Today is All Souls Day, and in Roman Catholic circles particularly, it's the day when we pray for the souls of the dead who are in Purgatory. I am not Roman but I am Episcopalian, and we do celebrate All Souls. However, I'm just about positive I don't believe in Purgatory as a place where souls go after death when they don't go straight to Heaven or Hell. In fact, I'm pretty sure I don't believe in Heaven or Hell (those places with the capital "H") as realms where souls go after death. I'm agnostic about what happens after death. I believe that the eventual fate of all that we are is in the hands of God -- but I don't really know what that means. It's more of a commitment, or an acquiescence to a shared mystery, than a statement of any intellectual understanding. I don't know if anything at all "happens" after death, but I also don't think that's a very important question in the grand scheme of things.
I am of the many who believe that the main point of any discussions of heaven and hell in the Bible and in our Christian faith is about what we make of life now, while we are living it. Heaven is what we create when we live a life that does follow love for God and love for each other as the first and primary calling. And hell is alienation from God; what we experience when we lose sight of that great commandment. So then, what is purgatory; does it have a place in my thinking? Maybe. Perhaps purgatory is when we honestly don't know what do do, when we struggle with knowing right from wrong, when we know that we are seeing "through a glass darkly" but don't know how to turn on the lights. I don't believe that faith is a simple or easy undertaking, I believe that God is often hidden, that we have to diligently seek God even when he is silent. And at least for me it's hard work to find some sense in life and some sense of the transcendent. So maybe purgatory is more of our natural state in this life than either heaven or hell.
One thing over which I am currently in a state like purgatory is whether to associate myself with the Diocese of Albany, in which I live for the greater part of the year. As long as I have maintained another home in Southern Virginia with my wife of 28 years, I have maintained my membership in our local Episcopal church in Hampton, VA. But the truth is that I live about half, if not more than half, of the year in Malone, NY. While I am here I attend St. Mark's Malone and have become quite active in the parish, and to some degree active in the Diocese -- but I am still reluctant to move my letter. Participation is one thing, but I can't get over the hurdle of membership. Can I commit to full parish membership in a Diocese where I disagree so strongly on so many points? My new parish definitely needs my support, but it's not like my previous parish doesn't also need it. Right now I split my pledge, but the greater portion goes in Virginia where my membership commitment exists. Is that right, when I spend more time in Malone? But what message does it send when a mainstream Diocese looses a member and a Diocese like Albany gains one? Can I stomach signing my name to such an action? We are working through the "Marks of Discipleship" adult education series in our parish, the one that has been distributed by the Bishop throughout the Diocese of Albany. I find some of the theology represented in it to be completely unpalatable and frankly un-Anglican. What influence should this have on my decision? I don't think there are easy answers to my question, nor do I think there is a "right" or "wrong" answer, except as perhaps I hope to eventually gain a sense of what's right for me--right here, right now. Or perhaps I will never know for sure. But, since today is All Souls...
Please pray for me and for all souls in purgatory--may God shine a bit of that light that is perpetual on us.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
I've Been Bad...
... probably about many things! But, although less titillating that perhaps you were hoping, my meaning is that I've been really bad about keeping up with my blog. I wanted originally to challenge myself to write once a week, to see how serious I am about trying to be a writer. But apparently I am not that serious; or else I'm too easily distracted; or I'm just plain too busy. However, sometimes a subject comes along that is so important to me that I feel compelled to try to write. And, today it is the idea of...
Unity in Diversity. It is a concept that means a very great deal to me as an Episcopalian, as a Christian, and, most importantly, as a person. The concept has become something I think of as one of those essential aspects of a life well lived, a life necessarily lived in community with others.
A friend asked me today to ask if I'd been offended a few days before when her husband and I disagreed about the merits of the Harry Potter series (I'm a big fan; he less so). Actually, far from being offended, I'd really enjoyed our animated exchange of ideas. I love to find out what people like and why. And as a scientist I'm trained to be skeptical, to play "devil's advocate," to always look for the alternative point of view. I ordinarily much prefer discussing things with people who have different viewpoints, rather than just with people who see things the same way I do. EXCEPT, of course, for those opinions I hold very dear, like we all do, and can't see HOW someone could disagree. But then I know (from hard experience), that disagreeing can be even more important. Some of those conversations -- the ones where we share what we believe or feel and why, and why it means so much to us, and what paths have brought us to the various viewpoints -- are the most valuable I have ever had. Not to convince another to my viewpoint, or to be argued out of it, but just to understand how we come to be so diverse and to learn to value the other's experience. To me, that is essential in becoming fully human--in "growing up." Somehow or other, we all have to learn that we don't have a lock on truth, that our perspective is not the only one, that what "works" for me may not "work" for someone else.
I went today to a meeting of the the Albany Via Media in our diocese. One of the questions we asked ourselves was, "What message would you like to send to the Bishop?" My answer didn't fit easily into 2 or 3 sentences, but it is fundamentally about this point. I, like so many other Episcopalians, came to this branch of the faith from another. My former church insisted on a litmus test; "You have to hold THESE opinions, or you CAN'T be a Christian." I chose Anglicanism because we are a community based upon a common worship and a mutual commitment to a community of believers, NOT one that insists on doctrinal conformity in all matters, especially relatively minor ones not "essential to salvation." Hooker believed that authority should be based on piety and reason, not conveyed by automatic investiture. Or, as my friend Louie Crew says, "The Episcopal Church is where you don't have to check your brain at the door." We can think for ourselves, question, and disagree -- what holds us together is the communion table. It is this meal that we share that cements our membership in one another, not some robotic conformity.
One of the advantages(?) of being a close friend of Louie Crew (for those who know who he is, or have had the experience), is ending up, almost by default, active in church polity (and often politics) on the national level. He is so passionate about this branch of the faith and so devoted to the Anglican Communion in all its diverse glory that you just have to get involved, and I did extensively for more than a decade. I especially loved General Convention; attending once as a volunteer for Integrity, once as part of the Consultation, and once as an Alternate Deputy for my Diocese. One year (1997? 2000?), I was assigned to monitor the activities of one of the committees who were looking into the subject of human sexuality and society. I went faithfully every day, and ended up habitually sitting just across the aisle from Martyn Minns (who was one of the prominent Episcopalians to leave the church in 2007 and join the Church of Nigeria). I remember at first the expected discomfort at being so close to someone there to argue against my inclusion in the church (I was also there to testify to my experience as the same-sex partner of a transsexual woman, and the discrimination--as well as threats--we had both experienced in society as well as within the Church). But, as the days went on, I not only calmed down about his proximity but I remember noticing the little things each day, like whether he looked tired or happy or sad, and the habits and ways of speaking that made him a real person to me rather than just an icon of the "conservative side." By the end of the week, I felt a genuine affection for him and, even though we presented starkly different viewpoints to the Committee, I truly wanted to be and remain part of the same Church with him. I found I couldn't know him, even at this relatively superficial level, and not feel connected. We both loved the same Church, the same Lord. It really hurt--actually I cried--when I read that he had left the Episcopal Church. I felt like he was a family member who had chosen to disown us. I wanted him, that person with the face I had learned to read so well, to be there around that communion table that is so central to me. We disagree about just about everything, but I still think we need each other. I guess he does not.
I feel like, in this Diocese of Albany, we are almost at the door marked "Exit" in the traditional Big House of Anglicanism. There are only two "approved seminaries" where our priest and deacons can be trained, there are doctrinal conformity opinions that must be held before a candidate can be accepted into an ordination process or a priest can be called to a parish, the teachings that come from the Bishop reflect opinions that are presented as "true" while other commonly held opinions within the diversity of mainstream Episcopalian theology are presented as "wrong." Most disturbingly to me, those of us who hold differing opinions are treated as though we don't exist. The Bishop pretends to speak for "overwhelming majority of the people and clergy of the Diocese" without listening to us or ever asking our opinion. Yet, meetings such as today's prove that there are many even in some of the "traditionally conservative" parishes who do not hold these narrow views of Anglicanism.
I don't know of any successful way of living together except to learn to agree to disagree. Right now in the Church the controversy seems to be largely about sexual orientation and gender. Some say "love the sinner but hate the sin," but I can not accept that what some call sin is what I believe is one of the God given qualities that makes me the unique individual I am; not a choice or action or lifestyle, but a unique individual created in the image of God (however you interpret that). But, this is only one issue. If we all eventually learn to agree on this (as we have over time on issues like slavery, for example), we will still disagree about other things. I do not believe any two people in the world could agree on everything that they hold dear, certainly not an entire diocese in this geographically diverse, economically diverse, culturally diverse, and every-other-which-way diverse North Country. But, I want to be able to live together anyway. I want to hear people who agree with me and I want to hear people who disagree with me, and everything in between. I want all voices to be welcome, and--at least within what is held to be acceptable Episcopalian thought on the National Church level--I want leeway for diverse perspectives to be represented, taught, and respected as legitimate in this Diocese. I want to be a Big House Church, I want to walk the Via Media with the WHOLE communion.
Unity in Diversity. It is a concept that means a very great deal to me as an Episcopalian, as a Christian, and, most importantly, as a person. The concept has become something I think of as one of those essential aspects of a life well lived, a life necessarily lived in community with others.
A friend asked me today to ask if I'd been offended a few days before when her husband and I disagreed about the merits of the Harry Potter series (I'm a big fan; he less so). Actually, far from being offended, I'd really enjoyed our animated exchange of ideas. I love to find out what people like and why. And as a scientist I'm trained to be skeptical, to play "devil's advocate," to always look for the alternative point of view. I ordinarily much prefer discussing things with people who have different viewpoints, rather than just with people who see things the same way I do. EXCEPT, of course, for those opinions I hold very dear, like we all do, and can't see HOW someone could disagree. But then I know (from hard experience), that disagreeing can be even more important. Some of those conversations -- the ones where we share what we believe or feel and why, and why it means so much to us, and what paths have brought us to the various viewpoints -- are the most valuable I have ever had. Not to convince another to my viewpoint, or to be argued out of it, but just to understand how we come to be so diverse and to learn to value the other's experience. To me, that is essential in becoming fully human--in "growing up." Somehow or other, we all have to learn that we don't have a lock on truth, that our perspective is not the only one, that what "works" for me may not "work" for someone else.
I went today to a meeting of the the Albany Via Media in our diocese. One of the questions we asked ourselves was, "What message would you like to send to the Bishop?" My answer didn't fit easily into 2 or 3 sentences, but it is fundamentally about this point. I, like so many other Episcopalians, came to this branch of the faith from another. My former church insisted on a litmus test; "You have to hold THESE opinions, or you CAN'T be a Christian." I chose Anglicanism because we are a community based upon a common worship and a mutual commitment to a community of believers, NOT one that insists on doctrinal conformity in all matters, especially relatively minor ones not "essential to salvation." Hooker believed that authority should be based on piety and reason, not conveyed by automatic investiture. Or, as my friend Louie Crew says, "The Episcopal Church is where you don't have to check your brain at the door." We can think for ourselves, question, and disagree -- what holds us together is the communion table. It is this meal that we share that cements our membership in one another, not some robotic conformity.
One of the advantages(?) of being a close friend of Louie Crew (for those who know who he is, or have had the experience), is ending up, almost by default, active in church polity (and often politics) on the national level. He is so passionate about this branch of the faith and so devoted to the Anglican Communion in all its diverse glory that you just have to get involved, and I did extensively for more than a decade. I especially loved General Convention; attending once as a volunteer for Integrity, once as part of the Consultation, and once as an Alternate Deputy for my Diocese. One year (1997? 2000?), I was assigned to monitor the activities of one of the committees who were looking into the subject of human sexuality and society. I went faithfully every day, and ended up habitually sitting just across the aisle from Martyn Minns (who was one of the prominent Episcopalians to leave the church in 2007 and join the Church of Nigeria). I remember at first the expected discomfort at being so close to someone there to argue against my inclusion in the church (I was also there to testify to my experience as the same-sex partner of a transsexual woman, and the discrimination--as well as threats--we had both experienced in society as well as within the Church). But, as the days went on, I not only calmed down about his proximity but I remember noticing the little things each day, like whether he looked tired or happy or sad, and the habits and ways of speaking that made him a real person to me rather than just an icon of the "conservative side." By the end of the week, I felt a genuine affection for him and, even though we presented starkly different viewpoints to the Committee, I truly wanted to be and remain part of the same Church with him. I found I couldn't know him, even at this relatively superficial level, and not feel connected. We both loved the same Church, the same Lord. It really hurt--actually I cried--when I read that he had left the Episcopal Church. I felt like he was a family member who had chosen to disown us. I wanted him, that person with the face I had learned to read so well, to be there around that communion table that is so central to me. We disagree about just about everything, but I still think we need each other. I guess he does not.
I feel like, in this Diocese of Albany, we are almost at the door marked "Exit" in the traditional Big House of Anglicanism. There are only two "approved seminaries" where our priest and deacons can be trained, there are doctrinal conformity opinions that must be held before a candidate can be accepted into an ordination process or a priest can be called to a parish, the teachings that come from the Bishop reflect opinions that are presented as "true" while other commonly held opinions within the diversity of mainstream Episcopalian theology are presented as "wrong." Most disturbingly to me, those of us who hold differing opinions are treated as though we don't exist. The Bishop pretends to speak for "overwhelming majority of the people and clergy of the Diocese" without listening to us or ever asking our opinion. Yet, meetings such as today's prove that there are many even in some of the "traditionally conservative" parishes who do not hold these narrow views of Anglicanism.
I don't know of any successful way of living together except to learn to agree to disagree. Right now in the Church the controversy seems to be largely about sexual orientation and gender. Some say "love the sinner but hate the sin," but I can not accept that what some call sin is what I believe is one of the God given qualities that makes me the unique individual I am; not a choice or action or lifestyle, but a unique individual created in the image of God (however you interpret that). But, this is only one issue. If we all eventually learn to agree on this (as we have over time on issues like slavery, for example), we will still disagree about other things. I do not believe any two people in the world could agree on everything that they hold dear, certainly not an entire diocese in this geographically diverse, economically diverse, culturally diverse, and every-other-which-way diverse North Country. But, I want to be able to live together anyway. I want to hear people who agree with me and I want to hear people who disagree with me, and everything in between. I want all voices to be welcome, and--at least within what is held to be acceptable Episcopalian thought on the National Church level--I want leeway for diverse perspectives to be represented, taught, and respected as legitimate in this Diocese. I want to be a Big House Church, I want to walk the Via Media with the WHOLE communion.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Wisdom Wherever You Find It...
So, my embarrassing little secret of the month is that I am a true "Gleek" (which is a fan of the show Glee, if anyone has been hiding under a rock for the past 2 years or so). Glee is super big with teens and young adults, but actually ranks high with the entire 13-49 year old crowd. OK, I'm 52 and a bit out of the demographic, but I like it anyway!
Admittedly, I'm a closet Diva and I like nothing better than to sit at the piano all afternoon singing show tunes, so it's probably not surprising that I'd enjoy singing along to the show's amazingly well produced tunes and watching the dance routines. (How do they do so many week after week? One article I read said that they work 20 hour days when filming, and I believe it.) But, it's actually not the music that impresses me so much. It's really excellent drama, and excellent comedy. I like how, with it's over-the-top comedic format, the characters do and say the things that we all think but would never actually say or do. For me, it brings up those tricky little not-so-nice parts of me that I'd rather not admit to, and forces me to examine them. It also makes me realize that I don't think enough about all that might be motivating what someone else says or does. The show doesn't let you fall into the trap of thinking that you have any character all figured out, and it maybe even makes you reexamine the possibility of ever figuring another person out completely.
I especially like that the show treats both kids and adults sensitively and (within it's admittedly over-the-top format) realistically; with heart. It's all about kids around 15-18 looking for guidance and mentoring from a couple of 25-30 year old "semi-adults" who are still struggling to grow up themselves. I like that sometimes the students are the wise ones and it's the teachers, or the parents, who need the lesson. Yes, sometimes there's a "lesson" or some moralizing that is pretty obvious -- sometimes real life lessons are like that as well, I think. But, I like that the producers and writers have enough respect for the audience to leave things real-life messy and ambiguous in as many respects. Sometimes no one is particularly likeable and everyone's motives are questionable, and sometimes even the most despicable have a heart, or do something really courageous. I think the show displays a lot of wisdom.
And that gets me to my point today. When I tell people in my general age group that I like Glee, I have gotten a surprising number of people who react with the idea that if it's a show that's popular with today's children and young adults, it's can't possibly be thought-provoking, wise, or worthwhile. And I wonder why we are so conditioned to look for wisdom only in certain venues and predictable guises. Yes, there is certainly something to be said for age and experience... But in terms of experience, the youth of today are so bombarded with it. We do recognize how they have to grow up so fast, how they face so many more stresses and tough choices and expectations than we did at their age. We look for stress and disillusionment and burn-out in them from it all. But we forget to look for the flip side; wisdom, compassion, resilience. That's there too, in spades I think, but we might miss it if we expect it to come dressed up in our own filters and biases. Each generation has a different relationship to music, to language, to sexuality, etc. than the last. The newest generation basically has no choice but to understand and be able to navigate the world view of their elders and parents, since that defines the world they were born into. Although young people have forever been about the business of questioning and often rejecting what their elders hold dear, they really don't have the option of ignoring it. But sometimes the older generations don't give the youth the respect of acknowledging and trying to understand that they have their own world view. If we did, we might find out that they have more on the ball than we thought, and much of worth to say to us.
Admittedly, I'm a closet Diva and I like nothing better than to sit at the piano all afternoon singing show tunes, so it's probably not surprising that I'd enjoy singing along to the show's amazingly well produced tunes and watching the dance routines. (How do they do so many week after week? One article I read said that they work 20 hour days when filming, and I believe it.) But, it's actually not the music that impresses me so much. It's really excellent drama, and excellent comedy. I like how, with it's over-the-top comedic format, the characters do and say the things that we all think but would never actually say or do. For me, it brings up those tricky little not-so-nice parts of me that I'd rather not admit to, and forces me to examine them. It also makes me realize that I don't think enough about all that might be motivating what someone else says or does. The show doesn't let you fall into the trap of thinking that you have any character all figured out, and it maybe even makes you reexamine the possibility of ever figuring another person out completely.
I especially like that the show treats both kids and adults sensitively and (within it's admittedly over-the-top format) realistically; with heart. It's all about kids around 15-18 looking for guidance and mentoring from a couple of 25-30 year old "semi-adults" who are still struggling to grow up themselves. I like that sometimes the students are the wise ones and it's the teachers, or the parents, who need the lesson. Yes, sometimes there's a "lesson" or some moralizing that is pretty obvious -- sometimes real life lessons are like that as well, I think. But, I like that the producers and writers have enough respect for the audience to leave things real-life messy and ambiguous in as many respects. Sometimes no one is particularly likeable and everyone's motives are questionable, and sometimes even the most despicable have a heart, or do something really courageous. I think the show displays a lot of wisdom.
And that gets me to my point today. When I tell people in my general age group that I like Glee, I have gotten a surprising number of people who react with the idea that if it's a show that's popular with today's children and young adults, it's can't possibly be thought-provoking, wise, or worthwhile. And I wonder why we are so conditioned to look for wisdom only in certain venues and predictable guises. Yes, there is certainly something to be said for age and experience... But in terms of experience, the youth of today are so bombarded with it. We do recognize how they have to grow up so fast, how they face so many more stresses and tough choices and expectations than we did at their age. We look for stress and disillusionment and burn-out in them from it all. But we forget to look for the flip side; wisdom, compassion, resilience. That's there too, in spades I think, but we might miss it if we expect it to come dressed up in our own filters and biases. Each generation has a different relationship to music, to language, to sexuality, etc. than the last. The newest generation basically has no choice but to understand and be able to navigate the world view of their elders and parents, since that defines the world they were born into. Although young people have forever been about the business of questioning and often rejecting what their elders hold dear, they really don't have the option of ignoring it. But sometimes the older generations don't give the youth the respect of acknowledging and trying to understand that they have their own world view. If we did, we might find out that they have more on the ball than we thought, and much of worth to say to us.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
9-11 Overload
I finally completely overloaded on 9-11 memorials and remembrances this morning. Even all the comics, except a very few, were dedicated to remembering -- straining the ability to say anything new and/or relevant, and calling into question the patriotism of those who didn't refer to 9-11 at the same time. I could only sympathize with Doonesbury, which at least tackled the issue straight on and asked to turn to some other programming, because the 9-11 overload was simply too much.
The articles and speeches all try harder than the last to honor the dead and the responders, to elicit grief for the affected, to assert that we will never forget. The non-religious blame religion for the root of all evil. The religious emphasize the peaceful nature of their religions and many look for the common message of peace and love of humanity in all major world religions. But, it all still seems to me to be a pointing the finger of responsibility, or defending against the finger so pointed. We seem stagnated, unable to transform the experience into something new and positive...
Today the power went off all over town for about 3 hours. It was almost as though even the systems of our daily life were also protesting that it is all "too much." In the brief time between finding out that power was out all over for no apparent reason and being reassured that it was only a local phenomenon, I wondered what it would mean if there had truly been a repeat performance and some terrorist group had managed to strike at our power infrastructure and cause a major, perhaps continent-scale, power outage. What would it mean and how would I respond?
I was right in the middle of things 10 years ago; working 2 blocks from the Capitol, commuting through the Pentagon. I spent the whole day walking around DC after being evacuated, trying to find out what was going on, seeing the smoke from the Pentagon--trying to get home, trying to contact loved ones. Yet, in a way for me it was more of a day when nothing essential changed rather than a day when "everything changed." I was not a different person after. I went through a traumatic experience, yes, and I knew people who went through much greater trauma. I grieved, major day-to-day routines changed forever as the city adjusted to the aftermath, some friends suffered life-changing loss or psychological terror. But, those things are not limited to terrorist attacks. I survived, but if I had not survived, I simply wouldn't have survived. That happens every day too. Sometimes to one person at a time, and sometimes to a lot of people at once. Overall, life went on as life always goes on.
But, for some people everything did seem to change that day. There was a new bogeyman out there -- a new "them" opposed to all of "us," a new collective existential terror. Some people even seem to think this is good, and that it's the "them" that we should remember and continue to fear and to fight. But, I thoroughly reject this view. There is no nameless evil or completely external enemy, only the collective effect of a universe of individual responses to life; individual choices between compassion and community or fear, competition, greed, and the unknown.
This morning I realized again that nothing that really matters or is truly a part of who I am and what I believe about the world would change if we were again under attack. I realize that I am in a perhaps even more vulnerable position now. I wouldn't last long if we lost major infrastructure for longer than a few weeks, I am too dependent and not young enough or strong enough to take care of myself. Nor am I interested in being a survivalist. I would much rather think of myself sharing my final meal and letting go than of lifting my finger against another to preserve my life at the expense of theirs. I couldn't plan for a world where that was necessary. But, even that extreme eventuality would not really change who I am, how the world turns, what it important.
It's not religion, nor the lack of it, nor "them," nor protecting our way of life that is the issue. Each day, each moment, we make the decision how to live and whether to love, and how far to extend that love. That decision isn't subject to externalities, even the most extreme. It comes from choice and from the heart.
In something like 6.8 billion of such individual choices lies our single and ongoing opportunity to transform the world -- or not.
The articles and speeches all try harder than the last to honor the dead and the responders, to elicit grief for the affected, to assert that we will never forget. The non-religious blame religion for the root of all evil. The religious emphasize the peaceful nature of their religions and many look for the common message of peace and love of humanity in all major world religions. But, it all still seems to me to be a pointing the finger of responsibility, or defending against the finger so pointed. We seem stagnated, unable to transform the experience into something new and positive...
Today the power went off all over town for about 3 hours. It was almost as though even the systems of our daily life were also protesting that it is all "too much." In the brief time between finding out that power was out all over for no apparent reason and being reassured that it was only a local phenomenon, I wondered what it would mean if there had truly been a repeat performance and some terrorist group had managed to strike at our power infrastructure and cause a major, perhaps continent-scale, power outage. What would it mean and how would I respond?
I was right in the middle of things 10 years ago; working 2 blocks from the Capitol, commuting through the Pentagon. I spent the whole day walking around DC after being evacuated, trying to find out what was going on, seeing the smoke from the Pentagon--trying to get home, trying to contact loved ones. Yet, in a way for me it was more of a day when nothing essential changed rather than a day when "everything changed." I was not a different person after. I went through a traumatic experience, yes, and I knew people who went through much greater trauma. I grieved, major day-to-day routines changed forever as the city adjusted to the aftermath, some friends suffered life-changing loss or psychological terror. But, those things are not limited to terrorist attacks. I survived, but if I had not survived, I simply wouldn't have survived. That happens every day too. Sometimes to one person at a time, and sometimes to a lot of people at once. Overall, life went on as life always goes on.
But, for some people everything did seem to change that day. There was a new bogeyman out there -- a new "them" opposed to all of "us," a new collective existential terror. Some people even seem to think this is good, and that it's the "them" that we should remember and continue to fear and to fight. But, I thoroughly reject this view. There is no nameless evil or completely external enemy, only the collective effect of a universe of individual responses to life; individual choices between compassion and community or fear, competition, greed, and the unknown.
This morning I realized again that nothing that really matters or is truly a part of who I am and what I believe about the world would change if we were again under attack. I realize that I am in a perhaps even more vulnerable position now. I wouldn't last long if we lost major infrastructure for longer than a few weeks, I am too dependent and not young enough or strong enough to take care of myself. Nor am I interested in being a survivalist. I would much rather think of myself sharing my final meal and letting go than of lifting my finger against another to preserve my life at the expense of theirs. I couldn't plan for a world where that was necessary. But, even that extreme eventuality would not really change who I am, how the world turns, what it important.
It's not religion, nor the lack of it, nor "them," nor protecting our way of life that is the issue. Each day, each moment, we make the decision how to live and whether to love, and how far to extend that love. That decision isn't subject to externalities, even the most extreme. It comes from choice and from the heart.
In something like 6.8 billion of such individual choices lies our single and ongoing opportunity to transform the world -- or not.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Telling Stories
I am back from spending another wonderful week at Chautauqua Institution (summer camp for life-long learners, essentially) with my in-laws and assorted relatives on Jan's side of the family. Each year this one week leaves me with enough material to think about and continue studying for the entire year. It's a wonderful time.
The week's central theme was Creativity and Innovation, and in the department of religion this translated into a week's worth of looking specifically at Jesus' use of parables and the possible meanings of these enigmatic little stories. The main speaker was Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University, who is a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, and is a marvelous story teller herself. I was at first worried about a week of lectures from the same individual, but she was well worth the time and I only wish we could have heard more from her (see a sample of her lecture style here).
What Dr. Levine helped us to do was look at parables the way a first century Jewish audience might have looked at them; essentially stripping away all the pat Sunday-school interpretations that never really made sense but that you were told was the "meaning" and don't ask any more questions! In fact, she told us that a parable can have as many interpretations as readers, and that doesn't matter anyway, because what's important isn't what the parable "means" but what the parable "does." This is something I've been told before not just about parables but about all scripture, and about doctrine and other "religious" stuff. I've had a terrible time understanding the whole concept of what scripture "does" vs. what it "means." This week, I think I almost got it -- because what parables "do" is make us all uncomfortable; they make us ask questions; they make us wonder what came before or what comes next; they give us the opportunity to make up our own endings; they invite us into the story, first as one character then as another; they invite us to tell our own stories...
Dr. Levine took us through several "de-churchifyings" (my term, I don't want to blame her for that one) of a parable and then building up alternative perspectives. I would like to try to recapture some of what she said about one of them here, and then give it my own twist. [My interpretation of her interpretation is my own and may not accurately capture what she either said or meant! In other words; if you like it I probably got it right, but if you hate it don't blame her, blame me. I probably got it wrong.] Let's see how this goes...
The parable is from Luke 15 -- the one usually dubbed the parable of the prodigal son, but which she calls the parable of the missing moms. It's about a father and his two sons. As the story goes (read it here -- don't take my word for it), the younger son demands from his father his half of the father's estate. The father divides the property and the younger son takes his half and goes off to squander it in wild living. When he is destitute, and there is a famine in the land, the younger son "comes to himself" and decides to go back to his father and ask to be hired on as one of his servants, who fare far better than he had fallen. But, the father is filled with compassion for him and welcomes him home with a kiss, a ring, a robe, and a party. The older son is resentful of the welcome the younger son gets, and complains that his father never threw him a party although he'd served faithfully for all the time the younger had been wasting his inheritance. And that's pretty much where it ends.
The "Sunday-school" interpretation emphasizes the utter ruin that the younger son comes to and how great the father's love is to run to him and welcome him home -- using the allegory of the son representing sinful people who repent and turn to God, and the father representing God who welcomes home sinners who return to him. If the elder son is mentioned at all, he is the one who thinks he can be saved through depending on merit and reward and "the law" while God is really all about love, and compassion and grace. Although it's a reading that has "worked" for a lot of people, it's always left me a little cold and we heard this week that it doesn't have to be taken that way.
Instead, Dr. Levine asked us to look at a story as just a story and a family as just a family, and see where it leads. She doesn't like either of these son's much. The first is scandalous! Asking for your inheritance before your parents are even dead is the height of disrespect and selfishness -- that, I think, is the same today as it was then. This is truly bad behavior. But, look further at what he does. When he uses all his money up in "wild living" and there is a famine, no one will give him anything. He remembers that the servants in his father's house are better off than he is and he wants to improve his lot. His decision to return to his father's is way too mercenary to make Dr. Levine (or me) comfortable. He's not sorry, he's not worried that his father might be hurt by his actions, he's not concerned about how badly he acted, he just wants to eat again and decides this is the mostly likely way to get back on his feet. THIS is a repentant sinner?
Dr. Levine says the second son isn't so likable either. Initially the story tells us that the father divides his property between them. Yet later we see the eldest son still dependent on his father, complaining that his father has never given him anything. She sees him as one who fails to claim his inheritance -- his livelihood, his property, his power -- even after it has already been divided to him. And then he complains that his father still controls what he has neglected to own. AND he is resentful of a father's love and generosity, rather than compassionate himself over the sorry situation in which his brother comes home.
What impresses Dr. Levine in the story is the father's love. He does not wait until the younger son repents before running out and forgiving him and restoring him to his favor. When he hears that the elder son is resentful, he runs out to him as well and tries to persuade him to come in and also be glad. He is portrayed as reaching out to both and trying to effect reconciliation. He is doing all he can to bring the whole family into a right relationship, but everyone has choices -- the younger son could truly repent, but he could simply take advantage of the situation again. The elder son could extend compassion and look for reconciliation, or he could become fixated in his sense of fairness. We are forced to think about what is good, what is right, what is just, and what is fair as perhaps all different things, and ask which to choose -- what are the possible consequences of each one? How did they get in the situation anyway, was there some way that this could all have been avoided? (This is where the missing moms come in -- Dr. Levine guesses that they were sons of different mothers, and perhaps the situation was set up from the start for this kind of confrontation by the conflict of a favorite wife or the striving of one wife for advantages for her son over the other son? Do we, as parents, nurture a strong family or set-up our kids for future conflicts?)
Dr. Levine proposes that perhaps the meaning of the parable is in asking ourselves who are the family with whom God would have us reconcile and what power or which choices will draw us closer to that goal or perhaps push us further apart? What are we doing with the resources that are ours? Do we claim our power and our control over circumstances, or do we look for others to blame? Are we able to truly repent and seek reconciliation? Do we wait for others to reach that point or do we go further and create safe spaces where perhaps they will get there, but perhaps they won't? How extravagant is our love?
I really loved this overall interpretation and most of what Dr. Levine said about the characters in the parable, but there was one part that I disagreed with. In keeping with her major premise on parables, that we need to reinterpret and reinterpret as long as there are different readers and different "takes" that provide useful insights, here's where I try my own "take" on it -- and why I differ in some particulars with hers.
If I understood Dr. Levine correctly, she indicated that when the father divided the property between the sons the elder never actually "claimed his own" -- learned to believe and act as though his share of the property was actually his own. He was still deferring to the father long after he could have taken charge of his life and livelihood. That's an interesting thought, and I can see how there would be a lesson there. So many of us do, metaphorically and sometimes literally, spend our lives wishing and dreaming for things that are already our own and have been all along. But, still, I just don't think this idea fits this particular parable.
To me the more believable interpretation is that the father "divided his property between them," gave the younger his share as the younger was demanding, and told the older that "the rest will be yours when I die" (and by implication, not before I die -- unless I say so). Of course, we read first through our own lenses, and this seems more likely to me because it is my family history. My grandfather did much the same with my father and his brother, although for slightly different reasons and with very different results. But, when Dad's younger brother became a man and was married, it was clear that he was not going to stay on the farm like my father. My grandfather decided that it made more sense to split the property at that point, sell enough to give Dad's brother his share, and gave gun his inheritance early to help him get a start in another chosen career -- all with the understanding that my father would then, upon my grandfather's death, inherit the farm. But (with definite emphasis on the but), had he started to act like the owner while my grandfather still "had another 20 good years in him," Dad would have found, as country folk say, that he had "another think coming."
So, when I read the parable, the setup doesn't seem strange at all. That's just what father's sometimes choose to do with their property. However, beyond just not seeming strange to me, I think there are further clues in the story that this is the more likely interpretation. When the younger son decided to return home, he assumes that the father is still very much in charge. He doesn't even anticipate that the elder son will have anything to say about how he is received. They are his father's servants who have food to spare, not his brother's. It is his father that he will entreat to give him a job, if he cannot expect to be received as a son. I think when the elder son says to his father that "you have never given me a young goat so I can party" and his father says that "everything I have is yours," the father is thinking through the old "someday all of this will be yours" refrain. But I'm willing to bet that if the elder son had ever actually taken that goat and given himself a party, he would have incurred the father's wrath, and he might very well have been denied even if he had "asked very nicely." Sometimes people who hold the reins have a hard time letting them go, or even cutting a little slack. (Especially when they have done it before and seen that part of the inheritance squandered?) I don't see any reason not to take the elder at his word that he has been serving the farther all these years in the expectation of an inheritance he has yet to receive (and may be in a little fear that he might lose the inheritance entirely, if he doesn't toe the line better than his younger brother -- once burned, twice shy, and all that.)
Anyway, following through with my interpretation, the really strange part of the parable is in how all three parties act toward each other as members of the same family. Although the father does act with a great deal of love in the end toward both sons, to me there doesn't seem to have been a lot of love lost between the three of them up until that point. The father doesn't seem to have been motivated by love in the dividing the property; not so much thinking of what's best for the sons (as I believe actually was the case in my family) as just doing what the younger demands to get him off his back. We are never told that the younger son worries about having hurt his father, or even thinks that he can come home because his father loved him and will love him still. He thinks of what will be best for himself, but not at all about whether his father will be anxious to see him again, might be worried about him, etc. And most disturbing to me, as I identify the most with him, the elder son seems more anxious to ruin his father's joy in the younger's return than to preserve it. He seems to serve his father out of necessity rather than familial love. I can understand his resentment of his brother and his sense of being somehow treated unfairly in all this, but what shocks is that he shows no evidence of love for his father, nor does he seem sure at all of his father's love. It's almost as though he's begging to be reassured that his father loves him too. Had it been me, I would have fallen all over myself to try to hide my resentment, at least for a time, and make my father's joy as complete as possible for as long as possible. Life is hard and joy isn't all that easy to come by; you simply don't do anything to ruin it for those you love and who have loved you.
Neither son seems to love the father very much. They are concerned about themselves and their own interests solely, and that makes me wonder about the father. If he is so loving, and if he's characteristically been so loving, why didn't they too learn to love? (Maybe here's where we wonder where they mother's are and what THEY'VE been teaching the sons???) Yes, despite the best and most loving upbringing, some children do not grow up to be loving and responsible individuals -- but I believe more often than not they do. Love generally becomes reciprocal over time. I think maybe this particular father hasn't always been so loving. Maybe he's one of those who don't actually realize they love, or at least don't show it, until they already have lost or are about to lose that which they love. Only when the younger son is gone, does the father realize how much he misses him and loves him? Only when the elder is resentful, does the father realize how much he has taken him for granted rather than shown him love? If I am right and he has been an "absentee father" up to this point, is pouring out his love at this late date in each boy's life going to do any good? Might it be too late?
Whichever way we interpret the parable, what we are left with at the end is three people who should, in a Kingdom of Heaven world, be in a loving family relationship and are not. There are no guarantees that the relationship can be salvaged, but still choices that each one can make that can be directed either towards attempting to reconcile or choices that could break the family apart permanently. So, I think I agree with Dr. Levine that the point, or direction, of the story is not what has happened already but what happens next. Each person has choices and each person has some power to do the right thing or the wrong one -- no guarantees, as a full resolution would take all three to create but any one could derail, but plenty of potential and something to say to us no matter where we see ourselves in the story.
The week's central theme was Creativity and Innovation, and in the department of religion this translated into a week's worth of looking specifically at Jesus' use of parables and the possible meanings of these enigmatic little stories. The main speaker was Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University, who is a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, and is a marvelous story teller herself. I was at first worried about a week of lectures from the same individual, but she was well worth the time and I only wish we could have heard more from her (see a sample of her lecture style here).
What Dr. Levine helped us to do was look at parables the way a first century Jewish audience might have looked at them; essentially stripping away all the pat Sunday-school interpretations that never really made sense but that you were told was the "meaning" and don't ask any more questions! In fact, she told us that a parable can have as many interpretations as readers, and that doesn't matter anyway, because what's important isn't what the parable "means" but what the parable "does." This is something I've been told before not just about parables but about all scripture, and about doctrine and other "religious" stuff. I've had a terrible time understanding the whole concept of what scripture "does" vs. what it "means." This week, I think I almost got it -- because what parables "do" is make us all uncomfortable; they make us ask questions; they make us wonder what came before or what comes next; they give us the opportunity to make up our own endings; they invite us into the story, first as one character then as another; they invite us to tell our own stories...
Dr. Levine took us through several "de-churchifyings" (my term, I don't want to blame her for that one) of a parable and then building up alternative perspectives. I would like to try to recapture some of what she said about one of them here, and then give it my own twist. [My interpretation of her interpretation is my own and may not accurately capture what she either said or meant! In other words; if you like it I probably got it right, but if you hate it don't blame her, blame me. I probably got it wrong.] Let's see how this goes...
The parable is from Luke 15 -- the one usually dubbed the parable of the prodigal son, but which she calls the parable of the missing moms. It's about a father and his two sons. As the story goes (read it here -- don't take my word for it), the younger son demands from his father his half of the father's estate. The father divides the property and the younger son takes his half and goes off to squander it in wild living. When he is destitute, and there is a famine in the land, the younger son "comes to himself" and decides to go back to his father and ask to be hired on as one of his servants, who fare far better than he had fallen. But, the father is filled with compassion for him and welcomes him home with a kiss, a ring, a robe, and a party. The older son is resentful of the welcome the younger son gets, and complains that his father never threw him a party although he'd served faithfully for all the time the younger had been wasting his inheritance. And that's pretty much where it ends.
The "Sunday-school" interpretation emphasizes the utter ruin that the younger son comes to and how great the father's love is to run to him and welcome him home -- using the allegory of the son representing sinful people who repent and turn to God, and the father representing God who welcomes home sinners who return to him. If the elder son is mentioned at all, he is the one who thinks he can be saved through depending on merit and reward and "the law" while God is really all about love, and compassion and grace. Although it's a reading that has "worked" for a lot of people, it's always left me a little cold and we heard this week that it doesn't have to be taken that way.
Instead, Dr. Levine asked us to look at a story as just a story and a family as just a family, and see where it leads. She doesn't like either of these son's much. The first is scandalous! Asking for your inheritance before your parents are even dead is the height of disrespect and selfishness -- that, I think, is the same today as it was then. This is truly bad behavior. But, look further at what he does. When he uses all his money up in "wild living" and there is a famine, no one will give him anything. He remembers that the servants in his father's house are better off than he is and he wants to improve his lot. His decision to return to his father's is way too mercenary to make Dr. Levine (or me) comfortable. He's not sorry, he's not worried that his father might be hurt by his actions, he's not concerned about how badly he acted, he just wants to eat again and decides this is the mostly likely way to get back on his feet. THIS is a repentant sinner?
Dr. Levine says the second son isn't so likable either. Initially the story tells us that the father divides his property between them. Yet later we see the eldest son still dependent on his father, complaining that his father has never given him anything. She sees him as one who fails to claim his inheritance -- his livelihood, his property, his power -- even after it has already been divided to him. And then he complains that his father still controls what he has neglected to own. AND he is resentful of a father's love and generosity, rather than compassionate himself over the sorry situation in which his brother comes home.
What impresses Dr. Levine in the story is the father's love. He does not wait until the younger son repents before running out and forgiving him and restoring him to his favor. When he hears that the elder son is resentful, he runs out to him as well and tries to persuade him to come in and also be glad. He is portrayed as reaching out to both and trying to effect reconciliation. He is doing all he can to bring the whole family into a right relationship, but everyone has choices -- the younger son could truly repent, but he could simply take advantage of the situation again. The elder son could extend compassion and look for reconciliation, or he could become fixated in his sense of fairness. We are forced to think about what is good, what is right, what is just, and what is fair as perhaps all different things, and ask which to choose -- what are the possible consequences of each one? How did they get in the situation anyway, was there some way that this could all have been avoided? (This is where the missing moms come in -- Dr. Levine guesses that they were sons of different mothers, and perhaps the situation was set up from the start for this kind of confrontation by the conflict of a favorite wife or the striving of one wife for advantages for her son over the other son? Do we, as parents, nurture a strong family or set-up our kids for future conflicts?)
Dr. Levine proposes that perhaps the meaning of the parable is in asking ourselves who are the family with whom God would have us reconcile and what power or which choices will draw us closer to that goal or perhaps push us further apart? What are we doing with the resources that are ours? Do we claim our power and our control over circumstances, or do we look for others to blame? Are we able to truly repent and seek reconciliation? Do we wait for others to reach that point or do we go further and create safe spaces where perhaps they will get there, but perhaps they won't? How extravagant is our love?
I really loved this overall interpretation and most of what Dr. Levine said about the characters in the parable, but there was one part that I disagreed with. In keeping with her major premise on parables, that we need to reinterpret and reinterpret as long as there are different readers and different "takes" that provide useful insights, here's where I try my own "take" on it -- and why I differ in some particulars with hers.
If I understood Dr. Levine correctly, she indicated that when the father divided the property between the sons the elder never actually "claimed his own" -- learned to believe and act as though his share of the property was actually his own. He was still deferring to the father long after he could have taken charge of his life and livelihood. That's an interesting thought, and I can see how there would be a lesson there. So many of us do, metaphorically and sometimes literally, spend our lives wishing and dreaming for things that are already our own and have been all along. But, still, I just don't think this idea fits this particular parable.
To me the more believable interpretation is that the father "divided his property between them," gave the younger his share as the younger was demanding, and told the older that "the rest will be yours when I die" (and by implication, not before I die -- unless I say so). Of course, we read first through our own lenses, and this seems more likely to me because it is my family history. My grandfather did much the same with my father and his brother, although for slightly different reasons and with very different results. But, when Dad's younger brother became a man and was married, it was clear that he was not going to stay on the farm like my father. My grandfather decided that it made more sense to split the property at that point, sell enough to give Dad's brother his share, and gave gun his inheritance early to help him get a start in another chosen career -- all with the understanding that my father would then, upon my grandfather's death, inherit the farm. But (with definite emphasis on the but), had he started to act like the owner while my grandfather still "had another 20 good years in him," Dad would have found, as country folk say, that he had "another think coming."
So, when I read the parable, the setup doesn't seem strange at all. That's just what father's sometimes choose to do with their property. However, beyond just not seeming strange to me, I think there are further clues in the story that this is the more likely interpretation. When the younger son decided to return home, he assumes that the father is still very much in charge. He doesn't even anticipate that the elder son will have anything to say about how he is received. They are his father's servants who have food to spare, not his brother's. It is his father that he will entreat to give him a job, if he cannot expect to be received as a son. I think when the elder son says to his father that "you have never given me a young goat so I can party" and his father says that "everything I have is yours," the father is thinking through the old "someday all of this will be yours" refrain. But I'm willing to bet that if the elder son had ever actually taken that goat and given himself a party, he would have incurred the father's wrath, and he might very well have been denied even if he had "asked very nicely." Sometimes people who hold the reins have a hard time letting them go, or even cutting a little slack. (Especially when they have done it before and seen that part of the inheritance squandered?) I don't see any reason not to take the elder at his word that he has been serving the farther all these years in the expectation of an inheritance he has yet to receive (and may be in a little fear that he might lose the inheritance entirely, if he doesn't toe the line better than his younger brother -- once burned, twice shy, and all that.)
Anyway, following through with my interpretation, the really strange part of the parable is in how all three parties act toward each other as members of the same family. Although the father does act with a great deal of love in the end toward both sons, to me there doesn't seem to have been a lot of love lost between the three of them up until that point. The father doesn't seem to have been motivated by love in the dividing the property; not so much thinking of what's best for the sons (as I believe actually was the case in my family) as just doing what the younger demands to get him off his back. We are never told that the younger son worries about having hurt his father, or even thinks that he can come home because his father loved him and will love him still. He thinks of what will be best for himself, but not at all about whether his father will be anxious to see him again, might be worried about him, etc. And most disturbing to me, as I identify the most with him, the elder son seems more anxious to ruin his father's joy in the younger's return than to preserve it. He seems to serve his father out of necessity rather than familial love. I can understand his resentment of his brother and his sense of being somehow treated unfairly in all this, but what shocks is that he shows no evidence of love for his father, nor does he seem sure at all of his father's love. It's almost as though he's begging to be reassured that his father loves him too. Had it been me, I would have fallen all over myself to try to hide my resentment, at least for a time, and make my father's joy as complete as possible for as long as possible. Life is hard and joy isn't all that easy to come by; you simply don't do anything to ruin it for those you love and who have loved you.
Neither son seems to love the father very much. They are concerned about themselves and their own interests solely, and that makes me wonder about the father. If he is so loving, and if he's characteristically been so loving, why didn't they too learn to love? (Maybe here's where we wonder where they mother's are and what THEY'VE been teaching the sons???) Yes, despite the best and most loving upbringing, some children do not grow up to be loving and responsible individuals -- but I believe more often than not they do. Love generally becomes reciprocal over time. I think maybe this particular father hasn't always been so loving. Maybe he's one of those who don't actually realize they love, or at least don't show it, until they already have lost or are about to lose that which they love. Only when the younger son is gone, does the father realize how much he misses him and loves him? Only when the elder is resentful, does the father realize how much he has taken him for granted rather than shown him love? If I am right and he has been an "absentee father" up to this point, is pouring out his love at this late date in each boy's life going to do any good? Might it be too late?
Whichever way we interpret the parable, what we are left with at the end is three people who should, in a Kingdom of Heaven world, be in a loving family relationship and are not. There are no guarantees that the relationship can be salvaged, but still choices that each one can make that can be directed either towards attempting to reconcile or choices that could break the family apart permanently. So, I think I agree with Dr. Levine that the point, or direction, of the story is not what has happened already but what happens next. Each person has choices and each person has some power to do the right thing or the wrong one -- no guarantees, as a full resolution would take all three to create but any one could derail, but plenty of potential and something to say to us no matter where we see ourselves in the story.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Believing Miracles
Next week I am going to Chautauqua Institution with my in-laws and sundry family members -- 9 people to a jointly rented house for a time of fun, food and learning. We did this last year too, and I still marvel over some of the incredible lectures we heard. The speakers provided me new ideas and food for thought to last the whole year, and I am expecting/hoping for a repeat performance.
I want to tell one favorite story from last year: One of the most eloquent and moving of the many excellent speakers had just finished his lecture, having had the audience of hundreds eating out of his hand for the entire time. An elderly gentleman stood to complement the speaker and ask a question. The speaker seemed a little startled at first, and then became extremely deferential. He explained to the audience that this was one of his most dearly loved and respected mentors and he showed, through gestures and in the tone of his voice, his delight in the complement and the great reverence for the man. It was clear that the honor he'd received he wanted to give back tenfold. In fact, it seemed to me that the collective aura of the whole audience, which the speaker had so deftly owned and manipulated during his lecture, was now effectively turned by his hands to bow at the feet of the august mentor. There was a hush that went over the crowd like a collective holding of breath. The crown of the speaker's accomplishment had been laid at the mentor's feet, and we hundreds were participants in the nevertheless quite intimate ceremony. It was one of those rare sacred moments that I will remember for a lifetime.
This story is entirely true. However, I think when you read about my "incredible" speakers you heard, as I meant you to, that I heard "really memorable, out-of-the-ordinary, amazing" people whose words I have thought of again and again during the year and who I learned much from. I doubt that you heard "incredible" as "not believable," even though that is the literal meaning of the word. And I doubt that anyone really believed I was part of an entire audience that literally ate food given out by the speakers hands, or took me to mean that my two eyes saw (as opposed to my inner eye) an aura that became a physical figure that then bowed at someone's feet, or that there was a real crown taken from the speaker's head and laid at the elderly man's feet. I used metaphorical language that is common enough to all of us that I would be surprised if anyone thought much about it at all. Most readers would have an easy time separating the inner meaning I was trying to convey from the physical description of the setting.
But, think how the above passage might read to someone in a few hundred years from now, or even translated literally from English into another language where the culture might not use the same common expressions and imagery. My story would seem in(not)credible indeed! If I insisted, as I also did above, that it was a true story, you would assume that I must be talking about miracles.
This morning in Sunday service we heard about some "miracles" that Jesus performed during his ministry in Galilee, and our minister asked us if we were ready to jump out of a boat on the St. Lawrence River (nearby) and walk across the water. Did we have enough faith, if we thought God asked us to? Doing so sounds pretty incredible to me -- the impossible kind of incredible. No, I am not ready. But, I forget that stories of miracle workers and supernatural occurrences were commonplace in first century Jewish life. The audience for this gospel story would have been used to hearing of special, memorable, amazing people doing in(not)credible things and, I'm sure, believed them to be true -- just as I assert that my story is true -- without a thought that, in the literal sense, the "facts" just don't line up with the world as we experience it.
I cannot be the type of Alice in Wonderland Christian who forces herself to believe "six impossible things before breakfast" in order to assert my credentials as a "believer." But I think that the authors of these miracle stories encountered someone really memorable, out-of-the-ordinary, amazing, and incredible who, just possibly, introduced them to something life-changing and precious beyond the ability of ordinary language to express. Not because I believe the impossible, but because I recognize the extraordinary, I believe that it is instructive and will be worth my while to take a closer look at these stories and "see what the Spirit is saying to the Church."
I want to tell one favorite story from last year: One of the most eloquent and moving of the many excellent speakers had just finished his lecture, having had the audience of hundreds eating out of his hand for the entire time. An elderly gentleman stood to complement the speaker and ask a question. The speaker seemed a little startled at first, and then became extremely deferential. He explained to the audience that this was one of his most dearly loved and respected mentors and he showed, through gestures and in the tone of his voice, his delight in the complement and the great reverence for the man. It was clear that the honor he'd received he wanted to give back tenfold. In fact, it seemed to me that the collective aura of the whole audience, which the speaker had so deftly owned and manipulated during his lecture, was now effectively turned by his hands to bow at the feet of the august mentor. There was a hush that went over the crowd like a collective holding of breath. The crown of the speaker's accomplishment had been laid at the mentor's feet, and we hundreds were participants in the nevertheless quite intimate ceremony. It was one of those rare sacred moments that I will remember for a lifetime.
This story is entirely true. However, I think when you read about my "incredible" speakers you heard, as I meant you to, that I heard "really memorable, out-of-the-ordinary, amazing" people whose words I have thought of again and again during the year and who I learned much from. I doubt that you heard "incredible" as "not believable," even though that is the literal meaning of the word. And I doubt that anyone really believed I was part of an entire audience that literally ate food given out by the speakers hands, or took me to mean that my two eyes saw (as opposed to my inner eye) an aura that became a physical figure that then bowed at someone's feet, or that there was a real crown taken from the speaker's head and laid at the elderly man's feet. I used metaphorical language that is common enough to all of us that I would be surprised if anyone thought much about it at all. Most readers would have an easy time separating the inner meaning I was trying to convey from the physical description of the setting.
But, think how the above passage might read to someone in a few hundred years from now, or even translated literally from English into another language where the culture might not use the same common expressions and imagery. My story would seem in(not)credible indeed! If I insisted, as I also did above, that it was a true story, you would assume that I must be talking about miracles.
This morning in Sunday service we heard about some "miracles" that Jesus performed during his ministry in Galilee, and our minister asked us if we were ready to jump out of a boat on the St. Lawrence River (nearby) and walk across the water. Did we have enough faith, if we thought God asked us to? Doing so sounds pretty incredible to me -- the impossible kind of incredible. No, I am not ready. But, I forget that stories of miracle workers and supernatural occurrences were commonplace in first century Jewish life. The audience for this gospel story would have been used to hearing of special, memorable, amazing people doing in(not)credible things and, I'm sure, believed them to be true -- just as I assert that my story is true -- without a thought that, in the literal sense, the "facts" just don't line up with the world as we experience it.
I cannot be the type of Alice in Wonderland Christian who forces herself to believe "six impossible things before breakfast" in order to assert my credentials as a "believer." But I think that the authors of these miracle stories encountered someone really memorable, out-of-the-ordinary, amazing, and incredible who, just possibly, introduced them to something life-changing and precious beyond the ability of ordinary language to express. Not because I believe the impossible, but because I recognize the extraordinary, I believe that it is instructive and will be worth my while to take a closer look at these stories and "see what the Spirit is saying to the Church."
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Transforming Love
Although it is obvious from the bulk of my writing that I approach things from a distinctly Christian perspective, I try to write about things of the spirit that are more broadly relevant across a variety of spiritual traditions. I think there is so much we can learn from each other, and I believe "that truth" is not the sole property of any one religion or tradition. One thing that definitely does not translate well across beliefs, or even across denominations within the Christian tradition, is Church politics. Few of us are interested in the inner workings of polity and authority even of our own particular tradition, much less someone else's. However, today I want to venture into this frequently mundane territory. There is a current argument in my Episcopal Diocese of Albany that I believe resonates on a much larger human scale. So, bear with me for a little bit of background and I promise to get to a point...
The Diocese of Albany is one of the more conservative/evangelical dioceses in the Episcopal church. Of the six New York dioceses, five bishops were in support of the same-sex marriage law and four will now allow Episcopal clergy to perform same-sex unions. The Diocese of Albany is the lone hold-out, whose bishop just sent a pastoral letter to be read in every parish reiterating his continuing ban not only on performing these weddings, but on clergy participating in any way in such weddings or recognizing such relationships. In it, he claims a "long-standing commitment to acknowledge homosexual persons as loved by God, and as recipients of pastoral care within the Church" and makes the entirely unsubstantiated (nobody ever asked us!) claim that the "overwhelming majority of the people and clergy in the Diocese of Albany do not and cannot support the new marriage legislation." The Bishop is quoted by Dennis Wisnom in the Albany Via Media webpages as characterizing those who disagree with him as "well intentioned people, but they are misguided." I am told by those who know him better than I that the Bishop is "a very loving person," but that it is also characteristic that he believes he has the whole truth in this matter (and in others) and that he sees himself as right and others as wrong or misguided when they disagree.
Thus, we get to the point of my concern and my larger question. I wonder if it is possible to really love and at the same time to be sure that one is "correct" and others "misguided"? I submit that it is not!
It gets down to the meaning of love. Even though we do lip service to the great commandment that includes "love the other as you love yourself," we have turned "charity" [the Latin version of the Greek work agape -- according to Encyclopaedia Britannica defined in the Christian tradition as "man’s love for man ... based not upon the desirability of its object but upon the transformation of its subject through the power of divine agāpe"] into something that we think of more as "alms giving," and we think of "compassion" as "pity" rather than in it's literal sense of "to suffer with, or to feel with." That is, we deprive these words of much of their power by focusing on the object of the love rather than the original sense of transformative love that has at its core the subject's vulnerability and openness to change.
And our greatest love does come where we are open to the greatest personal change. Perhaps no one has more universal claim to our greatest love than our own child: One who can initially give nothing in return but who transforms our life and our identity completely -- I am now a mother, a father, my purpose in life has changed, my priorities rearranged. At our best as new parents we can be so transformed that the standard refrain is "I never knew I could feel so much love."
True love does not require that the other receive, or even know of that love. What is essential is not a change or response in the loved one, but a transformation in the lover, and this transformation can be the impetus to love as much as the result of it. Teachers, musicians and artists, public individuals: we can truly love those who cause us to think, understand or feel in new ways and open new worlds to us, even when they have no idea that they have done so. The gratitude for inspiring us to dig deeper, to become more, opens our hearts to love even when there is no true relationship.
But, how much greater the love when there is true relationship. If I love you, then I must be open to being changed by participating in your life, feeling with you, seeing as you see; and when I sense that you love me I know my experience has changed you too, and that you have willingly entered into my life and volunteered to understand what it is to see as I see and feel as I feel. We can neither of us come out of a love relationship unchanged, and therefore, cannot truly enter into a love relationship without being willing to be changed by it.
So, when I hear people asking why we can't just allow them to "love the sinner but hate the sin," or "accept the pastoral care of the church" without anticipating that the church will be transformed by the experience of its new members -- No, I don't see true love. You can't truly love and care for people you invite into the community without being open to being transformed by seeing as they see and feeling what it is to be them. To say "you are welcome in but we are not open to change" is not to welcome at all. And, yes, loving the previous outsider may turn the inside world upside down. First Gentiles were allowed into the church and centuries of certainty about what God meant in "the law" were transformed by their perspectives. Slaves were allowed in and, once people began to understand and see through their experience, theologies of man's relationship to other men underwent drastic revisions. When men finally sought to understand the world through women's eyes, some finally understood why the protestations of traditional patriarchy that they weren't paternalistic fell on generally deaf female ears. A new theology of a God that is neither male nor necessarily mediated through an all male priesthood began to become mainstream. And, yes, if we welcome in lesbians and gays, and transgender folks, and anybody else who is "different" from us in ways that maybe scare us, and if we really love them, we will continue to be changed by our love for them in ways that may now seem downright "wrong" but will not with our newly transformed eyes.
Certainty, fixed, unalterable, I'm right, you're wrong -- these are all words that are at odds with love. Where there is no openness to transformation, there is no love.
The Diocese of Albany is one of the more conservative/evangelical dioceses in the Episcopal church. Of the six New York dioceses, five bishops were in support of the same-sex marriage law and four will now allow Episcopal clergy to perform same-sex unions. The Diocese of Albany is the lone hold-out, whose bishop just sent a pastoral letter to be read in every parish reiterating his continuing ban not only on performing these weddings, but on clergy participating in any way in such weddings or recognizing such relationships. In it, he claims a "long-standing commitment to acknowledge homosexual persons as loved by God, and as recipients of pastoral care within the Church" and makes the entirely unsubstantiated (nobody ever asked us!) claim that the "overwhelming majority of the people and clergy in the Diocese of Albany do not and cannot support the new marriage legislation." The Bishop is quoted by Dennis Wisnom in the Albany Via Media webpages as characterizing those who disagree with him as "well intentioned people, but they are misguided." I am told by those who know him better than I that the Bishop is "a very loving person," but that it is also characteristic that he believes he has the whole truth in this matter (and in others) and that he sees himself as right and others as wrong or misguided when they disagree.
Thus, we get to the point of my concern and my larger question. I wonder if it is possible to really love and at the same time to be sure that one is "correct" and others "misguided"? I submit that it is not!
It gets down to the meaning of love. Even though we do lip service to the great commandment that includes "love the other as you love yourself," we have turned "charity" [the Latin version of the Greek work agape -- according to Encyclopaedia Britannica defined in the Christian tradition as "man’s love for man ... based not upon the desirability of its object but upon the transformation of its subject through the power of divine agāpe"] into something that we think of more as "alms giving," and we think of "compassion" as "pity" rather than in it's literal sense of "to suffer with, or to feel with." That is, we deprive these words of much of their power by focusing on the object of the love rather than the original sense of transformative love that has at its core the subject's vulnerability and openness to change.
And our greatest love does come where we are open to the greatest personal change. Perhaps no one has more universal claim to our greatest love than our own child: One who can initially give nothing in return but who transforms our life and our identity completely -- I am now a mother, a father, my purpose in life has changed, my priorities rearranged. At our best as new parents we can be so transformed that the standard refrain is "I never knew I could feel so much love."
True love does not require that the other receive, or even know of that love. What is essential is not a change or response in the loved one, but a transformation in the lover, and this transformation can be the impetus to love as much as the result of it. Teachers, musicians and artists, public individuals: we can truly love those who cause us to think, understand or feel in new ways and open new worlds to us, even when they have no idea that they have done so. The gratitude for inspiring us to dig deeper, to become more, opens our hearts to love even when there is no true relationship.
But, how much greater the love when there is true relationship. If I love you, then I must be open to being changed by participating in your life, feeling with you, seeing as you see; and when I sense that you love me I know my experience has changed you too, and that you have willingly entered into my life and volunteered to understand what it is to see as I see and feel as I feel. We can neither of us come out of a love relationship unchanged, and therefore, cannot truly enter into a love relationship without being willing to be changed by it.
So, when I hear people asking why we can't just allow them to "love the sinner but hate the sin," or "accept the pastoral care of the church" without anticipating that the church will be transformed by the experience of its new members -- No, I don't see true love. You can't truly love and care for people you invite into the community without being open to being transformed by seeing as they see and feeling what it is to be them. To say "you are welcome in but we are not open to change" is not to welcome at all. And, yes, loving the previous outsider may turn the inside world upside down. First Gentiles were allowed into the church and centuries of certainty about what God meant in "the law" were transformed by their perspectives. Slaves were allowed in and, once people began to understand and see through their experience, theologies of man's relationship to other men underwent drastic revisions. When men finally sought to understand the world through women's eyes, some finally understood why the protestations of traditional patriarchy that they weren't paternalistic fell on generally deaf female ears. A new theology of a God that is neither male nor necessarily mediated through an all male priesthood began to become mainstream. And, yes, if we welcome in lesbians and gays, and transgender folks, and anybody else who is "different" from us in ways that maybe scare us, and if we really love them, we will continue to be changed by our love for them in ways that may now seem downright "wrong" but will not with our newly transformed eyes.
Certainty, fixed, unalterable, I'm right, you're wrong -- these are all words that are at odds with love. Where there is no openness to transformation, there is no love.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Love Unto Death
In celebration of New York's final entry into the new millennium with legal provision for same-sex marriages, a friend of mine sent me a copy of the sermon recently preached by the Very Rev. Peter Elliott, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver, celebrating the marriage of his friends Steve and David. In it, Dean Elliott said; "the greatest intimacy we can know is spiritual intimacy: and that’s the deep companionship that sustains a life long commitment. If you make a vow to accompany someone through to the end of life you are making a soul commitment. And love is the energy that sustains that commitment."
The idea of a soul commitment that involves a vow to last to the end of life is one that especially resonates with me today, although I am thinking about it in broader contexts than just marriage.
The possible extent and cost of a soul commitment was captured eloquently in a song (In Sickness And In Health) that a friend of mine included on a recent new album (highly recommended!). The song -- about the effects of an early, devastating, and fatal illness on the caretaker spouse, from the perspective of the ill spouse -- echoes with the refrain "you (we) didn't know what you signed on for when you said that you'd be mine." It asks the question; "When we said 'in sickness and in health,' although you've surely kept that promise, have you almost lost yourself?" and, "As my body betrays me, are you patiently waiting to be set free?"
For, however much we try to shelter ourselves from the reality of it, death is a part of life and we are called to participate in it -- even sometimes to linger overlong in its precincts. Although at its utmost extremity death is something we face alone, all of us are invited to share in either being ushered to that threshold by our own loved ones or in ushering others we love to that common destination.
Jan and I often joke that we must make a pact to die instantaneously in an accident that takes us both, because to either one of us the idea of losing the other -- either with the quick devastation of surprise or the slow despair of long illness -- seems too painful to contemplate (not to mention having to deal with the mess of the other's estate!). Yet we know that the odds are otherwise, and we willfully continue in this perilous and uncertain existence because that is where the heart leads.
But, the human heart leads to other commitments even more certain of leading to "love unto death" and we, as in humans everywhere, continue to step willingly onto these paths.
A few years ago, a friend whom I hadn't seen for awhile told me that the reason I hadn't seen him recently was that he had been at home dealing with chemotherapy from a cancer that had been diagnosed at about the time I had seen him last. My reaction, which I think is the reaction most of us would have, was not relief that I had missed out on being there with him but sorrow that we had not been good enough friends yet for him to call on me for support in his sickness. I immediately threw myself into the process of cementing the friendship that I had hoped from from before would grow deeper, even though, or perhaps especially because, a voice at the back of my head said that he was going to NEED my friendship later. There was no particular reason to feel that foreboding -- his cancer was supposedly in remission and the treatment had an 80% success rate; there was no reason to suspect a recurrence. And, we did go on to become best friends and to have some wonderful times before his cancer recurred. The second time around, the prognosis wasn't so good -- it had spread to his liver and remission rates were far less positive. Nevertheless, we went through 6 months of chemo and hope, all the while cementing our friendship and nourishing my growing friendship with his life-partner, parents, other friends, etc. In the end, as "best friend," I was the one who was asked to let him know that the options were all gone, that he was going to die. We were all there around him until the end, and I felt like I had jumped in at the beginning with the knowledge that this was all going to happen just as it had. He needed me and it was enough.
I faced a similar time with my mother, with her death from breast cancer, and more from the sidelines but equally painfully with my dad. I know -- if I live long enough -- that I face other times of care-taking, disease, and facing death with my dearly loved in-laws, my own generation of siblings and friends, and even with the possibility of losing some of the next generation. Each is painfully unthinkable just as is it ultimately inevitable. And, it's not just people who bring us to face-to-face with the inevitability of disease and death.
As I age, the number of pets I have loved and lost keeps growing, as has my experience of the variety of ways to participate in their suffering and to ultimately lose them. The first cat I had to put down was my beloved Sadie-cat of my post-college years. I met her loss with much trauma and angst, which unfortunately also communicated the same to her as I took her on the final trip to the vet. While no less painful, I have learned to have more compassion on the dear little ones who have loved me unto death, and now deal with that decision with their welfare utmost in my mind. But, oh the pain and loneliness when they are gone!
Each time I lose a loved one, I feel that so much of me is gone with them that I can never again be whole. In the midst of care-taking and decision-making, do I long to be set free? No. The question is, rather; "When to set free? When to finally let go?" And, although torn apart and tired, if I really look at what is left I find a bigger me than I began with.
I carry them all, all the ones whom I have loved and let go, the force of their love and the precious scars of their loss, deep inside me -- and the pressure of that love on my heart keeps it expanding outward to limits that I did not know were possible.
In the Epistle reading for today from the Lectionary (Romans 8: 12-25), the apostle Paul talks about being "set free from the bondage of decay" to await the "freedom of glory ... the redemption of our bodies." I don't believe that we need to understand this as some expectation of life after death or any miraculous resurrection. I think that there is a "redemption of the body" in meeting death and decay head-on, releasing it of its existential dread, and coming to terms with the impermanence of our own self and that of our loved ones; learning to live this ephemeral existence fully in-the-moment because of it.
Looking at things from the middle of a family member or friend's prolonged illness or ultimate death, or even in the middle of my own prolonged illnesses and frailties (as longer life has allowed me to experience), would I have "signed on" if I had known where it would take me? Perhaps not. But age and endurance have the advantage of providing distance and perspective. Today, I can say that I treasure each of these experiences and would sign on again willingly for the precious gift of sharing life AND death with everyone that I have loved and who has loved me. Far from losing myself, I have become myself by immersion in their impermanent lives and through the grace of their transcendent love.
The idea of a soul commitment that involves a vow to last to the end of life is one that especially resonates with me today, although I am thinking about it in broader contexts than just marriage.
The possible extent and cost of a soul commitment was captured eloquently in a song (In Sickness And In Health) that a friend of mine included on a recent new album (highly recommended!). The song -- about the effects of an early, devastating, and fatal illness on the caretaker spouse, from the perspective of the ill spouse -- echoes with the refrain "you (we) didn't know what you signed on for when you said that you'd be mine." It asks the question; "When we said 'in sickness and in health,' although you've surely kept that promise, have you almost lost yourself?" and, "As my body betrays me, are you patiently waiting to be set free?"
For, however much we try to shelter ourselves from the reality of it, death is a part of life and we are called to participate in it -- even sometimes to linger overlong in its precincts. Although at its utmost extremity death is something we face alone, all of us are invited to share in either being ushered to that threshold by our own loved ones or in ushering others we love to that common destination.
Jan and I often joke that we must make a pact to die instantaneously in an accident that takes us both, because to either one of us the idea of losing the other -- either with the quick devastation of surprise or the slow despair of long illness -- seems too painful to contemplate (not to mention having to deal with the mess of the other's estate!). Yet we know that the odds are otherwise, and we willfully continue in this perilous and uncertain existence because that is where the heart leads.
But, the human heart leads to other commitments even more certain of leading to "love unto death" and we, as in humans everywhere, continue to step willingly onto these paths.
A few years ago, a friend whom I hadn't seen for awhile told me that the reason I hadn't seen him recently was that he had been at home dealing with chemotherapy from a cancer that had been diagnosed at about the time I had seen him last. My reaction, which I think is the reaction most of us would have, was not relief that I had missed out on being there with him but sorrow that we had not been good enough friends yet for him to call on me for support in his sickness. I immediately threw myself into the process of cementing the friendship that I had hoped from from before would grow deeper, even though, or perhaps especially because, a voice at the back of my head said that he was going to NEED my friendship later. There was no particular reason to feel that foreboding -- his cancer was supposedly in remission and the treatment had an 80% success rate; there was no reason to suspect a recurrence. And, we did go on to become best friends and to have some wonderful times before his cancer recurred. The second time around, the prognosis wasn't so good -- it had spread to his liver and remission rates were far less positive. Nevertheless, we went through 6 months of chemo and hope, all the while cementing our friendship and nourishing my growing friendship with his life-partner, parents, other friends, etc. In the end, as "best friend," I was the one who was asked to let him know that the options were all gone, that he was going to die. We were all there around him until the end, and I felt like I had jumped in at the beginning with the knowledge that this was all going to happen just as it had. He needed me and it was enough.
I faced a similar time with my mother, with her death from breast cancer, and more from the sidelines but equally painfully with my dad. I know -- if I live long enough -- that I face other times of care-taking, disease, and facing death with my dearly loved in-laws, my own generation of siblings and friends, and even with the possibility of losing some of the next generation. Each is painfully unthinkable just as is it ultimately inevitable. And, it's not just people who bring us to face-to-face with the inevitability of disease and death.
As I age, the number of pets I have loved and lost keeps growing, as has my experience of the variety of ways to participate in their suffering and to ultimately lose them. The first cat I had to put down was my beloved Sadie-cat of my post-college years. I met her loss with much trauma and angst, which unfortunately also communicated the same to her as I took her on the final trip to the vet. While no less painful, I have learned to have more compassion on the dear little ones who have loved me unto death, and now deal with that decision with their welfare utmost in my mind. But, oh the pain and loneliness when they are gone!
Each time I lose a loved one, I feel that so much of me is gone with them that I can never again be whole. In the midst of care-taking and decision-making, do I long to be set free? No. The question is, rather; "When to set free? When to finally let go?" And, although torn apart and tired, if I really look at what is left I find a bigger me than I began with.
I carry them all, all the ones whom I have loved and let go, the force of their love and the precious scars of their loss, deep inside me -- and the pressure of that love on my heart keeps it expanding outward to limits that I did not know were possible.
In the Epistle reading for today from the Lectionary (Romans 8: 12-25), the apostle Paul talks about being "set free from the bondage of decay" to await the "freedom of glory ... the redemption of our bodies." I don't believe that we need to understand this as some expectation of life after death or any miraculous resurrection. I think that there is a "redemption of the body" in meeting death and decay head-on, releasing it of its existential dread, and coming to terms with the impermanence of our own self and that of our loved ones; learning to live this ephemeral existence fully in-the-moment because of it.
Looking at things from the middle of a family member or friend's prolonged illness or ultimate death, or even in the middle of my own prolonged illnesses and frailties (as longer life has allowed me to experience), would I have "signed on" if I had known where it would take me? Perhaps not. But age and endurance have the advantage of providing distance and perspective. Today, I can say that I treasure each of these experiences and would sign on again willingly for the precious gift of sharing life AND death with everyone that I have loved and who has loved me. Far from losing myself, I have become myself by immersion in their impermanent lives and through the grace of their transcendent love.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Hard Work!
Some friends and I have been reading Karen Armstrong's The Case for God recently and one of the things she repeats several times is that religion is hard work. God has never been easy to understand and some of our finest mystics and theologians assert that God is found more in the questions and contradictions, and the struggle the struggle to understand, than in answers and doctrines.
We've had different responses to this idea. Some of us want at least some core -- some basic set of unalterable truths to be taught and to teach our children -- around which some of the other questions can exist as points of discussion or difference. Some of us are willing, or even eager, to question everything and to challenge all our positions radically. I think it's been good for us all to hear the perspectives of the other, and to be open to the diversity of our paths.
Today's gospel, if you read the longer passage (Matthew 10:34-42, instead of just 40-42) is one of those places where all the questions and contradictions seem to come to a head. At first Jesus says "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" and talks of setting everyone against each other. But, the passage ends with the "whoever welcomes you welcomes me" passage about radical hospitality. It's enough to set the mind spinning. Just at first it doesn't seem quite so contradictory -- love God first and foremost, and then others, and treat them like you would treat Jesus. That's what we heard in the sermon. But, the more I think about it, the less clear it becomes. If I am to treat even one of these little ones like I would welcome the Lord, then how can it be that "one's foes will be the members of one's own household"? How can I fully recognize and respond to God in everyone and yet expect that the result will be not peace, but a sword? Why are these so apparently contradictory teachings given practically in the same breath (at least as the gospel writer has recorded it)? Is it, perhaps, the contemplation of the contradiction that is the point? The either/or interpretation works for some people -- sometimes it is like this, sometimes like that. But, for me, it's is the both/and question that is the most profitable. How can both instructions be true at the same time, what is the meaning of the paradox?
As I have been trying to learn more about gardening the past couple of summers (my historically brownish-black thumb is showing a few signs of green around the edges), I have discovered that my plants respond very differently to pruning. Some have to be pruned very gently, and may even die if you cut away too much or at the wrong season. Some, like my lilacs, are almost impossible to kill and do best if old growth is cut away completely not long after they finish blooming. I guess I respond most like a lilac. I do best when my strongest held and most solid beliefs get chopped all the way back to the root every once in awhile -- everything up for rethinking and possible revision. The resulting chaos and even trauma make me dig deeper and bring out new growth and (one hopes) new blooms in due season. But, I also need to be careful not to inflict my drastic pruning methods on plants or people who respond differently.
As Armstrong also says in her book, the proof of a religious doctrine or point of faith isn't in it's being right or wrong, it's whether it is helpful or unhelpful in helping us to live the life we want to live and be the people we want to be. We won't all get there in the same path or by the same set of beliefs and doctrines.
We've had different responses to this idea. Some of us want at least some core -- some basic set of unalterable truths to be taught and to teach our children -- around which some of the other questions can exist as points of discussion or difference. Some of us are willing, or even eager, to question everything and to challenge all our positions radically. I think it's been good for us all to hear the perspectives of the other, and to be open to the diversity of our paths.
Today's gospel, if you read the longer passage (Matthew 10:34-42, instead of just 40-42) is one of those places where all the questions and contradictions seem to come to a head. At first Jesus says "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" and talks of setting everyone against each other. But, the passage ends with the "whoever welcomes you welcomes me" passage about radical hospitality. It's enough to set the mind spinning. Just at first it doesn't seem quite so contradictory -- love God first and foremost, and then others, and treat them like you would treat Jesus. That's what we heard in the sermon. But, the more I think about it, the less clear it becomes. If I am to treat even one of these little ones like I would welcome the Lord, then how can it be that "one's foes will be the members of one's own household"? How can I fully recognize and respond to God in everyone and yet expect that the result will be not peace, but a sword? Why are these so apparently contradictory teachings given practically in the same breath (at least as the gospel writer has recorded it)? Is it, perhaps, the contemplation of the contradiction that is the point? The either/or interpretation works for some people -- sometimes it is like this, sometimes like that. But, for me, it's is the both/and question that is the most profitable. How can both instructions be true at the same time, what is the meaning of the paradox?
As I have been trying to learn more about gardening the past couple of summers (my historically brownish-black thumb is showing a few signs of green around the edges), I have discovered that my plants respond very differently to pruning. Some have to be pruned very gently, and may even die if you cut away too much or at the wrong season. Some, like my lilacs, are almost impossible to kill and do best if old growth is cut away completely not long after they finish blooming. I guess I respond most like a lilac. I do best when my strongest held and most solid beliefs get chopped all the way back to the root every once in awhile -- everything up for rethinking and possible revision. The resulting chaos and even trauma make me dig deeper and bring out new growth and (one hopes) new blooms in due season. But, I also need to be careful not to inflict my drastic pruning methods on plants or people who respond differently.
As Armstrong also says in her book, the proof of a religious doctrine or point of faith isn't in it's being right or wrong, it's whether it is helpful or unhelpful in helping us to live the life we want to live and be the people we want to be. We won't all get there in the same path or by the same set of beliefs and doctrines.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Parental Guidance Suggested
Today was "youth Sunday" at the Church I visited. More about that later...
When I got up this morning, I found myself thinking of my grandmother who was "raised a Methodist" and was always determined to "die a Methodist" as well (her reaction to the rest of our family joining the Southern Baptist church in town when the local Methodist church closed). Perhaps I thought of her because I planned to visit another church this morning, my Episcopal church having moved services to the evening so that the vicar and vestry could attend Diocesan Council downstate. I chuckled a bit while thinking that perhaps she should have been Presbyterian instead, since she certainly believed in predestination. However, her version of predestination didn't have much to do with God's foreknowledge but had everything to do with her own determination and will. She was determined that we grandchildren were destined for the future she planned, at least as far as she had energy to make it happen. My brother was to take over the farm, my sister was to be an artist, and I was to be the church musician. In the last, she had the assistance of my Great-Aunt Georgia to reinforce her will. My Aunt Georgia was the church organist/choir director and my Grandma Grace the church pianist. As far as they were concerned (and that settled it!) it was my destiny to take over for them as the local church organist and pianist and choir director, and they started me in lessons when I was just 6 years old. Although I felt I had very little choice in the matter, I learned to love the music and was happy with my fate. Unfortunately, Aunt Georgia died only a few months after my first lessons with her, but my Grandma did live to hear me sing and play both piano and organ in our hometown church. My sister also became an artist, so Grandma managed to live to see predestination confirmed for at least 2 of her grandchildren. (I do not, however, admit to any organ playing skills at all--I did it once just to please her, but I never got the hang of playing with my feet, or of pushing and pulling knobs while simultaneously trying to play the keyboard!)
I had a wonderfully rich Christian upbringing. Our home and our church were full of Bible stories, hymns, Christian books and study guides, and testimonies of faithful people. Life was a succession of worship services, Sunday School, youth group, vacation Bible school, and twice yearly revivals (especially after we became Southern Baptists!). I had read the whole Bible through by the time I was in my early teens, and knew the Old Testament stories and the stories of the Gospels through and through. My parents clearly believed that early church education was essential and made sure that we children were exposed to as much as we could absorb, but without ever forcing us to go or insisting that we believe.
I could wish, however, that they had spoken to us more about what they believed, how they believed it, what parts they struggled with, and how they integrated it all into their lives. I look back now on what I believed then, who I listened to, what I accepted without question, and I find much of it very troubling. I was not very discriminating, and I had very little guidance to help me navigate the very many conflicting claims on "God's truth."
Which brings me back to "youth Sunday" at this church I visited; I could not help but wonder whether anyone was guiding them to think critically about what they accept. The music was young and hip and surprisingly good from a musical standpoint, but the lyrics were troubling. One song had young David thanking Jesus (!) for his defeat over Goliath. Another challenged Christians to take their religion back into the schools as a replacement for the humanism and evolution being taught there. I didn't think this particular church had a reputation of being fundamentalist or teaching compulsion in religion! Parents and church leaders, are you listening to what your children are being taught? Are you asking them what they think? Are you telling them what YOU think?
I cringe at the person I became in my teenage years -- I sang "I wish we'd all been ready" and truly believed that the Rapture was imminent. I preached to all my friends about the coming Armageddon, surely presaged by the formation of the World Council of Churches, who were undoubtedly harboring the Anti-Christ as their leader. (If the Anti-Christ wasn't, in fact, the Roman Pope -- another good contender!) I carried my Bible everywhere and dropped tracts wherever I went that outlined the 4 Spiritual Laws, the formula by which one could step from one side of "the line" to the other and become "saved--that is, not like OTHER people."
I read my first (pretty mild) pornography while on a panel of people trying to persuade schools to censor this kind of stuff from impressionable youth. (My colleagues thought I was older than I was, and I wasn't about to disabuse them. It was the only access I had...) All the time I was publicly decrying exposing our nation's youth to such "filth" I was secretly devouring the examples, our proof texts, in the hopes of learning something about this new and scary world of sexuality, which was otherwise completely taboo to us "good Christian youth." Later, I bought a whole series of books on dating and sexuality from a Christian publisher. They taught complete abstinence until marriage, and insisted that masturbation and even romantic/sexual fantasy were as sinful as actual premarital sex. The books and their advice bent, twisted, folded, and crumpled me into myself, binding me thus tighter than the compressed bales of hay with which we filled the barn for winter fodder, but my parents never asked about what I read or what I was thinking. I was, after all, reading good Christian books from a reputed conservative publisher -- I must be getting the advice I need, right?
I was a typical teenager. It's not easy to talk to a teenager, who by definition knows everything and understands it all so much better than an adult who is, also by definition, over-the-hill and irrelevant. I remember once my dad mentioned some Mormons had moved nearby, and I went into a long tirade about how Mormonism was a cult and dangerous and how good people should beware lest Mormons try to spread their faith any further or try to gain political or economic influence. My dad responded, "Now wait a minute. I though for the most part, Mormons are good people with strong families and a good work ethic?" Of course, I contradicted him at the time, but I also immediately KNEW, the moment he called me on it, that I was being a self-righteous prig spouting a "party line" of stuff I'd been told and never even bothered to investigate. I realized right then that I deserved to be challenged, and I also never forgot the lesson.
I would have benefited from many more such lessons, but I, for the most part, didn't get challenged in my excesses. I wish I had known then -- I wish I knew now -- what they thought of my early fundamentalism, my anti-intellectualism, my exclusivism, my tendency to swallow whole what ever certain charismatic youth leaders or musicians taught. Were they even aware of it, or did they think that Church is generally benign and therefore not really pay any attention to what I was getting out of it? What would they have said if they had known what I was really into? It was so important in our family that we read the Bible, know the stories, sing the hymns -- and they modeled this -- but, I wish I knew more about what difference these things made to my parents and grandparents and family as people. Somehow, I can't quite imagine that they had the same kind of tight, confining, exclusionary faith that I was being taught and was swallowing whole. But, they never said and I never took the chance to ask them about it.
When I was 13, to insist on "dying a Methodist" because you were "born a Methodist" was clearly just stubbornness and resistance to change. Some four decades later I understand much more about what it means to claim a heritage and identity, and to find meaning and strength in choosing a path and sticking to it, even if it is just one path among many. I have my own ideas about what being a Methodist meant to my Grandma because I know what being Christian and Episcopalian mean to me, but I will never know for sure just what she was trying to say. I wish I could ask her. I wish she had at least tried to tell me.
When I got up this morning, I found myself thinking of my grandmother who was "raised a Methodist" and was always determined to "die a Methodist" as well (her reaction to the rest of our family joining the Southern Baptist church in town when the local Methodist church closed). Perhaps I thought of her because I planned to visit another church this morning, my Episcopal church having moved services to the evening so that the vicar and vestry could attend Diocesan Council downstate. I chuckled a bit while thinking that perhaps she should have been Presbyterian instead, since she certainly believed in predestination. However, her version of predestination didn't have much to do with God's foreknowledge but had everything to do with her own determination and will. She was determined that we grandchildren were destined for the future she planned, at least as far as she had energy to make it happen. My brother was to take over the farm, my sister was to be an artist, and I was to be the church musician. In the last, she had the assistance of my Great-Aunt Georgia to reinforce her will. My Aunt Georgia was the church organist/choir director and my Grandma Grace the church pianist. As far as they were concerned (and that settled it!) it was my destiny to take over for them as the local church organist and pianist and choir director, and they started me in lessons when I was just 6 years old. Although I felt I had very little choice in the matter, I learned to love the music and was happy with my fate. Unfortunately, Aunt Georgia died only a few months after my first lessons with her, but my Grandma did live to hear me sing and play both piano and organ in our hometown church. My sister also became an artist, so Grandma managed to live to see predestination confirmed for at least 2 of her grandchildren. (I do not, however, admit to any organ playing skills at all--I did it once just to please her, but I never got the hang of playing with my feet, or of pushing and pulling knobs while simultaneously trying to play the keyboard!)
I had a wonderfully rich Christian upbringing. Our home and our church were full of Bible stories, hymns, Christian books and study guides, and testimonies of faithful people. Life was a succession of worship services, Sunday School, youth group, vacation Bible school, and twice yearly revivals (especially after we became Southern Baptists!). I had read the whole Bible through by the time I was in my early teens, and knew the Old Testament stories and the stories of the Gospels through and through. My parents clearly believed that early church education was essential and made sure that we children were exposed to as much as we could absorb, but without ever forcing us to go or insisting that we believe.
I could wish, however, that they had spoken to us more about what they believed, how they believed it, what parts they struggled with, and how they integrated it all into their lives. I look back now on what I believed then, who I listened to, what I accepted without question, and I find much of it very troubling. I was not very discriminating, and I had very little guidance to help me navigate the very many conflicting claims on "God's truth."
Which brings me back to "youth Sunday" at this church I visited; I could not help but wonder whether anyone was guiding them to think critically about what they accept. The music was young and hip and surprisingly good from a musical standpoint, but the lyrics were troubling. One song had young David thanking Jesus (!) for his defeat over Goliath. Another challenged Christians to take their religion back into the schools as a replacement for the humanism and evolution being taught there. I didn't think this particular church had a reputation of being fundamentalist or teaching compulsion in religion! Parents and church leaders, are you listening to what your children are being taught? Are you asking them what they think? Are you telling them what YOU think?
I cringe at the person I became in my teenage years -- I sang "I wish we'd all been ready" and truly believed that the Rapture was imminent. I preached to all my friends about the coming Armageddon, surely presaged by the formation of the World Council of Churches, who were undoubtedly harboring the Anti-Christ as their leader. (If the Anti-Christ wasn't, in fact, the Roman Pope -- another good contender!) I carried my Bible everywhere and dropped tracts wherever I went that outlined the 4 Spiritual Laws, the formula by which one could step from one side of "the line" to the other and become "saved--that is, not like OTHER people."
I read my first (pretty mild) pornography while on a panel of people trying to persuade schools to censor this kind of stuff from impressionable youth. (My colleagues thought I was older than I was, and I wasn't about to disabuse them. It was the only access I had...) All the time I was publicly decrying exposing our nation's youth to such "filth" I was secretly devouring the examples, our proof texts, in the hopes of learning something about this new and scary world of sexuality, which was otherwise completely taboo to us "good Christian youth." Later, I bought a whole series of books on dating and sexuality from a Christian publisher. They taught complete abstinence until marriage, and insisted that masturbation and even romantic/sexual fantasy were as sinful as actual premarital sex. The books and their advice bent, twisted, folded, and crumpled me into myself, binding me thus tighter than the compressed bales of hay with which we filled the barn for winter fodder, but my parents never asked about what I read or what I was thinking. I was, after all, reading good Christian books from a reputed conservative publisher -- I must be getting the advice I need, right?
I was a typical teenager. It's not easy to talk to a teenager, who by definition knows everything and understands it all so much better than an adult who is, also by definition, over-the-hill and irrelevant. I remember once my dad mentioned some Mormons had moved nearby, and I went into a long tirade about how Mormonism was a cult and dangerous and how good people should beware lest Mormons try to spread their faith any further or try to gain political or economic influence. My dad responded, "Now wait a minute. I though for the most part, Mormons are good people with strong families and a good work ethic?" Of course, I contradicted him at the time, but I also immediately KNEW, the moment he called me on it, that I was being a self-righteous prig spouting a "party line" of stuff I'd been told and never even bothered to investigate. I realized right then that I deserved to be challenged, and I also never forgot the lesson.
I would have benefited from many more such lessons, but I, for the most part, didn't get challenged in my excesses. I wish I had known then -- I wish I knew now -- what they thought of my early fundamentalism, my anti-intellectualism, my exclusivism, my tendency to swallow whole what ever certain charismatic youth leaders or musicians taught. Were they even aware of it, or did they think that Church is generally benign and therefore not really pay any attention to what I was getting out of it? What would they have said if they had known what I was really into? It was so important in our family that we read the Bible, know the stories, sing the hymns -- and they modeled this -- but, I wish I knew more about what difference these things made to my parents and grandparents and family as people. Somehow, I can't quite imagine that they had the same kind of tight, confining, exclusionary faith that I was being taught and was swallowing whole. But, they never said and I never took the chance to ask them about it.
When I was 13, to insist on "dying a Methodist" because you were "born a Methodist" was clearly just stubbornness and resistance to change. Some four decades later I understand much more about what it means to claim a heritage and identity, and to find meaning and strength in choosing a path and sticking to it, even if it is just one path among many. I have my own ideas about what being a Methodist meant to my Grandma because I know what being Christian and Episcopalian mean to me, but I will never know for sure just what she was trying to say. I wish I could ask her. I wish she had at least tried to tell me.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Turning Things Around
When I began this blog, I promised myself that I would, as much as possible, try to write something every Sunday. It doesn't always look like I've done very well at that, but what you don't see (and I don't want to see when I revisit my blog months down the road!) is all the stuff I write that is clearly not worth posting. Having just finished a letter criticizing my own preacher for saying very little worth listening to, I have to admit that I have less of interest to say than I thought I did when I started the blog. Sometimes I feel really inspired, but inspiration is elusive even when I do apply perspiration to the task!
What survives of my musings from last week is below:
Some friends and I are reading Karen Armstrong's Case for God together, and one thing she says early in the book is that atheism requires a doctrine of God to oppose -- that it's not possible to be in opposition to something without some definition or conception of what it is that one's against. She is (and I am also) an atheist to the God of most fundamentalist Christians (as well as other fundamentalists of various religions) and perhaps to the God of many other Christians as well. In fact, I find that many of the Criticisms leveled by the Dawkins, Hitchens, Hawking, etc. crowd of neo-atheists to be extremely on target. Yet, I listen to them with a great deal of frustration because I don't recognize the God that they don't believe in -- at least that God is foreign to me on so many levels, yet they seem to insist that anyone who professes to believe in God must hold at least some of these beliefs that they oppose. (I could, perhaps, argue that I hold none of them and yet STILL profess to be a Christian -- it all depends on what one means when one uses words to describe things essentially not describable with words. There are always different angles and different interpretations.)
I like too what Armstrong says about evaluating religious ideas and practice not in terms of right and wrong, but in terms of skillful and unskillful (or helpful and unhelpful). Does something (a belief, a practice, a text, ...) help me to connect with others, to feel integrated and whole, to find meaning and purpose, or not? And, are other people finding those things that do the same for them?
I'll finish for today with one of those things from the Bible that opens so many questions for me about the nature of God, of faith, of how we look at things and what they might possibly mean: The gospel for today (John 17) says, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." Actually, pretty much along with our neo-atheists, I'm one of those people who has very little of either fear or expectation from death, I think it is just the end, like birth is the beginning, and that the two endpoints in some sense encompass the total of my being. But, there's nothing in the above that contradicts from that at all -- it says "eternal life" is "to know God." If you look at that from some vantage points it blows the traditional idea of "life after death" quite out of the water. Time and space are related and derivative, properties of the physical universe, rather than outside of it. Perhaps to know God is to touch something which transcends time and space? Beyond that, my thoughts grope blindly... but, does anything essential in scripture actually insist on a "life after death" perspective? [That people have, at times, believed in life after death? -- yes. That it is an essential belief for faith in God? -- I haven't found it!]
Last week, Jesus spoke to his disciples of "In my father's house are many mansions," and "I go to prepare a place for you." But, is he necessarily speaking of some kind of life after death? "My father's house" could equally well be something we encounter in this life. Jesus knew he was going -- this life was ending -- but with his life and death he had perhaps shown how, prepared us for, finding a dwelling place in God for our being, not someday, but now. Of course, "a dwelling place in God" could be equally many things, or nothing at all. Isn't that the point; to keep asking these questions and searching for answers, looking from as many angles and vantage points as possible while we still can?
What survives of my musings from last week is below:
What I "believe," how I think or speak about anything spiritual, changes with every approach I make to the subject. Sometimes I believe it all, sometimes none of it, and most often bits and pieces, but it's all dependent on how I look at things at the moment. Just a slight change in angle or time makes everything look different and elicits a different response. Anyone reading these pages can see that what I say is not "consistent" in any common use of the term, I make no attempt to avoid contradicting myself and claiming essentially opposite things -- I just write as I feel at any particular moment. And yet, it never seems that what I actually feel, behind the attempt to put it in words, changes all that much. How I describe it changes radically depending on the perspective, the viewing angle, but the reality behind all the striving to put it into words is as steady and unchanging as it is elusive and impossible to describe...In somewhat related thoughts this week, I heard the preacher ask "Is it sufficient just to believe in God, to be a Christian?" but my heart responded with the question, "Is it necessary to believe in God to be a Christian?" Because I often don't "believe" in God -- or at least, what I do believe has very little in common with how many would define God. Nevertheless, being (in some sense, not everyone would agree) a Christian is central to who I am, and I doubt I could walk away from defining myself so even if I wanted to.
Some friends and I are reading Karen Armstrong's Case for God together, and one thing she says early in the book is that atheism requires a doctrine of God to oppose -- that it's not possible to be in opposition to something without some definition or conception of what it is that one's against. She is (and I am also) an atheist to the God of most fundamentalist Christians (as well as other fundamentalists of various religions) and perhaps to the God of many other Christians as well. In fact, I find that many of the Criticisms leveled by the Dawkins, Hitchens, Hawking, etc. crowd of neo-atheists to be extremely on target. Yet, I listen to them with a great deal of frustration because I don't recognize the God that they don't believe in -- at least that God is foreign to me on so many levels, yet they seem to insist that anyone who professes to believe in God must hold at least some of these beliefs that they oppose. (I could, perhaps, argue that I hold none of them and yet STILL profess to be a Christian -- it all depends on what one means when one uses words to describe things essentially not describable with words. There are always different angles and different interpretations.)
I like too what Armstrong says about evaluating religious ideas and practice not in terms of right and wrong, but in terms of skillful and unskillful (or helpful and unhelpful). Does something (a belief, a practice, a text, ...) help me to connect with others, to feel integrated and whole, to find meaning and purpose, or not? And, are other people finding those things that do the same for them?
I'll finish for today with one of those things from the Bible that opens so many questions for me about the nature of God, of faith, of how we look at things and what they might possibly mean: The gospel for today (John 17) says, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." Actually, pretty much along with our neo-atheists, I'm one of those people who has very little of either fear or expectation from death, I think it is just the end, like birth is the beginning, and that the two endpoints in some sense encompass the total of my being. But, there's nothing in the above that contradicts from that at all -- it says "eternal life" is "to know God." If you look at that from some vantage points it blows the traditional idea of "life after death" quite out of the water. Time and space are related and derivative, properties of the physical universe, rather than outside of it. Perhaps to know God is to touch something which transcends time and space? Beyond that, my thoughts grope blindly... but, does anything essential in scripture actually insist on a "life after death" perspective? [That people have, at times, believed in life after death? -- yes. That it is an essential belief for faith in God? -- I haven't found it!]
Last week, Jesus spoke to his disciples of "In my father's house are many mansions," and "I go to prepare a place for you." But, is he necessarily speaking of some kind of life after death? "My father's house" could equally well be something we encounter in this life. Jesus knew he was going -- this life was ending -- but with his life and death he had perhaps shown how, prepared us for, finding a dwelling place in God for our being, not someday, but now. Of course, "a dwelling place in God" could be equally many things, or nothing at all. Isn't that the point; to keep asking these questions and searching for answers, looking from as many angles and vantage points as possible while we still can?
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Falling Down on the Job
I mentioned in my last post an elderly friend who died on Easter. She fell, knocked herself unconscious, and died a few days later as a result of the trauma. The following Sunday, I too fell -- about halfway down a flight of wooden stairs while carrying two suitcases and a glass. While I didn't hurt myself very badly, I did get bruised and shaken up quite a lot, and the recovery time explains my lack of blogs for the month...
One thing about falling down the stairs; it takes a remarkably long time. Between the fatal misstep and the final crash at the bottom is PLENTY of time for regrets and apprehensiveness. As I stood at the top of the stairs, I briefly thought that I should not attempt to carry so much down all at once. But, going up and down the stairs hurts my bad hip and I did not want to have to make another trip. I thought, "I'll just be careful," forgetting that said "bad hip" often fails me at the critical moment. A few steps in, a sharp pain hit as my hip complained of the extra weight, the foot slipped, I started to catch myself and then realized that it is too late! Simultaneously, in those stretched-out seconds while I fell, I was thinking: "Don't tense up, try not to twist, be careful of the glass..."; "My partner has already started driving to Virginia; she'll have to turn around to get to the hospital, or maybe plan the funeral!"; "How stupid! Why didn't I listen to my good sense and not try to carry two bags at once!" "I'm too young to die!" And when I finally hit bottom, I gingerly moved a muscle at a time and thought what a miracle as everything seemed to work, for the most part. "Artificial hip still in place? Check. I can move my right leg out from under me? Check. Left leg? Also check. Hand? Lots of tiny cuts -- rapidly turning red all over and lots of smashed glass all around, but no spurting blood anywhere. No major cuts! OK. What hurts? Major gash on the left leg, I don't want to look... My inlaws are running in--No, not dead. Ice please! And let's just sit here for awhile before trying to get up..."
As it turned out, I was tremendously lucky. No major injuries, although enough minor ones to keep me sore for a couple weeks and reflecting on the lesson: "Listen to that little voice that tells you when you are trying to do too much!" Much gratitude for having another chance. Whether or not God exists as we envision, it seems necessary at times to feel that overwhelming gratitude for second chances--just as it is sometimes necessary to rail against God over the tragedies of the world. Sometimes faith isn't a conscious choice, it just seems to be human nature.
With my fall behind me as I sat in church this past Sunday, listening to the familiar words of the 23rd Psalm, I thought a bit about "thy rod and thy staff." As with many familiar Bible stories, I had never really gone back and revisited my early Sunday-School interpretation of this Psalm and what it means. What we had always been told is that the rod and staff mean that sometimes God punishes us when we are wrong, so that we will know to do right later ... sort of a Biblical "Story of Ping" with the Good Shepherd waiting to hit us across the rear with his staff -- consequences teach us to appreciate punishment when we see what trouble we would get in without correction. But today I wonder how often shepherds go around hitting their sheep? Although I don't know much about herding sheep, I do know a lot about herding and chasing cows. My father always insisted that we were NOT to hit the cows. We carried large staffs to whirl around our bodies and make ourselves look bigger, so that it was easier for the cows to see us and understand our directions, to be guided -- not hurt! Only if the cows were going in the wrong way or charging would we threaten them with the staff, and only if they were charging directly at us would we ever resort to hitting them. That was a last resort!
So, this Sunday when I heard "thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me," I thought about that voice that whispered in my ear, "don't try to carry too much down the stairs!" Remember to look for guidance! It is given to comfort, not punish.
One thing about falling down the stairs; it takes a remarkably long time. Between the fatal misstep and the final crash at the bottom is PLENTY of time for regrets and apprehensiveness. As I stood at the top of the stairs, I briefly thought that I should not attempt to carry so much down all at once. But, going up and down the stairs hurts my bad hip and I did not want to have to make another trip. I thought, "I'll just be careful," forgetting that said "bad hip" often fails me at the critical moment. A few steps in, a sharp pain hit as my hip complained of the extra weight, the foot slipped, I started to catch myself and then realized that it is too late! Simultaneously, in those stretched-out seconds while I fell, I was thinking: "Don't tense up, try not to twist, be careful of the glass..."; "My partner has already started driving to Virginia; she'll have to turn around to get to the hospital, or maybe plan the funeral!"; "How stupid! Why didn't I listen to my good sense and not try to carry two bags at once!" "I'm too young to die!" And when I finally hit bottom, I gingerly moved a muscle at a time and thought what a miracle as everything seemed to work, for the most part. "Artificial hip still in place? Check. I can move my right leg out from under me? Check. Left leg? Also check. Hand? Lots of tiny cuts -- rapidly turning red all over and lots of smashed glass all around, but no spurting blood anywhere. No major cuts! OK. What hurts? Major gash on the left leg, I don't want to look... My inlaws are running in--No, not dead. Ice please! And let's just sit here for awhile before trying to get up..."
As it turned out, I was tremendously lucky. No major injuries, although enough minor ones to keep me sore for a couple weeks and reflecting on the lesson: "Listen to that little voice that tells you when you are trying to do too much!" Much gratitude for having another chance. Whether or not God exists as we envision, it seems necessary at times to feel that overwhelming gratitude for second chances--just as it is sometimes necessary to rail against God over the tragedies of the world. Sometimes faith isn't a conscious choice, it just seems to be human nature.
With my fall behind me as I sat in church this past Sunday, listening to the familiar words of the 23rd Psalm, I thought a bit about "thy rod and thy staff." As with many familiar Bible stories, I had never really gone back and revisited my early Sunday-School interpretation of this Psalm and what it means. What we had always been told is that the rod and staff mean that sometimes God punishes us when we are wrong, so that we will know to do right later ... sort of a Biblical "Story of Ping" with the Good Shepherd waiting to hit us across the rear with his staff -- consequences teach us to appreciate punishment when we see what trouble we would get in without correction. But today I wonder how often shepherds go around hitting their sheep? Although I don't know much about herding sheep, I do know a lot about herding and chasing cows. My father always insisted that we were NOT to hit the cows. We carried large staffs to whirl around our bodies and make ourselves look bigger, so that it was easier for the cows to see us and understand our directions, to be guided -- not hurt! Only if the cows were going in the wrong way or charging would we threaten them with the staff, and only if they were charging directly at us would we ever resort to hitting them. That was a last resort!
So, this Sunday when I heard "thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me," I thought about that voice that whispered in my ear, "don't try to carry too much down the stairs!" Remember to look for guidance! It is given to comfort, not punish.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Saying What I Believe
Late Saturday night I found myself in a dream explaining in great detail what exactly I believe about heaven and hell and the possibility of an afterlife. This was an occurrence (even in a dream!) so unusual (I don't like to be pinned down and what I believe is constantly changing anyway) that the shock of it woke me up, and I was almost, but not quite, energized enough to get up and write it all down while it was fresh. I didn't do that, but I will try to reproduce some of it here, since I thought it was a better job than I'd ever done of it while I was awake and I wanted to record it for future reference.
As is evident from the synthesis of my blogs over the past 8 months or so, my belief set ranges from something approaching orthodoxy on some days to the downright heretical on others, and it would bother me more if my beliefs were constant than it does that they are constantly changing. But, of course, they have been pushing more in some directions than others over the past few years, and I am enjoying the leisure at this point in life to spend some time following through and chasing down some trails of spirituality and religion that others have walked before me. I doubt that I'm blazing any new trails, but do hope that my rambling will encourage others to ramble a little on their own as well. I think the only true heresy in this world is to be of a completely settled faith -- to stop questioning, learning and growing. That would be to be dead already!
One might think that it being Easter had a lot to do with my dream and the arguments I made in it, but I think it was the expected death of an elderly friend (she died on Easter Sunday) that actually precipitated the dream. In it, I was pinned down and made to explain whether I believed in heaven/hell and an afterlife, and there was no escaping putting my thoughts into words. So here, to the best of my memory, is what I said:
"Humans have always had a very difficult time talking about things that are spiritual, since we don't have very good vocabularies to do it. At the same time, I think we are in awe of the power of the spiritual realm, and that we use language not just ineffectively, but deliberately in attempts to put at arms length or play down the importance of the things we are discussing. Thus, we too often use "only" and "just" where they should not be; as in "only metaphor" or "just a myth." Actually, metaphor and myth are quite possibly the most powerful language we possess, and certainly best we have devised for talking about the realm of the spirit.
"That said, I believe that heaven and hell are metaphor and that the concept of afterlife is myth. AND, I believe absolutely in the thing, the concept, behind these terms. We have no other language to convey -- but, let me try anyway.
"I believe that the choices we make have meaning and consequence greater than anything we can conceive, not just for ourselves or even those close around us, but even for the universe as a whole.
"I also believe that we are each more a part of the universe, and of each other, than we fully understand. One of the first tasks of a baby, in order to function as a human in this world, is to distinguish between "myself" and "other." We are not born with than innate distinction of separate self. In fact, meditation helps to suppress the part of the brain where we have built up the 'separate-self sense,' which may explain why it can be such a spiritual experience. Perhaps we learn this sense a little too well -- I think in many ways the separate self is a dangerous illusion.
"Physically, the universe appears to be a closed system. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. We are the stuff of stardust--our molecules the remnants of ancient suns exploding into the vastness of space and converging here on Earth in just the right conditions to give rise to life as we know it; and 'remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.' Time too, we now know from Einstein, is a physical property of the universe, related to space and distance. I think eternity in the spiritual sense is perhaps more of a concept of outside of time-outside the constraints of the universe or perhaps encompassing time and space and the physical universe. I believe that what we call 'the spirit' that is in us is also part of this closed system of the universe, and is neither created or destroyed but changed again from one being to another in this complex web about which we understand so little. And perhaps "God" is the spiritual equivalent of eternity -- encompassing, or outside of and beyond...
"If we were only to say that our choices matter in ways that will continue to have repercussions after our death, the very wording seems to imply that they will matter to others after we die, but somehow we will be beyond caring or will have ceased to exist to care. But, this violates the idea of the universe as a closed spiritual system. Whatever it is that makes up me, that is my life's meaning, doesn't just go away when I die, however changed it may be. So, what matters now will still matter to my spirit--my self--as something that it deeply connected to all of life's/the universe's continuity. And, although my choices affect others as well as myself, the responsibility for my choices lies only with me. [That is, perhaps what matters in the spiritual sense is not so much the consequence (the physical element) as the responsibility.] I can think of no metaphor other than heaven/hell that actually captures this kind of awesome responsibility for our choices and the profound consequences (physical) and import (spiritual) of them for a universe in which there is no escape.
"In complexity science, one talks about the emergent properties of a system (such as the intricate patterns of sand dunes sculpted by wind, rain, and individual grains of sand; or the intricate dance of schools of fish). Emergent properties are properties of the whole of a system that are not in evidence in, or extensible from, any of the individual components that make up the system. In a sense, I think, one can consider life itself to be an emergent property of the right collection of complex organic molecules, water, and energy. And, perhaps consciousness is an emergent property of a highly complex brain. I wonder if it couldn't also be considered that God is an emergent property (THE emergent property, or the sum of the emergent properties) of the whole of the complex universe? Despite the seeming reductionism of this thought, I don't think it necessarily takes anything away from our concept of God. If everything we are -- our consciousness, our sense of self, our creativity and values and morals -- could be emergent properties of our complex individual lives and our societies together, how much more complex could be a God who is emergent from the whole of the great, almost infinitely complex universe? And if we have questioned and pondered for generations on whether we are the sum of our parts or whether we create ourselves through our learning, actions and choices, then how much more complex a question about whether God is creator of the universe, or the universe of God? Or, if that is ultimately even a meaningful question? As small individual components in that complex system, the one thing we do know is that we do not have--cannot have--the ability to fully grasp that whole, even though we are impacted by and live in the patterns that characterize it.
"Complex systems may have several different stable states, and often transition between them with only seemingly minor variations in the configuration of the components. Thus, the individual components of even vast systems can produce major changes that affect the whole. (One fish encounters an obstacle and begins swimming in a different direction -- suddenly the whole school is engaged in a new dance pattern!) Seen from this point of view, again, the consequences of individual choice on the universe could be considered to be vast, ongoing, and inescapable -- still under control of God; within the design of God--whose nature is the patterns that are the 'stable states,' but choices that are momentous nonetheless.
As is evident from the synthesis of my blogs over the past 8 months or so, my belief set ranges from something approaching orthodoxy on some days to the downright heretical on others, and it would bother me more if my beliefs were constant than it does that they are constantly changing. But, of course, they have been pushing more in some directions than others over the past few years, and I am enjoying the leisure at this point in life to spend some time following through and chasing down some trails of spirituality and religion that others have walked before me. I doubt that I'm blazing any new trails, but do hope that my rambling will encourage others to ramble a little on their own as well. I think the only true heresy in this world is to be of a completely settled faith -- to stop questioning, learning and growing. That would be to be dead already!
One might think that it being Easter had a lot to do with my dream and the arguments I made in it, but I think it was the expected death of an elderly friend (she died on Easter Sunday) that actually precipitated the dream. In it, I was pinned down and made to explain whether I believed in heaven/hell and an afterlife, and there was no escaping putting my thoughts into words. So here, to the best of my memory, is what I said:
"Humans have always had a very difficult time talking about things that are spiritual, since we don't have very good vocabularies to do it. At the same time, I think we are in awe of the power of the spiritual realm, and that we use language not just ineffectively, but deliberately in attempts to put at arms length or play down the importance of the things we are discussing. Thus, we too often use "only" and "just" where they should not be; as in "only metaphor" or "just a myth." Actually, metaphor and myth are quite possibly the most powerful language we possess, and certainly best we have devised for talking about the realm of the spirit.
"That said, I believe that heaven and hell are metaphor and that the concept of afterlife is myth. AND, I believe absolutely in the thing, the concept, behind these terms. We have no other language to convey -- but, let me try anyway.
"I believe that the choices we make have meaning and consequence greater than anything we can conceive, not just for ourselves or even those close around us, but even for the universe as a whole.
"I also believe that we are each more a part of the universe, and of each other, than we fully understand. One of the first tasks of a baby, in order to function as a human in this world, is to distinguish between "myself" and "other." We are not born with than innate distinction of separate self. In fact, meditation helps to suppress the part of the brain where we have built up the 'separate-self sense,' which may explain why it can be such a spiritual experience. Perhaps we learn this sense a little too well -- I think in many ways the separate self is a dangerous illusion.
"Physically, the universe appears to be a closed system. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. We are the stuff of stardust--our molecules the remnants of ancient suns exploding into the vastness of space and converging here on Earth in just the right conditions to give rise to life as we know it; and 'remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.' Time too, we now know from Einstein, is a physical property of the universe, related to space and distance. I think eternity in the spiritual sense is perhaps more of a concept of outside of time-outside the constraints of the universe or perhaps encompassing time and space and the physical universe. I believe that what we call 'the spirit' that is in us is also part of this closed system of the universe, and is neither created or destroyed but changed again from one being to another in this complex web about which we understand so little. And perhaps "God" is the spiritual equivalent of eternity -- encompassing, or outside of and beyond...
"If we were only to say that our choices matter in ways that will continue to have repercussions after our death, the very wording seems to imply that they will matter to others after we die, but somehow we will be beyond caring or will have ceased to exist to care. But, this violates the idea of the universe as a closed spiritual system. Whatever it is that makes up me, that is my life's meaning, doesn't just go away when I die, however changed it may be. So, what matters now will still matter to my spirit--my self--as something that it deeply connected to all of life's/the universe's continuity. And, although my choices affect others as well as myself, the responsibility for my choices lies only with me. [That is, perhaps what matters in the spiritual sense is not so much the consequence (the physical element) as the responsibility.] I can think of no metaphor other than heaven/hell that actually captures this kind of awesome responsibility for our choices and the profound consequences (physical) and import (spiritual) of them for a universe in which there is no escape.
"In complexity science, one talks about the emergent properties of a system (such as the intricate patterns of sand dunes sculpted by wind, rain, and individual grains of sand; or the intricate dance of schools of fish). Emergent properties are properties of the whole of a system that are not in evidence in, or extensible from, any of the individual components that make up the system. In a sense, I think, one can consider life itself to be an emergent property of the right collection of complex organic molecules, water, and energy. And, perhaps consciousness is an emergent property of a highly complex brain. I wonder if it couldn't also be considered that God is an emergent property (THE emergent property, or the sum of the emergent properties) of the whole of the complex universe? Despite the seeming reductionism of this thought, I don't think it necessarily takes anything away from our concept of God. If everything we are -- our consciousness, our sense of self, our creativity and values and morals -- could be emergent properties of our complex individual lives and our societies together, how much more complex could be a God who is emergent from the whole of the great, almost infinitely complex universe? And if we have questioned and pondered for generations on whether we are the sum of our parts or whether we create ourselves through our learning, actions and choices, then how much more complex a question about whether God is creator of the universe, or the universe of God? Or, if that is ultimately even a meaningful question? As small individual components in that complex system, the one thing we do know is that we do not have--cannot have--the ability to fully grasp that whole, even though we are impacted by and live in the patterns that characterize it.
"Complex systems may have several different stable states, and often transition between them with only seemingly minor variations in the configuration of the components. Thus, the individual components of even vast systems can produce major changes that affect the whole. (One fish encounters an obstacle and begins swimming in a different direction -- suddenly the whole school is engaged in a new dance pattern!) Seen from this point of view, again, the consequences of individual choice on the universe could be considered to be vast, ongoing, and inescapable -- still under control of God; within the design of God--whose nature is the patterns that are the 'stable states,' but choices that are momentous nonetheless.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Passion, Sanity and Betrayal
As I write I am looking at the wedding portrait of two good friends -- still happily married as far as I know, and I hope they remain that way--but the portrait reminds me, nevertheless, that sometimes the people who most despise each other are those who were, in the past, married to each other. Why is it that we reserve our most intense, almost insane, enmity for the people who have been perviously the most dear to us? Passion: red hot or cold blooded, fire and ice, ecstasy and horrible pain. Love is so strong, so full of hope; yet also so costly and so prone to be disappointed. We expect that our loves will provide us with the reason for living. I think, in fact, it can be the hardest thing that we ever do to forgive when when we are failed by someone in whom we have invested so many of our hopes and dreams -- when we can only say, "I gave so many years of my life, my fortune, all my effort, all my future into building what has turned into only ruins and shambles." The sense of betrayal can be so severe that it does bring on a sort of (hopefully temporary) insanity, where it's almost impossible not to lash out in violence of words and/or acts. Perhaps at the same time, this is the greatest test of character.
The gospel for today (Matthew 26), I believe, gives us two examples of this kind of overwhelming passion that can lead to disappointment, and the extremes to which the one(s) who are disappointed may go.
The crowds who followed Jesus truly believed that he was going to be the leader who would restore the kingdom of God to Israel, who would give them independence from Rome, drive out foreign invaders, restore prosperity and self-determination. Many followed him at great personal expense, risking family, fortune and freedom to help in his political and social rebellion. And here he was seemingly giving himself up, abandoning their movement just when it looked like they could achieve something. If he would only seize the opportunity and call on the crowds he had gathered to fight and overwhelm the rulers, protest in the streets, create an uprising! Hadn't he been telling them that the time had come? --the kingdom of God was at hand? How quickly, but how naturally too, the devotion to Jesus' cause turned into hatred and scorn at how he had duped them, how he refused to fight, how he refused to compromise, even a little, for the sake of ends that should justify whatever means necessary to effect them! It's easy to look back in scorn at the crowds yelling "crucify him," but I've felt that same kind of bone crushing disappointment myself; that feeling of having given everything I had into the hands of someone who just thrust it all aside as if it was nothing. I suspect that Judas really did believe that Jesus just needed a little push; that his kiss would simply spur him into taking the action that he'd planned all along. But, if it did not, perhaps it was fitting as the last chance and the last straw -- "if this doesn't make him act, then we are all history! Too many promises, not enough follow through." It's perhaps a bit ironic that, with us, the crowd that condemned Jesus could have easily sung "All my Hopes on Him are Founded." The only difference is that their hopes were also thoroughly dashed. They expected an uprising, a successful throwing off (intifada) of the oppressor, a new kingdom that would launch a new age. And what they saw was a revolutionary that had given himself up and given them over. No WONDER they turned on him.
But, Jesus too must have been terribly disillusioned. By all accounts, he really believed, at least early in his ministry, that he would lead a revolution, establish a new society -- a kingdom of God here on Earth. James Taybor's The Jesus Dynasty (I highly recommend it, but be aware that it is a secular view of Jesus life and times, not a Christian text) gives some of the most convincing and exciting commentary on what Jesus and John the Baptist must have felt like and worked toward in those few years of his public ministry -- and it was revolutionary, and inspiring, and it did look like a believable threat to the Roman rule! Jesus too must have wondered where it all went wrong, where God's promises had taken him. In the garden, he gave God one last chance as well -- "There's still time, if it is Your will, You'd be welcome to get me out of this thing right about now!" Even in Jesus' choice on the cross to invoke King David in quoting Psalm 22 ("my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), one can also hear the echo of later verses of the same psalm ("O Lord, make haste to help me! Deliver my soul from the sword."). What is amazing, though, is that Jesus never once turns bitter. I can't believe that he really knew that it was all part of the Plan, that he believed it would all turn out the way it did. He must have been truly disappointed, his hopes for his own life completely dashed and his hopes for his followers undergoing some serious confidence-shaking; given their dispersal and betrayal. Yet, he does not accuse God of betrayal. He follows his sense of God's will, his trust in life's goodness and in truth and justice to the end. Even his refusal of the drugged wine while on the cross was, above all, an act of confidence in the goodness and value of this life he had always conducted in the very best way he knew -- he would not willingly miss a minute of it, not will himself into oblivion for even those last few moments. For Jesus, it was truly not over until it was over, and he never wavered in his passion for life lived according to his revelation, his sense of God.
I have often read that it's not possible to understand the Easter story without fully understanding the Passion story. I've never quite understood why, but perhaps the key is Jesus' passion for life, his confidence in its goodness, his willingness to live every second of it in radical obedience to his vision despite every temptation to the contrary... In another book I read this week, the main character remarked about how good it is to outlive one's resentments. That is, how different life is when one has learned that resentment, feelings of betrayal, the desire to strike back when we've been hurt -- all those things that have the capacity to turn formerly loving, self-sacrificing individuals into insanely vindictive and broken people -- do not need to be our response to even the worst disappointments of life. Radical trust in God, profligate giving of one's self and one's resources--like the sower who scatters precious seed freely over good, poor, stony and weed-choked ground alike, confidence even when all reason seems to be gone; these crazy and counter-intuitive things are our inheritance as Christians. If there's anything in this idea of resurrection that we will ponder next week, perhaps there are clues here.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring
I had been back in the North Country for 10 days, but it would seem that as yet I had not even opened my eyes. My sister asked me if I my crocuses were out, and walked me outside to see hers. Their progress had been lovingly noted since the first small pinprick of green had creased the soil or pushed up under the still remaining mantle of snow. Surely, she said, I must have some too. But my winter mind was still focused inside on the leftovers of last year; repacking Christmas decorations (still waiting for me here in March after I drove south during the holiday season -- What? They didn't put themselves away?), cleaning away the dust that had settled over possessions and thoughts as well, putting things back in order and thinking to prepare for new life in the spring. Somehow, spring had arrived while I was lost in its anticipation.
I walked out the next morning and really looked at my yard. There were brave little purple blossoms all along the front fence, thrusting up through as yet unraked leaves and nearly buried under sand swept from the center of the road after a season of winter plowing. I spent the morning raking and tidying, and now the row of crocuses is startling and bright and I wonder how I could have missed their profusion. The longing, anticipation and preparation had become so absorbing that I almost missed the real thing. And they such bright and loud, almost raucous harbingers.
Is there a lesson in my deafness to the loud shout of spring all around my house? This is what I longed for and rushed back to see, yet I have been so focused on preparing for it that I almost missed it happening all around me.
I walked out the next morning and really looked at my yard. There were brave little purple blossoms all along the front fence, thrusting up through as yet unraked leaves and nearly buried under sand swept from the center of the road after a season of winter plowing. I spent the morning raking and tidying, and now the row of crocuses is startling and bright and I wonder how I could have missed their profusion. The longing, anticipation and preparation had become so absorbing that I almost missed the real thing. And they such bright and loud, almost raucous harbingers.
Is there a lesson in my deafness to the loud shout of spring all around my house? This is what I longed for and rushed back to see, yet I have been so focused on preparing for it that I almost missed it happening all around me.
Friday, February 4, 2011
What's become of me?
If you're wondering what's become of me, I'm on 3 month sabbatical. Blogging and my winter trip to warmer climes just didn't manage to work out well together. I will start up the blog again in April. See you then!
--AnnBarbie
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