2021.05.02 Very First Things

The biblical story in Acts about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch is fantastically sci-fi and charged with spiritual energy. It’s an Easter story, acknowledging earthly life in full with heavenly life alongside. Philip runs into this eunuch, an Ethiopian court official in charge of the palace treasury no less, on the road. The eunuch by chance is reading a passage from the prophet Isaiah and doesn’t understand its meaning until Philip explains. The passage is fierce, all about sheep led to slaughter making no protest at all, humiliated and facing death soon. Such a God!  Philip leaps in with the the Good News of Jesus Christ, and the ecstatic eunuch leaps into a quickie roadside baptism administered by Philip who then vanishes.

Instant Christian conversion has not been my experience, yet I can understand the sudden burst of energy that accompanies a brand new awareness—irresistible so you leap or plunge.

I can identify with this eunuch a bit. When I was a child I sought to flee too much positive attention, while the eunuch sought to flee too much negative attention. There is something shaming about too much attention period, unless that attention is unconditional love—Godlike.  

I thought my spiritual story began at three under that dining room table, but in fact there’s a prequel. I’ve recently “unearthed” my baby book called “Tot to Teens,”written by my mother who, thrilled with my existence after several miscarriages, went overboard with her praise. I’m really not that great!  

My mother recorded EVERYTHING!  
    -first words Mmmm, DaDa and Ba—presumably my bottle.
    -seeing across the room at 3 1/2 months
    -played with rattle at 4 months
    -turned 1/2 way over at 4 1/2 months
    -ate prunes and baked apple at 6 months, asparagus tips at 6 1/2 months
    -first shot for whooping cough at 5 1/2 months
    -used the “toidy” after her first time on it at 6 1/2 months
    -crawled at 11 1/2 months
    -walked alone at 13 1/2 months

By two and a half I could button my shoes. I was real “olympian”. Notable: my next “first” words were boy and car.  No comment!

“Talks fluently (no exaggeration) and distinctly at 2 1/2 and can tell what is written in her book on any page from memory and is always right.”  I am delighted to read this prophecy, because I grew up to read and write with great pleasure always.

Equally prescient and humorous is the description of the celebration of my first birthday: “We gave a cocktail party but no babies on Lyn’s 1st birthday.”  There followed a complete list of guests and gifts, including a hot plate for my cereal, a monogrammed silver hairbrush, and a pearl necklace I still have.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My dental record included a diagram in which every tooth was labeled by number in order of appearance. No tooth fairy yet, but there was much concern about my thumb sucking and my front teeth—at 2 years and three months! “She looks like Eleanor Roosevelt.” If they’d only foreseen the orthodontist bills they’d later pay, not to mention my later becoming a Democrat! 

As to pets and playthings I had numerous dolls and animals, including two elephants named Lodie and Lodelot. My favorite was a white cat I named Pussy P’Sandra. I still have her lookalike but I machine-washed her, poor thing, and all her long white “fur” shrunk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My first birthday party at 3, “wearing a little white dimity dress with a pinafore with red rickrack and red slippers.” My mother thought I was “adorable”—which I might have been, save for photographic evidence to the contrary in black and white. But the shoes are on my home altar. High fashion, right?  

 

 

 

 

As to religion, we were members of the Brick Presbyterian Church where I went to nursery school. “Lyn adores school and has learned the 23rd Psalm and “Onward Christian Soldiers.” I did love school and I do recall being excellent at memorizing—good enough to later reject all those omni-words I realized were inadequate descriptors for God. Who needs a know-it-all God who is also power-hungry!  I did like the choir and the music. Here I am at 6 or 7 in the New York Herald Tribune—my first publicity photo. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 As I write this I feel such sadness. I felt over-mothered and longed to wear dungarees and be free of incessant pinafores. I also knew I was loved, if a bit too attentively. One baby book entry brought tears. It was under the heading, Aptitudes. Mom, who loved to dance and was good at it, had missed her chance to follow her dream. She also wanted to be married with children. Back in the 1940s she couldn’t do both, so she wrote about teaching toddler me to dance: “I taught Lyn to “Truck” “Shag” and “Minuet”. She points her toes very gracefully and has a semblance of rhythm and timing. Is very graceful in nursery school and keeps excellent time to music. I was very proud of her skipping to music on a witches broom stick at the school Halloween party.”

Descriptions of my advancing years in parties, pinafores, and adulations continued till I weighed in at 33 pounds at 4. Then the notations stopped, although the book provided space through 9th grade. I’m sure Mom got too busy with two more daughters and life itself.

Today I can honestly say that I loved my mother, have forgiven our differences, have no pinafore regrets, and, as a mother myself, wish she were here to laugh and cry and dance.  

2020.05.31 Pentecost. Whose Birthday Is It?

Pentecost is NOT the birthday of the Christian Church as many have been taught. Pentecost is a much bigger, grander, and far-reaching bomb of a holy day.

Think Mystic Flame, Mystic Wind, Cloven Tongues. Think crowds in the hundreds, Jews gathered to celebrate the 50th day after Passover Shavuoth—liberation and plenitude. Think crowds of thousands— Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Pamphylia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs, Gentiles and Jews alike—all assembled, eager to experience Divinity. The huge guest list itself is the meaning of Pentecost in Acts—all drawn to the hearth of God's heart.

We dare not downsize this Spirit, nor confine it to certain sacraments administered by “fatherly hands.” Nor can it be claimed by any one religion or national group. It is the Spirit of deepest contact with the Divine, believers and non-believers. Pentecost is the birth of Internationalism—the spirituality of Democracy.

In 1918, theologian, Vida D. Scudder, said that Peter’s first sermon, carried a democratic message: “To you is the promise and to your children and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord God shall call . . .”   The struggle between nationalists and an international ideal was very much part of the story of the early church. How big will we be? How far is our reach? Who is part of this institution and who is not?

Peter, a nationalist, was overcome by the Spirit, which gave him breadth of vision. Nevertheless, he went right on opposing Paul and insisted on circumcision as a condition until the Spirit re-programmed his institutional tapes and shook his soul alive. That’s the goal of Pentecost. Even proper Anglicans get permission to shed decorum and explode with exuberance. 

Flowing from this Pentecostal Spirit are gifts. The first is Tongues. I once heard a woman speak in tongues in a parish church. To my shame, I silently condemned her as mentally ill, simply because I, sane and sensible, could not understand her language.

I was abashed to read Scudder’s interpretation of The Gift of Tongues as the Gift of Sympathy. Sympathy? Yes, feeling for the feelings of another. Tongues means to understand without language. It is the gift of knowing-by-soul, not by words. Habitually, we translate everything into our own language to validate it. I remember my thrill when I first read something in Spanish without translating it into English as I read. Tongues signifies that every stranger and alien, through the pentecostal Spirit, understood God’s revelation in their own language without translation.

When I went to Spain to live with a family, people talked so fast I couldn’t understand a word they said, in spite of my big fat college degrees! I felt scared and left out—alone. Too embarrassed to ask them to slow down, I just listened and watched until I caught the energy, the animation. I felt the people before I comprehended all their words. When I came home my mother asked me what the people were like, and I said: “People are people, the same everywhere.”

Habitually, I break things down, analyze meanings, develop my own arguments and opinions. That’s fine, but there is also a wordless language. Ask any baby. They all speak in tongues. And we listen, babble back, caught up in a transcendent moment of nonsensical connection.

To transcend one’s body is orgasmic. It’s not a sustainable state. For a moment you are both inside and outside yourself, experiencing a mystic self-transcendence, speechlessly beyond the comfort of intellect. Some of us cry out—O God—in such moments. 

When I went to a bullfight in Spain, I felt this transcendence. The howling crowd swayed side to side, following the energy of both toro and torero. To parse it was impossible. To make it mentally accessible impossible. So I lost my mind. I swayed with the rhythmic pulse of Olé. I had no objectivity, so I simply got lost in pentecostal exuberance. My olés were for the bull, but it didn’t matter. The crowd rose and fell in one piece—as one, just as Jesus advocated.

Try not to be offended that I put Jesus, and sex, and and the cruelty of bullfights together. All analogies fall short of Pentecostal immensity. Beyond the birthday of one religion, Pentecost summons us to recognize and realize the intimate transcendent oneness of all living things.

In church Christians gather to receive humble wafers and hear: “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” possibly with the addition, "may it keep you in everlasting life” These words are not death sentences; they  do not mean we have to die or fly off to heaven to be with Christ. They mean that right now we are embraced by Infinity—IN God.

Pentecost, the Holy Spirit Presence, I believe, is always, always these things:
    -unitive not divisive
    -expansive not contractive
    -connective not disruptive
    -inclusive not exclusive
    -impartial not partisan
    -potent not passive
    -creative not destructive   
    -international not national
    -interdependent not autonomous

Pentecost is not the Birthday of Christianity. 

It is the Birthday of Creation.

   

The Great Emergence

Where now is the authority? Who says? Where is the plumb line for sound spiritual teachings and practices? Where if you desire can you be fully your human self and experience a dash of the divine as well?

The authority question is the besetting question of every new era.

I have no answers to these question just more questions. In fact questioning and exploring spiritual questions together in groups may be the authority of today in this age of what some call the Great Emergence.

Phyllis Tickle, founding editor of the Religion Department of Publishers Weekly and a respected authority herself on religions in America today has written a book called The Great Emergence, in which she defines the phenomenon as “monumental.” Her focus is Christianity in America in a time of reconfiguration of tsunami proportions.

Tickle, an active Episcopalian and author of The Divine Hours on prayer, deftly sweeps through church history to give a panoramic view of trends and developments. How did we get here? Only through history can we understand patterns that lead us to where we now are.

Anglican bishop the Right Reverend Mark Dyer famously quipped that every 500 years the Church holds a giant rummage sale—searching attic treasures discarding what is no longer useful and finding some that have been forgotten and need refurbishing and new life.

We can trace such movements back to the arrival of Jesus and the change of the era (BCE/CE) and the challenge to Judaism, to the Decline and Fall of Rome and the challenge to empire, through the Great Schism of East and West, Latin and Greek brands of Christianity, to the Great Reformation of 1517....and 2000. What is emerging now?

No one can articulate it to a tee. I hear a lot of lament: I can't keep up with the changes. I hear fear: I don't want any more change! And I hear: This is a challenging and exciting time to be alive. Go where the love is.

Historically, each “rummage sale” has issued forth in a more vital form of Christianity, a new way to be a Christian; each one was good; in each “winnowing” the Christian religion was reconfigured not destroyed. The key to such a miracle is that the establishment softened to let in the new. The softer, more supple the structure the more durable.

You can read about this process of softening in the biblical book of Acts in which Jerusalem authorities listened to the experience, stories and testimonies of the followers of Jesus struggling to survive and be taken seriously. Room in time was made, though not without much pain and persecution, but Judaism survived and became stronger. (Yes, the Pharisees!)

You can see this happening now as more and more homosexual people tell their truth out loud in churches, join communities of faith, laugh, love, pray, get ordained, married and serve.

And I marvel at how Christianity in the sixth century spread to northern England and the isles, not to take over but to become integrated with the pagan religions without shedding a drop of blood. No martyrs. Look at the chief symbol of celtic spirituality—the circle. Visit Iona, a small isle off northern Scotland, and see the high crosses, many with pagan symbols down one side and biblical symbols down the other. Side by side.

Tickle maintains that the emergent phenomenon, although complex and in process, is across the boards in American culture. Every institution is rummaging and reshaping. All are being called to soften in order to move into the future in peace with weeping and rejoicing side by side.

We are called. Will we respond?

The Episcopal Church according to Tickle is ideally suited to receive and accommodate this new movement with all its changes. Because, as she says, it’s “like mercury on a counter—not definable.” That is its gift and to some its curse. You just can’t grab that mercury and nail it down even if you crucify it.

Tickle’s own prediction along with other writers and thinkers, is that the process called “the Great Emergence will rewrite Christian theology—and thereby North American culture—into something far more Jewish, more paradoxical, more narrative, and more mystical than anything the Church has had for the last seventeen or eighteen hundred years.”

I am keeping watch on a spider as she spins her web. Of course I have named her Charlotte and hear her speaking in the voice of Julia Roberts as she works. I watch. I look for the web each day. In the sun’s light, or the light of our outdoor lamp, the threads shimmer and glimmer, precariously spread across the window pane on the side of our front door. The wind blows fiercely this wintry night. In the morning the web is still sturdy. I clap. I stare at the web’s shape— circular; some strands go up and down, some go across; every one is connected—intimately separate and dependent. In its vulnerability is its strength. I am transfixed by its fragile grandeur.

Some day it will blow away completely. And Charlotte? She or her look-alike will make a new pattern in a new place.