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
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
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
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
Sunday, November 14, 2010
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
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
Sunday, November 7, 2010
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)
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)
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