Lions and Lambs and Climate and Forests

Today's Old Testament lesson (Isaiah 11:1-10) is the one that promises that the wolf shall live with the lamb and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. In my psychology class I teach about altered states of consciousness. This altered vision of reality must come from some such altered dream state, as we all know that a wolf would not be a wolf if it didn't prey on animals like sheep, nor a lion a lion if it wasn't a carnivore. This is not a description of some possible state where everything works the way it is supposed to. In fact, predators and prey, scavengers, even the worms, bugs and microbes that feed on decomposing bodies, are part of what we recognize as the natural order of things that we mess with at our peril. No, this is metaphor that speaks to something much more real than our physical world and it's order, it speaks to our greatest fears and vulnerabilities. In Isaiah's time, just the sheer vulnerability of life would have been constantly in the forefront. Things could change in an instant; dangers from wild beasts and poisonous snakes, but also from wars and cruel leaders and simply man's inhumanity to man. Perhaps today the stark fear of violent death is less an issue than for our ancestors, but we too have dreads that sit at the pit of our stomach and cause us untold anxiety. What will we do when the climate is changing more rapidly than our infrastructure can handle? When the rainforests are all gone? When there are no more wild fish in the seas? In church this morning, one man's t-shirt read; "Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money." Perhaps these concerns are the lions and bears and adders and asps of our time -- the forces outside our carefully circumscribed lives and beyond our control that we know, even as we know they are forces of nature that are not inherently evil, still threaten to bring us harm and destruction.

So, what does Isaiah pose as the cure for our very real and rational fears about the potentially destructive natural forces in life? I find it to be an enigma. Buddhists would say that one must realize that it is both all an illusion and that it is all one -- one creation of which we too are part of the whole. To accept the true nature of things, avoiding attachments that deceive us into wishing permanence for that which is inherently temporary, is to free one's self from suffering. But here in Isaiah, we are told that the cure is in moving from rightness to righteousness. "He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth." Perhaps he is saying that our fears of the destructive natural powers are not so much about the natural order of things after all--that they are displaced. Might our anxiety actually stem from all the ways that we fail to live up to our ideals? Do guilt and shame transform the uncertain and very temporary nature of our lives from something that just is into something fraught with terrors and menace? Can the simple word of truth ("he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked") turn everything back around?

--AnnBarbie

Epiphany for Advent

I had an epiphany yesterday. Not a very big one; in fact I suppose what I realized should go pretty much without saying. Nevertheless, it was one of those major shifts in thinking that makes so much seem to slip into place -- the big "Aha!" moment.

I am reading Karen Armstrong's "A History of God" and, as always when I read this kind of book, I found myself agreeing with many of the perspectives presented from multiple different religions. I wondered again what I actually believe, considering how easy it is for me to identify with -- actually inhabit -- so many of the beliefs of others. What I realized was that I have been asking the wrong half of the question. It's not the belief that is at question, it is the I. I am not the same person today that I was even yesterday, and will be a different me even 5 minutes from now. Why should I expect what each of these selves believes to be exactly the same?

Most of us believe that whatever we take to be the ultimate, to be supreme ("God," many of us call it), is "the same yesterday, today, and forever," and we generally even agree that each of us seeks and worships this same ultimate; even though we go about it in many different ways. I call myself Christian because that is the tradition I am steeped in, my cultural background, my practice, the path that I use to get to the point of transcending paths completely. But, as I learn more about other perspectives, particularly as I learn to love and identify with people whose background is from those other perspectives, I find myself increasingly seeing and experiencing things through those other perspectives as well. The inconsistency is not in the belief but in my sense of a stable I. As I have attempted to learn the art of compassion, of truly "feeling with" another, my sense of who I am has gotten a bit frayed around the edges. I am also whoever I am feeling with, the ones I am learning to love "as myself." Erikson thought that the choices of advanced age are between ego integrity and despair. While I agree with him that ego integrity (knowing and coming to terms with who we are and all that we have been in life) is important, I think there is also a process of ego dissolution that comes into play, at least for some; the realization that we are part of each other to such a degree that the idea of a separate self seems almost an illusion. Thus also, the question of what I believe is an illusion -- both nothing and everything, and all at once!

This epiphany -- realizing that it's simply the nature of my ever-changing I to believe with others in the measure I identify with them -- makes the lessons today on Jerusalem (Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122) particularly poignant. In each passage, Jerusalem is lifted up as a place of peace where God teaches his ways to all the peoples -- "Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity with itself." These words should be true! All those who fight over this city and the places of God within it claim to believe ultimately in the same God. In Jerusalem we have the opportunity, unparalleled in any other place in the world, to prove the truth of that claim. If we could only learn to employ the discipline of seeing things compassionately, through each other's eyes... Therefore, my Advent discipline: " Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: 'May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers. For my brethren and companion's sake, I pray for your prosperity. Because of the house of the Loud our God, I will seek to do you good.'"

--AnnBarbie

Quick Thought

Way too much to do this week, but just a quick thought from today's reading.

Jeremiah 23: 1-6 has the Lord saying, "then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing (emphasis added)." We know that not every one who is driven out into foreign lands comes back -- history is such a long recitation of all those who were widow and orphans and strangers and dispossessed, who perish far from home and seemingly without the attention of the God who we believe makes covenant with us. So, what does it mean that not any shall be missing?

As I was preparing for class this week, I was confronted in the textbook with one of the famous photos from Abu Ghraib; the one where a US soldier stands holding a leash over a naked and fallen prisoner with a dog collar around his neck. Both are figures who, as scripture reminds us, are made in the image of God -- infinitely precious -- in front of whom angels would bow down and call out "make way for the image of God." Both are tragically alone and lost, with eyes that haunt; the torturer and the tortured locked in an intimate interaction that profanes everything we profess to believe about being human. I dearly hope that is a God somewhere, of some type, who is in the business of insuring that not any shall be missing-- that there is some hope for finding one's way back for any of us, for all of us -- to wholeness, to reclaiming one's humanity and dignity, even to recognizing the image of God in each other.

Does God collect all the lost and lone --regardless of how far they have strayed or been driven out -- who would otherwise disappear from the face of history? Does God preserve their essence, the part that is "in God's image," for some greater cosmic truth that we can't quite grasp? Is no one ever actually beyond the watch and protection of the shepherd, no matter how much it may seem like it? And it DOES seem like it! The statement in Jeremiah reminds me of my favorite line from one of the Prayers of the People in our Book of Common Prayer, in which we pray "for all who have died in the communion of your Church, and those whose faith (and we could add, whose pain, whose motivation, whose confusion, whose fear) is known to you alone, that, with all the saints, they may have rest in that place where there is no pain or grief, but life eternal."


--AnnBarbie

It Isn't Eschatology?

The lections for today contain various passages that are considered to be eschatological in nature. Whether we read Isaiah 65 ("For I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it.") or Malachi 4 (" The sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents."), the Old Testament passage promises a day ahead when everything will be alright. In contrast, the Gospel passage (Luke 21) tell us "When some were speaking about the Temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, 'As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.' ... They will arrest you and persecute you. ... [Only] By your endurance you will gain your souls." Everything is not (at least by our usual way of reckoning) going to be alright!

Of course, in many ways the prophesy of Jesus in Luke 21 has already been fulfilled. Not only was the actual Second Temple destroyed in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the stones of what was still at that time a common Abrahamic faith (in the One God we all still claim to worship) have also fallen far apart with cataclysmic destructive force. And even in our separate traditions, the unifying edifices we've attempted to build or rebuild have repeatedly fallen apart into more and more splinters of antagonistic new modes of understanding. The stones could not be more completely knocked asunder! But, if you read further into Jesus' message, it doesn't look like he is talking about a single event or even events that we could ever say are over and done. He seems to think, and certainly the Church has so interpreted his words, that this message is for all of his followers in every age; that it will be our common lot to face some sort of dreadful test to our faith and our endurance in following God's will.

The Old Testament passages at first glance seem the more straightforwardly eschatological -- after all, we certainly don't have a Jerusalem right now that all peoples can call "a joy" and "its people a delight." We still need "a sun of righteousness" to "rise with healing in its wings" -- we need it desperately. In fact, I think we need it too much for us to risk dismissing these passages as references to some time yet to come. These words will never be true if they are not true now, somewhere in our inner vision, in our sense of the possible, in our sense, perhaps, of a truth that is truer than the reality of our senses.

What I suggest is that these two conflicting prophetic visions of faith in the God of Abraham are jointly visions of where we are and where we need to be, each and every day. If, to invoke Ray Cummings, "time is what keeps everything from happening at once," perhaps faith is a place where truths can dispense with the strictures of time and space, and be held in a paradoxical unity. The Isaiah 65 ideal of harmony with God is exemplified in the holy spaces of Jerusalem--the Glory of the Temple of Solomon, the Temple where Jesus worshiped and taught and defended the faith, the great Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock; it all can and must exist together forever, as I see it, outside of corrupting time and history, as physical manifestations of our collective faith(s), our mutual commitment to this prophetic vision, and the link(s) between our reality and God's. We can strive to achieve that existence and unity in God that is outside and beyond time and space, to build it in our minds and hearts, but I think only in so much as we are also always tearing down and throwing apart all those stones that we have just so laboriously put together. There is a reality that is perfect, the culmination of all that God has in mind for us and that we seek in God, but each human attempt at achieving that dream is imperfect and insufficient -- to be taken down, reexamined, revised and reshaped; always striving, never finished.

November 3 was the 410th anniversary of the death of Richard Hooker, the foremost theologian of the Anglican tradition and the person most responsible for our emphasis on reason as an equal leg (with scripture and tradition) on the "three-legged stool" of our particular branch of the faith. Reason always requires this examining, this rooting around in and through the foundation stones of our faith--unearthing, upending, recutting, repositioning, even starting over. Whenever I think that I have finally settled some question of theology or belief, I only find myself questioning it again as I encounter something challenging and new, beyond my previous experience. I know that there is an ultimate reality that is true, that is God, and I know that somehow I hold this truth in the center of my being. Nevertheless, my deliberate approaches, the ways I understand this with my mind, go off in all the wrong directions, never hit the mark--my "beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God" only worthy to be taken apart, thrown to the ground, and reassembled again and again. Perhaps where Hooker leads us is to understand that the faithful are meant to be a little like Sisyphus, always and ever in struggle; destined for a lifetime of frustrating attempts at perfecting our souls in an impossible task that, in another reality, a truer reality, we know has already been accomplished.

I think that if we could wrap our minds fully around this paradox we'd find some way to struggle through this together, as fellow travelers, with hospitality and mutual support, rather than always be tearing at each others' throats. But, how to proceed ...

Ideas?

--AnnBarbie

The God of the Living

We had a baptism today at church. While always a delightful event, this involves one bit of Episcopal common worship with which I have quite a lot of difficulty -- we had to recite the "I believe" form of the Apostle's Creed.

I don't have any problem reciting the "We believe" form of the creed -- good since we do it almost every week. I feel fully a part of a Church that has used this creed to describe our common faith for centuries. It is a statement of Christian doctrine that has held us together as a people: that we have believed, that we do believe, and that we will believe at least until such time as the Church jointly revises the statement to reflect some future common understanding of our faith. I value it and ponder it: what does it mean when we say "he ascended into heaven"? In another day, "heaven" meant the dome of the sky and/or the universe as it appears in the night sky, while today "heaven" connotes something much different. How do we understand the word "virgin"? Do we all believe, and have we always believed, that Mary conceived Jesus without engaging in sex? Or, was she a young girl, innocent of having done wrong, willing to be vulnerable in the service of her God? Can I "get away" with believing that? (My mom thought not! One of our few really tense discussions about faith...) What is "life everlasting" and does it happen now, or at some time in the future? I can assert the creed as our common faith declaration and still entertain all these questions without feeling like I have lost my anchor.

I have a lot more problem when the creed gets up close and personal in the "I believe" form. Sometimes I don't recite it at all, because I'm not sure I do believe it. I'm positive I don't believe what some people believe, not sure that I believe enough to even be considered a good Anglican (and that's really saying something, since in general it's perfectly fine for Anglicans to be all over the map on matters of theology). At the same time, I can't say that I don't believe it, or even any part of it. I'm just not sure how I believe it. Take the "resurrection of the body and the life everlasting" bits. I can't find it possible to have hope of there being anything waiting to be discovered after I die. I tend to believe -- perhaps more with the typical Jew than with my own coreligionists? I am not sure why this should be -- that the purpose of religion, of God, of salvation and redemption, is in the here and now, the life of the community, the finding of meaning in the human condition, and in the healing of the world. I feel like the love that we give, the contributions we make, the people we help to grow into their own maturity and contributions -- all those live through us and after us as a kind of eternal (or at least until the end of the human era) life. Today's Gospel (Luke 20) talks about God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as "the God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive." (vs. 38). Are they living on some "other plane of reality" as physical beings in heaven? Or do they live -- really live, truly alive for us -- in our collective understanding of their stories and how we have incorporated them into everything we are and aspire to be as a people? To me, it's the latter, and to me the latter is so much more powerful an idea, so much more real. Whether that is enough or not, it is all I can find myself able to believe about eternal life.

The closest I can come to an idea of a "resurrection of the body" is a conviction that the dual concept of spirit vs. body isn't quite "it." That idea is too closely associated with the belief that body is bad, to be resisted or denied, and that spirit is good only in the measure that it is pure and disembodied. I am more of a panentheist -- I believe that God is the source of as well as a part of, actually the very essence of, every part of nature; so that the very molecules that are my body are also eternally of God or animated by God. Earlier in this blog I wrote about how, with the constant recycling of our molecules, we and those we love are "uniquely, separately ourselves, and we are unimaginably, inextricably entangled." In reality, the physical I that I am today is not the same I that I was yesterday or that I will be tomorrow -- I, the physical reality, am constantly changing, morphing into something new, and I , or the bits of matter that currently make up the I that I am today, will someday be someone or something quite other. Perhaps we shall eventually all return to be incorporated back into the God that is the source of all and yet beyond all, creator and sustainer of all, eternal inhabitant of timeless time and spaceless space. Is this the resurrection of the body? All I know is that, when I took my beloved Butte, hopelessly ill cat companion of nearly 14 years, to be euthanized this week, I leaned in and breathed in her last breath -- wanting to keep her with me, incorporate who she has been to me into my own molecular structure.

We do our best. All the theology in the world, and all the pondering of what it means and if I can believe it -- it's all inadequate when we stand naked to the reality of love and loss. Thank God for poets, who sometimes manage to put into words those things that, nevertheless, cannot be said in words:

...remembering

Again the loss of you who stayed long

Enough to enrage my heart, short enough

To sound it with natural laments of you*


--- AnnBarbie

* Raficq Abdulla, private communication (Nov 11, 2010)

Let's Argue it Out

Caveat: The approaching election is obviously getting to me, so don't take this one too seriously, and definitely not too literally...

The Lectionary Page that I use to review the upcoming Lessons for each Sunday uses the New Revised Standard Version. I notice that for Oct 31 the Isaiah chapter 1 passage is translated not "Come, let us reason together," like I grew up hearing, but "Come, let us argue it out, says the Lord." I feel a lot more like arguing it out with God today than I feel like reasoning, and so am very glad to see this invitation.

I've had a bone (or a whole spinal column of bones, actually) to pick with God for a long time. I have a severe case of juvenile idiopathic scoliosis, the kind that would have killed me given half a chance, and the kind that, no matter how well they corrected it when I was a kid, still leaves me as a "hunchback," a "cripple," or, as Leviticus 21 calls it in good Elizabethan English, "crookbackt" -- someone who might "profane the sanctuary."

Why would God create someone who was inherently, through no volition of their own, just by their very nature, fated to "profane the sanctuary" if they were to be accorded the privileges granted to others? Is God perverse? And more to the point for me, can't the God answer for Itself? My grandmother prayed for my healing every day -- made me pray with her -- agonized over her little faith or my little faith being the thing that prevented me from being healed. With all that she put into believing, and as much as I tried to believe for her, you'd think that if God was in the business of healing at all, it would surely have happened. Instead of the joy she anticipated each time she decided I was going to be healed this time, my being me caused her nothing but anguish and brought great doubts about her faith. That's another thing to argue about, God! I really loved her, but it didn't turn out so well, did it?

That bit about God answering for Itself is the rub for me, most of the time. I've actually given up asking this question of other people -- except now I will throw it out into the aether, where I fear my blog electrons perpetually swim in a sea of indifference. At least here I don't expect an answer. But, whenever I ask it of a friend, however close, I have come to expect yet another defense of God. Is God so weak that It must have men (and women) to defend It at every turn?

I asked myself the other day what kind of an answer I have been looking for, what is it that I continue to seek, and continue to set myself up to be denied yet again every time I broach this subject? I guess just a hug; an "I understand"; maybe someone to add a voice to mine and also question, "Hey God, what IS up with that?" This disagreement seems pretty lopsided -- would it be too much to ask to have a few on my side? I don't think God really needs all those defenders.

So OK God, step up to the plate -- without your cast of thousands. Just you and me, let's argue it out!

--AnnBarbie

Finding a Place of Springs

One line from the Psalm in today’s lections (Psalm 84:5) actively leapt off the page and grabbed me as I read it: “Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs.” I had thought of this as God’s presence replacing/overwriting desolate valleys with springs of water, but things I’ve been reading lately make me wonder whether it, instead, means that the springs actually require the desolate valleys as raw material from which they may eventually well up in us.

I guess this needs some explaining. I’ve been reading the just released book Discovering the Spirit in the City (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), for which my dear friend Raficq Abdulla has contributed a chapter. In addition to Raficq’s delightful essay [that goes without saying!], I found the contributions of Pádraig Ó Tuama and Mark Oakley to be profoundly moving. These two write with such compassion and grace, and seem particularly able to illuminate both the best and the worst of the human experience as we wrestle with the God we perceive as involved in and, perhaps, central to our being. I thought how wonderful and how valuable for the rest of us that there are such people who can enter so deeply into the experience of being human, and help us to see it in it’s fullness; from tragic to glorious, mundane to transcendent, and all things in between.

At the same time, I found myself reacting in frustration because they are both gay, and much of the compassion and vulnerability I sensed in them seemed to be bound together with the bitter pain of rejection and alienation they had both experienced in trying to serve God as a gay man in the Christian church. I’m not mad at them for being gay; I’m mad at the rest of us for not being more like them – so that not every damn time I discover someone who seems to fully embody the spirit of love that I believe to be God, they turn out, invariably, to be gay! I worry that then when I write, as in this blog, “Oh, these writers are great, you must read them!” people will just dismiss the recommendation with the thought that “They’re probably nothing special; those queers just stick together.”*

So, I had these frustrations in mind when I read the lections, and for the first time I thought, “Whoa! Maybe you can’t get to the point of being a ‘place of springs’ unless you actually go through the 'desolate valleys.'” Perhaps the thought is not so much replacing the desolation but transforming its essence into something beautiful and life giving.

Lately, in response to a recent spate of disturbing suicides, there has been a media campaign with the message “It gets better” (sponsored by the It Gets Better Project) and aimed at vulnerable gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender teens. The messages have been mostly oriented towards convincing desperate teens that their lives will be happier and much easier to navigate in the future – if they will only consent to stay alive long enough to find that out. Additionally, it may very well be these teens, who go through so much desolation in their bullied, taunted, dehumanizing valleys of despair, that will transform themselves into pools of living water for all of us in the future; our healers, priests, counselors, prophets and spiritual teachers – if they remain alive long enough to find their own unique "place of springs." For our own sakes as well as theirs, lets hope (and work towards making sure that) they do.

In the meantime, where are the desolate places in my own life that perhaps I can begin to transform into my own “place of springs”?

--AnnBarbie

*Whatever term one might ultimately create to define an appropriate demographic for me, because I am married to another woman people perceive me as lesbian. However, in this case I can’t claim the same early trauma that g/l/b/t youth generally experience, so I don’t feel that I writing about myself here.

Are We All In This Together?

Kathleen Norris, in her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2001), says something so profoundly true for me that I've quoted it over and over in the decade since she wrote and I read that book: "We go to church in order to sing, and theology is secondary." I thought of her again this week as I drove alone the 10 hours from home to DC. Per usual, I sang and carried on imaginary conversations in my head with people I've been reading or thinking about. Since I've been doing so much thinking lately about other religions, religion and politics, and interfaith dialog, I found myself wondering how I would explain being a Christian to someone from another faith. I realized that the best explanation I could give would be to just sing for them, all the songs I learned as a child as well as the ones I sing now. In my mind I thought of how my favorites have changed over the years as I have changed, and how I still relate to all the music on so many different levels. Theology is truly secondary -- that part of Christianity is all in my head. Music, and singing most of all, is the realm of my whole being.

And so, I sang. My voice only lasted for about 5 hours, but my repertoire of Christian hymns and songs could easily have carried me through the 10 hour trip without delving too far into the territory of "um's" and "la, la, la's" when I forgot the words. This heritage is that much a part of me. Nevertheless, what the songs say to me changes over the years as I change and, particularly, as I have become more aware of the perspectives of others. One of the first times I became particularly disconcerted about the words to a familiar hymn was when the Methodists decided that maybe Rise Up, Oh Men of God should be retired from regular Sunday worship. I was still young and it was new to me to question what it means to have the whole church singing as though only the MEN of God matter. But even though I never consciously felt excluded, the discussion made me realize that when I, like all the other kids of my acquaintance, played Knights of the Round Table or dreamed of going on the Crusades, I always wanted to be a Knight or even the King. I had no use for the women's roles and refused to play one in my mind or in our games. I had internalized our society's message that only men could grow up to do great and wonderful things. Of course, these days I am also squeamish about those Crusades that I so wanted to go on as a child. Though I still love the "DUM, dum, DUM, dum" rhythm of Onward Christian Soldiers, I cringe when I sing it not only for the lasting damage those historical episodes wreaked on Christian/Muslim/Jewish relations, but also for my comfort in adopting a decidedly militaristic outlook. Did I love the music I sang as a child because it reflected my very narrow world view? Or did the music I loved unconsciously write these attitudes so deeply on my soul that is has taken a lifetime to pry them up from under that bedrock and examine them in the light of day?

Whatever the cause and effect, my attitudes continue to require a lot of soul-searching and frequently go through sea changes that leave me reeling. It is still the music I sing that serves as my touchstone for interpreting these changes. During my trip, one of the songs that came to mind was John Prindle Scott's setting of Come Ye Blessed Of My Father. For a trained-but-not-spectacular singer like me it's a great solo piece. It's not vocally challenging and is both emotional and accessible -- the kind of music people like to hear. It's always been one of my favorites to perform, but I suddenly realized that I am not going to be able to sing it anymore, at least not until I can sort out my new antipathy towards the words. The song, if you don't know it, is a setting of Matthew 25: 34-36 ("I was hungry and you gave me meat ... naked and you clothed me ... sick and you visited me ... I was in prison and you came unto me.") The prison part, in particular, feels all wrong.

I've been teaching in the local men's medium security prison for several months, and am having the time of my life with "my guys." It's a great job, but it is also just that -- a job. I react viscerally when I tell people about my new job and they respond with, "What a ministry!" It happened again this morning. I mentioned my job and someone at church remarked, "Oh, I know a pastor who does prison ministry. It must be so rewarding." But it's not just that I don't "do prison ministry," on some fundamental level it seems just plain wrong to think of "ministering to" anyone. There's such an implied power dynamic, a "higher" and "lower" that I think has no basis in reality and no place in a healthy world view.

The truth, to me at least, is that I am a teacher. I can't be a teacher without students, and I need them at least as much as they need me. The fact of their incarceration is incidental, and I would also say, quite arbitrary. "My guys" are not much different than any other group I have known or taught. Some of them I would trust with my life, others no further than the edge of my field of view. Some I like, some not so much. Some work hard, some hardly work. Nevertheless we are all in it together, we are all part of each other. We would not be the same class -- we would not be whole -- with any one of us missing. That's just the way it works.

I guess what bugs me about the Prindle Scott song setting is that it seems to interpret the passage as God promising us a reward for doing good; God saying, "Come inherit the kingdom because you did all these good things!" I don't see it that way. Definitely not now. Especially not the prison part. I think the meaning of the passage resides in vs. 40 where Jesus says "as much as you have done this to the least of these, my brothers, you have done it to me." In other words -- or at least in my words -- whatever I do for anyone, anywhere, is both to and for myself and, in a wider sense, to and for God because we are all a part of each other and the image of God resides in us all. It's about "if you don't love your brother, whom you have seen, then how can you love God, whom you have not seen?" (1 John 4:20) And it's about looking for that sister or brother not only among those we admire, emulate, and wish to know, but also among all those that society tells us are underprivileged, outcast, and even beneath our notice.

In the song, the emotional center -- the high point -- is where the line crests at the word "came" in the line "I was in prison, and you came unto me" and then in its quiet echo "you came unto me." I'm going to be uncomfortable singing that until I can figure out some way to effectively convey to the people who accuse me of "ministry" that it would be just as profound a spiritual message to sing, "I was a teacher and you listened to me, you learned something from me!"

Who is Lovable, and Why?

For the past couple of weeks I've been thinking a lot about what it is that makes a person lovable.

Today's Old Testament lesson (Amos 6:1a, 4-7) and Gospel lesson (Luke 16: 19-31) seem to indict us not so much for our riches and luxury, but for our failure to love (Lazarus, in the New Testament, who was at the rich man's gate every day hungry and covered with sores; failure to grieve over the ruin of Joseph in Amos). We even sang a hymn promising God to "hold your people in my heart." But, as much as I might like to THINK that I mean it when I make such promises, that I can love a people or love humanity, it only takes one instance of the particular -- one person I can't love -- to trash that house of cards and prove to me that I am nowhere near that attainment. At least, I personally think that one can only meaningfully love "humanity" one person at a time -- alternatively, that the measure of how much I love "humanity" is whether I am able to love the specific example of humanity that may be on my plate an any particular moment. The Buddha, the Dali Lama, other saints may have gotten there, but I am still far away from affirming love in every instance. And yet...

I should digress to say that I am not, when I talk of love, talking about sexual or romantic attraction, or about affection based on similar interests, compatible personalities, family bonds, etc. I mean the "your neighbor as yourself" kind which really approaches the dissolving of my individual, ego-bound need into a space where the other's need, desires and priorities are equal to my own. I am nowhere near where I want to be on this capacity, and yet I do love -- often easily, sometimes surprisingly intensely.

Why are some people so easy to love and others so difficult? As the class I taught this summer came to a close I asked myself this question concerning my students. As usual, some I had come to care for very strongly. Most I felt that I had at least connected with to some degree. But a few I found it really difficult to love. I decided that whom I loved had very little to do with whether they were good students or even good people. [I teach in a men's medium security prison; it's not always a stretch to imagine why they are there, or to imagine that they may be back pretty quickly even when they finish the current sentence. They are not necessarily what society would call "good" men, but many are still eminently lovable.] It's not a matter of personableness or likability -- some of the most socially awkward and withdrawn sparked a real passion within me, and some of the most entertaining were difficult to respond to at any level of depth. While it might be a matter of need -- it's always nice to be needed and sought out for advice -- that also doesn't explain it. I loved some who needed me, but others who were entirely self-sufficient and academically so advanced that they needed me not at all, except to validate their pre-existent capability with a formal grade.

On the same question in another venue, I thought of the many speakers we heard at Chautauqua this year [I am not COMPLETELY over writing about the subject, but I think I am winding down now...], and of those who were especially memorable. Off that subset, there were a few who actually transcended memorable, and I simply loved.

A digression -- In Mark's telling of the rich young ruler visiting Jesus (Mark 10), he writes that "Jesus, looking at him, loved him." (verse 21). Hardly two sentences had passed between them (at least as Mark tells it), and Jesus just simply loved him. People slip under and around your boundaries like that sometimes, you're not looking and suddenly they are, deeply buried beneath your skin. How'd that happen?

So after pondering this all for a couple of weeks (and a lifetime, I guess), I have come to the conclusion that the essential factor in what makes people lovable, to me at least, is the amount they actually reveal who they really are. Huston Smith, in talking about the Jewish view of human nature, writes that "human beings, who on occasion so justly deserve the epiteths 'maggot and worm' (Job 25:6) are equally the beings whom God has 'crowned with glory and honor' (Psalm 8:6). There is a rabbinic saying to the effect that whenever a man or woman walks down the street, he or she is preceded by an invisible choir of angels crying, 'Make way, make way! Make way for the image of God.'"* I am reminded of this with my inmates; it's not whether they are "good" or "bad" people, whether they are trustworthy or manipulative, whether they try hard or goof off, but whether they reveal themselves to me or remain hidden behind their defenses and behind the person they want to project. Yes, that really fits! If they are open and I can understand, I can love. In a way, I can even see myself waiting and hovering around the edges of the boundaries of the people who withhold themselves from me, looking for a crack in the armor where I can catch a glimpse of the person, the "image of God," they really are.

Referring to the public speakers, I am reminded that the woman for whom I wrote speeches and presentations for 10 years was almost universally loved, despite whether we gave her good or bad material, whether she got her words crossed, knew her material thoroughly, or waxed eloquent -- or not. What she WAS was almost entirely transparent -- she could not be other other than who she is, no matter how she tried. She gave herself away to the audience (in both good and bad senses of the word, I guess), and they loved her for it. In the same way, at Chautauqua, the speakers I loved (in the above sense of the word) were just impossible not to love (I am thinking of Ken Burns and Ori Soltes, in particular), simply because they layer so much of themselves and their passion into their presentations that they transmit to the audience not so much thoughts and ideas but their own living souls. Hard NOT to respond.

So, I am left with a paradox. We all try, I especially, to present to others the person we'd like to be -- more, perhaps, than the person we are. But those projections, if I am correct in my hypothesis, are precisely what is KEEPING us from being lovable. However I try, the projection of the me I WANT you to see is flat and 2-dimensional, it leaves me dislocated from the "image of God" that is, warts and all, our birthright and nature. But, still, how scary to let that pretense go...

*Smith, H. (1991). The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Harper Collins, New York, NY. P. 323. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (first paperback edition), Lanham, MD. p. 280-281.

Addendum to "Tolerating the Intolerable" -- Godspell

After I wrote my Sept 5 post, I did more thinking about alternative interpretations of the ending of Godspell. While I am reluctant to interpret too far beyond what the show's creators intended, the modern (electric fence) crucifixion scene still leaves me feeling one can interpret it through the lens of the Holocaust and, even if not explicitly intended, find the questions thus raised provocative and potentially profitable.

I had written that perhaps the occurrence of the Holocaust (and, in general, humanity's repeated plunges into unfathomable evil) is an indictment of Christianity, and that we as Christians should ask ourselves whether two millennia (+/-) of our faith's dominance on the world stage has done us as a species all any good. I still think that's a valid question and, while hoping and believing that the answer is positive for Christianity, it's a question that I propose we should entertain more often than we do.

Another way to look at the symbolism, though, is as a comment on the parallelism of the Jewish and Christian sister religions. Soltes talks of the "relationship between Judaism and Christianity as siblings, children of the same Hebrew-Israelite-Judaean parent, each seeing itself as the legitimate child of that parent and the other as the bastard child."* Huston Smith counters that, at least in modern times, Christians have begun to view their sibling in a different light and recognize "the need for a continuing Jewish presence. Until the world is regenerated, the witness of a nation of priests remains relevant."**

Assuming, with Smith, that God has not been a fan of the primogeniture we two sibling traditions have been trying to assert to each other, it could also be interesting to ask if the play's ending draws an explicit parallel between the passion of Jesus and the Holocaust suffering of the Jewish people.*** However one comes down on the question, I think it might not be so bad to ask if the concept of redemptive suffering is commensurate in the two traditions -- more of a both/and than an either/or? If I were staging the musical, I think I would attempt to draw the parallel even somewhat explicitly, just to get people to consider the possibilities.

Anyway, just another thought...

*Soltes, O. Z. (2009). Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Searching for Oneness.

** Smith, H. (1991). The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Harper Collins, New York, NY. P. 323. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (first paperback edition), Lanham, MD. p. 18.

*** In particular, I am following H. Smith's assertion that "the deep meaning the Jews found in their Exile was the meaning of vicarious suffering" (p. 295), and that the traditional Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 53:4-6 ("he was wounded for our transgressions," etc.), where Christians see prophetic foretelling of Jesus' passion, is the that it points to the suffering of the nation of Israel on behalf of the world.

Tolerating the Intolerable

I'm not yet used to using the Rite One prayers that my little Episcopal Church here in the North Country still follow. Over time, the Episcopal Church has moved theologically to less groveling and more confidence in our public worship. Most of us now stand before God in the prayers and when receiving the Eucharist, instead of kneel in submission. And when we do confess our sins (which may be omitted), we confess only that we have done things we shouldn't and left undone things we should, and that we have not loved with our whole heart. We rarely talk to God anymore about our grievous sins provoking just wrath, much less "bewail" them. I do understand and generally agree with the Gospel of confidence, but I don't know, this week I still can't shake The Ashen Rainbow (Who could? --see my Aug 29 blog), and I wonder if sometimes we aren't just a little too quick to overlook our individual and collective capacity for utter, unqualified evil. What other episode in human history so clearly shows our talent for tolerating the intolerable, looking away when we calculate that the cost of truly seeing is more than we are willing to bear?


I also haven't been able to shake the image from the very end of Godspell where Jesus, who has been crucified on an electric fence is cut down and carried off on a bier to the chorus of "Long Live God." There doesn't seem to be any historical reason to believe that this musical was every associated in anyone's mind with Holocaust Art--nothing I could find, anyway. But the image for me of this buoyant and hopeful musical retelling of the optimism of the Christ story, which culminates with the death and subsequent exit of God on an electric fence, is a apt metaphor for the two millennia Christian experiment culminating with the death of 6 million Jews under the Nazi "final solution."


Before anyone gets too incensed, I realize that the Nazi ideology was thoroughly pagan, and that there were many Christian heroes and Christian martyrs who were engulfed in those years, and that many other groups besides Jews were targeted by the Nazis. I also think that neither God nor society have much need for self-indulgent brow-beating or even much in the way of active response at this point, except that we take up the responsibility for a clear eyed gaze at where we have been and where we might return if we again allow ourselves to cultivate the talent of the incremental tolerance of the intolerable.


But, I do say that thinking Christians would do well to ask ourselves whether this Christian experiment has failed. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were supposed to usher in a new age of the Spirit of God manifest on the earth in the community of the Church, God's new "light to the nations." Surely after a couple thousand years, it's reasonable to take out a tally sheet and ask, "Ok, overall impact: Good or bad? What's our score? Was there really something to this new cult of Jesus?" There is much on the positive side, of course, but there are these troubling little interludes like the Crusades and the Inquisition, for instance, or the subjugation of women, the defense of slavery... And, then, in the case of the Holocaust, there is the little problem of entrenched Christian antisemitism that cannot be explained away. If we sing Ein Feste Burg and take shelter in God's "Mighty Fortress," then we cannot overlook that Martin Luther believed and taught that the Jews are "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."* -- This is our Christian lineage; not an aberration, but the natural continuation of centuries of animosity and scapegoating that created a climate in which the utterly unimaginable and intolerable became inescapable history.

At the end of Godspell, Jesus cries out "Oh God, I'm dying" and the chorus answers "Oh God, you're dying." His lifeless body is carried off on the fence from which he was crucified, to the strains of "Long Live God," and a reprise of "Prepare ye the Way of the Lord." I hear the echo of "The King is dead. Long live the King!" and I at least have to ask, what is there to show that Christianity isn't dead and should be supplanted by some new, perhaps less tragically flawed religion? Are we an ultimately failed experiment in living out the incomparable vision of a great prophet who died too soon?

For me, the jury is still out on that question, although, on the other hand, I can bring myself to do nothing other than continue as a Christian. I am too thoroughly culturally grounded in Christian myth, symbolism, language, metaphor -- Christianity is so completely the vehicle that has conveyed me in my struggle to make sense of the world and my place in it that I don't think I could be separated from that identity and still be me. This background is still the filter through which I process and respond to the world. But, in all honesty, I still have to ask... And if, by some great mercy of the God I'm not so sure I still believe, the answer is that Christianity is still viable, then perhaps, on occasion, we would do well to be seriously troubled about the deeds against the "divine Majesty" of God's original chosen people that are on our heads and were (in the sense that we believe we are living members of each other in the community of believers) committed by our own hands:

"We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins

and wickedness,

which we from time to time most grievously have committed,

by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty,

provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.

We do earnestly repent,

and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;

the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,

the burden of them is intolerable.

Have mercy upon us!"

* Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies, 154, 167, 229, cited in Michael, Robert. Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 111.

More About Love...

"Love is not a pleasure garden, it is agony that leaps
Into your spirit, carries out its work that makes you dear
To yourself and to Him, ready to spark the Way in you
That lives beyond belief and unbelief, that merely reaps
Religious piety.  With love you shall change, make true
What your souls signify, singing psalms in the air with deep
Regard for the mystery that waits for you both out and in.
When you start the journey you wash away your shadow's sin."1

1. From The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, new interpretations by Raficq Abdulla.  Interlink Books, New York, 2003.

Always a Theological Question

This is reunion week in New Hampshire for Jan's and my (by marriage) family, an event we look forward to all year long.  In the reunion "down time" between meals and activities, I've been reading a book by Ori Soltes entitled The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust.  --Yes, it's a strange topic for what's supposed to be a relaxed, fun weekend.

A main thesis of Professor Soltes' book is that an event of the enormity and import of the Holocaust can never be understood solely through reviewing the facts and figures, knowing the details, reading the descriptions, or even through exhaustive and ongoing analysis; that the arts can present another way of knowing and interpreting what is and will remain an essentially unfathomable event in huamn history.  As if to prove his point, he has written a book that is engaging and well presented.  It fascinates and repulses, and prompts the thinking of new thoughts and the grappling with questions of enormous import. But at the same time, the book has it's greatest impact in the oblique comment, quote, or description that provides a flash of visceral insight, adding new layers of meaning or connecting on a level not possible through the intellect alone.

A second, less explicit but all the more deeply embedded thesis of the book is that all contemplation, discussion or analysis of the Holocaust is ultimately a theological question; Where was God?  Where is God?  Is there a God?  Is it morally possible to even believe in a compassionate God, a just God, in the face of such utter evil and the negation of everything we like to believe defines our humanity?  At the same time, if there are those who went through this worst imaginable manifestation of the world we create for each other and still wrestle with and affirm the Divine--still seek, and sometimes find, meaning even in the middle of a such a travesty--then who am I to so easily dismiss what they have proven with greater perseverance and sacrifices than I could ever imagine?

As ever, the contemplation of the Holocaust (or any of humanity's unfortunately all too numerous examples of atrocities that belie our clam to being "humanity") begs the question that has no answer, but that we must, nevertheless, try to comprehend.  How could such things happen?  Beyond the simple but powerful "fear of other," I think that three "biggies"are the malleability of memory, our need to be right and to think of our own actions as good and just, and the very human tendency to want our own suffering to be acknowledged first, before opening our hearts to respond with compassion to another's suffering.  It's disturbing that these tendencies are ones I recognize very strongly in myself.

Why is it that I am so stingy with compassion?  From childhood, where the excuse for hitting a sibling is, "but I was upset" or "I wanted what she had" to my responses to social injustices -- isn't it always, "but I have suffered too"?  When faced with the Holocaust, I shy away from knowing too many of the actual details, the too convincing proof that, as Soltes writes, "never before or since has the entire apparatus of a sophisticated state been turned so obsessively and completely toward the destruction of an entire people."  I want to be able to point to the suffereng that my family felt during th war; my uncles who fought, my German grandmother and family who bore the ill will of their community in the US because we were at war with Germany, even the small depravations that the "war effort" constituted for those who were so far from the true reality of that dreadful time.  I definitely DON'T want to ask myself what being Christian means, what being German means, in any context of culpability for any part of such a series of events.  Even in ultimate breakthrough, when the clear presentation in words and analysis, as well as in art and emotion, of the terrific magnitude of the suffering of the Jewish people finally unmakes me and I fall in awe out of my petty protestations before the unfathomable, there is still the insidious voice inside my head that whispers, "NOW do I deserve compassion?  Look how sorry I am, how sympathetic, how GOOD."

Even the idea that ordinary people did inhuman things because they succeeded in mentally dehumanized their enemy bears questioning.  Would it have been possible or necessary to devise more and more elaborate and cruel tortures if the Other were seen simply as nothing, less than a gnat to flick away?  To arrive at such an attitude about a fellow human being is in itself appalling, but if that were the whole case, why not simple efficiency?  Why the sadism and grim delight in mind games of the worst imaginable?  For some there may have been only simple indifference, but the imagination and cruelty that characterized the "final solution" could only come from intense hatred, the kind of hatred that is the tragic flip side to admiration and respect.  If I can recognize something in the other that I would wish for myself but do not possess, a quality I admire but cannot achieve, a light in another to which I pale by comparison, and if I cannot find in myself the ability to confront and be reconciled to my relative inadequacies, then I must hate.  Without humility, I must destroy what threatens to blow away the house of cards of my self-concept. 

The need to feel good about myself is so strong, so consuming.  Might I too be willing to destroy the other to preserve the pleasant fiction of my own goodness?  How would I even know where the line is drawn, to descend, but not TOO far?  When I do or say or feel something that I cannot call "good," I find myself immediately in need of finding an alternate reality, an alternate memory that puts me in the right, shows my action as just.  I realized long ago that my memory is altogether too malleable.  I am unnervingly accomplished, if I am honest with myself, at rewriting memory to erase what I can't countenance.  I can quickly bring myself to a point where I truly do not know what is truth and what is fiction.  I find I've rehearsed over and over the events until I am convinced of the goodness, the necessity of even my most unworthy deeds.  Yes, small self-deceptions to start with.  However, with layers upon layers of rewritten memories, what distortion of truth have I wrought?  In how many of those compromises will I hurt others to keep my self-justification intact?  Ultimately, what perversion could result -- Doesn't history give us enough examples?  And yet, I cannot seem to keep myeslf from repeating the "little" self-deceptions each new time I frighten myself with a glimpse of my own capacity for evil.

What would it take to live with the reality of those parts of myself that I simply cannot face?  I think I would have to believe in the existence of love. I would have to believe that to question myself is not the ultimate abandonment, not self-annihilation; that there is some "safe space" for my soul carved in the heart of an Other.  If there IS some Other who upholds and affirms my meaning and value then perhaps I can risk relaxing my own efforts at self-deception. 

And so, as Soltes predicts, my response to his book is to find myself confronting the ultimate question of theology, of God. And for me too, there is no easy answer.  If there is a Divinity, it does not make it easy.  There is no proof that love exists, that there is meaning, that there is any such thing as goodness, or immanence, or transcendence.  I feel no lightning bolt, see no signs.  I am no Moses visited with a burning bush, no Paul on a Damascus road... I am left only to consider and chose; to believe, or to trust in my own devices.  I fear, and yet my soul longs to believe, and my heart longs to be free, to love.
 

Repairer of the Breach?

This week I am still thinking about the House of Abraham and the almost impossible breach of these traditions as physically manifest in the conflict in Jerusalem.  I thought it was fitting that the scripture in the Lectionary picked up where my sister left off last week, in Isaiah 58.

Isaiah 58: 9f

If you remove the yoke from among you,

the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

then your light shall rise in the darkness

and your gloom be like the noonday. 

.

.

.

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;

you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;

you shall be called the repairer of the breach,

the restorer of streets to live in. 

Nowhere in the world do the foundations of so many generations contain so much shared, and so much conflicted, meaning and history than in Jerusalem, and there is nowhere that is so much in need of a repairer of the breach and restorer of the streets to LIVE in, not die in.  The city, in all our traditions, is a place of holy ground and a physical location close to the divine presence.  Yet it is a place where the buildings of one generation arise on the ruins of another, and supplant, sometimes by war or rebellion, one sense of the holy with an opposing tradition.  It is a place where the physical presence of the holy has become a stumbling occasion for even the members of the same tradition, who can't decide who is worthy to maintain a particular site and so allow it to deteriorate while arguing about jurisdiction. 

Perhaps those foundations we need to raise up are not the buildings themselves, however holy they are to our traditions, but those foundations that were destroyed by our original human breaches?  I believe this prescription we are called to fulfill can repair the breach back even so far as Cain with Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, the sons of Jacob, even to Peter and Paul, the 1st century Jews with the early Christians, and the misunderstandings of Islam with Judaism and Christianity.  And what is called of us?  Simply to stop repressing, stop maligning, stop pointing fingers, cease from speaking evil, treat each other with compassion and empathy, and look out for others and their needs even as I look out for my own.  It appears that to address these issues of deep theological and historical divide, all I have is a simplistic solution not much different that the "golden rule."  But, isn't that EXACTLY what it takes? 

We can not heal by agreeing.  As one of the lecturers I heard at Chautauqua last week [Ori Soltes; Georgetown U] reminded us multiple times that "None of us was there."  We have nothing other than our deepest held convictions to convince us of the "rightness" of our point of view, but we each have deepest held convictions that are different from each other.  None of us was there -- there are no objective, conclusive proofs to convince anyone who does not already believe that we are right.  We have generations of coerced and forced conversions to demonstrate the folly of insisting on "rightness" in the absence of conviction.  So if we cannot, with reason, hope to ever agree, how can we heal but through respect, empathy and even love for the other despite our not being able to see eye to eye? 

Having true empathy for another involves being able to step aside from my own perspective and convictions and feel what the Other feels from their own perspective.  It sounds dangerous and is dangerous.  I cannot, I believe, feel from the other's perspective and come back to myself unchanged.  But, that danger may be the thing I have to face in order to be a "repairer of the breach."  In the Buddhist tradition, a person who achieves enlightenment completely merges with the ultimate reality, losing identity as a separate entity in the ultimate reality which is non-self and perfect unity.  But,  a person can delay ultimate enlightenment and become a Bodhisattva, a person who is near enlightenment (or, some say, has already obtained it) but who delays ultimate sublimation into non-self to help other sentient beings realize their own enlightenment. 

I believe a similar type of empathy, a culture of Abrahamic Bodhisattvas, is needed, even required, from us in healing the relations between our three traditions (and our several political entities that are tied up in the problem).  It is possible to enter into the world of the other and yet retain my own identity; and without doing this how can I hope to know what is the truth, to avoid speaking evil or being thoughtlessly insulting, and to understand and attempt to meet the other's needs? I can't insist that anyone else enter into my world, and if I wait to enter theirs until I see that they are ready to commit to the same path, when will any healing ever get started?  If I believe it is right, I have to get started whether or not there is any to come with me, and whether or not I see any chance of success. 

I want to be a healer of the breach.  I want streets restored where we ALL can live in peace and mutual understanding.  I want us all to see and celebrate the common foundations of our most deeply held beliefs, even though they have diverged.  There is so much pain today, and so much more destined for tomorrow unless we act now to counter it.  I believe this passage gives us the only prescription with any hope to cure the disease. 

Honor in the House of Abraham?

So, the big question of the day in America seems to be, is there room in our hearts for an Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero?

On September 11, 2001, I sat in a Washington DC office just 2 blocks from the Nation's Capitol watching the news.  A plane had just flown into one of the World Trade Center towers in NYC and none of us knew what to think.  Surely this was some tragic accident of technology, mechanical failure, a horrible navigational mistake -- at very worst, the work of a lone extremist!  We struggled to go on with our usual routines while keeping one eye and both ears on the TV in the conference room.  One colleague left for a meeting across town, another returned to his office.  The secretary went to answer the phone.  I sat alone in the conference room watching the TV as a second plane flew into the camera's view and crashed into the second tower.  In the several seconds before the newscaster even knew what the world had seen happening on the video feed projected behind her head, my brain registered that this was no accident or isolated event.  We were at war.  Nothing would ever be the same.  I screamed for our secretary and we sat watching in stunned silence.  The news hit her in a way it could not touch the rest of our office.  She is Muslim.  As the first words of "Islamic terrorists" and "Jihad" began floating across the airwaves, she began to realize the profound changes that she and her family, her faith community, and her entire way of life would undergo.  Her first thoughts were for her children, attending Islamic school in the middle of the city, and for her family.  The rest of us worried about the process of being evacuated (The Pentagon had been hit and it was thought a 4th plane was headed for either the Capitol or the White House), the uncertainty of getting home (I walked for hours before finding a way out of the city), or about staying in contact with friends and family (cell phones were the only, and very sporadic, means of communicating).  She worried about when the retaliation would start -- would her children and husband make it home without harm, even alive?  Was she safe on the street?  When would the backlash start?  Would there be riots?  Would they ever be safe or feel accepted in this community again?  We assured her that her fears were groundless -- that this is America, after all!  Americans wouldn't turn on our own over something as senseless as this, would we?  Unfortunately, she was more prescient than we.

I did not understand at the time what a gift it was to experience Sept 11 with a devout American Muslim about whom I care deeply.  I had the privilege of experiencing from the first what so many have yet to realize, and some stubbornly refuse to realize:  this attack on America was in even greater part an attack on American Muslims, an attack on our co-existence and on the hard earned interfaith respect and collaboration that had been blossoming all across the US and across the globe.  But, although our hearts in the office went out to our Muslim friend, the hearts of so many of the American people began to turn away...

As bad as it was in 2001, the attacks on American Muslims and on Muslims of goodwill across the world seem to have gotten only worse.  Don't you feel a terrible urgency that something must be done?  I do.  I an convinced we must rescue the situation before we lose, catastrophically, all possibility of coexistence.

Some things are being done; more are needed.  Here in New York, The Chautauqua Institution designated the week of August 9-14, 2010 for the study and discussion of "Sacred Spaces," and I was extremely fortunate to attend.  The Department of Religion focused their several lectures on "Sacred Spaces: Jerusalem" with lecturers from Muslim, Jewish and Christian perspectives who eloquently argued for learning to respect and share this space that is sacred to all three of our family of traditions.  In addition to the Ground Zero dilemma, the powder-keg of today's Jerusalem threatening to erupt into violence between Palestinian and Jew confirm these topics of shared space, shared history, and mutual respect as some of the most important discussions of our time.  Our very survival as a species, even as a planet, could easily depend on our learning to understand and ability to respect and honor the Other in a shared search, but very individual approach, to the divine.

With the comments of Chautauqua's speakers still echoing in my mind, I listened this morning as my sister preached at her church, using as her text Isaiah 58: 9-10 (NIV quoted below) --
        ⁹ Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
       you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
       "If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
       with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
        ¹⁰ and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
       and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
       then your light will rise in the darkness,
       and your night will become like the noonday.
She spoke of a God who will bring us only as far as we are willing to go, but who wants us to commit everything that we have and are to "glowing in the dark," being a light to the nations.  That's actually a concept all three Abrahamic traditions share, especially as concerns Jerusalem as a tangible model of holiness and a "city on a hill" that shows its light to all nations.

I do not know how to promote true interfaith dialog and cooperation among our three sister faiths.  The Chautauqua lecturers were profoundly moving and are doing tremendous things, yet still too few and too far between.  Those who participated were inspired and grateful.  Yet still, it sometimes seems the only ones anxious to participate in interfaith dialog and collaboration are those who believe that one path is as good as another, that all paths lead to the same divine, that each faith is equally valid.  Their participation doesn't bring to the table the considerable factions, most probably majorities, in each Abrahamic faith who do believe in the exclusivity or at least preeminence of their own tradition.  What hope is there of engaging the necessary critical mass in interfaith conversations when the barriers seem so high?  I think my sister's text of Isaiah gives an important prescription:  First "do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk."

I am guilty of letting the yoke of oppression go unchallenged.  I am guilty of seeing and not deflecting the pointing finger, of hearing and not correcting malicious talk and slander.  How many times have I heard the charge that there are no moderate Islamic voices?  ("If there were, why did they not speak out against the terrorism?") And yet I sit by as the American Society for Muslim Advancement and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who have been passionately active in interfaith dialog and promoting peace and understanding since well before the 2001 attacks, are slandered in the current press as celebrating the triumphalism of extremist Islamists.  I hear the Qur'an misquoted or taken out of context to incite hatred and loathing.  I hear Sharia law twisted and presented as entirely backward and brutal.  In as much as I do not check it out for myself and I accept these exaggerations, these deliberate lies, I am guilty.  When I do know the truth and I don't speak up, I am guilty.  Whenever I stay silent and allow suspicion and rumor to rule the day, I am guilty.  Whenever I do not actively seek the truth, I am guilty.  I sit in my own self-righteousness and demand that the Other sacrifice for the sake of my convictions and sensitivities, instead of seeking to meet the Other more than halfway for the sake of our joint humanity.  I am guilty.

It may be that we can never agree on our faiths, perhaps never truly worship or pray together, but we can be, we must be, scrupulously honest in our our dealings and entirely just in our judgments.  Anything else is, for all three of our Abrahamic traditions, a travesty of our own beliefs and our shared beliefs.  We have this much in common, to commit ourselves to do justice and to love mercy.   Can we get to know each other as friends and siblings?  Can we perhaps ask of ourselves, in the pursuit of compromise, to give 60% and seek only 40% in return (understanding in our human frailty that this is how strict reciprocity generally feels)?  Might this be enough; to learn to love despite our differences for the sake of our similarities?  If our boundaries and our shared spaces were defended by mutual honor,  respect and affection instead of defensiveness and aggression, could we wage peace as actively as we now wage war?

Perhaps, as Isaiah implies, we will need to give even more.  What would it mean to spend myself on behalf of the hungry -- to seek to satisfy not my own needs, but the needs of the oppressed, the Other?   I can control only one tiny bit of the necessary currency, my own self.  I can't ask it of anyone else, and I can't know what contribution my bit of currency could ultimately make, but I can begin to ask myself what I am willing to sacrifice for peace.  Are you with me?

Which Way God? (Outside us or In?)

Looking at all the scriptures for the past few weeks in the Lectionary, particularly the old testament lessons, I notice how so much has been about whether God is angry and will punish, or will He stay his hand and be patient with His disobedient followers.  But, it's written, and I have always read it, as directed toward an external God that decides independently of his children how to reward or punish their actions.  An independent actor on the stage of life.

This distant God out there somewhere does not any longer represent my concept or experience of God.  In fact,  everything that I personally know of faith and spirituality involves a God that we are part of, that is in us, who works through us, out of whom we are created and to whom we return.  If this is true God, is there another way to read the message of these passages?  [Or at least, a better way to read these Old Testament stories (and some of the New Testament ones as well) with a modern spiritual sensibility?]

In Matthew 16:19, Jesus says to his disciples, "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."  Might he be saying that our actions and our decisions are the actions of God in this world?  We ask God to "let your anger depart from us." "Will you not give us life again?" "Show us your mercy and grant us your salvation."  Are we directing this cry outwards? Or perhaps inwards to ourselves and to our fellow believers?  We hold the keys to God's wrath and God's mercy in our own hands, attitudes, actions.  Such a reading would turn impotent railing against God or pleading with God into something more like giving ourselves a "good talking to" about getting our minds, hearts and actions in line with what we profess to believe and value.  Instead of groveling and pleading in our unworthiness, almost bribing God with our flattery, might it instead be the case that we are struggling between our true selves -- our best nature and our connection to the eternal light and love -- and the ways we continually disappoint and embarrass ourselves as we come short of that best self in all our illusions and blindness. 

This same type of thinking gives a different turn to the gospel lessons of the last few weeks as well--in  particular, the teaching about prayer and asking in persistence: knocking, seeking, searching.  Who are we asking and being demanding of except, again, our true selves?  So, it's not some God out there who will supply, but we receive out of our own persistence in demanding of ourselves all that we can bring to light of our true selves, getting beyond the illusions that hold us back, insisting of life fully lived.  If we want it, it is there but at the price of asking, seeking, searching, knocking, and persisting.

--Not a complete thought today, but what's been tumbling around in my mind this week.  Responsibility for being God, incarnated in me -- in you.  Something to think about...

Words to Live By?

Throughout the ages people have promoted simple phrases as suggested words to live by:  "What would Jesus do?"  "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."  "Love your neighbor as you love yourself."  "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty."  Even "walk softly and carry a big stick."  This week, I've been wondering whether there is a phrase I might offer to sum up my philosophy of life.  I think it would have to be, "It's not all about you!"

From a baby's first drawn breath, the oneness of child and mother gives way to an awareness of self, individuality, personal needs and wants, and the separateness those create from other beings.  At first, the world truly does revolve around me.   But very soon the child becomes aware of others and, at least in the normal course of events, begins to learn the basics of empathy and love.  Later still is the almost universal quest for meaning or purpose in this life.  But we inevitably find that the more we concentrate on me -- my needs and desires, my meaning, my legacy, my future, my fate -- the more elusive happiness, love and meaning become.

I think this is because we all need to learn the fundamental truth that it -- whatever is truly important and ultimately meaningful in life -- is primarily not about me.  It may be partially about me.  I'm there and a part of it all, something essential in the whole scheme of things, but I am only a part of a much larger whole.  I suggest that our search for meaning in life is only met when we finally learn that we are a part seeking the whole, and begin to seek and serve that sacred communion that only all things together can complete.  Thus, what might seem to be in my immediate self interest -- be it riches, physical well-being, achievement, recognition, accomplishment -- will not ultimately satisfy if it does not lead further toward communion and the realization of our collective interest -- the achievement of peace, justice and mercy (God's kingdom) on earth.  I am impressed by the message of community developed and lived by the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel after his and his family's tragic encounters with the Nazis in Germany.  He speaks of the stillness "full of demands, awaiting a soul to breathe in the mystery that all things exhale in their craving for communion.  Out of the world comes the behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God." [As I interpret it anyway, that is that the song for God, the thirst for God, the spirit of God, is the collective essence of all things craving together for communion.]  In today's gospel (Luke 11:1-13) it is "our father," "give us our daily bread," "forgive us from evil"... I believe this prayer at the most fundamental level asks us to own that God is communal, that none can know God in any meaningful way without intimate involvement with the rest of us, the whole of creation. 

Philosophers and psychologists have long argued about whether there is really such a thing as altruism.  Many argue that every action is ultimately an action of self-interest, even if only the need to feel good about one's self by performing what others consider to be selfless deeds.  But, if one truly believes that it is false to assume separateness and true that we are incontrovertibly connected to and part of all others, then there is no need for the concept of altruism.  To act for the benefit of others is to act ultimately, if not immediately, in my own interest, regardless of the impact of the action on my illusion of "separate self."  Certainly, from what I've seen of life, those who share this perspective seem to find more joy and meaning in this life than those who seek to attain their own immediate ends.  Today's gospel assures us that God wants to give us good gifts, and all we need to do is ask.  But, there's a subtle shift in the nature of gift at the end of the passage.  First, it talks about our asking for a fish or an egg, about how the Father gives good gifts just like we give good gifts to our children who ask.  But then it says, "How much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him."  Not, how much more with the Father grant our request, our wants, even our needs -- but the Father will give us the Holy Spirit.  The good gift -- the only gift that Jesus appears to be saying matters, the ultimate good gift -- is the Holy Spirit, the one that is "God in us," that is "the mystery all things exhale in their craving for communion."

I am constantly challenged [aren't we all?] with questions about how I should act, what I should do with my time and resources, how I should feel about slights and actions taken against me, how I should react to a sometimes cruel fate, as well as how I should react to life's great blessings and my good fortune.  These questions are where, to me, the "it's not all about you" phrase is the most practical. When I am hurt or angry, should I strike back?  If I am deciding about how to use my money, or spend my time ... where "the rubber meets the road."  Jesus, who is our incarnate example of God, the "I am," "emptied himself" and lived as a servant to others.  I know that I won't be satisfied very long with my behavior unless I constantly remind myself that "it" -- what matters, and therefore how I should behave,  use my energies, respond to the world -- "is not all about me."

Doing the Right Thing -- At the Wrong Time

Ever been absolutely sure you were doing the right thing, but had it all backfire in your face? There are days when it seems, as some people say, that you just can't win for losing. I'm sure that's how Martha felt when she gave the dinner party for Jesus that was the subject of today's Gospel (Luke 10:38-40).

In all honesty, I was mad enough to spit at the sermon today in my little church. The Decon gave the same old "Be a Mary, not a Martha" message that I choked on when I was a baby in Sunday School. "Martha was a multi-tasker: too worried, too concerned with everything being perfect. Mary gave her whole attention to Jesus. We need a few Marthas around to keep everything going, but it's better to be a Mary." I kid you not, he actually said that! He wanted us to believe that we need Marthas -- detail oriented, multi-tasking, harried types -- because they get things done and make everything run smoothly; but it's better to be a Mary of an attentive and passionate one-track mind!

WTF??? Since when does God create some people as indispensable and yet "not as good as"? [Oh, yeah. Men have believed that about women for millennia, haven't they? ... I'm still not buying it!]

Martha's dilemma gets short shrift in this story by most preachers. I can't help but think that it's no accident that one of the scriptures for today (ok, an alternate reading, but the one we happened to use) is the story of the Lord visiting Abraham at the oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18). This is one of the few times in the Old Testament where one of the fathers or mothers of the faith encounters a physical presence of "the Lord" in the form of a man. So there is really a direct parallel between Abraham and Martha each receiving the Lord as an honored guest at their own home. Here Abraham hosts and elaborate feast for the three men who visited them, running around washing their feet, having Sarah bake fresh bread, having a young calf slaughtered and cooked, serving them himself and standing by while they ate -- hovering over his guests with as much concern and attention to detail and as many special treats as his establishment could offer. This was no quick refreshment for some travelers on the road, it was quite an elaborate banquet. And the reward was beyond his greatest imagination. Surely God had approved and rewarded his most anxious attention to every detail and all his (and Sarah's) running around and making everything "just perfect" for the visitors.

The absolute primacy of hospitality was still very much alive in Martha's day -- she knew it was her sacred duty to offer a guest in her house her very best; the more honored the guest, the more she was required to pull out all the stops. How could she not have felt that she was doing exactly what her God required in inviting Jesus into her home and treating him with great honor and ceremony? Why was it such a great and glorious thing when Abraham acted exactly the same way, but derided as overly anxious multi-tasking when Martha did it? She just can't win for losing!

Somehow I just find it very hard to imagine the Angel(s) of the Lord reacting positively if Abraham and Sarah had sat down unceremoniously in the sand with them by the side of the road, maybe passed around a canteen if they had one handy, and begged them for the latest gossip. And yet, that does appear to be the kind of treatment Jesus expects, and calls "the better part," at the hands of Martha and Mary. (Where was Lazarus in all this, anyway? Why wasn't he helping?) If Jesus wasn't just being insensitive and petty (and I am not the only one who things he sounds insensitive -- see my friend Louie's comments here), then what could he possibly have been trying to say?

I don't want to dismiss his admonishment too quickly. What if he really had a point to make; something new to teach? If so, then what is it? If the rules of hospitality hadn't changed between Abraham's time and Jesus's time, and I don't believe they did significantly, then what else might have changed? Could Jesus be pointing to something as profound as a new relationship between "the Lord" and the believer?

The Epistle for today (Colossians :15-28) is probably not a coincidence here either, in trying to understand this story. In it, the writer emphasizes a new relationship between God and believers because of Jesus, the Christ -- that thorough him God has reconciled all things to himself, and that to each on is offered "Christ in you, the hope of glory." The relationship between Abraham and the three men who visit him is very formal. They are treated as honored guests, but also as strangers. Sarah stays in the tent while Abraham serves them and stands (on ceremony) while they eat. All very correct, but not at all intimate. Martha would probably love to copy Abraham's success and, perhaps, receive a like blessing from God. But, maybe Jesus is actually saying; "Martha, that's already been DONE. There's no reason to stand on ceremony with me. Just plop whatever's on hand in the oven and come sit with me and talk. We're family!" Might Jesus want to be no stranger, no honored but distant and formal guest? My guess is that he is claiming a role as their intimate -- OUR intimate brother (or sister, farther, mother, friend), welcomed into the home as closest family -- the Christ in Jesus the same as the Christ in Martha, and the Christ in Mary, or in me.

But I still really hope that when he when he said, "Martha, Martha..." (with a smile in his voice?) he was at the same time taking the table cloth, dishes and silverware out of her hands and starting to set the table while he shooed Mary into the kitchen to help Martha finish up the prep! At least, that's what I think our elder brother, even if is he is "the firstborn of all creation," would do...