Becoming more Christ-like

"Something Christlike" was the way John Buchanan opened his editorial in the July 29th edition of Christian Century. In it he outlines the recent history of Holy Apostles Episcopal church in New York City, and says rather plainly that we could use with more churches practicing what we preach. An excerpt of Buchanan's piece:

The version of Christianity that appears in the media often embarrasses me: it's narrow, sectarian, exclusive and sometimes mean-spirit. So it was a joy to find in the May 26 New Yorker an article by novelist Ian Frazier about a church being a church in the best sense.

Frazier conducts a weekly writing workshop at a church soup kitchen in New York City, and he regularly encounters gifted men and women who, for one reason or another, are homeless and hungry. The Church of the Holy Apostles is a landmark, with a high arched ceiling and gorgeous stained-glass windows. Over the years the Episcopal congregation dwindled in size as the neighborhood changed until the 200 members could no longer afford to pay the bills to keep it going. A new rector suggested that "if Holy Apostles is going out of business, it might as well do some good before it does."

So in 1982 the church launched a free-lunch program. Thirty-five people showed up. The program grew and attracted more people and outside support. In a few years the congregation was serving 900 lunches daily and bursting the seams of its mission house.

...

The program rules are simple: no proselytizing and no one turned away. If anyone wants more food, that person can go outside, stand in line, get another ticket and eat again. Frazier asked Elizabeth Maxwell of the Holy Apostles staff about the religious motivation behind the program. She said: "well, we do this because Jesus said to feed the hungry. There's no more to it than that. Jesus told us to take care of the poor and hungry and those in prison ... In all the intricacies of scriptural interpretation, that message -- feed the hungry -- could not be more clear. Those of us at Holy Apostles feel we have a Sunday-Monday connection. The bread and wine of the Eucharist we share on Sunday becomes the food we share with our neighbors during the week.

It seems so plain to me that we as Christians, and we working within the church, have a huge job before us. The world does not perceive us the way we perceive ourselves. Buchanan puts it, "Maybe the world would find churches more interesting and compelling if they showed something of the love of Jesus in their lives and practices."

I was reminded of our need for this in the recently completed class I have been teaching at Iolani schools during the summer. I have before me 17 high school students who are enrolled in a "required" class on the bible. For the last few years I have included a question on the final that asks whether the student thinks that Christianity (based on our reading of the New Testament) is inherently exclusivist and intolerant of other religions. The question has added poignance because many of the students come from non-Christian or completely secular homes.

This year, more than in past years, I was startled to read on perhaps a quarter of the answers, some version of a view that while Islam was accepting of other religions, Christianity was essentially intolerant.

I thought to myself that the view reflected the perceptions of the younger population that was utterly at variance with the perception of another (older) slice of our population, one that would see Christianity as essentially tolerant and accepting of everyone, "Christ-like hospitality."

The message for me is similar to what I find powerfully expressed in a story that originates with Tony Campolo. He tells a true story. The punchline probably goes back at least to G.K. Chesterton, that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried.

I encountered Campolo's story first in a book by Philip Yancey, but variations of the story have apparently been circulated broadly. It goes like this (from /www.swapmeetdave.com):

A few years ago Tony flew to Hawaii to speak at a conference. The way he tells it, he checks into his hotel and tries to get some sleep. Unfortunately, his internal clock wakes him at 3:00 a.m. The night is dark, the streets are silent, the world is asleep, but Tony is wide awake and his stomach is growling.

He gets up and prowls the streets looking for a place to get some bacon and eggs for an early breakfast. Everything is closed except for a grungy dive in an alley. He goes in and sits down at the counter. The fat guy behind the counter comes over and asks, "What d'ya want?"

Well, Tony isn't so hungry anymore so eying some donuts under a plastic cover he says, "I'll have a donut and black coffee."

As he sits there munching on his donut and sipping his coffee at 3:30, in walk eight or nine provocative, loud prostitutes just finished with their night's work. They plop down at the counter and Tony finds himself uncomfortably surrounded by this group of smoking, swearing hookers. He gulps his coffee, planning to make a quick getaway. Then the woman next to him says to her friend, "You know what? Tomorrow's my birthday. I'm gonna be 39." To which her friend nastily replies, "So what d'ya want from me? A birthday party? Huh? You want me to get a cake, and sing happy birthday to you?"

The first woman says, "Aw, come on, why do you have to be so mean? Why do you have to put me down? I'm just sayin' it's my birthday. I don't want anything from you. I mean, why should I have a birthday party? I've never had a birthday party in my whole life. Why should I have one now?"

Well, when Tony Campolo heard that, he said he made a decision. He sat and waited until the women left, and then he asked the fat guy at the counter, "Do they come in here every night?"

"Yeah," he answered.

"The one right next to me," he asked, "she comes in every night?"

"Yeah," he said, "that's Agnes. Yeah, she's here every night. She's been comin' here for years. Why do you want to know?"

"Because she just said that tomorrow is her birthday. What do you think? Do you think we could maybe throw a little birthday party for her right here in the diner?"

A cute kind of smile crept over the fat man's chubby cheeks. "That's great," he says, "yeah, that's great. I like it." He turns to the kitchen and shouts to his wife, "Hey, come on out here. This guy's got a great idea. Tomorrow is Agnes' birthday and he wants to throw a party for her right here."

His wife comes out. "That's terrific," she says. "You know, Agnes is really nice. She's always trying to help other people and nobody does anything nice for her."

So they make their plans. Tony says he'll be back at 2:30 the next morning with some decorations and the man, whose name turns out to be Harry, says he'll make a cake.

At 2:30 the next morning, Tony is back. He has crepe paper and other decorations and a sign made of big pieces of cardboard that says, "Happy Birthday, Agnes!" They decorate the place from one end to the other and get it looking great. Harry had gotten the word out on the streets about the party and by 3:15 it seemed that every prostitute in Honolulu was in the place. There were hookers wall to wall.

At 3:30 on the dot, the door swings open and in walks Agnes and her friend. Tony has everybody ready. They all shout and scream "Happy Birthday, Agnes!" Agnes is absolutely flabbergasted. She's stunned, her mouth falls open, her knees started to buckle, and she almost falls over.

And when the birthday cake with all the candles is carried out, that's when she totally loses it. Now she's sobbing and crying. Harry, who's not used to seeing a prostitute cry, gruffly mumbles, "Blow out the candles, Agnes. Cut the cake."

So she pulls herself together and blows them out. Everyone cheers and yells, "Cut the cake, Agnes, cut the cake!"

But Agnes looks down at the cake and, without taking her eyes off it, slowly and softly says, "Look, Harry, is it all right with you if...I mean, if I don't...I mean, what I want to ask, is it OK if I keep the cake a little while? Is it all right if we don't eat it right away?"

Harry doesn't know what to say so he shrugs and says, "Sure, if that's what you want to do. Keep the cake. Take it home if you want."

"Oh, could I?" she asks. Looking at Tony she says, "I live just down the street a couple of doors; I want to take the cake home, is that okay? I'll be right back, honest."

She gets off her stool, picks up the cake, and carries it high in front of her like it was the Holy Grail. Everybody watches in stunned silence and when the door closes behind her, nobody seems to know what to do. They look at each other. They look at Tony.

So Tony gets up on a chair and says, "What do you say that we pray together?"

And there they are in a hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon, half the prostitutes in Honolulu, at 3:30 a.m. listening to Tony Campolo as he prays for Agnes, for her life, her health, and her salvation. Tony recalls, "I prayed that her life would be changed, and that God would be good to her."

When he's finished, Harry leans over, and with a trace of hostility in his voice, he says, "Hey, you never told me you was a preacher. What kind of church do you belong to anyway?"

In one of those moments when just the right words came, Tony answers him quietly, "I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning."

Harry thinks for a moment, and in a mocking way says, "No you don't. There ain't no church like that. If there was, I'd join it. Yep, I'd join a church like that."

During my class this summer, many of the students had a nervous habit of saying "Yeeaaah" in a real drawn out way. It was a way of saying, "That's all. I don't have any more. That's it." At one point I said to them that that was a rough translation of the Greek word they encountered in the New Testament: "Amen."

"Yeah."

Trying to keep it simple

March Angelus

Fr. Dale

As I write this, we are half way through Lent. It has been a delightful journey thus far. Our Wednesday fellowship group (meeting at 9:30 am) has moved from discussion (and practice) of prayer to a metaphysical discussion on Being and God as that which is. With that group we have to try to keep things simple, but we cover lots of ground. On Wednesday evenings, between 45 and 60 folks from the east Honolulu parishes have been meeting to consider various perspectives on the Joseph of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Each time we have met it has been better than the last. And it took me 3 sessions to finally get a bowl of mushroom soup. Joseph has been seen as a member of a dysfunctional family, as a sign of redemption, as reminder of the need to work against slavery in the world today, . . . and upcoming Joseph as dreamer and Joseph as a way of seeing ourselves. As I began preaching, Lent just beginning, I stumbled onto a phrase that has become my personal mantra for the season. Show up Listen Speak heart-felt truth Let go of the results These 4 steps have become for me a short-hand way of understanding my daily task of living faithfully, under the banner of the Lord Jesus Christ. They don’t say all that needs to be said, but they provide a road-map for me of what I must do in order to recognize God’s sovereignty over my life. The other day I happened to share with the small youth group meeting the message I tell myself at least once a week. They didn’t really believe me. I said, “I don’t necessarily do a very good job of it, but I tell myself that it’s the goal.” The acronym means: “keep it simple stupid.” It originated with the growth of Alcoholics Anonymous and its Twelve Steps to sobriety. But I apply the wisdom of “keep it simple stupid” to my daily affairs and to my aim in preaching, teaching, and counseling. Now the fact is that I am not very good at keeping it simple. The “stupid” part of the saying is usually the loudest for me. “Don’t think too highly of yourself, Dale,” I hear it say. “Take yourself much less seriously.” As the bumper sticker said, that’s why angels can fly, because they regard themselves lightly. Many before me have noted that the 12 steps are in fact a marvelous short-hand way to understand the Christian life. They match remarkable well with the way of life outlined by saints and holy men and women of ages past. These are the original Twelve Steps as defined by Alcoholics Anonymous: We admitted we were powerless over . . . that our lives had become unmanageable. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to . . . , and to practice these principles in all our affairs. I learned some time ago a short-hand way of remembering the 12 steps, reducing them to 3: “I can’t. God can. I think I’ll let him.” Now these don’t really cover all of the steps, only the 1st half. The 2nd half could be summarized by the opening of St. Mary’s mission statement, “Share God’s love.” I can’t God can I think I’ll let Him Share His Love Easter (in this short-hand environment) is getting to the end of the 12∕4 steps (which is really a way to get to the beginning of them all over again). Easter is recognition that in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, we have indeed been awakened, we have been raised with him, we have become a new creature. Thank you for the journey. I invite you into the simple steps that proceed from showing up to sharing God’s love.

Season of Hope

Season of Hope

Fr Dale

December Angelus

Thanksgiving Day is past. The stores have rolled out their Christmas promotions and decorations. We have entered the “holiday season.” As has been said countless times before, such a pattern of time is not the church’s time but the culture’s time. During my 2 weeks of vacation at the beginning of November, I concentrated on doing 3 things: Resting, Reading, and Exercise. I did tolerably well at each of them, which is to say I could have done better but I could have done worse. In the reading department, while at Camp Mokule’ia, I read Sephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell. I had eyed this book in the bookstore from its first appearance, but put off buying it. Finally a friend loaned it to me. Hawking, for those of you unfamiliar with the name, is a world-famous physicist (perhaps familiar from the image of him in a motorized wheel-chair, since he has suffered from ALS for many years). He made his name in physics because of his work in demonstrating the theoretical existence of “black holes.” He now holds the same chair of Mathematics at Cambridge as did Isaac Newton 300 years ago. Of late, Hawking is well-known to many because he has done better than most at making contemporary physics accessible to ordinary folks like myself. The reading My reading was exhilarating and challenging. When I was 16 years old I had some facility in science and math. 40 years later it is all a faint glimmer in the past. It turns out the stars in the sky are somethig like that glimmer of the past. The light we see sparkling in the night sky actually left those stars millions of years ago. And that’s just the beginning of the journey that Hawking offers the reader. Einstein’s contributions, string theory (wherein there are postulated many more dimensions than the 4 to which we are accustomed: 3d + time) and much more awaits the reader. Among the mind-bending discussions in the book, a fair amount of time is spent considering the possibility of time travel. Though the question is hotly debated among today’s scientists, Hawking believes that there is a good possibility that time-travel is theoretically (as opposed to “practically”) possible. You may well be asking why I am writing about this here and why I think you might care. The reason grows out of my own conviction – it is a foundation of my faith in God – that “God is Truth.” For this reason I believe that anyone who is able to know or glimpse any facet of what is true, that person is knowing something of God. Scientists, for me, can teach me something about God – not everything, to be sure, but something. So I pay attention and am interested in what they are saying – as I try to pay attention to what artists, musicians, even politicians are saying and doing. They each are capable of teaching me something of God. From my own experience of God, I am not at all astonished by the idea of time being slippery, the present slipping into the past and then again into the future. Something like that proclamation is built into our brief exclamation of faith at the Eucharist: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Ancient meditation on the meaning of the Seder meal at Passover indicates that while the stories of past events are retold (e.g. enslaved Israelites in Egypt being delivered by Yahweh) what was past is made present and God’s deliverance is made real for us. The same thing is believed by Christians to occur at the Eucharistic prayer. What I found intriguing about my reading of Hawking was that he seemed to primarily consider the possibilty of going back in time. He wasn’t really considering the possibility of discovering where it’s all headed. The reason for that, as he freely admits, is that as a positivist scientist, he is interested in the evidence that can be seen and demonstrated. As Christians, we have a different starting point, a different platform for hearing the evidence and for looking out from this place we call home and the present time. In particular, I have in mind the essential nature of “hope” in the Christian view of the world and the “universe.” We are now entering that season of hope, approaching the “holidays” as the popular culture calls them. In the language of the church, we are ending a church year and beginning another with the anticipation, the waiting, the expectation, the listening, and the preparation that is involved with celebrating the Nativity of Jesus the Messiah. The Meaning of Faith 1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts; and always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, with humility and fear: 2 When I was in college, I laughed at the stories from a couple of comedians based in Maine. They told stories that were local to the northeast of the U.S., but somehow the comedy played in other parts of the country too. I was able to “get it.” One of the stories I still remember is of the directions being given to a traveler in some rural area of Maine. The local person begins by pointing to the barn “down thar” where you turn left and go a pretty far piece, then you make a right turn at the big oak tree, . . . and after a long account, he ends by saying, “Come to think of it, you can’t get there from here.” I thought of that story because it seems to me that you can’t get from Stephen Hawking’s starting point to the place of hope as told in the Letter to the Hebrews or 1st Peter. As fantastical as Hawking’s reflections are, they are rooted in a rear-ward looking view of the universe. His universe in a nut-shell can’t include the place to which we are headed. Hope looks out to the future, to what we cannot yet see, but to which we are headed. It is our destination that is now unfolding. When my children were younger – and in their eyes I was big and strong – they would jump off the stairs into my arms. Sometimes there would be a contest to see how high up they could go. I enjoyed exercising with them their ability to trust. That seems to be the missing ingredient in the scientist’s view of the universe. It’s difficult for them to trust in what is unseen (or unmeasurable). When the eyes of faith look out at the universe, we can see all of what Stephen Hawking can see, looking backward. But we can also see that which we anticipate, that for which we long, that which is unfolding into our present. The season is upon us, and we begin to long for the coming (the advent) of Christmas. And as God is faithful, from ages past to the future ages, he appears among us, Emmanuel. The light that is come into the world illuminates our path so that both present, past and future are made manifest (Epiphany). And our journey continues. We proceed through the slow days and the fast ones, the lengthening (Lent) of days. And the God of ages past and the future ages continues with us. Finally, in the center of our life, at the beginning of the meaning of the universe, God’s Son comes to an end and a new beginning on the cross (Easter). God is with us. Praise be to Him who was, who is, and who is to come. The alpha and the omega.

Change and transitions

Angelus February 2007

Fr. Dale

I returned last week from 4 days attending a conference put on by the national church. The title was “Upward Bound.” It was billed as a follow up to workshops titled “Start Up Start Over.” I was interested in the work because of my conviction that St. Mary’s is now going through an important transition in its life of just over 100 years. I hoped to gain some insight both for myself and for the congregation, some tools and some new skills, that would help us along this time of change. The diocese is quite obviously going through change that is marked by the election of a new bishop. The change confronting us is less obvious and is really not unlike the changes facing congregations all over the country. Linda Lingle was aware of a similar kind of dynamic when she gave her “State of the State” address this year. She said, Some think it is easier to keep doing what we have been doing. They think it is too hard to change. But, hard or not . . . change will happen. The question for us to answer is, will we just let change happen to us in the coming years . . . or will we create the change we want to see so that future generations are able to live a good life in Hawai’i? I had a somewhat quirky approach to our workshop because the title of it sounded like a program I was quite aware of growing up in Colorado. “Outward Bound” grew out of the observation that under similar conditions of stress, some people some people survive and some perish. The observation was first made in the Navy during World War II. When a ship was torpedoed and sinking, some sailors survived and others didn’t. Outward Bound was intended to train people to be a part of the survivors. How to function well under extreme stress. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t Outward Bound, it was Upward Bound. However, because of my association, I had a thought that perhaps Upward Bound was intended to train people (leaders) in congregations to be able to be survivors at a time when many Episcopal congregations are facing deep questions of survival. Why is it that some congregations flourish while others in more or less similar circumstances perish? And what can we do about it? Maybe the association was intentionally made by the organisers? As I write, I am aware of Lent being upon us. It always seems to come too early for me, whatever the actual calendar date may be. It no doubt has something to do with what “keeping Lent” means to a pastor of a small congregation. It may also have to do with an inner voice that says, “This year, Dale, you should do better than last.” Every year is new, and yet every year it is the same. Not unlike the rhythm of our lives. Things are constantly changing and forever familiar. We help to make them that way. We don’t want to be overtaken by the “new” and we want things to get better. We want there to be an upward trajectory in our lives, while not disrupting the things that we know and are familiar. Keeping Lent in the wider “catholic” tradition of which we are a part means to intentionally travel the way of the cross that Jesus’ entire life was. If during the Epiphany season we have heard of the highlights of Jesus’ emerging ministry that reveal his identity as Savior and Lord, during Lent we travel in lightning fashion the main road that he took – from Nazareth to Jerusalem, from promise and excitement to death on the cross. As we travel, we expect that the ship we are on is impregnable, it cannot be sunk. We anticipate advancing from one victory to another, from one awesome sign to another. That’s what Jesus did, afterall. The first sign at Cana. Wonders and healings that followed him wherever he went. No wonder the disciples anticipated that this was going to be a big deal. They just didn’t know what kind of big deal it was to be. And so we (at least I) get surprised each Lent as we discover that the end of the road is an ignoble execution. Year by year I really do end up experiencing a little piece of Jesus’ way of the cross. Enough. God’s mercy gives me just enough. Not too much. Not too little. The main opportunity for keeping Lent that we are offering this year at St. Mary’s will occur on Wednesday evenings. The congregations of east Honolulu will be gathering for a light supper, followed by a teaching and discussion about Joseph the Patriarch (son of Jacob). This is the first such cooperative venture that I am aware of on this side of the mountains among our Episcopal congregations. I very much hope it is a success that we can build on. This effort will really begin the day before Ash Wednesday with a pancake supper and video presentation at Holy Nativity. Erni Uno was the last to spearhead such a dinner at St. Mary’s. I will be remembering him on that day. The schedule for Ash Wednesday will be slightly different from what it has been in the past. There will be 2 services offered, one at noon and the other at 7:00 p.m. Ashes will be imposed at both services and the schedule should allow almost everyone to attend one of them. I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. (BCP, p. 265)

To climb mountains

Sermon: Last Epiphany 2/18/07

Pride in Colorado expedition up Mt. Everest

It's a very ordinary story that I have to tell this morning. It happens that it is my story -- but it could be that of any of you. It's a story of longing for a closeness with God. It is about seeking God in the high places -- and finding him in the ordinary. It is a story of conversion not unlike that faced by Jesus' good friends Peter and James and John. They had left everything to follow him, to learn from him -- but still they didn't really get it until they had followed all the way to Calvary and beyond -- to the empty tomb.

"If we can pull it off," Norman Dyhrenfurth said of the West Ridge, "it would be the biggest possible thing still to be accomplished in Himalayan mountaineering." This judgment came from the man best qualified to make it. He was leading the American Mount Everest Expedition when he said it; he had already climbed in many lands, had been on four previous Himalayan expeditions including the Swiss Expedition to Everest, and he had been dreaming of the West Ridge for years. SIERRA CLUB SAN FRANCISCO Copyright 1965 from the foreword . . .

The West Ridge

It was especially important to me that 2 members of the team were from Colorado. Dick Pownall I knew slightly because of my involvement with the Colorado Mountain Club and the Colorado Ski Patrol.

I experienced a mild disappointment that the Colorado members weren't on the final assault.

But the experience helped to ignite a longing within to be in the wilderness -- to go to places that not many had gone before.

Mountaintop experiences

Mt. Athos

Because the longing in my heart was really a longing experience God -- to be close in some way to the power of God -- eventually the longing for the wilderness took the shape of a spiritual seeking. I looked to other kinds of mountains and mountain experiences.

Like Mt. Everest, which I never expected to climb, I became enchanted for a time with the spirit of Mt. Athos.

Monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece

Metaphors and Symbols for Religious and Spiritual Experiences

Mountains have always been places where God was especially prone to be encountered. Consider these words about religious language:

"Language which authentically describes a spiritual experience transcends verifiable knowledge and is very imaginative, poetic, metaphoric and inexact. It is language stretched to the breaking point. In speaking about spiritual matters, we are always beating around the bush, albeit a burning bush."

". . . Authentic spiritual language about God does not confuse the map with the territory, the symbol with the thing. Literalism concentrates on the letter and misses the spirit; it gets the words but never the music, creates a spiritual tone-deafness. You can starve to death trying to eat a cookbook."

Although direct and precise words aren't adequate to the task of answering the question, I'd like to suggest that metaphors will do very well. In fact, some metaphors convey the essence of a religious or spiritual experience so well that they have been used by people throughout the world and in different cultures.

For example, take the metaphor of a sacred peak. Such mountains have been used as a cosmic axis for centuries—Mount Sinai, Mount Zion, The Mount of Olives, Mount Olympus, ... During the Second World War, a French mystic and writer, Rene Daumal, drew on this symbolism and wrote Mount Analogue, an allegorical novel of a supreme mountain where people may awake from the slumber of their usual state of mind and ascend to higher levels of consiousness:

"In the mythic tradition, the Mountain is the bond between Earth and Sky. Its solitary summit reaches the sphere of eternity, and its base spreads out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the way by which man can raise himself to the divine and by which the divine can reveal itself to man. . . . For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, the ultimate symbolic mountain, its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique, and it must exist geographically." By Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

One of my climbing partners introduced me to that book -- it was many years and much suffering before he would find his way to Christ's embrace.

Malcolm Muggeridge: story of conversion

It was the priest who brought me back to the church who introduced me to Malcolm Muggeridge. MM was going through hiw own personal journey of gradual conversion. And that was how my priest friend found me.

I found a keen connection with Muggeridge -- his quest and his "curmudgeonly" attitude toward establishment institutions.

He wrote wonderfully, curmudgeonly (giving me the word)

"As Hilaire Belloc truly remarked, the Church must be in God's hands because, seeing the people who have run it, it couldn't possibly have gone on existing if there weren't some help from above. I also felt unable to take completely seriously . . . the validity or permanence of any form of human authority . . . There is . . . some other process going on inside one, to do with faith which is really more important and more powerful. I can no more explain conversion intellectually than I can explain why one falls in love with someone whom one marries. It's a very similar thing . . ."

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. Malcolm Muggeridge

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus. Malcolm Muggeridge

Muggeridge became known as the "discoverer" of Mother Teresa, whom he first interviewed in London in 1968. He told the world about her deeds through a television documentary filmed in Calcutta called Something Beautiful for God, and through a best-selling book of the same name. He was well-known for his wit and profound writings (e.g., "Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream"). He wrote two volumes of an autobiography called Chronicles of Wasted Time. The first volume (1972) was The Green Stick. The second volume (1973) was The Infernal Grove. A projected third volume The Right Eye was started but never completed.

Something Beautiful for God

My search for spiritual experience

Mother Theresa

Before embracing Christianity I looked for spiritual enlightenment in hallucinogenic drugs. I quickly discovered it wasn't there.

I was curious about a cult in our college town (Colorado Springs). I was disinclined. A friend I went with was “caught” and eventually became a leader.of what became a white supremacist group in Idaho and Montana.

Later, after conversion, I was interested in Charismatic/Pentecostal experiences. Here, too, eventually I concluded that this path was not a “be-all and end-all.”

My conversion came from having a "taste" of the sacred at Good Friday. It was a simple parish. Not an unusal celebration of the liturgy, though it was “high church”. God had captured me.

Consider:

• Moses on Mt. Sinai -- but then returns to the people

• Jesus at Transfiguration -- revealing glory, but bringing his disciples right down to the nitty-gritty of life.

Like Jesus, our call from God is not to dwell on the mountains. It is to plow into the plains. Into the everyday life that surrounds us.

And that way, leads us to the least among us, to those in need, ...

Sisters of Charity at work

... and to Calvary.

To walk with Christ, to be a disciples, is to have a longing for God -- to haave seen a glimpse, to have heard a voice, to have had a foretaste of the heavenly banquet --

But then to go down into the valley, as Moses did, as Peter and James and John did, as Mother Theresa did,

And there to embrace the world. To love it. To bring some healing as God provides. To be a companion. And to tell anyone who will listen, the story of climbing the mountain and coming back down again.

That's our story for today.

What the World Needs Now

The last week has seemed full and busy to me, leaving me feeling tired. But I am aware that the coming week also weighs on me and that that can make me feel tired. My mother used to urge me, sometimes badger me, to let go of worry over the future. That worry was not going to help whatever was going to happen. Other things might; preparation, relaxation, even prayer. At New Beginnings training last weekend we did a warm up exercise. I was surrounded by teenagers. One of the questions we responded to was, "What do you wish you did better at?" I answered, "Do my homework." I think the comment was lost on the teenagers. But it was heartfelt on my part and worthy of a post in itself.

Over the last week I read The Looming Tower. I had heard the author I think on Fresh Air (NPR) and appreciated a certain freshness that he brought to his analysis of Iraq. As reflected below, I am interested in trying to understand what is going on in the world today, and what is going on seems to be colored a lot right now by Islam and Iran in particular. I have been repeating the name of the President of Iran to myself, almost like a mantra for the last 5 days. Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad. ... I still can't pronounce it at all correctly. Part of me wanted to learn how to pronounce the name of this prominent person. But there was also a part that was trying to understand by means of the silly repetition.

The news seems to me exceedingly depressing these days. "Temperature of earth reaches a million year mark." "What war with Iran would look like." "Secret CIA report says that the war in Iraq has made the world less safe from terrorists."

I have often repeated that I think that the slippery road to succumbing to terrorists was begun when Yasser Arafat spoke at the United Nations in the 1970's, brandishing his gun and warning the world. And the world blinked, as if to say, "Oh, we'll be good, don't you worry."

I know that's too simplistic and terrorism goes back centuries or even millenia and that none of the world's nations are innocent. But there seem to be so many "no-brainer" decisions that have been avoided over the past decades in the name of ... I don't know what.

Ahmadinejad. It makes me think of Gian Carlo Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors" -- the tale of a crippled shepherd boy and his widowed mother who receive a surprise visit from the Three Kings en route to Bethlehem. Remembering back to those years when I first viewed the show, 1960's, seems like an innocent time in retrospect. And yet at the time I remember, e.g., thinking that the Vietnam War had always been and always would be.

Day after tomorrow my oldest daughter turns 24. I haven't seen her in over a year. She is the most wonderful person. I wish you could meet her. She was born on St. Michael and All Angels. As if the angels sang and danced around her birth.

So it is that we go on, in the midst of global warming that may well destroy life on earth, in the midst of threats of nuclear war and talk of "annihilation" of another country -- in this case a people that I am convinced are in fact God's chosen people. I am a Christian, but the Messiah I follow was a member of that "chosen people."

Little phrases have stood out this week. "Whenever a government strives to impose purity, terror results." I wonder to myself is that true? I know that I have long criticised the enduring Puritanism that subtly governs the people of The United States. Probably it has seemed oppressive to me because people no longer recognize its presence. When things work on us below our consciousness they are most powerful.

The state in which I have lived since Ahmadinejad's compatriots blew themselves up against the looming towers was westernized by Puritans. The effects of those efforts, almost 200 years ago, are still felt pervasively, in a variety of ways, some positive some negative. Someone asked me the other day about the impact of the early missionaries here in Hawai'i. I was only partly ficitious when said that my sense was that they made themselve wealthy. I quickly added that wasn't true of all of them and many of them were noble-minded and made great sacrifices for the good of the people with whom they lived.

Another book I have begun this week is by Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant. I haven't finished it yet. But as with everything he's written I am sucked right in. In spite of his vast learning, he seems to speak the language of the ordinary person. Someone the other day paid me that compliment after hearing me preach. I graciously accepted the words. Unfortunately the impact was colored by the fact that English was not their first language and I'm not at all sure how much they actually even understood.

But something like what Garry Wills has achieved in his life is what I have striven for during my adult life. I read my first book by him when barely out of my teens, Bare Ruined Choirs. Quickly I followed with Nixon Agonistes and I have followed with probably a dozen of his works since then. But his writing production is monumental, so I can't even say I know his writing all that well.

But his approach to the church and to his faith is one that I find compatible and inviting to my own. He is profoundly -- and learnedly -- critical of the powers-that-be in the church. But he is also not ashamed at all of his own faith. Conservatives and liberals both find fault with him. He must be doing something right.

One chord he strikes early in his book is the claim that seems so self-evident to me, but is so strongly rebutted by many, that the way to read the New Testament is entirely to find its meaning and not its historicity.

I'll write more about the book later.

For now another daughter is calling for me to "put her to bed." Off I go.

A child's longing

Tonight at Zippy's I was sitting across the table from my 11 year old daughter. She launched into a banter that produced a huge grin on me that wouldn't quit.

She went on for about 5 minutes. My smile got bigger and bigger. She was running through one stock phrase after another, drawn from things that she, her sister and her mother say to one another. But each one was said with some kind of twist to it. Or it was side with a funny, twisted, facial expression. She was like a clown. Or a stand-up comedian. And she was displaying a very quick mind and delightful creativity. At one point she said, "Work with me here," with a subtle twang in her voice. She was quoting her mother, who uses the phrase to try to motivate people to pay attention to her. Sometimes she succeeds with the phrase and sometimes not. Here, my daughter was playing off the phrase, using a grown-up mother's phrase, trying to get the smile or affirmation she desparately wanted.

All the time her gaze was fixed on her mother sitting next to her. The purpose of the monologue was to get a smiling response from her mother. She didn't get it; her mother remained stuck in her skin with the things that weighed on her.

I thought my daughter was displaying the kind of quick wit that I had always wished I could muster but never did. She showed a flare and a dramatic talent that was magnetic and hot. I loved it.

But here's the thing that I don't get. Two days ago we went over her grades and school and she's getting a D in English/Language Art.

One clue I have came yesterday as I was helping her with some homework. It was really easy stuff that she knew well enough, she just wanted to share it with me, really. I simply read the questions and asked her about what she saw on the page. She understood all she needed to know. She answered one of the questions correctly then moved to the next one, which was kind of a mirror image of the first. Since the answer to the first was "down", Emma immediately said that the answer to the second was "up". But it wasn't. The right answer was also "down". But something in Emma's training to date had told her that things like needed to "match." She had developed a habit of answering tests not by understanding the questions but by memorizing patterns.

Now what I am describing is very like what I have read is done by children with learning disabilities. And it may well be that is part of the answer here. But my suspicion is that it also has something to do with the style of education that my daughter has received these past few years. Emphasis has been very heavy on standardized testing. Often the best way to get through them is by relying on "patterns." Not that it gives the best results, but that it's the path of least resistance, at least for my daughter.

There are some signs that this year she is finally figuring out some of the mis-steps she has made and the habits may get changed. I hope so.

In the meanwhile, I so hope that the magical energy she commanded in her banter at the restaurant will not be lost and that she will find a channel to exercise it and keep it alive.

a pope's words - part 2

From Sept. 5, 2006 The Christian Century this notice: The title of a session in Scotland on Western ignorance of Islam was titled "We don't know Shi'ite."
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The Pope gave a speech/lecture at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12. The media reported on a minor section of the talk and the Muslim world exploded with vituperation, demands for an apology, rioting, and the murder of an elderly nun. I wrote yesterday of how surreal it all seemed to me.

What adds to the strangeness of it all is the subject matter of the lecture itself. For myself, the Pope seems to exist in a time-warp and a disconnect from the world. We might attribute that to the disconnect expected of an other-worldly mystic. And so it might be. Joseph Ratzinger, however, has not usually been described that way, but rather as an academic-minded theoretician. That would be how I read him.

What makes the talk strange is who the Pope understands his polemical partner(s) to be. He is speaking against a process of de-hellenization that he tracks in the western world through 3 major stages. The first is the Reformation, the 2nd is in liberal theology of the 19th and 20th century, and the last an ongoing stage of the assimilationism inherent (as he sees it) in "cultural pluralism."

Pope Benedict perceives a threat in all of this. But it's not a threat he sees coming from Islam. It's a threat that has been developing, as he sees it, over 500 years in the "west", namely Europe and the Americas. The threat he perceives is to the "catholic" faith, again as he sees it. As a consequence, it is for him a metaphysical threat to the truth claims of Christianity itself.

The issue for Benedict is whether or not Hellenistic ways of thinking are inherent to the gospel and hence inherent to reality itself.

The New Testament was written in Greek and forged in an environment in which Greek thinking was omnipresent if not utterly dominant. The debate had raged in Judaism from the time of the Maccabees over how much Hellenism to allow into Judaism. The result was a back and forth power struggle stretching through 100's of years and thousands of violent deaths. Peace was forged in that debate with the rise of the rabbis in the post-Temple period.

The New Testament reflects some of the debate from a Christian perspective with the tension between Paul's version of the gospel and James' (or even Peter's) vision. The debate was ultimately answered in Paul's favor, though only in post-New Testament times. Hellenism won.

The rabbis and Christians took different paths in post-New Testament times. The rabbis could appropriate Hellenistic thinking when that suited them, but they could also adopt Babylonian ways or Egyptian, then later eastern European. Christianity proceeded to appropriate a variety of cultural influences through the centuries, but kept its primary allegiance to the hellenism reflected in the New Testament. Only in recent centuries has Christianity been able to be self-critical in appraising these developments. The result is the "threat" that the pope sees in efforts to "dehellenize" the New Testament and Christianity.

One can sense the high degree of abstract thinking going on in this lecture by the way Benedict equates without explanation Platonism and Cartesianism, 2 philosophical traditions with nearly 2,000 years separating them. The equation is intriguing, and perhaps the pope has written of it elsewhere. But he sees no need to reference that in his talk.

His conclusion as he puts it is a critique of modern reason "from within." But he claims not to be arguing for some kind of magical return to a time before the Renaissance and the Reformation, a mythical ideal time. But it seems to me that claim follows the familiar pattern of "Yes, but ..." While outwardly saying yes, the speaker is really saying "no."

Pope Benedict seems to want a return to a time that never was, when reason (logos) was recognized as central to God's creation, when understanding and dialogue could transpire between people who disagreed, precisely because they both acknowledged that reason was the final arbiter.

He looks out on a world where reason is not recognized as the final arbiter, where understanding one another is not experienced as a high priority, where getting one's way is. The Muslim reactivity to the Pope's remarks seems to be a wonderful illustration of this pervasive reality in our world. The realistic expectation is that these forces are only going to become more destructive than they have already proven to be. Not a pretty sight.

Benedict is trying to argue against these developments. And I applaud him for that. But he is so far removed from the world in which I live and the reality which I perceive that his words are nearly meaningless. (Worth killing a nun over?) Even from the vantage point of an Anglican with some connections to Roman Catholic influences, I can see that Benedict's own church is vastly more than the one that he seems to live in.

It all seems so strange. But a wonderful illustration of the power of words and their elusive nature. Thank you.

a pope's words - part 1

After reading my post on "Words", a good friend of mine sent me an email, pointing me in the direction of the recent lecture of the Pope that has caused reactivity in large parts of the Muslim world. I was really intrigued, having only engaged the Pope's words through the reporting in the media.

I found a copy of the lecture, read it, and saw immediately the connection that my friend had made. The Pope's words didn't really have anything to do with relations between Christianity and Islam, but were addressed to (largely western) Christianity and the culture that surrounds it (us -- for everyone living in the United States.) The lecture drew on the classical Greek meaning of the word "logos", i.e. "word" or "reason" or "rationality". He made reference to the prologue of John's gospel, just as my article had.

His logic was dramatically abstract in nature. By which I mean it was so abstract it would be easy to lampoon it with concrete silly gestures. Maybe something like a cartoon of a teacher in pope's garb, floating high in the air, talking to himself, with a crowd of students below, wondering why they can't understand him. abstract in nature.

Before I respond more to the argumentation of the lecture, I must respond to the other aspect of the words -- shall I call it the political impact of the words.

First let me acknowledge that my own political sensitivities are about as low as they can get and still allow me to reasonably function in society. It's not to say that I'm not politically engaged, I am. It's that my intuition absolutely does not function when it comes to politics. Bill Clinton's political sensitivies (whether you like him or don't) are obviously off the chart. He instinctively knows. I instinctively don't know.

That said, the responses of the Muslim world to the Pope's words seem to me utterly bizarre. An example I think of the Pope's argument that in today's world, rationality is not given very much stature. But it occurred to me that the response of people to the pope's quote of a quote from the 15th century was profoundly ironic. The reference of the Byzantine Emperor was to a belief that Muslims too much rely on violence and "the sword" in the propagation of their faith. The Pope was arguing against such a use of violence in the furtherance of "faith", but not particularly applying it to the Muslim world. In fact, as I've said, the whole lecture was really addressed to the western world.

So let me say it. The response of Muslims to the quote, with violence, destruction and murder where possible, death threats and the like, seems surreal to me. It is like a minor variation on the surreal that surrounded the watching of passenger jets crashing into the World Trade Center. Words like, "What is the world coming to?" do not begin to convey it.

Now I have thought the world was a mysterious place for a long time. And religions hold a special place in the mystery quotient. When I was a teenager, 40 years ago, my mother acquired a book from Readers Digest on World Religions. The pictures captivated me. Enough that I am still in possession of the book. A photo of a yogi, alone in the stance of a stork. The weird Hindi statues that made no sense to me whatsoever. The blood running down the Filipino pilgrims as thet cut themselves and nailed themselves to a cross. I was fascinated by the utter inexplicableness of the phenomena depicted in the book.

Looking back now 40 years later, it is interesting to me that the pictures of Muslims -- even less the essays -- were of little interest to me. Pictures of huge crowds of men, bowing on mats in prayer, just didn't carry the drama of the other accounts. Little could I have guessed that in my 50's it would be that group of people who would most grip my interest. I really want to understand. But I am persuaded that many Muslims, and certainly the most vocal, do not want understanding. That would be "logos" stuff. And that I think they think is western corruption. So the Pope was without knowing it defending the primacy of western culture, albeit a form of western culture that is supported and lived by only a minority.

One of the news reports from the middle east quoted a Muslim as saying the Pope doesn't understand Islam. I thought to myself, "Well, duh! Of course he doesn't. He only understands a narrow range of Christianity. How could he hope to understand Islam." I am quite sure he meant no insult or harm to Muslims. But I don't think he quite "gets it."

He doesn't "get it" that Catholicism is hugely bigger than the part of it that he defends as the only truth. His metaphysics is based on Thomism which is in turn based on classical Greek philosophy. There was a time in my life that I was convinced that such philosophy was the only way to understand truth and reality. I worried about the health of my soul because I wasn't an expert on Thomism. I tried to familiarize myself with it. I wouldn't call it being a student of Thomism. But I eventually concluded that this philosophy left out far too much reality, both the kind you can see and touch and feel -- as well as the kind of reality that is beyond seeing, touching, feeling. The ineffable. There was too much that Thomism just didn't "get". And so I moved on in my life, carrying with me real sympathy for the magisterial pieces that Thomism does get about reality.

But I don't claim for myself that I "get it". I am a student, still learning. I think the Pope is too. Many Muslims also.

Words

I started a blog this week. Maybe it's because I don't want to be left behind as the world whizzes into the future. Maybe it's because I have had a glimpse of the way "networking" creates power. My late friend John Hornbuckle told me back in the middle of the 1980's, when I bought my first computer, that I wouldn't really have experienced computers until I had experienced networking. (This was before the invention of the "world wide web" and before I had first experienced the internet which was in 1988.) Maybe it's because I have been involved in "open-source" software for 8 years, and I believe in the empowerment that comes from a community working together.

Whatever the reason, I did it. I'm letting you know about it. And herewith some reflections on my rash action.

When I was in high school I assumed that I would become a scientist or engineer. Mathematics and Physics seemed to come naturally to me. I could relate to numbers, shapes, the relationships between things. I once dreamed of making an ultra-accurate pendulum clock that had been featured in Scientific American. (This was just before the invention of quartz crystal, and then atomic, clocks that are the basis for time-keeping these days.)

But there was another side that I couldn't ignore. Maybe it was related to my abilities with music. I had been good at that, too. It wasn't as much the technical ability of making music - that has to do with "numbers, shapes, and relationships", together with coordination - but it had more to do with a sensitivity to a more elusive side to music. It was the beauty, the spirit, of the music that I could sense.

This same side of me could be seen in the response I made to church summer camp when I was 13 and 14 years old. I caught a glimpse of the spirit that was associated with the Holy Spirit and I wanted to know (or experience) more of it.

Now these impulses may be no more than is present in every adolescent, but these were mine. So by the time I got to college, I abandoned the assumption that I would be an engineer and I began to explore language, both formally and informally.

What captivated me about language was not the scientific or quantifiable aspect of language. It was the power of language to point to what was beyond. Language, words, have the power to point us beyond language itself, to what can not be said.

It is a strange thing that as human beings, the only way we can talk about the ineffable is with words. From that age onward, words have seemed to me to be most valuable when they express what words cannot express. They reach beyond themselves to the world of spirit.

During these years I became especially aware of the power of words. They were able to express something beyond the bare meanings of individual words. It was in images that could be evoked. It was in a harmony that could be made to "play" when certain words were brought together.

Words could be used for good and for ill. They were behind the power of demagogues and tyrants as well as providing us the link to saints and mystics. Poets could be intolerable as human beings and at the same time use words that lifted others into the neighborhood of God. It was possible to get the meaning of words profoundly wrong. At one point "bad" came to mean "good."

An example for me was the time I made what I thought were wonderful, special Christmas greetings. I had been pursuing the link between various Greek philosophers and the use of the word "word" (logos) in the opening of John's gospel. I spent weeks carving a linoleum block with the Greek of John's prologue. And only at the end of my labors did I realize that I had forgotten to carve the whole thing backwards. (So that when printed it would come out right.) The experience has been a reminder to me that it is possible to get the impact of words precisely and radically wrong!

Words are slippery. They seem so solid, but they're more like mercury. Useful and powerful, yes. But mercurial, yes, too. You can't really pin them down.

What a Wonderful symbol
for God's Son.

God spoke and it was. Through the word, the world came to be. Through the Word, the light beyond light came into the world. But no word or words can pin this Word down.

Words seem to be one of the essential features of human beings. Though elements of language and communication can be found throughout the natural world (something we know only from the advances of science in recent years), language as such seems to be distinctly human. Our words link us to one another, perhaps because we can call one another by name. We have a name. And you can know my name. We can have a relationship. We are linked.

I opened a blog this week because of my own conviction that words have power to link us in communion. That words have the ability to unite us. I am not under the illusion that my words, or my blog, are in any special way powerful. But as of now I have put them out there for you to read. You can also comment on any of my words if you would like. May God's Word, the living One, bless you.