2016.09.18 I'm With Her—HIllary R. Clinton, Politically and Spiritually

I feel as if we are living in quite a whirlwind in this chaotic American election season. Honestly I can’t wait for evening when we can gather, my beloved and I, to munch on popcorn or other delights and watch TV serial soap-opera-ish murder mysteries or medical melodrama. Why this activity is soothing, remains a mystery.

As to whirlwinds, the biblical Job, in the midst of the chaos and suffering of his life:  Where is God?   God spoke to Job finally out of the very whirlwind Job wanted resolved. So God must have been in the whirlwind proper, else how could God have been speaking out of it? Consider. 

“Whirlwinds in meterology are complex chaotic systems that suggest not pure chaos but rather the turbulent emergence of complexity at the edge of chaos.” (Catherine Keller) Job’s answer was/is blowin’ in the wind. I’m trying to trust the complexity emerging at the edge of chaos, the complexity where God just might be at work for the good.

I’m doing this by choosing life—not dying, shrinking in fear, or wasting energy on soul-starving negativity. I’m choosing to be “With Her,” as Hillary Clinton’s campaign signs invite. To be with her I’m seeking positive information about her. Positivity is hard to find. It does not sell newspapers, win Pulitzers for journalists, or popularize television news shows, but it’s in the whirlwind with everything else—including Godde.

Here are some earnest positive words (2015) about the young Hillary from the Rev. Dr. Paul Santmire, author/theologian and Lutheran pastor, retired professor of theology at Boston University:

A hundred years ago, I worked closely with a bright young Methodist student at Wellesley College, where I was serving as a teacher and Chaplain, one Hillary Rodham.  She was then, and, I believe, still is a person of deep moral passion, notwithstanding press caricatures of her that have appeared in recent years with predictable regularity.

Hillary came to Wellesley as an enthusiastic “Goldwater Girl.”  Hers was a dedicated voice of the Midwestern Right.  Then she took the (at that time) required sophomore Bible course, and it changed her life.  She was especially fond of Amos, texts such as 5:24, “Let justice roll down like waters.”  And she did not just talk the talk.

One example.  As president of the student government, she and a group of young women like her (I was a kind of back-row advisor to all this), wanted to address the mostly lily-white complexion of the student body.  At that time there were, as I recall, 12 African-Americans in a student body of some 2000.  The College’s administration wanted nothing to do with all this.  Hillary took the lead with her group to raise money independently to pay for those African-American students to make recruiting trips to predominantly black high schools across the country.  Not only had those schools never been visited by Wellesley College recruiters before, they were unknown to the Admissions Office.  That project turned out to be a minor success.  But my point here is not minor successes, but Hillary’s impressive moral passion and her eagerness to act on that passion.

I have kept close tabs on her personal and political trajectories ever since.  Notwithstanding her being the object of sometimes vicious attacks (tell me that sexism is not alive and well in this country) and notwithstanding mistakes of her own along the way, I believe that the faith that she discovered in Amos and the moral passion she exemplified at Wellesley College have not left her.  If anything, given the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, that faith and that moral passion have deepened and become the driving force of all she does.  I believe that she has added the wisdom of spiritual depth, too, which sometimes comes with maturity.  Did you notice that when asked, during one of the New Hampshire debates, about spiritual influences on her life she spoke at length and with some conviction about how much she has learned from that great Catholic spiritual teacher of our time, Henri Nouwen?

I, of course, am not an unbiased witness.  I affirm what I once saw, and I affirm what I now see.  I have walked the streets of New Hampshire in her behalf and I support her current campaign financially.

I write only with this hope, that, as you continue to reflect about the current campaign, you will take into account her moral passion and her spiritual depth.  She is much more than her popular detractors, even on the liberal side, make her out to be.  I also believe that she has even more to offer.  Her much vaunted “experience” is not something to shake a stick at, for example, not to speak of a certain wisdom she brings with her as a knowledgeable student of history. 

2015.10.04 Go With the Flow—Or Against it.

Have you ever been scorned for going against the flow, doing or saying something different from the ways things are going or the way everyone else is behaving? I’m sure most of us have had such an experience.

Yesterday we attended a workshop: Now and At The Hour Of Our Death: Medical Decision Making At The End Of Life. It was led by Episcopal Deacon, Daphne Noyes, and Christine Gryglik, R.N.  I am grateful for the huge packet of resources I came away with. Death is no easy project! There’s lots to do to make sure your dying is, well, sort of in control.

More deeply I’m grateful to feel accompanied by a laughing and loving faith community, all of whom will die. Me too. Just to know you’re not alone is enough to face death with dignity and carry no assumptions about anything,  no matter how many plans you make………..  Oh yes.

When we left I felt disgruntled and irritated and as if I already knew and had done most of this stuff— all sure signs that I was plain scared and pretending not to be. Denial in tow, however, we headed straight to CVS to get flu shots and updates on the latest pneumonia vaccine. It helped. I even wanted a lolly pop to reward my bold effort to grab life for all its worth, which is considerable.

Thanks to the science of physics, about which I know very little,  I know that occasionally something completely random and unpredictable happens to make the word “inevitable” near obsolete.  It make us sit up and take notice. It is when a whirlwind suddenly gets whirled in a new direction—a brief moment when things do swirl back against the flow.

Current popular wisdom consistently advises: Go WITH the flow. I’m lousy at that. I wonder if God makes counter swirls?

The teenager’s room won’t pick itself up, so you do it yourself, out of despairing smoldering rage. It takes less energy than nagging without results. Same thing applies to trying to get someone to stop destroying their life with an addiction. A counter swirl happens when the teen does it herself, without complaint, without being asked and then keeps on doing it week after week. It happens when the addict chooses abstinence, from whatever the substance or behavior of choice is, and can’t tell you precisely how that choice was made. Usually they can cite numbers of factors, none of them governing the exact moment of turning against the expected flow.

Some people call such Mystery moments the grace of God, or a miracle. That’s what my mother called my birth after three miscarriages. I went with the God part and rejected miracle status.

Such events seem to reverse the law of physics which says that energy ever seeks lower levels flowing from more ordered states to disorder, dispersing over time. It’s called entropy and comes form the Greek en (inside) + trope (transformation).

Transformation, ironically, is a powerful and positive word in the field of theology. In the Bible, and other religious scriptures, God is seen as a creative force, a restorer of order, a reverser of entropy from within chaos, often not in ways we can predict. The Christian idea of Resurrection, the transformation of death into new life, is one such example. I rather like it.

Inner transformation, change of heart, is what faithful people seek and pray for, as in the transformation of the inner chaos of addictive disease, mental illness, climate change, patterns of social violence such as we are experiencing right now in America with arbitrary gun violence and deaths of innocent citizens in the absence of laws that would regulate gun purchase and restrict gun use to hunting and sport. Faithful people pray AND write their congressional representatives asking them to craft such legislation.

Things are spinning out of control. Who will dare to initiate a counter spin? Who will dare to spin the current political paralysis in a new direction?  Who will defiantly thrive? It will take sacrifice.

Think of the image of a whirlwind. Meteorologically, a whirlwind is a complex chaotic system suggesting not pure chaos but rather the turbulent emergence of complexity at the edge of chaos. 

Now think of the story of Job in the Bible. It is a story of Job's suffering, supposedly at the hand of God, but clearly having nothing to do with the sufferer’s integrity, faith or character. Job begs God for answers about his suffering and gets none. He spins in a unidirectional whirlwind of moral, spiritual, emotional, and physical pain—unconsoled and with no answers about his plight and God’s refusal to address his grievance.

And yet………..Job does get something. He gets a strong vision and very strong spiritual experience of the divine presence which speaks to him right out of a whirlwind. In his vision, God escorts Job throughout all Creation, wonder by stunning wonder. Job is awestruck, both by the breadth of the vision, by how little he knows, and by the intimacy of the divine Presence at his side. Job is spun in a new direction and is invited to go on with his life in spite of all his losses. To put it in a mundane way, Job gets an entirely new perspective on life and is freed from his OCD panic. We do not know how or why, just what.

Job’s story is symbolic, yet it is so true to most earthly experience that it feels literal, historic. Job’s story is not just about suffering. It tells us, as does Jesus’s story, that there is a God who speaks out of whirlwinds and makes counter swirls.   

Oh Godde, I know you don’t dole out death and illness, but I’m putting in my request anyway for more good years of life—specifically I want my eyesight, most of my hearing, and most of my mind—oh and my fingers to type with.  Intervene with a counter swirl if  you want to. Thanks for listening. Amen.