May 28, 2008

Deceit

Bob Herbert of the New York Times, writing after the tragic death of Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, said, “If there was one thing above all else that David taught us, it was to be skeptical of official accounts, to stay always on guard against the lies, fabrications, half-truths, misrepresentations, exaggerations and all other manifestations of falsehood that are fired at us like machine-gun bullets by government officials and others in high places, often with lethal results.” To illustrate a contemporary “for instance,” he added that, “A government that will lie about the tragic fates of honorable young Americans like Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch will lie to the public about anything.”

One of the presidential press secretaries in our present administration has just now written a memoir about his time in that position that is apparently one more confirmation of Halberstam’s warning. It is said to reveal his experience of a commonness of deceit that has marked the past seven plus years of the executive branch of our government.

Scott Peck wrote the book “People of the Lie” about the nature of human evil and how lies, liars, and lying are the true axes of evil. It is chilling just to recall it. Sisela Bok wrote a book called “Lying.” It is about “moral choice in public and private life.” She covers every conceivable situation in which one lies or must choose whether to lie — deception as therapy for the sick and dying, public good and crises, unmasking liars, lying to enemies, confidentiality, “white” lies, parenting and paternalism, and heaven knows how many others.

In the face of all the neurotics of deceit who can and do pervade church and state in our time, I remember from another source this comment about neuroses: “Neurosis has nothing to do with how one behaves or how one suffers. It has nothing to do with the fact that the psyche, the self, is infused with contradictions. Rather is it primarily the failure of the capacity to attend to the truth about oneself, whatever it may be, with an awareness free of emotionalism, a capacity that the great spiritual masters called sobriety.”

Once again, we’re about to choose another administration for this remarkably- and truthfully-conceived nation that we enjoy.

May 27, 2008

Ambiance

Marsha Williams died Friday last after a long tour with the big C. Among her many talents, she had computer skills beyond imagining. I’ll miss her as a friend and be lost without her as the Webmaster for Out of Nowhere and The Covenant Journal (covpubs.org). I can hear her now when I’d call about one of my many computer glitches. “I told you how to do that a month ago! You should print it!” followed by telling me patiently once again.

We’ll celebrate her life this Saturday morning at St Ann Church as near as we can in the manner in which she wished, an ambiance evincing of the Big Easy. The Requiem Eucharist will be surrounded with my band playing Dixieland Jazz, beginning with her favorite, “I’ll Fly Away,” spicing the service hymns a bit, then processing out, the band leading the congregation with “The Saints Go Marching In.” French Market fare will be served at the reception.

Conversations our last few weeks putting all this together left me feeling that Marsha was one of those tour guides who already knew so much about where she was going that she’d surely already been there herself in one way or another.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon her and give her peace. So be it.

May 26, 2008

Regeneration

I flew four-engine bombers for Uncle Sugar’s Navy during one of our great misunderstandings (aka WW II). I never got shot at or even had a crash landing. I got into Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation by default, on the mere technicality of being the right age at the right time. And, I might add, by having read enough Daredevil Aces magazines and Tom Swift adventures to think I knew something.

Brokaw writes about that generation as if there were no other and certainly as if such could not be at all without there being a war or two within its life span. Memorial Day needs at least an octave to commemorate all the honest-to-God veterans properly and to remind all the rest of us not only that hardly any generation has ever been spared a war, but also that, as heaven well knows, their service is beyond invaluably and incredibly selfless.

But what if there were also memorials for peace? Times when the world would no longer be in denial about and no longer tolerate genocide? What if there were those memorable eras when the hungry were actually fed, the naked clothed, the cup offered, and all the millions covered by health insurance in the sure and certain knowledge that the receivers, not the givers, were the point? How about honoring not only the greatest generation, but also a greatest regeneration when, for whatever reasons, our enemies are loved rather than killed. How come? On account of Jesus said to, maybe.

Do we churchers really, honestly believe that our deciding what is orthodox and what is not orthodox rather than working for peace and justice is really all that important in God’s eyes?

May 21, 2008

Talk

Maybe it’s getting to be an inconvenience our calling ourselves a Christian nation.

We can trust in God, and many, maybe even most, would think this is an altogether good thing to do. But even that doesn’t necessarily make us or even God Christian. There’s a lot of evidence to question any claim that it does. Furthermore, Jesus can be our president’s favorite “philosopher,” to use his term, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that maybe he’s not read that memo either.

Perhaps the real clincher is the thing about Jesus saying we should love our enemies. Heaven knows it’s hard enough to get any consensus about what it means for just one person to love another or whether what sex they have to be to do so, let alone a whole nation. Some say that for a nation or a church or any other institution to love is at least for them to treat others fairly and justly and, above all, peacefully. That’s at least what our Constitution and other laws more or less suggest.

So if we cannot love our enemies, we can at least, again, if we claim to be a Christian nation, treat them fairly and, like it says, with peace and justice for all. Maybe our presidential aspirants who seem to be in such a twit about even talking to our enemies could reflect about all this. Not even Jesus said we have to like the scoundrels, but at least to be civil, for heaven’s sake. And it seems altogether puzzling if that doesn’t at least mean to say, Hello, how you doin’? Maybe they’ll say, Jes’ fine. And it’s no wonder where things could go from there.

Of course, it might be best first to ask whether they even want to talk to us at all. Maybe they don’t.

May 20, 2008

Direction

Complete with foot-in-mouth, I started a weekend retreat at a nearby mountain convent by asking Sister Mary Anonymous, whom I thought to be my assigned spiritual director, What is a spiritual director. She claimed that she didn’t know what is a spiritual director. Further, she added that she was not one, and, with emphasis, that she was certainly not mine. With that refreshing opener, off we went in some not altogether obvious spiritual direction.

I had only a few weeks previous been named to the short list as a nominee for the coming episcopal election in our diocese and was feeling a bit heady about it. After two sessions, Sister answered a question that I had not asked nor had we discussed as she informed me that I was in no way episcopal material. What she knew about bishops was clearly more than she claimed she knew about spiritual direction. If she was right about that, she was surely right about me. That was considerable relief, though my vanity hardly agreed and was not at all pleased.

I suppose I’ve enough vanity left to recount this story largely because of the compliment she gave me at the end of our last session and because its relevance may seem obvious shortly. I am surprised and much pleased, she said, finally to find a priest who is so well in touch with his feminine consciousness.

This almost daily essay named for one of our band’s favorite tunes depends a lot on muses. Muses are neither always that dependable nor generous and more often of late just plain hard to get. But wouldn’t you think they’d know along with the Sister how well-aimed is my spirit in their direction and maybe give me some slack now and then?

May 16, 2008

Flap

Returning to college after the Great Middle War, we WWII veterans were required along with everybody else to take old Senator McCarthy’s loyalty oath. We refused, en masse. If we hadn’t already demonstrated our loyalty and patriotism, signing a piece of paper wouldn’t prove anything. It created quite a stir, but the powers finally gave in and gave up.

Loyalty-oath takers and other so-called patriotic types are currently acting equally silly about the flag. I got indoctrinated on flags as a Cub Scout, and it mostly stuck, largely, I suspect because nobody then seemed much to make an idol of them. I continue to stand, take off my hat, and hold my hand over my heart for the playing of our largely unsingable national anthem. I notice fewer do so nowadays. I also know pretty much what are the rules for the public display of the flag. It’s okay. We live in a culture generally illiterate about symbols and other metaphors, anyway. Myth and falsehood continue to be synonyms, even in the churches. Such doings and their commensurate bedfellow biblical inerrancy inevitably lead to idolatrous confusion and thus to our loss.

The current flap over the lapel flag-pin suggests that the problem seems never to go away. Ironically, too many of those who wear them, probably even on their jammies, make the biggest fuss over patriotism, then all the while ignore the Constitution, lie a lot, spy on their neighbors, and torture their enemies.

On the other hand, I don’t use flag-adorned postage stamps, but I do try to tell the truth most of the time and always salute on reflex. As for my lapels, barren they be.

May 15, 2008

Stigma

(Warning: Early on when I thought I knew the answers and was only searching for the questions, a sage mentor advised me that no self-respecting Anglican cleric ever preaches on Trinity Sunday, but schedules Sunday School graduation instead. No longer having a Sunday School handy to graduate, here’s some evidence to support his counsel. — LD)

Trinity Sunday

“It takes a mighty big stigma to beat a dogma.”

Dorothy Sayers said it. She was British. She was also a theologian, a mystery novelist, a poet, and a Dante scholar. So she knew, it’s safe to say, what she was talking about, whether I do or not.

She could have been talking about Trinity Sunday, the only time in the entire liturgical keeping of time that a dogma assumes front stage center and elbows all those majestic events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost to the wings.

Preaching on Trinity Sunday makes me feel like the heart attack victim that called for a priest who, on arriving, moved the gathering crowd aside, knelt beside her, and asked, “Do you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” With great effort, the stricken woman addressed those surrounding her, “Here I lay dying, and the Father is asking me riddles.”

Dogma, that’s doctrine with legs, seems always to be faith’s more or less futile attempt to make sense out of nonsense and come up with religion. Whereas faith, not unlike love (and they’re not all that different), is about as exposed a position as a person can take and with very little reason to support it. It’s like getting caught with your hand in life’s cookie jar. It makes you feel like you need some kind of excuse. Dogma, on the other hand, gets you out of hock and with an alibi.

I suppose it is not without purpose, then, that on this Sunday dedicated to a major piece of Christianity’s hard drive, there is appointed in the propers that grand and eloquent story from Genesis to wrap a security blanket around the whole idea (Gen 1.1-2.3). It reminds us that we are put here to mind God’s creation, and as Frederick Buechner has eloquently said, to give the universe something to talk with, to give God someone to talk to, and to give us somebody to talk about.

And further, Genesis says that whatever we do about it, even to the making of enigmatic riddles, God thinks that it is good and makes us unconditionally in God’s image. Which is to say that we and all the rest of us — and them and it — are gently and lovingly shaped and brought forth with cause out of the unfathomable depths of God’s ingeniously fecund imagination.

And not as mere clones. But as beloved sharecroppers in whatever may be our capacity in all this exercise in fertility. And that, beloved, is very scary stuff. So scary, and yet, so enticing, that right off, we blew it out of the garden and have needed the safety belts and air bags of doctrine and dogma ever since.

Doctrine, dogma, whatever, serves us well. We want everybody to buckle up. But never at the expense of our imagination and worship. Such insight is perhaps no more obvious than in the turn of phrase at the heart of the collect for Trinity Sunday. Thus, we pray, “Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity… ” (BCP p 228) We acknowledge doctrine. We worship God. For it is thus as we imagine that we are most godlike, most as God creates us to be, incarnating our spirit into human being and leading us forth to walk the talk.

May 14, 2008

Dancing

Common sense and a sense of humor, said William James, are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor, he said, is just common sense, dancing.

Might common prayer and a sense of humility be the same thing, moving at different speeds… a sense of humility, just common prayer, dancing?

Nothing so well defines Anglicans as the Book of Common Prayer. Through the cycles and the crises of life, it tells the world who we are and what we believe about ourselves and God. If we listen carefully, it can help center us and protect us from letting too much distance show between our sense of humility and our sense of humor. Then may we experience the incredible lightness of being.

Common prayer dancing, indeed.

May 13, 2008

PenteCost

Nothing in the Beatitudes suggests that “blessed are the religious.” Maybe it’s because the more religious one is, the fewer blessings one needs because religion is all about security and being right and decreasing the risks one takes.

On the other hand, the more we let our spirit loose from our religion, the riskier things get. Pentecost was a kind of turning or breaking point between religion and spirit. Jesus had been hammering away trying to bust up that union now for a few years and not without a lot of risk to himself and here comes the Holy Spirit at his behest to blow it all out of the tub.

When it happened, everybody got drunk on it (they don’t call that stuff “spirits” for naught) and wailed away in a linguistic whirlwind. For once, they communicated and chummed up pretty good. But it didn’t last long.

One of the worst things about a hangover is facing whoever your liable to wake up with. You or they rarely ever look as good as the night before. So ever since then, we’ve be building more religions to keep us between the curbs and the Spirit, of course, at arm’s length.

It’s good for us to celebrate Pentecost, to remember that ordered chaos out of which we came and where we got a glimpse of what Jesus wanted us to see and wanted us to be, then carrying on in our own tongues about the “mighty works of God” (Acts 2.11). The church needs Pentecost maybe worse than ever right now. It seems to be becoming more and more religious and throwing up barriers against anything that looks like that smoke and mirrors fiasco reported in the Acts of the Apostles.

Generally, the more religious we are, the fewer risks we take. On the other hand, to mature spiritually (to live, grow, awaken) is to move from attachment to detachment. The more loving, the more risks. The more inclusive, the more need to cover your rear.

A collegial style of life seems more becoming to a church than a hierarchical, pontifical style. It’s about community, and community is that possible state of grace to which we are called and that allows us to live in and sustain the inevitable tension between religion and faith. May the forthcoming Lambeth Bash take note.

Faith is the way Spirit moves among us. Faith questions, religion answers. Religion patronizes. Faith cares. The church’s vocation is least of all, if at all, to preserve religion, nor even to propagate faith (in the sense of “adding” to it), but to be faithful, to be a sanctuary in which one can explore what it means to be human, that is, to discover the mystery of what it means to be created in the image of God, as well as to witness to other communities or sanctuaries where such creativity can happen.

True conversion moves us away, then, from pretense to nonsense. The tragedy of religion is that it must always make sense of the world, that it seems so, might we say, rational. Maybe that’s where original sin came from, being reasonable.

One of the more profound things a church can do by being a church, a people, is to become a “somewhere” one can find a sense of “place,” a locus in the chaotic, madding crowd not for some brain-dead serenity and liturgical lethargy, but where chaos can be discovered as not all that alien to life, but indeed perhaps even quite central to life, where women and men and children can dare to discover who they are and be content to be who they discover, where all can connect and exchange their deepest searches into the wells of human imagination and spirit and offer them to one another with God’s comfort and joy and confidence.

It sickens me to hear some of our leaders speak as if the world would be “without” God if it were not for the church whose task they perceive is somehow to “bring” God to the world. Far from that, “church” is where people who may be thought of as “places-where-God-is” share those places in reverence and awe and jolly good hilarity. Not to bring God, but to find God.

A church marquee up in Denver, Colorado, counseled, “If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans.” Pray let us be a Pentecost church where we dare not fear to tell God our plans.

May 12, 2008

Change

The liturgical calendar reminds us today that it’s the anniversary of the first Book of Common Prayer and that it got started back in 1549. That was about a big change that people didn’t much care for then any more than they do now.

Change is on everybody’s mind these days. The presidential aspirants talk a lot about it, whose change is better, whose change is worse. Nothing seems to be spared. Talking about change usually creates some serious pastoral problems in the church. If there’s anything we churchers get nervous about, it’s change. When I think about it, a lot, if not most, of my energy over the past half century as an east Texas country preacher has been used up dealing with change.

First of all, there’s the gospel we’re supposed to be preaching. That’s an ongoing problem that keeps rearing its head. It’s not only about the big change as such, the one that conversion is about, but if the story about the widow’s mite means anything at all, it’s also about small change, the one the Every Member Canvass usually ends up being about. But every time I tried to say much of anything about the gospel as change without using carefully veiled terms, there’d inevitably be something come up at a vestry meeting in opposition to it. Like one of our members said once, they all act like a bunch of colonels trying to tell the general how to run the army.

And then there are all the lesser changes down through the years. About the time I got out of seminary, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was coming along and folks were saying things like If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for them. If that wasn’t enough, here came the Seabury Series of Sunday School material with all its so-called maieutic midwifery talk about teachers and students. That really made people nervous to think it was going to be about telling little children where babies come from, and that it was not Chicago like they thought.

Then there was the National Council of Churches which some claimed was a communist front masquerading behind a Christian mask. Next there was Bishop James Pike, and people began to realize that Isaiah wasn’t so nice after all. Then it suddenly began to dawn on people that Jesus probably loved all the races about the same, and we started integrating the schools and even the churches alongside. A reporter called me up one Saturday, said he was going to bring some black people to our eleven o’clock service the next day, and what was I going to do about it. I told him we’d usher them to a seat and give them each a pledge card. He said they’d go somewhere else, and they did.

Not long after, we got into ordaining women and changing the prayer book and the hymnal all in about the same time and opening up all kinds of ways of getting the laity up front to lead the liturgy. One of our bishops got so incensed about it, he called it the creeping gangrene of participatory democracy.

Now it’s sexual orientation. Trouble with that is that people think it’s about sex when in fact it’s not about sex at all. It’s about orientation. And it’s orientation that’s always bothered churchers. When that gets out, we’ll really have a problem, because orientation usually means change or at least paying attention to where you’re headed and to what’s going on. Now that’s a real problem, especially when you’ve still got the 1928 prayer book memorized and are wondering when it’s ever coming back.