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.