54-60/60

It seems that there's little to say about the last six years ~ during which I've filled page after page online and in private journals.

Only two words, really.

Suicide.

Ordination.

The birds and the hikes are still out there.  I had breast cancer and that was pretty awful but, in the grand scheme of things, not all that important.  I became a spiritual director and I get to hear wonderful stories of longing and prayer and confusion and discernment. Our surviving children are doing well. 

A couple of weeks ago I became one of the founding board members of the Northern Ohio Chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  During our largely organizational meeting, we talked briefly about the extent to which loss to suicide defines our lives.

I suppose that, at the five year mark, it doesn't really define my life anymore. It night seem that way more than is the case, because I read and write a lot about it, and I do some suicide prevention work and some with survivors.  But it's become a reality that I've sort of absorbed into my skin.  Enough so that now I need to become more alert to how surprised and shocked others can be when the topic comes up.

No, the thing that defines me is: I have three children and one of them is not here.  I miss him so much that I live each day, no matter how satisfying or productive or filled with love, around a crater of loss.    His death, the fact of it, the gone-ness of him, the mystery of where he is now, define almost everything I do in ministry, every way I think about theology, every twist and turn in my cycle of despair and hope.

I wish I could say that ordination to ministry defines my life.  At one time I thought that it would.  But my experience has been so different from others' and so overshadowed by the death of my son that I find myself mostly wondering  . . .     .  It would be preferable, I suppose, for a pastor to say that her Christian experience has overshadowed her experience of death.  But  I can't make that one up. 

Had you asked me, six years ago, as I was preparing to go to seminary, to imagine my life six years hence, I could not possibly have predicted the reality.  I'm in a reading group trying to get together to discuss Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss.  These words of his apply, I think:

"When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life.  I lived not with God, nor with his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities -- a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism -- nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself.  I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-love at once protected me from and subjected me to.  Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe."

 

In some way, perhaps, it is a matter of grace that I have known so much of God's absence these past five years.  God's presence in the midst of so much suffering ~ my own and, so much more terrible, my child's ~ is, I think, not something I can comprehend.  Maybe that is the work of however many years are left to me. 

Hostility Toward Faith

I've been pastoring officially for only 1.66 years, but I've already experienced the compulsion people seem to feel to defend their faith positions, despite no challenge having been issued.  I suppose that means that my very presence constitutes an unspoken challenge, in their minds at least.

Typical example: Neighborhood gathering, at which a good friend introduces me to another of her friends, proudly identifying me as a pastor.  Her elderly friend looks me over and pronounces airily that she "doesn't believe in God."  As she waits expectantly for ~ well, for what, exactly? ~  I say, "It's so nice to meet you.  I heard that your granddaughter just graduated from college?"

I've been thinking about this seemingly instinctual hostility toward faith, and Christian faith in particular, since my two pieces have been published in the Huffington Post.  The first, a shortened version of a blog posted here, and directly primarily toward Christian pastors dealing with those who grieve, generated some negativity which I took to mean that neither intended audience nor word count had been understood.

Nevertheless, I was a bit startled.  And remorseful.    I think it would be difficult to find a pastor more open to other faith experiences and expressions than I am, but clearly I had failed to communicate that.

The second post, about faith responses to suicide ~ to those who are contemplating or have attempted suicide, and those who have survived their loved ones' completed suicides ~ was written with a more general audience in mind.  Nevertheless, one commenter noted that,

"I think it was you who had another article on HuffPo about helping people deal with the grief of a loved one's suicide and I was very glad to see someone approaching the topic (1 1/2 year since my father's and 7 years since my mother's last attempt). I was disheartened by the tone some of your talking points took in that earlier article seeming to push religion a little much for my comfort. I love the changes that were made it make it more inclusive of all peoples of every religious shading. This is a great guide to helping people talk about dealing with this kind of lose with others. Thank you very much."

I'm glad she found the second one helpful, but I wondered: What on earth had I said in the first one? 

 

As far as I can tell, it was the following:

"This is a chance for Christian pastors and friends to shine with resurrection hope and assurance.  Almost everyone, regardless of how tenuous or strong his or her connection with the church, regardless of whether he or she is a staunch atheist or a lifetime believer, has some sense or perhaps downright fear that the beloved friend or family member might be in hell, whatever he or she imagines hell to be. If ever there were a time in which people need to hear God's infinite grace and love proclaimed in a ringing public voice and in a quiet private whisper, this is it."

I can understand atheists taking issue with my statement about them if their experience differs; I can  only report what people have said to me.  (In 850 words or less, and without divulging confidences.)

But . . .  shining with resurrection hope?  God's infinite grace and love?  Proclaimed and whispered?

What have we done, we Christians, that people respond with such negativity?  

Of course, I know.  I hear it all that time.  And it's not just Pat Robertson and his ilk.

"You must . . . ".

"You have to . . . ".

"You'll go to hell if you don't . . . "

We pastors find ourselves in a calling filled with people who love to talk, love to preach, love to teach.  I know this, because I am one of those people. 

And we have sometimes proclaimed God's grace so loudly and emphatically and obnoxiously and invasively that people have come to associate it with words and acts they cannot stand to hear or watch.

I think of my father's quiet statement, as we left the funeral home after his wife's funeral.  "Those people are so well-meaning . . .  and so intrusive."

When I try to convey resurrection  hope, I'm talking about the hope that God is already re-creating and renewing the face of the earth.  (Frankly, I don't feel the need to say much.  If you know me and my life history, you know that the fact that I'm alive and in ministry bespeaks resurrection hope.)   When I try to reflect God's infinite grace and love, I'm trying to show that God is out and about, gently loving and caring and tending to all, whether they ever know or acknowledge it or not. 

It seems that we have mostly ourselves to overcome. 

 

I'm not going to write an article about how God doesn't matter, because I don't believe that to be true. 

 

But I wish I were better at conveying that I'm inviting people into a discovery of that God, not trying to pummel them into adopting a belief system they're assuming I want to further.  As has been said by many others besides me, I don't believe in that God whom they're rejecting either.

Providence

I went to college in Providence, Rhode Island, but I can't recall having ever given the city's name much thought.

I think I memorized some material about the word "Providence" as I prepared for my ordination exams, but it wasn't a word I'd heard utilized much, and so that particularly arena of studying fell into one of those "memorize without meaning" categories.  Like Greek.

But I find myself today placing the word "Providence" at the top of my list for prayer and study and exploration and wondering.

I used to care a lot about whether God suffered with us.  It seemed obvious to me that the answer was "yes" ~ as Jesus, betrayed by his friends and followers and executed on a cross; as God, a loving parent watching a child suffer; and as the Spirit, seeking to wend its way throughout the experience of human life.  Then I got to seminary and discovered a wide range of viewpoints on this topic, and I read a lot about it after Josh died, and I wondered a LOT.

And then I didn't care anymore.

In last night's episode of Call the Midwife, Dr. Turner says to one of the midwife sisters after the inexplicable death of a newborn, "These are the times when I wish I had your faith."  The young Sister Bernadette looks calmly at him and responds, "These are the times when I wish it made a difference." He looks rather startled, and it occurred to me that that exchange must mark the beginning of the love story I know is coming. 

I suppose that's the point I've reached.  Whether or not God suffers, as we do or in some other God kind of way, makes no difference to our lives here.

On the other hand, whether God cares and provides for us, here and later ~ that might be making a difference.

I have discovered recently that a number of people in my congregation share a cut-and-dried and, to my way of thinking, brutally limited, understanding of who God is and what God is up to.  You accept Jesus into your life and you're going to heaven.  You don't, and you aren't.  I've also discovered that when I try to respond to them by conveying (in a most paltry way, apparently) the abundant and infinite nature of God's love, they respond to me by saying, "No."

I have no idea what to do about this. 

I thought that eventually I might invited to schedule my departure over the issues of gay marriage and ordination. 

Now I think that it might be over something far more fundamental.

So . . . Providence.  God's care and provision for us.  That's what I'm wondering about these days.  And how I communicate that God is way more interested in all those "re" words ~ renewal, restoration, reconciliation, re-creation ~ that in the "de" ones ~ destruction, demolition, devastation.

Or.  I guess I could be wrong.

 

Hell?

I've been meaning to share the following, written by my friend Karen, for quite some time, and today I'm feeling the need.

 

Karen and I have both lost children -- she, a daughter, to cancer, and me, a son, to suicide.  And we've both bumped up against what she terms "a dark theology" in the church.  Actually, it's a pretty standard theology, which a lot of people find reassuring with a confidence that remains a complete mystery to me.  I suppose that there's something to be said for believing that God's justice includes eternal damnation and will prevail -- if you presume that you and your loved ones will escape its rather more negative consequences -- although why anyone would presume that he or she would be among those who gain eternal life as opposed to others, I have no idea at all.  Or why anyone would want to believe that.  Do people really think it's ok that their neighbors and colleagues might be "left behind"?   More to the point, do they really think that it would be ok with God?  Really?

 

Anyway, Karen had an experience in a Bible study with viewpoints which I frequently encounter. A dark understanding of an eternity in which people are always sheep and goats, and never "shoats," and in which the outcome for the goats is wearily predictable and grim.   These encounters generally leave me in a depressed state of mind, and I suppose I'm having an attack of that this week.  I'll let her speak, as she's far more eloquent than I:

 

"I’ve been wondering about the concept of hell lately, probably because of the time I spent in this church, listening to their views.

 

Those of us who feel we’ve already seen hell, or lived there, seem to have no need to create or believe in another, later-destination version of it. Those who have experienced hell seem to want to bring heaven to earth as much as possible, with love, kindness, ministry, compassion, forgiveness, healing and tenderness. Those who speak and express the most concern about hell (as a place one might go after death) make me wonder if they really live in daily fear of it – and wonder if they’ve ever truly suffered here in this life, or are simply braced against it.

 

In my opinion, if you’ve already been there, hell is no longer an intellectual construct, a doctrine or a place to be sent after death, but a reality of this broken world that cries out for redeeming, here and now. It is illness, decay, depression, death, the suffering of mankind…what could be more hellish than those?

 

I wonder if we aren’t actually called – each one of us – to “go to hell” here in this life, and to come out of it with a heart transformed. That seems to be one way of looking at the Paschal pattern. To be frank, it’s one of the only ways that I can make sense of the past six years of my life.

 

I love God deeply, but experience has made me a bit wary of what He allows, as the price is so very high – it’s everything! (Yes, I am mid-life, flawed, and still not totally surrendered to Him.) Yet what other option and relationship do we have? “Lord, to whom shall we go?” He is the One – the Way, the Truth, the Life, the great source of Love – our Creator.

 

I truly desire to serve Him and participate in His work of love in this world; it’s the only life worth living anymore. I prefer to see it as bringing a bit of His kingdom – heaven – into the present time and place, rather than fearing a possible hell in the future."



Image: Detail from  Michaelangelo's Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel.

Let Nothing Disturb You . . . God is Unchanging

Don't you think it's kind of intriguing that after I posted here a few days ago about St. Teresa's prayer and my own reluctance to affirm that God is unchanging, the following should be today's music on Pray As You Go?

The singing/lyrics begin at about 1:20.

I was out for an early morning walk in the midst of the changing colors of fall as I listened to PAYG this morning.  And no, I don't make the mistake of believing that the God who is in all thing is all things.  But the paradox of an ever-changing universe ~ - nature, human, and everything else ~ and the possibility of an unchanging God did not escape my prayer.

At any rate, regardless of your orthodoxy or lack thereof, prayer or lack thereof, faith or other structure for life: it's a beautiful prayer and a beautiful piece of music.  Give it the full 6:23.

God Is The Artist

The first thought that popped into my mind as I began to ponder the "Who is God?" question was that "God is a painter." 

Then I began to ponder the word "painter."  God as an artist.  God as abundantly and infinitely creative and and creating.  I considered adding a few more nouns.  God as a painter, an architect, a builder, a potter, a designer, a musician, a dancer, a photographer.

Hmmm.  Was I responding to the "Who?" question with a litany of what God does rather than an affirmation of who God is? 

I thought about the young man who died this past week, by all accounts a brilliant mechanic and a kind and generous human being, especially to those who found themselves and their cars sideways in a ditch or tangled up with another vehicle.  God is a kind of mechanic, putting seemingly disparate bits of material back together and creating anew. But I didn't want to limit my description of God to that of a utilitarian functionary of some sort.  And the particular mechanic of whom I have been thinking was evidently . . .  an artist.  An artist with respect to both trucks and human friendship.

God is an artist.  That's a what, and it's a "what God does," but most of all, to my way of thinking, anyway, it's a who.  An artist is a who.  An artist is someone whose very essence pours out of herself and into her creations.

God is an artist.  Almost every form of human work and human relationship is a work of art ~ an expression of the one in whose image we are created.

Three intimations of God, the artist:

The universe, which many refer to as a revelation of God's self.  If you had asked me when I was a little girl growing up in my God-indifferent family how I knew about God, I would have pointed to the world around me: the brilliant beech trees on the autumn hillside, the glittering ice in the winter sunshine, the caterpillars turning themselves into butterflies, the lightning bugs filling the summer night spaces, the oriole nest hanging from the tree across my grandmother's driveway, the goldenrod growing alongside the country roads, even the snakes leaving their discarded skins across the gravel road to our own house.  Color, shape, size, form; such dazzling ingenuity.  There is God, I would have said.

Loss and the burden of grief which follows. You might be surprised to hear me say that.  I am surprised, myself,  But when I look at the dimensions in my life which have opened up in the past four years, I can conclude only that a great artist has been at work.  An artist who is not intimidated by an excess of thick black paint, or by deep gashes in the canvas, or by the ceiling caving in and raining chunks of plaster all over the entire exhibit,  An artist who shrugs her shoulders, dumps the black paint into the canyon-deep gashes, crunches up the plaster and tosses it into the mix along with some left over yellow paint and glitter sticks, rocks back on her heels, and says, "Even that is good."  Because out of Friday comes Sunday.  Out of Week Three comes Week Four.*  Out of thick dark comes glittery light.

Silence.  I don't pretend to grasp how glittery light emerges from thick dark. But I am sure now, four years into what has become my life-experience of God and not-God, that God is an artist of silence.  I say that as someone whose local orchestra, the one down the street, is one of the most celebrated in the world.  I say that as someone whose bucket list includes the Westminster Cathedral and King's College choirs.  But I say it also as someone who has practically seen with her eyes God painting with silence as the medium.

God's silence:  Patience.  Anger.  Sadness.  Hope.  Desire.   Infinite gift of self.  God pours silence from God's self into the shape of love. 

And so, who is God?  God is The Artist.

(*For all you Ignatian-folks,)

People and God

Something that I'm finding intriguing these days:

A lot of people connected to churches, institutions to which they are by no means required to attach themselves (we as a culture being no longer consumed by medieval fears of hell or 1950s expectations of suburban belonging), have, as far as I can tell, little interest in a deep encounter with God. 

That's not a criticism; it's an observation, and one that increasingly fascinates me.  I am talking about deeply good people: kind, generous, invested in caring for others. People who are much nicer than I am.   I'm talking about people who seldom miss a Sunday morning in church and are engaged in all kinds of church work and activity.  People who work much harder than I do.  I'm also talking about people who seldom approach a church but, upon being asked, would assure you that they are Christian believers.  Most of them are truly excellent human beings.

I remember myself very clearly as a sixteen-year-old girl standing out in the snow under a star-filled expanse of western Massachusetts sky and asking of the God in whom I did not believe, "Who are you and what are you doing?"

I assumed (and yeah, we all know how to parse that word) that my questions were typical ones.  I'm still asking them.

But I see that a lot of people aren't.

I think a lot of people find God bland, or boring, or easy to take for granted, or just kind of there.  Even people negotiating major life transitions, for good or for ill, don't seem to expect much in the way of involvement from God.

Isn't that interesting?

Shifting Spirituality: God Our Mother

The maternal dimension of my life has been something of a disaster.  Mother, son, breast.  And lest you think I am veering toward the melodramatic, let me remind you:  Instant death in a car crash.  Suicide.  And now the carving up of my body, three times so far.

I haven't focused much on the feminine aspect of spirituality.  For one thing, I've never been surprised or perturbed by references to God as mother.  (All those years in girls' boarding schools, perhaps?) It's God as father that causes me some consternation.  I heard few references to God as father in my church home, but it was a consistent phrase in seminary, and is even moreso in the community in which I minister. Yesterday I was repeatedly distracted for the first hour of a presentation by the speaker's references to the Holy Spirit as "he."  But I try to let it go.  I recall my first spiritual director stating  one day in regard to another topic that he didn't want to say anything that would make it difficult to anyone to pray, and that seems a reasonable stance to me.  Of course, it requires me to overlook the endless invocations to "Father God" that make it difficult for me to pray.

For a second thing, my spiritual directors have all been men.  Jesuit priests.  Yes, I've needed father figures in my life, but they're also all brilliant and well-educated.  YEARS of education that I wish I had.   Give me a keen mind and a wide-ranging knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, psychology, and spirituality, and my religious little self is hooked.  I used to be a little bit circumspect in what I said because they are, after all, guys, but breast cancer has demolished what reserve I had.  Probably to their dismay. 

Interestingly, as Catholic guys, they may have more to offer in terms of feminine spirituality than even most women in my own branch of the church.  Catholics, after all, have Mary.  And all those saints.  And, I might add, it was a Jesuit who wrote to me when I was approved for ordination to say that he was praying  that the Holy Spirit would guide me to exactly the call she had in mind for me.

At any rate, these days I find myself experiencing what may be a major shift in my spiritual orientation.  The last couple of weeks have been hell, with my experience of aesthetic devastation now followed by the most unwelcome reality of whole-body pain, which I have a sinking suspicion has to do with a third surgical assault in a six-month period.  As a consequence, I find myself wondering much more about the feminine in the divine, or about the divine in feminine contexts.

I guess we'll see where she leads me.

Image: Julian of Norwich, who wrote about God Our Mother in the 14th century.

Hello God; It's Me, Gannet

When I was sixteen and in the 11th grade, I did not believe in God.  Five years of VERY religious Catholic and Protestant boarding schools,  and the result was that I considered religion to be a ludicrous invention of a desperate humanity.  (I have a college student who sees things in the same way.  He has no idea how much consideration I give to him.)

Nevertheless, I do recall one winter night in western Massachusetts, when I stood in the snow on a hillside under a sky filled with stars and asked, "God, who are you and what are you doing?"

In some ways, I am still that girl.  Without the long, long brown hair.

**********

This ~ breast cancer:  surgeries and all the other unpleasantness it entails, months and then the rest of my life being attuned to the possibility of disaster  ~ is turning out to be, in terms of my experience of God, nothing at all like that of three years ago, after Josh died.  

I don't understand what happened three years ago, and went on for months and months  ~ in the expletive deleted middle of seminary ~ but I do see now that it was a dramatic and deep break from anything that I might have thought or imagined about God. Even in my most cynical 16-year-oldness. It was a place so hugely empty, so very dark, so completely lonely, so desperately sad ~ no wonder no one seemed to understand what I was talking about.  And no wonder I was so agitated and angered by some of the nonsensically pious words people tossed my way. Parallel experiences that intersected nowhere.

Now, looking back, I believe that I got to know God a little better.  At least one small, and very silent, dimension of God.  I have a deep sense of God's presence and labor in places where it seems evident that God is not.

I also think that there was some considerable grace there in that I survived to tell the story.  Literally.

**********
A situation is brewing in my little church.  The timing is most unfortunate: Advent, and a pastor learning to navigate post-cancer treatment. Aren't those enough? I am supposed to be the leader, the wisdom figure to whom people will turn.  I have no idea whether they will do that or not.  I am surprisingly calm.  Anesthesia brain or a genuine confidence in God at work?

Who are you and what are you doing?

**********

Humor persists.  I have an appointment with my plastic surgeon this afternoon.  That phrase, "my plastic surgeon" ~ it would completely crack me up if I weren't so exhausted.  (He's very cute, and smart, and funny.  I hope he is as skilled as his reputation indicates).  I am going to have a plastic surgeon in my entourage for a long time.  

Life is bizarre.

**********

Image: There are some kids at church who want to know what God looks like.  The Helix Nebula, I think.

Fourth Question

Yes, I see that the third question is a bit overwhelming.  Since I'm about to go on vacation, I'm going ahead with my answer.  I'll read the others over the course of the day.

My response to the third:

For me, the big question has to do with seeking/finding/encountering ~ being sought by, found, encountered by ~ God.

One of the hallmarks of Ignatian spirituality is that God is in all things. 

When I was making the Spiritual Exercises six years ago, I once heard my spiritual director say, in a public talk, "Well, first you have to find God in some things."

I didn't see either statement as much of a problem.

And then Josh died and my experience was of God in no things.  My experience was of a silence and emptiness so vast that it seemed that I was falling endlessly into a great abyss, falling and falling and falling, and would continue to fall forever.

 I could see that God was plenty available to other people.

Eventually, I began to wander through the new territory in which I found myself in an experiential sense by listening to the spiritual journeys of others.  That's how I knew that God was still interested and involved.

I dove into it in an academic sense by continuing with seminary.  One of my ordination exam essays involved a hypothetical in which several people were engaged in a  discussion with their pastor about whether God is revealed only in Scripture (perhaps a Reformed position), only in Jesus (and, therefore, Scripture ~ a Barthian clarification of the Reformed take), or primarily in nature (certainly a view common among spiritual seekers). 

My Catholic friends may wonder why none of the hypothetical conversationalists took the position that God is revealed through tradition.  That would be because they were hypothetical Presbyterians.

My answer ~ and we had to address such questions with a theological exposition and then a practical response to the individuals in the scenario ~ covered all of the foregoing as well as Celtic Christianity, contemporary Calvin studies, and the Wesleyan quadrilateral, and was deemed, well, a good deal more than acceptable. 

How did I do that in an hour? How at all?   I suppose the response has something to do with the fact that I had just completed my second year in seminary over the course of the year and a half immediately subsequent to Josh's death, a year in which I read and discussed and wrote about everything I studied in the context of those questions:    Is God in all things?  Some things?  Any things?  How does God reveal God's own self? 

Over time and in surprising ways, God's presence ~ to me ~ became profoundly evident.  I think now that one of the basic symptoms of grief is Failure to Notice.  Kind of like failure to thrive in babies.  Not, I would think, a startling revelation. 

And now I am more passionately interested than ever in how the Spirit of God sustains and nourishes us, and how we come to recognize and celebrate that engagement of God with us.

Believe it or not, this all has something to do with colors, cities, landscapes, interiors, and clothes.

The fourth question: How do you connect your answers?

The Silence of God - 2

I am teaching a class on the parables of treasure in the Gospel of Matthew this morning.  Parable: from the Greek verb; from nouns in Old French and Latin: to throw beside, to cast alongside; a comparison.

I have been thinking about some of my own:

The compassion of God is like a  mountaintop above the treeline: devoid of green, buffeted by wind, steady, still, silent, its surface aglow in the moonlight.

The compassion of God is like a lake at dawn: still, silent, deep, with its mysteries submerged below the surface.

The compassion of God is a like a house early in the morning: a still, silent, receptacle of memories and repository of hope.

Image, here.

The Silence of God - 1

What suddenly occurred to me today, out of nowhere:

I think that the silence of God = the compassion of God.

What do you think?

I feel a multiplicity of posts coming on, but not quite yet.

Lent in July

The following is a post from my Desert Year blog, from the summer of 2009.  My husband and I and two of our children had ventured to the wedding of our next-door neighbors' son.  Our own Josh, in love with a Vietnamese-American girl, had died less than a year previous.  Nevertheless, we felt that we should attend this wedding; our children had all grown up together and spent many years running back and forth between the two back yards.  It turned out to be even harder than we  had anticipated, and we've turned down all wedding invitations that have come our way since this one.

I've been thinking (wondering) a lot about happiness and freedom and suffering and God, and when I came across this post today, it suddenly seemed very Lenten.

**********

The wedding is much like one I had once imagined. Simple, elegant, a small crowd in a Catholic church. A quiet, self-possessed groom; family and friends here from Germany. A lovely and delicate bride; family and friends here from Korea.

The groom's grandmother approaches me at the reception. "I don't believe a word of it," she announces. "Ridiculous."

"Weddings?" I ask her. "You've given up on marriage?"

"No, no ~ weddings are fine. The religious stuff. It's absurd."

"Oh. I thought you were Catholic, too."

"Not me. None of that stuff for me. I can't believe that otherwise intelligent people buy into it." She squints up at me. "But I suppose you believe it, don't you?"

"Yes," I say.

"Does it help you; does it give you any comfort?"

"No," I say.

The real answer is actually much more complex. But this is a wedding reception.

"I don't know how you stand it," she says. "I suppose you have to."

I look at her and wonder if I am supposed to have some kind of answer. Some kind of satisfactory explanation of the universe. 

 

She has two daughters, six grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. All well and happy. For the last two weeks, I have been watching her twin great-grandchildren, little towheads here from Germany for the month, playing in the back yard next door, where the groom and his sisters, one of them now the mother of the towheads, grew up. They look exactly like the little people who used to play in my yard. 

 

I don't think that I have any explanation of the universe, satisfactory or otherwise.

"I don't like the mushrooms and I don't like beef, so there's really nothing for me until dinner is served," she says. "I guess I'll get another drink."

Prayer ~ John of the Cross

I'm taking a class for a few weeks on John in the Cross, and for each night two or three of us are asked to prepare prayers or meditations based on the week's reading.  Mine, for tonight:

We would ourselves choose, always, the light. 
We would choose the light sparkling across the water, the sun burning our shoulders, the warmth of friendship, the sparkle of romance. 
We turn on the lights as we enter a dark house, knowing darkness as the place in which we stumble, bump into tables, trip on the stairs.
We instinctively look up when we go out into the dark, seeking illumination from streetlights, from the moon, from the stars.
We choose Orion's Belt over the blackness of space.
We set our sights on the tail of a comet, not on the darkness through which it speeds.
We aim our spaceships for the moon and our telescopes toward Saturn, toward light, toward something ~ not toward emptiness.
And You are in all things -- in the sunlight, in the warmth, in the lights, in the stars and in the planets.
We count on you to be there.
And we cannot see you in the dark.

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We walked and walked in the night.  It was so dark.

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Is this where you nourish your beloved?
Is this where you impart strength?
Is this where your river flows, silently and imperceptibly?

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We walked and walked in the night.  We did not run away.  We walked right into the dark.
We walked into your embrace.
Your silence.
Your stillness.
Your reticence.
Your humility.

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Do you scoop your beloved up in the dark?
Do you catch those who fall in the silence?
Do you embrace those who find themselves wrapped in emptiness?

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You create a space for yourself where we cannot.  Will not.  Do not want.
You seek us completely for yourself, and you give us the dark in which to find you.

Into the Silent Land: The Healing Balm of Silence

My final post in the blogging exchange in which Michelle and I have explored  the book Into the Silent Land is up.

Michelle's will appear here in the next few days and then, we hope, author Marty Laird will weigh in. 

I'm personally hoping that, among other things, he might address the question of context.  As I wrote my previous post, I noticed that in her book When God is Silent, Barbara Brown Taylor says that, "The polyvalence of silence is what makes it so intriguing.  Context is everything."

Now that I've spent months pouring over Into the Silent Land, and many more months than that listening to God's silence, I find myself in disagreement with her.  Context may surprise or perplex us, but God's silence seems to have a quality that transcends all context.

Perhaps we'll get some answers from the Silence Expert.  Or more questions, which would do as well.

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All of our posts are linked in the tab above.

In which I attempt to explain myself . . .

There's a great little story up here, on People for Others, a blog which I enjoy very much.

Today, though, I find that I don't agree with the story.  Because:

There are people look to God for help all the time and pain and suffering still abound.

There are people who do not evince the slightest awareness of God and goodness and grace still abound.

I don't pretend to know what the connection is between the grace of God and the human glance toward God.  

There are people drenched in, saturated with, the grace of God, whose lives are filled with suffering.  People who extend themselves to the furthest inch to contribute to the repair of our world and are rewarded with . . .  more repair work to do.

It seems, in fact, that to know suffering, whether in one's own life or in the lives toward which we offer care,  is one of the surest means for coming to know God.

It also seems that to know or to observe suffering is one of the surest means by which we can drift far from God.

I do not pretend to understand the causal connection, if there is one.

I only wish that the answer were as simple as human effort, or lack thereof.

Slow Reading, Prayer, and Is God in the Desert?

I read a lot, and I usually read very fast.  I just counted and there are 22 books piled up on the floor next to my bed, on the table next to my bed, and in my bed.  (Yes, my favorite place to work is in bed.)  Oops ~ two more under the bed.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that for my daily focused prayer time (which sometimes is daily and sometimes is not, and sometimes is all at once and sometimes takes place in brief periods scattered through the day), I was going to read and journal about two things v-e-r-y  s-l-o-w-l-y.  One, something in Scripture and the other, some kind of classic devotional reading.

I decided on Luke for the Scripture.  I know, the Luke lectionary year is about over, and it might be more sensible to move on to Matthew, but this has nothing to do with work.  This has to do with God and me, and Luke is the gospel filled with healing stories.  I did decide to make one concession to the liturgical year by starting with Luke 4.  I'll go back to the first three chapters during Advent.  So far it's been two weeks and I'm just reaching the end of the Chapter 4.

My other choice is Jean-Pierre de Caussade's The Sacrament of the Present Moment, originally entitled Abandonment to Divine Providence.  I've read it before, via my usual zip-through method, but I thought that it might be a good choice for something more considered.  It's basically a series of letters written by a 17th century Jesuit priest to the nuns to whom he had been appointed spiritual director.  You might be startled to discover how much of what he says applies to a 21st century person seeking to be more attentive to God in the daily.  Two weeks and I'm at page 19.  I 'm doing remarkably well at slowing down, yes?

What has astonished me as I read at this snail's pace is how complimentary these two books are. I read a very short passage in each in the morning or at night or whenever I get around to it, and then use what I've read as the basis for prayer then and through the day, and with almost every set of readings, I say to myself in a surprised inner voice, "They're on the same topic."

You may know that Jesus spends the first portion of Luke 4 in the desert where he is tempted by the devil.  And believe me, that episode reads a good deal differently when you have spent two years as I just have.  But as I was reading de Caussade one night, and trying to grasp what he says about being intensely and completely in the present, I came across a sentence that says, "Thus, the present moment is like a desert in which simple souls see and rejoice only in God." 

And I thought, I don't think that I've ever read or heard anyone say anything about Jesus' forty solitary and tormented days in the parched and barren desert being a time of rejoicing in God.

And, I continued, I'm pretty sure that my Desert Year blog does not represent a time of rejoicing in God.

And then I wondered, Is the desert perhaps not empty, but in fact filled with God?

Memory (Academic Stuff)

One of the last classes I took in seminary was a seminar on the work of Miroslav Volf, a theologian currently at Yale, whose experiences as a Croat in the Balkans have led him to a deep interest in a theology of reconciliation. His current focus is on relationship among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and I initially thought that that would be my focus as well for my paper in the class.

Instead, I became engaged by his work on memory, found largely in the book The End of Memory.  His thesis is that much of the emphasis we place on memory of wrongs is misguided; that while we need to "remember rightly" in order to effect restoration and reconciliation, the ultimate purpose of right memory is to forget the wrongs we have perpetrated and suffered.  Quite a controversial viewpoint, as you can imagine, and we had some lively discussions about it.  Here's something of the gist of what he has to say (I've left out my footnotes):

"Ultimately, he argues, the purpose of memory is reconciliation and its consequence is forgetting – not the creation of a self-sustaining narrative, not healing, and not justice or prevention of future harm. All of those are important objectives, but they are waystops on the road to reconciliation.  Volf does not at all diminish their importance; in fact, he puts considerable effort into articulating the conditions under which memory serves those purposes.  Rightful memory requires both effort and integrity: it demands that we identify and condemn wrongdoing, that we look at our own culpability as well as that of those who have wronged us, that we practice the double vision that will enable us to see things from their side, and that we not exaggerate the harm done to us any more than that we minimize it. Nonrightful memory produces truncated healing; healing based upon falsehood rather than upon naming and condemning wrongdoing is not healing.When acknowledgment does not take place and healing is incomplete, justice is not served.  In other words, a simple “forgive and forget” does not suffice.  However, the memory of harms suffered may cause harm, in the form of retaliatory violence or continued inward trauma,rather than promote good; the insistence upon remembering the Holocaust, or 9/11, or the Japanese occupation of Korea, or personal trauma, may foster justice but, quite possibly, or even likely in the short run, justice without reconciliation."

It got even more interesting when we reached Volf's argument that, in the world to come, we will forget even the crucifixion.  More from my paper:

"One of the most startling aspects of Volf’s argument with respect to forgetting is that we will forget even the crucifixion; that it will not come to mind.While this idea also meets with resistance, as many have been taught that it is by the cross and by his wounds that we shall know him, the evidence of that in the Bible is scant insofar as the eschaton is concerned.  The direct evidence, as Volf points out, is found in Isaiah 65:17-19  and in Revelation 21:1-4 :  in the new heaven and the new earth to come, there will be no more weeping, and every tear will be wiped away.  It seems unlikely that all tears could be dried if the memory of wrongs suffered were still present; in the latter situation, there would never be an end to tears.  If, however, we understand Jesus as the one who both forgives and restores, the one who acts on both sides of the reconciliation equation, forgiving those 'who know not what they do' and substituting himself for those who have done wrong and from whom restitution is required, then his work is to eradicate death and create a Kingdom of Life – identified as the new heaven and new earth.  We then, will know him in the eschaton as the giver of life rather than as the victor over death, suffering and death no longer being possibilities.  We ourselves will necessarily be transformed into new beings, beings who no longer remember the cross, because we will love God for who God is rather than for what God has done for us."

As I noted in my paper (more footnotes), nearly everyone with whom I discussed it as I was writing it was at least disturbed by what he has to say.  Most simply rejected it outright, whether with respect to themselves and identities formed, at least in part,  by much suffering, or with respect to the crucifixion.

I am quite taken by what he has to say, however:

"Perhaps it is a testimony both to how much we suffer and how outraged we are by our suffering that we are so resistant to his suggestion.

            

Or  perhaps our resistance is an indication of how little we understand about what God desires in offering us reconciliation through Jesus Christ, and of our inability to imagine, let alone accept, that reconciliation means transformation to an extent beyond our comprehension.  Even here, in this life, our identity is to be found in our baptism; as Volf says, 'we are not fundamentally the sum of our past experiences.'  With Luther, Volf says that to be only our past would be to be very small indeed.  That is an outrageous idea to the contemporary mind; we do not think of ourselves and our lives as small, and we are as a culture unaccustomed to thinking of God as vast.  However, Volf is suggesting that we have it backwards and that, if we could but understand the vast self-giving love into which we are invited, we would see that to leave our traumas behind would be not a sacrifice of self but a receiving of ourselves as the people we were originally intended to be."

Why am I inserting all this today?  (Be grateful that it's not the entire paper!)  Well, as you can imagine, I think and wonder about it all the time.  And I wanted to share some music, which is better understood in light of the above.  If there is an ordination service in my future, I hope to fit it in there somewhere: