Tell it Slant

Walking the Walk

2012-01-28T23:34:00.000-08:00

Imayam School students at assembly

Near the southernmost point of India we visited three schools: a college where women are preparing to be teachers, a well-equipped school for girls with over 3000 students from what we might term middle class families, and a smaller school of 170 students for boys and girls from small villages that surround the city of Tuticorin. Called the Imayam School, this school was started ten years ago in an area that was completely rural. The school site itself was barren. Now it is a kind of oasis, with hundreds of trees planted on the school grounds (three more were planted during our visit to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the school). The students gathered on the grounds near the entrance to the school for the big celebration. Every single student participated in the program that was offered: boys and girls danced, a group of girls presented a very funny play in English, another group recited ancient Tamil poetry, and boys offered acrobatics. It was a wonderful event—with very few words from the staff!

Tree planting with Ms. Saraswathi & Ms Ponrathi

This school is run by two women who are the founders. I asked Ms Saraswathi how the school was founded. She told me how she and her assistant principal Ms Ponrathi had been teachers at the larger, more prosperous school we had visited. They taught there for 25 years, and then took early retirement, gathered all their retirement funds and purchased the property and built the first building and opened the school. Both of them had felt for many years that the education they had received and then had offered at the larger school—that quality of education should be available for poor students who could never dream of attending such a school. So they walked the walk, putting all of their savings into the project and depending on the generous support of some of their ex-students, now adults—many of them prosperous: doctors, lawyers, bankers, community leaders. With the help of the community of peoploe they had taught and worked with all those years they got the school up and running.

The school also receives important support from the Kolam Foundation started by Vi Ganesan Herbert who is a native of Tamil Nadu now living in Hawaii. Vi has been our guide during this visit and one of the purposes of our trip was to introduce us to the school and invite us to support its mission.

I was touched by the story of these two women who had a vision, offered their savings, their energies and skills and who turned to the community in which they had worked and lived for support. They were among the most humble people I have met, deflecting all praise and thanks, giving thanks to others and to their students and to God for what has been created.

Boys acrobatic performance

Some of the students began the day by showing us their science experiments, explaining them to us one by one, then all the students offered their gifts in dance, and drama, and athleticism. Their rapt attention to one another and their enthusisasm were infectious. They were all in their uniforms (if not in their dance attire, especially sewn by their teachers) and, like most people in Tamil Nadu, had no shoes. Their parents mostly work in the farmlands of the area, and earn perhaps 300$ a year. They pay no tuition. The students are highly motivated and grateful for a chance to learn. They walk or ride bikes that the school has provided to get to school, traveling between 2 and 5 kilometers each way. Many of them who finish their tenth grade go on to another school to finish high school, and many of those go on to college. This is a remarkable intervention in the cycle of poverty.

Girls dance performance

The directors of the school also work with the parents of the students, provide educational opportunities in the surrounding villages, and counsel the families about educational and work opportunities for the students. It was a wonderful experience to visit this private school serving the poor. It was humbling to see what two women have been able to accomplish—with help from others in their own community and a bit from abroad. The day began with a prayer, and I left the school with one of thanksgiving.

Water, water everywhere

2012-01-23T03:29:00.000-08:00

Is it safe to drink the water? Number one visitor question. Answer usually given: No, mostly because of our unfamiliarity with Indian micro-organisms. Everywhere we go there are bottles of water—tourists of all kinds imbibing, and even many of the people of the area. Plastic everywhere, and no place to dispose of it. (Bottled water we've been drinking is said by the guide book to likely be heavy in pesticide! Yum!) The amount of non bio-degradable waste accumulated just by our group of ten is staggering to think about. The infrastructure challenges here are great—1.2 billion people who need clean water (compared to our 311 million) and places to dispose of garbage.

Water is precious and in some sense sacred, too, to most people here. At least certain waters—we're far from the Ganges, but here at the tip of India where the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea flow together some folks travel hundreds of miles to see the sun rise and set (along the same horizon), and to bathe in the waters. And a bit north of here in the mountains, the Ghats, where stunning waterfalls flow people not only bathe to get washed, but bathe because that's what the waterfalls invite them to do. Most of the temples we've seen have water, pools of water.

This is a part of India that has some big rivers, a monsoon season, and water coming out of the mountains to keep the fields green—even in this the dry season. We've driven past miles and miles of rice fields, coconut and banana, sugar cane. Green, green, green—everything .. But water here is a contentious subject as well. Kerala and Tamil Nadu argue over dams and water allocations—just like California and its neighboring states. Some of the rivers have crocodiles in them, we've seen a couple of those basking in the sun—and we visited a crocodile sanctuary where efforts are being made to preserve them. They cool themselves off by opening their mouths really wide—impressive. (Makes me wonder if some of our politicians aren't doing the same....)

Temple pool at Suchindram, Tamil Nadu

Women washing clothes in rivers, and pools (often among the water lilies), and in the pool by the village temple—a central gathering place for the community, and a place to bathe and wash too. Often not kept clean by Western standards, but getting a lot of use nonetheless. Some of these are beautiful, and they carry a spiritual weight too.

We took a short boat trip into a mangrove swamp that helped to preserve a village during the tsunami. Not all areas were so fortunate: the 04 tsunami was devastating to portions of Southern India. One town we visited lost 400 --mostly fishermen and their families who live along the beach in thatched roof houses. This city where I am now (Kunniyakumari) at the southern tip of India suffered 1000 deaths. And, further north, this enormous boulder is where one man told us he spent 8 hours waiting for the waters to die down. The caretaker at a shrine area, he scrambled to the top and sat there giving thanks for his life.

So, water and its centrality to life is something we share with the people in this area. We can't live without it: although at times it is terrifying in its capacity to destroy. It's a source of energy and means of transportation, it is essential to agriculture. Also comforting, healing, cleansing, water reminds us of the One who is like a river: source of life, settling in the depths and moving, always moving.

Sunset where Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea & Indian Ocean meet

Images and Ponderings from Tamil Nadu, India

2012-01-22T01:51:00.000-08:00

These beautiful terracotta horses have a long history in Tamil Nadu, although they seem to be found today in mostly off-the-main road places. We saw a small set of litle horses near an enormous banyan tree that we visited. The tree was at least 400 years old.. A beautiful elderly woman lives near the tree as its caretaker and tends the little shrine there. She performed a ritual there and then blessed each of us. She told us that many birds and animals find refuge in the tree including a sacred cobra (which I did not see).

Later we came upon a collection of horses at the foot of an enormous volcanic rock, where Jain monks once carved their beds out of solid rock near the top, They slept with a stunning view of the surrounding valleys.

The largest collection of horses we visited was at a small village shrine in a part of the woods that is protected. They formed two long lines leading to the shrine. No one is really sure about the origins of these horses, although they are thought to be ready and waiting when the village protector gods need to ride out on their missions. What I love about them is their obviously rollicking sense of humor. Many of them are guffawing. Some of the horses are very old, others are new. Even today when some folks ask the gods for help they may promise to offer a horse at the shrine if their wish is granted.

You can't help but notice that many of the horses are falling apart. Their heads have been knocked off. Of course, they are decomposing due to age, wind and rain. But the real culprits at work are the monkeys who live in the area and play among the horses. They are the ones who knock the heads off. And no effort is made to protect them either. The monkeys live there and probably lived there before humans, so they are left to run free as they wish.

This seems to go against our American sense of order and need to control. I was reminded, though, of how the pueblo people of New Mexico let their adobe homes decompose naturally. At least this is what they did for most of their history. No big repairs made, what came from the earth returned to it. Part of the rhythm of life. Maybe you built a new home if you needed one and the old one had collapsed.

In stark contrast to these ways of living is the damage we have viewed at so many of the temples in Tamil Nadu: where invaders—be they Muslims, Christians, Europeans, whoever... attempted to destroy the images carved into rock by the ancient peoples of this area. Faces knocked off, arms broken, bodies dug out—in one case the entire temple complex was razed by Muslim invaders in the 1300s. This is destruction of a different kind—or at least it seems so to me: the attempt to control and to assert one's own way as THE only way. And, perhaps in the case of the temple art, there was a fear of the beauty and sensuality, and the “otherness” of the images and the gods they represented. This reminded me of the attempt in New Mexico by the French-born church authorities to destroy all of the devotional art that had been carved and painted by the people of the area. The idea was to bring in “true” art from France. Hispanos in New Mexico had to hide their devotional objects—what they didn't hide was destroyed—by those who knew “better.”

Portion of one of the Great Chola Temples, 11th century

Tamil Nadu has been invaded and governed by foreigners many many times over its long history, and there has been much suffering and loss over those years. All cultures experience loss and there aren't many that have escaped the influence of others, but there seems to me a difference between the loss of the horses' heads, the demise of the adobe dwellings versus the destruction of the temple art of Tamil Nadu and the devotional folk art in New Mexico.

Christmas: A bit of reflection and a poem, one old, one new

2011-12-28T08:43:00.000-08:00

“We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.”
- Meister Eckhart, 1260-1328, German Dominican monk

Read by Teri Hobart, Christmas Eve, 2011, The Chapel of St. George

And, a poem:

Christmas

This year
I let Christmas in.

And it occurs to me that
every year
the spirit of Christmas goes wandering
looking for room at the inn
of my heart

turned aside
by the hurry of business
the demands of desires
the walls of grudge, bitterness

but when at last
a door of willingness opens
there comes inside
each year
a newborn spirit

of hope
joy of this life
the courage of kindness
the warm embrace of forgiveness

so powerful,
it draws shepherds,
wise ones, some who hold sway in this world,
even humble animals respond,
look up to the silent chorus
of shimmering angels
among the stars, bending
low, to welcome again this
simple

overwhelming
grace.

- Scott O'Brien With thanks to Larry Robinson for passing this along.

It was Rita Dove who said about poetry, that it "is language at its most distilled and most powerful."

May the power and grace of Christmas be yours now and in the coming year.

In a Minor Key

2011-12-20T17:04:00.000-08:00

The Santa Rosa symphony’s December offering this year was dark: two pieces by Brahms, the Tragic Overture and the German Requiem, were rounded off with the powerful singing of two American spirituals by Jubilant Sykes, baritone--"Motherless Child" and "Were you there?" A community honor choir sang the Requiem, which admittedly is one of the more “positive” of requiems: the third movement sung by the soprano and choir was lyrically sweet. But there was no escaping the minor key of the evening.

Stark contrast to the cheery “jingle bell hop” greeting me in the grocery store, not to mention “Here Comes Santy Claus” and all the rest that have been playing since before Thanksgiving in some of our local establishments. And, lest you think I’m entering my Bah! Humbug! phase what really set me thinking was how powerfully the juxtaposition between the symphony’s offerings and the musical background in the stores speaks to the contrast between the Christmas story as told in the gospels and the “holidays” proclaimed in our culture.

A friend remarked on the strangeness of the dark offerings at the concert in this holiday time of year, and I told her that from a Christian perspective the minor key was the right key for the season. The birth of Christ has been viewed as connected to his death since the early years of the church. The story of his birth has been understood to foreshadow the cross. The vulnerability at his birth and as he walks toward his death, the powers that be and their violence, the no place at the inn theme echoing from birth to crucifixion.

The other night I watched the video The Nativity, and was struck again by how dark a tale it really is. Oh, the star is bright and illuminates the birth, but the sense of impending trouble, the rejection in Bethlehem, the threat of Herod and his minions, the need for the wise men to go home by another route, the killing of the holy innocents and the escape to Egypt: it's a very dark tale. Birth in the midst of brokenness, threat and death. The fragility of new life.

And, really would anything less be as precious? I think of the music in the mall, the decorations, the enforced cheeriness of it all---and I can't help but be thankful that that is so far removed from the promise of Christmas. I go about this season knowing so many who are hurting, aware of the turbulence of our world, the tenuousness of our economy, the countless folks who are homeless and on the move around the globe, the machinations of the powers that be, the longing of so many for meaning in their lives. Same old, same old. No amount of glitter or jingle can speak to that.

Instead we Advent-keepers are invited to a real world gift of grace and new life to be found in the midst of all the darkness--the possibility of new beginnings offered again and again in the context of fragility. Opening ourselves to that offering is the calling of the season. Our minor key Advent hymns are all about that.

A friend told me the other day that she didn't have any problem saying with Mary, "Here I am Lord." but her question is: "Where are you?" What a great confession. One I could make most days. It's a minor key longing at we have deep in our hearts. What we long for I believe is found in the little story of the birth. It's a tiny little story, and a hard-to-notice birth. The darkness that surrounds it seems to engulf us--and makes it hard for us to attend. Hard to give yourself over to something so seemingly insignificant. At least that's how it is for me. All of it: minor key. Beautiful, strangely beautiful, and true.

Emptiness: a hard-edged gift

2011-12-06T12:12:00.001-08:00

My co-housing community is living with loss these days. Bill Evans was known in the paper as "Running Bill"; he got his nickname because at 85 years he was still running between shots on the golf course, pushing or pulling his cart—no leisurely stroll or golf cart for him. He loved golf and told his wife that he wanted to die on the course, and he got his wish; he died there. But around our community he was Bill, a man who wouldn’t step into a community meeting, but who loved to engage in conversation—with children and adults alike. He loved animals and took care of cats and dogs that were and weren’t his own. He could beat almost all of us at table tennis. He was curious always, and opinionated too. But he could listen and change his mind as well—an important character trait for those of us living in co-housing. Wherever I turn I miss him. He did so much in our gardens and along the pathways: sweeping. cleaning, digging, pruning, moving chips to the front, weeding—all of it to him was exercise and he did it with enthusiasm. So now when the leaves have mostly been blown off the trees and are lying around on the ground, I see them and I miss him. I know he’d be out there sweeping and hauling them out to the compost. But when I look up at the trees, their branches so nakedly exposed, the sky showing through where once there were leaves—I think of him too. The emptiness of the trees echoes in my heart. The presence of absence.

We are enamored of fullness in this country: There is the pushing back from the Thanksgiving table. Stuffed. No emptiness, even for dessert. A walk maybe necessary before the final course. It’s the season of fullness. Culminating with that image of the myriad gifts under the tree.

And then there is fullness’ twin: instant gratification. The other day a friend told me that she loves her Kindle because she can get a new book to read in just a couple of minutes. Poof! There it is. I know what she means. No waiting involved. No empty space between books.

I write this on the train, going toward Bakersfield—and not at bullet speed either. In fact not only does the train move rather slowly, but there is the standing-still waiting involved when you travel by train in this country. You wait for the bus to get to the train, you wait for the train. You wait. And no amount of texting or playing games can hide it: you wait. Such an unfamiliar experience. Waiting by the track, empty of train. Waiting, empty.

This advent season of waiting is in a deep sense about absence. And its not just the absence we know is there in the midst of fullness: the poor among us who don’t have a tree, much less the gifts; those who have given up on job hunting they’ve been at it so long; the men and women far from home fighting in wars in the season of peace; the folks who have come up against illness and loss in the midst of the “season.” It’s more than that. It’s the knowing deep within that there is an emptiness. So much fullness and so much emptiness.

Jesus tells a little parable (MT 12.43-45) about the person who swept their house clean, only to discover that the “unclean spirit” had entered the empty rooms and filled them with its friend. To know your emptiness is to be aware of your vulnerability. To be empty is a fragile place to be. It’s often the case that we do our best to avoid such a state. We dull the ache, cover it over. We fill our emptiness with things that don’t satisfy: with noise, or drink, or drugs, sour relationships, or work, or even achievements, you name it—we’ve tried it. Our fast paced, instantly gratified culture makes it easier to pretend. But, still underneath it all there is emptiness.

The “holiday season” is notoriously hard on many of us. It’s a time for grieving loved ones no longer with us, those who are far away, the death of a relationship, dreams unfulfilled. It’s a time when those who live alone may feel their aloneness acutely. Blue. And empty. Some churches even hold blue Christmas worship—and why not? Emptiness is at the heart of the season.

It’s been important for me to know my own emptiness. Hard as it has been and is. The times I have lived as though I were full have been costly.

Without the emptiness: there can be no hope. No waiting in expectation. There can be no new life where there is only fullness with no room for it to be born.

Bill is not here as he was. He is not raking the leaves, pushing the wheelbarrow, smiling at me in the early morning, not telling me what he thinks. There is a real loss. The presence of emptiness. And that real absence puts me in touch with the larger emptiness that is so much a part of Advent. A hard-edged gift.

Of pools and play

2011-11-21T21:29:00.001-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, at a retreatof the Ranch Board of Directors we took time out to say good-bye to theswimming pool. Or, at least this iteration of the pool. It is over 80 yearsold! By next summer we’ll have a new pool in its place.

We gathered around the pool andgave thanks for it as a place for playing. Kids and adults have gathered allthose years to play in this pool: to experience “time out of time” that comesto us when we are playing. Oh, yes, serious people have swum laps there forexercise and many adults have taught their children how to swim there. Butmostly it’s been a place for play. Kids jumping in to be the first to grab thegolf tee, kids seeing who can jump the furthest into the pool, who can find thecoin at the bottom, children playing imaginary games in the water—sharks,submarines, mermaids, octopi—all of them playing. Teens rough-housing; some, weheard, have jumped off the roof of the bath house to the pool. [They shallremain nameless.] David Forbes told us that the pool house actually was built inthe 60s when Bishop Pike was leading the diocese—it was constructed out of hisconcern for children, their education and their camps.

Play can happen almost anywhere,but I’m thankful there are special places for playing at the Ranch. We need to play.Especially these days: there is little room for play when so much of our everyday is so structured, both for adults and children. We need to be able to enjoyactivity that seems to have no purpose. I say, “seems to” because scholars tell us that play actuallydoes have purpose. It is very important in our development: in our learningabout our strengths and limits, and about cooperation and trust, and it’s vitalto our ability to solve problems and to relate to others with compassion. Playtests our bodies and our skills, our imaginations and our capacity for joy andsurprise.

Play time is “out of time.” You areso there that you don’t notice how much time is going by. Anyone who has evertried to get a child out of the pool by explaining that the allotted time hasgone by, knows that time in the pool is “time out of time.”In that sense, playtime is Sabbath time. It is time when we arenot responsible for the upkeep of the world. When we step out into a worldwhere we can relax, let the creative energies of the divine take care—where wecan just be and be alive. We can enjoy God’s creation and each other. It a wayof honoring the divine by taking time out. Sabbath.

Some of us adults have a hard timeplaying, even if we played a lot as kids. Our work ethic is distorted so thatwe feel guilty if we’re not “doing something productive.” Many parents knowthat their children help them get back in touch with their playful selves.Grandchildren can do the same. This is a note from quite awhile back that I keep near mydesk. My granddaughter wrote it to me when I was working “a bit,” one day whenshe was visiting. I take it as a beautiful invitation from her, which I cherish.It also represents the divine invitation we’re extended everyday to remember we’reloved and to remember that we’re made to come out and play!

The pool isn’t the only place wehave for play at the Ranch. We have other play spots: there is the swingoutside the refectory and down the hill a bit. The basketball courts. There isthe art center. There is a place for a game of horse shoes, and one for bocce ball.Over the years, the tree house was such an important “time out of time” center. We hope and pray that soon it, too,will be built afresh and again ring with the sounds of children and adults atplay.

The pool at the Ranch was dug withdraft horses pulling the equipment—just imagine that. Think about all those years of play, all thethousands of people who have enjoyed it. Now we are embarked on theconstruction of a new pool in the same playful place, ready we expect by thissummer, and once again offering children and adults a place to play. A sabbathplace: the swimming pool. “Come on out!”

To learn more about play: there’s a rather serious talk byStuart Brown at http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html

orvisit the website of the National Institute for Play http://nifplay.org/index.html

Of trees and leaves and cancer

2011-11-15T20:22:00.001-08:00

Holy autumn. I’ve been so enthralled with the treesand their colors that I actually got lost in my own neighborhood the othernight. Taking a walk and not looking at street signs. Lost in beauty I guessyou’d say.

Trees. When I visited the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork several months ago, I wandered through an amazing exhibit focused on ourcommunication with things—how we talk to and listen to the tangibles of ourenvironment. One of the highlights of the exhibit was putting on earphones andlistening to the sounds of sap moving through a tree. Listening to the sounds atree makes. Someone had “miked” a tree and the result was a sweet soft sound, asound full of energy and life—a sound from a tree we generally perceive as mute.In my life I’ve heard the sound of dripping sap from maples in Vermont in thespring. I’ve heard the sound of a branch cracking as it broke from the trunk ofa tree. I’ve heard the sound of leaves whistling and whirling, and of rain onleaves. But I’d never thought about the voices inside a tree. I felt like I hadentered a holy of holies—even though I was surrounded by all kinds of peopleand movement and noise in the museum. I didn’t want to leave.

Leaves. Astonishing colors on our leaves this autumnin Sonoma County. We’re probably at the peak right now, before the rains takethem all away. They are dancing in the wind, reflecting the light, andbeginning to cover the ground; in every way reminding us that the time ofletting go is upon us. Soon the trees will be bare—their skeletons speaking withstartling clarity of our strength and of our mortality.

Autumn. My dictionary tells me it’s “the time of fullmaturity” or as it puts it “sometimes, the early stages of decline.” I have ahard time distinguishing between the two. My own self seems to be perhaps amixture of both—or maybe that’s just denial on my part, the evidence of a slideinto decline is definitely clear. Parts aren’t able to do what they once did,that’s for sure. And I’ve been dropping leaves, some of them beautiful and richin texture and color, for a long time now. Letting go, paring down, becoming, I pray,more transparent, more skeletal.

Cancer. Some very dear friends are living with cancer this Autumn.When I walk among the trees I think of them. One of them who has lung cancertells me that he is always congested and every breath he takes reminds him ofhis mortality. Another tells me she may try medical marijuana, she has lost somuch weight under treatment. Another, whose latest round of treatment bore goodresults, tells me that the good news is in the context of the possiblecontinued spread of the disease to other areas of her body. For them this hasbecome an autumn time, a time of letting go, of centering down, of concentratedrootedness, a time of clarity: when the essentials are laid bare in the swirlof falling leaves. There are loss, uncertainty,grief, pain, fear, and exhaustion at the autumnal edges. There are also faith, hope,courage, real strength, and dare I say, an exquisite beauty in each of these people. Ifyou listen closely you are privileged to hear the murmur of the life-force within. The Holyof Holies.

Jesus. Bruno Barnhart in The Good Wine describes Jesus as a tree. “The human tree which isJesus sends its roots deep and sends its branches high, a manifold bridge oflife. It swallows up the separation of sin and death, and the law’s distinctionof good and evil, in the one, unrejecting life.” He goes on say that a tree isa “witness standing, moving, in the changing wind and sun, it speaks within uswhere its likeness lives and grows, joining the world in one.” My friends, in away, offer this witness, as do the trees. I am thankful for each.

Barnhart, Bruno. TheGood Wine. Wipf & Stock Publishers (December 2008),p. 86.

The MOMA Exhibit was “Talk to Me: Design and theCommunication between People and Objects.” It closed on November 7, but thereis information about it at http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1080

Biblical wandering

2011-10-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

LastSunday I noticed that the big bible, usually kept on the lectern, wasn'tthere anymore. I found it on a back pew. There are other bibles in thechapel--smaller more portable ones. I wondered, in fact, whether someone had usedour lectern Bible as a pillow--stretching out on the pew for a nap in sacredspace. As scientific research now tells us "sleeping on it" can be avery positive way to learn and to stretch your creative thinking. . ."Whatever"... as they say. At the Chapel things have a way ofwandering--so many different groups and individuals make use of the space, andeach has their own sense of order.

But ourwandering bible reminded me of a bible I saw at the New York City PublicLibrary. It was very old and it had a huge chain on it. Bibles were oftenchained to the pulpit or lectern in churches. Precious. Liable to be taken.Hard to imagine anyone stealing a bible these days. A part of me wished thatweren't the case. People might take to stealing bibles if they saw the value ofthe scriptural words soaring like gold.

Of courseback then, printing was a new thing, and there weren't that many bibles around.The Gutenberg Bible and those that followed represented a radical notion: thatordinary people could access scripture by themselves. Read the word, hear it,and take it in. No second or third hand interpretations needed. The King JamesBible whose 400^th anniversary we celebrate this year was one ofthose that made the words of scripture available to folks in their ownlanguage. At some level, I suppose those early chained bibles represented theattempt of the clergy to hold on to their privileged status as 'protectors' ofthe word.

Seeingthat bible in chains also set me thinking about the long history of chainingthe word of God. Interpreting it according to our own opinion, proof-texting,using it to defend our own convictions, keeping its meanings tight, and notletting its poetry and metaphor carry us into God's surprising imagination.Often those chains are still in place in our own day.

Ourroaming bible in the Chapel is perhaps a token of the ways the word moves amongus on a Sunday in our worship, stirring whoever feels so moved to speech andinterpretation, and wonder, and questioning, and then to silence. Holy time.

Pieta in The Mall

2011-10-18T17:53:00.000-07:00

A visit to TheMall--the one in Washington DC I mean. We walked from the metro stop nearestthe Washington Monument, where there were people preparing for the"repelling" look at the earthquake damage, to the World War IImemorial to the Korean War memorial, the Martin Luther King memorial, theLincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the Vietnam Women's memorial and back. Beautifulmemorials, each one powerful in its own self. A long walk through a lot of warsand a lot of violence. I'd forgotten the words of Lincoln's Second Inauguralwhere he opined that the horrifying costs of the War we now call Civil werelikely God's judgment against the sin of slavery. (These are written on thewall of the Memorial).That's not a theology I personally choose, but I couldn'thelp considering that the costs in human life caused by the slavery and the warto end it, were/and are almost beyond counting. The King memorial, an object ofcontroversy because its artist and stoneworkers are Chinese, sits just off theMall across the water from the Jefferson Memorial. It too reminded me of thestruggle, also called Civil, that for Martin ended in assassination.

The word monument by the way has its origins in"reminder or warning." And, memorialechoes that remembering, reminding. The smallest of the reminders is theone of the American service women of the Vietnam war. And its Pieta figure of the nurse holding thewounded or dying soldier in her arms, was a beautiful and sobering summing upof my walk around the mall.

Post-it : An Illuminated Bible

2011-10-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Makoto Fujimura, artist

When I was inNew York I visited the Museum of Biblical Art. Perhaps like me you never knewsuch a place existed. It's supported by the American Bible Society and housed in the same building is theirvast collection of Bibles. To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King JamesBible the Museum had on display the original paintings of Makoto Fujimura, theartist whose work is included in a new illuminated edition of the Holy Gospelsjust published by Crossway. Theseare beautiful non-figurative paintings, one for each gospel and one of Jesus'tears. The paintings were hung in such a way that you could imagine theminteracting with one another across the space.

I can't think ofa Bible that contains non-figurative art. ...Well, I guess I've seen some thathave rather abstract art, but always with words written to make clear themessage. What an incredibly inviting and freeing experience it was to viewthese paintings associated with the gospels. There were no images of Jesus toconstrain our imaginations.

This morning Iread a little piece by Bruno Barnhart suggesting that we might think of the NewTestament "as a single energy field, the global field of the Spirit. Wecan imagine each text--sometimes even each word--as emanating its own littleenergy field around itself as the aura or soul of the word." He imagines these fields"overlapping, interacting, joining and parting, resonating and engaging,fusing and multiplying."

Perhaps thatkind of understanding of Scripture moved Fujimura to paint as he did. You canget a tiny taste of the artist and his work at http://www.makotofujimura.com/four-holy-gospels/

Serving the helpless. . . an ordination sermon

2011-09-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

Sermon preached at ordination of Mack Olson, St. John's Episcopal Church, Petaluma, Sept 10, 2011
It’s aparadox: The ordination of a deacon and our lesson (Luke 22:24-27) begins with a dispute amongthe disciples about which of them is the greatest. This isn’t just any dispute,this one takes place in the context of the last supper. Just as Jesus hasoffered them the bread and wine, as his body and blood, and just as he has toldthem one of them will betray him, they begin to argue about who’s the greatest.

We humansare indeed a piece of work. Our little egos have this longing for greatness,celebrity maybe—at least that’s how it is in our own culture—fame, being known,or at least being known for hanging out with the known. Positioning ourselvesto be noticed by the stars. Jockeying for position. Wondering what others thinkof us. Scanning the crowd to see if we’re noticed; if we’re liked.

To add tothe paradox: We are here to ordain a deacon, one who serves the poor, the weak,the sick and the lonely. One whose calling is to remind us, each of us, that inserving the helpless we are serving Christ. We come to this little ministry,the ministry of humility, of helplessness with all the pomp and circumstance wecan muster! True to our heritage, we’re all decked out in our finery, Bishopwith his mitre atop his head, staff in hand, beautiful music, colors flying,church polished. If you didn’t know better you might think we were here tocrown a king.

I love thisparadox. It exposes our undersides. In the church it is common knowledge thatwe are all called to be servants. We pretty much all know this story: Jesus tells them/us that whileothers may lord it over folks, their/our calling is NOT. Their/our calling isto be the least, the youngest, the powerless, the servant. We know this. Don’twe? We dare not lose it in the midst of ceremony.

We alreadyknow, as the Bishop will shortly remind us “that in serving the helpless wewill encounter Christ.” We will serve Jesus, the anointed one. He will meet usin his helplessness.

Think aboutit. How can this be? I mean really? When in your serving have you met Christ?Known the presence of God we could say, come up against the divine runningrampant through life, met it/him/her face to face? In serving?

Serving is acomplicated matter. If you’ve read the book The Help (by Kathryn Stockett) or seen the movieor followed the controversy around it, you’ve got some inkling of howcomplicated it is. There are power dynamics involved—some are surprising. Aservant no matter how oppressed, how trapped, always seems to have some choice,some decisions to make about their serving, how it will be done. . . . And, Iwould be remiss if I failed to mention that the blessing of serving in churchcircles, at least until recent times, has been a blessing particularlyconferred on women. Our “special blessing” you might say. I digress.

What kind ofa servant was Jesus? Think about him, his life, how did he serve? And, how haveyou served in your life? What kind of a servant are you? What are the qualitiesof the servant who serves God in their serving?

I can’tanswer for you, only for me. But when I look back on my serving I can honestlysay that I have often served with mixed motives and sometimes with what couldonly be described as ‘tude. Oh, yes. I have served simply because I was toldto. I have served grudgingly, even resentfully. I have served manipulatively. Ihave served from a position of authority and power, distancing myself from theperson served. I have served more than once half-heartedly. I have served inways that served my own interests more than those of the person I was serving.I have served because it made me look good to serve. I have served because indoing so I could exert control over another. I have served to be rewarded. Ihave served to win love and acceptance. I have served seeking greatness. I have.

Rarely haveI met the Christ when I served in these ways. Rarely have I served the Christin these ways.

I watched awoman serve others a few days ago. She did it in a way that made the presenceof the divine almost palpable. I was volunteering at a day shelter program forhomeless and at risk women and children in Santa Rosa, the Living Room. It wasmid morning and the women had finished their breakfast and were sitting aroundthe room talking. A woman came in, a professional looking kind of woman, andwas introduced as a speaker to make a presentation about the services providedby a nearby Disability Center. The room grew quiet, but some of the women keptreading the paper, or a book—not very interested. The woman began a kind ofnormal talk about the services provided by the center for people with all kindsof disabilities, legal advice, help filling out forms, support groups, etc etc.Same old same old. I could see some eyes beginning to roll back in heads. Onemore agency promising not very much.

But thensuddenly and quietly the woman began to talk about her own disability. Her needto stay on medication, the tricks she uses to deal with her mind’s obsessing inthe night. She talked about the support group she runs and how it impactspeople’s lives. Books and papers were forgotten, people started askingquestions; there was life in the room. She was surrounded by women when shefinished, and she stayed for a long time talking one on one with folks.

Her honestyand willingness to take a risk and share her own need and vulnerability, herown helplessness in a sense, created a spaciousness in the room that had notbeen there before. And in that space the divine was moving, there was deeplistening, and sharing, and new life. She served from a place of humility. Notas a victim, not wallowing in her own pain; but in the truth of her own self.Very human, very weak you might say. But strong too. Knowing that she is thechild of God is how I would put it. She served from that place of mutuality. Aplace of grace. She is a woman who knows in her body that God’s healing knowsno boundaries. She didn’t even ponder how others would judge her. She simply spokeher truth and met others in their need.

Now I wantto say something to you about this man Mack who the Bishop will ordain in a fewmoments—ordain to be a deacon. He is as most of you know a gay man. He has apartner, Jeremy. They are members of your community. So you could get allexcited about this ordination as a big deal. The people of St John’s Petalumawho have been through so much, wandering in their own wilderness, returningfinally to new life at their old home church, a building which is beautiful butwhich in the past heard its share of harsh judgment about gays. This peoplehave raised up a man from among their own community to be ordained deacon andthen priest—right here in this building. And he happens to be a gay man. Godmoves in mysterious ways you might be thinking. Or, why did you have to mentionthat? Or, alleluia! you could be thinking. Or, Oh my God, I didn’t know!

But here’swhat I want to tell you. I want to remind you that Mack brings many gifts tothis ministry. Gifts of faith, bridge-building, listening, teaching, leading, agift of compassion. . . And, one of the gifts he brings is his experience oflife in our culture and church as a gay man. One of the gifts he will alwayshave for the ministry is his embodied experience of what it is to be helpless.To be helpless in front of the judgment of others, to be helpless in front ofthe rejection of others. He has known helplessness. He has known serving othersto try and win their love and acceptance. He has known many of those other waysof serving too—the ones that lead nowhere. Mack has known what it is like tofeel like he doesn’t fit in—that there is no spaciousness for him.

This is agift. At least it is now. Becausenow this man who will shortly stand before you and before the Bishop to beordained deacon will do so in the truth of who he is and in the strength of whohe is and in the knowledge that he, like each one of us, is a beloved child ofGod. God’s realm is one of spaciousness. Mack is ready to serve from that place,that truth. He will need your help to do that, just as you need his help and thehelp of others to do that. It isn’t easy.

Christ camein power, but also in helplessness. He gave himself over to life, to humans whodid what they would do. He gave himself over to the limits and the grandeur ofwhat it means to be human, to the heights and depths, and to the spaciousnessthat comes from helplessness—from choosing to be a servant. In doing so, hegave himself over to the God within. This is our calling.

Thank God we have deacons to remind us who we are and who we arecalled to be. All of us, lay people, deacons, priests and bishops are called tobe servants—may we dare to do so in the truth of who we are: Open to our ownhelplessness and thus to the One who loves us, the One who comes to us, sooften in those we serve. AMEN

A fashion statement worth making

2011-07-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

Ed and Pat hatted

On Saturday last I spent the day in Sacramento at an anti-racism training. I confess to being a reluctant participant, and when we were asked to tell the reason we were there, I wrote “Mandatory.” My hopes for the day were that I would learn something and be re-invited to live more deeply into the life of a follower of Jesus Christ. I was doubtful, but as it turned out I did and I was.

Monica & Caitlin

After grudgingly driving from Santa Rosa to Sacramento when I entered the hall I was given a couple of paper hats to write on. On one we wrote words describing all our roles in life: “mother, grandmother, friend, aunt, leader of worship, listener, accompanier, etc” On the other we were instructed to write “Child of God.” Generally speaking I am not exactly enamored of gimmicky games at workshops. But I did as I was told; then we were instructed to actually put on the hats. When I looked across the table at two of my friends with their hats on, I quite simply burst into laughter. They looked so ridiculous in their paper hats. We put on the “role” hat and then the “child of God” hat. Both looked so silly I couldn’t help laughing. I laughed and laughed. This was a gift, since it broke my spirit of grudge and opened me to the spirit.

The day progressed and we talked together, watched videos, and listened deeply to the stories we had to share about growing up in a society that is racist, as people who are racist. What did we learn from our families of origin? What did we learn from others about people of different races? What were our own experiences as white or black or brown or mixed? Just how is race constructed in our society? What are the privileges of being white? What about power relationships? What’s it like to be a person of color followed around a store by a guard who expects you to steal something (because of the color of your skin)? What does our baptismal creed have to say about all of this? What about Jesus’ life and teachings? All of this and more. Through it all there was really no conflict expressed in the room. Folks asked questions, shared their stories, and listened. But there was no challenging of one another.

Until. . . I spoke up recommending that people read the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. I mentioned that it traces the history of the War on Drugs and the resulting mass incarceration of black men. I said that it describes the financial benefits to local law enforcement resulting from the War on Drugs. Then, a woman stood up and asked in a voice that indicated that she was upset, “Just what kind of financial benefits are you talking about?” She said her son was a police officer and she had never heard of such a thing. I can’t remember her exact words, but what I remember was her upset. The microphone came back toward me, and another man at our table was ready to speak, but the workshop facilitator cut us off saying something to the effect, that, “This sounds like it will turn into a debate. That’s not what we are here for.”

I sat there and thought about the question and the emotion behind it, and remembered a few of the facts from the book worth mentioning, and I knew I would go to the woman before we left the hall. I needed to honor her question and how to do that?

I glanced down at the table. My “Child of God” hat was sitting there. I thought, “Yes, that’s what we should do. We should don our hats and have our conversation. On equal ground as children of God.” Then we could really listen and be respectful of one another.

Ridiculous, right? . . . Or, not so. If only we remembered our true identity when we are out in the world with others, or in our families, or workplaces—the identity we share with all others. Our hats might make a difference—(at least until they became old hat). I imagined our Congress persons dressed in their paper hats, and people in war-torn areas, in places where divisions run deep—hats! I giggled to myself. If only. If only it were that simple. . . but of course it is. Actually it is.

In the end, we were asked to don our hats again, and then we prayed our way out of the training. We’d been there all day in uncomfortable chairs, and when it was over folks were ready to leave. But I did go and speak with the woman who asked the question. I confess that I didn’t wear my hat, but we had just taken them off, and we were still full of the truth of who we were. She listened to me graciously and I to her.

Napping as Spiritual Practice

2011-07-14T19:51:00.000-07:00

I’m at the Ranch at the Benedictine Experience week. At our first session we participants were asked to share our hopes for the week, and as each person talked, the theme that kept on keeping on was “rest and renewal.” The first evening we were promised a short version of Compline so that we could all go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep. And, the next evening Fr. Robert Hale’s meditation focused on the spiritual benefits of sleep!

That got me thinking about a dear friend, Mary Eunice Oliver who was perhaps the most action oriented Christian I’ve known. She’d marched with King, demonstrated in countless places, been arrested, spoken the truth to power many many times. On the side she’d raised four sons to adulthood and been a loving wife to her husband. Her secret? She had an abiding faith AND she took a nap every afternoon. Of at least an hour, I think it was two. Amazing. I didn’t know her when her boys were young, don’t know how she made that nap happen, but in the years I knew her she never missed her nap. Napping kept her grounded.

Scripture has lots of sleep references—from Adam’s sleep during the creation of Eve, to Jacob’s sleep broken when he awoke to discover “God is in this place and I did not know it”—to poor Samson’s snoozing that led to his loss of the Lord’s power and his locks. One of the psalms (44) rails against God who is apparently napping, “Rouse yourself, why do you sleep, O Lord?” which reminds us of the time Jesus was napping in the boat when the storm came up and the disciples made a similar cry. Proverbs not surprisingly takes a both/and approach to sleep sometimes approving it and other times sounding like the mother of a teenager, “How long will you lie there, O lazybones?” (Proverbs 6.9). In Matthew we remember Joseph’s dream telling him to take Mary as his wife, and of course, the disciples who kept falling asleep in the Garden when Jesus had asked them to stay up with him. In the Book of Acts (Acts 20.9)there is the story of the young man sitting in the window while Paul went on and on; he falls asleep and out of the window, thunk! Paul redeems himself by raising the poor fellow up.

So it’s a bit of a mixture this scriptural picture of sleep. In our ordinary days, we can sleep our lives away and sometimes sleep to avoid living, and sometimes we’re awake, but really asleep. All of that is true. But many of us I suspect take to our hearts that beautiful line from Psalm 3 “I lie down and sleep, I awake again for the Lord sustains me.” And that is where we find the essence of sleep as spiritual practice. If we nap or go to sleep giving ourselves over to the One who sustains us; acknowledging that in fact the world can exist without our direction and input, then we have taken a small but important step toward Sabbath. Sabbath is that part of the on-going creation narrative when we do our part by letting go and relaxing into. By resting, by simply being, nodding off-- we acknowledge that we are not in charge.

As Fr. Robert pointed out sleep is something you can’t just make happen. Instead you have to receive the gift of it. You can prepare yourself to receive it, but by willing it you really can’t make it happen (it’s kind of like love that way, I guess). That’s another aspect of taking a nap or going to sleep at night as spiritual practice. There are things you can do to be a better recipient of the grace of sleep, but it is a grace. Many of us need practice in the art of receiving.

There is a giving in order to receive. It is said that giving ourselves over to sleep is an important way we practice giving ourselves over to life and to death as well. That closing of our eyes and drifting off is vital to our spiritual selves. Fear can keep us awake, or waken us from sleep—so can an over-active mind that refuses to let go. The unclenching of our hands, relaxing our shoulders, our backs, and of course our thoughts is not always easy to do in our face-paced world. Not easy to do when we have people to worry about, lists of unaccomplished tasks, brilliant thoughts to remember, etc etc. Many of us actually suffer from sleep deprivation.

According to Lawrence Epstein writing in Newsweek, “Adults typically need seven to nine hours of sleep each night to feel fully rested and function at their best. However, Americans are getting less sleep than they did in the past. A 2005 National Sleep Foundation poll found that Americans averaged 6.9 hours of sleep per night, which represents a drop of about two hours per night since the 19th century, one hour per night over the past 50 years, and about 15 to 25 minutes per night just since 2001.” Sleep deprivation results in high blood pressure, heart disease and obesity.

Oh, good grief. One more thing to add to the list of life’s dangers to be avoided. I simply MUST get more sleep. . .

NOT. Sleep is a gift to be received. All we can do is dispose ourselves to receive it. And an important step in that is simply acknowledging that I do not run the world. I am not in charge. I can entrust myself to sleep and to the creator who still goes on creating while I am dozing. Sleep as spiritual practice not only results in physical health but also in spiritual health.

So, happy zzzzz’s. (And if you do lie awake at night, here’s something to ponder: God took a rest on the seventh day. Let your imagination savor that for a bit. God’s resting as part and parcel of God’s creating.)

Reflecting on "Least Action," a poem by Kay Ryan

2011-05-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

I've been pondering Kay Ryan's poem that Nancy read for us so beautifully last Sunday. The poem called Least Action which is about the notion of incremental resurrection, that slight movement to put right our world which is awry. (Here's a link to the poem, scroll down, it's the third one.) http://www.blographia-literaria.com/2008/07/kay-ryan-three-poems-from-niagara-river.html

Driving somewhere this week I heard a snippet of an interview: in it, one man commented that one of the greatest barriers to our recognition of climate change is our inability to notice the small incremental changes that have been occurring and continue to occur.

Human beings it seems just aren't that attuned to noticing the small increments of change. We, and perhaps this is not just an American characteristic, tend to focus on the big events! We're noticing the Mississippi flooding right now, we noticed the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, but the small erosions and readjustments, the isolated tornado even if it is part of a pattern--those don't seem to penetrate. We don't attend to the small changes. The media focus is usually on the BIG DEAL as well, and briefly.

Perhaps we don't focus on the negative changes because we don't want to see them. But you'd think we would attend to the positive, life-giving changes, even if they are small. You'd think we would search diligently for those. But really, at least in my own life, I'm not that focused on those either.

I had occasion this past week to attend an awards ceremony at Sonoma State. One of my sons, Eric, received an award for excellence as an educator, teacher and administrator. The woman who presented the award spoke glowingly about Eric. And, I guess like any parent, I was pleased and happy to hear others say out loud the things I believe about him.

As I drove away from our little family meal after the ceremony, I remembered how Eric as a child and teen really didn't much like school, really didn't find it a place to put his energies. Later, in junior college a very gifted professor turned Eric on to history and to teaching. A turning indeed. I'm sure there were other little moments in his path toward his becoming an educator, but that's one that I noticed.

Later in the week talking with a friend who is a preschool teacher I was suddenly reminded of another. She was telling me how she was looking forward to writing her year-end evaluations of her students. How she loved telling their parents of the changes these little people had made, their accomplishments, their small learnings that really are important in their development--their growing up into their full selves. The people we might say that God created them to be.

Only then did I remember Eric's preschool teacher, who comforted me about him. It was time when it seemed to me that all the parents of other children in his class were focused on how their children could read, and write and maybe even do advanced algebra.... Their goals were all about high academic achievement even in preschool years. Eric really wasn't interested in those things. He liked playing with cars and trucks and making tracks for them and building with blocks. His teacher took the time to tell me about the ways these activities were important, and the ways he was learning and growing. The rest would come later.

Because I was listening to other parents and thinking about college when my child was only in preschool, I wasn't attending to the incremental changes going on in him. There is a sense in which this is a spiritual issue really. A lack of attending to the now, an inability to notice and appreciate the importance of the incremental changes going on in our everyday lives, among those we love and know the best.

The pace of our lives, the amount of information, the perceived need to stay in touch: by texting and on Facebook and Twitter, the list goes on and on--- the list of things keeping us from being present to the content of our lives. The distractions that keep us from noticing the incremental resurrections as well as the incremental deaths in our midst.

There is something profoundly true in Kay Ryan's poem: its basis in the goodness of creation, in the notion that things are a bit askew and need righting perhaps bit by bit. I calls us I think not only to be about the call to act as "restorers of the streets to live in" (Isa. 58.12) but especially to begin to live fully in the now exactly where we are and to notice and celebrate the movement of gifts of new life as they come, whatever their size. We can give thanks for those who help us find the eyes to see, and can give ourselves over more deeply to the grace that moves incrementally in our lives.

Neither Here Nor There

2011-04-23T21:51:00.000-07:00

It's late in the day, Holy Saturday. Many churches are well into their Easter Vigil services; but I've been pondering the emptiness of Holy Saturday all day today. It's in between-ness. To be neither here nor there is to be in a place. The tomb is the place. And, it's a time. Saturday is the day.

The place and the day are well known to most of us. You've been there. Anyone who has moved from death to life knows this place. It's darkness, it's coldness, it's numbness--deadness, you might say. That place where you find yourself when you have let go of the old and not yet embraced (or been embraced by) the new. You knew that to continue as you had was death. So, finally you ungrasped your tightly clutched fingers, and let go. And the deathliness that had been your way of life began to leave you. Yet, you had no idea, really, what new life would look like.

One time I remember in my own life was when I moved toward an intervention with my husband about his drinking. I moved because I knew that to continue as we had would be death. But I had no idea of how new life might look. I could not imagine him, really, without a drink in his hand. That was beyond me. And, thanks be to God, he did choose to go into treatment and emerged a new person in important ways. We're no longer married, but I've been privileged to see him now for many years without a drink in his hand--living a full and compassionate life. But there was a time there, when the old had been discarded but the new had not yet arrived. A time of uncertainty. Holy Saturday: neither here nor there.

And then there was the time when I let go of being a priest in the church. I'd been in ministry for a longish kind of time, and my identity was enmeshed in being a priest. But I found myself in a place and a time when I couldn't live with integrity and function in the church as a priest. So I let go. It was painful. Many tears were shed. I talked with my spiritual director about the shifting sands of the exodus beneath my feet. I can still remember that feeling. I'd let go, but what was coming toward me? To what was I being called to open myself? Holy Saturday was the place I lived in; the tomb and its darkness.

So, to me this day marks one of the holiest of times. A time essential. A time and place where God's grace is seemingly distant, perhaps--but a time and a place where the deepest transfigurations take place, take hold. Where lives are being made new. The tomb is a place calling on our capacity to trust--to trust the letting go, the dying to, and to trust the new life that comes--with no clear vision really of what that might be.

I think of the souls like Abram and Sarai setting out on their journey; Ruth, following Naomi, Mary saying yes to the angel, Paul setting out blind for Ananias--the list goes on and on. These are folks who knew this day. Holy Saturday.

They knew the in-between-ness of life. The neither here nor there-ness of it. It's an honorable place and time. You can entrust yourself to it. Without it there is no new life. It's the place we all dwell in and the time we breathe in.

Maundy Thursday's radical self

2011-04-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

It’s Maundy Thursday and I’ve been pondering the radical nature of both the last supper and the footwashing. In John’s gospel there is no mention really of the last supper—insofar as the “words of institution” (“this is my body, this is my blood”) that are the basis of our communion service. There is no description of his gift of the bread and wine—the story focuses on the footwashing and the sending out of Judas. Very different.

Yet these two differing versions of Jesus’ last meal with his friends do bring about what Beatrice Bruteau¹ has called the “Holy Thursday revolution.” The meal with its gifts of bread and wine, his body and blood, begins what she calls a “communion paradigm.” And the footwashing marks the end of the “domination paradigm.”

The footwashing is a radical undermining of the way things are in society—the hierarchies—the expected roles. Peter steps back because he cannot stand the notion that Jesus, his teacher, would wash his feet. He is scandalized by this degradation. Its implications are too much for him. (And for Judas too apparently, in the gospel of John anyhow). And, we must confess, since we only dare to follow his example maybe once a year, if that, it may be too much for us. We, too, perhaps like things in their proper places.

The meal we know as Eucharist is as radical a proclamation of the abundance of God’s mercy and provision for all (against the backdrop of the feeding of the multitude stories—we can’t think otherwise, can we?). And the oneness. The oneness at the heart of the Eucharist. We who are fed with the bread and wine leave as one, made one in the one, and one with each other. The artificial notions we have of separation are shown for what they are as we come to the table to be fed: Virtual reality maybe, but not reality. Flesh and blood reality, bread and wine reality, is oneness, connection, inseparability. Inside/outside/all aroundside/atomside/cosmosside.

Our traditional Maundy Thursday services bring together these two radical readjustments to business as usual. Overturning our notions of the ordering of society, which separates us out as teacher or servant, master or slave, educated or not, rich or poor—you-know-the-drill. The meal further radicalizes what we know about life. We are made one in the body and blood. One. No separation.

It’s a mystery. These two gifts of Jesus. Here’s a poem by Kay Ryan that pushes us deeper.

Backward Miracle²

Every once in a while

we need a

backward miracle

that will strip language,

make it hold for

a minute: just the

vessel with the

wine in it—

a sacramental

refusal to multiply,

reclaiming the

single loaf

and the single

fish thereby.

1 Bruteau, Beatrice. “The Holy Thursday Revolution,” in Liturgy, 1978. quoted by Bruno Barnhart in The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center, Paulist Press: 1993.

2 Kay Ryan, The Niagara River, Grove Press Poetry Series, New York: 2005, p.69.

Taking it to Heart

2011-04-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

This year Good Friday falls on the same day as Earth Day. Unusual juxtaposition. But thought provoking. We know the ancient origins of Good Friday.

Earth Day was the brainchild of U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (WI). The first Earth Day was on April 22^nd 1970, a mere 41 years ago. After witnessing the horrifying results of the oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast in 1969, Nelson got the idea to try and mobilize public consciousness about air and water pollution. He collaborated with Pete McCloskey a Republican Congressman and they announced a “national teach-in” on the environment.

On that first Earth Day some 20 million Americans participated in various programs for a healthy, sustainable environment. Groups that had been fighting on their own for a whole variety of environmental concerns realized that they shared common interests and values with others. Today Earth Day is celebrated all over the world, and focuses not only on education but on concrete acts to take care of the earth.

This morning’s Old Testament lesson from Jeremiah [Jer. 12:1-16] begins with the prophet’s complaining question to Yahweh:

Why does the way of the guilty prosper?

Why do all who are treacherous thrive?

You plant them, and they take root;

they grow and bring forth fruit;

you are near in their mouths

yet far from their hearts.

Good question. One no doubt we’ve all asked from time to time—forgetting our own penchant for guilt and treachery. Yahweh in pretty typical Jeremiah fashion turns the question around and utters a divine lament, deeper even than Jeremiah’s. God’s precious people (and specifically their leaders) have turned away, turned against Yahweh, and Yahweh is distraught and enraged.

Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard,

they have trampled down my portion,

they have made my pleasant portion

a desolate wilderness.

They have made it a desolation;

desolate, it mourns to me.

The whole land is made desolate,

but no one lays it to heart.

No one takes it to heart, we might say. No one cares as deeply as Yahweh. The desolate wilderness mourns to Yahweh, but no one takes it to heart.

The text goes on as Yahweh proclaims that the sword of God will devour the spoilers: no one will be safe.

They have sown wheat and have reaped thorns,

they have tired themselves out but profit nothing.

They shall be ashamed of their harvests

because of the fierce anger of the LORD.

The violence of this text makes it hard for me to read. But the mourning desolation is something my heart recognizes. When I was in Panama last month, listening one evening to a campesino tell us about the industrial rice farm where he’d worked I came to know for a time the exhaustion and shame Yahweh describes. The young man told us how six of his friends had died working on that farm. One had been sprayed full on by a low-flying plane dropping chemicals on the fields. After that he quit; he said he knew there had to be another way to provide for his family. I was tired to the bone and I was ashamed of our harvests, ashamed of the enormous cost of our abundance. I didn’t suspect the anger of the Lord to be at play, but then perhaps it was.

This mourning has its own echoes in the desolation of Good Friday. In Matthew’s account darkness covers the land from noon to three as Jesus is crucified; and when he dies the earth shakes, and the rocks are split. Metaphor or just the facts, the truth is that our actions and decisions that seem to have nothing to do with the earth do in fact have their impact. In our day perhaps we are just beginning to fully comprehend the interconnections of life. And the movement of the earth and the seas can make impotent most of the grandiose efforts we humans make to control things. There is a oneness to all of creation, and to live as though that were not the case is folly and it is desolation and cause for mourning. May our hearts be opened to wailing of the aggrieved, and may we join in the cry. This is spiritual practice that will take us to the heart of God.

On Being Church

2011-04-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

Last week a friend sent me a link to an announcement by Shaun King, a young preacher of a church in Atlanta, a young church. The announcement told the members of the church that for the weeks in Lent they would be meeting in small groups to focus on “discipleship, relationships, and radical service” and that after Easter they would no longer be meeting for worship every Sunday. They would meet once a month for worship and the other Sundays (and presumably other days of the week as well) they would be serving their larger community: working to solve the urgent problems faced by folks living in Atlanta. You can read this for yourself; I commend it.

http://www.shauninthecity.com/2011/03/its-true-preaching-my-last-sermon-series-courageous-church.html

It certainly got my attention. I've been pondering it as I have been going about my daily life, and when I've been weeding and preparing our garden for new life. King wonders in his letter where the church got the idea that following Jesus consisted mainly in getting together on a Sunday morning to worship and listen to a sermon. That led me to think about what we are about in our Sunday morning worship at the chapel. And what would be gained and lost by meeting only once a month in the chapel for worship, and serving together in the community the other Sundays.

God knows there is plenty of need and plenty lack of justice in our beautiful Sonoma County. People in the larger community would most likely be shocked to learn of our existence, and of our corporate commitment to making a difference in their (and our own) actual lives. They might get a sense of the loving God of Jesus if we were engaged in corporate acts of healing, service, and justice-making.

No doubt, we would learn a thing or two as well. We'd deepen our friendships; we'd learn more about each other as we worked alongside one another. And, we'd see the Christ in each other, AND in those we presumed to serve. At least we would if we went about it with a sense of humility and mutuality. If we went about it with a holy curiosity, ready to listen and learn and to simply be with. Maybe we'd learn how to articulate the faith that is in us: people might ask us questions, seeking to figure out who we are and why we are behaving this way. And, it’s even possible that the community would benefit in concrete ways from our efforts to serve the poor and work for justice.

Most of us serve others in our everyday lives, in our own "little" ways. Some of us work and volunteer in the world of need. But I think Shaun King is focused on how we could do this together, and what we might learn in meeting God as we went out into the world together.

For me, at least, it would be important that we would meet regularly to ponder our experience--to bring it up against the stories of the Bible, and the teachings of Christ. I would need to ground and re-ground our work in the world in the faith we share. Otherwise it might just become a kind of doing good deeds, social service work--devoid of mystical meaning. I'd want to offer the work to God with more than lip service. We'd want to try and avoid the sense that we're doing, doing, doing to earn our place in God's heart. That might be a danger. But the moving into the pain and suffering in the larger community might well give us a deeper idea of what is in God's heart. Our hearts and God's heart might become one in a new way. There is that to consider.

And what would be lost?

You probably could come up with your own list. Just for starters: I would miss the Eucharist: that meal of mystery, that feeds us and makes us one. And I don't mean that just in some ethereal way, but one in our bodies, having been fed from the same divine source. We leave the meal God-in-us-all, in oneness. I'd miss the music: the singing, the chanting that carry us to places familiar and places unmapped and unimagined. I would miss the corporate silence: sitting with you in quiet and spaciousness. I'd miss the insights of the community gathered around the word. I'd miss the community gathered in worship. Each of us bringing ourselves, presenting ourselves to the Holy One offering our prayers and our thanksgivings for the gift of life. Bringing ourselves in whatever shape we're in to God and to one another. I'd miss our prayers that stretch me beyond my own little prayers said at home. I'd miss the richness that each of you brings. The laughter and the joy, the beauty.

Those once a month gatherings for worship would be like manna in the wilderness for sure.

What would we gain and what would we lose? What do you think?

On Credentials and Nametags

2011-04-02T10:07:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I attended a day-long class. One of those where there is a presenter who gives a talk and the class is then invited to ask questions. Somewhere in the day I realized that certain of my classmates used question time as speechifying time. And when they began to speak, I just began to zone out. I turned off. Didn’t listen. I’d decided somewhere inside me that the person speaking wasn’t someone that I wanted to spend my time listening to. The presenters all had long vitas justifying their reason for their expertise. I was more inclined to listen to them than to some of my friends. I gave their credentials merit, even if they too did some speechifying when they answered (or didn’t). Very interesting. Who I listen to and who I don’t. Who I pay attention to and who I don’t.

So in last week’s gospel story [John 4. 4-42] the woman at the well is shocked by her encounter with Jesus, someone who shouldn’t have been speaking to her. And, when they return from their shopping, his disciples are not exactly pleased to find him talking with a Samaritan, and a woman to boot. They can’t believe he would notice her, much less speak to her and listen to her. Their minds were made up on that subject. There are folks worth your time, and others who aren’t.

It’s easy for me to judge the disciples from the safe distance of geography and time. . . “I’m not like them.” But then, I notice as I did in the class, actually I am quite a bit like them. Very much so.

Tomorrow’s gospel lesson is another one that sheds light on the same subject. It’s John’s story of the man born blind whom Jesus heals. [John 9.1-41] The Pharisees judge Jesus to be a sinner; they cannot accept that he has healed the blind man. He doesn’t fit their expectations of who could possibly be a healer. The man must still be blind. Their pharisaical judgment blinds them from the unexpected (to them) light. Now, I am of course not like them—those Pharisees—I know that Jesus is a healer, and in him I find the light. So, from my perspective it’s easy to judge those Pharisees, blinded by their own light and knowledge! Oops, there I go again.

My judgments keep popping up all over the place. And I can only wonder about how often they keep me from seeing the light, from hearing the Word, from encountering the truth. No matter how many times my judgments are stripped from me, no matter how often my little boxes of comfort are blasted open, I keep lapsing into my little judgments, short cuts to living. And of course I know that we humans cannot physically pay attention to everything at once. Our brains cannot handle all the information pouring into them. We can only make sense of so much. Even the greatest multi-tasker reaches a limit. So we make our judgments about where to put our attention.

A friend told me about being at a gathering of wealthy donors to the arts and “people of importance.” Everyone was wearing a nametag. As she went around the room she noticed that no one looked her in the face. They all glanced first at her nametag to see if she was worth their consideration. Then they passed on looking for someone more worthy.

My tendency to dismiss the lesser known, the uncredentialed has a cost. A spiritual cost. I think back to the Christmas story: to the shepherds. The way God plays the music comes clear in the story of Jesus’ birth. The outsiders, the uncredentialed, the looked down upon, heard the good news and responded and came praising God. My chances of noticing them, of hearing them, of seeing the light in them are pretty slim. When I’m looking at the nametags, and not paying attention to those who don’t fit my expectations as worthy-to-notice, I’m the one who loses. The good news seems to hang out with the ones I don’t.

The water in the well, and elsewhere

2011-03-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

Surprise, surprise! I'm thinking about water. it’s everywhere here in the new Seattle. Walking, driving, dodging it are becoming a way of life for most of us; although some are embracing it. There were those ducks I saw enjoying a dip in a new freeway off ramp pool. And, I saw two young men were walking down Mendocino with no hats, rain coats or umbrellas, just chatting away with the water dripping down their faces and clothes sopping wet. Great sight. Almost made me want to join them (not quite).

Our minds these days are filled with water. The rain rain rain we're living with. The terrifying images of the waters of the tsunami in Japan. The water being dropped on the nuclear power plants there in the effort to cool down the rods. People getting by with very little water in the days after the earthquake when water was rationed for so many. Others in Tokyo and elsewhere rushing to buy bottled water in fear of contamination of their water supplies. And then there are the images from Libya where, on the desert, lack of water is an everyday reality. In our own country while flooding goes on back East and our own rivers are roaring along near the tops of their banks, in other places there is no rain, no snow either, and drought continues.

Water and life go together. The average human body is made up of about 60% water; we can't live without it. We can go without food for quite a while, but not water. Water can be life-giving, beautiful, comforting, and mysterious. I think of the joyful gurgle of the creek I once lived near. Children are attracted to puddles, ponds and streams like magnets. Water play is high on the list for many of us. Sailing, boating, fishing, skiing, swimming, bobbing in the ocean, just sitting on the coast and listening to the waves. We're privileged to live where there is water.

And yet, water can be dangerous; it can destroy and kill. The power of a flood is hard to fathom. The year our creek flooded I learned a lot about the power of water. Cars, huge drainage pipes, cement blocks, tossed like straws in the wind. And the images we've seen of the damage done in Japan almost defies description. At times water is no respecter of human enterprise--our grand dams notwithstanding.

Water is a central reality and image in our faith tradition. The spirit's brooding over the waters in creation, the river flowing out of Eden to water the garden, the great flood and the ark, the water of the Red Sea, the waters of baptism, the water flowing from Jesus' side, the water of the River of Life flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb in the last chapter of Revelation-- the Bible is filled with water. Jesus fished in it, preached from it, calmed it, walked on it, and appeared to his friends after his resurrection at the beach.

Our gospel reading this Sunday [John 4:5-42] is the wonderful story of the woman at the well--Jacob's well, and that long, earthy-watery-mystical conversation she has with Jesus. The water of the well being at the center of the story no matter how you look at it. And like so many of the gospel stories this one has an important backdrop: this well was where Jacob first met Rachel, and rolled back the stone covering the well so that her flocks could drink. (And you perhaps are reminded of the rolling back of another stone that will be central to a different story of new life). You can't escape the intimacy of the backdrop and the intimacy of the conversation. Water for drinking for the body and water overflowing to the fullness of life--real life, embodied 60% water, life. And water breaking its channels and flowing out to others, to those supposedly not ready or acceptable. The deepness of the well at the center--the reservoir of the Spirit. The intimacy of relationship between the two at the well. The breaking open of their worlds--it's quite a story.

It helps me remember that water means so much more than just another gray soggy day in Seattle.

The Wilderness zone

2011-03-19T12:32:00.000-07:00

Lent opens with the Spirit's driving Jesus into the wilderness [Matthew 4:1-11]. For those who take comfort that “God is love”, it is sometimes hard to accept that the Spirit is the guide taking Jesus into this arduous fast and place of testing. Our image of love can tend toward the slurpy. We'd rather not think that the Spirit at work in our midst might suddenly nudge us in the same direction.

It plays havoc with my comfort zone, so carefully constructed and maintained. Whatever else the wilderness does, it dis-comforts my "zone". It exposes the inadequacies of my default responses. In the wilderness, I'm discomforted to find that when I reach for the chocolate bar in the refrigerator door that there is no chocolate--nor even any refrigerator for that matter. I am left to my own devices. My own self becomes exposed in the wilderness light. My hunger and longing.

We all have wilderness times in our lives--whether the Spirit has driven us there or not, they seem to come upon us. Gaunt times, times when we are pushed to our limits, and we find ourselves--should I say our "selves"--dis-comforted and dis-closed. Unclosed and Unclothed maybe being words appropriate to the wilderness. My identity uncovered, my-who-I-am-right- now hidden under the chocolate bars, the routines, the fall back positions, the distractions..... My who-ness plainly visible even to me.

What does it mean to be God's child? God's beloved? What exactly are the implications of that identity? Jesus rises up from the Jordan to those words in his ears, and goes out into the wilderness, hungry to begin to learn what they mean--for him. Who is he? Who is he becoming?

My own life has been marked by such places: I have been driven into the wilderness by illness, loss, death of relationship, lack of work, death of loved ones. and more: these times have left me gaunt--a shadow of my former self perhaps--but always with a deeper knowledge of who I am really. My limits, my strengths, my ability to make choices, good and bad, my need for others, my need to listen deeply for God in the midst of it all.

And sometimes I have even chosen a bit of the wilderness, knowing that it will bring me deeper knowledge of my who am-ness, and my who-am-I-becoming-ness. Recently I went on a trip with some friends, a trip that stripped us of some our usual comforts and securities so that we could see some truths with clarity and feel them in our own selves. Incarnationally, you might say. It's one thing to think about things, or read about them, or see them on the news; it’s quite another to live into them even for a short time. Embody-d. In your body the truth becomes a part of you. Stays with you.

At their best I suppose some of the traditional Lenten practices can help us enter a bit of wilderness to learn again who we are and who we are called to be. Letting go of the stuff, the patterns, the rigidities that fill our days can be dis-ruptive, and dis-comforting to an extent, and can open a space for truth to be seen and new life to begin to blossom. Disruption of our “zones” can open us to God's new life that beckons.

But the truth is that when I am paying attention to my every day, when I am present to my life, I find that I am often in a little space of wilderness, where some inadvertant words escaping my lips expose my true self--a self in my case sometimes far less than the self I'd hoped I was. Some surprise encounter with another person can jolt me out of my ordinary covered-up self. This happened to me just yesterday, and I can only say it was a sobering glimpse of my true self (my self-focused self). Perhaps you catch these glimpses, too, from time to time. It's a good practice to pay this kind of attention to our lives, whether it’s Lent or not. The wilderness is a good metaphor to take along with you when you hop out of bed in the morning.

And the angels are ministering to us in the wilderness truth. What we learn in the wilderness can be offered to God and by grace we can live more deeply into the selves we were created to be.

Covered in Dust

2011-03-12T09:31:00.000-08:00

We learned that Sandra died on Ash Wednesday. She was a client at the Living Room, a day center for at-risk women and children in Santa Rosa. Apparently she had a massive heart attack, exactly where this happened was not clear. Her death was a shock to the women gathered that morning, Some of them had seen her just the day before, the day of her death. One woman had pictures of Sandra on her phone. I invited them to talk about Sandra, and some of them did, remembering her kindness and her friendship. One woman though spoke of how hard life was for Sandra; the challenges she faced; some said she'd been told to leave the shelter where she'd lived and was searching for a place to stay. There were tears and an unusual quietness hung over the room. Sandra was dead.

At noon that day at The Ranch a group of chapelers gathered for the imposition of ashes--to be marked with the sign of our mortality as a beginning to the season of Lent. My own mortality was vibrantly present to me. I didn't need the ashes to remind me. I didn't need the ashes to open me to the truth of my limits, to the truth of my dustiness you might say. I was covered in dust when I arrived.

I've always found the seasons of the church year to be a gift. Calling me to enter the rhythms of the faith journey, and sometimes calling me to truths I would prefer to avoid. Even so, there are times when life itself patterns our lives more deeply than any season can. There are people I know living a Lent right now that has come to them unbidden, but more penetrating than any Lenten practice could offer. The loss of loved ones, illness being lived with, family struggles, the search for employment, dire financial straits; these are only some of the ways that we enter into the truth of our own mortality and our need to entrust our lives to God in ways we'd never imagined.

Merton describes Lent as a season of healing. Its purposes in the early church were to prepare the catechumens for baptism at the Vigil, and through penance to offer an opportunity to those who had been separated from the community through sin to re-enter. (Strange as this notion of banishment of sinners seems to us today in our tradition, we may have experienced the ways in which sin separates us from others, and the sometimes arduous path to reconciliation that reunites) In both cases the goal was integration with the faith community, and a deepening of relationship with God. Healing indeed.

It helps I think to consider our Lenten practices as those that might lead us to healing. And it seems to me that some of us have little need for traditional practices of the season; if you are already immersed in Lent in your daily living, then perhaps your call is to live each day in the truth of your own mortality and to entrust yourself to God's grace.

To know the need we have for healing is perhaps a gift of the season--whether it has come to us via the church calendar or through life itself.

Power and Might, Divine and Otherwise

2011-02-11T21:48:00.000-08:00

I've been watching the news from Egypt these last days, and thinking about power and the exercise or restraint of power. How could I not? I visited Egypt just a few years ago and could see and feel the reality of police state oppression. This week I marveled at the crowds, their strength, commitment, and persistence, and their unarmed power. These weeks have been filled with questions about power: the day the so-called pro-Mubarak forces attacked the crowds, the army’s refusal to shoot at civilians, the people who slept under the tank treads to ensure that they would not move, the speech Mubarak gave insisting that he would not resign, the confusing and sometimes contradictory statements from our own government, and then today the news of Mubarak’s resignation and the council of the army taking over the reins of government. Power of governments, power of armies, power of money, power of the media, power of tweets and cell phones, power of unarmed civilians. No matter what happens next, we’ve witnessed one of the great examples of the power of nonviolent resistance in our day.

All of this took me to some reflections I’ve been having about God’s power. On Sunday morning when we gathered around the altar and sang the Sanctus, "holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might." which we sing every time we gather for Eucharist, I wondered about divine power.

The first part of the Sanctus comes from the text in Isaiah that describes his vision of God.

Isaiah 6:1-3

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.

And one called to another and said:

“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;

the whole earth is full of his glory.”

The words we use in our service are from the 1973 translation of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. And I don’t know how those commissioners arrived at these words. But I do know those aren't the words we've used in other times, nor are they the words used by our friends the Lutherans for example. Here’s our own 1928 Prayer Book version, which also happens to be the version used in Rite I of our 1989 BCP.

HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, Lord God of

hosts, Heaven and earth are full of thy

glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord Most High. Amen.

This may be more than you ever wanted to know about the Sanctus, but I mention it because I think the words we use in worship are important. They work their way on us. They mold our images, and affect our imagination. Singing every week of the power and might of God has an impact on our understanding of who God is. And of course, God’s mightiness is worth pondering.

Just how is God mighty? How is God’s power exhibited? Is God more of a police state kind of God, with tanks and guns, and military weaponry or is God more like the hundreds of thousands unarmed folks in Tahrir Square and the streets of Cairo and Alexandria? Is God a god of coercion or persuasion? Is God more likely to hit you upside the head or persistently wear you down by presence? Is God more like a dictator or a lover? What kind of power is creative power? Is there a power in letting go? These are some questions worth asking. And Scripture gives us a multiplicity of images—from the drowning of Pharoah’s army to the still small voice that Elijah finally heard. Not to mention lots and lots of images of humans doing all kinds of violence in the name of God.

Jesus’ talked a lot about the reign of God come among us, and he did say that by prayer we ourselves could move mountains, but if we look seriously at Jesus himself for our clues about God’s might we see a God of invitation, persistence, love, and presence. Jesus’ own might and power was certainly not that of physical force, but that of presence, of connection and rootedness, the power of righteousness, we might say. He had a freedom that sent him across boundaries and to sit at table with all sorts. And he exercised his power with compassion and restraint. Using it to heal, to challenge, to make new, to feed, to bring together, to call people to live more deeply into the reign of God already present among them. His most violent act was perhaps the overturning of the tables of the money lenders, and when push came to shove in the Garden, he restrained his followers from violence. This is a very different kind of power than the one we see most often on our TV screens or at the movies. It is a different kind of power than our culture generally holds up before us.

It’s worth thinking about your own experience of God’s power and might. Maybe you have felt hit upside the head by God, or maybe your experience is more along the line of the still small voice from within, or the grandeur and enormity of the ocean, maybe you’ve known the power of God's love to transform. It would be worth talking about sometime.

Here’s the Sanctus in Latin. And perhaps thinking about the Lord God Sabaoth or the Lord God of Hosts would be a helpful practice. (And what does “Lord” mean to you these days anyhow?). Meanwhile lets give thanks for the images we’ve had from Egypt of the power of nonviolence. (I can’t help feeling that the Mysterious Holy Oneness is pleased with human nonviolence).

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus

Dominus Deus Sabaoth.

Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua.

Hosanna in excelsis.

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

Hosanna in excelsis

An epiphany about choosing to journey

2011-01-12T08:20:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I participated in Bishop Marc’s Epiphany retreat. We spent the day engaging with some of the texts of the season; we prayed; we sang hymns and chanted; we sat together in silence, and then we told stories of our own lives as they met the stories of scripture. We used what is called public narrative to set the form of our story telling. Brief (three minutes), a story that touches our own deepest passions, a story that presents a challenge and choice and one that invites others in—to make their own choice.

The first text we heard was the story of the wise men who journeyed in the darkness guided by the star; the travelers who ended up going home by another route (Matthew 2.1-12). After hearing the story and Bishop Marc’s few words offering possibilities of focus, we fell into a silence. As I sat there I re-visited a journey I made years ago when I realized that my partner was dying. And I knew that we had a journey into darkness ahead of us. For me, this part of our journey together began with small choices—choices to accompany her to doctors’ appointments, eventually to many hospitalizations, and the choice to stop working to be at home. On and on the choices presented themselves and eventually were hardly noticed. Each one though took me into new space, a smaller space—more restricted in some ways. We were in a sort of cocoon those last months. One that was dark, no doubt about it, but there were always shards of grace. Little moments, glances of understanding, mutual vulnerabilities, and the presence of the One who stands with us. Kathy died at home surrounded by loved ones. A time of grace that marked us all. I went on by a different route.

Just the day before the Epiphany retreat I had attended an all day workshop on energy offered by the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy www.ecoleader.org. It began with a detailed presentation by Richard Heinberg www.energybulletin.net on US energy policy and the path to sustainability—the depletion of world oil reserves, the cost and risks of coal and oil production in the years ahead, the connection between rising oil prices and economic recession; the impact of lack of oil on our way of life. Airplane travel, home heating, transport of products, plastics, on and on the list went—our worlds will shrink almost certainly. And we will travel, work and live in different ways as we face into the first of the limits to growth. I had heard these facts before –most of them—but never all at once. And I sat there fighting off depression… thinking about the hard choices to be made—and about how life is sure to change in the coming decade and the years that follow. More than I can imagine really. There are many decisions to be made at various levels of government. But I wondered about my own choices. How to live into this in my own choosing?

As I sat in the silence at the retreat my two stories came together in a way I would never have thought myself to. I realized that my life has been a series of journeys into darkness, with letting go and entrance into limits. The one I remembered so well that morning, and others: growing older is itself one of these. The limits to growth we face in the not-very-distant future present us with choices to make, and challenges to face. But if you too have had these journeying experiences you know what I realized in the silence: we can choose to enter this new and seemingly dark journey and trust that in the shrinking place we will encounter the one without boundaries. There will be a lot of letting go, there will be pain, and there will be shards of grace; we will not be the same—that’s for sure. We’ll find ourselves returning home by a different route.

The Spiritual Practice of Blueness

2010-12-18T18:38:00.000-08:00

In many communities across the country churches are offering Blue Christmas services. These vary a bit in content and ritual, but all are designed to offer a place for folks who are feeling blue during “the holidays” to be at home in worship, and find solace. Truth be told many of us find ourselves feeling blue at this time of year. With all the emphasis on joy, and the gathering of family and friends around the table, the plentitude of gifts, the ho-ho-ho-ness of it all can wear a bit thin.

Because it is a time when families do get together, loved ones who have died or who are far away, almost necessarily come to mind as the gatherings occur. And, often one grief, one sense of a significant absence, can lead to other griefs, other losses. Losses of friends, loved ones, even dreams and hopes. And, loneliness is something many know during this time. If you live alone you are likely to feel it more deeply now than in other times of the year.

In a dream Joseph hears the word from God that he is to name Mary’s child Jesus (Yahweh saves) because the child is actually the fulfillment of the ancient promise that a child would be born: Emmanuel (God-with-us). [Matthew 1:18-25] Strange eh? God saves by being God-with-us. God-with-us is to be named Jesus.

So many of us are trapped in our fears of abandonment. Our fears of being left alone. Unnoticed, ignored, lonely, left to our own devices. It may be that our deepest longing, the one that lies under all the other ones, is to know God-with-us. To know that I am not alone, ever. God is present, with us.

Way under all the holiday chatter and glitter, Christmas is really about that bedrock truth—that in Jesus we know God-with-us most deeply—and maybe that is why so many of us are blue. We long for God-with-us, and yet we live with grief, and loss, and at best seem only catch glimpses of the divine We look at our world, and it seems in many ways to be devoid of God’s grace at work. We grieve. We wish the gift of Christmas were ours for the receiving, but we are blue. We long to dare to give ourselves over to the truth that is the Christmas truth: God-with-us.

One way to look at our blueness is to think of it as the deepest of Advent spiritual practices. Our grief and sense of aloneness is where our longing starts. It is a measure of how much we long for the one who is coming. It may be that our emptiness inside is making room for the One who comes. Emmanuel.

Ho-ho-ho-ness really is not much of an Advent practice. Blue-ness can be.

Gifts of a Darkness

2010-12-12T20:20:00.000-08:00

[A meditation given at the Advent Quiet Days on the theme of The Darkness and the Light]

I have learned most of what I know about the divine, about grace, about deeper truth --in the dark. In the dark. Not the light.

The psalmist sings to God in Psalm 139: “If I say, “Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me turn to night,” Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, darkness and light to you are both alike.” Darkness and light to you are both alike, O God.

How is it that the psalmist can claim that to God darkness and light are alike? In what ways is God present and God’s grace at work in the darkness. The darkness before the light. The darkness which the light does not seem even to penetrate. We have all, I suspect, lived in this darkness.

Or I should say darknesses. Because it seems to me there are different darknesses—related, but experientially different. Some are horrendous—the darkness of the holocaust, the darkness of terror and violence, of imprisonment or torture. I would not presume to speak of these kinds of darkness. I am not equipped.

But, some darknesses I have known.

The darkness of loss. Where suddenly perhaps some person or something, or your way of life, or even just some self-understanding is gone. The person I always thought I was, clearly is not the person I am. That moment of facing into the truth—the what simply is—about myself. I look at the hurt I have caused. I know deep inside that I chose the actions I chose. Those actions hurt others. I did that willfully. I am not the kind person I thought or hoped I was. I sit in darkness of truth. A hard darkness.

My friend goes in for surgery and dies on the operating table. My partner, my brother, dead; my best friend in high school dead in an accident. Other dear friends gone. I sit in darkness. Alone. Seemingly alone.

The darkness of fear. When fear takes over and I am immobilized. Like depression, fear can leave me stopped in my tracks. Fear of failure. Fear of economic ruin. Fear of loss of relationship. Fear of inadequacy. Fear of attack. Fear of vulnerability. Abandonment. Fear is cold and dark.

The darkness that comes when I have lost my way. I was on a path and seemed to know where I was going, suddenly things have shifted. Doors have closed. Things once possible seem impossible. Friends once reliable are no longer there. My body, once reliable, suddenly refuses to do the things I want to do. Where am I? This place is strange and I cannot see my way ahead. I am off the path and don’t know how to get back on it. Darkness.

Perhaps you have known these dark places and times in your own life. Or others. There are many. We are a people who walk in darkness much of the time. But there is one darkness that I invite us to ponder. This is the darkness of transformation. The darkness of process. The darkness of incompleteness—not yet thereness—the times when I am on my way to being made new—not yet transfigured, but in process. Maybe this is the darkness of the womb, which I have entered many more times than one. Have you been born again? Indeed, in darkness every time.

Wendell Berry has these words to say about darkness,

To be in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, be dark. Go without sight

And find that the darkness, too, blooms and sings

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.(1)

Living with that poem these last weeks brought to a story of darkness in Genesis—the story about Jacob’s return to his brother Esau. (It’s in chapters 32-33) Jacob, the trickster and manipulator, the man who made things happen, the one who had tricked his brother and father to gain his brother’s birthright and his father’s blessing, and had fled to an alien land, where after many adventures and challenges he amassed a goodly fortune, several wives and many children. In a dream he came to understand that he should leave where he was and return to his brother and the land of promise. He starts out on the journey and sends some messengers ahead who come back to tell him that Esau is on his way with lots and lots of men. Things do not look good. In fact, Jacob fears the worst; so in his typical fashion he gets ready: he organizes his flocks and his goods and his family and sends them on ahead hoping to shower Esau with gifts to persuade him not to massacre them all. Night falls and having sent everyone else across the Jabbok, there he is alone. Alone with himself. In the dark.

And then one of the most familiar and weirdest of stories. In the dark, all alone Jacob finds himself wrestling by the river with a stranger—a man. They wrestle all night. I’m thinking about that—about wrestling in the dark. I’m thinking about wrestling with someone I can’t see. I talked a bit recently with a young man in high school who is a wrestler. He spoke of the training, the need to be in shape, the strategies, the strength and the perseverance needed to wrestle. So, imagine if you will Jacob, not ready really, certainly not imagining in all of his dread of the coming encounter—all of his imaginings about that—not imagining I’m sure that he will be wrestling this night. In the dark.

To wrestle in the dark without sight you’d have to rely on other senses. On touch and smell I would guess, on hearing. Think how carefully you would be listening. Think of grappling, touching the other and through touch learning about him or her. No sight. And I guess you would sniff too. Smell the body of the other, maybe smell your own self and maybe even catch a whiff of your own fear.

When you go dark, as Wendell Berry says, without sight you might have to rely on instincts—your instincts—your gut as they say. Is that on the list of senses? If it isn’t it should be. Trust your deep interior sense. What is that telling you? In the dark you might want to rely on your instincts—your insides. In the dark we might have to connect to that sense.

At the end of the wrestling the stranger the text tells us, touches Jacob’s thigh and from that moment on he walks with a limp. Touching goes both ways. As daylight breaks Jacob demands a blessing but what he gets is a new name. Israel. Jacob the “leg or heel puller” becomes Israel “the one who strives with God.” Jacob is reputed to have been born tugging on the heel of his twin, Esau. But now he is celebrated as the one who has striven with God and man. Because of course it dawns on Jacob as this encounter ends and the sun rises, that the one he has been wrestling with is God. “So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’ The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.”

Later, when Jacob, (now Israel) meets Esau his brother embraces him and kisses him, and they weep. He says to Esau in one of the most beautiful lines in Scripture. “truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” Jacob/Israel is a changed man. He sees life differently and it’s because of his time in the dark when he went without sight.

Perhaps you have known a time like this in your own life.
I certainly have. The years I spent caring for my partner as she moved toward death; those were dark times, and there was not much I could see. I had to let go time and again of the ways I’d thought about life, and the ways I’d lived my life. I came to the end of my strength, my capacity to make things happen. I learned to accept the kindness of strangers and friends. I learned to listen oh so carefully, and to touch and smell in new ways—smaller ways you might say. There the grace of God touched me in tiny and surprising ways. And, once I came out into the light I found that I had been blessed. My name maybe hadn’t changed, but I had been remade. I am a different person. Maybe you know this kind of dark time—time traveled by dark feet and dark wings. Maybe you’ve felt the comfort of those dark wings and the feet that have accompanied you.

And these times come too in the everydayness of life. I spoke with a friend recently who after months and months had come to a place of clarity about something important. She told me that she hadn’t been able to keep a spiritual practice that she knew would have helped her come to the truth, if only she’d kept it. But she didn’t. Instead she wrestled, and woke up in the night, and let go and took back, and let go and took back. From time to time, heard her gut speaking, but kept dismissing it. Finally, she was there. And what lay ahead would be hard, but she was once again on firm ground—and dawn was on the horizon. Peniel.

There is much we could say about darkness. It’s worth pondering. The gifts of it: its strange little flowerings and haunting melodies. The dark feet and dark wings. What we learn about love in the dark, about nurture, about tenuous signs of new life, about trusting our own senses, about trust period. The blessedness of sleep. And about how God’s grace moves in the darkness calling us into new life. Making us new, unclenching our grasp on the old, so that we can welcome the new. Right now, we’re on our way to the longest and darkest of days. This is a season of darkness, Advent. We’re on our way.

_______________________________

1) Wendell Berry, Selected Poems, Counterpoint: Berkeley, 1998, p 68

Fading light & dying season

2010-11-30T22:40:00.000-08:00

Out for a walk to the Cristo yesterday—one of those stunningly clear afternoons. The grasses were almost throbbing with greenness—reminding me of Hildegard’s celebration of “greening” at the core of life. The trails were covered with autumn leaves. The creek was running—I love that noise of water moving over the rocks. I stopped by a huge tree stump that’s been there for years, turned on its side—dead to initial appearances. But the longer I stood by it, the more life I saw—a little lizard, other critters scurrying about, fungi growing. Death and life intermingled.

When I got up to the Cristo I wasn’t surprised to see that the oak behind it had lost two of its huge branches—I’d seen that earlier, shortly after it happened. But in the sunlight with the green carpet beneath my feet enlivening my eyes—suddenly the divine presence in life and death took a hold of me. I’d seen and heard it all around me—the starkness of bare trees, the vibrancy of the green grasses, the movement of the water, where not so long ago there had been neither water nor movement—the clarity of the late fall light, the tree stump dead and teeming with life.

I took time to visit the tree house tree—the tree house has been removed, and Doug and his crew have devoted lots of work to shoring up the ground around its roots, and putting dirt and mulch, and a cover of rye grass around it. That ancient tree has brought so much joy and life to so many, offering swings and shelter, and a remarkable memorial to many who died of AIDS, finally began to show the cost of that service—and no doubt the signs of age. Its canopy has been severely damaged, and one enormous branch is dead—but even so there are signs of new life there. The arborist was not optimistic, but our hope is that it will somehow recover.

Edith Stein wrote of the intricate connection between the birth in the manger and the death on the cross. How the birth itself carried within it the truth of the death. The truth of my own mortality is something I come up against over and over again. I know in my bones that what she said about Christ, she said about me, and all of us—and yet she said so much more. Christ’s birth and death and withness makes all the difference. Immanuel. No matter. This is all hard to hold on to when wherever I go in town I am assaulted with tra la la ing. But a walk outside can help to bring it home.

Last Sunday we sang that wonderful advent hymn, “Signs of endings all around us.” How true how true. And how strangely comforting. The Cristo by its oak, the tree stump, the tree house tree; the land itself proclaims what is most deeply true this Advent season. “Fading light and dying season sing their Glorias to you.”

Giving thanks

2010-11-25T13:01:00.000-08:00

A simple phone conversation this morning with two people I’ve been missing and worried about really. We used to talk every month or so for sure, but it had been many months. Just hearing their voices and renewing our relationship filled me with gratitude. Then, I learned about some of the challenges and pain of the time we’d been out of communication, and of the hard work. And I could hear a new strength and a hope that had not been there for a long long time. I came close to tears, and could only give thanks. Giving thanks, my heart was set free.

Thanksgiving seems to me to lie at the heart of our faith. Thanksgiving and forgiveness I guess I would have to put there. But today the day our country sets aside for the giving of thanks (whatever the mythic origins of the day) seems an appropriate time to honor the spiritual practice of simply saying thanks.

To give thanks is to acknowledge the giftedness of life. The pure gift of it. To say thank you is to know deep down that I am not in charge. It is to relinquish that myth of self-sufficiency. And, it is incredibly freeing.

When I am thankful my body is at peace—even spacious inside. There is no clenching of jaws or fists either in thanksgiving. And there is room inside for receiving. “Let your gentleness be known to everyone,” says, Paul, “God is near.” Wow. I'm not sure, but thanksgiving seems to be a prerequisite to gentleness, don't you think?

I’ve found that it’s a helpful practice to open my eyes in the morning and give thanks, and to do the same when I close them at night. Our services of morning and evening prayer in the chapel essentially are a living out of that practice corporately. It's a practice that helps me live thankfully each day.

Here’s a poem I read this morning by Mary Oliver. It’s from her book Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006, p. 17).

Praying

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones, just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together, and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Those who sit in Judgment

2010-11-18T12:13:00.000-08:00

This morning in the Chapel we celebrated the life of Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, and in our reading we heard the passage from Matthew (Matthew 19:27-29) when Peter asks Jesus what the rewards are for having left everything to follow him. Jesus tells him that when the Son of man returns they will be seated as judges of the twelve tribes.

Usually I have a hard time letting my imagination take me to these end times visions. This morning though I imagined the disciples all sitting on their thrones of judgment (not that different from how our judges sit in courts of law—you know, higher up than the rest of us, looking down). To be honest, it was a bit schmaltzy.

But, then I thought about who might be judging me? --not in the end times necessarily but in the here and now. Who by their life sits in judgment over mine? Not hard to answer on one imaginative level. Some of the famous ones--no surprises here, I guess: Martin Luther King (in his dedication to speaking the truth to power and to the ways of nonviolence), Archbishop Tutu (in his vision of ubuntu and his capacity to weep and to joy), Gandhi (in his single-minded devotion to the spiritual practices that would set him free from fear and move him toward his goal of seeing God face to face), Mother Teresa (in her life of service to the poor and the dying), Hildegaard of Bingen (in her visions of the unity of the created order). I envision these not seated on some high falutin’ bench, but right at my level, looking me in the eyes. And the judgment isn’t about punishment (no gnashing of teeth here); it’s a judgment of love.

The truth is that there are others in the circle whose lives stand before me as living exemplars. These are friends or folks I’ve met over the course of my life. There’s A and B who are among the most generous of people, and C whose persevering love calls me to be more steadfast in my own loving. And, D who has a wonderful determination to live ever more deeply into God, and E who clings to hope like no one else I know, and F who is so fully herself that I can only rejoice when I see her. Just last weekend I met some people who are committed to nonviolence in the deepest fabric of their everyday lives. And there are some I know who live out lives of quietly serving others, in their own families or among their friends or among the poor. These are people I know, who are not perfect by any means, but in their living they challenge me to a more faithful life. They call me to live into the fullness of life—and the fullness of the person I am called to be. I imagine that you have your own list of judges too.

Autumn Light

2010-11-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

God is praised by all creation.

O come, let us worship.

--From the opening of daily morning prayer at the Chapel

There aren’t very many words, and there is silence. And much of what is said out loud is praise and thanksgiving. What better way to start the day?

Since we turned our clocks back last weekend morning prayer is offered with bright sunlight shining through the four stained glass windows to the east. From where I sit the light through the windows plays on the west wall. The four windows dance there: the yellows, greens, blues, deep orange, and white creating wonderful patterns. At times, the four take on the form of beings of some sort. I can make out heads and bodies, and what looks like doves or bright lights shining above on either side of each figure. One might be a blue bear, another’s a bit like a camel perhaps. As clouds outside float by, the light dims and new mysterious shapes and colors appear. It is hard to turn my eyes away from these delights of the early morning.

And every time I say the words “God is praised by all creation,” I can’t help enjoying the praise of the light on the wall in front of me. Its praise lifts my own.

This week I’ve been reading Cosmic Conversations: Dialogues on the Nature of the Universe and the Search for Reality by Stephen Martin. It presents a series of interviews—conversations, really, about the universe—that the author had with experts from various fields—some from science, others from spiritual traditions, and others representing modern cultural thought. I’ve only begun to read their insights and to consider the implications of their understandings. The book is already stretching me. I am wondering and pondering. I’m only in the section of interviews with scientists, and each one has a different special interest and a different “take” on the universe and on human life and its meaning. I feel the need to “read, mark and inwardly digest” it slowly.

But one insight has already joined me in our morning prayers. It’s from Martin’s interview with Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist. He describes humans as “recycled stardust” and urges us to take seriously the idea that “we are here to marvel over existence and to celebrate it and to extend to those less fortunate the great privilege of being alive and healthy.”

Imagine how our living might change if we were to take seriously our calling to marvel and celebrate. Daily prayer that centers on praise and thanksgiving, whether offered at the Chapel or anywhere else, is one small way to be about this vocation. Autumn light helps us to remember our calling. Extending the privilege to others flows out of that celebration—it can’t help itself.

The Silence of the Sun

2010-10-17T20:41:00.000-07:00

These days, there are mornings when I walk across the grounds to lead morning prayer, and the sun is just beginning to show itself behind the hills. Slivers of red and orange, flickering. The vineyards in the valley are already beginning to show their autumnselves: bright yellows and browns. It would be better, really, to have our prayers outside; to sit in silence before the majesty of the rising sun.

One morning recently we read Psalm 19 inside the chapel. Slowly. With pauses between verses, and words sounded softly, distinctly falling into silence.

The heavens declare the glory of God

the firmament shows your handiwork.

One day tells its tale to another,

and one night imparts knowledge to another.

Although they have no words or language,

and their voices are not heard,

Their sound has gone out into all lands,

and their message to the ends of the world.

In the deep you have set a pavilion for the sun,

it comes forth like a bridegroom out of his chamber;

it rejoices like a champion to run its course.

Inside the chapel we cannot help ourselves. We watch the sun’s light play through the stained glass windows across the walls. No words or language, voices not heard. The silence of which we partake, in fact, encompasses us—whether we are inside or out.

Humility and the Abyss

2010-10-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve returned to my morning reading of Joan Chittister’s daily readings and commentary on The Rule of Benedict. Right now we’re deep in humility, which is a challenging place to be in our society. Say the word, and people often immediately go to “groveling” or to people we know who have a kind of false humility. People who say little disparaging things about themselves all the while tooting their own horns, so to speak. You may know some of these. Groveling though is harder to find in a culture that emphasizes self-sufficiency and taking charge and “Don’t you tell me what to do!” In any case, humility seems in short supply and not a very respected character trait these days.
Humility to Benedict was neither false nor groveling, although when you read some of the words in the Rule itself, you might conclude that groveling was essential to the Benedictine way. Benedict was fond of quoting the psalms, and includes a variety of pretty grove-ly snippets (Ps 22.7, Ps 73.22-23). Even so, the essence of Benedict’s humility is about knowing our place in the universe—our creatureliness and our belovedness. “Humility is knowing who we are and what our lives are meant to garner. The irony of humility is that, if we have it, we know we are made for greatness, we are made for God.” (Chittister, p. 65)
It isn’t easy to hold on to this humility. To live into our gifts and abilities, our creativity, capacity to love and forgive, and at the same time to live in the truth of our limits, our weaknesses, our dependence on others, and especially our dependence on God. Humility isn’t about refraining from a sense of pride at an accomplishment well done; but it’s about living with that in perspective. It’s about living with an openness to others, to learning from others.
A couple of weeks ago the Sunday gospel lesson was that story of the rich man who, during his life, ignored the poor man, Lazarus, lying at his doorstep—and of the impassable gulf between them depicted in the after-life. It made me think about how much riches and possessions insulate me from others: create seemingly impassable gulfs between us in this life. Wealth and possessions and my routines supported by them can close me off from others. How fearful I am of crossing those gulfs to meet the others at my doorstep.
In important ways the abyss is a false one, something I pretend is there. The patterns and possessions of my life help me keep the pretense alive. Occasionally life thrusts me across the abyss, but often I need to consciously choose ways to help myself across. Recently I’ve attended a couple of house meetings put on by the religious communities who are part of the North Bay Sponsoring Committee. At those meetings I’ve been a part of small groups of people from different congregations and traditions. We’ve listened deeply to one another as we’ve shared how this recession has affected us and our families. We’ve listened as we’ve shared our concerns and hopes for the children growing up in Sonoma County now. “Tell me what is” could be the theme. Conversations that most of us don’t often have with others. Stories of pain, and fear, and loss, and anxiety, and of courage, and grace, and caring. This is just one tiny way I’ve been able to open myself to others, one small way to cross an abyss.
I couldn’t help leaving each meeting with a sense of humility. Marveling really at how small and how great we are, and how deeply connected we are.

Watching for Whales

2010-09-21T08:59:00.000-07:00

So, she said to me, “What’s the point of having a blog when no one ever posts to it?”
Hmm.

I’ve lived in Sonoma County for almost twelve years now, and yesterday for the very first time I went out to the Bodega Headlands. I went to see if there were whales to see.
It was a beautiful day when I left Santa Rosa, clear and crisp, after the rain of the day before. As I drove I wondered how it would be at the coast where it is often clear when its foggy inland, and the opposite as well. Sure enough when I reached the Headlands the fog was covering the water—but the sun was shining in the distance and seemed to promise that in the end it would burn off the fog or push it out to sea.
The foggy view was stunning. I went quiet inside.
I’d brought along a beach chair, so I simply sat and looked, and breathed in the salty ocean air. Felt the fog and then the sun begin to burn a bit. The fog moved out, and then back in. There were cormorants, and gulls, and black oyster catchers with bright orange bills on the rocks below us where the sea palms moved up and down, to the rhythm of the waves.
No whales in sight, but the folks who came to watch for them included one who said he was a docent, of what I wasn’t sure. But he knew a lot about the whales and had brought along pictures he’d taken of whales—both here and in Baja. A woman who had been out the day before and spotted some, told me to look for a circle of calm in the water, the footprint or “flukeprint.” No circles and no whales could be seen. The fog played its game along the coast.
People came and people went. Most came and walked to the edge, took a look, and were gone within 3-5 minutes. They’d come to see the whales and seemingly expected them to swim by when they themselves appeared on the cliff top. Like a circus or Sea World performance.
Three of us waited: the woman (who had a camera with a telescopic lens the size of my thigh and length of a leg), and the docent who sat in his beach chair with its special pocket for his photos. And, suddenly, there they were! In the distance a whale or whales, spewing water in the air, frolicking, it seemed, putting on a show—for whom I wasn’t sure. Perhaps for the pure delight of being alive—of feasting.
Later, as I packed up my chair, the woman came toward me, “You saw them, didn’t you?” “Yes.” “They were there all the time, but we didn’t see them,” she said.
Watching for whales as spiritual practice.

The Ranch as Time: Talk presented to Acorn Society June 19, 2010

2010-06-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

I’d like to talk a bit with you about the Ranch and our commitment to revitalizing our spiritual core. Not that there hasn't always been a spiritual center here: the Chapel is symbolic of that. But over the years we'd been unable to offer morning and evening prayer during the week, when so many retreatants are here, and we hadn’t been able to sponsor our own retreats or quiet days. The Ranch's formal prayer life was carried primarily by the very faithful community of worshippers who gather here on Sundays, led by Jim Brown, who is one in the Ranch’s long line of saints. So we've been working to build from the base of our founding and early years, and from the faithful practice of the Chapel of St George's community. Maggie Ross came in February as our first prayer residentiary. She has offered daily worship, rung the chapel bells three times a day and she has made herself available for conversation with individuals here on retreat. She's also led retreats and quiet days, a whole series of them in the winter and spring. She's taken an active part in staff meetings and in the work around here. All of this has been a wonderful contribution to the Ranch and to the life of the spirit in this place. We're glad she is willing to stay and continue with us through the end of the year.
So, why is it important for us to offer regular silence and prayer in our chapel? What difference does that make, when so many groups who come here are not religiously inclined, and those that are often have their own worship? Our attendance at these offices is not noteworthy. Why are we called to this?
Let me give you a little vignette from my own life--some years back. I had been working at a parish for about a year; I’d been hired as an assistant, but the rector left two days later on sabbatical, and basically came back only for a few weeks before he resigned. It was a very tough year for the parish and for me. But at the end of it I had an opportunity to go to a retreat that was being held in CT. So just as an interim finally came to the parish, I left and flew across the country in the dead of winter, and was driven out into the country to this wonderful retreat center. I can still feel in my bones how tired I was. I kind of staggered through the front doors. Wendy, the woman who was host there, took one look at me and sent me to bed. She did, she told me to go straight to bed.... Later, she told me that she had never seen a more pitiful example of burnout and exhaustion in all her years at the center. (This is not a source of pride I must confess.)
I was an extreme case, but the truth is that when I go about my ordinary days, and meet ordinary folks, adult types....when I say, hi how are you? Typical responses I get are: “Tired, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going,” “I’m exhausted,” “Overwhelmed.” These are people whose work lives and family lives are filled with stress and responsibilities that don't seem to end. Maybe you know these folks too, some of them probably live in your neighborhood, maybe even in your homes, or perhaps even in your skin. Young adults I know work long long hours, if they have kids, their lives are generally incredibly complex. Even relaxation in America seems to have an air of stress to it. Things are always organized. There isn't much hanging out being done, except maybe by some teens. I see people on vacation rushing from one place to the next, from one activity to the next. We don't seem to know how to play any more. Noise, traffic, technology. You know the scene. Yesterday I was reading yet another study about how the web is actually affecting our brains. How we don't read like we used to, and we don't think like we used to. We skim, and multi-task. We don't take time to reflect. We race to the next bit of information. This leads to snap judgments and decisions too. (I must confess, I was skimming this article on my phone.... So I can't give you the full report!)
My own experience of this kind of living is that when I'm in it I'm mostly in my head, detached from the rest of my body (except when I notice it complaining)--I'm thinking about the next thing on the list that needs doing, calculating how soon I can get there, whether I can stop and take care of an errand on the way. I'm really rarely present to the here and now.
The other day I was at Kaiser in the pharmacy there in Santa Rosa. Crowded, long lines. I'm in the little shop there buying vitamins. A woman is there stocking the shelves. She leaves shortly before I do, and as I leave I see her in front of me. A man in a wheelchair is at the water fountain and he asks her if she can get him a cup, because he can't get water from the fountain because he can’t stand up. She doesn't really look at him, and going out the door, she calls back and suggests that he should go to the coffee bar and ask them for a cup. She's out the door. The coffee bar is in the next building. He's just there beside the water fountain. I'm walking toward the door myself, contemplating my next errand. But I have time to think that that's a pretty poor response. I'm half way out the door, when I stop. . . Suddenly I'm present. In the pharmacy. Near the thirsty man. Half way out the door, but finally present. . . I go to a nearby counter and ask for a cup for him. The nurse gets the cup and brings it out to him. I leave. I'm embarrassed with myself. And rightly so.
What kind of world is this? How did it get to be this way? How have I let myself lose the capacity to be present? How is it that we get caught up in the pace of life, with it's countless tasks, and shoulds, and pressures, and responsibilities, and musts? How is it that we who once were citizens of this country are now consumers? And, what ever happened to being a child of God? How is it that so many of us have way more possessions than our parents did? How is it that so many of us actually feel guilty when we sit and do nothing--even for a moment or two? We worry that life won't go on without us doing our part. Our sense of who we are might be lost if we aren't doing what we do. What do you do? That’s the first question anyone ever asks. What do you do?
Our faith doesn’t begin with that question at all. In fact our faith is far more interested in who we are and who God is, than it is in what we do. Our tradition offers us an option for fullness of life, a way to live fully present to what is. Fully and humanly present in our bodies. In fact, our tradition enjoins us to live differently. Actually commands us, if you are into that kind of thing, and few of us are these days. I’m talking about Sabbath. That seventh day of creation when God completed God’s initial creating by resting. The Sabbath is the first thing declared holy in Scripture. The culmination of the creation story, not the post script.

I have this theory that almost all the folks who come to the Ranch, whether they know it or not, come seeking Sabbath. Of course, not the rigid, somber, blue law kind of sabbath that maybe some of us remember, or read about once. No, I'm talking Biblical sabbath. I'm talking rest, and, joy, and saying no. I'm talking resting in the arms of God. I'm talking embodied. Living in our bodies. Loving our bodies. Living in creation. Loving creation. Entrusting ourselves to God’s ongoing creativity at work. Living into God. Loving God. Giving thanks for the sheer gift of life. I'm talking sleep, relationship. Remembering who we are. I'm talking freedom. Stillness. Listening. Reflecting. Simply being.
We mostly think of the Ranch as a place. Not the only place. A special place, a beautiful place, a welcoming place. But, equally the Ranch is a time. Sabbath time. Not the only Sabbath time. But a special, beautiful, welcoming Sabbath time. A time when overly busy, burned out, stressed out, desensitized, over-responsibilitized folk can come away into Sabbath. To remember who God is and who they are.
I’ve got a little hand out here for everyone. It’s got just a few of the texts from Scripture and a poem too, to help remind us what a gift Sabbath is. And Sabbath is not only a gift for our bodies and minds and emotions, but at the heart of it, a spiritual gift. A godly gift. Ours for the taking. For the simple accepting of it.
Sabbath can be found anywhere. You can catch a bit of it here and there each day. You can set aside a weekly time to truly honor the Sabbath, and you can make room for it in your daily living. It’s a question of saying yes to the gift. Not always easy because that yes requires saying no to our culture. We can begin with little no’s perhaps, and work up to the bigger ones. Maybe you can’t imagine taking one day a week to do nothing that you must do, taking a whole day every week to rest in the arms of God, to trust that the world will go on without your work, to trust that I have value when I’m NOT working…. But maybe you can take a little time each night, or in the morning to simply be.
Let’s take a quick look at these texts.
Notice how the creation story [Genesis 1.1-2.3] culminates in the Sabbath. Notice too the more accurate translation of the beginning of that story. (“ In a beginning when God began to create… “) The ongoingness of Gods creation. Creation is good. God sees it. And declares it good. There’s a beholding here and a working together you might say. God creates by cooperating with the earth and the waters. (“Let the earth put forth vegetation.” “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures.”) Or they cooperate with God. The goodness of creation is central to Sabbath. For that is what we entrust ourselves to, when we stop and honor the time.
The first sanctification of anything in the Bible is the sanctification of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is the first thing made holy. The root of the word hallow or sanctify is like betrothed. To sanctify is to betroth yourself to the sabbath. Betroth yourself to the time of rest. Think about that. Betrothed to rest.
Part of creation is the resting. The dormancy. There is a rhythm to life. You and I know this. Yet it is sometimes hard to honor it. Sometimes we don't slow down to rest until there is a crisis. Or we get sick. Have you heard people say that they are actually relieved to be sick? They get a break that way. Sometimes it's a near death encounter, or the death of a loved one. Then they stop and slow down. Only then.
Sabbath is security. There’s a letting go, resting and entrusting ourselves to God’s ongoing creativity. Exodus 20:8-1: Remember that God Is creator. Creation is good. I can let go of the musts. The universe does not depend on my work. Take a breath. Let God. Remember who God is. Creator. Let time slow.
Sabbath is freedom: Deuteronomy 5:12-15 offers a different slant on Sabbath. It grounds the Sabbath in freedom. God as freedom-giver. God brought us out from slavery.We need to remember that too. By letting go we entrust ourselves to God rather than the system. We begin to be set free. No longer brick makers. Or, in our culture, perhaps, brick-consumers.
Sabbath is silence and Stillness. Being present to the God within. Dare to enter the depths of self. Some people come to the Ranch; they weep. We have lots to weep about, don’t we? They are afraid. Sometimes they’re simply afraid of entering the silence within, that touches on the silence of God. Sometimes they’re not sure they will find a there there deep inside if they stop. They’re afraid they won’t know who they are if they slow down. Sabbath can be scary that way.
Sabbath is spaciousness. Room to play, room even to occupy our bodies. Who knows? Maybe even make love. (I suspect there has been some of that here at the Ranch) Room to laugh deeply, to marvel, to wonder, to awe. Awe-ing is a splendid part of Sabbath-keeping.
A few weeks ago at our Sunday service, Camp talked about a dream he’d had about his own death: how he’d realized he was at peace about dying, about giving himself over to God’s care—the care he knows in his living. Others responded and talked about dreams they’d had about death. My ten-year-old granddaughter was with me that day. As we left the chapel and walked out into the sunlight, she said to me, “Adults think about death. Kids think about things like climbing trees and looking at flowers.” Awe-ing. Spaciousness. Room to climb trees and look at flowers. And even to think about death and the giving over of self to God’s continuing care. Sabbath.
In the church we’ve succumbed in so many ways to the pace of our culture. We ask people to give of their time, meetings, committees, whatever. We begin to think that our faith is like everything else, doing, doing, doing. We worship on Sundays, that we do, but in large part we’ve forgotten how often Jesus offered rest (Matthew 6:28-29, and Matthew 11:28-29). Sabbath. That Sabbath was made for us, and makes us human. The Ranch hasn’t forgotten.
And when people come here, they may not be as pitiful as I was when I entered that retreat center in CT, but they are often bone-tired, and spiritually longing. Bereft, some of them. So we offer them place, and time. Both are vital.
The heart of Sabbath time is God. That’s why is essential that we celebrate God-- that we invite folks into the center. Through contemplative worship, through the ringing of the bells marking the time, through retreats and quiet days, through Sunday worship, and spiritual conversation. We’re not in the business of offering vacations. We’re offering Sabbath.
And our prayer is that our Sabbath offering will not only be renewing for people, but may even re-connect them to the truth of who they are and who God is. May give them a taste of true freedom and true security that will bring them new life. That’s our prayer.

THE SPIRIT, TRUTH, & OIL

2010-06-04T15:57:00.000-07:00

A friend was telling me about a couple of events in her life. You know those kind of casual--or they seem so initially--conversations, that leave you with a feeling in the pit of your stomach, a sense that something is off kilter, but you go on with your day. Then later, if you take stock and ponder what happened, you realize that an important truth was being offered. A truth that maybe you didn't really want to look at, perhaps even a truth that had offered itself to you more than once, but you'd never really let it seep in.Maybe it was a truth that earlier you simply couldn't bear. But now, you are able to see it clearly, and, more importantly, you find yourself ready to make a new decision because of it.
This has been a pattern in my life. How many years did it take me to face the truth of my husband's alcoholism, and my own need to take action? Years, it took years. Years of repeated moments of clarity, moments of truth you might say, that initially I didn't see at all; later I grasped dimly, and then finally one day I saw so clearly that I simply had to make a new choice. My reluctance to see the truth and let it change me was much more about me than it was about him, I might add. In the end, I saw it about like this: "I have set before you life and death…. Choose life," says Yahweh. (Deut. 30:19)
In last Sunday’s lesson(John 16:12-15), Jesus says good-bye to his friends. He says that he has some things to tell them that they cannot bear. Maybe you've known those times. Times when you could see some truth for a family member or a friend or even a community--but you knew it wasn't the time. The truth would be too much to bear. Maybe you even spoke the truth out loud, but there was no response. No openness to receive it. Or, on the other hand, perhaps you've caught glimpse of a truth about yourself, and simply pushed it aside, because it seemed too much to bear at that moment. We seem to have our limits, don't we, when it comes to bearing the truth? The cost of facing the truth, especially the truth about ourselves, can seem simply too high to be borne. It would require too much change, too much risk.
In the same short passage, Jesus tells his friends he is sending the Spirit. Once he's gone, the Spirit will come and will guide them into all truth. Wow! Even though I know in my head that the truth will set us free, the thought of being led into all truth can be pretty sobering. In my life truth pretty much requires me to act. Usually, when I think about it, it has required me to change. Sometimes to simply stand firm in the truth, but often to change. I couldn't confront alcoholism in our family without changing. Me, I had to change. I had to open myself to the guiding of the Spirit to find the wherewithal to live into truth.
Which brings me to the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. (To call it a "spill" seems like the height of circumlocution.) I'm wondering if the Spirit is guiding us into all truth now. In the Gulf of Mexico.
There have been many other such disasters, some of them spills, one at least caused deliberately, some that have poured millions more gallons of oil into the oceans than this one so far seems to have, (no one can agree on just how much has been gushing into the Gulf). The Exxon Valdez, catastrophic to the coast of Alaska, in some estimations of major oil spills ranks a mere 34th. (That ranking is based purely on the amount spilled, not on the ecological consequences.) At any rate, my point is just that this isn't the first and so far it apparently isn't the worst--although it certainly looks to become the worst.
And my take on the activity of the Spirit, or the Spirit's invitation into this kind of truth, is that up until now we have managed to avoid letting the truth in--letting it change us--change me. Previous spills have resulted in the suing for and awarding of damages, and in construction of tankers with more than one hull, and improvements in drilling technologies.
But I can't help wondering if the truth being revealed to us is less about technology and its apparent limits, and more about our lives: the way our lives depend on oil, and the way we keep building our lives so that we need more of it. We know that this is unsustainable. The Gulf disaster's truth has moral implications that go beyond judgments about BP's "misinformation" and choices made to save money at the risk of human safety and the environment, or about the failures of our government agencies to more closely regulate oil drilling.
I'm wondering if this time we can dare to open ourselves to the Spirit and let the truth of this event into our selves. Let the truth begin its work in us, changing us, giving us courage to make new choices, to stand up in the truth wherever we must. To recognize at some new depth the truth of how deeply embedded in the web of life we are. How connected we are to the disaster, to its causes, to the waters and their life, to the people working to stop the flow, to those who work to preserve life there. The list goes on and on. Of course the truth of the Gulf disaster has implications that go way beyond you and me. But, when I can bring myself to look at it, I cannot pretend that the truth of the Gulf is not my truth. So much of my life, the things in my life, the movement in my life are all about oil. I can't help but think that the Spirit is at work in us, guiding us to face things that up until now we could not bear. I need to remember that the Spirit walks with us into truth, helping, enabling us to bear it.

A link to Thoughts on Diversity & Trinity

2010-05-31T14:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a link sent by Brian Baker, Dean of Cathedral in Sacramento. The video isn't terrific but the audio is fine. Worth a visit. http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/index.php?ct=store.details&pid=V00594

Three Witnesses on a Rainy Day

2010-04-11T17:14:00.000-07:00

As I drove through the rain to the Ranch to worship I was pondering the texts for today: Revelation 1:4-6 and John 20:19-31 and witnessing. Both readings made me wonder about witnessing. What does witnessing look like in our world, in our community? In what ways do we at The Ranch witness? And to what or whom? In what ways am I a witness?

Revelation, that book so quoted and interpreted (and often poorly interpreted, it seems to me) seems to have been written at a time of persecution or under the real threat of persecution. It witnesses to the gracious acts of God—the Alpha and the Omega—in amazing images and poetry—it does so in a letter. Letter as witness. A letter to seven specific church communities, yes, but each one is able to read the messages to all the others. Like a letter written to a family of children maybe, with special messages to each, but read by all. That alone is worth imagining. Letter writing is becoming a lost art in our world today—at least in our part of the world. But a handwritten letter can be a precious gift. It takes time to write a letter by hand and it takes purpose. A letter can certainly be a witness. Perhaps you have some letters saved away in a special place. I do. Not many, but the ones I’ve saved serve as a special testimony to those who wrote them and to our relationship.

At the Ranch we gather together to worship and in many important ways the silence in our worship is witness. I know we usually think of worship—at least in our tradition—as filled with words and actions that witness to God. These express our longing, thanksgiving, praise, wonder, even our doubt and fear. They tell the stories of our faith. But it seems to me that the silences that surround our worship, that surround the words and singing, the actions and prayers—the silences witness to the One to whom we seek to open ourselves. The spaces between the notes are as important as the notes. Keeping silence opens us to that part of us that can stop arguing, defining, measuring, debating. There is where we can be caught by surprise, maybe even catch a glimpse, a mutual beholding of the One who awaits us there.

The other Ranch witness I thought of is the witness of welcoming. Hospitality is at the heart of what the Ranch is all about. And offering hospitality is a witness of a special kind. Maybe like silence, hospitality allows us to relax and settle into ourselves and the place, to let go and become more spacious inside. When we don’t have to worry about food or bed or shelter or where we will find beauty—when we are welcomed genuinely we may even find ourselves in touch with the One who is within each of us and among us. The giver of all good gifts, the One who loves and frees us.

Ordinary witnesses really: letters, silence, hospitality. Each of them can invite us into relationship with one another and with God.

A prodigality of forgiveness

2010-03-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

So the prodigal son returns home—to his family. Conflicted when he left it, and apparently not much different when he returns. The elder brother—a person I imagine most of us know intimately—didn’t turn into a bean-counting resentful person in the course of the telling of the tale. He’d no doubt been making his judgments and harboring his list of hurts for a long time. Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

I just went through the annual tax event and so refreshed myself in the ways of elder-brother thinking. All of us know this thinking—this worldview. We use its mind-set to traverse much of life. Discriminating, counting, judging, calculating, adding up, subtracting, measuring up. We raise our children to function in this economy. Our schools are rife with it. Grades, make-up assignments, comparisons, rankings, etc. In our families this economy is often at work too. The economy of scarcity and competition for just rewards shows up in competition to earn first place in the parental love race—or the sibling race for number one status—but we can know its darker side in the pain of separation. The brother who stands outside the party: most families have tasted of this brokenness.

I come from a smallish family: only four cousins and one was killed in his early adulthood. In my twenties one of my cousins had a falling out with his mother, and in essence divorced the family. I never knew the details. My parents weren’t inclined to talk much about such matters. Over the years various family members tried to make contact, but to no avail. My cousin with whom I had spent many summers as a child and visited as a young adult disappeared from my life. He might as well have died as far as his family of origin was concerned. Several months ago I got an email from my cousin’s wife telling me that he had died. That was the first communication I had received in close to forty years. Although he had lived a life, had children, grandchildren, a career, hobbies, passions and a faith life, the email confirmed what for me had been a separation-like-death, albeit chosen, many years before.

There are times and reasons for separating ourselves from others. Certainly where there is on-going abuse, when one family-member cannot or will not stop abusing another—then separation is necessary for one’s own protection. But separations caused by judgments, resentments, nursing of old hurts and injustices bear with them a cost. Usually to more people than just the few directly involved. The celebration of the prodigal’s return was less than it might have been had the elder brother allowed himself to party with the others.

The economy of measurement and earning which prevails in so much of my life has no room in it for the prodigality of God’s love and forgiveness. That utter spaciousness and abundance go beyond the “measure of the mind”, as our hymn puts it. It’s that simple. Too much to count. Too impossibly generous. Too scandalously rule-free. It isn’t fair. It isn’t just. It is just beyond beyond. And often in the face of it we find ourselves running up against the measure of our minds.

Visiting my old parish in Santa Fe yesterday a woman came up to me and told me she still remembered a course I’d taught on forgiveness and reconciliation almost 15 years ago. She told me that as she has aged she’s found herself to be more obsessive: obsessive about hurts and injuries, and maybe (although she didn’t say so) stuck on her own sins as well. I suggested that perhaps she should obsess about forgiveness. To be honest I didn’t remember the course, but immediately I knew that I am still pondering and growing into forgiveness and reconciliation. Still praying for the grace to let myself live into the spaciousness of God’s forgiveness. Still unclenching my tight grip on the ways of scarcity and yearning to entrust myself to God’s abundance.

What I love about the parable of the prodigality of God’s forgiveness is its ambiguities and its certainties. I can’t tell if the wayward son has “really” repented or just made a decision to do what he needs to do to get food and shelter. I have no idea if the elder son “repents” and goes into the party. I can imagine many familial outcomes as these three begin their new life together—there are a lot of unknowns to the story. Some things are very clear though: the Father’s love and forgiveness. The utter prodigality of that. The invitation to all to join in the party. The rejoicing that he who was dead is now alive.

There is no divine punishment. The cost of sin here is the result of human choice. The sin to separate and squander. The sin to resent and separate. Costs there are. Some losses are irrecoverable. Life is precious. You and I are every day a day older. But, the welcome is always before us. The spaciousness of new beginnings.

Silence as "slowed holding"

2010-02-22T13:46:00.000-08:00

On a recent morning, I read some of John O’ Donohue’s poetry for breakfast and one phrase in “Before the Beginning” made me pause. He describes how an audience stills itself at a concert and the soloist pauses and lets the silence deepen. Then, “In that slowed holding, the whole aria/ Hovers nearer, then alights/ On the wings of breath/ Poised to soar into song.(1)

On Ash Wednesday our worship seemed infused with that same slowed holding. The long silence was a gracious container holding our actions and our words—so simple and basic—and so powerful. Like the slowed holding in the poem, ours was a communal slowing and holding. It was relational, creating a spaciousness among us and within each of us too. To be still and sit in silence in our culture is necessarily to slow down. And, that slowed holding allows us to receive the depths and heights that our ritual has for us. In the slowed holding we can allow ourselves to be fully present to what is.

This Saturday at our Lenten Quiet Day we experienced the slowed holding again. Fifteen of us gathered in the Pavilion for a day of stillness and silence. Late in the morning we had a time of guided movement. Our guide came early and sat for a while in the Pavilion in the midst of the silence. When we gathered to follow her instructions, we were still in silence. Only soft music and her voice could be heard. At the end of the session she exclaimed that this was the best class she’d ever had! The slowed holding of the silence into which we offered our movement allowed us to be more fully present to our bodies and the stillness within.

I’ve known moments of this slowed holding in some not-so-silent places. Moments when time seems to stop, and I am made present to what is. Occasionally when I am with a child there is such a silence, and into that slowed holding the child will speak some clear truth—that needs saying and needs listening to. Years ago I rode a bus out of Quito, Ecuador to a village some hours away. The bus was filled, and the road was curvy and bumpy in places. Somewhere in the middle of the trip I saw the man across the aisle from me: a beautiful man, high cheek bones, blue-black hair. He held his infant child in his arms, cradling her and gazing at her with such love that I felt I had inadvertently invaded a private intimacy and so had caught a glimpse of the divine. There was no sound. A slowed holding.

My godson Scott once told me of a time in South Africa during the apartheid years when he had been arrested at a church service—along with others. Imprisoned in separate cells—isolated—deathly silence as night descended. Then out of the silence first one prisoner began to sing, then another joined in. Soon all had soared into song: isolation was overcome and hopelessness lifted.

This week I heard a similar story about a small community in Haiti. After the devastation of the earthquake when the air had been filled with horrific noise, buildings falling, adults and children crying and wailing, late in the night a silence descended—and out of the silence—hymn-singing. Held for a time in the silence, the human heart spontaneously rang out in song.

There are other ways we can be made present to what is. A friend told me of her Ash Wednesday worship and how deeply she had entered that interior heart-space. It took place outside on the sidewalk under a BART track, with cars whizzing by on the street; priest and people kneeling on the sidewalk to pray the litany, receive the imposition of ashes. Somehow in the midst of all that noise and activity there was a slowed holding and she fell into the actions and the words much as we did in the silence at the Chapel.

Exterior silence can offer a spaciousness that leads to the interior silence where we meet the divine. In a noisy, busy world such as ours exterior silence can be a precious gift. It is one we are committed to practicing here in our worship. But, it isn’t the only path to the God of Silence who dwells within. And for that, too, we can give thanks.
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(1) John O' Donohue, Conamara Blues: Poems. Harper/Collins:2001, p.12

"Here am I; Send Me"--Matters of Life and Death

2010-02-13T16:35:00.000-08:00

“The gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving”: these are words of invitation to receive communion from the Book of Common Prayer. I find myself always adding, lived. Christ lived and died. I’ve been thinking about life. Christ’s life and our lives.

MaryLynne died yesterday morning, early. She was a person of great wisdom, whose life had brought its share of troubles. She'd done a lot of reflecting on the content of her life, and she had a great sense of humor too. (Maybe those are connected.) She’d been diagnosed with a pretty virulent cancer about two years ago. And, she lived these two years—deeply lived them. She gave herself over to life you might say. She took her treatments and sometimes they knocked her out, but she traveled, she had fun, she nurtured and cherished relationships—including her relationship with God—she enjoyed being herself and gave and received the love of family and friends. She gave herself over to her relationships and to life itself.

I’ve been pondering the lessons we read last Sunday, the one from Isaiah—his call—“Here am I; send me,” he says to the Lord.(Isaiah 6:1-8) And Jesus’ calling to his friends, who drop their nets and follow him. Calling—our calling—our vocation, you might say. (Luke 5:1-11) I hear those lessons and I begin to reflect on God’s calling to me—and I’m not talking about the priesthood either. I’m pondering the call of God to me in my peculiar self to give myself over to life—to the fullness of life—to living fully as who I am, with the gifts and limits I have.

I think it’s a trap to focus only on Jesus as ”giving himself over to death”—to think of Jesus as only called to die for us. Oh, don’t get me wrong: he died. His death—that we remember on the Friday we call Good—is at the heart of our understanding of who Jesus is and who God is. Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, and he died there. But, that death flowed from his having given himself over to life—to the fullness of life. To living in the truth of God’s love and grace—to living out of that boundaryless love. Death came—and as no surprise perhaps—given how the powers-that-be reacted to the freedom with which he lived and to the truth-telling which kept oozing out of him, about as much as the healing, forgiving, grace of God did. (All part of the same thing) Death is a part of life—to live fully is to die.

I finished reading a beautiful memoir this week: An American Requiem: God, my Father and the War that Came Between Us by James Carroll. It’s the story of his deep and broken relationship with his father, his church, and his country—during the period of the Vietnam War. It’s a story about vocation: his journey to becoming a priest and then resigning from the priesthood to take on the life of husband, father, poet and novelist—but more deeply to the vocation of becoming himself—to give himself over to life as his own person, God’s beloved James Carroll. Death is a part of life—and this book faces into that truth. The death of illusions, of relationships, of friends, his father, his baby daughter, the horrifying carnage of the war—all of these are part of his journey to his realization that the question “was no longer What does God want? but What do I want? The two questions were the same.”

He finally comes to the place where he has access to God within his own self. He’d grown “up into Christ” as St Paul might have put it. He has a Self to give over to the fullness of life. Not a “perfect” self, but an authentic self—and above all else a self beloved by God. He’s grown up into the fullness of himself—the person loved and graced by God—not for any achievement on his part —but simply as he puts it, ”because I exist. God’s love for me manifest in this man [Jesus] is a gift, not a reward. Grace, not salary.”

I’ve come to believe that vocation is more about that than it is about what activities, doings or work we engage in. “Here am I; send me” is maybe about saying yes to the unspeakable divine otherness whose hem fills the temple who shockingly Isaiah also finds within himself. Maybe as the burning coal touches his lips—he knows he is God’s Isaiah, meant to live life fully and deeply. He is now able to live from the godness that was peculiarly his. He gives himself over to the fullness of life.

I think in her own way, MaryLynne reached the same place—she’d been on the path for a long time—letting go and giving herself over to life. In these last years she did so with passion and grace. In that, she modeled our vocation as Christians. We who knew her were blessed, richly blessed.

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James Carroll. An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us, Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1996.

The crow in the window

2010-01-31T18:57:00.000-08:00

Ted talks: joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows
     Last week a new window in the Canticle of St. Francis set was installed in the Chapel. It is dedicated to Sr. Death, and given in thanksgiving for animals that occupy our earth with us--a beautiful gift from the artist Irmi Steding. It contains an image of a crow (or perhaps a raven). After seeing it, I went home to do a bit of investigation into the lives of crows. The link above is to an interesting short talk with some great video clips--and it's all about how smart crows are. It has some things to suggest about our rather sad efforts to get rid of creatures that may seem like pests, but actually have things to contribute to us. I'm not sure I go along with Klein's notion of rewarding crows for trash-pick-up, but he makes some interesting points about crows and other animals that we live with.
    Crows have been depicted variously in fable and myth--sometimes as tricksters, sometimes a harbingers of death, and in other ways too. And while ravens get some scriptural reference, the only crow mentioned in my thesaurus is not a crow, but the cock crowing that led to Peter's weeping by the fire the night of Jesus' arrest.
   I imagine that as we look more deeply into the window, we'll find new layers of meaning. Meanwhile we can give thanks to Irmi, and for Sr. Death and crows. And most especially for God's enduring presence and love.
   [If you click on the link, you should go to the talk.]

Tell it Slant

2010-01-24T17:13:00.000-08:00

Strange name for a blog venture, no?

Well, here's some of my thinking....

While I prefer to let poetry stand on its own--challenge us and open us in its plain-selfness. I'll say just a bit to try to explain myself.

Tell all Truth but tell it slant

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise. . .

I love this snippet of Emily Dickinson. Perhaps because try as I might: no matter the words I choose to describe my experiences of the One we call God or even my thinking about the divine, I always end up telling it slant. Not right on--always a little (or a lot) off. Words just cannot contain the love or grace or creative energies of God.

Whatever I have learned on this path has mostly come to me out of the corner of my eye. I can't seem to handle straight-on encounters.

I should stop now.

But.... the truth that shall set us free is indeed superb. (And that's telling it slant).

Hence my choice of title.

Then of course there are the lawn chairs.