rejoicing in simple blessings...

Today is a perfect day in the Berkshires: cool 72F with patches of sun coming and going along with a gentle breeze. I walked around the back yard late this morning with Lucie who is FINALLY healing from a torn leg muscle. Looking at our still evolving Celtic Zen garden made me smile. Our small wild flower patch is actually blooming this year. It looks like my pumpkin patch is going to bear fruit, too. And the other flowers are all exquisite.

Later this afternoon, our Friday L'Arche Ottawa prayer gathering will take place. At the suggestion of one of the community leaders, I asked a Francophone assistant if she might share a short homily - and she agreed. Her reflection is tender and rich. Interestingly (for me) our various conversations through email were all in French. Thank God for deepl.com that helped me decipher beyond my meager ability and share answers to her concerns in her native tongue. Throughout the process I learned a little more about nourishing trust in community: if you want another to join-in and try something they've not done before, it is essential to go the extra mile in both patience as well as creativity. Too often many of us feel pressured - under the wire to get results - so we keep going back to the tried and true helpers rather than widening the circle of participation. Or we do the task ourselves. This gets the job done, of course, but it neither welcomes fresh voices nor helps those who want to participate in new ways get the opportunity and time to give it a shot. I continue to learn that that creativity and true hospitality requires twice the lead time.

I am also aware of what hard work the Ottawa volunteer spirituality group has done for the past 18th months: learning new technologies, becoming creative with new music, working vigorously to keep the whole community engaged. What a privilege to be a part of this effort. Unless the damnable Delta variant gets in the way, we'll have a chance to visit the community again in mid-September. What a blessing.

post-pandemic blues and tenderness...

Over this weekend I had what can only be called a post-pandemic bout of forgetfulness re: time: what day is it? can you tell me the actual date? So much so that this morning I misread the recycling calendar and put out cans and bottles instead of plastic. This used to happen on a regular basis during our sheltering in place days. And our lives since May 2021 continue to be quite solitary, so I'm not at all surprised I slipped into the covid "twilight zone." I wonder how many other ways I'll experience pandemic blues in this uneven recovery with yet another round of unchartered waters?

As we were driving home from Millerton, NY on Saturday (our wonderful children and grandchildren gave us birthday gift certificates to both the local tea shop AND a regional independent bookstore because what else does a person really need besides tea and books - except, perhaps, a garden?) the closing story on the radio show, "An American Life," had to do with the so-called summer of sex. The set up was simple: word on the street was that once the lockdown was over everyone who could get in the sack with a willing partner would do so over and over again. Part one of this story sounded like another salacious saga for hipster wannabes. The narrator was all about her mandatory 30 something vocal fry: as she first described rack after empty rack of condom dispensers in a variety of NYC pharmacies, and then shared the observations of bartenders at popular Brooklyn watering holes, her paradoxical titillation and ennui was palpable. Apparently the  restrooms at hot spots have been in constant need of cleansing every weekend of the summer with heavy duty couple traffic coming and going. And the lost and found departments of these establishments now have a growing set of discarded pants to contend with. Really!

When the hipster reporter actually interviewed young, hot adults, however, part two of the story took on a gravitas that betrayed the casual sex set up. What seems to be taking place in these early months after the lockdown and solitude is more deep conversations about loss and trust than coitus. Both women and men want to connect with one another about their grief. They want someone else to hear and validate their stories. And simply be held by another compassionate, safe soul who takes them seriously. Which strikes me as very healthy - not that I have anything at all against getting laid - but anonymous self-gratification is not the best way to sort our our lives and seems to be giving way (at least for now) to emotional and spiritual intimacy. 

North American politicians continue to carp about our divisions. Make no mistake about it: they are real and too many political conservatives are still ignoring the protocols of science when it comes to this pandemic. But at least some young American adults are looking to go deeper. The NY Times this morning wrote about the under 40 crowd resisting/rebelling against being forced back into the same old mold of work, too (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/business/economy/return-office-young-workers.html?) And I suspect a new commitment to compassion is in play as many of us return to wearing masks in public whenever we're inside various stores and buildings. 

I understand that it is my spiritual disposition to see signs of the sacred in my ordinary experiences. That's what mysticism is all about: discerning sacramental acts and insight within our everyday encounters. So, while there is still profound disfunction, there are also signs of tenderness, grieving, and consolation, too. And I believe that it is not only appropriate, but essential for living into the world we want to create.

pray ALL ways: embodied rejoicing and rest

PRAY ALL WAYS: Resting in Time as Embodied Prayer

I remember the first time I heard Paul Simon pray: it was November 1969 on a TV special with lots of behind the scenes black and white footage. Over the decades I’ve heard other prayers by St. Paul on CDs like: The Rhythm of the Saints, Graceland, and Beautiful or So What but this was unique – and I’ve never forgotten it.

Old-timers know that by the late 60’s Simon and Garfunkel were folk music icons – some even called them oracles – who knew how to discern the words of the prophets that were written on the subway walls and tenement halls and even how to hear the sounds of silence. At the time of the TV show, they were riding high on a national tour after scoring big at the Oscars with the sound track to “The Graduate” and breaking the charts with “The Boxer.” They had just recorded “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” which would soon dominate the air waves with its message of grace and renewal for a nation worn out by the Vietnam War and the assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy.

But that wasn’t my epiphany. No, it arrived in a throw away song that Paul Simon still detests: the 1966 Cheerios jingle, “Feelin’ Groovy,” from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. I suspect I was moved by the way Simon played this song, quietly on his acoustic guitar in a hotel bed-room in-between the bustle and fury of record studios and concert halls. It felt almost like an afterthought sandwiched between the poetry and music that REALLY mattered. But in that wee song I heard lament and petition wrapped wistful beauty and it spoke to me of prayer: In a near whisper, Simon sang:

Slow down you’re moving too fast – you got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones - looking for fun and feeling groovy
Ba da-da da-da da-da, feeling groovy…

It’s become ONE of my go-to prayer songs for more than 50 years and only now do I sense I’m starting to get parts of it right: the slow down part. Gardening, yard work and poetry has helped. Saints Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry have been guides along the way.

It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, (she wrote) it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. (Later she added)I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do.Do cats pray, while they sleep, half-asleep in the sun?Does the opossum pray as it crosses the street The sunflowers? The old black oak growing older every yearI know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the treeswith my mind filled with things of little importance, in fullself-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive. Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not. While I was thinking this I happened to be standing just outside my door, with my notebook open, which is the way I begin every morning. Then a wren in the privet began to sing. He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, I don’t know why. And yet, why not. I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe or whatever you don’t. That’s your business. But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer? So I just listened, my pen in the air.

And I never get tired of taking-in this advice from Brother Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water,

and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

Today, as our gentle summer quest to become more of the change we desire continues, Fr. Ed Hays suggests that yet another way to incarnate the sacred words of grace and pray ALL ways has some-thing to do with fasting from flurrying about in a storm of self-importance. We might say that God is asking us to relinquish rushing as our default position, to forsake filling each day full to overflowing with commitments, details, hopes, dreams and other ephemera, so that like the Psalmist, we too might be still… and know: know grace, know rest, know being before doing, and know that we are the Lord’s beloved created in God’s image before there was time. Another St. Paul, the rabbi formerly known as Saul of Tarsus in the first century CE, offers his insight concerning how to live as a prayer grounded in grace. Philippians 4 invites us to rejoice: rejoice in the Lord always and in ALL ways for again I say: rejoice!

Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

This summons to rejoice challenges us to let God’s abiding presence embrace us in all conditions and situations. It’s a request to trust rather than fret, move with gentleness instead of frenzy, look towards what is just, true, loving, and nourishing before obsessing on life’s woes, and practice being rather than doing. Such a manner of life, you see, nourishes our soul with peace and shapes how we outwardly engage the wider world as well. And it’s important to say out loud that St. Paul wrote this letter of encouragement to the first church on European soil from prison. It isn’t clear in which prison the apostle experienced this incarceration – tradition claims it was Rome in about 60 CE, but he was often tossed into jail and modern scholarship suggests it might have taken place in Ephesus in present day Turkey early in his ministry and a mere 400 miles from Philippi – so all we know for certain is that Paul is bound into the captivity of the Roman Empire and chooses to write a note of to this newly formed community of faith – which strikes me as remarkable.

Some days I can so easily get trapped in kvetching about totally first world problems like: I can’t find my favorite type of PEN in this stationery store; or my 11-year-old car that still runs great needs new brakes; or why do I have to fill out two separate affidavits re: my vaccination before I can enter Canada? Lord, have mercy, right? I mean… really? I should simply thank God that I HAVE a car and BOTH vaccinations – and shut the hell up!

But St. Paul, who could carp along with the best of us, chooses to move in a whole other direction here – and my hunch is it has something to do with consciously giving thanks for being healed from the inside out through the Cross of Jesus. In chapter two of this letter, the apostle writes that only after he was struck blind and helpless did he learn to put on the whole mind of Christ: this is when he discovered how to trust rather than fear God. By faith, Paul inwardly accepted the path that Jesus walked before him which led him to rejoice that Jesus: who, was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited or manipulated.

Rather Jesus emptied himself by facing his fears; relinquishing them by choosing to trust God’s love more than his own feelings. Jesus accepted the form of a slave – the lowest servant among us – and found that his humility empowered him to become obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross – the most shameful death in that culture. But on the other side of this life, God exalted him with sacred love so that we might be moved to place his name above every name where every knee shall bend and every voice proclaim that Jesus is Christ to the glory of God.

What St. Paul learned in his collapse is what Jesus experienced on his journey from the cross to the resurrection: the organic rhythm of God’s love in all things. It begins by being cherished as God’s beloved before we’re born. It ripens as we age until, at some point, we too find ourselves facing one type of death or another. Call it humility or letting go, a relinquishing of our fear or some other type of surrender. Whatever it is, if we embrace it as Christ did the Cross, trusting God’s love rather than our fear, God promises us a renewal and resurrection like unto Christ’s where we, too will be filled with a love greater than death. If we have eyes to see we know some of this as spring consistently follows winter, sunshine always arrives after the nightfall, and the cycle of life moves from abundance to decay and then renewal. Honor this and trust it, Paul tells us, and we will put on the whole mind of Christ so that in all ways our lives will may rejoice in the Lord.

So let’s be clear that to rejoice is not just about feelings: it is the intentional practice of turn-ing our inward gratitude for God’s love into a life that outwardly shares it. St. Paul consist-ently uses the Greek word – chairó – the verb form of the root xaris meaning grace. To rejoice is to consciously claim that the core of our identity begins with God’s grace and then to outwardly celebrate that with acts of tenderness and justice. Thomas Merton trained the young monks entering the Gethsemane Monastery saying: You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level: God’s beloved.

To rejoice as those committed to the way of Jesus is to visibly share grace in our politics, shopping, attitude, habits, thoughts, words, and deeds. St. Paul was explicit in Romans 12 in Peterson’s The Message: Here’s what I want you to do. Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God has done for you is the best thing you can do for the Lord. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on grace and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you… and you’re task is to share this by how you live.

What often gets in the way of consciously claiming our grace-filled identity is busyness. Fr. Ed playfully but prophetically reminds us that Brother Karl Marx got it wrong: it is not religion that is the opium of the masses, it is haste, speed, stimulation, and an ethos of double your pleasure, double your fun. An article I read by Fr. Henri Nouwen shortly after entering Union Seminary in the late 70’s stated that busyness had become the standard by which we in the West were judged by others and the measure by which we evaluated the value and worth of nearly everything else in the world – ourselves included! “I know you’re so busy…” became the honorific bestowed upon ALL people of value in our society before the pandemic. Forty years BEFORE the lockdowns, Nouwen wrote:

In our utilitarian culture, where we suffer from a collective compulsion to do something practical, helpful, or useful, and where we feel compel-ed to make a contribution that can give us a sense of worth, contemplative prayer is a form of radical criticism. It is not useful or practical. It is simply an act we choose to waste time for and with God. It cuts a hole in our busyness and reminds us and others that it is God and not we who creates and sustains the world.

I pray that 18 months of solitude has helped us gain some of this perspective; but if we aren’t consciously choosing it as parts of the pandemic subside, we’ll be dragged back into the morass, forsaking any sense of the hard won blessings of grounding, balance and rest we’ve encountered. I think that’s why I’ve taken heart recently in the fact that more and more of us are refusing to go BACK to the office, BACK to the jobs we hated, BACK to a pace of life that not only exhausts our hearts, minds, and bodies but wears out our souls as well. Could it be that the pandemic has given birth to an unexpected rebellion?

One of the unexpected blessings of the lock down has been the opportunity for some of us to re-think the cost, value, and meaning of the way we used to live. Going backwards into the busyness and acts of mere survival that were once normative, now seem reprehensible. That’s not the only reason we’re currently experiencing a labor shortage: older workers have opted for retirement, younger workers are demanding a higher living wage, childcare costs have sky-rocketed, and a massive skills gap now requires a radically different way of recruiting and training a 21st century workforce beyond our current 20th century competencies. Still, cumulatively, American workers are consciously exploring what it might mean to work at jobs that serve the common good, provide a measure of satisfaction to their souls, and are built upon wages that allow for rest, renewal, and re-creation as well as food, shelter, and health care. Dare I call this rejoicing all ways?

Fr. Ed writes that once upon a time, a revolution in values began when hungry souls chose or were sent out into the desert to rethink their perspective on life. The stillness of the wilderness aided them in sorting things out:

In the desert, ageless and clockless, still as sagebrush – all time moves at a lizard’ speed. There is time to sit and once again to hear. “God speaks slowly” the Wisdom Keepers tell us, “a word an hour, a sentence a century.” That is why the prophets sang: “I will lead my beloved into the desert and there will speak to her heart. Then she shall respond as in the days of her youth.

In the desert we find a different pace where it’s too hot to hurry, where we must take our time to move slowly… where we can hear quietly with NO rush to respond. It is a place of contemplation, trust, and focus. Well, we’ve just spent 18 months practicing desert spirituality – being still so that we might know – and while there are places where we can now tentatively leave our solitude, this sojourn isn’t over. The Delta variant, political division, and bold-faced ignorance is causing yet another covid spike in the USA that our best minds predict won’t end until autumn. It seems our departure from the covid desert is going to be uneven and staggered – even in places with a high vaccination rate - which is probably why that poem Lynn Ungar wrote back in March 2020 when no one thought we would have to endure more than a year and a half of solitude popped back into my mind.

Her words are still a little romantic but carry a prescience worthy of reconsideration in 2021.

What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath — the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing, pray, consider only those to whom you commit your life.

Center down. And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart.

Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.

(You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands.

(Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart.

Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly,

where we cannot touch. Promise this world your love – for better for worse, in sickness and in health – as long as we shall all live.

Let the Republican lackeys of short-term profits and bottom lines yelp all they like: I choose to trust that the labor shortage we’re experiencing after our extended exile in the desert of sheltering in place is a quiet rebellion of rejoicing! The old ways of working ache to be replaced with tenderness and self-care. Some among us have used this quiet time to decipher what nature – God’s first word – might be telling us about how to live together in ways that are more sustainable. Jeremy Lent, writing in YES Magazine, notes that “nature uses a fractal design with similar repeating pat-terns at different scales” to help us recognize “a form of organization known as holarchy.” It is a way of celebrating the interdependence and love built into the fabric of creation:

Where each element – from cells on up – is a coherent entity in its own right while also an integral component of something larger. In holarchy the health of a system as a whole requires the flourishing of each part. Each living system is interdependent on the vitality of all the other systems. Based on this precept, an ecological civilization would be designed on the core principle of fractal flourishing: the well-being of each person is fractally related to the health of the larger world. Individual health relies on societal health, which relies in turn on the health of the ecosystem in which it’s embedded. Accordingly, from the ground up, this social organization would foster individual dignity, providing the conditions for everyone to live in safety and self-determination with universal access to adequate housing, competent health care and quality education.

People don’t want to return to the same old same old: so you may say I’m a dreamer – but I’m NOT the only one. Perhaps you recall another poem from the early days of self-isolation that Fr. Richard Hendrick shared with the world writing:

Yes there is panic buying. Yes there is sickness. Yes there is even death.
But, they say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise you can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet the sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear. They say that in the streets of Assisi people are singing to each other
across the empty squares, keeping their windows open
so that those who are alone may hear the sounds of family around them.
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know is busy spreading fliers with her number
through the neighborhood so that the elders may have someone to call on.
Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples are preparing to welcome
and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary.
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting.
All over the world people are looking at their neighbors in a new way.
All over the world people are waking up to a new reality to how big we really are.
To how little control we really have. To what really matters. To Love.
So we pray and we remember that Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
Yes there is isolation. But there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes there is panic buying. But there does not have to be meanness.
Yes there is sickness. But there does not have to be disease of the soul.
Yes there is even death. But there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe. Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic- The birds are singing again
The sky is clearing, Spring is coming, And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul And though you may not be able
to touch across the empty square, Sing.

In my commitment to rejoicing I am consciously calling this eruption of interdependence the prayer of rejoicing. It is not completely. It is not without political division, ugly and mean-spirited posturing, tears, death and way too much rancor, fear, and hatred. But our season of wandering in the desert has awakened many of our hearts and voices and souls to the importance of rejoicing. How many who are starting to venture out of our isolation are doing so with a sense of gratitude? Slowly tasting life again in all its bounty? We are rejoicing. Living as human beings who KNOW we’re saturated with grace. Fr. Ed encourages us to: take our time with this joy… look in the ordinary for the extraordinary hidden in plain sight, look at the daily and you will find the divine. For blessed are those who live slowly they shall see God.

In early May, I went to visit my brother in San Francisco: the CDC had just announced that those of us who were fully vaccinated could start to venture outside again – especially in communities that were equally fully vaccinated – and San Francisco was close to 80% vaccinated. With a renewed sense of adventure, and our fair share of fear and trembling, my brother, sister-in-law and I went back out into the streets that Leonard Cohen calls the sacred meeting ground where the races meet. At twilight in early May, we gave it a shot, walking around the streets of North Beach without our masks – the first time in 16 months – and it was exhilarating!

We could see a person’s WHOLE face. Especially their smiles. People we didn’t even know stopped us for a fist bump, a laugh, and a story. It was like coming out of hibernation and I wanted to greet everyone with a bear hug – I didn’t – but I wanted to! The next night we went out again and took-in a killer funk band that had the whole neighbor-hood singing and dancing just like Martha and the Vandellas prophesized: the music, the love and the rejoicing were calling out around the world: are you ready for a brand new beat? Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street.

So, we did – we DANCED in the street – we shook our bootees with one another and people I’ll never see again and it felt like Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas all at once. Dr. Adam Grant recently wrote about this in a NY Times guest editorial: “Most people” he stated, “view emotions as existing primarily or even exclusively in their heads. Happiness is considered a state of mind; melancholy is a potential warning sign of mental illness. But the reality is that emotions are inherently social: they are woven through our interactions.”

Research has found that people laugh five times as often when they’re with others as when they are alone. Even exchanging pleasantries with a stranger on a train is enough to spark joy. That’s not to say you can’t find delight in watching a show on Netflix. The problem is that bingeing is an individual pastime. Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity. We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence. That’s a concept coined in the early 20th century by the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. Collective effervescence is the synchrony you feel when you slide into rhythm with strangers on a dance floor, colleagues in a brainstorming session, cousins at a religious service or teammates on a soccer field. And during this pandemic, it’s been largely absent from our lives. Collective effervescence happens when joie de vivre spreads through a group.

I felt it in North Beach dancing in the dark. Dianne and I felt it again a few weeks later when our children and grandchildren feasted with us on our deck as we laughed and danced and sang and played like innocents on our way BACK into the sacred garden. And I see others in our wider com-munity feeling it too as we freely walk down the aisles of Stop and Shop or Wal-Mart after a long, long hibernation and consciously put our masks back on. I was ecstatic when I could take it off – and I want to share that ecstasy with others – even those whose names I’ll never know. So as much as they feel hot and uncomfortable, I trust there is a bit of collective effervescence and even sacred rejoicing in re-upping those damn masks into another round of service again. I want to dance in the streets with everyone and that requires some disciplined rejoicing right now, yes? I want ALL God’s children to be welcomed at the table of grace, so I’ve got some work to do, don’t you think.

It’s in moments like this when so many of our leaders have their heads in the sand or someplace worse that those who KNOW God’s love must take it upon ourselves to make it visible. Now is the time to consciously share our small part of fractal flourishing with those we love – including those strangers whose names we’ll never know – as we separate the “trash from the treasure” as Fr. Ed encourages. Now is the time to sort out: the blessed work from the busy-busy work… resisting the temptation to addictively look at our watches (or smart phones) … as we let go of time as we have known it and allow the Beloved to lead us into quiet, hidden every-day sacred spaces that are free from haste and rushing so that we might help one another live – and live with abundant affection.” I hear that the Poor Peoples’ Movement is gonna dance in the streets this summer in Texas for voter rights.

Now I celebrate what Brother Barber is doing, but not all of us can make it to dance in the streets of Texas. So, I'm wondering if we might take up another type of street dancing. More Motown, where you look at your partner, it's more one on one, sensual and honest, funky where you take your body seriously and their body seriously and everybody's bodies seriously and move to the groove with fun out in public. In the grocery stores. In the library. Wherever you meet someone who needs some encouragement in these dark times connect with them like you're Motown dancing.

So, maybe you can practice that with me by singing an old song in a new way, a vow to live like we’re dancing in the streets as we take on the commitment to love one another consciously. I need help doing this and find if I have a song to sing, my living prayer is strengthened. It maybe crazy but try this with me…

Callin' out around the world are you ready for a brand new beat

Summer's here and the time is right for dancing in the street

They're dancing in Chicago (dancing in the street)Down in New Orleans (dancing in the street) way out in New York City (dancing in the street)

All we need is music, sweet music there'll be music everywhere

There'll be swingin' and swayin' and records playing dancing in the street

Oh it doesn't matter what you wear just as long as you are there

So come on ev'ry guy - every girl - everywhere around the world

There'll be dancing (dancing in the street)

They're dancing (dancing in the street)

It is an invitation across the nation a chance for folks to meet

There'll be laughing, singing and music swinging and dancing in the street Philadelphia, PA (dancing in the street)

Baltimore and D.C. now (dancing in the street)

Can't forget the Motor City (dancing in the street)

All we need is music, sweet music there'll be music everywhere

There'll be swingin', swayin' and records playing and dancing in the street Oh, it doesn't matter what you wear just as long as your mask is there So come on, rich and poor, guys and girls,

 gender fluid all around the world

We be dancing… dancing in the street

no permanent allies or enemies...

Early last week I posted a meme that quoted Liz Cheney re: Jim Jordan's traitorous hypocrisy.

The comments that followed were yet another reminder of how profoundly polarized we are as a people: while there was general agreement that Ms. Cheney's insights noted above are true re: Jordan, it makes many of us uncomfortable to consider her an ally on this issue. Fair enough. Cheney has a public record to stand on which is not pretty. It is hardly compassionate and not all that different from the priorities enacted by the once demagogue in chief. But when it comes to the January 6 insurrection, I believe she is right on the money - and needs to be respected for this. Clearly this is why Nancy Pelosi put her on the House Select Committee to investigate the attempted coup.

One of the principles of grass roots community organizing is: no permanent allies and no permanent enemies. This is American pragmatism that always trumps political ideology when working for the common good. Even Jesus taught his disciples that they needed to learn how to make peace with "unrighteous mammon!" And Reinhold Niebuhr celebrated much the same when he wrote Children of Light, Children of Darkness in the midst of the Great Depression of the 30's. Too often open-hearted, optimistic people get trapped when we choose to believe that ideological purity is more important than compromised results. This holier than thou inertia solves nothing and confuses the purity of our bubble for authentic engagement. Studying with masters like Cesar Chavez, Fred Ross, Ed Chambers, Dolores Huerta, and various Industrial Areas Foundation organizers has taught me not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. As the sermon on the mount makes clear: God makes the sun rise and set on the righteous as well as the unjust. 

All which is to say, for the first time in decades I'm with Bernie at this moment in time. He realizes that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to make significant economic changes law for middle class and working class people. So, like the mature wing of SDS used to say, "we're PART of the way with LBJ." And Bernie is part of the way - maybe even MOST of the way - with Uncle Joe Biden. He didn't rant and pout when the first Biden stimulus package bailed on the $15 an hour minimum wage. Rather, he said we'll pick it up later. And we'll let our pragmatic allies build momentum for it, too. Same with the two huge infrastructure proposals that have a good chance of becoming law before Labor Day. Are they perfect? Everything a good democratic socialist would want? Not at all, but as the man has said out loud and in public: the up-coming infrastructure bills are the most comprehensive changes working people will encounter since the days of FDR.

Sanders also knows that realistically there are only a few more months to get results before the 2022 election cycle sucks the oxygen out of the room for those in Congress. Most Americans won't pay much attention until September 2022, but the policy wonks, lobbyists, hacks as well as fundraisers will turn a blind eye to deal-making once the summer is over and the position themselves for mid-term elections. Now is when it compromise and cooperation counts. The recent one year extension of tax credits for children must become permanent law. The infrastructure bills that address brick and mortar repairs alongside more high tech needs and climate change are vital, too. This is a time for introspective prayer, disciplined agitation for real changes that we can accomplish with common ground, and then the courage to use the limited power of this moment boldly before the hour passes. So, let's give Ms. Cheney credit where credit is due, quit the carping, and find more areas for cooperation as there are already too many entrenched ideologues heralding their purity but doing nothing to heal our wounds. Dr. King used to say that we are given certain moments to advance the cause of justice and hope - and they don't last for ever. So, seize the moment

pray ALL ways: suffering as a school of prayer

PRAY ALL WAYS: Embracing Suffering as Prayer

(Notes from this morning's live-stream)

How we choose to live into our experiences of pain and suffering will shape how we ripen and mature as people of faith. I’m not trying to be pious here, just direct. We all know – and have known – pain in our lives. Grief, emptiness, sorrow, and anguish are givens in the human condition. An ironic Yiddish aphorism that I’ve long savored puts it like this: In life, God often seems like a banker: with joy and happiness, there are limited quantities; so, for a season the One who is Holy gives blessings to some, and happiness to others only to take them away to share with others. But when it comes to sorrow and pain? They seem are unlimited and are freely distributed to all!

· I am NOT one of those who believes this literally – that God causes us pain for one inscrutable reason or another that may only be revealed on the other side of this realm – not at all! Such a deity would be cruel and sadistic – not at all what Jesus shows to us. But I still like that old saying because it’s what life FEELS like when we’re hurting – like we’re living through a season of joy that will suddenly fade into fallow or dry times maybe even heartbreak as well.

· Suffering exists in a multitude of forms – from social injustice, violence, industrial disease, and climate change to depression, abuse, injury, and anxiety – they all zap our strength, exhaust our inner resolve, cause us to grieve and despair, and ask ourselves WHY the hell this is hap-pening to me? Or to US? Or to the communities and families we love?

Fr. Richard Rohr writes: “Sooner or later, the heart of everybody’s spiritual problem is, “What do we do with our pain? Why is there evil? Why is there suffering?” The dean of San Francisco Theo-logical Seminary’s post-graduate program, the Rev. Dr. Warren Lee, used to say to us on a regular basis: “How you respond to the unavoidable agonies of a parishioner’s suffering is your personal, existential litmus test concerning whether or not you should stay in pastoral ministry! If you come up with nothing, it’s time to get out!” Blunt but insightful professional advice.

To which the late Dorothee Soelle, post-Holocaust German theologian who helped me shape my senior thesis in seminary, taught that the reason we in the West no longer know how to respond to human suffering with insight and compassion is because we’ve been blinded to death’s wisdom by our quest for success. We want to know the WHY in every situation. We ache to control ALL the mysteries of life. And while this has an upside in science and technology – the speed by which we were able to create and distribute COVID-19 vaccinations is proof – this quest has been a dismal failure when it comes to embracing suffering as a mode of authentic prayer.

· St. Paul wrote in Romans 8 that “nothing can separate us from the love of God. Not death nor life, nor angels nor the powers of hell, not things present nor things to come, not height nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God made real in our lives by Christ Jesus our Lord.”

· Why then, Soelle asks, does traditional Western Christianity teach that the Creator is an “omnipotent, distant Father-God” who stoically, mysteriously, and seemingly randomly acts beyond human compassion in ways that may only make sense after our death? It’s because we’re addicted to success and control to such a degree, she replies, that we have lost our capacity to live without a why.

We’ve sanitized death – we hide from it – losing touch with a wisdom which is built into the rhythm of the seasons and the soul of nature. Small wonder we can miss the truth Jesus incarnates in his life, death, and resurrection. The core of Christ’s journey documents that suffering can NOT be avoided and must not be endured alone; rather it’s to be embraced as yet another way of encoun-tering God’s loving presence. Richard Rohr, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Dorothee Soelle all attest to the assertion that Jesus learned in his life what Job discovered before him. Job begins his journey beg-ging God for an explanation that never comes – because Job is NOT in control.

Only when he relinquishes his demands and becomes silent does Job start to realize that he has NOT been ignored by the holy, but rather welcomed into a sacred conversation with God’s love that takes his pain seriously. You may that Job started out asking his friends to explain his anguish but all they offer are worn-out religious cliches about a punitive God who afflicts only sinners: what is YOUR secret sin, brother, they demand? What have YOU failed to confess? Such bankrupt, em-otionally callous, and theologically cruel replies only demoralize and infuriate Job – and well they should! The poetic prophets of ancient Israel assure us that God HATES this type of abstract, shame-based spirituality. You can find it in the Bible, of course, whenever Deuteronomy or Leviti-cus is interpreted in wooden and uncreative ways. But far more plentiful and persuasive are the cries of prophets like Amos and Isaiah who shout:

I HATE and despise your feasts days says the Lord… So shout out and do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet and announce to my people… that they may seek me day after day pleading: “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why do we humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and continue to oppress all your workers. You fast only to quarrel and fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Take stock, you who have eyes but will not see: Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Do this and then your light shall break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up quickly; then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am.

Job is a righteous soul, however, who continues to plead with the holy, trusting the steadfast love of the Lord that endures forever until he’s so exasperated by God’s apparent silence that he explodes in exhaustion. When he hits rock bottom, when he is completely empty of self, and no longer holds any illusions of control, then symbolically and emotionally Job hears and experiences the still small presence of the sacred within and beyond him which evokes this response: Oh, NOW I get it! Now…I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted… Once I uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful and grand for me to grasp. Now I know that when I can hear, you will speak. When I engage and trust you, you are present. Once I had only heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now I have seen you, experienced you, trusted you… and I am humbled into trust…

· James Hillman, a protégé of depth psychologist C.G. Jung, speaks of this as “growing down” in contrast to the “growing up.” Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, he says, each person will struggle blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life.

· There was a time, Hillman recalls, when, “one of Jung’s students, in a discussion of Pilgrim’s Progress, asked Jung what his own pilgrimage was like. “In my case,” the learned professor replied, “my Pilgrim’s Progress consisted of me having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.” Hillman adds:

The path of descent, the “deepening into life,” means letting go. At some point we must surrender; let our roots sink into our own darkness to weave and web their way into what lives in that dirt of self – what has been waiting within us. Here we can discover the deeper realities hidden within our own bodies, our circumstances, our experiences, as we let the old ways die. In this loss we can make space for Something Greater, for the soul to be reborn. It is from here that we can be re-enlivened like limbs warming back from cold or a lack of blood, returning not with the trap-pings of the world, but to an enriched, embodied life.

Jesus experienced the conundrum of descent as he literally and figuratively lived into his own passion, death, and resurrection. Jesus discovered in his day what Job found out before him: God is present during the darkness of our suffering. And not only present, but trustworthy and loving. Richard Rohr builds on this saying: 

We are “saved” or made whole by being addressed and included in the cosmic conversation. We do not really need linear answers; we need only to be taken seriously as part of the dialogue. To be loved. But we usually only know this in hindsight after the suffering and the struggle. It cannot be known beforehand, not theoretically or theologically, for our knowledge of God is participatory. God refuses to be intellectually “thought,” and is only known in the passion and pain of it all, experientially, when the issues become soul-sized and worthy of us.

Rachel Alana Falconer of Midwives of the Soul adds that: A growing down so often necessitates a "sinking to the depths". If we do not consciously choose the journey, the journey will choose us. The soul, weary and neglected so often captures us in the only way it can - calling us into sickness or depression, perhaps some kind of a fall or terrible grief, or betrayal - even a lingering apathy. At some point all the ornaments of self-image will lose their sparkle or even vanish, and it's often with great suffering we realize they no longer contain the mean-ing the world assured us they would have. Eventually we have no choice but to turn within in silence.

Which is precisely what Soelle taught us at Union Theological Seminary: The more people anticipate the elimination of suffering, the less strength they have to actually oppose it. The more we sanitize death and avoid its lessons, the farther we move away from the presence of God’s love. For whoever deals with his or her own personal suffering in the way our society teaches – through illusion, minimization, suppression, apathy, and our addiction to success – will certainly deal with societal suffering in much the same way.

Cumulatively, this is why I believe Fr. Ed Hays tells us that suffering can become a school of prayer for us where we discover like Job and Jesus that our anguish is yet another way to embrace God’s love. It is how we can be embraced, too. Suffering can become one way to pray ALL ways if we relinquish our illusions of success and control, learn to wait in the silence for God’s assurance that our pain has been taken seriously, and then enter into a deeper intimacy with the holy. There are three foundational wisdom texts from the New Testament that I want to share with you:

· First, the post-resurrection conversation between Jesus and two disciples on the Emmaus Road in Acts. Second, the words Jesus shares with his friends about bearing fruit in St. John’s gospel. And third, the confession St. Paul offers linking trusting God with the presence of the Holy Spirit during hard times.

· In Romans 5 he puts it like this: Because of grace we can celebrate our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, a hope that does not disappoint us, because it is God’s love being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

For me, the key to the Emmaus Road story is the conversation: like Job’s mystical encounter with God that evokes trust when he is taken seriously, and Christ’s passion that leads him into a communion with God that carries him beyond the Cross into a resurrection, this story starts with the despair and questions of the disciples: Why did Jesus have to die? Why were our hopes dashed? Why have we been forced into grief? Fr. Ed writes that the questions of the disciples are “timeless, as current as anything today.” But the Holy One does NOT respond to these why questions with a logical answer; instead he offers a relationship: Jesus meets his friends in their pain, listens to them with compassion, refuses to ignore their woes, and finally shares with them a mystical insight about a seed falling to the ground and dying before it bears good fruit:

How else could the Messiah come into his glory,” he asks? There’s no explanation or excuse for our suffering, simply a conversation and relationship that honors their broken hearts. Fr. Ed writes: Without entering the darkness, the suffering of his Passion, the gentle rabbi from Nazareth would have remained simply Jesus and never become the Christ, the Cosmic or Universal source of hope, grace, and love. The brutal death and resurrection transfigured the wonder-worker from Galilee permanently into the essence of divine light and glory. Because – and this is critical – this is how God’s love bears fruit.

I know that when I have been locked into agony, fear, shame, and suffering, two truths have been salvific: holding on to my baptism by faith and remaining open to the loving solidarity of key people I trust. During a particularly bleak bout of burn-out in Tucson some 20 years ago, the only prayer I could articulate was the one Martin Luther used during his darkest hours: I have been baptized!

This was NOT a statement of pride, privilege, or triumph, just a hopeful, short-hand affirmation of trust that from the beginning of time I have been loved and cherished by God as one of the beloved. I didn’t FEEL loved, cherished, or beloved by anyone – least of all myself. But for nearly five months I made myself pray those words over and over to remember that NOTH-ING could separate me from the love of God. Not my feelings of despair. Not the reaction of some of colleagues nor anything within or beyond. Like they say in AA, sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. So I kept saying that nothing could separate me from the love of God. I had been baptized – and I just didn’t have the energy or wisdom to pray anything else.

Same goes for the deep conversations and loving embraces of a few key confidants: they did not nor and could not fix me. They really didn’t have all that much wisdom to share with me either – certainly no answers for what I was feeling and dealing with. But they listened. And they loved. They kept our relationship alive and real. They refused to ignore or abandon me either. In this, even at my lowest, I knew I wasn’t alone – and this is how I stated to learn that my suffering could be a school of prayer – that my descent mattered – and that’s part of what I hear taking place in the Emmaus Road story.

· Jesus listened and shared with his wounded friends what he had experienced both from God and from Mary Magdalene. You may recall that there are parts of the New Testament that try to erase this fact, but Magdalene and Magdalene alone never deserted Jesus: she stood by him when the disciples doubted, she was there through the Last Supper where she anointed Jesus Messiah before his death, and she continued to stand witness for him through his trial, crucifixion, and burial.

· I have been persuaded that Cynthia Bourgeault is right in insisting that we reclaim this truth and add it to our liturgies for it shows how Jesus gives to us what he first received from his beloved friend and then the Lord adding credence to what the old timers used to say: you can’t go where you don’t know and you can’t give what you ain’t got. What was true for Jesus – and Job and Magdalene and even St. Paul as well – is true for us, too.

The second text to consider comes from St. John’s gospel where Jesus tells his friends that in nature there is a cycle of dying into new life that we need to honor in our spiritual journey. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record about this, but we in the industrialized West are SO out of touch with Mother Nature and her sacramental wisdom and healing that it can’t be restated enough. Not so with our first century itinerant rabbi who spoke the language of his family and friends. Bearing fruit: Is a clue to understanding the problem of pain – and what we can do with it. For fruitfulness in human beings resembles the pattern of fruitfulness of nature.” In the 12th chapter of St. John’s gospel Jesus tells his friends that there is a cruciform shape built into the ebb and flow of nature:

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Fr. Rohr interprets this with stunning simplicity: To say that there is a cruciform shape to reality means that loss precedes all renewal, emptiness makes way for every new infilling, every transformation in the universe requires the surrendering of a previous “form.” And death is not the end, but part of the renewing gift of life.

In John 15 Jesus builds on this by referring to himself as the True Vine in whom we are to abide – which means to rest and trust that God will prune from us those parts that keep us from bearing good and healthy fruit. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

· If part one of the school of suffering prayer teaches that descent can lead to a deeper intimacy with the holy where we are not ignored but embraced as the beloved; part two tells us that there are times when parts of us must die or be relinquished before we can become our best selves.

· And the truth is that most of us are not very good at letting go. Or accepting what cannot be changed as the Serenity Prayer puts it. So, we fight death in small and big ways even when Jesus asks us to rest into a death that must happen so that we can become fully alive.

So let me speak to you from my experience, not because I’ve mastered this spiritual dying or des-cent, but because I still fight such the counter-cultural wisdom that links death to renewal. I know all too intimately that we’ve been taught to avoid suffering at all costs: we have meds and physical diversions as well as entertainment and emotional manipulation.

We have whole industries built on distracting us from all that hurts. And while there’s a place for taking a break from our woes, there is also a time to pay attention to the pain like a rotten tooth must be extracted and give it up. In my mother’s last year of life I bumped up against the fact that I knew she was going to die soon and I still hated parts of who she had been for me. We had a tense and often abusive relationship where alcohol too often got the better part of her and led her into violence. As one of my sisters put it, “I’m having a hard time dealing with the fact that Mom loved Jim Beam more than me.” Me, too.

So, when she was drawing close to the end, knowing that I was expected to say something at her memorial service, I found myself outraged and terrified. I would never say anything cruel about her at such a time, but a dark and mean-spirited hatred was churning away inside me that I didn’t really know what to do with. I’m serious: it was ugly and vicious and deeply troubling. I thought I’d dealt with all that junk, but… apparently, I was wrong. My spiritual director and counselor at the time listened carefully to my lament and then asked me how I might deal with my mom if she were simply a member of my faith community. It did not take long to realize that I would be heart-broken for her: not only had she survived abuse herself, but she did the best she could with the resources available to her. Acknowledging her pain helped me take stock of the suffering we shared– and gave me a measure of relief. My own hurt and shame did not vanish, but now I could embrace her as one of Christ’s own beloved wounded ones.

Which empowered me to sing, rather than speak, at her memorial service using Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song, “Jubilee” to express my complicated but recovering love and forgiveness. The heart of this song still cuts close to my heart and goes like this:

I can tell by the way you're listening that you're still expecting to hear
Your name being called like a summons to all
Who have failed to account for their doubts and their fears
They can't add up too much without you so if it were just up to me
I'd take hold of your hand, saying come hear the band play your song at the jubilee

Yes, I can tell by the way you're searching for 

something you can't even name
That you haven't been able to come to the table: 

simply glad that you came
And when you feel like this try to imagine 

that we're all like frail boats on the sea
Just scanning the night for that great guiding light announcing the jubilee

My pain, her pain, our pain are a part of God’s pain – it’s all wrapped up together – and I stumbled and wept a sharing that song. But by facing the whole mess with wise counsel mixed with God’s grace and the courage to accept what I could not change: I tasted a bit of serenity in the suffering, and it keeps growing stronger. To bear fruit, the kernel of wheat must fall to the ground and die – this is the cruciform shape of God within all of life.

The third insight grows out of the first two wherein St. Paul suggests that letting suffering connect us with God’s spirit of holiness can lead us into the light of hope. Fr. Ed writes: “When we’re able to flow with suffering, we move with it and into it and then through it. When we fight or reject it, when we are at war with suffering, we end up a victim of anxiety and exhaustion. Suffering and pain are creative when they lead to the growth of the human spirit and the ability to live life fully.” So, he asks: is there any room in your prayer life for the Gethsemane Prayer? “We might find it valuable if we had a special feast day to celebrate the mystery of Gethsemane, a prayer of lone-liness and doubt, a prayer of preparation for facing and embracing the suffering that will certainly come our way, a prayer to help us make suffering creative, redemptive and productive.” For the past few years, I’ve been taking Richard Rohr’s wise interpretation of these words with a renewed seriousness. Religion in America has become a wreck, filled with hatred, violence, blame and shame. It’s nothing like the way of Jesus. Rohr writes:

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. I am sorry to admit that I first see my wounds as an obstacle more than a gift. Healing is a long journey. If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. 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, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.

One of the ways we pass on our pain if we haven’t dealt with it is scapegoating: blaming and punishing others for our wounds. The Republican Party is doing this in spades right now with the Big Lie, but it’s written into the fabric of our American mythology where the winners are the only ones who count: they get to shape what the city on the hill looks like and everyone else is either en-slaved or enemies. Rohr reminds us that the Jesus Story “is about radically transforming history and individuals so that we don’t just keep handing on the pain to the next generation.”

The late Rene Girard, French anthropologist who studied the role of violence in fomenting social cohesion in cultures, put it best when he concluded that the gift Jesus on the Cross gives us is showing us what scapegoating looks like from the perspective of the vanquished. The sacrificial gift of the Cross gives is not some magical obliteration of sin through a blood offering to God. Rather, it is how Jesus inverts culture and documents what cruelty and scapegoating look like up close and personal from the perspective of the loser. The innocents made to suffer the violence of empire. Jesus offers us a non-violent alternative to scape-goating by practicing sacrificial love and sharing the burden of social suffering with us all.

“For unless we can find a meaning for human suffering and discover how God is somehow in it and can also use it for good,” Rohr concludes, “humanity is in major trouble – because we will suffer – and even the Buddha said that suffering is part of the deal!” Our challenge – and the charism of the school of suffering – is to learn how to carry this pain and hold it consciously without projecting it on to others. Trusting that God’s spirit and presence will lead us into a deeper love, the mystics ask us to “learn to carry the cross of our reality quietly until God transforms us through it.” This is how our suffering empowers us to become the wounded healers of the world. I think Fr. Henri Nouwen is right when he holds up Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà as one such wounded healer:

(After the Cross) one would expect her to take the role of wailing or protesting, but she doesn’t! Mary is in complete solidarity with the mystery of life and death. “There’s something deeper happening here,” she prays; so how can I absorb it just as Jesus is absorbing it, instead of returning it in kind?” Jesus on the cross and Mary standing beneath the cross are classic images of transformative spirituality. (To which I would add Mary Magdalene.) They do not return the hostility, hatred, accusations, or malice directed at them. They hold the suffering until it becomes resurrection! That’s the core mystery of Christianity and it takes our whole life to begin to comprehend this.

It is my conviction that over the next five years many of our lives are going to challenged like nothing we’ve known on the continental USA since the Civil War: the white nationalists, the para-military fascists, their minions, and financial backers are planning for a time of violent chaos and the dismantling of elections. It is not inevitable, but should it come to pass, we will experience blood in our streets and threats to the well-being of all we hold dear. Our spiritual tradition at its best offers us a way into deeper intimacy as the Holy Spirit opens our hearts to trust.

pray ALL ways: living as a gift for others...

The late John O’Donohue, contemporary Celtic prophet of blessed memory, once wrote that there are at least two layers to the aphorism: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Usually, he taught, this means that our sense of beauty is utterly subjective for “there is no accounting for taste because each person's perspective is different.” There is, however, another more subtle insight:

If our manner of looking (could) become beautiful, then beauty would be visible and shine forth for us intrinsically. We (would be delighted) to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is pre-sent already secretly in everything. For when we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.

So, too with prayer. At least in the Western tradition, prayer tends to be taught as a series of hierarchical steps to follow not unlike Jacob’s Ladder to heaven: you start off on the bottom rung with simple requests to God – now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep – slowly add more complex liturgical words like the Lord’s Prayer or Hail Mary, until eventually you make hymn lyrics your own before stepping up to spontaneous phrases. There are even layered formulas and outlines to follow if you want to master prayer in the Western tradition. I remember an internship where I was given a prayer recipe to practice called ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. It was helpful, functional, and oh so utilitarian as is the charism of Western culture. In our realm, in all manner of things, we strive for simple, practical solutions that begin at the bottom and incrementally move higher.

Over time, however, I’ve learned that just as with beauty, so too with intimacy with God: there are a host of other, more organic ways to pray. That’s what Fr. Ed Hays invites us to experience in his incarnational guidebook: Pray ALL Ways. How can our lives become living prayers that bring blessings to birth for others while nourishing our own deepest spiritual intentions at the same time? That is, how can we become a living gift to others and God in real time? “As we reflect upon the art of gifting as prayer,” he writes, “we can find no better place to begin than with those three mysterious magi who once brought gifts to the infant Jesus.” As our “pray ALL ways” series continues, I’m going to use Fr. Ed’s overview today to high-light three insights about living as a gift that we may have overlooked in times past:

+ First, the significance of gifts and how they differ from tools and necessities.

+ Second, the way God’s first revealed word in creation, nature, can be our mentor for becoming gift bearers in the manner of Jesus.

+ And third, why reclaiming the art of living as a prayerful gift matters personally and publicly as these weird, post lockdown days unfold.

 So, let’s open our hearts together in prayer as I ask for the inspiration of the Spirit of Holiness to guide my reflection:

Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and restore a whole and loving spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Give to me the joy of your salvation and sustain in me a willing spirit. May my words and intentions affirm that we are ALL made in God’s image, befriended by Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. May my words affirm the goodness that is in the heart of every person, planted more deeply than any or all of our wounds. And may my reflection celebrate the miracle and wonder of God’s unfolding purpose being realized each day in all of us and all of creation to the glory of the sacred: Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The first question Fr. Ed asks addresses is what it means to live like the Magi – who brought the infant Christ gifts of gold, incense, and myrrh at the start of St. Matthew’s gospel – and why it is significant that these wisdom bearers came from the East rather than the West? Sorting this out will, I trust, articulate some of the differences between tools and gifts – and why this matters.

One of the obvious insights implied here has to do with the spirituality of the Magi as well as their ethnic origins. Clearly, they are NOT first century Jews – they might be categorized as gentiles which in 21^st century Western culture simply means those NOT of the Jewish nation – but back in the day could – and most likely did – connote those who are considered pagans or even heathens not spiritual mentors to be taken seriously. Certainly, some in the early days of the Jesus movement were more concerned with the non-kosher foods eaten by Gentiles, their unclean worship practices that included the veneration of idols, as well as aspects of their sexuality. These factors took on more significance than the intentions of the Magi’s hearts or the gifts they reverently carried for two years through the desert to honor a baby messiah born into anonymity.

To be fair, there was rabbinic ambiguity about Gentiles before this era: many learned rabbis taught that Gentiles were ethically exempt from the purity codes of Jewish law – they gener-ally lived separate lives and were not to be judged by the same ethical codes as those living under the Mosaic covenant. But by the beginning of the first century CE, Jewish rabbis began to conclude that all Gentile men were to be considered ritually unclean either because they did not honor the laws requiring abstinence from sexual intercourse during a woman’s men-strual impurity or because some Gentile men engaged in acts of sodomy. What’s more, as divisions between the early followers of Jesus and the rabbis of Jerusalem and the Diaspora grew more tense and polarized, some were scandalized that pagan, Persian astrologers were given a prominent role in the emerging Christian story.

Consequently, Jewish commentary began to emphasize a new condemnation for consulting with soothsayers, sorcerers, or necromancers as noted in both Deuteronomy and Leviticus. So, too, the ridicule of stargazers spoken by the ancient prophets of Israel. Cumulatively, this disdain grew into judgement where even those ethnically identified as Chaldeans – those from Babylon – were all considered untrustworthy and unclean astrologers. This suggests that the inclusion of the Magi into the birth narrative of Jesus was not only a theological pronouncement concerning the radical spiritual, racial, ethnic, and cultural inclusivity of the Jesus Movement, but also a blunt recognition of the conflict brewing between the old guard Jewish Christians and those entering the new covenant from non-Jewish cultures, traditions, and practices.

+ St. Luke, written about the same time as St. Matthew, was inclined to sanitize, romanticize, and exaggerate the inclusivity in the early church. In the book of Acts, he tells us that all believers were together in harmony, sharing resources with one another and daily adding members to their community.  In the next breath, however, he writes that St. Peter had God strike dead a married couple who withheld a portion of their re-sources from the community. Clearly it was not just one or the other but both/and. And should we doubt, the letters of St. Paul document the intense disagreement and polarization that existed between members in-side the early Jesus Movement as well as those outside the fold, too.

In much the way many of us learned to speak of America’s Founding Fathers as well as our Constitution, emphasizing only the most noble of intentions and never confessing the tragic and incomplete promise of freedom revealed by the brutal legacy of slavery, so too parts of the Bible’s mythmaking. The inclusion of the Magi at the start of St. Matthew’s gospel celebrates God’s welcome of Gentiles into the blessings of grace in the West Church, as well as  Christ’s baptism and calling into ministry in the East, and the on-going conflicts encountered as they tried to live into this holy promise. That’s one part of the story.

Another has to do with Fr. Ed’s emphasis on the difference between Western utilitarian culture and Eastern sacramentality. He puts it like this: if the Magi had come from the West, these men “would not have been kings but rather professors and no doubt department heads from different universit-ies.” Then again, knowing our Western mentality, “we would have probably sent a committee, an adoration committee… composed of some of our most intelligent people” who would’ve come bearing:

Practical gifts for this poor family that was living in such dire poverty. These modern magi of the West would have carried boxes of groceries, warm clothing and perhaps even a propane stove. As Western wise ones, they would have thought of something way more useful than incense for poor people living in a barn! Instead of myrrh or perfume, they would have presented to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph insulated underwear. To our Western way of logic, to give to the poor golden gifts instead of practical necessities smacks of stupidity. But thanks be to God the first magi were from the East not the West – and that they were wise one and therefore people guided by wisdom.

There she is again, Lady Wisdom: If you joined us last week, I spoke at length of Lady Wisdom as the feminine incarnation of God’s love – the intuitive, compassionate, creative, and playful force of grace – who, when embraced by the masculine gift of linear thinking and down-to-earth logic lives into holy balance with songs as well as tears, dance alongside mourning, birth, life, and death as sacred gifts guided by a time for every season under heaven. The Magi are wisdom people. And a part of sacramental balance, writes Fr. Ed, is understanding “the briefness of this mortal life. The people of the East know that it is necessary to acquire as much pleasure from life as possible. Per-haps because their culture is older than ours, they know that time is far too short to delay the enjoy-ment of it.” They make a distinction between tools and gifts to which Fr. Ed adds:

So, yes, there will be practical matters to attend to: we must have homes to live in, food to eat, clothing for our bodies. (We must have tools.) But we have souls as well and this spiritual, or inner, person has needs to be nourished, too (with gifts.) Just as the body has needs, so has the heart. We have a need for the incense and perfumes of life as well as the gold of beauty. And true wisdom knows it is the proper care of the entire person – the inward and outward – that renders living blessed.

+ Back in 1982, I first journeyed to what was then Soviet Russia for conversations with Russian Christians about people-to-people peace-making. I had never spent any time inside Roman Catholic, let alone Eastern Orthodox, churches as I’m a child of New England’s Congregational Way. Our sanctuaries were simple, without visual distractions from the Bible as God’s only revealed word for our lives. So, seeing the intricacy of Russian Orthodox sanctuaries, with their gold encased iconostasis that reached 20 feet above our heads, was mind blowing. So, too the elaborate sacred art and flowers to say nothing of the physicality of their prayer that was saturated with incense and candles as the faithful crossed themselves and some prayed prostrate on the floor in humble devotion. It was all so sensual…

+  … and I loved it. I fell in love with icons – visual prayers for our eyes, writes Henri Nouwen, for those times when our hearts and souls can no longer form words to express our love or grief. I began to study Orthodox liturgy – and incorporate simple chants, iconography, and liturgical art into my life at home – and later in the churches I served. The Eastern Orthodox taught me the difference between tools and gifts and about beauty as a gift to and from the sacred.

 Years later, Di and I were in Edinburgh for the 20^th anniversary of my ordination when a sudden rainstorm drove us into a small Scottish Anglican sanctuary just off the High Street. No one else was present so we quietly walked around the candle lit contemplative room in reverent awe. In a side chapel, there was a massive triptych painting of folded linen. Nothing else. Just folded linen and about 15 rows of dark wooden prayer stools. It was humbling, ecstatic, calming, and challenging all at once for this work of liturgical art evoked both the sacrifice and death of Christ as well as his resurrection simultaneously. After sitting awe-struck before this gift for 10 minutes of silence, I found a description written by the Anglican bishop who likened this painting to the per-fumed oil St. Mary Magdalene poured upon the feet and head of Jesus as she anointed him with oil and love. “You may argue about the extravagance of this painting. You may complain that its cost could have been used to feed the hungry,” the bishop wrote. But consider what the Lord told his disciples in St. Mark’s gospel in the 14^th chapter:

Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service and blessed me. You will always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body before-hand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.

Eastern traditions have much to teach us about the gift of being and sharing beauty: gifts go well beyond the utilitarian functions as tools. They feed our souls and nourish our spirits so that we might re-enter creation refreshed. Small wonder that in another context Jesus told his friends: Remember, we do not live on bread alone. On that same first trip to the Orthodox East, taking the train OUT of Russia into what was still Communist Poland was eye opening for me in another way. In Russia – and even more so in the GDR, East Germany, everything that was built after the revolution from houses to stores and parks was functional. It was all utilitarian, practical, and ugly: stocky, blocky, boring building without imagination or soul. But in Poland, stepping off the train in Warsaw was a shock as flowers filled the station and everywhere you looked people were boldly splashing color into the official uniformity of the regime.

Outside one Catholic church, I stumbled upon a Solidarity protest where a capella hymns were sung and the bold red and white Solidarity banner was unfurled for 5 glorious minutes. Then everyone dispersed quickly to avoid the state police and what had been an orgy of sensuality slipped back into ugly communist gray functionality. That was a living lesson in Christ’s reminder that we do NOT live by bread alone. Fr. Ed’s second point about living as gifts and sharing gifts with a world starved for balance and beauty is that: “We in the West must learn to get into the center of life instead of living only on the edges of it, on the surface of what we see, taste, touch, and hear.” Quoting the mystic of science, Teilhard de Chardin, he writes: “By your incarnation, O Lord, all matter has become incarnate.” Meaning a holistic spirituality is engaged with material things sensually so that we’re able to take pleasure in all of creation rather than trying to live on bread alone.

Time and again Jesus calls us to renew an intimacy with God’s first incarnate word, not himself, but nature. Look at the lilies of the field, or the sparrows in the wind. God has adorned them in more majesty and beauty than all of the glories of Solomon’s temple. This almost promiscuous use of color and diversity in nature is overwhelming and ecstatic for those with eyes to see. Sadly, “our historical spiritual formation has made us suspicious of enjoying the world of nature,” he writes, “not to mention that the moral theology of the three little pigs warns us against taking pleasure in the luxuries of life. According to this formation, eating, sleeping, making love, and the other uses of our senses are NOT so much to be enjoyed as endured. We fear the sensual enjoyment of the natural world lest it steal us away from being spiritual.”

Which is NOT the spirituality of Jesus who was regularly condemned for favoring the feast more than the fast. The Magi, too, ask us to learn from the wisdom of God revealed in nature. In the material. In the bounty of creation that is all around us – and then incarnate it, too. Henri Nouwen put it like this: “The visible world is… the veil of the invisible world… all that exists or happens visibly, conceals and suggests a system of persons, facts, and events beyond itself.”

How differently we would live if we were constantly aware of this veil and sensed in our whole being how nature is ever ready for us to hear and see the great story of the Creator’s love, to which it points. The plants and animals with whom we live teach us about birth, growth, maturation, and death, about the need for gentle care, and especially about the importance of patience and hope… It is sad that in our days we are less connected with nature and we no longer allow nature to minister to us. We so easily limit ministry to work for people by people. But we could do an immense service to our world if we would let nature heal, counsel, and teach again. I often wonder if the sheer artificiality and ugliness with which many people are surrounded are not as bad as or worse than their interpersonal problems.

For the past few months, I’ve slowly been pondering a YES Magazine devoted to what they call an “ecological civilization.” Jeremy Lent synthesizes the essence of this sacred and political wisdom with the term “mutually beneficial symbioses” meaning that nature shows us a relationship between “two parties where each contributes something that the other lacks – and both gain as a result.” He explains this mutually beneficial symbioses with a simple beauty:

There is no zero-sum game in this. The contributions of each party create a whole that is greater than the sum or its parts. Whenever you take a walk in the woods, for example, eat a meal, or take a dip in the ocean, you’re experiencing the miracle of nature’s symbioses. Plants transform sunlight into chemical energy that provides food for other creatures, whose waste then fertilizes the soil the plants rely on. Underground fungal networks contribute essential chemicals for tree in return for nutrients they can’t make for themselves…

He goes on to make the connection between the wisdom and miracles of nature and our human experience of symbiosis like this: “In human culture, symbiosis translates into foundation principles of fairness and justice, ensuring that the efforts and skills people contribute to the common good are rewarded equitably. In an ecological civilization, relationships between workers and employers, producers and consumers, humans and animals would thus be based on each party gaining in value rather than on group exploiting the other.”

Mary Oliver says much the same thing in this poem: 

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean—the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Lady Wisdom teaches this by insisting that nature is our first teacher – and first gift-giver – and subsequent mystics – Jesus included – show that learning from nature not only strengthens our ability to see and share beauty but does so in ways that enliven our hearts. Fr. Ed suggests that the Magi not only learned this gift from nature and Lady Wisdom but documented the sacred balance of beauty incarnated in nature by blending their physical gifts with emotional and spiritual care too. “Along with the Magi’s gifts of gold, incense, and perfume, these three wise men manifested another oriental custom of linking our spiritual enjoyment of life with a commitment to courtesy. In the Middle East, ceremonial behavior that honors the feelings of others is a high priority.” Note that their journey included paying respect to King Herod as the local ruler.

“Their adoration before Jesus was part of this same cultural attitude: adoration, bowing, and other manifestations of gracious behavior are rarely practiced by modern people. Adoration, the physical expression of respect, is no longer part of our consciousness.” When we fail to show reverence for one another in the flow of our ordinary lives, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we forget how to be courteous and reverent in worship or public functions, too.

+ Consider the wild contrast between the public behavior of Presidents Trump and Biden. I believe that our once groper-in-chief showed the world the WORST of American ruthlessness – a selfishness that is only ME first, without any sense of decorum, respect, or grace. Pushing his way to the forefront of a G-8 photo op is but one minor example of what it looks like when we lose touch with respect and ethical integrity. Compare this with President and Mrs. Biden visiting England’s queen or at the next G-8 summit: civility, humility, and respect was the rule of the day rather than crass opportunism. “In the East,” Fr. Ed notes, “where people live very close to one another on narrow streets and travelers exist elbow to elbow, proximity created the need for a sacrament of consideration and courtesy.”

+ In the West, we might remember that “we do NOT live by bread alone…” whenever we’re jammed too close to one another: our lives might be fed as well by kind words and gracious behavior where expressions like ‘excuse me” recognize the sacred in the other.” We incarnate our devotion to God whenever we practice the sacrament of courtesy – living as a gift for an-other where we see the divine within the human – the beauty beyond just the demands of the moment – and honor a shared commitment to the fullness of life: We who often feel like machines need to know that by courtesy and gentle manners we become  royal people like the Magi who knew that people are not things to be used and discarded.

We just marked the 6^th month anniversary of the January 6^th insurrection fomented by a crass president who continues to be the distillations of everything that is wrong with our rude, crude, careless, and cruel American culture.  He was a leader so devoid of courtesy and kindness, so blind to his own arrogance and stupidity, and so obsessed with instant gratification that he not only endangered the safety of the hard-working men and women policing the US Capitol, but the very foundation of our experiment in democracy as well.  Wendell Berry recently wrote that: We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us individually would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must now change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that will require that we know the world and learn what is good for it.

Living as gift-givers rather than a wealth-takers matters publicly, it matters politically, spiritually, ethically, and emotionally, too.  As we recall that we do NOT live by bread alone, we honor beauty. We recognize that we “need perfume, red wine, roses in the winter, good books, poetry, music, incense, respect, kindness and the time to enjoy them all slowly, sip by sip.” This is the mystical magic at the heart of Jesus and at the core of his living body in community.  A friend sent me this quote a few weeks ago from the Quaker scholar Douglas Steele: “To listen another’s soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another.” Lord, may it be so among us.