live streaming on tenderness...

NOTE; The sound quality on today's live stream was poor. I will re-record later today and get it online. Thanks. Here is the new version... much better!


REFLECTIONS ON TENDERNESS FOR MAY 17
Let me begin this morning’s reflection on tenderness with quotes from two time-tested guides. They offer a context for why I have become an advocate of a spirituality of tenderness – and why I would value your company along the way. The first, from Fr. Richard Rohr, speaks to the big picture. The second, from Brené Brown, summarizes my studies to date. Fr. Rohr tell us that:

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers – invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.

Like Michael Stipe of the band REM sings: “Everybody hurts.” The challenge is to figure out what to do with our pain. The Judeo-Christian holy texts tell us that if we do not transform our wounds into wisdom and tenderness, “the sins of the mothers and fathers will be passed on to the children of the third and fourth generation.” (Deuteronomy 5) If you know anything about addiction, abuse or family systems theory, you know this is true. Maybe you know it yourself from your own hard experience. Brené Brown synthesizes what she has learned about one of the ways our pain can be transformed from her work as a social scientist working with the military and sports organizations.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path. You see, vulnerability, like authenticity, is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.

That’s probably as clear a description of living into the way of tenderness that I know: choosing every day to show up, greet reality with vulnerability and let it nourish us with clarity. The late Mary Oliver put it more wistfully in her poem: “Angels.”

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not
entirely anyway, other people’s
heads.

I’ll just leave you with this.

The quest for a life of authentic tenderness that helps us transform out wounds into wisdom so that we don’t transmit it, and also ripens patience and compassion within our culture, is all about a conscious inward/outward journey. Life as a pilgrimage, if you will, “a path or radical unknowing” as Christine Valters Paintner writes: where we “stop reaching, forcing and trying to make our experiences into something… and give ourselves over to the tender grace of God’s fertile darkness” that shows us how to just be and mature into the serenity of trust.

Don’t misunderstand me: there are times, like Jacob’s encounter with the holy, when we don’t realize something sacred is taking place until it is over. What does he say in the text? “Clearly the Lord was in this place and I – I – did not know.” But Jacob was willing to learn, to be guided by the Spirit into a deeper way of being, so that inside and out he experienced the blessings of trusting the holy. I think the early disciples who chose to follow Jesus were a lot like Jacob in this story: they, too, wanted to go deeper but did not fully know what that meant. They wanted their brokenness to be transformed but were not certain how to go about doing it. As another verse in the Christian texts puts it: they were like sheep without a shepherd – and when Jesus looked upon them, he felt compassion for he saw men and women consumed with anxiety and confusion.

· Like the prophetic mentors and prophets of ancient Israel who walked before him, Jesus taught with actions, words and silence. In this morning’s lesson, he has just washed the feet of the disciples before celebrating what was likely the Passover feast. Jesus assumed the role of a servant to teach them about trust and invited them to become vulnerable and open. If you have ever had your feet washed before, you know how vulnerable you feel taking off your shoes to let another hold your naked foot and bathe it carefully. Talk about kinesthetic education!

· Afterwards, Jesus interpreted this encounter with embodied wisdom with words and silence telling them two essential truths: first, your experience with vulnerability and trust – your feelings of uncertainty mixed with openness as you let go – are of the Holy Spirit. You can’t see the Spirit, but you can experience her and you are starting to trust this to be true. Second, the more you practice radical love – laying down your life for those you care about – the more the Spirit will guide you into places of greater vulnerability. Then he put the icing on the cake by silently looking each person around the Passover table in the eye and let it all sink is for a moment.

Finally, he wrapped it up saying, “I can tell you these things now because you are starting to trust your vulnerability. You are no longer servants or students, now you are my friends, living with me heart-to-heart.” Collectively, as well as personally, we, too are living into a time of profound vulnerability. Some of us are unsettled, others are anxious and confused, and a few sense that God is giving us all the chance to go deeper into the ways of tenderness so that we might consciously create new ways of living.

Life in this time of contagion has exposed again to white America the terrifying consequences of our racism – and all the ways we deny it. Whether it’s the fact that more people of color are dying of the virus because of economic and health disparities; or that white fear is so out of control that a father and son in Georgia felt free to murder Ahmaud Arberry from the back of their pick-up truck trusting that they would not be prosecuted: we can no longer avoid confronting our nation’s original sin. The NAACP’s new call to action, We Are Done Dying, is right on the money – and ALL people of good will know it.

Perhaps that is why people of every race and spirituality are also finding new ways to express their solidarity. A growing coalition of people who never would have allied themselves with Senator Bernie Sanders are now joining his call to guarantee that the 36+ million recently unemployed Americans get health care during this crisis. What’s more, despite what we see online from a bold minority, in our everyday lives most Americans are looking out for one another. David Brooks writes in The New York Times that folks in “red and blue states are staying home at nearly exactly the same rates. There is little correlation between whether a state is red or blue and how it is doing in fighting the disease… What’s more the best polling data tells us that the share of Americans who feel they live in a divided society has fallen from 87 percent to 48 percent. Eighty-two percent of us now say we have more that unites us than divides us.”

Brooks concludes, and I concur, that beyond the cynicism of our public culture, we are all learning about endurance. Trust. Vulnerability. “The pandemic has revealed (to us) the rot in many of our political dogmas and institutions, but also a greater humanity, a deeper compassion in the face of suffering, and a hidden solidarity, which I, at least, did not know was there.” So let me call to your attention two stories you may not have heard much about.

Last week in Montreal, a multi-cultural consortium of musicians invited some of the Hasidic Jews from the Outremont neighborhood to join them in singing their evening prayers for the city out loud from their balconies. Local musician, Martha Wainwright, was the catalyst for what has become a weekly event on the famous balconies of Montreal as well as Face Book. For 30 minutes each Wednesday night, that city gathers individually to sing together songs of the heart to strengthen one another for our long journey into vulnerability. It is like NYC’s 7 PM nightly people’s chorus of song, pot banging and praise for the health care workers, grocery store clerks, fire fighters and every other citizen dedicated to the common good who carries on their work in public while the rest of us love one another in self-quarantine.

Like Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, “it was the best of times and the worst of times.” And that is so among us, too. While some of our politicians choose profit over human life – what some are calling an act of genocide to save Wall Street – others, like the teachers of Minnesota, are putting together an all-state read of the children’s book, Because of Winn Dixie, with a state-wide Zoom gathering on May 20th.

Have you heard about the New Story Festival? It is a seven-month, on-line commitment by some of our culture’s wisest and most creative souls calling us together to “exchange our story of separation, selfishness, and scapegoating for one in which each of us finds our place, our needs are met, our gifts shared, where connection, creativity, and beauty become the most obvious characteristics of our lives.”

I’ll put a link to it up on my Be Still and Know Face Book page so that you can check it out. But here’s the deal: The New Story Festival grows out of the conviction expressed by the author, Arundhati Roy, in a bitingly insightful essay claiming that this pandemic is a portal: a way into a new and potentially better reality—if we have the courage to step through it—if, as I put it, we choose to consciously commit to and practice the inward/outward pilgrimage into vulnerability.

So let me share with you what I have been studying, pondering, praying over and trying to embody in practice over the past five years – what I have come to call a spirituality of tenderness. For me it has become essential to ground my spiritual practices in my own tradition. Some prefer a more eclectic approach, a salad bar or smorgasboard spirituality, where they pick up an insight from Buddhism, add it to a prayer from Islam, mix it together with a pop song and work in some New Age meditation. Thomas More writes that this is finding our own religion – and if it works – God bless you. At this point in my life, I’m with Mary Oliver when she wrote: I don’t care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty. For myself, but not for other people. That’s a place you just can’t get into, not entirely anyway, other people’s heads. I’ll just leave you with this… For me I feel most grounded with Merton’s invitation to grow where I was planted.

So, first I wondered where the word tender came from? The etymology of the English word tender started with the Old French, tendre, as well as the Latin, tener. It assumed its current form after the Norman conquest of England in the 15th century. Tender has always been distinct from the word gentle that began in Latin as gentilis – meaning of the same clan – which, in time, became the root of the Old French gentil - of high or noble birth. Gentle was linked to the courteous nature of nobility during the Middle Ages. And from this came the implication that gentle is about moderation while tender suggests compassion. Gentle arises from "a disposition" of kindness offered to others from above while tender is more about a shared sense of our common fragility.

Frederick Buechner speaks about tenderness like this: “Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within." Henri Nouwen explores tenderness in his "wounded healer" reflections and the L’Arche community that I volunteer with in Ottawa has been influenced by the late Jean Vanier's work that says: “Every child, every person, needs to know that they are a source of joy; every child, every person, needs to be celebrated. Only when all of our weaknesses are accepted as part of our humanity can our negative, broken self-images be transformed” rather than transmitted.

· To be tender, therefore, is to move outward: it is relational and anticipates interacting with others who are equally vulnerable. One who is tender receives others without harshness. These words touched Henri Nouwen’s heart when he chose to leave the competitive world of Harvard for a simpler way of life: “I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.” This is the recognition that we are all wounded whatever our public circumstance. Just below the surface we are all broken, beautiful and beloved children of God.

· I also found out that sometimes speak of some foods as "tender" - that is, not tough. We say that some plants are "tender" and need special attention. Some parts of our bodies are tender and require extra care and protection. Those "of a tender age" require a unique sensitivity. And some subjects warrant extra tact in our speech and action because they are "of a tender nature” as Merriam Webster puts it.

A spirituality of tenderness, therefore, must deepen sensitivity to our own wounds, accept as normative the vulnerability of all living creatures, and invite us all to enter the world with care by treading lightly whether we’re acting, speaking, writing or living. That’s when I needed to understand the biblical foundation for this way of being. Granted, it has been around since the start as a minority report, or as Richard Rohr says, “an alternative orthodoxy,” and it continues to leaven the whole. From my perspective there are five key insights from the Hebrew and Greek scriptures of Judaism and Christianity that help me shape an "applied spirituality tenderness." And that is what spirituality is all about, right? A way to consciously live into our values integrating our experiences of holiness with our everyday humanity.

The first key word is hesed (חֶ֔סֶד): it appears over 241 in the Hebrew Bible and is often translated as either "loving-kindness" or "covenant loyalty." The Septuagint, the Hebrew texts translated into Greek, almost always translate hesed as mercy ( Ἔλεος). The ethical core of the covenant involves building right relationships that embody God’s fairness, trust, and tenderness in real time. It is a way of ordering our time and energy that strengthens solidarity with one another and God. And there is nothing abstract about being in covenant relationship with real people and striving to treat them as God treats you. It takes work, awareness, intentionality and a whole lot of forgiveness.

· Two texts are illustrative: Micah 6 states: God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? The other is Hosea 6:6: For I (the Lord your God) desire steadfast love and not sacrificial rituals, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

· To do justice involves building right relations between real people who can be just as dense and annoying as yourself. To cherish kindness is to engage creation with the tenderness of our Creator. And to walk with humility is to know, like Mary Oliver, that you are not the center of the universe.

The second word from the Hebrew Bible is rachm (רַחוּם: Often translated as compassion in English, rachm speaks of God's powerful love from above or beyond us in ways that resemble a mother's love. It is illustrative to note that the Hebrew root grows out of the word for womb.

It is also important to say that this tenderness is not about what happens between people, but rather what takes place between God and God's beloved. That is, this tenderness does not evoke human solidarity, but intimacy with the holy. Psalm 86 comes to mind: But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Or even Psalm 131 where the soul in prayer rests in serenity in God’s presence much like a child upon her mother’s breast.

Covenant kindness and sacred intimacy are part of a spirituality of tenderness. Three Greek New Testament texts are also worth our attention. They are shaped by the Hebrew Bible and inter-preted through the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus as the Christ.

First is the word mercy in English – eleos (ἔλεος) in Greek – which is how the Hebrew hesed is translated by the rabbis in the Septuagint. Here the sense of solidarity within a community is key with tender feelings of support during times of suffering being essential. Mercy is quite different from pity: pity is an emotion experienced by the elite, those not connected to a particular pain, while mercy is all about sharing the sorrow of the afflicted. Mercy moves into action; pity remains a feeling among the aloof. Mercy is used 217 times in the New Testament and one of my favorite verses from St. Matthew is finds Jesus saying: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but the broken.”

Second is the almost psychedelic sounding word for compassion in Greek – splagchnizomai (Σπλαγχνίζομα) - it appears 12 times in the Greek Testament. Like the Hebrew, rachm, that evokes tenderness from God deep within our vital organs, the Greek word is equally embodied: the Hebrew has its origins in a mother’s womb while the Greek arises from the seat of our affections found in “the nobler entrails of the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.(Strong) Splagchnizomai is also like the Hebrew in that it involves a compassion shared with those in a covenant or committed relationship who are suffering.

It is not an abstract or universal experience, but one grounded in intimacy with the particulars of real people. In Mark 1: 41, it is a particular leper upon whom Jesus has compassion, not all lepers in general: “A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.” The same particularity is true in Matthew 9 where Jesus moves through the various towns of the covenant in Israel healing first a paralytic, then a girl and a woman, two blind men and one who was mute. Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for each one who was broken, because he knew they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” In other words, Jesus was moved to bring healing and hope to the lives of individuals within his community of faith.

And third is the Greek word agape (ἀγάπη) which we know as tender, self-giving, generous and compassionate love for others. The Gospel of John uses it often, the letters of Paul are saturated in its wisdom and the Greek Testament speaks of this love 116 times. The key text, of course, is I Corinthians 13. And the radical implications of this tenderness are made most clear in Eugene Peterson’s brilliant reworking of the classic text from The Message:

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love. Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. It doesn’t want what it doesn’t have, doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end. Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled. When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good. We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

As I hope is now clear, the inward/outward implications of a spirituality of tenderness are profound and invite us into a way of being that is at rest within – knowing God’s deep love – and engaged with the world beyond ourselves, too. The Finnish theologian, Paulina Kainulainen, in a short work entitled, Tenderness and Resistance: Women's Everyday Wisdom Theology, suggests that tender-ness is a resistance that: 1) embodies alternatives to consumerism, 2) challenges the technologicalization of everyday life: and 3) gives shape and form to what she calls a "quest for the Kingdom of Tenderness."

· This is a spirituality that honors feelings as much as reason, values as well as facts. It is wisdom theology - sapientia – seeing with the way of the heart that has been forgotten in the West but revered and practiced in the Eastern church.

· Wisdom theology is different from an academic theology that is built upon sciencia alone - hard facts and formula – or what Dr. Paulina calls a "theology of sure knowledge." "A theology of Sure Knowledge is interested in forming definitions and constructing systems to explain the world and faith." It creates a specialized language and seeks precision and intellectual comprehension. If you’ve spent any time in a major contemporary seminary you know this is true as highly motivated intellectuals speaks of soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology. We have a specialized jargon that often locks ordinary people out of the conversation.

· Wisdom theology, on the other hand, looks to integrate the head with the heart and celebrates speaking of the sacred in ordinary language that real people use every day. This is how Jesus spoke, likening God’s kingdom to a wedding banquet or a feast of reconciliation. It is decidedly this-wordly. Never dismissing or ignoring the transcendent truths of our faith, a spirituality of tenderness remains grounded: Salvation now is more than an abstract promise. Salvation is now a get-together, an event, a kiss, a piece of bread, a happy old woman or a child resting on her mother’s breast. It is everything that nourishes love, our body, our life. It is more than happiness in the hereafter, even if we hang on to the right to dream of our eternal tomorrow. It is sacramental and incarnational – it sees the holy in our humanity and rejoices.

Now, I don’t know if that helps you, but digging through my tradition helped me discover just how foundational tenderness is to the way of Jesus. It gave me a language grounded in my scriptures – a lens through which I can see Jesus more clearly – as well as an ethical core to evaluate my politics, my check book (or ATM transactions), my relationships, and my time. It gave focus to my intellect and emotions, a measure of order upon the chaos of all around and within me, and helped me know how to ripen into my best self.

So, let me give you a tool that grows out of this study, a resource you can use to help ground you in the steadfast love of the Lord that endures forever. It comes from the always practical work of Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault who writes: “Of any number of spiritual practices both ancient and universal to bring us into a state of vulnerable openness, the most direct and effective:

… is simply this: in any situation in life, confronted by an outer threat or opportunity, you can notice yourself responding inwards in one of two ways. Either you will brace, harden, and resist, or, you will soften, open and yield. If you go with the former… you will be catapulted immedi-ately into your smaller self, with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the later regardless of the outer conditions, you will remain in alignment with your innermost being, and through it diving being can reach you and guide you. Spiritual practice at its n-frills simplest is a moment-by-moment learning NOT to do anything in a state of internal brace – bracing is NEVER worth the cost.

Let’s take a quiet moment right now and rest into this steadfast love of the Lord trusting that it is real and welcomes us into the silent serenity and safety of this place… let us pray.