News from Florida

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice. . . Showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply.
-Julian Barnes

Florida has a kind of smell, a pungent, "alive smell" of things that are always growing. It is the smell of a greenhouse. I have spent the past week in the Florida greenhouse with some 35 other retired or about to retire Episcopalians, considering what our future holds. Thanks to the forethought of the Church, most of us have adequate means to live in comfort. But we are looking at meaning. What will it mean to be among the elders of our Church and society? It would seem that the answer to that question might be quite simple. It is not. It turns out that playing an important role as a maintainer of the social/cultural fabric involves questions that face all retirees, questions of health and finances. But further, we have delved into questions of spirit and of continuing use of gifts we have developed over the years we have spent encouraging Christian congregations to grown and nourish their participants.

The substructure that supports those who have finished their gainful employment is rooted in Spirit. What sort of person am I called to become by the God who draws us into newness? How might the gifts I have used (and overused) over the past decades be translated into something helpful, even needed by those around me? In other words, "Where does my desire meet the world's needs?"

The answers are not in any one sized fits all format. The require a good deal of patient waiting, a clear sense of self and an ability to recognize in a chance encounter, an emerging vocation. One is reminded that the educated mind is not simply the one who can read and write, but one that can entertain a new idea, discern a new possibility and face limitation with humor and serenity.

A lot of what we are doing is letting go. We are loosening our grip on a role we each have worn for most of our adult life. We are finding that some of the abilities we have developed are no longer used or useful. We are preparing for life increasingly dependent on hope.

I was reminded that from God's standpoint nothing is ever lost. That may have been the most important learning of the entire 8 days. The smell of Florida is not the smell of rotting of decay. It is a greenhouse of a place, where plantings can come to fruit and to flower. Retirement may appear to be being put out to pasture. I can see that it might mean a glorious harvest. Thank God.

The Gospel Dog

But religious knowledge comes incrementally and slowly.
And religion is like any other activity.
It is not easy to do it well.
-Karen Armstrong

The wholesale pursuit of "life changing" experiences are a paradox of our time. In what is, perhaps, the most affluent nation in history, we seem hell bent of 'life change." It is a script being played out time and again in the media. It may be a measure of the "born again" staple of evangelical religion that we are so inhabited with this pursuit. "Remember whenever you're down and in, the only way is up and out," sings the lyric of Hey Look Me Over. But what of the up and outs. How do they change? It is a provocative question for our time. I want to suggest that the life changing promotions of everything from bromides and religion are so thoughtlessly applied as to have no meaning. They have become, rather than a source of inspiration, the tap root of dissatisfaction.

Bring on the dogs. The Bible, along with most of western civilization, have few kind words for our "best friend." Years back, when I looked into the status of dogs in the scriptures, I found universal disgust. Canines are panned in the pages of holy writ. If you want to deliver a put down, in biblical terms, call it a dog.

Were it not for the dog reference, I might have missed this little tale, buried in the Gospel of Matthew.

From there Jesus took a trip to Tyre and Sidon. They had hardly arrived when a Canaanite woman came down from the hills and pleaded, "Mercy, Master, Son of David! My daughter is cruelly afflicted by an evil spirit." Jesus ignored her. The disciples came and complained, "Now she's bothering us. Would you please take care of her? She's driving us crazy." Jesus refused, telling them, "I've got my hands full dealing with the lost sheep of Israel." Then the woman came back to Jesus, went to her knees, and begged. "Master, help me." He said, "It's not right to take bread out of children's mouths and throw it to dogs." She was quick: "You're right, Master, but beggar dogs do get scraps from the master's table." Jesus gave in. "Oh, woman, your faith is something else. What you want is what you get!" Right then her daughter became well.

It is a tale of encounter. The Master meets a Canaanite woman. She is not only a foreigner. She represents the seductress whose marriage to good Israelite boys threatened the early life of the community in the promised land. It is also a tale of insult. Jesus, infers the common wisdom, "she is a pagan, then she is a dog." To that point Jesus' world was one made up of two teams; the children and the dogs.

Owing to the woman's persistence another world came into view. Jesus found what he was looking for in that conversation with the forbidden pagan. Isn't that usually the way it is when we meet the enemy as a human being? Matthew signals that Jesus' mission was transformed from that of a narrow slice of the Israelite camp to a universal world embracing Gospel. Even for Jesus, religious knowledge came incrementally and slowly, built on in depth conversation with the uppity Canaanite.

Now, those with close association with canines are not surprised by this story. It is always they way it is with dogs. They do not get their good habits not from a "born again" moment, but from the persistent careful training of a master. They may learn to bite in a moment of cruelty. But they learn loyalty in a lifetime of considerate treatment. And there is no better companion than a loyal dog. They are the teachers of the lessons of loyalty and empathy.

Maybe the metaphor of dog training as life in the Spirit is what it will take to build a deep running empathy in the human family. At least in this one story, the Bible gets dogs right. I am wondering how we might apply the lessons of life training in a world that lusts after just one more experience that "changed my life."

Let a dog teach you a thing or two.

quote, quote

Because television can make so much money doing its worst, it often cannot afford to do its best. -Fred Friendly

The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention--the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress. -Maggie Jackson

9-14, The New 9-11?

Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
-Kurt Vonnegut

Sometimes, the lectionary (a listing of public worship readings assembled over 2 decades ago) can be eerily prescient. Across the nation, church going folks will be hearing this pithy tale Jesus told, on the subject of economics. How amazingly timely! Will preachers take the opportunity to remind folks that the terrorists are not the only ones who are implicated in the figurative fall of the twin towers? Or will this become yet another appeal for parish fund raising? As Abraham Heschel reminds us, "All are guilty, some are responsible." Listen and pray for the prophetic voice in your local pulpit this week.

“The kingdom of heaven is like the owner of an estate who went out at dawn to hire workers for the vineyard. After reaching an agreement with them for the usual daily wage, the owner sent them out to the vineyard. About mid-morning, the owner came out and saw others standing around the marketplace without work, and said to them, ‘You go along to my vineyard and I will pay you whatever is fair.’ At that they left. Around noon and again in the mid-afternoon, the owner came out and did the same. Finally, going out late in the afternoon, the owner found still others standing around and said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day?’ ‘No one has hired us:’ they replied. The owner said, ‘You go to my vineyard, too.’ When evening came, the owner said to the overseer, ‘Call the workers and give them their pay, but begin with the last group and end with the first.’ When those hired late in the afternoon came up, they received a full day’s pay, and when the first group appeared they assumed they would get more. Yet they all received the same daily wage. Thereupon they complained to the owner, ‘This last group did only an hour’s work, but you’ve put them on the same basis as those who worked a full day in the scorching heat. My friends’: said the owner to those who voiced this complaint, ‘I do you no injustice. You agreed on the usual wage, didn’t you? Take your pay and go home. I intend to give this worker who was hired last the same pay as you. I’m free to do as I please with my money, aren’t I? Or are you envious because I am generous?

Apres moi, le deluge

Our capacity for justice makes democracy possible, and our capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary - Reinhold Niebuhr

It is equally illegal for rich and poor to sleep under bridges. - French Proverb

Louis XIV’s prescient words are the metaphor for our time. His reign as the King of France built the nation into an international power while simultaneously bankrupting it. Le deluge reminds us that the raw pursuit of power and influence have their costs. That seems to be the lesson of history and of recent politics.

The deluge came to mind as over 9 inches of rain fell on us over the weekend. While we live on a ridge, our front hallway was flooded, just on some of the runoff from the driveway. It was a cloudburst.

My attention soon turned to a contemporary deluge, a regieme fixated only on power and influence. It is the ultimate self defeating behavior in governance. That focus has failed to have any impact on the hurricanes, market collapses and wars of choice that have come our way. The failure of Louis XIV and of the current occupant are, at root, theological in nature. Each have rejected a balanced stewardship of the whole of a nation’s life as too complicated. They substitute simplistic power formulae in place of a solid understanding a complicated world. The Hebrew Prophets*, along with the ancient Greeks agree that our misguided aims can bring on le deluge. And the stakes continue to build. Global Climate Change will challenge our best efforts. But the ancients warned us of this sort of excess.

At bottom, we need to grasp reality “as it is” with all its complexity. It is not enough to be satisfied with our preferred formulae. A bipolar world of good and evil, simply cannot get its arms around the nuanced real life situations we face. It creates synthetic verities, truthiness as Stephen Colbert calls it. We need to pull our economy, the environment, our military forces and our politics back from the precipice.

The adage goes, “even a blind pig comes up with an acorn now and then.” Maybe we’ll get lucky this time.

*See especially the prophet Amos for a vivid description of contemporary politics.

With God's Help

Life oughta be much clearer to me than it is.
-Garrison Keillor

Many Christians, upon entry into the community of faith, make promises. In the Episcopal Church, these vows are called the Baptismal Covenant. The Covenant begins in the Apostles Creed and ends with five affirmations to which the candidate responds, "I will, with God's help." That is the perfect response, because the affirmations are challenging indeed. Among the things we vow is to "strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being." This is, for me, the most challenging, if not impossible of the promises. Not a day goes by when respect of my fellow human beings is not an issue. Sometimes, I think that we have made that vow and dwell on it so that we can notice those times when genuine respect actually appears, when consideration and true compassion are present among us.

Those who grasp the depth of this promise have been disconcerted by the imprisonment of so called detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This is no news. Walled off from the rest of the human race by name calling and military restrictions, these prisoners have been called "the worst of the worst" by government officials. Mahvish Khan, a translator and student of the law, has written a book, My Guantanamo Diary, which pulls back the curtain of Gitmo. The not so surprising discovery of the book is that the folks at Gitmo are in most ways persons, just like me. Sure, there are those who have plotted dastardly deeds agains Americans. Many are probably prisoners of war. But 87% of the detainees came into our custody having been "turned in" for a reward. Many of these are folks "just like me" which Khan interviews. The simple act of telling the stories of these ordinary people snared in the "war on terror" may be a first step toward living out the promise "to respect the dignity of every human being."

What surprises me about the book is not that human beings are about the same everywhere. What caught me off guard was the vehemence with which folks resist that self evident idea. In the climate of fear, complicity and name calling that pervades this nation, it should come as no surprise that the last thing many might want is a human face on the so called terrorists.

I commend Ms. Khan's book to you. It would make an excellent counterpoint to the prayers and devotional reading you will be consulting during the coming Advent or Lenten Seasons. Make a note of it.

Creating Wild Men?

As I see it, the primary religious task these days is to try to think straight.

-William Sloane Coffin

Idolatry is the peculiar province of the inflexible and unimaginative. American religion has its own brand of idolatry which remains largely unexplored. Like a feeding vulture, one of the foundational issues circles around the question “How are we to live in creation?” From that question emerge idols, rooted in deep faith needs. Some, in fact most, of American Christians are deeply moved by a need to belong. A full 75% of us identify our faith by family or tribe, i.e., by denomination. We need to belong. A smaller proportion of us have the need to quest, to challenge the prevailing conditions so carefully nurtured by those who derive identity from their faith. Each of these primal needs creates its own particular theological “spin.” And when that spin becomes fixed, it quite naturally leads to consequences. In fact, each has its own particular idolatry.

Excessive focus on belonging leads to the idol of “family.” All effort is on the preservation of the family unit, perhaps the congregational unit as well. All of the conversation is about well- being and safety. But the truth about this idolatry was laid bare by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his famed Harvard Speech, where he said this: “Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.” Making families and congregations into suffocating havens is an idolatry.

So too, the focus on innovation and the search for answers leads to a kind of rootless and commitment free society. We see this in the reaction to the stifling “protestant ethic” of our culture. There are those who make a life out of resisting the common sense values of the dominant church culture. To make families and congregations laboratories of resistance is also an idolatry.

It is said of mental illness that is “doing the same, self defeating behavior again and again, expecting, this time, a different result.” We seem to be doing that in our religious shouting matches. The “Family Values” crowd and the “Wilderness Values” crowd seem to be shouting past one another. We are getting nowhere fast. Can there be another way?

Real men drill - Ellen Goodman

One neglected focus is the care and nurture of young men as they sort through their own ways of being in the world. We now have young men growing up in our world with no experience of any wildness at all. They are deeply suspicious, if not phobic about what lurks in nature. We also have young me who approach the natural world as their domain, using the tools of civilization to overwhelm, even attack the natural world. The tracks of 4 wheelers, the roar of Sea Do’s and the wanton destruction of wild places attest to omnipresence of this way of life. In July of 1994, I mused on this dilemma, writing this:

Sitting by the falls of the Ohio River, once one of nature’s mighty spectacles, now smelling of creosote, its backwaters stacked with coffee cups, tampon inserters,

six pack binders, the ever present plastic. The turd laden waters of the Ohio drift by hearty souls who angle for jackfish and the bottom feeding species. Nature, while under siege, still attracts the hunter gatherer. The call of the hunt is pursued even under the most adverse circumstances. I name this convergence the “missing husband.”

By this I mean that the model of manhood in nature is neither exploitation for the good of the family, nor is it found solely in nature for itself. Rather, manhood flourishes when it acts as husband. Husbanding is that peculiar role that both depends on natural gifts and at the same time resists their overuse. The husbanding paradigm is not of wild man protecting the family, nor is it of wild man protecting wildness. It is flexible, moving between each as it is require. In short, a husband approaches nature with judgment.

Husband is wildness with commitment, it is relationship. Building true manhood is about building commitment to the well being of the human family and to the divine root of the creation.

In wildness is the preservation of the world. -H. D. Thoreau

So what do we teach to young men in the wild? We teach mirroring and we teach creativity. Mirroring in creation is about finding within oneself the continuity between self and other. It is not a case of man against the wilderness. We have suffered at the hands of the opposition long enough. But it is about creation located in ourselves. It means finding creation in us. It means returning to the same places again and again so that a relationship can form. I have visited some wild places for over twenty years, before they began to reveal themselves to me. Watching the shifting vegetation in one spot year after, rejoicing in a new crop of wild fruit, sitting still enough to see an animal in its natural setting; these are ways of being in continuity with wildness. Creativity of heart is the compliment to continuity with wilderness. It is not enough to fall in love with the wilds. We must learn to express the wild in the culture as a whole. That means learning to do the arts in response to nature’s gifts.

Balanced men are husbands. A husband enters the wilds with love as his guide. He finds ways to be partners. It seems to me that the Church, the place of partnership, is the place peculiarly prepared to do this work. But it will mean abandoning the peculiar excesses of ego centered theologies. It will mean putting families in their place, forging paths between what is outside and what is inside and hearing the passionate voices who find in the created order the voice of the divine. Oh, that’s pantheism, you say. If our wild places are to be around for future generations, we must find a way to introduce them to our worship. A good place to start are with the wild men of holy writ, Moses and Jesus. They are our forerunners, whose work began in wild places. Part of today's theological challenge is to recover the husbanding of all creation.