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Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Of Darkness and Deliverance
We approach the Winter Solstice, the darkest time of the year. In ancient ritual, in cultures around the planet, at the Winter Solstice, worshipers would encircle a fire and bid their God to descend from the darkness beyond into their midst...fire inviting fire, of like mind, to enlighten the dark. The dating of Christmas in our tradition follows this ancient one...all religious practices sprung from the ancient, bearing mystery from the dawn of time into present symbol. Christmas is set just after the solstice when the days begin broadening, when the long ebbed light makes its return in spite of all the cold and in spite of all the dark.
We are the heirs to the ancients as we stand around our fiery altars as the conscientious faithful, and invite our God into our midst, and into the world's midst. Our God manifest in the figure of a vulnerable child, a child whose life is light, which is the light of all people, John's Gospel informs us. We too, like the coming Christ are light bearers to the world...light as vulnerable as a child, guttering against the dark and cold...but like a child, full of promise...full of hope...full of love. So we celebrate our coming birth as well...this light-birth.
This light that is coming will reveal as plain as day the ways of heaven in earth: that nothing in the economy of God is lost; that all things matter; that mystery carried by beauty transforms; our meal taking and hospitality, rhythmic rudiments of the way life really is; that compassionate sacrifice graces our neighbor and heals our souls; that justice and peacemaking are the real hope that begins now in earnest; that the world is being forever made new and we in it; that death and life are the same beautiful song....and the darkness, mere contrast...It is something to celebrate, this light, this fire inviting fire, despite all that cold and all that dark.
We are the heirs to the ancients as we stand around our fiery altars as the conscientious faithful, and invite our God into our midst, and into the world's midst. Our God manifest in the figure of a vulnerable child, a child whose life is light, which is the light of all people, John's Gospel informs us. We too, like the coming Christ are light bearers to the world...light as vulnerable as a child, guttering against the dark and cold...but like a child, full of promise...full of hope...full of love. So we celebrate our coming birth as well...this light-birth.
This light that is coming will reveal as plain as day the ways of heaven in earth: that nothing in the economy of God is lost; that all things matter; that mystery carried by beauty transforms; our meal taking and hospitality, rhythmic rudiments of the way life really is; that compassionate sacrifice graces our neighbor and heals our souls; that justice and peacemaking are the real hope that begins now in earnest; that the world is being forever made new and we in it; that death and life are the same beautiful song....and the darkness, mere contrast...It is something to celebrate, this light, this fire inviting fire, despite all that cold and all that dark.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Of Love's Strategy
I've been reading a compendium of essays by Johann Baptist Metz, a Roman Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, entitled Love's Strategy. First and foremost in Metz's mind is the reality that the coming of the Christ is the coming of Love, the Love of God made manifest in earth, in the warp and woof of the human condition, in all aspects of our common life, in the political realm (political meaning: how we order our common life), the social, the economic, in industry and agriculture...all affected, influenced and transformed by the strategy of Love. This is Love oriented towards the future, Love that is active and transformative, Love brought to bear in bold acts of hope, Love a way of living the way we are made to live.
As Christ's raised body in the world, we are Love's strategists. It is up to us as people of faith to set this Love loose in the world, so that the world may be changed for the better. Love is not static, but on the move. Metz calls it enlightened conscience. That means we must practice this strategy, our life's vocation, as a high art; we must study, worship, pray, and pay attention intelligently to our world, to the matters that would hinder this love so passionate for us, and not so patient. This is the life of the church: to be enablers of Love's strategy in earth...a strategy that can be apprehended in each bold act of loving sacrifice....sacrifice, living for the good of the whole, the template of such a strategy.
In Advent we are called on in Hebrew Scripture, by Isaiah and Baruch, and in the Gospels by John the Baptizer, to prepare the way of God, a way which begins as we speak; and to prepare the way of God is to prepare the way of Love...to recognize and break down the barriers that would hinder such love...to prepare for the change love brings...change for the better for all of God's beloved...no one left out...Love would not have it any other way....strategy enough for a world made new.
As Christ's raised body in the world, we are Love's strategists. It is up to us as people of faith to set this Love loose in the world, so that the world may be changed for the better. Love is not static, but on the move. Metz calls it enlightened conscience. That means we must practice this strategy, our life's vocation, as a high art; we must study, worship, pray, and pay attention intelligently to our world, to the matters that would hinder this love so passionate for us, and not so patient. This is the life of the church: to be enablers of Love's strategy in earth...a strategy that can be apprehended in each bold act of loving sacrifice....sacrifice, living for the good of the whole, the template of such a strategy.
In Advent we are called on in Hebrew Scripture, by Isaiah and Baruch, and in the Gospels by John the Baptizer, to prepare the way of God, a way which begins as we speak; and to prepare the way of God is to prepare the way of Love...to recognize and break down the barriers that would hinder such love...to prepare for the change love brings...change for the better for all of God's beloved...no one left out...Love would not have it any other way....strategy enough for a world made new.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Of Thanksgiving and Ambiguity
Our children arrive tomorrow for the holiday. I'm happy about that....I haven't seen them in six months. Their coming has caused me here in late mid life, in the waning light of Fall, to take stock of things that make this earth heaven:...their gracious friendship...my wife who loves me more than I deserve...my mother who believes in me...the work I get to do, and this fine parish within which I get to do it...the beauty of this city by the bay...the rusting sedge of the delta...the Spanish moss...the glide of the pelican...I could go on... but also there is grief in this season...I miss my father...friends dead and gone...unresolved family quarrels...our own coming death...joy and pain held together in a sweet mystery indissoluble.
Ambiguity is the rhythm of life...the light and the dark, necessary for each other...artful contrast at the heart of our knowing, and our being...we are not whole without the whole of it: controversy and resolution; regret and joy; anguish and restoration; love and death.
Our culture would tell us otherwise, that life is supposed to be all bright, all happiness, but where is the art in that? Ours is to own the ambiguous beauty of life in earth, for such is the way of heaven: beauty made manifest among the light and the dark textures of existence. beauty, not just at the surface, but beauty that has the resonance to transform and create...the ambivalent shadow-side of life mere birth pangs of the new. So I give thanks for the whole of it...the whole of life's experience...the whole that God calls and celebrates as very good.
Ambiguity is the rhythm of life...the light and the dark, necessary for each other...artful contrast at the heart of our knowing, and our being...we are not whole without the whole of it: controversy and resolution; regret and joy; anguish and restoration; love and death.
Our culture would tell us otherwise, that life is supposed to be all bright, all happiness, but where is the art in that? Ours is to own the ambiguous beauty of life in earth, for such is the way of heaven: beauty made manifest among the light and the dark textures of existence. beauty, not just at the surface, but beauty that has the resonance to transform and create...the ambivalent shadow-side of life mere birth pangs of the new. So I give thanks for the whole of it...the whole of life's experience...the whole that God calls and celebrates as very good.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Of Building Jerusalem
The principal aim of Hebrew Scripture is to tell the story of a people loved and chosen by God, a people sent in mission to build Jerusalem, the holy city envisioned by God through the patriarchs, the judges and kings and sages and prophets. And once built, scripture tells us, this same Jerusalem is in urgent need of restoration...an eschatological irony to be sure: We arrive and yet we are not yet there...an emblem of the life of faith. The people of Israel are rescued from slavery in Egypt and sent out to build the city of God, a city in which the lowly and abased are raised up, a city that protects the orphan and widow, a city in which self interest is cast out for the sake of the whole. Throughout the Biblical narratives there is a dynamic tension between that which is, and that which might be; between the reality of despair and poverty, violence and disease, and the way of hope and healing, justice and abundance and peace...the people of God the tipping point.
New Testament literature continues the theme and names this enlightened and intentional way of life, the Way of Christ: the way that is predisposed to sacrifice, living our collective lives for the outcast, the least and the lost; this the the way of vulnerability. We are told by our spiritual forebears that such a way engenders abundant living, a life in the heart of God, a life of true joy; to build and tend a city, a gracious commonweal, within whose bounds the truth is spoken in love, and enacted with courage and grace; in which creativity governs instead of fear.The bounds of this city are no bounds at all, but portals of welcome and hospitality...portals to life and light.
To build this city in our own time is our life's work, and this work can and will be complicated, controversial and unsettling at times, but such is the way of the cross, that symbol of our life and labor, offered in unyielding sacrifice....and with humility and a good sense of humor. The new Jerusalem, the new heaven and the new earth waits to be born at the hands of the human community, worn hands that bear God's very life; the ropey veins and arteries a map of the world....Hands called into a labor of love.
The purpose of the church is to nurture, and encourage and celebrate such a vocation; a place of refreshment and empowerment for the way ahead; enabling our place in the way upon which many have already walked and given courageously their life and labor. We are heirs of their craftsmanship, of their enlightened industry...the new builders of this city to be...this city whose portals open as we speak to all who would come and build...and there we will find welcome and rest...and it is marvelous in our eyes, this peaceable and glittering city of God...We are not yet there and yet we arrive.
New Testament literature continues the theme and names this enlightened and intentional way of life, the Way of Christ: the way that is predisposed to sacrifice, living our collective lives for the outcast, the least and the lost; this the the way of vulnerability. We are told by our spiritual forebears that such a way engenders abundant living, a life in the heart of God, a life of true joy; to build and tend a city, a gracious commonweal, within whose bounds the truth is spoken in love, and enacted with courage and grace; in which creativity governs instead of fear.The bounds of this city are no bounds at all, but portals of welcome and hospitality...portals to life and light.
To build this city in our own time is our life's work, and this work can and will be complicated, controversial and unsettling at times, but such is the way of the cross, that symbol of our life and labor, offered in unyielding sacrifice....and with humility and a good sense of humor. The new Jerusalem, the new heaven and the new earth waits to be born at the hands of the human community, worn hands that bear God's very life; the ropey veins and arteries a map of the world....Hands called into a labor of love.
The purpose of the church is to nurture, and encourage and celebrate such a vocation; a place of refreshment and empowerment for the way ahead; enabling our place in the way upon which many have already walked and given courageously their life and labor. We are heirs of their craftsmanship, of their enlightened industry...the new builders of this city to be...this city whose portals open as we speak to all who would come and build...and there we will find welcome and rest...and it is marvelous in our eyes, this peaceable and glittering city of God...We are not yet there and yet we arrive.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Of Song and Seasons
Every season has its song. The music of Fall is decidedly different from the music of Summer, Spring and Winter. Vivaldi thought as much. So did Keats and Byron and Eliot. The changing of seasons has inspired artists since time immemorial. The earth acts differently depending on the season: In the summer one won't see yellow leaves scuttling down city streets; or feel the brace of a cool morning; nor would one behold the ambiguous sunlight glittering on the water at a slant. Those phenomena belong to the Fall of the year, when the ways of earth mature and ripen and slow down to take account...of the harvest...of mutability...of waning light...the coming cold...of our dead....the music now in a minor key.
The liturgical life of the church is emblematic of the way we live according to season. We begin Advent soon. We leave off reading about the life, teaching and ministry of Jesus, and we recount again the prophecies of renewal and restoration, and we remember the promise and hope of a new birth that bears profound possibility as to the way ahead. We do this as the light lessens. The service music will be different, the hymnody, the vestments change, the procession changes...All pointing to the reality that the earth and our lives in earth participate in a mysterious and beautiful transience, divine process set to song, that animates the universe entire... the becoming that is and is to come.
Pay attention to the truth of the season...for seasons sing of truth...pay attention, for this season of "mists and mellow fruitfulness" won't last...seasons beget new seasons that sing their version of truth too; but for now the earth begins sacred rest, accounting for what is gleaned and what is lost...and begins preparation for sleep...sleep in hope of season come round again, as if for the first time.
The liturgical life of the church is emblematic of the way we live according to season. We begin Advent soon. We leave off reading about the life, teaching and ministry of Jesus, and we recount again the prophecies of renewal and restoration, and we remember the promise and hope of a new birth that bears profound possibility as to the way ahead. We do this as the light lessens. The service music will be different, the hymnody, the vestments change, the procession changes...All pointing to the reality that the earth and our lives in earth participate in a mysterious and beautiful transience, divine process set to song, that animates the universe entire... the becoming that is and is to come.
Pay attention to the truth of the season...for seasons sing of truth...pay attention, for this season of "mists and mellow fruitfulness" won't last...seasons beget new seasons that sing their version of truth too; but for now the earth begins sacred rest, accounting for what is gleaned and what is lost...and begins preparation for sleep...sleep in hope of season come round again, as if for the first time.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Of All the Saints
This past Sunday, All Saints Day, we beheld the outward and visible evidence of the vitality of this venerable place and of its faithful people. The music and the liturgy and our joyful participation in it were emblematic of a church that matters. Over the past one hundred years parishioners have gathered here for nurture and empowerment and rest in order to live lives of integrity for the good of the community we serve. All Saints has the reputation of being a welcoming community; a community of gracious hospitality; a place to which the stranger is invited; a place in which there are no outcasts; an informed people who care for their neighbor and the least fortunate and least dignified among us....these the characteristics and demands of the Gospels. There is not a week that goes by in which I am not thanked for the work you do in Mobile and beyond. I am proud to be part of such a community.
The challenges and demands of the next one hundred years for All Saints will be many. I see the role of the church as compassionate advocacy; a predisposition of profound relevancy and action. As people of conscience, people of faith, people of the way of Christ, we are duty bound to call for justice and peacemaking; duty bound to be advocates for healing, duty bound to be enlightened critics... duty bound to enact compassion and dignity where there is despair and dishonor. Churches that sit impassively on the sidelines on the matters that face us as world citizens will cease to be. The Gospels require us to be advocates for, and bearers of, goodness wherever the potential for such transformation exists. The Gospels require us to live a life for the good of the whole, the sustainable and mutual commonweal that our God, as recounted by our wise forbears, envisions... God's coming kingdom but a collaborative communion of equals, and to bring it to birth is our life's work.
In this century we will as a people of faith have to address intelligently the shocking realities of a world grown small and intensely interrelated. As people of faith we have to address the truth about climate change and its disproportionate harm to the poor. Why? Because we are named in scripture as stewards of Creation and friend of the least....We will have to address the fast growing disparity of wealth. Why? Because the Gospels teach us that we are to live in God's abundance through self-giving and sacrifice for the other...We will be duty bound to heal the sick and feed the hungry, and give water to the thirsty and stop the violence of our world...The Gospels demand that our faith lives and moves in the public sphere as God's transforming love...love incarnate in the world in our very hands, hearts, minds and bodies. And we will for another hundred years continue to gather as often as we can to praise our God who calls us into such a high vocation...We will as a liturgical community gather and name as beautiful this life of faith that changes our world for the better. What gracious responsibility and honor God bestows upon us...something worth celebrating...Rise up you saints of God...there is much yet to do....and so little time...even if a hundred years.
The challenges and demands of the next one hundred years for All Saints will be many. I see the role of the church as compassionate advocacy; a predisposition of profound relevancy and action. As people of conscience, people of faith, people of the way of Christ, we are duty bound to call for justice and peacemaking; duty bound to be advocates for healing, duty bound to be enlightened critics... duty bound to enact compassion and dignity where there is despair and dishonor. Churches that sit impassively on the sidelines on the matters that face us as world citizens will cease to be. The Gospels require us to be advocates for, and bearers of, goodness wherever the potential for such transformation exists. The Gospels require us to live a life for the good of the whole, the sustainable and mutual commonweal that our God, as recounted by our wise forbears, envisions... God's coming kingdom but a collaborative communion of equals, and to bring it to birth is our life's work.
In this century we will as a people of faith have to address intelligently the shocking realities of a world grown small and intensely interrelated. As people of faith we have to address the truth about climate change and its disproportionate harm to the poor. Why? Because we are named in scripture as stewards of Creation and friend of the least....We will have to address the fast growing disparity of wealth. Why? Because the Gospels teach us that we are to live in God's abundance through self-giving and sacrifice for the other...We will be duty bound to heal the sick and feed the hungry, and give water to the thirsty and stop the violence of our world...The Gospels demand that our faith lives and moves in the public sphere as God's transforming love...love incarnate in the world in our very hands, hearts, minds and bodies. And we will for another hundred years continue to gather as often as we can to praise our God who calls us into such a high vocation...We will as a liturgical community gather and name as beautiful this life of faith that changes our world for the better. What gracious responsibility and honor God bestows upon us...something worth celebrating...Rise up you saints of God...there is much yet to do....and so little time...even if a hundred years.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Of One Hundred Years
This Sunday we will celebrate the centennial of All Saints Parish, four to five generations of a people of faith who have gathered Sunday to Sunday at the corner of Government and Ann streets. The people of All Saints have experienced two world wars, economic depression, the invention of weapons of mass destruction, humankind's venture into space, the invention of computer technology, immunization, movies and television, civil rights reform, the advent of feminism, birth control, the poetry of Eliot, Dickinson, Hughes and Stevens, the prose of Faulkner, Steinbeck, O'Connor, Morrison and McCarthy, the art of Wyeth, Warhol and O'Keeffe, the music of Barber, Gershwin, Ellington and Bernstein, the plays of Williams, O'Neil and Miller, presidents...hurricanes and lynchings and jubilees and kings and queens and balls and despair and joy and life and death and many seasons...change and the naming of change...the making and remaking of our world....the universe expanding.
And what of the next one hundred years? The effects of global warming, over population, new wars and rumors of wars, the decline and fall of nations, perhaps our own, new birth, and our own very deaths....the continued rubric of change and transformation...the continued making and remaking of the created order, which is no order at all but the blossoming forth of possibility and potential bearing the mystery of being on ahead...the potential of future borne in the present and past, hope its talisman....birth pangs and surprise and regret and joy...It shall be much the same and so utterly different.
What is our place in this grand procession of being? We are to point the way as best we see it; we are to name the truth of the matter as best we apprehend it; we are to enact the light of goodness that sets right exponentially this process of becoming. We are the people who have chosen and choose conscience; we are they who point to the way; the way of mercy and compassion and justice and peace: alchemical rudiments of transforming the leaden dispossession of our world into golden dignity, the commonweal of grace ordained in the beginning... And one more thing: We are to praise the God who inhabits this marvelous becoming...we are to sing the song of creation in both minor and major key; we are to prayerfully and passionately pay attention...at least for the next one hundred years...at the very least.
And what of the next one hundred years? The effects of global warming, over population, new wars and rumors of wars, the decline and fall of nations, perhaps our own, new birth, and our own very deaths....the continued rubric of change and transformation...the continued making and remaking of the created order, which is no order at all but the blossoming forth of possibility and potential bearing the mystery of being on ahead...the potential of future borne in the present and past, hope its talisman....birth pangs and surprise and regret and joy...It shall be much the same and so utterly different.
What is our place in this grand procession of being? We are to point the way as best we see it; we are to name the truth of the matter as best we apprehend it; we are to enact the light of goodness that sets right exponentially this process of becoming. We are the people who have chosen and choose conscience; we are they who point to the way; the way of mercy and compassion and justice and peace: alchemical rudiments of transforming the leaden dispossession of our world into golden dignity, the commonweal of grace ordained in the beginning... And one more thing: We are to praise the God who inhabits this marvelous becoming...we are to sing the song of creation in both minor and major key; we are to prayerfully and passionately pay attention...at least for the next one hundred years...at the very least.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Of Days of Heaven
We are reading Job in the Hebrew Scripture portion of the lectionary right now. We had the option in year B of reading Genesis and Amos and Isaiah, but we chose the enigmatic Book of Job. The Book of Job offers a theological critique, a theological challenge to the dominant Deuteronomistic theology of Hebrew Scripture, the theology that pervades the Law and the Prophets. The theology goes like this: If the people Israel are loyal to Yahweh, worshipping only him, then they will receive blessing; if the people of Israel are disloyal and stray in their devotion to the worship of other gods (yes, there were many in ancient Palestine and in Jewish culture) then God would curse them...the quid pro quo of the Covenant.
Job is a good man, loyal, faithful, pious and dedicated to Yahweh. He is the archetype of Israel keeping Covenant...and yet all manner of pain and suffering and loss is visited upon him...and Job won't take it lying down. He becomes Everyman demanding an answer of his God to the time immemorial question as to why, as Rabbi Kushner puts it, why do bad things happen to good people. For some thirty five chapters Job demands not just answers but he demands that God show his face and stand face to face with this loyal but suffering soul, and fess up as to this profound paradox called creation.
And then God finally speaks...this, the longest soliloquy that God has in the whole of scripture. God begins to describe the wonders of creation found in the natural order...full of God-enthusiasm, God gets carried away, almost ecstatic, exulting in God's own artistry, an artistry that is random and playful, an artistry that even sets God awestruck...Can't you see it!? God lovingly asks Job.....Can't you see the divine in this heaven that you call earth? And the climax of this legend is that Job does see at last...Job sees God face to face within the mysterious beauty and genius of God's artifice we call Creation. To experience God's genius is to experience God....Dogma won't do it...beauty and mystery will.
We would do well to look well...for our God is all around and among us...We only have to look to the slanting light among the live oaks...the cobalt of the sky...the splash of the pelican...the music of the seasons...the cool of Fall...the miracle of eggs...the warmth of human touch....the gift of forgiveness...It is in beauty in her myriad manifestations where we will encounter our Creator who is enthusiastic to a fault still about the prospects of creation...It is in beauty...God's very genius, and ours as well, that we will know the days of heaven right here in earth...Just look and you will see.
Job is a good man, loyal, faithful, pious and dedicated to Yahweh. He is the archetype of Israel keeping Covenant...and yet all manner of pain and suffering and loss is visited upon him...and Job won't take it lying down. He becomes Everyman demanding an answer of his God to the time immemorial question as to why, as Rabbi Kushner puts it, why do bad things happen to good people. For some thirty five chapters Job demands not just answers but he demands that God show his face and stand face to face with this loyal but suffering soul, and fess up as to this profound paradox called creation.
And then God finally speaks...this, the longest soliloquy that God has in the whole of scripture. God begins to describe the wonders of creation found in the natural order...full of God-enthusiasm, God gets carried away, almost ecstatic, exulting in God's own artistry, an artistry that is random and playful, an artistry that even sets God awestruck...Can't you see it!? God lovingly asks Job.....Can't you see the divine in this heaven that you call earth? And the climax of this legend is that Job does see at last...Job sees God face to face within the mysterious beauty and genius of God's artifice we call Creation. To experience God's genius is to experience God....Dogma won't do it...beauty and mystery will.
We would do well to look well...for our God is all around and among us...We only have to look to the slanting light among the live oaks...the cobalt of the sky...the splash of the pelican...the music of the seasons...the cool of Fall...the miracle of eggs...the warmth of human touch....the gift of forgiveness...It is in beauty in her myriad manifestations where we will encounter our Creator who is enthusiastic to a fault still about the prospects of creation...It is in beauty...God's very genius, and ours as well, that we will know the days of heaven right here in earth...Just look and you will see.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Of a Matter of Life and Death
About six weeks ago a dear friend of mine who lives in Dothan was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I talked to him this morning. His disease is in an early stage, and his prognosis is less dire than most, but in all likelihood he won't live past five years. Today was his first day back at work, and he remembered a time some fifteen years ago when I went to his office to console him as his marriage had fallen apart. I remember it now...the light in the room...He remembered that day fifteen years past, and called me to talk about death and faith and hope and love.
He said he had just returned from M.D. Anderson and he said he thought that the way he was treated there, not just by the doctors, but the nurses, staff, the waiters in restaurants, the taxi drivers, store clerks, hotel employees, was the way the kingdom of God might be; and that he has returned home with hope and peace and an unbridled joy at the way he has been loved. I told him that he was seeing the kingdom already in its becoming; that in his paying attention, living prayerfully, (prayer, the art of paying attention) he is seeing the world as it really is...he is seeing the world as God knows the world to be, a world in which death is no enemy...but sacred as life is sacred....one process of a perfecting universe.
Jack Spong asserts in his new book that organized religion chiefly came about in order for us self-conscious humans to cope with the reality of death, even to escape it, and I think that is true to a certain extent. But in facing death honestly and imaginatively, whether imminent or distant, I believe we are able to see life the way it is meant to be; the way life really is.... that peace and hope and joy come inevitably, in spite of any circumstances; we see the value of community which is the means of God's gracious commonweal bearing love that is, in truth, stronger than death....love that is, in truth, stronger than fear....the love light present in the room.
I will continue to pray for my dear friend, and I will give thanks for his faithful witness to the truth of the matter; that his days in God's peaceable kingdom are marked by love and life and hope that vanquishes fear and despair, and that at the last he will find rest for his soul. That is a prayer for all of us is it not?...all of us mere sojourners in the profound sweet shortness of the days of heaven in earth.
He said he had just returned from M.D. Anderson and he said he thought that the way he was treated there, not just by the doctors, but the nurses, staff, the waiters in restaurants, the taxi drivers, store clerks, hotel employees, was the way the kingdom of God might be; and that he has returned home with hope and peace and an unbridled joy at the way he has been loved. I told him that he was seeing the kingdom already in its becoming; that in his paying attention, living prayerfully, (prayer, the art of paying attention) he is seeing the world as it really is...he is seeing the world as God knows the world to be, a world in which death is no enemy...but sacred as life is sacred....one process of a perfecting universe.
Jack Spong asserts in his new book that organized religion chiefly came about in order for us self-conscious humans to cope with the reality of death, even to escape it, and I think that is true to a certain extent. But in facing death honestly and imaginatively, whether imminent or distant, I believe we are able to see life the way it is meant to be; the way life really is.... that peace and hope and joy come inevitably, in spite of any circumstances; we see the value of community which is the means of God's gracious commonweal bearing love that is, in truth, stronger than death....love that is, in truth, stronger than fear....the love light present in the room.
I will continue to pray for my dear friend, and I will give thanks for his faithful witness to the truth of the matter; that his days in God's peaceable kingdom are marked by love and life and hope that vanquishes fear and despair, and that at the last he will find rest for his soul. That is a prayer for all of us is it not?...all of us mere sojourners in the profound sweet shortness of the days of heaven in earth.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Of Rest and Labor
One of my favorite pieces of music is John Rutter's Requiem. On September 11, 2001, my first day of seminary, in our liturgical music class, instead of a lecture, we went to the chapel and simply listened to Rutter's Requiem in homage to the dead killed by terrorists on that day. The last piece of the Mass is the Lux Eterna, that begins in pristine unison and broadens into four part harmony making the claim that the dead "rest from their labors." Rest from what? I thought. Rest from life's difficulties; rest from pain, from anxiety; rest from burden?
No, I mused, we rest from the labor of bearing God's life to the world. That is our vocation. That is the sole work for which we exist, for which we were made; and it is work that we share, work that is collaborative, mutual; work and the fruits of which, that are greater than the sum of its parts. This is the work of creation, shouldering the artful process of making and remaking the world according to God's vision of it. This labor is hard and requires our attention and intention and courage and perseverance:....the making of justice up and against the intractable injustices in our world....forgiving and forbearing each others' faults....practicing the art of healing our wounds and illnesses....feeding the hungry...caring for our planet...hard work....and we don't abdicate that work to an aloof deity who operates on his own; there's no such God...Our God graciously inhabits and empowers this work in us...we the means of God in earth; we God's very flesh and blood; God's hands and feet and heart.There is no other way. There's no other choice.
The reward is rest...something in our culture that is in short supply...rest and its accompanying peace and satisfaction and meaning and enlightened perspective...no small thing as reward for our bearing God's life to the world...and this rest doesn't only come in the end...It comes as gift along the way. Labor and rest, our life cycle, and when we give ourselves to this our true nature, our true calling, then life is rife with meaning and purpose and beauty... and fear is banished....that's a promise to us from our wise forbears. Go then with joy into the workplace of creation for there you will find sacred rest for your souls and you will be fully alive beyond all imagining; and the world God loves, the better for it.
No, I mused, we rest from the labor of bearing God's life to the world. That is our vocation. That is the sole work for which we exist, for which we were made; and it is work that we share, work that is collaborative, mutual; work and the fruits of which, that are greater than the sum of its parts. This is the work of creation, shouldering the artful process of making and remaking the world according to God's vision of it. This labor is hard and requires our attention and intention and courage and perseverance:....the making of justice up and against the intractable injustices in our world....forgiving and forbearing each others' faults....practicing the art of healing our wounds and illnesses....feeding the hungry...caring for our planet...hard work....and we don't abdicate that work to an aloof deity who operates on his own; there's no such God...Our God graciously inhabits and empowers this work in us...we the means of God in earth; we God's very flesh and blood; God's hands and feet and heart.There is no other way. There's no other choice.
The reward is rest...something in our culture that is in short supply...rest and its accompanying peace and satisfaction and meaning and enlightened perspective...no small thing as reward for our bearing God's life to the world...and this rest doesn't only come in the end...It comes as gift along the way. Labor and rest, our life cycle, and when we give ourselves to this our true nature, our true calling, then life is rife with meaning and purpose and beauty... and fear is banished....that's a promise to us from our wise forbears. Go then with joy into the workplace of creation for there you will find sacred rest for your souls and you will be fully alive beyond all imagining; and the world God loves, the better for it.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Of Creation and Purpose
Last week in this space I reflected on Bishop Spong's new book on Eternal Life and a new religious consciousness beyond traditional theism. I appreciate Spong's bold iconoclastic approach to matters of faith, and, as I said, Spong has given us fresh and mature language with which we are more able in a post-modern context to speak of the life of faith unfettered by literalism and superstition; he has given us language by which we are able to speak intelligently about Christianity with an integrity that does not cease to be passionate and spiritual. That is not to say that I agree with everything Spong says. He still struggles with his own ego-centrism and with his lifelong battle to escape his literalist roots; all the while acknowledging both.
Spong makes the bold claim early on in Eternal Life... that the purpose of the universe is not life. He hasn't yet referred to some other, or some grander or transcendent purpose, but the implication is that perhaps in the randomness of the origins of the universe, there is no purpose whatsoever...that the universe just is....no telos (no ultimate direction)...no meaning....just random iterations and reiterations of gas and metal and carbon chains and water....of unimaginable heat and unfathomable cold...and loneliness and fear.
The fact of the matter is...there is purpose everywhere....where there is illness, the purpose is healing...where there is despair, the purpose is hope...where there is hunger, the purpose is to nurture...where there is injustice and indignity, the purpose is to set things right, to restore what we know is meant to be...What is right? What is meant to be?...Oh, don't bother to ask, for we know don't we...this knowledge, this genius contained in the DNA of the stars...this mysterious helix of truth and goodness and sacrifice, spiraling towards a mysterious perfection amid a randomness... a randomness that we dare trust and praise as divine.
Could it be that as the universe becomes still.... that purpose becomes still...the chief symbols of this becoming: change and adaptation and transformation and evolution...the cosmic musical refrain....Perhaps at each intersection point of this transformative process, this assaying of the universe.... new purpose is engendered, fiery birth of implicit necessity...the new vocation of the midwife bringing into life that which inevitably becomes...for example, it would have been unthinkable three hundred years ago to say that global warming threatens our existence...but now it is a pressing reality...Certainly we must be purposeful towards restoring the sustainability of our planet...a new purpose heretofore unknown...but known now...Who knows what purpose will become amid the Creation's becoming, who knows for what purpose to which we will be called, that which will evolve three hundred years from now, and again and again. The cosmos rife with purpose...purpose engendered by change and empowered by love, yes love a rudiment as well.
The imperative for us people of faith is that as community we must pay attention, we must think critically and imaginatively; we must seek and work toward being enlightened so that we may artfully and skillfully apprehend the purpose to which we are called....purpose that comes as we speak, ever changing, ever becoming, and we dare not miss its coming...this the Creation in its very becoming, imagining in transcendent proportions the purpose at hand....The clue for me in this process, is that wherever there is sacrifice for the greater good; wherever there is the work towards restoration...there we will apprehend a purpose, truth itself, that we can't deny to be true...and therefore we name it as divine....and celebrate.
Spong makes the bold claim early on in Eternal Life... that the purpose of the universe is not life. He hasn't yet referred to some other, or some grander or transcendent purpose, but the implication is that perhaps in the randomness of the origins of the universe, there is no purpose whatsoever...that the universe just is....no telos (no ultimate direction)...no meaning....just random iterations and reiterations of gas and metal and carbon chains and water....of unimaginable heat and unfathomable cold...and loneliness and fear.
The fact of the matter is...there is purpose everywhere....where there is illness, the purpose is healing...where there is despair, the purpose is hope...where there is hunger, the purpose is to nurture...where there is injustice and indignity, the purpose is to set things right, to restore what we know is meant to be...What is right? What is meant to be?...Oh, don't bother to ask, for we know don't we...this knowledge, this genius contained in the DNA of the stars...this mysterious helix of truth and goodness and sacrifice, spiraling towards a mysterious perfection amid a randomness... a randomness that we dare trust and praise as divine.
Could it be that as the universe becomes still.... that purpose becomes still...the chief symbols of this becoming: change and adaptation and transformation and evolution...the cosmic musical refrain....Perhaps at each intersection point of this transformative process, this assaying of the universe.... new purpose is engendered, fiery birth of implicit necessity...the new vocation of the midwife bringing into life that which inevitably becomes...for example, it would have been unthinkable three hundred years ago to say that global warming threatens our existence...but now it is a pressing reality...Certainly we must be purposeful towards restoring the sustainability of our planet...a new purpose heretofore unknown...but known now...Who knows what purpose will become amid the Creation's becoming, who knows for what purpose to which we will be called, that which will evolve three hundred years from now, and again and again. The cosmos rife with purpose...purpose engendered by change and empowered by love, yes love a rudiment as well.
The imperative for us people of faith is that as community we must pay attention, we must think critically and imaginatively; we must seek and work toward being enlightened so that we may artfully and skillfully apprehend the purpose to which we are called....purpose that comes as we speak, ever changing, ever becoming, and we dare not miss its coming...this the Creation in its very becoming, imagining in transcendent proportions the purpose at hand....The clue for me in this process, is that wherever there is sacrifice for the greater good; wherever there is the work towards restoration...there we will apprehend a purpose, truth itself, that we can't deny to be true...and therefore we name it as divine....and celebrate.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Of Eternal Life
The Beth Murray Sunday School Class at All Saints is beginning study of Bishop Jack Spong's latest and perhaps last book entitled Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. I'm really excited about the book, so I'm sitting in on the class. In some religious circles Spong is considered a heretic. I beg to differ. Spong's legacy is that he has given thinking Christians (no, that's not an oxymoron) fresh and intelligent insight into ways of thinking and speaking about the true nature and practice of the Christian life. His is a sane voice amid the cacophony of literalism and superstition in what passes for Christianity in a culture that eschews the art of critical thinking. Spong's work not only makes Christianity believable, but he also makes it livable. He has given us new and helpful ways of thinking ( scripturally based) about the so-called miracles, virgin birth, Jesus as human and divine, resurrection, ascension, and in this his new book he explores the illusive concept of eternal life and the speculation of life after death.
I have read just the first few chapters of Spong's new book, but that's got me thinking ahead. So here are some of my reflections on eternal life, before we read Spong's take on it: The Eternal is found in truth and beauty...that's my starting point. And Eternal life is not just about the future; it finds its way into the present as well as the past. Through the imaginative memory, individual and collective, eternal life can be found and named in past events, some of which we barely noticed when they actually occurred, but in memory we see the truth of the matter to which this often mundane event points....And we see it in the present, the truth of the matter...in the dynamic of life and death in the delta...the flashing trout...the wheeling gulls...the fading sedge...the taste of salt in the wind...the northeastern squall...all outward and visible sign of the profound divine that pervades the universe....In art: Picasso's Guernica, Shakespeare's Tempest....Dickinson's images of death,....it goes on forever, these ways into the eternal.... and eternal life pervasive among the human community...in every act of mercy....in every gesture of kindness...in each locale of bestowing justice and dignity...where there is hope...where love is imaginatively engendered, Eternal life is surely self-evident....a quality, an aesthetic of the divine that is seen, heard, felt and tasted by the imagination, the essential midwife of the eternal.
And of the future? Science tells us that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We humans now sojourn for a season in earth as self conscious beings; perhaps there is a consciousness far beyond that which we know: a transcendent consciousness of matter and energy, things animate and inanimate, dancing within the song of the universe...We know in string theory that the ultimate rudiment of the universe is tonality, sound waves, music. The song will forever be, and we forever in it and of it...forever a part of the creation's becoming, forever alive in the creation turning towards its perfection always apprehended in the sacramental common things of creation....starfish and star dust.... forever singing in high celebration of a high consciousness beyond all reckoning that perhaps waits in hopeful joy for us all...Imagine that.
I have read just the first few chapters of Spong's new book, but that's got me thinking ahead. So here are some of my reflections on eternal life, before we read Spong's take on it: The Eternal is found in truth and beauty...that's my starting point. And Eternal life is not just about the future; it finds its way into the present as well as the past. Through the imaginative memory, individual and collective, eternal life can be found and named in past events, some of which we barely noticed when they actually occurred, but in memory we see the truth of the matter to which this often mundane event points....And we see it in the present, the truth of the matter...in the dynamic of life and death in the delta...the flashing trout...the wheeling gulls...the fading sedge...the taste of salt in the wind...the northeastern squall...all outward and visible sign of the profound divine that pervades the universe....In art: Picasso's Guernica, Shakespeare's Tempest....Dickinson's images of death,....it goes on forever, these ways into the eternal.... and eternal life pervasive among the human community...in every act of mercy....in every gesture of kindness...in each locale of bestowing justice and dignity...where there is hope...where love is imaginatively engendered, Eternal life is surely self-evident....a quality, an aesthetic of the divine that is seen, heard, felt and tasted by the imagination, the essential midwife of the eternal.
And of the future? Science tells us that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We humans now sojourn for a season in earth as self conscious beings; perhaps there is a consciousness far beyond that which we know: a transcendent consciousness of matter and energy, things animate and inanimate, dancing within the song of the universe...We know in string theory that the ultimate rudiment of the universe is tonality, sound waves, music. The song will forever be, and we forever in it and of it...forever a part of the creation's becoming, forever alive in the creation turning towards its perfection always apprehended in the sacramental common things of creation....starfish and star dust.... forever singing in high celebration of a high consciousness beyond all reckoning that perhaps waits in hopeful joy for us all...Imagine that.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Of Good and Evil
Theologians have pondered forever the problem of evil in our world. The great problem is of course, "Why would a God whom we say is loving allow bad things to happen in the world God loves?" It's a good question to which there are no easy answers. The escape route is to say that it is the presence of free will thus shifting the blame to humankind's proclivity towards wrong choices. That's a weak answer and egocentric to say the least, because there's plenty of mayhem and violence in the natural order itself. No, there is more mystery to this reality.
Some of us just watched at All Saints the movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a visually stunning but emotionally disturbing depiction of a cruel and hard world along the Mexican American border filled with betrayal and lies and pain and violence. The characters include a Texas cattle rancher, the vaquero (cowboy) Melquiades, a young overly zealous border guard and his wife, Mexican families along the border trying to migrate into the U.S., the promiscuous waitress at the diner who insists that she loves her husband, the crooked sheriff, the border patrol; the abuse of power, a character unto itself. One of the group commented during the discussion time after the movie that none of the characters were redeemable; that they all were at some level or another depraved.
And yet redemption comes in a very powerful way at the end of the movie; it came with tears, and it comes in the midst of all this depravity. How could this be so, we asked? After all, this is just a movie. What about the real world? Is there truly any hope for us? The evil that surrounds us is so very real and undeniable. Are things really any better than they ever have been? Perhaps things are getting worse. Where do we look for answers? Where do we look for hope?I would suggest that we would do well to pay attention to our artists...art forever the window onto the truth of the matter....we would do well to trust the imaginative word.
In spite of all the characters being participants in the world's evil in the movie, goodness and redemption comes inevitably. It comes through friendship. It comes through sacrifice for each other. It comes through simple acts of hospitality. It comes through compassion and mercy. It comes through welcome and bestowing dignity, and it comes through justice in the midst of injustice. Perhaps the evil in our world is that essential component of creation against which the good struggles and finds its life and thrives...evil a foil, a contrast against which we may apprehend the profound and transforming good that takes gentle root around us. Perhaps Goethe is right in Faust in which the protagonist even after selling his soul to the devil is redeemed; that the redemptive good will ultimately have its way in the end...the unscrupulous good using even evil for its purposes.
Indeed such alchemy is held up in the gospels, more imaginative word...Mercy and justice and compassion and goodness and welcome and hospitality and inclusion transforming a world that feels hard and unjust. All these the means of opening God's commonweal to all of earth, so that forever God and we the people of God, and the created order entire, can look upon all the world in the birth pangs of its becoming and dare to call it very good.
Some of us just watched at All Saints the movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a visually stunning but emotionally disturbing depiction of a cruel and hard world along the Mexican American border filled with betrayal and lies and pain and violence. The characters include a Texas cattle rancher, the vaquero (cowboy) Melquiades, a young overly zealous border guard and his wife, Mexican families along the border trying to migrate into the U.S., the promiscuous waitress at the diner who insists that she loves her husband, the crooked sheriff, the border patrol; the abuse of power, a character unto itself. One of the group commented during the discussion time after the movie that none of the characters were redeemable; that they all were at some level or another depraved.
And yet redemption comes in a very powerful way at the end of the movie; it came with tears, and it comes in the midst of all this depravity. How could this be so, we asked? After all, this is just a movie. What about the real world? Is there truly any hope for us? The evil that surrounds us is so very real and undeniable. Are things really any better than they ever have been? Perhaps things are getting worse. Where do we look for answers? Where do we look for hope?I would suggest that we would do well to pay attention to our artists...art forever the window onto the truth of the matter....we would do well to trust the imaginative word.
In spite of all the characters being participants in the world's evil in the movie, goodness and redemption comes inevitably. It comes through friendship. It comes through sacrifice for each other. It comes through simple acts of hospitality. It comes through compassion and mercy. It comes through welcome and bestowing dignity, and it comes through justice in the midst of injustice. Perhaps the evil in our world is that essential component of creation against which the good struggles and finds its life and thrives...evil a foil, a contrast against which we may apprehend the profound and transforming good that takes gentle root around us. Perhaps Goethe is right in Faust in which the protagonist even after selling his soul to the devil is redeemed; that the redemptive good will ultimately have its way in the end...the unscrupulous good using even evil for its purposes.
Indeed such alchemy is held up in the gospels, more imaginative word...Mercy and justice and compassion and goodness and welcome and hospitality and inclusion transforming a world that feels hard and unjust. All these the means of opening God's commonweal to all of earth, so that forever God and we the people of God, and the created order entire, can look upon all the world in the birth pangs of its becoming and dare to call it very good.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Of Health and Wholeness
It's hard not to be thinking about health care in our country right now. It is dominating the airwaves and cyberspace. It has prompted me to get out my own policy and try to figure out what my coverage is; I'm still figuring. The debate has certainly heated up conversations around dinner tables and civic meetings; and it is all so very complicated: to what extent should the government play a part, if any; will costs really be controlled and who controls them; how much in fact will it cost over the long haul. I'm having trouble sorting out the pros and cons, the wisest path; but I feel strongly about a few things: everyone needs access to health care; there should be no uninsured in this the wealthiest country in the world; health care should be affordable for all; and everyone should have equal benefits. The other thing that seems clear to me is that this will not be solved in a partisan manner. Such major reform will require colleagues of both parties and interest groups working respectfully and imaginatively toward the good of the whole. I have to believe that's possible. Now is not the time for intransigent posturing of interests.
Jesus had a lot to say about health and healing. Healing stories dominate the four Gospels, and they are told in the context of salvation. In our modern western world we have come to believe that salvation is a personal thing, the disposition of our souls earning us a heavenly reward, but salvation in the early church had to do with community living in the now, and even more to do with those alienated from community, principally: the sick, the naked, the homeless stranger, the illegal alien, the shamed. The healing stories in the gospels largely take place among the marginalized of our world...those on the outside... the unincluded...salvation in the ancient world had everything to do with the dignity of the community and the dignity of those the community welcomes; salvation comes when all are made whole... wholeness with dignity, the face of salvation....and salvation is impaired until all experience it.
To experience healing one is restored not simply to good health, but restored to the community that loves and nurtures, restored to dignity. Think how alienating an illness can be. In fact, there used to be Rites in Judaism and in the Christian church which welcomed the one healed back into the community. My father died early on Sunday morning in the hospital in 1984; then there was no Hospice where we lived. We got to the hospital just after he died. A nurse told me that he died with dignity. I've thought about what that might mean over the years, and in the context of the present day it may mean that he died amid loving and skilled care...his pain minimized as best possible...and not alone....Salvation has everything to do with our dying in dignity and our living with dignity...that makes the issue of health and wholeness a gospel issue...Let's hope that whatever is decided on our behalf is something ALL of us can live with...and die with.
Jesus had a lot to say about health and healing. Healing stories dominate the four Gospels, and they are told in the context of salvation. In our modern western world we have come to believe that salvation is a personal thing, the disposition of our souls earning us a heavenly reward, but salvation in the early church had to do with community living in the now, and even more to do with those alienated from community, principally: the sick, the naked, the homeless stranger, the illegal alien, the shamed. The healing stories in the gospels largely take place among the marginalized of our world...those on the outside... the unincluded...salvation in the ancient world had everything to do with the dignity of the community and the dignity of those the community welcomes; salvation comes when all are made whole... wholeness with dignity, the face of salvation....and salvation is impaired until all experience it.
To experience healing one is restored not simply to good health, but restored to the community that loves and nurtures, restored to dignity. Think how alienating an illness can be. In fact, there used to be Rites in Judaism and in the Christian church which welcomed the one healed back into the community. My father died early on Sunday morning in the hospital in 1984; then there was no Hospice where we lived. We got to the hospital just after he died. A nurse told me that he died with dignity. I've thought about what that might mean over the years, and in the context of the present day it may mean that he died amid loving and skilled care...his pain minimized as best possible...and not alone....Salvation has everything to do with our dying in dignity and our living with dignity...that makes the issue of health and wholeness a gospel issue...Let's hope that whatever is decided on our behalf is something ALL of us can live with...and die with.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Of Life and Labor
As we approach this coming Labor Day we will remember in our prayers this Sunday all who labor. We will specifically pray for justice in the workplace, justice being an imperative both in Hebrew Scripture and in the Gospels. Worker justice in our country continues to be a serious issue. The issue was the reason for the forming of labor unions in the first place; but now labor unions lack the influence they once had. Some would argue that that is a good thing, others would disagree, but the presenting problem of justice in the workplace persists still, however we intend to deal with it.
Worker justice has not only to do with a fair wage, but it also has to do with a safe environment, affordable benefits, adequate leisure, reasonable hours and due respect. Labor is a gift when it is performed in a just environment. It is the means of artful sacrifice; an outward and visible sign of human creativity that makes and remakes our world for the better. Labor performed in the context of injustice is quite the opposite. It debases and injures and stifles the creativity of the human spirit. Unjust employment practices abound in our city, our state, our country and our world broadly unseen, and it is our solemn promise as the Baptized that we will "strive for justice, and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being." That is job one for us Christian people.
This Labor Day weekend when we take our leisure, thank sincerely someone who labors; thank them for what they do, and for doing it well, for it is our labor that transforms our world, labor a rudiment of the process of Creation, labor that clothes and houses and feeds and waters and heals our world. We are lifeless without our sacred labor, so we give thanks for our own privilege of labor ourselves.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the created order, an outward and visible reflection of the Creator Godself... is process, an ever becoming and evolving reality...the created order and God in it still becoming what might be...the universe blossoming into goodness...Our labor then a high metaphor for this becoming...work and rest, work and rest...and at the last, on the seventh day, the joy of jobs well done.
Worker justice has not only to do with a fair wage, but it also has to do with a safe environment, affordable benefits, adequate leisure, reasonable hours and due respect. Labor is a gift when it is performed in a just environment. It is the means of artful sacrifice; an outward and visible sign of human creativity that makes and remakes our world for the better. Labor performed in the context of injustice is quite the opposite. It debases and injures and stifles the creativity of the human spirit. Unjust employment practices abound in our city, our state, our country and our world broadly unseen, and it is our solemn promise as the Baptized that we will "strive for justice, and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being." That is job one for us Christian people.
This Labor Day weekend when we take our leisure, thank sincerely someone who labors; thank them for what they do, and for doing it well, for it is our labor that transforms our world, labor a rudiment of the process of Creation, labor that clothes and houses and feeds and waters and heals our world. We are lifeless without our sacred labor, so we give thanks for our own privilege of labor ourselves.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the created order, an outward and visible reflection of the Creator Godself... is process, an ever becoming and evolving reality...the created order and God in it still becoming what might be...the universe blossoming into goodness...Our labor then a high metaphor for this becoming...work and rest, work and rest...and at the last, on the seventh day, the joy of jobs well done.
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