When the rain comes...

It was heavenly to get up this morning - and then go back to bed for a few hours.  Holy Week has come and gone:  we journeyed with the Lord into Jerusalem, confronted our sin at the foot of the Cross, wept and waited in silence for a time and then rejoiced in song and celebration for God's love that comes to the world with true shock and awe in the form of Christ's resurrection. The whole week was practice in receiving the mystery of God's grace to use the words of Thomas Keating.

Now, however, it is chill-time... and I am watching the rain. I remember buying the Beatles' 45 - Paperback Writer/Rain - on June 10, 1966 and falling in love with Lennon's creation.  Don't get me wrong, PBR is a ton of fun with a hot bass line, but there is something magical about "Rain."  So on relaxing days like this, my mind drifts back to this song as if summoned by another Lennon tune:  let me take you down.  And now as the sun hides and teases the day, I see that the rain sometimes turns to snow only to change back again in mid course.  Spring is trying hard to take hold but the ways of winter are deep in the Berkshires.

Three thoughts are flying around my mind on this first day after Easter like the rain become snow in the woods behind our house:

+ The first comes from the reaction I've received to our "disorientation" meditation on Good Friday.  In a word, people GOT it - I've received about 20 notes so far - and they especially got the part about how utterly startling but beautiful God's grace can be when it arrives in the midst of our suffering.  It is undeserved. Unexpected.  And unsettling. I sensed that this was becoming true as our meditation in song, silence and scripture matured because when we got to the part where we simply sang "Amazing Grace" a capella, the harmonies in the band AND the gathered congregation were sweet and full.  What's more, EVERYONE got up to light a candle against the darkness, too.  Whether a person was testifying to their experience of God's stunning but unexpected presence, or else praying for it to arrive, I could feel the movement in the crowd from apprehension to refreshment and hope.

+ The second is related to GF:  when we quickly debriefed after worship with the band and liturgists, some wondered if there was enough active participation in the meditation.  In general we left unclear about that aspect, but upon deeper reflection I think we hit the right balance because much of the participation involved the imagination.  Yes, there were times of spoken litanies, times to sing in community, move and light candles and act in ways that are expected in church, too.  But there was also a lot of shared silence - a practice born of meditation but not many Protestant worship  gatherings - AND there was an expectation of imaginative encounter.  This, too, is very different from the wordy and head-obsessed habits of most Reformed liturgies.  

At one point in my brief comments on Friday I observed that this way of doing worship was a bit like a musical Serenity Prayer combined with a trip to MassMOCA:  when you encounter a work of art that touches you, it is never passive. It can be shocking or breath-taking - it can be healing or frustrating - or simply perplexing.  But it is never passive; rather you have to consciously WORK the applied wisdom of the Serenity Prayer - accepting, changing, questioning and wrestling with wisdom - which is an internal form of participation.  My hunch is that my highly fluid and porous boundaries when it comes to worship and art are confusing to traditional church.  If it isn't printed in the bulletin, it isn't participation, right?  Well, I think the contemplative way leaves more room for both intuition and imagination - and after being here for my sixth Holy Week we are starting to find ways to communicated that in deep ways.

+ And third, Wendell Berry's current eassy in Christian Century entitled, "Caught in the Middle," resonates with what I have discerned as a "special vocation of showing people how to love."  Cathleen Falsani Posseley speaks of this in a recent FB posting in reference to Pope Francesco I, but it is something I have been exploring, too for the past 20 years.  It is about a ministry of presence more than anything else; listening and practicing compassion in the most quiet and ordinary ways.  Berry makes the point that in a society that has been consumed by corporations, "the collapse of families and communities... is in fact a social catastrophe." 

Government-by-corporations will not and cannot teach us this special vocation of knowing how to love.  And in our highly polarized reality we see:  "One side espousing family values pertaining to homes that are empty all day every day. And the other side promoting liberation that vouchsafes little actual freedom and no particular responsibility.  And so we are talking about a populace in which nearly everybody is need, greed, envious, angry and alone." More than almost anything else, it seems to me, there is an aching to know how to love - and a special vocation for those who have been called by Christ to make this loving flesh in our daily lives.  I look forward to exploring this with my leaders and congregation in the week's after Easter.

But that's enough for now:  the snow has become more vigorous and deserves more of my attention.