Someone must have praying for me. Good praying, I mean, not the sanctimonious prayer of some, where the person tells God what the prayee NEEDS (in their opinion). No, this one was coming from someone who knew me enough to want me to have God present to me during my pilgrimage-on-the-California-highways instead of my pilgrimage in Ireland, where I wasn't because I have no discipline and cannot save money. I didn't even have the money to be doing this camping trip which was really a pilgrimage of the .... you get the picture.
Doogie and I (Doogie is my Westie and soul mate) set out one early morning in May for San Diego, and planned to camp there two nights before heading up the coast to Oceano Dunes, stay there for two nights, and then get up to San Francisco. Then over to Tahoe or Utah, and down to the north rim of the Grand Canyon or through Flagstaff. I was going to be flexible and open, because I don't get to do that in my work as a parish priest enough (you know how those people can be; they are more interested in schedules and actually following the schedules than they are about being spontaneous in the spirit!).
Except that someone whispered doubt into my ear just before I left... and so I abandoned the trip midway, and it could have been a complete failure.
But somebody must have been praying for me.
After two good nights and a full day of dog beaches and dog friendly shops and cooking over a gas stove in San Diego in between, we hit the road for Oceano Dunes. I was prepared to ditch this portion and find a plan B. Oceano Dunes -- I had read and they didn't exaggerate -- was one huge camping and ATV beach. I envisioned 20 -some people on quads zipping all over the beach, up and down the dunes, and the possibility that there wouldn't much privacy. I was going to listen to my gut (Ms Holy Spirit herself) to see if it felt safe there. I shot up I-5 from the campsite because it was close by, and decided I would just bear down and get through Los Angeles as quickly as possible using sheer stupidity. As with every big city, there were many detractors telling me how many hours it would take me to get through the traffic.
It wasn't that bad, really. Except that bearing down and ramming through is one of the best ways to miss the scenery, which I KNOW wouldn't have happened if I had gone on the Ireland pilgrimage with Gil Stafford and his group. One of the stated principles of his group "Peregrini," which, from what I vaguely remember from seminary, has something to do with traveling, is that you should NOT miss the scenery.
Fortunately, I came to myself like the son in the story of the generous father (also known as the prodigal son), and got off I-5 a little after lunchtime to take the 101 toward the ocean. The 101, I found out later, has a worse repurtation than LA for its notorious traffic snarl-ups. Or "parking lots" more accurately.
I finally got off at a sign that said "Beach Traffic" or something similar, and parked it in a shopping center with interesting shops. After letting Doogie pee and smell a couple of unhealthy-looking trees in the parking lot, I took him to Starbucks and parked him with a scruffy looking guy that looked like he would throw down his life if someone tried to take Doogie from him so I could pee and smell the coffee in my own parking island of caffeine. (okay, that's over the top...)
Doogie and I sat grateful not to be moving and grateful not to be in the sweltering Arizona heat, and we people watched. Within sight of the shopping center was a middle class neighborhood; hell, I might have even been able to afford a house there if it wasn't California or Arizona. I got out my Atlas and tried to figure out where we were. We had been driving five hours by then, and I realized how silly I had been originally to think I might be able to get to San Francisco in one day. I was even beginning to wonder if we would get to Oceano before it got dark, but had re-discovered daylight saving time there in California. We don't do DST in Arizona; there is no need to inflict MORE daylight when the hottest temperatures soar even higher on our time off when our employers are not paying the AC bill.
I had missed the signs saying where we were. I have full-blown ADHD, but that usually doesn'y apply to traveling. I'm more like
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Preparing for the Upside Down Kingdom
Sermon – Sept. 23, 2012
One of my favorite pictures is of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama hamming it up at the camera, both with big smiles on their faces. They look almost impish in their grinning, as if they are up to something mischievous.
It is my favorite image of two of the holiest people of our time, and I guess for me, laughter is an essential ingredient of holiness.
I once heard that laughter is the shortest distance between two people, so if God is love, then God must laugh a lot.
So Jesus must have laughed a lot as well. At lunch the other day with the Llanases and Betty Marquand, we got talking about just that: Jesus laughing, and I told of a painting that I had seen of The Laughing Christ. Well, it turns out that there are several paintings of Jesus laughing, but I downloaded the one I liked best. Here it is.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is trying to instill in his disciples the kind of humility it takes to be a servant leader, an upside down version of what the world sees as leadership. Instead of a warrior king who would be Messiah by bringing political power to the Jews, Jesus tries to help them see that “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
Then he takes a child, puts it on his lap and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and welcomes the one who sent me.”
The only other time Jesus mentions children is in the Gospel of Matthew, when he says ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
It’s important to acknowledge that Jesus was probably talking about becoming child-LIKE and not being child-ISH. The disciples are being child-ISH when they are arguing about who is going to sit on Jesus right and left hands.
Instead, he is probably talking about holy qualities of an innocent, natural child. that would best prepare us for the upside down world of the kingdom, where servants are valued over the powerful of the world, where the last in line get to be first, where the meek inherit the earth, and where those who are willing to die to their egos are given true life.
What qualities will it take to prepare us for such a kingdom?
Certainly, the ability to laugh easily, but not AT others’ foibles, but at our OWN sense of importance. The person who can laugh at himself when he feels slighted, and say ironically “Obviously you don’t know how important I am” is someone who will feel at home in the kingdom of God.
The next qualities come right out of the prayer that we say just after a child is baptized, when we pray that he or she will be given “an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.”
An inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.
All of these qualities embrace the gifts God has given us, and embrace the world as if life is an adventure, and there is trust that God will be there all along the way. And there’s JOY, without which life can get pretty dusty, pretty bitter. A Christian without joy is a contradiction of all Jesus taught, and if God is truly at the center of our lives and our being, joy should always be close at hand.
Finally, Jesus valued everyone equally, regardless of status or wealth. It is a very childlike quality to say to someone, “I’m coming to your house for dinner!” as Jesus did more than once. There is a trust in the goodness in other people’s hearts, because your own heart is pure.
Okay, so most of us don’t have pure hearts. But we can at least act a little more trusting, a little more joyful, wondering in the discoveries we might find.
The 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi tells the following story about a young man seeking advice asks to speak to someone wise. The villagers point to a man playing stick-horse with children. “He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child’s play.” During their conversation the young man asks the wise man why he hides his intelligence. The man answers, “The people here want to put me in charge. They want me to be judge, magistrate, and interpreter of all the texts. The knowing I have doesn’t want that. It wants to enjoy itself. I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time I’m eating the sweetness.” The following words are from the middle of the poem.
Knowledge that is acquired is not like this. Those who have it worry if audiences like it or not. It’s a bait for popularity. Disputational knowing wants customers. It has no soul. Robust and energetic before a responsive crowd, it slumps when no one is there.
Chew quietly your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay playfully childish. Your face will turn rosy with illumination like the redbud flowers. -Rumi 1207-1273 translation by Coleman Barks with John Moyne The Essential Rumi
If that doesn’t speak to you, maybe this thought will. I recently read a poster that said, “If you haven’t grown up by age 50, then you don’t have to.”
Now, let’s go and have some fun at a picnic!
One of my favorite pictures is of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama hamming it up at the camera, both with big smiles on their faces. They look almost impish in their grinning, as if they are up to something mischievous.
It is my favorite image of two of the holiest people of our time, and I guess for me, laughter is an essential ingredient of holiness.
I once heard that laughter is the shortest distance between two people, so if God is love, then God must laugh a lot.
So Jesus must have laughed a lot as well. At lunch the other day with the Llanases and Betty Marquand, we got talking about just that: Jesus laughing, and I told of a painting that I had seen of The Laughing Christ. Well, it turns out that there are several paintings of Jesus laughing, but I downloaded the one I liked best. Here it is.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is trying to instill in his disciples the kind of humility it takes to be a servant leader, an upside down version of what the world sees as leadership. Instead of a warrior king who would be Messiah by bringing political power to the Jews, Jesus tries to help them see that “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
Then he takes a child, puts it on his lap and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and welcomes the one who sent me.”
The only other time Jesus mentions children is in the Gospel of Matthew, when he says ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
It’s important to acknowledge that Jesus was probably talking about becoming child-LIKE and not being child-ISH. The disciples are being child-ISH when they are arguing about who is going to sit on Jesus right and left hands.
Instead, he is probably talking about holy qualities of an innocent, natural child. that would best prepare us for the upside down world of the kingdom, where servants are valued over the powerful of the world, where the last in line get to be first, where the meek inherit the earth, and where those who are willing to die to their egos are given true life.
What qualities will it take to prepare us for such a kingdom?
Certainly, the ability to laugh easily, but not AT others’ foibles, but at our OWN sense of importance. The person who can laugh at himself when he feels slighted, and say ironically “Obviously you don’t know how important I am” is someone who will feel at home in the kingdom of God.
The next qualities come right out of the prayer that we say just after a child is baptized, when we pray that he or she will be given “an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.”
An inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.
All of these qualities embrace the gifts God has given us, and embrace the world as if life is an adventure, and there is trust that God will be there all along the way. And there’s JOY, without which life can get pretty dusty, pretty bitter. A Christian without joy is a contradiction of all Jesus taught, and if God is truly at the center of our lives and our being, joy should always be close at hand.
Finally, Jesus valued everyone equally, regardless of status or wealth. It is a very childlike quality to say to someone, “I’m coming to your house for dinner!” as Jesus did more than once. There is a trust in the goodness in other people’s hearts, because your own heart is pure.
Okay, so most of us don’t have pure hearts. But we can at least act a little more trusting, a little more joyful, wondering in the discoveries we might find.
The 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi tells the following story about a young man seeking advice asks to speak to someone wise. The villagers point to a man playing stick-horse with children. “He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child’s play.” During their conversation the young man asks the wise man why he hides his intelligence. The man answers, “The people here want to put me in charge. They want me to be judge, magistrate, and interpreter of all the texts. The knowing I have doesn’t want that. It wants to enjoy itself. I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time I’m eating the sweetness.” The following words are from the middle of the poem.
Knowledge that is acquired is not like this. Those who have it worry if audiences like it or not. It’s a bait for popularity. Disputational knowing wants customers. It has no soul. Robust and energetic before a responsive crowd, it slumps when no one is there.
Chew quietly your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay playfully childish. Your face will turn rosy with illumination like the redbud flowers. -Rumi 1207-1273 translation by Coleman Barks with John Moyne The Essential Rumi
If that doesn’t speak to you, maybe this thought will. I recently read a poster that said, “If you haven’t grown up by age 50, then you don’t have to.”
Now, let’s go and have some fun at a picnic!
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Send Me Tough Angels
"I am not asking you
to take this wilderness from me,
to remove this place of starkness
where I come to know
the wildness within me,
where I learn to call the names
of the ravenous beasts
that place inside me,
to finger the brambles
that snake through my veins,
to taste the thirst
that tugs at my tongue.
But send me
tough angels,
sweet wine,
strong bread:
just enough."
(Jan Richardson, In Wisdom’s Path)
It seems I must go through the wilderness again.
St. Luke's is running out of money and will not be able to afford a full-time priest after September of this year. We had bought ourselves some time with an aggressive pledge campaign, increasing our total pledges by $25,000 for 2012. We crunched numbers, cut programs drastically, cut back the hours on already very part-time cleaning people, parish administrator, and facility repair guy. The biggest line-item in the budget is the clergyperson.
So I brought it up first. "You can't afford a full-time priest. You don't NEED a full-time priest. The parish doesn't need to go anywhere, but you need to get creative about how you can be the church without a full-time priest." They were all quick to come to my defense. "We need you." Those not as worried about my feelings, but concerned about how this might "look" said, "we will die if we don't have a full-time rector."
Of course this is not true. More and more parishes in the country, in mainline churches all over, are going to part-time clergy. Unfortunately, it can't be me. I have no savings, no other sources of income that will allow me to work part-time. The careers I had before seminary have now moved on without me, and my credentials have expired, the places I worked have closed or changed hands, the supervisors are elsewhere.
So I am back in the job search again. And though I have gone through this wilderness place before, the demons come back, the temptations can still get their claws in me, and pull me into their haunting cruelty. "This is not going to look good on your resume. Two years in one place. A year in another. Now less than three years here. How's it going to look?"
Oh, I know that one well. "How's it going to look?" Some people can be very cavalier about this idea. "Who cares what others think?" they ask. Those people have never been on the other side of an interview, or waiting for a response from a job application, or had someone with power over them question if it is something THEY did that created these questionable items on their resume. It is an upper middle class white person's luxury to be able NOT to care, and it is becoming scarce even among this population as "downsizing" makes its way into our daily lexicons.
And so I count on the Holy Spirit, who works in ways that aren't bound by tradition or appearances or worth in the world's ways of measuring worth. She will send those tough angels for support and reassurance when resumes are ignored, when emails are sent saying "you aren't a good fit," when phone interviews fall flat. And she will (and HAS) opened the right doors, the right hearts and ears of a search committee somewhere out there with a parish who needs the gifts of a quirky but faithful woman of God who preaches from her heart, teaches with passion and curiosity, gives deep spiritual guidance and touching pastoral care, who may not keep all the balls in the air from dropping, but has enough humility and self-effacing humor to admit it.
"Send me tough angels, sweet wine, and strong bread. Just enough."
to take this wilderness from me,
to remove this place of starkness
where I come to know
the wildness within me,
where I learn to call the names
of the ravenous beasts
that place inside me,
to finger the brambles
that snake through my veins,
to taste the thirst
that tugs at my tongue.
But send me
tough angels,
sweet wine,
strong bread:
just enough."
(Jan Richardson, In Wisdom’s Path)
It seems I must go through the wilderness again.
St. Luke's is running out of money and will not be able to afford a full-time priest after September of this year. We had bought ourselves some time with an aggressive pledge campaign, increasing our total pledges by $25,000 for 2012. We crunched numbers, cut programs drastically, cut back the hours on already very part-time cleaning people, parish administrator, and facility repair guy. The biggest line-item in the budget is the clergyperson.
So I brought it up first. "You can't afford a full-time priest. You don't NEED a full-time priest. The parish doesn't need to go anywhere, but you need to get creative about how you can be the church without a full-time priest." They were all quick to come to my defense. "We need you." Those not as worried about my feelings, but concerned about how this might "look" said, "we will die if we don't have a full-time rector."
Of course this is not true. More and more parishes in the country, in mainline churches all over, are going to part-time clergy. Unfortunately, it can't be me. I have no savings, no other sources of income that will allow me to work part-time. The careers I had before seminary have now moved on without me, and my credentials have expired, the places I worked have closed or changed hands, the supervisors are elsewhere.
So I am back in the job search again. And though I have gone through this wilderness place before, the demons come back, the temptations can still get their claws in me, and pull me into their haunting cruelty. "This is not going to look good on your resume. Two years in one place. A year in another. Now less than three years here. How's it going to look?"
Oh, I know that one well. "How's it going to look?" Some people can be very cavalier about this idea. "Who cares what others think?" they ask. Those people have never been on the other side of an interview, or waiting for a response from a job application, or had someone with power over them question if it is something THEY did that created these questionable items on their resume. It is an upper middle class white person's luxury to be able NOT to care, and it is becoming scarce even among this population as "downsizing" makes its way into our daily lexicons.
And so I count on the Holy Spirit, who works in ways that aren't bound by tradition or appearances or worth in the world's ways of measuring worth. She will send those tough angels for support and reassurance when resumes are ignored, when emails are sent saying "you aren't a good fit," when phone interviews fall flat. And she will (and HAS) opened the right doors, the right hearts and ears of a search committee somewhere out there with a parish who needs the gifts of a quirky but faithful woman of God who preaches from her heart, teaches with passion and curiosity, gives deep spiritual guidance and touching pastoral care, who may not keep all the balls in the air from dropping, but has enough humility and self-effacing humor to admit it.
"Send me tough angels, sweet wine, and strong bread. Just enough."
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Reflecting on that First Good Friday
I always imagine the first Good Friday as cloudy, with a dark threatening sky. One version of the crucifixion story says that the sun was blocked and that there was an earthquake, even. Others have cited evidence that there was actually an eclipse. We don’t really know, but it couldn’t have been a nice day.
I also feel for the disciples on that tragic day. Imagine giving everything up, your family, your home, your job, to follow someone who was so charismatic, so inspiring that you KNEW he was someone special, and then watching as he is arrested very publicly, dragged before the authorities, accused of blasphemy, and executed.
Not only would you have felt in danger yourself, as one of his followers, of being arrested yourself, but you would have questioned whether he was really who he said he was.
We know the rest of the story. We know how everything he told them was true, how he warned them that this was going to happen. It all makes sense to us because we know the whole story, from beginning to end. We may even feel a certain impatience with the disciples for being so thick-skulled and not understanding, but those last days, those emotional days before the execution of Jesus must have been incredibly confusing.
One minute they are preparing for the Passover feast, renting an upper room to gather for the Seder meal, even riding into town on a donkey, with the crowd getting caught up in the event like they KNEW this Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. “Blessed is he that comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” they all chimed in. The disciples must have felt proud to be associated with him, shooing away people who got too close, the children who wanted to ride with him, the women who must not touch this man of God.
How could it have gone from that to THIS so quickly? Now they are left to sort it all out, scattered from each other in fear, cowering in hiding places all over the city while their Lord was being nailed to a cross.
The women, the Marys, stayed anyway. Jesus’ mother, another Mary, and Mary Magdalene, whom some said was Jesus’ favorite--they all stayed with him at the cross, kneeling on the ground, sobbing openly.
And John, the beloved disciple, who looked younger because he had no beard, risked his own safety to be there with the women. The guards paid no attention to the grieving group. They were looking for weapons, for signs of an uprising by the followers of this troublemaker Jesus. They were having their lunch using the cloak they had stripped from Jesus as a tablecloth.
They were too busy trying to look fierce and do the bidding of Caesar’s army to notice the interaction between the four stragglers and Jesus, who was telling John to look out for his mother as if she was his own. “Behold, your son,” Jesus also told Mary, of John, knowing that John could not replace him as her son, but would remind him, in his love for Jesus, of all that Jesus had tried to do.
But Mary cannot be consoled so easily, although she had suspected for awhile that this time was coming. Hadn’t someone warned her that her heart would be grieved? When they told her what a great man her son would become, hadn’t they also told her that first there would be sorrow?
John, too, felt as if his heart would break. He had seen and understood so much of what Jesus had said, that as the Son of God Jesus was one with the Father. Couldn’t he have used that power to destroy these soldiers, to save himself from this horrible death?
But Mary Magdalene knew this could not happen. He had said that the temple would be destroyed, and that Jesus would rebuild that temple in three days. He was speaking of himself, Mary realized at that moment when the sky was at its darkest, as Jesus breathed his last breath. And at that moment she resolved to be there when he returned.
I also feel for the disciples on that tragic day. Imagine giving everything up, your family, your home, your job, to follow someone who was so charismatic, so inspiring that you KNEW he was someone special, and then watching as he is arrested very publicly, dragged before the authorities, accused of blasphemy, and executed.
Not only would you have felt in danger yourself, as one of his followers, of being arrested yourself, but you would have questioned whether he was really who he said he was.
We know the rest of the story. We know how everything he told them was true, how he warned them that this was going to happen. It all makes sense to us because we know the whole story, from beginning to end. We may even feel a certain impatience with the disciples for being so thick-skulled and not understanding, but those last days, those emotional days before the execution of Jesus must have been incredibly confusing.
One minute they are preparing for the Passover feast, renting an upper room to gather for the Seder meal, even riding into town on a donkey, with the crowd getting caught up in the event like they KNEW this Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. “Blessed is he that comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” they all chimed in. The disciples must have felt proud to be associated with him, shooing away people who got too close, the children who wanted to ride with him, the women who must not touch this man of God.
How could it have gone from that to THIS so quickly? Now they are left to sort it all out, scattered from each other in fear, cowering in hiding places all over the city while their Lord was being nailed to a cross.
The women, the Marys, stayed anyway. Jesus’ mother, another Mary, and Mary Magdalene, whom some said was Jesus’ favorite--they all stayed with him at the cross, kneeling on the ground, sobbing openly.
And John, the beloved disciple, who looked younger because he had no beard, risked his own safety to be there with the women. The guards paid no attention to the grieving group. They were looking for weapons, for signs of an uprising by the followers of this troublemaker Jesus. They were having their lunch using the cloak they had stripped from Jesus as a tablecloth.
They were too busy trying to look fierce and do the bidding of Caesar’s army to notice the interaction between the four stragglers and Jesus, who was telling John to look out for his mother as if she was his own. “Behold, your son,” Jesus also told Mary, of John, knowing that John could not replace him as her son, but would remind him, in his love for Jesus, of all that Jesus had tried to do.
But Mary cannot be consoled so easily, although she had suspected for awhile that this time was coming. Hadn’t someone warned her that her heart would be grieved? When they told her what a great man her son would become, hadn’t they also told her that first there would be sorrow?
John, too, felt as if his heart would break. He had seen and understood so much of what Jesus had said, that as the Son of God Jesus was one with the Father. Couldn’t he have used that power to destroy these soldiers, to save himself from this horrible death?
But Mary Magdalene knew this could not happen. He had said that the temple would be destroyed, and that Jesus would rebuild that temple in three days. He was speaking of himself, Mary realized at that moment when the sky was at its darkest, as Jesus breathed his last breath. And at that moment she resolved to be there when he returned.
A Transformative Peace
Over the last 25 years that I have attended Holy Week services, I have learned that the experience is powerful, transformative, and more moving than I could even anticipate.
There have been Holy Weeks that I have come to with things on my mind, outside disturbances that weighed on me heavily, even a resistance to the experience at times, and despite myself, have been swept up in the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil when we have done it, and of course, Easter Sunday, which is always made more glorious for having walked through the events earlier in the week.
It is not an easy walk. Maybe we should advertise a disclaimer, like we do with dramatic television shows: “Viewers may find this disturbing,” or “Warning: Viewer discretion is advised.”
After all, we are walking with someone through the last days and moments before his execution. That it is our God who is being executed makes it that much more disturbing. Many people, MOST people choose to stay away, to look away at the most painful moments, just as many of Jesus’ disciples ended up doing at the last.
We who are courageous enough to be here do so for many reasons: out of a sense of obligation or loyalty to a God who has walked with US through tragedy; because we believe that our God NEEDS US at this time of need; because we know that there is more going on than just empty worship.
This time of year, more than any other, is an experience of ANAMNESIS, of re-living the walk to the cross, and not just telling the story. If it was merely a re-telling, we could all read our Bibles in the comfort of our living rooms.
But here is one place where our liturgical tradition gets it SO RIGHT: by physically touching and consuming the bread and wine, by solemnly carrying out the furniture and decorations from the altar, we are RE-LIVING Jesus' last experiences. We are living out in our BODIES Jesus’ beginning the Eucharist, his command to “do this to remember me.” When we strip the altar, we are physically participating in Jesus’ stripping before he is hoisted on the cross and nailed to his death.
And sometimes we are even willing to allow someone to wash our feet, and turn and wash another’s feet, though proud Episcopalians have resisted this over and over, perhaps out of embarrassment over the ugliness of feet, or out of distaste for having to “do as I have done” even if Jesus DID say it.
Tonight is a time of sadness and a time for the hope of possibility as well. If Jesus is asking us to REMEMBER him, then he must mean that his Spirit will be there for us. If Jesus is asking us to love others as he has loved us, to do what he has done, then there’s much more to the story.
This is merely the end of one chapter, with more to follow. Of course we know that.
But before we can have Resurrection, we must first have death.
The world, and all of the people who avoid Holy Week, want us to fast forward through that death part, to avoid the pain and sorrow that comes from any ending. Tonight is not a Hallmark Hall of Fame sort of event. It is too complex; there are too many conflicting emotions, and the naked reality of sorrow and betrayal and torture, and yes, promise.
Which is why Jesus says almost ironically just before he is taken away, “Peace is my last gift to you; my own peace I leave with you; peace which the world cannot give, I give to you.”
This is not a peace which says emptily, “everything is going to be okay,” as some would have us say. This is a peace which passes all understanding. This is a peace which says, “everything is NOT okay, but you will be okay, because God is with you.” It is the sort of peace which will get you through ANYTHING, even death upon a cross.
There have been Holy Weeks that I have come to with things on my mind, outside disturbances that weighed on me heavily, even a resistance to the experience at times, and despite myself, have been swept up in the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil when we have done it, and of course, Easter Sunday, which is always made more glorious for having walked through the events earlier in the week.
It is not an easy walk. Maybe we should advertise a disclaimer, like we do with dramatic television shows: “Viewers may find this disturbing,” or “Warning: Viewer discretion is advised.”
After all, we are walking with someone through the last days and moments before his execution. That it is our God who is being executed makes it that much more disturbing. Many people, MOST people choose to stay away, to look away at the most painful moments, just as many of Jesus’ disciples ended up doing at the last.
We who are courageous enough to be here do so for many reasons: out of a sense of obligation or loyalty to a God who has walked with US through tragedy; because we believe that our God NEEDS US at this time of need; because we know that there is more going on than just empty worship.
This time of year, more than any other, is an experience of ANAMNESIS, of re-living the walk to the cross, and not just telling the story. If it was merely a re-telling, we could all read our Bibles in the comfort of our living rooms.
But here is one place where our liturgical tradition gets it SO RIGHT: by physically touching and consuming the bread and wine, by solemnly carrying out the furniture and decorations from the altar, we are RE-LIVING Jesus' last experiences. We are living out in our BODIES Jesus’ beginning the Eucharist, his command to “do this to remember me.” When we strip the altar, we are physically participating in Jesus’ stripping before he is hoisted on the cross and nailed to his death.
And sometimes we are even willing to allow someone to wash our feet, and turn and wash another’s feet, though proud Episcopalians have resisted this over and over, perhaps out of embarrassment over the ugliness of feet, or out of distaste for having to “do as I have done” even if Jesus DID say it.
Tonight is a time of sadness and a time for the hope of possibility as well. If Jesus is asking us to REMEMBER him, then he must mean that his Spirit will be there for us. If Jesus is asking us to love others as he has loved us, to do what he has done, then there’s much more to the story.
This is merely the end of one chapter, with more to follow. Of course we know that.
But before we can have Resurrection, we must first have death.
The world, and all of the people who avoid Holy Week, want us to fast forward through that death part, to avoid the pain and sorrow that comes from any ending. Tonight is not a Hallmark Hall of Fame sort of event. It is too complex; there are too many conflicting emotions, and the naked reality of sorrow and betrayal and torture, and yes, promise.
Which is why Jesus says almost ironically just before he is taken away, “Peace is my last gift to you; my own peace I leave with you; peace which the world cannot give, I give to you.”
This is not a peace which says emptily, “everything is going to be okay,” as some would have us say. This is a peace which passes all understanding. This is a peace which says, “everything is NOT okay, but you will be okay, because God is with you.” It is the sort of peace which will get you through ANYTHING, even death upon a cross.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
A Return from the Wilderness
It is now 2 years after my experience in unemployment wilderness, and I finally surface to give an update. My time and energy has been spent on moving to a new city (Racine, WI), starting as rector of a parish (St. Luke's, Racine), settling into a cute bungalow and exploring the city, until two months in, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
My usual routine when I move into a new city was altered as I focused on all the medical details, which I blogged about in CarePages for the last year. I am now overjoyed to report that I am "dancing with NED (No Evidence of Disease)", as my oncologist put it. Yes, God saw fit to put me in the care of an oncologist who is also a mystic and very spiritual: Dr. Michael Mullane.
Now, on the other side of chemotherapy and radiation and baldness, my hair has grown back curly, and I quickly revert to routines. I am still not ready to proclaim what I learned from the experience of cancer. In some ways, the experience of being on the prairie, in the wilderness of not knowing if I was going to run out of money or ever find another job, was much more difficult than cancer.
But I don't want to minimize anyone else's experience of cancer. I just found that having cancer was one of those struggles that I could easily share publicly. People expressed a lot of compassion and yes, some pity, but it was so much more acceptable than being unemployed, or struggling with depression, or having financial problems. The problem with going through more shameful (according to society) life experiences is that it isolates you. I found the same thing with the death of my husband Ernie, after about six months. People feel awkward and don't know what to say, so the tendency is to quit talking about what's happening. They don't ask, so you don't tell.
It's interesting that I did not feel isolated during my time on the prairie, any more than I felt isolated going through cancer. There are some high-powered pray-ers out there, and I have learned to cultivate the ones whose prayers I can feel. I'm not sure I'm one of them. I confess that I forget to keep praying for people. I make a point, when someone asks me to keep them in my prayers (a natural thing to ask your priest!) to say to God, "Take care of them and bless them, and help me to remember to pray again."
And so, there were high-powered pray-ers who were thinking of me, and there were people who checked in on Facebook, and there were others who met me for lunch halfway between Loveland and Boulder, and that meant so much. Because isolation, or estrangement, or alienation of whatever way you experience disconnection from others' care is ultimately a victory for the Dark Side.
I have been encouraged to take up this blog again, and I do so a bit timidly. When I was interviewing for the position of rector of St. Luke's, one of the parishioners Googled my name, and found my blog post about "Unemployment Wilderness." My blogging style is to be pretty candid and revealing about my own struggles of faith and confidence and God's work in my life.
This parishioner was alarmed that the person they were looking at to be their next rector didn't have the confidence to lead a parish, and so he contacted the Bishop's office. Fortunately, the Canon to the Ordinary who read my blog liked what he read, and I was hired anyway, but I wondered if I should risk putting my thoughts and struggles in such a public place.
It is something to consider for every one of us who decides to be honest in a public way. How much is appropriate, and how much is necessary to be authentic? What thoughts are helpful to others and what needs to be kept private, between a close friend or therapist?
The ultimate purpose of any writing is to bring us as human beings closer to each other through shared experience, thought, and culture, or to provide insight through different experiences, thoughts and culture from our own.
In addition, my hope is that through my being honest, it will bring you, the reader, closer to yourself.
My usual routine when I move into a new city was altered as I focused on all the medical details, which I blogged about in CarePages for the last year. I am now overjoyed to report that I am "dancing with NED (No Evidence of Disease)", as my oncologist put it. Yes, God saw fit to put me in the care of an oncologist who is also a mystic and very spiritual: Dr. Michael Mullane.
Now, on the other side of chemotherapy and radiation and baldness, my hair has grown back curly, and I quickly revert to routines. I am still not ready to proclaim what I learned from the experience of cancer. In some ways, the experience of being on the prairie, in the wilderness of not knowing if I was going to run out of money or ever find another job, was much more difficult than cancer.
But I don't want to minimize anyone else's experience of cancer. I just found that having cancer was one of those struggles that I could easily share publicly. People expressed a lot of compassion and yes, some pity, but it was so much more acceptable than being unemployed, or struggling with depression, or having financial problems. The problem with going through more shameful (according to society) life experiences is that it isolates you. I found the same thing with the death of my husband Ernie, after about six months. People feel awkward and don't know what to say, so the tendency is to quit talking about what's happening. They don't ask, so you don't tell.
It's interesting that I did not feel isolated during my time on the prairie, any more than I felt isolated going through cancer. There are some high-powered pray-ers out there, and I have learned to cultivate the ones whose prayers I can feel. I'm not sure I'm one of them. I confess that I forget to keep praying for people. I make a point, when someone asks me to keep them in my prayers (a natural thing to ask your priest!) to say to God, "Take care of them and bless them, and help me to remember to pray again."
And so, there were high-powered pray-ers who were thinking of me, and there were people who checked in on Facebook, and there were others who met me for lunch halfway between Loveland and Boulder, and that meant so much. Because isolation, or estrangement, or alienation of whatever way you experience disconnection from others' care is ultimately a victory for the Dark Side.
I have been encouraged to take up this blog again, and I do so a bit timidly. When I was interviewing for the position of rector of St. Luke's, one of the parishioners Googled my name, and found my blog post about "Unemployment Wilderness." My blogging style is to be pretty candid and revealing about my own struggles of faith and confidence and God's work in my life.
This parishioner was alarmed that the person they were looking at to be their next rector didn't have the confidence to lead a parish, and so he contacted the Bishop's office. Fortunately, the Canon to the Ordinary who read my blog liked what he read, and I was hired anyway, but I wondered if I should risk putting my thoughts and struggles in such a public place.
It is something to consider for every one of us who decides to be honest in a public way. How much is appropriate, and how much is necessary to be authentic? What thoughts are helpful to others and what needs to be kept private, between a close friend or therapist?
The ultimate purpose of any writing is to bring us as human beings closer to each other through shared experience, thought, and culture, or to provide insight through different experiences, thoughts and culture from our own.
In addition, my hope is that through my being honest, it will bring you, the reader, closer to yourself.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Temptations in Unemployment Wilderness
Almost three weeks into the gift and blessing of my "hermitage", being in the wilderness does not seem so hard. I wonder if Jesus felt this way at some point during his time in the wilderness just after he was "driven out" by the Holy Spirit. (I sometimes wonder what the Holy Spirit drives: a Honda Accord, so people could say they were all together in one accord?). Of course Jesus did not have the option of driving into town to go to AA meetings, or coffee shops for internet access, or lunch with good friends when the isolation was too great.
But if I can put myself in the same company as Jesus, I do believe I have been tempted in this wilderness of unemployment that I've been in. And as all spiritual lessons seem to come in threes, I, too, feel I have had three different temptations.
The first temptation I experienced was the temptation to be a victim. After that first breathtakingly bewildering experience of realizing, oh my god, I won't have an income soon. I don't know what I'm going to do to "make a living", there is the overwhelming urge to run around screaming from the rooftops, and get others to say oh my god with you. Since it was the church that I was talking about, I knew it wouldn't be hard to find people (who later found me) who would say, "I wouldn't think the church would lay off anyone," as though the church was somehow exempt from the rules of economy, and that when the church's expenses were greater than its income, a God-flow of money would just fill its accounts again. This type of thinking was what got me in this position in the first place: people who considered the church a place for solace and comfort, but didn't feel responsible to help keep it afloat financially.
One woman in AA actually said in a meeting, "wow, it's bad when you get fired by God," which made me laugh, but touched a really deep fear deep inside me that God was trying to tell me I should leave the church and the priesthood, and that if I didn't, it was like someone in an abusive marriage who stayed in the marriage out of fear of the unknown and the fear that the real world was a lot scarier than anything the relationship could dish out. I still don't know for sure that this is NOT God at work, but friends who seem to see things deeply keep steering me away from this thought, and keep telling me I AM a good priest, and the church needs me.
But this reassurance did not keep the second temptation at bay: the temptation to believe that I am not of value if I d not have a job. Now, this is probably a very common belief in our culture. What we DO, how much we MAKE, how many people we INFLUENCE, how much power we have is the way the world measures a person's worth. But I'm a spiritual person who believes in God's love, and tells people all the time that they are ALREADY loved by God before they ever get out of bed and make a dent on the problems of the world. We can't earn that love, and we are priceless by our very being alive. I tell other people that, but when the rubber meets the road, or when the fears come and roost, the temptation is to feel a lot more like a failure than a beloved child of God.
This particular temptation has taken an interesting spiritual twist, though. I know, even at the heart level, that I am worth more than just what I do. Where I feel as though I don't measure up is that right now I am not contributing any work with the poor or comforting someone who is feeling downtrodden, or giving BACK to the world. I fear that I will become a self-absorbed narcissist who does not care about the needs of the world, which by any standards are worse than anything I am experiencing. We liberals do believe, more than we might like to admit, in a works righteousness world. And it comes back to bite us.
The third temptation hasn't hit full force right now, but every once in a while I can see it peeking up over the mountains surrounding my hermitage. That is the temptation to despair. You could say that so far, I keep telling myself not to go there, not to allow myself to entertain the thought that maybe I'm supposed to experience going completely broke, or the humility of having to work at Walmart, or even having to declare bankruptcy and give up my dogs and go to live in a shelter. Why shouldn't I? There are certainly plenty of people who have had to do this, and God doesn't love me any better than them, so why not me?
There. It's out there. I named it, and it makes a lot of sense, rationally. So do the worst of temptations in our various spiritual wildernesses. They are cold, hard and rational, and don't leave any room for grace or miracles or people who swoop in generously like the friends who are letting me stay in their home right now. I'm also doing my part, and applying to every position for which I might remotely qualify in the church, on Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com and even Boulder County unemployment, which I don't qualify for, by the way, because the church doesn't pay in to unemployment insurance, because the church almost never lays anyone off, I guess. Don't get me started; it might set me off into being a victim, which I was hoping I had left behind me securely.
But if I can put myself in the same company as Jesus, I do believe I have been tempted in this wilderness of unemployment that I've been in. And as all spiritual lessons seem to come in threes, I, too, feel I have had three different temptations.
The first temptation I experienced was the temptation to be a victim. After that first breathtakingly bewildering experience of realizing, oh my god, I won't have an income soon. I don't know what I'm going to do to "make a living", there is the overwhelming urge to run around screaming from the rooftops, and get others to say oh my god with you. Since it was the church that I was talking about, I knew it wouldn't be hard to find people (who later found me) who would say, "I wouldn't think the church would lay off anyone," as though the church was somehow exempt from the rules of economy, and that when the church's expenses were greater than its income, a God-flow of money would just fill its accounts again. This type of thinking was what got me in this position in the first place: people who considered the church a place for solace and comfort, but didn't feel responsible to help keep it afloat financially.
One woman in AA actually said in a meeting, "wow, it's bad when you get fired by God," which made me laugh, but touched a really deep fear deep inside me that God was trying to tell me I should leave the church and the priesthood, and that if I didn't, it was like someone in an abusive marriage who stayed in the marriage out of fear of the unknown and the fear that the real world was a lot scarier than anything the relationship could dish out. I still don't know for sure that this is NOT God at work, but friends who seem to see things deeply keep steering me away from this thought, and keep telling me I AM a good priest, and the church needs me.
But this reassurance did not keep the second temptation at bay: the temptation to believe that I am not of value if I d not have a job. Now, this is probably a very common belief in our culture. What we DO, how much we MAKE, how many people we INFLUENCE, how much power we have is the way the world measures a person's worth. But I'm a spiritual person who believes in God's love, and tells people all the time that they are ALREADY loved by God before they ever get out of bed and make a dent on the problems of the world. We can't earn that love, and we are priceless by our very being alive. I tell other people that, but when the rubber meets the road, or when the fears come and roost, the temptation is to feel a lot more like a failure than a beloved child of God.
This particular temptation has taken an interesting spiritual twist, though. I know, even at the heart level, that I am worth more than just what I do. Where I feel as though I don't measure up is that right now I am not contributing any work with the poor or comforting someone who is feeling downtrodden, or giving BACK to the world. I fear that I will become a self-absorbed narcissist who does not care about the needs of the world, which by any standards are worse than anything I am experiencing. We liberals do believe, more than we might like to admit, in a works righteousness world. And it comes back to bite us.
The third temptation hasn't hit full force right now, but every once in a while I can see it peeking up over the mountains surrounding my hermitage. That is the temptation to despair. You could say that so far, I keep telling myself not to go there, not to allow myself to entertain the thought that maybe I'm supposed to experience going completely broke, or the humility of having to work at Walmart, or even having to declare bankruptcy and give up my dogs and go to live in a shelter. Why shouldn't I? There are certainly plenty of people who have had to do this, and God doesn't love me any better than them, so why not me?
There. It's out there. I named it, and it makes a lot of sense, rationally. So do the worst of temptations in our various spiritual wildernesses. They are cold, hard and rational, and don't leave any room for grace or miracles or people who swoop in generously like the friends who are letting me stay in their home right now. I'm also doing my part, and applying to every position for which I might remotely qualify in the church, on Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com and even Boulder County unemployment, which I don't qualify for, by the way, because the church doesn't pay in to unemployment insurance, because the church almost never lays anyone off, I guess. Don't get me started; it might set me off into being a victim, which I was hoping I had left behind me securely.
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