confessing the "banality of ideas pervading mainstream america today"

Today was all about reflection: there was yard/garden work in the morning for me, quiet

reading/prayers later,a wee nap along with a late afternoon visit with Di before more gardening. I will spend an hour of prayer, lament and rejoicing with the PBS news crew @ 6 pm and then prepare a simple pesto supper. As I cut the grass, edged the garden, weeded and weed wacked areas in need of order, I was stunned: our garden is bursting with beauty right now. There are deep purple irises, bold pink azaleas, lilacs, pale wild roses, sky blue forget-me-nots, orange day lilies, a white dogwood tree, lavender creepin' charlie on the periphery of the lawn, and a few unknown little red wildflowers peeping out from within the ground cover - even a few white daisies in my still evolving wildflower patch. At the start of this day, I took in these thoughts from Pádraig Ó Tuama's work in the Corrymela Prayerbook.  

...Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies.
Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears.
Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us...
The world is big, and wide, and wild and wonderful and wicked,
and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable and full of meaning.
Oremus.
Let us pray.
~ Pádraig Ó Tuama, from "Oremus," in DAILY PRAYER WITH THE CORRYMEELA COMMUNITY

We will join him in a virtual workshop tomorrow through the IMAGE Journal. It seems that his journey and insights are resonating with my own these days - and I am grateful. As I read, think, ponder, fret, pray, trust and then read some more about where this nation - and so much of the world, too - could go if we were to put people before profits, I find it hard to image a truly compassionate culture and economy for the United States. I know they exist, of course. Not perfectly and not without their own dark sides as well. But in real time, there are Western societies where health care, education, community policing, hospitals to say nothing of psychiatric care, community diversity and gender equality are considered to be essential rights not privileges. They are part of what human beings need to thrive in safety, creativity and hope. On Easter 2020, Pope Francis spoke of the need for a Universal Basic Income as a foundation for justice. The Anglican and United Churches of Canada have endorsed such a "leap forward" and have committed their energies and resources to influencing public policy.(see https://www.united-church.ca/news/seize-moment-universal-basic-income-canada)A number of city councils in the United States are beginning to have this conversation, too as well a serious consideration of defunding our militarized police forces and using tax dollars in creative ways to advance safety and social peace.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, writing in The New Yorker today offers a few home grown insights that have help me as I try to imagine new possibilities. Her wisdom is a stretch for me as I am so enmeshed in the the privileges of the status quo. And yet she speaks truth to power in ways that I trust and aspire towards with heart, flesh and soul. And while it is still early in the convergence of our contagion and social uprising to draw conclusions, I am grateful for minds far more creative and wise than my own who can see what is still not yet clear to me. She writes:

There have been planned demonstrations, and there have also been violent and explosive outbursts that can only be described as a revolt or an uprising. Riots are not only the voice of the unheard, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said; they are the rowdy entry of the oppressed into the political realm. They become a stage of political theatre where joy, revulsion, sadness, anger, and excitement clash wildly in a cathartic dance. They are a festival of the oppressed.

For once in their lives, many of the participants can be seen, heard, and felt in public. People are pulled from the margins into a powerful force that can no longer be ignored, beaten, or easily discarded. Offering the first tastes of real freedom, when the police are for once afraid of the crowd, the riot can be destructive, unruly, violent, and unpredictable. But within that contradictory tangle emerge demands and aspirations for a society different from the one we in which we live. Not only do the rebels express their own dismay but they also showcase our entire social dilemma. As King said, of the uprisings in the late nineteen-sixties, “I am not sad that Black Americans are rebelling; this was not only inevitable but eminently desirable. Without this magnificent ferment among Negroes, the old evasions and procrastinations would have continued indefinitely. Black men have slammed the door shut on a past of deadening passivity. Except for the Reconstruction years, they have never in their long history on American soil struggled with such creativity and courage for their freedom. These are our bright years of emergence; though they are painful ones, they cannot be avoided.”

King continued, “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

By now, it should be clear what the demands of young black people are: an end to racism, police abuse, and violence; and the right to be free of the economic coercion of poverty and inequality. The question is: How do we change this country? It’s not a new question; for African-Americans, it’s a question as old as the nation itself. A large part of the reason that rebels swell the streets with clenched fists and expressive eyes is the refusal or inability of this society to engage that question in a satisfying way. Instead, those asking the question are patronized with sweet-sounding speeches, made with alliterative apologia, often interspersed with recitations about the meaning of America, and ultimately in defense of the status quo. There is a palpable poverty of intellect, a lack of imagination, and a banality of ideas pervading mainstream politics today. Old and failed propositions are recycled, but proclaimed as new, reviving cynicism and dismay.

(see the whole article @ https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-do-we-change-america?)

Rumi once wrote: "Be patient where you sit in the dark... dawn is coming." I trust that with my being. I also trust the God is doing a new thing within and among us. For now that means listening. And waiting. Reflecting on this new moment in my solitude even as I search for ways to honor the poet Lucille Clifton's admonition: "You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking."

 

reflections on holy trinity...

Reflections on the Holy Trinity: June 7, 2020

Today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity in the wider Western Church – a Sunday set aside for us to contemplate, but not necessarily comprehend, the wisdom of loving God as Three in One and One in Three – because to ponder the Trinity is to become a theological poet. Or an artist or dancer rather than an engineer of fact-checker – women, men, and children at peace with mystery and paradox – in a world addicted to exactitude and certainty. The Eastern Orthodox Church teaches that honoring God as Trinity is a dance that moves us between contemplation – the inward journey – and action – the outward journey. It is a willingness to give up binary thinking and feel the presence of the holy in our hearts and world as we then try, ever so tentatively, to give tender expression to those feelings, knowing all the while that whatever happens will always be incomplete. For how can the finite ever define the infinite? Poet, Mary Oliver, says:

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, 

to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” 

and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

The Scriptures for today whisper hints of what it might mean to experience the holy as Trinity, while never fully articulating a complete solution to our conundrum. Our liturgical tradition asks us to start with words from Genesis suggesting that God is simultaneously Creator and Spirit: the source of all creativity:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, until the breath from God swept over the face of the waters. God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light - and God saw that the light was good; so God separated the light from the darkness – calling the light Day, and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Next we’re encouraged to share the ancient Psalmist’s song that reveres God’s majesty in creation even as it conjures awe within our souls:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet.

Finally, we’re asked to lift-up the closing words from St. Matthew’s gospel where the resurrected but still wounded Jesus confers a blessing and a responsibility upon his friends saying:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Now, I am down with all of these words: I love them and wrestle with them knowing that NONE of them tells me precisely what God as Trinity means, ok? Theologians and scholars agree that this was the case in the early church which for 300 years often spoke of God as Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – yet never once tried to define what that meant. After all, there were a host of other names for the divine that were equally useful in a mystical musical manner.

· Do you recall the defining hymn of the Advent season: O Come, O Come Emmanuel? It uses seven of the early holy names for the sacred: including Sapientia – Wisdom – Adonai – Lord – Radix Jesse – Root of Jesse (King David’s father) – Oriens – dayspring – Rex Gentium – King of the nations – and Emmanuel – God who is with us.

· Other names for the holy include: Sophia – Lady Wisdom – Logos – Word of God – Father and Mother of Comfort – Abba – Advocate – Almighty One – the Beginning and the End – Bread of Life – Morning Star – Good Shepherd – Deliverer – Rock of My Salvation – and on and on.

It wasn’t until the middle of the fourth century that both the Roman Emperor Constantine, who wanted to bring uniformity to a very diverse church that was now the new state religion, and a variety of Eastern clergy, who wanted some shared creedal clarity about the nature of Jesus, set in motion a process of defining the Holy Trinity. The emperor didn’t give two hoots about theology. He just wanted a template for shaping the new religion as it grew throughout his domain. And the Eastern Orthodox clergy were trying to nail down a working understanding as to whether Jesus was human or holy or both? Of the same essence as the Father or something different? Both/and, some combination of each, or none of the above? The Western Church didn’t get into the fray until the 5th century of the Common Era with the writing of St. Augustine; so, for nearly two hundred years the Eastern Church experimented and argued and explored ways to clarify what they meant whenever speaking of God as Trinity. And, what they concluded was pure genius: they concluded that the Trinity could never be fully defined – with words.

· All doctrine, the Eastern Church concluded, must always remain provisional – more a process of feeling the holy in our hearts and spending time with that feeling in contemplation – than clear, objective facts. After all God is greater than our ability to control or comprehend, consequently silence is more appropriate than sound.

· And while those who shaped our early creeds still utilized words, they used them with precision, knowing that the ineffable can only be considered evocatively, symbolically – their term was simulacrum – a verbal clue of a deeper truth that could never be fully contained in any form.

Which is to say: poetry. To speak of God as Father, Son, Holy Spirit – or Creator, Redeemer, and Comforter – or Source, Savior, and Sustainer – is heart language, not head talk. It is art, not science. The words of the church’s early creeds point to a relationship with the sacred, an experience within, that can be manifest outwardly as activity in the world, albeit always imperfectly. The words shall be beautiful and none are complete. They summarize what Mary Oliver prayed in her poem: Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have answers. And let me keep company always with those who says, Look! And laugh in astonishment – and bow their heads. Karen Armstrong writes in her magnificent, A History of God, that, “The Trinity was to remind Christians that the reality we called God could be experienced but never fully grasped by the human intellect.”

The Trinity was not to be interpreted in a literal manner, it was not an abstruse scientific theory (to be proven), but… ultimately a mystical or spiritual experience that had to be lived, not thought, because God went far beyond human concepts. It was not a logical or intellectual formulation, but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. (Armstrong)

To know the divine as Trinity is to encounter some of the limitless ways the holy touches our lives. Sadly, in the West, Father, Son and Holy Spirit became a calcified doctrine when it was always meant to be a poem. My tradition offers a modest corrective by speaking of our “testimonies of faith” rather than insisting upon theological tests to determine who is pure enough to pass the entrance exam for church. Church. Testimonies are stories about how we have personally experienced the sacred: they are deeply intimate insights, songs, poems, and statements born of the heart.

While tests… well, tests lead to Inquisitions – and torture – and a God of love who is turned into a tyrant of fear. So, to be a part of the rehabilitation and even the re-enchantment of the Holy Trinity in the West, I would like to suggest three, inter-related areas we might reclaim a healthy, mysterious, mystical, playful, healing, healthy, sensual, spiritual, and poetic relationship with the Holy Trinity. Specifically, I wonder what our experiences, our encounter with culture, and our art might already be telling us about the bounty of the divine within and among us? You see, I have come to believe that every person – atheists and agnostics, Democrats and Republicans, women, men, and children – all have all had some encounter with the holy. We may use different words to describe what we’ve felt – some are joyful, some filled with fear, some are beautiful and others broken and cruel – still our lives have something to tell us about the sacred that we need to know. Frederick Buechner is helpful here:

There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him (or her) or not to recognize, too, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly… If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments – and life itself is grace.

This in an invitation to open ourselves to the Holy Trinity in our ordinary, everyday realities. The medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart, used to teach that “reality is the will of God –it can always be better – but we must start with what is real.” 12 Step groups say much the same thing in the Serenity Prayer: deep rest and peace are the fruit of accepting what is true in real life. No magical thinking here. The first Bible passage I ever memorized was St. Paul’s insight about 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 the Lord. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Peterson, The Message, Romans 12)

I wonder, then, what this moment in history is asking or telling us? Have there been times when you’ve been frightened? I have – frightened for myself as an old white guy over 65 in this time of contagion, frightened for my beloved who has breathing troubles, terrified for my grand-children should they or their sweet parents become ill. I’ve found a lot of fear alive inside me, a ton of fear, alongside a lot of love as well. I wonder what has changed for you during the plague. How have you experienced judgement? Or been called into a new level of solidarity? What are you learning about the integration of prayer and social justice these days? Or compassion for the most vulnerable among us? Have you used this time of sheltering in place to grow in contemplation? Or rest? Or lament? Or all of the above? Our experience with reality – personally and inwardly as well as socially and externally – is one of the ways we renew intimacy with God as Holy Trinity.

· Sacred awe is one of the ways I get a handle on this. The first time I stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon with my young daughters and tried to take in the magnitude of what I was seeing, I was overwhelmed. It was literally hard to breathe given the enormity – the beauty – the fullness along with the emptiness – simply staggering. My youngest daughter, who had just received her first camera, took maybe 75 pictures in a row of the canyon. When we got the film back – which tells you how long ago this was – at first we just laughed because there seemed to be almost no difference in any of the 75 photos. But then we realized that they were a visual prayer. She, like we, had been overcome with awe – and beauty – fear and the enormity of the canyon as well as what it said of God’s greatness.

· I confess I had much the same reaction while helping to bring to both of my two daughters into this world during their births at home: seeing them emerge from within their momma’s body, cradling their tiny heads as they crowned, and then sliding their flesh into my trembling hands before they nursed was a holy/human moment of such deep awe that continues to shape who I am 40+ years later.

But let’s not be simply sentimental as we celebrate the beauty and majesty of the holy: the Holy Trinity is just as present in our suffering and grief as in our joys and blessings. I’ve told you before that I regularly weep when praying over the evening news – and I know you do, too. Watching that agonizing 8 minutes and 46 second execution of George Floyd grabbed me by the throat and shook something awake inside of me with a ferocity and sorrow that I know was of the Lord. It has ignited something throughout the world, too awakening in us God’s call into the Beloved Community.

Valarie Kaur of the Revolutionary Love Project has helped me understand that all our experiences of rage, grief, fear, numbness, tears, and confusion are part of how we live into the holy in history. She notes that in 2020 there are more of us out in the streets in this uprising for justice for black and brown people than in 1968 or 1992. She writes: “Never before in our shared history have so many non-black people of color and white allies, young people, and local leaders exercised their voice to say: Black lives matter and we are united in calling out the centrality of anti-black racism in America.” She is clear that this is God’s voice sounding within our own. “As we let our grief into our hearts…” she continues, “we learn how to fight for those who need us. As we honor our rage… we encounter connections to the wider world that brings creativity to birth in ways we could never imagine.”

Like birthing itself, she concludes, this moment is teaching us how to push and breathe and trust our way into the Beloved Community even in the middle of our doubts and fears. The late Robert Kennedy, speaking to an Indianapolis crowd of mostly black and brown people from the back of a truck on the eve of Dr. King’s assassination was guided by Holy Spirit wisdom when he told the crowd that while he came from privilege and whiteness, he knew something of the agony of that night, too. Because his own brother had been gunned down just like Dr. King. After a pause, Kennedy added: “My favorite poet was Aeschylus who wrote, ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”

So, first, our experiences – our testimonies – our stories of how we have met and encountered the sacred are part of what it means to know God as Holy Trinity. These stories recognize the life-changing presence of God within and among us. They honor the diversity of our experiences and help us see that because we all have them, we must live into a love that locks NO ONE out of God’s embrace. For from within the fullness of our lives – our joys and sorrows, celebrations and sufferings, brutalities, boredom, brokenness and blessing – God’s presence has been revealed within our flesh. That’s part of the blessing of living into the Holy Trinity.

Another takes place whenever we practice an upside-down cultural critique born of holy humility. If we have eyes to see the holy – and are awake – than we can see that even our most convoluted and wounded habits and institutions are still speaking to us of a shared hunger for the sacred. This hit me some 20 years ago during Advent in Arizona. For the longest time I had been a pretty ridid guy when it came to observing the RIGHT spirituality for the season: there could be no Christmas carols until Christmas Eve, none of the glitz and gluttony of the shopping mall, and a thorough rejection of all the holiday displays that would show up in grocery stores weeks before… Wait for it.. before what? Before Halloween.

It was revolting to me – so much so that what I taught about Advent was pretty damned heavy-handed and humorless considering it was the celebration of Christ’s birth, right? But one evening, and I can’t tell you exactly why, I found myself driving to one of those sacreligious shopping malls. And as I wandered around taking in the lights and the decorations, the busyness and buzzing energy of the crowds, and all that music, I had an epiphany: I may detest the commercialization of Christ’s birth, but guess what? It’s not all about me. Something real is taking place here and it comes from a holy longing deep within us all. So quit carping and start celebrating. I almost burst into tears of joy as a I walked around that mall singing Christmas carols out loud and taking in all that beautiful excess and light and hope: thanks be to God Ebenezer Scrooge had left the house! And isn’t that at the heart of the Christmas story? Finding the Christ Child, a small gift from God, in the most unlikely and unexpected place?

Sometime later, it dawned on me that the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, had a similar revelation once while running errands in downtown Louisville for his monastery. He put it like this: In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly over-whelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renuncia-tion and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. (Merton)

Advent in a glitzy shopping mall gobsmacked me, downtown Louisville at rush hour did it for Merton, so what’s it been for you? How have you been surprised by grace? When have you discovered that you are a part of the great, broken, joy-filled and confused community of God – and realized we’re all in this together? I’ve come up with a short prayer to help me cut to the chase: When, O Lord, am I being a hard-ass – and what must I do to quit it?! Like a spiritual director once told me: never put whipped cream on BS, man. So, from time to time I try to pray: when, O Lord, have I been a hard-ass? The ancient rabbis sometimes played with today’s psalm connecting it with Job 7: the wise and humble soul, they taught, carried two scriptures in different pockets. In one was the verse: What are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made us just a little lower than the angels. In the other: Remember that Thou wast taken from dust and to dust ye shall return.

Being able to laugh at ourselves with grace, take a break from being the center of the universe as we let humility ripen, and simply celebrate that we KNOW life is NOT all about us… is another part of how we live into the Holy Trinity. The old gospel hymn tells us: it’s not the preacher, or the deacon, but it’s me O Lord… standin’ in the need of prayer. Last summer for my birthday, David Bromberg added: it’s not the rabbi, nor the mullah but it’s ME O Lord…

And that brings me to the gift our artists offer in living into the Holy Trinity. I’m partial to their contribution, I know, because I am a musician, but it is still true. Walter Brueggemann, wise scholar of the Hebrew scriptures and Christian theology, teaches that the prophets of ancient Israel realized they had three essential tasks. First, they were called by God to warn the people that built into the rhythm of creation were consequences for living lives of self-absorbed greed and over consumption. Sometimes we say that what goes around, comes around – and the prophets were clear that bigotry, violence, avarice, and willful ignorance all lead to natural disasters and social collapse.

Second, as so often happens then and now, when people choose to ignore the cries of the prophet – and experience the devastating

consequences of selfishness through drought, famine, flood, war, tumult and exile – the prophet’s job changes: once there was a time for warning and repentance, but when that season ended, it became a time for mourning. Lament. Grieving. The prophets were explicit: until the broken own their complicity and recognize how their privilege wounds everyone, nothing will heal. Hearts will remain hard, divisions will intensify, and shalom – right relations between neighbors and nature – will be elusive. It seems that hard-hearts can only make room for grace if they were broken and then broken open. Jesus said in his time: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem: who kills the prophets and stones the peace-makers. How I longed to gather your children together like a mother hen gathers her chicks, but you were not willing. O that you knew the things that made for peace. During the seasons of suffering, the prophets became relentless advocates for the practice of lamentation.

And then, at a time of God’s choosing not ours, when everyone feels as if despair is eternal, hope is introduced through a culture’s artists through what has been called the prophetic imagination. It is not something politicians understand – nor is it the purview of bureaucrats or ideologues how God brings hope to a grieving people through its artists – but it is time-tested and true. Bureaucrats defund the arts in our schools and politicians manipulate creativity for propaganda. But artists… like Dostoevsky said: artists create beauty and it is beauty that saves the world. Maybe you heard the music during George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis? Perhaps you’ve see some of the protestors dancing together as the crowd sings Brother Bill Wither’s anthem: Lean On Me? Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow, but if we are wise we know that there’s always tomorrow. Lean on me, when you’re not strong and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on, for it won’t be long before I’m gonna need somebody to lean on. Brueggemann writes:

Our artists engage in futuring fantasy. They do not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. That is why every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one Pharaoh or the King wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

When we least expect it, beyond our control and despair, artists start to share songs and poems, dances and dramas, movies and paintings and sculptures that fill empty hearts broken open by grief. Their imaginations, like John Lennon sang, nourish our own impoverished souls with possibilities. Their sacred ability to give shape and form to the promise of redemption rather than predictions of the status quo are unique. And this, too, is how we become Holy Trinity people: by trusting our artists. By listening to them from our hearts. And by making it safe for the artists to keep going when the tyrants want to lock them down. Jesus told his friends: I want you now to go out into the whole world and fill it with images of hope – share the poetry of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – God’s grace in everything – and bathe my people’s broken hearts in peace. Ok, I’ve paraphrased the Great Commission of Matthew, but I believe that artists do a better job of bathing people’s hearts in God’s sacred possibilities than most of our preachers. We’re too afraid, still not done with our own grieving, still thinking about implementation rather than imagination and our hearts haven’t yet been fully broken open for trusting a Holy Trinity life. So, the One who IS holy has anointed artists to help us. There’s a whole crop of NEW artists being commissioned by God to do this work during the pandemic and the uprising – and I can’t wait for them to baptize us in their creativity.

In the meantime, I find myself going back to mine the beauty of older artists who have brought me the balm in Gilead in previous seasons of my grief. One who continues to speak to my heart with passion and clarity is Mary Chapin-Carpenter – especially her introspective songs – although I LOVE her, “Shut Up and Kiss Me!” My favorite song – one I sang at my mother’s funeral - is “Jubilee.” It is a message I need to hear these days – and often – and maybe you do, too. So, I am going to share it with you as both a prayer of lament and hope trusting that it will evoke your encounter with taste of Holy Trinity living…

I can tell by the way you're walking that you don't want company
I'll let you alone and I'll let you walk on and in your own good time you'll be
Back where the sun can find you under the wise wishing tree
And with all of them made we'll lie under the shade and call it a jubilee

And I can tell by the way you're talking that the past isn't letting you go
But there's only so long you can take it all on and then the wrong's gotta be on its own
And when you're ready to leave it behind you you'll look back, and all that you'll see
Is the wreckage and rust that you left in the dust on your way to the jubilee

And I can tell by the way you're listening that you're still expecting to hear
Your name being called like a summons to all
Who have failed to account for their doubts and their fears
They can't add up to much without you so if it were just up to me
I'd take hold of your hand, saying come hear the band pay your song at the jubilee

And I can tell by the way you're searching for something you can't even name
That you haven't been able to come to the table: simply glad that you came
And when you feel like this try to imagine that we're all like frail boats on the sea
Just scanning the night for that great guiding light announcing the jubilee

And I can tell by the way you're standing with your eyes filling with tears
That it's habit alone keeps you turning for home even though your home is right here
Where the people who love you are gathered under the wise wishing tree
May we all be considered then straight on delivered down to the jubilee

'Cause the people who love you are waiting and they'll wait just as long as need be
When we look back and say those were halcyon days we're talking 'bout jubilee

saying goodbye to our japanese maple....

It is a muggy, damp, almost rainy day in the Berkshires. Before the impeding deluge, I took out an old friend, a once beautiful Japanese maple tree, which had given up the ghost. She had graced our view with splendor for thirteen years - and probably longer for those before us. But last year I noticed only half of the tree budding with spring foliage. This year there was none. We shall replace her as the summer ripens even as the hole created in our garden bears witness to her abiding gifts.

In some ways it feels frivolous to lament this loss: given the magnitude of human suffering,

injustice, grief and anxiety in the USA - especially but not exclusively among brown and black folk - to feel sad about a tree seems cruel. Still, as i peruse saved copies of Maria Popova's fabulous weekly Brain Pickings, I find numerous references to the sacred and healing power of trees. "In the final years of his life, the great neurologist Oliver Sacks reflected on the physiological and psychological healing power of nature, observing that in forty years of medical practice, he had found only two types of non-pharmaceutical therapy helpful to his patients: music and gardens. It was in a garden, too, that Virginia Woolf, bedeviled by lifelong mental illness, found the consciousness-electrifying epiphany that enabled her to make some of humanity’s most transcendent art despite her private suffering." (take a look here for Natasha McElhone's reading of Herman Hesse's 'love letter to Trees,"too. https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/05/04/natascha-mcelhone-wander-hesse-kew/mc_cid=e66586b857&mc_eid=d53a910493 And please don't forget stunning review of Robert MacFarlane's Under Land that begins:

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter. “As a man is, so he sees.” Walt Whitman saw trees as the wisest of teachers; Hermann Hesse as our mightiest consolation for mortality. Wangari Maathai rooted in them a colossal act of resistance that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. Poets have elegized their wisdom, artists have drawn from their form resonance with our human emotions, scientists are only just beginning to uncover their own secret language. Robert Macfarlane — a rare enchanter who entwines the scientific and the poetic in his lyrical explorations of the natural world — offers a crowning curio in the canon of wisdom on human life drawn from trees in a passage from Underland: A Deep Time Journey (public library) — his magnificent soul-guided, science-lit tour of the hidden universe beneath our feet.https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/11/13/robert-macfarlane-underland-tree-love/?mc_cid=e315e9cc24&mc_eid=d53a910

The wise Mary Oliver regularly evoked the salvific gift encountered in the presence of her tree friends: "When I Am Among the Trees."

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

So, too, Wendell Berry: "The Peace of Wild Things." 

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

These trees have taught me the love of God incarnated in the Holy One's first word: creation. I have learned something of the spirituality and rhythm of the seasons. And have found a measure of solace watching, listening, pruning, resting, and caring for these friends who offer their gifts without reservation and stand witness to a grace greater than my anxieties. To be sure, living in their presence is privileged. Not a doubt in the world about this. There is also tender responsibility, too as they invite me to learn, trust, and share their way of being balanced in a culture beyond beauty and proportion.  I spend more time with trees and plants these days than people. That, too is about balance having spent most of my adult days busy with human connections. I need precious little external conversation now. That was true before the corona-lock down - and will continue far beyond it as well. I find that silence fills and nourishes me more than conversation. Paul Goodman put it like this:

Not speaking and speaking are both
human ways of being in the world,
and there are kinds and grades of each.

There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy;
the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face;
the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul,
whence emerge new thoughts;
the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”;
the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity;
the silence of listening to another speak, catching
the drift and helping him be clear;
the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination,
loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it;
baffled silence;
the silence of peaceful accord with other persons
or communion with the cosmos.

Silence - combined with our trees, plants, flowers, grass and sharing each day with one I love

- empowers me to speak a little each week in ways that feel useful. Or, if not useful, at least honest. Silence also gives me more and more clues about the music I want to keep playing and creating. Thomas Merton has been insightful to me: 

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision... In a world of noise, confusion and conflict, it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom... When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer...

Billy Collins add insight, too, in his poem: "Silence."

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

the cynical symbolism of a sacrilegious demagogue: trump's bible

It has been well-documented that the Third Reich not only co-opted the majority in the German church

- both Roman Catholic and Reformed - but used their buildings, clergy, and liturgies as props for their propaganda. Between 1933 and 1945, Christian leaders cooperated with the Nazis: they preached Nazi hatred and antisemitism on Sunday mornings, abandoned their theological independence for a Nazification of Christianity, and became instruments of hatred rather than compassion and justice. The clergy of the Reich encouraged the wider population to turn a blind eye to genocide, euthanasia, mass incarceration, and the desecration of the Gospel. This took place in both the Roman Catholic and Reformed branches of the Christian Church. (see the US Holocaust Museum for more background @ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state)

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote his satirical political novel, It Can't Happen Here, a story of a populist demagogue who becomes president. It has been suggested that Louisiana's governor, Huey "Kingfish" Long, was the historic inspiration for Lewis characterization. (NOTE: Long was assassinated in 1935 just prior to the book's publication.) In 2016, The New Yorker ran a piece by Alexander Nazarayn, "Getting Close to Facicism," describing a new stage interpretation of Lewis' novel as critique of the presidential primaries. In 2017, The New York Times published Beverley Gage's, "Reading the Classic Novel that Predicted Trump," which stated:

“It Can’t Happen Here” is a work of dystopian fantasy, one man’s effort in the 1930s to imagine what it might look like if fascism came to America. At the time, the obvious specter was Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power in Germany provoked fears that men like the Louisiana senator Huey Long or the radio priest Charles Coughlin might accomplish a similar feat in the United States. Today, Lewis’s novel is making a comeback as an analogy for the Age of Trump. Within a week of the 2016 election, the book was reportedly sold out on Amazon.com. At a moment when instability seems to be the only constant in American politics, “It Can’t Happen Here” offers an alluring (if terrifying) certainty: It can happen here, and what comes next will be even ghastlier than you expect. Yet the graphic horrors of Lewis’s vision also limit the book’s usefulness as a guide to our own political moment. In 1935, Lewis was trying to prevent the unthinkable: the election of a pseudo-fascist candidate to the presidency of the United States. Today’s readers, by contrast, are playing catch-up, scrambling to think through the implications of an electoral fait accompli. If Lewis’s postelection vision is what awaits us, there will be little cause for hope, or even civic engagement, in the months ahead. The only viable options will be to get out of the country — or to join an armed underground resistance.

(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/books/review/classic-novel-that-predicted-trump-sinclar-lewis-it-cant-happen-here.html

In 2020, it HAS happened here and yesterday's photo op at St. John's Episcopal Church in the nation's capitol closes the circle opened by Hitler, embellished for the USA by Lewis, and now embodied by Donald J. Trump and his advisors. It appears that Hope Hicks, PR adviser to 45, suggested that now would be a good time to link the rhetoric of repression with religion. Without consultation or permission, the regime used the National Guard and tear gas to clear the area of protesters, trotted across the street from the White House for a short photo shoot with 45 hoisting a Bible as evidence of his holy mandate before returning to the bunker. Thanks be to God that both the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Rev. Michael B. Curry, and the Bishop of Washington, DC, the Rev. Mariann Budde, have denounced this cynical manipulation of our symbols. Budde told reporters: "He did not pray. He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years." Rather, he held up a Bible as a prop, a book he is thoroughly unfamiliar with, as a dog whistle to his evangelical supporters. Curry was equally outraged saying: 

This evening, the President of the United States stood in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, lifted up a bible, and had pictures of himself taken. In so doing, he used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes. This was done in a time of deep hurt and pain in our country, and his action did nothing to help us or to heal us. (for more please see: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/politics/trump-st-johns-church-bible.html)

For the time being freedom of the press remains in the United States. Freedom of religion and from religion, too. People of good will, integrity, and compassion must clearly denounce this regime's cynical manipulation of our sacred symbols. The whole entourage is morally bankrupt to say nothing of shameless and cruel. The uprising in our streets, Dr. King used to say, is the language of the unheard. No more "whitesplaining" about patience. This uprising IS about law and order - especially for black, brown and vulnerable people in the USA. I am grateful that the leadership of the Episcopal Church chose not to be silent over this offense. Others have added their voices, too. May we find ways to stand in solidarity with the uprising in pursuit of a more perfect union. Dr. King also used to say that moments such as these must be seized and utilized lest we miss our chance to change to the course of history. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Pentecost worship: May 31, 2020

Today's Pentecost worship with First Congregational Church, Williamstown.

worship online tomorrow with first congregational church, williamstown

Tomorrow, Sunday, May 31, 2020, is Pentecost Sunday. I will be leading worship for First Congregational Church, Williamstown, MA in place of my regular FB live-streaming reflections. For friends who have joined me on Sunday morning on the Be Still and Know page, this week I invite you to log onto the FB page of First Congregational Church of Willimastown as I will be leading their Zoom worship. Worship starts at 10 am. Please find the link to join the streaming @ https://www.facebook.com/FirstChurchWilliamstown/

My heart grieves tonight - as well it should - for racial and economic justice too long deferred in the United States. As our cities burn and our people rage in righteous anger, I think back to my time in Cleveland when I had the privilege of being part of an inter-racial reform team along with Larry Lumpkin, Susan Leonard, and Leon Lawrence. Working with Mayor Michael R. White and his education assistant, my friend Chris Carmody, was a most satisfying, demanding, wild, creative, challenging, hopeful but only modestly successful endeavor. I will forever be grateful to those on both sides of the divided city - black and white - who not only welcomed me and our team even if it never accomplished all our goals, but also taught me so much about acceptance, earning trust, and keeping the faith.

 

nobody told me there'd be days like this...

This is a grand time to be present in the Berkshires: I planted phlox this afternoon, transplanted 8 wild sunflowers, walked around the garden to see how the gladiolas and irises were doing (quite well), and took the time to bask in the simple beauty of this place. The lilacs are here. What might be Otto Luyken Laurel is happening, too even as the cherry blossoms fade. It is a weird juxtaposition of realities for me: while I wander quietly through my floral bubble of privilege, so much of my country is suffering, Indeed, this is a day when grief fills the air as yet another white police officer murders yet another black man and we achieve the ghastly milestone of 100,00+ cornavirus deaths (80K of which were preventable! and 60% of whom are black and brown people.) Being an old timer, my heart drifts back to Brother John Lennon singing: Nobody told me there'd be days like this... strange times indeed!)

Earlier in the day I finished writing (well, almost) my message for this Sunday. It is the feast of Pentecost and I will be live-streaming with my friends from First Church in Williamstown. NOTE: I will be posting a link to this web page so that those who would like to tune in @ 10 am may do so; this will be a one week change from my regular Be Still and Know setting, ok? So watch for the details. We had a Zoom meeting/rehearsal, too. What a joy to reconnect with this faith community. Back when sheltering in place/self-quarantining was a novelty, I had the privilege of helping them go live with worship. And now we get to do it again for Pentecost - only this time with Zoom! 

During all of this solitude, I have found myself taking on a few books I never got around to when they first arrived. Like Karen Armstrong's short overview of "the Bible," Gertrud Mueller-Nelson's look at fairy tales entitled, Here All Dwell Free: Stories to Heal the Wounded Feminine, and Ancient and Medieval Legacies in the United Church of Christ Living Theological Heritage series. Next week it is on to: Inviting the Mystic/Supporting the Prophetic by Dyckman and Carroll; The Little Way of St. Therese of Lisieux by John Nelson; The Other Side of Silence by Morton Kelsey; The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson; and a reread of The Ideal Bakery by Donald Hall.

Di turned me on to a new poet, Beth Hautala, who crafted this gem.

Sometimes,
beautiful things fall apart.
That doesn't mean
they weren't beautiful.
Grief doesn't cancel joy.
It highlights our capacity
to hold it.

This rings so true to me today...

wendell berry's "questionnaire"

For some odd reason I awoke before sunrise today. I struggled to keep my eyes open, and periodically returned to my bed for a nap or two, but have continued to ponder this poem by Wendell Berry I read at about 6:00 am. "Questionnaire" is worth our reflection on a day set aside to pay our respect to  sisters and brothers who gave themselves over to death in our various wars. Freedom is always costly. So as some of my fellow Americans flaunt their rights today by refusing to honor social distancing, disregarding the possibility that their actions could be infecting another more vulnerable citizen with the deadly corona virus, and ignoring the necessary balancing always required between freedom and responsibility, I wonder if we have become what we hated. I know deep inside that the overwhelming majority of my nation despise these willful acts of both
ignorance and arrogance so I pray we are able to keep some perspective. This poem helped me...

Questionnaire - from his book Leavings (2010)

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

reflection on ascension sunday, tears and the sacrament of humility...

SPIRITUALITY OF TENDERNESS: The Feast of the Ascension 2020
One of my favorite centering prayer chants is the children’s song: “Frère Jacques.” Do you know it?

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques: Dormez-vous – Dormez-vous?
Sonnez les matines – Sonnez les matines: 
Ding, dang dong, ding, dang, dong.

I reclaimed this little ditty as a resource for getting grounded during a sabbatical in Montreal some five years ago. Like many, I learned to sing it phonetically as a child, but had no idea what the words meant. Part of the unexpected but blessed revelation of that sabbatical was revisiting the core of my spiritual life: finding out what still worked, what didn’t, and letting the garbage go. Bringing a similar methodology to this song showed me that it was a gentle call to prayer in the real world for Friar James.

· Now I had no idea what it meant to be a friar. As a young boy, I was a big fan of Robin Hood – so I knew that Friar Tuck added comic relief to the drama – but I had no idea what a friar did or how he differed from a monk?

· Fr. Richard Rohr teaches that Franciscans are not monks, they are friars, those who are called to care for the whole community. A monk is cloistered – living a life of prayer for the world within a discrete community that is set apart from others – while a friar freely moves throughout the city sharing love, food, shelter, presence, and encouragement.

Most friars are neither priests nor pastors, they are simply brothers - Frère Jacques – equals living in the world with love and service to all without rank, authority, or hierarchy. That was my first discovery – and being a New Age friar fit my emerging spiritual identity. The second was that the song asked Brother James if he was sleeping: dormez-vous? Are you awake, alive, and engaged, or, are you out of it? Sleepwalking or distracted because you’re too busy to know what’s really going on?

If you are dozing, and it happens to us all, just listen, listen to the gentle bells of Matins: sonnez les matines. There’s music to bring you into the morning's first office of prayer. So come, Brother James, come in gentleness to join the others, lending your voice and presence to the day. No guilt or shame, ok? No false sense of importance or drama either. Just awaken to the bells of Matins and take your place. What a life-giving, tender-hearted spirituality in this little song: bells and prayer, music and silence before sharing yourself with the people of God throughout the city. This felt like a gift to me – a revelation – much like the way St. Paul spoke in this morning’s first reading as he prayed that his sisters and brothers might see with the eyes of their hearts: I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Source of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and insight, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may trust the hope to which God has called you… 

That is foundational to the Feast of the Ascension – seeing with the eyes of the heart – being awake and aware of the presence of Christ that illuminates creation. Each liturgical season in the Christian year teaches us something about how to go deeper into God’s loving presence. As I’ve said before, Advent takes us into the silent darkness of waiting in anticipation, Christmas and Epiphany flood our senses with comfort and joy. Lent leads us into the dark waiting of grief before revealing the unexpected blessing of new life on Easter. The pilgrimage of 50 days in-between Easter and Pentecost is yet another time of kinesthetic learning where we wait again for guidance in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; this time we wait by contemplating the foolishness of Christ, the upside-down nature of the kingdom, what some call the Paschal Mystery where new possibilities emerge from out of the embrace of human suffering and God’s gifts. 

The gospel for today puts it like this: After his death, Jesus presented himself alive to his friends in many different settings over a period of forty days. In face-to-face meetings, he talked to them about things concerning the kingdom of God. As they met and ate meals together, he told them that they were on no account to leave Jerusalem but “must wait for what the Father promised: the promise you heard from me, God’s power from on high. John used water, but soon you will be baptized by the Spirit. Then, one way of engaging the presence of Jesus ended, it appeared as if he rose into the sky, and a new time of wonder washed over the disciples: quit staring up at the empty sky, the angels said, and starting figuring out how you are going to go out into the world again to share Christ’s tender love with those outside the community. That’s just what Jesus had said: God has called me to com-mission you: Go out to everyone you meet, far and near, with this way of life, marking them with signs of the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you – and I will be with you always and in all ways.

The content of contemplation between Easter and Pentecost is the new commandment: love one another as I have loved you. Jesus embodied this by washing the feet of his disciples, enduring the Cross with a mystical trust in God’s grace, and then reminding his friends through prayer and reflection on the scriptures of all the ways God shares compassion for real live, hurting human beings. The Ascension announces that now is the season to figure out how to take Christ’s healing into the world using our lives. You are not me and you can’t do what I did, Jesus told his friends, but you are you – blessed and beloved of God – and you must figure out how this love becomes flesh through your thoughts, words and deeds.

In the liturgical calendar that’s what the nine days between the Feast of the Ascension and Pentecost represent: after learning, praying and practicing the essence of trusting God through the vulnerability of foot-washing, now we are called to go beyond the safety of our sanctuaries and homes. The work of the Ascension is discerning how our gifts can best bring Christ’s love to life in our ordinary circumstances. I think that’s why Frère Jacques grabbed me so profoundly. It validated that I was now more of a friar than a pastor in these later days of ministry – and invited me to use my gifts of music, presence and prayer throughout the city – beyond the confines of professional expectations, titles, and institutions. A poem by the late Denise Levertov she calls “The Gift” speaks to this truth:

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

Frère Jacques was an answer, of sorts, making it clear that it was time for Brother James to wake up, honor the tender call to prayer and music floating throughout the world, and join in the full celebration of live. I didn’t know it at the time, but the opening words of Matins are the same ones I use to start this gathering every week. From Psalm 51: O Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Give to me the joy of your saving help again and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit. All glory be to the undivided Trinity: Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and every shall be, world without end. Amen. The heart and soul of the Feast of the Ascension is discerning what unique gifts God has entrusted to us and how to share them to strengthen compassion?

Jesus promises that if we trust the Spirit to show up at the right time, the Spirit will show us how best to do this – meaning we can let go of our anxieties because now we’ll be acting on God’s timetable. One wise old soul put it like this: Your calling by the Spirit is wherever your greatest joy intersects with the world’s greatest need. Our life in the world must be authentic and salvific for both you and creation. No more guilt tripping by the church. No more exhaustion from resentment either; just your greatest joy embracing the world’s greatest need. I am certain that’s what Jesus meant when he said: Follow me, I will fill you with peace as you learn to live into the unforced rhythms of grace. Or as we used to say: Come unto me all ye who are tired and heavy laden and I will give you rest. I rather like the way Glennon Doyle put it in a short poem: “Life cannot be handled. The secret is simply to show-up. It’s about witnessing it all – even the pain – and letting it touch you and make you not harder, but more tender. Showing up, feeling it all – this is my new kind of prayer. I call it praying attention, and it’s how, for me, everything turns holy.”

· And here’s the most startling blessing born of Christ’s grace and freedom that I have experienced: the more I trusted, the more pondered how to use my gifts for the love of God, the more I wept. Now, let me tell you, I would never have called my tears a gift from God. For most of my life I’ve HATED how easily I cry: my father used to ridicule me about it when I was a teen because I would weep when I was happy and cry when I was sad; quietly shed tears of joy when beauty took me by surprise – in a song, a poem or a movie – or sob keen when grief, anguish, or injustice washed over me.

· In my house, tears were considered a sign of weakness for a boy. So, while I could never stop them, I learned to hide them. Bury them and deny the. But three Roman Catholic priests in three different places kept encouraging me to make peace with my tears – these were men who were strong and tender, real and faithful, open even in their wounds – and they kept telling me that there was a blessing to receive in this peculiar gift.

Fr. Richard Rohr of New Mexico put it like this: Unless you somehow let yourself weep over your own phoniness, hypocrisy, and woundedness, you probably will not let go of the first half of life. The gift of tears helps you embrace the mystery of paradox, of that which can't be fixed, which can't be made right, which can't be controlled, and which doesn't make sense. But if you don't allow this needed disappointment to well up within you, if you surround yourself with your orthodoxies and your certitudes and your belief that you're the best, frankly, you will stay in the first half of life forever and never fall into the Great Mercy. Many religious people never allow themselves to "fall," while many sinners fall and rise again.

Fr. Edward Hays at Shantivanum House in Kansas wrote: Tears are the prayer-beads of men and women because they arise from a fullness of the heart. Such an overflowing can be the result of great sorrow, or else great joy. Tears appear as an expression of the heart – and seeing with the eyes of the heart is always good prayer – so that makes tears one of the ways we worship God. The prayer of our tears are not manufactured, manicured, memorized or controlled… they are free and flowing… making tears sacraments of humility. Fr. Ed used to tell a story about a reporter interviewing an old, Indian guru about his work in giving spiritual guidance to Americans. “What is the first thing you try to teach Americans?” the reporter asked. And the old man answered, “I try to teach them how to cry again.”

And Fr. Jim O’Donnell of Cleveland, a mentor and spiritual director, said: James, Jesus wept – and that should be all the permission you need to make peace with your own tears - but probably you won’t until you make a confession. So, the sooner you do so, the quicker you’ll be able to honor the blessing of those tears. And Fr. Jim was right: my first formal confession took place during Lent at Fr. Jim’s retreat center house. It unlocked such a reservoir of tears that they poured out of me for 30 minutes only to make room for a joy that was sublime. I get it when the old hymn sings: I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.

Tears became for me a sacrament of humility and the prayer beads of a full heart. When Jesus wept over the death of Lazarus, he gave form to what compassion means in the midst of sorrow. When St. Paul wept, he showed us the way out of religious rigidity and into the unforced rhythms of grace. When Magdalene wept, she first embodied a full-hearted prayer that was simultaneously sensual and salvific, and then gave us an expression of gratitude as the apostle to the apostles. When St. Peter wept, first he remembered his tears of fear that caused him to betray Jesus; as he owned his tears of shame that compelled him to run and hide, Christ accepted all of those tears and they became tears of joy and in the forgiveness of Easter. When my children wept, they opened my heart and called me to comfort their hurts. When my grandchildren weep, it breaks my heart – especially now when I can’t hold them – and can only hear their tears virtually. And when my wife weeps, it is a summons to stop whatever I’m doing and pay attention because in that moment her tears are the only thing that matters.

Each of these saints have taught me a little about praying the sacrament of humility through their tears. They have helped me honor my own tears, too. Frederick Buechner put it like this in his little book, Telling the Truth: 

YOU NEVER KNOW what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure: Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next. 

So, let me add two more names to my list of mentors in weeping: Michael Daniels and Lou Reed. They both broke open my heart in different ways. Driving back to Massachusetts after attending a jazz and liturgy workshop in Cleveland, someone in the back of our van said, “Oh, damn, Lou Reed just died.” We were at a rest stop on Interstate 90 outside of Buffalo and it took a few seconds to register: “Lou Reed just died.” It was Sunday, October 27, 2013. I grew up with Lou Reed and the Velvets. Not literally as part of Andy Warhol’s Village scene, nor figuratively as part of that pale tribe of misfits who “only came out at night.” But chronologically and aesthetically, I came of age with those musicians and felt that they expressed something dark and alive in my psyche. I bought their first LP – the one with a banana on the cover – one afternoon after submitting to a forced haircut back in June 1967. It was suburban CT in the summer of love.

Today I ask myself, “What the hell did I know about ‘waitin’ for my man with 26 dollars in my hand up on Lexington and 125th Street back then?” But back then, somehow, I got it – or part of it. Not the smack or the grit. But the aching energy behind those pounding guitars sounded a whole lot like my own throbbing emptiness. And when I played Lou Reed alongside “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles – both were released in the same month – something told me this was truth. This music made me cry. I didn’t know words like paradox or the via negativa in the ninth grade, but I did know that something was going on that helped me live even as I hurt.

And now Lou was dead. It was disorienting. He had been my guide into genre and gender bending. He raged against the same sentimentality that I saw sucking the soul out of the religion I loved. He encouraged me to “take a walk on the wild side” when I really didn’t know what that meant. He prophesized against eco-disaster and class war, pseudo-mystical cheap sex and the collapse of culture with the cry: “you need a bus load of faith to get by!” When my sister, Linda, was shriveling on the vine of life with cancer of the cervix and radiation ate her alive, I wore out Lou’s “Magic and Loss” cassette driving between Cleveland and Walter Reed Hospital.

Howling along as the master I lamented: “What good is seeing eye chocolate, what good’s a computerized rose? What good is cancer in April, no good – no good at all.” For decades, Lou Reed had been one of my spiritual anchors – and now he was gone. Later that same night, as if by design, I learned via email that another old friend from Cleveland, Michael Daniels, was also six feet under as well. I met Michael one nasty, sleeting night on Cleveland’s West Side. My church office had received a call that Cheryl Daniels' father had died and she wanted to plan a memorial service. We set up a pastoral visit and I headed off into one of the rougher public housing projects.

When I found their darkened house both residents were trashed: Mike let me in and stumbled back to his recliner while Cheryl shouted a garbled welcome from the bathroom. There was garbage, newspapers, pizza boxes, and unopened mail everywhere. As Michael fumbled around to clean off the sofa for me, and search for his missing cigarettes, a revolver fell to the floor from under more unopened mail – and he never batted an eye. I was certain I would never get out of there alive. Still, I sat on the sofa and waited – waited for ten excruciating minutes of silence – while the blackest man I had ever met stared at me and smoked cigarettes with his gun on the floor. Cheryl eventually appeared and somehow amidst the liquor, smoke, and unmentioned pistol, we planned a memorial service. Three days later the liturgy came and went, and I wondered if I would ever see anyone from the Daniels' clan again.

It often happens with people wrestling with grief and addiction: they show up in the life of a church only to disappear after the crisis passes. They come and go without any conscious plan – getting what they need for the moment - and moving on. After a few weeks, that’s what I thought would be true for Mike and Cheryl. Ten months later, however, Michael called me in tears saying that Cheryl had disappeared. She’d been treated for bipolar disorder and after quitting her meds had gone missing. We searched bus stops and homeless shelters, drove down dark streets and checked-out popular dumpsters for a few nights.

Eventually she showed up in the psych ward of the county hospital just around the corner from our church. In time, she was released, but her new meds made her almost catatonic. People from church helped them move into a new apartment after being evicted from public housing. And things seemed to be getting better. Six days after the move though I got another frantic call from Michael saying he had just been arrested. When I got to the city jail he told me that when he’d gone out that morning for cigarettes, Cheryl put his gun into her mouth and killed herself. “That God-damn gun again!” I thought to myself as he confessed that she had gone off her meds one more time and he didn’t know what to do. Afternoon slid into evening as I waited with Mike until, finally, the police determined that Cheryl’s death was suicide. I was free to take Mike home. Only now he had no home – during his incarceration all his belongings had been thrown out the window on to the front lawn by his landlord. And by the time we got to his address, the junkies and scavengers had ravaged through everything of value and Michael had been evicted once again.

With nowhere else to go and in shock over his wife's death, I took him home with me, put a mat-tress on our living room floor, and begged my wife and children to be patient. They were understandably nervous having an alcoholic, homeless stranger sleeping on their living room. But he stayed for another few days until a room in a transitional housing dorm opened up. One of the non-negotiables in the shelter was that everyone stayed clean. Mike managed a white-knuckled sobriety for three days but fell off the wagon one afternoon thinking he could fake-out his hosts. They gave him one last chance. But the day after Cheryl was buried, he blew it again and was kicked out of this port of last resort. More tears and shame followed as we sat in my church office. I wept with him because now we both had run out of options. At some point I recall saying some-thing like: Man, the time has come to make a choice. I can't bring you back to my house and I can’t leave you here. So, either we say good-bye right now, walk away from one another and who knows what the hell happens next? Or, I drive you to the detox unit right around the corner and maybe we can start again.

With almost no hesitation Michael said, "I done lost EVERYTHING I loved already... just take me to there. It can't be any worse than this." Twenty-eight days later, he came out clean and sober – and stayed clean and sober for twenty more years. On the anniversary of his sobriety, Michael would call me making jokes that the only reason he went to rehab with me that night was because I was the blackest white man he ever knew. A brother. "Dude, I know you are passing" he laughed. "But your secret is safe with me; just never forget I know you be black.” This man who once terrified me to my core was now making jokes with me. Together through our tears he had come to trust me – and I him – and beyond the divides of race and class those tears led us into a friendship of tender-ness. And now he was gone – both Lou and Michael were dead – on the same day.

It’s funny in an odd way how tragedy can lead to healing, but those two deaths gave me permission to trust what all my mentors in weeping had said. So, I wept for those guys – really wept – and those tears connected me to all the tears I hadn’t shed for the ones I had loved and lost over 40 years of ministry. And the more I wept, the better I felt. I wasn’t hiding them anymore and found myself weeping again when a hymn touched me or the grocery clerk smiled at me on a hard day. I cried in terror and gratitude when our first daughter greeted us in her hospital room after the birth of our first grandchild. As I made a pilgrimage through that reservoir of tears, my tears freed me from a ton bull shit – mine and others – because now life was just too precious and short to do otherwise.

And I’m telling you this long-winded story right now because during this pandemic, even as one phase winds down but the rest roars on in all its life-defying uncertainties, I know many of you have been weeping, too. Some are exhausted from all the tears you’ve already shed while others are just getting started. And I suspect that if we’re honest a whole lot more of us will be weeping this week-end in solidarity and grief over the 100,000 American dead. So, what I want you to know, wherever you on this journey, that your tears are sacred. Holy. And part of God’s healing for you.

This time is like the uncertain in-between time of the Ascension and Pentecost. The first followers of Jesus were just as unnerved by this in-between time as we are right now. They had been assured that Jesus would be with them always. But now he was gone – they were left on their own – and they didn’t know what would happen next. In those in-between days, the early believers felt every bit as unsettled and anxious as we ourselves. And our tears are much like theirs. So, let me say this as clearly and tenderly as possible: “Our tears right now are the prayerful activity of mature women and men searching for the presence of God.” Beloved, I want you to know that the divine is with us in these tears. Fr. Ed once wrote: If we find in Jesus a pattern for our own prayer and way of living, if his love and grace makes sense to us – and we remember that he prayed a prayer of tears over the city of Jerusalem, at the tomb of his dear friend Lazarus and probably countless times not recorded but ever so real when he walked and lived among us – like when his friend was married at the wedding in Cana, or during that mystical meal he shared after washing his disciples’ feet, and what about in the garden when he was abandoned and facing certain death…then we must know that our tears are bathed in the holy… Our tears, like those of Jesus, show us what it means to be fully alive, fully compassionate, fully grounded in reality.

I trust that the prayers of our tears are heard and honored by God. Right now in America our old myth is dying – and as David Brooks wrote in the NY Times: “something more profound is taking place in that death. We are undergoing a more permanent shift in national consciousness, a true reconstruction of meanings, symbols, values, and narratives. If the old American creed grew up in an atmosphere of assumed security and liberty, the new one is growing up in an atmosphere of vulnerability and precariousness… and we are learning to value community over individualism, being connected over autonomy… and the new American identity that is growing up in the shadow of the plague celebrates our shared vulnerability, the humility that comes with an understanding of the precariousness of life, and a fierce solidarity that emerges during a long struggle against an invading force.” As much as it hurts, I give thanks for our shared tears.

It has taken me the better part of 50 years to make peace with them – and sometimes I am more at peace with them than at others – but I know they connect heaven to earth and the holy to our humanity in a sacrament of humility. So, as you ponder this, let me play for you my reworking of an old Lou Reed song: “Sweet Jane.” He used to do it hard, punching out the lyrics under a raunchy rhythm section that cut like a knife. The words, however, were tender. They were humble and I think they sometimes got lost in the noise. So, as I listened to them – and reclaimed their sweet message – they, too became another prayer for me like old Frère Jacques. Take a moment and see what bubbles up for you now…

Standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand
Jack’s in his corset, Jane’s in her vest and me, me I’m in a rock and roll band
Ridin’ in a Stuz Bearcat, slim, o, those were different times
All the poets, they studied rules and verse, and the ladies rolled their eyes
Sweet Jane…

Now Jack he is a banker, and Jane she is a clerk
And both of them save their money, honey, when they come home from work
Sitting by the fire, the radio it plays, little classical music for you kids,
And if you listen closely, you can hear Jacky say:
Sweet Jane…

Some people like to go out dancing, others like us we gotta work
And there’s even some evil mothers who’ll tell you life is made from dirt
That women never really faint, that villains always roll their eyes,
That children are the only ones who blush and life is just to die

But anyone who ever had a heart wouldn’t turn around and break it
Anyone who’s ever played a part would turn around and hate it
Anyone who’s ever had a dream, anyone who’s ever played a part
Anyone who’s ever been lonely, anyone who’s ever slit apart
You’re waiting, waiting down and ally – you’re waiting all alone
You’re waiting down the corner so you can come back home
Sweet Jane