Worship notes: sabbath as resistance #1

WORSHIP NOTES:  Over the next 6 weeks I will be using Walter Brueggemann's new book, Sabbath as Resistance: saying NO to the culture of NOW - as the foundation for my worship reflections. We'll also have conversation about the text after each Sunday celebration. I am looking forward to being with the community again after two weeks apart. It was a joy to celebrate midday Eucharist today.

Introduction

I LOVE vacations:  I love every PART of vacations – from the planning and anticipation to the actual experiences and surprises – and this year at the Montreal Jazz Festival we encountered some wonderful musical experiences and met some truly remarkable people along the way. We had the chance to bask in our birthday celebrations with our children and grandson and take in a few soul-satisfying walks around an incredible city. For me it was a time for rest and play, love and music, conversation and silence.

+  And as we were driving home I began to realize that over time I have even come to love the ending of our vacations: we return to our own homes and beds, reclaim the rhythms of our ordinary lives, unpack our luggage, listen to the new music we have collected and try to carry forward a gentle sense of refreshment into the work of each new day.

+  As the Scriptures tell us, to everything there is a season, yes? 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 silence, and a time to speak;  a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

Our spiritual cousins in Judaism are better at doing this than most

contemporary Christians. Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has written, “As in so many things concerning Christian faith and practice, we (often) have to be reeducated by Judaism (because) it has been able to sustain its commitment to (hallowing time) as a positive practice of faith in the Sabbath.” So today, fresh from the re-creation of my time away, I want to talk with you about the radical importance of honoring the Sabbath.

Throughout the summer I will be using brother Brueggemann’s new book, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying NO to the Culture of NOW as a guide – and I invite you to get it and read along with me. Each week I will lift up some of his biblical insights, share them with you and then invite you to share your reactions and questions with me. We’ll even regroup for more conversation after worship, too, for those who would like to go deeper.

And here’s why I think this is so important:  we no longer understand or practice Sabbath keeping in its deepest and most liberating sense. We have forgotten why God ordained this way of life as essential for faithful living four thousand years ago. We no longer grasp what a bold alternative the Sabbath is to the busyness that infects and addicts us all. And as independent as we like to think we are, we don’t really know how to unplug ourselves from “the demanding, chattering and all pervasive presence of advertising” that saturations our contemporary culture and clutters our soul.

·   This morning’s gospel reading finds Jesus telling his disciples a story about the way God has written grace into the very rhythms of creation: the seed of God’s love, he tells us, will grow and bear fruit wherever there is rich, deep and uncluttered soil. It will try to bring blessings amidst the rocks and sand and thorn, but it needs uncluttered soil to prosper.

·   And in the tradition of Moses and the prophets this uncluttered soil comes into being through Sabbath keeping. Honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy, you see, not only unclutters our lives, it brings us clarity about the very nature of the God we love – and how we can go deeper into God’s love. 

·   How does the Psalmist put it:  happy – or more precisely blessed – are those who are undefiled as they walk in the way of the Lord?

Insights

To walk in the way of the Lord is to move and live according to the Holy One’s commandments – God’s decrees as the Psalm says – to embody and embrace the 10 Commandments. That’s what Jesus did during his ministry and that’s what we are called to do in our generation: live and move and have our being in the ways of the Lord.

So let’s look at the opening of these commandments in Exodus 20 because they offer us invaluable insights – and what is the first commandment? Thou shall have NO other gods before me, right? Now think about this with me for just a moment:

·  The first four commandments concern God and the remaining six speak to us about living as God’s people.  Scholars have suggested that the fourth commandment – remember the Sabbath and keep it holy – is the hinge between the sacred and the secular precepts of the Lord.  Brueggemann puts it like this: the fourth commandment looks back to the first three and the God who rests, and, looks forward to the commandments that concern a way to live at rest with our neighbors.

·   The Sabbath is not only at the heart of these commandments, you see, but for Israel the Sabbath is also a short hand summary of God’s story. How do the commandments start out in Exodus 20? Would someone read that text out loud, please?

Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

Our God – the God of Israel and Jesus Christ – is the God who brought us out of the land of bondage and slavery in Egypt.  In this sense, Sabbath is a short hand way of talking about the Exodus – the experience of God hearing the cries of those in pain, inspiring Moses to lead the Hebrew slaves AWAY from the never-ending work of Pharaoh’s slavery and the children of God finding a land of grace and hope in the Promised Land.  “The Sabbath commandment” Brueggemann writes, “is drawn into the Exodus narrative for the God who rests is the same God who emancipates from slavery… those who had been bound by the work system of Egypt and its gods.”

·   Are you still with me? Because here’s the kicker: the REASON why we are told – and prohibited – from worshipping other gods – in this case the gods of Egypt, Syria, Babylon and Persia – is because these gods are insatiable. They demand work, work and more work.  All they want is MORE – more products, more gold, and more grains to store in more pyramids – and to get more, they required slaves.

·   Part of what the Ten Commandments teaches us is that Pharaoh served gods whose demands were relentless, whose economy required slavery and oppression, who organized life in such a way that there could be no rest for all but the elite.  Just do a quick survey of chapter five of Exodus and you will be dumb-founded for “Pharaoh comes across as a hard-nosed production manager for whom production schedules are inexhaustible.”

Read selections from Brueggemann re: working for Pharaoh pp. 3-4

Now contrast “this hopeless weariness with the God who erupts into the story

as a burning bush – a God who hears the despairing fatigue of the slaves – and who is resolved in liberating the broken and wounded ones from their suffering.” This is the God who celebrates freedom – a god who knows about rest – and has created all things in such a way that grace is built into the natural order of things – so much so that not only do all of God’s creatures need and honor rest, but so does the LORD!  “The first commandment is a declaration,” you see “that the God of the exodus is unlike all the gods the slaves have known heretofore.”

·   And just so that there can be no confusion between THIS god and those who relentless crave more and more, THIS god is revealed as “the God of mercy, steadfast love and faithfulness.”

·   That’s one of the crucial truths about Sabbath keeping: it reveals God’s deepest nature. It tells us that the LORD GOD is NOT “a workaholic, that the Lord our God is NOT anxious about the way creation works and that the well-being of all creation does not depend on endless work.”

Ours is a God who RESTS – who seeks refreshment and renewal – who enjoys a vacation.  Ours is a God who is not restless, but restful.  And we grow closer to God’s nature – learn more about God’s will – and unclutter our lives when we, too practice resting:  “Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete and visible way of opting for and aligning ourselves with the God of rest.”

·   The other three opening commandments – NO other gods before me, no idols and no trivializing God’s name – reinforce that walking in the way of THIS God is different from serving the gods of oppression and obsession.

·   In fact, I would go so far as to say that the reason the Bible tells us that ours is a jealous God is because God’s love for us is so fierce. We often think of jealousy in a negative way, but this word – qanna in Hebrew – is only ever used for God. It is as if the Lord’s heart were breaking with extreme grief and anger whenever we choose to walk in the way of other gods.

·   Does that make sense? Please, God weeps and shouts, do NOT return to the ways of bondage that exhaust and destroy:  walk in my ways – follow my path – that you might no longer be weary and heavy laden but know… rest.

Conversation

Ok, that’s my reflection – born of the study and hard work of both Walter Brueggemann and others – about Sabbath and its importance. Brueggemann likes to say that Sabbath is not only a way to resist the culture of over-work, stress and anxiety, but Sabbath offers an alternative, too.  So, what are you thinking?

·   Did I clearly state why Sabbath is so important to our way of being faithful?

·   Do you have any questions you want me to unpack or go deeper with?

·   What gets in our way of honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy?

·   What clutters our hearts and minds and live? What stresses us out?

This challenge is obviously ancient – not something we’ve just encountered – but something God’s people have been wrestling with since the start of time. The way we experience the relentlessness and inadequacy, however, IS different .  

+  Can you name aloud some of the other gods that consume us – and wear us out – and render us anxious and exhausted?

+  God’s word in Scripture suggests that honestly keeping and practice Sabbath unplugs us from the madness: it is one of the ways we move from death into life.

+  So what’s it going to take for us to start making Sabbath keeping an essential for us at First Church:  what would that look like?

Blessed are those who practice God’s decrees – who honor and keep the Sabbath – for they seek the Lord in all things with their whole hearts.

credits

1) spirrealism.wordpress.com

2) theschoolofthetransferofenergy.com

3) fineartamerica.com

4) fineartamerica.com

Re-entry is slow and easy...

Re-entering the groove of ministry: at this stage in life I rarely jump back

into the game and hit the road running. Rather, my re-entry strategy is to gently ease back into the flow of public life and keep my schedule light for a few days. Here are a few semi-related quotes floating around my head that strike me as connected, but we'll have to wait and see, yes?

+ First, from David Brooks in this morning's NY Times, something he calls "The Creative Climate" about where we might find creativity in today's stagnant culture. "Creativity," he writes a la the historic tensions between John Lennon and Paul McCartney (of the Beatles), "rarely flows out of an act of complete originality. It is rarely a virgin birth. It is usually the clash of two value systems or traditions, which, in collision, create a transcendent third thing." He goes on to note that "Shakespeare combined the Greek honor code (thous halt avenge the murder of thy father) with the Christian mercy code(thou shalt not kill) to create Hamlet, Picasso combined the traditions of European art with the traditions of African masks. Saul Bellow combined the strictness of the Jewish conscience with the free-floating go-getter-ness of the American drive for success." 

What really grabbed me, however, was this observation:  "Sometimes creativity happens in pairs - duos like Lennon and McCartney - who bring clashing worldviews but similar tastes. But sometimes it happens in one person, in someone who contains contradictions and who works furiously to resolve the tensions within. When you see creative people like that, you see that they don't flee from the contradictions; they embrace dialectics and dualism... the ability to hold two opposing ideas together at the same time."

If they are religious, they seek to live among the secular. If they are intellectual, the go off into the hurly-burly of business and politics. Creative people often want to be strangers in a strange land. They want to live in dissimilar environments to maximize the creative tensions between different parts of themselves... (So) if you are looking for people who are going to be creative in this current climate, I'd look for people who are disillusioned with politics even as they go into it; who are disenchanted with contemporary worship, even as they join the church; who are disgusted by finance even as they work in finance. These people believe in the goals of their systems but detest how they function. They contain the anxious contradictions between
 disillusionment and hope.

+ Second, in the new overview of the life of Joni Mitchell, Joni, Catherine Monk makes the observation that artists are by nature aliens to their culture.  They may love it and ache to shape it, but they not only hear the Spirit's call more clearly, but they respond to it in ways outside the norms of the status quo.  And to emphasize this thought she quotes a stanza from the epitaph for Oscar Wilde:

And alien tears will fill for him / Pity's long-broken urn / For his mourners will be outcast men, / And outcasts always mourn.

What a brilliant insight!  Artistic outcasts and aliens, let me suggest, know how to mourn because they hear, feel and sense the brokenness within and among us. They are not paralyzed by sorrow but embrace lament. That's what the blues is all about - and the blues is the foundation of jazz. Without the capacity and willingness to feel and sing the blues, the outcast becomes a boring and tragic clown. But let her/him tap into the mourning alive within a culture and watch out!

From Israel: I want to apologize for the unforgivable...

Every day in prayer my heart breaks for my extended family in both Israel and Palestine. They are my extended family, you see, because as a Christian I am united to "the people of the Book" through good times and bad. We all claim a common origin in the patriarch Abraham. We have all shared parts of the same ancient Holy Lands. And no matter how loud the hyperbole or histrionics by ill-informed or mean-spirited fundamentalists of any camp become, nothing can change this fact. As Sister Sledge put it in their 1979 dance groove: we ARE family...

Some of my spiritual cousins are Jews; they are colleagues and friends here and abroad whom I hold close to my heart in prayer each day. I studied Hebrew with the rabbi of Temple Beth-El (now Temple Beth Israel in Bay City) who was an Argentinian Jew serving a congregation in Saginaw, MI. During my first trip to the former Soviet Union, our peace group spent time at Auschwitz, an encounter with horror and dread that will never leave me. Some of my in-laws are Jewish - their beloved forced to flee from Russia during the pogroms of the early 20th century - and my wife is a student of biblical Hebrew. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is a treasured elder in my spirituality. And I am in love with the words of the Hasidic tales of wisdom as recounted by Buber and Wiesel as well as the music of the klezmer.

Simultaneously, some of my other spiritual cousins are Palestinians and Arabs. One of my spiritual directors in Tucson, AZ was a second generation Arab whose family had roots in the Christian realm of Syria. He would pray the Lord's Prayer with me in Arabic at the close of our sessions. Others in my extended family have recently served as international monitors for peace in Palestine where their lives were changed forever by the realities on the ground. And I can never forget that the one I know as Messiah - Jesus of Nazareth - was born in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem and walked the region when it was occupied by Rome. (For the past few years I have been looking for a small book that contains a picture of the house Christ's mother, the Virgin Mary, spent her final years within after St. John took her to Ephesus in modern day Turkey. And while cleaning my study yesterday, I came across it!)

I take these connections with my extended family seriously. In every city I have lived in, my ministry has included ways of being in solidarity with both Jews and Muslims. I cherish our links - they are a source of hope and fidelity to me - and yet they break my heart every day. This morning in prayer I read a posting from Bradley Burston, a columnist for the Israeli paper, Ha'aretz, called "An Israeli Jew's Apology." It is an honest and anguished reflection on the escalating revenge murders currently taking place in both Palestine and Israel. Specifically, it is his lament over the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir - a 13 year old Palestinian boy beaten and burned alive by fanatical Jewish nationalists - in retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli youth - Naftali Frenkel (16), Gilad Shaer (16) and Eyal Yifrah (19). 

Burston expresses what I often feel in my own heart: "I owe you an apology" he writes. "I owe you many, in fact. Many more than I have space for here. But a person has to begin somewhere. So I'll begin with what's right in front of me, right now. I want to apologize for the unforgivable..." (read the whole article @ http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/.premium-1.603542#.U7qGfBEIJIo.facebook)

Today, like so many others, I grieve and wait in silence. Last night I was reading Sari Nusseibeh's memoirs, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life. In it he describes a lecture once given at Hebrew University:

How is it, I asked, that an act of the will can turn one thing into its opposite? Standing on the stage before a crowd of Israeli students and faculty, I said, we needed to develop the miraculous knack of turning hatred into under-standing. Their response taught me that we didn't have to wait for an act of divine intervention, however appreciated it would have been. The empathy those in the audience showed, their lack of public hostility, revived in my the belief... that some mysterious bond connects our two people. We are allies.

I trust this to be true. I trust that hearts committed to compassion are stronger than lives consumed by fear and hatred. And I trust that God's heart aches for this family to find a way into real peace, security, justice and hope. In my tradition, however, the way we move from anguish and fear into trust involves forgiveness. Apologies are part of the process, of course, but always incomplete. I have also come to believe that most of the time politicians are unable to find their way towards peace or forgiveness because their careers are defined by appealing to their base. I don't mean to say that they don't want peace in their hearts, but their public roles keep them from moving in deep and bold ways. There are exceptions, to be sure, but all too often our politicians are in bondage to the status quo.

 So today, in addition to this lament, I pray the words of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is discord, harmony;

Where there is error, truth;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Heart man...

Sometime during my second year at Union Theological Seminary in NYC (I am thinking it was fall of 1980) Professor of Homelitics, James Forbes, asked to see me in his office. To say that I was in awe of his preaching skill, wit and compassion would be an understatement. So I approached our conversation with fear and trembling.

After a bit of small talk, he cut to the chase: why don't you take a break from your strident activism during seminary? After all, he smiled, even Gandhi took time off from his campaigns for justice to periodically get centered. Why not use what time remains inside the safety and encouragement of the seminary community to both rest and reflect deeply? This is a sacred gift, so why not use it wisely? He paused for a moment before closing: "Besides you'll have plenty of time to get yourself killed after graduation."

I left his office confused. My calling to ministry came in the aftermath of Dr. King's assassination in 1968. Since that time I had become a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam (never called up for alternative service), worked in Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers movement, dedicated myself to the practices of ethical vegetarianism a la Frances Moore Lappe, renewed my conviction to urban ministry and aligned myself politically with both NAM (New American Movement) and DSOC (Democratic Socialists of America.) What was Dr. Forbes, a passionate person of faith and justice, asking of me?

In retrospect - with lots of missteps in between - it is clear that this was an invitation to learn about balance - what Elizabeth O'Connor calls the inward and outward journey and Fr. Richard Rohr knows as the work of action and contemplation. But I didn't know that then and sadly I mostly ignored the kind wisdom of my mentor. Not intentionally nor in rebellion, but rather because I knew next to nothing about the contemplative tradition. Of course I knew that the Beatles had given themselves to transcendental meditation for awhile. My brother had done time with the TM camp, too. But my world of social and political activism rarely spoke about balance or the integration of action with contemplation. All the organizers I knew were agents for social change 24/7 - and the ones who were not were burn outs. "So what can a poor boy do," asked the Rolling Stones, "cept to sing in a rock and roll band cuz in sleepy London Town there ain't no place for a street fighting man!"
Today my thoughts go back to that afternoon conversation in Dr. Forbes' office because, on this stunning Sabbath morning in the Berkshires, it is time for my annual vacation reflection on ministry. We do a professional evaluation at church at the end of each year - and that has value and merit - but I have discerned that I need something deeper if I am to keep on keeping on. And it only becomes clear after a time away from everything related to ministry. That is one reason why we head-out to the Montreal Jazz Festival each year: in a place that is saturated in French, I have to listen more than speak. It is a gentle way of stepping back from the busyness of ministry for a measure of solitude and even silence.

To date, two insights have been bubbling up over the past 10 days:

The first has to do with the inter-section of ministry and the creative arts. I bought three books while in Montreal and have three more on my night stand to read for work. Just as I can learn what is going on in my heart and soul by paying attention to the music I am listening to, so too with the books I buy. 

+ JONI by Katherine Monk explores the "creative odyssey of Joni Mitchell" including the philosophers and artists who have shaped her work.

+ The Conductor by Sarah Quigley is a work of fiction set in Leningrad 1941 and reflects on the "life-saving properties of music, creativity and hope."

+ Fridays at Enrico's by Don Carpenter is the unfinished novel by a mentor to the Beat poets/writers set in North Beach - a meditation on being a serious writer in North America - and his homage to Richard Brautigan.

+ Sabbath as Resistance by Walter Brueggemann is subtitled "saying NO to the culture of NOW."

+ Slow Church by C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison is a reflection on being deliberate and contemplative in a bottom-line 21st culture. 

+ And A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer explores "the journey toward an undivided life in a wounded world."

Detect a theme? Am I ready for my sabbatical? I'm still revisiting the wisdom Dr. Forbes suggested 34 years ago, right? Only now I have some experience and understanding about how to nourish the action/contemplation balance. And even when I completely screw it up, I am more grounded in grace so fret much less than before. Last year was filled with demands both personal and professional - from births and deaths to anniversaries and grant applications - and it was exhausting. Creative and satisfying, but exhausting. This year will be given over to preparing for the sabbatical and will require being very careful about laying the groundwork so that both the congregation and I get the most out of this creative time away.

In a penetrating essay, "Hearing the Cries of the World," Mark Nepo writes:

Each of us must make our peace with suffering and especially unnecessary suffering, which doesn't mean our resignation to a violent world. For the fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence. As our heart breaks with compassion, it strengthens itself and all of humanity. Can I prove this? No. Am I certain of it? Yes. We are still here. Immediately, someone says, “Barely.” But we are still here: more alive than dead, more vulnerable than callous, more kind than cruel— though we each carry the lot of it.

That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away, to soften our minds once they've been hardened by the storms of our day.

Always, on the inside of our hardness and shyness and numbness is the face of compassion through which we can reclaim our humanity. Our compassion waits there to revive us. When opened, our heart can touch the Oneness of things we are all a part of. Then, we can stand firmly in our being like a windmill of spirit: letting the cries of the world turn us over and over, until our turning generates a power and energy that can be of use in the world.

(read the whole essay here: http://www.parabola.org/index.php?option=com_ easyblog&view=entry&id=47&Itemid=268)   

The second theme that has bubbled up in my vacation reflection on ministry is an increased desire for focus. In music, I want to deepen my skills and ability in jazz. In worship, I want to create more space for quiet contemplation AND open dialogue. In justice work, I want to strengthen our emerging inter-faith network. In community relations, I want to make a vigorous commitment between a local synagogue and our congregation. And within the life of the church, I want to strengthen our adult formation ministries. 

Doing all of that AND preparing for my sabbatical will be more than enough for 2015. And it will require of me making certain I say NO at least as much as I say yes. And that means also practicing better self-care physically, spiritually and emotionally. I like the way Luka Bloom puts it in the song "Heart Man."

So as the rest of this beautiful day unfolds, I'm going to clean my study and cut the grass and take the dog for a walk. And as I do, more thoughts about the past year will become clear. Thanks be to God.

Unsentimental compassion redux...

Interestingly - at least to me - after my earlier posting I read these words on Fr. Richard Rohr's daily meditation. They amplify and deepen what I was trying to say so I offer them as part two...

The compassionate holding of seeming meaninglessness or tragedy, as Jesus does in hanging on the cross, is the final and triumphant resolution of all dualisms and dichotomies. (Friday)

Rest: Tonglen

Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, shares the practice of tonglen as a way of holding suffering and awakening compassion:

“In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves.

“In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean—you name it—to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves . . . . Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one’s heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind.

“The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering—ours and that which is all around us—everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem to be.

“We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy, or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in others’ pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness, happens to be at that moment.

“At that point you can change the focus and begin to do tonglen for what you are feeling and for millions of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or revulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can’t name what you’re feeling. But you can feel it—a tightness in the stomach, a heavy darkness, or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in—for all of us and send out relief to all of us.

“. . . [You] can do tonglen for all the people who are just like you, for everyone who wishes to be compassionate but instead is afraid, for everyone who wishes to be brave but instead is a coward. . . .

“Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.

“Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.”

Adapted from “The Practice of Tonglen” by Pema Chödrön,
Shambhala.org

Unsentimental compassion...

There was a time when I lived as an activist for social justice: I saw life through the lens of struggle, I looked for contradiction and injustice in the news and culture, and I considered myself one of the company of the committed. Today I think that my earnest stridency was mostly just the other side of the coin of oppression - a self-righteous obsession that rarely made any difference in the real world - and often deepened the polarization and pain without any authentic measure of compassion.

My understanding of justice work, you see, was defined by the status quo - the marketplace - where there must always be winners and losers, profits and loss, ups and downs. I remember sitting at a Farm Workers boycott meeting in Lawrence, Kansas one hot afternoon in the early 70s with a few Roman Catholic supporters talking about our next action. Towards the end of our discussion, I said something like: "Those bastards - those damn bosses and growers - they don't know anything about the agony of the workers." There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. So being a young hot head I didn't quit: "We should give them a taste of their own ugly medicine and see how they like it being treated like dirt. Fuck them!" 

No one replied to my rant. No one embraced my anger. And no one seemed interested in kicking ass. In time an old priest said, "Son, be careful, you don't want to become what you hate." I left the meeting thinking this was pious bullshit, but those words have haunted me for nearly 40 years. Today I know that the old priest was right. It is so easy to become what we hate. It is so simple to delude our heads and hearts with self-righteous fury that we are unable to move in the ways of love and hope. And it is so often the case that our opposition to injustice blinds us to our own participation in that which is hateful, cruel and destructive. To paraphrase Mark Twain: "Do I believe in human sin?  Man, I've SEEN it." Like St. Paul noted about himself: all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  

Frederick Buechner has a phrase that I have come to embrace - compassion without sentimentality - that he describes like this."It is a lucid, cool and grave compassion. If it had a color, it would be pale, northern blue." He wrote this about his colleagues at the East Harlem Protestant Parrish - an experiment in ministry born from those returning to the US after WWII who wanted their lives to matter - and could not tolerate being a part of the stagnant status quo of the 1950s. 

They never seemed to romanticize the junkies and winos and dead beats and losers they worked among, and they never seemed to let pity or empathy distort the clarity with which they saw them for no more if no less than what they were. Insofar as they were able to approach loving them, I got the impression that they did so not just in spite of everything about them that was neither lovely nor lovable but right in the thick of it. There was a sad gaiety about the way they went about their work. The sadness stemmed, I suppose, from the hopelessness of their task - the problems were so vast, their resources for dealing with them so meager - and the gaiety from a hope beyond hope that, in the long run if not the short, all would in some holy and unimaginable way be well.

In time, it was this compassion without sentimentality that changed my life. It applied to me - in spades - to those I loved who were broken, for sure - and to the injustices that invaded my limited understanding of how the world was supposed to work. Leonard Cohen eventually gave me the right metaphor to comprehend how this all hung together when he sang, "There is a crack, a crack in everything... that's how the light gets in." Compassion without sentimentality, yes? Again, Buechner got it right when he observed that in contemporary culture the brokenness and despair is easy to see - but what about the grace?

My frustration... was in discovering that although many writers have

succeeded in exploring the depths of human darkness and despair and alienation in a world where God seems largely absent, there are relatively few who have tried to tackle the reality of whatever salvation means, the experience of Tillich's "new being" whereby, even in the depths, we are touched here and there by a power beyond power to heal and make whole. Sin is easier to write about than grace, I suppose, because the territory is so familiar and because, too, it is of the nature of grace, when we receive it, to turn our eyes not inward, where most often writers' eyes turn, but outward where there is a whole world of needs to serve far greater than the need simply for another book.

In my world - in my heart, my family, my church and community - the wounds are too great for me to be an activist (at least in my old understanding of that word.) Rather I have been lured towards living into an unsentimental devotion to compassion - with a lucid but cool awareness of Buechner's sad gaiety - that honors the cracks in everything. The old way was exhausting - and shrill and eventually boring and exhausting - but unsentimental compassion not only brings hope and clarity to each day, it keeps me grounded in a love far greater than myself. The more I trust this love, the more I am able to be fully present with people. And the more present I am, the more I can share and join in with their suffering. From time to time we even find ways to address some of the pain.  The rest, as the wise one said, we leave to the care of the Lord.

Quiet reflections on July 4 2014...

A rainy and slow moving Fourth of July in the Berkshires: I have a cold, the dog is sleeping at my feet and I have more hot tea brewing. This is a hard holiday for me to celebrate this year. Normally, I love Independence Day - I take time to ponder the "dream" of America a la the poetry of Langston Hughes - and also prayerfully reflect on our failings. In my heart it is a somber and sacred time. 

But this year life in these United States seems terribly out of balance. The whole Hobby Lobby/Supreme Court debacle is not only bad news for women, men and children at this moment in history, but the implications of such a mean-spirited order suggests even more suffering and alienation for future generations. It is as if our obsession with free-markets has become the only vision viable for contemporary society. And while some would suggest that such flagrant selfishness is a sign that the old ways are starting to cave-in on themselves, I am not nearly so confident. Rather, my hunch is that we're in for yet another generation of wild social neglect. As the poet W.H. Auden wrote: "I and the public know/ What schoolchildren learn/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return."

There are, of course, other disturbing signs of the times that do not bode well for this present era, too. My nation is caught between a rock and a hard place in Iraq with no good options to consider. Throughout my part of the world we are experiencing an epidemic of heroin use with the concomitant tragedy of more and more deaths by overdose. A quick survey of popular culture suggests that just below the surface Americans are terrified of everything: think of the TV shows like the return of "24" - or our addiction to the zombie/vampire genre of "The Walking Dead," "Bitten," the upcoming "The Strain" or "True Blood" - to say nothing of the malevolence of "Orphan Black." Don't get me wrong, I enjoy some of these shows, but a clear theme of unmitigated fear is driving part of our entertainment industry. Could the same case be made for our movies, too? Hmmmm... "Godzilla," "Maleficent," "Edge of Tomorrow," "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," "Guardians of the Galaxy," "Sin City 2," "Dracula Untold," and the remake of "The Equalizer?" Yes, I think that case can be made here, too.

This grim reality, however, while needing authentic lamentation is not the end of the story. Perhaps for the first time in 50 years more and more Americans are open to an alternative to the fear and confusion of this generation. I trust in my heart that a more humble and joyful alternative is also gaining traction at this moment in time.

+ Pope Francis I put it like this in his recent apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “We cannot forget that evangelization is first and foremost about preaching the gospel to those who do not know Jesus Christ or who have always rejected him. . . Christians have the duty to proclaim the gospel without ex­cluding anyone. Instead of seeming to impose new obligations, they should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but ‘by attraction."

+ Jim Wallis of Sojourners recently articulated this re: Iraq: America is stunned by what is happening in Iraq right now, and happening so quickly. We may be facing the worst terrorist threat to international security so far — despite all we have done and sacrificed. Both our political leaders and media pundits are admitting there are no good options for the U.S. now. But there is an option we could try for the first time: humility. Let me turn to two biblical texts that might provide some wisdom for both the religious and non-religious.

If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Rom. 12:20–21)  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God. (Matthew 5:9)

All nations use propaganda to tell half-truths and spread misinformation about their enemies, which should be honestly challenged. Even so, it is also true that we have real enemies in this world, as individuals, groups, and nations. To assume otherwise is foolish, from the perspective of history, certainly, but also in light of good theology about evil as part of the nature of the human condition. According to the Bible, even our faith communities will encounter enemies. Jesus’s teaching assumes that we will have enemies, and he teaches us how to treat them. In the passages above, Jesus and Paul the Apostle offer guidance for more effective ways of dealing with our enemies. It seems to be clear that our habit of going to war against them is increasingly ineffective. For the past several years, we have found ourselves in a constant state of war with “enemies” who are very hard to find or completely defeat. (read the whole article here: http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/06/27/iraq-humility-best-option)

+ And Parker Palmer posted these insights for Independence Day: As we Americans approach Independence Day — aka the Fourth of July — here's a modest proposal. How about adding an annual INTERdependence Day to remind us of something we seem in danger of forgetting: "We're all in this together!"

A society where that simple fact has been forgotten is not a society: it's a nightmare.

Of course, I value independence, national and personal. But I also value

collaboration because little that's good has ever been achieved without it. And if we did not take communal responsibility for one another, where would we be? I, for one, would be utterly lost without the many people who've invested time, energy and love in me — and without the many generations who cared enough for the common good to invest in such things as public schools.

Here's a poem I love that lifts up the common good, laments the ways in which we violate it, and reminds us that nature has much to teach us about interdependence and the good society:

Blackbirds
by Julie Cadwallader-Staub

I am 52 years old, and have spent
truly the better part
of my life out-of-doors
but yesterday I heard a new sound above my head
a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air

and when I turned my face upward
I saw a flock of blackbirds
rounding a curve I didn't know was there
and the sound was simply all those wings
just feathers against air, against gravity
and such a beautiful winning
the whole flock taking a long, wide turn
as if of one body and one mind.

How do they do that?

Oh if we lived only in human society
with its cruelty and fear
its apathy and exhaustion
what a puny existence that would be

but instead we live and move and have our being
here, in this curving and soaring world
so that when, every now and then, mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives
and when, even more rarely, we manage to unite and move together
toward a common good,

we can think to ourselves:

ah yes, this is how it's meant to be.

These are genuinely hard times to celebrate America. They are also an important time to live more deeply into the promise and prayer of humility and compassion as a gentle alternative. There are so many among us who are truly hungry for the experience of living bread.

Adieu doux Montréal: vous étiez aimable et sainte pour nous ...

We are now home in Pittsfield - grateful for our time away - and grateful to be in the comfort and gentleness of our own home. The ride home was easy and safe. Our friends were gracious as we picked up our wacky young dog, Lucie, from their loving care. And we settled back into a familiar groove eating fava beans and Israeli couscous before finding a new British TV show.  Here are a few inter-related albeit not consecutive thoughts:

+ On my urban walk about I saw two examples of the human condition: earlier in the day, as we sat in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Vieux-Montréal, a duet was singing "Ave Maria." Out of the corner of my eye I saw a wizened old woman singing along quietly. From time to time, she wiped away a tear from her eye. The old Montréal has changed much in her life time - mostly for the better - but it is hard to let go of the deep, old time religion. 

Later that night, leaving the Jazz Festival, I was walking behind two obnoxious young men who were drunk. As one passed an old, homeless man sleeping in the doorway of a store on Ste.Catherine, he poured out the remains of his beer can on the old soul and laughed as he strutted away. I have to say that the wind was kicked out of me with such a cavalier act of cruelty and I found myself stumbling to grasp hold of a street lamp. I, too, found myself shedding a tear but for a very different reason, yes?  

+ Last night's "Zappa Plays Zappa" concert was another sacred time for me. First of all, young Zappa plays his father's music with panache and grace. As he said in an interview, "Too many people missed the genius of Frank.. and that was just wrong." Second, his opening set included a few of my favorite early Zappa compositions, notably "The Other People." To my mind, this song is a testimony to the community of God embodied and proclaimed by Jesus. The chorus is clear:  "we are the other people, we are the other people, we are the other people, you're the other people, too. Trying to find a way to get to you..." 

Then Zappa offers three verses about how we project our fears onto those we don't understand or who frighten us. Again, without any notice, I found I was weeping tears of gratitude.

+ Being home - and picking up our strange and wonderful dog - filled me with a sense of peace. I LOVE living here. I love the people in my congregation. And I love sharing all of this with my sweetheart. We both celebrated birthdays on this trip - as we have done for the past 6 years - and growing older with her continues to be the best thing I have ever experienced in my life save the birth of my two daughters. As we sat listening to Zappa - and then talking about the extraordinary genius of his music - I was reminded again of how blessed I am to share this time with her in ministry and life. I have one more week of vacation - time to rest and reflect and do some essential home improvement tasks - and I have to say I am looking forward to it all. 

AT 62 I am keenly aware that I must not take ANY of this for granted. Maya

Angelou said it best: Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. Little by little I find that I am starting to grow up - not a lot - but a bit - and that feels right.  When Di and I were first reconnected more than 20+ years ago, one rainy night in a bookstore I stumbled upon this poem by Kabir (translated/reworked by Robert Bly) and knew that my life had changed. It is called "The Time Before Death."

Friend? hope for the Guest while you are alive. 
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think... and think... while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time 
            before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten -- 
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
          City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next 
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.

Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
Sitting on our sofa, eating Israeli couscous and fava beans, sipping red French wine while Lucie rested at our feet filled me with a whole new layer of gratitude.

Jeune Zappa joue la musique de la vieille Zappa ...

Yesterday it was beastly hot in Montreal: 31C which is about 88F with 85% humidity. It was also Canada Day. I saw a news poll that only 31% of Quebecers feel a connection with this national holiday versus 61% of the rest of the country. 

We did a bit of wandering - and sweating - to feel the local groove - and like most things here it was subdued. Mostly we retreated to places that were air conditioned - including our flat - and caught up on some reading. Later that evening, however, I was feeling the need to explore the world of the night. As often happens about this time in our travels, Di needs a quiet time alone away from festivals and the sometimes frenetic energy of her partner. 

So, I started slipping into darkness about 9 pm and didn't quit until I got home about 2 am. Mostly, I walked the neighborhoods surrounding the Jazz Festival to get a sense of what's happening in these locales. Part of me loves to walk into an unknown bar, chat up the bartender and listen to his/her story about what's important at this moment in time.

To be completely honest, I am also fascinated by the people who thrive in the late hours of the evening. How did Edward Winter put it: those who only come out at night? They're the Lou Reed/Tom Waits crowd - a mostly gentle, creative community of souls who often put on a brutal exterior in their quest for connection - and I have always been intrigued by how their world works. It is not, you see, my natural habitat. I am more at home in bookstores and libraries - small jazz or folk clubs and coffeehouse work, too. But since the time I first wandered around the West Village during the summer of love - and then made countless pilgrimages to the Fillmore East - I find myself eager for proximity to this unusual and deeply compassionate under class.

I guess it is somehow fitting that our last show in Montreal tonight will be Zappa Plays Zappa. The Mothers of Invention were my first concert ever. They played the old Garrick Theatre in the West Village. And the combination of seeing their LATE show - with all its bizarre jazz, biting social commentary and foolish lewdness - plus the spectacle of taking in the burgeoning NYC hippie groove in 1966 apparently scared me for life. I learned a LOT from those guys about acceptance, creativity and diversity. In their own way, the Mothers embodied the down and dirty reality of Christ's kingdom where no one earns their way into God's blessing, it is just absolutely free. What's more, "who cares if you're too poor to buy a pair of mod a-go-go stretch elastic pants? There will even come a time when you can take your clothes off when you dance!"

This world wears its brokenness and wounds on the outside - expressing with no uncertainty the tragedy and sorrow it knows all too well - while keeping its beauty, tenderness and hope very, very private - something that is shared only with those who can be trusted. This is, of course, the polar opposite of what I grew up with - bold, outward expressions of beauty, faith, hope and love - but I think both are different sides to the same coin. The cultural critique of bourgeois society and its bottom line values ebbs and flows. It finds a public expression, however, because every human heart aches to be loved and every human soul yearns to be affirmed. The aesthetic expressions of this longing looks different in time, culture and context, but the truth of this cadre - from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Ginsberg, Kerouac, Joni Mitchell, Marge Pearcy, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, and l'orchestre d'hommes-orchestres - remains constant: at our core, we ache for truth, beauty and love.

So off we go to see young Zappa bring tribute to his poppa and introduce a whole new generation to the wisdom and weird genius that was Mr. Francis Vincent. It will be a little bit of reunion for me so how appropriate that today is my birthday...

Jazz est la nourriture de mon âme...

After spending most of the day resting and reading, we left part of the afternoon roaming Marché Jean-Talon. Opened in Little Italy in 1933, it continues to be a delight of sights, smells and sounds where you can get fresh crepes as well as world class breads and cheeses, fruits or vegetables. What's more, it is an easy place to continue practicing French without the distractions of the Jazz Festival or the roar of city traffic.

After a little more resting, it was off to Bobby McFerrin who is doing a show in tribute to his father's musical influence he calls "Spirityouall." As you might guess, it is a collection of spirituals and gospel songs reworked for his unique gifts. For this tour he is using a killer band that includes his daughter on vocals plus a pianist, drummer/guitarist in addition to two other guitarists who sometimes play violin, electric guitar,pedal steel guitar and/or slide. It is a bold and big sound that can evoke tender French chansons, raw and swampy Delta moans or even some playful bebop (in the middle of the show he tossed off a sweet little version of Monk's "Well You Needn't" giving his band the chance to show off their jazz chops.)

Two or three times during this show I found I was moved to tears - nothing really unusual for me when I encounter such beauty and awe - as tears have become one of my ways to pray. What I was reminded of, however, was how important it is for Di and myself to feed our souls with music, beauty and down time. Last year, for a variety of reasons, this didn't happen nearly as much as is healthy: the end of last summer marked the first anniversary of my sister's death, then our daughter had our first grandchild, we did some special music shows that were fun but demanding, throw in the fullness of Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter at church - plus our congregation's 250th anniversary and our local justice organizing and periodic baby sitting in Brooklyn - and there just wasn't time or energy for a lot of self-care.

So as I've observed before, these musical events are a bit like church for me: they put me in touch with my deepest soul food. They also give me the experience of celebrating great artists sharing their gifts with joy and abandon - and that encourages me to do likewise. As a rule I often return to the fold rested and highly energized after our summer retreats into the realm of jazz.

After the concert we sat outside at a cafe sipping red wine and listening to one of Canada's young jazz stars: Emilie-Claire Barlow. She has a big, strong voice - her band had a tight and light groove - and the moon going down over Montreal was magical. Today is Canada Day so who knows what will happen? Whatever it is, I am grateful.

AND I LOVE DI'S PICTURES OF THE DAY!