Of Knowing and Doing

To know what love is one must be about loving; to know what good is, one must do goodness. I learned about that again this morning. I just served as a panelist along with several L'Arche core and team members in a conversation with some Birmingham Southern students who have chosen for their January term project observing and learning about intentional communities; what they have termed neo-monastic communities. They first visited a Benedictine community in north Alabama; then the Koinonia community in Americus Georgia, and now L'Arche Mobile their last stop. L'Arche, for those of you who don't yet know about it, is a residential community that serves people with mental disabilities. People, if it weren't for L'Arche, who would be institutionalized. They reside together, take their meals together, share household chores,worship together, share sorrow and joy and the stuff of life, just like the rest of us.

Each team member (the paid staff) of L'arche without exception said that they stay at L'Arche for far different reasons from those for which they came. One woman said she came because she simply needed a job, but that now she stays because through her caring for these "least" souls, these who are considered marginal in our world, she is learning not only how to love unconditionally her friends and family through an acquired new perspective; but she is learning also how to love herself. She said that once she almost left because of the deaths of two core residents whom she'd grown to adore, but that she stayed because she had learned that love was in truth stronger than death. Another team member informed the students that living in this community is not all sweetness and pious hymn singing, but that there are flashing moments of anger and resentment, just like with the rest of us. But she said that those moments don't last long because they work hard at communicating their differences with the goal of reconciliation. A student asked, "and you pull that off consistently?" "We have to", she said, "or else we wouldn't last as a community." She said that she came to L'Arche because of a vague calling that she wanted to serve something larger than herself. Now she says that she stays because she is learning that love is real; that God is not invisible but alive in all of us created in God's image. These weren't canned phrases...but words learned and spoken from experience.

Over my years here, I've been learning from L'Arche too. I've learned that seeing to the good of our neighbor is the highest form of love, love that brings joy and love that transforms. The L'Arche community is a model, with all its flaws and messiness, for all to see, that we can't live with integrity and dignity except in community, a community that cares first for the other, that the needs of each matter equally.... a community that forgives as vital necessity; a community that, in spite of its fragility, becomes invincible through love...That is who God is...and that is who we all are...creatures both human and divine, made to give only...to love only for the world's transformation and renewal....and to live such a life is to know joy that is visible...to do love is to know love....to know God alive among us, ...Let us get about the work of enlightened loving, for there we will surely see the God of Love.... see and know in our own time and own place....We have to, else we won't last.

Of Medium and Message

In 1967 Marshall McLuhan coined the term, "the medium is the message." McLuhan was a professor of English Literature, critic and scholar, but much of his life's work had to do with the study of how we communicate in the context of a post-modern multi media world. He also coined the term, "global Village" recognizing that, even as early as the 1960's, electronic multi-media would begin bridging the socio-economic and cultural gaps in our world. He developed this theory well before computers as we now know them existed; before e-mail; Facebook; Twitter; digital video; and digital cellular and satellite communications. McLuhan's primary hypothesis concerning media was that the message that is communicated is profoundly affected by the means by which it is communicated....We know, for example, that e-mails may be understood quite differently as compared to a spoken conversation; remote live video communicates far differently compared to still photographs; poetry different from prose. The medium is the message.

I have marveled at the television media's coverage of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. I must say that I have a broad ambivalence regarding the so-called news media, but in this case things seem somehow different. A young doctor was seen on camera weeping at the magnitude of his task ahead. He told NBC's Nancy Sniderman that this event had changed his life forever. She asked him if he thought he would be able to continue...He replied that he would stay until all was done...We saw a young surgeon telling a mother that her six year old daughter's leg must be amputated or else she would die....the mother wailed, tears streaming down her face of ebony, but was soon consoled by her injured daughter, her husband and this young surgeon from Raleigh North Carolina...similar tears on her white face; then we saw a woman who had been trapped in rubble for six days, her husband keeping vigil until he heard her small voice...three hours later she was rescued by fire-fighters from Los Angeles...as she lay on the gurney, she sang hymns of praise; another NBC reporter who lived thirteen years in Haiti as a child tracked down her nurse to make sure she was alive....both were unable to speak upon finding each other.

The medium is the message. Where the medium is compassion, then the message is God's love incarnate...alive and real....by air and land and sea...and this love ramifies throughout the global village, the commonweal of humankind, in which we now see and hear and know of our astounding and irrevocable interdependence...we have seen it in the flesh....and we will continue to see it, this intimacy of the global human community, in all aspects of our lives...our lives that shape and are shaped by many other lives...Our tears this day, our common ground and our shared humanity....Where there is compassion, even in the midst of unthinkable tragedy, there is God's love. The medium: compassion; the message: Love alive.

Of Death, Life and Water

K got up early with the puppy this past Saturday morning. I heard a portentous moan from the kitchen....We have no hot water, the voice said....(we were told that hot water pipes freeze first because they are smaller...I have no idea if that's true or not) The outside thermometer read twenty degrees. By early afternoon the cold water pressure dropped to a trickle...I could hear water running under the house....sure enough a pipe had burst....We cut off the water at the street, called two different plumbers, and waited wondering about how and why our life had taken this not so pleasant turn.

Life and death, and the entire cosmic order for that matter depend so much on the elemental...the mysteriously mundane basics...water, a simple and basic compound...two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen...simple, mundane, basic.... we will die without it...life in any form, as far as we know, can't exist without it...and water can be our undoing....the sailor swallowed by the deep...the unreckonable floods of Atlantic hurricanes... "full fathom five your father lies." death and the inevitable rebirth, the creative artistry of water....shaping canyons and glaciers...bringing the new....over eons and in a moment.

Water has always been a powerful symbol in the human religious psyche...the earliest religions we know of practiced water rites...holding up as holy this unpredictable element...life bearer and death bringer...We say in our own water Rite...that in it we are dead to the world of sin, shame and indignity...and in it, alive as well, transformed for the way ahead...empowered and emboldened for the good of the whole...a sea change for the soul.... Water the mystic means of the death and life cycle...the universe cycling towards its marvelous completion to the tune and rhythm of H2O.

Water is both grave and womb....we are forever in and of that knowledge...and we must trust that knowledge and love it as well....for it speaks of a profound reality that holds the secret...a secret that has everything to do with life and death and love and hope...and at last, quite elementary.

Of Birth in the Dark

I was standing in the foyer of the church office just before the five thirty Christmas Eve service when the bottom dropped out. The front line of severe weather had arrived as predicted... as if on cue. Frenzied sheets of rain hurried through the already flooding parking lot; umbrellas were turned inside out by the wind; people bent under coats were scrambling for shelter, soaked in just seconds....and then it happened...BAM....a bright apocalyptic flash...and then darkness....for a moment the lights flickered in a paltry last gasp...and in a shower of sparks the transformer affixed to the pole in the parking lot gave up its ghost; and all manner of thing was dark..... and what made it worse was that all the surrounding buildings in our neighborhood had power.... a good sign or a bad one, I wondered.

I didn't have time for an argument with God, and as we all scrambled for candles, it crossed my mind that for almost two thousand years the church survived without electricity... so we would make do....and we did...We prayed, we sang a cappella....we greeted each other in the name of the one born among us...and together we ate and drank of a holy meal... And as people were leaving the church, phantoms in the wavering candlelight, a parishioner's face appeared floating in front of me, and he said, "Christmas comes anyway." Indeed it does I thought. This birth comes with all inevitability despite all that would prevent it...despite the windswept dark of chaos...This new life insists and persists, so that light will forever come again to inform the unruly dark.

We can trust such a birth...that amid every dark night, the light breaks upon it...at every moment of despair and trouble in our lives, amid the crisis moments which inevitably find us, the truth of the matter is that light comes surely and decisively...that we will never be left without hope. The dark is not the enemy...it is our fear of it that is...The dark is gracious contrast to the truth of the human condition, the light-truth, that we are never left to languish in the dark of nothingness...that the light insists and persists, as does each and every birth....God's Spirit moves as light once more over the face of the deep, graciously and generously ordering and creating the world entire...as certain as the dawn follows the dark of night...So fear not and celebrate this light-truth... this marvelous birth...the light birth...the love birth...For this is all we know of God for sure...and all we need to know.