exploring the possibilities...

Back at the beginning of the Trump regime, many of us said: it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Little did we know HOW bad - and the worse is still coming! The singer/songwriter, Carrie Newcomer, recently put it like this:

We are weathering a terrible storm, and so we find shelter, create sanctuary, and share hope and courage. Now is when we feel what we feel, find community and ground ourselves in our deepest most beautiful values and practices. Remember working for positive social change is daily and personal, but needs to be sustainable. What brings you hope and keeps you centered? I just got back from traveling in CO where I cycled and hiked, went to an uplifting concert, took photos of amazing wildflowers. Today I took time to meditate, ruffle my dog’s ears, ate a really good apple for lunch and put my feet in the pond and listened to the birds. I started a new poem. I am finding that staying in touch with beauty in this broken time is essential for centering myself in what I love - and our best work for the better kinder world will always rise up from what we love. When so much feels wrong and broken, what is still whole and beautiful? What still makes sense in senseless times? Spend time there…where ever that is for you.

I resonate with Ms. Newcomer's music, poetry, and prose often but now with one exception - and it's a biggie: hope! Over the past few years a beloved friend has helped me realize that this is not the time to speak about hope. Possibilities? Choices and options? Of course. But not hope as I have traditionally understood it, because as the marine biologist, Avana Elizabeth Johnson, told Krista Tippett of ON BEING:

Facing climate change, with the effect on seas and melting ice caps, has led me to be a realist who is not a fan of hope as a guiding principle, because it by definition assumes that the outcome will be good, which I know is not a given, I am completely enamored with the amount of possibility that’s available to us. So that’s the word that I try to embrace when I think about what if we get it right, is how much possibility remains.

For ages I've affirmed this distinction intellectually with either Meister Eckhart's confession that "reality is the will of God - it can always be better- but we must start with what is real" or Reinhold Niebhur's "Serenity Prayer" which says: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Embracing this shift in my heart, soul, mind, vocabulary, and flesh, however, is still a work in progress. But living into our age of modern plague and political dysfunction has pushed me beyond the confines of abstractions towards embodied prayer. This feels like a season to leave magical thinking, bromides, platitudes, and sentimentality behind so that the sacred can become flesh within our ordinary lives. Jan Richardson is one of my quiet guides who helps me practice letting go again at a more profound level. Her poem "Plentitude" is instructive:

At lunch today
it was the purple
of the olive pits
against my cobalt plate
that stunned me.

At tea,
the gold of peach
bloodstained by its stone.

I do not know
where the greater part
of the miracle lies:
that I should pause
to notice this,

or that I,
a woman of
such great hungers,
should be so well satisfied
by such small things.

It's my hunch that this is something like what St. Paul was telling us in his letter to the emerging church in Rome. He put it like this in Romans 5: "We celebrate our suffering because living openly with our wounds strengthens us with endurance, and endurance can ead to a balanced and wise character which evokes hope within and among us because hope (or trust) is God's love being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit." (my paraphrase) That is to say, the wisdom of our wounds have the potential to awaken us to new ways of living in balance with the sacred rhytmn of creation. It isn't automatic nor is it inevitable. It is simply a sacred possibility. Carrie Newcomer's poem,"Making Sense," strikes me as another way to imagine the wisdom of the ancient apostle.

Finding what makes sense
In senseless times
Takes grounding
Sometimes quite literally
In the two inches of humus
Faithfully recreating itself
Every hundred years.
It takes steadying oneself
Upon shale and clay and solid rock
Swearing allegiance to an ageless aquifer
Betting on all the still hidden springs.

You can believe in a tree,
With its broad-leafed perspective,
Dedicated to breathing in, and then out,
Reaching down, and then up,
Drinking in a goodness above and below
It’s splayed and mossy feet.
You can trust a tree’s careful
and drawn out way
of speaking.
One thoughtful sentence, covering the span of many seasons.

A tree doesn’t hurry, it doesn’t lie,
It knows how to stand true to itself
Unselfconscious of its beauty and scars,
And all the physical signs of where
and when It needed to bend,
Rather than break.
A tree stands solitary and yet in deepest communion,
For in the gathering of the many,
There is comfort and courage,
Perseverance and protection,
From the storms that howl down from predictable
Or unexplainable directions.

In a senseless time
Hold close to what never stopped
Making sense.
Like love
Like trees
Like how a seed becomes a branch
And compost becomes seedlings again.
Like the scent at the very top of an infant’s head
Because there is nothing more right than that. Nothing.It is all still happening

Even now.
Even now

In so many ways, this IS a senseless time: a season of confusion, despair, anger, and alienation. The world as we have known it is unraveling before our eyes and most of the time our response is unclear. To which the wisdom-keepers reply: "Hold close that which has never stopped making sense..." The late Langston Hughes was clear that we are to:

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

My first inclination, shaped by a broken heart and broken trust, is to become angry. Like many other men confronting our powerlessness to bring healing to this mess, I want to lash out, blame, punish, and overcome my impotence. But that only makes reality worse. To patiently and faithfully explore the possibilities... now there's a healthy alternative. To fortify love. To trust the sacred wisdom of creation so that I live like the trees who know that

A seed becomes a branch
And compost becomes seedlings again.
Like the scent at the very top of an infant’s head because there is nothing more right than that. Nothing.It is all still happening

Even now. Even now.

let's work together...

This may seem upside down, but here goes: NOW is the time for all people of good will to fortify ourselves with love, focus our attention on creative ways to circumvent the backwards SCOTUS decisions re: reproductive rights and gun control, follow the witness of Indigenous communities and African-American allies into new expressions of grief as well as solidarity (not appropriate their rituals and traditions but rather learn from them), fund alternative strategies so that NO woman lacks realistic and affordable options, face the fact that life in these United States is going to get worse before it gets better, and faithfully live into new expressions of community, trust, vulnerability, and resistance. There are options even as the religious and political right feverishly tries to impose their harsh theocracy upon us all. Our response to this brave new world will be costly on many levels. But, the alternative to accepting the status quo would be worse.

Over the past 50 years, I have witnessed an incremental loss of inclusive, safe, and creative places for progressive people to celebrate in solidarity, lament our shared pain, and renew our souls through relationships of trust and compassion. This is not true for the right wing of the Western world. They consistently find ways to strengthen one another in their mass gatherings. As was reported during the truckers blockade that spread like wild fire throughout Canada, many of those who participated confessed to being surprised at the loving welcome they experienced in these new societies of protest: there were rituals and songs, there were dances and feasts, too, so much so that a festival atmosphere of inclusion ruled the day. On the left, we tend to come together more like a circular firing squad than the Beloved Community. (Thank God Bobby Weir and others have taken Dead and Company on tour this summer! At least for a few hours everyone who shows up will be an equal in pursuit of peace and love.)

Don't misunderstand: I know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of small grassroots associations striving for solidarity and struggling to be heard over the bullhorns of our emerging fascism. But reality in the so-called progressive realm tends to favor ideological purity over strategic coalitions. With the exception of BLM and the Poor Peoples Movemnt, 2022 feels like it's WE (fill in the blank re: your discrete concern) against EVERYONE else. But as the semi-spontaneous protest currently taking place in front of the Supreme Court at this moment makes clear: we can no longer accept the MY way of the HIGH way approach to social change. How did Canned Heat put it right after Woodstock? "Let's work together..."

I genuinely don't understand why or how the forces of progressive engagement in the USA chose to abandon culture and spirituality; but for the most part the animating energy of creativity and the arts has died on the vine. Twenty years ago, Mako Fujimura, a theologically conservative visual artist, urged us to reclaim beauty again in the arts rather than naked self-expression. Not that our distinct charisms are to be buried, hidden, or censored, but that they come into birth in ways that bind us together rather than polarize in crude and/or sensationalistic ways. Another conservative religious and cultural warrior, the late Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, proclaimed to the world in his Nobel Prize speech that Dostoevsky was right: beauty CAN save the world. 

Dostoyevsky once let drop an enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world.” What is this? For a long time it seemed to me simply a phrase. How could this be possible? When in the bloodthirsty process of history did beauty ever save anyone, and from what? Granted, it ennobled, it elevated—but whom did it ever save?There is, however, a particular feature in the very essence of beauty—a characteristic trait of art itself: The persuasiveness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable; it prevails even over a resisting heart. 

A political speech, an aggressive piece of journalism, a program for the organization of society, a philosophical system, can all be constructed—with apparent smoothness and harmony—on an error or on a lie. What is hidden and what is distorted will not be discerned right away. But then a contrary speech, journalistic piece, or program, or a differently structured philosophy, comes forth to join the argument, and everything is again just as smooth and harmonious, and again everything fits. And so they inspire trust—and distrust.

(read the speech in its entirety here: https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/solzhenitsyn-explains-ldquobeauty-will-savetheworldrdquo/#:~:text=It%20shall%20be%

20we%20who,the%20entirety%20of%20its%20purposes%3F&text=It%20is%20like%

20that%20small,a%20realm%20forever%20beyond%20reach.)

Like other artists concerned with cultural renewal in pursuit of a safe, sustainable society, I trust that this is more of a birthing moment than just a chaotic death sentence - but make no mistake there IS death happening all around us, too. That's a piece of what is driving our stagnant and retrograde politics: fear of living through the end of one way of being where mostly wealthy, white men call the shots for everyone else. You can see evidence of the new world struggling to be born. But it appears it's going to be a complicated and extended birth so we need to equip ourselves with resources that will allow us to hang tough during the long haul. 

Part of our small musical ensemble's raison d'etre is cultural and civic renewal of beauty as bread for the journey. If you want to join our small get together this Sunday @ 4 pm, there's still room for a few more. Drop me an email and I'll give you the details.

hearing and trusting the sacred with our ears NOT our minds...

The guitar became my friend, companion, mentor, source of solace, and prayer partner almost 55 years ago. My confirmation class ally and long-time friend, Ross, taught me five basic chords each Wednesday after school before we went to the "Pastor's Class" at First Congregational Church. His family had recently returned from living in the UK - and we were both obsessed with the Beatles. He had an electric guitar. So, when Sergeant Pepper came out in June 1967, Ross and I would listen with wonder and awe as we sat religiously before the family stere0. When his family vacationed on Martha's Vineyard later that summer, I practiced my ass off on those five chords so that when he returned we could start a band. Like most "garage bands" of that era, our repertoir was limitted to "Stepping Stone," "Louie, Louie," "Twist and Shout," "Midnight Hour," and "Heart Full of Soul" which we played over and over and over again. In August, we added another guitar player, a drummer - and a few months later a "lead" singer - and gave our first music house party performance in the basement of Ross's home in the company of our girlfriends and one or two others.

This coming Sunday, June 26th on what is the liturgical feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, we'll be doing another music house party. We hope to raise some funds for the Ukranian refugee resettlement work being done by the UN as well as raise the spirits of some friends during this third summer of covid. I continue to know in my soul that being together physically in the same place so sing and make music is one of the best ways to fortify ourselves for life in general and especially so in times of stress and trauma. As William Congreve wrote in 1697: "Music has charms to soothe a savage beast." 

Covid precautions have only accelerated our social isolation as Western culture has long been neglecting the spirituality of shared music. For the past 40 years, fewer and fewer people have attended public worship of any type, funding for school music programs has been slashed and trashed, the once fighting and singing union movement has been in radical decline (with a few hints of revival), and social movements - with the exception of the Poor Peoples Movement - have simply given up on public singing. A few notable exceptions during the first year of covid would include the musical doctors and nurses of Iran and the balcony singing in Italy - but they were the beautiful exceptions to the rule.

When Andy and I recently took up the challenge of teaching a diverse group of elementary school children how to play the ukulele, my own isolation bubble was exposed. "Ok, let's sing "Bingo" I suggested to which the teacher said, "Nobody knows that any more." "Old MacDonald Had a Farm?" I queried. "Nope, that's totally forgien territory, too" I was told. Each young player knew Michael Jackson. Justin Bierber and a ton of hip hop. They could all mimic the synchronized dancing so popular on Tic Toc as well. But carry a tune? Recognize a golden oldie? Or belt out what was once a standard like "Amazing Grace?" Not a chance. We ended up with "You Are My Sunshine" and returned thanks that it worked.

In John Philip Newell's most recent book, Sacred Earth/Sacred Soul, he recounts
the work of Alexander Carmichael who devoted himself to gathering, transcribing, and then translating the music and public prayers of the Hebrides in Scotland. He discovered that despite his homeland's radically rigid shift to Calvinism in the 16th century - a social and religious movement that despised and feared the arts as the work of the Devil - the old pre-Christian melodies and images continued to linger in these remote places of the land. In the Hebredes, the songs of resistance to the Clearance Movement were also alive and well although without Carmichal's collection, they were one generation from extinction. That rendered the Carminia Gadelica a monumental work of cultural preservation. Newell calls it an "icon for us today which shows the power of poetry and song in keeping alive a vision of the sacredness of the earth and every living being." He notes:

For hundreds of years in the western islands of Scotland it was song that helped the people remember that the physical and the spiritual are interwoven. It was song that was used in the cycle of the seasons and in the journey of human life to keep them connected to the heart of their being made of God. And it was song that sustained them in their times of loss, suffering, and exile. For the people of the Hebrides this was passed down in oral form. The songs, prayers, and poems were intoned by one generation to the next over many centures. Most of us today, however, do not belong to an oral tradition. We depend instead on the written world of our literary culture and the world on online communications and recordings. So, perhaps for us today, it is a matter of accenssing written prayer,s printed poetry, and recorded music to help awaken us on a daily basis to the sacred rhythm within and around us. (p. 119)    

That's not a good idea, but only as astarting place because I believe that our soul sickness requires stronger medicine including experiential encounters with shared songs. That's the foundational reason we're starting our small summer experiemtn in music house parties. We'll play a variety of tunes, from a host of sources, that evoke joy, sorrow, resistance, and lament. We'll take some time to talk about what songs stir our spirits - and try out a little group singing, too. Add our outdoor venue plus some snacks and libation... and we shall see.

If you are in the area and would like to join us, please drop me a note and I will forward to you the specifics. My prayer is that we do this one or two more times this summer - and then find other small venues to keep the groove going when the weather starts to shift.

relearning what our souls already know...

There is a profoundly wise statement John Phillip Newell makes in his most recent book, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, that has been swimming around inside me for a few months. Newell's wisdom percolated up inside me again this week urging me to give it my full attention: he writes that this moment in time must be about "relearning what our souls already know."

We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught, and some of this deep knowing may actually be at oddes with what our society or religion has tried to teach us... In the Celtic tradition it was said that we (often) suffer from soul-forgetfulness. We have forgotten who we are and have fallen out of true relationship with the earth and with one another.

I can't say exactly why this moment is any different from all the others, nor do I know why my soul grabbed me by the scruff of the neck a few nights ago and literally awoke me from a sound sleep with this recollection. I do trust, however, that when the student is ready, the Buddha will appear. 

St. Paul noted that "now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall face to face." My hunch is that this type of "seeing" is both a part of creation's cyclical pattern of helping us process life's wisdom from: 1) a series of encounters; into 2) contemplation and reflection; so that 3) in time we can embrace and incorporate our experiences in a healthy way. It also seems likely that such vision is a mirror of the deeper manner of how truth is embedded and revealed to us at the end of our journey. Like Henri Nouwen confessed: "If God is love, and we come from God, then we shall return to love when this journey is complete." Integrating life's lessons leads us into an organic wisdom that simultaneously enriches our existence even as it trains us to rest into our demise. (Talk about the paradox of the Alpha and the Omega!)

Before turning off my reading light last night, I had to jot down a short list of "spiritual" truths I've long known in my soul but had either forgotten or hadn't yet discovered words to describe. This list looks a lot like a mystical "rule of life" that has been taking shape incrementally within me for five or six decades. 

1.  All spirituality comes down to noticing when we tense-up in life and when we let it all go in trust. As Cynthia Bourgeault teaches in The Wisdom Way of Knowing: holding on and becoming rigid causes our heart to atrophy and our soul to shrink; while releasing our feelings into trust opens us to compassion and strengthens our intimacy with all that is human and holy. In this, all prayer and spiritual discipline becomes an incarnational and experiential encounter as the Word communicates grace to us through our Flesh. This does not discount other ways to practice resting into the presence of the holy, it simply clarifies how each discipline actually works.

2. We are the midwives of creativity and love, NOT their source. We cannot control most of what takes place in our lives. But we can choose to assist the birth of beauty, truth, solidarity, and trust. These blessings can be twarted, too through arrogance, selfishness, or ignorance. The symbolism of midwifery, therefore, is all about where and how we give our attention to others. Having assisted the two different sets of midwives who guided the delivery of our two daughters led me to trust that our calling as human beings is to tenderly partner with others in their celebrations and sorrows. We are not in charge. We are allies whose humble presence can help or hinder those we cherish.

3. The trajectory of authentic Christian spirituality is not one of ascent, but descent. This is not always honored in Christian orthodoxy as it was taken hostage by the promises of neo-Platonic binary thinking. Still, at its best, we love the God who "comes down at Christmas" like Christina Rossetti sang. We worship the "marriage of heaven and earth, where justice and peace kiss one another and compassion and humility embrace." (Psalm 85) We seek to follow the path and presence of the Word becoming Flesh. (John 1) And we look for the holy within the human and material rather than etherial abstractions. St. Luke tells us in chapter four of his gospel that at the inauguration of his public ministry, Jesus proclaimed:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Historically, spiritual wisdom in both the East and West has been shaped by the confines of ascent: our goal and destination supossedly points upward to the top of the mountain, to the heights of heaven, to a release from human suffering into the blissful anticipation of noncorporeal eternity. Jesus articulated and embodied a whole new way of exploring intimacy with the sacred with his spirituality of "small is holy." Ours is not a journey of escape, but solidarity. Phillipians 2 summarizes this downward mobility well:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himsel and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

Therefore God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

4. The Holy Trinity shows us how to search, wait, and then enflesh the integation of competing truths rather than fight them into a synthesis of inadequate compromise.  Most deep thinking about conflict resolution in our culture is guided by Hegelian patterns wherein one truth bumps into a competing truth as they battle it out until a compromise can be achieved. (i.e. thesis - antithesis = synthesis) The presence of the sacred Three in One and One in Three, however, celebrates a different process where progress and resolution are realized as opposing realities are embraced equally into the presence of love, trust, and surrender. Professor Brueggemann is clear that the prophets of ancient Israel tell us that injustice, suffering, and oppression require grieving until our hearts are broken open by reality. When this takes place, and we are finally empty and beyond all illlusion of control, then in God's time but not our own, we are able to be surprised by new truths born in love that most often arrive from the periphery of the status quo through our creative artists. Relinquishing our long romance - dare I claim addiction - to binary thinking is essential in cultivating a commitment to the sacred deep healing and transformation promised by God.

5. In an age filled with noise and chaos, many intuitively hear God with their ears in music even if we don't believe in God with our minds. For most of my life I have listened to creativity's call as the presence of the sacred. I have lived this, trusted it, and encouraged it without having the words to describe it. Upon reading American philosopher and eco-theologian Jay McDaniel, however, his words resonated with my history of "hearing God" with my ears even in my intellectual questioning and/or disbelief. He cuts to the chase saying:

Three voices singing in harmony are an invitation to imagine that we
humans can dwell in creative community with one another, keeping our differences while holding on to each other in caring, non-suffocating ways. When we sing together our singing (becomes) a coordinated act of kindness and creativity, courage and compassion, delight and sharing. Jews call this shalom; Muslims call it salam; and Christians call it peace. Whatever words we use, the spirit of this peace is fluid and changing (filled with possibilities) which means that you can never fix it in a single frame and say gotcha.

Increasingly, I trust that singing and sharing beauty is essential.

6. Laughter that is guided by self-deprecating humor is an incarnational way of nourishing sacred humility. Some humor is cruel. Some is shallow and even stupid. But it is not coincidental that the word humor and humility are etymologically linked to the word humus which the Oxford Dictionary defines as: the organic component of soil, formed by the decomposition of leaves and other plant material by soil microorganisms. That is, to paraphrase Ernest Kurtz, its the shit out of which new life emerges. When we can laugh at ourselves, living as part of the whole rather than the center of the universe, when we've learned NOT to take ourselves too seriously, there is room for others to thrive. There's space for us to ripen and grow deeper. There are possibilities for all of us. Our culture is one of hierarchy that tends to use humor as a weapon or else a defense mechanism. But that is sadly stagnate and does nothing to welcome change or progress. 

7. Given enough space, safety, encouragement, and time most people are able to ripen into their best selves. Not always, of course. And some wounds are too deep to be healed in this realm. But rather than nag, cajole, push, shove, judge, or make ultimatums, I have come to see that waiting and trusting God's love is always the best course. This requires a deep comfort with silence. And holding one's tongue. It also necessitates a deep self-awareness, too because if what I want for myself is any indication of what is useful for another, then I need to shut up more than sound off, right?

I owe a world of debt to Cynthia Bourgeault and Richard Rohr (as you might have gathered.) Same goes for the faith communities I participate in: L'Arche Ottawa, Iona, and the Dancing Monks of the Abbey of the Arts. What do you think? I would love to know your thoughts and reactions, ok?