2) Make certain to get outside and breathe in some fresh air because Mother Nature is a time-tested healer. Autumn is a season of spiritual transition and we are being asked to learn to let go: so be like the leaves in the NE and recognize that the old order is dying and something new is about to be born that is beyond our control. But, please, take time to be still - and breathe.
3) Stay in touch with those you love - and make the effort to go the extra mile. Love heals all wounds. All fears. All anxieties. Not perfectly. And not always the way we want. But, in the long run, in the ways we need. (Oh yes, and BLOCK all trolls as they will eat your heart and wear out your soul.)
4) Try to limit your time with so-called news to one hour every day. Total. Don't cheat. Take in what is happening. Hold it close in prayer. And then let it go - any more time with the craziness is like worry which some have called praying for something bad to happen.
Now that the Season of Creation has come to a close - the new liturgical season
celebrated ecumenically as a way to deepen human solidarity with the holy throughout the cosmos - those who join me for our Sunday morning reflections on FB live will return to readings from the Common Lectionary of the Ecumenical Church. This practice not only grounds us the shared Bible texts being used for worship throughout the world, but also invites us into a vision and rhythm of life greater than our own. Without this window into the bigger picture, it is too easy for me to become self-absorbed and/or overwhelmed by the events surrounding me. Being connected to sisters and brothers throughout the world in prayer, study, and the practice of sharing common readings in worship helps nurture a measure of stillness and solidarity within.
Two Celtic songs from the Wild Goose Collective affiliated with the Community of Iona spoke to me this morning in prayer. Textually and melodically these songs reunited my being with the wider creation. The first, an interpretation of Psalm 138 for the opening of Morning Prayer, starts with these words:
I shall praise you, O God, from my soul
Though my song be at odds with the will of earthly gods:
I shall praise you, O God, from my soul.
The second, a contemporary hymn set to a traditional Celtic melody, was equally counter cultural:
Don't tell me of a faith that fears to face the world around;
Don't dull my mind with fickle thoughts of grace without a ground.
I need to know that God is real, I need to know that Christ can feel the need to touch and love and heal the world - including me!
Don't speak of piety and prayers divorced from human need;
Don't talk of spirit without flesh like harvest without seed.
Last night I read in Steven Chase's fascinating and dense work, Nature as Spiritual Practice, of the subtle but real distinctions between the words earth, nature, and creation. Each celebrates connections, yet each also focuses attention on discrete specialties as well. What I am learning to see is how layer upon layer of creation shares a living inter-connection between things seen and those experienced by faith. Between flora and fauna in nature and humankind on earth. Between we who dwell on earth and the sacred throughout the cosmos. I suspect my growing appreciation for the intricate ways all of life is united will inform Sunday's meditation. I am going to walk around with this notion for another day before beginning my Scripture study and intentional writing. Besides, today there's outdoor work to be done in the sun before the anticipated rains of tomorrow.
Today, like many of you, my soul is troubled: my heart is at war with itself, my
head is filled with questions and fears, my flesh feels unsettled – angry and exhausted – at the same time. To be a person of faith at this moment in the United States is to stand in solidarity with the wounded, the poor, the forgotten, discarded, abused, and powerless people of our nation and present our bodies as a living sacrifice – a humble, sacred alternative to the calculated attacks of 21st century fascism, the desperate violence of white supremacists, and the spiritual and emotional abuse the President and his ilk use to break our spirits. It is a demanding and sacred summons in the simplest season – and has become exponentially more complicated now that the current residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have been stricken with the plague.
Church historian, Diana Butler Bass, recently wrote that what we experienced on national television in the behavior and rhetoric of Donald Trump is the distilled essence of a cruel, dangerous, and evil person. He not only assaulted us all, he turned us into his victims. “Words are powerful,” Bass writes:
They cut the heart. They silence opponents. They force others to submit. The biblical wisdom tradition insists that words can nurture or destroy… and Donald Trump weaponized words, intending to “break the spirit” of Joe Biden, of Chris Wallace, of those watching, and even America’s democratic traditions. Not only was it mean and rude and unfair and cruel, but most of us intuited that the verbal violence was sinful. It was a purposeful exercise in evil.
No wonder so many of us could not sleep that night – or even still – we had been assaulted. Bass adds:
These kinds of attacks wound on several levels, leaving immediate bruises and long-term trauma. In the short-term, they are like gut punches, taking our breath away. We are knocked off our feet; we feel confused and disoriented. Longer term trauma — sleeplessness, panic attacks, depression — can set in, too.On a spiritual level, these attacks unmoor us, undermining our capacity to love our neighbors, causing us to doubt ourselves and God. And that’s why) it is necessary to name what happened on Tuesday night honestly — an act of verbal evil on the part of the President – against his opponent, the process, and the American people.
When I try to grasp what it means for me to embody Christ’s love within this maelstrom of disorder and deceit, I’m drawn again to the witness of that wounded healer some of us know as Henri Nouwen. He was a gentle, broken man, often overcome with anxiety and shame, who yearned to be at peace with God and his neighbors. And if I might summarize his tumultuous journey of faith in one sentence, Nouwen came to see that people of faith are “constantly invited to overcome their neighbor’s fear by entering into it with them, and to find within the fellowship of suffering our own way to freedom.” In relationship. In compassion. In tenderness together.
Alone we feel immobilized – frozen in feelings beyond our comprehension – but when they can be shared in love and trust, they thaw out and become our way into peace. Part of the foolishness of God – the wisdom of the Cross – is that the fears and wounds of another are paradoxically the way into our own healing as well as theirs. Nouwen called this the charism of a wounded healer, where “the loneliness and despair of another awakens in ourselves similar pains within our own hearts” and we begin to see that the suffering of another cannot be healed or taken away without entering into it. As Dr. King told us: We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny and whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Pointing to Jesus, a revolutionary for compassion, who never offered the world an ideology – only himself – Nouwen says that when Christ’s friends were distraught after the Cross, hiding in an upper room in Jerusalem from both the soldiers of the empire and the religious zealots of his culture, Jesus appeared to them saying: “Peace I leave you, my peace I give unto you.” His presence – his solidarity with their trauma – was essential in that moment.
They were alone and afraid, so he adds, “I leave you peace not as the world gives, but as I embody it, so that your hearts need not be troubled or afraid.” In their time of need Jesus offered himself, his companionship, make it clear that sharing our humanity in solidarity is God’s sacred antidote to isolation, anxiety, and the trauma of abuse. The prayer of St. Francis renders poetically the paradox of the wounded healer who discovers that consoling another creates solace for all, that giving to others is how we receive, that pardoning becomes our entry into forgiveness, that listening without judgment reveals the essence of the holy, and that dying to self becomes the way of new life within God’s peace.
Make me an instrument of your peace, O Lord:
where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light and where there is sadness, joy.
By myself I cannot overcome my alienation. That’s why the song says WE shall overcome. We need each other. When I started these live cast reflections 29 weeks ago, it was to help another local congregation during their transition. But after a few weeks it dawned on me that in this era of self-quarantine and solitude, I needed to be in relationship and conversation about what was taking place as much as anyone else. I needed to reach out to you and those I love both to be consoled as well as to consolation. Even virtually, I’ve experienced how the paradox of presence brings me a measure of peace as I experience Christ with you. Until the lockdown, I never took Jesus seriously when he claimed that he would be among us whenever two or three gathered in his love. Well, sometimes, that’s all there is on a Sunday morning, right – two or three gathered in his name – and that’s just fine! Over these past seven months I’ve learned that the charism of the wounded healer trusts our fragility to be one of the ways we experience God’s strength. St. Paul used to say to the first faith communities in your weakness and emptiness, God offers a fullness beyond human comprehension.
The more you accept your need for companionship, the more your heart opens to the living spiritual presence of Jesus made flesh through other people. But if you act like you’re the self-sufficient center of the universe, the promised peace of Jesus simply seems absurd. Especially if your identity is indebted, embedded, or addicted to Empire where you become a human do-ing instead of a human be-ing. St. Paul’s first letter to the struggling community in Corinth put it like this:
The message of the cross is foolishness to those enmeshed in the status quo of Empire, but to us who are being made whole by grace, the Cross is the power of God. In the upside-down ways of the Lord, when the world did not grasp God’s love in nature or reason, God decided, through the Cross, to reveal a sacred mystery to the world. Those who would only trust tradition continued to demand signs that they could control while those with sophisticated training desired rational explanations and all we proclaimed was Christ crucified and risen, a stumbling block to tradition and foolishness to conventional thinking.
It is my growing conviction that right now God is once again whispering to us: let Christ’s peace fill your hearts beyond trouble and fear. Take up the invitation to be a wounded healer who honors both the promise and the pain of each day. For in this vulnerability, I will bring you the strength and peace to make it through yet another day by faith.
Do you recall how Mary Oliver put it in “Wild Geese?” Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine? Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains, and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
The apostle Paul’s insights, Henri Nouwen’s charism, the poetry of both St. Franci
s and St. Mary Oliver all insist that the peace that passes all understanding becomes flesh whenever we reach out beyond ourselves to another in trust and tenderness. The early church used to speak of this as “learning to live and walk by faith not by sight.”
That means practicing trust by resting our fears within God’s strength not our own efforts. When the weakness of our flesh, the foolishness of our faith, the limitations of our power, even the dread of our hearts are placed into God’s love, then we discover the solace of the Holy Spirit taking up residence within. When we risk being empty, then we can be filled. I think that’s what Jesus was trying to tell us in the Sermon on the Mount – and this becomes clear in Eugene Peterson’s reworking of St. Matthew: You are blessed when you’re at the end of your rope - for with less of you there is more room for God. You’re blessed, too when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you: only then are you ready to let the one MOST dear to you embrace you with grace.
The Christian educator, Gertrud Mueller-Nelson, observes something similar when she notes that “whenever we become ‘bankrupt’ or have no defenses left to shield us from reality, the possibility of transformation becomes possible… Too much money, too much comfort, power, good looks, charm and outward success all mask our inner poverty of spirit. That’s why Jesus says losing one defense after another, bit by bit, is a blessing.” (Here We All Dwell Free, p.32)
Think of St. Paul: in his certainty, he became a spiritual terrorist; but when he was strike blind and vulnerable became a servant of grace and peace. He’s speaking from experience in Romans 8 when he says: God searches our hearts and knows what is the mind of the Spirit; so when the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs to deep for human words, we’re being filled with God’s love. That’s why we can trust that all things work together for good for those who love God. Not that all things ARE good – just that God can transform even death into new life for the sake of love. Knowing this, experiencing it myself within my own flesh, I must tell you if God is for us like this, who can be against us? No wonder I am convinced that neither death nor life, angels nor rulers, things present nor things to come, not powers, height, depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Now this didn’t happen in a vacuum – Paul wasn’t left by himself to figure out how God’s love was transforming him from hatred into peace-making – that would’ve been cruel. No, when Paul’s hard heart was broken open by the presence of Christ’s tenderness on the road to Damascus, God sent a servant by the name of Ananias to care for him, to nourish him physically and spiritually in his own home as Paul’s blindness was being healed. To pray with and for him during this convalescence and then to baptize him into a new way of living into God’s love. And while we don’t know the details of what happened next, we DO know that for the next three years Paul was nurtured by others in the way of Jesus. He was NOT left alone. Companions, who became for Paul the living presence of Jesus, renewed him inside and out and trained him to become yet another wounded healer.
This is much like what happened to St. Francis some eleven hundred years later. Francis entered the world as the privileged son of an Italian merchant who lived the life of a self-centered playboy. But when he was wounded during one of the crusades and spent the next year in prison before his father bailed him out, he sensed the presence of Christ visiting him in his lonely despair. And when this young hotshot regained his strength, he announced that Jesus had asked him to rebuild his church – and that’s what Francis literally did – stone by stone, step by step, he rebuilt the ruins of San Damiano into a chapel for the poor. Once again, it was the living, loving presence of Jesus, then a cadre of followers who became Franciscans, and eventually all of creation itself – think Brother Sun, Sister Moon and his kinship with animals and nature – that healed Francis. For such is the foolish, transformational, mystical grace of deep incarnation that reveals God’s strength to us in our weakness and empowers us by the Spirit to become wounded healers for the glory of God.
For a whole month we’ve been listening to foolish wisdom of the Lord through the non-linear insights of trees and rivers, wilderness and soil. Softly and tenderly the season of creation asks us to trust the charism of the wounded healer more than the power of Empire and rules that govern the status quo. Eco-theologian and spiritual director at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Minnesota, Steven Chase, suggests that if we’re paying attention the cosmos reveals God’s foolish, paradoxical, healing to us over and over. He writes, “creation rejoices and mourns - it trains our souls through silence - opens our eyes to awe – and overwhelms our senses with the sensuality of the sacred. Creation is inebriated with love, intoxicated with longing and joy, and in constant praise for its Creator.” For five weeks the presence of God in nature has been luring us into giving up the ways we ordinarily measure value, worth, and meaning to simply receive the glory of God as it has been given to us in creation and community.
A beloved Zen teacher in my life, the late Michael Daniels of blessed memory, was reborn from above when he got clean and sober. After years of losing a debilitating battle with a grisly addiction to alcohol, Michael was transformed from the inside out by accepting his weakness and trusting God’s love. And when he had some sobriety under his belt, he often told me, “James, you are too damned smart for your own good.” And when I challenged him his reply was: “You freakin’ intellectuals all believe you can think your way into grace and study your way into the peace that passes understanding.” He knew that was true for me because my study at church and home was filled with bookcases and stacks of magazines and newspapers.
So, he loved to slowly look at all those books before turning to silently smile at me
before saying, something like: “The truth of the Spirit is that you only get God’s peace by letting go. If there’s too much YOU inside, you squeeze the Lord outta business. To be filled by God, you gotta be empty – and none of these books are gonna save your over-educated and sorry ass.” What a guy – what chutzpah – I was the one who got him into treat for God’s sake. But Michael was right.
He never used the word paradox – he didn’t know the Paschal Mystery or the foolish wisdom of the Cross from a whole in the ground – he just knew that after he hit rock bottom and became so sick and tired of being sick and tired that it was either death or trust that God was stronger than he was that he chose to let God be God so that he didn’t have to be. And he became a new and loving creation as a wounded healer.
Of course, he still had his demons and troubles. I had the privilege of receiving several of what AA calls the fourth and fifth steps in the 12 Step Process. Essentially they are confession and absolution. So I know the ups and downs. But when Michael worked the program – and he did – when he reached out to others when he was afraid or in trouble and together they both reached out to God however they under-stood the One who is Holy – one more day became clean and sober and manageable and even sacred to this scrappy little saint. And he was one happy dude. I miss him a lot and give thanks that God brought St. Michael into my life.
And what was true for Michael – and the first disciples and St. Paul and St. Francis and so many others – is true for us right now in the morass of the pandemic, an ecological catastrophe and America’s most serious racial reckoning in 50 years. We, too, can live in the paradoxical tension of our pain and God’s peace as reasonably happy dudes and dudesses if we’re open to becoming wounded healers. More than ever before it’s got to be just ONE day at a time right now – anything more is just overwhelming. So let me ask you to sing this little tune called One Day at a Time with me as we get ready for Holy Communion and the blessing of our pets. Another wounded healer by the name of Willie Nelson wrote it a long time ago. I first heard Joan Baez sing is and I think it’s the perfect prayer for us right now…
"May the fertility of silence give life and power to our words and deeds, O Lord, give us hope." Steven Chase includes this Lenten antiphon in his engaging and informative book: Nature as Spiritual Practice. Incrementally I am making my way through it this fall (and most likely winter, too.) It is both an extended theological meditation on what Scripture in the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches about nature, and, a collection of contemplative practices to lead us deeper into being in nature as an embodied prayer. "Throughout this book," Chase writes, "we will see how Scripture is saturated on virtually every page with the Creator's creation. Yet even people very familiar with Scripture often miss this central role that creation plays. (but) The earth/creation/nature is, in fact, a major character in the drama of God's people." (p. 13) An excerpt from the wisdom book of Job is illustrative:
But ask the animals and they will teach you;
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
Ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea and they will declare to you.
Job 12: 7-8
Creation rejoices and mourns - it teaches and evokes silence in our being - it opens our eyes to awe and overwhelms our senses with power. "Creation is inebriated with love, intoxicated with longing and joy, in constant praise for its Creator... it is also a place of mourning as Paul says in Romans 8, actively groaning, in bondage to decay. Perhaps," Chase asks carefully, "this is the very reason - that creation itself is so practiced in mourning - that enables nature to become a place of consolation that so willingly and without condition absorbs human grief, loss and pain." I know this to be true but have never considered that it is one of the intrinsic attributes of nature: God has infused it with a solidarity born of suffering. Certainly this is part of what Wendell Berry discerns in his poem, "The Peace of Wild Things." (Listen to the author read it here:https://onbeing.org/
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.
Yesterday, try as I might, I was only able to make a small dent in the debris of bracken: my old back just wouldn't/couldn't keep on lifting. So, with a measure of sad resignation, I accepted my limits for the day and called it quits. We hope to find some younger, stronger bodies able to handle the load over the next few weeks. Until then, however, I will chip away at the weeds, vines, rotten wood, and muck that needs to be cleared away. The magnitude of this task is a good mentor in the school of humility: I really do have limits - more and more as I ripen - and tenderness demands that I honor these limits. Chase frames this in a unique way:
Take a closer look around you: what is 'ripe for harvesting?' Another way to put this metaphor plainly is: what do you experience as sacred (ripe) now? How can you be present to creation in both her ecological and sacramental realities? (p. 15)
My friend the sugar maple, queen of the wetlands, continues to speak to me about ripening into the sacred as she matures this fall. In spring, she did the slow work of welcoming the warmth into her roots so that sap might patiently rise up her trunk and into her boughs. Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants that we can learn when a tree is starting to transition from a winter's rest into the slow work of spring by noticing when the snow has melted around the tree's base. This when the tree tells us spring is really coming. By May in these parts, new leaves have formed and the maple's skeleton is clothed in fine green splendor. Throughout the summer she welcomes our carbon dioxide and returns it with oxygen in a symbiotic relationship that we depend on. And then, after the exuberance of summer has passed, this sugar maple starts to slowly shut down: the sap calmly returns to the core, the leaves lose their chlorophyll, and as they die their true color is revealed. If I am not paying careful attention, I am startled by this dramatic truth as her vibrant yellows seem to show up overnight.
This year, since I have been photographing her for a while as one of my meditations, I've noticed the subtle changes: the sugar maple is showing me how to be fully present (although I have a LONG ways to go.) Here is what she has shared over the course of just one week.
With our tomato plants hanging upside down in the basement (in the hope that a modest sacred ripening will occur) and our herbs sheltered inside around the sun room, I am starting to practice part of this season's spiritual wisdom: sacred transition. I still must replant the gladiolas bulbs. And turn over the garden bed with a bit of compost. Now I need to walk around the house and plug up two small holes that just scream WELCOME to the field mice before tomorrow's storms. How right did Robert Frost get it when he crafted this poem?
"It is the nature of a stone to be satisfied," wrote Mary Oliver. "It is the nature of a
river to want to be somewhere else." My soul is clearly akin to the river and yet I am currently considering what is the nature of a tree? The wetlands behind our home is filled with these friends as well as marshland, grasses, milkweed, asters, and goldenrod. I can't help but sense that in this season of suspended river living, it is time for me to let these trees become my mentor and ponder their deepest nature.
One resource is Maria Popova: in her on-going, on-line reflections, Brain Pickings, she regular writes about trees - and her insights are inspirational. Weaving together quotes from a wide-ranging cadre of artists alongside her own artistic analysis, Popova shares a weekly prose tapestry that is warm, vibrant, creative, challenging, and eclectic. Where else can you find visual art, poetry, links to in-depth essays and book reviews like this?
Popova led me to Herman Hesse's wisdom as well as the musings of Walt Whitman. She has published poems I would never find by myself as well as art that is breath-taking. And she turned me on to Peter Wohlben's The Secret Lives of Trees (arriving later this week) who offers more than a few answers to my question.
Why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach the forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer... Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance.... for a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.
Part of their nature, so it would seem, has to do with sustaining community. Trees apparently care for one another. Popova writes that writer Macfarlane:
Marvels at the slim contour of empty space around each tree’s crown — a
phenomenon known as crown shyness, “whereby individual forest trees respect each other’s space, leaving slender running gaps between the end of one tree’s outermost leaves and the start of another’s.” In this, too, I see a poignant lesson in love, evocative of Rilke and what may be the greatest relationship advice ever committed to words: “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
Trees also posses a long-view of time. Norman MacLean confessed at the close of A River Runs Through It that he is, "haunted by waters." I am not haunted by rivers - they feed me with their constantly flowing freshness - but I may be haunted by trees. They arrest my attention with their gravitas. They speak to something deep within me about patience, listening, and loving as I age. Their changing colors invite me to pay attention to the spirituality of the season. And trees quietly ask me to stay rooted in caring about the common good. One additional insight from Macfarlane that energizes Popova likewise captures my attention, too:
Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: “we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.” As someone lucky to live in a long love, I recognize that gradual growing-towards and subterranean intertwining; the things that do not need to be said between us, the unspoken communication which can sometimes tilt troublingly towards silence, and the sharing of both happiness and pain. I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings. Theirs, too, seems to me then a version of love’s work.
I spent sometime yesterday afternoon clearing bracken from the wetlands closest to our garden. I am heading out to do so again soon for the grapevine and bramble threaten to choke other more tender-hearted flora. When my aching back would summon me to quit, I would take a few minutes just to soak in the view behind me where the aspen, sugar maples, birch, and pine trees put on a show mixing yellows and reds with orange and green. For a variety of reasons, our social interaction will continue to be limited for at least another year. Neither of us is prepared to venture far from home until a vaccination is part of everyday life. These hills and trees are starting to tell me that now is the time to grow where I have been planted. As fall unfolds, I'm going to slowly learn more about the nature of the trees all around me - and listen carefully to what they want me to know.
As noted many times before, autumn is my favorite time of year. yes it often feels a bit melancholy, but that can be sweet, too. After this morning's live-streaming, I spent a while cutting back the bracken in the wetlands. There is much more to do but my old back could only take so much. And when I looked up from my labors, I saw my old friend had continued to ripen. After a long nap, Di and I sat out on the deck for a late tea with oat bannocks and soaked up the beauty. W.S. Merwin expressed his encounters with the light of September like this:
When you are already here you appear to be only a name that tells of you whether you are present or not.
and for now it seems as though you are still summer still the high familiar endless summer yet with a glint of bronze in the chill mornings and the late yellow petals of the mullien fluttering on the stalks that lean over their broken shadows across the cracked ground
but they all know that you have come the seed heads of the sage the whispering birds with nowhere to hide you to keep you for later
you who fly with them
you who are neither before nor after you who arrive with blue plums that have fallen through the night perfect in the dew
Two days ago, when I first noticed what may be a sugar maple, she was just starting to respond to the frost.
Today, her beauty looks like this.
And there is more grandeur to come. A poem by Mark Doty gets it right tonight.
Grateful for their tour of the pharmacy, the first-grade class has drawn these pictures, each self-portrait taped to the window-glass, faces wide to the street, round and available, with parallel lines for hair.
I like this one best: Brian, whose attenuated name fills a quarter of the frame, stretched beside impossible legs descending from the ball of his torso, two long arms springing from that same central sphere. He breathes here,
on his page. It isn’t craft that makes this figure come alive; Brian draws just balls and lines, in wobbly crayon strokes. Why do some marks seem to thrill with life, possess a portion of the nervous energy in their maker’s hand?
That big curve of a smile reaches nearly to the rim of his face; he holds a towering ice cream, brown spheres teetering on their cone, a soda fountain gift half the length of him —as if it were the flag
of his own country held high by the unadorned black line of his arm. Such naked support for so much delight! Artless boy, he’s found a system of beauty: he shows us pleasure and what pleasure resists. The ice cream is delicious. He’s frail beside his relentless standard.
NOTE: Since retiring from public life I have tended not to offer political commentary. My work has been small: as a volunteer with L'Arche, as a spiritual director, as a grandfather and part-time musician. This reflection steps beyond my current restraints in the hope that, like Dan Rather, another perspective might be useful.
Since the death of Notorious RBG of blessed memory I have heard a great deal of genuine grief and sadness. For so many reasons, this encounter with loss resonates with me as Ginsberg not only advanced the cause of equal rights for women, she brought dignity, class, humor, intelligence together with a wise awareness of timing. She was a master of what the old Democratic Socialists used to call working from the left wing of the possible. For these gifts, I return thanks to God and mourn her departure from our fracture body politic.
There has also been a boatload of carping, whining, self-righteous posturing, and self-pity coming out of the Left alongside the calculated, muscle-flexing bravado of those on the Right. This blathering is disingenuous. Did people NOT know Justice Ginsberg was old and riddled with cancer? Have we become so mathematically challenged as to be unable to count Republican votes in the Senate? It all strikes me as an ugly caricature of how politics can pursue the common good but no longer does. Sadly, those on the Left appear addicted to doing the same old song and dance mime of liberal kabuki theater as they act the part of wounded and betrayed political innocents. Those on the Right publicly look shocked at being called out for stacking the Court with ideological lap dogs. They prevented President Obama's nominee from even the courtesy of a hearing 9 months before the 2016 election. And now claim only to be following the rule of law allowed by the Constitution. Privately, they're smirking in the shadows because once again they've outstrategized their opponents.
All of this disgusts me, but what I find galling is the feigned shock of those who should know better. Back in 1944, Reinhold Niebuhr hit the nail on the head in his Children of Light, Children of Darkness saying out loud what many of us still refuse to acknowledge.
The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.
That is to say, the children of darkness know how to play for keeps: they are ruthless, cruel, and strategically smarter than the so-called children of light who consistently fail to accept the brokenness of human nature when it comes to politics. What Niebuhr knew all too well is that some engage in power only to win without any regard for the common good. Their self-interest is clear, well-defined and, to paraphrase what Chuck Colson once said about his loyalty to Richard Nixon, they will run over their grandmother if it will help them maintain their power. Liberals are besotted with sentimentality that causes progressives to choke when faced with naked power. They are uncomfortable with the ethical murkiness of such combat and try to play nice rather than advance the goals of their cause. And while I believe in the liberal democratic agenda, I also know it is more about the lesser of various evils than purity. The insights of Niebuhr continue to be necessary: "Man's (sic) capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's (sic) inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." The art of politics - and war - is a balancing act requiring regular times of confession so that humility is always brought to the table. Without this, it is all too easy for us to forget our shadow side and believe our own public relations campaigns.
In the fight to control the Supreme Court, it is absurd to think that the current Republican Party would act in a noble or fair manner. As one ex-Republican strategist, Stuart Smith, writes in his confession, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, since 1968 Republicans have cultivated and courted America's (sometimes) closeted white nationalist vote for their own advantage. These technocratic financiers at the top did not share the values or goals of the wounded white working class, but were willing to manipulate them to win. Of course, they turned a blind eye to the vulgar and ugly racism of the masses. Beyond a doubt, they did not care if some people of color where hurt or even killed as collateral damage. Such are the sad consequences of war and playing to win. In time, however, this Faustian bargain with America's racist minority overwhelmed those at the top as the fringe became the core and the zealots devoured all moderation.
Tragically, as this was happening, most of our mainstream liberals refused to see what was true for black and brown people, women of all ages and races as well as the LGBTQ community, and alienated white working people. They turned a blind eye to the cruel madness being cultivated by the Republican center. And when they awoke in November 2016 to the fact that American politics had become what we hated, it was too late. So let us not forget that one of the reasons it was too late is because progressive types confused their own questionable ethical purity when the challenge was winning part of the battle. They sacrificed the good for the perfect forgetting or not knowing that politics is ALWAYS about the good and NEVER about the perfect. Bernie Bros, Jill Stein-heads, Ralph Nader clones: who cares what you call them? They all opted out because HRC was tainted. The Left regularly does this: think of their halfhearted support of LBJ - remember their whimper "Part of the way with LBJ?" - or their absence when HHH needed them the most? Pete Townsend likes to scream: "Meet the new boss - same as the old boss"- but that is mostly self-righteous bullshit.
How did St. Paul put it in his letter to the Romans? "None of us are righteous (meaning just and compassionate.) No, not one. We have ALL sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." That so many traditional Republicans are finally bailing in the hopes that the Trump regime goes down in flames in 40 days is one sign that humility matters in politics. So does striving towards the common good and listening to those who disagree with us. And bending over backwards to find common ground. Niebuhr grasped that honest politicians realize that the unintended consequences of our best plans are often ugly - and while we can't predict what they are - we can make contingency plans to clean up the messes we make. That is what distinguishes Joe Biden, in my opinion, from Donald Trump. Trump is a fascist riddled with pathological narcissism and limited intelligence. Biden is a time-tested, middle of the road liberal who has made tons of mistakes in the past - and tries to humbly own and redress them in the present. One is an historic swindler, the other a life-long politician looking for compromises and common ground. Given this moment in time, there is no contest that Biden is not only a better human being and wiser politician, he is the right man for the job when it comes to restoring a bit of integrity to the quest for power. Niebuhr put it like this:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
"Being a monk in the world means for me to live slowly in a fast-paced culture, to treasure the gift of 'being' in a world that says my value comes from 'doing,' to linger over life's moments, and recognize that what I seek most deeply is already here waiting to be revealed." (Dr. Christine Valters Paintner, Sacred Seasons: A Yearlong Journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year - A Self-Study Online Retreat)
This quote resonates with my soul - and my world, too during this season of solitude and contagion - a monk in the world. In our semi-cloistered secular context, where interaction with the world is mostly virtual, I take comfort in communing with a tree in the wetlands behind our house. This morning I noticed she is starting to radiate colors beyond her regular vibrant green.
Over the course of this week, she will suddenly shine with a golden hue that seems to pulsate. This is a most remarkable tree and I cherish her annual journey of transformation. It is a small sign of stability amidst our current social, spiritual, political, and ecological chaos.
As I gazed upon the wetlands this morning, taking in its changes and watching the various birds coast among the trees, I realized that my eyes were praying in the spirit of gratitude. That happens sometimes: part of me beyond my conscious mind returns thanks to God spontaneously. Perhaps you've sensed this, too? At times it is my voice - and I discover I'm singing in thanksgiving. Other times it is my hands - especially while digging in the garden. Savoring a blueberry muffin or some excellent hot tea, it is my mouth and tongue singing praise. And certainly my ears regular celebrate the grandeur of creation as one song after another touches my heart. Currently, I am loving one that comes from the Community of Iona's rendering of a South African tune: Come Bring Your Burdens to God:
I don't know about you, but at least right now, I find I am hungry for signs of God's loving presence in the world. Fr. Richard Rohr recently encouraged us to intentionally shut down any obsession/addiction with the 24/7 news cycles by prayerfully limiting our intake to no more than 60 minutes of so-called information total each day. That includes smart phone updates, radio/internet streaming as well as TV. As the US lurches toward the November election, what passes for news will become increasingly sensational and troubling. Call it self-care or contemplative discernment, but I feel the need to follow the good friar's advice. Jesus was not kidding when he told us in the Sermon on the Mount:
So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and God's
righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
I spent a little time this morning singing through the tunes we'll use this afternoon
at the L'Arche Ottawa Friday Zoom prayer gathering. Currently our theme has to do with being on a spiritual journey. In addition to the South African song, we'll sing "Prends ma vie" (take my hands, Lord) and "Bless the Lord my soul" (a Taize favorite.) The community will celebrate various anniversaries, lift one another up in spontaneous prayer and I will offer this short homily.
TEXT: Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, his face shone like the sun, his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. (Matthew 17: 1-8)
REFLECTION: Our whole lives are a journey of spirit and flesh. Knowing this helps me accept that I don’t have to have it all figured out right now. Or ever. In fact, I can’t grasp the fullness of God’s love in my life except by living it fully, pausing to listen for clues along the way, and trusting that when my race is run God will embrace me with love forever. God’s grace encourages me to learn from my failings and fears as well as my gifts and joys.
Peter, James, and John in today’s reading remind us of ourselves. Jesus invites them up the mountain with him for prayer. Whenever mountains show up in the Bible, it’s our clue to pay attention: they are symbols that important insights from God, like the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, are coming. Jesus and his friends have a mystical mountain top experience where Jesus speaks with the fathers of Judaism about faith. Moses led Jewish slaves out of Egypt and received the Ten Commandments from God, and, Elijah was a holy prophet who welcomed the wounded of the world into God’s loving community. As this extraordinary prayer ends, Peter is so happy he shouts: “Let’s stay up on the mountain, Jesus. I’ll build us shelter so we can be with Moses and Elijah forever.” You may recall that Jesus liked to call his friend Petras – the Rock in Greek – because Peter’s feelings often carried him away like a stone rolling down a hill. “Slow down,” Jesus replied, “we have important work to do down in the valley, too.” To make sure Peter understands, the voice of the Lord proclaims: “Jesus is my Beloved. Listen to him.” This terrified the disciples who fell to the ground, hid their faces, and trembled. When the darkness and fear passed, they looked up and saw Jesus only.
Our spiritual journeys are much like Peter’s: we know excitement as well as fear and confusion – and sometimes we get carried away, too. To stay grounded, we’re asked to look to Jesus. He leads us up the mountains for refreshment and back down to the valleys for love and service. He never scolds when we’re afraid or confused, but quietly invites us to trust God’s love. By trust, we don’t have to “get” it all right now. St. Paul liked to say, “Now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall see face to face.” By trust we know that God will go with us in love on the mountains of life as well as the valleys. And when our journey is over, God will shower us with grace forever.
Two recent quotes caught my attention after reviewing the homily. The first comes from St. Fred Rogers of the Neighborhood who said: "Our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise than silence... and we need much more wonder and silence in our lives." The other is from a Jungian therapist, Leya Aylin, who wrote:
When there is no cure yet to be found, no solution in sight, no help coming over the horizon, when there are no techniques, no teachings, no rulebooks to guide you, when the comforts of false hope and guarantees are gone, along with any promise that you’ll make it to the other side, when healing or transcendence or miracles have not come and the only way out is through the flames, the smoke, the rising water, the heartache, the despair, when there is nothing left to hold onto… hold on.
Although no one may applaud you or call you heroic or see what heart, what soul, what bravery it takes, although there are no books to read on "The Power of Hanging In There" and really no advice on how to do it (just that still small voice within) although you won’t see it romanticized or spiritualized or as a goal on any vision board probably anywhere, although you may be filled with hopelessness and grief and fear, and only barely able to keep on, don’t be fooled, sometimes the soul’s most vital, most courageous, most sacred, and most difficult task is to just hold on.
And I was able to complete my Sunday, "Small is Holy" notes for the live stream reflection, too. It is a meditation on the wisdom, voice, presence, and power of our rivers. Using poetry and song, biblical interpretation and silence, my focus will be upon how I have learned to listen and respond to the insights of our river., the might Housatonic. This prayer/poem by Jan Richardson speaks to what I am trying to say - and while she uses the metaphor of a road - and I am looking to a river - the similarities are striking.
THE HARDEST BLESSING If we cannot lay aside the wound, then let us say it will not always bind us.
Let us say the damage will not eternally determine our path.
Let us say the line of our life will not always travel along the places we are torn.
Let us say that forgiveness can take some practice, can take some patience, can take a long and struggling time.
Let us say that to offer the hardest blessing, we will need the deepest grace; that to forgive the sharpest pain, we will need the fiercest love; that to release the ancient ache, we will need new strength for every day.
Let us say the wound will not be our final home—
that through it runs a road, a way we would not have chosen but on which we will finally see forgiveness, so long practiced, coming toward us, shining with the joy so well deserved.
