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? 

2021.10.03 CREATION

The huge window, called the Rose Window, at Washington National Cathedral is at the west end. It is in dialogue with the altar at the east end. This colorful Rose Window sacralizes the biblical moment in the Genesis Creation story when God, joined by angels and all the company of heaven, called for Light.  The window looks over the people as they enter the building and as they move along the long aisles towards the altar facing East and where the focus of the Sacrament of Christ is central. Leaving the building people head West under the Rose window. The trajectory follows the path of the sunlight.  

Rose windows were not so called until the seventeenth century after the English flower named rose. This window was installed in 1976 in time for the nave’s completion and dedication. It’s a “Creation” window. Its design starts in the middle, where pieces of white glass send thousands of rays of light radiating outward as the petals of a rose. Designed by Cathedral master artisan Rowan LeCompte and fabricated by Dieter Goldkuhle, the 26-foot window celebrates the majesty and mystery of all creation. The window includes every color LeCompte and Goldkuhle could summon, but key parts also represent the four Greek elements: red for fire; gray for air; green for water, and brown for the earth. I regret that this image is not clear enough for you to see the mastery and wonder. It is fascinating to me that people enter the cathedral under the eye of God/Creator and leave the same way.

Here is another image, a photo of a rising sun lighting the way into the day, through roiling stirring waters. It transmits a similar message: Let there be light—to  guide and guard you on your path each day. In your coming in and in your going out. 

My "Racism"— Part Twenty-two. Prayer and Chutzpah.

In the testaments of the Holy Bible, in my seminary studies, in my ministries as a priest/pastoral counselor, chaplain, and spiritual director, my “racism” came into glaring focus. So did my wondering about large categories like race and gender. Is there no category called race or gender that is not now called racISM or sexISM? I mean it is the addition of ISM that suggests that the concept before the ISM wields exclusive, or too much, power—psychologically, spiritually and institutionally. 

Over time I’ve grown to understand my own “racism” as intersectional—layered with many other -isms, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, feminism, socialism, fundamentalism, materialism, intellectualism, consumerism. Such complexity describes my lived experience of my “racism”, making it bearable, forgivable, and, dare I say, manageable. 

Carol Lee, my best preteen friend and the black girl I betrayed because I was racist, no longer haunts my soul or pricks my conscience, thanks to Bible stories, the presence of God within me, and the little bird in PD Eastman’s book, “Are You My Mother?” who at last realizes that all his questions, all his earnest questing for his lost mother, all his heroically strenuous efforts have come to naught. He kneels on his tiny exhausted wee bird legs and becomes a prayer. 

I am my prayer to you, says the psalmist in Psalm 109 (Greenberg translation). 

How does one become one’s own prayer? It is not by working obsessively, seeking answers to your prayer, although such efforts are good for your mental muscles and may even be helpful to other people. It is rather to slow down enough to uncross your eyes so as to see beyond your own desire, to slide off the throne of your ruling desire, your immediate worry, to release your held breath, to open your clenched fists, to let your willing tears flow freely, thereby giving God’s Spirit some stretching space in your soul. 

Scene LXI.  Prayer Rose

I discovered this on many many silent retreats in which prayer was the only bloody thing I did. Well, I cheated, but not much. I became a living, walking, breathing prayer. At night in the chapel at Mercy Center in Madison, Connecticut, I knelt alone and gazed at the elongated oil portrait, painted by artist Mary Daly, RSM, of a rose—long stem, thorns, bursting petals against a faintly visible green cross—hanging behind the tabernacle. This to me became the sacred heart of Christ, not bloodied or dead, but beckoning. 

I wanted to walk into this rose. The tabernacle below, containing the sacrament consecrated as Christ’s body and blood, was locked. Locked. I stared. I became a prayer. I climbed the “stalk” of that rose, feeling pricked and torn by thorns, finally to enter the sacred rose-heart of Christ—bruised but breathing. The next day when there was light I drew my own rose and wrote: "I am a rose/You are too/We two rose." 

To make such a climb—powerless, longing, praying—was what it was like to feel called to priesthood in my own religious tradition while trapped in one of those -isms, the sex one, and to be locked out, as I, because of the White-only rules at our beach club, had locked Carol Lee out for her -ism, the race one. Locked out. 

Scene LXII.  Breaking Up the Old Boys’ Club. Women Breach Male Collegiality in the Episcopal Church

In 1974, and again in 1975, groups of Episcopal women deacons organized, inspired by their calling to priesthood. They got political. Some willing bishops broke ranks to ordain these women outside of Church canonical regulations. Prayer, communicating with one another, and their shared desires led them to disobedience—and success. 

These women, on whose shoulders I stood as I pursued my own call to priesthood in the Episcopal Church, acted together to break a small but not insignificant sound barrier in patriarchal Episcopal Church politics. It would take a long time for the Church to swallow the whole law whole, to unlock its heart, to disrupt the “order” of things, and admit women as priests—and eventually as bishops. Here are some of the original 1974 group, the Philadelphia Eleven, lifting up the consecrated body of Christ-in-bread. 

Scene LXIII. The Syrophoenician (Canaanite) Woman

This small ancient story (Mark 7, Matthew 15) is one of my favorite ones in all scripture. Biblical women to me are not without flesh. Their stories count and help shape my soul. The woman in this small story counted as much to me as the actual women who paved the way to ordination for us all. It took me eleven years of knocking on doors and prayer-begging to be ordained priest. It would have been easier if I were a man, easier if I’d not been divorced and single, therefore dangerous, you know what I mean, harder perhaps if I’d been Black, or burdened by any other -isms, and easier if I had not overexercised and flaunted my natural chutzpah. 

I identified with this Syrophoenician woman, because she too was an outsider, a noisy threat, a Greek, a Gentile, banging on doors, annoying the Rabbi who was on a mission to secure the promised land for his people, the Jews. She was an interruption and a disruption of ordered canonical processes, like all of us women seeking priesthood were. She was even viewed by Jesus himself as unacceptable by standards we could call NationalISM.  He said: “I came for my people Israel!” Locked out she was. He turned her away three times. She kept on asking for healing for her daughter. Jesus I suppose felt a bit bullied yet heard in her cry, her prayer, the reminder of the depth and breadth and inclusivity of God’s own healing mission—not for Jews alone.

I, like her, and like the other women seeking ordination who were trying to overcome ancient biases, never gave up. Never. 

 

Choosing Up Disciples—Images of God

Jesus of Nazareth’s disciples, save for one latecomer, an accountant/taxman, named Matthew, were nothing if not a motley, rowdy, band of guys, eking out a living from the daily catch—of fish. Women joined in, but they received little mention in the biblical records. 

Why would Jesus, who hoped to surround himself with loyal followers to whom he would reiterate the basics of the Torah covenant with God and carry on with the vision of a heavenly kingdom on earth, choose people from society’s blue collars? It’s backwards! 

Well, because God does everything backwards—Jesus a prime example, right? 

The truth is that we are ALL among the chosen. It’s just that those whom human society ranks last get to go first in God’s created order, especially animal critters and children who often do know best, because they don’t think it over, and over and over, then rethink it—again. 

There follows a record of our own silly personal “disciples”—images of God, all.  

Here are our own dear “babies”—stuffed and silent: Miss Wise, owl, Leo, lion, Ganley I & II, hedgehogs, Walter, fishie, and Izzy, lady bug. They are very real in our hearts. We talk to them, sometimes through them, and let them sleep with us. 

Here is a very small shoe lost on the playground, then retrieved by a kind adult or an older child. It sits aloft on the pylon that escapes no one’s notice as everyone enters the playground to play.

Here is an elephant family on parade, painted on a changing table in the bathroom of a doctor’s office. It’s cute, right? It’s also sexist: Male leads, female follows, baby girl follows. You can tell the sex, because the girls follow and have lashes to flirt with. Big daddy leads and has no lashes. 

Here is a child full of wise questions and lots of his own talk. Recently, he told his father he “talked in school.” Daddy thought that was great, but son tugged at his father’s shirt and said: “No, Daddy, you don’t understand I TALKED in class. I mean when someone talks to you you’re supposed to answer and talk too, right? ” Daddy got the idea: no talking in class was the teacher’s rule, and the child was making a preemptive confession in case the teacher called his parents. A preemptive strike at six, no less! 

Here is a lion king (painted by Gaby D’Alessandro). He is majesty itself, elegant and outstanding for his roar and his finery. The lioness is nondescript and unadorned. It’s safer for mom to be plain and less attractive to predators, because Mom she stays home with the kid-cubs. In human nature it’s just the opposite—to our peril perhaps yet for our good.  

Here are four really fine adult children of mine—John, Jill, Bev, Rob. I cherish every breath they take and thank God for their well-being daily. Some days I think of them as my prayers-made-flesh. 

Here is an old woman sitting on the back of the truck amidst “junk” collected from a parish clean-up. She is a faithful Christian with a smile of gold. The truck will dispose of the junk but she will stay. She is not junk. 

Here is an infant boy, fisting the leash of the faithful family guard dog who will not sprint off, even after a squirrel. This is love. This child, like all children, including the one you once were, will lead us—with dog’s help.  

In the wreckage 

of our battles

where the powers 

have collided

we find greatness

shyly hiding

in the frailty 

of our children.    (Michael Hudson) 

And here is Nature Herself—dawnsweep over calm waters— Creator’s voiced assurance.  (photo credit, Dr. H.C. Richardson)