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.
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
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