2014.06.15 Trinity? What's That?

Who knows? I try, anyway.

It’s an early Christian stunt, not to divide Divinity up into equal parts like ancient Gaul, but to describe distinct spiritual experiences of the one living God, important enough to name each separately yet to assert that each never exists apart from the whole. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. God is both. Godde as dynamism creates all life, ignites all life, and connects all life—all the time, all three. Trinity is the Christian name for God. Here is a lorica, a Celtic symbol associated with St. Patrick and the hymn we sing to the Trinity.

A lorica was a breastplate, armor that covered the chest. Today we might call this a bulletproof vest. Biblically, it is symbolic of the armor of Christ, an internalized protection against temptations to succumb to maleficence. (Ephesian 6:11) Here it is, according to Augustine of Hippo.

Each in each, and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one.

Say this very fast and you might feel dizzy.  What might it have been like to come up with  this idea?

The small group who knew Jesus well didn’t come up with doctrines immediately after Jesus died. They had no ritualized funeral, no rich collation. I bet they did what we do: sat around and talked about the one who had died, shared memories, cried and laughed. Time passed. Like us, they didn’t forget. You don’t when you really love someone.

Eventually, I guess someone came up with a strange idea:  What if Jesus the Christ was divinely human? After a silence, they all chimed in at once.
   
    Are you kidding? There’s only one God. 
    Yes, but . . . 
    Crazy heretic!
    Well, he was kinda special, healing and all. A mensh (Yiddish: person of integrity and honor.)
    Who asked you, woman?
    All his oddball teaching, too. Oi vey!
    The authorities killed him for that, so shut up already.
    Holy maybe, but not divine, not God. 
    I’m going home. Come on. Why are you all sitting there like stones? We’re all meshugga. (Hebrew for idiotic, nuts.)
    Or, it’s a miracle.
    Sheesh!
    Wait. Listen. If Jesus was divinely human then so, just by being human, are all of us.

They sat motionless. If Jesus was a divine human, then so are we?

With a staggering degree of imperfect simultaneity, this tiny band breathed: O, my God.
             (This is what you say when you recognize God in something.)
                                               

Still, who, in fact, would sign on to such an idea? Some did. Some ran like hell. It’s the same now.
   

Yet these beginners kept breathing their idea. The news spread, as all good gossip must, spirit-motioned or not. We could say that’s how the Trinity got going and took off.  

OR, we could stay with St. Augustine who later identified this idea as something they’d always intuited: God is simultaneously Lover, Beloved, and Love itself. 

OR, we could ask the beasts. Remember Moley from The Wind in the Willows? Here's a Trinity/God story.






Mole and his best buddy Rat cruised the river in a small boat on an errand of true mercy. Their good friend Otter, despite strenuous efforts, was unable to find his lost baby son, Portly. Despair possessed Otter’s heart. Rat and Mole instructed their friend to sit on the river bank and wait. The two entered treacherous waters pulled along by the sounds of piping. Rat was transported by “this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp.”

Mole, more empirical than Rat, heard nothing and rowed on, Rat all the while exuding rapture. Then Mole heard and was transfixed. Soon “the clear imperious summons that marched hand-in-hand with the intoxicating melody imposed its will on Mole, and mechanically he bent to his oars again.” They moored at a small island patch. “Then suddenly Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near.” Mole is smitten.

In summary, the two followed the music and met a demi-god piping a panegyrical lullaby. Nestled asleep between the hooves was the round pudgy little baby otter. They awakened him and returned him to Otter who had waited “in dumb patience.” (Now ain't that a truth?) Otter gave a joyous bark and ran to embrace his tiny “prodigal” son.

The rescuers struggled to understand what happened, exactly. The Vision had vanished, the music replaced by bird songs. “For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness.”

But what does this mean?”asked the exhausted little mole. Silence. His friend, the weary Rat, was fast asleep.

The grace of Jesus Christ, the love of Godde, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you, each and all, all ways. Amen.

2014.06.08 Pentecost Birthings

Most Christians today remember the role of God Holy Spirit. We wear red, because God as Holy Spirit traditionally comes in on a blaze of fiery red. Red’s a tricky color. Spirit red is pure—no purple, pink, orange or lavender. Red is the best color for the experience of “a world flamed into life.” (Barbara Ehrenreich’s phrase from Living With a Wild God.)

I could go on with a lot of good church-talk and risk boredom or adulterating the redness of red. Instead I will write about my four children. When each was born, the world flamed into life. Quite incongruous with the mess my body was in: blood, sweat, pain—no gore.

In an instant, childbirth turned into Creation. Fireworks. I remember feeling very close to Creator-Godde—not “Father” but Creator.  The great American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) had a day job delivering babies in Paterson, N.J. One of those remarkable spirit-flukes, no?  He was regularly present to transcendence and immanence at once. When a woman carries and births a baby she puts her body in the way of creation.

I didn’t think my children were miracles. I knew how babies were made. And no, I don’t believe God sends kids in answer to prayers, even though I prayed to get pregnant, not to get/be pregnant, and for knock-out drugs—none of which God did.

Not  being as eloquent as Ehrenreich, I’d just say that the internal presence of a new life and the emergence of each tiny black head made me sure that this was exactly how Creation happened, how Holy Spirit ignited and ensouled the cosmos, similar to a great work of art.  No bigger explosion of life could be possible; no greater awe could be felt. Love follows immediately, but is not first.

My adult children would cringe at my excesses. O Mom! Nevertheless, despite the many failings and forgivings we’ve all experienced, they are spiritual mentors. They still flame my world into life.

Bev (b. 1963) one day listened patiently to me make amends for my errant midlife abandonments, overdoing it really. She was worrying about her own mothering. It triggered a spate of mother-guilt in me. She listened, then interrupted: “Mom, stop apologizing!”

Jill (b.1964) once mentioned something about prayer, or maybe God. It was good theology. “Where’d you hear that?” I asked. “From you.”

Rob (b.1967) was in a serious car accident about 10 years ago. He and his younger brother were on the way home from a concert when a truck swerved into their lane. Rob was driving. It wasn’t his fault but they are lucky that neither of them was hurt. When Rob called to tell me, I tired to comfort, saying they were lucky, blah blah.  But he kept repeating, “I could have killed my brother. Mom, I could have killed my brother.”

John (b.1970) recently confessed in the course of a phone conversation that he was nagging at himself, putting himself down, angry with himself and his stubborn habit. At my mothery/pastoral best, I was supportive, understanding, giving him a reason why his self-critique made sense in relation to a circumstance.  “Nah,” he said, “it’s in my nature.”

You might say they put me in my place, reddened my cheek. (Oh, they know better than me.) These are small examples but such things have happened many times as the body-remembered umbilical attachment stretches thin and finally falls gently away, replaced by an even stronger, freer bond.

Maybe that’s what being born again—and again—is like.  Ya think?

2014.06.01 Words Matter, Spoken and Unspoken

Ludwig Wittgenstein (below) was born Vienna in 1889 and died in Cambridge, UK, in 1951. He was was a philosopher interested in language. He wrote: "The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."  I wonder.

What if you have no words?

I’m no philosopher, though I think a lot—too darn much in fact. But I do love languages, even Latin. (I had a great Latin accent.)  Curiosity, wonder, and yearning make us humans reach for heaven—sometimes even touch, like Adam and Creator-God in Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting. Both reach. Both touch. No words.

When I was a hospital chaplain at Hartford Hospital I worked on the spinal cord team. It was a terrifying ministry—quadriplegics and paraplegics all. I saw young teens who had dived off piers and cliffs and broken their necks; I saw young people who had flown through car windshields to land on open road; I saw middle-aged people who’d fallen off ladders. I saw everything—lives snapped off at the neck, literally. I cried myself to sleep often.

Some could still talk, but others were without speech, without words, although, cruelly it seemed, their minds could still function. Most could still hear. We invented ways to communicate, a bit.  What got me through was the poetry I read to people, smiles, prayer, and staying in the tension of my desire to know what it was like and my desire to flee.

Also nurses.

Nurses are the most bold and creative people I know. They are not afraid of bodies—sick, disabled, paralyzed bodies. They flip them and turn them and shove them around the bedclothes, and rarely speak down to them.

I visited a quadriplegic nurse in the hospital and in a rehab center. She finally made a decision to die—or not to live in a paralyzed body. She could talk very little and think, but not move. She set all her affairs in order, had her priest anoint her, and somehow willed herself to die. I prayed helplessly by and never tried to “talk” her out of it. I will never forget her courage and felt sure, for no reason, that Godde was present throughout. Suicide is not a sin!

What I learned in my time on the spinal cord team was that there was a language of the soul, a language without words. I wrote about it. I had no skill in this silent language, being such a cognitive wordy freak, but I could sometimes feel eyes speaking, read twitching mouths, and hear sound in the silence. And touch was visible even when it could not be felt. 

Wittgenstein, the word man, offers a metaphor that helps me define soul-speech: "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."

It’s possible that the imagination has a life that travels far beyond the body and the mind. And that it has its own keyboard and its own music. The Church calls this the Holy Spirit and uses the image of a dove flying about and landing inside human hearts with a wordless word.

Perhaps, all those years ago, the feeble words I uttered mattered anyway. Maybe they struck the imagination of some of my patients and we made a chord. I have no idea. I just made my rounds, used all kinds of words, was glad to be rotated off the spinal cord team.

Godde, you are sometimes imaged as the Word, a word of grace and wisdom. Be the Word in our words, and help us to be more conscious about how very much words matter, how very much they can enhance or impede the flow of your divine love.  Amen.

Amen, in soul-speak, is three blinks.

2014.05.25 Inalienable Speech—and Thought?

It’s graduation season, an exciting-hopeful-crazy time, full of terror. What are we commencing to do? Will I meet a boy in college? Fall in love? Did I tell my kid enough about what to avoid, on and on. Will I be homesick?  Go!—with all my love and Godde’s grace! Here’s a little cash.

Bless you, Gillian, the family high school grad, 2014.  (GG with Uncle John)

 

I’ve been reading in the news about some disturbances at colleges about choices of graduation speakers, choices that offended some students’ political views.  Inalienable rights of speech and thought came into question. Whose rights?   (Inalienable, btw, means you can’t give this away, nor can it be taken from you.) I presume that includes the right to think and speak and have ideas.

Ruth Simmons, retired former president of Brown University, was the first black president of Smith College, my alma mater, from 1995-2001. I remember feeling proud of Smith when she was selected, and also irrationally miffed at Brown for “stealing” her away and Simmons for abandoning my alma mater.  But after all, at Brown she got to have two firsts: first woman and first black. Still, Simmons did not take the job for those reasons. She's not like that. She is humble—and religious. She stepped in at the last minute to deliver the commencement address at Smith on May 18, 2014.

She filled after Christine Lagarde, FIRST woman to head the IMF (International Monetary Fund),  pulled out. There had been some protesting about the choice of Lagarde whose perspectives come from a conservative point of view—the "1-percent" view, you might say.

Lagarde said that this was an occasion of celebration and joy, and that no tensions, if avoidable, should interfere with that spirit, nor with the focus on honoring the grads who had worked so hard.  Her decision seemed gracious.

The current president of Smith, Kathleen McCartney, accepted Lagarde’s decision with regret and commented, "I was interested in hearing what she had to say.”

 

It would not, I believe, have hurt Smith grads, their families, and the whole gathered academic community to hear from a woman leader with a challenging viewpoint. This is what their liberal education prepared them for. That’s what I learned at Smith, a gift of thinking for myself, not in isolation, but with courage. That's also what I learned as a Christian priest who welcomes everyone to the table.



Simmons was quite brilliant, also tearful and witty, with a little quip about herself being a religious person but having faith in the inalienable right to practice one’s religion without persecution. Not bad for the daughter of a Baptist minister, she grinned. She carefully articulated the liberal, same root as liberation, values of the college and the importance of fighting for everyone’s right to have a voice, even and especially if it represented a challenge. Oh Godde, ya hafta think!

The college, Simmons said, should not “lapse into a place of quiet repose” but rather fight for “the jangling discord of learning at its best.” — “to protect the right of each one to each one’s views.” Simmons closed with a passionate call to graduates, in whatever they chose to do, “to do it in the full spirit of who you are and who (I do know it’s whom) you care about.”  "Above all, she concluded to cheers and ovation, “take care of your voice!”  

That feels like gospel!

I could not help but think that the church should not become a place of “quiet repose” as so many expect, want, and even need.

The church is an organic community of living breathing souls, all of them with voice, and all of them covenanted to love Godde, self and neighbor.  Jesus was slaughtered for his voice. It takes courage to speak your mind and heart. 

Take care of your voice through careful thought, conversation, and with prayer: Godde, help us not to lapse into quiet repose, except when we sleep each night, and, for Christ’s sake, guard us against waking repose. Amen.