On meeting St. Catherine of Siena just this morning

Today is the feast day of Catherine of Siena. The Mass at noon today was in her honor. She lived in the Tuscan city of Siena in the late fourteenth century. At age five it is told that she had a vision of the great martyrs in the heavenly courts all at the right hand of God. This vision among many others were so poignant for Catherine that she wished to dedicate her entire life to Christian service. She was one of twenty five children. It was not uncommon to have many children in those days because of the persistent death toll of the Black Plague which terrorized all of Europe. She learned to read and write, and wrote many letters to priests and bishops exhorting them to a proper Christian life of service, challenging the abuses of the institutional church. The town of Siena was divided as to whether she was a mystic or a fanatic. Perhaps the two are close kin.

Catherine became a member of the Dominican order and gave her life to helping the sick and dying. Legend goes that God offered her the stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ, but she refused declaring her unworthiness; that her joy found in her work was her just reward. She died from exhaustion at the age of thirty three.

I met her quite by surprise this morning early. I was at a hospital visiting a parishioner. The family and I were waiting outside the patient's room, and this patient was requiring around the clock nursing care. The nurse came out into the hall, and one of the family members said to her, "Gosh you are really earning your paycheck this week." To which this tall, dark-skinned, wise-eyed soul said, her eyes profound and fixed on ours, "I thank God for this work every single day!"

Here is one who has given herself to a vocation that many won't or can't do. She has learned the secret that in God's economy we find joy and purpose and life at the margins of our world...where there is disease and death...where there is poverty and indignity...where there is violence and injustice...There we meet the Christ and the response, the reward is joy. I looked at her hands and saw the hope of our world just there...hands which offer themselves in loving sacrifice, recreating once again, and each day, the universe. I didn't have to ask her name; I already knew, and I thought to myself, I hope she gets her rest, for we will need her for far longer than thirty three years. Blessed Catherine pray for us.

Of Improvisation and Particularity

I write here in Austin Texas at the library of the Seminary of the Southwest. It is about seventy degrees outside at about 20% humidity. We don't know about twenty percent humidity in Mobile. My sinuses are confused. There's not a cloud in the sky and around noon we took a drive into the Texas countryside mainly in search of barbecue brisket...but also the landscape: random breaks of wind tossed mesquite; siverado sage; cacti in full bloom... red, yellow and orange....old native cemeteries along this ancient trade route etched among the sandstone trap rock...there a grotto carved into the rugged landscape with the figure of the Virgin of Guadeloupe inside....She the God of Mexico then and now, long before the white man God...Mexico, the name of this very land just some one hundred and seventy years ago.... Then, the Mexican Hat, Indian paintbrush...bluebonnets in and among the roadside culverts would have been called by very different names.

None of these species of plants flourishing along the way could even survive in the climate of Mobile just six hundred miles away at roughly the same latitude. If one wanted to bring camellias, sasanquas, hydrangea, ginger lilies; bananas; elephant ear to central Texas...the things that grow without effort for us...one would be sorely disappointed...they would wither and cease to exist. Both out of context.

Life adapts to the particular; Life forever an improvisational enterprise....setting its roots taking into account the context of its engendering. The life force forever mindful, conscious of the incomprehensible iterations in time and space of the particular beauty that shapes its improbable destiny...a destiny not pre-ordained but still becoming in mystery, in particular contexts...not as a sweeping universal reality....but a reality intimate and close and particular...the end of things in this particular becoming always a speculation about which God Godself can only wonder and marvel and dream and hope.

Resurrection is the name, within our particular religious and cultural and socio-economic heritage, that we give to this life force that forever renews itself within the most improbable circumstances....this is the life force that in every particular cultural and socio-economic context, every corner of human community, brings dignity and mercy and justice and nonviolence and new hope by whatever name it is given....Its gods have many names around the world...the Virgin of Guadeloupe, she the earth mother...Krishna, the go between of earth and heaven...the Tao in its enlightening aesthetic....different manifestations according to the particular milieu, that is its own fertile soil...the matrix within which truth and life may flourish... myriad means of redemption...but still wherever there is dignity brought to bear...wherever justice and kindness... wherever sacrifice for the greater good...there is life and life abundant, and the world, in one particular at a time, is raised into its fullness....life always improvising a way...being always engendered anew....by any faith...by any name....but for us, in our particularity: Christ is risen and in our significant soil...all is made alive.

Of the Holy Cross

At one time I had a Celtic cross that I wore around my neck, just for two or three years or so. I remember a college friend asked me that if Jesus had been killed by firing squad, would I then wear a gun around my neck...or an electric chair, or a guillotine or a hangman's noose...I found the question disturbing and distasteful; but over the years it's a point well taken. Crucifixion was the punishment practiced by the Roman Empire for seditionists...enemies of the state. It was a particularly gruesome way to die, because it was meant to be observed by the public as a deterrent, lest anyone else got any rebellious ideas. It was terribly painful and the onset of death was a slow asphyxiation as the lungs gradually filled with fluid....and crucifixions occurred outside the walls of the city meant to shame the victim and the victim's family...It was dehumanizing to say the least.

The saving act of God for the world was not this demeaning and shameful death of God's son; but that as the raised community of the faithful, and the goodness that we bear as followers, imitators of Jesus...the saving truth is that this goodness can stand against and even overcome such shame and brutality... and must... We stand with our God in a solidarity of non-violence, peace and justice. This goodness, which is the kingdom of God in its very becoming, will transform the brutality and dispossession and shame that surely abounds. Salvation then is living the faith passionately serving the other. The crosses we wear around our necks this Holy Week, whether figuratively or literally, are the outward and visible signs that violence and injustice are ever present....and it is ours to stand against them no matter the cost...It is what we are made for...to make Holy the cross wherever we come upon it.

And let us remember all the crucified...all the shamed and victimized...We as the body of Christ are a living, life giving sacrifice for them...We who are resurrection life...life called forth out of the very darkness itself for the world's transformation...life that is borne by all of us who stand at the empty tomb...life that raises the world's dead...Resurrection life is Jesus' legacy for the church and all people of conscience...and that life is ours to share, for it is real and it is alive, and it will change the world...and it will transform the brutality of the cross into a profound and resilient joy.

The Passion of the Christ

During my last year of seminary Mel Gibson's movie the Passion of the Christ was released about this time of year, right around Holy Week. I had read reviews and I knew I probably wouldn't like it, but I felt if I were going to critique its theology, it would probably be good form if I saw it. So I went by myself...just me and a few others scattered in the theater.

The movie began with a techno-Arabic/Hebrew/Semitic musical score...an eerie otherworldly chanting the backdrop for one of the most gory movies I've ever seen...slow motion torture in strobe-like rhythm...and more blood than one can imagine...I left after about thirty minutes; and I thought about the pervading theology of the Passion, the crucifixion of Jesus, in our western culture: the theology of Substitution, that goes something like this: God loved us so much in spite of our innumerable sins as humankind that he sent his son to be tortured and killed to pay the penalty for all of us; Jesus' death the ransom for all of our sins so that we may have eternal life...What kind of God would that be? As I left the theater whatever remnant of atonement theology still around in my consciousness, I left there in the seething dark.

God does not require blood. The crucifixion in the Gospels is an unveiling of the brutality of power gone wrong...an unveiling of imperial injustice...the murder of an innocent man. God does not require blood. God requires passion for our world...Jesus the model...Jesus the archetype. Jesus and the community that followed Jesus cared so much for their world, cared so much for changing the world for the better, cared so much about calling out the injustice that beset them... that it got them in trouble, got many of them killed...So the theology rightly goes like this: God so loves the world that God calls all people of conscience, as God called the Christ, to love passionately their world even if it means risking one's life...That we live solely for our sister...that we live solely for our brother...that we live as God lives...in an utter predisposition of sacrifice....sacrifice that saves; sacrifice that brings eternal life in earth...eternal life meaning living in the presence of God here and now... not in some otherworldly supernatural existence...but living our lives as they are truly and forever meant to be...to live in the presence of God is to be fully human...fully human like the Christ....fully human...passionate for our world.

Like our brother come before us, we are called to go with Passion into the Jerusalems of our world...into the places of indignity and dispossession, loving our neighbor, which we are told is the same as loving God...let us go not counting the cost whatever that cost may be....then will the sin of the world be cast off...we, the people of passion, the living atonement of the created order....At our coming then will even the rocks and stones cry hosanna in the highest...blessed be the coming of the Lord.... at last.

Of Salvation and Dignity

Mary Robert and I received the J. Allen Pope Reaching Out award this past Saturday evening. The award is given by AQUA, an organization comprised of the various organizations and agencies that serve the gay, lesbian and transgendered community in Mobile. It was a bigger deal than I thought; incredible energy and enthusiasm in the room; and I realized that the award was more about All Saints than it was about Mary and me. It is the people of All Saints, who as a matter of practice, continually reach out, claim and include those who in some way or another have found themselves excluded. This reaching out here goes far beyond the LGBT community; we reach out to displaced refugees, the poor and the hungry, the battered and the disenfranchised of our world.

In accepting the award I said to the assembly gathered that we church folk have a lot of fancy words we have been using over the centuries of our several and disparate denominations, to the extent that many of our so-called church words have lost their meaning. One such word I suggested is "salvation." What does that word mean beyond a Christian platitude? We hear it so often. I remember in high school other kids asking me if I were saved...."Jesus saves" bumper stickers...salvation in our culture a decided means of exclusion...either you're in or your out....Augustine of Hippo thought as much...only a few denizens in the city of God...while the doomed burgeoning city of the world falls off the cosmic stage as ballast....Calvin derived most of his theology from Augustine...and alas this exclusionary predisposition of Christianity is still pervasive.

Ishmael Garcia noted theologian and ethicist argues that salvation is not some elite rank of which one is a member...a somewhat private guarantee of a blissful life after death, to the exclusion of others....He argues that salvation is a present reality that has a decided face, and that face is dignity. Wherever dignity is made present there God's saving love is made manifest...therefore salvation is for all...everyone on this planet is intended by God to live a dignified life...Another way to say the line from our Baptismal Covenant is: "to respect the salvation of every human being...the notion of salvation then takes on a very practical reality, instead of some overused abstract platitude. Salvation then becomes a practice...a practice of making the lives of the least in our world better....the practice of salvation now the means by which all people live in the light of God's gracious favor; in God's abundant kingdom.....our high call is to bear God's dignity to the world....feeding the hungry; providing clean water, medical care...through advocacy within the structures of our political and socio-economic world to enable for all people, God's children, a better way of living...Salvation not a badge but enlightened practice....a practice with implications both material and spiritual...of the same cloth....the ancient world never separated the two.

We are learning the art of salvation here....I think and hope we are... It is why we are here in the first place, not for ourselves alone but for those who are given to us....we are being sent, as we speak, into the dark corners of the indignity in our world, we, as followers of Christ, bearing the face of salvation....inviting all to God's table...no one left out....the city of God and the city of the world one shining city in which there is dignity enough...room at the table enough...and all will see salvation face to face, together.

Simply Salvation

I don't watch a lot of television; just sporting events, Jon Stewart on the Daily Show when I can catch him, and Food T.V. I've given up on real journalism. It's all entertainment sound-bites now; and don't even get me started on the so-called reality shows. But lately I've been watching a show on the Travel Channel called No Reservations featuring Anthony Bordain, a chain smoking, irreverent gourmand who travels the world exploring food and culture. Last night featured Vietnam...thin crepes, the process learned about during the French occupation, but adapted to the fresh ingredients that are the hallmark of Vietnamese cuisine...crepes stuffed with alfalfa sprouts, leeks, hot peppers, fish sauce, lemon grass and shrimp....simple and profound.

Bordain's premise, not just on this particular segment, but in most of these broadcasts, is that to know the true beauty of the cuisine of a culture, one must taste the food of the poor...the cuisine of the common people...tried and true cooking that sustains a way of life...the tried and true cooking that informs and underpins the haute cuisine of every culture...The last segment of this show was set in a farm house outside of Saigon...the entire extended family, three generations were there at table...all of the meal served was produced on the farm, cooked over a wood fire in a wok that had served the family for several hundred years...peas stir fried with red peppers and garlic...roasted corn with lemon....a pork braise in a rich vegetable stock, pineapple to sweeten...simple and profound...and the meal graciously shared....a holy moment...as in every shared meal...mundane, meagre ingredients marvelously transformed into food for life, nurture for the way ahead. A profound moment of renewal born of the most common things of earth....a reality, an innate gnosis, knowledge that has been carried down throughout the evolution of the created order. It is no accident that the principal Rite of the church is a meal....forever a principal act of worship long before Christianity.

The metaphor for me here is that salvation begins on the common and mundane margins of our world...at the core of our common life...a world wherein despite meagre means, hospitality is the rule of living...that God's gracious abundance is quite paradoxically found where there seemingly is none. In the economy of God it is sacrifice that multiplies the loaves. In every act of sacrifice God's love and nurture are set loose exponentially. A rudimentary meal transformed into the food of the gods bearing quite literally new life....We would learn well to simplify....to value our meals as sacred....to graciously share...to invite the guest....these are rudiments of the kingdom...come close...and simple as a plot of vegetables...at the next shared taste....something to marvel....something to praise.

Of Faith and Fasting

Thou hast neither youth nor age

But as it were an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both

from Eliot's Gerontion

I've never been one to fast during Lent. I remember once or twice I gave up chocolate, or potato chips, but that was no big deal, just a fairly simple means to chalk up a brownie point or two with God. It seemed sufficient that I knew people or had friends who fasted. This Lent, however, I've decided to fast...very little meat, light meals, very little carbs or fat...water instead of soda....sparkling water instead of wine. We were out walking the other afternoon and stopped into a coffee shop. I found myself staring at the Philly Cheese hot dog advertisement, mesmerized: sauteed peppers and onions, melted fontina cheese, pork sausage, toasted bun, grainy mustard....but I digress.

I've stayed hungry for the past week, living expectantly for each meager meal, still waiting for the payoff on the scales.... but I have discovered something else: my mind is more active, dreams more poignant; my soul is stirred. I've been reading a lot more lately....Just the other night I couldn't really get to sleep (hunger will do that) and I found myself immersed in memories that flooded into my consciousness in a luxurious and gentle reverie...I arranged them in terms of my school grades...Mrs. Camp my first grade teacher, Kathy Bennett gave me a Christmas present....Kennedy shot, dead and buried in the second....Mrs. Baxter grieving for her husband in the third, long division, Ulysses lost at sea, I loved Penelope too...Allen Jones' wit, seventh, spin the bottle, Jane returned the locket, tears... basketball in the ninth, Shamrock milkshakes, Abbey Road....growing pains in the tenth, Latin, the smell of lantana at the beach, a salty sea breeze...college, Yeats discussed at the truck stop.....marriage and children...beloved pets departed....of wheeling seasons...bitter sweet our lives.....love and loss...hope and grief....joy and disappointment....boredom and poignancy.....my life a never ending succession of unlikely occasions...never happening the way I had thought...joy and regret of the same fabric, of the same song.....the memories so real and so close now it seems.

Now is the time in the "juvescence" of the year, as Eliot puts it....now is the time to take stock, to take account....to gather up the fragments of our lives and hold them gently and with reverence, because these shards of our existence, these memories, no less real than the present moment, are sacred...not just some of them, but all of them....our lives universes unto themselves and intimate rudiments of the universe entire...redeemed by water and Spirit. Nothing is lost...nothing of no use... nothing without meaning...A holy hope manifest among the broken pieces that all manner of thing will be well.....A hope that already sets its roots in the present surely...if we but pay attention.

However you choose to do it...take account....pay attention...glean the soul...live expectantly...the time is nigh and the kingdom of God is at hand, God's kingdom that seeks every time and place, God's bitter sweet kingdom that even inhabits our memories...Prepare the way of the Lord....a way upon which we all, memories and all, are profoundly implied.