2016.02.14 Turning a LIfe Around?

I know I should be Happy Valentine-ing it so Happy Valentine's Day to all you dear readers. I do love you, ya know.  And love, even in its smallest, funniest expressions, least expected or traditional, does turn lives around.

A man in treatment to recover from addictive disease once told me that he hated love because it was so gooey. I asked him what he loved, and he burst into hearty laughter, saying: "Gooey caramel candy covered with melty chocolate. Better than a beer!" And there you have it.

When things turn around there is usually a tumult of reaction, inside and out. It can be a new direction you decide to take, a new understanding of a relationship, a sudden humorous take on what you thought was sacrosanct or right for you. Or a new way of thinking about God and your relationship or your language about God. 

On Thanksgiving in Maine, 2014, I wrote: "Along the Kennebunk beach road looking out to sea there was a sunset so spectacular people stopped and stared; people pulled their cars off the road and jumped out with their i-phone cameras to snap a shot. Reverse selfies!— turning the camera's eye away from the self toward something much grander and more beautiful." Such a switch is refreshing in this age of selfie-ism.

Beauty will save the earth, I'm sure. It arrests us, even those in the midst of despair or in the grip of evil. All it takes to turn a life around is one moment, followed by a lifetime of hard work and commitment. Watch for the moments. And by all means feel free to project theology onto them.Such beauty may be a beckoning.

How do you know what is transcendent and what is immanent? Whether God beckons you from without or within?

William Temple,  one time Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-1944) wrote a brilliant book called Nature, Man, and God. I read it years ago in seminary and didn’t understand much, except that I never forgot the way Temple fused aspects of Divinity which our tiny minds inevitably separate: the close presence of God, immanence, and the distance of God, transcendence. Is God far away or is God as close to us as our own breath? Can we have one without the other? Nope. Temple wrote about the transcendence of the immanent and the immanence of the transcendent. We’re stuck with both together at once. (Temple's mind was not blurry like this image:)
Christians see this fusion in Jesus the Christ. Look for it in yourself, too—or in Nature or Music or Humor or any prayer. 

I  know a woman who calls God “Honey".   She regularly loses her keys and other small possessions that matter to her and prays: "God, Honey, I lost my keys again. I was sure I left them right here. Any ideas?” Then she bustles about and usually finds what is lost.

My one-time Jesuit spiritual director once suggested that I find an affectionate name for God, something to down-size divinity, draw it close, like a lover or a teddy bear. (My comforting god was my thumb which I sucked mercilessly as a child.)

Overwhelming almightiness and superpower dominance is admirable of course in a window, or miles away at the high altar, or in the towers of cathedrals, but I wanted to touch and feel and sense—and name with affection. I tried calling God sweetie, then darling, my mother’s favorite term of endearment, but nothing stuck until I thought of beloved. I don’t regularly call anyone else that, but for God, whose love I’d been taught was too vast even to imagine, let alone hold onto, and I can imagine anything, Beloved seemed close enough.

Henri Matisse, born in 1869, in Le Cateau, France, had no interest in art. He went to law school in Paris and never visited a single museum. Had it not been for a case of appendicitis, he might never have become an artist. Bedridden for several weeks during his recovery, he took up painting as a way to pass the time. It was a revelation, a turnaround. He said, "For the first time in my life I felt free, quiet, and alone ... carried along by a power alien to my life as a normal man." At 22, he quit the law to begin work as a full-time artist. He was a revolutionary who dressed like a bourgeois, and he once said, "It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”

Don’t worry if you don’t think of Godde like everybody else. Just find a way for you. Just make it your own. Then see how it feels when you behave toward yourself and others exactly as your god-image behaves. You might find out it's pretty much as you want to be treated yourself. 

“Wheresoever you go, go there with your whole heart.” -Confucius

A woman who is struggling through rounds of chemotherapy for cancer, without remission, asked for prayer just to stay with the treatment. She said humor helps. She also said that a fresh new day with the sky pure blue and the sun in full shine mode, even a winter day, raises her soul  She has had many blood transfusions and calls herself Vampire Jane (not her name).  "Vampires are strong. They get good blood, right?" Right.

And I can not resist sharing a couple of typos. Mistakes, even unintended, can break right through fear and tension and the most violent of prejudices and differences, everything that mandates against going out on a limb, everything that causes us to fight.

Occasionally the institutional Episcopal church goes out on the limb and doesn't fall off the tree—yet.  After the Rev. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, was elected bishop in New Hampshire in 2003 there was plenty of flak.

Maine's Bishop Chilton Knudsen offered "listening sessions" at every congregation she visited after the controversial consecration of Robinson. People could come to talk, ask questions, even kvetch—and also listen to each other. The bulletin in one parish read (Freud would love this one!):  

"After the service today, the bishop will remain in the chancel for a listening session to hear your comments about the election of Gene Robinson. You are welcome to stay and share your thoughts with her. If you don't wish to stay and meet with the bishop, please heave quietly."

“Be not sad, surly Allah is with us.” Surely Allah is, along with all of Allah's other divine names and images, is with us. It is we who are "surly" and we who "heave"— and we, too, who can turn lives around.

2013.01.13 Pink Is the New Black

It’s the 50th birthday of my oldest daughter and first child, the 10th birthday of my oldest grandson, so I’m thinking of firsts, and of time and its passage—not a preoccupation I usually bother with, at least until my body lets me know my age.  And it is the Sunday we remember Jesus' baptism in the Jordan. Another first.

My daughter was born on Jan. 13,  at 1:13 a.m., weighing 8 pounds, 13 ounces.  Thirteen is a very good number.  Some say it represents the divine feminine. Here is the 13 girl Bev with her boyfriend Steve. Happy Birthday to you Bev—young, beautiful, and limitlessly beloved.

In 1989, the diocese of Massachusetts, against all human odds, elected the Rev. Barbara Clementine Harris as its bishop suffragan.  She is the first woman to be elected bishop in the Episcopal Church. Some people thought it was “the final crisis,” a disaster of apocalyptic proportions. But it wasn’t. It was simply history making progress in the flesh of a small, feisty  African American woman with a passion for justice, and a sense of humor that has peppered the Church with the courage it needs to keep God’s creation alive and well in the Body of Christ.


I lament that no one ever seems to care or count what the Church does to advance the cause of women in leadership, unless that Church is Roman Catholic.  The Episcopal Church is small but mighty, and rarely gets noticed—except for its firsts: Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, first woman in that office, elected in 2006; Bishop Gene Robinson, first openly gay man elected bishop of New Hampshire in 2002; and Bishop Barbara Harris

HOWEVER......on Jeopardy this week, one of the clues under the Women Firsts category mentioned Barbara Harris. We Episcopalians made it to Jeopardy.  And, one of the contestants, a  a young man of Indian descent, knew which Church she represented—and pronounced it correctly!

Here is the Rt. Rev. Barbara C. Harris, bishop, maker of history, and woman of Godde, at a recent General Convention of the Episcopal Church.  Have you ever in your life seen so much PINK on a Church dignitary? 

                                                            Pink is the new black!

2011.05.22 Close to Nature in the City

It’s odd that we live closer to nature now that we live in the city than we did in the burbs. In fact we are embedded in the beauty of nature, close enough to practically reach out the window and touch the heavy blossoms on the trees or grab a squirrel‘s tail as she skitters along on a nearby branch, or breathe scents as we fall asleep, or watch the day by day construction of a robin’s nest.I feel wrapped and sheltered.

I actually saw two robins doing it, or what I imagined to be it. They flew by upright beak to beak wings slapping the air and keeping them both steady, suspended in love. Amazing. A kiss in flight.

Bluejays it seems don’t stop to love or linger much. They are swoopers who light, give me the eye and swoop off.

Chipmunks are scarce and shy. They zoom.

And on clear nights we can say goodnight moon to Her Majesty. I feel as secure as the millions of children who like that book read to them nightly as I close my eyes and fall safe into Godde’s great womb, murmuring thanks as I drop.

Am I getting sentimental in my old age or is this kind of appreciation part of the territory, a gift?

Nurture and Challenge Your Spirit With Joan Chittister, Part III

More Joan Chittister highlights, provocative enough to keep me blogging. Besides it’s too hot to unpack more post-moving boxes.

-Christianity is the most anthropocentric and androcentric religion of the major faiths. BUT in the West....................(Christianity exiled its feminine mostly to church domestics.)

-We’ve lost touch with Incarnation: divine presence in ALL created things, animals and nature, not just humanity.
-We’ve lost the the Godde of Genesis who declares ALL of it GOOD and says ALL of it requires care, not sovereignty.
-We’ve lost the sacramentality of the universe.
-We’ve lost the awareness of human finiteness and human dependence on everything in nature‚ exclude oil! We have abused our environment with our demand for moreness and our inability to know enoughness.
-We’ve lost the wholeness of biblical story. Genesis 1, the creation story, and Genesis 2, the companionship story, must be read as a whole.
-We’ve forgotten that Adam named and included all the animals. We turned naming into ownership and control. Any of you with children? Do you name them? How much control does that give you? LOL.
-We’ve lost what science and ecofeminism have retrieved: the interrelatedness and interdependence of all people and things. The Christian Church must catch up to the fact that life is a weave not a ladder and that autonomy and rugged individualism are dangerous illusions.
-We’ve lost the omnipresence of Godde, aka the Holy One.
-We’ve lost our femininity and with it our full humanity.
-We’ve lost the Sabbath, the contemplative mind of Godde, as the crown of all creation.
-We’ve lost our Jewish roots. “If you believe that Godde build inequality into creation you are party to the gassing of the next generation of Jews.”

Chittister closed with a wrap-up parable from Buddhism. The Buddha one day asked a notorious bandit if he could pull a branch off a nearby tree. Of course said the bandit, flexing his muscles and strutting toward the tree. Snap! Now, challenged the Buddha, can you put it back? Are you crazy said the bandit. I can’t do that?

Can we do this? Can we teach it, talk it, preach it, write it, live it?

Joan Chittister nurtured us with her humor and her spiritual vitality. She challenged us with not a brand new but a restored vision, a vision in line with feminist values, common sense religious thinking, and an ethic of mutuality in league with a wholistic spirituality grounded in relationship, humility and sacramentality.

Is there hope?

Chittister says that male feminists give her hope that the dream is realizable. We are not the same but differences can be valued as contributing to the whole while we claim our sacred human lives together to build a new world view.

I strongly believe this is and has always been Godde’s work into which we join come-lately but not too lately if we wake up to the task, the ministry of transformation. And we don’t have to ask any more, Is it broken? Or rationalize saying, If it’s not broken don’t fix it? Patriarchy as mindset, domination politics, policy and practice is broken and breaking us. With Godde’s grace working in us that which is enlivening for the common good we can fix it.

I am grateful to Chittister’s prophetic mission and person for: no reference to the sexual abuse scandal in her church (too easy a scapegoat for a larger issues); no reference to denominations or any thought of one true church; taking on the risk of a celebrity status for the sake of the prophetic message.

I am grateful for: my own Episcopal Church risking rifts in the Anglican Communion of which it is a part to elect a woman, Katherine Jefferts Schori, as our Presiding Bishop, and consecrate a non-celibate gay man, Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire; my Roman Catholic friends some of whom make home sabbaths and some of whom go to Episcopal or Lutheran churches on Sundays but still call themselves Catholic; Roman Catholic women who are getting ordained, excommunicated, and living out their vocations in a variety of non-traditional ways; my sisters and brothers in all faith traditions who are not afraid to explore new ways of telling the story and new ways of doing church; feminist theologians in all traditions.

(P.S. The title of these posts is borrowed. It is the identifying “motto” for St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Apparently in the age of marketing tyranny everyone needs a brand. I’ve seen cattle branding. Not fun. But to be serious I suppose it’s a good exercise for a community, in this case a Christian parish, to come together to attempt to sloganize its particular spirituality and charism. Thank you St. John’s.)


NEWS FLASH: We have a Rabba. She is Sara Hurwitz, the thirty-two year old mother of three children. She is the first woman ordained in American Orthodox Judaism. The ordaining Rabbi is Avi Weiss of Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, New York. In March of last year Weiss ordained Sara and dramatically proclaimed in the presence of witnesses: “The authority of Torah will rest upon your shoulders to spread the knowledge of God throughout the land.” She carries the title Rabbi or Rabba.

It give me chills and thrills. There is hope for a new world view, the story told another way.