June 10, 2008

Hagioscope

Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Percival Lowell, astronomer for whom the Lowell Observatory in Arizona is named, spent some fifteen years looking at Mars and sketching what he perceived as a network of fine lines connecting the polar cap with a number of dark areas. He argued that these were canals built by an intelligent civilization to move water from the polar ice caps to deserts, similar to phenomena he also saw on Venus.

Years later, subsequent studies revealed that he had so configured the aperture on his telescope as (unintentionally) to make it mimic an ophthalmascope, an instrument used to examine the interior of the eye. What Lowell saw as spokes on Mars and Venus were actually shadows of the blood vessels and other structures in his own retina.

The way some of us churchers these days are making such certain claims and big threats and even signing proclamations and petitions and all makes me wonder when’s the last time we configured the apertures on our hagioscopes.

June 9, 2008

The Walk

Fred Rogers wanted to meet Koko, the gorilla who had been taught American Sign Language and who had often watched “Mr Rogers’s Neighborhood.” When they met, the huge gorilla gave the diminutive Rogers a big hug, then took off Mister Rogers’s shoes.

It is only too easy to think of a neighborhood more as a place than as a relationship, more realty than reality. In our better moments, we might even call it an outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual reality. Then maybe we’d be on to something.

To use a neighborly term, this summer’s Lambeth Conference is just around the corner. All those bishops in all those shades of purple. What a vision. There they’ll be from all over the world gathered in one place. But if what we hear is true, some of them will not even speak to one another, and some weren’t even invited. Talk about global warming.

What if we could somehow set aside all of religion’s protective security long enough to allow faith’s openness and risk to have their way? What if we could just find some way to embrace Lambeth as a kind of Big Fat Anglican Wedding and accept it as a rollicking collection of some of those neighbors God wants us to love like ourselves?

Perhaps Koko and Mr Rogers give us a clue. Why not before each plenary gathering the bishops just give one another a big hug, take off a neighbor’s shoes, and dance? Remember the Lambeth Walk?

June 6, 2008

Airplanes

The airplanes have started charging for check-through baggage and have simultaneously even stopped serving pretzels. A cartoonist the other day showed them charging for drop-down oxygen masks. Past them I would not it put.

All this together with delayed flights has become a way of life. Charging for shipping has increased the number of carry-ons. With more baggage now scattered around, one dare not leave anything unattended for fear of Homeland Securities’ insecurely collecting them along with trashing all our over-three-and-a-half-ounce treasures. This makes the layovers even more frustrating, the missed appointments and connections even more expensive, and the tempers even shorter.

Maybe we ought to rebel. Our local postal office used to offer a free first-class stamp for anybody who had to wait in line for service more than five minutes. When the postage went up last time, they stopped all over and instead bought 250,000 new “Next Window Please” signs with the profit. So a lot of the snailmailers became e-mailers. Maybe we could organize an opposition group, something like TRIF, The Revenge of the InFrequent Flyers.

On the other hand, the president thinks we’re addicted, and he’s probably right. Maybe we’re too hooked to fight back. If that’s the case, then the Middle East is just enabling our codependency all the while and would probably ban even AlAnon as a CIA plot against unknown Muslims.

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June 5, 2008

Walking

Pentecost 4/5A Mt 9.9-13,18-36

“As Jesus was walking along… ” (Mt 9.9a)

It’s all in a day’s work.

Enlist a new disciple, one with a shady reputation whom nobody trusts. Take a dinner party for the opportunity to tell people why, that only the sick need care, that mercy trumps sacrifice every time, that it’s the sinners who need attention.

Be interrupted by the local rabbi with the news that his daughter has just died. Make a not altogether graceful exit. On the way, stop long enough to heal a woman ill for years, then go and restore the child midst a mocking, flute-playing audience, wondering, perhaps, how ludicrous things can get. And wondering, as well as some have, that maybe medicine might have been a more rewarding profession than politics and preaching.

“As Jesus was walking along… ”

Might we churchers have it so good. We are so serious about ourselves. Going out for such a stroll in our way never seems to enter our minds. Or maybe it does, and we see what happened to Jesus. And maybe we fail to see how “walking along” turned out to be precisely his occasion for to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. And to see how Matthew’s simple little pericopé, his little summing up reveals the very pattern for our ministry.

This week remembers the fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. In a collection of newspaper op-ed pieces, his children reflected on him as their father. One of them remembered that he taught them that we must build a system of justice which enjoys the confidence of all sides. That peace is not just to pray for in some distant time, but something all of us have the responsibility to create in our way every day. And that we must garner the courage to bypass all that impedes us and face the truth about ourselves as well as those we consider our enemies.

As Jesus was walking along, I wonder had he not come to something like these conclusions for his own ministry. He had long since discovered the truth about himself and the courage he needed to implement it. Perhaps the challenges we face as Anglican Christians walking along as we do may bring us to the same realities.

June 3, 2008

Clime

Our town has won another award. I don’t know where from came our previous honors Music City, USA, and Athens of the South. My suspicion is maybe from a modest Chamber of Commerce of previous years.

But not the accolade that was in the paper yesterday. We are now the sixth most polluted city in the nation. I couldn’t find either Houston or Los Angeles even on the list. Flonase and Advair and Singulaire are vying for the honor of making us their poster child.

I saw somewhere the other day that global-warming scofflaws think our climate problems are caused by sunspots. That it is unfair to blame soccer moms and their SUVs, even though our town has more than its share of both. A large portion of them come from neighboring counties where only the birds face emission tests.

There is this to say. The magnolias are in bloom, though our Little Gem looks rather scruffy. The hummingbirds should arrive shortly. The redbreasted grosbeaks have headed wherever they head. The goldfinches and the cardinals seem right at home.

The neighborhood cats nod in passing but generally ignore us, being more intent on the bird feeder locations. The squirrels seem to have thinned out, maybe because a red fox has taken up residence in one of the thickets nearby our yard. It passes by usually of a morning and closer, it seems, each day, this morning stopping long enough to exchange silent, ear-flipping greetings, for it seemed to understand when CP, the polyglot, spoke to it in Dog.

A realtor friend of ours said she sold four houses here last week ranging from $90,000 to two million, and that people from all over are moving here to this smog-filled anticlinal basin. Maybe it’s because we claim to have more bluegrass than Kentucky. Like Jane Fonda might have said on one of her workout videos, Go figure.

June 2, 2008

Listen

It simply never occurred to me that whatever I said from the pulpit of a Sunday morning would make much difference except to somebody who couldn’t remember whether or not they had turned off the oven before leaving home. The only way it did seem to matter, however, was to be careful whom I quoted. Mention “Bishop James Pike,” and I could watch the hearing aids — real and virtual — shutting down. Plagiarize him, and get nothing but praise from the narthex traffic for whatever he said that they thought I had said.

Actually, we got little comfort on the subject from our seminary homiletics prof. He said that about all anybody would remember about our preaching would be the jokes… if any… and that there should always be a few.

But things have changed. Church and state are supposed to be separated in our nation’s polity, but I guess actually only when it’s convenient. If you can’t find anything else negative to say about some aspirant for public office, check out what kind of preachments they’ve been listening to. It used to be a plus for a person just to show at church now and then in order to get a leg up on an election. Nobody seemed to care much about whether or what you believed. It is said that even Hitler believed in God. Now you can praise torture out of one side of your mouth anytime you want so long as you praise the Lord out of the other.

I suppose it’s a positive thing that people seem to be paying more attention to sermons now than ever before. From what I hear, it might be a good thing if maybe some preachers will catch on and do the same.

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.