Wednesday, April 19, 2023

i believe house cleaning is embodied prayer...

Our "warm" spell in these old hills has come and gone so it now looks, feels, and smells like April in the Berkshires. That's as it should be with mud to be dealt with, leaves to be raked, daffodils to adore, and seedlings to get into their wee planters. I've finished my Sunday worship work for this week (sometimes you're the windshield and sometimes you're the bug, right?) so I spent a few hours down in the basement clutter. Besides a mountain of boxes, not much has happened down there since before Christmas so it's fair to say it was a mess. But not any more - and that helps me chill a bit.

Those who know me well understand that I genuinely love to clean the house. Work in the garden and yard, too. Not only can I see and experience the fruit of my labor, but it feels like an embodied prayer for those I cherish. Same goes for setting a lovely table or cooking a tasty meal. Once again, I resonate with the simple, direct, and sacramental spirituality of Carrie Newcomer. Her poem, "Kindness," is talking to me today.

Kindness is human size,
Hones and doable, 
Softening even the hardest of days,
The country cousin to love,
Unpretentious,
And daily,
And completely possible,
It takes out its earbuds
And listens to your story.
It gives up its seat on the bus
And hums in the kitchen,
Washing dishes when nobody asked it to.

And more often than not,
If I start with a little kindness
Love is usually following
Just a few steps behind,
Nodding and smiling
And saying,
"That's the way it's done.
"Yes, honey,
That's the way it is done."

After an afternoon break I'll head to the grocery store to pick up a few things for tonight's band practice. Our drummer celebrates a birthday today and he' such a precious friend. We'll rock out - but not until we honor a big hearted brother. One more Carrie Newcomer gift comes to mind...

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

peter learns that if you always do what you've always done...

When I was a young preacher back in Michigan and Ohio, I went through a phase of LOVING the liturgical songs of John Michael Talbot. He was once a Midwest rock’n’roller who gave up that dissolute life for the rigors of a Franciscan monastery. He still played the guitar, but now his music was all about welcoming others into a life of prayer and service. One of his song cycles was shaped by the “I AM” statements of Jesus: I am the light of the world, I am the bread of life, I am the resurrection and four others. I’ll say a word about these I AM confessions in a moment as they’re central to the insights of St. John’s gospel, but for now let me simply note that Talbot’s tunes became my prayers for a few years. They’re very easy to sing and helped me memorize portions of scripture. One of my favorites goes like this:

I am the bread of life – all who eat this bread shall never die.
I am God’s love revealed – I am broken that… you may be healed.


Simple, gentle melodies saturated in Scripture, yes? As both time and I ripened, my way of prayer-ing changed and I put John’s songs away. I now value the deeper wisdom of silence but from time to time still find myself singing some of his choruses: they ground me in the gentleness of grace, they open my heart when I’m feeling alienated, and they lure me towards the paradox of Christ’s love that takes me deeper within so that I might be more compassionate and real in public.

I am the bread of life – all who eat this bread shall never die.
I am God’s loved revealed – I am broken that… you may be healed.


That couplet synthesizes what I call sensual sacramental spirituality: seeing the obvious or pre-senting truth while trusting that just below the surface exists a deeper insight or blessing. Sr. Joan Chittister suggests that sensual sacramental spirituality can see the “eagle within the egg and knows that there is a spiritual child waiting to be born again within every adult.”

+ The classic definition of a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace: our tradition sees only two sacraments – baptism and eucharist – while our Catholic and Orthodox sisters and brothers name seven including baptism, eucharist, confirmation of baptism, confession, last rites, marriage, and holy orders. These older spiritual traditions consciously claim the symbolic patterns in Scripture and ordinary life and carefully construct words to help believers connect their experiences with the presence of the sacred. They even name three categories for the seven sacraments to reflect both the Blessed Three-in-One nature of God as Trinity as well as the sacred rest of the Sabbath that comes after God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested upon the seventh.

+ As you may have already guessed, my evolving spirituality tends to trust the older tradition’s broad inclusivity of seven sacraments as superior to our paltry two – but I don’t think even that tradition goes far enough. No, sensual sacramental spirituality must be wildly more generous so that we can begin to cherish the rhythm of God’s grace in all of creation, poetry, art, politics, sexuality – even the act of breathing.

A sacramental spirituality, for example, hears the sacred in the songs that ring true in culture: Ten years ago, Lady Gaga’s monster hit, Born This Way, treated sexuality in a sacramental way when she sang:

My mama told me when I was young, "We are all born superstars"
She rolled my hair and put my lipstick on in the glass of her boudoir
"There's nothing wrong with loving who you are ‘
cause God made you perfect, babe
So hold your head up, girl, and you'll go far and listen to me when I say:
You’re on the right track, baby, you were born this way.
No matter gay, straight, or bi', lesbian, transgender life
I'm on the right track, baby, I was born to survive
No matter Black, white or beige, chola, or Orient' made
I'm on the right track, baby, I was born to be brave
I'm beautiful in my way 'cause God makes no mistakes
I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way
Don't hide yourself in regret, just love yourself, and you're set
You’re on the right track, baby, you were born this way, yeah

I hear Ms. Gaga unpacking a core blessing from our creation stories in Genesis 1 where God pauses, looks at all that has been created and says: ooh this is good – very, very good – and takes a rest on the seventh day and called it a Sabbath. Gaga doesn’t overtly use Biblical language, but the mess-age is the same. I tested my working hypothesis of God’s still speaking nature again this week by randomly looking at the Top Ten songs only to find Taylor Swift channeling St. Paul in Romans 7 as she sings: “Anti-Hero.”

I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser 
midnights become my afternoons
When my depression works the graveyard shift
All the people I've ghosted stand there in the room
I should not be left to my own devices they come with prices and vices
I end up in crisis (tale as old as time) - 
I wake up screaming fromdreaming
One day I'll watch as you're leaving cuz you got tired of my scheming
It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me at teatime, everybody agrees
I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It’s so exhausting always being for
 the anti-hero

Practitioners of a sensual sacramental spirituality celebrate the way Ms. Swift
reframes St. Paul in Romans 7:

Maybe this is your experience? I’m full of myself… but what I don’t understand about is why I decide to act one way, but then act another, doing things I absolutely despise. If I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and do it, it’s obvious that God’s love is necessary…. But even when I know that love is real in my head, I still can’t keep trusting it for the power of sin keeps sabotaging my best intentions. I realize that I don’t have what it takes: I can will it, but I can’t do it. I decide to do good and not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. And it happens so regularly that it’s predictable.

Our tradition used to celebrate a still speaking God; that’s our 21st century paraphrase of what the Reverend John Robinson’s said to those boarding the Mayflower in 1620: I am very confident the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy Word. A sacramental spirituality searches for how God’s grace is being enfleshed within and among us. The ancient Celtic and Orthodox traditions speak of this as deification.

Our becoming ever more comfortable in our own skin and humanity in the spirit of Jesus. They reject, as do I, the notion that we were born into sin. They advocate original blessing rather than original sin: this path never denies human brokenness but insists that as we learn from our mis-takes we can grow in humility and wisdom just as God intended. This spirituality simultaneously re-jects sentimentality AND cynicism – with a long albeit it obscure legacy starting with St. Irenaeus in the 2nd CE, Pelagius in the 3rd, John Scotus Eriugena in the 8th CE, both St. Francis and St. Bonaventure said it in the 12th and 13th centuries respectively, George MacLeod of Iona in the 20th, and Cynthia Bourgeault, Matthew Fox, and Richard Rohr today. All claim that our faith starts with a loving God who creates ALL life – ourselves included – imbuing the totality of creation with a grace deep within. We can tarnish and reject our original blessing, we can ignore it and trash it, too but we can not destroy it. How did Thomas Merton put it?

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is God’s name written in us. It’s like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It’s in everybody, and if we could see it we would see billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish. I have no program for this realizing this. I only know it is real and shows me that the gate of heaven is everywhere.


+ Are you still with me? I know that’s a bit over the top and arcane; maybe I should have simply said sensual sacramental spirituality seeks grace in ALL things and trusts that love trumps karma always.

+ It’s an alternative orthodoxy – a generous orthodoxy – that posits acts of love over abstract doctrine; orthopraxis – right living – over orthodoxy – right belief. It’s how St. John talks about Jesus in the fourth gospel – sacramentally – noting that there are no parables of God’s kingdom in this gospel; rather, Jesus tells us HE is what kingdom living looks like: I am the bread of life, I am the resurrection, I am the way, the truth and life. Same for the deeds of Jesus. Fr. Raymond Brown, master scholar of St. John, writes that the so-called “signs” that Jesus shares have an obvious meaning as well as a deeper truth:

A figure today who could physically give the blind sight and restore to life the recently dead would be hailed not only medically but spiritually. John's Jesus has a totally different outlook. He does supply earthly bread to a crowd that hungers; but that’s not the real marvel, for they will hunger again and so are not permanently better. The real marvel is that Jesus can give a bread from heaven that obviates spiritual hunger. Likewise Jesus gives a blind man sight, but such a gift simply makes the man no more disadvantaged than the rest of humanity that has sight but can-not see God. The real marvel is that Jesus as the light come into the world can lead the blind man to a believing sight that will enable him to see God wherever he looks. Jesus restores physical life to Lazarus, too but does that make Lazarus better off than he was before he died? The real marvel is not simply that Jesus can restore the dead to life but that he can give a life impervious to death. Lazarus comes forth from the tomb in his burial garments because he will need them again when he dies a second time. His being raised is a sign pointing to the resurrection of Jesus who will leave his burial garments behind in the tomb, never to be needed again.


Like I said at the outset: sensual sacramental spirituality sees creation as
saturated in grace whether we have eyes to see or not. One of the blessings of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Je-sus is that Jesus gives shape and form to what grace looks like. That’s why I’ve come to see Jesus himself as a sacrament – and this is crucial for today’s text about Peter’s betrayal becoming a portal away from shame and into a new and more consistent compassion. If you know Peter’s story, you see how incrementally he becomes more of his best self after encountering the love of God made flesh in the resurrected Christ.

+ We meet Peter as a hard-working fisherman: what the text DOESN’T tell us, but what would have been widely know back in the day, is that under the bootheel of Roman occupation, most of those occupied in the fishing industry essentially worked for the Empire. They were not quaint, craftspeople sharing their wares in a rustic setting. They were more like today’s farm workers laboring in the sun for corporate agribusiness. Small wonder Peter and Andrew drop everything to follow Jesus when the invitation is offered, right? They were escaping the rigors of feeding the occupying army of the Roman Empire.

+ Once Peter gives up his fishing nets to spend with Jesus before the Cross, he’s learning how to balance his enthusiasm with responsible accountability. Jesus gives him the nickname Petras, the Rock, because Peter gets carried away like a bolder crashing out of control down a mountainside.

You may recall that early on Peter discerns the unique charisms of Jesus and confesses him to be the Christ – the Anointed One – but in the next breath begs Jesus NOT to live into his ministry which prompts the Master to bark: Get thee behind me, Satan. Later, Peter awakens in a boat crossing the sea of Galilee and sees Jesus walking towards him on the water; in a fit of enthusiasm, he jumps ov-erboard only to sink when his faith fades. Get the picture: he’s up and down and all over the place.

The arc of Peter’s story throughout the gospels shows a passionate devotee who is hard headed and in need of discernment – a reality that plays itself out in spades when, at the Last Supper, Peter first argues with Jesus about getting his feet washed then begs to be washed all over before prom-ising NEVER to leave Jesus only to deny him three times in betrayal hours later. Peter flees the scene in fear and shame – and at least in St. John’s iteration returns to his old ways as a fisherman again.

And right THERE is a key clue about why living sacramentally matters: Left to his own de-vices, Peter returns to his old ways. Now play that out with me, ok? I know people who fall off the wagon and return to their old addictions when overwhelmed by fear or shame. I know good souls who crash and burn when their expectations of what a lover should be goes up in smoke. I know precious people trapped in grief after losing a loved parent, spouse, sib-ling, or friend. So, this aspect of the story is not JUST about Peter’s collapse: it’s a paradigm for what often happens when we can no longer see the eagle within the egg. When life’s pain pushes us back into our old ways. How do my buddies in AA put it?

IF YOU ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU’VE ALWAYS DONE
YOU’LL ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU’VE ALWAYS GOT!

· Think of this within our body politic…

· Or in the life of our church…

Sacramental spirituality shows us that even our failures and wounds can serve a greater good IF we’re willing to be open to the love of God. That’s what the conclusion of today’s lesson is all about: after encouraging Peter to own his shame and his suffering – that’s what the three love questions are about – accountability for betrayal: three times Peter denies Jesus and three times Jesus pointedly asks: Peter, do you LOVE me? They say confession is good for the soul, but only if it helps us get off the dime of shame and into taking responsibility for our actions – which is precisely what happens next.

+ Jesus tells Peter: look, man, when you were young and impetuous, you lived for yourself and did what you wanted, when you wanted, however you wanted. But now that you are older – and more humble – it’s time you let someone else gird your loins and lead you into those places you do NOT want to go.

+ Sounds like therapy, yes? Could’ve been Carl Gustav Jung speaking: to become whole and deepen God’s love in your life you’re going to have to into those places, feelings, events, and activities that you do NOT want to explore.

Culturally, politically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually that’s where we are right now: trembling before those places we do NOT want to go into. Authentic racial and gender equality. REAL and consistent reproductive rights for all women not just those with enough money and clout. Partner-ing with Mother Nature to heal our precious earth. Finding a way through the blood and morass of political stagnation to come to terms with gun violence and our historic addiction to it. Need I go on? When we were younger, we did as we pleased and went where we wanted. But now, guided by love and accountability, we must let another lead us into those places we DON’T want to enter – but must.

It’s hard – it’s costly – and it will hurt. But the good news is that as Peter honored this call to let another lead him into a new way of being, he grew in courage and conviction. His story becomes much less brash after Easter: he shepherds his brothers and sisters with compassion rather than hu-bris. He reaches out beyond his prejudice and fear to welcome Gentiles into the fold. And at least apocryphally if not accurately, when Rome chose to put him to death by crucifixion, he insisted on being crucified upside down to symbolically show us he knew he wasn’t Christ’s equal but a servant of the Lord. If Peter can change, not perfectly but profoundly, so can we – and THAT is how the word becomes flesh in our generation. So, let those with ears to hear, hear.

check it out the small is holy video here: https://fb.watch/j_Dm4E4A-7/

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

it's been a long time coming...

  
Indeed it HAS been a LONG time coming - decades, in fact - but the blessing is becoming clearer: the deeper I go into the spirituality of Jesus the more I lose interest in traditional theology and doctrine. I don't make this confession lightly, ok? I have found solace and insight for at least 50 years in some of my tradition's wisdom and its keepers. And yet, as I survey my current book shelf - after culling perhaps 600+ texts in anticipation of retirement - the evidence is staggering: I kept none of the foundational systematic theologies from the Reformation and a mere handful of Roman Catholic works concerning beauty as a revelation of the sacred. What remains?

+ Lots of Richard Rohr, Henri Nouwen, Barbara Brown Taylor, Cynthia Bourgeault, Frederick Buechner, Joan Chittister, Kathleen Norris, Belden Lane, John Philip Newell, and various volumes of Iona liturgies.

+ A bunch of Brueggemann, a cornucopia of Celtic spirituality, piles of poetry and mountains of music anthologies along with a variety of manuals re: spiritual direction, dreams, archetypes, mythopoetic men's issues, and history.

+ And since retirement I keep adding commentary of the Scriptures after giving most away 8 years ago. I am particularly grateful for the work of Amy-Jill Levine and her deep scholarship. In ways I never expected, I keep going back both professionally and personally to the "way" of Jesus. But not as my tradition has historically interpreted him in doctrine and creeds, but mystically. More as sacrament for authentic living than sacrificial lamb.

These days I find a life-giving resonance in Bouregault's reclamation of St. Mary Magdalene 
as a model of Christian discipleship. I experience centering and soul guidance from Richard Rohr's wisdom re: the Cosmic Christ/Paschal Mystery as a window into holy/human reality. And Barbara Brown Taylor's ripening critique of contemporary Christianity speaks to my heart when she writes that the way of authentic mysticism is all about liberation and tender accountability:

It is about freeing you from your ideas about God, your fears about God, your attachment to all the benefits you have been promised for believing in God, your devotion to the spiritual practices that are supposed to make you feel closer to God, your dedication to doing and believing all the right things about God, your positive and negative evaluations of yourself as a believer in God, your tactics for manipulating God, and your sure cures for doubting God. (Learning to Walk in the Dark, p. 145)

I suppose my path has
always been experiential: my prayer is music - and now gardening. My guides have long been Dylan, Mitchell, Cohen, the Beatles, the Boss, U2, Coltrane, Miles, Simone, Lou Reed, CSN&Y, Gil-Scott Heron, Coburn, Gaye, Simon, Grateful Dead, and Carrie Newcomer. I keep going back to the poetry of Bly, Oliver, Clifton, O'Tuama, Berry, Levertov, Rumi, and Collins with side trips to Angelou, Lorde, Olds, and Kabir. As Taylor puts it: "Doctrines and creeds are no longer enough to keep faith alive. Instead, the faithful seek practical guidance and direct experience of the sacred." Small wonder, then that at just the right time - from an unexpected source - I've been redirected back to Walter Wink's brilliant and challenging, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man, and Cynthia Bouregault's, The Wisdom Jesus: A New Perspective on Christ and His Message.

All of which has given me a fresh perspective on Lent and Holy Week. In the past I have gone deep into the story of what happened to Jesus. That still moves me. And yet what strikes me as more important now is how the events of Christ's life inform my own journey. How these events sacramentally teach me how to become more fully alive. Taylor writes:


What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world. To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive comment-ary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, and stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of being real in our everyday, ordinary, walking around lives.

It is, perhaps, appropriate then that earlier this week an old and mighty wooden arbor crashed to the ground during one of the recuring wind storms that are becoming normative. It was hefty and strong. It was here when we arrived some 16 years ago. But slowly, left to the sun, wind, rain, snow, and insects it rotted from the inside out - and collapsed when its time was done. For about 8 years, we used that old arbor for our outdoor chapel: we've gathered there for prayer with our children and grandchildren, we've sat in that silent space contemplatively, and adorned it with a horse-shoe cross our buddy, Roger from Tucson, made for us as well as a deep and melodic wind chime. And now our old friend is gone. I added the beams to a rustic fence that borders the wetlands out back all the while pondering what will replace it. So far nothing has grabbed my heart except adding a bit of bamboo fencing and wild flowers. 
Meister Eckhart writes: "The soul does not grow by addition, but by subtraction." And so we walk deeper into the darkness of Holy Week.

Sunday, April 2, 2023

making time for everything to hurt: palm/passion sunday 2023

Today we mark both Palm AND Passion Sunday: talk about tension and paradox. Both have always been a part of Lent but NOT always in this combination. If you’re a life-long Prod like me, you grew up with Palm Sunday as a distinct and moving worship experience unto itself followed by the grandeur of Easter. And even though the world is changing faster than we can comprehend, we tend to believe that what we once knew has always been; so, let’s consider the back story of today’s liturgy so that we can embrace it’s wisdom.

· Passion Sunday is relatively new to Protestants – it came into being after the 1969 Vatican II reforms of the Roman Catholic Church. For twelve hundred years before that, Western Catho-lics celebrated Passion Sunday on the Fifth Sunday of Lent – last week – and then Palm Sunday today. They were united in 1983 when the Western ecumenical church agreed to partner with Rome and make a significant liturgical change.

· The reason this came about has long been misunderstood: modern believers say it had to do with simplifying worship schedules. In a frenetic era, many found it complicated to be at Palm Sunday and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy Week, too. So popular wisdom claims that Palm Sunday merged with the Passion narrative to give busy people a break. But nothing could be further from the truth: both Roman Catholic and traditional Protestant scholars agreed to this change fundamentally as an act of spiritual formation. This day is ALL about discipleship and deep experiential education – not convenience.

Contrasting the Palms with the Passion, Hosannas with cries of Crucify, is NOT about scheduling: The Passion gospel intended for today takes at least 11 minutes to read aloud. It’s 81 verses, 1,961 words on three single-spaced pages; too long for one setting no matter HOW busy our lives have become. No, this liturgical shift intuitively evokes an intellectual and spiritual tension for us that challenges all our psychological, spiritual, personal, and political certainties. Putting the Palms side by side with the Passion shows us that:

The one betrayed and deserted in the passion is none other than the one hailed as the long-aw-aited divine monarch. We’re supposed to feel an emotional whiplash as we descend from “Hos-anna!” to “Crucify him!” (For) Holy Week is a kind of choreography or symphony, with distinct movements unfolding over time: from “Hosanna in the highest!” to “Surely not I, Lord?” to “Take, eat; this is my body” to “Let this cup pass from me” to “I do not know the man!” to “Let him be crucified!” to “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” to “He is not here; for he has been raised.” And these truths require time and space to be felt and understood.

One colleague put it like this: rather than reduce our time in worship, now we must give it MORE in order to reclaim the counter-culture call of Christ on our daily lives. She wrote that our culture:

Want to hurry people through their suffering. Like Job’s friends, we can only tolerate their discomfort for so long before we begin to give advice, offer solutions, and speak for God. The hardest thing I do as a pastor is sit with others in their suffering without trying to hurry them along. I must choke back easy platitudes. I feel a crawling under my skin, a resistance deep in my chest when called on to simply be present. I want to fix it. But there is no fixing the woman who is preparing for her 38th back surgery or the parishioner whose cancer has returned. And they aren’t asking me to. It takes discipline, courage, and time to sit in the chair and listen, without patronizing pity, and just bear witness to the unsolvable suffering. (Melissa Earley, Christian Centurey)

The exuberance at the start of Palm Sunday is linked to the grief of Christ’s passion later because:

· Pedagogically it confirms the inward/outward struggle to put on the whole mind of Christ: those who yearn for lives of integrity and a world shaped more by compassion than cash must come to terms with our own contradictions and wounds that contribute to the suffer-ing we all ache to change.

· Further, the unity of Palms and Passion makes it clear that the Jesus was NOT a helpless pawn entrapped by either Empire or religion: he was NOT the unwitting sacrificial lamb offered up to an angry, jealous deity as payment for human sin.

Rather, as Cynthia Bourgeault teaches, Jesus willingly wagered his life to show us that trusting God’s love in our flesh – relinquishing our broken selves to holy and human compassion – could simultaneously empty our hearts and minds of our addiction to control and then fill us full (or be fulfilled) by inner peace. Acceptance, you see, is the key to serenity within and without because INNER peace is a game changer. Fr. Thomas Keating wrote: “The effectiveness of action depends on the source from which it springs. If it’s coming out of the false/broken self with its shadow side, it’s severely limited. If it’s coming out of a person immersed in God’s grace, it’s extremely effective for the contemplative state, like the vocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is how Christ comes into the world.” Fr. Richard Rohr adds that this upside-down truth drives intellectuals and activists like us wild:

Jesus does not directly attack the religious and institutional systems of sin of his time until his final action against the money changers in the temple. His primary social justice critique and action often disappoints radicals and social activists (because) his social program is more a quiet refusal to participate in almost all external power structures or domination systems. His primary action is a very simple lifestyle, which kept him from being constantly co-opted by those very structures we know as institutional sin. He avoided the monetary system as much as possible by using “a common purse.” His three-year ministry, in effect, offers free healing and healthcare for any who want them. He consistently treats women with a dignity and equality that is almost unknown in a patriarchal culture. At the end of his life, he consciously surrenders to the punitive systems of both empire and religion by letting them judge, torture, and murder him. He is finally a full victim of the systems he refused to worship… (because he trusts that God’s love is greater than all our brokenness.)

· This spirituality and social action plan is all about learning how to live with sacred tension: earlier this week when yet another six people were murdered at a school – including three precious children – most of us reeled and wept and fumed. All over the Internet were cries of THIS MUST END. But like the current crop of know-nothing politicians carping about cutting government spending without any clue how to do so, ours are cries of impotence, too – more a chorus of compassionate broken hearts howling for a way to heal the horrors that are beyond our control. Carrie Newcomer wrote:

the truth is polls show that the majority of Americans do support common sense gun laws, limiting or outright banning military style weapons. The majority of Americans do love their children and are asking their legislators to do the right thing. What we do not have are legislators who are willing to listen to the majority of their constituents and do the right thing. What we do have are legislators who are willing to exchange the precious lives for NRA contributions. I am bewildered and righteously angry that a certain segment of our legislators seem to feel that their sole avenue for “protecting” our children is to ban books from public and school libraries that honor our diverse racial, cultural and sexual orientations in this country, to ban the teaching of the true and real complicated history of the country (which is the first step in healing and moving forward as an educated nation), and to institute whole rafts of laws that discriminate, endanger and humiliate people of diverse sexual orientation . These are often the same legislators who wear AK15 pins on their lapels as they boldly proclaim themselves to be “pro-life”. This is an odd disconnect at best and terrible hypocrisy at worse.

We tie ourselves in knots when we ignore the Serenity Prayer because inner peace requires accepting our limitations to fix what is so obviously broken and THEN mustering the courage and tenacity to fix what can be repaired. We CAN and MUST make a difference – we CAN help one another, too – we’re NOT inept or inconsequential – we’re just limited and can’t give to others what we ain’t got!

· That’s the paradox of mature spirituality documented sacramentally today: it accepts limitations, honors boundaries, cultivates inward equanimity in order to concretely make a difference wherever and whenever we can. But not in all places at all times. North Americans are particularly infected with illusions of omnipotence and magical thinking: we middle-class, white intellectuals are deeply confused about this because so much of our outward lives are efficacious. We work hard, we’ve adequate resources to purchase what we need or want when we want it. So, letting go – relinquishing control – messes with our minds. It is truly a counter-cultural spiritual discipline we must return to repeatedly because we still believe we can think ourselves into a new way of being; when we must LIVE our way into a new way of thinking.

· My old buddy, the late Michael Daniels of blessed memory, used to tell me this constantly back in Cleveland after he got clean and sober. “You’re too damn smart for your own good,” he’d chide me. “You still think you can plan, work, and think yourselves into serenity even as your life careens out of control.” And he was right so what I’m about to say is not an abstract critique it’s just one beggar telling another where to find bread.

The fusion of Palms with the Passion reminds us that Jesus didn’t live in the Garden of Eden – and neither do we. He lived in occupied Palestine under the boot-heel of Roman greed and violence. As Howard Thurman would remind Dr. King: Jesus took the time to train his friends in contemplation before sending them into the world to confront suffering and injustice.

He required that they master a measure of inward peace born of grace before trying to redress the pain of oppression all around him. Consequently, Jesus regularly slipped away into the quiet of nature to reclaim his grounding. It wasn’t automatic for him – and if JESUS needed quiet time to practice calming his soul – well, let’s just say that we do, too. That’s the wisdom and rhythm of Holy Week: Palms AND Passion – joy as well as sorrow – the journey of letting go as well as receiving the unexpected gift of spiritual rest. “Peace, I give you” Jesus says in St. John’s gospel, “but not as the world gives it.” Somewhere along the line, this was misplaced in our tradition. Later it was all but discarded and lost but:

· The charism of Holy Week presumes 40 days: it’s about slowing down with silence, study, and prayer. The rich liturgies of Holy Week take time to carry us to Maundy Thursday and the foot-washing before the Last Supper, the agonizing emptiness of Christ’s death on the Cross on Friday, and the ecstatic festival of light and baptism on Saturday night’s Easter Vigil.

· Do you know that for the first 300 years of Christianity there was NO sunrise service? No, on the Saturday night before Easter Sunday adults who had already spent three years in training for their new life in Christ were stripped naked, fully immersed in the baptismal waters of a symbolic death, rose again to a new life of grace, were reclothed in garments of white before finally feasting upon Holy Communion for the first time. (SALT Project)

Slowly and carefully Christians were formed – not born; trained in their habits not just their minds. Do you recall how St. Paul put it in his training manual for new believers?

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. Embrac-ing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for the Lord. Don’t become so well-adjust-ed to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God’s love and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you and respond to it quickly. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of im-maturity, God brings out the best in you, develops well-formed maturity in you, so that you are NOT squeezed into the conformity of the status quo. Peterson, Message, Romans 12)

The reclamation of this counter-cultural commitment is now upon us because let’s face it: the old ways are not working in culture, in church, in our civic or business spheres. Our Lenten small group study was taken by the way Barbara Brown Taylor describes our need for a FIFTH gospel in this era where:

The good news is that dark AND light, faith and doubt, divine absence and presence, do not exist at opposite poles; they exist with and within each other, like distinct waves that roll out of the same ocean and roll back into is again. As different as they are, they all come from and return to the same source. And if I can trust that – if I can give my heart to it and remain conscious of it – then faith and trust become a verb, my active response to the sacred reality that the best of rel-igions in the world point to. (Learning to Walk in the Dark)

Take the ritual of foot-washing: most of us still think it’s just a Catholic thing – and for hundreds of years OUR way of doing church was mostly NOT what the Catholics do. We differentiated ourselves by subtraction: THEY do THIS, so WE do NOT. WE do Tenebrae – the service of shadows – on Maundy Thursday instead of foot-washing to distinguish ourselves from them. Same for Good Friday and the Easter Vigil: that’s what THEY do. Our tradition took the Wednesday Tenebrae out of the Catholic monasteries, moved it to Thursday, mostly ignored Friday and Saturday and replaced the Saturday night Easter Vigil of Baptism with a sunrise service on Easter morning. I submit to you that this mash up unintentionally eliminated the extended time we need for quiet introspection from most Reformation congregations. Our jumbled, rewritten rituals still have beauty and power – I love them – but they fail to help us savor what’s at stake in a mature spirituality that knows from the inside out how to negotiate the rigors of paradox within the tensions of contemporary life.

Let me tell you: there’s NO worship liturgy in the whole Christian tradition that leads us more into the power and beauty of patient humility and an honest assessment of our limitations than foot washing. I didn’t grow up with it, but after the United Church published our official worship book in 1986, I’ve used it faithfully. To kneel before another as a servant, not a leader; to let an-other hold my grubby, weird foot and gently wash and dry it before sharing Holy Communion in community is ALL about learning how to receive grace – liturgy, after all MEANS practicing the work of the people – because we’re not very good at this. Part of the human condition wants control. We like to GIVE gifts – initiate and guide life – but receive them quietly? Humbly? Not so much.

· Back in the early days of the pandemic when we realized that lock down was going to go on for more than a week or two, we shared a few Lenten prayer times with our family in Brook-lyn on Zoom – including a simple foot-washing ceremony with our grandchildren aged 3 and 5. I told the story from St. John’s gospel of Jesus offering his disciples an alternative to their bickering by putting a towel around his neck (that’s what these stoles represent, ok?), kneel-ing in humility and patiently washing their feet. Then I washed Dianne’s foot and invited our children and grandchildren to do the same – which they did. Five-year-old Lou washed mom-ma’s foot, 40-year-old poppa washed three-year-old Anna’s foot. It was slow, quiet and ten-der.

· Afterwards, as we talked and shared a closing prayer, we noticed Anna was still kneeling on the floor with her baby dolls: she was washing their feet. We quieted down to listen to what she was saying and heard: this is what Jesus asked us to do for one another. It was reverent. Simple. And exactly what Lent is supposed to evoke: a humble sharing born of trust that nourishes loving connections and a bit of patience for life’s paradox. No doctrine. No theology. No unrealistic expectations. Just simple acts of love honoring one another’s flesh.

As we go through the portal of Holy Week together this year, it feels to me like many of us know that the old ways of being church are over: young people confess that the faith they inherited from their elders is worn out. Wisdom keepers like Karen Armstrong say that “we’re living through a time of global transformation where religions are taking stock of what enmity has cost them and turning towards new wisdom about what it means to be fully human.”

Dr. Taylor writes that “we’re currently in the midst of that great rummage sale the Christian church seems to hold every 500 years” to decide what should stay and what should go. My prayer for you – my prayer for me – my prayer for all of us is that we give Holy Week this year time to take us deeper into the tension of a mature spirituality that loves the darkness as well as the light. That knows how to let go at least as well hold on. We don’t need more theology, doctrine, catechisms, abstract spiritual concepts, or academic study: we need more practice in patience, trust, acceptance of our limitations, more tender-ness for one another and ourselves, more silent contemplation, and more openness to the inward journey so that we can stay the course outwardly with one another like Magdalene did with Jesus.

She couldn’t stop Empire from executing Jesus. She couldn’t bring him back to life or change the minds of those addicted to patriarchy and violence any more than we can shake our legislators free from the idolatry of the NRA. But she could stand silent witness so that Jesus was not alone in the agony of his Passion. Magdalene embodied for Jesus what Jesus had earlier incarnated for her: open-hearted solidarity, walking with her through the darkness, teaching her how to trust that even in uncertainty there is a love greater than our fear, and doing so at the speed of the soul.

We’re living through a darkness that we cannot control or fix right now. So much of what we once took for granted is unraveling. Beyond the insanity of cancel culture, we haven’t yet begun to ack-nowledge the centuries of arrogance and the legacy of genocide that are, as Malcolm X prophesied, the chickens of racism and gun violence coming home to roost as we murder one another with abandon. Oh my God, there’s so much to confess, relinquish, and forsake in a culture that refuses let us grieve thoroughly. Holy Week is meant to give back to us the time we need to let go, accept and trust the counter-cultural humility, patience, and courage of Jesus. You know, Jesus doesn’t own a monopoly on this path: he came NOT to be called Christ but to give grace away as a fully conscious human being. So, let’s continue what we started in Lent: learning to walk in the dark together.

· To practice the inner peace Jesus promised. To learn from Mary Magdalene how to stand witness in solidarity with sisters and brothers so that no one need be alone when everything else seems to be falling away.

· To consciously lay aside all jargon, doctrine, dogma, and creeds so that we can discover that becoming fully human is what God’s heart yearns for in each and all of us. Dr. Taylor wrote:

What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most or-dinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world. To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, and stir.

Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of being real in our everyday, ordinary, walking around lives. As the journey ripens, young Amanda Gorman reminds us:

Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.

Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.

This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.

May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.

Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.

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