…bending toward the light

“… The far-left wing of the Democrat Party, not mainstream Democrat ideology, the values, the planks in the platform of the Democrat Party. It’s the far-left wing of the party is getting ready to take over the entire federal government.” (Republican Party Vice-Presidential Nominee, Sarah Palin)

At least since the Council of Chalcedon, ‘orthodox’ Christians have spoken of Jesus as both fully human and fully divine.  The divine way of thinking about Jesus told us that what we saw in this historical figure was actually a glimpse into the heart of God.  And the humanity of Jesus told us that God had chosen to come among us not in glory and power, or as a celebrity or success, but as a marginal Jew on the fringes of Roman imperial power and entitlement.

The Jesus I grew up learning about in the Gospel accounts allied himself not with smug religiosity or narcissists dressing for success or desperately grasping for control, but with the poor, the meek, the outcasts.  Jesus clearly wouldn’t have won a nomination, much less an election, for office in his day or ours.  And “God and Guns” certainly would not have been his campaign slogan had he tried.

Jesus infuriated the religious-moralists of his time, the Pharisees. He made welcome a woman caught in adultery, and tax-collectors, not tax-cutters. Jesus taught about the blessedness of the poor, who better than any “rich young ruler” knew what it was like to live with only God between them and extinction. Jesus threw the capitalists out of the temple, refusing to tolerate the creation of wealth for some by the charging of outrageous rates of interest to others.  He was willing to pay Caesar what was owed by law, not because he was a free-spending liberal, but because Jesus knew that we owe even more than that to God … in fact we owe God everything, which of course is a lot more than most politicians usually are willing to pay.

Jesus refused to take up arms against his persecutors, even going so far as to call blessed the peacemakers, not those who waged war in his time.  Jesus wasn’t Red or Blue, but inspired his followers to teach that the world’s distinctions have been overcome, that God looks at Jew and Greek, female and male, free and bound, with one and the same eye of compassion.

Jesus was a realist who knew that the world wasn’t yet like this, and that there would be those who resisted what he called “the Reign of God” until the very end of time — goats, he called them, who stubbornly refused to hear the call to the sheep by the Good Shepherd offering shelter and refuge, rather than the wolf’s advantage over the weak.  Yet in his confrontation with the principalities and powers of the world, Jesus refused to appeal to our lower-nature.  He never succumbed to negative campaigning for the Kingdom, yet despite this he was never afraid to call our attention to the costs to humanity of falling prey to our ongoing desires for vengeance and violence and control.

Jesus probably have been called a ’socialist’ and a ‘liberal’ and probably even a ‘traitor’ for not putting country above God — maybe even a ‘terrorist’ for palling around with a criminal on the cross.  By some, I have no doubt, Jesus would have been viewed as a dangerous proponent of the agenda of the far-left wing who threatened those who assumed they had power and religion on their side.  In fact, he was, and died for it.

I have no illusions that any political candidate can provide to this nation, or any other, what human beings  need in order to turn back our presumed entitlement to whatever we have the power to take — or from lying about one another … or choosing to play soccer, go to brunch, or sleep in late on the seventh day of the week, rather than keeping Sabbath.  I know that there will always be idols along the way to tempt us off course — that like the Hebrew people in the Exodus, Christians often will likely be the first to grumble and murmur about God’s way of being God, even when we stand on the brink of The Promised Land, too foolish and arrogant to be able to take God up on the offer to live “on earth as it is in heaven.”

I plan on voting tomorrow for Barack Obama, not because I think this will fix everything that is wrong, or because I believe that doing so can bring an ‘end’ to human arrogance and our willingness to botch up most  of what God dreams for us.  I will not vote for Barack Obama because I think “God is on his side” — God, in my Book, brooks no such favorites — or with fist clenched in anger because I think that “the other side” is evil, unredeemable, or even ‘un-American’.

I will vote for Senator Obama because doing so challenges me to reclaim my higher self, to choose to live the remainder of my days with as much of a view to the needs of others, as to my own comfort and security, national or financial.  I will vote as I do because as a Christian these are times that challenge me to learn to trust, and even love, more deeply God’s strange and compelling way of being God, even when it leads through suffering, rather than simply towards privilege — towards the cross of tomorrow, not just into the entitlements of today.

If that pushes me to the far-left wing, then there it is.

I often hear people describing a tension they feel between “being” the church and “serving” the world.  Often it is described as a choice between “maintaining” the church versus being “missional” and oriented toward the world beyond the confines of the church building.  And if the options were defined by this either/or choice alone, who among us would vote for “maintaining the status quo” versus being part of God’s gracious and redemptive work throughout the fabric of the world around us?

I don’t believe that these two options actually exhaust the options; rather, they “frame” an important question erroneously. Once we’re told the Rorschach ink blot is ‘really’ a duck, it’s hard to see anything else.

When we use dichotomies such as lay/ordained, Sunday/everyday, church/world, and even maintenance/mission, I realize that we are struggling to name an issue that is troubling us; usually one half of the pair is seen as neglected or undervalued, and the point of the either/or language is to level the playing field, restore the “balance,” and put the two halves back together again.

In my experience, however, once we start with an assumption that these pairs are opposites, it proves impossible to get them back together again.  The Humpty Dumpty Effect, I call it.  After the crash - Humpty’s tragic fall –”All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, couldn’t get Humpty Dumpty together again.”

We need to tell a better story.  Which means we need to start in a different place, with different assumptions. We can view Humpty as tragedy, or see at the bottom of the wall the beginnings of an omelette!  It makes all the difference whether the story begins with the assumption that Humpty’s purpose was to remain pepetually uncracked, or whether he was even perhaps a souffle-in-waiting.

When it comes to the dichotomies of faith and works, or church and world, I personally have come to tell the stories of these tensions from a different starting point.  Rather than having two “things” that need to be restored to unbroken unity, I have come to see faith and life as moments in a larger sacramental rhythm.  Faith is about gathering as the church to be fed and nurtured by Word and Sacrament, and then being sent out to be the sacramental presence of God in the world and to do the works appropriate to who we are.  As Mother Theresa described it, “you are God’s hands, God’s feet in the world.”

If we stay within the confines of institutional-church-life alone, it is like breathing in but never exhaling; the church, like a human body, risks smothering to death.  Breathing out is necessary if we’re going to benefit from the next breath in.  And in like manner, we can’t just constantly breathe out; the body of Christ “burns out” unless it is refreshed and renewed by “the inspiration – literally, breathing in — of the Holy Spirit” in the community of worship and life, the Church, through Word and Sacrament.

And so it is that I see the ministries of laity and clergy having roles in both the arena of “the church” and the arena of “the world”.  The practice of building up the Body of Christ, it is true, must never be reduced just to “maintenance” – we are growing and changing – serving and responding to the needs of creation around us — or we are dying.  Yet the mission of that Body also cannot be sustained over time if it is just giving itself away, acting as if we are self-sufficient and never in need of “returning and rest”.  And so people who “come to Church” wanting just to “play Church” are as off target as are people who think they’ve got to turn against or away from the community of the church in order to focus sufficiently on serving the world.  The Worship and Outreach Committees need each other.

For me we’ve got to recover a way of thinking of ourselves as ‘church’ – as ‘the people of God’ – wherever we are and whatever we do.  And we’ve got to recover the unity of the reality we all live it – we are not “more in the world” when we are away from the community of the church, nor have we “gotten away from the world” when we gather to learn and worship and pray and be fed at Christ’s table.  We take the grace of that table with us every day, and we bring the cares and needs of the world back with us to God’s table again each time we gather.  In that rhythm I personally discover again and again that we as human beings are “necessary but not sufficient” to bring in God’s Reign “on earth as it is in heaven” – we need one another, and we need to be grounded in our relationship with God and our neighbors (loving God, loving our neighbors as ourselves).

And no one of us is capable of doing all this at the same time.  A curriculum I am developing in my job for the Alban Institute, “Faith and Everyday Leadership,” focuses on the role of Christians to take the lead in being God’s hands and feet in the larger world.  The “Transition in Ministry” program run by Lilly Endowment, which Alban has recently evaluated and examined closely, is focused on helping young clergy to find their own place in this rhythm, and learn how to be sustained and fed for the long haul.  Both programs need the other; there is no one program that can “do it all” – even though I hope both programs always remember the broader perspective, the wider rhythm of gathering and being sent out.  I hope they both remain essential to being the church and doing God’s work in the world.

Episcopal layperson and lawyer William Stringfellow once wrote that lay people bail out on our vocational call to represent Christ in the world by asking clergy to do it for us – to be the face of God’s presence amidst the demands and needs of the world.  He said as a young man, he traded that vocation for a substitute frenetic church-participation.  Until the day he realized what he had become – a “profession Christian” – or in his words, “a Pharisee”.  Stringfellow said that only later did he realize how essential the vocation of clergy is to the calling of lay persons.  He wrote an essay entitled, “No Clergy, No Laity,” where he said that without the clergy doing their own sacramental vocation of gathering and feeding and nurturing and sending God’s people into the world, the laity will revert to “playing church” – acting like “junior clergy”.  And clergy will not be able to “be clergy” because they will be too busy “doing what the laity should be doing” – representing Christ in the world.  We need each other in order to be ourselves.  For we are, all together, “the people of God,” the “Body of Christ,” and I think St. Paul understood this well when he wrote about every member of that Body having its own distinct and essential place.

But just because I understand it this way doesn’t mean that it is at all easy to live this out day to day.  For that, we also need one another deeply.  I live convinced that no one of us has the whole picture much less can be and do all the functions of the entire Body of Christ.  We need one another so that Christ’s Body can be healthy and whole and vital for the work God has for us to do.  None of us can say that we have no need of another.  At least I know I can’t.  And so I continue to work to find ways of bringing people together, and getting them to step back and look differently at “the mess we’re in,” so that we can step back into the messiness of the world together with a renewed sense of mission and purpose and direction.  If anyone thus far had written the book or invented the program to make this happen, God’s Kingdom would already have come in its fullness!!  And obviously it hasn’t.  So just as obviously we’ve still got lots to do, and lots to learn about who we are as “the people of God.”

I am always heartened to be reminded of fellow pilgrims along the way, who are still seeking, inquiring, remaining willing to act to take risks and try new things.  We need one another for wisdom and insight, and sometimes just plain strength and courage, so that we can get up every morning and say, as St. Benedict taught his monks, “And so we begin again.”

The Washington Post, June 26, 2008

High Court Strikes Down D.C. Ban on Handguns

Justices’ 5-4 ruling strikes down D.C.’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as
incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment

“The 5 to 4 decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia represented a monumental change in federal jurisprudence and went beyond what the Bush administration had counseled. It said that the government may impose some restrictions on gun ownership, but that the District’s strictest-in-the-nation ban went too far under any interpretation.

Scalia wrote that the Constitution leaves the District a number of options for combating the problem of handgun violence, “including some measures regulating handguns.”

“But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,” he continued. “These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”

The court also held unconstitutional the requirement that shotguns and rifles be kept disassembled or unloaded or outfitted with a trigger lock. The court called it a “prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”

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by Elizabeth I. Steele

Defining the church’s ministry by responding to people’s needs is a common notion; but, because of the blurred line between want and need, no matter how much we speak of needs or perceived needs, it puts the church in the position of being defined not by its faith or history but by people’s wants. This trivializes the church, its mission, and its outreach. It eviscerates the heart of the church’s message and cuts the church off from its identity as the people of Christ. But the attitudes engendered in people who come to congregations expecting the church to make meeting their needs (or, more likely, their wants) a priority also harms the church. Simply put, when we say the church is to meet people’s needs, many people personalize that message. They hear, “If I go to church, those folk will take care of me.” In selling the church as a place where people’s needs are met, we draw people for whom there is, at least in their perception, an implied promise that if they come to the church it will provide them with what they think they need. The measurement of a congregation then becomes personal: “Is it meeting my needs?”

These needs are not limited to the basic needs of food, safety, and shelter. In all but the poorest congregations, members tend to meet those needs on their own. More often people turn to the church for emotional and spiritual well-being. They envision the church providing what they think they need to ensure contentment and satisfaction. Their confusion between needs and wants means their attitude often becomes not “Is this congregation meeting my needs?” but “Is this congregation giving me what I want?” They come believing the church will have as its priority, in terms of time and effort, taking care of whatever they feel is important. They require the church to respond to them personally. They believe it is the church’s job to listen to them, act on their ideas, and support their beliefs. Other aspects of the congregation’s life, other things it might be doing, are strictly secondary to the parts that impact them directly. So, if their concern is children’s ministry, they aren’t interested in outreach to singles or empty-nesters. If their interest is in traditional music, contemporary hymns or a praise service will be deemed unimportant. At best, they will treat such activities with disinterest. At worst, they will see such endeavors as detractions from their concern that should therefore be eliminated.

What happens when these people feel their needs are not being met? That is, what occurs when they do not get what they want? They believe the church is letting them down. It is failing to do as promised, which they see as a breach of contract. In response, they may leave, or they may challenge whatever is happening and whoever is in charge until the promised care-taking and attention are provided.

A Sense of Entitlement

Jesus said, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). He also said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 14:24). Christian faith has always been about giving, not receiving. Those who expect the church to respond to their needs—no matter what—frequently have little interest in doing for others. They came to be cared for, so they see being asked to help others as changing the rules. The signs of declining commitment noted by many pastors—lower rates of worship attendance, pledging, and other forms of participation—indicate this emphasis on receiving. So do the requests, ranging from minor to impossible, that people feel free to make of congregations and the often extreme reactions they have when a congregation does not do as they desire. The underlying thinking appears to be this: The church is supposed to care for my needs, so I can ask whatever I desire of the church. It does not matter whether or not the congregation knows me, nor does the difficulty of my request matter. I do not need to cooperate or be flexible. It is the congregation’s duty to respond, giving me what I want the way I want it.

A Source of Disruption

Churches include people who are not only troublesome and disruptive but who also feel free to attack, diminish, and destroy church leaders, including and especially pastors. A portion of the blame for such disruptive conflict must rest with the needs definition of ministry. As mentioned above, when people believe the church is to care for their needs and it is not doing so, they feel free to become increasingly disruptive until they get what they want. The same expectations for personal response are applied to church leadership: If I believe the congregation is to care for my needs, then so are the congregation’s leaders. They are to visit me when I want to be visited and stay away when I don’t. They are to share my concerns and interests, make sure the kinds of programs I want are available when I want them, and design worship to include the kind of music I like. The expectations are even greater for pastors: Pastors should preach sermons I approve of. Their prayers should be neither too long nor too short and should cover the topics I consider important. They should be available whenever I want them.

No one can meet such expectations for every member of the congregation. Sooner or later the congregational leadership will disappoint someone. When that happens, the disappointment is again treated as a breach of contract. The church is failing to do what it is supposed to do and the disappointed member feels free to challenge the guilty leaders until they capitulate.

Misplaced Loyalties

One of the ironies is that, while some pastors are attacked no matter how much they do, others are defended despite misconduct. Indeed, there are almost always members strongly championing their pastor even in the face of extensive evidence of egregious misconduct. Part of this is the natural denial of grief. When misconduct is first discovered, it is hard to believe. As the evidence mounts, however, the support continues. Because the needs mentality encourages people to measure pastors by what they personally receive, it encourages such misplaced support. Just as it does not matter what a pastor is doing for others if my needs are not being met, so it does not matter what a pastor is doing to others if my needs are being met. Misconduct thus becomes unimportant when it does not affect me directly.

Changing Our Language

“Need” is an elastic term. Many congregational ministries could be placed under it. If the needs aren’t physical, they are emotional or spiritual. The problem with the idea of ministry as responding to people’s needs is not in what congregations do but in how people come to think about the church. It reduces the church to a service provider whose clients/recipients are free to complain whenever they are dissatisfied. Lost is the idea of people being and becoming the church. Lost is the understanding of the church as a community of faith whose members struggle together to draw closer to God and to express that closeness in how they live and interact with the world.

To counter this, a shift in thinking is called for, and this shift must be reflected in our language. There are other, richer ways of speaking about ministry and mission than just talking about needs. Congregations that move beyond that language find that their self-understanding expands. As a denominational representative, I worked with one congregation that had been through a disastrous two-year pastorate. As we talked, I asked them who benefited from their existence and how. They answered solely in terms of trying to respond to community needs—providing a preschool to help young families, and helping the homeless who came to their door. We then spoke of what tied them together as a church. They spoke of shared bonds of fellowship and growing together in faith, of the importance of worship in their lives. The word “need” was never mentioned. I pointed out they had just described two different kinds of pastors, and that pastors whose primary emphasis was responding to community needs used their time differently than those whose primary concern was nurturing a community of faith. As we reflected on the priorities of a pastor focused on needs, one of the congregants spoke up, “That’s what we just got rid of,” he said. From this conversation and others, the congregation came to realize that the center of their life was not to respond to community needs but to be a community of faith. They changed their self-description and pastoral expectations. They still have the preschool and feed the homeless, but now they do it as an expression of their life as a community of faith.

Looking at spiritual gifts is another way to move beyond the “needs” mentality because it reminds people that they have much to give. One congregation I worked with as an interim pastor had a twelve-week new members’ class. From the very first session, new members were asked how they would share their gifts. At the last session they were not only asked to fill out a financial pledge card but also to complete a spiritual gifts inventory and describe where and how they would be involved in the life of the congregation. The whole twelve-week program was designed to remind them that they were becoming participants in the church, not just recipients of it.

Reclaiming the language of call is another way to inspire a new awareness of purpose. As an interim minister, I often introduce congregations to Fredrick Buechner’s comment, “The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” The wonder is how much this quote changes congregations’ understanding of mission. They stop trying to duplicate what another congregation does well and begin to consider what they can do. They stop looking for someone to tell them what to do and start generating ideas themselves. Best of all, ministry moves from being something they are supposed to do to being a celebration of their own call.

Adapted from “How Responding to People’s Needs Hurts the Church” from the Spring 2008 issue of Congregations magazine.

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I haven’t been blogging here for quite a while because I lost my voice. I ceased to like the tone of much of what I was tempted to say, and found myself even deleting some old posts because I didn’t like myself when I read them.

My season of self-examination during the Lenten 40-days before Easter have continued now up to the eve of Pentecost!

• And all I know is that if blogging and ranting are synonymous, my blogging days are done.
• I’m tired of getting caught up in the fever of “A VERY SIGNIFICANT CONVERSATION” — which will, of course, be even more important, since I weighed in with my 2-cents (what’ll we do if the entry level coin of the realm becomes the nickle? but I digress).
• I’m especially tired of the self-important delusions of grandeur that afflict so many of the religiously-oriented blogs that I’d gotten in the habit of reading.

Blogging has become more of an addiction than anything else, with the habit needing to be fed at least daily, if not hourly at times when the iron is hot. One isn’t a ‘real’ blogger without daily posts, and a high Technorati ranking. There are more rules governing the blogosphere than you can shake a mouse at. And the result is that seemingly unless you’re approaching the world with a jaundiced eye that appreciates the dichromatic poverty of red-and-blue, and have the links and trackbacks and metrics to show everyone is listening, you’re really not a part of the blogospher, which means you’re not really ‘real’ after all.

So the web is beginning to be populated with all too many who log on assuming the role of omniscient narrator about “the known world,” omnipresently retrievable on every search engine that exists, all-wise in all things, and dreaming of becoming all-powerfully able to command the heavenly hosts themselves, if we so wished them, to comment on topics that we have categorized and tagged to our own heart’s delight. We are not real bloggers until and unless we covet to speak with the very voice of God.

Having given up on that ambition, I am still examining my motivations and purposes in continuing to choose to flirt with even the sheer potential of ubiquity - of floating my perspective out onto the “world wide Web.”  What voice is it that is speaking in this journal of my soul’s journey, and why do I think I shouldn’t just pull the plug, let my Web domain name expire, and leave the blogosphere to those who are sure they belong here?

O.k., I admit it; when it comes to food, I really don’t have much self-discipline. I take that last bite of dessert. I eat the last cookie in the bag. Three scoops of ice cream can’t be that much worse than two. Just a handful of pistacios before bedtime. And so my pants seem to be shrinking. And my Lenten disciplines have been such a dismal failure that my piety feels like it’s shrunk, as well, allowing no cover this year for any spiritual self-righteousness.

So I’m not rationalizing away my own abominable self-control when I say that, theologically speaking, I’ve always had a problem with the voluntary renunciations of Lent. For suffering in itself grants us no privilege in God’s sight.

We do not please God because we suffer. We take on the suffering of voluntary renunciation, of denial of self, so that we may learn how to live in solidarity with the suffering of others.

This is why Anglicans always have taken care that the denial of the self in the renunciations of Lent is intimately linked with service to others — that what we give up is for the sake of what we take on, a Lenten discipline of service, compassion and forgiveness.

The point of our suffering is holy only when it points us towards others through concrete acts of love.

We must realize that to take on the poverty or suffering of others voluntarily is in itself an act of privilege— an act of one who can choose when to suffer, and when not. The discipline of Lent, and the voluntary suffering of deprivation that it entails — however harsh our version of it, even if we wear hair-shirts and draw blood with our self-flagellations as some medieval Christians were prone to do — is different, we must remember, from the involuntary suffering of those of God’s creatures who have no other choice.

We can choose to suffer in a holy way only if our voluntary suffering through self-denial binds us closer in love with those whom the world makes suffer against their wishes — and God’s. A ‘holy’ suffering remembers that when we live in solidarity with the poor, as the Catholic writer and social activist Dorothy Day once pointed out, “we cannot get away from our privilege background. We are not really poor. We are always foreigners to the poor.”

Dorothy Day’s warning about the false piety of voluntary poverty or suffering is a reminder that just as much as God does not desire us to suffer, even so God does not desire the suffering of others, either. Rather, God’s desire is redemption from suffering.

Lenten renunciation-of-self and service-to-others are meant to lead us further into the mystery of God’s own suffering on the cross — for it is this suffering, and none other, that is redemptive.

Only because of Christ’s suffering, does any other suffering, especially our voluntary suffering through renunciation, have any meaning at all. It is because God has chosen to suffer, that any and all other suffering can be redeemed.  It is because God has chosen to suffer with our suffering, and that of our neighbors’, that our suffering becomes incapable of defeating any of us. It is because God has chosen to die in the midst of God’s creatures’ dying, that even death itself has been overcome.

It was with this in mind that the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison facing his own death: “Only the suffering God can help.”

This was one of the favorite T.S. Eliot poems of my late friend Peter Bocock, with whom I learned so much about “the observance of a holy Lent.” May peace be yours, Peter.

I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying
Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.
At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.
At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs’s fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.
Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.

IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs
Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour,
Sovegna vos
Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing
White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word
But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken
Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew
And after this our exile

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice
Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.
O my people.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.

St. Thomas’ Parish, Dupont Circle, Washington, DC

It’s the journey. Spiritual life, that is.

We live, however, in a destination culture. Just look at travel ads in newspapers and magazines; almost none of them are about ‘traveling’ - the point is what to do once you ‘get there’.

Christians are no less susceptible to this than anyone else. Christmas itself has become a destination-event. Once you get there, you’re done - trip’s over.

To begin to try to experience Christmas not as just a day but a twelve-day season requires us to shift our attention from the destination to the journey. Advent tried to slow us down a bit, emphasize the expectation.

© AP Image

The part of the Christmas story about the Three Wise Men (or, equally likelely, wise women), as told by the writer of Matthew, is a strange and disquieting interlude. It is about their long journey looking for a special child — and about the King of Judea, Herod, who himself wanted to use their curiosity to find this child so Herod could kill him, lest he grow up to threaten Herod’s power as King.

© Gisela Ueberall, “Three Wise Man II”

Herod wanted to turn the Magi into Wise Guys, as Gisela Ueberall’s painting portrays them, not a little scarily. But they decided otherwise, being warned in a dream. And having found the child Jesus — perhaps days, or even weeks or months after his birth — they journeyed back home without word to Herod, who in turn responded by killing all the male children young enough to include this messianic threat. These are the Holy Innocents commemorated in the Prayer Book calendar each year on December 28.

Throughout this season the wise have always been “on the way” to finding and being found by God among us. Time has gotten stretched out again into it’s more normal scale, rather than being compressed with everything appearing to happen simultaneously as in a medieval tapestry. The Magi in liturgical time have not yet arrived at the manger, despite all the Christmas creches that suggest otherwise. Their day is yet to come, Epiphany, celebrated on January 6th, when we recollect that this infant Jesus has unveiled for all the world the very heart of who God is and who we are, as well.

Spiritual life, as I understand it, is lived always “on the way” to understanding the wisdom of God who took flesh to dwell among us, and who in doing so, as the 16th century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker has put it, “hath deified our nature, though not by turning it into Himself, yet by making it His own inseparable habitation.”

“Wait” photo © Jan L. Richardson

I have a wait problem. Maybe some of you do too.

I hate to wait.

And if one of your favorite oxymorons is the sign that reads “emergency waiting room,” then maybe you have a wait problem too!

Waiting for the bus.
Waiting for water to boil.
Waiting for the paint to dry.
Waiting for your beloved to get home.
Waiting for the check in the mail.
Waiting for the alarm clock to go off.

When we have to wait, time gets heavy.
It’s hard to have time on our hands; so we stay busy. We don’t waste time.
But then there’s too much of it, and we find ourselves killing time, instead.
Maybe it’s that we’re afraid of running out of time.
In any case, speaking personally, after not much waiting, my patience runs out.
“Are we there yet?” the inner child in each of us sometimes screams. I can’t wait! I hate to wait!!

I’ve tried time management; now maybe I need wait management.
The problem with waiting is that when you’re waiting, as for a bus, many times you don’t know if you’re early or late.
And you don’t know what time is hiding from us round the next corner.
We don’t know if we’re optimistically waiting for the check in the mail, or pessimistically for the other shoe to drop.

I’ll do almost anything; just don’t ask me to wait!

Commuting to work early today, I was reminded how not alone I am in hating to wait.

I got off the Red Line METRO train, ten minutes ahead of schedule and facing a cold wait out in the snow for my ride to pick me up to carry me on to work. As I came up the escalator, a lone trumpeter was playing already at 6:45 a.m. the familiar Christmas carol, “The Little Drummer Boy.” “Ba Rumpa Pum Pum!!” It hit me: None of us know how to wait for Christmas.

So we drag the ecclesiastical 12 days of Christmas back into the 4 weeks after Thanksgiving, and by the time Baby Jesus is in the manger, we’re already plotting which of the toys we got for Christmas will need returning, and many of us are planning for our Super Bowl party.

We just can’t wait!!

What if time wasn’t such a burden, but more often really felt like a gift?

It’s easy to understand why some kinds of waiting are burdensome: Fear is just a kind of waiting in the expectation of an unpleasant outcome, and stage fright is simply a kind of anticipatory waiting for the curtain to rise on the unexpected.

It’s so easy to forget that hope, too, is an essential form of waiting.
What if we could go home after work saying, “WOW! Tonight I’ve got time on my hands!!”
What if tomorrow morning I could stand in the 29 degrees forecasted and say, “WOW! I get to wait for the bus!”

What if we could redeem time, turning our anxiety, fear, and boredom into sheer anticipation?
“Wait, wait, don’t tell me!” - a child may say, exhibiting pleasure at the anticipation of figuring out a riddle. So how come by the time we are adults has time become thoroughly infected with irritation at having to wait, or, even worse, at dreading what we think we know is coming?

Why is so much of our waiting frosted with disappointment, which is, after all, just waiting that we decide wasn’t worth it?

The Buddha, it is said, achieved Enlightenment simply by waiting beneath a Bodhi tree - waiting and waiting as long as it took. The sole difference between the Buddha and every other person is that, while he sat waiting, the Buddha remained fully awake. He taught that Enlightenment isn’t primarily about wisdom or fortune; it’s about staying awake to experience living whole-cloth while we wait. It’s about remaining vigilent. Even when we’re tired. Even when we get impatient. Even when we’re afraid.

Jesus the grown man taught his followers in the lesson we use during Advent that says: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. … Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. … Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

This is the same Jesus whose birth we await during Advent — the child who is born in the dead of night while most of the world was not awake but sleeping — except for his parents, a few shepherds, and the Three Wise Ones from the East who stay awake, traveling and following a star — who stay awake and find Jesus “at an unexpected hour” and in what others saw as “an inappropriate place.” “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” And remember, as the angel tells the shepherds in Luke’s telling of the nativity, “Fear not! For this night is born to you a saviour!” And this is GOOD!

But I get ahead of myself; I’ve committed a boundary violation and wandered over into a Christmas pageant. I really do have a wait problem!

Tonight, in the dark of Advent, we must still wait … singing in voices of hope, the Taize hymn: “Wait for the Lord, whose day is near. Wait for the Lord, keep watch, take heart!”

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Progressive Episcopalians in the United States now and again need to be reminded that there are others in the Anglican Communion who not only support our decisions about the full inclusion of women as well as gays and lesbians in the church, but who are getting on with the business of doing just that.

For example, the Diocese of Toronto has elected a woman as the new suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Toronto. Canon Linda Nichols will become the 4th female bishop in the Canadian church. And the southern Ontario Diocese of Niagara this past week approved blessings for gay couples; previously their bishop, The Rt. Rev. D. Ralph Spence had issued guidelines for the reception and blessing of civilly married gay and lesbian couples.

Closer to hand, there are efforts among some United Methodist clergy, such as Rev. Dean Snyder, Senior Minister of Foundry United Methodist Church, Washington, DC, who has just issued a pastoral Letter concerning the way in which he intends to provide liturgical services to recognize and honor lesbian and gay committed relationships, while at the same time trying to live “as a loyal United Methodist pastor … within the covenant of the United Methodist Church as set forth in our Church’s Constitution, General Rules, and Book of Discipline.” While the United Methodist Book of Discipline states that “Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches” (Para 341.6), Rev. Snyder says that in not responding to the reality of faithful lesbian and gay couples in his own congregation, “the failure of their Christian community and their pastor to properly recognize and honor their committed relationships formally denies them, at the very least, an encouragement and spiritual support the Church provides to other couples. At the worst, it undermines and dishonors their commitments by withholding recognition and prayerful support.” Significant in its own right, Rev. Snyder’s letter may gain additional attention if Foundry United Methodist Church remains the congregation in which the Clintons worship, if Hilary follows her husband Bill as the President of the United States.

Finally, I encourage you to look at the video presentation by The Rev. James Alison based on his book Faith Beyond Resentment (Video courtesy of Trinity Television and New Media.) that is posted on the Diocese of Washington blog. It is a striking example of the sort of deep theological contribution that is being made to the whole of the Christian community by theologians like Alison reflecting on the impact that his identity as a gay man has on the way he understands the theological tradition we all share.

I am tired of blogging about turmoil; it is so refreshing to be able to share news of those who are “getting on with business” as Christ’s Body on earth, which of course includes the business of living into our commitments to diversity and full inclusiveness of all of God’s people in the business of the Church.