practice resurrection

Advent Diary (Don't Act Natural)

I think I may have posted a link to this article before, but I came across it again as I was making a sweep of some papers needing to be filed.  It's a reflection from Rabbi Shais Taub:

"So if you would like to see a miracle, I would say that in very down-to-earth terms it means a person who has come to think, feel, of behave in a way that is uncharacteristic of themselves.  It is a re-setting of the default personality.  And that is literally supernatural."

I've been a little inwardly jaded lately on the ability of people, more accurately systems made up of people, to change.  It seems to me lately that even the smallest conflicts have folks hunkering down to fight.  So how is it going to be possible for us to take on the bigger, more serious problems we face?  Rabbi Taub says that getting human beings to act naturally isn't hard at all, what is seemingly impossible is getting us to act against our defalt position.  We do not easily seek out the incomfortable thing.

I think this may be a theme for me this Advent, acting against instinct, seeking the uncomfortable, not acting naturally.

Orchestral Music in Casual Wear is Much Hipper

 

A Letter from Bank of America

An Apology to Our Customers

(The Borowitz Report) – The following letter was sent today by Bank of America to all of its debit card customers:

Dear Valued Customer:

As most of you probably know by now, last month we instituted a $5 monthly fee for all of our debit card users.  To say that what followed this decision was a shitstorm would be a massive understatement.

Considering that just three years earlier taxpayers had bailed us out with billions of their hard-earned dollars, it’s understandable that Bank of America was compared to a person who, as he is pulled from a burning building, turns and kicks the fireman in the nuts.

That’s why we are writing to you today with a simple message: “Our bad.”  And to tell you that we are refunding the $5 to you, effective immediately.  All you have to do is pay a simple, one-time $10 refund fee.

You can receive your refund online, or pick it up at your nearest Bank of America branch, where a teller will hand the money directly to you for a simple, one-time $15 handling fee.

If you do visit your branch, feel free to use any of our services, including our state of the art ballpoint pens and deposit slips.  (Prices on request.)

Again, accept our apologies for instituting the debit card fee.  We have learned our lesson, and we make this solemn promise: next time we squeeze money from you, we'll do it in a way you won’t notice.

Sincerely,

Bank of America

 

My Soul Longs For the Sabbath

My Soul Longs For the Sabbath (by Christopher Giffen, January 08)

I want to rest from being who everyone else knows me to be.

I want to rest from being put together and up to speed
– I want to fall apart and to fall behind.
I want to stop making the same mistakes
– the ones I make when I never stop.
I want to stop hurting people for a time
– and to mourn and to cry.
I want to be suspended between the strong tall towers of obligation
– in a hammock dreaming.

I want to float where I have stumbled,
dance where I am chained,
lose where I have found.

I want to say NO where my dutiful YES has chimed forth!
I want to have six devoted days worthy of a holy seventh!
I want to lay down the burden of my ego in the soft warm cradle of tenderness!
I want to know the truth, and to speak the truth and to let it destroy me!

I want to stop measuring my worthiness and “love-ability”
– and be weak and powerful and naked.
I want to release my strength and kneel down
– still and silent as it crumbles into deep dark soil.
I want to dangle on the branches of my life’s deepest purpose
– and to ripen into richest colour and flavour.

I want to need someone again,
I want to need someone again.

I want to give away what I have kept,
fall down from where I have climbed,
receive the deepest blessing of inheritance
which is mine to share with another
in the wide restful heart of the Sabbath.

And I want to stop wanting.

Don't Surrender Your Loneliness So Quickly

by Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz (c. 1320-1389)

Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

from Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives, by Wayne Muller, Bantam Books, 1999

You Might Need this Friday

 

Pacing the Cage

Bruce Cockburn (prounounced co-burn) is a songwriter out of Canada who over the years has moved me.  The song of his most indelibly burned into my mind is called "Pacing the Cage."  There are some wonderful images in his text:

"ive proven who I am so many times/ the magnetic strips worn thin/ and each time I was someone else/ and everyone was taken in"

But it's the refrain that in these past few years has come to mean a great deal to me--Pacing the Cage.  For a few years now I have lived in Shawnee longer than I've lived in any other location in my life. When that sort of stability emerges in your life there is an internal rythmn disrupted.  We no longer find ourselves moving every few years, typical of the college/grad school/early job phase of life.  For a very long time my life was predominantly about preparing for what was next.  There was always the task of being fully present in the moment, but there was also an escape hatch not too far down the road; the next degree, the next move, the next, the next.  

So there is an internal adjustment you have to make when you finally end up in the place where you are going to end up.  And every so often you find yourself pacing the cage.

I'm reading through Kathleen Norris' book, Acedia & Me, a series of reflections on the condition that the monastic traditon refers to as acedia.  It isn't quite boredom, it isn't quite depression, it isn't quite apathy, but it has an aproximation to all of those things.  She reflects on the 4th Century monk Evagrius Ponticus' description of this elusive state:

"...I had discovered a description of something that had plagued me for years but had never been able to name.  As any reader of fairy tales can tell you, not knowing the name of your enemy, be it a troll, a demon, or an "issue," puts you at great disadvantage, and learning the name can help to set you free.  "He's describing half my life," I thought to myself.  To discover and ancient monk's account of accedia that so closely matched an experience I had at the age of fifteen did seem a fairy-tale moment.  To find my deliverer, not a knight in shining armor, but a gnarled dessert dweller, as stern as they come, only bolstered my conviction that God is a true comedian."

I'm not experiencing such torpor these days, though I have in the past.  My life right now is fomenting with relationships and meaningful work.  But I do find myself in an awkward place of not knowing what my life and work will look like in the next few months.  I'm finishing up my seminary studies with my Episcopal Diocese and approaching ordination.  Where I will be next as a deacon and then a priest is up in the air.  It may to continue right where I am, it may be somewhere else.  It is a strange kind of limbo where I hold the work of a life-well-lived right where you are planted in tension with the unkown of the near future.  It one of those detail-oriented aspects of faith.  I'm pretty good with the big aspects of faith, the cosmic ones, I have more trouble with the day to day stuff.  But God knows such things and continues to abide regardless.  

"ive proven who I am so many times/ the magnetic strips worn thin/ and each time I was someone else/ and everyone was taken in"

I'm not sure if I want to start over.  A recalibration always has its advantages, and I know I can muster up the energy to do it.  God knows I've made enough msitakes in this town that a fresh invention wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen.  But I also know that one of the tenets of monastic commitment is that of stability--obedience, chastity, poverty and stability.  Such things often leave us pacing our cages, but they can also reap a reward that only happens over time, an authenticity to relationships that comes only when you push through the torpor, the boredom, the conflict and the depression.  It is that kind of life that requires us to surrender our imgaginaitons and wills over to the will of God.  And that is the real kind of work that I am called to, God will do the rest.

Sunset is an angel weeping
Holding out a bloody sword
No matter how I squint I cannot
Make out what it's pointing toward
Sometimes you feel like you live too long 
Days drip slowly on the page
You catch yourself
Pacing the cage

I've proven who I am so many times
The magnetic strip's worn thin
And each time I was someone else
And every one was taken in
Powers chatter in high places
Stir up eddies in the dust of rage
Set me to pacing the cage

I never knew what you all wanted
So I gave you everything
All that I could pillage
All the spells that I could sing
It's as if the thing were written 
In the constitution of the age
Sooner or later you'll wind up
Pacing the cage

Sometimes the best map will not guide you 
You can't see what's round the bend
Sometimes the road leads through dark places 
Sometimes the darkness is your friend
Today these eyes scan bleached-out land 
For the coming of the outbound stage
Pacing the cage 
Pacing the cage 

 

I Figure Someone Might Need this Tuesday

Tom Petty - Something Good Coming

 

 

I'm Religious, Not Spiritual.

This is a reposted repost from the Episcopal Cafe, but I sure can relate to her breakdown of the "spiritual, not religious" gammit.  I was bemused once when a fellow clergy person introduced herself to me as "religious, not spiritual."  My immediate thought was, we are SO going to be friends. --TS

UCC pastor Lillian Daniel writes on the regular encounters with the person who, upon hearing she's a minister, declares him/herself to be "spiritual, but not religious."

Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo. Next thing you know, he's telling me that he finds God in the sunsets...

Like people who go to church don't see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature.

 

Harsh? Probably. Funny and accurate? Oh yes: I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me. Rev. Daniel goes on to make her point:

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.

She has a point, but I would add a caveat: eight times out of ten, what the person telling me that they are spiritual but not religious is really trying to do is justify to me (clergy) why they don't go to church. And behind that reason, usually, is either wounded (or turned off) personal experience, or world fed assumptions about religion.

In truth, they owe me no explanation: as Rev. Daniel said, the spiritual not religious viewpoint is "now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture."

However, there is opportunity here. Engaging in the conversation is a great place to be interrupted by God. By asking things like "Can you tell me more about your Spiritual life?" or "How does it impact your daily life choices?", I not only learn their language for God, but I actively help break the stereotype that clergy have (or think they have) all of the answers.

There is also the invitation to talk about the value of religious community.

After all, in the term "spirituality", most people are referring to their encounters with the holy and divine. By saying that they are "not religious", they are telling me that they are not part of an established way of understanding the meaning. I think this comes from an assumption that religion primarily defines rules for where one is to see God, what one is to believe, and how one is to live.

I think this understanding misses what religion is supposed to be about. Religion, at its base, is asking the "so what" questions that often comes from the spiritual encounter: what meaning does this have, what does this point to in terms of the world, how does it affect the way I live my life, and what does it say about my relationships to others.

Additionally, the word "religion" assumes community. Human beings grow and are challenged by the depth of their interactions with each other. Hearing the viewpoints of others (even if we don't come to agreement) keeps us from wrongly assuming that we have the complete picture, and holds us accountable both to further relationship with others and committed to personal growth. Within the context of a "religious way", we wrestle with not only the lives of other people living in today's world, but also with the recorded struggles of peoples past.

It is worth remembering that "the Church" often fails to remember that the "so what" questions are far from answered, and that our offering to the world is the opportunity to explore the fabric of life's meaning within the context of community (past, present & future).

And people might just discover the promise in being religious...

 

Office to Office

Moving ever more so closely to ordained life in the Episcopal Church, I am reminded that one of the practices the tradition invites? requires? encourages?  us to do is to pray the Morning Office; a guided prayer that includes readings from the the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as well as guided prayers. The practice connects us to God, together with the larger American Episcopal Church and remotely to the world-wide Anglican Communion.  And when I do it, I like the way it frames my day and gives it structure and focus.  So, I've been trying to make it a daily habit, as well as evening prayer around the dinner hour (though with a family I find that to be a greater challenge).

I missed it this morning.

I got distracted by the usual things, Facebook, News Aggregators, morning radio.  Eventually, I ended up getting ready for work, but decided firsts to take my latest Newsweek into the bath-tub (yes, I am "that guy"), the one with the highly criticized photo of Michelle Bachman on the cover, looking a bit crazed.  I wanted to get up-to-speed on the news before heading to the parish, having been out of town all last week in the desert on retreat.

The story that I got stuck on was Sarah J. Robbins' account about three remarkable women, Dr. Hawa Abdi and her two physician daughters.  Dr. Abdi runs a hospital turned refugee camp in Mogadishu, the former capital of Somolia, now desimated by Clan wars and anarchy.  Hawa's story is riveting, as is the unbelievable suffering that is sadly common in that region. 

When I finished the story, I got dressed and headed out the door.  The sobering nature of such things makes me refocus, and examine small things, like how I plan to spend my money today and what things I choose to care about.  How will I spend my energy today?

I missed the Daily Office from the prayer book, but I still managed to encounter a daily office of sorts.  The Spirit finds a way if we will be open and embrace what we are given--and even better when we choose to act upon something that same Spirit might be asking us to do.