I went to hear Gloria Steinem speak in the early ’80s at Hartford College for Women in Connecticut. The lecture hall was packed with over a hundred women—and three men, one of them my husband who indulges most of my whims and also counts himself a feminist.
There were no seats except a few banking the side of the podium right up front. The usher apologized for the unfortunate sidelined seats. We thought they were perfect. Who would worry about a front view when you can view, with no neck craning, a profile as glamorously elegant as Steinem’s?
The last time I’d felt swoony like that was as a young teen over Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Steinem was graduated in 1956 from Smith College, just 4 years ahead of me. I didn’t even know that; nor had I read her books and was not a subscriber to Ms magazine. But I was in love with Steinem’s voice because she was saying out loud in the public media what I’d sequestered in journals over many years. She awakened my soul and stretched its every nerve, as the hymn text suggests.
I wanted to hear that voice with my ears. She’d become one of my gurus, a spiritual teacher who had nothing to do with church, religion, or even spirituality in an obvious way.
Gloria Steinem embodied a whole movement. She wasn’t the first to stand up for women’s rights but she has remained the go-to guru for over 40 years since first advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1970. (That was three years before I knew I even needed a woman guru, or anything but the joy of my children’s laughter and the drone of the vacuum cleaner.)
When Steinem stepped up to the podium the applause and cheers were as robust as any you’d hear today from crazy mad fans at a sports event or a rock concert. Women can roar.
I was surprised that Steinem, although passionate and eloquent, was quite soft-spoken. I expected a pep rally voice or a preacha. I expected waving hands and pointing fingers. I expected a “man”! But Gloria spoke calmly, with focus and direction about justice for women. And she spoke without using the vocabulary of war and fight. Stunning! Her presence and clear voice hushed the crowd and opened our ears.
At the end of her talk she commended the courage of the three men in the audience. They stuck out like sore thumbs. With a wry but not derisive grin, Gloria Steinem made them “honorary women” to protect them for “the revolution to come.”
That gesture I’m sure was something Jesus would have done. It gave me the Easter shivers.
Currently Steinem is working at Smith College on an archive that reflects the diversity of feminism. Like Christianity, feminism is a movement not a place or a person, and it has ballooned, thanks to the Internet, into a vast network organized for gender justice and equivalence, and also for a just society period.
So no single feminist guru has emerged. But do we need one?
Feminism’s slowly emerging fourth wave isn’t the kind of enemy-driven push for inclusion and empowerment I was part of in the late ’70s. It is more spiritual, steadied by the drum of multiple voices. Steinem herself is quoted in a March 18, 2012 article in the New York Times Sunday Styles section: “It’s obviously a great sign of growth and success that the media no longer try to embody the bigness and diversity of the women’s movement in one person.”
I am reminded of the biblical women at the tomb of Jesus, looking for their guru and finding an empty tomb, a burial shroud, and their own terror. So they ran away. But they stayed together—and talked, as women do, maybe strategized about how to tell a miracle.
Later the small band of women hooked up with their brothers, discerned the message of Easter’s God of new life, and started a movement that grew, fizzled, grew some more, got inflated and exclusive, nearly lost breath, then re-membered its own message: We are centered in, and motivated by Love, not fear.
The biblical women decided that the best way to get something holy across was to do it together. Even Jesus refused kingship and the kind of guru-worship his world demanded.
I still long for a guru. And I know there is a better way.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Sunday, May 6, 2012
2012.05.06 Loss
I lose things a lot, not just my way on the road but things I value. Its annoying. And sometimes as I age I don’t even know I’ve lost something.
Like the time I was driving home from a retreat weekend in CT. and stopped to lose my pee in a rest stop near Attleboro, MA. The civilized in-house was “closed for renovations.” Three noble portable out-houses stood by to accommodate.
A woman coming out of one of them made a face and commented to me “Pretty bad in there.”
I didn’t need the review. I knew. But when you have to go, you have to go. (For once I was grateful for my diminished sense of smell.)
I drove the rest of the way home to Cambridge. As I came in the phone was ringing. It was my husband asking if I had my bag. “Sure,” I said. “No, you don’t,” he said. “Alex has it.”
I’d left my bag on the floor in the outhouse; Alex had retrieved it, called my daughter (the last call on my cell phone,) and she had called my husband asking, “Where’s Mom?” Alex, who spoke with a heavy accent, lived in Brookline, only a short drive, and he had my bag intact.
Driving to Brookline I imagined Alex, whose accent I’d identified as Russian, as a dashing diplomat or maybe a rugged writer. The man who stood on the street as we drove up to the address had a cigarette butt hanging out of one side of his mouth and scraggly long blond hair. I knew this wasn’t Alex.
“You Leen?” the man said.
I nodded. “Yah, he said. I recognize you by your por-tray-t.”
Alex led us upstairs to his apartment where he presented my bag and insisted I take accounting of everything in it. It was all there, even the cash. I offered him some cash which he refused with a toss of his head while he was holding back a large barking dog, Russian wolf hound type.
“No worry, “said Alex,” “He bark, no bite.”
As we left Alex shared his first grin, “No worry. My wife she leave her wallet all over town all the time.” His wife, who it seemed didn’t speak much English, stood by nodding and smiling assent.
* * *
Earlier that same weekend as Alex the good Russian, I lost, for the third time, one of my tiny diamond earrings. The tiny earring AND its backing were on the floor of the shower at the retreat house. (The first time I’d retrieved both in the trap of the sink; the second time I found one glimmering among the dust kitties under the dresser.) Real diamonds—not shiny fakes. I’d said a prayer each time, just in case, and thought of the woman in the Bible story who searched diligently for one lousy little coin until she found it. A parable of divine love.
I don’t think God finds things things for careless fools like me. I pray because I talk to God. And maybe that connection soothes my anxiety and helps me focus my attention. Loss happens when I’m distracted.
That I find things or that honest people like Alex exist in the world are lovely accessories. They matter and fill me with gratitude, but what really matters most to me is this spiritual gleaning: Nothing is ever lost in God’s economy—and no one is a loser.
Like the time I was driving home from a retreat weekend in CT. and stopped to lose my pee in a rest stop near Attleboro, MA. The civilized in-house was “closed for renovations.” Three noble portable out-houses stood by to accommodate.
A woman coming out of one of them made a face and commented to me “Pretty bad in there.”
I didn’t need the review. I knew. But when you have to go, you have to go. (For once I was grateful for my diminished sense of smell.)
I drove the rest of the way home to Cambridge. As I came in the phone was ringing. It was my husband asking if I had my bag. “Sure,” I said. “No, you don’t,” he said. “Alex has it.”
I’d left my bag on the floor in the outhouse; Alex had retrieved it, called my daughter (the last call on my cell phone,) and she had called my husband asking, “Where’s Mom?” Alex, who spoke with a heavy accent, lived in Brookline, only a short drive, and he had my bag intact.
Driving to Brookline I imagined Alex, whose accent I’d identified as Russian, as a dashing diplomat or maybe a rugged writer. The man who stood on the street as we drove up to the address had a cigarette butt hanging out of one side of his mouth and scraggly long blond hair. I knew this wasn’t Alex.
“You Leen?” the man said.
I nodded. “Yah, he said. I recognize you by your por-tray-t.”
Alex led us upstairs to his apartment where he presented my bag and insisted I take accounting of everything in it. It was all there, even the cash. I offered him some cash which he refused with a toss of his head while he was holding back a large barking dog, Russian wolf hound type.
“No worry, “said Alex,” “He bark, no bite.”
As we left Alex shared his first grin, “No worry. My wife she leave her wallet all over town all the time.” His wife, who it seemed didn’t speak much English, stood by nodding and smiling assent.
* * *
Earlier that same weekend as Alex the good Russian, I lost, for the third time, one of my tiny diamond earrings. The tiny earring AND its backing were on the floor of the shower at the retreat house. (The first time I’d retrieved both in the trap of the sink; the second time I found one glimmering among the dust kitties under the dresser.) Real diamonds—not shiny fakes. I’d said a prayer each time, just in case, and thought of the woman in the Bible story who searched diligently for one lousy little coin until she found it. A parable of divine love.
I don’t think God finds things things for careless fools like me. I pray because I talk to God. And maybe that connection soothes my anxiety and helps me focus my attention. Loss happens when I’m distracted.
That I find things or that honest people like Alex exist in the world are lovely accessories. They matter and fill me with gratitude, but what really matters most to me is this spiritual gleaning: Nothing is ever lost in God’s economy—and no one is a loser.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
2012.05.02 Blogoir: Gift, Miracle, Table
Miraculousness, my status at birth according to my mother, made me too precious for Mom to hug much but not too precious to fuss over. She defined miracle as something God does for you without you. I’d seen the picture of me inside of her and obviously she was a partner in the making of this miracle. I became suspicious. Either God or Mom was lying but what little child can choose between these two deities?
Being “a gift from God” had more promise for me as an identity than miracle. I preferred being a gift because a gift required intention and thoughtfulness, even love, while a miracle seemed like a flash-in-the-pan quick fix. Also, no one in their right mind, even my theologically addled mother, would turn down a present as adorable as she said I was.
Preferences aside however, both spiritual ideas imparted to my young and curious mind a fascination with God. Who was this divine guy and how did He choose me for His gift?
At first I confused the whole masculine divinity idea with my father because Mom always called him “my divine guy.” It seemed she confused us both with God. It was easy to tell Dad wasn’t that heavenly. Someone as big as God who created the whole world and all that was therein (words I heard from a book) probably didn’t drink martinis and nightly neglect the daughter who was a gift from God to him also. Wasn’t she?
My father held the magic glass. He twirled the stem between his thumb and forefinger. My mother had a different glass, tall with ice and dark fizzy liquid in it. Still, Daddy’s glass drew worship from both of them. What was wrong with my mother? She had told me this was supposed to be the “children’s hour” like the poem said. Their elitist nightly ritual disgusted me. It hurt, too.
I stomped away from the sanctuary of the parental Cocktail Hour leaving my parents to gaze at the long-stemmed triangle-shaped glass filled with clear liquid and three enormous green cross-eyed olives. Too big to float they nestled near the stem, their red eyes staring out at me in a menacing way—the evil olive eye.
I found refuge under our large dining room table with the cloth to the floor. I took off my slippers and left them outside the tablecloth—token good girlism. Then I crawled in under the table, sat cross-legged on the worn maroon carpet, and hiked my yellow nightie with the tiny flowers all over it up over my knees.
For company I took my three imaginary friends; for food I took some Ritz crackers I’d snitched from the cocktail tray. I lined the crackers up on one of the cross beams and started my “sermon”— a lively one-way conversation with God who joined the group and, unlike my distracted friends, was the only one who listened attentively and unflinchingly—and listened and listened at a time when no one else did.
After I’d turned myself inside out chattering I was hungry and it was time for our meal. I ate my Ritz cracker and left the other four lined up on the cross beam. I felt sure my communicants would come for them after I went off to bed, but of course my mother would have retrieved them, knowing that my faith in my three imaginary friends depended on it. She never asked about the fourth.
That was how I got my image of God, how I first knew for sure that I mattered no matter what, and how I invented a eucharist. I felt this experience could be the greatest story ever told.
Some days I still wonder.
Being “a gift from God” had more promise for me as an identity than miracle. I preferred being a gift because a gift required intention and thoughtfulness, even love, while a miracle seemed like a flash-in-the-pan quick fix. Also, no one in their right mind, even my theologically addled mother, would turn down a present as adorable as she said I was.
Preferences aside however, both spiritual ideas imparted to my young and curious mind a fascination with God. Who was this divine guy and how did He choose me for His gift?
At first I confused the whole masculine divinity idea with my father because Mom always called him “my divine guy.” It seemed she confused us both with God. It was easy to tell Dad wasn’t that heavenly. Someone as big as God who created the whole world and all that was therein (words I heard from a book) probably didn’t drink martinis and nightly neglect the daughter who was a gift from God to him also. Wasn’t she?
My father held the magic glass. He twirled the stem between his thumb and forefinger. My mother had a different glass, tall with ice and dark fizzy liquid in it. Still, Daddy’s glass drew worship from both of them. What was wrong with my mother? She had told me this was supposed to be the “children’s hour” like the poem said. Their elitist nightly ritual disgusted me. It hurt, too.
I stomped away from the sanctuary of the parental Cocktail Hour leaving my parents to gaze at the long-stemmed triangle-shaped glass filled with clear liquid and three enormous green cross-eyed olives. Too big to float they nestled near the stem, their red eyes staring out at me in a menacing way—the evil olive eye.
I found refuge under our large dining room table with the cloth to the floor. I took off my slippers and left them outside the tablecloth—token good girlism. Then I crawled in under the table, sat cross-legged on the worn maroon carpet, and hiked my yellow nightie with the tiny flowers all over it up over my knees.
For company I took my three imaginary friends; for food I took some Ritz crackers I’d snitched from the cocktail tray. I lined the crackers up on one of the cross beams and started my “sermon”— a lively one-way conversation with God who joined the group and, unlike my distracted friends, was the only one who listened attentively and unflinchingly—and listened and listened at a time when no one else did.
After I’d turned myself inside out chattering I was hungry and it was time for our meal. I ate my Ritz cracker and left the other four lined up on the cross beam. I felt sure my communicants would come for them after I went off to bed, but of course my mother would have retrieved them, knowing that my faith in my three imaginary friends depended on it. She never asked about the fourth.
That was how I got my image of God, how I first knew for sure that I mattered no matter what, and how I invented a eucharist. I felt this experience could be the greatest story ever told.
Some days I still wonder.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
2012.04.29 This Bible is Amazing, Mom . . .Did You Know?
My youngest adult son John got interested in the Bible—not in the usual ways, like church, or by being lovingly schooled and nurtured in biblical story by his mother a priest. It’s a little embarrassing but wondrous.
One day John walked into his therapist’s office for his session and saw his therapist reading from laminated pages. The therapist put down his pages but John was curious, a necessary virtue for growth.
What are you reading? John asked.
The gospel of Luke from the Bible, his therapist said.
The conversation and John’s session began, oddly, not with whatever John’s issues of the day were, but with the Bible.
To satisfy John’s curiosity the therapist explained his interest in the Bible for its wisdom and amazing stories. He had no heavy-handed Christian agenda, or any agenda except following John’s agenda, which had suddenly become the Bible. (I love how good stuff spreads.) The therapist, a sensitive apostle, explained that the pages of the Bible were fragile and tissue-thin so he’d laminated the ones he was reading to carry around in his briefcase.
The conversation evolved as conversations of interest do, and John’s therapy that day included Bible study. Somehow his own life got laminated into those pages. It ended, as always, with some homework, not of the usual kind. The therapist suggested that John read the Gospel of John, a namesake of sorts, in the New Testament.
That’s when the phone calls started. Mom, this stuff is amazing. Did you know all this? Listen to this that Jesus said. Cool. I think it means this.
It’s no small spiritual matter when someone engages scripture and the words written jump off the pages and into the mind and the heart. Living Word.
To me this was like the God of Living Word, who has brought me to new life again and again, now bringing new life and insight to someone as beloved as John is to me. Downright Easter!
“I’m trying Mark next, Mom.”
(Mark is the name of the gospel writer and of John’s step brother and good friend. I love how stuff spreads.)
P.S. I read the Bible cover to cover,compulsively, when I was in 7th grade, looking for advice on dating. All I found was God getting women pregnant, which I definitely didn't want! But I did learn that both testaments were shot through with a relationship pattern by which God and humanity connected, disconnected and reconnected—over and over without fail. That gave me hope. I concluded that the star of the Bible is not God or humanity but their relationship.
One day John walked into his therapist’s office for his session and saw his therapist reading from laminated pages. The therapist put down his pages but John was curious, a necessary virtue for growth.
What are you reading? John asked.
The gospel of Luke from the Bible, his therapist said.
The conversation and John’s session began, oddly, not with whatever John’s issues of the day were, but with the Bible.
To satisfy John’s curiosity the therapist explained his interest in the Bible for its wisdom and amazing stories. He had no heavy-handed Christian agenda, or any agenda except following John’s agenda, which had suddenly become the Bible. (I love how good stuff spreads.) The therapist, a sensitive apostle, explained that the pages of the Bible were fragile and tissue-thin so he’d laminated the ones he was reading to carry around in his briefcase.
The conversation evolved as conversations of interest do, and John’s therapy that day included Bible study. Somehow his own life got laminated into those pages. It ended, as always, with some homework, not of the usual kind. The therapist suggested that John read the Gospel of John, a namesake of sorts, in the New Testament.
That’s when the phone calls started. Mom, this stuff is amazing. Did you know all this? Listen to this that Jesus said. Cool. I think it means this.
It’s no small spiritual matter when someone engages scripture and the words written jump off the pages and into the mind and the heart. Living Word.
To me this was like the God of Living Word, who has brought me to new life again and again, now bringing new life and insight to someone as beloved as John is to me. Downright Easter!
“I’m trying Mark next, Mom.”
(Mark is the name of the gospel writer and of John’s step brother and good friend. I love how stuff spreads.)
P.S. I read the Bible cover to cover,compulsively, when I was in 7th grade, looking for advice on dating. All I found was God getting women pregnant, which I definitely didn't want! But I did learn that both testaments were shot through with a relationship pattern by which God and humanity connected, disconnected and reconnected—over and over without fail. That gave me hope. I concluded that the star of the Bible is not God or humanity but their relationship.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
2012.04.25 The Gift of Alanon
When I went to my first Alanon meeting I was in the midst of my own midlife turmoil, getting things straightened out by messing them up first. You know the usual adolescent passage.
Anyway, all I could think as I sat quietly tense listening to many stories told by people who had lived with alcoholism, some all their lives, some only recently, and all of them stunned that they had never realized what was happening to them, was, “MY MOTHER WOULD KILL ME FOR BEING HERE!” (I was violating the tabu against narking or ratting. I was telling "classified" family info.)
The story tellers were mostly women, stunned, to varying degrees, that they had not realized what was happening to them because of what was obviously someone else’s problem.
Odd and crazy! I hated this meeting. Yet...... odd to find myself so utterly one of them. Odd too that I worried about my mother when wasn’t my father the alcoholic? He after all was the one with the tri-cornered martini glass twisting between his thumb and forefinger nightly.
Alanon, I read in the pamphlet, was initiated in the mid 1900s by Lois Wilson, wife of alcoholic Bill Wilson, founder of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous.) Lois realized that her own life was as affected by Bill’s addiction as his was. You don’t have to be the one vomiting to feel nauseous. You don’t have to be the one lying to feel blame. You don’t have to be the sleep-distrubed one to lose sleep.
AA and Alanon are siblings and, yes, they often rival but they have the same goal: to live sober, serene and happy lives. Transformation is the way out and it can not be done without the help and support of other people and God aka Higher Power.
The meeting went on around me as my mind smashed into its own fears and judgments. Why hadn’t I known and why hadn’t my mother known and done something about it? And why hadn’t my father loved me at least as much as his glass? And why did I fall in love with alcoholics?
But I sat and flinched because my mother would not want me to know or to tell. It was then that I first realized how ashamed and self-condemning she too must have felt at her helplessness. It was then that I began to understand my mother, avoid being “killed” by her, and understand her micromanaging as an effort to make things right not torture me. It was then I began to forgive her, just a little.
The meeting ended and the friendly women said to keep coming. All you need is the desire to live well and sane.
I left that first meeting vowing never to return. Too much truth blinds—and awakens.
Yes I went back. I kept on listening. I never was at a meeting that I didn’t hear in the shreds of another’s story something that was part of my story, something that enlightened me and helped me feel not so confused, hopeful that insight could bring healing. Sometimes I told my story, too.
What Alanon taught me: 1) You don’t have to drink to be alcoholic. All you have to do is be constantly/secretly anxious, engage in a life mission of controlling the uncontrollable, and alternate between anger (bullying and tempers,) passivity (cold withdrawal and secret scorn,) and micromanagement of your own and other’s lives— all strategies of control. 2) You can’t recover, transform, your life by yourself. 3) How you think about God, or the transcendent dimension of life, is crucial. It’s easy to give your heart to the wrong God or follow the wrong star. 4) Humility is the highest virtue. 5) How to take care of yourself, a little like coming home to your own integrity and worth and knowing that you matter. 6) How to detach with love: to love fully without losing yourself in the other, or abandoning the other to save yourself.
Alanon is like eastering.
Anyway, all I could think as I sat quietly tense listening to many stories told by people who had lived with alcoholism, some all their lives, some only recently, and all of them stunned that they had never realized what was happening to them, was, “MY MOTHER WOULD KILL ME FOR BEING HERE!” (I was violating the tabu against narking or ratting. I was telling "classified" family info.)
The story tellers were mostly women, stunned, to varying degrees, that they had not realized what was happening to them because of what was obviously someone else’s problem.
Odd and crazy! I hated this meeting. Yet...... odd to find myself so utterly one of them. Odd too that I worried about my mother when wasn’t my father the alcoholic? He after all was the one with the tri-cornered martini glass twisting between his thumb and forefinger nightly.
Alanon, I read in the pamphlet, was initiated in the mid 1900s by Lois Wilson, wife of alcoholic Bill Wilson, founder of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous.) Lois realized that her own life was as affected by Bill’s addiction as his was. You don’t have to be the one vomiting to feel nauseous. You don’t have to be the one lying to feel blame. You don’t have to be the sleep-distrubed one to lose sleep.
AA and Alanon are siblings and, yes, they often rival but they have the same goal: to live sober, serene and happy lives. Transformation is the way out and it can not be done without the help and support of other people and God aka Higher Power.
The meeting went on around me as my mind smashed into its own fears and judgments. Why hadn’t I known and why hadn’t my mother known and done something about it? And why hadn’t my father loved me at least as much as his glass? And why did I fall in love with alcoholics?
But I sat and flinched because my mother would not want me to know or to tell. It was then that I first realized how ashamed and self-condemning she too must have felt at her helplessness. It was then that I began to understand my mother, avoid being “killed” by her, and understand her micromanaging as an effort to make things right not torture me. It was then I began to forgive her, just a little.
The meeting ended and the friendly women said to keep coming. All you need is the desire to live well and sane.
I left that first meeting vowing never to return. Too much truth blinds—and awakens.
Yes I went back. I kept on listening. I never was at a meeting that I didn’t hear in the shreds of another’s story something that was part of my story, something that enlightened me and helped me feel not so confused, hopeful that insight could bring healing. Sometimes I told my story, too.
What Alanon taught me: 1) You don’t have to drink to be alcoholic. All you have to do is be constantly/secretly anxious, engage in a life mission of controlling the uncontrollable, and alternate between anger (bullying and tempers,) passivity (cold withdrawal and secret scorn,) and micromanagement of your own and other’s lives— all strategies of control. 2) You can’t recover, transform, your life by yourself. 3) How you think about God, or the transcendent dimension of life, is crucial. It’s easy to give your heart to the wrong God or follow the wrong star. 4) Humility is the highest virtue. 5) How to take care of yourself, a little like coming home to your own integrity and worth and knowing that you matter. 6) How to detach with love: to love fully without losing yourself in the other, or abandoning the other to save yourself.
Alanon is like eastering.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
2012.04.22 Spiritual Co-Incidences
I do believe in co-incidences. Things co-incide/collide all the time. Sometimes it hurts and transforms, and sometimes it soothes and transforms.
I do not believe that such co-incidences are arranged by divine design. I do believe that they can be spiritually charged and may reflect more than random unpredictability, a co-operation: divine grace and human effort together. Somewhat like a good waltz.
A few such co-incidences: small collisions that have prodded, poked, and lifted my spirits over the years in church.
The presence of a community of mentally and physically challenged people from a local care facility alters a worship, challenges expectations for ordered liturgy— and adds aliveness. Once in a parish church the priest announced the gospel of the day: “The Holy Gospel according to John.” From the rear of the church a man walked up the aisle and stood right next to the priest, waiting. Startled, a little flustered, the priest asked the man what he wanted? “Did you call me?” the man said. The priest said no, and then quickly, yes. The man’s name was John.
Dialogue sermons open up a whole congregation to spiritual co-incidence as people, closet theologians all, preach a sermon together. The prompt: Why do you doubt? Jesus asked. The responses: I don’t know where it comes from. It’s the devil of course. You gotta fight it. It’s when I get afraid. Doubt isn’t bad, it’s one side of the faith coin. My faith is so weak. Jesus wouldn’t have asked about faith if he didn’t respect doubt. Some things like resurrection are just too true not to doubt. Yeah, it’s easier to doubt than to face strong truth even if you think it might be good for you. Doubt’s a habit. Up and over and under and round wove the threads of a very good co-incidental homily.
In a small parish I used to serve one space sufficed to worship God, meet to pass a budget, pray, sip coffee and munch a cookie or crack a carrot, and more. Here, just as I elevated the bread of Presence for the Eucharist,the coffee urn percolator made its own presence known—bloop/blurp/blop/blup—nourishment for all in God’s name. Eucharist and eucharist. All of it wholseome.
The spontaneous appreciation of, as they say, differently abled people, sometimes in off the streets, is a gift. Who has ever received a round of applause after a homily or at the end of a Sunday mass (not for the organ postlude either)?
Wouldn’t you clap for God?
I do not believe that such co-incidences are arranged by divine design. I do believe that they can be spiritually charged and may reflect more than random unpredictability, a co-operation: divine grace and human effort together. Somewhat like a good waltz.
A few such co-incidences: small collisions that have prodded, poked, and lifted my spirits over the years in church.
The presence of a community of mentally and physically challenged people from a local care facility alters a worship, challenges expectations for ordered liturgy— and adds aliveness. Once in a parish church the priest announced the gospel of the day: “The Holy Gospel according to John.” From the rear of the church a man walked up the aisle and stood right next to the priest, waiting. Startled, a little flustered, the priest asked the man what he wanted? “Did you call me?” the man said. The priest said no, and then quickly, yes. The man’s name was John.
Dialogue sermons open up a whole congregation to spiritual co-incidence as people, closet theologians all, preach a sermon together. The prompt: Why do you doubt? Jesus asked. The responses: I don’t know where it comes from. It’s the devil of course. You gotta fight it. It’s when I get afraid. Doubt isn’t bad, it’s one side of the faith coin. My faith is so weak. Jesus wouldn’t have asked about faith if he didn’t respect doubt. Some things like resurrection are just too true not to doubt. Yeah, it’s easier to doubt than to face strong truth even if you think it might be good for you. Doubt’s a habit. Up and over and under and round wove the threads of a very good co-incidental homily.
In a small parish I used to serve one space sufficed to worship God, meet to pass a budget, pray, sip coffee and munch a cookie or crack a carrot, and more. Here, just as I elevated the bread of Presence for the Eucharist,the coffee urn percolator made its own presence known—bloop/blurp/blop/blup—nourishment for all in God’s name. Eucharist and eucharist. All of it wholseome.
The spontaneous appreciation of, as they say, differently abled people, sometimes in off the streets, is a gift. Who has ever received a round of applause after a homily or at the end of a Sunday mass (not for the organ postlude either)?
Wouldn’t you clap for God?
Friday, April 13, 2012
2012.04.15 Poems to Easter By
Poetry is a natural spirit lifter and provoker. Good medium for eastering.
Here is one from Rumi, not his usual style but refreshing.
I called through your door, “The mystics are gathering in the street.
come out!”
“Leave me alone. I’m sick.”
“I don’t care if you’re dead! Jesus is here, and he wants to resurrect
somebody!”
And from St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), The Journey of the Mind to God
Do not assume that mere
Reading will suffice without fervor,
Speculation without devotion,
Investigation without admiration,
Observation without exaltation,
Industry without piety,
Knowledge without love,
Understanding without humility,
Study without divine grace..
Expect the end of the world.Laugh.Laughter
is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have
considered all the facts. So long as women do
not go cheap for power, please women more
than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman
satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the
sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.Let down in the
shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear
allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.
Be like a fox
who makes more tracks than necessary, some
in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
Here is one from Rumi, not his usual style but refreshing.
I called through your door, “The mystics are gathering in the street.
come out!”
“Leave me alone. I’m sick.”
“I don’t care if you’re dead! Jesus is here, and he wants to resurrect
somebody!”
And from St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), The Journey of the Mind to God
Do not assume that mere
Reading will suffice without fervor,
Speculation without devotion,
Investigation without admiration,
Observation without exaltation,
Industry without piety,
Knowledge without love,
Understanding without humility,
Study without divine grace..
Expect the end of the world.Laugh.Laughter
is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have
considered all the facts. So long as women do
not go cheap for power, please women more
than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman
satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the
sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.Let down in the
shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear
allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.
Be like a fox
who makes more tracks than necessary, some
in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
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