2021.11.07 My "Racism"—Brief Anecdotal History. Part Twenty-four. Seasoning All Saints

Although an ordained priest for over ten years, I hardly felt like a pro. I had given parish ministry a try and found it not a fit for my gifts. I did not have the stamina, skill, or desire to manage a small business, let alone the politics and the stress of loneliness. I had wanted to be ordained priest of Word and Sacrament, not a manager of money, and of mostly all-male vestries. I was surprised, therefore, when the Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts, The Rt. Rev. Bud Cederholm, called me to ask if I’d be willing to mentor a new priest. I said yes. 

Scene LXVII.  My Little Mentee

I moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1997 where Dick had accepted a position as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church. I would establish my pastoral counseling/spiritual direction practice in a neighboring UCC parish and serve as a non-stipendiary Sunday Priest Associate at St. John’s with regular opportunity to preside at Eucharist and preach. Perfect!  

Dick and I had tried to secure a joint rectorship in Connecticut, but no one was ready for that “heresy,” or for a divorced couple, the female, me, with a lingering reputation as a reject and possibly a seductress of innocent clergy. We both, however, had discovered after over ten years of marriage that the hardest thing about divorce was not overcoming the Episcopal Church’s attitudes, but the grief of missing the proximity of most of our growing children. Oh yes, everyone could visit, but you know it’s not the same. 

So we settled in a new diocese for a new start. Bishop Cederholm took office in Massachusetts in 2001. He decided that it would be a good idea for newly ordained diocesan clergy to have seasoned clergy mentors who would lend them support and counsel as they started out. I was invited to be a mentor. Hardly seasoned, I was about to be a mentor myself now. 

My mentee, the Rev. Stephanie Spellers, a young vigorous and gifted African American woman was ordained priest in 2006. Stephanie is a small woman. I called her “my little mentee.” I meant nothing racist by that. We both were small women. I had no idea why I was selected as her mentor, nor did she, but we hit it off. She lived in Boston and hopped on the train about once a month to come see me. I picked her up at the station. We would enjoy lunch together and have lively talks about heaven knows what. As I recall we had lots of laughs, a bit of serious ministry talk, discerning gifts and ambitions, and a shared passion for the Episcopal Church.  

Stephanie and I didn’t talk directly about racism, but I knew it had to be burbling under the surface in us both. I never felt uncomfortable with Stephanie, and I hope she felt the same with me. We would joke whenever we ran into each other at diocesan events about whether she had a boyfriend—no, the right boyfriend—yet.  

Then once at a diocesan gathering she showed me a picture of her guy, and we had a hug and a laugh. I do not think marriage is the only goal of anyone, but I do know Stephie wanted that. In fact, in her latest book, The Church Cracked Open. Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community, she wrote for him this acknowledgement: “To Albert DeGrasse, . . . patient, smart, kind, not woke-but-waking White guy who nodded as I read aloud (and loudly) from racist eighteenth vestry minutes, fed me fruit and veggies, did laundry and built fires like a boss. Yeah, you, the one out there teaching the Doctrine of Discovery to seventh graders. The one who put that ‘Beloved Community’ sign up over your classroom door. The one who agreed to marry me in the midst of this madness. You inspire me every day. Now let’s get after it.”   [The Doctrine of Discovery, a version of White Supremacy, was used for centuries to justify seizure of indigenous lands and subjugation of populations. It was in time repudiated by the United Nations.]  Stephanie and her beloved were on the same political and spiritual track to go forward together, to carry on as White teacher and African American priest, together.

 

I knew Stephanie was both talented and ambitious. She was on the road to happiness and a sterling career as a writer and a priest eager to lobby against racial injustice in her beloved Episcopal church. It wasn’t long before she became the priest for a ministry called The Crossing in Boston, a ministry for those who lacked access to adequate resources, including the liturgical ministrations of Christian liturgy. She wrote her first book called Radical Welcome, urging the Episcopal Church to be more hospitable—genuinely welcoming to all “sorts and conditions” of humanity as one of the confessional prayers in the Book of Common Prayers identifies all people.

I recalled my own experience, way back in the late 1960s in Alabama where my first husband and our three young children lived for a short time. The “uptown” Episcopal Church had a “warning” sign about its segregated status—Whites only. The downtown church welcomed black people, although their worship was more Baptist than Episcopal. I stayed home and wondered what White was—really. I guessed it had much to do with culture, geography, and varying styles of worship, each according to how their people saw God and proffered Jesus.

Stephanie Spellers brought her joy and zeal into her church, dancing her way and jumping through the hoops of the Episcopal Church’s political ecclesiology, while never losing sight of her vision. My “little mentee” now serves as Canon for Evangelism, Reconciliation and Creation, serving Episcopal Presiding Bishop, the Most Reverend Michael Curry, himself a spirited black man. (Stephanie’s charge as Canon is mighty spacious—just like her own soul and her God.) 

Canon Spellers has been my mentor-model for me as I hope I was for her. We both know what it takes to stay true to one’s own passion for justice, while hanging onto a broad vision written into Stephanie and Albert’s marriage covenant: “Life is short and love is precious”  

For me, the Church and seminary, oddly and despite obvious statistics, were not the first but the richest contexts in which I encountered racial diversity. Living too much of my life without black people has been, for this white woman, like living half a life, and certainly spiritually too shallow. 

Scene LXVIII. A Deep Conversation     

Usually when clergy get together at the annual clergy conference they want either to gossip among themselves, confront the bishop about some itch, or whine, sit in the bar for idol chit-chat, or maybe even a serious conversation. 

At such a conference in 2019 we gathered to listen to the dynamic black woman priest, the Rev. Canon Kelly Brown Douglas, theologian and president of Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) at Union Theological Seminary, New York, and Canon Theologian of Washington National Cathedral, who told us many wise and true things about racism in the institutional Church. What I remember most was her anguish about her growing son’s safety, even thinking fearfully about sending him away somewhere. Would he be safe? Would he stay alive? Such questions I have worried about as well, mostly in relation to alcohol abuse. I have felt frightened for a son who nearly died after surgeries. But I never had to say: “Will my son be shot to death?” 

During the afternoon break, Dick and I decided to engage two black clergy friends over lunch and through the break time. It felt urgent to get serious about personal experiences with racism. Each of us shared out personal experiences with racism. I spoke about Carol Lee and the racist decision I had made as a child and still remembered. Each of us shared a unique experience and emotions to go with it. I learned how hard it is to be brown thanks to mixed parentage, and how difficult it is to be able to “pass” for either color—but not really. And what it means to be definitely dark black and originally from another country where color consciousness was an issue, only because whites stood out as different. I learned how hard it was to have trust and closeness to black friends whom your parents know by name only—until the time comes for your parents to meet/see your dear friends. Our deep conversation was fruitful for us all, and we stayed friends over some time and met for more lunches filled with wit and soul. 

I was invited to preach at St. Cyprian’s in Boston where one of these friends was the Rector and the other the Deacon. It was a scarily thrilling experience for me to look out upon a large congregational gathering and see no white faces. I focused on the Gospel’s awareness of justice for all peoples and spoke directly to the growing concern about voting injustices. My sermon was punctuated by a few “say it, sisters” and “amens”—so supportive. When I concluded the whole congregation burst into applause. I asked the Deacon “Do they always do this.” He shook his head from side to side and grinned. I think I flew all the way home with sure and certain knowledge that the Episcopal liturgy and ritual could be a force for uniting the races. 

Scene LXVIX.  Blessing All Saints

When I presided at the Eucharist, I would touch each child’s head gently as I used a paraphrase of ancient biblical words to offer each one a blessing at the altar rail. They kept their small heads bowed, humbly obedient to their parents’ wishes that they not receive Holy Communion until they were confirmed. One Sunday, a very small saint, standing and white-knuckling the altar rail so as not to topple over backwards, tilted her head up to give me a broad grin and a giggle. A blessing.

May God bless you and keep you

May the face of God shine upon you

—and from within you—

This day and always.  (Numbers 6:24, YHWH to Moses, paraphrased)  

AMEN.  

(and please!)

2021.10.31 HALLOWEEN WONDERMENTS

Whatever Hallowed Eve is, it’s at least a time to have fun, to dress up in funny or scary costumes, to say BOO, to eat mountains of Candy Corn (a horrifyingly bad candy), and most of all to laugh with and at ourselves. As the poet says, so it goes. 

HALLOWED EVENING

Do the beloved dead

come back

this night

to sit in their favorite

easy chairs

and breathe in

the earthly fragrances

they once knew

  so well?

Do we believe

that heaven is so 

ailing

that the beloved dead

would not be 

infinitely happy

there and would need

a trip back to earth

to fill their hearts?

Best allow

the commercial

takeover of this night

to erase all thoughts

of this bizarre idea,

and to enjoy the dark.

Best just open the door

and hand out candy

to kids in costumes. 

by Carole Jean Smith, poet, Watertown MA., Into The Wild

As well we should!—because, according to Western Christian tradition, the next day, November 1, is declared Holy: All Saints Day, all Hallows Day, as in “Hallowed be thy name.”  It is a day to honor all saints who are deemed to have attained heaven. Silly, right? Because who knows who is in heaven?  Sainthood is not about points for good deeds or for martyrdom, a vocation to which few are called. It is safe to assume that it is God’s gracious loving desire that everyone be heavenbound. If you want to know who a saint is, look in the mirror—and grin! 

WHO COOKS FOR YOU?

  

I call this critter a hooting owl fish. She, or he, was photographed by David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes in Night Life for National Graphic Magazine (10/21) in the darkest night-depths of the sea.  “The only way to know which way is up is to watch which direction the bubbles are going,” Doubilet says.

HINENI   (Hebrew for "Here I am"  pron. hee-NAY-nee)  

 

Here is the latest discovery in fossildom. Years ago, with a friend at a museum of natural history, looking at fossils, my friend announced: “There are no fossils.” I did not pursue her certitude, because I knew I would get a lecture on “creationism”—the idea that God created everything fully formed, that is, no room for evolutionary processes. But this little crab defies that notion. I call her/it/them/who knows “Buster in Yellow.” They are a fossil encased in hard plastic. She says: “hineni”.

CONVERSATION WITH A WASP

In a piece by Paul Hond, Columbia Alumni/ae Magazine, Fall, 2021, he quotes Michelle Ashkin, ’04 alumna: “Then a strange thing happened. My mother and I were looking at a wasp. It cocked its head, and my mother and I just stood there. Did you see that? We moved, and the wasp followed our movement. My mother and I looked at each other, and it was an ‘aha moment’ for both of us. This is a being. This being sees us, or sees something—recognizes it, and is aware of it. How in the world were we going to kill it? We couldn’t—it became a being, not a disposable, not ‘oh, we can kill it because there are hundreds more outside. So we found a cup, captured it and let it go.' ”   

I used to do the same for ants in the city of Cambridge. Then I’d unfasten the screen and put it on the window sill where it froze until it felt safe enough to bug off on its own.  Lady bugs —family signs of new life—get to stay in residence. 

We are human beings. All Creation is shared Being. So be it. 

THE MISSING TREE

She is bent but not broken. He is weary but not tired. 

They are old and alive, missing every tiny life, animate or inanimate, 

that ever was, or is, or is to be—without regret. 

WISDOM

“Lord increase my bewilderment.” That is the entirety of this Sufi Muslim prayer. 

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”  Jesus, according to King James.Mt. 6:36

“Let go and let God.” Twelve Step Recovery (AA et. al.) slogan wisdom.

CRACKED CLARITY CONFUSED  

I’m going out

without a jacket

or a hat, only a mockingbird

for directions.          

Carole Jean Smith, Into the Wild. Poems in praise of the beauty of our imperiled world. 

©Lyn G. Brakeman, 2021

 

2021.10.24 My "Racism"—Part Twenty-three. -ISM Healing

When Jesus healed the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, he first asked him:”What would you like me to do for you?” Such a dumb question! Wasn’t it obvious?  Yes, of course, yet Jesus never flaunted his healing gifts, nor did he assume. He did not suffer from personal “messianism”—being a Messiah before being a kind human being.  

Scene LXV.  Gloucester-ISM?

Dick and I had moved from Connecticut to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1997. We were ready for a new experience, a new place that had no biases about our divorce/remarriage story. We felt branded. A Connecticut man had even called us “church criminals.” He was a victim of serious mental illness, but we felt the sting of criticism. I tried to laugh it off, but I admit that a new location had promise—the geographic cure. I didn’t want to feel my own self-doubt. 

Dick, whose heritage was Italian, was excited that this new location would be spectacularly Italian—full of great pasta, wonderful sea waters, beaches, and liberal Democrats. Well, the sea-beaches and the pasta were abundant, but the politics was distinctly mixed and local/eccentric—Sicilian, thus not really Italian. Or was it? We’d wondered about the isolationism of an island. Gloucester was not really an island. Or was it? Jokes abounded about people never “crossing the bridge”—off island. 

We arrived after a sad, teary, and strenuous move, as all moves are, on a fog-bound, cold and dreary February day. We had booked a motel for one night, because the moving van would not arrive until the next day. Where would we find a restaurant for dinner? All we really needed at this point was wine anyway. The motel owner gave us a few ideas, recommending Schooners on the road that runs along the harbor. The owners were friendly and welcoming, and I never—ever before or since—tasted shrimp cocktail like this one. The owner told us his recipe for cooking fresh shrimp was “a secret”—apparently his alone. Nevertheless, Schooners, although it changed names a few times in the ten years we lived in Gloucester, became our restaurant of choice on most Sunday evenings.  

We discovered quickly that if you weren’t from Gloucester you were, well, not from Gloucester, not a Glawsta girl or guy. How naive we were to imagine that the parish would be different. I mean, we did know what an Episcopal church was. That, it turned out, was about all we knew. The congregation had at its center a group of folks who had left a neighboring parish that split over what brand of Christianity was right and true. They had come to St. John’s to evangelize the parish with its brand of Christianity—conservative, leaning fundamentalist/ biblical literalist.

Dick’s first sermon articulated two versions of Christianity—one he thought true to the gospel of Christ and the other, not so much. The next week he preached on a story from the Old Testament, and after church I overheard an angry young man, comment to another parishioner: “Is he even allowed to preach from the OLD Testament?” Someone else said: “What about HER?” A man looked down on me one Sunday and, with a challenging tone, asked: “Do you believe Jesus was divine?” I can’t remember if I said a little prayer or not, but my answer came back firm and true: “Of course I do. You don’t think I’d be praying all these prayers to just any old guy, do you?” 

Much of this talk was underground, but you know how stuff leaks out. An older parishioner, herself not a Gloucesterian, adopted us and invited us for sumptuous dinners. I felt hopeful. None of this was their fault; nor was it ours. It was about differences, assumptions, and enough grit to make choices—not from right/wrong or good/bad stances, but from what we all called God’s Grace—also humor.  The first Easter that I preached I opened with my best Boston accent: “It’s Eastah in Glostah!” We laughed together.

Yes, I prayed for us and for the parish. God was good enough and big enough to listen without judgment, at least judgment that I felt. Dick stayed steady, got to know people, as did I. He opened his door to any and all parishioners. The place began to breathe, and the dissatisfied people either left by choice or found ways to adjust. We spent ten amazing years in dear old Gloucester where we grew to know and love many good people—Gloucesterians! 

Scene LXVI.  Healing Mentors 

Finding mentors in your journey through life enriches your soul. These are people who, let’s say, know the ropes of spiritual struggle and the tossing and turning of both joy and strife. They are people who pray and people who have experienced hurt personally and institutionally, often because they have bucked the system and its rules. These are they who rise above the temptation of ISMism. 

I will not forget the time I sat on the front steps of the church with Sereda, an aging old “salt”  originally from Nova Scotia. She found home in her parish church. She had studied theology in a correspondence course from Oral Roberts University and was very proud of this work, for which she had a certificate. She was talking vigorously to me about how she did NOT approve of women as priests. I cringed internally but listened. She then grinned at me and said, while patting my knee reassuringly: “But the Bible tells me (see Luke 2:36) that the old woman Anna hung out in the temple, praying every day, and actually bore witness to the child Jesus as the savior when his parents brought him to be presented at the Temple. She was a prophet! So I guess if an old woman like that could speak in Church, other women could too.”  We laughed. I felt warmed. Sereda was my first mentor on Gloucester. 

*  *  *  * 

The Rev. Elmore McKee was an Episcopal priest who had been defrocked because of his divorce at a time when clergy divorce was, well, more than frowned upon in the Church. I was living in  Connecticut, attending Yale Divinity School, and struggling myself with the Church’s rejection. It was the late 1970’s. My application to be ordained had been turned down twice. I was doing field work in ministry at the Episcopal parish in Avon. The rector there, the Rev. Philip Stowell, suggested I make a time to talk with Elmore McKee. I did.  

Elmore McKee had no political clout, but he sure was able to give me large doses of heart. He was kind and gentle. I poured my story, my tearful pain, my shame, into his listening ears. In his presence I felt consecrated. I could even glimpse his own pain, although he never talked directly about it. He knew what such rejection felt like. Elmore had remarried and occasionally interrupted our sessions to tend to his wife who had some form of dementia. He was remarkably loving and attentive to her presence in the next room. “Are you all right, my darling?” Elmore’s deposition was the Church’s loss.   

Elmore talked a lot to me about the value and wonder of lay ministry, imagining I suppose that he would encourage me in ministry, should I never be ordained. He went on so much I once asked him whether there was any room for priests in his definition of ministers of the Church. We laughed, although he, I bet, couldn’t imagine that I might try again after the diocese elected a new bishop. Elmore died the year after I was ordained priest in 1988.  He had been a “priest” to me. 

Ironically, Phil Stowell ended up divorced, as did I, as had Elmore, as did the bishop who had rejected my application. The Episcopal Church, in time, unstiffened its moral and ecclesial spine, on this issue. 

*  *  *  *

Madeleine L’Engle, author and spiritual director, was equally priestly to me. She was impatient with the Church’s resistance to women’s ordination. She was confident I would be ordained. She was more vocal than Elmore, and very rigid about no divorce, except maybe for adultery. She did allow for divorce, but only in situations where it was inevitable, or nearly necessary.

Madeleine told me to talk to women I respected, six of whom were divorced and six of whom had stayed in long-term marriages. She was intent on making sure I understood what a “rough” process divorce could be. Just before I was to graduate from seminary in 1982, Madeleine wrote to me with a suggestion. “It might help a lot to talk with people who have gone through what you are about to go through what you are about to go through.”

I took her suggestion to heart and found enough women—itself not an easy task—whose experience might help me and who were willing to talk. I listened carefully to each woman. Each experience on either side was very different, and all decisions had been extraordinarily difficult for many reasons. To summarize my findings: I discovered that the women who had divorced could not imagine themselves growing old and needful with their present spouse. The women who stayed in the marriage could see themselves growing old and needful with their present spouse, with whom there was enough mutual trust.

As I moved through the ordination process once again, I heeded Madeleine’s final commandment: “Now my dear,” she said in the fullness of her certitude. “When you get ordained, and you will, do not become a little man.”  

*  *  *  *

The Rev. Pierre Wolff, an Episcopal priest, formerly a Roman Catholic priest and a Jesuit, was the spiritual director who guided me through several messy processes: divorce, rejections, shame, and falling in love with Jesus. He knew about grief and hard choices. Pierre “divorced” his Roman Catholic Church, principally because of the way they treated and perceived women—institutional sexism. He left his first religion, and he left his first country, France. He never left Jesus though. Eventually, Pierre married a former nun, and I officiated as priest at their 1988 marriage, a mere six months after I was ordained priest. The marriage preparation counseling was hilarious. Now I was his authority figure when he still felt like mine. Still, I felt honored to be chosen, and I think in the homily, I referenced the hazards of divorce and recovery from divorce—with God’s grace. 

Pierre didn’t know a thing about boundaries, but then neither did I back then. I suppose we learned together. Of the many things Pierre taught me about Jesus and Scripture and prayer, I remember his frequent spiritual refrain—what he would always say when things felt overwhelming: “Doucement, cherie.”  Take it easy. I say it all the time to myself. Pierre died in 2018 and I preached at his funeral.  

As I stood over my prepared and prayed-over text, I muttered to myself, doucement cherie, and began my thank-you-note homily, this way: “Dear Pierre. . .”  

2021.10.17 Divine Immanence

Leaves fall down and die, and so do souls. Not to be moribund about divinity here, but I am thinking about theology. How important it is to stay aware—and pray aware—like the biblical Job did, of life’s shadowy sides, and God's role in the life of a faithful servant. God didn’t attack Job. Job discovered, or uncovered, God in the hollows of his own pain— the context of near-death dying when he could see nothing but darkness. God offered no explanation but only the divine Presence—up close and personal. It was enough for Job.   

Bumper sticker wisdom informs us: “Shit happens”.  Another bumper sticker carries another wisdom: “Grace happens.” But you never see this latter one, do you? The point is that both of these are true, and God is in both the bright and the shady, both the gloomy and the happy—and everything in between, the liminal area where most of us live most of the time. 

I get seduced easily by the happy joy-bomb, the happily-ever-after parade. People want to follow such pied pipers out of town, taking the rats with them. That’s what they thought they were doing I suspect when the early Jews followed Jesus. He tried to warn them, saying wet blanket things, such as: I’ve come to serve not to be served. OR I’ve come to die, not to live happily ever after. Yet they keep on following and asking. So do I.

A rewrite of an old Methodist hymn text popped into my mind recently, in part because I have been praying with someone who is going blind and who thinks VERY little of God. “Why did He make all this great world and then let it be so ugly and full of bad people?” she asks. I make all the obvious arguments for freedom’ed love, but I too wonder. Then these words came:  

Lead me, Lord, lead me in thy righteousness

Make thy way plain, within my heart.

Love me, Lord, love me in my weariness.

Love all my fears. Take me within your heart. 

Tune, 1861:Samuel Sebastian Wesley, grandson of Charles Wesley.

Text: The Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman, 2021

Within these words, I retrieved and, dare I say, resurrected, the early theological doctrine defining the divine nature as Immanent—oh so close. We, both church and culture, in America, are dancing and dashing after the Transcendent God who we assume makes everything better by a sleight of divine magic, simple as kissing a “boo boo” all better. We have betrayed the doctrine of Immanence. We have created God in our own image.

The father of poet E.E Cummings, Edward Cummings, a cleric of vigor and punch, preached from the pulpit of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston, Massachusetts in the early 1900s. He scared his listeners half to death, saying: 

“The kingdom of Heaven is no spiritual roofgarden, it’s inside you!” 

The poet and son, Edward Estlin, was devastated when his father died in a car accident in the 1930s. He paid homage to his father in the poem, entitled, “my father moved through dooms of love.” 

Dooms of love.

©Lyn G. Brakeman, 2021  

2021.10.10 Can Spirituality Trump Morality?

Sin, by one definition, happens when our own needs cause us to disregard, incorrectly assess, or fail to consider the needs of others. When this happens, individuals, as well as systems, fall into sin. Moral condemnations are made. What happens to Spirituality, that profound inner connection to Soul?

Even ancient biblical writers pondered this question. In the beginning God created everything in perfect order, hunky dory, with only one proviso, one moral restriction. Don’t mess with the tree that will give you both good and evil knowledge. You’ll fall into sin.and your life will be full of both good and evil. You will always be free to choose the good, the evil, or some mixture thereof. Oh, you won’t like the rules and the moral rectitude you think you need to live by, yet you will discover that when you get rigid about this moral effort, you risk losing your own soul’s health, your deep connection with the Love that created you and still re-creates you daily. So good luck. Take with you these clothes to protect you  from the elements, and remember that love triumphs over sin. 

All of us fall into sin, lose “Eden.”  All of us lament, all of us protest, and all of us struggle to re-create “Eden.” All of us hurt ourselves and others in this process.

My first husband and I struggled to be good spouses and good parents. We did what we thought was the right thing, the moral thing, according to the rules of the day and the promises we had made. We tried to stay married and to be good parents for twenty years. Over time we both broke promises, hurt the children, hurt each other. We grabbed for what I am calling our spirituality, our freedom-of-being. The “eden” of our whole loving family fell into sin.

While fulfilling my moral commitment to be a good mother, I’d neglected my own needs. Such imbalances may not be strictly immoral, but they are surely spiritual sin. The tremors from this loss of trust echoed for years. Over years I have been able to make amends, share tears, and make amends. Amends do not correct or re-create, but they can reconnect and heal. 

Institutions, too, fall into sin. The sin of the Institutional Church-Mama, all religions really, has always been the tendency to narrow access to God with rules and moral rigor. Spirituality, the soul-needs of the faithful, gets neglected. Worship does not entirely fill that need or heal that inner longing to know and trust God—Love itself. 

Spirituality can trump morality in the human heart. 

*  *  *  *

“There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth.” Rumi. 

Rumi (1217-1273) was a Persian poet whose full Arabic name is too long to manage. He was Iranian, and identified as a Sufi Muslim—deeply, mystically committed to the Oneness of God and consequently the oneness of being:  

“On the seeker’s path, wise men and fools are one.”

“In that faith, Muslims and pagans are one.”   

A favorite Sufi parable tells about blind men washing an elephant, each one washing a different part, and each one concluding that the whole elephant can be described and defined by that one part.  We all know how misguided such narrow knowledge is, and yet Rumi compared it to the ways of institutional religions—each one posing as the best, each one too narrow. Rumi, a teacher, spiritual guru, poet, and theologian, did, nevertheless, give primacy to Islam and the Q’uran. A popular saying in Arabic apologizes: “Love, however, has its own many other dialects.” 

American religious scholar/philosopher and one-time professor of religious studies at UC Berkeley, Huston Smith (1919-2016), was born in China and raised in a Methodist missionary family. He devoted his study and life work to bringing the world’s religions together in order to promote understanding, justice, and peace. He said: 

“If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.” 

Although a Christian, Smith had no aversion to taking his “vitamins” from other religions. He wrote: 

“Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the AMA? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion. Religion is institutionalized spirituality.” 

This feels harsh, yet I can see how institutions, even small systems, become fearful and rigid. Families, societies, businesses, nations, religions get corseted by their need for moral rules and regulations, to such a degree that the beauty of personhood itself, not to mention Nature and her ways, gets stifled if not lost. Overbearing moral regulation stifles Love. Morality trumps spirituality. The system falls into sin. 

But do we not need organization? Even Yoga and Twelve Step Recovery are organized. The idea is to pay attention to the rigor, and by your own heart keep it from exploiting those, including yourself, seeking spiritual wholeness. 

  *  *  *  *  

Jesus is remembered as liberator and reformer of systems, both political and religious, that had fallen into sin. The love of God in and for all creation was gasping for air in stifling systems. When Jesus asks a rich young man, sincerely moral and devoted to his faith—upstanding and ambivalent—to give away his wealth to the poor and the hungry, he was calling for systemic change. He was asking for less morality and more spirituality—not chaos without organization, but living breathing space for all Creation.  

All we creatures, great and small

are the heirs of sacred wealth,

and we all, together, live

by the other’s Lasting Health.     (Michael Hudson. Songs for the Cycle, 2004)

2021.10.04 Is Love Many-Splendored, Divine, Human, or Both?

"Love is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which s loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that reminds us to love."  

    -Valerie Kaur, author of See No Stranger. A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love 

I was always enchanted by the golden, romantic goo of the 1950s American film and song,"Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing." I suppose it was my own deep longing for a love beyond love, a kind of love that wouldn't shoot me into the dreary, but also romantically alluring slops of the Elvis Presley song, "Heartbreak Hotel" we teenage girls swooned and wailed over in junior high school. We all wanted the basics: boobs and boyfriends, but what we really wanted was the kind of love that reassured us of our ultimate worth, and assured us our safety—forever.  

God?