2020.10.25 Scared Sinless

We "Whities" seized dominance with vigor, vengeance, veracity
We consumed everything within our reaches—and more.
We—voraciously and stingily— gobbled up
    all land
    all healthcare
    all money
    all goodly resources
    all power—and made it male
           
At first our status gave us
    pride, joy, glory
Then denial, ignorance, lassitude.

Now we are dying
    in droves,
        droves.

The Beauty of the Earth
    dims
    blurs
    dwindles.

We are quick to say wild animals—some human—have invaded,
        BUT
It is we—we—who have invaded their living space. We. Us.

We are scared to death
    ashen.
On knees we pray, and pray, with all that makes quiver our minds.

There is only one solution—one.
    Forgiveness?
    Too slippy slippery

No, we must actually love our neighbors as ourselves.

This cannot be lame lip service, a nod to Biblical aspirations.
    NO.
It must run deep into the veins of our heart.
We must get to know, not just love, our neighbors.

Known and unknown,
    always the one commandment.
        
Bidden or not, neighbors are here.

Moses legislated the politics
Jesus summarized the vision
Paul made it unconditional
Parental figures taught the young
   repeatedly taught and told and taught
the only one—just one behavior
    crucial
        necessary
            indispensable
            
               SHARE.

2020.10.18 Wisdom. Who? What? Where? When? Why?

Wisdom is considered one of God’s unfathomable gifts.  This is a note on the first chapter of the biblical Book of Sirach the central theme of which is that Wisdom comes from God, was with God in the beginning, is of God, is a female figure, and is deeply connected with spirituality. Whew!     

But why is Wisdom “unfathomable”?  Well, I suppose because Divinity itself is unfathomable.

Back in the 1980s, I was the chaplain at an alcohol/drug rehab facility. I was giving a talk on Spirituality to the patient community and ventured into the topic of Wisdom and its role in recovery. I began with a phrase from the biblical book called Sirach: “To fear the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, or God./Higher Power” A young black man leapt to his feet, raised his fists and shouted: “What the hell do you know about wisdom, anyway—or God?” He called me inept and stupid. I froze. Unbidden, a surge of energy rose up inside me:  “Excuse me, sir, sit down right now. I have listened to you and others with respect. You owe me the same. So sit down and shut up!” He sat down—wisely. Whether this was a wise confrontation or not, I have no idea, but it surely was unfathomable and felt damn good-godly to me.
            
                                             *  *  *  *

Sister Stan (Stanislaus Kennedy), Irish Sister of Charity since 1958, wrote in Gardening the Soul. Soothing seasonal thoughts for jaded modern souls, 2001. Her entry for October 12, our traditional Columbus Day, now quite discredited, unless you are wise enough to hold the wonder of explorative adventure in your soul alongside modern historical skepticism about legends, is:

Wisdom is not knowing as well as knowing, and being at peace with that uncertainty. It is about awareness and it is about wonder. It is about stopping and noticing phenomena in the world around us—air, water, wind, light, gravity, birth, rocks, heartbeats—and appreciating and understanding them.   

To glean wisdom we must keep ourselves open and receptive and perceptive. Wisdom comes from boldness, from participation and tolerance, uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, suspicion, pain, suffering, joy, laughter, fun and love. Wisdom comes from our participation in and appreciation of all things in our mind, heart, body, and spirit.

                                           *  *  *  *

Who is wise? What is wise? Why be wise?  You could after all be a wise-arse or a wiseacre.

Some years ago my late great Jesuit Spiritual Director Pierre Wolff  wisely told a group of retreatants, eager for a clear Word from God: "If you want to know how you stand with God, then look at how you stand with your neighbors.” Simple, right?  Inside I thought: hopeful, uneasy, fearful, judgmental, ashamed, loving, longing, hopeful.  Simple?   

From ancient Persian wisdom: “How do you know God?” You should respond, ‘Because God is in my heart.’ Can we know ourselves if we do not know God? The real understanding of ourselves is our understanding of God.”

The Bible is called Holy exactly because it is a jumble of unfathomably interconnected paradoxes—all of them beloved in Godde. The biblical book called Ecclesiasticus (book of the Church) or The Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach, composed about 180 BCE, was not included in the Jewish canon, but considered canonical by the early Christian Church. Protestant reformers relegated it to Apocryphal writings—runners up. Hence!—Sirach was and is controversial, unfathomable, and obviously wise.  

Sirach makes the case that Wisdom is from the Lord God, insisting throughout: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning is Wisdom. . . . To fear the Lord is fullness of wisdom; she inebriates mortals with her fruits . . .”  (Sirach 1: 16) This line is scandalous. She? Inebriation as in drunkenness? Her fruits? Sex?  Unfathomable! Yet it was the energy that surged inside me and gave me courage enough to confront those in my path who would hold me back, turn deaf ears.
 
Wisdom inebriates mortals with her fruits. She inebriates mortals with her fruits.

HOLY WISDOM. HOLY WORD. Thanks be to God.

Oh, and what does Wisdom look like? Check your mirror, my friends.

2020.10.11 My "Racism". Part Twelve. Sowing Seeds.

I started to attend the Episcopal church regularly. I loved the unitive meal, called Holy, but it didn’t happen every week. Why not? Did they think we Christians only needed to be transfused with Christ’s body and blood monthly?

All this religion. All this prayer. All this church. All these beautiful rites and rituals and songs. No one has a right to any of it. I was learning that rights and duties merged—merged—in acts of simple creative gratitude, like worship. Worship is art for the sake of everyone’s spiritual delight. Worship is, or should be, natural. It just happens, like praise. Birdsong is worship as grand as the huge Mormon Tabernacle choir, or a Gospel Choir of all black people, or a little girl marching about crooning Handel’s Hallelujah chorus, or the murmuring hum of prayers.    

What matters to God, really?  Would I find that in church? I went to graduate school at Columbia in N.Y.C. where I got my Master’s degree in Spanish language and literature, still searching for God and myself, still wondering about my racism and God’s vision, feeling sure that words mattered as much as sacrament and song in true worship.

I was married and the mother of four lovely children. I was still searching for God’s will—or mine, whichever came first. This might be the first time in my young life that I tangled with a moral dilemma that had no right answer.

Chapter XXXII. Motives and Consequences—Another Pungent College Learning

The professor, Miss XXX, walked slowly, so slowly you could call it deliberate, into the Ethics class to deliver the first lecture. Would she make it onto the dais? I thought she was either too ancient to care about ethics, or had lived enough life to be close to a guru on the moral life. Either way, I remember exactly her first sentence of the first lecture: “In making ethical decisions, which is more important, motives or consequences?”  She added: “Please prepare an essay with your own thoughts on that question and have it ready for next week’s class.”

This old woman was nobody’s old fool. I wrestled with that question day and night. I thought there had to be a “right” answer. This was an Ethics course, wasn’t it? I argued for consequences, imagining all the innocent people hurt in car accidents, or in wars, or in love.

I remembered that Bill Brakeman had been very badly injured in a car accident. I remember the phone call from his mother; I remember going to visit him in a hospital off of Den Road, in Rye, New York, just over the Connecticut line into New York state. Bill had been driving home from the big city where he had gone to hear jazz and was hit by another vehicle. I have no idea who was at fault. All I knew was that Bill was very badly injured. I stared down at him, pale and in pain, in that hospital bed. Not sure of a thing except my own shock, I bent over and kissed him lightly on the lips. I thought but do not remember saying: I love you. Bill’s recovery was very long, so long it delayed his going to college by a year. He had been a year ahead of me in high school, and now he would be a year behind me in college. God, I was glad he lived.

Years later I would decide that motives outweighed consequences. I think I got that from the Bible. God was often portrayed as a voyeur into human hearts, and people often changed from within, like Job. I decided that what happens inside a person has a lot to do with God—and motives.

Chapter XXXIII. Who Is The Greatest?

Memory: Once in junior high school a teacher posed this question to a bunch of upturned but blank faced seventh graders: Who was the greatest man in the world and why? I hated the WHY!  I knew enough not to put down my father, which wouldn’t have been quite true anyway. I wrote down Abraham Lincoln. Why? He freed the slaves of course. I learned that my answer was void of any historical complexities, but the teacher cleared up my confusions—and failed. There was no freakin’ right answer! Later I thought the church’s answer would have been Jesus of course. I didn’t understand that one either, but I recall a twinge of guilt that I had not put Jesus down.

Would I now? Would Jesus have freed slaves? Surely he died trying. Jesus’s cruel death was inevitable given his political vision. So was Lincoln’s.  Jesus acquired the messianic title Christ after his followers woke up years after his death to the image of God he proclaimed and lived. Lincoln had no such a title though he was a devout Christian. Still, one does not have to be a Christian to be a christ.

Both men, strikingly, were “men of sorrow acquainted with grief” as the great messianic lyric (Handels’ Messiah) tells us. Lincoln didn’t smile much. And Jesus is not remembered in the New Testament as laughing and smiling either.

     

Both of my chosen heroes told parabolic stories with a punch, stories that pointed without GPS directions, stories that confused and transfixed. These stories were provocative and told not to convert but to create—to stun, astonish, make something new, motivate people to do something new, something true. Parables are motivated by greater goals. My choice wasn’t such a miss.

Chapter XXXIV. The Sower

Jesus’s Parable of the Sower was told to listeners living in an agricultural culture.  A sower goes into a field to sow seeds with the obvious hope that some of the seeds will take root, grow, and supply food enough to feed hungry people.

Those who remembered Jesus and retold his parables, orally and later in writing, knew that he had a habit of not explaining them. Jesus hoped his stories would seed the kingdom. Lincoln too sowed seeds he hoped would become a country. BUT, in this parable, Jesus, or Jesus according to Matthew’s gospel, gives in to nagging disciples who beg to know what this parable means—exactly. Please, please, please. He succumbs to the lure of consequential ethics. He details the different qualities of soil, each one descriptive of a human condition—too dry, too rocky, too distracted—none of which yield a fruitful harvest.

Just like when a parent gives in to a nagging child, Jesus’s usual strategy of not explaining got sabotaged. His immediate followers, then and forevermore, obsess and compete. Whose soil will yield the best growth for the vision of God? Right away they, and we, lose sight of the main character in the story: the Sower.

The Sower, a metaphor for God, continues to sow and sow and sow. That’s the idea. That’s the grace, the point. This is not a parable about divine condemnation, rejection, or self-improvement. It’s not even about the sin of competitiveness for self-gain. The silent sower, whose sack is never empty of seeds, keeps sowing—without ceasing. God is extravagant with seed. If your “soil” is too arid today, seeds keep coming. There is no end to such potentiation. And no discrimination. I pray to the Sower.

Sow me, Sower
Sow your seeds.

In the beginning, I am fertile—flirty, fruitful, foxy
Any seed is mine. Every seed bears fruit.

In the middle, I try out soil-types—obsess about my own—until
    I harden against any seed
       waste seeds, ignore others,
    arid with indifference,
                  thinned by busyness and grief,
        bloated with pride or affluence
The Sower deftly sows—all seeds mine, all soils me.

At the ending time
    I don’t care—nor lie nor fake nor die
         —nor try to be sower seed or soil alone

Sower, seed, and soil—just so.

Sower, sower, double my order. Thank you.


Chapter XXXV.  Formation
 

I learned from all the sources that have formed me over time. I didn’t realize this at first, but now I see that most of my seeds came from Scripture and prayer conversations with the Sower. I was seeded to believe that no one was excluded from divine seeding—no one. Such conditioning would become my armor against racism, even in a white-privileged world. I could see that this way of living was NOT the way of God. Simply so.

“Lincoln will not return from the dead, even as a ghost, but his broadly balanced democratic  pluralism may be all there is to rescue us yet again.”  New Yorker, 9/28/20, Adam Gopnik “Better Angel. An Abraham Lincoln of His Time, and Ours.”

Jesus the Christ appeared to many after he died. We are STILL working on Jesus’s vision of the Kingdom of God. Perhaps these two greats will collaborate—for kingdom, for country.  

I must note this: Neither one of my chosen heroes slipped into racism or exclusionary rhetoric along the torturous way of promoting a unitive vision—although both men were white, Jesus with a semitic edge, and privileged, Jesus with rich friends who provided consistent hospitality and some financing of his campaign.



 

2020.10.04 Listen! You Are Holy.

Below is a poignant prayer of great beauty by Jane Mead, award-winning American poet who loved Nature, lived in California, and died at 61—too young. Yet her words live on. Here she says: Listen!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I live in a retirement community surrounded by tall trees—Nature’s sentinels  I do not feel the ache of loneliness, because I do not live alone.There are many people here, however, who do feel such loneliness. The weather is friendly to outside walks. When I see people strolling I nod and wave at a distance. I stop to chat—standing 6-10 feet away and through my mask—when I see people sitting on a bench or on their walker seats. Sometimes we stand side by side to watch the construction site vehicles, at rest or at work. Despite the current isolating circumstances, amidst the silent dread of winter’s approach and anxiety about our nation, not to mention our planet in peril, there is a silent affectionate ache that connects every living thing. Listen for it.


Concerning That Prayer I Cannot Make
     by Jane Mead

Jesus, I am cruelly lonely
and I do not know what I have done
nor do I suspect that you will answer me.

And, what is more, I have spent these bare months bargaining
with my soul as if I could make her
promise to love me when now it seems
that what I meant when I said “soul”
was that the river reflects
the railway bridge just as the sky
says it should - it speaks that language.

I do not know who you are.

I come here every day
to be beneath this bridge,
to sit beside this river,
so I must have seen the way
the clouds just slide
under the rusty arch -
without snagging on the bolts,
how they are borne along on the dark water -
I must have noticed their fluent speed
and also how that tattered blue T-shirt, caught,
and the white islands of ice flying by
and the light clouds flying slowly under the bridge, though today the river’s
fully melted.  I must have seen.

But I did not see.

I am not equal to my longing.
Somewhere there should be a place
the exact shape of my emptiness -
there should be a place
responsible for taking one back.
The river, of course, has no mercy -
it just lifts the dead fish
toward the sea.  
Of course, of course.

What I meant when I said ”soul”
was that there should be a place.

On the far bank the warehouse lights blink red, then green, and all the yellow
machines with their rusted scoops and lifts
sit under a thin layer of sunny frost.

And look -
my own palm - there, slowly rocking.
It is my pale palm -
palm where a black pebble
is turning and turning.

Listen -
all you bare trees
burrs
brambles
pile of twigs
red and green lights flashing
muddy bottle shards
shoe half buried -
listen, I am holy.