Happy Independence Day: History as Life Preserver

 I have begun this 4th of July listening to a variety of podcasts:  an interview with The Rest is History British podcasters and David Remnick and a NYT Book Review podcast with Jill Lepore talking about history and good books for Independence day.  I listened to this story on heartland rock, which didn't tell me anything I didn't already have figured out about Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."  This piece on Octavia Butler's typewriter was disappointingly short. 

I have been re-reading Octavia Butler's Wild Seed, and I might go on to re-read Kindred, both interesting approaches to understanding history.  The interview with Jill Lepore meanders into a remembering of what it was to be immersed in books, especially the summer reading in childhood type.  Glorious!  I am always grateful to have longer stretches of reading time than I sometimes do during the school year.

This morning, I've also been re-reading past July 4 blog posts that I wrote.  Every 4th of July post is both similar and different, full of hope, yet also tinged by dread of what might be coming.  This year is no different.  Sure, we have a corrupt president, but that has usually been a national truth revealing how many different ways one can be corrupt, if one has enough power.

Here is the way I concluded my 2012 July 4 post.  It seems perfect for any ordinary Independence Day, but also for this one, which celebrates the U.S. at year 250:

I love this picture of a flag and a life preserver.  I often wish that our country could do more to hold out a life preserver to oppressed people across the globe.  But it's good to remember that our history serves as a life preserver of sorts, a beacon of hope to so many.

Parish Church as Community _____(Builder, Resource, Space to Breathe)

Later today, we head to Bristol, TN for the last fish fry for the community.  It's an outreach activity of a sort, but we're not really reaching unchurched people.  In the far-eastern mountain part of the state, most people who want a church home have found one, and almost everyone already knows we're there.

So why do it?  In part, my very tiny congregation raises an impressive amount of money for the local charities that feed the hungry.  But in part, we do it to feed the souls who come for dinner.  It's a great space for people to sit and eat and to linger with others that they don't see as often.

This morning, I read a blog post by Pastor Clint Schnekloth, and I want to capture part of that blog post here, so that I have it in the future, in case the post goes away.  It captures what I've been thinking about ways that the physical church community, including the building, can be important in new ways that are old ways, particularly in the space to breathe/refuge way:

"But over time I have also come to think that many of us internalized a false opposition between the local and the public. We sometimes imagined that meaningful ministry always happened elsewhere, beyond the congregation itself, when in reality local congregations can become some of the most important sites of public trust remaining in contemporary life. The parish was treated as a launching pad for the “real” work of the gospel, rather than itself being a primary site of public life.

Theologically, however, Christianity has always resisted that abstraction. The incarnation is not an argument for generalized spirituality but an affirmation of locality. God does not merely send ideas into history but inhabits a place, a body, a neighborhood, a people. Jesus comes from Nazareth. He lives among actual communities, eats in homes, and becomes recognizable through repeated relationships. Even the resurrected Christ remains marked by wounds. Christian faith is therefore never purely conceptual or placeless. It is embodied, located, and relational.

I no longer think about congregational life primarily in terms of maintaining institutional machinery. Increasingly, I think in terms of cultivating conditions under which grace can circulate through a community. What we are tending in parish ministry is not only institutional continuity but a social and spiritual ecology shaped by trust, accompaniment, hospitality, beauty, mutual responsibility, and shared life. People arrive for worship, for healing from religious trauma, for acceptance of LGBTQIA+ children, for relief from loneliness, for grounding amid exhaustion and outrage, or for practical support in grief, family breakdown, or economic strain.

What has struck me more and more is that people often experience churches like ours less as providers of religious goods and more as places where they can breathe.

That may sound simple, but culturally it is becoming rarer and more important. In an anxious, fragmented, performative society, spaces where people can exist without fear, humiliation, ideological sorting, or relentless productivity become deeply public realities.

None of these dimensions exist independently."

The Feast Day of Saint Patrick

Here we are at the Feast Day of Saint Patrick, perhaps even more popular with non-Christians than the Feast Day of St. Valentine.  I think of people eating corned beef and cabbage, or perhaps some sort of potato dish, served with soda bread and green beer to wash it all down.  Do those people think about Saint Patrick's years of slavery in Ireland before he became a missionary to Ireland before he became a patron saint of Ireland?

It's strange to think of Saint Patrick in these years when we've been censoring books that mention slavery, when we've been banning curriculum that talks about the more recent history of slavery, when we've been altering information at museums and national parks.  Hmmm.

We like slaves who are safe in centuries we can scarcely remember.  Patrick was born to a high ranking Roman family in England, but when he was approximately 16, he was kidnapped and spent 6 or 7 years as a slave in Ireland. While there, he learned the language and the non-Christian customs of the land.

This knowledge would come in handy when he was sent back to Ireland in the 5th century to solidify the Christianity of the country. There are many stories about Patrick's vanquishing force, complete with Druid spells and Christian counterspells. I suspect the real story was perhaps more tame.

Later scholars have suggested that Patrick and his compatriots were sent to minister to the Christians who were already there, not to conquer the natives. Other scholars have speculated that one of the reasons that Christianity was so successful in Ireland was because Patrick took the parts of pagan religions that appealed most to its followers and showed how those elements were also present in Christianity--or perhaps incorporated them into Christianity as practiced in Ireland.

These days, I am thinking about all the decisions made in the earliest centuries of Christianity, about roads not taken, about the ways we could have had a more vibrant religion.

This morning, on the Feast Day of Saint Patrick, I'm realizing that we do have it.  

I'm thinking of Celtic Christianity and all the ways it can enrich our daily lives.  I realize we could argue about whether or not Celtic Christianity really existed in the way we might think about it now, this many centuries later.

Even if modern versions of Celtic Christianity aren't historically accurate, these ideas have much to offer us in the twenty-first century.  I like the idea of living in community.  I like the idea of taking care of creation.  I like the way that spirituality can infuse every element of our lives, if we're being aware and intentional.  In an article from the Northumbria community, Trevor Miller says, "Esther De Waal puts it well; ‘The Celtic approach to God opens up a world in which nothing is too common to be exalted and nothing is so exalted that it cannot be made common.’ They believed that the presence of God infused daily life and thus transforms it, so that at any moment, any object, any job of work, can become a place for encounter with God. In everyday happenings and ordinary ways, so that we have prayers for getting up, lighting the fire, getting dressed, milking the cow etc."

The entire article is well worth your time, especially if you're looking for ways to revitalize your own spiritual life.  What a great way to celebrate Saint Patrick--much more nourishing than corned beef and green beer! 

More Thoughts on Pope Francis

Since Monday, I've been thinking about Pope Francis, and there are better minds than mine who can explain his importance and where he fits historically.  I've particularly enjoyed a conversation with that appeared in The New York Times, and I've made it a gift article which you can access here.  David French, David Gibson, and Leah Libresco Sargeant do a great job of explaining what the Pope can do (not as much as many of us think) and what the Pope means in our current age.

I've been thinking about Pope Francis as the pope who prioritized the poor and the dispossessed.  That's one big reason why he mattered to me.  Of course I wish he had done more to move women into positions of leadership, but that was likely not reasonable of me to expect/wish.  The pope can't issue orders and force change in the way that we think.  The Pope can call a council and changes can come out of that.  But the Pope can't declare that women are now priests--as I understand it, that's outside of the Pope's power, which as David Gibson says, "The pope has supreme authority in the Catholic Church, and it’s supremely limited. There are certain things that the pope can’t do and he won’t do."

I find it fascinating that we live in such a secular age, and yet, the passing of the pope can make so many of us sad.  In some ways, that's the power that a pope has, that a president or prime minister is unlikely to ever have.

Francis provided a powerful model of how to live a faithful life, and his faithful priorities were often similar to mine.  I will miss him greatly.

April 24 update:  I also loved a conversation in The New York Times between Ross Douthat and Father James Martin, a gift article which you can access here.

Can God Change? A Theologian Changes His Mind

Yesterday, I came across this interview between Richard Hays and Peter Wehner in The New York Times.  Richard Hays is a theologian who published a book arguing against gay marriage and arguing even against gay and lesbian marriage.  That was back in 1996, and now, he has changed his mind; now he has published a new book, The Widening of God’s Mercy (what a great title and a great concept).

In the interview, Hays resists saying that God can change.  He's not saying that it's not possible, but he always circles back to the necessity of realizing that we can't possibly know.  Peter Wehner points out that if God can change, if the way we interpret scripture can change, that there's a great risk of only picking out passages that support whatever line of thought we're having at a particular time; Wehner asks Hays about his earlier beliefs and what Hays would say to his earlier self.  Hays says, "Yeah, but the shape of the whole biblical story gives us a pattern, a pattern of grace that is played out again and again, where we see God’s mercy broadening in ways that were unforeseen in earlier experience of the people of God."

Hays points out that there are plenty of scriptural ideas that we are willing to say are of their time and not relevant to ours, like Paul's ideas about slavery.  Why shouldn't sexual behaviors be seen similarly?

He also points out that there are practices described, like Jews and Gentiles eating together, that would have been incredibly shocking at the time, but now we don't even register them as an issue at all.

The interview circles back to whether or not God can change.  The idea of a God who changes is a dealbreaker for some Christians, but Hays is open to the idea, and can show places in the Bible text as evidence of God changing.  There's actually a whole theology that explores this, process theology, but Hays doesn't really mention it.

Hays is facing a reoccurrence of cancer which led him to write this book.  He also talks about the practice that he and his wife have, one they adopted with the first diagnosis, of reading a Psalm every night after dinner.

It's a long interview, but well worth a read.  I'm happy that a major newspaper gave the space to it.

The Imagination of Jesus

This morning, I stumbled across an interview with Barbara Brown Taylor.  It ran in Issue 97 of Image, which appeared in Summer of 2018.  In some ways, it didn't tell me much that I didn't already know about Taylor's life and her views on the larger world.  But then I got to the end, which blew me away.  I'm putting a paragraph break that didn't exist in the original:

"In my view, Jesus changed lives because he was able to change the way people imagined their lives. He dared them to imagine the stranger as neighbor, the child as teacher, the enemy as mirror, the deity as loving father. He helped them imagine lepers, women, and Roman centurions as exemplars of faith. He asked them to imagine that the most important person at the table was the waiter, and that the end of the line was the place to be. At the moment I cannot think of a single story he told that was not intended to change the way his listeners imagined the world. 

I believe the arts can do the same thing. They can break my heart, rekindle my courage, wreck my prejudice, give me second sight. If they can do it better than most sermons can, then that’s because they give themselves to me unconditionally. They give me the best they’ve got and then they trust me to know what to do with it. If you think about it, that amounts to having huge faith in the power of the human imagination. Of course this artistic channel is also unregulated, and that scares some Christians I know. They worry that the human imagination will cook up something evil or unorthodox, transmitting it in ways that are difficult to police. One of the great things about Image is that it provides readers with a safe-enough meeting place for faith and the arts. If it were entirely safe, it wouldn’t be a powerful place, but since it’s willing to take risks, it is."

Advent Treats of the Reading Variety

I am trying to convince myself that I have enough time to write a blog post.  My Systematic Theology paper is due today, at 11:59 p.m.  I have been hard at work, and I am in the writing stage where I don't know if any of it makes any sense.  I have one more section to write, about what salvation means, and that's the part that will be easiest.  The part on Trinitarian theology requires me to weave together many ideas that show I've done the readings and understand the history.  Part of me worries that I'm relying too much on notes and the theology of others.  But that's what the assignment requires; I'm not asked to create my own theology of the Trinity.

I've been enjoying an Advent reading, Gail Godwin's Evensong.  I read it when it first came out, back in 1999, and then I reread it again a few years later.  So, it's been about 20 years since I've read it, and I don't remember much about it.  

It's about a woman who is an Episcopal priest; it's the sequel to Father Melancholy's Daughter, a book I loved deeply.  Twenty years ago, I loved Evensong because it told me what happened to the main character of Father Melancholy's Daughter.  This year, I'm loving it because it's set during Advent and because it's about church life in a mountain town similar to the one where I live and the one where I serve as Synod Appointed Minister.

This morning, I'm enjoying the Fresh Air interview with poet Christian Wiman--lots of great thoughts on faith, pain, and creativity.  Here's a quote to give a taste:  "I think you can believe in God and not have faith. I think faith means living toward God in some way, and it's what you do in your life and how you live it. I don't feel the sense of mystery or terror alleviated by faith. I don't feel that at all. I don't understand when people present God as an answer to the predicament of existence. That's not the way I experience it at all. I have this hunger in me that is endless, and I think everyone probably has it. Maybe they find different ways of dealing with it, whether it's booze or excessive exercise or excessive art or whatever. I tried to answer it with poetry for years and hit a wall with that. And finally ... I discovered ... the only solution to me was to live toward God without an answer."

Well, speaking of quotes, let me get back to that paper for Systematics.

Children's Sermon for a Baptism Sunday

I am a Synod Appointed Minister at Faith Lutheran, a small country church near Bristol, Tennessee.  When I look at the population who comes to church each Sunday, I don't anticipate many baptisms or weddings; it's an older population for the most part.  But there are 5-9 children every Sunday, mostly grandchildren of members.  

We did have a baptism on Sunday--we baptized the grandchild/great grandchild of family members who attend.  The parents live in Nashville and were in town for the week-end.  Back in early autumn (late September?  early October?) the church members asked if I could do a baptism, and I treasured the look of joy on their faces when I said yes.  We began to plan for a baptism on the Sunday of Thanksgiving week-end.

I offer a children's sermon every week, so I didn't want to let this opportunity pass.  I knew that this baptism might be the only one the children see.  My sermon talked a bit about sacraments, in a less mystical way than I might have presented the ideas to adults; as I reflect on it now, I realize that children might be able to grasp the mystical ways in a more capable way than most adults.

I wanted to talk about the other aspect of baptism in the Lutheran (ELCA) church--that we're making promises that later the child will decide to continue with or not.  I also talked about the fact that we as a congregation are making promises too--we will promise to support the child and pray for our new sibling in Christ.

I had a family tree chart that my mom made for our September family reunion.  I saved it and brought it to our smaller family reunion at Thanksgiving.  I showed them the chart and added my name to it and Stephen's name to it--he and I are people they know, and we are part of this family tree as the generation goes on.  I added our names on sticky notes.

Then I talked about the Christian family--imagine a family tree that contained the name of every baptized Christian.  Imagine how we are all connected.  We are individuals in different times, and yet our baptism connects us.

I could have done more, of course.  There's the interconnectedness of literal trees through root systems and the fungi that support them.  There are ways that older trees protect younger trees (for more on this fascinating research, read this article from Smithsonian Magazine).  There's always more I could have done and so much church history that I always decide not to include.

I think it worked well, but I often think that.  It's a sobering fact of both teaching and being a minister that I will rarely know whether or not I've been successful in what I hope I am passing on to others.  But I'm also aware that this preaching and teaching feeds my soul too; I'm lucky to be able to do it.

Maundy Thursday: Back to the Table

Here we are, Maundy Thursday again.  I am in a house that I didn't own last year.  Last year, Maundy Thursday was the day before I broke my wrist.  This year, I am hearing all the broken body parts of our liturgy differently.

Diana Butler Bass has already written the perfect Maundy Thursday essay, the type of essay where I almost decide I don't need to bother to write anything further.  She writes "Christians mostly think of Maundy Thursday as the run-up to the real show on Friday."  And then she writes a whole essay to address this idea:  "What if we’ve gotten the week’s emphasis wrong?"  She writes a whole essay to expand on the idea that the table, the meal, should be the main point, not the cross.

On this day, I'm thinking of Anselm and his ideas of atonement.  On this day, I'm wondering what would have happened if Christianity had emphasized something different, if the cross could have been a different kind of symbol.  More on that tomorrow.

On this day, I'm thinking of those earliest Christians, sharing all they had, not calling themselves Christians yet, just a group of people who had experienced something shattering.  They gathered to try to understand what had happened and how to move forward.  They expected Christ to come again soon, in their lifetimes.  Reading Paul in that context changes some of his letters for me.  I still wonder if we would be better off without them.

I still wonder what letters are lost to us, letters from other earliest followers of the new way.  I am dreaming of a recipe book from those earliest Christians, a book of recipes and stories about new life.

This week, with its mix of Spring holidays, including Ramadan and Passover this year, along with all the Christian holidays, also reminds me of a poem I wrote long ago now, while all these images swirled in my brain and my quilt group met. We wouldn't have had the meal that the poem describes, but everything else is factual. Well, I wasn't exactly the lapsed Lutheran in the sense that I once was, but like the rest of the poem, it's true, if not factual.

It was first published in Ruminate.


Eucharist

I knead the bread leavened with beer,
stew a lamb shank in a pot of lentils,
prepare a salad of apples, walnuts, and raisins,
sweetened with wine and honey.
No one ever had herbs as bitter as this late season lettuce.

My friends gather at dusk, a motley band
of ragtags, fleeing from the Philistines of academia:
a Marxist, a Hindu, a Wiccan, a Charismatic Catholic,
and me, a lapsed Lutheran longing for liturgy.

Later, having drunk several bottles of wine
with prices that could have paid our grad
school rents, we eat desserts from disparate
cultures and tell our daughters tales from our deviant days.
We agree to meet again.

Gnarled vegetables coaxed from their dark hiding places
transform into a hearty broth.
Fire transubstantiates flour and water into life giving loaves.
Outcasts scavenged from the margins of education
share a meal and memories and begin to mold
a new family, a different covenant.

Calamitous Centuries Past and Present

I am listening to the Throughline episode that explores Omar El Akkad's novel, American War.  I read the book in 2017, and I remember it as a searing experience, searing in a good way.  It begins with a discussion about the past and the future, about sci-fi and futuristic fiction (will it be hover cars or will it stay rooted in the conflicts of past ages?).  It's a great conversation.  When I finished it for the first time, I listened again.

As I drove to Williamsburg, I listened to an episode of On the Media about the brave new world of Artificial Intelligence, followed by news of devastating weather crashing into California.  I thought about the century we're in, the 21st century, and I thought about the decades that will unfold.  I think that if humanity survives, we will use the word "calamitous" to describe the 21st century, much the way we use it with the 14th century (see Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror) or the collapse of the Bronze Age.  

Yes, I think there will be spots where we marvel at how humanity solved one problem or another.  Maybe it will be the vast fields of solar panels (and we will wonder why humans didn't attempt this sooner, maybe staving off the climate catastrophes that cascaded through the 21st century) or the ways we've learned to vanquish some diseases.  Some of us won't perceive the century through a lens of disaster and catastrophe.  Many of us won't survive long enough to think about the 21st century at all.

My mom and I spent a lot of time over the week-end returning to the issue of the future of church, both The Church (the institution) and the Sunday service itself.  My thoughts have continued to circle around the various developments I learned about in Church History I, the times when the Church could have become something else, could have championed a different set of values and beliefs.

I find myself thinking about the emphasis on personal salvation vs. the salvation of societies.  When we face threats that are more existential, does the Church abandon the personal salvation/substitutionary atonement theories?  Or does society give up on church altogether, thinking that if there's a hope for salvation, it won't be coming from The Church?

The coming decades may illuminate these questions, if any of us have leisure time to reflect on them.

Martin Luther King's True Birthday

 Today is Dr. Martin Luther King's true birthday; Monday is the day when many of us get a holiday. We will likely hear many people declare that this week-end should be one of service.

As a Lutheran and a social justice person, these declarations make me grumpy. Every week should be devoted to social justice, and that's one of my spiritual goals, to make sure I do some work of social justice and/or charity each week.

Of course, I realize that the rest of the nation could stand to be reminded periodically of the necessity of service and social justice work. It's a dark time, in many ways, and I find the words of King still inspiring, still consoling, still hopeful: "Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real sense this is a great time to be alive. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future. Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible. Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life's restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men." (from this post on The Writer's Almanac).

Years ago on the NPR program Talk of the Nation, Tavis Smiley and Cornell West discussed King's legacy. They talked about the fact that when King died, he was not the beloved person he is today. Smiley said, "King's life was really about three things: justice for all, service to others and a love that liberates people. Justice for all, service to others and a love that liberates. Sometimes, when you have that as your agenda, you're not popular. You're not understood." The whole interview is well worth a listen or a read (go here).

Just think how profoundly our society would change if more of us devoted our lives to these three things: justice for everybody, service to others and love that liberates. There's a worthy goal to keep in mind, not just this week-end, but every week-end.

New Research on Mary and Martha and Lazarus

For years, I, like much of the church world, thought that Mary and Martha and Lazarus were siblings.  You may remember Lazarus as being raised from the dead or Mary and Martha as siblings with different ideas of how to treat Jesus when he comes to visit.  But what if we've gotten it all wrong?

In the closing sermon at this year's Wild Goose festival, Diana Butler Bass presented the work of Elizabeth Schrader, a PhD student at Duke.  She did research on the Lazarus text and noticed that the word Mary had been changed to Martha.  Why would someone do this?  And how can we be sure?  

Happily, Diana Butler Bass published her sermon here.  It's worth the read.  She makes the case that it was likely a 4th century change, a change to disempower Mary Magdalene.

But more important, she makes the case for why we should care.  Imagine how Christianity might have been different if we had seen Mary Magdalene as an important pillar of the church, just like Peter:  "The word magdala in Aramaic means tower. And so now you get the full picture. In the Synoptics, Jesus and Peter have a discussion. In that discussion, Peter utters the Christological confession. As a result of the Christological confession, Jesus says, "You are Peter the Rock." In the gospel of John, Mary and Jesus have a conversation, and Mary utters the Christological confession. And she comes to be known as Mary the Tower."

Would we have a better world today if we had prioritized Mary as much as we did Peter?  I would say yes.   I envision a more egalitarian world, of course.  I'd also like to see a world where we realize that we can contribute to the Kingdom of God in a wide variety of ways.  

If we had seen Mary and other women as important and vital, we'd have seen that there are other ways of being a disciple.  But it's not too late, of course.  If we see the Bible with fresh eyes, maybe we can move to that more egalitarian vision, so many centuries after the death of Jesus.

Sea of Tranquility, World of Turmoil

During my April travels, I heard this interview with Emily St. John Mandel on the NPR show 1A. The interviewer and the author discussed the new book Sea of Tranquility, which sounded interesting. I first read Station Eleven and enjoyed it thoroughly, so I was predisposed to like this book.

In fact, I loved this book. I’d go so far as to say it's one of the best I've read in a long time. I started it Friday afternoon and got up early Saturday morning to finish it. I don't want to say too much about it because I don't want to ruin it for those who haven't read it, so let me just say that it was satisfying in so many ways, particularly in ways that pleased me as a writer. I was so impressed with what she managed to pull off.

This interview on the Ezra Klein podcast also inspired me to want to read this book. This morning I went back and listened to both interviews again. Emily St. John Mandel is a wonderful guest with a wide range of knowledge.  I’m glad that she’s younger, that we might have many more books from her to enjoy.

I was sad yesterday when I learned that Rosemary Radford Ruether had died. She, too, had a wide range of knowledge. She was one of the feminist theologians who helped change how we talk about God. She did groundbreaking, revolutionary work on gender issues and God talk. She's not one of the theologians whose work I go back to reread, but her work forms a foundation for many of the works of theology that have sustained me.

I wish I could say that her work was done, that it seems part of an earlier age and no longer relevant.  Sadly, that is not the case. Just last month I was part of an interesting conversation about changing references to God as a father. We talked about translation issues and gender issues and whether or not it was appropriate to have a more expansive language when talking about the creator.

The person who was most opposed to changing God the Father language was not in his 90s. I looked him up later to be sure. He's roughly my age, at the far side of mid life. I thought that most people in more liberal church denominations had accepted the need for careful language when it comes to the creator, a need to move beyond tradition. I was surprised by the ferocity of the conversation.

I held my own, while at the same time thinking of the decades of work that had been done on this issue of the language of God talk. It's also interesting to think of these issues in a week where the Southern Baptist Convention has had revelations of all sorts of horrible abuse. It reminded me of one of my undergraduate friends who went on to seminary in the late 80’s, right at the time at the Southern Baptists decided to stop ordaining women. I felt sad that the church world would lose her gifts.  I feel that sadness still.

We live in a time when the church world is losing the gifts of all sorts of people who turn away for all sorts of reasons. Some people scoff at the idea of language making a difference, but theologians like Ruether knew that change doesn't happen at the larger macro level without change happening at the micro language level. Maybe we need to return to some of those revelations.

This morning I took delight in reading this tribute to Ruether. Come to find out, the academic dean at Wesley Theological Seminary, where I am a student, studied under Ruether, and she directed his MA thesis. I have been so pleased this past year to be at this seminary, and discovering that the seminary has connections back to Ruether makes me even more happy to have made this choice.

How to Do True Reconstruction: The Practice of the Better

In today's meditation, Father Richard Rohr offered this bit, which was so good that I wanted to preserve it so that I can find it more easily when I want to go back to it:

"Assisi is surrounded by city walls. Inside those walls are the cathedral and the established churches, all of which are good. That’s where Francis first heard the gospel and fell in love with Jesus. But then he quietly went outside the walls and rebuilt some old ruins called San Damiano and the Portiuncula. He wasn’t telling the others they were doing it wrong. He just gently and lovingly tried to do it better. I think that’s true reconstruction. Remember, the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. That might be a perfect motto for all reconstructive work. It does not destroy machines or monuments but reinvigorates them with new energy and form."

The italics in the quote are Rohr's.

Visio Divina in Seminary Class

One of the cool things about being in a seminary class is that we can actually engage in spiritual practices and not just talk about them.  On Wednesday, in my Spiritual Formation for Ministry class, we did a session of Visio Divina, after reading Henri Nouwen who talked about this practice.

I reached for my sketchbook, but it wasn't going to be that kind of Visio Divina. It's a class conducted via Zoom, so our teacher pulled up this image, "Emmaus," by Emmanuel Garibay:

On Wednesday, we looked at this image, while our teacher led us through the meditation.  "I invite you to . . ."--much of what our teacher offered was preceded by this phrase.  She invited us to focus on different parts of the image.  She invited us to close our eyes.  She invited us to consider where we see God in this image.  She invited us to consider what God was saying to us in this image.

Then we broke into small groups.  My group was me, another woman, and a man who is also in my CD group, so I knew him.  He's a Seventh Day Adventist, so I wasn't surprised to hear him say that he found the image too disturbing to even have it on his screen.  I talked about how it was hard for me to meditate on the image because I wanted to analyze it, especially the background, which reminded me of both depictions of Hell and Pentecost.

We came back together as a group to discuss.  Not surprisingly, we had a wide range of experiences.  Our teacher reminded us that "God will reveal Godself in any image."  She suggested we try it with images out of the news.  Interesting!

I'd like to try this again, only this time with a less unsettling image.  I found it hard to shut up my analytical brain long enough to let God, or anyone else, speak to me through the image that we used on Wednesday night.  But I'm not unhappy to have had the experience--or to have found the work of an artist whom I hadn't heard of before Wednesday night.

If your brain is like mine and wants more insight into both the artist and the art, this essay by Rob Pattendon in Image is a great place to start.

All the Ways We Bleed

This morning, I continue to be tired, but it's a good tired, born of good classes, work on final papers, and pleasant days at the office getting the tasks of a campus done.  Let me just record some reflections that I don't want to lose, reflections that probably don't hang together as a cohesive essay but are worth capturing nonetheless.

--I'm listening to Terry Gross interviewing Dave Grohl, whom I've always loved.  What a delight.  He's self taught, so his approach to creativity and music gives hope to people like me who don't have lots of time to learn music theory.  He talks about how he approaches the guitar as if each string is a drum in a drum kit.  Fascinating!  And he's got his guitar with him to demonstrate what he's talking about.

--The other night, I was listening to my New Testament teacher talking about crucifixion and resurrection, while my spouse was in the other room watching this strange vampire movie.  It had the bad cinematography of a cheap 70's movie:  grainy with awful sound quality.  The plot:  boy meets girl in a bar, and they have sex, and oh dear, she might be a vampire.  There's a middle-aged male detective, that squat kind of man who populates so many movies.  He will never be able to attract a nubile vampire girl into his bed, and so he's out to decimate all their joy.

--I spent the end of Thanksgiving week-end looking at the 4 crucifixion stories in the gospels.  On Sunday, I sat in church, and thought about Jesus being both God and human.  I wondered how the story would have turned out if Christ had behaved differently.  I am not a person who subscribes to the theory of substitutionary atonement, the idea that Christ must be crucified to appease a God who needs that sacrifice so that humans can be saved.  Crucifixion was a capital punishment reserved by Romans for enemies of the state, so clearly, Jesus was doing something to put him on a collision course with the occupying force/imperial army.  What if Jesus had been a different person?  What if there had been no crucifixion?  How would we understand God?  How would history have been different?

--I wrote this in for a seminary assignment, but I realized it was taking me in a different direction, that while it was interesting, wasn't within the scope of the assignment:    "Could there have been a means of salvation that didn’t involve crucifixion if Jesus had behaved differently?  I believe in a universe that is rooted in free will, in which nothing is pre-determined.  If I truly believe in a universe rooted in free will, does this mean that God can’t be omniscient?"

--For the record, I don't believe that God is omniscient.  If we believe in free will, then God can't be omniscient.  And yes, I know all the ways that people try to say that we can have both free will and an omniscient God, but I don't agree.

--In the not too distant past, I'd have been burned as a heretic.  I am OK with that.

--Speaking of witches, it's also strange to be thinking about fleshly issues like vampires and crucifixion while the Supreme Court may get rid of Roe v. Wade.  I was thinking about my time in the 80's, when I was very careful with birth control since I lived in South Carolina where abortion was only legal in the first trimester.  I was thinking about all the ways women used to try to have abortions and how glad I was that abortion was safe and legal, even as I hoped never to need one.  I'm thinking about all the tender parts of the body, all the ways we bleed.

Resources for the First Days of Climate Talks

 How interesting that these first day of climate talks take place across the triduum of Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day.  While I don't have a poem that makes use of that conjunction (but I will!), I do have plenty of poems that ponder climate change.  Here's one that seems to fit best for this first day of climate talks in Glasgow; it's from my chapbook of the same name, and it first appeared here, with haunting art work to accompany it, at Escape Into Life. :

Life in the Holocene Extinction


I complete the day’s tasks
of e-mails and reports and other paperwork.
I think about which species
have gone extinct
in the amount of time it takes
to troll the Internet.
I squash a mosquito.

He drives to the grocery store
to pick up the few items he needs
for dinner: shark from a distant
sea, wine redolent of minerals from a foreign
soil. He avoids the berries
from a tropical country with lax
control of chemicals.

As she packs up her office,
she thinks about habitat loss,
those orphaned animals stranded
in a world of heat and pavement.
She wishes she had saved
more money while she had a job.
She knows she will lose the house.
She wonders what possessions
will fit into her car.

Maybe you were hoping for less poetic resources.  The website for the meeting is here.  For something less dry (pun intended), I loved this article that has the author going to new condo buildings in Miami Beach where she posed as a wealthy buyer and reports on sea level rise and its impact--or puzzling lack of impact--on the high end real estate market.

I first heard about that article in this episode of Hidden Brain that explores the idea of what happens if we approach the issue of climate catastrophe either like Dunkirk or Normandy, those WWII situations.  You may have to scroll down to look for the episode "We Broke the Planet:  Now What?"  I also liked this episode of It's Been a Minute, which didn't seem like the same old, same old about the topic.

It is hard to believe that these climate talks will make a difference.  It is hard to understate how time is running out--or may have already run out, for some of us in some locations.  Sigh.

Faith After Doubt: Brian McLaren's 4 Stages

Being able to participate in various conferences and presentations is one of the joys of these days when more opportunities have moved online.  Last year, I signed up for the Festival of Homiletics.  I bought the package where I could view presentations at any point, and I have yet to do that.  This year, I signed up for the free streaming option.

On Tuesday, I heard a great presentation by Brian McLaren.  I suspect it's a distillation of his latest book Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It, but it was still a great presentation.

He says, "It is not doubt that harms your faith; it is dishonesty about your doubts."  Well, I haven't had much problem with being honest about my doubts.  Happily, he didn't spend too much time on this point.

Instead, he talked about the 4 stages of modern faith/doubt and their characteristics:

1.  Simplicity:  Dualism.  Faith in authority figures.  Faith before doubt.

2.  Complexity:  Pragmatism.  Authority figure as coach.  Faith managing doubt.

3.  Perplexity:  Relativism.  Authority figures as iconoclast.  Faith falls apart.

4.  Harmony:  Integration.  Non-dualism.  Authority figures as mystics, visionaries and saints.

McLaren cautions that if we live too long in the land of Harmony, we can find ourselves back in a place of Simplicity, that unquestioning assumption that we know it all.  He also says that a vast majority of churches and individuals are at stage 1 or 2.

He addressed preachers and pastors specifically, saying that we need a plan for guiding through stages of doubt.  He reminded us that we're likely to have all 4 types in our pews, and we need every sermon that we preach to address all the stages, to affirm and challenge each stage:

1.  For people in Simplicity, we can encourage learning, stressing growth, not perfection.

2.  For people in Complexity, we could model unknowing as we present options.  We could present literary literacy (instead of fact-based truth) and curiosity.

3.  For people in Perplexity, we can offer meaning but not factual truth, reverence in the face of mystery.  We can stress radiance and depth.

4.  For people in Harmony, we can offer different contemplative practices like those of silence and the arts.

As I was listening, I was scribbling notes and thinking, some day soon, I could be preaching more often.  Let me take good notes!  But perhaps I should also read his book.

He concluded with these wise words, both for those of us preaching sermons and for those of us living our lives in other ways:  Emphasize what needs to continue--de-emphasize what doesn't need to continue, de-emphasize and replace what doesn't need to continue.

It was a great presentation.  I'm really glad I had a chance to participate.  I'm even happy for virtual participation--it's great to see how the form can work (more notes for a possible future of designing online enrichment).

Good Friday in a Week of Depressingly Ordinary Violence

Holy Week 2021 been an interesting experience.  We've seen a surge in mass killings by young men with guns in the U.S., a surge just in the past two or three weeks.  We've seen a surge in violence against Asians in the U.S., along with coverage of who fights back, who intervenes, and who closes the door, thus refusing to get involved.  This week has brought coverage of the trial of the police officer accused of killing George Floyd, with testimony from the people who witnessed the event.

I wish that I could say that this violence is out of the ordinary, but it's not.  We have increased coverage, but communities of color would tell us that they've always endured violence, both from their fellow citizens and from officers who took an oath to protect us all.  Even during the time of lockdown, 2020 was one of the deadliest years for gun violence, even if we had fewer mass shootings (see this article in The Washington Post for more details).

Diana Butler Bass has written a powerful essay for Good Friday 2021.  She considers the issue of the crowd, both the one in Minneapolis watching George Floyd die, unsure of what to do and unable to do much even as they wished they could, and the crowds at the time of the trauma of Jesus, crowds who were surely feeling the same thing:  "The imperial police were torturing a man who was most likely innocent as they forced him through city streets to his death. Some may have turned their heads, not wanting to see the same scene again, having witnessed far too many victims taken down this very route toward the same end. Others might have been horrified by the whipping, the cold cruelty of the Roman soldiers. A few reached out to offer comfort, to plead with the executioners for mercy."

She says, "This week, we are reminded that the trauma of oppressive systems isn’t borne only by its most direct victims. Imperial violence spreads from the knee on the neck and the cross on a back of individual sufferers to the bystanders, the witnesses, others on the way. Here we see the powerful truth — those on sidewalks become casualties as well."

Good Friday comes around again to remind us that the problem of violence isn't new to our generation.  It wasn't new to Christ's generation.  I was taught that Jesus had to come to the world to save us from our habit of violence, that he had to die on the cross to appease his angry father God--otherwise, that harsh punishment would have fallen on our heads.

I could make the argument that harsh punishment is falling on our heads day after day, year after year, century after century.  What difference does the death of Christ make anyway?

Let me be clear:  I do not believe in the substitutionary atonement theory that explains the death of Jesus as necessary to keep us all from going to hell.  I believe that Jesus was killed because he was a threat to the Roman empire.  Crucifixion was the punishment for terrorists; other types of criminals were stoned or beheaded.

I can't find the Richard Rohr quote that I'd like to end with, so I'll paraphrase.  The cross is not God's requirement to love us.  Crucifixion is the world's response to God's love.  Jesus comes to show us of the depth of Divine love, and for his trouble, the Roman empire crucified him.

And yet, God can use this ugliness too.  The empty tomb tells us that empires and other powers will not have the last word.  Out of utter cruelty and depravity, we can find new life, new hope.

Prophets, Ancient and Modern

In his daily reflections, Richard Rohr has been focusing on prophets this week.  He has been reminding us all week that the role of the prophet is to point out what's wrong with society, with all the idols we worship, including priests and the temple itself.  But it's so much more than that.  It's about sharing the ecstatic vision of God, about the vision that God has for creation.

The reflections have been speaking to me.  I feel we need prophets for our own time.  Most people assume we need prophets to speak truth to power, and we do.  But we also need prophets to proclaim God's vision for creation, to remind us all, again and again, that a better way is possible.  We need prophets to paint a picture of the possible, so that more people catch that fire and work towards that vision.

It's important to remember that any of us can do that work.  Prophets through the ages have come from all sorts of places and backgrounds.  This morning's reflection quotes Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister:

"These prophetic people, people just like us, simple and sincere, eager and inspired—these sheep herders like Amos and small-business people like Hosea, these simple country farmers or priests like Jeremiah, these thinkers and writers and dreamers like Isaiah and Ezekiel, these struggling lovers and suffering witnesses like Micah, these brave and independent judges and leaders, like Deborah and Miriam, made no small choices. They chose courage. They chose the expansion of the soul. They chose to stake their lives on what must be rather than stake their comfort, their security, the direction of their lives, on what was." 

from her 2019 book The Time Is Now: A Call to Uncommon Courage

For more, go here and look for the Daily Meditations section of the website.