Choosing Up Disciples—Images of God

Jesus of Nazareth’s disciples, save for one latecomer, an accountant/taxman, named Matthew, were nothing if not a motley, rowdy, band of guys, eking out a living from the daily catch—of fish. Women joined in, but they received little mention in the biblical records. 

Why would Jesus, who hoped to surround himself with loyal followers to whom he would reiterate the basics of the Torah covenant with God and carry on with the vision of a heavenly kingdom on earth, choose people from society’s blue collars? It’s backwards! 

Well, because God does everything backwards—Jesus a prime example, right? 

The truth is that we are ALL among the chosen. It’s just that those whom human society ranks last get to go first in God’s created order, especially animal critters and children who often do know best, because they don’t think it over, and over and over, then rethink it—again. 

There follows a record of our own silly personal “disciples”—images of God, all.  

Here are our own dear “babies”—stuffed and silent: Miss Wise, owl, Leo, lion, Ganley I & II, hedgehogs, Walter, fishie, and Izzy, lady bug. They are very real in our hearts. We talk to them, sometimes through them, and let them sleep with us. 

Here is a very small shoe lost on the playground, then retrieved by a kind adult or an older child. It sits aloft on the pylon that escapes no one’s notice as everyone enters the playground to play.

Here is an elephant family on parade, painted on a changing table in the bathroom of a doctor’s office. It’s cute, right? It’s also sexist: Male leads, female follows, baby girl follows. You can tell the sex, because the girls follow and have lashes to flirt with. Big daddy leads and has no lashes. 

Here is a child full of wise questions and lots of his own talk. Recently, he told his father he “talked in school.” Daddy thought that was great, but son tugged at his father’s shirt and said: “No, Daddy, you don’t understand I TALKED in class. I mean when someone talks to you you’re supposed to answer and talk too, right? ” Daddy got the idea: no talking in class was the teacher’s rule, and the child was making a preemptive confession in case the teacher called his parents. A preemptive strike at six, no less! 

Here is a lion king (painted by Gaby D’Alessandro). He is majesty itself, elegant and outstanding for his roar and his finery. The lioness is nondescript and unadorned. It’s safer for mom to be plain and less attractive to predators, because Mom she stays home with the kid-cubs. In human nature it’s just the opposite—to our peril perhaps yet for our good.  

Here are four really fine adult children of mine—John, Jill, Bev, Rob. I cherish every breath they take and thank God for their well-being daily. Some days I think of them as my prayers-made-flesh. 

Here is an old woman sitting on the back of the truck amidst “junk” collected from a parish clean-up. She is a faithful Christian with a smile of gold. The truck will dispose of the junk but she will stay. She is not junk. 

Here is an infant boy, fisting the leash of the faithful family guard dog who will not sprint off, even after a squirrel. This is love. This child, like all children, including the one you once were, will lead us—with dog’s help.  

In the wreckage 

of our battles

where the powers 

have collided

we find greatness

shyly hiding

in the frailty 

of our children.    (Michael Hudson) 

And here is Nature Herself—dawnsweep over calm waters— Creator’s voiced assurance.  (photo credit, Dr. H.C. Richardson) 

 

 

2014.06.22 All Is Lost?

The silent films have returned with a blast— not comedies, not slapstick, not in black and white. Yet they have no dialogue, only music to carry the action along. Recently we watched “All Is Lost,” starring Robert Redford. His facial expressions do all the "talking."

“All Is Lost” dramatizes eight days in the life of a damaged sailboat, captained by one older (78) man, lost in the vast Indian Ocean, 1700 miles off Sumatra (Indonesia.)

That’s all. The main character is really the sea, or the contest between the man and the sea.  Water is both alluring and full of unpredictable danger as most of us know. It’s like God. We can’t stay away from it, and we can’t manage it, though we try.

The almost 2-hour film opens with the classic note in a bottle. It’s a note of apology from the sailor. He has set out on some quest or other and he anticipates his death. The note is obviously to loved ones. “I’m sorry,” he reiterates as if it were punctuation.

Every single second of this enormously ambitious film is full of suspense. I didn’t even get up to get more cookies, and I disciplined my bladder. You can’t tear your eyes away from this stupendous and wordless struggle between Humanity and Nature. 

The overarching theme of the film is Hope. The man never gives up. (I would have thrown in the towel by day #2, but then I wouldn’t have been out there in the first place. I take risks to pursue other dreams.)

How is this film spiritual? I learned from a seasoned and wise Jesuit that a sound spiritual life is spent discerning Godde’s spirit and moving with it. Such discernment required three things, no matter what your circumstance: awareness, sensitivity and action. All three!  Exercising all these together, one gets closer to knowing and loving oneself—and also God. God-knowledge and self-knowledge are correlative.

The sailor asserts these three gifts consistently, repeatedly, and in the most minute, often startling ways.

Examples: 

This story is not about a casual leap into adventure for the sake of a testosterone high or simply to prove oneself. This man is more prepared than the best of Boy Scouts. He has learned uncanny skills, such as training his lungs to hold air far longer that most of us can. His craft has every single bit of equipment imaginable. It is stocked with every provision, and then some. The man is an accomplished sailor, and, though aging, has obviously worked on physical fitness.  He is strong in every way.

As the film moves from crisis to crisis, the man uses all his resources, natural and learned. I knew the F-word could be a prayer. I just never saw it on film. “God” is uttered softly, once. We see his prayers on his face. I think of the Hebrew psalmist’s bold prayer when in dire distress:  “I am my prayer to you, God.” (Psalm 69:13, Greenberg translation)

The man raises awareness to an art form, paying attention to everything. For example, he notices the huge plastic container of water, not potable. It’s useless and a painful reminder that he is dying of thirst. (I thought of one of Jesus’ remembered words as he was dying: “I thirst.”)  Suddenly he sees the discarded water container in a completely new way. He is alert, sensitive to its new meaning. It can help him desalinate sea water, a skill he learned in preparation for this journey. Despite exhaustion and being near death, he leaps into action to create a desalinating apparatus. Go figure! 

In one imaginative moment he stares attentively, apparently aimlessly, at an empty tuna fish can—useless, empty, trash.  Yes, in one way, but the man scrutinizes it, contemplates it really, and it leaps into new focus. He bores a hole in it and rigs it to use as bait to lure swarms of small fish to follow it. Their movements create a current to push his raft along. 

In the end all is lost and the man makes a decision to jump into the inimical sea. The ending twists and turns in naked but not sentimental ambiguity.

All is lost, isn’t it?  

2013.07.14 Ask the Beasts: Spirituality and the Evolving Earth

“Ask the beasts and they will teach you;
    the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth an they will teach you;
           and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among those does not know
    that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing,
    and the breath of every human being.”  (Job 12:7-10) 

Yesterday at Boston College I heard a brilliant talk by Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, professor of theology at Fordham. She used as her biblical text the above passage from the biblical book of Job.

Poor old Job, impatient for a change in traditional theological thought and having to suffer further because of righteous friends who kept insisting that his sufferings and loss must be divine retribution. Just search your soul, confess, repent and be right with God, they said. 

NO, NO, NO said Job, you’re full of claptrap. I did NOT cause my misfortunes. I am innocent. Just ask the beasts—and every living thing. (This means plants, animals and people—all)

So how do all these living things answer? 
    Their science story: We all evolved over 3.5 billion years. We are all connected in a grand molecular/biological schema on a tree of life and continue to modify, branch and diversify in order to grow and multiply. The more diversified we become the more success each species will have in life.  One beast has evolved with no diversification—the horseshoe crab. One plant the same—the jingo tree. Some of us, of course, will die out.
    Their theology story: We all owe our origins in existence to God. God will transform us into a new creation, a future of life with God who never abandons. Most importantly, God sustains us moment to moment—creatio continua. This is the Tree of Life, home of every living thing.

Johnson's core point was that all living things evolve, thrive in the same intricately connected ecological web, and are in the hand of God/the Lord—now and forever.  Divine creativity is active all the time or there would be no world! AND, "pay attention to biology!"

In ancient times science and religion agreed on these convergences. Darwin was a faithful scientist, a beholder of every living thing. Unlike some righteous religionists (like Job's friends) Darwin shined praises on the minutiae of biological life in a way that brought about his theory of evolution.

He wrote "...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." He marveled that the bone structure of the human hand (for grasping), the mole’s paw (for digging), the fish’s fin (for paddling), and the bird’s wing (for flying) are all exactly the same skeletally. 

So what happened?  The history is too much for me to go into here, but you might say the same hubris that motivated the putative apple caper in Eden caused humanity to forget that it was only ONE species among every living thing that God held in hand.  We placed ourselves at the top of an ascendancy scale. We're still doing it! Recently the Occupy Movement made witness to such hubris.  Johnson's case, however, was that we humans have left every living thing except ourselves behind, discounted, outside of our concern and God's as well. 

How will we heal this rending?  Ironically, by not paying so much attention to sin and the spiritual state of our own narcissistic souls and looking out the window at the whole order of which we are one part. "LOOK OUT THE WINDOW!!" Johnson said. "We need a robust pneumtology."

It is She, the Holy Spirit who in our Christian Nicene Creed is called "the giver of life." The Latin words mean vivifier.  I can't resist commenting here that I would so love it if we could at least stop referring to the Holy Spirit as HE in the creed. Please! Three men on top—too much. 

Tears came to my eyes more than once as Johnson talked about the Spirit— the spiritual radiance of  plants and animals as well as human beings. 

LOOK OUT THE WINDOW. LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF NATURE. GET OVER YOURSELF.

A few irresistible wise tidbits that beg to be heard:
    -Creation is a cosmic event.
    -Deep Incarnation means that God in the flesh goes beyond Jesus' flesh, even beyond human flesh,  and into the flesh of the whole natural living world—every living thing again. Flesh ( Greek sarx)  means everything that is vulnerable, perishable, fragile and transitory. That's the whole enchilada.  
    -The Exultet Christians chant at the Easter Vigil begins with: Rejoice all earth...(not all humanity)
    -The extinction of a species means the end of birth (Darwin) 27,000 species are lost each year!  We are a species!
    -For Christians: Jesus is made of the same molecular dust as we all are. In Christ’s resurrection the earth itself arose. Resurrection redeems from DEATH, not just sin!
    - Birds have the power to fly; for the ancients birds went where humans couldn’t reach, so the bird, symbol of the Goddess of Love, became the symbol for the the divine Spirit in both testaments of the Bible.
    -There are two bibles: Nature and Scripture
   
If the Church is too tied into the resources of corporate wealth to divest from fossil fuel investments, then the Church is irrelevant and voiceless, as mostly it has been already.  (NB the United Church of Christ has just voted to divest, and so did the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.)
 “If you push for such things, you may end up despised,” Johnson said with a compelling grin.

When I went home I rushed to Genesis and back to the Garden of Eden. I knew all about the good and evil morality tree whose fruit was death.  But wasn’t there another special tree?  

YES.... in Genesis 3:22: the tree of life. The story gives us a glimpse no more of an opportunity for humanity “to reach out his/her hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 

We can perpetuate the schema of the great Darwinian/ biblical Tree of All Life.  The beasts and all green life ask no less of us than to act now to save the earth, to help God’s creatio continua.

Is NOW the time to reach with all our might and wit and resources for that tree of life and save all earth—and ourselves with it?

IF NOT NOW, WHEN? 




   

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?