that we could come to understand as God continues to make all things new.

May we not be here, then, just to influence others and make them think as we do, but may we be open to influence, not only to acknowledge and respect the creeds of our tradition, but the freedom of others, and may we seek to enhance their capacity as well as ours to make a difference.

May we choose always to serve together and to achieve a collegial bond of caring and witness that the world may then know that we are in Christ and he in us and know this to be so by the way we love one another and by the fairness and justice that is found here. That kind of poetry can only cleanse. There is no greater and no more faithful and no more winsome evangelism.

Oh, and one last note from Garrison Keillor. Maybe Lake Wobegon is a possible metaphor for the church. You know, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average. And where there’s always an exciting story, not just a story of bachelor Norwegian farmers, but also a story to be told of this rather peculiar vine and its sometimes errant branches.

April 23, 2008

Torpor

So it is said, sloth in writers is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict, especially that laziness which renders us incapable of doing the thing to which we are most looking forward. As well, perfectionists are notoriously lazy and all artistic indolence is deeply neurotic, a pain, not a pleasure.

If I heard “promise” once when I set sail for life, I heard it a zillion times. Glory me, I believed it all. And then its two close companions sloth and perfectionism sidled up and said, “Promise? We’ll show you promise. Just you watch.”

Sloth, the word, derives from accidie, Greek for negligence and indifference, then it came to convey sadness and spiritual torpor. It made it to the Vatican’s Top Seven in late antiquity and the middle ages and was classically described as a state of restlessness and the inability to pray. Restless, I am, but more or less able to pray. Sadness at the corner of spiritual torpor, now there’s a familiar intersect.

Essayist Cynthia Ozick writes, “letters, those vessels of calculated permanence,” in her collection, “Metaphors and Memory.” Something writers do, she implies, perhaps to avoid writing.

I imagine letters that way. Writing has always come more fluidly with me when there’s somebody “out there.” Maybe I don’t have to get a response. Not that I want to let my intended (youm, thass whom) off the hook. But writing to somebody who doesn’t answer doesn’t make all that much difference, just so that my imagination can think about them. Maybe that’s what Ozick means by “calculated permanence.” Of course, there is a kind of permanence in a reader’s mind once something is read, if memory can be thought to be all that enduring.

But if it’s like the “permanent care” cemeteries claim (there’s some torpor, for you), then one must expect it to accumulate weeds and toppled concrete urns and generally just to weather the wear and tear of time’s seasons watching the ground sink slightly and irregularly over and around whatever’s underneath.

Anyhow, Yogi Berra said you can observe a lot just by watching.

April 21, 2008

Business

With all the changes and chances and occasional improvements in telephones, one thing that hasn’t changed much is the busy signal. I don’t know how anybody came up with that pulsating buzz, but there’s not much possibility of mistaking its universally annoying and frustrating sound.

I suppose most phones, like mine, have redial buttons for calling the same number over and over when necessary. That, coupled with some good horse sense to know when a line’s busy, should be enough comfort even when you’re running out of patience. But apparently not so.

Now Ma Bell’s progeny have found still another way. For a price, of course. Just in case you’re either absolutely stupid or maybe from Mars (although ET knew better) and making your first Earth-side phone call, Ma’s schoolmarmish robot will interrupt the buzz-buzz to tell you in case you couldn’t recognize the sound, “This line is busy.”

After that admonishment, you’re told that for a charge of whatever, “we” will keep trying for 30 minutes, ring you back with a special ring when the line is available, and then automatically connect you.

Of course, I suppose there’s some solace in and no charge for calling a wrong number. On the other hand, that’s one that, come to think of it, is never busy.

April 18, 2008

Massage

Perfectionism is sweeping the campuses, and the deans, of all people, are worried.

Far from being shocked, the dean of student affairs at one college supported the women’s group that came up with a campaign of posters showing naked undergraduates from the neck down in all their short, tall, thin, not-so-thin, fit and unfit, anonymous, unairbrushed glory. Anything, they said, to stop students from worrying so much about body image instead of grades and careers.

College officials are telling students to get off the treadmill. Go for a walk, go surfing. Read a novel just for pleasure. Eat ice cream. Hang out with the knitting club. Find your passion. Follow your bliss.

All of this reflects the ever-increasing attention colleges across the country are giving to undergraduates’ personal growth and emotional well-being. There are now even free massages and dogs to cuddle in exam seasons, biofeedback workshops, and therapists available just to help students work through their first C.

We didn’t have those posters when I was an undergraduate. All we had was our imaginations, where some of the bodies were always perfect. But I do remember very well my first C. I was so grateful finally to make one, that I even offered the prof a massage.

April 17, 2008

Place

Easter 5A Jn 14.1-14

Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (Jn 14.2)

Wendell Berry lives in Kentucky, but he is everybody’s neighbor. He wrote that if we don’t know where we are, we don’t know who we are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign.

He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge and sense of place that comes from working it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it.

He is talking about a sense of place. Fewer and fewer of us enjoy a sense of place in that sense in this day and time. Not because we are not farmers, although awareness of the land is essential for our good health, but because we are so mobile, so restless, so displaced. Berry is talking not only about the sense of place that land gives us, but even more so, the sense of place in which our poets specialize.

It takes not much stretch for me to imagine that this is the kind of knowing, the kind of sense of oneself that the poet Jesus specialized in. He said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” It is not only there, in that house of many rooms, where Jesus prepares a place for us that one day we may occupy, but it is also from that house that Jesus reaches out to us and prepares a place for us that we can now in this day and this time occupy.

Perhaps one of the major causes of our social malaise is that we have become indifferent to, even contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better. We seem as hooked on change as we are afraid of change. A lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it.

In our displaced condition we are not unlike the mythless person that Carl Jung wrote about, who lives “like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. He… lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth.”

It is only a step from this to another: that no place is a place until it has had a myth, until it has a story, a spiritual genealogy. No place, not even a wild place, not even a place where all of Maurice Sendak’s wild things are, is a place for us until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we can call poetry.

What Frost did for New Hampshire and Vermont, what Faulkner did for Mississippi and Steinbeck for the Salinas Valley, Wendell Berry is doing for his family corner of Kentucky, and hundreds of other place-loving people, gifted or not, are doing for places they were born in, or reared in, or have adopted and made their own.

I doubt that we will ever get the motion out of us, for everything in our culture of opportunity and abundance has, up to now, urged motion on us as a form of virtue. The way we drive our roads makes it seem that even vengeance has become a virtue. Our tradition of restlessness will not be outgrown in a generation or two, even if the motives for restlessness are withdrawn.

Our frontiers have been explored and crossed, at least in geographic terms. It is probably time we settled down. It is probably time we looked around us instead of looking ahead. We have no business any longer in being impatient with history. We need to know our history in much greater depth, we even need to know our geology, for our geology is only our history projected a little ways back from our founding fathers and mothers.

History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Why else would our present administration speak of “old Europe” with such disregard and disdain? Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history for us and defiling the natives who were here already and had their own history, we did not only them, but both the country and ourselves considerable harm. Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging.

“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” says Robert Frost’s poem. Only in the act of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established.

The place Jesus makes for us is uniquely ours, a gift of grace from which we can grow and become the human beings he intends for us to become. It is our story. It is our myth. He is our vanguard, but as well, he is our shepherd in the here and now. With him, as T S Eliot reminds us, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

April 16, 2008

Justice

Our country’s leaders get scarier with every new greed-based initiative and failed commitment. Few seem to realize that that kind of behavior is ever so much adultery all the same, that infidelity is not confined to the oval office and wherever can assume more shapes than one.

A newspaper columnist put the current damage assessment right: “I’m afraid to drink the water,” she said. “I’m afraid to breathe the air. I’m afraid glaciers will melt and seas will rise. I’m afraid to visit California in the dark. I’m afraid the Dow will dip below 5,000. I’m afraid Russia will take leave of its senses. I’m afraid China will take leave of its senses. I’m afraid North Korea will lob a missile our way. Soon, I’ll be fearing fear itself.”

Such anxiety yearns for pastoral care and presence. Such failure of leadership calls for prophetic indictment. Such an environment calls for a church, like the one in the Baptismal Covenant. Of course, there’s that irksome old problem of whether the Bible is infallible, whether our clergy are orthodox, and who’s shacking up with whom.

With all this, there’s simply no time for justice.

April 14, 2008

Remnant

To the poet Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand. (Jane Langton in The Thief of Venice, as quoted in Library Juice, 14ii01)

CP’s a librarian and likes this quote from Homer, says she’s never heard much at all about God staying his hand over anything we “other” priests are up to. Actually, she never needs to remind me, for I rather revel in it. There’s already among her other charms a sort of reference-desk ambiance, the kind that may well appeal to God. If it’s a Puccini aria for a crossword puzzle or a shortstop for the Cubs or a novel by Eudora Welty I’m wont to name-drop for an OoN column, she’s always there. Besides, knowing what Homer said about librarians and so long as we’re the both of us within firing range of celestial missiles always gives me a sort of comfort, something like a basement in a tornado.

Whenever I meet somebody who doesn’t even own a library card, I lament inwardly. And when I find out he or she depends altogether on internet book sellers to keep track of reading preferences, I cringe. My friend Walt, the wonder librarian at our branch, watches out for me and alerts me to the latest James Lee Burke, Robert B Parker, or Carmac McCarthy. I wonder would Homer feel the same way about Amazon as he did about librarians?

Before Google, when CP was actually a reference librarian instead of the top gun for the whole system like later on, she’d get calls from, say, a bar where some guys were arguing about sports stats and wanting the facts. She got offered ten bucks once to skew the data to the winning side. Of course, that was before greed became even more rampant and corporate. Ten bucks then amounted to something. Actually, she only told me that story, not whether she collected.

April 11, 2008

Covenant

Easter 4A / Acts 2.42-47

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2.42).

This simple statement about the early church that we repeat two millennia later as part of our Baptismal Covenant says it all. We are asked, “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?” And we answer, “I will, with God’s help.”

Then just so there’s no mistaking things, we spell out that teaching and that fellowship and what it means. It means to persevere in resisting evil, and failing, to repent and return to the Lord. It means to proclaim by word and by example the Good News of God in Christ. It means to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves… And it means finally and maybe most important of all, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being. And our answer at each step is the same… “I will, with God’s help.”

In other words, we are that fellowship. We break that bread. We pray those prayers. The apostles are us. And we are the apostles. We are the ones who have the commission to be and to do these things.

I don’t know if Pastor Jeremiah Wright ever took those vows or a reasonable facsimile, but he sure sounds like he might have. Oddly (and tragically) his one remark that has proven most controversial seems to me fairly basic, as our Covenant attests, to a responsible understanding of the Christian faith.

Actually, when you think about it, even in a casual reading of the Prayer Book Daily Evening Office when one comes upon the Blessed Virgin’s startlingly lovely Magnificat, you’ll find her saying some remarkably similar things.

“The Almighty has done great things for me,” she says, “and holy is his name… he has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit, he has cast down the mighty from their thrones… ” (cf Lk 1.46-55).

Stripped of the emotion and the phraseology, Pastor Wright — and the Magnificat — are saying that the United States of America stands under God’s judgment no differently from the way any other peoples in any other land stand under God’s judgment. Surely we don’t think that when we sing God Bless America, we get a free pass or get to be overlooked on the torture we have inflicted in our current as well as past wars, on the bombings of civilian targets, on resorting to armed combat for economic reasons, on the disenfranchisement of native Americans, on the practice of slavery, and on and on. I am seriously depressed at the depth of the civil religion practiced in this country that would exempt us from being held responsible for our national sins any more than it would hesitate to offer thanksgiving for the blessings we have received and the good judgment we have shown. (1)

Are we reflecting on this? Has our House of Bishops or the church in any of its manifestations responded to this current controversy about which the media reminds us over and over again? Surely nobody even imagines that this is in any way even approaching a partisan issue, so why not? (1)

The flak over the pastor’s remarks only serves to distract us from the fact that we live in perilous times. Thousands are in serious economic straits. Millions are without adequate health care. We are in a war immersed in a kind of grandiosity and denial that is killing hundreds and leaving hundreds more homeless daily. I need not rehearse that litany. You know it as well as I and also have probably heard all you want to hear.

Just last month, a 36 year old New Jersey father of three came home from work, walked off the commuter train, crossed the tracks, and deliberately placed himself in the path of the oncoming train. He was killed instantly. Later it was learned that he feared he was going to be “downsized.”

My family lived through the Great Depression of the late twenties and early thirties, the four of us barely getting by. Similar stories then were not all that uncommon. Today’s subprime market’s collapse coupled with severe unemployment and home foreclosures is seen by many financial gurus as a confirmation of an impending financial disaster not unlike the one my family and some of you lived through. Many of these experts are deeply concerned about widespread unemployment and the crippling indignity which always comes in its wake. This young father’s suicide may be a tragic parable of our times.

We are deep now into Easter. The gospel of Jesus and the great saga of this season at heart tell another parable, a parable of hope and abundance, a parable of peace and of justice. There is every reason to believe that more than the usual number may be in search of these very gifts, and that some may search right here where these realities by which our affirmation of the Passion and encouragement of its redemptive healing can assure them.

That many of our churches would welcome them instead with an obsession with sex, with some quick-fix covenant, and with how many bishops can stand on the head of a pin is to our shame. It is surely an embarrassment to God. For the church is called to be, and the church must be, especially in these times, an embodiment of this Easter parable rather than merely one more religious institution bewitched and bollixed with the fear for its own survival.

Today’s lessons about the Good Shepherd and the 23d Psalm and the life of the early church recall our commission to be both pastor and prophet in these times. For this Easter parable is not one only of compassion and nourishment, but, as well, one of prophetic indictment of the very divisive forces in our society that bring about these current conditions that humiliate and denigrate ourselves and our neighbors in utter contrast to the Baptismal Covenant we have made.

I cannot recall when in recent times have these commitments in this Covenant been more central to our ministries. We have embraced these and we must and we can be ourselves refreshed by what they call to us to be and to do — to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship and by our liturgies, by our resistance to evil, by our repentance, by our proclamation of the Good News of God in Christ, but above all in these days by a Christ-seeking and Christ-serving leadership that strives for justice and peace and respect for the dignity of all.

The church — this church of St Ann — is the family where these things can and do happen, indeed, the church all over this land is the family where they must happen. The church must be the family where women and men and children can be loved until they can come to love and respect themselves and where they can then come to love and respect others. It is this we must offer and this to which we must live out the kind of winsomeness that makes it irresistible.

This ministry, this Easter parable for dignity, spells it all out in the Liturgy of the Eucharist when we come to stand or kneel before the Altar to receive the body and blood of the crucified and risen Jesus. Side by side, we are all equal. The clergy are our servants distributing bread and wine equally to all. When the words are said, The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven, let us hear The Body of Christ, the bread of justice. When the words are said, The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation, let us hear The Blood of Christ, the cup of compassion.

For it is in food and drink offered equally to everyone that the presence of God and Jesus is found. But food and drink are the material basis of life, so we cannot avoid the further reality that the Lord’s Supper is also political criticism and economic challenge as well. (2)

By the grace of God and with Jesus’s presence, we can, we do, we must make these things happen.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
1) Comments about Jeremiah Wright are adapted from remarks by the Revd Thomas B Woodward with his permission.
2) Parts adapted from correspondence with the Revd G Richard Wheatcroft with his permission.

April 9, 2008

Calendar

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s on the calendar today. It’s because he was a truth-teller. It’s also because he was planning to break one of the Ten Commandments in a plot to murder Hitler. He got caught. The Nazis hanged him. It was sixty-three years ago when, like Martin Luther King, he was only thirty-nine.

There’s not much point in his being remembered unless he reminds us that the truth we’re to be about telling is not so much about words as it is about the Word made flesh. Jesus said, I am the truth. In other words, he walked the talk.

Molly Ivins was a talk-walker. One time, she told it like this: “So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”

Come on churchers. Are we having any fun?