Ora et Labora and Writing

I started writing a blog almost four years ago partly because I hoped it would make writing, generally, come easier to me. (Or should that be “more easily”?)

It hasn’t worked out that way.

I write painfully slow. (Or should that be “slowly”? Well, yes, probably so if grammatical correctness is important (it is) but I like the sound of the line, the word this way. But I’m not sure; maybe it will trip up the reader if I say “painfully slow.” That wouldn’t be good).

Perhaps you can see part of my problem. And this, believe me, is just part of my problem . . .

I have a book project I need to devote my full attention to, so for a month this summer I’m going to reside at a Benedictine abbey and hope that the writing comes. Easier. More easily.

I’m not counting on luck or magic. I’m trusting that there really is something to the ancient wisdom of ordering one’s day, one’s life, around the rhythms of work and prayer.

I know there’s nothing romantic about this. It really is work. And prayer. Routine and habit. Tedium and fortitude. As Kathleen Norris observes of her early experiences as a Benedictine oblate,

One of the first things I noticed on my longer retreats, when I was with the monks in choir four or five times a day for a week or more, was how like an exercise class the liturgy seemed. It was sometimes difficult to rise early for morning office, at other times during the day it seemed tedious to be going back to church, but knowing that the others would be there made all the difference. Once there, the benefits were tangible, and I usually wondered how I could have wished to be anywhere else. When I compared all this to an aerobics class, a monk said, “That’s exactly right.”

I think that writing is like that, too. It’s the showing up that matters, the discipline of being present and attentive to the work, even when you don’t feel like it, even when nothing is coming–even when you wish to be anywhere else. Some days, if I can suggest a different athletic image, it’s like a 4-mile run with a breeze at your back and plenty of air in your lungs and strength in your legs. But on many days, you struggle, you trudge; it’s drudgery. But at least you got up, put on the workout clothes, and did the work.

For 30 days I’m going to show up, both for prayer and for the work. Neither may come easily. But I’m trusting, hoping, praying that by the end I will have wondered how I could have wished to be anywhere else.

 

Eyeing the Heart

I got a good look at my heart on Sunday morning.

It wasn’t any kind of religious experience, though maybe it was something of one: I had an echocardiogram.

It is profound to see one’s own beating heart. As a friend said to me about their own similar experience: we talk about our hearts all the time, but to see that muscle pumping in real time . . . . it is both sobering and wonder-inducing.

As I looked at the screen and as the technician identified this chamber, that valve, I was a little undone by the realization that this muscle has been doing the work of keeping me alive my whole life. I thought I had been appropriately thankful for that gift. But seeing my heart — or at least an image of my heart and much of its structural intricacy — I was moved to gratitude in ways that I didn’t know quite what to do with in that moment, dressed as I was in a baggy hospital gown, lying uncomfortably on my side, the noises and flickers of light coming incessantly from the machine, the helpful technician, chatting to me. It was such a sterile, clinical setting, yet it seemed like a holy moment.

When you see this muscle on a sonogram it strikes you as odd that we use the heart as a metaphor for so many aspects of our humanity. We talk about a broken heart while clearly this is as durable an organ as is in the human body. We say we’re heartsick but we don’t mean by that coronary disease. We call a beloved “sweetheart” but the sight of this muscle doesn’t invoke thoughts confectionary. We’re told to follow our heart, to speak from the heart, to name our heart’s desire.

We want to get to the heart of the matter, act out of the goodness of our hearts, take heart (not lose heart), We don’t want to have a heavy heart, a cold heart, a heart of stone (a heart of gold is best). We want to learn by heart, know by heart, open wide our hearts.

Meanwhile, this muscle in the chest does its silent work. Sometimes we don’t treat it well by lifestyle choices we make. Sometimes our hearts fail us. Eventually, inevitably, our hearts will fail every one of us, or at least cease from their labors once and for all.

But seeing with the eyes of the heart (Eph. 1:18) we can try to love all beating hearts and the people whose lives these faithful hearts make possible. And we can be grateful.

—————————————————————————–

P.S. My echocardiogram was routine (no health worries). But it was kind of strange having it scheduled on a Sunday morning.

 

For the Love of Teaching

A prose poem I wrote in the Creative Writing class I took last fall. (WordPress won’t let me reproduce its original linebreaks here) . . .

 

For the Love of Teaching

 . . . of all things visible and invisible. 
                                                The Nicene Creed

Some would say that it’s the invisible things we’re about in a classroom like mine: God, for instance, or love or goodness or truth. There’s truth in that, I suppose. Theology wrestles with much that is unseen.

And some would say that objectivity is the invisible goal in such a setting: Just give them the facts; let them decide.

And some would say that the teaching enterprise itself is something of an invisible pact: you fill their heads with knowledge, they prove their mastery of it (or they don’t), transaction complete.

But here’s what I see: In the mysterious synergism of a classroom discussion on, say, the lepers of Calcutta, we discover that God has a face, and that truth and goodness have arms and legs, hands and feet that are about the work of love in the world.

And I see that there is no way that I can teach them about God or love or truth in a way that exempts me from any of it. I’m not neutral—but neither am I an evangelist. Wasn’t it Kierkegaard who said that the best teaching is personal in the sense that the teacher impersonates—mimics, models herself after a kind of selflessness meant to move, persuade, compel, convince?

And I see that in our sterile, fluorescent-lighted classroom we operate less by contract than by covenant: the mutual promise to show up, to keep at it, to attend to the process and all its uncertainties, even when we don’t feel like it, even when we struggle—I to communicate and they to understand. Yes, there will be grades, but there is also, always, grace.

Because my students are also neighbors I’ve been given to love, I see in them—incomprehensible as it is to the bureaucrats of assessment and of managed classroom expectations—the very face of God. And in our common work, some days, once in a while, I think it was yesterday, love, goodness, and truth are right there in our midst—in a question asked, a doubt expressed, a circle closed. And at semester’s end, I hold onto the hope that beyond grades and through grace, each of us will have been surprised by joy, our unseen hearts moved to make the invisible visible: to be about the work of love in this world.

 

Irony, Fear, and the Sentimentality of Terrorism

What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige.
Adam Gopnik

It seems odd in this era of “pervasive cultural irony” (David Foster Wallace) that Americans are so prone to sentimentality. We have been schooled to be cool with the shocking, the disgusting, the daring, the outrageous–to strike postures of ironic detachment and to mask our true feelings by displaying their opposite: indifference, say, for disappointment or amusement for anger. Having recently attended a reading featuring the poetry and fiction of undergraduates, I submit as anecdotal evidence a roomful of students and professors who winced not a whit as bland and clinical reportage about post-adolescent sexual experimentation was lauded as literary art. In such a setting the desire to know what the students actually longed to say is met by what Wallace says is irony’s always unspoken answer: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”

And then something happens like a terrorist bombing at the Boston marathon, and our “hip fatigue” (Wallace again) snaps out of itself, turns on the TV, and gets with the program. Our cynical knowingness meets our deep insecurity–our fear that we are not safe, that the world is a precarious place and not simply the site onto which we map our rebel cool.

And yet even this fear is out of proportion, a mismatch for what we can’t turn away from on our screens. Our exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism leads us to villify whole ethnic groups. It instills an unquestioning reverence for the nonsense that comes out of so-called experts on terror in the corporate media. Americans are, as Wallace notes, united more by common images than by common beliefs, and thus the iconography of terrorism–video and still shots of the maimed and dead, of airplanes slamming into towers, all played on an endless loop on TV–makes of us fearful practitioners of American civil religion, the central tenet of which seems to be that we are an exceptional people whose suffering is always exceptional and whose public lamenting of our exceptional suffering must go on and on and on. (And on some more).

More subtly, perhaps, this fear reveals that we might not know who we really are or what our lives are for. Are we fearful because the American dream (so central to American civil piety) turns out to be empty pomp, and pressure-cooker bombs going off in Boston remind us that our pressure-cooker lives have been seduced by a vacuous fantasy?

And then our ironic-gazing-turned-fearful-watching can’t help but make us sentimental. Sentimentality is, of course, excess; it is, as Flannery O’Connor observed,

a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite.

The script for narrating every act of violence against the U.S. and its citizens since 9/11 (and arguably before) contains the dominant theme that we are the innocent, the bedeviled, the blameless put-upon. It is given voice by liberals and conservatives alike; it is codified in our laws; ritualized in our civil piety; inscribed, it would seem, on our very hearts.

And this distortion of sentiment, this overemphasis on innocence makes us the opposite of innocent. In little more than a decade our exaggerated fears have helped to produce and sanction a sophisticated weapons system by which a CIA official in a windowless, Washington office can launch a drone attack a world away and still make it home in time for dinner and his kid’s soccer game.

But that’s not terrorism. That can’t be terrorism. Not in a world where we can’t name our deepest fears and in which sentimentality infuses our piety, our politics, and our very definition of terrorism: that it is only the dangerous fanatic, the disgruntled immigrant who shatters lives and rains down terror on the innocent.

In this era of pervasive cultural irony, how can we miss the irony in that?

 

Easter Vigilance

I have been trying to find the words all week.

Words to describe the experience of the Easter Vigil, the Triduum, Holy Week 2013.

A week later, I still got nothing. At least in terms of a tidy narrative that would chronicle the events of those days in some kind of interesting, orderly fashion.

(And I don’t presume that readers of this blog have been waiting expectantly for such an account; but I have been a little anxious that the words haven’t come, that I might not have some written record, if only for myself, of this life-changing experience).

All I have are some impressions–some fleeting, some seared into my psyche–but all of them, all of them, precious to me.

• The Triduum. It is one continuous liturgy. I should have known this but I didn’t. It was deeply moving to me to move deliberately through this days-long observance, recalling and reliving the arc of a story of friendship and betrayal, of imperial violence and forgiving love, of blinding grief and unbounded joy.
• Sacred Chrism. On Holy Thursday I carried the Sacred Chrism to the altar at the beginning of mass. At the Easter Vigil I was anointed with it in the sacrament of confirmation. I liked the feel and fragrance of this holy oil on my forehead. I didn’t wash my face on Saturday night.
• Kissing the Cross. It’s actually called the Veneration of the Cross and I was completely undone by this Good Friday ritual. Given all of the ways that many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, tend to regard the cross in militant, triumphalist terms, touching or kissing it is such a surprising gesture–so tender, so grace-filled. Such beauty in seeing women, men, and children (especially those with infirmities) bow and bend and kneel to venerate the cross of Christ on Good Friday night.
• The Communion Rite. On Good Friday there’s no mass. (Jesus is in the tomb, after all). But there is communion (though not yet for me): consecrated hosts reserved from the Mass of the Lord’s Supper the evening before. I don’t quite understand this theologically. I mean: I know why it isn’t Eucharist. I just don’t know why we do it.
• Friends. Throughout this journey–not just Holy Week, the Triduum, and the Great Vigil–I have been moved beyond words by the support and encouragement of friends. Cards, emails, facebook comments, phone calls, gifts (beautiful gifts). Five friends from the Sunday School class I teach at my husband’s church (and will continue to teach) came to the Easter Vigil. As did a student of mine. And my sponsor–a lovely, lovely woman who has prayed for me and cheered me on all these months. Seeing all of these faces at the Vigil, taking in their genuine good wishes for me. Still, no words.
• My Parents. Who, having raised their daughter in the Methodist Church and who must have felt some disappointment with my decision to convert, never once conveyed anything to me but their complete love and support. More than that, they embraced the journey with me–wanting to learn more about Catholicism; waxing effusive (my dad did) about the new pope. Having them happily present at the Easter Vigil . . . this is something I will always be grateful for.
• Bees. Is it crazy that one of the most indelible memories I have of the Easter Vigil (a service of taxing length and tremendous beauty) is that of bees in the Exsultet, the hymn of praise sung by a deacon before the Paschal candle? The revisions of the Roman missal in 2010 resulted in these beautiful lines:

. . . accept this candle, a solemn offering,
the work of bees and of your servants’ hands,
an evening sacrifice of praise . . .

But now we know the praises of this pillar,
which glowing fire ignites for God’s honour,
a fire into many flames divided,
yet never dimmed by sharing of its light,
for it is fed by melting wax,
drawn out by mother bees to build a torch so precious.

• Eucharist. Through all the months of the RCIA process, I wondered what this moment at the Easter Vigil would be like–the moment when I would receive the body and blood of Christ for the first time in the Catholic church. I was conflicted: I very much wanted to resist sentimentalizing the experience–privatizing it, turning it into something pious and precious; but I also felt that it did hold a kind of significance, bore a kind of gravitas that I needed to pay attention to. I don’t know that I resolved that conflict in the actual moment. What I most remember is my priest’s luminous face, the blandness of the wafer, and how the taste of the wine lingered long on my tongue. I also remember that after I and the other candidates received, the rest of the congregation processed forward and it all seemed rather ordinary and unremarkable–as I think it should.

* * * * *

It’s been hard to find the words this week. Especially to describe the Easter Vigil.

So a few words from the Exsultet will have to sum it up:

Dazzling [was] the night for me.
And full of gladness.

 

Beating Jesus Up

Reposted from Holy Week 2010.

John 18:1-19:42

During Lent of 2004 Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ, his controversial and enormously popular depiction of the last days of Jesus. Because it was Gibson’s movie (think Braveheart, Mad Max, Lethal Weapon), it was expected to be bloody, violent, and in-your-face intense. Gibson himself was clear about his intention to ratchet up the gore factor: “I didn’t want to see Jesus looking really pretty,” he said in promotion interviews. “I wanted to mess up one of his eyes, destroy it.”

Crucifixion in the ancient world was a gory spectacle. Since its purpose was to deter insurrection–to send a clear message to would-be political subversives–the brutality of this form of capital punishment was breathtaking. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that Jesus had a messed-up eye.

But it is interesting (and important) to ask why the biblical narratives do not dwell on the violence and the physical brutality. And it’s worth asking how our cinematic/cultural fascination with blood and carnage and general gruesomeness has shaped our understanding of the cross and of suffering and salvation.

Gibson was also quoted in interviews as saying that, in making The Passion of the Christ, he “wanted to be true to the gospels.” But the passion narratives in each of the four gospels are strikingly spare in their accounts of Jesus’ physical suffering and death. The synoptics say simply that “having scourged Jesus, Pilate delivered him to be crucified. When they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him.” Just a few verses later Jesus is dead.

If Gibson really wanted “to be true to the gospels,” he would have focused more on the people, the crowds especially, who are integral to the Passion story. He would have explored Jesus’ Holy Week dealings with both the powerful and the poor. The scourging and the crucifying wouldn’t have taken up much screen time.

So why is it that the New Testament handles the details of Jesus’ physical pain and suffering with a kind of no-fuss minimalism? It’s not, as many commentators have pointed out, because they thought such details unimportant. Clearly, the whole gospel story builds toward Jesus’  confrontation with the powers in Jerusalem. It’s not because the writers were squeamish about blood or because they were embarrassed by the way Jesus died. The apostle Paul boasts unapologetically in the cross of Christ.

Rather, the gospel writers seemed to sense that to fixate on the bloody details would risk endorsing a false view of what the cross of Christ accomplishes–a false view that goes something like this: An angry, offended deity demanded payment for humanity’s great debt of sin, and so Jesus had to suffer–really suffer, violently suffer–in order to appease God’s wrath and pay the debt in full.

Unfortunately, various versions of this idea have taken hold through the centuries and we’ve yet to fully shake them. We’ve all heard them in one form or another.

But they miss the mark, for the crucifixion is not the act of a wrathful Father piling condemnation on the innocent, victimized Son. As Miroslav Volf puts it, “Jesus is not a third party inserted between God and humanity to take care of human sin. He is the God who was wronged . . . God placed human sin upon God.”

“God placed human sin upon God.”

In Christ, writes the Apostle Paul, “God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” Note carefully that it’s not: Christ was reconciling an angry God to a sinful world. It’s not even that Christ was reconciling a sinful world to a loving God. Rather: God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself. As Volf says, “the One who was offended bears the burden of the offense.”

Our response to this truth, then–this gift–is profound gratitude. But when the brutality of Jesus’ death is unduly emphasized (exploited)–when our gaze lingers too long upon the messed-up eye or the bloodied brow–we are distracted from gratitude and are drawn instead into cheap voyeurism and sentimentality.

Frederica Matthewes-Green puts it this way: “It would be as odd as welcoming home a wounded soldier, and instead of focusing on the victory he won, dwelling on the exact moment the bayonet pierced the stomach, how it felt and what it looked like. A soldier might well feel annoyed with such attention to his weakness rather than his strength.”

“This is the sense we pick up in the Gospels,” Matthewes-Green goes on to say. “Jesus’ suffering is rendered in the briefest terms, as if drawing about it a veil of modesty. What’s important is not that Jesus suffered for us, but that Jesus suffered for us.”

The blood and gore in a film like The Passion of the Christ manipulate emotions and stir up misplaced pity. We can end up feeling so sorry for the beaten-up Jesus–poor guy–that we miss the point: in walking the way of suffering, Jesus compels us to do the same.

 

Love in Steubenville

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

John 13:34
Gospel Reading for Holy Thursday

Last week in my Christian Ethics course we talked about love.

God’s love. Human love. Love and sexuality. Loving the whole of God’s creation.

I shared with my students a favorite quote from a favorite writer, Wendell Berry:

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world. summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

And the author of our course text, Paul Wadell, reminded us — among many other things in his robust treatment of the subject — that genuine love is always directed toward the well-being of others. To love genuinely, truly, fully is to desire and pursue the flourishing, prospering, thriving of that which (whom) one loves.

True enough.

Nothing to disagree with here.

But I’ve been thinking about love, theologically construed, with its many rich associations, in all of its messy, complicated beauty in light of the news about the Steubenville rape trial.

It’s true that the media coverage of the verdict in the case was troubling for its one-sided focus on the “ruined lives” of the convicted rapists, sixteen-year-old boys with “promising futures.”

It’s true that we need more cultural conversations, both small- and large-scale, about the relationship between sex and structural power, between rape and “consent.”

It’s true that well-meaning sympathy for female victims of sexual assault often unwittingly reinforces America’s deeply disturbing rape culture.

It may be true that the defendents deserved harsher sentences. Maybe.

But it’s also true, I think, that in our responses to this news we would do well to consider what it might mean to attend to the humanity, the brokeness, the possibilities for healing and redemption for the two boys.

In most of the angry reactions to the verdict and the media’s coverage of it, Ma’lik Richmond and Trent Mays have been used as props for moral outrage scoring points. They have served to uphold one of the cardinal rules for how, as citizen-spectators, we are allowed to engage American jurisprudence: you can be on the side of the victim or on the side of the perpetrator; but never on the side of both.

Earlier this semester in Christian Ethics we watched a video interview of Sr. Helen Prejean who argued that indeed it is possible to be on both sides. Necessary, even.

“When you descend down deep to where God is,” she says, “that’s upholding the dignity of life on both sides.”

Jesus, Sr. Helen goes on to say, always has one arm around the victim, holding him or her as a beloved child of God, and the other around the perpetrator, saying, “He or she has done an unspeakable crime, but this too is my beloved son or daughter. Don’t abandon them.”

In other words: love them.

This week, Holy Week in the Christian Year, we will remember and relive the scandalous ways of love. A love that:

washes the feet of betrayers and those who would curse and deny a friend . . .

refuses to respond in kind to brutality and violence . . .

looks with tender forgiveness on wrongdoers who know not what they do . . .

assures a convicted criminal of his place in paradise . . .

surrenders everything to the divine will that “summons the world always toward wholeness” (Berry).

We will hear the familiar story of this scandalous love this week. We will act it out as we wash each other’s feet on Holy Thursday, find our place in the drama of Jesus’ passion on Good Friday, and sing of love’s triumph at the Great Vigil of Easter.

But will we hear this story of scandalous love as a summons to our own participation in God’s reconciling work in the world?

Jesus’ outstretched arms on the cross embrace thieves and thugs, the woefully misguided, and us. Is it possible that we might learn to love scandalously, to pursue — however costly, inconvenient, or counterintuitive — the well-being of all others?

 

Under Scrutiny: Why I’m Becoming Catholic (part two)

On the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays of Lent the scrutiny rites are celebrated during mass. These liturgies recover and reclaim much of the early church’s insistence on rigorous self-examination before taking up the way of Jesus. You really want to follow this crucified Messiah? asked second- and third-century priests and catechists. Then scrutinize your deepest commitments: how do you make your livelihood? (pimps and gladiators had to find new jobs); what’s your position on violence and war? (those with “the power of the sword” had to renounce it).

In contemporary language the priest prays that the elect will be “strengthened against worldy deceits of every kind” and that they might be encouraged by the example of “catechumens who have shed their blood for Christ.”

For those preparing to be received into full communion at the Easter Vigil, the scrutinies are sobering. They are also beautiful. (One of the petitions in the third scrutiny’s intercessions for the elect prays “that the whole world, which God has created in love, may flower in faith and charity and so receive new life”).

There is also the scrutiny-like penitential rite for those baptized candidates who are coming into the Catholic Church from other Christian traditions. Also sobering, also beautiful, this liturgy solemnizes the candidates’ desire (and the Church’s) that they be duly prepared to receive the sacraments of confirmation and Eucharist at the Easter Vigil.

And as catechumens and candidates have undergone these rites during this Lenten season, a new pope also finds himself under scrutiny.

Under a microscope is more like it.

But what has been revealed so far is also sobering. And beautiful.

An archbishop with a pastor’s heart and the people’s admiration and affection.

A man who has communicated with each word and gesture a deep and long-standing humility, an endearing sense of humor, and a desire to shepherd the church in new and necessary ways.

The reforms he will promote (yet unknown, of course; there will likely be some disappointments) will be revealed, I suspect, less through pronouncements and press releases, and more through his own humble witness to what the gospel is at heart–love of God and neighbor, especially the poor and suffering neighbor.

And his name.

Francis.

Leonardo Boff puts it this way (and a radical priest/liberation theologian praising a cardinal-become-pope is its own sobering, beautiful miracle):

Francis isn’t a name; it’s a plan for a Church that is poor, simple, gospel-centered, and devoid of all power. It’s a Church that walks the way together with the least and last, that creates the first communities of brothers and sisters who recite the breviary under the trees with the birds. It’s an ecological Church that calls all beings those sweet words “brothers and sisters”. Francis was obedient to the Church and the popes and at the same time he followed his own path with the gospel of poverty in hand.

As we make our way toward Easter may each of us scrutinize with love and compassion–ourselves, the church, the new pope–that we might “walk the way together with the least and last.”

This is the sobering call of the faith we confess.

And it is beautiful.

 

“An Undying Tremor and Draw”: Why I’m Becoming Catholic (part 1)

Like everybody else, I bowed my head at Mass during the consecration of the bread and wine, lifted my eyes to the raised host and the raised chalice. I believed (whatever it means) that a change occurred: I went to the altar rails and received the mystery on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes and felt time starting up again. It was phenomenally refreshing and, when I began to admit to myself that I was losing faith in it, I was very sorry. Intellectually speaking the loss of faith occurred offstage, there was never a scene where I had it out with myself or with another. But the potency of those words remains for me, they retain an undying tremor and draw; I cannot disavow them. Nor can I make the act of faith. In ‘Station Island,’ I arranged for John of the Cross to help my unbelief by translating his ‘Song of the Soul that Knows God by Faith.’

Seamus Heaney,
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, Dennis O’ Driscoll
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 234

Song of the Soul that Knows God by Faith

How well I know that fountain, filling, running,
although it is the night.

That eternal fountain, hidden away,
I know its haven and its secrecy
although it is the night.

But not its source because it does not have one,
which is all sources’ source and origin
although it is the night.

No other thing can be so beautiful,
Here the earth and heaven drink their fill
although it is the night.

So pellucid it can never be muddied,
and I know that all light radiates from it
although it is the night.

I know no sounding line can find its bottom,
nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom
although it is the night

And its current so in flood it overspills
to water hell and heaven and all peoples
although it is the night.

And the current that is generated there,
as far as it wills to, it can flow that far
although it is the night.

And from these two a third current proceeds
which neither of these two, I know, precedes
although it is the night.

This eternal fountain hides and splashes
within this living bread that is life to us
although it is the night.

Hear it calling out to every creature.
And they drink these waters, although it is dark here
because it is the night.

I am repining for this living fountain.
Within this bread of life I see it plain
although it is the night.

Station Island, XI

 

A Healing Word

It’s my turn on the bLOGOS rotation at The Ekklesia Project to write this week’s lectionary reflection:

The Second Sunday in Lent, Year C

Revised Common Lectionary:                                  Lectionary for Mass:
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18                                                Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18
Psalm 27                                                                       Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17-4:1                                                   Philippians 3:17-4:1 (or 3:20-4:1)
Luke 13:31-35 or Luke 9:28-36                               Luke 9:28-36

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

Psalm 27:1

The gospel reading for the Second Sunday in Lent differs significantly for Protestants and Catholics. The Revised Common Lectionary appoints four pithy verses from Luke 13 which reveal a rather astonishing range of reactions in Jesus as he reckons with both his imperial pursuers and his faithless kinsmen.

To Rome’s proxy ruler, Herod, he sends a message of combative confidence (“go and tell that fox for me . . .”). To Jerusalem, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it,” he speaks with surprising, maternal tenderness:

“How often have I desired to gather you children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings . . . “

The fox and the hen. Herod the stealthy predator; Jesus the protective mother.  Power versus vulnerability. And we know where this confrontation is headed . . . .

To read the rest click here.

 

Coming Out, Crossing Over . . .

“It’s been a difficult year to be Catholic,” a friend said to me recently.

I felt her pain.

Controversy has abounded, to put it mildy: the HHS contraceptive mandate; tension between the Vatican and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious; the coming-to-light of sexual abuse by priests during the tenure of Archbishop Mahoney of Los Angeles (in the midst of similar decades-long scandals).

All of this has been compounded by pretty relentless scrutiny of a pretty unpopular pope.

In the American media and in parts of American Catholicism, Benedict XVI is routinely labeled a conservative (and worse)–a  rigid, humorless leader leading the Church backward in time, not forward.

(It says something about Americans’ impoverished political discourse when all we can think to call this pontiff, who is opposed to gay marriage but is also a virulent critic of laissez-faire capitalism and a staunch enviromentalist, is “conservative”).

And we’ve never quite been able to forgive him for not being like his predecessor. Charisma and compassion are not words that spring readily to mind when thinking of Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict.

Morever, the missteps of his papacy, some of them egregious (like the speech at Regensburg in 2006), have not endeared him even to many who were predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Still.

Soundbite journalism can never fully and fairly chronicle the complex legacy of any world figure. For instance, as Carol Zeleski observed earlier this week,

With his distinctly nonfundamentalist interpretation of the Book of Genesis; his sophisticated handling of recent trends in biblical criticism (most notably, though least noticed, his book “Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life”); his role in the creation of the modern Catholic catechism; and his papal writings on faith, reason and love (beginning with his extraordinary first encyclical “God Is Love”), Pope Benedict has opened a new era in the dialogue between religion and secular reason.

And as a priest friend said to me this week, in illness and frailty Pope John Paul II chose to remain in office as a witness to suffering; in resigning the office under similar personal circumstances, Pope Benedict XVI offers a witness of humility.

Yet can our media-saturated views of this controversial man allow us to see such nuance, such complexity?

* * * * *

All of this matters to me in more than just an academic way.

When my friend made her remark a few days ago, I replied with: “It’s been a difficult year to be converting to Catholicism.”

Because that’s what I’m doing.

And as the questions have come (and as more will likely come), here’s pretty much all I’ve got:

I am at home in the mass.

I need the Church’s historic liturgy in my life: the familiarity of it, the poetry of it, the predictability of it, even the tedium of it. I am weary of the Protestant way of  “engineered” worship.

I attend Saturday afternoon mass at the Catholic church in the town where I live, a community I’ve fallen in love with, a community that will soon welcome me into full communion at this year’s Easter Vigil. Of course it’s possible that I may someday move and not have St. Brendan Church to love. But the worship there – along with the gifted priest and the beautiful people – will have helped to make me at home in Catholic life and liturgy wherever else I might land. (I don’t think my first tradition, Methodism, or Protestantism generally, knows very much about how to do this).

Related to this is something else I’ve always been deeply moved by (and appreciative of) in Catholic worship: there’s no hovering or smothering when a visitor like me shows up at mass. In fact, it can sometimes feel “unfriendly” to someone used to the Protestant way of welcoming committees and strategic follow-up with newcomers. What I observe, however, even though I don’t think many Catholic laity would articulate it this way, is the sense that in the mass it is Christ who does the welcoming; the people’s task is to never interfere with that.

Of course there’s the big thing — the elephant in the room for those like me undergoing RCIA: how can you join such a messed up church, with its abusive priests, prohibition of women priests, bullying bishops, and all the rest?). Part of me would say, rather impatiently, show me a church that isn’t messed up. And part of me would like to say (as the poet Mary Karr did when she became Catholic from nothingness), and I’m paraphrasing: I’m not joining the pope’s team; I just love the worship and the people.

But I’m not sure I can do that.

I am, in some sense, joining the pope’s team (or rather I’ll be joining the new pope’s team). I don’t have to love everything he says and does, but I have to somehow see that I am not my own authority as a follower of Jesus. I know how this can be perceived and how, as a woman, I might be seen as the messed-up one, the deluded one: relinquishing my autonomy, my identity, etc.

But what I believe, and what I believe to be at the heart of a Catholic anthropology, is that genuine freedom is always exercised within limits, and limits are not confinements but are, rather, “inducements to fullness of relationships and meaning.”

* * * * *

It’s been a difficult year to be Catholic. And to convert to Catholicism.

But I’m hoping and praying for grace–for the current Pope, for his successor, for myself, and for a Church bound up in controversy and crisis, that in all things it might bear witness to the way of suffering, the way of humility.

And in these ways my hope and my prayer is that the Catholic Church and the church catholic might be Christ’s welcoming, light-filled body in and for the world.

 

Martin (and Mary) on Speaking the Truth

I have written elsewhere (here and here for instance) about Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, this poem from Mary Oliver, who is often regarded (dismissed) as a starry-eyed nature poet, offers as fitting a tribute to King and his prophetic witness as I know of.

Of The Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Mary Oliver
Red Bird, p. 46

 

The Prayers of the Miserable Ones

Much has been written about the theology of Les Miserables–the book, the stage musical, and now the play-based film by British director (The King’s Speech) Tom Hooper.

Eddie Redmayne as Marius, Les Miserables

Richard Beck‘s blog, for instance, notes the two distinct political theologies depicted in the movie and embodied in the characters of Javert and Valjean.

Charles Klamut writes poignantly about encountering Monseigneur Bienvenu, the bishop of Digne, in the novel twenty years ago, and having his own life and vocation radically and irrevocably transformed.

Leah Libresco (“geeky convert”–atheist turn Catholic) ponders Javert’s pelagianism and God’s infinite mercy.

These appreciative takes on the movie (and book) stand in contrast to some theologically astute critics who didn’t like the film so much ( Jeffrey Overstreet, for one), who wish that the “relentless embrace of Christian iconography” had been less “heavy-handed.”

(I think Overstreet’s review is right about a few things, and wrong about many others, but that’s a post, perhaps, for another day).

Much has also been written about Hooper’s decision to have the actors sing live on set (almost unheard of in filmed musicals), a tiny ear piece piping in a just-off-set keyboard accompanist who was able to adjust to each singer’s in- and of-the-moment interpretive choices. And there’s very little unsung speech in Les Mis the movie. Noting that even in the most musical of musicals, there is always that jarring moment when, after long stretches of spoken dialogue, a song breaks out, Hooper felt that

there’s something creatively and intellectually more honest in saying ‘this is a world where people communicate through songs.’

These breaks with movie-musical convention are accompanied by yet another of Hooper’s artistic decisions: to film the musical’s principle players in relentless close-up. (This feature of the film may also be its most mocked). And that some of the movie’s main characters are not classically-trained singers: also the subject of much disparaging ink. Russell Crowe, especially, as Inspector Javert has been heavily criticized in the American media, though I agree with Peter Bradshaw of the London Guardian who suggests that Crowe

 offers the most open, human performance I have seen from him. His singing is so sweetly unselfconscious that there is something paradoxically engaging about his Javert, even when he’s being a cruel, unbending law-officer and royalist spy.

It was also Crowe who offered an insight to Hooper early on in the movie’s production when he noted that many of the musical’s sung sililoquies are like prayers (“people praying out loud or in their head”). As such, it seems all the more important–even urgent–that the audience observe these pray-ers in intimate proximity (as only film can make possible), not at a safe and spacious distance. By the time Valjean reprises the song/prayer “Bring Him Home” we have seen his tears many times, witnessed grief and regret, repentance and resolution, peace and contentment on his face. We have seen the raw physicality of prayer: the wrestling with God (Fantine’s I Dreamed a Dream), the doubt and despair (Javert’s Suicide); we have been moved by the tenderness, the vulnerability of such prayer (Eponine’s On My Own and Marius’s exquisite Empty Chairs at Empty Tables).

Which is why the imperfect voices of some of Les Miserables’s cast are perfect for this vision of Victor Hugo’s masterful story. Desperate prayers from desperate hearts don’t always sound beautiful to the ear. But perhaps at the heart of Hugo’s and Hooper’s story of the poor ones, the wretched ones, the miserable ones is the (theological) truth that imperfect voices raised in song and prayer to God are always, always beautiful.

 

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 32,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 7 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

 

The Seventh Day of Christmas and New Year’s Eve

On this day of celebrating and looking back and looking forward, I’m thinking on these things:

1.that good friends can save your sanity, your self-respect, your life . . .

2. that the teaching life is a privilege, despite misguided bureaucrats who would rob it of its joy . . .

3. that my students are neighbors I’ve been given to love and my task is to love them well . . .

4. that some days I forget this  . . .

5. that I want to learn to listen like a cow . . .

Those of you who grew up in the country know that cows are good listeners. And barns are great contemplative places–at least the old ones were. I recommend to you this kind of dairy barn listening. We don’t need fixing, most of us, as much as we need a warm space and a good cow. Cows cock their big brown eyes at you and twitch their ears when you talk. This is a great antidote to the critical listening that goes on in academia, where we listen for the mistake, the flaw in the argument. Cows, by contrast, manage at least the appearance of deep, openhearted attention.

If you are listening, if you are turning your big brown eyes or blue eyes on somebody and twitching your ears at them, you are earning your silage. You are listening people into existence. You are saving lives. You are producing Grade A.

Mary Rose O’Reilley

6. That my work in this world is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished . . .

7. that good poetry, and a good poem, can change your life . . .

8. that a good poet died too soon (Dennis O’Driscoll: requiescat in pace) . . .

9. that good music, and a good song, can change your life . . .

10. that the life of faith (a wholly inadequate way to describe the radical discipleship we’re called to) is about learning to be more human, not less . . .

11. that the life of faith is not separate from life . . .

12. that we need exemplars–neighbors, witnesses, friends–to show us how to be more human, not less . . .

13. that good friends can save your sanity, your self-respect, your life . . .

 

This Is Good News?

It’s my turn to do the lectionary reflection at bLOGOS on the website of the Ekklesia Project:

The Third Sunday of Advent

Zephaniah 3:14-20; Philippians 4:4-7; Isaiah 12:2-6; Luke 3:7-18

Gaudete in domini semper.

These words from this week’s lectionary epistle are also the text of the introit of the mass for the third Sunday of Advent. Thus on Gaudete Sunday, when Advent’s sober mood is broken a little and the pink candle on the wreath is lit, we remember that we are invited to “rejoice in the Lord always.”

These words are so familiar that perhaps we have lost the sense of irony in saying or singing them during a season and on a day when much of what we recall is rooted in scandal and gloom: the disgrace of pregnancy outside of wedlock in a strict patriarchal culture and John the Baptizer’s wide-eyed, fiery condemnations.

To read the rest click here.

 

Life of Pi, Love of God

“I just want to love God.”
Piscene Patel, Life of Pi

A boy, the son of a zookeeper, grows up in picturesque Pondicherry, India. He is bright and inquisitive and unusually attuned to the world around him. He is, by place of birth, a Hindu, and a devout one. He discovers Christianity (“Thank you, Vishnu, for introducing me to Christ”), and then finds the religion of Allah, especially its profound witness to the practice of daily prayer, to be life-giving.

His parents are perplexed. (“If you believe in everything, you will end up not believing in anything at all,” warns the boy’s rationalist father). His older brother, as older brothers are sometimes wont to do, sneers, scorns, and mocks the young boy’s earnest faith.

The boy, Piscene Molitar Patel, named by an uncle after a famous Parisian swimming pool, is patient with his critics and resolved to love God and the world and everything–everything–in it. As a teenager, a shipwreck and a harrowing ordeal in a lifeboat sharpen rather than diminish or extinguish his religious sensibilities. He emerges with a story, he says, that “will make you believe in God.”

* * * * *

It is tempting to dismiss Life of Pi as a parable of the postmodern quest for “spiritual fulfillment” without the messiness of doctrinal commitment, to see Pi as a cipher for what each of us is encouraged to be: a discriminating consumer of religious experience–trying on this or that belief or practice, picking and choosing what “works” for us, discarding or ignoring the rest.

I understand the temptation.

But I also think there’s something more or something else at work in the life of Pi. During his 227 days at sea, the necessities of survival (killing sea creatures with his bare hands and wolfing them down ravenously, animal-like) merge with his emerging sense of his own insignificance. After witnessing a spectacular display of thunder and lightning, Pi says (in the book, but not in the movie):

“For the first time I noticed—as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next—that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant . . . My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.”

With its echoes of the book of Job and the Psalms, this is not the sentiment of the contemporary seeker-shopper of religious goods and services. It is not the familiar narcissism of much of middle-class Christianity, nor is it the well-meaning but hollow piety of the “God-never-gives-us-more-than-we-can-handle” school of thought.

And after calculating his odds of outliving his lifeboat companion, a 450 lb. Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, Pi says: “You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.” This, too, reveals not the sunny optimism of religious individualism (“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”) but a clear-eyed embrace of a fundamental truth of existence: we are going to die.

When Pi makes peace with this truth he gets on with the business of living which, in his case, immerses him in the material exigencies of his plight: paying attention to the weather, monitoring his food supply, training his carnivorous companion. But it also means attending to the glorious beauty around him: inky-black skies swimming with stars, whales elegantly breaking the water’s luminous surface, a school of dolphins moving synchronously as if in a dance of pure joy.

And at journey’s end, when the middle aged Pi, who has been narrating the story all along, tells an aspiring novelist that he regrets not being able to thank Richard Parker and tell him that he loved him, we glimpse the young Pi Patel again, who was attentive to beauty, full of wonder and a desire for the holy, who only wanted to love God and the world, and who might have–as a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim–found a kindred companion in a contemporary poet’s own clear-eyed assessment of the truth of our finitude:

It was what I was born for—
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.

Mary Oliver, “Mindful”

 

When Death Comes

Remembering my friend, Diane Rubin (1960-2012), who was lively and lovely, full of wonder and amazement and gratitude, possessed of a magnanimous spirit and a kind, compassionate heart.

When Death Comes
by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

________________________________________________________________________________

“Sing Me to Heaven,” Daniel Gawthrop

 

Of Sonnets and Discipleship: the Beauty of Limits

“. . . our human and earthly limits, properly understood,
are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration
and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.”

“Faustian Economics,” Wendell Berry

Our assignment in my poetry class was to write a sonnet–English or Italian, our choice. But when it comes to sonnets, that option, in many ways, is where the freedom seems to end. You can’t write as many lines as you want (has to be fourteen, of course). You can’t make it rhyme–or not–however you might like (must be abab, cdcd, efef, gg for the English kind).  Line length is non-negotiable, too: five “feet” of “iambs” (unstressed syllables followed by stressed ones). Sonnets and the poets who write them take their metrics very, very seriously.

My classmates and I were a little freaked out. Writing formal poetry–poetry that adheres to form (e.g. sonnet, sestina, villanelle, tanka, ode)–seems the exclusive purview of the professionals. Plus, isn’t formal poetry too often, well, formal, in the other sense of that word: stuffy and standoffish?

Who wants to write a formal poem?

Not us, we all said. How can we say what we want to say when we’re so restricted? What is the point of writing a poem if you feel all hedged in–if the form itself seems intent on cramping your style, stifling your self-expression, limiting your freedom?

Yet here’s the thing:

Freedom, genuine freedom, (in any context) can be exercised only within limits. This seems counterintuitive, of course, especially in a culture founded on the idea of breaking free from all constraints (the sky’s the limit! no rules! live free or die!). America’s revolutionary war sloganism has had its inevitable end in modern advertising jingles that signal the swapping of one form of tyranny for another: in two hundred years we traded subjugation under King George for the slavery of the self to the forces of consumer-capitalism.

And so the so-called free individual finds it harder and harder to feel truly free. As theologian Philip Kenneson has put it:

How many people feel free not to buy a new car every three or four years? (Or not to buy one at all?) How many people feel free not to dress in the latest styles or fashions? How many people feel free not to look like, talk like, walk like and think like everyone else? In short, how many people feel free not to desire what everyone else desires?

As I often ask my brightest, most accomplished students: How many of you felt free not to come to college right after high school?

Unlimited freedom, it turns out, can be pretty limiting. Without a telos–an ultimate end or aim–and without a community of some kind in which such a purpose is given shape and substance, focus and direction, freedom can feel a lot like bondage.

But determined by a telos that has to do with the well-being and flourishing of all (and not merely the wish fulfillment of the unencumbered individual), genuine freedom is exercised in relationship and reciprocity. Etymologically related to “friend,” the word “free” carries the sense of “dear” or beloved,” and, as Wendell Berry notes,

We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our ‘identity’ is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections.

In Christian discourse, freedom is bound up (now there’s a theological oxymoron) in the freedom to love, to serve, to know and be known. We exercise our freedom for the sake of a life directed toward love of God and neighbor, not merely (or not really at all) as freedom from hindrance or constraint.  Freedom understood theologically is generative, fecund, prolific; its goal is not the casting off of encumbrances but fullness of life.  Freedom as free rein, by contrast, is narrow, small, often paranoid and suspicious—it fences out the neighbor, it feeds our narcissistic whims.

Fullness of life suggests that we live necessarily within certain kinds of restraints, certain disciplined practices that make evident what counts as a life lived fully before God and neighbor. Consider, for example, the Ten Commandments.  For Israel, the law given at Mount Sinai came as gift, as a liberating word to help the covenant people of God learn how to thrive in their new life together. Where we might see the keeping of the commandments as a way to earn God’s favor and escape God’s wrath (and even as a curtailment of our freedom), the biblical writers are clear that the law comes after Israel’s salvation and in response to it; keeping it, living it is how the people of God express their gratitude freely. And as Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed (from prison, interestingly), “nobody experiences the mystery of freedom unless through discipline.”

So disciplined, formal, speech like the Decalogue (and the creeds and the Lord’s Prayer) doesn’t restrict our freedom; in fact it makes genuine freedom—fullness of life and living—possible. As it turns out, astonishing complexity flows from the forms we adhere to.

* * * * *

But what about poetry and freedom? In the end, writing a sonnet wasn’t easy but it was surprisingly freeing.  The constraints of the form were not, after all, limitations to creativity but their necessary precondition. Once the boundaries were acknowledged not as confinements but as “inducements to elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning” (Berry), it was possible even to strive for and discover beauty: in choosing this word and not that one,  in making the rhyme scheme work, in finding a fitting image or metaphor.

The discovery of beauty in words, in life, in a life directed toward love of God and neighbor: What is our freedom for if not for that?

 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Remarks I gave on Founders Day at West Virginia Wesleyan in introducing my teacher, mentor, and friend — Larry Parsons – who received a Doctor of Humane Letters degree . . .

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver asks this question at the end of her poem “The Summer Day.” Oliver is famous for her pointed, probing questions, for poetry of such devastating beauty that when her queries come—sometimes at the end, sometimes in the middle, occasionally throughout a poem—the reader is often a little disoriented, a little undone by their sharpness, their clarity, their pinpoint precision at going to the heart of what it means to be a fully alive, fully engaged human being in this world. You find, sometimes, that you don’t have a good answer to Oliver’s piercing questions, but you want to, and so they stay with you, and you think about them: while you’re making dinner or going for a run or trying to sleep.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

When I think about this question and all of the contexts within which it might be fruitful to ask it, I think about the life and legacy of Larry Russell Parsons. Not that I have ever heard Dr. Parsons ask this question—at least not overtly, at least not in the kind of bare-faced, unabashed way that Oliver poses it at the end of her poem. But in reflecting on the shape of Larry’s life and loves, on the practice of his pedagogy and on the arc of a long career of nurturing and loving the students under his care, this question keeps insinuating itself.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

For whether you were in Concert Chorale, hammering out the notes, measure by measure, of a difficult piece, or having a personal conversation with Dr. P about your major or, more likely, about your life, fraught as it was with uncertainty, afflicted as you were with restlessness and indecision, you sensed over and over that for him the particulars of our day-to-day existence—making music, reading books, attending to friendships, making a beautiful dinner—these were about making a life; they were the raw materials of our life’s work—the work of being present in this world, indeed of loving it, of paying attention, of learning, quite simply, to stand still and be astonished.

Larry never presumed to tell you what to do with your one wild and precious life. He didn’t give career advice or tell you what occupation you might be suited for. Rather, he gently helped you to see what your vocation is—what your calling is in this world, regardless of what you get paid to do. Your job might be that of an organist or an orthodontist, but your vocation is to live purposefully, gratefully this one wild and precious life you’ve been given. And Dr. Parsons helped you to see this by simply (simply!) bearing witness himself to what a life well-lived might look like, to what it means to be present, to love, to pay attention, to stand still in this world and be astonished.

And in this work and witness he has been mindful, it seems to me, of at least two things: excellence and beauty.

In his work with Wesleyan students from the late 1960s until more than a decade into the new millennium; in his generous offering of his time and talent in bringing many forms of musical artistry to the citizens of West Virginia; in his considerable accomplishments these last several years as Dean of the college—in all of this and more, one sees over and over that for Larry Parsons excellence is the thing. If, as Aristotle said, excellence is about cultivating those habits and practices that help us achieve the good that inheres in any task worth doing, Dr. Parsons has shown us this work—this joyful, holy work—through the slow example of a lifetime.

And beauty.

It’s Mary Oliver again who nails the questions for us:

Have you figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

For all the stresses and strains in this era of higher education, with its emphasis on student assessment and measurable learning outcomes, I’ve taken great comfort in the fact that Dean Parsons is that rare administrator who knows what beauty is for, who knows that we cannot be fully alive, fully engaged human beings without beauty in our day-to-day existence—the beauty of Creation and of human relationships, the beauty of poetry, science, music, art. And that cultivating a love of beauty in students—whether you are teaching them Mozart or microbiology—is slow, patient work that will change their lives. For good. Forever. Attending to beauty, cultivating a love of it in the young—this work is not easily (if ever) quantifiable or measurable; it is not readily reportable, with a click of a mouse, on an online data form.

Have you figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

In his forty-plus years at West Virginia Wesleyan Dr. Parsons has introduced us to much beauty; he has inspired us to love the beautiful because he loves it. He has shown us what beauty is for, and he has changed lives.

Dr. Parsons: today we honor you for these gifts and for so many more. Our lives are infinitely richer for having known and loved you, for having been known and loved by you.

Thank you for bearing witness to a life well-lived. Thank you—teacher, mentor, friend—for what you have done with your one wild and precious life.

 

The Poetry of Grace

In August I wrote about a new thing I was about to do: take a creative writing class in poetry. It’s now the middle of the term and, while I still find myself a bit terrified at the prospect of writing verse, I have a couple of poems to show for my terror.

And today is my birthday. I would never have imagined, even six months ago, that I would post one of my own poems on this blog. But much goodness and grace has entered my life this year, and in many surprising ways. Out of this beauty has come tremendous gratitude, and this narrative poem:

 

Grace

There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.

William Carlos Williams

“Indigo Rose,” he said. And at first I thought I misheard him
or, perhaps, he misspoke because we were, after all,
talking about tomatoes, and “Indigo Rose” sounds so beautiful,
as if one might be referring to a flower or an Indian princess.
But I looked again at the plum-sized gems and they were,
in fact, beautiful: purple-black with a flaming orange underlay.
So Indigo Rose it was, and I said I’d take a dozen. And I asked
if he had any basil and he said yes, two kinds, classic sweet
and a spicy, deep purple variety, the latter so lovely we joked
you could make a table centerpiece of it and then
eat it for the salad course.

For weeks we carried on like this, my farmer-friend and I, I
admiring the bounty he brought to the town square
on Saturdays, happy to buy what I needed to make
fragrant summer fare—sauces and pesto and insalata caprese;
he, carefully weighing jewel-toned tomatoes and neatly
bundling basil, two kinds, for me. Our easy banter. Our
mutual gratitude. So one Saturday when he seemed a little
out of sorts and there were no Indigo Roses in his stall,
he volunteered that it had been a difficult week—“family stress,”
he said, though he was circumspect and discreet and apologetic
about the tomatoes.

All summer I think of my farmer-friend, how he must live
not only with the uncertainty of weather and the routine threat
of pest and pestilence but also with the same worries and woes
we all have: a wayward child, perhaps, or dying parents, or a
strained marriage. His labors and loves go deeper than what
he plants in the ground. Of course they do. And in my kitchen
of a late afternoon, when I close my eyes and breathe in the
clovey sweet scent of basil, when I take and eat the rosy-red flesh
of summer and sun, I feel gratitude for the grace of good food from
good soil from good stewards of the land, who sow and reap, who weep
for the beauty of it all, the sadness of it all: this life we live, all of us,

our labors and our loves going deep.
Deeper than we can say.
Deeper than anyone knows.

 

Why World Communion Sunday Is a Bad Idea

It’s my turn to write a post for bLOGOS on The Ekklesia Project website:

The origins of this Protestant observance reveal the best of intentions. But for at least three reasons, continuing to set aside the first Sunday in October to highlight the Church’s signature rite is not a good idea.

One: Observing something called “World Communion Sunday” one day of the year communicates the idea that the Eucharist is special. If Holy Communion really is the Church’s signature rite, if it is indeed that which makes the Church what it is, then “special” is exactly what it is not. We don’t think of the air we breathe as “special,” the breakfast we eat as “special.” These things are gifts, of course–breath and food–but it is in their givenness, their ordinariness that they are the means for life and health.

In Clyde, Missouri, the Benedictine Sisters
of Perpetual Adoration cut unleavened bread
into communion wafers and gather them
in plastic bags folded, stapled, and later packed
in boxes.

Two: Observing something called “World Communion Sunday” one day of the year suggests that the Eucharist is our achievement. To the contrary: Ordinary food–grain and grape–become the extraordinary gifts of God–body and blood–through a power not our own. Our only task is to receive these gifts: to take, bless, break, and share them. And when we do this, we learn what it means to be a people for whom the whole of our life together is “one colossal unearned gift.”

At the Exxon next door, Walter Miller
lifts his pickup’s hood, then turns to stare
at the acreage he used to own across the road.
Was his wheat, he wonders, even the smallest grain
in its long ascent to final form, ever changed into
the body of our Lord?

To read the rest click here.

 

No Poetry in Politics

I felt embarrassment for Clint Eastwood more than anything else.

He seemed disoriented, disheveled, a little frail. Dirty Harry as a doddering uncle, muttering inappropriate things at the dinner table while everyone averts their eyes, keeps their head down.

But there’s also this: Did the Republicans really need one more rich white guy rendering a black person invisible? On TV? In prime time?

Perhaps the most important question in all of this is also the most naive one: How does such a spectacle — not just crazy Clint talking to an empty chair but 21st-century presidential politics, generally – do anything to advance civility and honor and human flourishing (let alone informed decision-making) in our public life?

I don’t expect it to be much different when the Democrats gather in Charlotte this week. Same formula: political convention as tightly controlled, carefully composed, neatly packaged product. (That Eastwood’s loopy speech slipped through the cracks of the usual scrutiny and scriptedness must surely have some Romney aides averting their eyes, keeping their heads down).

* * * * *

Aristotle understood politics to be concerned findamentally with the well-being of citizens. The good life, he believed (happiness; eudaimonia in Greek), was the telos — the goal, the end game – of human existence, and participation in the polis was the means for realizing this ultimate purpose. In political community, goods are ordered in ways that all persons may flourish, and no person can flourish apart from a just, well-ordered polis.

Maybe the problem is that in our context we hear that term — “the good life” — and think of Budweiser commercials. Politics and the good life? Politicians are supposed to keep their hands off my good life . . .

* * * * *

Being immersed, as I am these days, in poetry, I find myself reading lots of Mary Oliver. She is sometimes regarded (even dismissed) as a mere (mere!) ”nature” poet, as someone who writes lovely lines about swans and geese but whose poetry lacks the intellectual heft necessary to be considered Important. Timely. Socially Relevant.

But I find Oliver’s meditative poems deeply engaged in the questions of what it means for human beings to flourish and how it is that we should order the goods in our lives for the well-being of all.

We are made for joy, Oliver insists. (Which isn’t too far from Aristotle’s idea that we are made for happiness).  Tell me, Oliver asks, what it is you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?

How is this not, at heart, at the root of all that matters, a political question?

For Oliver, and for Aristotle in a different sort of way, living into the telos of our existence is inseparable from the cultivation of beauty in our lives. The good life is a beautiful life and can never be fully realized apart from a just, well-ordered polis.

But politicians don’t talk this way, of course.  And neither do their spokespersons, who do odd, embarrassing things like go on television and ask strange, meaningless questions of an empty chair. And we avert our eyes, keep our heads down. For there is no poetry in politics and we are all the poorer for it.

 

Reading Poems, Writing Theology

As the summer slips away and I’m preparing for the classes I’ll teach this fall, I’m also readying myself for a course I plan to take: ENGL 351 – Creative Writing: Poetry.

Steadying myself is more like it.

Why did this seem like a good idea six months ago?

Actually, I’m still very committed to the class, still very much looking forward to it. But I also find myself feeling daunted and not a little stressed.

Not because of the professor: I have no qualms about my soon-to-be-poetry-teacher, Doug Van Gundy. He’s a good friend and colleague and a marvelous poet himself. He’ll be awesome, I know.

Neither am I (too much) concerned about the fact that I’ll be classmates with some of my own young students. There might be some awkwardness at first; Doug and I have talked a little about how to offset some of this. I’m hopeful that soon enough we’ll work out all the weirdness.

Poetry, of course, is not the problem. I love poetry. Love reading poems. Love learning about poets. I love sharing poetry with friends who also love it, and nothing is more satisfying to me than learning of a new poem from a trusted friend. I can be obsessed for days with a good poem. There are poems that have changed my life.

No, the parts of this creative writing class that have me feeling a little nauseous are the “creative” and “writing” parts.

Writing poems does not feel like something I can do, nor perhaps even ought to do. This is not false modesty on my part. I’m pretty sure that this kind of creativity is not part of my skill set as a writer.

I’m a theologian. Central to the task of theology is the routine avoidance of creativity or, at least, the forswearing of originality. The idea, communicated to me from my days in divinity school, is that theologians transmit a tradition; we don’t generate one. We make accessible the wise words of others, not our own. We are custodians, not creators; stewards, not inventors.

But it is also true that such transmission does not occur in a vacuum, that the context within which one does theology always requires something of a creative impulse, an imaginative bent, perhaps, even, an artistic eye. This is true, I think, because the ability to write theology well — to steward past tradition faithfully into the present for the purpose of encouraging lived discipleship now and into the future — this ability is linked to one’s facility with language. (Now there’s a connection to poetry I can latch onto).

And language is a slippery thing. And maybe theological language is especially hard to hold onto. It always wants to wriggle out of our grasp; it can be maddeningly elusive, fleeting, shifty, oblique. It is speech that is meant to furnish us with “a set of protocals against idolatry” but it does this always and only through a grammar of mystery and metaphor:  God is one and three? Jesus is fully human and fully divine? The Kingdom of God has come, but not yet?

So it takes some creativity to wield theological language, to transmit theological truth responsibly, persuasively and — just as importantly — beautifully. And it is attention to beauty, I think, that most links good theology and good poetry. (Two of my favorite contemporary theologians, Rowan Williams and James Alison, write beautiful theology and one of them — Williams — is a fine poet to boot).

Theology that seeks to be beautiful pays a deep and abiding attention to words — to their power and their limitations, to their rootedness in the Word, the eternal Logos, the logic of the universe that orders all our speech (and all our living). Through language that attends with exquisite care to such things, good theology, like good poetry, issues an invitation, arranges an encounter, invites a response.

* * * * *

What I’ve noticed after a couple years’ deep immersion into poetry is that not only does the thought of writing poems intimidate me, but my own writing (and thinking) as a theologian (and a blogger) has begun to shift. As a poetry-loving friend helped me to name it recently: I’ve been reschooled in the power of what words are for, what words are meant to do.

If theology is — or ought to be – more poetic than polemical then I find myself less interested than I used to be in argument and debate, in entering the fray of yet another controversial issue for the sake of scoring points — or simply causing a stir. (One could argue that blogging itself, and especially blogging about the connections between religion, culture, and politics, by definition reveals a desire to stir things up, to court controversy. I hear that; I wrestle with that).

But the truth is that both/all ”sides” of most public controversies are troubling and troubled. I can’t read a Franz Wright poem without knowing — deeply, viscerally — that  brokenness and ruin are everywhere and in everyone, and that gratitude for glimpses of grace in the midst of such misery is the first (and sometimes only) response we can offer. Mary Oliver’s poems break open my heart to a world of beauty that is both ordinary and transcendent, immutable and transitory. I want to pay attention to that world, learn from those insights, teach that truth.

Which isn’t to say that poetry doesn’t make room for the theologian’s (or anyone’s) righteous anger. Many a Wendell Berry poem will do that for you. And that can put me back into blogger-rant mode where I would beat up on Paul Ryan and lament a Romney/Ryan presidency as bad news for the poor and thus for all of America (which I believe it would be). Or I would say that Chick-Fil-A’s stance on gay marriage is unconscionable but so is their reliance on and perpetuation of an unjust, industrial food system.

There. Polemics done.

Now can we get back to poetry?

Soon enough. ENGL 351 starts next week.

 

Sports and the Christian Life or Why Discipleship is Not Like the Olympics

There are lots of ways to talk about the relationship between sports and religion.

The opening scene of Bull Durham comes to mind. As does the cultic quality of America’s obsession with football.

Sport as the center of personal and communal piety has a long history in many cultures, with the U.S. perhaps - to keep the competition motif alive here - winning the prize for the world’s most zealous devotees of the faith.

It works the other way around, too: Athletics as a central trope for describing the life of doctrinal religion. St. Paul, with his love of running and boxing metaphors, comes readily to mind.

And now with the 2012 Summer Olympics in high gear, the high drama of sport - and its inevitable associations with religious faith - are even more present in our lives.

Mostly we see this in athletes who acknowledge God when asked about their skill and success. This is not a new phenomenon but we can thank (or blame) Tim Tebow for elevating it to new levels in recent years.

There’s always the prickly problem of crediting God with athletic victory. Following her stunning performance this past week, American gymnast Gabby Douglas said: ““I give all the glory to God. It’s kind of a win-win situation. The glory goes up to him and the blessings fall down on me.”

It’s hard to know if she meant to imply that God gave her the gold. I’d like to think she didn’t mean that. I’d like to think instead that this young, charismatic gymnast understands her athleticism as a gift to be grateful for, and proper gratitude means stewarding such a gift, taking responsiblity for it, doing all in her power to nurture and develop it and, perhaps most importantly, taking exquisite pleasure in it. This way of thinking about God’s “blessings” could mean that the most “religious” thing an athlete does – elite or not, amateur or professional - is simply to be beautiful in his or her giftedness. God-talk not necessary.

In the Christian life generally we’re to nurture and develop and take joy in whatever gifts or graces we’ve been blessed with. Scripture speaks in various ways about the various gifts God gives God’s people. Yet always the emphasis is on the giving of gifts to edify the whole community, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,” as this week’s appointed (Protestant) epistle lesson has it.

Yet, individualists that we are, our tendency is to think of our gifts and talents as private possessions for self-expression, even self-aggrandizement rather than as shared treasure for the good of the whole. And in our sports-obsessed culture, it is interesting that the gifts in our children we seem most intent to nurture are athletic ones. Before our children can barely walk and often whether or not any native athletic talent is evident, we parents, with laser-like focus, spend tremendous amounts of time, energy, and money in the hopes of . . . of what? that one day our uniquely gifted child will stand on an Olympic podium or wear a championship ring?

That our sons and daughters might have other gifts worthy of such time and attention seems less likely to occur to us.

But what if a child shows evidence of the gift, say, of wisdom or of counsel (right judgment) or fortitude (courage) or understanding? (Four of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit outlined by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica). What if we focused our attention on helping children, even children not our own, steward such gifts?

When we baptize persons, in fact, we promise to nurture them in the life of faith, to support and encourage the gifts they’ve been given as they seek to live fully into their baptismal vows. The idea seems to be that it takes a community to discern one’s gifts, and it takes a community for those gifts to be fully realized for faithful witness in the world.

* * * * *

Olympic athletes are a joy to behold. As a lifelong swimmer, I’m completely in awe of Missy Franklin and many of the other supremely gifted athletes who move with such power and beauty in the water. And I’m now looking forward to enjoying the gifts of the fleet of foot, as track and field takes center stage this coming week.

But I’m mindful, especially as the words from Ephesians chapter 4 will be read and heard in worship this weekend, that the Christian faith works with a different grammar, a different set of assumptions about gifts and how we use them for God’s glory and for the good of Christ’s body. Stewarding gifts in community, for the community, and for the sake of the world is part of the slow, patient work of Christian discipleship. It is mostly unglamorous work, but necessary and holy work nonetheless as we seek to

grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love (Eph. 4:15-16).

That’s it really: it’s about love. Love for each other, love for God and love for the world God has made.

Which can look pretty odd in a culture where sports – much of it cutthroat, commercial, ruthlessly competitive - is the dominant religion.

 

The Shepherd Who Feeds Us

It’s my turn on the bLOGOS rotation at the Ekklesia Project Website. Some reflections on the appointed scripture readings for this weekend:

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23: Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34; 53-56

Eighth Sunday After Pentecost
Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

There is striking beauty in the appointed texts for this weekend.

And there are shepherds.

And the shepherds are beautiful.

I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord. (Jer. 23:4).

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. (Ps. 23:1)

. . . and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. (Mk. 6:34b)

The lesson from Ephesians does not mention shepherds but its images and metaphors are equally beautiful, and shepherd-like:

For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (Eph. 2:14)

When one reads these four lessons together, going back and forth among them, savoring their beauty, noting their obvious (and not so obvious) connections, it is difficult to reconcile the vision they cast of the shalom of God with much of what constitutes ecclesial life in our time. Especially in this season of denominational gatherings in which the worst of ourselves, individually and corporately, is often on display: the petty bickering; the refusal to really listen to each other; the lack of charity and humility in our dealings with those we disagree with.

To read the rest click here.

 

O Taste and See . . .

The Center for Parish Development hosts its annual Convocation July 26-28. It’s not too late to join us for some lively conversation about missional worship. Here’s a foretaste of some of it . . .

1. “And they sang a new song” (Rev. 5:9): The Formative Power of Worship. In this session we will explore what it means to be shaped – body, mind, and spirit – by what we do in the worshiping assembly. Resisting the idea that worship is “useful” (its only purpose is to give glory to God), we’ll look at how prayer and preaching, song and sacrament – indeed, all that we do when we gather as Christ’s body – make of us a people commissioned and privileged to participate in God’s mission in the world.

2. “Therefore let us be thankful” (Heb. 12:28): Communities of Gratitude and Generosity. Much of popular culture (and pop theology) would have us believe that gratitude and generosity are personal attributes that can make us happier, healthier individuals. While not discounting the “therapeutic” value of such habits, we will go deeper into an exploration of worship’s capacity to engender gratitude and generosity communally – to make these virtues constitutive of our way of living God’s mission in the world.

3. “O Taste and See” (Ps. 34:8): Consumption and Over-Consumption at Tables of Plenty. For all that Eucharistic fellowship means and for all that it requires of those who share in it, there is this fundamental imperative: We are to nourish and care for our own bodies and the bodies of others. In light of this we’ll consider how it is that all our sharing of food (and our withholding or wasting of it), our complicity with unjust food systems, and, perhaps most unsettling, all our eating (and overeating) are implicated in this simple meal of bread and wine at the Table of the Lord.

4. “I urge you as aliens and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11): Worship in a Foreign Land. What does it mean to worship a strange God (“love your enemies”; “sell all you have”) in a strange land (“for you were aliens in Egypt”)? How are Christians in North America a people in exile? Our concluding session will examine how the Church’s worship prepares us to engage the culture around us: to name the powers and principalities; to side with the strangers in our midst. The radical, embodied, cruciform witness we offer is one that does not shun or denounce or ridicule but which adheres to the missional impulse: to love the world as God loves it.

* * * * *

The biblical idea is not that God’s church has a mission but that God’s mission has a church. “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church” (Jürgen Moltmann).

This missio dei is the work of healing and restoration, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of the flourishing of all of creation, of welcome, hospitality, and shalom. The Church’s task, then, is not self-preservation or even “renewal” of its own inner life. The Church’s task is to bear witness to God’s mission in the world and to discern and participate in that holy, joyful work wherever we may encounter it.  

Missional worship, then, proclaims and celebrates what God has done, is doing, and will do in and through Jesus. At its best, missional worship draws on the rich resources of historic Christian liturgy, even as it seeks to offer its praise and thanksgiving in the varied contexts of the Church’s life and witness; and it recognizes the calls to false worship all around us: the lure of political power, militarism, status and prestige, the American dream.

Missional worship is, in some sense, circular since it is worship that sends us out into the world (the liturgy after the liturgy as the Orthodox like to say); but it is also true that worship is the primary goal of the missio dei: God’s desire is to be in communion with all that God has made. We were created for worship and “our hearts are restless till they find rest in God” (Augustine).    

 

Slow Church. (Stead)fast Friends.

We gather late in the week in the stifling heat of Chicago.

Every July.

We are called the Ekklesia Project – a pretty cool name, I think, but one that does not fully convey what this scattered-then-gathered-then-scattered-again assemblage of Christians is about. We are Catholics and Congregationalists, Mennonites and Methodists, Presbyterians and Pentecostals, Baptists, Lutherans, New Monastics, House Church Christians, and others. We come from our far-flung communities across North America (mindful that there are others of us in other parts of the world) to be in community intently, intensely for three sweltering days on the campus of DePaul University.

Each year our Gathering has a particular theme: Church and Empire, one year; Wealth and the Household of God, another. Other topics have included race and racism, language and word care, congregational formation, and the Kingdom of Heaven is Like . . . . Next year we’re thinking that we’ll take on the subject of violence, framing it around the church’s call to “learn war no more.”

So we do this thing every year in Chicago where we meet up and try to think and talk about what it means to be the Church, the body of Christ, in the world. We know that it is fashionable to love Jesus and hate the Church—or at least to scorn the Church, belittle it, distance oneself from it. But we love the Church, pained though we are by its spectacular failures, its accommodations to consumerism, nationalism, militarism, and other idolatries. (We spend a good bit of time lamenting this reality).

Yet for the EP, “the Church is the material, living people of God that crosses all borders and human divisions.” It is not an organization of our own making, an instrument for effectiveness in the world, a haven for the like-minded; rather, it is a gift of God meant to be a sign, servant, and foretaste of God’s good shalom. One of the most important ways that Christians bear such witness, we believe, is when we wash each other’s feet. And so we do this, too, when we gather every summer.

And this is what EP is really about: Friendship. As we we are fond of saying when we gather (and when we’re apart), the Ekklesia Project is about discovering friends you didn’t know you had.

In friendship we worship together. We eat meals together. We pray and practice lectio divina together. We throw a Chicago-style pizza party for ourselves. We talk and laugh and argue and laugh well into the night when we gather informally in the dorm’s lobby and lounges. (Did I mention that we like to laugh?). This year we hosted an open mic event so that the talented among us could sing songs, read poems, and tell funny stories.

Our theme this year was “Slow Church: Abiding Together in the Patient Work of God”:

In a world addicted to speed, violence, and the immediate we worship the God who walked with his people for forty years across the wilderness, sat with his people for seventy years in exile, attends to the impoverished and down-and-out, considers the lilies of the fields, loves this world enough to become human, died on a cross rather than kill, and took three days to be resurrected.  Known among us in broken bread, poured-out wine, and a gathered people, we abide in him, and in so doing we are learning to abide with others, and with all creation.

In plenary sessions, break-out discussion groups, and workshops we wondered together what it means to cultivate this kind of slow, patient witness in a fast, anxious world. Jonathan Wilson framed the challenge as two competing narratives: the story of death and the story of life. In the latter story, our story, we claim “the fecundity of the kingdom” as a means for living into the gracious plenty of God’s abiding peace.

In a conversational-style presentation, Stanley Hauerwas and Kyle Childress talked slow. I mean, slow church. (They’re Texans, after all). Evident in all they said was the deep, abiding friendship between them. Their well-delivered one-liners (Kyle: “My church members get called ‘socialists’ because we believe in recycling”; Stanley: “You resist the church growth bullsh*t by going limp”) communicated wisdom born of a lifetime of trying to live faithfully as pastor and professor, respectively. And they made us laugh a lot.

Phil Kenneson patiently, skillfully reminded us of what we know to be true of our life together and our life in God: the gift of God’s presence in the church and the world makes possible the gift of our being present – truly, fully, faithfully - to one another. Three dimensions of this real, human presence are abiding (the condition for receptivity), devotion (the lavish giving of ourselves), and attention (an intense openness toward another). In taking the time to know and be known, to see and be seen, we practice something of the mutual indwelling that is the very life of God.

* * * * *

Does it sound overly dramatic to say that this company of friends – some of whom I know intimately and some who are new to me – have more than once saved my sanity and saved my faith? If so, then happy drama queen I am. But as I’ve just returned from Summer Gathering 2012 where “the slow, patient work of God” was not only an idea to be explored but a reality to be embodied in time spent together with friends, I am reminded of how these enduring relationships are powerfully formative and transformative of my own attempts to practice patience and to be a worshiper of the indwelling God.

And I am grateful.

 

To Know, To Love, To Heal

Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Mark 5:21-43

“The spirit that enables one person to overleap the boundary of the body in knowledge and love and to incorporate the other in the self is matched by the same spirit in the other.”

Luke Timothy Johnson, Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel

Femme Touchant Jesus
Corinne Vonaesch

“He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’”    Mark 5:34

After several days of renewed public debate about health care, we hear this weekend the familiar healing stories from Mark chapter 5. By Sunday we will know the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision regarding challenges to the Affordable Care Act. So politically charged is this discussion, so designed is it to distort, divide, undermine, and confuse, it’s easy to forget that the issue, at its core, is a simple one: how ought a humane society tend to its suffering ones and aim for the well-being of all?

We will also hear this passage on a day when many will be anticipating the Fourth of July, and perhaps expecting their Sunday worship to kickstart the holiday’s celebration. In hearing the text from Mark, such worshipers might well wonder: What does Jesus’ encounters with a desperate, suffering woman and a young girl believed to be dead have to do with America’s love of freedom and fireworks?

Not much, it turns out. And so the preacher intent on proclaiming the gospel on such a day will find little here to prop up views (pro or con) on Obamacare, nor anything at all to underwrite the American ”values” of liberty and independence. What might be gleaned, however, is fresh insight into what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection make possible for our attempts to know him and one another, to love him and one another, to find healing and shalom in the relationships of our lives.

In his book, Living Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson describes learning the living Jesus as a process not unlike that of learning another person. To learn another is to participate in a meeting and exchange of spirit–that dimension of human existence which both includes and transcends bodiliness. That is, we know and are known, we love and are loved when spirit meets spirit, when we are incorporated (again, the language of the body–corpus–still matters here) into another in life-giving, soul-satisfying ways.

This learning of another person, says Johnson, requires certain moral as well as intellectual capacities. The first is trust: “a fundamental openness to the reality of the other.” Without it,

the other person–the one learned–is reduced to object only. As a result, both the spirit of the learner and the spirit of the one learned are occluded.

Attentiveness is also required: a “leaning toward” the other; alertness, yes, but also a posture of receptivity which assumes that “the other is always capable of change and surprise.”

 * * * * *

In Jesus’ encounter with the woman with the flow of blood–this unnamed woman who was desperate, spent, alone, and undone by an unknown illness–we glimpse something of this kind of mutual learning by which one knows and is known, loves and is loved.

The body matters here, of course, because an infirm body is in need of healing, and the woman seems to know (she trusts, attends to) the truth that touching Jesus’ own body–or at least the garments that cover it–is essential to the health and wholeness she seeks. Yet what is effected here, what is efficacious in the encounter is not merely a physical cure but a meeting and exchange of spirit, an entering into the mystery by which mutual indwelling of spirit with spirit is possible.

This woman trusts Jesus and in so doing enlivens his own spirit: “Who touched my clothes? . . . He looked all around to see who had done it” (vv. 30, 32). Jesus himself is undone, so surprised is he by this meeting of her spirit with his. As this woman “leans toward” Jesus in this impossible setting of crowds and noise and overprotective disciples, she receives what he gives and he, likewise, is transformed. Each knows and is known, loves and is loved. She is healed and he is changed.

* * * * *

A wise friend, who uses Johnson’s book in a course on Christian spirituality, recently said to me that the whole Christian life–no, all of human life that is worth living–hinges on this mystery of spirit that makes something like mutual indwelling possible for human beings. If this is not possible, my friend said, if we don’t glimpse the glory and the mystery at the center of this, then all talk of Christian spirituality is silliness. This is what makes any Christian spirituality worthy of the name possible.

I agree with my friend. And I find that in contemplating this familiar gospel story in this particular week we are offered new ways to imagine our own encounters with others: how it is we learn another–come to know and love him or her, as spirit meets spirit in life-giving, soul-satisfying ways.

And in such meetings we glimpse and share in the reality of knowing and being known by, loving and being loved by the resurrected Jesus. His spirit meets our spirit. In word and sacrament we are met, and we, too–like the woman with the flow of blood–can be healed.

 

Community of the Heart

“An experienced psychotherapist told me that a great deal of his work has to do with the quality of the ‘community’ that clients carry around inside them.”

David F. Ford

A dear friend recently reminded me of David Ford’s gem of a book, The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life. On the back cover, Nicholas Wolterstorff describes it beautifully: “[This book's] spirituality is profound and reflective, yet always concrete, and never dishonest or evasive; it uses not only Scripture but literature with creative facility. Simple, yet rich. A jewel of the spiritual life in its everyday manifestations. I want to savor it with repeated readings.”

Ford traces the “multiple overwhelmings” in our lives — the forces that shake us and shape us, those with the power to wound or crush and those that are life-giving and transformative. At stake in reckoning with such tumult is the whole of our lives and our living. “How,” he asks, ”in the midst of all our overwhelmings, are our lives shaped?”

Early on Ford suggests that it is helpful to think of a person as a sort of community, as one whose heart (“that dimension of our self where memory, feeling, imagination, and thinking come together”) is filled with “the faces and voices of those before whom we live.” Some in your community and mine are so much a part of our identity that they are of a piece with our own thinking and feeling. Others are a challenge, even a burden. They may be voices of discouragement or shame; they may be the faces of bereavement, estrangement, or fear.

This “community of the heart” is its own kind of overwhelming — the good and the bad, the welcome and the feared not always easily distinguishable in their deluging effects. But the life-giving faces and voices constitute our deepest mutual relationships: those few people who have “said yes to being overwhelmed by us,” whose membership in our heart’s community is born of a covenant of trust and gratitude and hope.

* * * * *

Every year on the Sunday after Pentecost worshiping communities take up the doctrine of the Trinity. Inferred in Scripture rather than explicitly stated, God’s three-in-one nature poses significant challenges homiletically, liturgically. Children’s sermons on the subject often go the way of the object lesson, with shamrock show-and-tells and instructions about the three states of H2O. And adults, understandably confused by the fuzzy math of trinitarian theology and the dearth of discussion about it the rest of the year, often hang on every word.

But a better way is to remind worshipers that the doctrine of the Trinity is meant not only to tell us the truth about God but to invite us to live that truth — a truth revealed not in abstract theory but in the flesh and blood, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As Rowan Williams puts it:

Nothing is known of God the Trinity that does not come through the Word incarnate . . . Jesus is what we see in history of an infinite identity and reality, God the Word, the One who is next to the Father’s heart.

In Sunday’s gospel lesson, when Jesus invites Nicodemus to be born from above, he overwhelms him with the hospitality of God’s own heart. The learned Nicodemus is not asked to solve a puzzle (“How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”) but to have his life shaped by the overwhelming mystery of a divine love that, as the passage’s most famous verse puts it, has been poured out on all creation: “For God so loved the world . . . . “

Jesus’ life and teaching would embody that love, would scandalize the world by it, and here, early in John’s gospel, the overwhelming of Nicodemus by an incomprehensible love is also his undoing – “the overturning of his certainty” — so that he (and we) might die to self and self-righteousness and be born anew to the truth of God’s eternal life and love, here and now.

 The good news of the gospel is that in the communities of our own hearts we can glimpse every day — not just on Trinity Sunday – something of God’s own inner life. In those life-giving, transformative encounters with people whose love and generosity overwhelm us, whose goodness overtakes us, we participate in — partially, fleetingly — the divine perichoresis that makes all of creation possible. Our own hearts become places of hospitality as God’s overwhelming love shapes us and reshapes us and shapes us again, expanding our capacity, enlarging our willingness to offer in return that same love, generosity, and goodness.

As the poet Micheal O’ Siadhail says with his own overwhelming beauty:

Gratutious, beyond our fathom, both binding and freeing,
this love re-invades us, shifts the boundaries of our being.

 

Memorial Day and the Church’s Soldier Fetish

From last year, but still seems fitting:

Why is it that conversations about Christianity and war are more likely to take place in academic settings rather than ecclesial ones? Why don’t pastors and preachers talk about war as much as professors do? What homiletical and catechetical conditions (failures?) make it almost impossible for congregations to undertake a study of, say, the proportionality criterion for just war or the reasons for the early church’s unequivocal pacifism?

And how does the “support the troops” ethos that has pervaded liberal and conservative America and low-and high-church Christianity contribute to the poverty of our discourse around these matters? That is, how does the fear of being perceived as anti-soldier silence preachers and teachers who have an obligation to preach and teach the peace of Christ in churches that glamorize, sentimentalize, and fetishize war – and the soldiers who fight them?

And where exactly did this new “warrior ethic,” summed up in the mantra “support our troops,” come from?

In an essay in the Society of Christian Ethics Journal, Patrick McCormick traces the confluence of narratives from liberal Hollywood filmmakers and the Washington war machine in which the valor of the individual soldier – not the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the greater cause – trumps every question about the justification of war. Genuine political debate about the rightful use of military force has been supplanted with this “idealization of soldiers,” and the just war ethic has been replaced with a “warrior code” — an ethic that embraces every war as just.

So now most Christians get their theology of war from Saving Private Ryan. What matters in the movie (and in real life) is not whether the war is just but that the warrior is righteous; and the warrior achieves righteousness simply by being courageous and loyal to fellow comrades. Support the troops and don’t ask questions. (Our recent fascination with the Navy Seals who “took out” Osama bin Laden only reinforces this new stance).

How can clergy and church educators gain the necessary courage to preach and teach regularly about war, making its intrinsic connections to our foundational practices: Baptism and Eucharist? When will church leaders trust those in their care with the complex history and theology of war in the Christian tradition (and not debate the finer points with their clergy friends only)? And when will we realize that we need to address these matters not so much on Memorial Day or Veterans Day but, more fittingly, during Advent or when we wash each other’s feet?

And how can discernment about war and violence be recovered as a communal, ecclesial practice since, as Bill Cavanaugh has pointed out, the church has always assumed “that those who would judge rightly in these matters would be followers of Jesus Christ, formed in the virtues of a disciple, and given authority by the Holy Spirit within the community of disciples.”

Hardly academic.

 

Assembling in the Spirit

It’s my turn on the bLOGOS rotation at the Ekklesia Project website:

Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” Acts 2:1

I was going to title this post “The Summer of Our Discontent.”

For various denominational bodies, late spring and early summer are seasons for gathering “all together in one place.” United Methodists conference together, Episcopalians and Baptists convene, and Presbyterians generally assemble (or assemble generally). Long-time participants in these gatherings and others like them might say, with a cynical wink, that, except for the “all together” part (and the being “in one place” part), these meetings are a real blast—productive, enjoyable, edifying . . . . . . Not.

The recent United Methodist General Conference, for example, was regarded by both participants and observers as emblematic of the church’s deep-seated woes: a bloated bureaucracy too unwieldy to do much good; back-room deals (still? really?) that always breed bitterness and disgust; a growing distrust of leadership at all levels; an aging membership tone-deaf to the pleas of the young; intractable theological disagreements that align with partisan political commitments. The damage assessment continues to be broadcast far and wide, much of it startlingly ungracious.

To read the rest click here.

 

Gay Marriage and God

“We are led into the knowledge that our identity is being made in the relations of bodies, not by the private exercise of will or fantasy: we belong with and to each other, not to our ‘private’ selves (as St. Paul said of mutual sexual commitment), and yet are not instruments for each other’s gratification.”

“The Body’s Grace,” Rowan Williams

My hunch: The theological polarization around Amendment One, which does not necessarily track as a liberal-conservative divide, is here to stay. At least for several more years. Decades, maybe. Such is the glacial pace of change in the ekklesia of God: slavery . . . women . . . human sexuality–it’s a long, slow slog with a lot of heartache and misunderstanding along the way.

And, contrary to the polarizing tactics of soundbyte journalism (and soundbyte religion), there are good people on both sides of the divide. (There are also bigoted, graceless, humorless people on both sides, but there’s a lot of good, too).

And there’s this: a third way of thinking theologically about marriage, including gay marriage–a way that resists the go-to arguments and clichés of both conservatism and liberalism. This third way locates the basis and legitimacy of marriage not in biological complementarity or in the soft logic of ”live and let live” but in the divine trinitarian relations–that is, in the very being of God.

This can’t help but sound a little ridiculous to those outside the Church–and perhaps to many within it–but here’s the thing: The source of a sound theology of marriage cannot be the Bible exclusively or perhaps even primarily, since its witness on the subject is necessarily varied, even contradictory, conditioned by cultures and customs spanning milennia. Which is not to say–as the liberal argument might put it–that modernity now trumps antiquity and thank God for that.

Rather, it is to see the Bible for what it is and for what it isn’t: a richly-varied record of encounter, not a handbook of personal moral instruction. And it is to resist the idolatry that attends so much of our engagement with Scripture–the tendency to worship the book instead of the One (or the Three-in-One, as I’ll get to in a minute) to whom the book points.

A theology of marriage begins, ironically, with the unmarried Jesus. Not the liberal Jesus of fuzzy love nor the conservative Jesus of family values (neither exists in Scripture) but Jesus, the Son, the second person of the Trinity who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, subsists in relations of divine reciprocity, mutual indwelling, eternal self-giving, ceaseless caritas. Marriage, christologically construed, bears witness to, even as it participates in this divine economy of grace and gift.

Those of us who marry, says Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. (in an argument for gay marriage), give ourselves over to another in order that we may be caught up in God’s own desire for us, that “we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.” Thus human, sexual, married love bears a trinitarian mark.

But such love is also, always–of course–bodily. So how does this bodily sexual love mirror the Trinity? In my view, no one is more convincing (or eloquent) in answering this question than feminist theologian Sarah Coakley:

What would that involve? Surely, at the very least, a fundamental respect each for the other, an equality of exchange, and the mutual ekstasis of attending on the other’s desire as distinct, as other. This is the opposite of abuse, the opposite of distanced sexual control; it is, as the French feminist Luce Irigaray has written, with uncanny insight, itself intrinsically trinitarian; sexual love at its best is not ‘egological,’ not even a ‘duality in closeness’ . . . As each goes out to the other in mutual abandonment and attentiveness, so it becomes clear that a third is at play – the irreducibility of a ‘shared transcendence.’

There is nothing in a trinitarian theology of marriage which makes heterosexuality normative. In fact, as Rogers insists, embodiment–which is at the heart not just of our sexual selves but of our creatureliness–implies diversity: “As the Spirit forms the bodies of human beings into the body of Christ, she characteristically gathers the diverse and diversifies the corporate, making members of one body.”

* * * * *

Much of the heated rhetoric of the last few days has been driven by fear: on one side, the fear of monumental social change that would unsettle and disrupt a familiar world; on the other, fear of the ever-diminishing dignity of those long-excluded from full participation in the social order. On Sunday, the lectionary for mass will include the passage from 1 John which says that “perfect love casts out phobos.” (Protestants will read from a different chapter of the letter).

This is the third way. The way of love. The way of a God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–who has created us for communion with each other and with God’s very self. For those who choose the vocation of marriage, this third way allows the labels to fall away; it refuses the polarizing politics of fear. And it’s where the body’s grace is something we learn to receive–tentatively, hopefully–with gratitude and wonder.

 

Beat the Gay Away: Reading Scripture Badly

What happens in church doesn’t stay in church.

At least not in the age of social media where one provocative Sunday morning video can land you on CNN in the morning and in the newsfeed of millions of Facebook users by mid-afternoon. A Baptist preacher in Fayetteville, North Carolina found this out the hard way when his controversial sermon exploded on the internet within 48 hours of delivery.

Sean Harris was addressing an upcoming state-wide vote on Amendment One, while he was also (or, rather, supposed to be) preaching–ostensibly from Mark chapter 10. But preaching partisan politics from the pulpit (loss of tax exempt status for you, Berean Baptist Church?) is probably the least of Harris’s worries.

The Amendment, which calls for “marriage between a man and a woman,” is redundant and unnecessary since same-sex marriage is already illegal in North Carolina. But Harris’s pitch for votes was vicious. Exploiting bigotry and fear, and to nervous titters and rousing “amens” from his congregants, he gave explicit instructions for how to deal with children who might display “homosexual tendencies”:

Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.

Or this for your “butch” daughters:

You rein her in and you say, ‘Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.’

And we thought “pray the gay away” was bad.

Harris (sort of) apologized on Wednesday. His official statement of retraction was lawyerly, and struck the tone of many a grudgingly offered public mea culpa. That is, he wasn’t really sorry for what he said; he was sorry that some were offended. (Sorry for those who were offended is another way these non-apologies do their passive-aggressive, patronizing work).

But Harris stood by his view that “effeminate behavior is ungodly.” Drawing on passages from the Old and New Testament, and PowerPointing them to the congregation, Harris condemned homosexuality with a smug confidence that his interpretation of the Bible on these matters is unassailable. (He told the congregation, after all, that they had a “special dispensation” from him to use violence against their children).

If only biblical interpretation were easy.

While Harris pivots into damage control in North Carolina, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church, meeting this week in Tampa, lost an opportunity to deal honestly with its own brokenness over issues of sexuality. (And why is it that we American Christians are so fixated on sex? For Christ’s sake–literally–there’s a suffering world out there waiting for a word of grace, a tangible sign of hope, and we wrangle obsessively, continually, mean-spiritedly over sex acts and supposed limp wrists. God help us).

Two prominent United Methodist pastors proposed a sensible substitution amendment (ah, the Church–like the State–and its amendments!) that offers a way for rethinking Methodism’s bitter divisiveness over LGBT issues. In part, it says:

A significant minority of our church views the scriptures that speak to same-sex intimacy as reflecting the understanding, values, historical circumstances and sexual ethics of the period in which the scriptures were written, and therefore believe these passages do not reflect the timeless will of God. They read the scriptures related to same-sex intimacy in the same way that they read the Bible’s passages on polygamy, concubinage, slavery and the role of women in the church.

These two pastors contend that long-standing interpretive differences on matters of same-sex relationships ought not keep us at odds with each other and with those whom we are called to love. The language of the amendment, especially as it relates to those who view same-sex intimacy as contrary to scripture, is generous, conciliatory, full of humility. As these things go in the bloated bureacracy that is the UMC, the amendment offered real hope for a denomination in crisis.

Of course it was defeated.

If only we could get past the limited and limiting view of the Bible as an instructional manual and see it, instead, as a record of encounter: the people Israel coming to terms with a God who rescues those in trouble and who relentlessly seeks their good; the early followers of the Way realizing that in a Jewish peasant dialectician God’s will for a reconciled creation had been enfleshed.

If scripture is this first, then the “advice” passages  — do this, don’t do this — can be seen in the context of their particular time and place and in the light of an overarching narrative of God’s boundless, indiscriminate love for all that God has made. If we learned this in church, then it shouldn’t stay in church. “See how they love one another,” might be what they said about us.

If only.

 

Kiss My Assessment, or, Why “No Child Left Behind” in College is a Bad Idea

This post is a revision of this one: Classroom Love.

What do your students know and how do they know it?

Giving tests, like the comprehensive final exams that college students everywhere will take in the coming days, just doesn’t cut it anymore. This is the age of “assessment” in higher education, in which administrators and accreditors expect measurable, reportable ”outcomes.”

Having colonized institutions like medicine and government services, the űber-instrument of outcomes-assessment made its way into K-12 instruction in the early 2000s. So if ”assessment” sounds a little like No Child Left Behind for undergraduates that’s because assessment is pretty much No Child Left Behind for undergraduates. In 2005 Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, commissioned a panel on the future of higher education which concluded that colleges and universities should “measure and report meaningful student learning outcomes.” This information, the panel said, should be made available to the public and ought to be “a condition of accreditation.”

Academics and administrators have been hashing this out ever since, arguing with an educational philosophy/mandate born of Bush-era politics (not a little irony here: leftist academics toeing the conservative line on education) and arguing with each other about whether, how, and when to implement it. You want Josh and Katie to be critical thinkers? Of course. Prove it, then. Whether your subject is Irish Poetry or Microbiology or the Sociology of Gender, show us how you will test and assess the skill of critical thinking (and a host of others) in your students.

Reputable counter-commissions and studies that call into question some of the fundamentals of outcomes-assessment have had little influence but they raise interesting concerns. For example, The Study of Undergraduate Learning at the University of Washington determined that writing and critical thinking are not generic skills but rather are “mediated by the disciplines.” It turns out that such skills are learned and applied differently in, say, chemistry than they are in Christian Ethics. The upshot? The attempt to measure broad competencies–assessment’s clarion call–is futile.

The root cause of this push toward assessment (from kindergarten to college) is economic: how will America compete in a sophisticated global economy if we aren’t producing graduates with certain measurable, marketable skills? How will we contribute to advances and innovations in science, technology, and industry if schools can’t adequately demonstrate what their students are learning?

Never mind that No Child Left Behind has been abandoned in secondary education. We have another metaphor, another instrument for measuring achievement and outcomes: Race to the Top. It is telling, though not surprising, that learning in western democracies is almost universally conceived of as a competition. Republican or Democrat, every modern president’s plea for overhauling America’s educational system–no matter how lofty or flowery the rhetoric–comes down to this dreary rationale: we must improve our schools for the sake of capitalism.

Sigh.

All this can weigh heavy on a teacher’s heart. Even when the learning outcomes have been “embedded” in the syllabus and the exam questions have been reworked to account for  required ”broad competencies,” we are still left with one of the foundational truths of classroom pedagogy: that the very nature of the teaching/learning enterprise–instructing, hearing, comprehending–is necessarily partial and incomplete. Professors can never say all that needs to be said; students can never hear all that needs to be heard. Failure is an inescapable part of the process. But this kind of failure is morally instructive; it reveals that education is less about mastery (and the instruments deemed necessary to measure it) and more about the kind of humility required to be a life-long pursuer of truth.

Finally, assessing the competencies of our students doesn’t address how it is we’re supposed to love them. Indeed, “loving the students you teach” is unintelligible speech within the discourse of “learning outcomes.” But good teachers come to love their students (which doesn’t mean that they always like them) because the art of teaching is an act of giving oneself away without reservation or embarrassment, of regularly making a fool of oneself for the sake of a subject one loves unequivocally. When you do this enough, the love can’t help but spill onto the other people in the room. If you’re lucky, once in a while those other people love you back.

Presidents and panels, administrators and accreditors don’t seem interested in measuring this kind of outcome. At least we can be thankful for that.

 

In Life, in Death, in Life Beyond Death

It’s the second movement of Leonard Bernstein’s choral work, Chichester Psalms. A boy soprano (or a countertenor), in the “role” of the shepherd boy, David, sings in Hebrew the opening verses of Psalm 23. He is accompanied–sparingly, fittingly–by the harp. The first several measures are tender but not tentative; filled with sentiment, but without sentimentality (this per Bernstein’s instructions). When the women’s voices take over the text at גַּם כִּי־אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת . . . (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .) there’s an ethereal echo-canon effect. This part of the movement, when executed well, is something sublime.

The tranquil beauty is then violently interrupted by the tenors and basses intoning the first four verses of Psalm 2: לָמָּה, רָגְשׁוּ גוֹיִם; וּלְאֻמִּים יֶהְגּוּ־רִיק . . . (Why do the nations rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?). It’s a manic few measures (allegro feroce)–abrupt, angular, agitated–with frenzied orchestral accompaniment.

But gradually, unobtrusively, and, according to the vocal score, ”blissfully unaware of threat,” the women return to Psalm 23: תַּעֲרֹךְ לְפָנַי,שֻׁלְחָן נֶגֶד צֹרְרָי (Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies . . . ). Underneath them, though, in the men’s percussive whispers, the turmoil continues. Even when the solo voice completes the last phrase of the 23rd Psalm and the women repeat its opening line, the final few measures of the movement belong to the instruments who, misterioso, recall the disturbing interruption of Psalm 2. The movement ends, as Bernstein himself once said, “in unresolved fashion, with both elements, faith and fear, interlocked.”

I sang the Chichester Psalms this past Sunday as part of a reunion concert at the college where I teach (and from which I graduated many years ago). The event honored Dr. Larry Parsons, the school’s long-time choral director and professor of music who is retiring this year. The Bernstein piece is a favorite of his and it was both musically satisfying and emotionally bittersweet to sing it one last time under his direction.

But I also sang the work with other thoughts in mind. On Friday I learned of the death of a dear friend, a woman of such light and loveliness that, in the years I have known her, she seemed to exude a kind of palpable joy at the sheer giftedness of being alive. She was playful and kind, compassionate and magnanimous–always sensitive to the needs and struggles of others. She was a person of deep faith, possessed of a fierce integrity and with little patience for apathy, idleness, or easy answers. In all my knowing of her she was a seeker of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

But in recent months my friend faced serious struggles of her own. Old demons returned. Important relationships were lost. And despite having given so much encouragement to others through the years, she could not receive the needed strength and support from those who loved her and who reached out to her. She was broken and in despair. She felt alone. I know that, till the end, she sought to hold onto belief, but in her death, ”in unresolved fashion, both elements, faith and fear, interlocked.”

And yet unresolved tension is not the end of things.

The coda of the third and final movement of the Bernstein is the first verse of Psalm 133:

הִנֵּה מַה־טּוֹב, וּמַה־נָּעִים– שֶׁבֶת אַחִים גַּם־יָחַד.

Hineh mah tov, Umah na’im, Shevet aḥim Gam yaḥad

Behold how good, and how pleasant it is, for brethren to dwell together in unity.

By including it, Bernstein intended it, he said, as “a prayer for peace.” But it is a prayer born of pain and struggle. Bernstein conveys this musically in the opening of the third movement with its tonal chords, dissonant semitones, and minor 9th chords. Conflict and irresolution abound. After this menacing dissonance and before the final coda, Psalm 131 is sung in its entirety. The musical tension is relieved and this gentle chorale, sung in rare 10/4 time, prefigures the final prayer that all might “dwell together in unity.”

In broader terms, the entire work might be said to represent the bringing together of the seemingly irreconcilable: everything from minor seconds and major sevenths to Bernstein’s own eclectic musical styles to gutteral Hebrew texts set for an English cathedral choir. That Bernstein wrote the Chichester Psalms in the mid 1960s with that era’s cultural upheaval and racial tension only makes the prayer for peace more poignant.

But on Sunday–a day that resonates with resurrection hope and with the promise of rest and renewal for all of creation–I sang it for my friend. I offered a prayer for her peace, that she might now dwell in unity, the tension of faith and fear finally resolved in her weary, restless spirit. I pray that she now rests eternally in God, that light perpetual shines on her, and that she knows as never before that in life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone.

Thanks be to God.

 

Maundy Thursday is for April Fools

Reposted from Holy Week 2010.

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Is it any wonder that since the beginning of the Jesus movement Christians have been suspected of doing strange things when they gather for their sacred rituals?

Cannibalism was the charge leveled against the earliest Christians: “What do you mean you eat the body and blood of your Lord?” incredulous civil authorities demanded of those first underground believers. Their understandable horror is lost on us.

This ”fellowship meal” that Christians continue to share (sounds so benign, doesn’t it?) is rooted in denial, betrayal, a disciple’s suicide, a Messiah’s death, the body and blood of this crucified Messiah, and . . . dirty feet.

Jesus gave the mandatum (from which we derive “Maundy”)–”to wash one another’s feet”–after he showed his disciples how to do it. This act of humility, he said, is not peripheral but integral to life in the reign of God. It is servant leadership learned in the doing of it.

With his enthusiasm characteristically misplaced, Peter wants the full-service wash: “my hands and head also, please!” But Peter’s foolishness provides the opportunity for Jesus to prefigure another friend’s imminent betrayal: “you are clean, though not all of you.”

Peter’s ignorant exuberance. The silent treachery of Judas. This fugitive community gathered for the last meal of a soon-to-be-condemned state criminal. Strange beginnings for a strange community, indeed.

In the midst of misunderstanding and a friend’s double-cross, Jesus sinks down to the lowliest of places to reveal not only the nature of servant leadership in the Kingdom but the very meaning of his death. Into the chaos and confusion of human existence the God of heaven stoops to dwell; into deceit and double-dealing, into the misery, fraud, and loneliness of our small lives–into this and more the Word became incarnate, and lived among us “full of grace and truth.” And the life he lived led to the death he died.

In a video segment of the popular Bible study, Jesus in the Gospels, South African theologian and Methodist bishop Peter Storey notes how fond Christians are of saying–especially during Holy Week perhaps–that “God sent Jesus to die on the cross.” But that way of putting it, says Storey, robs Jesus of his humanity, his capacity for moral choice; Jesus, on this view, is little more than a programmed robot, marching passively to a preordained fate.

God sent Jesus into the world not to die, Storey reminds us, but to love. And to those who tried to fence his love in, whose empty legalism was exposed, whose very social order was threatened–to those it became clear that to stop his loving they would have to destroy him. And so they did.

But on the night before he died, Jesus spent his love–his profligate, prodigal love–in an act of domestic servitude, washing the feet of his mystifed family of followers. This act of love was wasted on a dunce like Peter and a scoundrel like Judas and from this we know that it is wasted, even now, on cons and failures like us.