He's a poet, he's a picker, he's a prophet, he's a pusher
He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned
He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin' ev'ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
I've loved that song from the 1971 "Silver-Tongued Devil and I" album since my late sister, Linda, played it for me during her days of wild ass rebellion. It speaks to both my nearly complete ease with contradictions of all types, AND, my own ragged and haphazard spirituality that a church member in Tucson once described to his mother as the Pentecostal, Zen Buddhist monk who side lines as a snake handler. I could never have concocted that one for myself. And yet he whimsically captured the paradoxical tensions I live with on my quest to be faithful to Jesus and self. To that end, let me expand Kristofferson's list:
+ I am by nature a wanderer drawn to the quiet stability of monastic prayer.
+ I love gospel music and the passion of the early Jesus movement songs but need lots of silence and treasure the theology and aesthetics of chanted Psalms.
+ I am at home in high church liturgies but chafe under the patriarchal hierarchy; at the same time that I celebrate the democracy of my low church background, I detest our sloppy and sappy approach to liturgics and the neglect of the physical resources of worship.
+ My soul is grounded in a Celtic sacramentality that is nearly unknown to my traditional Reformed heritage.
+ I celebrate the Protestant mysticism of Quakers and affirm the Catholic critique: where the Quakers insist that evil and suffering can be overcome by more light - that is, knowledge, reason, and education - Rome is clear that human beings can never overcome our brokenness all by ourselves. To think otherwise is to be enslaved to the arrogant illusions of the bourgeois Enlightenment.
The best summary or affirmation of faith I know comes from the Community of
Iona Scotland. First, they share this prayer of confession, and please notice the order and intentionality:
Trusting in God's forgiveness, let us in silence confess our failing and acknowledge our part in the pain of the world. Before God, with the people of God, we confess to turning away from God in the ways we wound our lives, the lives of others and the life of the world.
It first insists that God is at the heart of all grace and forgiveness. Second, we share an awareness that whenever we wound ourselves, our neighbors, or creation we are turn away from the holy. A Trinitarian absolution follows:
May God forgive you, Christ renew you, and the Spirit enable you to grow in love. Amen.
The Lord's Prayer in the new ecumenical version roots us in tradition before a thoroughly new/old conclusion:
With the whole church we affirm that we are made in God's image, befriended by Christ, empowered by the Spirit. With people everywhere we affirm God's goodness at the heart of humanity planted more deeply than all that is wrong. And with all creation we celebrate the miracle and wonder of life, the unfolding purposes of God that are forever at work in ourselves and the world.
This prayer honors our faith community - the church - speaks to the foundational truth that we are all created in God's image and guided and helped by Christ and the Holy Spirit. The affirmation confesses that our essential nature is goodness - original creation as the Franciscans and others teach rather than primal sin - and recognizes that this truth is far deeper than previous Christian doctrine. It closes with miracle and wonder - what Brueggemann teaches as the core of Torah - asserting that we experience and participate in the world within co-creators with God in reality. A commitment to this paradoxical way of living in habit and heart is the practice of incarnation where intellect embraces flesh and the holy marries the human. As I ponder the experience of hope more seriously, I realize hope is a discipline as well as a doctrine that demands that I allow the Word to become
flesh.
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