Of Faith and Facebook

Yeah, I think I'm the last one on earth yet to join Facebook. All my friends have, everyone in the office. And they have all these friends. I thought I had friends, but alas, the cyber-truth of the matter is that I am virtually friendless without Facebook. K has recently joined and she has all these friends; she now knows when her niece in Greenville South Carolina purchases her vente from Starbucks. "Got my Starbucks...good to go," she chronicles. LOL I think. I was being recruited to join by one of the staff here, and I asked what if I joined and asked to be someone's friend and was rejected. "I couldn't bear that!" I said. "Oh they'll let you be their friend," she said with blithe confidence. My sons said K could be their friend, but warned her not to befriend their friends. What's that about?

In spite of Facebook being yet one more cultural and technological manifestation of our obsessive compulsive disposition, there is undeniably a palpable sense of community there amid the digital ether. K located and is in communication with a relative whom she hasn't seen since she was a child...she lives in California and is an Episcopalian...We're going to look her up when we are in California for the Episcopal General Convention...who knew? Our daughter has reconnected with high school friends. People in the know tell me there is even an All Saints group of friends in cyber space. OMG!

The life of faith at its heart is a life of befriending, the art of loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. The life of faith at its essence is, not an intellectual assent to a creed or a system of belief, but the artful practice of loving our neighbor, befriending the lonely and lost as we experience the joy of lively and imaginative community. We are so much stronger together; and it is God, Godself who inhabits every act of befriending. God thrives in community; and grieves for the friendless left out. To be befriended is to be granted dignity...dignity, the outward and visible sign of a God who loves only. Dignity the face of salvation. In all of our sacred befriending may we see God face to face....and amid friendship, know love come to light.

So, I'm asking ahead of time. If I dare to join Facebook, will you be my friend. Please.

Of Processions and Practice

I watched a little of the inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral this morning chiefly to hear the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church deliver the closing prayer. The service was grand and ecumenical, not ecumenical just among Christian denominations, but among all faiths as well. The theme of the gathering, in the preaching, in the singing and in the prayers...was the central theme of all the great religions of the world: that the world as God sees it rightly lives amid a just peace; that we live compassionately including the least of us; that we always serve first the common good. Upon this enlightened practice of the faith, we, the interfaith community have much in common....and it is practice from which true theology and belief are born....ever evolving...always on a journey of making and remaking....If the faithful in every culture practice the faith; then theologies will converge.

And then there was the procession out of the church, a decided Episcopal touch; we know about processions: Processions are the outward and visible sign that we are on a journey; that we are not the same travelers once we take our leave; that life is forever about change and transformation....and we hold up this reality as beautiful....human nature on a journey towards its perfection...a paschal event, as it were, a sacred crossing over from what has grown old into what is becoming new... We live our lives in this process and we name it as beautiful along the way.

And the procession goes out into the world...the community of the faithful, the people of imaginative conscience bearing this transforming beauty into the world, for the world's transformation...all of us now, a compassionate commonweal bearing God's life and love for the world's sake; taking on new travelers, some improbable companions, in this mystical journey, this process of becoming....and the predisposition for this manner of journey is sacrifice... (every traveler knows that) a profound act of humility wherein we embrace the very truth of the universe that in order to love God we must love neighbor first. This is the Gospel truth that is shared by all people of faith...and we see it coming to fruition in the practice of the faith...theology and dogma will forever be mere speculation....It is enlightened practice that saves...and it begins again with every breath we take.

"Stony the road we trod..."

Whether you voted red or blue this past election, there is no argument that this inauguration is one of poignant historic proportions. I was watching the Today show this morning and the soon to be official White House photographer was sharing some recent photos of the Obamas. I was struck with the image of the president elect with his two daughters in the Jefferson memorial; the three of them standing in front of this likeness of the American patriarch, founding father...white marble juxtaposed with brown skin. I realized that if the Obamas lived just two hundred and fifty years ago they quite likely would have been slaves....wives separated, sold at auction away from their husbands; parents separated from children; losing touch forever with family....a stony road indeed. I can't imagine what African Americans must be feeling now....joy, hope....liberation.

The entire sweep of Biblical narrative history, both Hebrew scripture and New Testament literature, is one long epic tale of God's vocation of liberation: the liberation of the people Israel from slavery in Egypt; the liberation from the Sinai desert sojourn; from the Philistine overlords; the liberation from the captivity in Babylon; from the oppressive Seleucids; liberation from Roman imperial indignity.....and liberation always begins on the margins, where it is most urgent; wherein it begins as renewal of community, the renewal of genuine human commerce. The way we have been forever meant to live. Community means that we forbear our differences in gracious hospitality; that we take care of our neighbor first; we feed and heal and clothe; the greater good being that which we serve; that violence will always be a lose/lose proposition....in short liberation always is engendered through sacrifice for the other.

All of us: the rich and the poor are in need of liberation; from that which binds our true creative predisposition, our true nature...self reliance is an illusion...our salvation is in community...the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is the Gospel formula, as it were, that we live first for our neighbor, and the mystery is: That is where we find life abundant...and the abundant life is for all, not just a few.

It seems to me that both political parties find themselves in renewal...a reality that has settled upon us; I have such high hopes...I hope not naive, not just because of another step towards liberation for our African American brothers and sisters; but for the liberation of all of us; we are all contingent to each other...a greater mysterious human organism, a powerful collective which in truth is the very body of Christ; and living within which we know intuitively that until all are liberated, no one is free....but perhaps soon enough.

Of Faith and Childlikeness

K and I were taking a walk late in the afternoon around the Episcopal Seminary campus in Austin last week, and we came upon two little girls who, outside their parents apartment in the driveway, had arranged a bed spread, pillows, stuffed animals, two dolls,a lamp, a table with a pitcher and two cups on it, two chairs beside; the worn chalky lines of an expired game of hop-scotch close by; the girls' hair long-escaped from the clasps and ribbons affixed by their mother earlier in the day. I asked them, "So girls, are you going to spend the night outside?" "Oh no sir," they said with youthful authority, "We are just playing." On the way home on Sunday morning several days later we were listening to the National Public Radio production called Speaking of Faith. I never get to hear this excellent broadcast because I am otherwise occupied Sunday mornings. The host, Krista Tippet, was interviewing the renowned child psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Coles about his vast experience studying the inner lives of children. What he had to say was astounding.

Children, he said, are far better models for us adults than we for them when it comes to spirituality. The older we get the more rational and rigid we become as we are conditioned by a culture that desperately seeks certainty. Children on the other hand are open to possibility; their imaginations always at the ready; and moreover, he said, children are passionate about discovery. They will go to great lengths and sometimes at great peril just to learn about the way of things; what things mean; why things are the way they are. Children are seekers par excellence. It is how we're all supposed to be.

All of us in the human family are created to make meaning of things. We are all discoverers. Our lives are predisposed to make meaning, not just for ourselves but for the sake of the world we serve. Jesus' counter cultural admonition to come into his fellowship as a child now takes on new meaning. We are as Christian folk to be about discovery, and that means we must be open to newness and possibility; we must be imaginative, ardent, courageous and passionate to seek to know and to share...the way children do. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...in seven joy filled days, God created them...to which God must surely say...I'm just playing.

Of Darkness and Light

In early religious Rites set at the winter solstice the ancients would gather at night and encircle a fire; they would sing and dance raising their fiery torches towards starry heaven and invite their God to come among them; to empower them to brace against the darkness that closes upon them....invoking God's presence...bidding God to descend again into the fray of life at the darkest time of the year. Indeed we need not look long or far to name the darkness that besets us in our time, as in every time.

This Christmas, set at the winter solstice appropriately, we will continue the practice of the ancients. We will gather around a fiery altar and proclaim God's presence with us in the person of Jesus, a fragile and vulnerable presence...but a presence to be sure. The scribes of the Gospel of John call this presence light...and that the light of Christ is in truth the light of humankind...that is a startling claim....that the light of Christ and the light of the human community are but one light...one light from the same source.

We, as people of faith, people of imaginative conscience, are therefore profoundly implicated in the Incarnation, the enfleshment of God in Christ. Through imaginative and compassionate practice of the faith, the way of Christ, the way of goodness, we are light bearers....bearers of the very fire of God to a darkening world. At Christ's birth the fiery ways of God are born yet again...and we too...we are yet born again into a vocation of light bearing...a vocation of enlightening our world...an unquenchable light vital for the world's salvation...a light by which all flesh will apprehend God's goodness and presence among God's beloved people....and this beautiful radiant light...this light from the source.... this light will cause even the darkness to sing and dance.

Of Singing and Significance

An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick
Unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium. From W.B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium


According to Augustine of Hippo, and later quoted by Charles Wesley, "One who sings prays twice." The songs and the singing from the Festival of Advent Lessons and Carols this Sunday past are still resonating in my head and heart and soul: the gentle soprano, the mellow alto, the harmonic tenor and sounding bass; each voice become artifice pointing to something or someone near, mysterious and profound.


Yeats the poet is seeking a way to marry the mortality, not just of humankind, but of the creation, to the eternal. His first premise is that it is art that bespeaks the eternal in the midst of a transient life, but the stunning discovery in this poem is that in singing, the singer becomes the artifice, the bearer of the song, and therefore participates in this illusive life eternal. Yeats is re-articulating the romantic high premise that beauty is truth and truth beauty...the means and ends of the eternal.


Indeed singing is a fine metaphor for the life of faith....all of us artisans in the courts of holy Byzantium imagining and building our world, still in its infancy, into what God imagines it to be. If the editors of Genesis had been paying closer attention when they wrote and rewrote the stories of creation, they might have been careful to note that God didn't just speak the world into being; rather the world was sung into being....the singing voice of God begetting the graceful rhythm and harmony of the universe...God's song moving over the face of the deep, ordering the world into a significant ineffable beauty...and we, heirs of the same song, still singing the same song....the song from the source...the song that moves the spheres of the universe entire...the song that will resonate in heaven and earth, the one Soul, forever....and its name among many names is love...love palpable and audible...love that transforms and saves and creates...love that redeems the tatters of the mortal dress of all ways and all things... So even if you think you can't sing...for God's sake sing.

Of Heaven's Advent

The great German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, makes the assertion that the Christian faith and life is a perpetual Advent, that we live in an eschatological tension between a certain hope of God's saving presence, and God's final consummation of heaven and earth, a time when God will be "all in all." I want to suggest that Moltmann's premillennialist sensibilities get the best of him. Premillennialism is the theology that we all live in a fallen state, in a spiritual winter, as it were, until the rapturous coming of Christ to set all things right; in the meantime we wait in hope for this decidedly future event.

This theology is pervasive in popular western Christianity, and I think it encourages a passive life of faith, a life of faith that only looks to a future manifestation, and we are rendered somewhat powerless by it. This is a predisposition for projecting our responsibilities as people of faith onto an aloof God decidedly absent from creation, or at least most of the time.

I want to offer a different take on the concept of God's Advent. Yes, the Christian faith and life is a perpetual Advent, but this coming is happening as we speak; hope and salvation breaking into present time. "What do you see? " John the Baptiser asks Jesus' would be disciples who wonder whether Jesus is the real deal or not. "We see the sick being healed, the poor being clothed and sheltered and fed; the marginalized dignified; we see justice for the dispossessed and outcast," they answer. (my paraphrase) This coming, this Advent is not just about the coming of Christ, the incarnation of God with us, but this Advent first and foremost is about a way of life breaking into the world, Jesus the archetype for such a life; and the means of this Advent rests with us and all people of faith bearing the life blood of this kingdom of God; we and all people of faith, the new Incarnation, the means of the way of heaven in earth. Advent is about the coming of the Way of Jesus, a way in which we participate with all our heart, and soul, and mind; and when the way of the kingdom of heaven is enacted by the people of God, then the kingdom comes now, and we see it in the flesh, a present, beautiful and glorious reality....We see that even now God is all in all; indwelling God's people....E'en so Lord Jesus, quickly come.