2013.12.10 When Tragedy Rends the Heart

When tragedy rends hearts there is little else to do but cry, pray anyway, and love without reserve.
This is Riley. She is six years old, in first grade, the daughter of friends of one of our children.  She has brain cancer, a cancer so aggressive and widespread that doctors at Boston Childrens' Hospital have said there is nothing more that can be done. Riley's parents are in shock, their pain almost too much to bear. Their only goal is to keep Riley as free of pain as possible and happy.  They love her to death.






People ask religious, spiritual questions at these times.  Of course we do. We want to know if there is a God who can help change what has happened.  Many conclude that there is no God, only human love.  That is true, but then God IS human love.  I can say by faith and experience that God's love  is limitless and eternal. It is God's power that is limited so we can be fully free. It is not God's love that is limited. In fact the divine heart itself is the first to break open, God's tears the first to fall.

Riley and her family face the likelihood of death. Hope calls for a miracle quite naturally, But whatever happens Riley will not be alone but surrounded by love also, in the words of a hymn:
Love Divine, All Loves Excelling."

2013.12.08 Advent: Mixed Grace IS Grace

Grace has lots of meanings and even more interpretations —a dancer’s movements, a prayer before a meal, a royal title like Your Grace the bishop of Switherington, time allowed to pay a debt, the equivalent of teacher’s pet (in her good graces), tiny notes that embellish an already darn good melody, Grace Kelly, and Gracie Storrs.

Gracie Storrs was the eleven year old girl who introduced me to the F word, without telling me what it meant—exactly. Immediately I asked my mother who paid swift attention to me, which I loved. She asked me who told me that word. Gracie, I said, and she said, Oh, Gracie, well then it’s a Gracie word. I came away still not knowing what F meant but in awe of Gracie’s power and henceforth without fear of F or other alleged tabus. 

My least favorite definition of grace is popular jargon: There but for the grace of God go I.  People sling this spiritual hash all the time. But think!  What kind of God is presented here?  Hint: your tumor turns up benign, but your roommate’s is malignant. So which of you is the grace-recipient? Really. Thank God because it’s the prayer of your soul and you can’t help it, but for God’s sake don’t sling hash—or even think it.

My favorite definition of grace is experiential. It came from a favorite seminary professor, Luke Timothy Johnson. He taught a course in which all we had to do was attend his lectures and then write in our journals about how we experienced big theological words, like grace, sin, holy, faith, idolatry. We signed up like ants to a blob of spilled honey. The course became a blockbuster—not because of it’s name, “Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit,” or Johnson's popularity, but because there was no reading! Nevertheless........such alleged gut courses actually have guts.We soon learned Whose life  we would be asked to directly experience in our flesh,  and then write our “scriptures.” 

This “gut” course re-rooted me in the God I’d first met as a child, the God who gave me “unconditional positive regard,” a term I grew to detest when I was in training as a counselor. We called it UPR. Psychologist Carl Rogers thought counselors should adapt UPR toward clients. We trainees all began to look and sound like puffy pink blobs of cotton candy. We sugarcoated without condition every ounce of client flesh. No human person worth her sinfulness can do that. (Later even Rogers got wise and removed the “positive” from his definition.)

Still, doesn't Carl look unconditionally
regarding?  Yet only Godde can do UPR grace.

Here's how Professor Johnson defined UPR grace:  an inward experience of being known and loved—at the same time. When have you experienced that?  I wrote about orgasmic sex, embodied UPR, a grace in which self and other merge so you never give a thought to being known/knowing/being loved/loving. I’d never coupled God and sex so explicitly before.

Recently, I came across another definition of grace. I like this definition because it is a merger, this time of alleged opposites. The quote is footnoted in William Countryman’s book Living On the Border of the Holy. Renewing the Priesthood of All, 1999, one of the supplemental texts for EfM.  Countryman is an Episcopal priest, professor of New Testament at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, CA. and a prolific author. Good gay guy scholar.

The question Countryman posed was: does the church institutional have value? YES, as both lay and ordained live the good news proclaimed and embodied by Jesus. BUT only if it the church functions aware of its limitations and with modesty. In this context he quotes Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief, 1994. Love that title.

“That the treasure of God’s grace reaches us surrounded by garbage will not seem surprising to anyone who is personally familiar with life in the church   . . . Grace comes to us, so Martin Luther argues, hidden sub contrario, ‘beneath its opposite.’  From this perspective, any idealized view of the church as only treasure is as faulty a vision of reality as any cynical view that the church is only garbage. Mangers, by definition, are found where there is manure.” 

So we’re back to Gracie and the F word and my conviction that nothing is outside the purview of divine grace even if you have to look sub contrario. 

 

2013.12.01 Wait-and-See Advent

Outside the church we are already commercially and spiritually focused on Christmas and its trappings. In this age of instant everything many of us are conditioned NOT to wait.  I get cross with my computer if it doesn’t pop into action at my touch. I can’t wait.

The comic strip, “Heart of the City,” features a kicky little girl who protests to a local store owner about Christmas paraphernalia on display even before Thanksgiving arrives. Heart carries placards, bravely pickets the store, and argues with its owner. She loses the battle to commerce, but wins the war. Few miss the point:

In our haste to get to the “good part” are we not missing the “best part?”

I remember my anticipation as a child. The baited breath suspense of Advent was as full of new life as Nativity. Waiting built up the Spirit, made Santa Claus, also Jesus,  all the more wondrous, and gifts all the more delightful when they came, even if they weren’t exactly what we wanted. 

Advent was the best part simply because as its days grew shorter and darker the world around lit up. Both darkness and light happened simultaneously. At the same time!  It made my eyes pop with awe.  I awaited the dark with as much eagerness as I did the light.

I feel it as an adult too. I don’t complain when days get dark early, unless it’s just to join the chorus of grumbling I hear all around me. But deep inside me I feel oddly comforted when we pull shades before 5 pm and turn on lights, maybe slide the thermostat up a tiny bit.  It’s cozy; it’s hearth; it’s holing in for the evening.

Advent is the interior season, the safe-and-warm-inside season— prayer, softness, dim glow, the color purple-blue, quiet womb, wait 'n see.

Yet in Advent I always think more about homeless people in this season. I don’t wait for Christmas to see Jesus in church pageants.  I see christs on the streets slumped against buildings, huddled in blankets, asleep on benches, sometimes mumbling thank you.  I can’t make them cozy or warm.

As a young child in the city I’d beg my mother for a nickel to throw in a cup or the bucket of a bell ringer.  Clink!  I’d ask: Why are they sleeping? It’s too cold to sleep outside. Don’t they have beds?  My questions were childish—or were they?  I couldn’t make them cozy and warm.

The Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts has an active street ministry and employs a street priest to celebrate Sunday Eucharist outside on Boston Common and organize pastoral care. This church is called Common Cathedral. Some of my church “taxes”go to the diocese to support this ministry. 

I’ve visited this outside cathedral  and once gave my scarf to a man who looked cold. I admit I felt awkward, guilty, not wanting to be perceived as Lady Bountiful—but also a little scared. I wish I could be brave and easy like street priests, lay and ordained, but I’m not. I wish I could be more externalized, more of an activist, but I’m an indoor priest. I wait, watch and hope with every “advent” bone in my body, through prayer and Christ’s Eucharist meal, that others with more vocational will and guts will take such generosity outside with them. 

There is hope. I just read (Boston Globe 11/29/13) about blanket ministry, administered in part by our Cathedral Church of St. Paul but the brainchild of Boston’s homeless community.  Some foolish christ asked them what they needed. Blankets, they said!! The blankets are folded to the size of a deck of playing cards in a small pouch. They are silver Mylar space blankets—extremely lightweight and very warm, the kind worn by astronauts and marathoners after a race. Inexpensive too!

You need something warm while you wait outside for a home inside.

The precious blankets are not distributed from shelters or agencies but by volunteers who have been homeless on and off themselves. Over 8000 blankets have been purchased and sent to St. Paul’s. The homeless christ-priests recognize their own on the streets, pull a small blanket pouch out of their backpack, and hand it out—sort of like Eucharist, a tiny wafer on the tongue or in the hand, blessed, as are the blanket pouches, and distributed. Neither solves life’s many problems nor fills an empty belly, but each helps. Oh, each helps as we wait.

To me the whole city world begins, metaphorically, to look eucharistic, open-hearted giving and receiving —wafers inside, blankets outside—as we wait together, but not precisely for Christ for christ is here in the heart of the city. 



 



 

2013.11.28 Thanksgiving Blessing

May the God of your inner being
most lavishly bless, empower and keep you;
the face of Divinity shine upon you
and from within you today and all days,
and give you peace.

Then, let a spirit of gratitude find room in your heart
so that you will be able to find grace in all things and
a soul enriched..............................
     by the compassion you receive from the warm
faces of neighbors nearby and far away, dead and alive;
    by the hope you receive from
flowers that are buried and waiting
under their incubating white snow comforter;
     by the light you receive from the daily presence
of sun, the nightly presence of stars and moon, the drench of cleansing, quenching rain;
    by the inner strengthening you receive from Jesus Christ, flights of the Holy Spirit, all scriptural wisdom, and all prayers sent to and from you;
    by love— undeserved and deserved— you receive from family and friends
who tolerate your foolish fears and damn-fool actions, anyway;
    by rage enough to create justice, and boundary enough to let go;
    by the faith of God who believes in you, thanks you, and enfolds you in
a wider Love of unconditional acceptance;
    by the uplift of humor you receive whenever the gift of laughter
releases you from the constriction of too much dour solemnity;
    and most of all may by the grace of Godde Eternal
who knows the whole truth and loves you into Life.

If you receive and pass on even half of this gratitude recipe
you will be a blessing now and for ever. 

                Thanksgiving Blessings, 2013

2013.11.24 Christ in Majesty—Or Married

Officially, the church calendar designates this Sunday as Christ the King, a time for Christians to honor the ultimate reign of God in Christ, a way to remember that ours is a resurrection faith— bursting with hope, for now and for eternity.  (I'd change the masculine nomenclature  of course, but Christ the Queen is, well, maybe OK:0)

The Episcopal Sisters of St. Helena call this Sunday Christ in Majesty, mercifully avoiding exclusively gendered imagery for the risen Christ-Spirit who knows no gender. 

God/Godde is fully male and fully female, and everything in between. To be true to that truth, many things will have to die to clear the way for non-gendered Divinity. Many will be hurt yet many have already been hurt by exclusive language. That's what Christian life is all about: life/death/resurrected life. Death is in the equation.

Dick and I were married on Christ in Majesty Sunday in 1986, 27 years ago.  From the ashes of both of our painful divorces God,working deeply within each soul and all heart, raised up new life hope, another chance, and forgiveness.

We exchanged anniversary cards and messages and felt again how important married love can be.
His card said: "It's so wonderful to be growing and deepening together. Much love to my favorite author on our 27th anniversary." It came to me on line from the “Duke of Cambridge,” latest sobriquet Dick has chosen for himself. The card played jaunty music and showed a couple spatting, making up, sharing tears and lots of laughs as they deepened themselves. Did it make me a “Duchess?” No, but I felt like one.

My card to him congratulated us for winning the woodchuck tango, a flamboyant near-calisthenic dance that requires arithmetic grace we don’t have—nor do woodchucks. Nevertheless...on we go in clumsy majesty. I don't want it ever to die, but................

This Sunday is the last Sunday in the Church year, just before Advent begins and we await, once again, the birth of Jesus at Christmas, thank Godde with no biological pregnancy for me, too old. But we all will be pregnant with Christ. We know the story; we know the familiar cycle; we know the onset of the bleak midwinter darkness, yet each year we are expecting.

What will or must die? Out of what death will God bring new life? 

I’m getting older. I neither expect nor desire to die soon but my death seems more possible, closer.  At a spiritual writing course I recently taught at Grub Street in Boston, we experimented with writing beginnings, middles, and endings. I wrote this as an ending:

At the end of my life I will sit—no, I will probably lie—on a bed, maybe half of the king size bed I’ve shared with Dick. But I will be able to see, even if my eyes are morphine-dazed or cataract-dimmed. My breath will be minimal but present, the spaces between each breath growing shorter and shorter until I am breathed out.  I hope to see the faces of my four children and my grandchildren for a final viewing. I will not tell them not to cry for me. Such a silly commandment really. But I will behold them as I first did, their squished- up, blind-eyed little faces at birth. And maybe I will see Dick too if he is not already dead. I don’t know if I will see him in heaven, wherever that is—or isn’t. But I will end and I will silently sing the words of a hymn I rewrote to fit my lung disease—as a prayer.
    Breathe in me, breathe of God,
    for when my life is done
    and my sweet lungs lose all their power
    my last breath and yours are one.
(Oh, I know I could be struck down tomorrow by any means but this is my foolish little plan. It’s a hope and vision.)

By faith, God will bring some kind of majesty out of my death. I know God will make that new life beautiful, like my new sky-blue earrings—whirly/spinning and cosmic.

                                                                    

2013.11.20 Thank You Mr. Lincoln

The famed Gettysburg Address was delivered by America’s 16th President, Abraham Lincoln,   November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Lincoln’s words remain wise and true, a good example of spiritual writing, not just because he used religious vocabulary, like “consecrate” and “hallow” and "perish,"  but because he went right to the heart and soul of what mattered most to him, personally as the leader of a vast war-torn and bloodied country, but also to Americans whose identity and future depended on keeping alive its founding vision as written in the Declaration of Independence of 1776—87 (four score and seven) years earlier.  

Founding events are important, defining, like the Exodus for Jews, Jesus Christ for Christians, or Muhammed for Islam.  Even individuals have such spiritual touchstones. Mine, as many of you know, was meeting God under the table as a child and learning, unequivocally, that I mattered, no matter what.  What is yours?

Near miraculous to me as a writer is that Lincoln spoke the essence of what mattered in just 272 words!!!  (He'd have loved Twitter.) Oh, envy! I have not a brevity bone in my body, as you can see.  I plan to channel Lincoln as I attempt to get my memoir manuscript’s pages over the transom of a publishing house—in just 250 words. 

When asked in junior high who we thought was the greatest person in the world, I wrote Abraham Lincoln without hesitation.  Later, I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t written Jesus Christ, but I didn’t know him very well yet. Even later, I felt another twinge that I hadn’t written a woman’s name, but all I could think of was Jane Eyre. I suppose therein were planted some early feminist seeds: why were all the upfront famous figures men?  

Lincoln said all men were created equal, as was the linguistic habit of his day. But why couldn’t we just say what we meant? Even at 14 I knew we weren’t all equal. Who lives all the way up to their vision?  We try. Yet I knew from my childhood experience that women were included in the equality vision. Girls mattered to Godde. 

To travel to Gettysburg, Lincoln left a fevered son and a distraught wife. He was exhausted with war, politics and from writing personal letters to everyone who wrote to him in their bereavement.  Then he stayed up all night working on his speech, which he read to a crowd of 20,000 from a single handwritten page. When he finished there was a long silence, followed by thunderous applause. And on the way home he contracted small pox, from which he recovered.

Lincoln was right about the “people.” That day they were the voice; they were the government;  they knew the vision had to prevail And they were the ones, on all sides of the issue, who sacrificed the most for the vision.  The biblical Book of Proverbs proclaims: Without a vision the people perish—all the people.  Lincoln knew that. And Jesus knew that. Both men died for the vision but so far neither our nation not Christianity has perished. It’s close.

I leave you with the words of a great man, and a vision to remember. It’s a prayer. Do you think that if we pray it we will come closer to living it, to uniting under it?  Can we feel compassion—for all?

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
 
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
 
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

2013.11.17 The Spirituality of Compulsion and Denial —Unlikely Buddies for Good

Denial usually helps me stay blind to household duties like cleaning/dusting and the like. But compulsion kicks in to help me when my denial caves.  Usually serving different purposes, these two mental health culprits occasionally cooperate to create dazzlingly healthy results—near spiritual.
                                                            *******
Recently I awoke in a bustley mood, full of energy, rarin’ to go—nowhere in particular.   My husband, Dick, hates my bustley moods because it means he will greet me cheerily in the morning and get no answer—not even a glance, because I’m on the move.

Usually a bustley mood has a compelling focus, almost like a call or an inner commandment.  This day my focus was thick layers of dust on every piece of furniture in sight, the blotches-from-“mars” shining in the sunlight on the bright blue bathroom tile floor, the large swinging cobwebs hanging from the cathedral ceiling, and the tight-woven web of dust swaying in suspension between the baseboard radiator and the neighboring bureau. And I noticed a smudge of blood on the sheet, his side, from a scratched cut of maybe weeks ago. It was, I decided, an infestation of filth— suddenly.

These spectres go ignored by both of us, often for months, except the bathroom crud. I may, from time to time,  pick up little gray hairs, which belong, I decide, to his shedding head not mine, but that’s all. Not today. Off came the sheets, then I dropped to my knees to attack the bathroom floor with a damp sponge. I am Cinderella without a tale of orphaned woe.  

Why are you doing this? he asked..... ( not as politely as I’ve phrased it. )

I don’t know, I said .....(even less politely.)

It’s because you’re nervous about the course you’re teaching tomorrow?  But of all days, Lyn, you don’t have time to clean and why now?? For God’s sake go pray. 

He’s always right about my compulsions, and I get angry at the psychoanalysis. Nevertheless I bustle on, hoping to get two floors done.  

I wasn’t nervous about the course. I was all prepared and confident. So why the Cinderella act? 

Over the vacuum I concluded thus: 1) My natural compulsive energy, sometimes irresistible and always irrational, was driving me; and 2) My denial had caved, unable to manage alone it called for help from a friend. Thus, in one sudden mysterious moment I stopped denying the condition of my surroundings and was given a charge of energy to fix the situation and reset the denial for its next tour of duty :0)   The results will last for a good while.

I know not why this rhythm is mine.  What I do  know is that both of these internal energies can work well together, and neither deserves pathologizing, although both are designated mental health diagnoses.

The spirituality of compulsion and denial working together has nothing to do with cleanliness being next to godliness, however,  their unusual cooperation seemed a mystery worthy of wonder and awe. When I’d finished my one floor I felt uplifted, enlivened to the roots of my being—not because I did such a good job but because it gleamed and glowed as if smiling at me.

In fact, if God had voice Godde might say, It looks glorious Lyn, nice to reflect my glory, or your own, but remember:  The glory of God is the human person fully alive. 


P.S. Because I’m not insane I abandoned today's swerve into compulsive cleaning too long denied. I had somewhere to go and left it half done with resolve to finish tomorrow. It turned out I didn’t have to because when I returned home Dick had cleaned the other floor. Now that’s godly.