Thinking about Justice and Theology on the Feast Day of Saint Valentine

Here's one of those strange feast days, a feast day that's more popular in the general culture than it is in the church culture that pays attention to saints and their days. Of course, February 14, Saint Valentine's Day, hasn't been a true feast day for decades.  But as Christians, why not celebrate love, along with the rest of the Western world?

Well, it's fraught, isn't it?  How many of us have perfectly happy marriages?  How many of us have romantic relationships with a primary person at all?  In any church congregation, we likely have more divorced, widowed, and single people than married people, at least if our congregation matches national demographics.

We could spend the day talking about what we learn about God's love for us in the love that we experience from each other.   If my spouse's love for me is but a pale shadow of the way God loves me, then I am rich in love indeed.

We could talk about the actual story of the actual person of Valentine.  This blog post gives us interesting background:  "And I'd be all for recovering a St. Valentine's Day about civil disobedience -- not letting the state tell you whom, or whether, you can marry -- and friendship."

There are other justice aspects of this holiday.  Last night I went to the grocery store.  The flowers were right there just beyond the entrance, followed by a huge display of chocolates, and just beyond them, the bakery with every heart shaped confection you could want.  I thought about how much money we spend on this holiday--and I wasn't even near a jewelry store.

If you want to show me you love me, don't spend thousands on a bauble.  Go ahead and pay down the mortgage.  It may not seem romantic on its face, but what could be more romantic than ensuring that I have a roof over my head and a door that locks.

But there are even darker justice elements.  This blog post reminds us of how many of our Valentine's Day traditions are built on the backs of abused workers--and not just abused workers, but enslaved workers and children:  "70-75% of the world’s chocolate comes from cocoa beans harvested in West Africa, where almost 2 million children work under violent and hazardous conditions.  Many of these children are kidnapped or sold (some as young as 7 years old) and forced into such labor."  The statistics are similar for our roses, our diamonds, our technology, and our stuffed animals. 

I thought about this post as I was at the grocery store.  I bought us some fair trade chocolate as a treat.  I came home to see where my spouse had planted the hibiscus--so that we can see it out of the kitchen window as we wash the dishes--a better approach to flowers.  It seemed a good way to usher in Valentine's Day.

I also enjoyed these theology valentines--no need to pay for a card!

Love Letters to God

My meditation is based on this text:

2 Samuel 22:  1-15

Tradition tells us that David wrote many of the Psalms, but modern scholars don't all agree on which ones, or even that David wrote them at all.  In this passage, we see why King David has come to be associated with so many of the Psalms.

One of the common themes of the Psalms is that of rescue from the wicked, from one's individual enemies, and from society's collective enemies.  We see that fierce image of God here, and that fierceness winds its way through the Psalms.  We see God in terms of battle imagery, which makes sense, since David is thanking God for help in battle.

The God in this passage is an angry God, one whom we wouldn't want to be against us.  This God takes all the elements of the universe and works a victory.  This is a God who comes down to be with us, to battle beside us.

It's a very different version of God than the one we see in Jesus.  What a different incarnation story!

We get a sense of that difference in Mary's song of praise to God that we find in Luke 1:  46-55.  Mary also sings of a God who does battle, but it's a different kind of battle.  Mary sings of a God who raises up the lowly.  God unleashes fierceness on the world, but with a very different goal.

In both of these passages, we see God's commitment to the people who are committed to God.  It's a mutual relationship.  It's a loving relationship.

It is interesting to read these passages in the context of Valentine's Day, which is fast upon us.  Look at our secular culture and what messages we get about what true love looks like.  At its worst, the message is one of consumerism:  we know we are loved by the lusciousness of the box of chocolates, by the rareness of the flowers in the bouquet, by the size of the precious stones.

God offers us a different love.  And as we offer our love letters to God, what would we say?

Poetry Friday: Rust, Dust, Construction, Resurrection

On Monday night before Ash Wednesday, I had such plans.  My spouse would be out late teaching his Philosophy class.  I wanted to make some headway with the short story I'd been writing and maybe do some grading.  But the story stalled, and I felt grouchy--I try not to grade when I'm grouchy.  I thought I might just go to bed early, but then the phone rang, and I couldn't fall back asleep.  There was nothing good on TV.

As often, I got myself back into a good mood by reading.  I picked up The Fellowship:  the Literary Lives of the Inklings  by Carol Zaleski and Philip Zaleski.  This book explores both the artistic and spiritual lives of C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the literary circle that they formed in Oxford in the earlier part of the 20th century.  Based on the 50 pages that I read Monday evening, this book will be a treat.

I went to my computer to check on e-mail, and I read a friend's Facebook post that noted the anniversary of John Carpenter’s “The Fog,” with its plot of ghosts of shipwrecked lepers and Dave Bonta's description of construction cranes around London, and I came up with the poem that you can find here and pasted below.

But let me also post some background and pictures that will give present readers (and future scholars?) some insight into my writing process. 

The parking lot of my school is now a building site.  It began with the parking garage that we now use.  It was fascinating to see the way that buildings are created now, with huge slabs of concrete that are shaped elsewhere and trucked to the site.  Huge cranes, guided by humans, hoist the slabs into place, and thus, the walls come into being.

Last night as I left that parking garage for Ash Wednesday service, I caught sight of the sunset to the west.  I took a few minutes to capture some pictures. 

It seemed a perfect metaphor for Ash Wednesday:  a parking lot becomes a building, and we all know that the buildings that were here 10-20 years ago have vanished for many of these new buildings.

As I was writing the poem, I thought of those paper cranes that are a peace symbol.  I thought of our church a few years ago, with its dramatic Lenten chancel.

For Easter, we transformed this starkness by hanging paper cranes on the branches.  I tried to make a few, but my cranes looked crippled and deformed.  Happily, we had a teenager who was up to the task:

They transformed the trees:

I had these cranes on the brain too, as I wrote the poem below.  I like how the poem holds the tension of Ash Wednesday and Mardi Gras, of dust and resurrection within its lines, but doesn't resolve it.

 

Cranes

Who will live in these shipwrecked leper
colonies? The cranes, the workhorse
of the Industrial Revolution, crank
away without ceasing, heaving future walls
into place. Pre-fab has such a different
meaning now, as big trucks rumble
the concrete slabs across a nation.

In my office, I fold paper cranes
the way I learned long ago, at a justice
rally on the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima
explosion or maybe for an installation art
piece made of stripped branches.

I write lines from poems on the paper
before I make the creases. I tuck these cranes
into the corners of my office building
and the chain link fence around the construction
site. I imagine them coming to life
at night, a constellation made of cranes
in a starless sky, a navigation
device that no one will need or notice.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, February 14, 2016:


First Reading: Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Psalm: Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16

Second Reading: Romans 10:8b-13

Gospel: Luke 4:1-13


This week's text is the classic tale of Satan tempting Jesus in the desert. Jesus goes to the desert to find out "what it meant to be Jesus" (in the words of Frederick Beuchner). Jesus goes to the desert, that scorched, barren land. We begin our journey with Ash Wednesday, with scorched ashes from last season's palms that we used on Palm Sunday. Richard Pervo points out that it is a journey that starts in ash and ends in flames (think Pentecost). Along the way of our spiritual path, we will face similar temptations to the ones that Jesus faced.

The first temptation is so basic: basic sustenance, stones turned into bread. Most of us in the first world find ourselves caught up in a whirlwind of earning money. Why do we earn money? Well, of course, we need to cover our basic needs: food, shelter, clothing. But most of us have far more than we'll ever use. If you're like me, you have a multiple sizes of clothes in your closet, and even if you stayed within one size, you've probably got a month's worth of clothes that you could wear before you'd have to repeat. If you're like me, you've got a month's worth of food in the fridge and pantry, even when it's not hurricane season. If you're like most Americans, you have several cars, several computers, several televisions. Maybe you even have several houses.

In this time of Lent, it's worth the time to assess our relationship with our stuff.  All of our possessions require time and upkeep and money.  What might we gain by going back to the basics of providing for ourselves what we need and sharing our excess with others?  How can we trust that God will provide for more of our needs so that we don't have to work ourselves into a state of total exhaustion to do it?

Jesus is then tempted with power, and it's the rare person I've met who doesn't wrestle with questions of status and fame--and the power that comes with it. Even if you wouldn't sell your family or your self to be on TV, you've probably felt this temptation--or envy, because you weren't someone getting offers of fame and fortune. 

We don't seem to have very many people who are famous because of their breathtaking charity or their ability to bring light to a darkening world.  In a world where it's possible to be famous for being famous or related to famous people, how might our culture be different if we celebrated those who had brought light into the world? 

The third temptation shows the danger of succumbing to the second temptation: once we become wealthy and powerful, we're likely to forget that we're not God.  We use our money to insulate us, but we forget how fortunate we are to have that money. We begin to think that we earn that money because we're so talented, so capable, so educated--for many of us, the fact that we have one job over another is largely a matter of luck.

In our society, money makes us feel powerful. Fame makes us feel powerful. Acclaim makes us feel powerful. And these temptations take us away from God, where the true power lies. We want to think we can do everything on our own. We want to be like God--all powerful. We need to remember the words of John the Baptist: "I am not the Messiah."
We could also read this temptation as the yearning to control God.  How often do we pray in an attempt to control God? Maybe we pray for specific results to a problem. Maybe we pray for things we want, even if it's something that seems good, like an end to world hunger. Most of us aren't very patient with God's time scale. We wish God would just hurry up and show us the Divine Plan.

We need to look to the model of our savior, who also wrestled with temptation. We need to be resolute in our refusal.

The beauty of the cyclical nature of liturgical life is that it is full of chances to turn around. Even if you recognize that you've given in to these temptations or the many other temptations the world offers, it's not too late. God calls us to return. God gives us any number of welcome home parties. God waits patiently, like the father of the prodigal son. And God knows that we will stray again. Like keeping to a sensible eating plan, this spiritual path requires more vigilance than we can sustain all the time. And yet, the struggle to wage this spiritual warfare will yield results eventually.

Welcome to Lent, the season of ash and penitence. Repent, return, retool your lives. It is time again to commit to resurrection, to submit to the purifying flames of Pentecost. Turn away from the ashes and towards the light.

Ash Wednesday and the Marks of Mortality

Make no mistake:  mortality marks us all:

Some of us wear our marks more openly than others, but we are all slowly returning to dust:

We find our various ways to be brave in the face of this knowledge:

We do the work that must be done:

The palms that once waved over our pre-Easter, Holy Week celebrations are ready for a different starring role today:

The universe is built on this forming and reforming of matter and energy.  The universe is inside each of us, and we carry with us the history of the stars and the universe.

All our earthly atoms are made of recycled stars.  We are the dust of stars and to dust we shall all return:

Shrove Tuesday: A Time of Tidying

Here we are, at the day before Lent begins.  I remember the 1970's, when people would come to church more than once a week--we might have had a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper.  We will not be doing that at my church today. 

More of us are familiar with Mardi Gras, usually as a drinking holiday.  And some of us might be familiar with Carnival festivities, which might last several weeks. 

Mardi Gras and Carnival, holidays that come to us out of predominantly Catholic countries, certainly have a more festive air than Shrove Tuesday, which comes to us from some of the more dour traditions of England. The word shrove, which is the past tense of the verb to shrive, which means to seek absolution for sins through confession and penance, is far less festive than the Catholic terms for this day.

Many of our Mardi Gras and Shrove Tuesday traditions come out of the need to use up the excess.  In medieval times, most Christians would give up all sorts of luxury items for Lent, luxury items like milk, eggs, and alcohol.  So just before Lent came the using up of the luxury items--because you wouldn't just throw them away.  Hence the special Mardi Gras breads and treats and the drinking.

We are at the juxtaposition of many holidays that involve tidying:  a Candlemas tradition involves sweeping one's house, the Chinese New Year has a time of deep cleaning, and many of the days leading up to Lent involve a straightening.  I don't have time for deep cleaning, but I will be grading rough drafts--a straightening of a different sort.

In the past, I've made special bread; if you have time, this blog post will walk you through the process.  I've made pancakes, but it always makes me somewhat sad to eat them alone.  I will not go out drinking tonight--I have to get up early tomorrow to go to spin class and then to work.

Today is also the day of the New Hampshire primaries--talk about interesting juxtapositions!  Yesterday was the Chinese New Year, which ushered in the year of the Fire Monkey.  The year of the Fire Monkey is often seen as a time of completion, and it has the potential to be a time of prosperity.  But fire years, while giving warmth, can also be times of aggression, restlessness, and impulsive behavior.

And then we move to Ash Wednesday tomorrow.  My poet brain is already whirring.

I will spend some time in contemplation as I move through the day.  I will have a sense of a different calendar that pulses beneath the secular rhythms of our culture.

Lent Approaches

This week, we leave the season of Epiphany.  Ash Wednesday will remind us of our dusty destiny:

We will change the paraments to purple:

Perhaps we will have a stark reminder of our mortality in the chancel:

It is time to decide on our Lenten disciplines:

It is time to move into a time of penitence: