Out of Nowhere

PS. What is a sense of humor after all, but an awareness of our own humanity?

Star Trek’s Data might make an acceptable Supreme Court judge.One of the episode’s plots centered around Data’s attempt to understand and to have a sense of humor. The standup comedian Joe Obispo was cast as himself and as Data’s coach not only to teach him to be funny, but to recognize and appreciate humor, as well. They even set up the Holodeck with a night club venue — a stage, floodlights, a band, some good writers, and all, but to no avail. Data simply couldn’t cut it.According to some critics of the current nominee for the Supremes, one needs something like Data’s kind of built-in androidmanship in order ever to be a “fair” justice. Of course, Data had no “race,” but then the critics might pile on him because he wasn’t human. But to be human, he’d need not only a sense of humor in some degree, but so far as we determine among ourselves, also a race.But then, which one? The DNA guys are telling us now that the we lay the category of race more or less superficially on ourselves out of a tradition of xenophobia, and that it actually has no ultimate use for much else but possible environmental protection and a handy way to discriminate. Fear creates “race,” makes it unavoidable in becoming a “filter” through which we judge one another, and then turns it at will into the pejorative “racist.”On the courts — and elsewhere — few would claim that we don’t need our humanity, and that we seem to be unable to have that without some way to communicate it. (Writer Toni Morrison suggests that it is language that makes us human.) Maybe the irony is that we are at our best when we realize that others, the judge and the judged, may well be and probably are also human. It’s called empathy.

Pentecost 2009

The Earth’s atmosphere is a relatively thin envelope of gases composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a smidgen of others. Perhaps our most vital activity in return for our lives, together with all the rest of creation, the animals, the plants, is constantly to be at the process of recycling this envelope. For it connects us in an essential and almost intangible ambiance. Philosopher-scientist Lewis Thomas, it was, who likened our atmosphere and its function most to the walls of a living cell.

In a remarkably similar way does God’s Holy Spirit wholly envelop us. It sustains our lives, creates our communities and connects us in them, and most importantly, enables our reconciliation with one another. No wonder that in so many languages spirit is translated as “breath.” And further, we well remember how it exists quite apart from us and like Jesus more or less told Nicodemus, this Holy Spirit lives and moves, comes and goes as it damn well pleases.

Unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, God’s Spirit seems limitless. We, by God’s grace, become the occasions, the stewards to receive and recycle its energy in service to God’s will. We are created by God as those spiritual beings whose vocation is to give human shape to the Spirit as we mature into the way God imagines us to be. Indeed, a case can be made, can it not, that this life begins with our first breath just as it ends with our last. That is a reality with which both pro-life and pro-choice advocates must contend.

Have you ever imagined how a symphony orchestra or a chorus or a pipe organ and a church choir or a big jazz band could function if there were no air, no breath? There is no sound, indeed, no life in a vacuum. The wind instruments, the strings, the percussion, all depend on there being an atmosphere if there is to be music, an atmosphere which they can move and sculpt if there is to be music.

So is our mission as churchers to shape Spirit. In the way a musician shapes the air into sound, so must we take our lives, the instruments God gives us and use them to play God’s melodies, to shape God’s Spirit uniquely in service to God and to our fellow human beings, as well as to be sparing in our observations of how they uniquely shape their own.

Perhaps one of the most grievous examples of the way we cripple this stewardship is our continuing effort to transfix Holy Spirit in our own interests and not in God’s. Of course, the mere thought of such a thing is ludicrous. But not a day passes that we churchers do not strive to fashion and refashion that Spirit in some way so as to warp the gift, and, of course, seem to forget what Jesus told Nicodemus.

Just as we contaminate the Earth’s atmosphere by our carelessness do we defile God’s Holy Spirit by forcing our or some other religious identity and constriction upon it. Global warming pales beside the toxicity of any religion’s selfish obsession with its manners, morals, and means at the expense of its mission. We must remember that we are not only the community created at the bonfire of the first such gathering, but we are, as well, the community commissioned for Pentecost. We are Spirit-enabled to become nothing less than Spirit enablers.

Scripture overwhelms us with this good news. Acts’ accounting of the fire, wind, and apostolic headiness that birthed God’s church (Acts 2.1-11). Paul’s catalogue of the gifts of the Spirit to fulfill the church’s purpose with shape and substance (1 Cor 12.4-13). Jesus’s granting of apostolic ministry by the power of his own breath, a portend of the Spirit to come (Jn 20.19-23).

We are called and called again to such ministry. “Breathe on us breath of God,” we sing and pray to brace and refresh us, to call us back to and enlist us in the Way, the Truth, and the Life revealed in the Upper Room. This Pentecost blessing comes to drag us kicking and screaming away from our fascination with ourselves and our need for ecclesiastic security. It comes to license us as God’s agents as Mary’s Magnificat sang to show the strength of God’s arm, to scatter the proud in their conceit, to cast down the mighty from their thrones, to lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things, to send the rich away empty, and to champion God’s peace and justice and love for all.

So yesterday, I got it wrong, the Augustine. The day was for Canterbury, not Hippo. I implied Canterbury did City of God, when all along, it was Hippo. So far, only one reader nailed me on that, and he was more or less gentle about it. He probably knew full well that I might be expected to know the difference, which, indeed, I do. I just get too casual at times. But not so that I don’t appreciate readers and especially feedback.

Or is it careless, not casual? I think yes. The chapel center for the college ministry at our town’s intellectually classy university is named for St Augustine. Whether it’s Canterbury or Hippo, anybody you ask seems to care less. My guess is that its being a collegiate chapel, it’s more than likely Canterbury.

I suppose the richest and most rewarding period in my time in ministry was with the college community. There was more of a sense among the student and faculty congregants of their mutual connection in both campus and church, of a kind of spiritual leaven and brew. There was there a servant leadership calculated not so much to impede by shadow boxing religion and science, but rather to join with and enable the academy that we could work and accomplish together as partners in the search for truth.

Lutheran Bishop and New Testament scholar Krister Stendhal spoke well when he said that wherever the brokenness of the world is being healed, there is present the kingdom of God. The academy enjoys a prophetic ministry together with the church which is not always well-received, but which can be healing. It behooves the church to stand beside and in support of this rare essential to enrich the democratic presence for peace and justice. Such is what we’ve called for decades “college work,” a welcome and refreshing dimension of our life together about which we must be neither careless nor casual.

Our founders of the US&A never cease to amaze me. Thinking about how they put together this government they hoped to balance in such a way that invites our stewardship and then how we’re not always so stewardly about it. So the president gets to nominate justices, it still takes the Senate’s judiciary committee and eventually the whole Senate to make it so. That’s us.

As if there are not enough impediments to such a process, we throw in the politics, a good word that we can make so suspect. We are the people, the polloi, actually hoi polloi say the Greeks, and there’s nothing so bad as it sounds about that. That is, until we start thinking more about ourselves than about the country we’re blessed to govern. Will we ever learn that political perspectives are not so made in heaven as they are representative of our biases, of whatever feathers our nests best? And when will we ever learn that nobody’s specially impressed by whatever biases we try to represent as the honest-to-God truth for all time?

Today’s the feast for St Augustine who wrote City of God about which I have no whiches because I never read it. I mention it because somehow it might be relevant. Anyhow, we’ve got a new nominee for the Supremes, a Latina, a woman. Whom, it is said, has the empathy the president said he was looking for and was born in the sticks on the wrong side of the tracks and for good measure took honors at Princeton and Yale Law. All American. May we be so, as well, in our way and after our fashion.

Events pile up.

Today is Memorial Day. It is also the Feast of the Venerable Bede. As well, it is the 24th anniversary for CP and me, a miracle in itself that an ISTJ and an ENFP (guess which) would make it at all, let alone this long.

Our premarital counselor said we’d likely not. I hate to prove him wrong for he’s a splendid and a wise priest colleague, but we do enjoy remembering his warnings. An occasional Myers-Briggsian “What would you expect?” can spice up a domestic confrontation rather well and head it off in a more productive direction.

As for Bede. It was for him that we designated the chapel for our college ministry at Rice University in 1958. The Collegiate Chapel of St Bede. He was an Anglican anchor if ever there was one.

I supplied at Holy Trinity Church yesterday. It’s the only English country gothic in our town, served as a powder storage and horse stable for the Yankees during the Great 19th Century Misunderstanding. We celebrated Memorial Day by recognizing the memorial windows one-by-one, telling stories about them, and praying for their folks (and those without windows) during the Prayers of the People. One of the windows for a young man who died in 1942 notes that he was an acolyte, a crucifer, and a trumpeter. Should I ever get a window (Ha!), I’d like such an inscription. But come to think of it, I’ve never been a crucifer.

First class postage just went up again. Strikes me as brazen considering the competition of the internet. But then, there’s the rumor that even the internet will start charging somehow soon.

Johnny Carson once commented on postage increases. He said the USPO uses the extra dough to buy 250,000 more “Next Window Please” signs. Our neighborhood PO branch seems already to have all those they need and to put them to good use. We’re the closest over there to our town’s Music Row. One whole wall of the branch is covered with autographed photos of those who are already country music stars and those who are mere wannabes. One of them shows a star holding her guitar like maybe a submachine gun. It’s signed, “This is a holdup. Give me all your Elvis stamps.”

This is Saturday morning at the OoN desk. Can’t imagine that anybody would actually pay for this and grateful that the internet doesn’t cost anymore already. Gracias, amigos.

Seigniorage is the difference between the face value of a coin and the cost to mint it. I just read that word in an Op-Ed piece. Seignior is from middle French and with -age means something about the right of the greater satraps of the Middle Ages to coin money. It recalls for me the use of Señor for Lord in the Spanish Book of Common Prayer and maybe with Caesar’s profile on the coin Jesus flipped for options.

English has close to 300,000 words when you don’t count the ones dictionaries call obsolete. Teenagers on the younger side are said to have about 10,000. Ten years ago, they had 25,000. Something other than our usual illiteracy is awry. I’ve known people who deliberately learn a new word every day to increase their vocabulary. I tried that, but forgot them about as soon as I learned them. There’s something about seigniorage, though, that intrigues me.

It’s like what would you call the difference between the face value of a human being and the cost to “mint” one? I read somewhere the other day that the average cost for having a baby is $35,000. I don’t know what that includes, mostly hospital and obgyn, I suspect, but it sure sounds prohibitive. Taking it for openers plus the cost of raising one of us up to age twenty or so might be effective birth control if anybody would pay attention on the way to running up the bill. But I doubt they would.

The ex-Veep said the other day when talking about WMDs and safety and the like that he wasn’t into vengeance. Perhaps not, but he seemed to have made a lot more of the 3,000 of us killed on 9/11 than the many more thousands of the militaries and collaterals and billions that have been spent so far on what often seems from the beginning a lot like getting even. This, he never mentioned.

Of course, the face value of a human being and the cost to mint one is of no comparison with coinage. It is precious and finally interminable, for that face value is for all to see. It is the remarkable and most winsome face of God.

 Ascension / Luke 24:44-53 When the people in the world of the Bible experienced what they called principalities and powers, they were discerning the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their time.Few today ever consider spirituality that way or as anything other than some empty synonym for religion and as a more or less irrelevant matter left to its practitioners. A further phenomenon is to presume that if something is spiritual, it must therefore be good, thus risking overlooking the daemonic that can lurk not only in our societies, but also in ourselves. For this too is “spiritual.,” and we allow it to happen to our ultimate peril.But we allow it anyway, even encourage it in our public education systems with their disdain for the libraries and the humanities, the arts and the world’s religions. That we do so has perhaps never been more obvious and reckless than it is today. All this leaves an empty space in the way we live, a vacancy into which rush the daemons of denial and grandiosity, pleasure and distraction, violence and illiteracy, and whatever else is at hand, thus rendering impotent the possibility of any creative stewardship of our lives.Our remembering the Ascension last Thursday recalls how Jesus had filled that space in his followers’ lives. His energy fed their energy, his charisma gave them enthusiasm, his manifest power gave them courage, his teaching gave them direction, and his confidence gave them hope. The little circle now seemed vacant, tattered, needing to be repopulated and reenergized. What had seemed so vibrant with Jesus present now seemed cold and lifeless with Jesus absent. Doubt and fear rushed in to fill their hearts.The gospel’s inherent irony is perhaps nowhere more poignant than in this scene of the Ascension. They’d already heard that something new and exciting had happened, but they chose not to believe it. Then, Mary Magdalene of all people and whom they knew only too well comes and tells them the good news of Jesus’ new life. Of course, neither did they believe her, even though they probably knew she’d been freshly purged of seven daemons of heavens-knows-what. Even so, the Magdalene was not your average soccer mom, but yet does she become the apostle to the apostles-to-become, and with little tribute to the rest of us males who stand in their succession and who so often miss the point ever so clearly as did they.In our liturgical keeping of time, we stand in between this time when we remember Jesus’ return to his father and the coming Pentecost when we commemorate the gift of the Holy Spirit and the birthing of the church. Perhaps this, as well, can remind us of our empty spaces and call us to attend to how they will be filled.Will we surrender to the understanding of spirituality as merely another organized and irrelevant religion? Or will we welcome this Pentecost next Sunday, embracing God’s Holy Spirit to renew us and make us church, letting that presence fill the vacancy in our lives, feed our energy, spur our enthusiasm, encourage and direct us, give us confidence and hope?As we observe the eleven disciples in Luke’s story, we know that the work, the ministry, the caring, the healing, the teaching, the conflicts, the suffering, the sacrificing, the storytelling, the recruiting, the dying — is now theirs to bring into this space. They could not just follow Jesus as before. They themselves had to embrace Holy Spirit as did he to fill the space he once occupied. And it is to our eternal benefit that they did precisely that, thanks to God’s gift to them of the Magdalene and others like her.It was like moving to a new home, into lots of promise and little warmth. It is like starting a companionship with someone who is largely a stranger, or starting a new job and knowing that all the sudden your resumé could mean next to nothing. We can either just stand there or we can embrace Holy Spirit in hand and heart, and then go out into the marketplace, into the crowd, into the swirl of pilgrims seeking God. The Spirit did not fashion for the disciples a nest, where they could feel safe and comfortable. The Spirit set them on fire. The Spirit drove them into the wilderness and into the streets.Dan Corrigan was a few decades ago one of our church’s more devoted and exciting bishops. He had a way of summing up this charge of the Holy Spirit. In the old 1928 prayer book, there was no “dismissal” at the end of the Eucharist as there is now. So he would stand at the altar, pronounce the closing Blessing, pause for a moment… then, in his great, booming voice, literally shout at us…GET UP! GET OUT! AND GET LOST!

Once upon a time past, we had for a while the “Evil Empire.” More recently, it was the “Axis of Evil.” Since then we’ve found that evil may be even more widespread and that it is only too easy to forget that when pointing and naming, there are always three fingers pointing back at the pointer.

Perhaps all this abut evil may be somewhat better understood in Scott Peck’s “People of the Lie: the Hope for Healing Human Evil,” p 129.

He says of evil that in addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, evil would specifically be distinguished by:

a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle…

b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury…

c) pronounced concern with a public image and a self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives…

and d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking at times of stress.

I suppose it’s only coincidental if any of this strikes us as familiar. Nevertheless, we might use more care, lest we get the point.