Out of Nowhere

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said: “What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears.” I don’t know from whom is Pamuk, but he reminds me of something our seminary’s Ethics prof once said, more or less: Good fiction rather than textbooks is where one finds a better understanding of ethics.

The gospel is probably as much about fear as it is about love. It reminds us that perfect love casts out fear. Fear is not one among many emotions. Rather is fear the wall-to-wall carpet that underlies emotions. Anxiety is fear of the future. Anger is fear in the present, the attempt to regain the balance one loses from anxiety. Guilt is fear of what I have done — real or imagined which can be just as real as real. Resentment is fear of what others have done to me — likewise. Resentment and guilt are among the larger bugaboos for recovering addicts. Love encompasses all these dimensions that Pamuk insists literature must assuage.

Church is the place to take our fears, to share and to hear the narratives that encompass and inform them. In church, we immerse ourselves in our family history and learn how our peers, past and present, dealt with their fears, their awe before the awesomeness of God. Life is that story, their stories, our stories, our awe.

Miles Davis played a tune called “So What,” a sort of in-your-face melody with a neat bass line plus only two chords that ring changes on mediaeval church modes. Seems logical if ironical that this may be one that he plays with his back to the audience. So here’s to fear and love and all that jazz. Peace.

A reader writes: “Having a lifelong interest in words, like C.S.Lewis, I like to play with them sometimes, and see how many forms a word may take. Sometimes, a verb. Sometimes, an adjective. So I said your OoNs were lucubracious. Not lugubrious as you seem to think by your referring to possible misspelling. Now I am tired of playing with you. I still like to read what you write.”

American Heritage Dictionary, 3d ed, says, lucubrate means to write in a scholarly fashion; produce scholarship. From Indo-European leuk = Light, brightness.

Neat word. Never heard of it. Glad to discover it. Honored to be associated with it. Sometimes I feel like the lad in “Our Town” walking through the public library stacks, gawking up and saying in utter amazement, “Words. Millions of words.”

I like finding new words, not neologisms, but old words, words with cognate histories running out their ears that are new to me. Wikipedia says “neologisms are words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities. Protologisms are neologisms that have not yet caught on widely. (In fact, “protologism” is a neologism to be avoided.)” I’d just as soon avoid neologisms, for that matter, save for “certain communities” that are so avant-garde they must use them and depend on them and sometimes, I suspect, delight in them ever so much as finding what they had to get a new name for in the first place.

Gospeler John must surely have been delighted when he discovered Word while looking for a new synonym for Jesus. Little did he know how the notion would intrigue Bible scholars and theologians down through the years. Then later, the DNA guys also took the alphabet and grammar to parse what makes us tick and only needed four letters to pull it off. Indeed, they found the words that become us in a way that old John might be proud to know about. Maybe they aren’t exactly neologisms, but they do just fine until something better comes along.

Trinity Sunday 7vi09

“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 place in the entire liturgical keeping of time that a dogma assumes front stage center, can leave a stigma all over one’s preaching, and elbows all those majestic events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost to the wings.

Preaching on Trinity Sunday can make one 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. 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, as well, with an alibi.

It somehow makes me mindful of that grand and eloquent creation story from Genesis that wraps a security blanket around the whole idea (Gen 1.1-2.3). It reminds us that we are put here to tend God’s creation by giving the universe something to talk with, giving God someone to talk to, and giving us somebody to talk about (cf Frederick Buechner).

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 riches and 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.

But dare not overlook that doctrine, dogma, and all their theological progeny serve us well. We want everybody to buckle up. But be aware, as well, we are reminded — and warned — too much of this good thing can be at the expense of our imagination and worship. Such insight as that is perhaps no more obvious than in the turn of phrase at the very heart of the collect for Trinity Sunday, as 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. We’re not to confuse these. For it is in the imagination of our worship that we are most godlike, most as God creates us to be, imagining and incarnating our spirit into human being — and what is more leading us forth to walk the talk.

In the dark days just before the Council of Nicaea, there was something called Layreaders’ Sermons. These were written by various and sundry clergy around the church who were selected by some mysterious Vatican Rolodex at “815,” the affectionate name for the midtown address of the New York headquarters of the Episcopal Church. There was no reimbursement, just the “honor” of having your name attached to one.

When I was some five or so years out of seminary, a request came for me to write one for Trinity Sunday. The instructions were that it would be nice if the sermon not be too long and kept more or less to the theme and the propers for the Sunday, but not necessarily so, and please cool it with the erudition.

I had a mentor who was a sage and learned Armenian cleric, so I asked him how to handle a sermon on the Trinity — or did I really have to. He said, “Of course not. No self-respecting Anglican cleric ever preaches on Trinity Sunday, he just schedules Sunday School Commencement.”

I was a carefree college chaplain at the time, and Trinity Sunday was on the calendar the week after the university had shut down for the summer and our chapel had shut down with it. Fortunately for me and sundry congregations, I didn’t have to preach anywhere on that Sunday, just write a sermon for some poor sucker to preach somewhere out in the boonies.

I didn’t remember Jesus ever preaching on the Trinity or whether he was even all that conscious of the notion in the first place, but it’s possible somebody will point out to me that he was and give me chapter and verse. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea might not have occurred to him once or twice. I could not imagine any theological orthodoxy whatever that may have impeded his sense of vocation at the time.

That should have been intuitive warning enough, but of course, it wasn’t. After all, I was just out of seminary for a few years and still pretty much in possession of the notion that there was very little that was known that I didn’t already know including making a homily on the riddle of all riddles. It was the last time I tried.

It’s different now. How different, I’m not so sure. But different enough that I’ll spare you (and me) that preachment I sent in to 815 for its nihil obstat. Tomorrow’s weekly homily time for Sunday next when I once more confront such questions yet awaits.

Note: As some may not be aware of such terms or care less, the “Nihil Obstat” and “Imprimatur” are official Roman Catholic declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained therein that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur agree with the content, opinions or statements expressed. As OoN is neither book nor pamphlet, I shall forge on, anyhow.

It’s June, and we saw the first double-breasted seersucker of the season at the bird feeder. We were having morning coffee at a favorite spot in our house where we frequently practice awakening. The view slopes up and away the backyard with its rich green and several gardens of native wild flowers, herbs, and hollies, the new October Glory maple waiting to crown all with its orange-red umbrage in the fall.

The yard in its entirety is CP’s domain, horticultured attentively as it is. She is not given to my foolishness with bird’s names or much else, for that matter. But this morning the lightness of our being seemed more nourishing than usual as we anticipated working out at rehab the next hour. We had only yesterday got the pump going again in the leaden cistern with the spouting lion’s head and fixed the leak along one of its joints with duct tape. Public television’s Red Green, I thought, would be proud of us.

I had enough yard work on my resumé by the time I got out of high school and into college to keep me from pursuing anymore. I’ve never been of much help save to admire CP whose strength and alacrity with forty-pound bags of topsoil is amazing for her size. All of which serves her well at rehab where the treadmills, stationary bikes, and workout machines with all their pulleys and levers and weights and pocketa-pocketa remind me of Walter Mitty hard at work in Dr Frankenstein’s monster assembly lab.

This morning was no different. But I must confess that workout seems always better in retrospect than in anticipation. It is good that God gives us these carnations with which to recycle her spirit in the hope maybe of doing some good every once in a while, that is, as the Quakers might say, when the meeting is over and the service begins.

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.