how then shall we live in this season of loss...

From time to time I just can't help myself so today I once again wade into the volatile waters of my nation's politics and culture to share a few thoughts. The catalyst was the opeing essay in Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. She makes the observation that there are two distinct understandings of lost:

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the
familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Her comment that "getting lost... is a case where the world becomes larger than our knowledge of it" hit home after pondering Tom Friedman's most recent column in the Sunday NY Times where he states:

For all you knuckleheads on Fox who say that Biden can’t put two sentences together, here’s a news flash: He just put NATO together, Europe together and the whole Western alliance together — stretching from Canada up to Finland and all the way to Japan — to help Ukraine protect its fledgling democracy from Vladimir Putin’s fascist assault. In doing so, he has enabled Ukraine to inflict significant losses on Russia’s invading army, thanks to a rapid deployment of U.S. and NATO trainers and massive transfers of precision weapons. And not a single American soldier was lost. Alas, though, I left our lunch with a full stomach but a heavy heart. Biden didn’t say it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. I could hear it between the lines: He’s worried that while he has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America. (check it all out here: (check it out here: https://www.nytimes.com/ 2022/05/22/opinion/biden-trump-republicans-democrats.html?)

This loss is sad and sobering: it is certainly a case of reality becoming bigger than my comprehension and way beyond my control. It's an assesment by a savvy and time-tested pundit: you may not agree with Friedman on some things - and I often don't - but you can't argue with his sense that something vital and valuable is slipping away and may soon be lost:

It’s clearly (Biden's) priority, above any Build Back Better provision. And he knows that’s why he was elected — a majority of Americans worried that the country was coming apart at the seams and that this old war horse called Biden, with his bipartisan instincts, was the best person to knit us back together. It’s the reason he decided to run in the first place, because he knows that without some basic unity of purpose and willingness to compromise, nothing else is possible. But with every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he can bring us back together. I wonder if it’s too late. I fear that we’re going to break something very valuable very soon. And once we break it, it will be gone — and we may never be able to get it back. I am talking about our ability to transfer power peacefully and legitimately, an ability we have demonstrated since our founding.

This is loss as tragedy. It did not have to happen. It is neither snipping from the sidelines of relevancy as is the want of so many pundits on the left nor the salacious carping for ratings practiced by the pitiful right wing entertainers of Murdoch's TV network. No, Friendman is a mainstream media professional who paid his dues covering the politics of disintegration in Israel and Lebanon. His feelings of fear and analysis of loss resonate with my own. Reading this report from our most trusted ally in Canada amplified my concern. CBC Montreal carried a story this morning that should shake and wake everyone who values living in an open and democratic society.

Canada's intelligence community will have to grapple with the growing
influence of anti-democratic forces in the United States — including the threat posed by conservative media outlets like Fox News — says a new report from a task force of intelligence experts: "The United States is and will remain our closest ally, but it could also become a source of threat and instability," says a newly published report written by a task force of former national security advisers, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) directors, ex-deputy ministers, former ambassadors and academics. Members of the group have advised both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former prime minister Stephen Harper. Now is the time for the federal government to rethink how it approaches national security, the report concludes.

(read the article @ https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/national-security-us-fox-news-threat-report-1.6459660)

And now add yet another mass slaughter of innocent children and educators by one more unmoored young man with a battery of guns. A constellation of middle-of-the-road analysts throughout the world, especially those above the 49th parallel, have concluded that the USA is on the verge of breaking. Friedman asks what other conclusion is possible now that we're living through an era when lying about telling the truth (a la Kevin McCarthy) is normative. The credibility of the United States, often compromised like every institution but also historically striving to build a more perfect union, is crumbling. This troubles and frustrates President Biden as Friendman observes:

(This) clearly weighs on him... we have built a global alliance to support Ukraine, to reverse the Russian invasion and to defend core American principles abroad — the right to freedom and self-determination of all peoples — while the G.O.P. is abandoning our most cherished principles at home. That is why so many allied leaders have privately said to Biden, as he and his team have revived the Western alliance from the splintered pieces that Trump left it in, “Thank God — America is back.” And then they add, “But for how long?” Biden cannot answer that question. Because WE cannot answer that question.

As a rule, I find solace in God's first word - Mother Nature - both for the clues creation offers us re: the sacred presence in our reality as well as the personal perspective she brings to my journey of trust in chaotic times. In my part of the world, there is a modicum of order playing out as Spring ripens into early Summer and each day grows warmer and more alive. As the wise old preacher, Qoheleth of Ecclesiastes fame, reminds us: "There is NOTHING new under the sun" because there:

Is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to throw away; a time to tear and a time to sew; a time to keep silent and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.

But even the well-ordered serenity of my rural solitude and its beauty cannot hide the loss taking place within and among us. The once arbitrary disasters in nature are becoming as common place as mass murders given climate change which suggests that we're NOT going to be able to dodge another political/cultural/spiritual/ecological bullet: this has become our season of disintegration and we're going to know break down, weeping, and the gnashing of teeth. Leonard Cohen prophetically told us: "I've seen the future, man, and it's murder."

I have studiously avoided TV news this week - and chosen not to read the editorial commentaries, too - because some simply recycle the self-righteous platitudes of the past while others only evoke despair without redress. At this moment in time I can only say: "Stick a fork in them - they're done!" Still, I ask how, then, shall we live into this time of loss, collapse, fear, and disorder? Two clues rise to the surface: 

+ First, our long suffering indigenous neighbors are offering some insights. With grace as well as irony, their elders insist that sharing wisdom about enduring during disaster is NOT cultural appropriation, a must to avoid, because caring is what a good neighbor does. Siku Allooloo wrote in YES! Magazine:

Last spring I spent some time with a very knowledgeable and beloved elder, Ethel Lamothe. We were at Dechinta Bush University—a Northern organization based outside of Yellowknife that delivers Indigenous education on the land and one of the saving graces in my own educational journey. I was helping her scrape a moose hide in preparation for tanning, and as our hands worked we talked about womanhood, spirituality, and bush medicines. She told me about the work she and others did in previous decades to advance decolonization, social transformation, and healing in Denendeh and also shared insight about the challenges. I had been troubled lately about the gap between elders and young people, the cultural inheritance being lost, the growing alienation I see in current generations, and the complexity of overcoming all these challenges when we are starting from such fragmentation. At one point Ethel stopped and said: “Our society is full of holes now, like the ones in this hide. So we have to sew them up. Where there’s a hole there instead of a mother or a father, an aunty or grandparent steps in to raise the kids. We have holes in our spirituality and culture, how we relate to each other and deal with things, so we have to find ways to relearn that. You know, we lost some of our own ceremonies and ways of praying, but we can learn from other cultures who still have it. You don’t have any grandmothers to teach what you need to know as a woman, so you adopt a new grandmother who can teach you. So we do it like that. We sew it up.”  

+ Second, the time-tested medicine of First Nations wisdom-keepers resonates with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible concerning lamentation: when we find ourselves by the waters of Babyon, and those in power ask us to keep singing our old songs as if nothing had changed, we must refuse. We cannot hurry along our descent into grief nor self-medicate our way out of our anguish. We must face it. Own it. Listen to it and embrace it. This is sack cloth and ashes time where weeping by the waters of Babylon is prelude to understanding and resistance. anything. Humility is to become our guide - and so many of us in the dominante culture have yet to practice letting go. We still think and act as if doing what we've always done can bring about something salvific when the truth is that until we own that we are lost we can't be found. Another indigenous wisdom keeper, 

Taiaiake Alfred, tells us:

There is a role in Indigenous resurgence for non-Indigenous people. They can play a part in the decolonization of this land simply by disassociating themselves from the privileges that are built into being part of the settler society, softening the stifling grip mainstream society has on Indigenous existences. Forgoing the need to be right, to be in charge, and to possess. Embracing the discomfort of the unsettled existence of an ally committed to the strength and well-being of Indigenous nations. Just as with the Indigenous people who are defining resurgence through their unscripted creative contention and generative acts of love for the land, there is no template or menu for allyship. For all of us, Indigenous and settler alike, there is only self-questioning and embracing this commitment: Listen to the voices of our Indigenous ancestors channeled through the young people of our nations, learn from Indigenous culture how to walk differently, and love the land as best you can.

My take on this season of loss and disintegration is becoming clear: the politics of self-imolation that now energize the elite of the United States is also birthing a new humility among some of us. Our loss is breaking our hearts open. We are starting to intellectually comprehend and spiritually sense that before new life and resurrection can happen among us, a great death must take place. It will be every bit as apocalyptic as the prophets portend - and it is going to much worse before it gets better. There must be a critical mass committed to grief work in the US where we empty our soul. As ancient Israel's prophets and our own indigenous wisdom-keeper know: only when we are empty, bereft and accountable for our hubris, are we free to grasp and respond to the presence of grace that God aches to share with us. 

Already some of the insights of resistance and resurgence are taking shape within
the artistic periphery of our culture. But there's too much arrogoance, busyness, shame, and deceit taking place for us to hear it with clarity. We're still too moored to the past to give birth to the future. So, we must wait for the Spirit while we groan with sighs too deep for human words. As Brother Leonard told us: I've seen the future, man, and it's murder. How, then, shall we live? Our indigenous neighbors suggest what the Hebrew Bible proclaims: exile is real but it is not the end of the story. Look at post WWII Germany that continues to rise up from the ashes of Nazi devastation. By creating and savoring as much beauty as is possible; by grieving what is being lost within and among us; by owning our arrogance and violence; and by listening carefully to those on the periphery who have learned how to renew their souls and communities in the worst of times we, too can mature and overcome. 

For the time being, I believe people of faith must carefully and conscientiously model lament within our grief resistant culture: we must take the unknown path into the darkness trusting that there is light on the other side. For as our tradition teaches: we are to journey by faith not sight. We will need to maintain close contact with those who love us if we're to endure. Solidarity is not an add-on or incidental, but an essential spiritual discipline for our era of lamentation. So, too our periodic feasts and fasts and celebrations that keep us connected to the bigger picture. Other nations and cultures have lived through what we are entering and tell those with ears to hear:

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the straps 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? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.” If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places and make your bones strong, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in. (Isaiah 58)

credits:

1) Holly Van Hadt @ https://hollyvanhart.com/abstract-forest-painting-wandering-in-wonder/
2) Domen Lo @ https://www.artmajeur.com/en/domen-lo/artworks/7929388/the-wandering-eye
3) Flags @ https://flagwix.com/products/canada-us-friendship-american-canadian-flag-thh3749gf/?attribute_size=4x6+ft.&attribute_type=No+Flagpole+Mounting+Rings&gclid=CjwKCAjwyryUBhBSEiwAGN5OCHLQJRYOtHunGYqXuCeLHyGo7kzhTooYfrcif1WlvwxyujwNa7x6XRoC0SIQAvD_BwE
4) lumsden garden
5) First Nations Art @ https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Juncture--First-Nations-Art-at-NERAM/595C75959BE3B7B3
6) Lament @ https://artandtheology.org/tag/lament/
7) George Grosz, Hitler in Hell @ https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/01/24/hitler-in-hell-german-historical-museum-acquires-george-grosz-painting
8) Marc Chagall, Isaiah @ https://www.imago-images.com/st/0126166663

time to shift gears...?

For the next few weeks I am going to try something different on "Small is Holy."
As a rule, I've been framing my reflections around liturgical prayers. I love good liturgy and celebrate the creative, compassionate, and conscientious innovative liturgies that hail from the Iona, Taize, Celebration, and Corrymeela communities. The flow of such prayers, songs, silences, chants, readiings, and Eucharist evoke both beauty and order in a chaotic world. They ground me in what is important and eternal. Back in the day, my daughters and I would laugh quietly to ourselves whenever various church people would complain that I was being "too creative" and outside the box. They used to say, "Man, Dad, do they not get it! If it was just up to you, we'd be chanting, bowing, bending with ALL the old smells and bells." True enough.

What I have tried to do during both my four pastoral ministry commitments and now in my journey into online community outreach is to find contemporary words to articulate the ancient wisdom. As Cynthia Bourgeault writes, there are four key components to the perennial wisdom tradition: ora y labora (prayer and work) as well as soaking up the silence and opening the heart through chanting. This is, however, probably best left for those deeply committed to the contemplative path. For those either new to contemplative reflection, those who have fled the oppressive nature of some aspects of institutional worship in their pasts but still seek a grounding in a spiritual path with roots, or simply those who know there is more than meets the eye but don't resonate with the existing communities of faith, I am wondering if a less formal, less liturgical Sunday evening prayer might be in order?

So, I am going to start an experiment this week to see if together we might discern a new rhythm for "Small is Holy," one that incorporates contemporary poetry, song and silence with an informal spoken reflection and a simple Eucharist. My hunch is that simpler might be better. We'll see over the next few weeks as I search for a new rhythm. Let me know your thoughts.

a new commandment to love... NOW

This week I was awakened again to a curious cultural paradox of my life – you might even call it a social or spiritual schizophrenia of sorts – where I am living a quiet, simple, nearly monastic life of gardening, writing, music-making, spiritual direction, and caring for those I love while whole clusters of people, as well as the flora and fauna, water, air, and cultures of creation must endure repeated acts of violence, trauma, chaos, and suffering. The merciless slaughter of people of color by a young, white, male domestic terrorist in Buffalo and the relentless carnage of the war in Uk-raine are just the tip of a vicious iceberg that includes a million lives lost to covid in the USA, our national addiction to drugs and mindless distractions, the harrowing loneliness and emotional trauma our young people have endured during the pandemic to say nothing of our political descent into fear, tribalism, and hatred.

This dilemma is timeless in some ways as walking by faith not sight has always
meant trusting a love at work among us that is greater than the obvious; but it is also uniquely modern quest, too as 21st century mystics and contemplatives seek ways to balance solitude with compassion in the digital age. When religious communities once lived solely within the confines of the cloister – and the flow of information moved among us at the speed of the seasons – establishing a well-ordered practice of work and prayer – ora y labora as the Benedictines say – was less complicated. In rela-tive isolation, we could maintain a measure of hospitality with the world, “unburdened by strange diets, esoteric devotions, or damaging denials of self.” As Sr. Joan Chittister suggests, “the true monastic walked through life with a barefooted soul, alert, aware, grateful, and only partially at home.” Today, however, and for most of the 20th and 21st centuries, people of prayer must learn to live into a reality that sees, hears, feels, tastes, and smells the celebrations as well as the lament-ations of creation without the protection of the cloister and without clear guidelines for balancing our contemplation with necessary social action.

With so much sensory data breaking our hearts open every day by the enormity of the world’s pain, you see, it’s no wonder so many feel overwhelmed, impotent, and despairing. I once heard Krista Tippett, the host of On Being, quip to her guest that she thought global technology could bring us back to a small is beautiful perspective: “We can now see the suffering and need all over the world in real time and respond instantly” she said. To which her guest ironically replied: well, maybe before adding:

Today we can look at an Iraqi or Ukrainian children, for example, whose agony wounds us and compels us to want to do something, yet because that child is NOT right there in front of you, you must confront your incapacity for action because what is really in front of you is an image and NOT the child herself. If that child was in front of you, you could take her in your arms. So, we must figure out how to live into a world where the imagination, the virtual, the long distance, sees things far away while they appear as close. But you can’t touch them. They’re close to the imagination, but they’re not close to our flesh and blood.

For the past five years, I’ve been learning at L’Arche what the late Thomas Merton – monastic, author, and activist – told Jim Forrest, a young peace activist during the war in Vietnam about just this quandary. The key to faithful living now Merton wrote is proximity – embracing the limitations of being small and even powerless – while managing our imaginations so that we do: “NOT depend on the hope of results.” Merton wrote:

When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work for peace, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be endured, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

This seems to be the wisdom consistently celebrated by contemporary

contemplative activists of every spiritual hue: embrace a simple but well-practiced rhythm of engagement, solitude and pray-erful reflection before returning to the fray; and, stay connected to real people who are close by. Let ideology and measurable results go and be like Jesus who kept asking his friend: “Peter, do you love me?” Small acts of tender love shared locally is how we reclaim balance and focus. I suspect that’s why I’ve been knocked out by this Leonard Cohen song. Its prescient lyrics and melancholic melody feels to me like our struggle to ground ourselves in small, local acts of love as we train our imaginations with simple, quiet prayer all bathed in love. Cohen calls it: “Almost Like the Blues.”

I saw some people starving, there was murder, there was rape
Their villages were burning, they were trying to escape

I couldn't meet their glances, I was staring at my shoes
It was acid, it was tragic: It was almost like the blues…

I have to die a little between each murderous plot
And when I'm finished thinking I have to die a lot

There's torture, and there's killing, and there's all my bad reviews
The war, the children missing, lord, it's almost like the blues

Though I let my heart get frozen to keep away the rot
My father says I'm chosen, my mother says I'm not

I listened to their story of the gypsies and the Jews
It was good, it wasn't boring: it was almost like the blues

There is no God in heaven, there is no hell below
So says the great professor of all there is to know

But I've had the invitation that a sinner can't refuse
It's almost like salvation, It's almost like the blues

The genius of this song, besides the couplets is, I think, the tag line: almost like the blues. That’s a mouthful of shorthand spiritual wisdom obliquely suggesting that often our lament is not QUITE as cathartic as the blues: it’s close, it’s almost there, but when anguish is not intimate, like it is in the real blues, when it’s more universal or abstract, it’s not attached to real flesh and blood. In his intentionally paradoxical way, Cohen wants us to know that many of our songs are not as gritty as Howlin’ Wolf, Big Momma Thorton, or Coltrane because they’re disembodied. The real blues moves through lament – it doesn’t stay locked in the pain – but reaches beyond it. Singing almost like the blues is what an emotional tourist does – dabbling here, watching there, grieving in the abstract before moving on. The real blues is salvific, transformative, while almost like the blues is honestly emotional but rarely anything more.

Which is what Jesus tells us in today’s reading from St. John’s gospel. At table with his be-loved friends, he says to us today what he told always told them then: God has been glorified – illumi-nated, celebrated, and incarnated – now. Whenever you love one another as I have loved you, God is glorified. Do this for it is my new commandment. Now, remember the setting of these words: it may be the 5th Sunday of Eastertide for us, but the text comes from St. John’s account of the last supper where three important things took place: First, Jesus anointed his friends for ministry using humble, ordinary water as he washed their feet; second, he shared a Passover meal with them; and third, he told them that loving real people we can touch is the key for moving beyond ALMOST like the blues.

Instead of despair or abstractions, let’s regularly gather around the table, share food and encour-agement with one another using the stories and songs of our tradition, and then go back into the world to love those closest to us. THIS is how God is glorified.

· Now I understand that my third insight is the minority report when it comes to this passage – and I’ve only come to it with any clarity recently. Most scholars want us to believe that God was glorified when Judas left the table to enact his betrayal: for these theologians it is the Passion that expresses Christ’s love most clearly.

· But the flow of the story seems to suggest that God was once glorified when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet before the Passover meal; so it stands to reason that God would continue to be glorified whenever we do likewise. Simple, humble acts of love to real human beings offered without any illusion of measurable results is the NEW commandment – compassion freely offered – is what gives shape, form, and honor to the holy.

Contemporary Bible scholars insist that “what Jesus has in mind here is distinctive, subversive, and surprising, with wide-ranging social consequences.” (SALT Project) That’s what I’ve come to believe, too. To glorify God, you see, is to “mirror God’s image” in real time: it is to make our words of love and commitment to compassion flesh. To glorify God, from the Greek doxazo, is to manifest the light, wisdom, beauty, grace, healing, and awe of the holy in observable ways. I think of it as sacra-mental as our inward and spiritual love is expressed in outward and visible acts that point towards their source in the sacred heart of the Lord.

That’s one of the gifts of this text: it reminds us that our outward spiritual worship

is more about spreading love than going to church. Or ending all suffering. Or getting trapped in feelings that we cannot act upon. As I’ve shared with you many times, St. Paul crystalizes this calling in Romans 12 clearly:

So, here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: 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 does 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 God and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. 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.

Sharing real love where we find ourselves, living with compassion among our neighbors, is one of the ways to resist our culture’s lowest common denominator. I’ve come to trust it is how God is glorified and how that glory becomes flesh in you and me. The poet and artist, Jan Richardson, rephrases this truth saying:

Let it be that on this day we will expect no more of ourselves
than to keep breathing with the bewildered cadence of lungs that will not give up the ghost. Let it be we will expect little but the beating of our heart, stubborn in its repeating rhythm that will not cease to sound.
Let it be we will still ourselves enough to hear what may yet come to echo: As if in the breath, another breathing; as if in the heartbeat, another heart. And let it be we will not try to fathom what comes to meet us in the stillness but simply open to the approach of a mystery we hardly dared to dream.

God is glorified when we don’t plot and plan so much as welcome, receive, and respond. When we consciously and with some consistency share Christ’s love with others like God has shared it with us. The context of this story adds poignancy to our emerging Eastertide spirituality which is easy to miss if we only read the appointed lectionary texts in isolation. Without the bigger picture, we might easily miss the revolutionary meaning of Christ’s rite of foot washing. So, keep in mind that:

· The first anointing in the arc of this story happens a week before Passover when St. Mary Magdalene anoints the head of Jesus with perfumed oil. Magdalene transforms her tradition not only by taking on the role of the priest – a truly revolutionary act for a Jewish woman in first century Palestine – but by anointing Jesus as Messiah: Lord and Savior.

· The male disciples had hoped that such an anointing would take place in the Temple, but Magdalene lets it be known that those who embrace the radical hospitality and grace-filled love of God in Jesus don’t have time to wait for the institutional leadership to catch up to the Holy Spirit. The Cross is too close for comfort. Fear is everywhere. So, at yet another table, she does what others should have done: she anoints Jesus as God’s beloved.

A week later, on the Eve of the Feast of Passover, Jesus builds on Magdalene’s revolutionary wis-dom when he strips off his outer garment, ties a towel around his waist, kneels before his friends and students, and washes feet still filthy from traveling the dirt roads of ancient Israel. This act, in and of itself, symbolizes a spirituality of humility, proximity, and servanthood where the supposed master now becomes like a slave. But just so that no one misses the point, Jesus ups the ante by in-verting and replacing the traditional perfumed oil with ordinary water and literally anointing the bottom of a person’s body rather that the top. Do you see the life-changing sacramentality of this act? Water instead of sacred oil is radically egalitarian, feet rather than head celebrates humility, and the holiness of the ordinary table instead of the grandeur of the Temple makes living in the love of Christ accessible to us all. We don’t needs special places or times to practice love: we can do it anywhere! Isn’t that what the new commandment says:

Behold, I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another, for in this God is glorified.

St. John places all of this within the arc of the Last Supper where prophecy is revealed at a simple dinner table. In this farewell discourse, the last words of guidance and consolation Jesus shares with his followers as he takes his leave… are that while Jesus is on his way out, the Holy Spirit is on her way in… As the post-Easter community is about to be born — a community that Jesus insists will go on to do even “greater works” than he did… the living community will incarnate the love they have experienced with the whole neighborhood without concern for results…and THEN God will be truly glorified.” (SALT Project)

· After the foot washing, after his humble anointing, as the Passover feast begins Jesus says: NOW God has been glorified. NOT at the Cross, or Resurrection, or Ascension. NOW – in the upper room. Before the Cross, the Resurrection, or Ascension.

· I don’t know how I missed the simple intimacy of this promise for decades, but I think I get it now: With tenderness Jesus recognizes our wounds and anxieties saying, “Little ones, beloved and humble, I am with you – I am with you now in one way; and as you love one another as I have loved you – I will be with you again. Just keep on doing what we have done tonight.”

The focus of a disciple now is as it was then: make friends with those around 

us without regard to status, bridge the divides between “above and below, insider and out-sider, clean and unclean,” gather regularly for simple meals of table fellowship where we can offer one another encourage-ment through storytelling, songs, prayers, poems, and acts of beauty. This is what the community of faith is to do when everything else around us feels like madness: we feast, we listen, we encour-age, and we love.

When communities are under assault, when hell becomes normative and hope fades from our memory, when war and violence rage and peace is forgotten: the followers of Jesus are asked to focus on three counter-intuitive, counter-cultural acts: gather together for a meal, listen with care to one another’s reality, and share love with those you can touch. That’s what Syrian priests told their congregations during the ugly civil war, it’s what the Christian remnant did when Isis ruled the land, it’s what empowered those consigned by chance to the evils of Stalin and Hitler, it’s what the African-American church preaches consistently, and, my friends, it is one of the ways we who are contemplatives can let go of singing ALMOST like the blues and get down to the real thing.

Back in 1983, during an international people-to-people peace pilgrimage to what was then the Soviet Union, on our way back to the West, we spent some time in Poland during Marshall Law as Solidarity challenged the brutality of communist totalitarianism with a few more days in the then GDR: the German Democratic Republic of communist East Germany. One night we had a long con-versation with some East German church leaders who later became instrumental in the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

These were men and women who, after the nightmare of Hitler’s brutality had the chance to leave Germany for at least the freedom of the West – or entrée into England or the USA. But they chose instead to stay where they were. Under the double whammy, as one dissident put it, of German autocracy and Stalinist cruelty, they chose to endure the worst of both worlds. Because, it was absolutely essential to love their ordinary neighbors. IF there was to be any hope of rebuilding a new and healthy free Germany: “We HAD to stay where we were if we were going to be faithful to Jesus and believed by those all around us. If we were to have any credibility, we had to stand and deliver love and not take advantage of our elite status and skip out on the pain.” We talked about this faithfulness – and the cost of such discipleship – for hours before one person lifted up the words of St. Paul from Romans 12:

So, here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: 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 does 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 God and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. 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.

I think of that dark time in an East German apartment as we go deeper into the

chaos and pain of our trials: it is every bit as terrifying and broken as what the early church faced before and after the Cross. It’s going to get as horrifying in our own way as what our East German friends knew – and it is going to be costly for those who love the way Jesus loved us. In a recent interview, another of Christ’s servants, Wendell Berry, replied like this when asked what do we do now to challenge the fear and madness of our age and live as those nourishing God’s love within:

What can we do? We can take Gary Snyder’s good advice: “Stop somewhere.” He meant stop and stay and deal with the consequences. We can teach ourselves to think as community members rather than as individuals in competition with all other individuals. We can work, shop, eat, and amuse ourselves as close to home as possible. We can, on our own or with like-minded people, become mindful of all that we have in our places that is worth keeping, and of the best ways of keeping those things. And, to quote Gary Snyder again, we can: stay together - learn the flowers - go light.

The spirituality of Eastertide that I see unfolding from the stories of this season ask us to stop – be where we are fully right now. Reconnect with those around us with love and patience as neighbors. Open our tables to one another, listen carefully to one another’s stories. And trust that these small acts of tenderness are exactly what God asks of us at this moment. Then we won’t be living like it’s ALMOST like the blues, we’ll be singing a profound lament that owns our anxiety and danger, but trusts the love of God to be greater still.

Let it be that on this day we will expect no more of ourselves than to keep breathing with the bewildered cadence of lungs that will not give up the ghost. Let it be we will expect little but the beating of our heart,
stubborn in its repeating rhythm that will not cease to sound.
Let it be we will still ourselves enough to hear what may yet come to echo: As if in the breath, another breathing; as if in the heartbeat, another heart. And let it be we will not try to fathom what comes to meet us in the stillness but simply open to the approach of a mystery we hardly dared to dream.

cranky, old man redux

This morning one of my musical/spiritual mentors - Carrie Newcomer - wrote this:

Now enters May, the bridge month, the days between the beginning of spring and arrival of summer. The first wildflowers, the trillium and hepatica, salt and peppers and Dutchman’s britches, the blue bells and celandine poppies are lifting their handkerchiefs in the wind, a tender farewell until the next muddy March. The second wave is emerging, rising up from the forest floor, the jack-in-the-pulpits, wild phlox, the morels and other mushrooms. At the bird feeder a flash of orange or red appears, a sleek scarlet tanager or Baltimore oriole, stopping in for a few days on their long journey north. The haunting song of the wood thrush has returned to the deep woods around my home. The frost date has past and it is time to plant my raised beds, to rake in compost and dream of the tomatoes that will ripen in July.

I’m not sure why I love the transitions in the natural world so much but I do. I love the liminal time when the bats head toward their roosts while the birds begin to sing their first morning songs. I love the wash of color that comes with the last rays of sun at the edge of the horizon. I love this time of year when the trees are covered with with a five O’clock shadow of barely unfurled leaves, that luminous spring green in perfect juxtaposition with the purple blooms of the redbud trees. I love the dusty smell in the air that lets me know that the summer has ended and the first days of autumn have arrived, and when the first filigrees of ice begin to form at the edge of the pond. There is beauty in the shift, expectation in the transition, a wonder in the process that make my heart ache and open. I can learn a lot from the experience of loving the changes that happen in the woods. There is wisdom in the order of natural things.

I'm with Carrie: I am energized by these transitional seasons and love how they help and challenge me to hang loose in the saddle. That was essential as this week evolved and I tried to find a way to refurbursh my ancient Fiskar Reel Push lawnmower. Our current model has  been in regular service for twelve hard years. Now that I must have the blades sharpened, guess what? No one does this type of work any more - in ALL of Berkshire County! The only gent who once sharpened reel mower blades moved South last year according to a wise old hardware store manager. What's more, push reel lawn mowers are not even sold in our neck of the woods any longer. I checked all the big box outlets as well as five independent hardware stores and none carried manual reel lawn mowers. To be sure, I could get a so-called eco-friendly electric machine with a rechargable battery - or one of a variety of gus guzzling, smoke spewing lawn mowing hogs - there's even some cut rate financing available for a mini-tractors. But nary a quiet, manually operated standard reel push model is to be found in all of Western Massachusetts. Color me cranky.

After a rigorous phone, online, and in-person search yesterday morning, I found a solitary hardware store that would sharpen my machine's blade IF I could remove it. After 45 minutes of trying to take my old friend apart, only to discover that it's constructed like a Swiss watch - intricate and complex - I threw in the towel and quit. You might say I felt modestly cranky again. Today I wanted to try sharpening the blade by hand but found that we'd lost the necessary file. And when I reassembled Old Faithful as well as I remembered, there were a few bolts gone missing forcing me to cut the most onerous parts of the yard with my weed wacker. Call it inspiration or the gift of learning a little from my countless mistakes, but I quickly ordered a new Fiskar push reel mower on line just to be safe. With none of ou local merchants showing any interest in such antiquated merchandise, once again I find myself caught in the web of Mammon. Jeff Bilbro carefully suggests that: 

Mammon is an old demon whose temptation Andy Crouch defines as “abundance without dependence.” Mammon promises to “conjur[e] up the goods and services I require and desire without entangling myself with the personalities and needs of other people.” Or, as Crouch puts it elsewhere in his book (on Wendell Berry), “what it wants, above all, is to separate power from relationship, abundance from dependence, and being from personhood.” At the heart of this temptation is the promise that our frustrations and limitations and failures have solutions and all we need to do is acquire the right technique. (see more @ https://

www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/05/severe-mercies-and-magnanimous-despair/)

While I enjoy and often use the wonders of internet shopping, we have also made a conscious committment to buy mostly locally. Living in a small community has given me the chance to know the local merchants and develop a measure of caring for them all, too. The woman at the local package store asks me about my grandchildren, the independent car mechanic committed to keeping older vehicles safe and running suggests the most economical and safe way to move forward, the neighbor who plows our steep drive way in the winter smiles and waves when ever he drives by, the clerks at Aldis or WalMart and I talk about the challenge of keeping an open heart when so many people are exploding in fear and rage, and I often see our local politicians at the farmers' market: I know them and have developed relationships of respect with them. Their well-being is genuinely linked to mine so I feel an ethical responsibility to share my resources with them in responsible ways. I sense that Gandhi got it right when he crafted his seven deadly social sins:

Which brings me back to my feelings of spiritual and cultural crankiness: the disappearance of crafts people doing simple repairs on small machines is antithetical to the soul of thrifty New England. It once was said with glee that "we ALWAYS repair rather than buy new." I grew up in five different traditional New England small towns where it was a virtue to recycle, repair, resuse, and repurpose. My Poppa Fred made us a racing cart out of an old ironing board and the wheels from a discarded baby buggie. My Granda Nick regularly baked yeasted dinner rolls from scratch. We used to make boats and dress-up hats out of discarded newsprint. Di's family shared hand-made gifts at Christmas.  Fifty years later, however, planned obsolesence is the order of the day even in our small towns throughout New England. It's become that era bigger is better and hence my collapse into Mammon.

One of the gifts I've received while pushing my old reel mower across the front yard involves the random conversations I've had with walkers, joggers, and delivery people. They almost all stop, watch me for a moment, and then say with affection: "I didn't think anyone used those any more. Its so quiet, not like those damn electric or gas powered leaf blowers that violate our Sabbath stillness and stink up the air." I stop and smile, and eventually they smile, too and shyly add, "Thanks, man" before heading on. It takes a lot more work to use this old mower. It is equally laborious to use an old fashioned rake for the bramble and accumulated winter detritus on the grass. Given my arthritis, there are days when I can only accomplish about 45 minutes of such manual labor at a time. But I despise noise pollution and detest fouling the air. Moreover, the physical and visual aesthetics of doing all this by hand are simply too wonderful to forsake.

So, given the bountiful sun forecast for the rest of the week, it looks like I'll be ALL about renewing my acquaintance with the garden. For the time being, Brother Sun has taken up semi-permanent residency in our Berkshire hills which is a blessing NOT to be taken for granted. We got the large plants back out on the deck along with assorted herbs. Tomorrow I'll build two new raised garden beds, add fertilizing from our compost, and add more organic top soil. Saturday we'll visit a few native plant nurseries to add a few new shrubs and seedlings to the place and get some pumpkin and herb seedlings. This year we're going to revive the three sisters of the First Nations people - corn, beans, and pumpkins - in a dedicated raised bed. Tomatoes will have reign over their own raised bed with potatoes taking up a third. Cukes and assorted squash will fill the fourth with new milkweed along the scrub ling with a ton of wildflowers in addition to the chard, lettuce, peas, and various green leafy plants closer to the house.

It is our hope to keep returning our small patch of creation back to its native origins with flowers and plants that have been long neglected but essential to our collective well-being. As we sit out on the deck at breakfast to soak up the trees and birds of the wetlands, I am reminded of what Wendell Berry said when asked what can we do to reclaim community:

What can we do? We can take Gary Snyder’s good advice: “Stop somewhere.” He meant stop and stay and deal with the consequences. We can teach ourselves to think as community members rather than as individuals in competition with all other individuals. We can work, shop, eat, and amuse ourselves as close to home as possible. We can, on our own or with like-minded people, become mindful of all that we have in our places that is worth keeping, and of the best ways of keeping those things. And, to quote Gary Snyder again, we can

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

Today, I am a joyful, old crank - unfit for the status quo - and unwilling to let my mind be squeezed into the mold of the lowest common denominator (as St. Paul put it.) I'll deal with a scruffy lawn until our new reel mower arrives. I'll keep on playing and learning in the dirt as we tend to our gardens and land. The Reverend Pamela Dolan put it like this in her open-hearted and wise little book, Contemplative Gardening: 

There is so much beauty and wonder in scenery that would have once struck me as ordinary and forgetable. This might be the greatest gift that gardening bestows: the ability to see the world in a new way and fall in love with creation all over again.

becoming a crankly, old man...

Somewhere along the way, and I can't tell you exactly when, I realized that I'd become what some would call a cranky, old man. Not that I see myself this way, mind you. No, I rather think of myself as a quiet, older white guy who loves to hear people's stories, putz about in my expanding garden, make satisfying and creative music with a few trusted friends, spoil my grandchildren, cherish my wife, and contemplatively walk with compassion through this current madness. I know that's only part of me, the visible, public side that my ego likes; its not my shadow, which poet Juan Ramón Jiménez playfully says is also part of our being but cannot be seen by us. Those who are paying attention, however, see it clearly in all the hidden truths we drag along behind ourselves mostly unawares:

Yo no soy yo. Soy este que va a mi lado sin yo verlo, que, 

a veces, voy a ver, y que, a veces olvido...
I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, 

whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die.

Yesterday, after our beginners ukulele class, I couldn't help but take stock of my near complete alienation from the status quo. I am now wildly out of step with these times. No more so than say Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver, an august duo if there ever was one, but clearly NOT part of the mainstream culture I once served and cherished. You see, no sooner had I arrived at the elementary school than my pack of little buddies swarmed me. These little guys - and they are all guys - ache for healthy male attention. They're bright, still tender despite their wounds, and so eager to please, learn, and succeede. It's a bit overwhelming how physically affectionate they are which is simultaneously rewarding and frightening. Given the magnitude of child abuse among vulnerable young people - and the litigious nature of a culture aching for somebody to blame - I am always on guard to maintain strict and safe boundaries with my little posse. Perhaps that's one of the reasons I feel overwhelmed with their affection: it is fraught with so many layers of complexity. In another time and place, you see, I would sit down quietly with these boys to listen carefully to their stories. All we can do now is share a few words in passing en route to trying to make a bit of music.

No wonder I'm cranky, yes? These young guys - and their young female peers - need affirmation and formation. They need trusted adults who care for them beyond their families - and beyond their teachers and assistants, too. Without a doubt, the school professionals are compassionate and consciencious. They continue to show up even as covid spikes yet again. They take-on a host of social problems they cannot resolve. And do so with humor, humility, and grace. But as has been said: it takes a village to raise a healthy child and, like most American communities, we don't value our children or education enough to get the whole village mobilized. That makes me cranky. Not resentful or despairing, just cranky because we could do so much better. And just a little bit of caring goes such a long way.

This time next week we're supposed to be doing a "concert" for the parents of our crew. We'll put on a show - three songs - but that's not a concert. What happens too often with poor kids and their institutions is that excellence is forsaken so that showing up can be celebrated. Don't get me wrong: showing up counts. But sitting in a chair alone does not create beauty. Or art. Or even teamwork. I used to say that sitting all night in the garage does not make me a car any more than howling all night at the moon makes me a coyote. So, too with expectations of excellence.

If there were both the time and resources to focus and do some hard work, a real musical event could be crafted over the course of a year. For now, we'll settle for showing up. That's another reason I'm cranky: our culture tends to exagerate the value of the lowest common denominator. Awards are given out every year for things like attendnace or daycare graduation. Really? Small wonder so many of these children say, "I can't do this" when a chord formation is hard. Or there's a bit of discomfort with the pressure from the ukulele strings on their fingers. I keep saying to them: "Really? You can't do this? Or you won't do this? There's a difference. What are you going to do when something REALLY hard happens? Quit? You are smarter and stronger than that, so let's try again." Sometimes they do but twice a week for five weeks is a drop in the bucket when it comes to changing expectations.

While Di and I were away this weekend for our anniversary, I kept thinking about our little uke class. They have touched my heart and I pray that I have touched theirs. Who knows if they'll be a follow up? Who knows who will keep practicing? I am not big on the "random" acts of kindness craze because kindness and compassion are commitments built upon consistency and even strategic discipline. This effemeral, new-age random kindness makes me cranky, too. So, I just have to chaulk this up to yet one more thing I cannot control. Tomorrow, after doing a bunch of hands on gardening, I'll venture back to our ukulele posse and give it one more shot. Lord, grant me the serenity to accept this as real.

making time to cultivate eyes to see in eastertide...

My "Small is Holy" reflections for today, Sunday, May 8, 2022, is steeped in this insight from Henri Nouwen. I am reflecting on the need to periodically step away from the fray for a moment to get re-grounded in grace. My point is that the sacred unforced rhythms of the liturgical year teach us how to engage, step back, reflect, and then return to a public life of compassion and right relations. Without the emptiness of our down time, our lives tend to becocme filled with anxiety, anger, and exhaustion. No wonder Nouwen writes:

Contemplative life is a human response to the fundamental fact that the central things in life, although spiritually perceptible, remain invisible in large measure and can very easily be overlooked by the inattentive, busy, distracted person that each of us can so readily become. The contemplative looks not so much around things but through them into their center. Through their center he discovers the world of spiritual beauty that is more real, has more density, more mass, more energy, and greater intensity than physical matter. In effect, the beauty of physical matter is a reflection of its inner content.

My point, should you choose to tune in to the live-stream at 4 pm, is that the movement of the soul in Eastertide - a seven week inward journey in anticipation of the outward witness of Pentecost - invites us to practice radical trust. When we know from the inside out that we are "One with the Father and Mother," then we are free to sensitively bring healing and hope to all that is broken. Without such inner assurance, however, we often try too hard, quit too early, and wear ourselves out. We will never be able to soothe all the pain or right all the wrongs; that's where radical trust comes in with the deep awareness that we are simply part of the movement of God's grace in creation.