NOTE; The sound quality on today's live stream was poor. I will re-record later today and get it online. Thanks. Here is the new version... much better!
REFLECTIONS ON TENDERNESS FOR MAY 17
Let me begin this morning’s reflection on tenderness with quotes from two time-tested guides. They offer a context for why I have become an advocate of a spirituality of tenderness – and why I would value your company along the way. The first, from Fr. Richard Rohr, speaks to the big picture. The second, from Brené Brown, summarizes my studies to date. Fr. Rohr tell us that:
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers – invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.
Like Michael Stipe of the band REM sings: “Everybody hurts.” The challenge is to figure out what to do with our pain. The Judeo-Christian holy texts tell us that if we do not transform our wounds into wisdom and tenderness, “the sins of the mothers and fathers will be passed on to the children of the third and fourth generation.” (Deuteronomy 5) If you know anything about addiction, abuse or family systems theory, you know this is true. Maybe you know it yourself from your own hard experience. Brené Brown synthesizes what she has learned about one of the ways our pain can be transformed from her work as a social scientist working with the military and sports organizations.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path. You see, vulnerability, like authenticity, is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.
That’s probably as clear a description of living into the way of tenderness that I know: choosing every day to show up, greet reality with vulnerability and let it nourish us with clarity. The late Mary Oliver put it more wistfully in her poem: “Angels.”
You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not
entirely anyway, other people’s
heads.
I’ll just leave you with this.
The quest for a life of authentic tenderness that helps us transform out wounds into wisdom so that we don’t transmit it, and also ripens patience and compassion within our culture, is all about a conscious inward/outward journey. Life as a pilgrimage, if you will, “a path or radical unknowing” as Christine Valters Paintner writes: where we “stop reaching, forcing and trying to make our experiences into something… and give ourselves over to the tender grace of God’s fertile darkness” that shows us how to just be and mature into the serenity of trust.
Don’t misunderstand me: there are times, like Jacob’s encounter with the holy, when we don’t realize something sacred is taking place until it is over. What does he say in the text? “Clearly the Lord was in this place and I – I – did not know.” But Jacob was willing to learn, to be guided by the Spirit into a deeper way of being, so that inside and out he experienced the blessings of trusting the holy. I think the early disciples who chose to follow Jesus were a lot like Jacob in this story: they, too, wanted to go deeper but did not fully know what that meant. They wanted their brokenness to be transformed but were not certain how to go about doing it. As another verse in the Christian texts puts it: they were like sheep without a shepherd – and when Jesus looked upon them, he felt compassion for he saw men and women consumed with anxiety and confusion.
· Like the prophetic mentors and prophets of ancient Israel who walked before him, Jesus taught with actions, words and silence. In this morning’s lesson, he has just washed the feet of the disciples before celebrating what was likely the Passover feast. Jesus assumed the role of a servant to teach them about trust and invited them to become vulnerable and open. If you have ever had your feet washed before, you know how vulnerable you feel taking off your shoes to let another hold your naked foot and bathe it carefully. Talk about kinesthetic education!
· Afterwards, Jesus interpreted this encounter with embodied wisdom with words and silence telling them two essential truths: first, your experience with vulnerability and trust – your feelings of uncertainty mixed with openness as you let go – are of the Holy Spirit. You can’t see the Spirit, but you can experience her and you are starting to trust this to be true. Second, the more you practice radical love – laying down your life for those you care about – the more the Spirit will guide you into places of greater vulnerability. Then he put the icing on the cake by silently looking each person around the Passover table in the eye and let it all sink is for a moment.
Finally, he wrapped it up saying, “I can tell you these things now because you are starting to trust your vulnerability. You are no longer servants or students, now you are my friends, living with me heart-to-heart.” Collectively, as well as personally, we, too are living into a time of profound vulnerability. Some of us are unsettled, others are anxious and confused, and a few sense that God is giving us all the chance to go deeper into the ways of tenderness so that we might consciously create new ways of living.
Life in this time of contagion has exposed again to white America the terrifying consequences of our racism – and all the ways we deny it. Whether it’s the fact that more people of color are dying of the virus because of economic and health disparities; or that white fear is so out of control that a father and son in Georgia felt free to murder Ahmaud Arberry from the back of their pick-up truck trusting that they would not be prosecuted: we can no longer avoid confronting our nation’s original sin. The NAACP’s new call to action, We Are Done Dying, is right on the money – and ALL people of good will know it.
Perhaps that is why people of every race and spirituality are also finding new ways to express their solidarity. A growing coalition of people who never would have allied themselves with Senator Bernie Sanders are now joining his call to guarantee that the 36+ million recently unemployed Americans get health care during this crisis. What’s more, despite what we see online from a bold minority, in our everyday lives most Americans are looking out for one another. David Brooks writes in The New York Times that folks in “red and blue states are staying home at nearly exactly the same rates. There is little correlation between whether a state is red or blue and how it is doing in fighting the disease… What’s more the best polling data tells us that the share of Americans who feel they live in a divided society has fallen from 87 percent to 48 percent. Eighty-two percent of us now say we have more that unites us than divides us.”
Brooks concludes, and I concur, that beyond the cynicism of our public culture, we are all learning about endurance. Trust. Vulnerability. “The pandemic has revealed (to us) the rot in many of our political dogmas and institutions, but also a greater humanity, a deeper compassion in the face of suffering, and a hidden solidarity, which I, at least, did not know was there.” So let me call to your attention two stories you may not have heard much about.
Last week in Montreal, a multi-cultural consortium of musicians invited some of the Hasidic Jews from the Outremont neighborhood to join them in singing their evening prayers for the city out loud from their balconies. Local musician, Martha Wainwright, was the catalyst for what has become a weekly event on the famous balconies of Montreal as well as Face Book. For 30 minutes each Wednesday night, that city gathers individually to sing together songs of the heart to strengthen one another for our long journey into vulnerability. It is like NYC’s 7 PM nightly people’s chorus of song, pot banging and praise for the health care workers, grocery store clerks, fire fighters and every other citizen dedicated to the common good who carries on their work in public while the rest of us love one another in self-quarantine.
Like Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, “it was the best of times and the worst of times.” And that is so among us, too. While some of our politicians choose profit over human life – what some are calling an act of genocide to save Wall Street – others, like the teachers of Minnesota, are putting together an all-state read of the children’s book, Because of Winn Dixie, with a state-wide Zoom gathering on May 20th.
Have you heard about the New Story Festival? It is a seven-month, on-line commitment by some of our culture’s wisest and most creative souls calling us together to “exchange our story of separation, selfishness, and scapegoating for one in which each of us finds our place, our needs are met, our gifts shared, where connection, creativity, and beauty become the most obvious characteristics of our lives.”
I’ll put a link to it up on my Be Still and Know Face Book page so that you can check it out. But here’s the deal: The New Story Festival grows out of the conviction expressed by the author, Arundhati Roy, in a bitingly insightful essay claiming that this pandemic is a portal: a way into a new and potentially better reality—if we have the courage to step through it—if, as I put it, we choose to consciously commit to and practice the inward/outward pilgrimage into vulnerability.
So let me share with you what I have been studying, pondering, praying over and trying to embody in practice over the past five years – what I have come to call a spirituality of tenderness. For me it has become essential to ground my spiritual practices in my own tradition. Some prefer a more eclectic approach, a salad bar or smorgasboard spirituality, where they pick up an insight from Buddhism, add it to a prayer from Islam, mix it together with a pop song and work in some New Age meditation. Thomas More writes that this is finding our own religion – and if it works – God bless you. At this point in my life, I’m with Mary Oliver when she wrote: I don’t care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty. For myself, but not for other people. That’s a place you just can’t get into, not entirely anyway, other people’s heads. I’ll just leave you with this… For me I feel most grounded with Merton’s invitation to grow where I was planted.
So, first I wondered where the word tender came from? The etymology of the English word tender started with the Old French, tendre, as well as the Latin, tener. It assumed its current form after the Norman conquest of England in the 15th century. Tender has always been distinct from the word gentle that began in Latin as gentilis – meaning of the same clan – which, in time, became the root of the Old French gentil - of high or noble birth. Gentle was linked to the courteous nature of nobility during the Middle Ages. And from this came the implication that gentle is about moderation while tender suggests compassion. Gentle arises from "a disposition" of kindness offered to others from above while tender is more about a shared sense of our common fragility.
Frederick Buechner speaks about tenderness like this: “Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within." Henri Nouwen explores tenderness in his "wounded healer" reflections and the L’Arche community that I volunteer with in Ottawa has been influenced by the late Jean Vanier's work that says: “Every child, every person, needs to know that they are a source of joy; every child, every person, needs to be celebrated. Only when all of our weaknesses are accepted as part of our humanity can our negative, broken self-images be transformed” rather than transmitted.
· To be tender, therefore, is to move outward: it is relational and anticipates interacting with others who are equally vulnerable. One who is tender receives others without harshness. These words touched Henri Nouwen’s heart when he chose to leave the competitive world of Harvard for a simpler way of life: “I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.” This is the recognition that we are all wounded whatever our public circumstance. Just below the surface we are all broken, beautiful and beloved children of God.
· I also found out that sometimes speak of some foods as "tender" - that is, not tough. We say that some plants are "tender" and need special attention. Some parts of our bodies are tender and require extra care and protection. Those "of a tender age" require a unique sensitivity. And some subjects warrant extra tact in our speech and action because they are "of a tender nature” as Merriam Webster puts it.
A spirituality of tenderness, therefore, must deepen sensitivity to our own wounds, accept as normative the vulnerability of all living creatures, and invite us all to enter the world with care by treading lightly whether we’re acting, speaking, writing or living. That’s when I needed to understand the biblical foundation for this way of being. Granted, it has been around since the start as a minority report, or as Richard Rohr says, “an alternative orthodoxy,” and it continues to leaven the whole. From my perspective there are five key insights from the Hebrew and Greek scriptures of Judaism and Christianity that help me shape an "applied spirituality tenderness." And that is what spirituality is all about, right? A way to consciously live into our values integrating our experiences of holiness with our everyday humanity.
The first key word is hesed (חֶ֔סֶד): it appears over 241 in the Hebrew Bible and is often translated as either "loving-kindness" or "covenant loyalty." The Septuagint, the Hebrew texts translated into Greek, almost always translate hesed as mercy ( Ἔλεος). The ethical core of the covenant involves building right relationships that embody God’s fairness, trust, and tenderness in real time. It is a way of ordering our time and energy that strengthens solidarity with one another and God. And there is nothing abstract about being in covenant relationship with real people and striving to treat them as God treats you. It takes work, awareness, intentionality and a whole lot of forgiveness.
· Two texts are illustrative: Micah 6 states: God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? The other is Hosea 6:6: For I (the Lord your God) desire steadfast love and not sacrificial rituals, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
· To do justice involves building right relations between real people who can be just as dense and annoying as yourself. To cherish kindness is to engage creation with the tenderness of our Creator. And to walk with humility is to know, like Mary Oliver, that you are not the center of the universe.
The second word from the Hebrew Bible is rachm (רַחוּם: Often translated as compassion in English, rachm speaks of God's powerful love from above or beyond us in ways that resemble a mother's love. It is illustrative to note that the Hebrew root grows out of the word for womb.
It is also important to say that this tenderness is not about what happens between people, but rather what takes place between God and God's beloved. That is, this tenderness does not evoke human solidarity, but intimacy with the holy. Psalm 86 comes to mind: But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Or even Psalm 131 where the soul in prayer rests in serenity in God’s presence much like a child upon her mother’s breast.
Covenant kindness and sacred intimacy are part of a spirituality of tenderness. Three Greek New Testament texts are also worth our attention. They are shaped by the Hebrew Bible and inter-preted through the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus as the Christ.
First is the word mercy in English – eleos (ἔλεος) in Greek – which is how the Hebrew hesed is translated by the rabbis in the Septuagint. Here the sense of solidarity within a community is key with tender feelings of support during times of suffering being essential. Mercy is quite different from pity: pity is an emotion experienced by the elite, those not connected to a particular pain, while mercy is all about sharing the sorrow of the afflicted. Mercy moves into action; pity remains a feeling among the aloof. Mercy is used 217 times in the New Testament and one of my favorite verses from St. Matthew is finds Jesus saying: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but the broken.”
Second is the almost psychedelic sounding word for compassion in Greek – splagchnizomai (Σπλαγχνίζομα) - it appears 12 times in the Greek Testament. Like the Hebrew, rachm, that evokes tenderness from God deep within our vital organs, the Greek word is equally embodied: the Hebrew has its origins in a mother’s womb while the Greek arises from the seat of our affections found in “the nobler entrails of the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.(Strong) Splagchnizomai is also like the Hebrew in that it involves a compassion shared with those in a covenant or committed relationship who are suffering.
It is not an abstract or universal experience, but one grounded in intimacy with the particulars of real people. In Mark 1: 41, it is a particular leper upon whom Jesus has compassion, not all lepers in general: “A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.” The same particularity is true in Matthew 9 where Jesus moves through the various towns of the covenant in Israel healing first a paralytic, then a girl and a woman, two blind men and one who was mute. Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for each one who was broken, because he knew they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” In other words, Jesus was moved to bring healing and hope to the lives of individuals within his community of faith.
And third is the Greek word agape (ἀγάπη) which we know as tender, self-giving, generous and compassionate love for others. The Gospel of John uses it often, the letters of Paul are saturated in its wisdom and the Greek Testament speaks of this love 116 times. The key text, of course, is I Corinthians 13. And the radical implications of this tenderness are made most clear in Eugene Peterson’s brilliant reworking of the classic text from The Message:
If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love. Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. It doesn’t want what it doesn’t have, doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end. Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled. When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good. We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
As I hope is now clear, the inward/outward implications of a spirituality of tenderness are profound and invite us into a way of being that is at rest within – knowing God’s deep love – and engaged with the world beyond ourselves, too. The Finnish theologian, Paulina Kainulainen, in a short work entitled, Tenderness and Resistance: Women's Everyday Wisdom Theology, suggests that tender-ness is a resistance that: 1) embodies alternatives to consumerism, 2) challenges the technologicalization of everyday life: and 3) gives shape and form to what she calls a "quest for the Kingdom of Tenderness."
· This is a spirituality that honors feelings as much as reason, values as well as facts. It is wisdom theology - sapientia – seeing with the way of the heart that has been forgotten in the West but revered and practiced in the Eastern church.
· Wisdom theology is different from an academic theology that is built upon sciencia alone - hard facts and formula – or what Dr. Paulina calls a "theology of sure knowledge." "A theology of Sure Knowledge is interested in forming definitions and constructing systems to explain the world and faith." It creates a specialized language and seeks precision and intellectual comprehension. If you’ve spent any time in a major contemporary seminary you know this is true as highly motivated intellectuals speaks of soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology. We have a specialized jargon that often locks ordinary people out of the conversation.
· Wisdom theology, on the other hand, looks to integrate the head with the heart and celebrates speaking of the sacred in ordinary language that real people use every day. This is how Jesus spoke, likening God’s kingdom to a wedding banquet or a feast of reconciliation. It is decidedly this-wordly. Never dismissing or ignoring the transcendent truths of our faith, a spirituality of tenderness remains grounded: Salvation now is more than an abstract promise. Salvation is now a get-together, an event, a kiss, a piece of bread, a happy old woman or a child resting on her mother’s breast. It is everything that nourishes love, our body, our life. It is more than happiness in the hereafter, even if we hang on to the right to dream of our eternal tomorrow. It is sacramental and incarnational – it sees the holy in our humanity and rejoices.
Now, I don’t know if that helps you, but digging through my tradition helped me discover just how foundational tenderness is to the way of Jesus. It gave me a language grounded in my scriptures – a lens through which I can see Jesus more clearly – as well as an ethical core to evaluate my politics, my check book (or ATM transactions), my relationships, and my time. It gave focus to my intellect and emotions, a measure of order upon the chaos of all around and within me, and helped me know how to ripen into my best self.
So, let me give you a tool that grows out of this study, a resource you can use to help ground you in the steadfast love of the Lord that endures forever. It comes from the always practical work of Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault who writes: “Of any number of spiritual practices both ancient and universal to bring us into a state of vulnerable openness, the most direct and effective:
… is simply this: in any situation in life, confronted by an outer threat or opportunity, you can notice yourself responding inwards in one of two ways. Either you will brace, harden, and resist, or, you will soften, open and yield. If you go with the former… you will be catapulted immedi-ately into your smaller self, with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the later regardless of the outer conditions, you will remain in alignment with your innermost being, and through it diving being can reach you and guide you. Spiritual practice at its n-frills simplest is a moment-by-moment learning NOT to do anything in a state of internal brace – bracing is NEVER worth the cost.
Let’s take a quiet moment right now and rest into this steadfast love of the Lord trusting that it is real and welcomes us into the silent serenity and safety of this place… let us pray.
WHEN LOVE COMES TO TOWN: REFLECTIONS ON TENDERNESS IN A CHAOTIC CULTURE
Sunday, May 17, 2020
Friday, May 15, 2020
a jumble of little friday encounters...
Today my Face Book "memory" was a picture of me and my grandson, Louie,
playing music together. He was so intense - that hasn't changed - and so captured by the experience of making music together - that hasn't change either. Except that he is in Brooklyn with his family living into a vigorous self-quarantine and so am I. We haven't made music together in so long... I spent the morning with this picture floating around my head as I finalized my reflections for Sunday's live-streaming gathering on Face Book.
After a simple lunch with Di out in the sun on the deck, I worked on the wee stone walk in the garden. Then we did our weekly Zoom visit with the clan in Brooklyn. And a short time after our Zoom-visit, I Zoomed with my community of L'Arche in Ottawa. We talked together of how it is we feel loved - personally and in community - and it was lovely. I shared a brief homily and a few new Taize songs, too. My text was part of the gospel reading assigned for this day:
REFLECTION
To love one another as Jesus teaches is simple – and costly. Jesus gave his friends a model for them to practice when he washed their feet: it shows us that love is an action that includes tender caring for another and vulnerability. Love goes both ways – we give and we receive – and it takes time, commitment, patience, practice and trust. St. Paul taught his friends about the love of Jesus, too saying: “Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end.” (I Corinthians 13, The Message)
In community at L’Arche we try to love one another every day as Jesus commanded – and we know this is always a work in progress. None of us gets it completely right all the time, so we keep trying and keep being forgiven by the community – and God. Loving in the spirit of Jesus takes practice– and this became a whole lot harder when the pandemic hit. Overnight, we were living in lock down, something no one signed-on for: suddenly, we were having to love like Jesus 24/7 and into the foreseeable future, too. This is what happens in real time. We are so not in control of very much. What has been remarkable – even holy – is how well everyone has been loving one another: core members as well as assistants, families and friends, too. It isn’t easy. It isn’t always pretty. And no one knows for certain how long it is going to last. Probably at LEAST through July – and maybe longer. All we can do right now is our best in every moment and trust God for the rest. Being women and men committed to the love of Jesus takes work – and trust – and lots of forgiveness. Today we give thanks to God for everyone in our community who keep sharing the love of Jesus every day – and ask for God’s forgiveness, too.
I prayed with Judy Woodruff, David Brooks and Mark Shields during the PBS News Hour, cleared off the deck in anticipation of a wicked thunder storm, cooked dinner and shared a few hours watching "After Life" and "Travels with My Father" with Di on Netflix. The rain is still falling as the day closes. Tomorrow, God willing, we'll be outside in the sun planting bulbs and seeds and working on another part of the garden. It is one of the ways we stay focused and return thanks to God during this season of isolation. I came across this quote from the late Gerald May going through evening emails that captures something of my soul right now:
TEXT: John 15: 12-15
Jesus said to his disciples: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
Jesus said to his disciples: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
To love one another as Jesus teaches is simple – and costly. Jesus gave his friends a model for them to practice when he washed their feet: it shows us that love is an action that includes tender caring for another and vulnerability. Love goes both ways – we give and we receive – and it takes time, commitment, patience, practice and trust. St. Paul taught his friends about the love of Jesus, too saying: “Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end.” (I Corinthians 13, The Message)
In community at L’Arche we try to love one another every day as Jesus commanded – and we know this is always a work in progress. None of us gets it completely right all the time, so we keep trying and keep being forgiven by the community – and God. Loving in the spirit of Jesus takes practice– and this became a whole lot harder when the pandemic hit. Overnight, we were living in lock down, something no one signed-on for: suddenly, we were having to love like Jesus 24/7 and into the foreseeable future, too. This is what happens in real time. We are so not in control of very much. What has been remarkable – even holy – is how well everyone has been loving one another: core members as well as assistants, families and friends, too. It isn’t easy. It isn’t always pretty. And no one knows for certain how long it is going to last. Probably at LEAST through July – and maybe longer. All we can do right now is our best in every moment and trust God for the rest. Being women and men committed to the love of Jesus takes work – and trust – and lots of forgiveness. Today we give thanks to God for everyone in our community who keep sharing the love of Jesus every day – and ask for God’s forgiveness, too.
I prayed with Judy Woodruff, David Brooks and Mark Shields during the PBS News Hour, cleared off the deck in anticipation of a wicked thunder storm, cooked dinner and shared a few hours watching "After Life" and "Travels with My Father" with Di on Netflix. The rain is still falling as the day closes. Tomorrow, God willing, we'll be outside in the sun planting bulbs and seeds and working on another part of the garden. It is one of the ways we stay focused and return thanks to God during this season of isolation. I came across this quote from the late Gerald May going through evening emails that captures something of my soul right now:
So in the end I am left only with hope.
I hope the nights are transformative.
I hope every dawn brings deeper love,
for each of us individually and for
the world as a whole. I hope that
John of the Cross was right when
he said the intellect is transformed
into faith, and the will into love
and the memory into – hope.
~ Gerald May in THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
I hope the nights are transformative.
I hope every dawn brings deeper love,
for each of us individually and for
the world as a whole. I hope that
John of the Cross was right when
he said the intellect is transformed
into faith, and the will into love
and the memory into – hope.
~ Gerald May in THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Thursday, May 14, 2020
inner healing and power tools...
That said, I've always liked to do small crafts: in the early 70's I loved to do crewel stitch embroidery on my jeans. A few years back I started making small, wooden prayer beads. And I have long found solace tinkering in the garden, too. Last year I decided I would teach myself how to make some raised-bed garden terraces out of discarded, recycled wood. It was a totally beginner's mind, Zen experience with a LOT of mistakes and do-overs. But, in the end, I figured out how to craft two decent sized raised-bed terraces and grew some respectable vegetables throughout the summer. This year, after buying an electric chop saw, I was ready to up my game and tackle rebuilding the terraces. That, too, became a Zen event as I had to rebuild two of them twice. Same with the small flower boxes constructed out of recycled wood: let's say that measuring precisely was not originally my long suit. But I learned from my mistakes and did not begrudge having to try, try again - and again.
This weekend we'll finally get the gladiola, iris and lily bulbs in the ground as well as the wild flower mix and sunflowers, too. Then it it on to experimenting with minor repairs on our 1950s wood frame house.
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
restoriing a prophetic imagination...
There was a light dusting of fine, dry, white SNOW on the deck this morning: ah, springtime in New England! Traditionally, St. Brigid's Day (February 1/Imbolc) marks the start of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It is halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox - a cross quarter point on the great wheel of life. For those of us in the hills of Western Massachusetts, however, that date rarely feels like spring. It isn't until sometime in March that the light has clearly shifted, the aroma of mud starts to fill the air, and a few, wee flowers start to poke their heads through the ground. What's more, it is not safe to do any outdoor planting here until well after May 1 (Beltane in the old way) and more often than not Memorial Day.One of the reasons I still consult the Celtic Wheel of Life, however, has to do with the spirit of each season: our overly linear, hyper-rational obsession with facts often renders the intuitive nature of the seasons listless and pale. But our ancestors knew better than we that "to everything there is a season" - emotions and actions included - and we lose touch with these insights from God's first word and incarnation in nature when we ignore the hard won wisdom of the past. It used to be common knowledge that human beings have weak instincts, but our brain is attuned to story-telling and that is how we pass on wisdom. Not much of that seems to be taking place right now.
The Benedictine monk, David Stendhal-Rast, makes much the same point in his little book on praying the monastic hours. "The monastic understanding of the word 'hour' goes back to a Greek word, hora, which is older than our notion of a day broken-up into twenty-four-hour segments. The original notion of hour is something quite different from a unit of time composed of sixty minutes. It is not a numerical measure: it is a soul measure." He continues:
We come closer to an appreciation of the original meaning of an hour when we reflect on the seasons of the year. They betoken the original understanding, in which a season is a mood and an experience, not an exact period that starts, say, on the twenty-first of December and ends on the twenty-first of March. In fact, we're usually surprised when we find in the calendar that the first day of winter is the twenty-first of December, because either winter has long been here, or it's not yet winter at all. Rather, seasons are qualitative experiences: We sense a subtle difference in the quality of light, the length of daylight, the feel of the air on our skin. We know intuitively that something is happening in nature. The hours are the seasons of the day, and they were originally understood in a mythical way. Earlier generations of our human race, not ruled by alarm clocks, saw the hours personified, encountered them as messengers of eternity in the natural flow of time growing, blossoming, bearing fruit. (p. 3, The Music of Silence)
During these days of self-quarantine and lock down, I am finding new value to the order of non-linear time. There IS purpose to each day if I am quiet enough to listen just as there is value to sheltering into the solitude of silence. As I watch the nervous agitation and ugly belligerence of many who are publicly protesting the current restrictions on activity, two truths become clear. One is that many contemporary Americans have lost the ability to wait for anything in a constructive manner; and the other is we have become so self-centered that we cannot comprehend life beyond instant gratification. We do not know how to listen for the sacred songs within the ordinary and we are so accustomed to distractions that we do not know how to rest without noise, activity and pressure. And this speaks more to the failure of our religious and spiritual institutions than the spiritual illiteracy of the nation's citizens.
During my last pilgrimage to L'Arche Ottawa in January 2020, before the travel freeze, I was listening to a podcast featuring Fr. Richard Rohr. He was taking questions about his new book: The Universal Christ. Someone wondered about the anemic way most churches celebrate baptism - sprinkling with the smallest amount of water possible with only the most minimal training for children or adults - which opened Rohr's emotional and analytic floodgates. "What a waste of archetypal energy" he roared. We have impoverished our best earth-centered sacrament by stripping away the power and awe of creation and rendering it dainty, quaint and sanitized. "This is just another example," he continued, "of the total failure of the church to train its members in the wisdom of the sacred". This came rushing back into my consciousness last night upon reading more in Christine Valters Paintner's book, The Soul of the Pilgrim:
As a culture we rarely acknowledge the value of being uncomfortable. We strongly discourage grieving people to stay with their sadness. Instead, we tell them to"cheer up" or "move on." Rarely are they encouraged to explore what grief can teach them. We are forever seeking the next thing to make us feel good. So much of what passes for spirituality these days is about making us happy, about affirmations and having positive experiences. We so often engage in what the poet Hafiz calls "teacup talk of God" where God is genteel and delicate. Sometimes, of course, we need these thoughts to remember all that is good and beautiful... (But we also need to know about) a path of radical unknowing (where we practice just being without) grasping for the clanging bells of great epiphanies. (pp. 84-88)
So here we are now as a so-called "Christian nation" in the heart of a season of radical unknowing without the skills or desire to enter it. No wonder some are racing around in trucks with their guns. That's how the dominant culture treats all challenges: with violence and threats. Others are just aching to get out and shop - another upside down sign of our gnawing emptiness. This is our time to "welcome the tender grace of unknowing" and give ourselves over "to a fertile darkness despite the fears or voices that long for certainty" (Paintner, p. 88.) But we can't because our spiritual institutions have steadfastly avoided guiding us onto this road less traveled. We are raging with expectations and have little understanding and almost no practice with letting go in order to rest into the serenity born of trusting God with all we cannot control. The radical irony of this paradox is that this is precisely the time when we are most apt to discover new eyes to see and new ears to hear: when we are vulnerable,broken, without clarity about what to do next and at our lowest. Will our religious and spiritual institutions find the courage and clarity to take us deeper? Some are trying, I know. But given our history, public trust is at an all time low. The renewal of the soul will be modest, humble and slow.
And that, too, is probably for the best. Massive social, cultural and economic changes are swirling all around us. So many among us are fearful and grieving. This is not the time to be abrupt. Rather, let us move quietly, slowly, tenderly and in small ways as we share compassion and open the door to the restorative wisdom of contemplation. In this we can contribute to the renewal of a prophetic imagination.
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
thoughts on spring, gandhi and social repentance...
All around me are signs that spring is truly here. Yes, while it snowed this past Saturday, zapping the magnolia tree once again, it is unlikely we'll have another frost until October (we hope!) The woodlands that were brown and gray just two weeks ago are now tinged with every shade of green imaginable. The lilacs, too are starting to bud. And I've had to cut patches of the lawn twice this month. The equinox has come and gone. Gradually this neck of the woods has become bathed in an increasing light. The peepers are going crazy in the wetlands, I saw brother woodchuck race through the bramble yesterday, and for a moment it feels as if all is right with the world.In reality, despite the the anguish of the contagion, all is right with the world. The virus is doing its job. After being forced into contact with humans by our ever increasing invasion of the wild, we are now sadly experiencing the natural consequences of our avarice. As the late Tom Hayden wrote back in 1972, "the love of possession is like a disease with them." He was quoting Sitting Bull from an address given in 1877. In 2020, we have been forced into doing what had once been our choice: shutting down an economy and way of being that was killing the planet, engorging the wealthy and devastating indigenous peoples. With over half of the US workforce now unemployed - and the forces of capital aching to renew our addictions - we are at a crossroads. And while the transition to a sustainable economy is neither inevitable nor painless, our lock down has created the opportunity to change direction. It will be resisted and compromised in ways too ugly to imagine. The love of possession IS like a disease for many. And yet we will never have the freedom to repent on an international level like the present so now is the time to act.
As I gaze upon the wetlands and the woods surrounding our home, I keep thinking of Gandhi's spinning wheel and my garden. After his career in South Africa as a lawyer, he returned to his home in India. Over the next three years, he traveled throughout the nation, studied, listened to the stories of ordinary Indians, prayed and began to craft a new/old way of living that embodied resistance: the Satyagraha ashram. From this simple living compound that abolished the confines of race and social class, Gandhi began a "do it yourself" movement that simultaneously taught India's poor how to weave fabric for themselves while resisting payment of an English colonial tax. Nearly ten years later, he executed his march to the sea to challenge the English tax on salt. As he walked through village after village, holding conversations with citizens and offering new ways of thinking, a revolution of the imagination started to grow. The march to the sea campaign altered none of the laws of colonialism yet showed people long oppressed what freedom looked and even felt like: British imperialism was not the only reality possible for India.
I can't help but think of Gandhi's revolution of the imagination at this moment in time. The eco-theologian, Thomas Berry, has observed that: “Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe.” The columnist and Unitarian pastor, Carl Gregg, put it like this in his article, "The Spirituality of Spring."Gardening connects you to the passing of time, the seasons, and the source of your food." This impulse is what led Gandhi to champion the “Do-It-Yourself” method of using a spinning wheel to make your own clothes in an age in which many of us are deeply disconnected from the sweatshops where so much of what we wear is made. Growing our own food, cooking our own meals, sewing our own clothes, and creating art are all some of the life-giving practices we can learn when we embrace the springtime seasons of our life — although doing them all at once, I will confess, sounds exhausting! (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2013/04/the-spirituality-of-spring-creativity-as-spiritual-practice/)
There are clearly those already poised and positioned for the political challenges of this moment: in the US the next phase of repentance will include bailing-out the states as they care for the 20+ million people currently thrown out of work by the pandemic. These moral warriors will not let the states slip into bankruptcy so that our social safety net is dismantled. Nor will they give up on maintaining a radical commitment to social distancing and re-opening the economy incrementally and safely. At the same time, however, I cannot help but think that we need a revolution of the imagination like unto that of Gandhi's era if we are to genuinely seize this opportunity for social repentance.
Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?...if you don't feel despair, in times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair, too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road....I am going to pick up [my scythe] and go and find some grass to mow. I am going to cut great swaths of it...I am going to walk ahead, following the ground... I am going to breathe the still-clean air and listen to the still-singing birds and reflect on the fact that the earth is older and harder than the machine that is eating it—that it is indeed more resilient than fragile—and that change comes quickly when it comes, and that knowledge is not the same as wisdom. (read more from this English thinker @ http://paulkingsnorth.net)
And at the same time I trust - and even sense - that the whole earthy cries "glory" and that the wisdom of God's steadfast love that endures forever is greater than human greed.
Monday, May 11, 2020
solidarity continues to ripen...
There has not been a lot of blogging coming out of my study over the past month. Clearly, my attention has been elsewhere: preparing the garden, writing and researching my weekly live-stream gathering each Sunday morning on Face Book (check it out @ https://www.facebook.com/Be-Still-and-Know-913217865701531/), painting the kitchen, starting to practice guitar again, working on a weekly homily and music for my L'Arche Ottawa community, etc. It has been a weird combination of intense new connection with friends both local and international and even deeper personal solitude. So, for what appears to be the foreseeable future, I suspect this new rhythm will abide. During this time I have slowly been working my way through Christine Valters Painters book: The Soul of a Pilgrim. There are a number of useful insights in it as well as tools for contemplation. One, in particular, spoke to me: discerning the thread that has been a constant in our lives. The idea comes from a poem by William Stafford that includes this line:
There is a thread you follow
Nothing you do can stop times unfolding.
You do not ever let go of the thread.
Like many of us who have been privileged to self-quarantine - and can do so without much obvious distress - these past two months have been a journey. Paintners speaks of this as an inward pilgrimage guided...
... by the monastic vow of obedience - which means deep listening - to whatever emerges in my life. Being a pilgrim means following wherever the call takes me, even if it takes me off the trajectory I expected. This is one of the places where the heart of the pilgrim and monk intersect.
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.
Clearly, this transmission is at work among us in public once more. So is a second development that holds greater promise and even more popularity. I am thinking of the increasingly compassionate and progressive social analysis that has taken root among us. What was once dismissed as abstract ivory tower radical pipe dreams - a living social wage as well as the importance of universal health care and the reshaping of business priorities - is now mainstream common sense. It is as if the United States went to sleep as Ebeneezer Scrooge and woke up as Bernie Sanders. Two recent developments in popular culture point to this depth of this emerging transformation:
+ The bastion of centrist public reflection, The NY Times, has been working on public policy essays re: how can we rebuild the USA in a vibrant, creative and authentically compassionate manner. In other words, how can this crisis empower us to become our best selves. If you have not seen the Nicholas Kristof report on the difference between a MacDonald's worker in the US and one in Denmark - one who has insurance, paid vacation and sick leave as well as a secure social safety net and the other left to fend for him or herself - it is worth the time. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/us-denmark-economy.html) The same goes for their new series entitled: The American We Need (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/opinion/ americainequalitycoronavirus.htmlcampaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20200511&instance_id=18387&nl=opiniontoday®i_id=88188211&segment_id=27249&te=1&user_id=0eda16b56f0c867e69fc1f00f235f5ad)
+ A growing encounter with public grief is also bubbling to the surface in these barely United States of America - something that has been anathema for generations. Showing grief in the USA has long been seen as a sign of inner weakness. Just look at the way we used to mourn: three private days were allowed as the maximum time allowed for dealing with a close personal death or tragedy. Then, it was back to work. Perhaps the better resourced private health insurance allowed for short-term grief counseling. But it was to be done in private and only 8 sessions would be covered. This still has not shifted completely. Grieving is a work in progress for us. And with half the American work force now unemployed and at risk of losing their private health insurance, it is not clear what will happen next. But that, too is a source of our collective grief. But beyond the blustering bullies clogging traffic in state capitals, and the self-righteous posturing of toadies like McConnell in the US Senate, more and more ordinary Americans are being forced to own our personal and collective suffering. This extended quote concerning the American heartland is sobering and insightful:
Trump’s approval ratings sank underwater in key midwestern swing states he won: Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. Any number of polls showed Trump and Joe Biden in a dead heat in about a dozen purple states, or with Biden in a comfortable lead. Bluster and blunder were coming home to roost.Corn prices dived 19% since January. Meat-packing plants are exploding with the coronavirus – 60% of the pork plant workers in Perry, Iowa, are infected. The sheriff for Waterloo, Iowa, said he wanted to stomp a boot on Tyson’s plant. The mayor of Sioux Falls argued with the South Dakota governor to shut down a Smithfield pork facility overrun with the virus. About 65% of people polled think folks should stay home and not dine in at the restaurant buffet. Although the Iowa governor allowed churches to reopen, they aren’t taking her up on the offer with Sunday services. They would just as soon wait until we can get some tests done around here. Republican leaders are not in tune with voters.
The Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat on Biden’s VP shortlist, held forth ably against armed men in the capital lobby and remains far more popular than Trump. In Wisconsin, Democrats were outraged when Republicans forced a primary election involving a key state supreme court race. Voters stood up for democracy, in line for hours braving Covid-19 infection to cast their vote. The Democratic-backed court candidate won. Wisconsin unseated the Republican governor, Scott Walker, in 2018 and elected a gay woman to the US Senate, Democrat Tammy Baldwin, before that. It is the land of La Follette, after all.
A reckoning is due for incompetence and neglect. Farmers are disconsolate. Every dairy worker suicide resonates. Hogs are backed up when one of the huge, consolidated slaughterhouses goes down for lack of healthy help. Producers are left to shoot them and bury them. People in nice SUVs line up for free food. It makes everyone nauseous. Everyday people can’t understand why NBA players can get tested but packinghouse workers ordered to keep the pork loins rolling can’t. Rural communities prone to vote Republican live under a cloud of fear that virus from immigrant workers will spread to them – that the health of your neighbor is in fact your health. Immigrants become human, and their treatment is realized as shameful. We’re waking up, all right. When 30 million people can’t get through to the unemployment system, and half of them lose their health insurance by fall, incumbents should cover their flanks.
Polls show that in the upper midwest, blue urban voters are more motivated to vote than rural red voters by fair margins. Armed people of color escorted an African American legislator into the Michigan capitol last week in response to the white armed men. Talk about stuff getting real. Do you think every African American in Flint is not motivated? “The iron is hot,” Custer said. “This is the time to make permanent change.” Even while sitting in his basement unheard, Biden is winning the midwest for all Trump’s blather. The genius may think we are suckers, but in Iowa we don’t ruin good corn liquor with Clorox. The gig is up. (https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/commentisfree/2020/may/11/mi)
Our shared pain is not only exposed, it is being owned by those who are often the most tight-lipped and taciturn. The anguish within communities of color is increasingly open and bold. Nothing is for certain, of course, and there is likely to be tons more anguish before any semblance of normalcy returns. The belligerence on the Right is not over - not during this bizarre presidential election year. And yet out of all these ashes there is the emerging promise of a new beloved community. Not perfect and barely taking shape in these tremulous times. But ripening and stretching within and among us.
The Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has written that only when a broken society grieves deeply can it burn off the dross of its hubris. When we are truly empty and open - willing to consider new possibilities and authentically repentant - then the Sacred historically shares with our artists, poets, musicians and creative beings visions for a new life together. Behold, says the prophetic poet of ancient Israel, I am doing a new thing among you. Brueggemann believes that one of the clues to this legacy occurs in Isaiah 56 where the blessings of the ancient covenant are extended to all who do justice and share compassion - including those once considered ritually unclean. What the new social contract after exile means is honoring the Sabbath and sharing compassion.
I continue to trust the steadfast love of the Lord even in the darkness.
credits
+ James Lumsden
+ Sojourners @ https://sojo.net/articles/faith-action/trinity-wholeness-contemplation-action-and-healing
+ Solidarity @ https://ips-dc.org/international-solidarity-in-a-time-of-crisis/
+ Solidarity @ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/519391769525412087/?autologin=true
+ Solidarity @ https://thejax.online/event/jax-meetup-solidarity
Sunday, May 10, 2020
REFLECTIONS ON TENDERNESS: May 10, 2020 live-stream Face Book
REFLECTIONS ON TENDERNESS: May 10, 2020 live-stream Face Book
Earlier this week we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. It was a glorious, cool day in the Berkshires filled with sunshine and silence – and we spent some of it wandering through the woods on a high rocky ridge above a roaring river filled with stone pillars reaching up for the sky. We were married outdoors in a stone quarry by a waterfall back in Cleveland on an equally stunning after-noon. So, as I am want to do, I found myself thinking of all the ups and downs we’ve encountered as a couple in our quarter century together. Let’s say it was a humbling and sweet journey down memory lane. As we walked through this pristine woodland palace, however, it was hard reconcile the beauty of the forest existing side by side with the plague still devastating our home – and much of the world, too. With 80,000 American deaths, US mortality rates are nearly twice the size of our small town in Western Massachusetts – and there are no signs that the contagion will be abating soon.
As we were soaking up the sunshine and fresh air in celebration, I was aware that at the very same time there were loved ones dying and relatives grieving – colleagues and friends ending or losing their careers in the midst of our current chaos – and good-hearted friends of every race and religion wondering how the hell they were going to pay their bills if the lock-down continued much longer. And as so often happens to me, that’s when the words of Jesus from St. John’s gospel for today popped up: Let not your hearts be troubled… trust that my love is the way, the truth and the life.
Holding the promises of the Lord in tension with reality – striving to keep trusting rather than surrendering to fear or despair – is the essence of faith. But it felt like spiritual schizophrenia even from the relative safety of my privileged solitude. I mean, how the hell are our hearts NOT to be troubled in times like this? As my younger colleagues say: if you’re NOT agitated and unsettled right now, you’re not paying attention, right? That’s why for today I can’t think of anything more counter-cultural and to the point than these promises of Jesus – unless, of course, it’s how St. Paul repurposed them to the church in Corinth:
We are fools for the sake of Christ: when reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly. We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day… for we know that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength… God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one, might boast in the presence of God.
The apostle was articulating just what Jesus promised: how practicing living from our heart looks absurd to those who think the heart is just the seat of emotions when it is really the core of how we consciously integrate reason and affect, spirit and flesh, hard truths and ethical responsibilities. The way of the heart celebrates rational wisdom even as it embraces poetic metaphor, encouraging the mind to dance together with the soul.
In a profound little book, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault clarifies the distinctions between popular, Western culture’s sloppy sentimentality and the more humble, heart-centered spirituality of Jesus. She writes: “In the psychological climate of our times, our emotions are almost always considered to be virtually identical with our personal authenticity – and the more freely they flow, the more we are seen to be honest and in touch” (p. 32.) One who gravitates to a mental mode of operation – valuing rational and linear thought – is regularly criticized for living “in his head” while we celebrate the domination of feelings and living “from the heart.” Yet this is the polar opposite of spiritual maturity, an existence enmeshed in the fickle ups and downs of feelings, rather than the stability of inner peace born of grace.
St. Paul put it like this: “When I was a child, I thought like a child and acted like a child. But when I grew up I put childish things away.” A humbled and reflective St. Peter realized towards the end of his life that it was time for people of faith to “put away all guile, insecurity and envy” for such were the ways of little children: let us now drink the pure spiritual milk of grace and grow up strong into adult lives of integrity. Dr. Bourgeault says something similar when she writes:
Far from revealing the heart, the Way of Wisdom teaches that our emotions are in fact the primary culprits that obscure and confuse (true understanding.) The real mark of personal authenticity is NOT how intensely we can express our feelings, but how honestly we can look at where they’re coming from, spot the elements of clinging, manipulation, and personal agenda that make up so much of what we experience as our emotional life today… (and sort out what is true, good, beautiful and just. Our goal is NOT to be addicted to feelings, but to understand and manage them.) In this, the heart is not for personal expression, but divine perception… (Through the integration of emotions with truth, experience, intuition, flesh and spirit) we are brought into a settled mind, a way of being that is present, balanced and awake whatever our emotional experiences. (pp. 32-37) In short it is how we embody a non-anxious presence in this age of insecurity.
The way of the heart that Jesus tells us will release us from anguish – the foolishness of Christ that St. Paul celebrates as the way to maturity – takes practice. It is NOT automatic nor simply the opposite of the head. Rather it involves embracing the “sensitive, multispectrum instruments of human awareness that include both the mental and affective operations of life as well as the conscious and subconscious dimensions” of our existence. (p. 85) And that is what I want to consider with you this morning: in this season of relentless grief, financial insecurity, political instability and an emotional uncertainty that feels surreal, Jesus’ promise of an untroubled heart cries out for a fresh hearing.
It not only offers us a measure of serenity and sanity within the madness, it can become for us a way to renew our personal lives while nourishing a social resistance born of tenderness. It is a way of being, to quote Sr. Joan Chittister, in which we learn to live “calmly in the middle of chaos, productively in an arena of waste, lovingly in a maelstrom of individualism (and sentimentality) and gently in a world full of violence.” (Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, p. 6) “Let not your hearts be troubled – trust God – and live into the way, the truth and the life.” Martin Buber called this the hallowing of our everyday. Robert Hayden captures this in slant in his poem, “Those Winter Sundays.”
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
To live and move and have our being from within the wisdom of the heart is to honor our failures, listen carefully to the sounds of silence and move deeply into each moment of life as a gift. It incarnates faithfully the patterns of the universe that reveal a love greater than death: Let not your hearts be troubled. To make these words flesh in our time is, I believe, part of how we move into healing now in the midst of the pandemic; and on the other side of the contagion, too when-ever that might be. So let me share with you my take on why Christ’s promise of an untroubled heart is the contemplative challenge for our season of solitude in solidarity.
The more I spend time with the gospel of St. John, the more mystery I uncover in its nuanced poetry, prose and purpose. Contemporary Biblical scholars have concluded that given the community’s context of conflict, we need to take our time parsing John’s carefully constructed phrases rather than simply accepting John’s words at face value. The most dramatic example of why this matters occurs in the way Christians have perverted the gospel when it comes to Judaism.
A surface reading sees only disdain and critique for the Old Covenant. The truth is, however, that the Johanine community began as a blended congregation of Jewish Christians from Palestine who still maintained some connection to the Temple alongside Samaritan believers – those left behind in 587 BCE when Babylon conquered Jerusalem – who now followed Jesus but were still alienated from traditional Judaism. To say that this created tension for both Christians and Jews while they lived in Jerusalem would be an understatement.
But tension turned to acrimony after Rome destroyed the second Jewish temple in 70 CE. John’s community was forced to relocate to Ephesus where Gentile believers started to join the mix. In one generation this small and feisty congregation found itself arguing not only with Jews over the inclusion of Samaritans and Gentiles in their church, but fellow Christians, too. Some had been influenced by Paul and believed Judaism was now passé given Jesus as Messiah, others shaped by those following the apostolic secessionist movement of Peter and a few old school congregations who continued to worship in the Jewish-Christian tradition of Saints Matthew and James.
I remind you of this because the ancient words that St. John penned during this first century conflict sound very different to those of us in the 21st century without an historical context. In the moment, John’s gospel was not the hateful, anti-Semitic tirade against Judaism it became; rather, it was more of a first century family feud between competing congregations. Tragically, much of John has been taken out of context, fueling the fires of vicious pogroms and eventually the Holocaust - all the more reason to be very careful when addressing the insights about practicing the way of the heart, ok? Today I see three nuanced insights that might have legs for us as we seek ways of being faithful to this moment in time.
First, consider Jesus’ promise that if we practice his way our hearts will not be troubled or filled with anguish. As I tried to clarify earlier, the heart has nothing to do with just our personal emotional lives and everything to do with trusting God’s love and purpose in the world. The way of the heart, you see, is a disciplined imagination and a focused attention. If we are to live as allies of God’s grace who embody tenderness within the cruelty of our culture, we cannot continue to remain addicted to random passions or let ourselves be driven by an adolescent fascination with romantic individualism. This is our time to go deeper into the foolishness of Christ as those who know how when reviled, to bless; when persecuted, to endure; when slandered, to speak tenderly of another way of living together.
Please understand that I am not saying we shouldn’t grieve or feel the real trauma and alienation of this hour. Not at all: our tradition is clear that our feelings and experiences all have a place in the dance of life. To everything there is a season and a purpose for all things under heaven: There is a right time for birth and another for death, a right time to plant and another to reap, a right time to cry and another to laugh, a right time to lament and another to cheer, a right time to make love and another to abstain, a right time to embrace and another to part, a right time to search and another to count your losses, a right time even for love and hatred.
I don’t know about you, but during this time of lockdown and self-quarantine there have been times when I’ve been overwhelmed with feelings of sorrow, grief and fear. Sometimes I can’t really believe it’s happening. Other times I feel exhausted but haven’t really done much all day.
Last week, during a Zoom visit with our grandchildren, my stomach flipped and eyes filled with tears when our grandson’s big feelings got the best of him. Clearly, we were all a little worn out and sad. It’s been two full months without hugs or walks or laughing together till we fall down on the floor in a fit of joy. So, as we were talking with our precocious six year old, our little man suddenly became unusually concerned that there was only 13% battery life left on the computer. In a flash, his lower lip started to quiver, his eyes watered up and in a tiny voice stretched to the point of snapping, he squeaked, “I’m going to self-mute myself for a moment” and walked out of camera range to speak with his dad. Oh my God. It stabbed my heart – Di’s too. There was nothing we could do to console him but wait till he returned – which he did - and we all regrouped for a few more minutes of loving chatter. I had to go out to the store briefly a few hours later. And when the friendly clerk asked how my family in Brooklyn was doing, I realized how fragile I was still feeling inside and nearly lost it right there at the check-out stand.
I get it – my life hurts like yours does - I grieve and cry and still sometimes wake up at 3 am feeling unglued. And still – and please listen carefully – still I trust that I do not have to be imprisoned by these feelings. I trust albeit imperfectly that there is a right time and right way to embrace our feelings and enter them fully. What the way of the heart asks is that we learn how to focus our response to our feelings so that they help us give birth to Christ’s tenderness rather than pass on more fear. Fr. Richard Rohr puts it like this: All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime.
If we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. Most of the time, we see our wounds as obstacles more than gifts. But if we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter (because) If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.
The way of the heart acknowledges the power of all our feelings, and, invites us to trust from the inside out the evidence and patterns of creation that show us that God’s purpose in everything is love. Love is what brings order out of the chaos and hope into the depths of despair. Love is what causes the sun to rise in the morning sky after the evening darkness and the moon and stars to shine every night with regularity. Love is why gravity works and the seasons flow one into the other. Since the big bang 13.8 billion years ago, love has been documenting that creation draws new life out of death – new insights out of suffering – heroic acts of compassion beyond the con-fines of history – resurrection Easter Sundays after the crucifixions of Good Friday – and the confirmation that even when the evidence is obscure, God’s love is greater than death. One old nun back in Cleveland put it to me like this: faith is the assurance that the eagle really is within the egg.
Now I am not saying that such trust is automatic or easy. It takes practice to surrender our monkey-minds to the wisdom of the universe. It takes time, sweat, tears, courage and acceptance to know serenity. It’s like the old joke about the young musician lost in Manhattan running around in a frenzy: frantically she rushes one way and then next until, seeing a police officer, she stops him and asks: Can you help me, sir? How do I get to Carnegie Hall? Looking at her violin case, the old says without batting an eye: Practice, ma’am, it takes practice. The lyric poet, Gregory Orr, captures this truth in the words he wants placed on his gravestone:
That’s the first insight buried in this text: our sorrows and anguish need not have the last word if we ally ourselves with God’s grace and practice letting our troubles rest in God’s care. This won’t take away the cause of our sorrow, but will give us the ability to respond in a healing and hope-filled manner.
The second insight that I believe Jesus and St. John are trying to tell us is that there is more than one way to get grounded in the way of the heart. “In my father’s house are many mansions– not just one - and where I am going to rest, you may go to rest, too.” To be sure, part of this is about the assurance of life after death spent in the eternal embrace of God’s love. Jesus made it clear to his friends that just as he came from God, he will return to God. That’s what the opening of St. John’s gospel is all about: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God and not anything that was made did not begin with God and God’s love, right? Clearly, Jesus is reassuring his friends that they need not fret, fear or worry about life after life: we begin with God and we return to God when this journey is complete. But I don’t think that’s ALL Jesus is telling us in the layered lexicon of St. John’s gospel.
I sense that he wants us to know that there are a variety of spiritual practices we can cultivate right now to help us stay grounded in the loving purposes of God and God’s love. Traditionally, the tools of grounding our hearts in grace include mindfulness, various types of meditation, chanting sacred songs and psalms together with others, quiet reading to discover God’s voice in our lives, spiritual direction, and the discipline of surrendering our egos to the greater good. Cynthia Bourgeault writes that training and awakening our hearts – what some call the spiritualized mind – involves practicing how to become more “sensitive, focused, energized, subtle and refined in living as allies with cosmic love.” Or as the poet Rumi used to say: there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground and a thousand ways to go back home again, too.
During this time of solidarity in solitude I have been rediscovering some of the traditional spiritual tools and must confess that they are wonderful. But let’s not be fundamentalist or biblically harsh when it comes to Christ’s insight that in God’s spiritual mansion there are MANY rooms. Many ways to tap into holy love and a variety of practices to help us stay grounded in this love. I have become enchanted with the whimsical wisdom in this poem by Carrie Newcomer as she articulates how she does evening prayer:
Every night before I go to sleep I say aloud three things that I am grateful for:
All the significant, insignificant, extraordinary, ordinary stuff of my life.
It’s a small practice and humble, and yet, I find I sleep better
Holding what lightens and softens my life ever so briefly at the end of the day.
Sunlight and blueberries – good dogs and wool socks –
A fine rain, a good friend – fresh basil and wild phlox,
My father’s good health, my daughter’s new job,
The song that always makes me cry – always in the same part –
No matter how many times I hear it. Decent coffee at the airport – and your quiet breathing,
The story she told me, the frost patterns on the window,
English horns and banjos, Wood Thrush and June Bugs,
The smooth glassy calm of the morning pond,
An old coat – a new poem, my library card, and that my car keeps running despite all the miles.
And after three things more often than not, I get on a roll and just keep going,
I keep naming and listing, until I lie grinning, blankets pulled up to my chin,
Awash with wonder at the sweetness of it all.
Do YOU do anything like that to practice nourishing the way of the heart in your life? Anything that is as tender-hearted and practical? How do you take up residence in one of the many rooms within God’s mansion to kiss the ground and return home to God’s love?
I’ve shared with you my new appreciation for the old hymn, “In the Bleak Midwinter” as well as St. Paul McCartney’s, “Blackbird.” As I was playing them again last week in prayer I found myself returning to another old chestnut, this from Bob Franke, “Alleluia, the Great Storm is Over.” I played it at my sister Linda’s funeral – used to play it during Advent for my children. It links inner serenity to the quest for social justice and assures me that the whole point of faith is not anguish, but rest, peace and compassion.
Alleluia, the great storm is over, lift up your wings and fly!
Alleluia, the great storm is over, lift up your wings and fly!
The thunder and lightning gave voice to the night,
The little lame child cried aloud in her fright,
Hush little baby, a story I'll tell of a love that has conquered the powers of hell…
Sweetness in the air and justice on the wind
Laughter in the house where the mourners have been
The deaf shall have music, the blind have new eyes the standards of death taken down by surprise.
Jesus closes his teaching with the words: I am the way, the truth and the life. He tells Thomas: you really DO know where to go. Look at me – my life – my freedom with the spirit - look at how I do it – and follow my lead. When Jesus tells us HE is the way, the truth and the life, he’s NOT asking us to sign off on a theological confession or creedal affirmation. And he’s not asking us to endorse a political action agenda either. He’s just inviting us practice an earthy spirituality shaped everyday by experiences that strengthen rest within and tenderness in public. St. Paul expressed the wisdom of Christ’s heart like this in Romans 12:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for God. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond. For unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops a well-formed maturity in you.
And what was true then, is true today: how do we nourish rest within ourselves – serenity – so that we can embody tenderness? Let me ask you to join me over the next week in exploring some of the many rooms in the mansion of God’s grace. Wander around in some you’ve never tried. Go deeper into a few you have visited but only on the surface level. Explore some that you’ve always wondered about but haven’t had the time to try. Ok? If you want to email or message me for suggestions, I will happily get back to you with some ideas.
This is a time we can use to strengthen our hearts, dear people: the lock down and its variants are going to become part of our lives for a long time – some say in various ways for at least the next 18 months – and maybe more. We cannot change this, we can only embrace it and let it take us deeper into trust, faith, hope and love. Do NOT let your hearts be troubled, beloved, let them be opened to God in love.
As we were soaking up the sunshine and fresh air in celebration, I was aware that at the very same time there were loved ones dying and relatives grieving – colleagues and friends ending or losing their careers in the midst of our current chaos – and good-hearted friends of every race and religion wondering how the hell they were going to pay their bills if the lock-down continued much longer. And as so often happens to me, that’s when the words of Jesus from St. John’s gospel for today popped up: Let not your hearts be troubled… trust that my love is the way, the truth and the life.
Holding the promises of the Lord in tension with reality – striving to keep trusting rather than surrendering to fear or despair – is the essence of faith. But it felt like spiritual schizophrenia even from the relative safety of my privileged solitude. I mean, how the hell are our hearts NOT to be troubled in times like this? As my younger colleagues say: if you’re NOT agitated and unsettled right now, you’re not paying attention, right? That’s why for today I can’t think of anything more counter-cultural and to the point than these promises of Jesus – unless, of course, it’s how St. Paul repurposed them to the church in Corinth:
We are fools for the sake of Christ: when reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly. We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day… for we know that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength… God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one, might boast in the presence of God.
The apostle was articulating just what Jesus promised: how practicing living from our heart looks absurd to those who think the heart is just the seat of emotions when it is really the core of how we consciously integrate reason and affect, spirit and flesh, hard truths and ethical responsibilities. The way of the heart celebrates rational wisdom even as it embraces poetic metaphor, encouraging the mind to dance together with the soul.
In a profound little book, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault clarifies the distinctions between popular, Western culture’s sloppy sentimentality and the more humble, heart-centered spirituality of Jesus. She writes: “In the psychological climate of our times, our emotions are almost always considered to be virtually identical with our personal authenticity – and the more freely they flow, the more we are seen to be honest and in touch” (p. 32.) One who gravitates to a mental mode of operation – valuing rational and linear thought – is regularly criticized for living “in his head” while we celebrate the domination of feelings and living “from the heart.” Yet this is the polar opposite of spiritual maturity, an existence enmeshed in the fickle ups and downs of feelings, rather than the stability of inner peace born of grace.
St. Paul put it like this: “When I was a child, I thought like a child and acted like a child. But when I grew up I put childish things away.” A humbled and reflective St. Peter realized towards the end of his life that it was time for people of faith to “put away all guile, insecurity and envy” for such were the ways of little children: let us now drink the pure spiritual milk of grace and grow up strong into adult lives of integrity. Dr. Bourgeault says something similar when she writes:
Far from revealing the heart, the Way of Wisdom teaches that our emotions are in fact the primary culprits that obscure and confuse (true understanding.) The real mark of personal authenticity is NOT how intensely we can express our feelings, but how honestly we can look at where they’re coming from, spot the elements of clinging, manipulation, and personal agenda that make up so much of what we experience as our emotional life today… (and sort out what is true, good, beautiful and just. Our goal is NOT to be addicted to feelings, but to understand and manage them.) In this, the heart is not for personal expression, but divine perception… (Through the integration of emotions with truth, experience, intuition, flesh and spirit) we are brought into a settled mind, a way of being that is present, balanced and awake whatever our emotional experiences. (pp. 32-37) In short it is how we embody a non-anxious presence in this age of insecurity.
The way of the heart that Jesus tells us will release us from anguish – the foolishness of Christ that St. Paul celebrates as the way to maturity – takes practice. It is NOT automatic nor simply the opposite of the head. Rather it involves embracing the “sensitive, multispectrum instruments of human awareness that include both the mental and affective operations of life as well as the conscious and subconscious dimensions” of our existence. (p. 85) And that is what I want to consider with you this morning: in this season of relentless grief, financial insecurity, political instability and an emotional uncertainty that feels surreal, Jesus’ promise of an untroubled heart cries out for a fresh hearing.
It not only offers us a measure of serenity and sanity within the madness, it can become for us a way to renew our personal lives while nourishing a social resistance born of tenderness. It is a way of being, to quote Sr. Joan Chittister, in which we learn to live “calmly in the middle of chaos, productively in an arena of waste, lovingly in a maelstrom of individualism (and sentimentality) and gently in a world full of violence.” (Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, p. 6) “Let not your hearts be troubled – trust God – and live into the way, the truth and the life.” Martin Buber called this the hallowing of our everyday. Robert Hayden captures this in slant in his poem, “Those Winter Sundays.”
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
To live and move and have our being from within the wisdom of the heart is to honor our failures, listen carefully to the sounds of silence and move deeply into each moment of life as a gift. It incarnates faithfully the patterns of the universe that reveal a love greater than death: Let not your hearts be troubled. To make these words flesh in our time is, I believe, part of how we move into healing now in the midst of the pandemic; and on the other side of the contagion, too when-ever that might be. So let me share with you my take on why Christ’s promise of an untroubled heart is the contemplative challenge for our season of solitude in solidarity.
The more I spend time with the gospel of St. John, the more mystery I uncover in its nuanced poetry, prose and purpose. Contemporary Biblical scholars have concluded that given the community’s context of conflict, we need to take our time parsing John’s carefully constructed phrases rather than simply accepting John’s words at face value. The most dramatic example of why this matters occurs in the way Christians have perverted the gospel when it comes to Judaism.
A surface reading sees only disdain and critique for the Old Covenant. The truth is, however, that the Johanine community began as a blended congregation of Jewish Christians from Palestine who still maintained some connection to the Temple alongside Samaritan believers – those left behind in 587 BCE when Babylon conquered Jerusalem – who now followed Jesus but were still alienated from traditional Judaism. To say that this created tension for both Christians and Jews while they lived in Jerusalem would be an understatement.
But tension turned to acrimony after Rome destroyed the second Jewish temple in 70 CE. John’s community was forced to relocate to Ephesus where Gentile believers started to join the mix. In one generation this small and feisty congregation found itself arguing not only with Jews over the inclusion of Samaritans and Gentiles in their church, but fellow Christians, too. Some had been influenced by Paul and believed Judaism was now passé given Jesus as Messiah, others shaped by those following the apostolic secessionist movement of Peter and a few old school congregations who continued to worship in the Jewish-Christian tradition of Saints Matthew and James.
I remind you of this because the ancient words that St. John penned during this first century conflict sound very different to those of us in the 21st century without an historical context. In the moment, John’s gospel was not the hateful, anti-Semitic tirade against Judaism it became; rather, it was more of a first century family feud between competing congregations. Tragically, much of John has been taken out of context, fueling the fires of vicious pogroms and eventually the Holocaust - all the more reason to be very careful when addressing the insights about practicing the way of the heart, ok? Today I see three nuanced insights that might have legs for us as we seek ways of being faithful to this moment in time.
First, consider Jesus’ promise that if we practice his way our hearts will not be troubled or filled with anguish. As I tried to clarify earlier, the heart has nothing to do with just our personal emotional lives and everything to do with trusting God’s love and purpose in the world. The way of the heart, you see, is a disciplined imagination and a focused attention. If we are to live as allies of God’s grace who embody tenderness within the cruelty of our culture, we cannot continue to remain addicted to random passions or let ourselves be driven by an adolescent fascination with romantic individualism. This is our time to go deeper into the foolishness of Christ as those who know how when reviled, to bless; when persecuted, to endure; when slandered, to speak tenderly of another way of living together.
Please understand that I am not saying we shouldn’t grieve or feel the real trauma and alienation of this hour. Not at all: our tradition is clear that our feelings and experiences all have a place in the dance of life. To everything there is a season and a purpose for all things under heaven: There is a right time for birth and another for death, a right time to plant and another to reap, a right time to cry and another to laugh, a right time to lament and another to cheer, a right time to make love and another to abstain, a right time to embrace and another to part, a right time to search and another to count your losses, a right time even for love and hatred.
I don’t know about you, but during this time of lockdown and self-quarantine there have been times when I’ve been overwhelmed with feelings of sorrow, grief and fear. Sometimes I can’t really believe it’s happening. Other times I feel exhausted but haven’t really done much all day.
Last week, during a Zoom visit with our grandchildren, my stomach flipped and eyes filled with tears when our grandson’s big feelings got the best of him. Clearly, we were all a little worn out and sad. It’s been two full months without hugs or walks or laughing together till we fall down on the floor in a fit of joy. So, as we were talking with our precocious six year old, our little man suddenly became unusually concerned that there was only 13% battery life left on the computer. In a flash, his lower lip started to quiver, his eyes watered up and in a tiny voice stretched to the point of snapping, he squeaked, “I’m going to self-mute myself for a moment” and walked out of camera range to speak with his dad. Oh my God. It stabbed my heart – Di’s too. There was nothing we could do to console him but wait till he returned – which he did - and we all regrouped for a few more minutes of loving chatter. I had to go out to the store briefly a few hours later. And when the friendly clerk asked how my family in Brooklyn was doing, I realized how fragile I was still feeling inside and nearly lost it right there at the check-out stand.
I get it – my life hurts like yours does - I grieve and cry and still sometimes wake up at 3 am feeling unglued. And still – and please listen carefully – still I trust that I do not have to be imprisoned by these feelings. I trust albeit imperfectly that there is a right time and right way to embrace our feelings and enter them fully. What the way of the heart asks is that we learn how to focus our response to our feelings so that they help us give birth to Christ’s tenderness rather than pass on more fear. Fr. Richard Rohr puts it like this: All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime.
If we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. Most of the time, we see our wounds as obstacles more than gifts. But if we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter (because) If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.
The way of the heart acknowledges the power of all our feelings, and, invites us to trust from the inside out the evidence and patterns of creation that show us that God’s purpose in everything is love. Love is what brings order out of the chaos and hope into the depths of despair. Love is what causes the sun to rise in the morning sky after the evening darkness and the moon and stars to shine every night with regularity. Love is why gravity works and the seasons flow one into the other. Since the big bang 13.8 billion years ago, love has been documenting that creation draws new life out of death – new insights out of suffering – heroic acts of compassion beyond the con-fines of history – resurrection Easter Sundays after the crucifixions of Good Friday – and the confirmation that even when the evidence is obscure, God’s love is greater than death. One old nun back in Cleveland put it to me like this: faith is the assurance that the eagle really is within the egg.
Now I am not saying that such trust is automatic or easy. It takes practice to surrender our monkey-minds to the wisdom of the universe. It takes time, sweat, tears, courage and acceptance to know serenity. It’s like the old joke about the young musician lost in Manhattan running around in a frenzy: frantically she rushes one way and then next until, seeing a police officer, she stops him and asks: Can you help me, sir? How do I get to Carnegie Hall? Looking at her violin case, the old says without batting an eye: Practice, ma’am, it takes practice. The lyric poet, Gregory Orr, captures this truth in the words he wants placed on his gravestone:
To be alive: not just the carcass , but the spark.
That’s crudely put, but … if we’re not supposed to dance...
Why all this music?
That’s the first insight buried in this text: our sorrows and anguish need not have the last word if we ally ourselves with God’s grace and practice letting our troubles rest in God’s care. This won’t take away the cause of our sorrow, but will give us the ability to respond in a healing and hope-filled manner.
The second insight that I believe Jesus and St. John are trying to tell us is that there is more than one way to get grounded in the way of the heart. “In my father’s house are many mansions– not just one - and where I am going to rest, you may go to rest, too.” To be sure, part of this is about the assurance of life after death spent in the eternal embrace of God’s love. Jesus made it clear to his friends that just as he came from God, he will return to God. That’s what the opening of St. John’s gospel is all about: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God and not anything that was made did not begin with God and God’s love, right? Clearly, Jesus is reassuring his friends that they need not fret, fear or worry about life after life: we begin with God and we return to God when this journey is complete. But I don’t think that’s ALL Jesus is telling us in the layered lexicon of St. John’s gospel.
I sense that he wants us to know that there are a variety of spiritual practices we can cultivate right now to help us stay grounded in the loving purposes of God and God’s love. Traditionally, the tools of grounding our hearts in grace include mindfulness, various types of meditation, chanting sacred songs and psalms together with others, quiet reading to discover God’s voice in our lives, spiritual direction, and the discipline of surrendering our egos to the greater good. Cynthia Bourgeault writes that training and awakening our hearts – what some call the spiritualized mind – involves practicing how to become more “sensitive, focused, energized, subtle and refined in living as allies with cosmic love.” Or as the poet Rumi used to say: there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground and a thousand ways to go back home again, too.
During this time of solidarity in solitude I have been rediscovering some of the traditional spiritual tools and must confess that they are wonderful. But let’s not be fundamentalist or biblically harsh when it comes to Christ’s insight that in God’s spiritual mansion there are MANY rooms. Many ways to tap into holy love and a variety of practices to help us stay grounded in this love. I have become enchanted with the whimsical wisdom in this poem by Carrie Newcomer as she articulates how she does evening prayer:
Every night before I go to sleep I say aloud three things that I am grateful for:
All the significant, insignificant, extraordinary, ordinary stuff of my life.
It’s a small practice and humble, and yet, I find I sleep better
Holding what lightens and softens my life ever so briefly at the end of the day.
Sunlight and blueberries – good dogs and wool socks –
A fine rain, a good friend – fresh basil and wild phlox,
My father’s good health, my daughter’s new job,
The song that always makes me cry – always in the same part –
No matter how many times I hear it. Decent coffee at the airport – and your quiet breathing,
The story she told me, the frost patterns on the window,
English horns and banjos, Wood Thrush and June Bugs,
The smooth glassy calm of the morning pond,
An old coat – a new poem, my library card, and that my car keeps running despite all the miles.
And after three things more often than not, I get on a roll and just keep going,
I keep naming and listing, until I lie grinning, blankets pulled up to my chin,
Awash with wonder at the sweetness of it all.
Do YOU do anything like that to practice nourishing the way of the heart in your life? Anything that is as tender-hearted and practical? How do you take up residence in one of the many rooms within God’s mansion to kiss the ground and return home to God’s love?
I’ve shared with you my new appreciation for the old hymn, “In the Bleak Midwinter” as well as St. Paul McCartney’s, “Blackbird.” As I was playing them again last week in prayer I found myself returning to another old chestnut, this from Bob Franke, “Alleluia, the Great Storm is Over.” I played it at my sister Linda’s funeral – used to play it during Advent for my children. It links inner serenity to the quest for social justice and assures me that the whole point of faith is not anguish, but rest, peace and compassion.
Alleluia, the great storm is over, lift up your wings and fly!
Alleluia, the great storm is over, lift up your wings and fly!
The thunder and lightning gave voice to the night,
The little lame child cried aloud in her fright,
Hush little baby, a story I'll tell of a love that has conquered the powers of hell…
Sweetness in the air and justice on the wind
Laughter in the house where the mourners have been
The deaf shall have music, the blind have new eyes the standards of death taken down by surprise.
Jesus closes his teaching with the words: I am the way, the truth and the life. He tells Thomas: you really DO know where to go. Look at me – my life – my freedom with the spirit - look at how I do it – and follow my lead. When Jesus tells us HE is the way, the truth and the life, he’s NOT asking us to sign off on a theological confession or creedal affirmation. And he’s not asking us to endorse a political action agenda either. He’s just inviting us practice an earthy spirituality shaped everyday by experiences that strengthen rest within and tenderness in public. St. Paul expressed the wisdom of Christ’s heart like this in Romans 12:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for God. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond. For unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops a well-formed maturity in you.
And what was true then, is true today: how do we nourish rest within ourselves – serenity – so that we can embody tenderness? Let me ask you to join me over the next week in exploring some of the many rooms in the mansion of God’s grace. Wander around in some you’ve never tried. Go deeper into a few you have visited but only on the surface level. Explore some that you’ve always wondered about but haven’t had the time to try. Ok? If you want to email or message me for suggestions, I will happily get back to you with some ideas.
This is a time we can use to strengthen our hearts, dear people: the lock down and its variants are going to become part of our lives for a long time – some say in various ways for at least the next 18 months – and maybe more. We cannot change this, we can only embrace it and let it take us deeper into trust, faith, hope and love. Do NOT let your hearts be troubled, beloved, let them be opened to God in love.
Saturday, May 9, 2020
rest in peace little richard: you were the original rock and roll wild man
I could not LIVE with myself if I didn't give Little Richard his propers today upon hearing the new of his passing. This mofo was the real deal: raw, conflicted, intergalactic, multi-sexual, wild, tender and a whole lotta fun. Little Richard was my introduction into rock and roll under the tutelage of my Aunt Donna in a basement in Milford, CT a few years before I entered first grade. To say that I was slain in some kind of spirit upon hearing "Tutti Fruitti" and "Long Tall Sally" would be too tame. I was knocked on my ass! And my all time favorite is still "Lucille." There ain't NOTHING like this one. Just look and listen to these cats - and how about Richard's eyes!!!!
Between my basement baptism in 1957 with Little Richard, and 1964 when the Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan, most of what was on the radio was second best. I dug the doo wop girl groups and felt something going on with Motown, too. I still get chills when the Jaynettes version of "Sally Go Round the Roses" pops up. A total gas.
And then I heard Paul McCartney do his take on the master, Little Richard, and it was rock and roll Pentecost: there WAS a place for a dumpy white kid if Macca could sing like that. Sir Paul was quoted today as saying that he learned to sing like Little Richard but he had to get about a foot above and outside himself and look down before it would rip. That sounds about right to me because it IS an out of body experience to do Little Richard. Let me add that John Lennon's screams and shouts were equally electrifying and soulful back in the day, too - and I loved his version of "Twist and Shout."
When I was writing my doctoral thesis on a spirituality of rock and roll I read about Richard's history: playing the chitin' circuit in the South, doing gigs in Black gay clubs, dealing with the Klan and all the rest. When Bo Diddley's producers brought him to New Orleans to record he had to clean up his act - and things went flat. Until he started playing his original version of "Tutti Fruitti" during a break. Everyone loved it but knew that in 1955 there was no way they could get a song that sang, "Tutti Frutti, good booty - if it don't fit, don't force it, just grease it, make it easy" on the air. Dorothy LaBosterie was called in to re-write the raunch while Little Richard kept up his original energy. She had no idea was he was singing about - and swore the song had another genesis - but no one could do it like Little Richard and his legacy endures. It really didn't matter that the man could really only play in one key, it always killed it.
My world came alive because of this brother's music - he was a total original - and I loved him. Rest in peace, Richard, keep rippin' it up.
Between my basement baptism in 1957 with Little Richard, and 1964 when the Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan, most of what was on the radio was second best. I dug the doo wop girl groups and felt something going on with Motown, too. I still get chills when the Jaynettes version of "Sally Go Round the Roses" pops up. A total gas.
And then I heard Paul McCartney do his take on the master, Little Richard, and it was rock and roll Pentecost: there WAS a place for a dumpy white kid if Macca could sing like that. Sir Paul was quoted today as saying that he learned to sing like Little Richard but he had to get about a foot above and outside himself and look down before it would rip. That sounds about right to me because it IS an out of body experience to do Little Richard. Let me add that John Lennon's screams and shouts were equally electrifying and soulful back in the day, too - and I loved his version of "Twist and Shout."
When I was writing my doctoral thesis on a spirituality of rock and roll I read about Richard's history: playing the chitin' circuit in the South, doing gigs in Black gay clubs, dealing with the Klan and all the rest. When Bo Diddley's producers brought him to New Orleans to record he had to clean up his act - and things went flat. Until he started playing his original version of "Tutti Fruitti" during a break. Everyone loved it but knew that in 1955 there was no way they could get a song that sang, "Tutti Frutti, good booty - if it don't fit, don't force it, just grease it, make it easy" on the air. Dorothy LaBosterie was called in to re-write the raunch while Little Richard kept up his original energy. She had no idea was he was singing about - and swore the song had another genesis - but no one could do it like Little Richard and his legacy endures. It really didn't matter that the man could really only play in one key, it always killed it.
My world came alive because of this brother's music - he was a total original - and I loved him. Rest in peace, Richard, keep rippin' it up.
Monday, May 4, 2020
staying home in this season of solidarity in solitude...
Over the winter my modest stone walkway collapsed when the snow decimated the retaining wall. That's my next project - and figuring out what type of flowers to pant in front of each garden box - is right up there, too. As the week warms, we'll get the bulbs and seeds in the ground as well. This spring and summer, the seasons of contagion for those of us in North America, will see no travel. We had planned a 25th anniversary magical, mystery tour to Prince Edward's Island and Halifax but that now awaits health reports and who knows what else? So the next five months will be spent at the homestead rather than exploring Canada. One thing this time of solidarity in solitude is reinforcing in me is the absolute necessity of letting go of expectations. That's always been a challenge for me. Now, with nearly two months to get good at it, let's say it is still a work in progress. Perhaps that's why I read and reread Carrie Newcomer's poem, "A Permeable Life," from time to time.
I want to leave enough room in my heart
For the unexpected,
For the mistake that becomes knowing,
For knowing that becomes wonder,
For wonder that makes everything porous,
Allowing in and out
All available light.
An impermeable life is full to the edges,
But only to the edges.
It is a limited thing.
Like the pause at the center of the breath,
Neither releasing or inviting,
With no hollow spaces
For longing and possibility.
I would rather live unlocked,
And more often than not astonished,
Which is possible
If I am willing to surrender
What I already think I know.
So I will stay open
And companionably friendly,
With all that presses out from the heart
And comes in at a slant
And shimmers just below
The surface of things.
So rather than the woods of the Eastern Townships and jazz festivals in Ottawa and Montreal, ours will be a season of seeing the flowers emerge rather than discovering them half gone. It will be a quiet time with space to do regular weeding and tending the lawn. There will be small joys and great grieving and a lot of silence in-between. Today I am sore and stiff from carrying lumber, bending and sawing, building and rebuilding and all the rest. It is a good pain though and I am grateful to be alive. Tomorrow, Di and I will celebrate 25 years of marriage. Thanks be to God.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
reflections on St. Peter's journey with Jesus into tenderness
This morning's live-streaming on St. Peter's journey with Jesus into the way of tenderness...
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