commence au festival...

Well, today was the day I set aside to give my flowing locks some style: my last visit to Ms. Rose, my coiffeuse, was early January 2020 just before our trip to Tucson. While in Arizona, my buddy don E was telling me about a strange new virus that had shut down an entire city in China. I was only mildly curious at that point. Upon our return, however, I was back and forth to Ottawa a few times as information and anxiety was increasing. In early March I sensed things were getting out of control and canceled another planned L'Arche visit - and a few days later our border was shut and the great commonwealth of Massachusetts entered total covid lockdown.

Without any wisdom about when sheltering in place would end - and without a working knowledge of how to live into the pandemic - I thought, "Let me quit cutting my hair until this mess is over." I wondered just how long it might get. And now, eighteen months later, after a joyous midsummer reprieve without masks along with a super abundance of vaccinations in my part of the country (over 70%), it felt like the time had come to bring my living in the catacombs look to an official close. Even amid the new uncertainties of the accursed Delta variant - and the new unofficial mask mandate in progress - it was time to trade my Willie Nelson in for a modified George Harrison.

                     Yesterday                                      Today

We hope to be in Canada on September 11th with our vaccination papers, recent molecular covid tests and passports in hand. Staying masked indoors will be a small price to pay for the chance to truly "get outta Dodge." We shall see. 

All I know is that my quest for incarnational spirituality requires some experiential body prayer to mark the movement of grace in my life. It's no secret that my ancient Celtic ancestors used tattoos and scarification to help tell their story of rites of passage and significant happenings upon their flesh. For almost 30 years I've been following their lead: my first earring came at 40, my second marked a divorce, and my third came with my marriage to Di. My first tattoo marked both the close of my Montreal sabbatical and the realization that after 35 years of pastoral ministry I was being called out of certainty and into the wilderness . My second tattoo gave expression to the journey into retirement and a whole new way of following Jesus. 

So, too now with these silver tresses: as Jack Nicholson wisely and apocalyptically proclaimed in his role as the Joker in the first Batman film: commence au festival! This coming year will be one of profound uncertainty and transition. My prayer is to live into it fully, moving through the pandemic portal (to borrow Arundhati Roy's phrase) in a way that celebrates the blessings that pop up among our sorrows while honoring our shared grief, too. 

 

the quiet melancholia of late summer...

Today I will start the last outdoor repair for this season: I must rebuild some of the ancient railings on our deck to keep them safe and replace a support beam on the front porch. As soon as the weather grew warmer, I began the tasks of spring including replacing rotten wood molding around some of windows, tearing out decaying planks and steps on the back deck, chiseling out old wood along the gutter in order to add more weather resistant trim, and patching small holes caused by expanding winter ice. There was withered paint to scrap after a hard winter as well as modest repairs to our raised bed gardens. Then it was on to the garden and clearing the property of fallen tree limbs, turning the soil, and all the rest. By July our mystical arbor was in place along with a bamboo fence in the outdoor chapel. The flowers were exploding in bold red, orange, blue, and yellow as a quiet symmetry settled upon the deck as the herbs ripened. And our shared driveway was fully repaved and ready for the storms to come.

Now, as the wetlands remind me that fall is coming by yielding their greens to various shades of brown and red - and the season's first golden rod has appeared - I know it's time to get round two of the repairs underway. It will take me the better part of two days to accomplish this work but that is exciting - an adventure of sorts - mostly because I know from experience it will be riddled with mistakes and wrong turns. I will measure carefully, to be sure; trace the old templates with all the precision I can muster, and cut the lumber with intentionality. At the same time, however, I know already that I will make a host of as yet unimaginable errors causing me to back track and regroup over and again. Such are the paradoxical blessings/curses of beginner's mind, yes? It is slow going if you wish to learn from your mistakes. What's more, there are often unexpected physical roadblocks that pop up and a variety of rigorous physical complications when taking apart old carpentry that can turn a relatively simple job into an adventure into patience and paying attention.

That's why these projects have become for me a type of embodied

prayer - practice in slowing down - the work of focusing carefully and paying attention. Not rushing towards the finish line nor sacrificing beauty for expedience or functionality. It is the type of spiritual direction I've discovered while baking bread or following a new recipe: the act of being fully present to the present moment in real time. Now I should note that it usually takes me a few days to work up to such sacramental activity. I am, you see, addicted to abstractions which cause me to spend countless hours in procrastinating rather than incarnating. In time, I get off the dime. But as Fr. Ed Hays writes in Pray ALL Ways:

"Procrastination is a love affair with tomorrow, which is that golden day when we will change, pray more, read, fix the back door, play with the children, or take our spouse out to dinner. Procrastination is NOT a virtue; it is a form of being asleep. Patience is vigilant waiting, a waiting that is full, pregnant with dreams, hopes, ideas, and peace. This waiting is not resignation, as when we resign ourselves to the fates. Real patience is loving and dynamic surrender."

For the past two days I've been pondering these repairs. I finished all the measurements last week. I've figured out how much lumber to purchase and even the two saws necessary to getting the job right done right. It is now time to get into the groove but taking the first step is complicated. Once started there's no stopping on such a project. It must be completed lest loved ones are rendered unsafe because of my sloth. 

FOUR HOURS LATER AFTER LUNCH:  The offending rotten wood has been taken down. Now it's on to tracing shapes for the jig saw and making certain my measurements are correct for the purchase of lumber.

simple living as embodied prayer

As our summer reflections ripen into this first Sunday in August, week 10 of the outline Fr. Ed Hays offers in his little book, Pray ALL Ways, tells us that: “Those who wish to pray always and, IN all ways, must also discover the importance of simple living as the function of simplicity is not penance but liberation.” When Fr. Ed penned those words back in 1981, simple living was not a market strategy: it was not a hipster fashion conceit, it was not a way to de-clutter our homes using a minimalist aesthetic, nor was it a beautiful trendy upscale magazine featuring idyllic glossy photos with short Zen quotes. Rather, simple living was embodied prayer – incarnating our deepest spiritual values into our everyday life - to sacramentally give shape and form to the holy. Simple living was both a rejection of the status quo – a refusal to be seduced into conspicuous over consumption – as well as a set of ethical life standards and values committed to justice and peace.

Think Mahatma Gandhi: we live simply so that others may simply live. Helen and Scott Nearing: Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation. Or E.F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful: Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful… The generosity of the Earth allows us to feed all of us; we know enough about ecology to keep the Earth a healthy place; there is enough room on the Earth, and there are enough materials, so that everybody can have adequate shelter; if we are competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need live in misery.

Forty years later, simple living has become more about aesthetics and decluttering than the ethics and spirituality of sharing. Right-sizing guru, Kathy Gottberg, writes that: Real luxury is not working like a maniac to take an expensive vacation—it is living a life you enjoy every day. And Marie Kondo, whom I have only recently become acquainted with, suggests that tidying and de-cluttering our homes are essential to constructing lives of value: what you want to own, she writes, is a question of how you want to live. That’s a fascinating shift of emphasis, don’t you think: social ethics and spirituality giving way to personal aesthetics and market driven consumption? I was genuinely shocked rereading Fr. Ed’s words forty years after first encountering them because so much had changed. Back in the day he was speaking to a post-Vatican II Roman Catholic cadre of socially engaged people of faith who were seeking spiritual guidance in an age of material abundance. “Let’s examine simplicity,” he wrote, “in light of the search for satisfaction. Daily we are told by a multitude of media about 1001 objects, which if purchased, will bring satisfaction. But DO they make us satisfied? What about the needs of others, especially those on the other side of the earth: are their needs of any concern to us?”

+ His intent was spiritual formation that was transformative: how can we live into the way of Jesus as affluent 20th century beings? “We Americans,” he notes, “are not by nature more exploitative than those who have lived in previous ages. They, unlike us, simply lacked the technology and modern means that make it so easy to be so. Consumption is so effortless it becomes unconscious. We don’t think about waste as unethical or anti-natural because it is so easy.”

+ Forty years later spiritual formation is barely implied in the simple living conversation: to-day it’s all about decorating trends and resources to declutter our abode. I confess that I’m not up to date with popular culture and way out of the loop when it comes to lifestyle trends. Visiting my dad about a year before he passed away six years ago, he said to me with visible excitement after supper, “James, we HAVE to watch my two favorite shows tonight, ok? Hoarders and Pawn Stars.” My old man gave me quite the education that night as I watched how taken he was with the unhealthy, conspicuous consumption of total strangers.As I drove back to Massachusetts, I realized how monastic my heart had become after all these years and I kept playing the old Brian Wilson song from Pet Sounds: I Guess I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times. 

Look, I have no interest in judging the new decluttering gurus: clearly their insights resonate with millions of modern individuals all over the world. It’s true that most of us DO have too much stuff that could be discarded. When I retired, I went through my books and music two or three times getting rid of hundreds and hundreds of titles that no longer brought me joy. And I must go through my clothes yet again to pass on pants and shirts I’ll never wear. So, I get that self-help experts have their place, ok?

But after 18 months of solitude in solidarity, It seems that we’re at a moment in history when reclaiming the ethical, spiritual, and social aspects of simple living has taken on a new urgency. Ecological civilization, living within the rhythm and wisdom of God’s first word in nature, renewed compassion, and strengthening the common good have once again become fundamentals as the pandemic portal calls us towards a brave, new world. I find Arundhati Roy’s commentary insightful today just as I did at the start of the pandemic when she wrote:

Coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Zenobia Jeffries Warfield and her cohort at YES Magazine have also taken up the challenge of what it might mean to move through the pandemic portal with a renewed commitment to simple living. She writes: As we live into and beyond the reality of Covid-19 and future variants, the time has come for us to explore a vison of the world that is healing: “Ecological civilization moves us from an uncivilized society based on selfish wealth accumulation to one that is community oriented and life-affirming. It is a movement that unites climate, racial and gender equality, economic fairness, and a love of life into a conscious commitment.” Fr. Ed calls this type of commitment mysticism – the sacramental expression of our deepest values – quoting St. John he says: “If a person has enough to live on, and yet sees a brother or sister in need and shuts his or her heart against that soul, how can it be said that divine love dwells within.”

Can we close our hearts and eyes to how we live, eat, dress, or entertain ourselves and at the same time seek to be fully one with God? To include simple living into our spirituality makes us mystics where spiritual encounters integrate the seen with the unseen on behalf of the common good.

It ‘s what Jesus told his friends in St. Matthew’s gospel just before choosing the Way of the Cross: 

When the Child of creation comes in truth and light at the end of time, all the nations will be gathered as a sacred separating takes place like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” The true child of creation will put the sheep to the right and the goats to the left saying: ‘Come, you that are blessed by God, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was starving, you see, and you gave me something to eat, I was parched and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and foreigner and you welcomed me, I was naked and you put your clothes on me, I was sick and you cared of me, in prison and you came to me.’ The compassionate will reply:
Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you or thirsty and gave you drink? When was it that we saw a stranger and welcomed you, naked and gave you clothing? When was it that we saw you sick or in prison and came to you?’ Whenever you did so for even ONE of these my sisters and brothers, you did it to me.

Mysticism is choosing to make the words and ideas of the sacred flesh. It is embodied prayer. Deciding that our choices about time, resources, attitude, culture, habits, and politics all give shape and form to the holy or the unholy within our humanity. So, one truth about renewing simple living as mystical, incarnational prayer for the 21st century rather than mere style, fashion, or fad is the scope of its vision: instead of personal preference, simple living in the age of pandemic asks us to consider the whole human family as integral to our well-being. WHEN did we see thee, Lord…?

Now, this is will strike some as all too obvious, but right now we in the United States are facing the deadly consequences of favoring too long personal aesthetics and free choice over shared compassion when it comes to vaccinations. Fully vaccinated adults make up barely 49% of our citizens with huge discrepancies between states buying into the fascist big lie of the 2020 election and more socially reasonable places. Where I live in the great commonwealth of Massachusetts 71% of us are vaccinated versus 41% in Missouri and 38% in Mississippi. It is no accident that the majority of new covid deaths and the over-flowing hospital emergency rooms are taking place in precisely those places that have refused to boldly advance vaccinations in their addiction to personal preference. And let me suggest another troubling aspect of this hyper-individualism: as more and more of our polarized neighbors become increasingly frustrated and angry with the anti-vaxxers among us, it is just a matter of time before physical violence takes place in our all too gun crazy country. It’s already adding fuel to our culture wars, as states, schools, businesses, and municipalities come under increasing pressure to mandate vaccinations. The New York Times reports that:

On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City ordered that all municipal workers be vaccinated against Covid-19 by the time schools reopen in mid-September or face weekly testing. Officials in California followed suit hours later with a similar mandate covering all state employees and health care workers. The Department of Veterans Affairs on Monday required that 115,000 on-site health care workers be vaccinated in the next two months, the first federal agency to order a mandate. And nearly 60 major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association, on Monday called for mandatory vaccination of all health care workers as well.

Consciously going through the pandemic portal means we MUST look beyond personal choice to-wards the common good and reclaim the social dimensions of our faith that implore us to see the face of Jesus n all that is broken, suffering, and in need of love and healing. This would be a genuinely counter-cultural spirituality that is no longer co-opted by consumerism. If St. Paul wasn’t kidding in the first century CE when he wrote to the church in Rome from the chains of prison, he REALLY isn’t now: “Do NOT be conformed to the ways of this world – do not be squeezed into the mold of the status quo – but, rather, by becoming grounded in the love of Christ, let your heart and mind be renewed by grace so that you may share God’s love as is your true spiritual worship.”

I sense two other truths to be true in our embodied spirituality of simplicity: first, this is a time when preaching to the choir is critical; if you’ve ever been a part of a choir you know that choirs need encouragement and support in hard times, too; and second no matter how gentle and tenderhearted we live into this spiritually of social nonconformity, it’s going to cause conflict and discord because the old ways of self-interest and privatized prayer won’t give up without a fight. Rebecca Solnit put it like this: “Do you win (in changing a culture) by chasing only those who don’t share your views, or by serving and respecting those already with you?

Is the purpose of the choir to sing to the infidels or inspire the faithful? What happens if the faithful stop showing up, donating, doing the work?” In a 2017 Harper’s Magazine essay, Solnit spoke presciently about what it will take for us to consciously move through the portal of this pandemic rather than be sucked into the undertow: The phrase preaching to the choir (usually) means hectoring your listeners with arguments they already agree with, and it’s a common sin of radicals, the tendency to denounce others as a way of announcing one’s own virtue. But it can be applied too widely, to malign conversation between people whose beliefs happen to coincide. The phrase implies that political work should be primarily evangelical, even missionary, that the task is to go out and convert the heathens, that talking to those with whom we agree achieves nothing.

But that isn’t all that’s necessary in moments like our own: one of the reasons I took up the mantle of doing this on-line reflection every week was to encourage friends to remain faithful and grounded in the way of compassion during this unraveling. It was and is my sense that bringing solace to those struggling to choose love over fear and trust in this present darkness matters. Preaching to the choir helps us live into the ambiguity before clear solutions come into focus.

That’s why I regularly turn to poets like Rumi, Oliver, and Rilke: Women and men who wisely celebrate patience and quiet vigilance as we learn to live the questions during the reign of social anxiety. In another perplexing era, Rilke wrote this to a young student: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

More than at any other moment in my lifetime, THIS feels like the era of living the questions. Dr. Rochelle Wilensky, for example, said on Tuesday that the Delta variant will not be constrained by previous rules: that’s why it looks like we’re always playing catch-up; we’re not flip-flopping, but learning more and making necessary changes. Dr. Fauci said much the same thing. So, while I’m not ecstatic about wearing masks again, and my region is not among the most dangerous, I’ll do it be-cause I trust the truth. Not MY truth nor my prejudice, but the empirical, quantifiable facts of the experts. But 30% of our body politic does not trust the facts because collectively we’re now reaping the consequences of 50 years of disrespecting and violating our essential public institutions by a well-organized cadre of ultra-conservative power brokers still yearning to dismantle the New Deal and Great Society.

Think about it: starting with Richard Nixon and his Watergate enemies list, America’s right wing has been relentless. After Nixon, they moved on to craft the sanitized cultural memes of the Reagan-Bush Southern strategy where buzzwords like entitlements, big government, and the undeserving poor communicated a message “every bit as powerful as the Confederate flag or a lynch mob’s noose.” This same cabal went on to manufacture and finance public fury during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, they literally stole the election from Al Gore by intimidating Florida’s election workers, they enacted a cynical and vicious manipulation of the media and Congress with the lies of the phony Benghazi hearings, and they gave license, dollars, and encouragement to the fascist agenda of the previous administration and its groper-in-chief. David Brooks outlined precisely this ugly history last week on the PBS Newshour when asked by Judy Woodruff, “What can we do about the anti-vaxxers and insurrectionists?” It was sobering to watch Brooks sadly but honestly shrug his shoulders and remorsefully confess that, “There really is NOTHING we can do right now except ride out this storm.”

This is an era of more questions than answers, more uncertainty than clarity, more focus actions than broad movements: a time clearly intended for preaching to the choir about how to live our questions. And I rather think that Rebecca Solnit is on to something when she tells us that in a culture shaped by speed, where instant news, fast food, immediate opinions, and hyped-up analysis that often sounds impressive but turns out to ring hollow, preaching to the choir makes good sense. Being together as a choir– even virtually – gives us time and space to slow down, listen to one another, sort out what is true, and practice singing in unison and in harmony.

+ St. Paul is once again instructive. Philippians 4 tells us that our non-conformity must be guided by what is true: Whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things. In a maelstrom of discord where violence and hyperbole rule the day, a spirituality of simplicity suggests to me that it will take some practice to see God offering us gifts of truth, beauty, noble sacrifice, and integrity. And if we’re to grasp that the holy shares these gifts with us intentionally so that our hearts might ripen into trust, I know I must be reminded that every sunset, rainbow, flower, song, work of heart and act of tenderness is God preaching to the choir.

+ In this complex age, what God asks of us is simple, too: Trust that the Lord is God – and we are not. Psalm 131 is perfect: My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. For I have calmed and quieted myself like a small child with her momma’s breast. This is what the Sabbath asks: learn to rest for a day just with those you love. This is what the Lord requires. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Heschel added that if we can learn to rest and waste time by trusting God for a day, then maybe we could try to do it more often. For if God can take care of the world while we rest for one day, perhaps that’s true for the rest of the week as well.

We all need to hear this, we all need this encouragement, we all need a little preaching to the choir in this age of living the questions. Fr. Ed also senses that we need to hear it is time to give up our American fascination with super sizing everything. “Super means great, large, powerful, big, and independent.” But what we need right now – and more so in 2021 than when he first wrote it in the 80’s – is an appreciation for all that is simple, small, little, and interdependent.

We need a new type of hero,” he suggests, “not a superman or superwoman, but simplemen and simplewomen who aspire not to climb the highest mountain or become millionaires overnight but rather those who can live in harmony with creation and with all people on this planet Earth, who by lives of simplicity can show us how to live with techno without losing touch with our inner selves. These persons will be political mystics whose lives, filled with the satisfaction of human relationships and the Spirit of holiness, will heal the world.”

One of those mystical heroes for me is the poet/farmer Wendell Berry. His poem about hope – which I’ll close with today - rings true to me on so many levels. As the fires in the West ravage the land, incinerate the wildlife, pollute the air as far away as New York City and the Berkshires, and melt parts of the polar ice cap, he asks us to stay connected because this tragedy is part of our brave, new world on the other side of the pandemic portal. We’ve arrived at that nebulous tipping point we’ve heard about for the past 20 years – and there’s certain to be more fire, flooding, and destruction in summers to come. Berry’s poem rings true to me, too watching the Capital Police give testimony about the paramilitary zealots who staged the January 6th insurrection in the nation’s capital. They are clear that our domestic terrorists have not been vanquished: they’re simply plotting, hiding, and rearming themselves for another more deadly attack. So while we can stand in resistance, yes; prepare for the worst, of course; and hold the hit-man in charge account-able. But as people of truth we must know that the violence is going to get worse before it gets better: insurrection has become like a religion for some said on officer.

Add to this mix both the war on voting rights for black, brown, and poor people and the carefully orchestrated attack on a woman’s right to control her own body and health care: and the call to live into the questions is clarified. Today the protections hard won by previous generations are being dismantled by what the Reverend Dr. William Barber calls the work of Jim Crow, Esquire: the high tech, well-financed, and legally sanctioned prohibitions that advance only the well-being of that same wealthy, ruthless, conservative white elite that’s been opposed expanding democracy since the Great Depression.

Earlier this week I woke up thinking: Never could I have imagined that I would actually be living into a post-apocalyptic world where Blade Runner was the new reality. But it’s happening now – and is our new normal as we move consciously through the pandemic portal. Arundhati Roy urges us to enter the pandemic portal as humble spiritual non-conformists: Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Our nonconformist stories are worlds different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. So, remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. I hear a’borning in Berry’s poem:

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,

For hope must not depend on feeling good
And there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
Of the future, which surely will surprise us,
…And hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
Any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit
Our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
The streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
Then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
Of what it is that no other place is, and by
Your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
Place that you belong to though it is not yours,
For it was from the beginning and will be to the end

Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
Your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor,
Who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
And the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
Fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
In the trees in the silence of the fisherman
And the heron, and the trees that keep the land
They stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.

This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power
Or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful
when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy
when they ask for your land and your work.
Answer with knowledge of the others who are here
And how to be here with them. By this knowledge
Make the sense you need to make. By it stand
In the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.

Speak to your fellow humans as your place
Has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
Before they had heard a radio. Speak
Publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
From the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
To the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
By which it speaks for itself and no other.

Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
Underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
Freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
And the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
Which is the light of imagination. By it you see
The likeness of people in other places to yourself
In your place. It lights invariably the need for care
Toward other people, other creatures, in other places
As you would ask them for care toward your place and you.

No place at last is better than the world. The world
Is no better than its places. Its places at last
Are no better than their people while their people
Continue in them. When the people make
Dark the light within them, the world darkens.

rejoicing in simple blessings...

Today is a perfect day in the Berkshires: cool 72F with patches of sun coming and going along with a gentle breeze. I walked around the back yard late this morning with Lucie who is FINALLY healing from a torn leg muscle. Looking at our still evolving Celtic Zen garden made me smile. Our small wild flower patch is actually blooming this year. It looks like my pumpkin patch is going to bear fruit, too. And the other flowers are all exquisite.

Later this afternoon, our Friday L'Arche Ottawa prayer gathering will take place. At the suggestion of one of the community leaders, I asked a Francophone assistant if she might share a short homily - and she agreed. Her reflection is tender and rich. Interestingly (for me) our various conversations through email were all in French. Thank God for deepl.com that helped me decipher beyond my meager ability and share answers to her concerns in her native tongue. Throughout the process I learned a little more about nourishing trust in community: if you want another to join-in and try something they've not done before, it is essential to go the extra mile in both patience as well as creativity. Too often many of us feel pressured - under the wire to get results - so we keep going back to the tried and true helpers rather than widening the circle of participation. Or we do the task ourselves. This gets the job done, of course, but it neither welcomes fresh voices nor helps those who want to participate in new ways get the opportunity and time to give it a shot. I continue to learn that that creativity and true hospitality requires twice the lead time.

I am also aware of what hard work the Ottawa volunteer spirituality group has done for the past 18th months: learning new technologies, becoming creative with new music, working vigorously to keep the whole community engaged. What a privilege to be a part of this effort. Unless the damnable Delta variant gets in the way, we'll have a chance to visit the community again in mid-September. What a blessing.

post-pandemic blues and tenderness...

Over this weekend I had what can only be called a post-pandemic bout of forgetfulness re: time: what day is it? can you tell me the actual date? So much so that this morning I misread the recycling calendar and put out cans and bottles instead of plastic. This used to happen on a regular basis during our sheltering in place days. And our lives since May 2021 continue to be quite solitary, so I'm not at all surprised I slipped into the covid "twilight zone." I wonder how many other ways I'll experience pandemic blues in this uneven recovery with yet another round of unchartered waters?

As we were driving home from Millerton, NY on Saturday (our wonderful children and grandchildren gave us birthday gift certificates to both the local tea shop AND a regional independent bookstore because what else does a person really need besides tea and books - except, perhaps, a garden?) the closing story on the radio show, "An American Life," had to do with the so-called summer of sex. The set up was simple: word on the street was that once the lockdown was over everyone who could get in the sack with a willing partner would do so over and over again. Part one of this story sounded like another salacious saga for hipster wannabes. The narrator was all about her mandatory 30 something vocal fry: as she first described rack after empty rack of condom dispensers in a variety of NYC pharmacies, and then shared the observations of bartenders at popular Brooklyn watering holes, her paradoxical titillation and ennui was palpable. Apparently the  restrooms at hot spots have been in constant need of cleansing every weekend of the summer with heavy duty couple traffic coming and going. And the lost and found departments of these establishments now have a growing set of discarded pants to contend with. Really!

When the hipster reporter actually interviewed young, hot adults, however, part two of the story took on a gravitas that betrayed the casual sex set up. What seems to be taking place in these early months after the lockdown and solitude is more deep conversations about loss and trust than coitus. Both women and men want to connect with one another about their grief. They want someone else to hear and validate their stories. And simply be held by another compassionate, safe soul who takes them seriously. Which strikes me as very healthy - not that I have anything at all against getting laid - but anonymous self-gratification is not the best way to sort our our lives and seems to be giving way (at least for now) to emotional and spiritual intimacy. 

North American politicians continue to carp about our divisions. Make no mistake about it: they are real and too many political conservatives are still ignoring the protocols of science when it comes to this pandemic. But at least some young American adults are looking to go deeper. The NY Times this morning wrote about the under 40 crowd resisting/rebelling against being forced back into the same old mold of work, too (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/business/economy/return-office-young-workers.html?) And I suspect a new commitment to compassion is in play as many of us return to wearing masks in public whenever we're inside various stores and buildings. 

I understand that it is my spiritual disposition to see signs of the sacred in my ordinary experiences. That's what mysticism is all about: discerning sacramental acts and insight within our everyday encounters. So, while there is still profound disfunction, there are also signs of tenderness, grieving, and consolation, too. And I believe that it is not only appropriate, but essential for living into the world we want to create.

pray ALL ways: embodied rejoicing and rest

PRAY ALL WAYS: Resting in Time as Embodied Prayer

I remember the first time I heard Paul Simon pray: it was November 1969 on a TV special with lots of behind the scenes black and white footage. Over the decades I’ve heard other prayers by St. Paul on CDs like: The Rhythm of the Saints, Graceland, and Beautiful or So What but this was unique – and I’ve never forgotten it.

Old-timers know that by the late 60’s Simon and Garfunkel were folk music icons – some even called them oracles – who knew how to discern the words of the prophets that were written on the subway walls and tenement halls and even how to hear the sounds of silence. At the time of the TV show, they were riding high on a national tour after scoring big at the Oscars with the sound track to “The Graduate” and breaking the charts with “The Boxer.” They had just recorded “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” which would soon dominate the air waves with its message of grace and renewal for a nation worn out by the Vietnam War and the assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy.

But that wasn’t my epiphany. No, it arrived in a throw away song that Paul Simon still detests: the 1966 Cheerios jingle, “Feelin’ Groovy,” from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. I suspect I was moved by the way Simon played this song, quietly on his acoustic guitar in a hotel bed-room in-between the bustle and fury of record studios and concert halls. It felt almost like an afterthought sandwiched between the poetry and music that REALLY mattered. But in that wee song I heard lament and petition wrapped wistful beauty and it spoke to me of prayer: In a near whisper, Simon sang:

Slow down you’re moving too fast – you got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones - looking for fun and feeling groovy
Ba da-da da-da da-da, feeling groovy…

It’s become ONE of my go-to prayer songs for more than 50 years and only now do I sense I’m starting to get parts of it right: the slow down part. Gardening, yard work and poetry has helped. Saints Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry have been guides along the way.

It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, (she wrote) it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. (Later she added)I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do.Do cats pray, while they sleep, half-asleep in the sun?Does the opossum pray as it crosses the street The sunflowers? The old black oak growing older every yearI know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the treeswith my mind filled with things of little importance, in fullself-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive. Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not. While I was thinking this I happened to be standing just outside my door, with my notebook open, which is the way I begin every morning. Then a wren in the privet began to sing. He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, I don’t know why. And yet, why not. I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe or whatever you don’t. That’s your business. But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer? So I just listened, my pen in the air.

And I never get tired of taking-in this advice from Brother Berry:

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.

Today, as our gentle summer quest to become more of the change we desire continues, Fr. Ed Hays suggests that yet another way to incarnate the sacred words of grace and pray ALL ways has some-thing to do with fasting from flurrying about in a storm of self-importance. We might say that God is asking us to relinquish rushing as our default position, to forsake filling each day full to overflowing with commitments, details, hopes, dreams and other ephemera, so that like the Psalmist, we too might be still… and know: know grace, know rest, know being before doing, and know that we are the Lord’s beloved created in God’s image before there was time. Another St. Paul, the rabbi formerly known as Saul of Tarsus in the first century CE, offers his insight concerning how to live as a prayer grounded in grace. Philippians 4 invites us to rejoice: rejoice in the Lord always and in ALL ways for again I say: rejoice!

Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

This summons to rejoice challenges us to let God’s abiding presence embrace us in all conditions and situations. It’s a request to trust rather than fret, move with gentleness instead of frenzy, look towards what is just, true, loving, and nourishing before obsessing on life’s woes, and practice being rather than doing. Such a manner of life, you see, nourishes our soul with peace and shapes how we outwardly engage the wider world as well. And it’s important to say out loud that St. Paul wrote this letter of encouragement to the first church on European soil from prison. It isn’t clear in which prison the apostle experienced this incarceration – tradition claims it was Rome in about 60 CE, but he was often tossed into jail and modern scholarship suggests it might have taken place in Ephesus in present day Turkey early in his ministry and a mere 400 miles from Philippi – so all we know for certain is that Paul is bound into the captivity of the Roman Empire and chooses to write a note of to this newly formed community of faith – which strikes me as remarkable.

Some days I can so easily get trapped in kvetching about totally first world problems like: I can’t find my favorite type of PEN in this stationery store; or my 11-year-old car that still runs great needs new brakes; or why do I have to fill out two separate affidavits re: my vaccination before I can enter Canada? Lord, have mercy, right? I mean… really? I should simply thank God that I HAVE a car and BOTH vaccinations – and shut the hell up!

But St. Paul, who could carp along with the best of us, chooses to move in a whole other direction here – and my hunch is it has something to do with consciously giving thanks for being healed from the inside out through the Cross of Jesus. In chapter two of this letter, the apostle writes that only after he was struck blind and helpless did he learn to put on the whole mind of Christ: this is when he discovered how to trust rather than fear God. By faith, Paul inwardly accepted the path that Jesus walked before him which led him to rejoice that Jesus: who, was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited or manipulated.

Rather Jesus emptied himself by facing his fears; relinquishing them by choosing to trust God’s love more than his own feelings. Jesus accepted the form of a slave – the lowest servant among us – and found that his humility empowered him to become obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross – the most shameful death in that culture. But on the other side of this life, God exalted him with sacred love so that we might be moved to place his name above every name where every knee shall bend and every voice proclaim that Jesus is Christ to the glory of God.

What St. Paul learned in his collapse is what Jesus experienced on his journey from the cross to the resurrection: the organic rhythm of God’s love in all things. It begins by being cherished as God’s beloved before we’re born. It ripens as we age until, at some point, we too find ourselves facing one type of death or another. Call it humility or letting go, a relinquishing of our fear or some other type of surrender. Whatever it is, if we embrace it as Christ did the Cross, trusting God’s love rather than our fear, God promises us a renewal and resurrection like unto Christ’s where we, too will be filled with a love greater than death. If we have eyes to see we know some of this as spring consistently follows winter, sunshine always arrives after the nightfall, and the cycle of life moves from abundance to decay and then renewal. Honor this and trust it, Paul tells us, and we will put on the whole mind of Christ so that in all ways our lives will may rejoice in the Lord.

So let’s be clear that to rejoice is not just about feelings: it is the intentional practice of turn-ing our inward gratitude for God’s love into a life that outwardly shares it. St. Paul consist-ently uses the Greek word – chairó – the verb form of the root xaris meaning grace. To rejoice is to consciously claim that the core of our identity begins with God’s grace and then to outwardly celebrate that with acts of tenderness and justice. Thomas Merton trained the young monks entering the Gethsemane Monastery saying: You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level: God’s beloved.

To rejoice as those committed to the way of Jesus is to visibly share grace in our politics, shopping, attitude, habits, thoughts, words, and deeds. St. Paul was explicit in Romans 12 in Peterson’s The Message: Here’s what I want you to do. 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 has done 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 grace and you’ll be changed from the inside out. 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… and you’re task is to share this by how you live.

What often gets in the way of consciously claiming our grace-filled identity is busyness. Fr. Ed playfully but prophetically reminds us that Brother Karl Marx got it wrong: it is not religion that is the opium of the masses, it is haste, speed, stimulation, and an ethos of double your pleasure, double your fun. An article I read by Fr. Henri Nouwen shortly after entering Union Seminary in the late 70’s stated that busyness had become the standard by which we in the West were judged by others and the measure by which we evaluated the value and worth of nearly everything else in the world – ourselves included! “I know you’re so busy…” became the honorific bestowed upon ALL people of value in our society before the pandemic. Forty years BEFORE the lockdowns, Nouwen wrote:

In our utilitarian culture, where we suffer from a collective compulsion to do something practical, helpful, or useful, and where we feel compel-ed to make a contribution that can give us a sense of worth, contemplative prayer is a form of radical criticism. It is not useful or practical. It is simply an act we choose to waste time for and with God. It cuts a hole in our busyness and reminds us and others that it is God and not we who creates and sustains the world.

I pray that 18 months of solitude has helped us gain some of this perspective; but if we aren’t consciously choosing it as parts of the pandemic subside, we’ll be dragged back into the morass, forsaking any sense of the hard won blessings of grounding, balance and rest we’ve encountered. I think that’s why I’ve taken heart recently in the fact that more and more of us are refusing to go BACK to the office, BACK to the jobs we hated, BACK to a pace of life that not only exhausts our hearts, minds, and bodies but wears out our souls as well. Could it be that the pandemic has given birth to an unexpected rebellion?

One of the unexpected blessings of the lock down has been the opportunity for some of us to re-think the cost, value, and meaning of the way we used to live. Going backwards into the busyness and acts of mere survival that were once normative, now seem reprehensible. That’s not the only reason we’re currently experiencing a labor shortage: older workers have opted for retirement, younger workers are demanding a higher living wage, childcare costs have sky-rocketed, and a massive skills gap now requires a radically different way of recruiting and training a 21st century workforce beyond our current 20th century competencies. Still, cumulatively, American workers are consciously exploring what it might mean to work at jobs that serve the common good, provide a measure of satisfaction to their souls, and are built upon wages that allow for rest, renewal, and re-creation as well as food, shelter, and health care. Dare I call this rejoicing all ways?

Fr. Ed writes that once upon a time, a revolution in values began when hungry souls chose or were sent out into the desert to rethink their perspective on life. The stillness of the wilderness aided them in sorting things out:

In the desert, ageless and clockless, still as sagebrush – all time moves at a lizard’ speed. There is time to sit and once again to hear. “God speaks slowly” the Wisdom Keepers tell us, “a word an hour, a sentence a century.” That is why the prophets sang: “I will lead my beloved into the desert and there will speak to her heart. Then she shall respond as in the days of her youth.

In the desert we find a different pace where it’s too hot to hurry, where we must take our time to move slowly… where we can hear quietly with NO rush to respond. It is a place of contemplation, trust, and focus. Well, we’ve just spent 18 months practicing desert spirituality – being still so that we might know – and while there are places where we can now tentatively leave our solitude, this sojourn isn’t over. The Delta variant, political division, and bold-faced ignorance is causing yet another covid spike in the USA that our best minds predict won’t end until autumn. It seems our departure from the covid desert is going to be uneven and staggered – even in places with a high vaccination rate - which is probably why that poem Lynn Ungar wrote back in March 2020 when no one thought we would have to endure more than a year and a half of solitude popped back into my mind.

Her words are still a little romantic but carry a prescience worthy of reconsideration in 2021.

What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath — the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing, pray, consider only those to whom you commit your life.

Center down. And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart.

Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.

(You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands.

(Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart.

Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly,

where we cannot touch. Promise this world your love – for better for worse, in sickness and in health – as long as we shall all live.

Let the Republican lackeys of short-term profits and bottom lines yelp all they like: I choose to trust that the labor shortage we’re experiencing after our extended exile in the desert of sheltering in place is a quiet rebellion of rejoicing! The old ways of working ache to be replaced with tenderness and self-care. Some among us have used this quiet time to decipher what nature – God’s first word – might be telling us about how to live together in ways that are more sustainable. Jeremy Lent, writing in YES Magazine, notes that “nature uses a fractal design with similar repeating pat-terns at different scales” to help us recognize “a form of organization known as holarchy.” It is a way of celebrating the interdependence and love built into the fabric of creation:

Where each element – from cells on up – is a coherent entity in its own right while also an integral component of something larger. In holarchy the health of a system as a whole requires the flourishing of each part. Each living system is interdependent on the vitality of all the other systems. Based on this precept, an ecological civilization would be designed on the core principle of fractal flourishing: the well-being of each person is fractally related to the health of the larger world. Individual health relies on societal health, which relies in turn on the health of the ecosystem in which it’s embedded. Accordingly, from the ground up, this social organization would foster individual dignity, providing the conditions for everyone to live in safety and self-determination with universal access to adequate housing, competent health care and quality education.

People don’t want to return to the same old same old: so you may say I’m a dreamer – but I’m NOT the only one. Perhaps you recall another poem from the early days of self-isolation that Fr. Richard Hendrick shared with the world writing:

Yes there is panic buying. Yes there is sickness. Yes there is even death.
But, they say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise you can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet the sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear. They say that in the streets of Assisi people are singing to each other
across the empty squares, keeping their windows open
so that those who are alone may hear the sounds of family around them.
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know is busy spreading fliers with her number
through the neighborhood so that the elders may have someone to call on.
Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples are preparing to welcome
and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary.
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting.
All over the world people are looking at their neighbors in a new way.
All over the world people are waking up to a new reality to how big we really are.
To how little control we really have. To what really matters. To Love.
So we pray and we remember that Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
Yes there is isolation. But there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes there is panic buying. But there does not have to be meanness.
Yes there is sickness. But there does not have to be disease of the soul.
Yes there is even death. But there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe. Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic- The birds are singing again
The sky is clearing, Spring is coming, And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul And though you may not be able
to touch across the empty square, Sing.

In my commitment to rejoicing I am consciously calling this eruption of interdependence the prayer of rejoicing. It is not completely. It is not without political division, ugly and mean-spirited posturing, tears, death and way too much rancor, fear, and hatred. But our season of wandering in the desert has awakened many of our hearts and voices and souls to the importance of rejoicing. How many who are starting to venture out of our isolation are doing so with a sense of gratitude? Slowly tasting life again in all its bounty? We are rejoicing. Living as human beings who KNOW we’re saturated with grace. Fr. Ed encourages us to: take our time with this joy… look in the ordinary for the extraordinary hidden in plain sight, look at the daily and you will find the divine. For blessed are those who live slowly they shall see God.

In early May, I went to visit my brother in San Francisco: the CDC had just announced that those of us who were fully vaccinated could start to venture outside again – especially in communities that were equally fully vaccinated – and San Francisco was close to 80% vaccinated. With a renewed sense of adventure, and our fair share of fear and trembling, my brother, sister-in-law and I went back out into the streets that Leonard Cohen calls the sacred meeting ground where the races meet. At twilight in early May, we gave it a shot, walking around the streets of North Beach without our masks – the first time in 16 months – and it was exhilarating!

We could see a person’s WHOLE face. Especially their smiles. People we didn’t even know stopped us for a fist bump, a laugh, and a story. It was like coming out of hibernation and I wanted to greet everyone with a bear hug – I didn’t – but I wanted to! The next night we went out again and took-in a killer funk band that had the whole neighbor-hood singing and dancing just like Martha and the Vandellas prophesized: the music, the love and the rejoicing were calling out around the world: are you ready for a brand new beat? Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street.

So, we did – we DANCED in the street – we shook our bootees with one another and people I’ll never see again and it felt like Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas all at once. Dr. Adam Grant recently wrote about this in a NY Times guest editorial: “Most people” he stated, “view emotions as existing primarily or even exclusively in their heads. Happiness is considered a state of mind; melancholy is a potential warning sign of mental illness. But the reality is that emotions are inherently social: they are woven through our interactions.”

Research has found that people laugh five times as often when they’re with others as when they are alone. Even exchanging pleasantries with a stranger on a train is enough to spark joy. That’s not to say you can’t find delight in watching a show on Netflix. The problem is that bingeing is an individual pastime. Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity. We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence. That’s a concept coined in the early 20th century by the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. Collective effervescence is the synchrony you feel when you slide into rhythm with strangers on a dance floor, colleagues in a brainstorming session, cousins at a religious service or teammates on a soccer field. And during this pandemic, it’s been largely absent from our lives. Collective effervescence happens when joie de vivre spreads through a group.

I felt it in North Beach dancing in the dark. Dianne and I felt it again a few weeks later when our children and grandchildren feasted with us on our deck as we laughed and danced and sang and played like innocents on our way BACK into the sacred garden. And I see others in our wider com-munity feeling it too as we freely walk down the aisles of Stop and Shop or Wal-Mart after a long, long hibernation and consciously put our masks back on. I was ecstatic when I could take it off – and I want to share that ecstasy with others – even those whose names I’ll never know. So as much as they feel hot and uncomfortable, I trust there is a bit of collective effervescence and even sacred rejoicing in re-upping those damn masks into another round of service again. I want to dance in the streets with everyone and that requires some disciplined rejoicing right now, yes? I want ALL God’s children to be welcomed at the table of grace, so I’ve got some work to do, don’t you think.

It’s in moments like this when so many of our leaders have their heads in the sand or someplace worse that those who KNOW God’s love must take it upon ourselves to make it visible. Now is the time to consciously share our small part of fractal flourishing with those we love – including those strangers whose names we’ll never know – as we separate the “trash from the treasure” as Fr. Ed encourages. Now is the time to sort out: the blessed work from the busy-busy work… resisting the temptation to addictively look at our watches (or smart phones) … as we let go of time as we have known it and allow the Beloved to lead us into quiet, hidden every-day sacred spaces that are free from haste and rushing so that we might help one another live – and live with abundant affection.” I hear that the Poor Peoples’ Movement is gonna dance in the streets this summer in Texas for voter rights.

Now I celebrate what Brother Barber is doing, but not all of us can make it to dance in the streets of Texas. So, I'm wondering if we might take up another type of street dancing. More Motown, where you look at your partner, it's more one on one, sensual and honest, funky where you take your body seriously and their body seriously and everybody's bodies seriously and move to the groove with fun out in public. In the grocery stores. In the library. Wherever you meet someone who needs some encouragement in these dark times connect with them like you're Motown dancing.

So, maybe you can practice that with me by singing an old song in a new way, a vow to live like we’re dancing in the streets as we take on the commitment to love one another consciously. I need help doing this and find if I have a song to sing, my living prayer is strengthened. It maybe crazy but try this with me…

Callin' out around the world are you ready for a brand new beat

Summer's here and the time is right for dancing in the street

They're dancing in Chicago (dancing in the street)Down in New Orleans (dancing in the street) way out in New York City (dancing in the street)

All we need is music, sweet music there'll be music everywhere

There'll be swingin' and swayin' and records playing dancing in the street

Oh it doesn't matter what you wear just as long as you are there

So come on ev'ry guy - every girl - everywhere around the world

There'll be dancing (dancing in the street)

They're dancing (dancing in the street)

It is an invitation across the nation a chance for folks to meet

There'll be laughing, singing and music swinging and dancing in the street Philadelphia, PA (dancing in the street)

Baltimore and D.C. now (dancing in the street)

Can't forget the Motor City (dancing in the street)

All we need is music, sweet music there'll be music everywhere

There'll be swingin', swayin' and records playing and dancing in the street Oh, it doesn't matter what you wear just as long as your mask is there So come on, rich and poor, guys and girls,

 gender fluid all around the world

We be dancing… dancing in the street

no permanent allies or enemies...

Early last week I posted a meme that quoted Liz Cheney re: Jim Jordan's traitorous hypocrisy.

The comments that followed were yet another reminder of how profoundly polarized we are as a people: while there was general agreement that Ms. Cheney's insights noted above are true re: Jordan, it makes many of us uncomfortable to consider her an ally on this issue. Fair enough. Cheney has a public record to stand on which is not pretty. It is hardly compassionate and not all that different from the priorities enacted by the once demagogue in chief. But when it comes to the January 6 insurrection, I believe she is right on the money - and needs to be respected for this. Clearly this is why Nancy Pelosi put her on the House Select Committee to investigate the attempted coup.

One of the principles of grass roots community organizing is: no permanent allies and no permanent enemies. This is American pragmatism that always trumps political ideology when working for the common good. Even Jesus taught his disciples that they needed to learn how to make peace with "unrighteous mammon!" And Reinhold Niebuhr celebrated much the same when he wrote Children of Light, Children of Darkness in the midst of the Great Depression of the 30's. Too often open-hearted, optimistic people get trapped when we choose to believe that ideological purity is more important than compromised results. This holier than thou inertia solves nothing and confuses the purity of our bubble for authentic engagement. Studying with masters like Cesar Chavez, Fred Ross, Ed Chambers, Dolores Huerta, and various Industrial Areas Foundation organizers has taught me not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. As the sermon on the mount makes clear: God makes the sun rise and set on the righteous as well as the unjust. 

All which is to say, for the first time in decades I'm with Bernie at this moment in time. He realizes that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to make significant economic changes law for middle class and working class people. So, like the mature wing of SDS used to say, "we're PART of the way with LBJ." And Bernie is part of the way - maybe even MOST of the way - with Uncle Joe Biden. He didn't rant and pout when the first Biden stimulus package bailed on the $15 an hour minimum wage. Rather, he said we'll pick it up later. And we'll let our pragmatic allies build momentum for it, too. Same with the two huge infrastructure proposals that have a good chance of becoming law before Labor Day. Are they perfect? Everything a good democratic socialist would want? Not at all, but as the man has said out loud and in public: the up-coming infrastructure bills are the most comprehensive changes working people will encounter since the days of FDR.

Sanders also knows that realistically there are only a few more months to get results before the 2022 election cycle sucks the oxygen out of the room for those in Congress. Most Americans won't pay much attention until September 2022, but the policy wonks, lobbyists, hacks as well as fundraisers will turn a blind eye to deal-making once the summer is over and the position themselves for mid-term elections. Now is when it compromise and cooperation counts. The recent one year extension of tax credits for children must become permanent law. The infrastructure bills that address brick and mortar repairs alongside more high tech needs and climate change are vital, too. This is a time for introspective prayer, disciplined agitation for real changes that we can accomplish with common ground, and then the courage to use the limited power of this moment boldly before the hour passes. So, let's give Ms. Cheney credit where credit is due, quit the carping, and find more areas for cooperation as there are already too many entrenched ideologues heralding their purity but doing nothing to heal our wounds. Dr. King used to say that we are given certain moments to advance the cause of justice and hope - and they don't last for ever. So, seize the moment

pray ALL ways: suffering as a school of prayer

PRAY ALL WAYS: Embracing Suffering as Prayer

(Notes from this morning's live-stream)

How we choose to live into our experiences of pain and suffering will shape how we ripen and mature as people of faith. I’m not trying to be pious here, just direct. We all know – and have known – pain in our lives. Grief, emptiness, sorrow, and anguish are givens in the human condition. An ironic Yiddish aphorism that I’ve long savored puts it like this: In life, God often seems like a banker: with joy and happiness, there are limited quantities; so, for a season the One who is Holy gives blessings to some, and happiness to others only to take them away to share with others. But when it comes to sorrow and pain? They seem are unlimited and are freely distributed to all!

· I am NOT one of those who believes this literally – that God causes us pain for one inscrutable reason or another that may only be revealed on the other side of this realm – not at all! Such a deity would be cruel and sadistic – not at all what Jesus shows to us. But I still like that old saying because it’s what life FEELS like when we’re hurting – like we’re living through a season of joy that will suddenly fade into fallow or dry times maybe even heartbreak as well.

· Suffering exists in a multitude of forms – from social injustice, violence, industrial disease, and climate change to depression, abuse, injury, and anxiety – they all zap our strength, exhaust our inner resolve, cause us to grieve and despair, and ask ourselves WHY the hell this is hap-pening to me? Or to US? Or to the communities and families we love?

Fr. Richard Rohr writes: “Sooner or later, the heart of everybody’s spiritual problem is, “What do we do with our pain? Why is there evil? Why is there suffering?” The dean of San Francisco Theo-logical Seminary’s post-graduate program, the Rev. Dr. Warren Lee, used to say to us on a regular basis: “How you respond to the unavoidable agonies of a parishioner’s suffering is your personal, existential litmus test concerning whether or not you should stay in pastoral ministry! If you come up with nothing, it’s time to get out!” Blunt but insightful professional advice.

To which the late Dorothee Soelle, post-Holocaust German theologian who helped me shape my senior thesis in seminary, taught that the reason we in the West no longer know how to respond to human suffering with insight and compassion is because we’ve been blinded to death’s wisdom by our quest for success. We want to know the WHY in every situation. We ache to control ALL the mysteries of life. And while this has an upside in science and technology – the speed by which we were able to create and distribute COVID-19 vaccinations is proof – this quest has been a dismal failure when it comes to embracing suffering as a mode of authentic prayer.

· St. Paul wrote in Romans 8 that “nothing can separate us from the love of God. Not death nor life, nor angels nor the powers of hell, not things present nor things to come, not height nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God made real in our lives by Christ Jesus our Lord.”

· Why then, Soelle asks, does traditional Western Christianity teach that the Creator is an “omnipotent, distant Father-God” who stoically, mysteriously, and seemingly randomly acts beyond human compassion in ways that may only make sense after our death? It’s because we’re addicted to success and control to such a degree, she replies, that we have lost our capacity to live without a why.

We’ve sanitized death – we hide from it – losing touch with a wisdom which is built into the rhythm of the seasons and the soul of nature. Small wonder we can miss the truth Jesus incarnates in his life, death, and resurrection. The core of Christ’s journey documents that suffering can NOT be avoided and must not be endured alone; rather it’s to be embraced as yet another way of encoun-tering God’s loving presence. Richard Rohr, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Dorothee Soelle all attest to the assertion that Jesus learned in his life what Job discovered before him. Job begins his journey beg-ging God for an explanation that never comes – because Job is NOT in control.

Only when he relinquishes his demands and becomes silent does Job start to realize that he has NOT been ignored by the holy, but rather welcomed into a sacred conversation with God’s love that takes his pain seriously. You may that Job started out asking his friends to explain his anguish but all they offer are worn-out religious cliches about a punitive God who afflicts only sinners: what is YOUR secret sin, brother, they demand? What have YOU failed to confess? Such bankrupt, em-otionally callous, and theologically cruel replies only demoralize and infuriate Job – and well they should! The poetic prophets of ancient Israel assure us that God HATES this type of abstract, shame-based spirituality. You can find it in the Bible, of course, whenever Deuteronomy or Leviti-cus is interpreted in wooden and uncreative ways. But far more plentiful and persuasive are the cries of prophets like Amos and Isaiah who shout:

I HATE and despise your feasts days says the Lord… So shout out and do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet and announce to my people… that they may seek me day after day pleading: “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why do we humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and continue to oppress all your workers. You fast only to quarrel and fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Take stock, you who have eyes but will not see: Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Do this and then your light shall break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up quickly; then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am.

Job is a righteous soul, however, who continues to plead with the holy, trusting the steadfast love of the Lord that endures forever until he’s so exasperated by God’s apparent silence that he explodes in exhaustion. When he hits rock bottom, when he is completely empty of self, and no longer holds any illusions of control, then symbolically and emotionally Job hears and experiences the still small presence of the sacred within and beyond him which evokes this response: Oh, NOW I get it! Now…I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted… Once I uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful and grand for me to grasp. Now I know that when I can hear, you will speak. When I engage and trust you, you are present. Once I had only heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now I have seen you, experienced you, trusted you… and I am humbled into trust…

· James Hillman, a protégé of depth psychologist C.G. Jung, speaks of this as “growing down” in contrast to the “growing up.” Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, he says, each person will struggle blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life.

· There was a time, Hillman recalls, when, “one of Jung’s students, in a discussion of Pilgrim’s Progress, asked Jung what his own pilgrimage was like. “In my case,” the learned professor replied, “my Pilgrim’s Progress consisted of me having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.” Hillman adds:

The path of descent, the “deepening into life,” means letting go. At some point we must surrender; let our roots sink into our own darkness to weave and web their way into what lives in that dirt of self – what has been waiting within us. Here we can discover the deeper realities hidden within our own bodies, our circumstances, our experiences, as we let the old ways die. In this loss we can make space for Something Greater, for the soul to be reborn. It is from here that we can be re-enlivened like limbs warming back from cold or a lack of blood, returning not with the trap-pings of the world, but to an enriched, embodied life.

Jesus experienced the conundrum of descent as he literally and figuratively lived into his own passion, death, and resurrection. Jesus discovered in his day what Job found out before him: God is present during the darkness of our suffering. And not only present, but trustworthy and loving. Richard Rohr builds on this saying: 

We are “saved” or made whole by being addressed and included in the cosmic conversation. We do not really need linear answers; we need only to be taken seriously as part of the dialogue. To be loved. But we usually only know this in hindsight after the suffering and the struggle. It cannot be known beforehand, not theoretically or theologically, for our knowledge of God is participatory. God refuses to be intellectually “thought,” and is only known in the passion and pain of it all, experientially, when the issues become soul-sized and worthy of us.

Rachel Alana Falconer of Midwives of the Soul adds that: A growing down so often necessitates a "sinking to the depths". If we do not consciously choose the journey, the journey will choose us. The soul, weary and neglected so often captures us in the only way it can - calling us into sickness or depression, perhaps some kind of a fall or terrible grief, or betrayal - even a lingering apathy. At some point all the ornaments of self-image will lose their sparkle or even vanish, and it's often with great suffering we realize they no longer contain the mean-ing the world assured us they would have. Eventually we have no choice but to turn within in silence.

Which is precisely what Soelle taught us at Union Theological Seminary: The more people anticipate the elimination of suffering, the less strength they have to actually oppose it. The more we sanitize death and avoid its lessons, the farther we move away from the presence of God’s love. For whoever deals with his or her own personal suffering in the way our society teaches – through illusion, minimization, suppression, apathy, and our addiction to success – will certainly deal with societal suffering in much the same way.

Cumulatively, this is why I believe Fr. Ed Hays tells us that suffering can become a school of prayer for us where we discover like Job and Jesus that our anguish is yet another way to embrace God’s love. It is how we can be embraced, too. Suffering can become one way to pray ALL ways if we relinquish our illusions of success and control, learn to wait in the silence for God’s assurance that our pain has been taken seriously, and then enter into a deeper intimacy with the holy. There are three foundational wisdom texts from the New Testament that I want to share with you:

· First, the post-resurrection conversation between Jesus and two disciples on the Emmaus Road in Acts. Second, the words Jesus shares with his friends about bearing fruit in St. John’s gospel. And third, the confession St. Paul offers linking trusting God with the presence of the Holy Spirit during hard times.

· In Romans 5 he puts it like this: Because of grace we can celebrate our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, a hope that does not disappoint us, because it is God’s love being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

For me, the key to the Emmaus Road story is the conversation: like Job’s mystical encounter with God that evokes trust when he is taken seriously, and Christ’s passion that leads him into a communion with God that carries him beyond the Cross into a resurrection, this story starts with the despair and questions of the disciples: Why did Jesus have to die? Why were our hopes dashed? Why have we been forced into grief? Fr. Ed writes that the questions of the disciples are “timeless, as current as anything today.” But the Holy One does NOT respond to these why questions with a logical answer; instead he offers a relationship: Jesus meets his friends in their pain, listens to them with compassion, refuses to ignore their woes, and finally shares with them a mystical insight about a seed falling to the ground and dying before it bears good fruit:

How else could the Messiah come into his glory,” he asks? There’s no explanation or excuse for our suffering, simply a conversation and relationship that honors their broken hearts. Fr. Ed writes: Without entering the darkness, the suffering of his Passion, the gentle rabbi from Nazareth would have remained simply Jesus and never become the Christ, the Cosmic or Universal source of hope, grace, and love. The brutal death and resurrection transfigured the wonder-worker from Galilee permanently into the essence of divine light and glory. Because – and this is critical – this is how God’s love bears fruit.

I know that when I have been locked into agony, fear, shame, and suffering, two truths have been salvific: holding on to my baptism by faith and remaining open to the loving solidarity of key people I trust. During a particularly bleak bout of burn-out in Tucson some 20 years ago, the only prayer I could articulate was the one Martin Luther used during his darkest hours: I have been baptized!

This was NOT a statement of pride, privilege, or triumph, just a hopeful, short-hand affirmation of trust that from the beginning of time I have been loved and cherished by God as one of the beloved. I didn’t FEEL loved, cherished, or beloved by anyone – least of all myself. But for nearly five months I made myself pray those words over and over to remember that NOTH-ING could separate me from the love of God. Not my feelings of despair. Not the reaction of some of colleagues nor anything within or beyond. Like they say in AA, sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. So I kept saying that nothing could separate me from the love of God. I had been baptized – and I just didn’t have the energy or wisdom to pray anything else.

Same goes for the deep conversations and loving embraces of a few key confidants: they did not nor and could not fix me. They really didn’t have all that much wisdom to share with me either – certainly no answers for what I was feeling and dealing with. But they listened. And they loved. They kept our relationship alive and real. They refused to ignore or abandon me either. In this, even at my lowest, I knew I wasn’t alone – and this is how I stated to learn that my suffering could be a school of prayer – that my descent mattered – and that’s part of what I hear taking place in the Emmaus Road story.

· Jesus listened and shared with his wounded friends what he had experienced both from God and from Mary Magdalene. You may recall that there are parts of the New Testament that try to erase this fact, but Magdalene and Magdalene alone never deserted Jesus: she stood by him when the disciples doubted, she was there through the Last Supper where she anointed Jesus Messiah before his death, and she continued to stand witness for him through his trial, crucifixion, and burial.

· I have been persuaded that Cynthia Bourgeault is right in insisting that we reclaim this truth and add it to our liturgies for it shows how Jesus gives to us what he first received from his beloved friend and then the Lord adding credence to what the old timers used to say: you can’t go where you don’t know and you can’t give what you ain’t got. What was true for Jesus – and Job and Magdalene and even St. Paul as well – is true for us, too.

The second text to consider comes from St. John’s gospel where Jesus tells his friends that in nature there is a cycle of dying into new life that we need to honor in our spiritual journey. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record about this, but we in the industrialized West are SO out of touch with Mother Nature and her sacramental wisdom and healing that it can’t be restated enough. Not so with our first century itinerant rabbi who spoke the language of his family and friends. Bearing fruit: Is a clue to understanding the problem of pain – and what we can do with it. For fruitfulness in human beings resembles the pattern of fruitfulness of nature.” In the 12th chapter of St. John’s gospel Jesus tells his friends that there is a cruciform shape built into the ebb and flow of nature:

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Fr. Rohr interprets this with stunning simplicity: To say that there is a cruciform shape to reality means that loss precedes all renewal, emptiness makes way for every new infilling, every transformation in the universe requires the surrendering of a previous “form.” And death is not the end, but part of the renewing gift of life.

In John 15 Jesus builds on this by referring to himself as the True Vine in whom we are to abide – which means to rest and trust that God will prune from us those parts that keep us from bearing good and healthy fruit. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

· If part one of the school of suffering prayer teaches that descent can lead to a deeper intimacy with the holy where we are not ignored but embraced as the beloved; part two tells us that there are times when parts of us must die or be relinquished before we can become our best selves.

· And the truth is that most of us are not very good at letting go. Or accepting what cannot be changed as the Serenity Prayer puts it. So, we fight death in small and big ways even when Jesus asks us to rest into a death that must happen so that we can become fully alive.

So let me speak to you from my experience, not because I’ve mastered this spiritual dying or des-cent, but because I still fight such the counter-cultural wisdom that links death to renewal. I know all too intimately that we’ve been taught to avoid suffering at all costs: we have meds and physical diversions as well as entertainment and emotional manipulation.

We have whole industries built on distracting us from all that hurts. And while there’s a place for taking a break from our woes, there is also a time to pay attention to the pain like a rotten tooth must be extracted and give it up. In my mother’s last year of life I bumped up against the fact that I knew she was going to die soon and I still hated parts of who she had been for me. We had a tense and often abusive relationship where alcohol too often got the better part of her and led her into violence. As one of my sisters put it, “I’m having a hard time dealing with the fact that Mom loved Jim Beam more than me.” Me, too.

So, when she was drawing close to the end, knowing that I was expected to say something at her memorial service, I found myself outraged and terrified. I would never say anything cruel about her at such a time, but a dark and mean-spirited hatred was churning away inside me that I didn’t really know what to do with. I’m serious: it was ugly and vicious and deeply troubling. I thought I’d dealt with all that junk, but… apparently, I was wrong. My spiritual director and counselor at the time listened carefully to my lament and then asked me how I might deal with my mom if she were simply a member of my faith community. It did not take long to realize that I would be heart-broken for her: not only had she survived abuse herself, but she did the best she could with the resources available to her. Acknowledging her pain helped me take stock of the suffering we shared– and gave me a measure of relief. My own hurt and shame did not vanish, but now I could embrace her as one of Christ’s own beloved wounded ones.

Which empowered me to sing, rather than speak, at her memorial service using Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song, “Jubilee” to express my complicated but recovering love and forgiveness. The heart of this song still cuts close to my heart and goes like this:

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 too much without you so if it were just up to me
I'd take hold of your hand, saying come hear the band play your song at the jubilee

Yes, 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

My pain, her pain, our pain are a part of God’s pain – it’s all wrapped up together – and I stumbled and wept a sharing that song. But by facing the whole mess with wise counsel mixed with God’s grace and the courage to accept what I could not change: I tasted a bit of serenity in the suffering, and it keeps growing stronger. To bear fruit, the kernel of wheat must fall to the ground and die – this is the cruciform shape of God within all of life.

The third insight grows out of the first two wherein St. Paul suggests that letting suffering connect us with God’s spirit of holiness can lead us into the light of hope. Fr. Ed writes: “When we’re able to flow with suffering, we move with it and into it and then through it. When we fight or reject it, when we are at war with suffering, we end up a victim of anxiety and exhaustion. Suffering and pain are creative when they lead to the growth of the human spirit and the ability to live life fully.” So, he asks: is there any room in your prayer life for the Gethsemane Prayer? “We might find it valuable if we had a special feast day to celebrate the mystery of Gethsemane, a prayer of lone-liness and doubt, a prayer of preparation for facing and embracing the suffering that will certainly come our way, a prayer to help us make suffering creative, redemptive and productive.” For the past few years, I’ve been taking Richard Rohr’s wise interpretation of these words with a renewed seriousness. Religion in America has become a wreck, filled with hatred, violence, blame and shame. It’s nothing like the way of Jesus. Rohr writes:

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. I am sorry to admit that I first see my wounds as an obstacle more than a gift. Healing is a long journey. If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.

One of the ways we pass on our pain if we haven’t dealt with it is scapegoating: blaming and punishing others for our wounds. The Republican Party is doing this in spades right now with the Big Lie, but it’s written into the fabric of our American mythology where the winners are the only ones who count: they get to shape what the city on the hill looks like and everyone else is either en-slaved or enemies. Rohr reminds us that the Jesus Story “is about radically transforming history and individuals so that we don’t just keep handing on the pain to the next generation.”

The late Rene Girard, French anthropologist who studied the role of violence in fomenting social cohesion in cultures, put it best when he concluded that the gift Jesus on the Cross gives us is showing us what scapegoating looks like from the perspective of the vanquished. The sacrificial gift of the Cross gives is not some magical obliteration of sin through a blood offering to God. Rather, it is how Jesus inverts culture and documents what cruelty and scapegoating look like up close and personal from the perspective of the loser. The innocents made to suffer the violence of empire. Jesus offers us a non-violent alternative to scape-goating by practicing sacrificial love and sharing the burden of social suffering with us all.

“For unless we can find a meaning for human suffering and discover how God is somehow in it and can also use it for good,” Rohr concludes, “humanity is in major trouble – because we will suffer – and even the Buddha said that suffering is part of the deal!” Our challenge – and the charism of the school of suffering – is to learn how to carry this pain and hold it consciously without projecting it on to others. Trusting that God’s spirit and presence will lead us into a deeper love, the mystics ask us to “learn to carry the cross of our reality quietly until God transforms us through it.” This is how our suffering empowers us to become the wounded healers of the world. I think Fr. Henri Nouwen is right when he holds up Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà as one such wounded healer:

(After the Cross) one would expect her to take the role of wailing or protesting, but she doesn’t! Mary is in complete solidarity with the mystery of life and death. “There’s something deeper happening here,” she prays; so how can I absorb it just as Jesus is absorbing it, instead of returning it in kind?” Jesus on the cross and Mary standing beneath the cross are classic images of transformative spirituality. (To which I would add Mary Magdalene.) They do not return the hostility, hatred, accusations, or malice directed at them. They hold the suffering until it becomes resurrection! That’s the core mystery of Christianity and it takes our whole life to begin to comprehend this.

It is my conviction that over the next five years many of our lives are going to challenged like nothing we’ve known on the continental USA since the Civil War: the white nationalists, the para-military fascists, their minions, and financial backers are planning for a time of violent chaos and the dismantling of elections. It is not inevitable, but should it come to pass, we will experience blood in our streets and threats to the well-being of all we hold dear. Our spiritual tradition at its best offers us a way into deeper intimacy as the Holy Spirit opens our hearts to trust.