Out of Nowhere

Blog is such an unfortunate word. I know what it means, but I fail to see why it has so much purchase. I rather prefer to call what I attempt to do with OoN “essays.” So you can imagine how pleased I was to discover this about Montaigne, all thanks to Garrison Keillor’s indispensable daily Writer’s Almanac this morning.

GK wrote today that the great essayist, instead of letters, wrote down thoughts to an imaginary reader. He wrote about all kinds of things: liars, smell, prayer, cannibals, and thumbs. He mixed anecdotes with academic thoughts. And he called his short pieces “essays” because he considered the pieces small attempts at addressing big ideas, and the French verb “essai” means “attempt.”

We are God’s imaginary friends. Imagining is the way God makes up stuff, attempts big ideas like us, made in her image and all. Like she told Moses, she is who she is, and gets on with imagining us to be. It doesn’t always work, but all the necessary ingredients are there via DNA and whatever else we’ve not yet found out. God essays. Surely she doesn’t blog. I hope.

I rather hope, also, that God wants us to essay, to attempt, to attempt being human and ever so often, maybe, to try out the sashay two-step here and there.

The OoN Icons piece the other day about the view out the window prompted responses that make glad the heart.

First… You could take a photo of your back yard and send it to all of us. We would like to see what you see out your window.

Response… I haven’t yet learned how to download pictures and send them out.

Answer… With a digital camera you should be able to download to your computer and attach whatever you want to emails. I know you can do it! Even I am able.

Another said: Well, it would be mighty nice to be sitting there with you, sipping some of your good coffee, looking out that window and chatting about the world out there…

And still another: You didn’t mention the robins, the mice, the squirrels, the groundhogs, an occasional cat chasing them, an occasional lizard, the cardinals, and all the little critters that add to the life outside those windows. They are wonderful!!! (until I see them having lunch on my black-eyed Susans).

And finally CP… Please don’t take a picture until this Spring when the yard wakes up.

Silent reflection… It will surely take me that long to figure out how to do it.

Publicly… Many thanks for the notes.

I never tire of the view out the window at the left end of my desk. It’s always the same, but never the same. The yard is steep. My view is the back half of a suburban lot held up by four hundred million year-old Devonian limestone terraces. It’s topped off by a majestic oak that rules the neighborhood hill and is named for a one-time Texas geologist (Quercus shumardii). The rest is CP’s lovely native wildflowers (asleep at the wheel right now), some hollies and cedars, a twelve-foot volunteer oak, some Otto Luken laurels, a dogwood, a jaunty potting shed, a hammock frame, grass, a handsome woodpile, and a cistern from another era for fire protection.

Bill Gates and company were apparently smart to use the name Windows and the neat little flaggy bright-colored logo that, like Mac’s apple, calls all that attention to itself. It makes them a lot of money, and they spend it wisely and generously. Trouble is, you can’t see squat through their Windows, and that’s what windows are for. Ironically, such a “window” is pointless as a window (as we Mac writers will tell you if you just ask), for the very name — and idea — is not to shut out the view, but to ventilate it with both light and air. A window is never an end in itself, but a means to an end in itself.

The Greeks call windows icons and their iconography has a mightily refreshing place in the ventilation and illumination of one’s spirit. We (and their sycophants) call celebrities icons all the time when what we really seem to mean is idol. Idols, they aren’t. Icons, they aren’t, either, except when they are, and the view is usually not all that great.

There’s a splendidly brilliant day outside my window this morning. The air is brisk, so the window is closed. But the view remains. I wish you could see it with me and enjoy watching life bam along out there over and underground.

The Catechism in the American Book of Common Prayer defines a covenant as “a relationship initiated by God, to which a body of people responds in faith” (p 846).

The Holy Scriptures of both Old and New Testament tell the story of a relationship initiated by God, to which a Judaeo-Christian body of people responded in faith. We, who may be said to be an Anglican body of people, adopt and assimilate their response in faith. We call it our normative tradition. Meanwhile, we build our own covenant tradition by responding in faith to a relationship God continually initiates with us. We affirm their covenant response to contain all things necessary to salvation. We are not always so sure whether our response does that or not, though we often feel it has promise.

Urban T Holmes writes about this response in his singular monograph, “What is Anglicanism?” He calls it our Anglican consciousness. He says that it “is a mode of making sense of the experience of God… a particular approach to the construction of reality, or to the building of a world.” The Baptismal Covenant according to the use of the Episcopal Church is a very important way that we respond in faith (BCP pp 304f). By that response in faith, we inform (give shape and life to) our understanding of our relation to God’s continuing initiative to make all things new.

It’s the faith with which we respond — there are at least two kinds — that often creates a problem. It is a problem sweeping our Communion even now. There’s the Apostles’ Creed (the Baptismal Formula), the credal or doctrinal faith “we believe,” and there’s the covenantal faith “we will.” There’s the believing here and now, with little direction or explanation as to how we go about it. And there’s the willing here and now with both present commitment and future intention, and whatismore, with clear instructions as to how we go about it.

It is the difference between faith as passive acceptance of some, albeit essential content, and faith as active participation in a relationship. The Anglican consciousness seems more a covenantal than a credal way of responding to our experience of God.

Samuel Butler is credited with saying “people in general are as equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted as they are at seeing it practiced.” These two kinds of faith, credal and covenantal, seem somehow caught up in that statement. It may be safe to presume that some say the creeds with their fingers crossed behind their back. It is something less than safe and something more than risky to will the Baptismal Covenant without both hands on the wheel.

This ambiguity is revealed by the Baptismal Covenant and its two sets of questions. The Apostles’ Creed (the Baptismal Formula) asks for our belief, for our passive faith. It is the part of the Covenant to which we assent. The questions that make up the balance of the Covenant ask for our will, for our commitment, for our active faith. They begin with “Will you…” to which we respond, “I will, with God’s help.” Strangely, we do not ask for God’s help for what we believe, but only for what we will and choose, perhaps because a covenant fulfilled is a process, a practice, a life, a relationship in which we choose to engage and, through time, confront any number of bends in our history, unexpected or planned.

Ironically, the Catechism, itself a form and outline of faith implied as belief, is also the source of the definition of a covenant. Faith as definition, as assent to doctrine and faith as understanding, as response to God’s initiative, all bound into one. The creeds do not spell out beyond implication at best how one must act in response to the affirmations one makes. On the other hand, the covenants are altogether specific about what one wills to be and to do in the relationship into which God calls us.
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Out of Nowhere and its companion occasional paper The Covenant Journal are archived at .

Epiphany last/Transfiguration (Mk 9.2-9)

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. His answer came, instead, not nearly so grandiose, but in the familiar King James Version’s “still, small voice” and in the later American Version’s far more poetic and lovelier “sound of gentle stillness” (1 Kgs 19.12 AV).

That may often be the same for us. Like Elijah, we look for signs, rather than simply listen for them.

The Transfiguration tells such a story. No noise, just a super wardrobe malfunction. It would be hard to imagine a more brilliant scene than that of Jesus’s consort with Moses and Elijah and having his garments suddenly lit up like half-time at a rock concert. We can’t fault Peter, James, and John for being overcome and wanting to negotiate a more permanent arrangement. It was only natural. It is only natural with us churchers. Majestic cathedrals, fancy vestments, great music and liturgy, all pointing to us in the hope that maybe like those disciples, the world will want to negotiate and join up.

The Voice from the clouds up there on the mountain says, simply, “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.” These were God’s words at Jesus’s baptism. But the Transfiguration story seems to suggest that there’s been an attention deficit in the meantime, as if that simple recommendation was not enough. There on the mountain, the Voice adds a simple command… “Listen to him.”

Perhaps this story is about witnessing. Witnessing that takes at least two forms. The obvious and more common one is telling the story of our experience as a people with God, enacting our story, making it as attractive as we possibly can. 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 presence, for Christ in the other. Listening, giving audience, paying attention may be, after all, a most profoundly magnetic and winsome way of witnessing. Listening for the “sound of gentle stillness.”

“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. There’s a saying around Alcoholics Anonymous circles that “boredom is a personal insult.” Whereas, to give ourselves unrestricted, unconditional audience, Nouwen says, defines the difference between loneliness and truly creative solitude.

As well with our neighbors must be our gift of audience, of truly listening without condition, 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 without condition, by opening up from mere illusions about God to attentive 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 understands us and the ways in which he has imagined us to become.

Deafness comes in many forms… arrogance, vanity, compulsive talking, dismissiveness, aloofness, and, so much more subtly, through an 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 the deaf 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 and peaceful 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’s grace.

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, the Beloved; listen to him!” (Mk 9.7)

A couple of OoN readers very kindly responded about my recent exploration into the Oval Office. I had likened an oval to an ellipse and presumed its two foci were the same as two centers. My only fallback is that I leaned on prosaic license to imply that occasional double talk prevails in that presidentially hallowed place. But even that doesn’t erase the screw up. One wrote, and she said…

“That is the kind of thinking that really turns me on. I’d be raving about it except for one minor glitch. An ellipse (oval) does have only one _center_, the place where the major axis and the minor axis meet. It has two foci, such that lines from every point on the ellipse to each focus all have the sum of the two equal to the sum of every other two such lines. So the positions of the two foci, along with the sum of the two lines’ lengths, define the ellipse.”

Now that this is perfectly clear, I wish I could remember and had kept a collection of my glitches over the almost six years of writing Out of Nowhere. There have been quite a few, but the memory of them escapes me. At least, they are mine, and fall not under the frequent copout of “mistakes were made.”

Occasionally, someone is kind enough to suggest why not an OoN book. An editor from a publishing house of some repute did volunteer that very same question. What he wanted was longer essays on whatever topic, but with a similar voice as the shorter pieces. He wanted no part in collecting OoNs already written into some sort of daily reader or the like. I was honored. I tried to write long stuff, but couldn’t come up with much having deliberately honed the few-paragraph approach. It didn’t take him long to give up and quit answering his mail. Maybe I’ll write a book in a few years when I reach my nineties, but apparently not now.

What I am reluctant and somewhat embarrassed to mention about ovals and ellipses, centers and foci, but feel compelled to, anyway, is that I minored in math on an MA in geology. But it’s been quite a few years ago.

Our parish will be 150 years old this summer. My friend, a Reader in the Diocese of Ely, Cambridge, UK, would listen and be understanding, but probably not be all that impressed. He looks weekly after several parishes each four or five times as old. I’ve visited them with him and shared the liturgy there. One of his parishioners is from Canada, said to me after a service, “How good it is to hear someone from my part of the world.”

The CofE readers are well-trained, write their own preachments, read the liturgy in their splendid accents, the kind one can almost believe God intends for the Book of Common Prayer. It was in February was my visit, cold, no heat in the naves, remain bundled on entering. “No money for feeding furnaces.” Yet it was altogether comforting remembering not only our Lord’s gracious and many gifts incarnating there, but the gifts of all those churchers down through the centuries who made certain we’d have a place in their places, the company of saints. Hearing the Scriptures is something of a spiritual genealogy tour, one’s family history set in common prayer.

There’s an ever so gentle inkling of belonging there that somehow overlooks the sternness that seems now so often to pervade our Communion. One senses an acceptance lacking as much in inquisitiveness as it is abundant in congeniality.

We’ll yet celebrate our 150th year joyously remembering our rich heritage with those who’ve gone so graciously afore us.

C P and I go to most of our neighboring university’s women’s basketball games. Neither of us has a very thorough understanding of the sport, but from watching men play — professional and collegiate — it seems to us that women play basketball more as it might be intended. (With a few exceptions, we can say the same thing for tennis.) If our observations are anywhere near approaching accurate, this should really be no surprise.Why? Because, feminists that we are (me, too), women seem with generally less to prove than men. With the exception of brute strength which so often unfortunately shows as machoism, women, perhaps by no fault of their own, possess a thoroughness, a completeness, an inclusiveness that’s altogether lacking in men.That this intimidates us men and apparently has done so forever possibly suggests why we’ve used our size and strength to try to dominate women and to attempt to keep them from exercising all the possibilities they possess. And, of course, and not the least of our fears, to protect ourselves.Be all that as it may, there’s more. There’s game, itself, to consider. John Dominic Crossan writes about game in his book, The Dark Interval, a study of the theology of story. He says, “… game prohibits absolute success… it allows and admires only partial and disciplined success, always mixed with failure. Paradoxically, perfect success in a game would be total failure, for then it would no longer be a game. To win absolutely would be to lose absolutely.” (Argus Communications, 1975, p 17)I suppose nobody plays any kind of a game without planning to win, or, at least, hoping to win, but reasonably expects only “partial and disciplined success.” The simple fact of the height of the basket/net in basketball provides some illustration of this principle. And the “slam dunk” is its symbol. Very few women are tall enough or perhaps strong enough to pull one off, whereas, men seem to make a thing of it as the epitome of scoring. The slam dunk by its very absoluteness seems contradictory to game. It removes chance and skill from the path of scoring. The game for a moment stops with its very accomplishment and only resumes when the ball is freed.Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled suggests that jazz and basketball are splendid examples of the true meaning of community. The players know their own limits and skills and that of their colleagues and execute play with that in mind.Perhaps women play the game completely, consistently, and mutually as a team because of who they are.

C P and I go to most of our neighboring university’s women’s basketball games. Neither of us has a very thorough understanding of the sport, but from watching men play — professional and collegiate — it seems to us that women play basketball more as it might be intended. (With a few exceptions, we can say the same thing for tennis.) If our observations are anywhere near approaching accurate, this should really be no surprise.

Why? Because, feminists that we are (me, too), women seem more complete than men, thus with generally less to prove. With the exception of brute strength which so often unfortunately shows as machoism, and women, by no fault of their own, possess a thoroughness, a completeness, an inclusiveness that’s altogether lacking in men. That it intimidates us men and that apparently has done so forever possibly suggests why we’ve used our size and strength to try to dominate women and to attempt to keep them from exercising all the possibilities they possess. And, of course, and not the least of our fears, to protect ourselves

Be all that as it may, there’s more. There’s game, itself, to consider. John Dominic Crossan writes about game in his book, The Dark Interval, a study of the theology of story. He says, “… game prohibits absolute success… it allows and admires only partial and disciplined success, always mixed with failure. Paradoxically, perfect success in a game would be total failure, for then it would no longer be a game. To win absolutely would be to lose absolutely.” (Argus Communications, 1975, p 17)

I suppose nobody plays any kind of a game without planning to win, or, at least, hoping to win, but reasonably expects only “partial and disciplined success.” The simple fact of the height of the basket/net in basketball provides some illustration of this principle. And the “slam dunk” is its symbol. Very few women are tall enough or perhaps strong enough to pull one off, whereas, men seem to make a thing of it as the epitome of scoring. The slam dunk by its very absoluteness seems contradictory to game. It removes chance and skill from the path of scoring. The game for a moment stops with its very accomplishment and only resumes when the ball is freed.

Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled suggests that jazz and basketball are splendid examples of the true meaning of community. The players know their own limits and skills and that of their colleagues and execute play with that in mind.

Perhaps women play the game more completely, consistently, and mutually as a team because of who they are.

C P and I go to most of our neighboring university’s women’s basketball games. Neither of us has a very thorough understanding of the sport, but from watching men play — professional and collegiate — it seems to us that women play basketball more as it might be intended. (With a few exceptions, we can say the same thing for tennis.) If our observations are anywhere near approaching accurate, this should really be no surprise.

Why? Because, feminists that we are (me, too), women seem more complete than men, thus with generally less to prove. With the exception of brute strength which so often unfortunately shows as machoism, and women, by no fault of their own, possess a thoroughness, a completeness, an inclusiveness that’s altogether lacking in men. That it intimidates us men and that apparently has done so forever possibly suggests why we’ve used our size and strength to try to dominate women and to attempt to keep them from exercising all the possibilities they possess. And, of course, and not the least of our fears, to protect ourselves

Be all that as it may, there’s more. There’s game, itself, to consider. John Dominic Crossan writes about game in his book, The Dark Interval, a study of the theology of story. He says, “… game prohibits absolute success… it allows and admires only partial and disciplined success, always mixed with failure. Paradoxically, perfect success in a game would be total failure, for then it would no longer be a game. To win absolutely would be to lose absolutely.” (Argus Communications, 1975, p 17)

I suppose nobody plays any kind of a game without planning to win, or, at least, hoping to win, but reasonably expects only “partial and disciplined success.” The simple fact of the height of the basket/net in basketball provides some illustration of this principle. And the “slam dunk” is its symbol. Very few women are tall enough or perhaps strong enough to pull one off, whereas, men seem to make a thing of it as the epitome of scoring. The slam dunk by its very absoluteness seems contradictory to game. It removes chance and skill from the path of scoring. The game for a moment stops with its very accomplishment and only resumes when the ball is freed.

Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled suggests that jazz and basketball are splendid examples of the true meaning of community. The players know their own limits and skills and that of their colleagues and execute play with that in mind.

Perhaps women play the game more completely, consistently, and mutually as a team because of who they are.