Writing What I See

Friday, July 10, 2020

When I was a new priest, Bishop Gulick wisely counseled me to remember that my work is to plant seeds-- seeds of love, and mercy, and justice—seeds of God’s dream for our world. A few of the seeds will grow, he explained, but you won’t necessarily get to see the blossoms or claim the harvest for yourself. Yours is only the planting, he warned me. I needed to hear these words, but never more so than during this Pandemic. I’m finding that it’s hard to putter around at home, or sit in front of the computer, doing mundane things, surviving, while the world around me comes unglued. Tending my own little garden feels so inconsequential. It’s easy to forget about the mysterious potentiality of seeds.

One summer, I got the notion to plant some flowers in a lovely container on my patio. I bought a package of seeds and scattered the small dirt-brown specks all over the rich potting soil. I could immediately picture in my mind’s eye the tall, beautiful potential blossoms; I could smell their sweet scent and could imagine them waving softly in the summer breeze. The next day, however, my two-year-old nephew came to town for a visit. Puttering around my patio, he spied my planter, and mischief glimmered in his eyes. I explained to him that he should leave the pot alone, since I had just planted flowers in it …. But despite my clear warnings, he couldn’t put together in his mind the “flowers” that he heard me describe, and the empty reality that he saw in the nice “miniature sandbox” right at his level. In the blink of an eye, my bountiful flower “harvest” lay scattered in clumps on the concrete and clung to sweaty two-year-old fists. In the simplicity of his vision, my little nephew didn’t grasp the glorious potential of seeds.

Without experience and practice, we, like my nephew, have trouble seeing potentiality. When faith tells us one thing and we seem to see another, we’re left squinting and rubbing our eyes in mistrust. We claim, for example, that the Church is the body of Christ—yet often when we gather, we see very imperfect humans struggling to work together. We talk about Eternal Life and Resurrection, and yet we watch loved ones suffer and die. We read about signs of God’s Kingdom, yet every day we pass by signs of injustice and oppression. It’s easy to respond like Sarah, laughing as God tells her that she will give birth to nations. All that she can see is the wrinkled, sagging skin of her old age. How much easier it is to walk through the fields and point out the worm-eaten sprouts and shriveled leaves around us that it is to speak confidently of the abundant yield to come.

In today’s parable, Jesus is trying to wake us up, to encourage us to look at everyday life around us in a new and different light. He shouts, “Let anyone who has ears to hear, hear!” In other words, “Pay attention!” Right now, as you watch your neighbors go about the business of sowing their crops, the compact little seeds of God’s new creation are also being sown. At this moment. All over. In all kinds of places. Not just in the places that you would expect. Not just in the favorable places, or in the places where you like to look for them, but everywhere.” In his parable, Jesus presents to our imaginations not only the seeds that withered and the seeds that were choked, but he opens our minds to the seeds that are still growing up and increasing, with ever greater and greater yields.

Seeing potentiality, and living by it, is a spiritual discipline. Not long ago, I came across the night-time prayer that Eleanor Roosevelt used as she took a key role in the creation of the universal declaration of human rights. This strong woman of action prayed at night, “Make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us … Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.”^{^[1]} It is interesting to note that Roosevelt’s drive to work for change in the world was accompanied by her nightly practice of praying to be made aware of potentiality. She sat, day after day, week after week, in a room full of harsh cold War rhetoric, dealing with soaring egos, inept governments, and impossibly lofty ideals. Yet, at night, her prayer kept her eyes open to the potentiality of one-hundred-fold yields. Seeing the world as God sees it, as “a world made ever new,” Roosevelt was able to persevere in her work for justice and human rights.

Did you ever stop to think that “potential” and “power” share the same root? Think of the word “potent,” like a “potent drug.” Potentiality is a channel of power—the kind of paradoxical power that makes a baby born in a manger the King of Kings. It’s the kind of paradoxical power that makes a mustard seed’s worth of goodness into the hope of the universe. Living into potentiality doesn’t mean just sitting back and imagining some vague and easy flowering that will probably come someday, without any effort on our parts. Neither does it mean flinging dirt around like my young nephew, ignoring the seeds that God has planted in our midst. Living into potentiality will take time and prayer, persistence and practice. Living our routine lives these days, one day at a time, we can choose. We can look around and take note of all the cracks and weeds and thorns around us. Or we can look around and start noticing the divine potential within. We can pray for the Light that will allow us to see ourselves and others as God sees us, filled with infinite possibilities.

I’m going to try praying Roosevelt’s prayer this month, and I invite you to join me. “Save us from ourselves, and show us a vision of a world made new.” Each evening, as I look back over the day, I want to picture the small seeds of love, mercy, and justice that I have seen scattered that day across the varied landscape of my world. And I will spend time imagining the abundant possibilities that await each one. How can I live in such a way as to foster those potentialities? How can I nurture those seeds?

Perhaps, as Jesus cries out to us, “Pay attention! The seed is being scattered here!” we will have been trained by faithful spiritual practice to reach for a basket and start tossing out huge handfuls of seeds all along our way.

[1] In Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), unnumbered page.

Friday, June 5, 2020

Beyond the Binary

Trinity Sunday, Year A

Us versus them. Black versus white. Republican versus Democrat. Police versus protestor. Christian Right versus Christian Left. American versus foreigner. Do you notice anything about how we are identifying ourselves in our turbulent times? There is a definite binary, isn’t there? One pushing over here. One pushing back over there. And in between the two—the chasm of broken relationship, a diminishment of wholeness and possibility.

Parents and teachers know what happens in binary relationship gone wrong. I once knew a father who believed that firm parental authority alone was the way to raise a good child. From the time his little son could crawl and grab, this father issued one loud command after another from his easy chair across the room. “Don’t touch that,” the father would bellow, raising his head from his book. A few minutes later, the exploring child would again be startled by a loud, “Leave it alone!” Day after day. The baby learned quickly. When the father issued a command, the baby—yet unable to talk--would raise up on his knees, head held high, and holler back with an angry, “Ahhhh” as loudly as his father had. He would then proceed to touch the offending objects. The stand-off usually resulted in a spanking … and a broken father-son bond.

Every good teacher knows that a power struggle between teacher and student, or teacher and class, is to be avoided at all cost. A two-sided clash of wills, once engaged, demands a winner and a loser. Either the teacher must crush her student’s will—and lose his trust—or she quickly loses her authority and her ability to maintain order in the room. As a new teacher, I once issued a standard threat to an incorrigible child in the lunch line.

“Straighten up, or I’ll call your parents,” I snapped.

His cutting reply, “Good, please do. At least then they’ll know I’m alive” sucked the life out of both of us.

Locked in a binary world, we are in desperate need of the “threeness” of the Trinity.^{^[1]} The way in which we imagine God is of more consequence for our lives than we often give it credit. For example, if we imagine God as a harsh Judge, we too will value harsh judgements of self and other. If we picture God as ruler of all things, we will place less emphasis on human freedom. What does it mean for us, then, to describe God as a trio of persons, a trio moving together in an energetic, joyful dance? What does it mean to imagine a holy Trinity engaged in pouring love back and forth in an endless circle, like water into an overflowing cup? To imagine God as a community of three, a unity in the multiplicity of relationship, breaks through the stuckness of binaries. As we heard in our first lesson, all of creation is good, made in the image of the Creator. All of creation participates in God’s community of outpouring love and generativity. For the very essence of God to be a harmonious outpouring of love within Godself means that we too are created for the “threeness” of relatedness in community. The question, of course, is how we human beings live into our own “threeness.”

Educator Parker Palmer proposes that we need a “third thing” in human interaction.^{^[2]} Pointing away from ourselves toward a third object, we find common ground. Focusing attention on a third thing outside of the binary levels the playing field. Many families consciously create such a “third thing” with which to negotiate their lives together: a set of family “rules” or guidelines. Monastic communities adhere to a “rule of life.” Teachers write a shared “classroom covenant” with their students. When disagreements arise, there is an accepted outside arbitrator to guide negotiations. In modern times, the social contract often serves even more widely as such a “third thing,” a shared reference with which an entire nation tacitly agrees to align itself.

As we know all too well, the problems arise when the “third thing” is devised unfairly, in such a way that some members are privileged over others. Such a covenant serves only to reinforce injustice and discord. If a family rule of life privileges the older child over the younger, or the parents over the children, then conflict is inevitable. When a social contract such as ours is built on a foundation of bondage and racial injustice, it is untenable. It can’t legitimately serve as a focal point for a just society.

And yes ... How easy it becomes for the ones in power to clear the way for themselves with violent and unjust actions. They can push into the binary with military force and then claim victory by holding up a Bible, pointing to its closed cover as if they are offering the “third thing” that can create common ground. Instead, a true “third thing” must be set in the middle of what Palmer calls a “circle of trust.” It must be placed in the midst of a circle where all are safe, valued, and included. We base our children’s Sunday School program in such a circle of trust. In the Godly Play classroom, children don’t focus on the teacher and his content. Instead, everyone sits in a circle on the floor, all at the same level. Together, story-teller and students are focused on simple objects that tell the story found inside of the Bible, the story of our relationship with our loving, Triune God. They listen together to what God might be telling each of them through the story, and then wonder together about what it might mean. The gentle open-endedness of this method is sometimes disconcerting to adults, used to the direct binary of right and wrong answers. But the outpouring of sharing and the focus on what lies “in between,” opens the space to a deeper kind of understanding.

On this Trinity Sunday, strife in our nation and even in our St. Andrew’s community has only strengthened our harmful binaries. It’s time for us to sit down together to create circles of trust. It’s time to “bind unto ourselves the strong Name of the Trinity.” It’s time to submit ourselves to the loving, creative relationality of our God. In today’s lesson from II Corinthians, St. Paul is also writing to a deeply divided community, where factions are set one against the other. Paul ends his letter with a blessing. It is a blessing that bestows upon them the health and wholeness of a God who is loving relationship: the living trinity of outpouring grace, of love, and of fellowship. In such a blessing lies our hope, the reparation of broken relationship. May “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with [us] all.”

[1] In her book God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity, Sarah Coakley also talks about God’s “threeness” disrupting our “twoness.”

^{^[2]}Parker J. Palmer, “Common Ground and Third Things,” December 8, 2015, found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEkqIBgXlOU.

Saturday, May 9, 2020

When It Will Never Be The Same Again

Each morning when I wake up, I hear the birds chirping happily outside my window, and I open my eyes to the soft morning light. Then it hits me, and I remember: The latest news. The deaths. The injustices. The hatred. The mistrust. The suffering. The risks. The losses. The pandemic. A gnawing uncertainty begins to churn inside me. The grief begins to prickle around my heart. And the questions begin to rise and swirl around in my brain: Where is my old life going? Where are my children’s lives going? Where is my country going? Where is my Church going? I thought I knew. But my old world seems to be slipping quietly away into a future that I can’t pin down. Will I survive? How will I find God in this “new normal?”

Today’s Gospel is made for times like this. The passage from John that we just heard is part of what scholars call Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse.” It’s the intimate conversation that Jesus has with his disciples on the evening that we now call Maundy Thursday—during their last meal together. The meal where he washes their feet like a slave would do. The meal where he offers them his flesh to eat and his blood to drink. The meal before he is taken away to be crucified. After this night, they will never be together in the same way again.

It will never be the same again. These are the words that we dread hearing, aren’t they? The disciples’ questions are tinged with their dread for the future. Their thoughts drown in uncertainty. Peter asks outright, “Lord, where are you going? Why can’t I come with you?” Thomas worries, “If you are already gone, then how can we find our way to you?” Philip frets, “Can you at least show us what it’s going to look like?”

Jesus’ heart is breaking as he watches them deal with the pain and grief that is filling their lives. He tries to comfort them, to tell them that he isn’t leaving them alone, that he loves them and that they will still be together somehow. “I’ve got this,” Jesus reassures them. “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust in me. You don’t need to know the way. I am the way, the truth, and the life. You might think that you can live life all on your own, that you can be in control of the future, that you can hang on to things that are passing away. But you can’t. It is through me, not on your own power, that you come to the Father.

It’s a shame how some Christians have misinterpreted these words of comfort that Jesus speaks from the depths of his pain and the depths of his love for us. They have made the caring words into judging words. “Ya’ gotta believe in Jesus to be saved,” these preachers say. “Jesus says right here in the bible, ‘You come to the Father only through me.’” But that’s not it at all! As Frederick Buechner writes: “[Jesus] does not say the church is the way. He does not say his teachings are the way … He does not say religion is the way, not even the religion that bears his name. He says he himself is the way. And he says that the truth is … the truth of being truly human as he was truly human and thus at the same time truly God's. And the life we are dazzled by in him, haunted by in him, nourished by in him is a life so full of aliveness and light that not even the darkness of death could prevail against it.”[1]

So often we Christians turn trust in Jesus into belief in doctrines. We turn the richness of abundant life in God into “sweet pie in the sky by and by” in heaven. Eternal life is not merely a future promise, however. The risen Christ leaves the linear world of timelines and maps behind. The risen Christ is everywhere at once, with us in each present moment. He is by our side in our pain and in our joy right now. He is by our side in the shadowy future that we have yet to experience. In Jesus’ loving presence, we can put our trust. In Jesus’ loving presence, we will find the life in life, as well as the life in death.

Like Thomas and Philip, it’s normal for us to want more particulars, however. How will we know it’s Jesus who is with us? How will we know our role in this new world? How will it all work? Jesus tells us that in him, we have seen God. If we want to know what life in God looks like, it’s right before our eyes in the story of Jesus’ life and death. We see Jesus eat with sinners, welcome tax collectors and prostitutes, touch the unclean, and call the little children to his side. We see him suffer and sacrifice his life for a different kind of Kingdom, opposed to the powers and principalities of this world. We see him die and yet still rise again. We hear him say that the single new commandment that he has for us is that we love one another. “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “the one who trusts in me will also do the loving, healing works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.” Where we see these works, yesterday, today and tomorrow, we find God and recognize Christ in our midst.

Recently, Dr. Rachel Easterwood was standing by the bedside of a patient struggling to breathe with Covid-19 in a busy New York City hospital. The patient was alone, unable to speak, and suffering. The doctor, who had trained as a classical clarinetist before going to med school, had an idea. She called a musician friend of hers on the other side of the country and asked her to play something and Facetime it through her iPhone for this patient. All of a sudden, beauty and peace flowed into a room filled with fear, pain, and the mechanical sounds of medical equipment. The music made such a difference to this patient that Dr. Easterwood continues her ministry in the midst of the Covid crisis. She has a network of musician friends—including a pianist right here at U of L—who have volunteered to play whenever a patient is especially alone or afraid. She just dials them up on her phone and places the phone next to a patient. Transcending time and place, the music, like God’s love, enters the nooks and crannies of our need. “It’s how we can hold [the patients’] hands right now,” one of the musicians said.

In an interview, Dr. Easterwood explained that when she first heard the music bring spiritual relief to a patient, all of a sudden she felt that everything she had done in her life had led her to that moment. Before, surrounded by death, she had felt helpless. Now, she mused, “If I don’t make it, I’ve done what I’m supposed to do.”[2] She has also done what Jesus asks of us: the work of love.

When I worry in the wee hours where my life is going, perhaps the only way to find out is indeed to trust in Jesus—and then to join the birds outside my window, pouring what I have left out into the world like a song.

[1] Frederick Buechner, “Let Jesus Show,” Day 1, December 29, 2014. Found at https://day1.org/articles/5d9b820ef71918cdf2003b4f/let_jesus_show.

[2] “Concert for One,” found at https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000007092240/coronavirus-covid-patients-classical-music.html