I had an epiphany yesterday. Not a very big one; in fact I suppose what I realized should go pretty much without saying. Nevertheless, it was one of those major shifts in thinking that makes so much seem to slip into place -- the big "Aha!" moment.
I am reading Karen Armstrong's "A History of God" and, as always when I read this kind of book, I found myself agreeing with many of the perspectives presented from multiple different religions. I wondered again what I actually believe, considering how easy it is for me to identify with -- actually inhabit -- so many of the beliefs of others. What I realized was that I have been asking the wrong half of the question. It's not the belief that is at question, it is the I. I am not the same person today that I was even yesterday, and will be a different me even 5 minutes from now. Why should I expect what each of these selves believes to be exactly the same?
Most of us believe that whatever we take to be the ultimate, to be supreme ("God," many of us call it), is "the same yesterday, today, and forever," and we generally even agree that each of us seeks and worships this same ultimate; even though we go about it in many different ways. I call myself Christian because that is the tradition I am steeped in, my cultural background, my practice, the path that I use to get to the point of transcending paths completely. But, as I learn more about other perspectives, particularly as I learn to love and identify with people whose background is from those other perspectives, I find myself increasingly seeing and experiencing things through those other perspectives as well. The inconsistency is not in the belief but in my sense of a stable I. As I have attempted to learn the art of compassion, of truly "feeling with" another, my sense of who I am has gotten a bit frayed around the edges. I am also whoever I am feeling with, the ones I am learning to love "as myself." Erikson thought that the choices of advanced age are between ego integrity and despair. While I agree with him that ego integrity (knowing and coming to terms with who we are and all that we have been in life) is important, I think there is also a process of ego dissolution that comes into play, at least for some; the realization that we are part of each other to such a degree that the idea of a separate self seems almost an illusion. Thus also, the question of what I believe is an illusion -- both nothing and everything, and all at once!
This epiphany -- realizing that it's simply the nature of my ever-changing I to believe with others in the measure I identify with them -- makes the lessons today on Jerusalem (Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122) particularly poignant. In each passage, Jerusalem is lifted up as a place of peace where God teaches his ways to all the peoples -- "Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity with itself." These words should be true! All those who fight over this city and the places of God within it claim to believe ultimately in the same God. In Jerusalem we have the opportunity, unparalleled in any other place in the world, to prove the truth of that claim. If we could only learn to employ the discipline of seeing things compassionately, through each other's eyes... Therefore, my Advent discipline: " Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: 'May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers. For my brethren and companion's sake, I pray for your prosperity. Because of the house of the Loud our God, I will seek to do you good.'"
--AnnBarbie
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Quick Thought
Way too much to do this week, but just a quick thought from today's reading.
Jeremiah 23: 1-6 has the Lord saying, "then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing (emphasis added)." We know that not every one who is driven out into foreign lands comes back -- history is such a long recitation of all those who were widow and orphans and strangers and dispossessed, who perish far from home and seemingly without the attention of the God who we believe makes covenant with us. So, what does it mean that not any shall be missing?
As I was preparing for class this week, I was confronted in the textbook with one of the famous photos from Abu Ghraib; the one where a US soldier stands holding a leash over a naked and fallen prisoner with a dog collar around his neck. Both are figures who, as scripture reminds us, are made in the image of God -- infinitely precious -- in front of whom angels would bow down and call out "make way for the image of God." Both are tragically alone and lost, with eyes that haunt; the torturer and the tortured locked in an intimate interaction that profanes everything we profess to believe about being human. I dearly hope that is a God somewhere, of some type, who is in the business of insuring that not any shall be missing-- that there is some hope for finding one's way back for any of us, for all of us -- to wholeness, to reclaiming one's humanity and dignity, even to recognizing the image of God in each other.
Does God collect all the lost and lone --regardless of how far they have strayed or been driven out -- who would otherwise disappear from the face of history? Does God preserve their essence, the part that is "in God's image," for some greater cosmic truth that we can't quite grasp? Is no one ever actually beyond the watch and protection of the shepherd, no matter how much it may seem like it? And it DOES seem like it! The statement in Jeremiah reminds me of my favorite line from one of the Prayers of the People in our Book of Common Prayer, in which we pray "for all who have died in the communion of your Church, and those whose faith (and we could add, whose pain, whose motivation, whose confusion, whose fear) is known to you alone, that, with all the saints, they may have rest in that place where there is no pain or grief, but life eternal."
--AnnBarbie
Jeremiah 23: 1-6 has the Lord saying, "then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing (emphasis added)." We know that not every one who is driven out into foreign lands comes back -- history is such a long recitation of all those who were widow and orphans and strangers and dispossessed, who perish far from home and seemingly without the attention of the God who we believe makes covenant with us. So, what does it mean that not any shall be missing?
As I was preparing for class this week, I was confronted in the textbook with one of the famous photos from Abu Ghraib; the one where a US soldier stands holding a leash over a naked and fallen prisoner with a dog collar around his neck. Both are figures who, as scripture reminds us, are made in the image of God -- infinitely precious -- in front of whom angels would bow down and call out "make way for the image of God." Both are tragically alone and lost, with eyes that haunt; the torturer and the tortured locked in an intimate interaction that profanes everything we profess to believe about being human. I dearly hope that is a God somewhere, of some type, who is in the business of insuring that not any shall be missing-- that there is some hope for finding one's way back for any of us, for all of us -- to wholeness, to reclaiming one's humanity and dignity, even to recognizing the image of God in each other.
Does God collect all the lost and lone --regardless of how far they have strayed or been driven out -- who would otherwise disappear from the face of history? Does God preserve their essence, the part that is "in God's image," for some greater cosmic truth that we can't quite grasp? Is no one ever actually beyond the watch and protection of the shepherd, no matter how much it may seem like it? And it DOES seem like it! The statement in Jeremiah reminds me of my favorite line from one of the Prayers of the People in our Book of Common Prayer, in which we pray "for all who have died in the communion of your Church, and those whose faith (and we could add, whose pain, whose motivation, whose confusion, whose fear) is known to you alone, that, with all the saints, they may have rest in that place where there is no pain or grief, but life eternal."
--AnnBarbie
Sunday, November 14, 2010
It Isn't Eschatology?
The lections for today contain various passages that are considered to be eschatological in nature. Whether we read Isaiah 65 ("For I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it.") or Malachi 4 (" The sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents."), the Old Testament passage promises a day ahead when everything will be alright. In contrast, the Gospel passage (Luke 21) tell us "When some were speaking about the Temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, 'As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.' ... They will arrest you and persecute you. ... [Only] By your endurance you will gain your souls." Everything is not (at least by our usual way of reckoning) going to be alright!
Of course, in many ways the prophesy of Jesus in Luke 21 has already been fulfilled. Not only was the actual Second Temple destroyed in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the stones of what was still at that time a common Abrahamic faith (in the One God we all still claim to worship) have also fallen far apart with cataclysmic destructive force. And even in our separate traditions, the unifying edifices we've attempted to build or rebuild have repeatedly fallen apart into more and more splinters of antagonistic new modes of understanding. The stones could not be more completely knocked asunder! But, if you read further into Jesus' message, it doesn't look like he is talking about a single event or even events that we could ever say are over and done. He seems to think, and certainly the Church has so interpreted his words, that this message is for all of his followers in every age; that it will be our common lot to face some sort of dreadful test to our faith and our endurance in following God's will.
The Old Testament passages at first glance seem the more straightforwardly eschatological -- after all, we certainly don't have a Jerusalem right now that all peoples can call "a joy" and "its people a delight." We still need "a sun of righteousness" to "rise with healing in its wings" -- we need it desperately. In fact, I think we need it too much for us to risk dismissing these passages as references to some time yet to come. These words will never be true if they are not true now, somewhere in our inner vision, in our sense of the possible, in our sense, perhaps, of a truth that is truer than the reality of our senses.
What I suggest is that these two conflicting prophetic visions of faith in the God of Abraham are jointly visions of where we are and where we need to be, each and every day. If, to invoke Ray Cummings, "time is what keeps everything from happening at once," perhaps faith is a place where truths can dispense with the strictures of time and space, and be held in a paradoxical unity. The Isaiah 65 ideal of harmony with God is exemplified in the holy spaces of Jerusalem--the Glory of the Temple of Solomon, the Temple where Jesus worshiped and taught and defended the faith, the great Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock; it all can and must exist together forever, as I see it, outside of corrupting time and history, as physical manifestations of our collective faith(s), our mutual commitment to this prophetic vision, and the link(s) between our reality and God's. We can strive to achieve that existence and unity in God that is outside and beyond time and space, to build it in our minds and hearts, but I think only in so much as we are also always tearing down and throwing apart all those stones that we have just so laboriously put together. There is a reality that is perfect, the culmination of all that God has in mind for us and that we seek in God, but each human attempt at achieving that dream is imperfect and insufficient -- to be taken down, reexamined, revised and reshaped; always striving, never finished.
November 3 was the 410th anniversary of the death of Richard Hooker, the foremost theologian of the Anglican tradition and the person most responsible for our emphasis on reason as an equal leg (with scripture and tradition) on the "three-legged stool" of our particular branch of the faith. Reason always requires this examining, this rooting around in and through the foundation stones of our faith--unearthing, upending, recutting, repositioning, even starting over. Whenever I think that I have finally settled some question of theology or belief, I only find myself questioning it again as I encounter something challenging and new, beyond my previous experience. I know that there is an ultimate reality that is true, that is God, and I know that somehow I hold this truth in the center of my being. Nevertheless, my deliberate approaches, the ways I understand this with my mind, go off in all the wrong directions, never hit the mark--my "beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God" only worthy to be taken apart, thrown to the ground, and reassembled again and again. Perhaps where Hooker leads us is to understand that the faithful are meant to be a little like Sisyphus, always and ever in struggle; destined for a lifetime of frustrating attempts at perfecting our souls in an impossible task that, in another reality, a truer reality, we know has already been accomplished.
I think that if we could wrap our minds fully around this paradox we'd find some way to struggle through this together, as fellow travelers, with hospitality and mutual support, rather than always be tearing at each others' throats. But, how to proceed ...
Ideas?
--AnnBarbie
Of course, in many ways the prophesy of Jesus in Luke 21 has already been fulfilled. Not only was the actual Second Temple destroyed in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the stones of what was still at that time a common Abrahamic faith (in the One God we all still claim to worship) have also fallen far apart with cataclysmic destructive force. And even in our separate traditions, the unifying edifices we've attempted to build or rebuild have repeatedly fallen apart into more and more splinters of antagonistic new modes of understanding. The stones could not be more completely knocked asunder! But, if you read further into Jesus' message, it doesn't look like he is talking about a single event or even events that we could ever say are over and done. He seems to think, and certainly the Church has so interpreted his words, that this message is for all of his followers in every age; that it will be our common lot to face some sort of dreadful test to our faith and our endurance in following God's will.
The Old Testament passages at first glance seem the more straightforwardly eschatological -- after all, we certainly don't have a Jerusalem right now that all peoples can call "a joy" and "its people a delight." We still need "a sun of righteousness" to "rise with healing in its wings" -- we need it desperately. In fact, I think we need it too much for us to risk dismissing these passages as references to some time yet to come. These words will never be true if they are not true now, somewhere in our inner vision, in our sense of the possible, in our sense, perhaps, of a truth that is truer than the reality of our senses.
What I suggest is that these two conflicting prophetic visions of faith in the God of Abraham are jointly visions of where we are and where we need to be, each and every day. If, to invoke Ray Cummings, "time is what keeps everything from happening at once," perhaps faith is a place where truths can dispense with the strictures of time and space, and be held in a paradoxical unity. The Isaiah 65 ideal of harmony with God is exemplified in the holy spaces of Jerusalem--the Glory of the Temple of Solomon, the Temple where Jesus worshiped and taught and defended the faith, the great Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock; it all can and must exist together forever, as I see it, outside of corrupting time and history, as physical manifestations of our collective faith(s), our mutual commitment to this prophetic vision, and the link(s) between our reality and God's. We can strive to achieve that existence and unity in God that is outside and beyond time and space, to build it in our minds and hearts, but I think only in so much as we are also always tearing down and throwing apart all those stones that we have just so laboriously put together. There is a reality that is perfect, the culmination of all that God has in mind for us and that we seek in God, but each human attempt at achieving that dream is imperfect and insufficient -- to be taken down, reexamined, revised and reshaped; always striving, never finished.
November 3 was the 410th anniversary of the death of Richard Hooker, the foremost theologian of the Anglican tradition and the person most responsible for our emphasis on reason as an equal leg (with scripture and tradition) on the "three-legged stool" of our particular branch of the faith. Reason always requires this examining, this rooting around in and through the foundation stones of our faith--unearthing, upending, recutting, repositioning, even starting over. Whenever I think that I have finally settled some question of theology or belief, I only find myself questioning it again as I encounter something challenging and new, beyond my previous experience. I know that there is an ultimate reality that is true, that is God, and I know that somehow I hold this truth in the center of my being. Nevertheless, my deliberate approaches, the ways I understand this with my mind, go off in all the wrong directions, never hit the mark--my "beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God" only worthy to be taken apart, thrown to the ground, and reassembled again and again. Perhaps where Hooker leads us is to understand that the faithful are meant to be a little like Sisyphus, always and ever in struggle; destined for a lifetime of frustrating attempts at perfecting our souls in an impossible task that, in another reality, a truer reality, we know has already been accomplished.
I think that if we could wrap our minds fully around this paradox we'd find some way to struggle through this together, as fellow travelers, with hospitality and mutual support, rather than always be tearing at each others' throats. But, how to proceed ...
Ideas?
--AnnBarbie
Sunday, November 7, 2010
The God of the Living
We had a baptism today at church. While always a delightful event, this involves one bit of Episcopal common worship with which I have quite a lot of difficulty -- we had to recite the "I believe" form of the Apostle's Creed.
I don't have any problem reciting the "We believe" form of the creed -- good since we do it almost every week. I feel fully a part of a Church that has used this creed to describe our common faith for centuries. It is a statement of Christian doctrine that has held us together as a people: that we have believed, that we do believe, and that we will believe at least until such time as the Church jointly revises the statement to reflect some future common understanding of our faith. I value it and ponder it: what does it mean when we say "he ascended into heaven"? In another day, "heaven" meant the dome of the sky and/or the universe as it appears in the night sky, while today "heaven" connotes something much different. How do we understand the word "virgin"? Do we all believe, and have we always believed, that Mary conceived Jesus without engaging in sex? Or, was she a young girl, innocent of having done wrong, willing to be vulnerable in the service of her God? Can I "get away" with believing that? (My mom thought not! One of our few really tense discussions about faith...) What is "life everlasting" and does it happen now, or at some time in the future? I can assert the creed as our common faith declaration and still entertain all these questions without feeling like I have lost my anchor.
I have a lot more problem when the creed gets up close and personal in the "I believe" form. Sometimes I don't recite it at all, because I'm not sure I do believe it. I'm positive I don't believe what some people believe, not sure that I believe enough to even be considered a good Anglican (and that's really saying something, since in general it's perfectly fine for Anglicans to be all over the map on matters of theology). At the same time, I can't say that I don't believe it, or even any part of it. I'm just not sure how I believe it. Take the "resurrection of the body and the life everlasting" bits. I can't find it possible to have hope of there being anything waiting to be discovered after I die. I tend to believe -- perhaps more with the typical Jew than with my own coreligionists? I am not sure why this should be -- that the purpose of religion, of God, of salvation and redemption, is in the here and now, the life of the community, the finding of meaning in the human condition, and in the healing of the world. I feel like the love that we give, the contributions we make, the people we help to grow into their own maturity and contributions -- all those live through us and after us as a kind of eternal (or at least until the end of the human era) life. Today's Gospel (Luke 20) talks about God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as "the God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive." (vs. 38). Are they living on some "other plane of reality" as physical beings in heaven? Or do they live -- really live, truly alive for us -- in our collective understanding of their stories and how we have incorporated them into everything we are and aspire to be as a people? To me, it's the latter, and to me the latter is so much more powerful an idea, so much more real. Whether that is enough or not, it is all I can find myself able to believe about eternal life.
The closest I can come to an idea of a "resurrection of the body" is a conviction that the dual concept of spirit vs. body isn't quite "it." That idea is too closely associated with the belief that body is bad, to be resisted or denied, and that spirit is good only in the measure that it is pure and disembodied. I am more of a panentheist -- I believe that God is the source of as well as a part of, actually the very essence of, every part of nature; so that the very molecules that are my body are also eternally of God or animated by God. Earlier in this blog I wrote about how, with the constant recycling of our molecules, we and those we love are "uniquely, separately ourselves, and we are unimaginably, inextricably entangled." In reality, the physical I that I am today is not the same I that I was yesterday or that I will be tomorrow -- I, the physical reality, am constantly changing, morphing into something new, and I , or the bits of matter that currently make up the I that I am today, will someday be someone or something quite other. Perhaps we shall eventually all return to be incorporated back into the God that is the source of all and yet beyond all, creator and sustainer of all, eternal inhabitant of timeless time and spaceless space. Is this the resurrection of the body? All I know is that, when I took my beloved Butte, hopelessly ill cat companion of nearly 14 years, to be euthanized this week, I leaned in and breathed in her last breath -- wanting to keep her with me, incorporate who she has been to me into my own molecular structure.
We do our best. All the theology in the world, and all the pondering of what it means and if I can believe it -- it's all inadequate when we stand naked to the reality of love and loss. Thank God for poets, who sometimes manage to put into words those things that, nevertheless, cannot be said in words:
...remembering
Again the loss of you who stayed long
Enough to enrage my heart, short enough
To sound it with natural laments of you*
--- AnnBarbie
* Raficq Abdulla, private communication (Nov 11, 2010)
I don't have any problem reciting the "We believe" form of the creed -- good since we do it almost every week. I feel fully a part of a Church that has used this creed to describe our common faith for centuries. It is a statement of Christian doctrine that has held us together as a people: that we have believed, that we do believe, and that we will believe at least until such time as the Church jointly revises the statement to reflect some future common understanding of our faith. I value it and ponder it: what does it mean when we say "he ascended into heaven"? In another day, "heaven" meant the dome of the sky and/or the universe as it appears in the night sky, while today "heaven" connotes something much different. How do we understand the word "virgin"? Do we all believe, and have we always believed, that Mary conceived Jesus without engaging in sex? Or, was she a young girl, innocent of having done wrong, willing to be vulnerable in the service of her God? Can I "get away" with believing that? (My mom thought not! One of our few really tense discussions about faith...) What is "life everlasting" and does it happen now, or at some time in the future? I can assert the creed as our common faith declaration and still entertain all these questions without feeling like I have lost my anchor.
I have a lot more problem when the creed gets up close and personal in the "I believe" form. Sometimes I don't recite it at all, because I'm not sure I do believe it. I'm positive I don't believe what some people believe, not sure that I believe enough to even be considered a good Anglican (and that's really saying something, since in general it's perfectly fine for Anglicans to be all over the map on matters of theology). At the same time, I can't say that I don't believe it, or even any part of it. I'm just not sure how I believe it. Take the "resurrection of the body and the life everlasting" bits. I can't find it possible to have hope of there being anything waiting to be discovered after I die. I tend to believe -- perhaps more with the typical Jew than with my own coreligionists? I am not sure why this should be -- that the purpose of religion, of God, of salvation and redemption, is in the here and now, the life of the community, the finding of meaning in the human condition, and in the healing of the world. I feel like the love that we give, the contributions we make, the people we help to grow into their own maturity and contributions -- all those live through us and after us as a kind of eternal (or at least until the end of the human era) life. Today's Gospel (Luke 20) talks about God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as "the God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive." (vs. 38). Are they living on some "other plane of reality" as physical beings in heaven? Or do they live -- really live, truly alive for us -- in our collective understanding of their stories and how we have incorporated them into everything we are and aspire to be as a people? To me, it's the latter, and to me the latter is so much more powerful an idea, so much more real. Whether that is enough or not, it is all I can find myself able to believe about eternal life.
The closest I can come to an idea of a "resurrection of the body" is a conviction that the dual concept of spirit vs. body isn't quite "it." That idea is too closely associated with the belief that body is bad, to be resisted or denied, and that spirit is good only in the measure that it is pure and disembodied. I am more of a panentheist -- I believe that God is the source of as well as a part of, actually the very essence of, every part of nature; so that the very molecules that are my body are also eternally of God or animated by God. Earlier in this blog I wrote about how, with the constant recycling of our molecules, we and those we love are "uniquely, separately ourselves, and we are unimaginably, inextricably entangled." In reality, the physical I that I am today is not the same I that I was yesterday or that I will be tomorrow -- I, the physical reality, am constantly changing, morphing into something new, and I , or the bits of matter that currently make up the I that I am today, will someday be someone or something quite other. Perhaps we shall eventually all return to be incorporated back into the God that is the source of all and yet beyond all, creator and sustainer of all, eternal inhabitant of timeless time and spaceless space. Is this the resurrection of the body? All I know is that, when I took my beloved Butte, hopelessly ill cat companion of nearly 14 years, to be euthanized this week, I leaned in and breathed in her last breath -- wanting to keep her with me, incorporate who she has been to me into my own molecular structure.
We do our best. All the theology in the world, and all the pondering of what it means and if I can believe it -- it's all inadequate when we stand naked to the reality of love and loss. Thank God for poets, who sometimes manage to put into words those things that, nevertheless, cannot be said in words:
...remembering
Again the loss of you who stayed long
Enough to enrage my heart, short enough
To sound it with natural laments of you*
--- AnnBarbie
* Raficq Abdulla, private communication (Nov 11, 2010)
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Let's Argue it Out
Caveat: The approaching election is obviously getting to me, so don't take this one too seriously, and definitely not too literally...
The Lectionary Page that I use to review the upcoming Lessons for each Sunday uses the New Revised Standard Version. I notice that for Oct 31 the Isaiah chapter 1 passage is translated not "Come, let us reason together," like I grew up hearing, but "Come, let us argue it out, says the Lord." I feel a lot more like arguing it out with God today than I feel like reasoning, and so am very glad to see this invitation.
I've had a bone (or a whole spinal column of bones, actually) to pick with God for a long time. I have a severe case of juvenile idiopathic scoliosis, the kind that would have killed me given half a chance, and the kind that, no matter how well they corrected it when I was a kid, still leaves me as a "hunchback," a "cripple," or, as Leviticus 21 calls it in good Elizabethan English, "crookbackt" -- someone who might "profane the sanctuary."
Why would God create someone who was inherently, through no volition of their own, just by their very nature, fated to "profane the sanctuary" if they were to be accorded the privileges granted to others? Is God perverse? And more to the point for me, can't the God answer for Itself? My grandmother prayed for my healing every day -- made me pray with her -- agonized over her little faith or my little faith being the thing that prevented me from being healed. With all that she put into believing, and as much as I tried to believe for her, you'd think that if God was in the business of healing at all, it would surely have happened. Instead of the joy she anticipated each time she decided I was going to be healed this time, my being me caused her nothing but anguish and brought great doubts about her faith. That's another thing to argue about, God! I really loved her, but it didn't turn out so well, did it?
That bit about God answering for Itself is the rub for me, most of the time. I've actually given up asking this question of other people -- except now I will throw it out into the aether, where I fear my blog electrons perpetually swim in a sea of indifference. At least here I don't expect an answer. But, whenever I ask it of a friend, however close, I have come to expect yet another defense of God. Is God so weak that It must have men (and women) to defend It at every turn?
I asked myself the other day what kind of an answer I have been looking for, what is it that I continue to seek, and continue to set myself up to be denied yet again every time I broach this subject? I guess just a hug; an "I understand"; maybe someone to add a voice to mine and also question, "Hey God, what IS up with that?" This disagreement seems pretty lopsided -- would it be too much to ask to have a few on my side? I don't think God really needs all those defenders.
So OK God, step up to the plate -- without your cast of thousands. Just you and me, let's argue it out!
--AnnBarbie
The Lectionary Page that I use to review the upcoming Lessons for each Sunday uses the New Revised Standard Version. I notice that for Oct 31 the Isaiah chapter 1 passage is translated not "Come, let us reason together," like I grew up hearing, but "Come, let us argue it out, says the Lord." I feel a lot more like arguing it out with God today than I feel like reasoning, and so am very glad to see this invitation.
I've had a bone (or a whole spinal column of bones, actually) to pick with God for a long time. I have a severe case of juvenile idiopathic scoliosis, the kind that would have killed me given half a chance, and the kind that, no matter how well they corrected it when I was a kid, still leaves me as a "hunchback," a "cripple," or, as Leviticus 21 calls it in good Elizabethan English, "crookbackt" -- someone who might "profane the sanctuary."
Why would God create someone who was inherently, through no volition of their own, just by their very nature, fated to "profane the sanctuary" if they were to be accorded the privileges granted to others? Is God perverse? And more to the point for me, can't the God answer for Itself? My grandmother prayed for my healing every day -- made me pray with her -- agonized over her little faith or my little faith being the thing that prevented me from being healed. With all that she put into believing, and as much as I tried to believe for her, you'd think that if God was in the business of healing at all, it would surely have happened. Instead of the joy she anticipated each time she decided I was going to be healed this time, my being me caused her nothing but anguish and brought great doubts about her faith. That's another thing to argue about, God! I really loved her, but it didn't turn out so well, did it?
That bit about God answering for Itself is the rub for me, most of the time. I've actually given up asking this question of other people -- except now I will throw it out into the aether, where I fear my blog electrons perpetually swim in a sea of indifference. At least here I don't expect an answer. But, whenever I ask it of a friend, however close, I have come to expect yet another defense of God. Is God so weak that It must have men (and women) to defend It at every turn?
I asked myself the other day what kind of an answer I have been looking for, what is it that I continue to seek, and continue to set myself up to be denied yet again every time I broach this subject? I guess just a hug; an "I understand"; maybe someone to add a voice to mine and also question, "Hey God, what IS up with that?" This disagreement seems pretty lopsided -- would it be too much to ask to have a few on my side? I don't think God really needs all those defenders.
So OK God, step up to the plate -- without your cast of thousands. Just you and me, let's argue it out!
--AnnBarbie
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Finding a Place of Springs
One line from the Psalm in today’s lections (Psalm 84:5) actively leapt off the page and grabbed me as I read it: “Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs.” I had thought of this as God’s presence replacing/overwriting desolate valleys with springs of water, but things I’ve been reading lately make me wonder whether it, instead, means that the springs actually require the desolate valleys as raw material from which they may eventually well up in us.
I guess this needs some explaining. I’ve been reading the just released book Discovering the Spirit in the City (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), for which my dear friend Raficq Abdulla has contributed a chapter. In addition to Raficq’s delightful essay [that goes without saying!], I found the contributions of Pádraig Ó Tuama and Mark Oakley to be profoundly moving. These two write with such compassion and grace, and seem particularly able to illuminate both the best and the worst of the human experience as we wrestle with the God we perceive as involved in and, perhaps, central to our being. I thought how wonderful and how valuable for the rest of us that there are such people who can enter so deeply into the experience of being human, and help us to see it in it’s fullness; from tragic to glorious, mundane to transcendent, and all things in between.
At the same time, I found myself reacting in frustration because they are both gay, and much of the compassion and vulnerability I sensed in them seemed to be bound together with the bitter pain of rejection and alienation they had both experienced in trying to serve God as a gay man in the Christian church. I’m not mad at them for being gay; I’m mad at the rest of us for not being more like them – so that not every damn time I discover someone who seems to fully embody the spirit of love that I believe to be God, they turn out, invariably, to be gay! I worry that then when I write, as in this blog, “Oh, these writers are great, you must read them!” people will just dismiss the recommendation with the thought that “They’re probably nothing special; those queers just stick together.”*
So, I had these frustrations in mind when I read the lections, and for the first time I thought, “Whoa! Maybe you can’t get to the point of being a ‘place of springs’ unless you actually go through the 'desolate valleys.'” Perhaps the thought is not so much replacing the desolation but transforming its essence into something beautiful and life giving.
Lately, in response to a recent spate of disturbing suicides, there has been a media campaign with the message “It gets better” (sponsored by the It Gets Better Project) and aimed at vulnerable gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender teens. The messages have been mostly oriented towards convincing desperate teens that their lives will be happier and much easier to navigate in the future – if they will only consent to stay alive long enough to find that out. Additionally, it may very well be these teens, who go through so much desolation in their bullied, taunted, dehumanizing valleys of despair, that will transform themselves into pools of living water for all of us in the future; our healers, priests, counselors, prophets and spiritual teachers – if they remain alive long enough to find their own unique "place of springs." For our own sakes as well as theirs, lets hope (and work towards making sure that) they do.
In the meantime, where are the desolate places in my own life that perhaps I can begin to transform into my own “place of springs”?
--AnnBarbie
*Whatever term one might ultimately create to define an appropriate demographic for me, because I am married to another woman people perceive me as lesbian. However, in this case I can’t claim the same early trauma that g/l/b/t youth generally experience, so I don’t feel that I writing about myself here.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Are We All In This Together?
Kathleen Norris, in her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2001), says something so profoundly true for me that I've quoted it over and over in the decade since she wrote and I read that book: "We go to church in order to sing, and theology is secondary." I thought of her again this week as I drove alone the 10 hours from home to DC. Per usual, I sang and carried on imaginary conversations in my head with people I've been reading or thinking about. Since I've been doing so much thinking lately about other religions, religion and politics, and interfaith dialog, I found myself wondering how I would explain being a Christian to someone from another faith. I realized that the best explanation I could give would be to just sing for them, all the songs I learned as a child as well as the ones I sing now. In my mind I thought of how my favorites have changed over the years as I have changed, and how I still relate to all the music on so many different levels. Theology is truly secondary -- that part of Christianity is all in my head. Music, and singing most of all, is the realm of my whole being.
And so, I sang. My voice only lasted for about 5 hours, but my repertoire of Christian hymns and songs could easily have carried me through the 10 hour trip without delving too far into the territory of "um's" and "la, la, la's" when I forgot the words. This heritage is that much a part of me. Nevertheless, what the songs say to me changes over the years as I change and, particularly, as I have become more aware of the perspectives of others. One of the first times I became particularly disconcerted about the words to a familiar hymn was when the Methodists decided that maybe Rise Up, Oh Men of God should be retired from regular Sunday worship. I was still young and it was new to me to question what it means to have the whole church singing as though only the MEN of God matter. But even though I never consciously felt excluded, the discussion made me realize that when I, like all the other kids of my acquaintance, played Knights of the Round Table or dreamed of going on the Crusades, I always wanted to be a Knight or even the King. I had no use for the women's roles and refused to play one in my mind or in our games. I had internalized our society's message that only men could grow up to do great and wonderful things. Of course, these days I am also squeamish about those Crusades that I so wanted to go on as a child. Though I still love the "DUM, dum, DUM, dum" rhythm of Onward Christian Soldiers, I cringe when I sing it not only for the lasting damage those historical episodes wreaked on Christian/Muslim/Jewish relations, but also for my comfort in adopting a decidedly militaristic outlook. Did I love the music I sang as a child because it reflected my very narrow world view? Or did the music I loved unconsciously write these attitudes so deeply on my soul that is has taken a lifetime to pry them up from under that bedrock and examine them in the light of day?
Whatever the cause and effect, my attitudes continue to require a lot of soul-searching and frequently go through sea changes that leave me reeling. It is still the music I sing that serves as my touchstone for interpreting these changes. During my trip, one of the songs that came to mind was John Prindle Scott's setting of Come Ye Blessed Of My Father. For a trained-but-not-spectacular singer like me it's a great solo piece. It's not vocally challenging and is both emotional and accessible -- the kind of music people like to hear. It's always been one of my favorites to perform, but I suddenly realized that I am not going to be able to sing it anymore, at least not until I can sort out my new antipathy towards the words. The song, if you don't know it, is a setting of Matthew 25: 34-36 ("I was hungry and you gave me meat ... naked and you clothed me ... sick and you visited me ... I was in prison and you came unto me.") The prison part, in particular, feels all wrong.
I've been teaching in the local men's medium security prison for several months, and am having the time of my life with "my guys." It's a great job, but it is also just that -- a job. I react viscerally when I tell people about my new job and they respond with, "What a ministry!" It happened again this morning. I mentioned my job and someone at church remarked, "Oh, I know a pastor who does prison ministry. It must be so rewarding." But it's not just that I don't "do prison ministry," on some fundamental level it seems just plain wrong to think of "ministering to" anyone. There's such an implied power dynamic, a "higher" and "lower" that I think has no basis in reality and no place in a healthy world view.
The truth, to me at least, is that I am a teacher. I can't be a teacher without students, and I need them at least as much as they need me. The fact of their incarceration is incidental, and I would also say, quite arbitrary. "My guys" are not much different than any other group I have known or taught. Some of them I would trust with my life, others no further than the edge of my field of view. Some I like, some not so much. Some work hard, some hardly work. Nevertheless we are all in it together, we are all part of each other. We would not be the same class -- we would not be whole -- with any one of us missing. That's just the way it works.
I guess what bugs me about the Prindle Scott song setting is that it seems to interpret the passage as God promising us a reward for doing good; God saying, "Come inherit the kingdom because you did all these good things!" I don't see it that way. Definitely not now. Especially not the prison part. I think the meaning of the passage resides in vs. 40 where Jesus says "as much as you have done this to the least of these, my brothers, you have done it to me." In other words -- or at least in my words -- whatever I do for anyone, anywhere, is both to and for myself and, in a wider sense, to and for God because we are all a part of each other and the image of God resides in us all. It's about "if you don't love your brother, whom you have seen, then how can you love God, whom you have not seen?" (1 John 4:20) And it's about looking for that sister or brother not only among those we admire, emulate, and wish to know, but also among all those that society tells us are underprivileged, outcast, and even beneath our notice.
In the song, the emotional center -- the high point -- is where the line crests at the word "came" in the line "I was in prison, and you came unto me" and then in its quiet echo "you came unto me." I'm going to be uncomfortable singing that until I can figure out some way to effectively convey to the people who accuse me of "ministry" that it would be just as profound a spiritual message to sing, "I was a teacher and you listened to me, you learned something from me!"
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