Posts Tagged ‘faith’

Truth and action.

{ November 24, 2009 @ 10:31 am } · { Eucharist, personal reflection, Sermon }
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There was once a young and gifted woman who set herself the almost impossible task of setting up a printing press so that she could translate and distribute the Word of God to the people.  Yet such a job would require a great deal of money, and so, almost as soon as she had conceived the idea, she sold the few items that she possessed and went to live on the streets, begging for the money that she needed.
Raising the necessary funds took many years, for while there were a few who gave generously, most only gave a little, if anything at all. But gradually the money began to accumulate.  However, shortly before the plans for the printing press could be set in motion, a dreadful flood devastated a nearby town, destroying many people’s homes and livelihoods.
Without hesitation the woman used all the money she had gathered to feed the hungry and rebuild lost homes. Once the town began to recover, the woman silently went back to the streets in order to start all over again, collecting the money needed to translate the Word of God.
Many more years passed, with many cold winters that caused great suffering to the woman. Then, shortly before the target amount was reached, disaster struck again.
This time a deadly plague descended like a cloud over the city, stealing the lives of thousands.
By now the woman was herself tired and ill, yet without thought she spent the money she had collected on medicines and care for the sick and orphaned.
Then, once the shadow of the plague lifted, she again went onto the streets, driven by her desire to translate the Word of God.  Finally, shortly before her death, this woman gathered the money needed for the printing press and completed the project she had set herself many years before.
After she had passed away, it was rumored by some that she had actually spent her time making three translations of the Word, the first two being the most splendid of all…
… What language are you translating the Word into?
Our mandate is double-edged: “We should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another.” Does not the whole of the gospel hinge on that one word, “and”? Believe… AND love.
I don’t know about you, but this terrifies me. Not only do I have to do more than think the right things (hard enough) or say the right things (sometimes easier), but I have to live rightly, in truth.
And I don’t even get to decide what that truth is – it’s love. And it’s not up to me what that action is – it’s love. Given freely, radically, generously, as long as there’s need for it… love’s circumstances might be flexible, they are likely surprising, but the mandate itself is not a puzzle.
We can stop asking what the “right” thing to do is… Which cause is the best? Where can I be the most effective? What if our resources run out? What happens when it floods, or the plague comes, Or (have mercy) institutions fail usand we have to start over, from the foundations?
God’s pretty clear on this one. We keep loving. In truth, and action.
We silently went back to the streets in order to start all over again.
You’re not here to be effective or successful.
You,… I,… am here to be faithful to the Word made flesh.
Because what we believe is a fabulous mystery, that we’re commanded to bring about the Kingdom when it’s already here… that we’re to reveal it and that’s all we’re to do.

This goal is already fact, God’s fact, the fact of grace and promise. No gap divides what God says from what God does. God’s Word is God’s action. And it, God, is waiting for us to see him in ourselves, here all along…
Truth and action… called to live in such a way that the Way, Jesus’ way, is read in the very fabric of our relationships to one another, to our fellow human beings, to Creation.
The sacraments, too, as Augustine says, are the “visible word” of God. They are the Word, enacted… and when we receive them, when we claim them, when we are saying we’re ready to welcome Jesus in his many disguises, that our hearts and doors and arms are open, that we’re gonna live out being bread and juice, that we too are the Word enacted, lovingly revealed, truthfully shared with all the world, not just talking about it, not even just theologically reflecting on it, translating it into just more speech, more words… but living it.
Then, then, we’ve finally translated the glorious Word in truth and action.
May it be so for you, and for me, and for all the world. Amen.

Faith and doubt.

{ August 22, 2009 @ 12:00 am } · { Uncategorized }
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In a very cool turn of events, I’ve been invited to participate as a fellow blogger of the Thomas Society. To read about the Society, which is an open space for ongoing dialogue between people who identify as atheist or as religious/spiritual, visit http://thomas2026.wordpress.com/about/.  Keep up with the conversation as it unfolds.

#20: Living (as though we were) baptized.

{ April 25, 2009 @ 3:41 pm } · { ecology and religion, personal reflection, social justice }
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***This is the twentieth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “The Baptized Life,” by Larry Rasmussen.

Baptism is more than a symbol… it does something to us, changes us.  It enacts the Good News upon us, moving us back into right relationship with God and Creation through the decisive fact of Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.  Resurrection is inherent in the symbol, being put under the water and drawn back out again, anew.  The Holy Spirit works mysteriously in that moment, doing all of the things of which we are reminded: cleansing, purifying, drawing us into the life of God by releasing us from the sin and death our fallen world holds, proclaiming the power of repentance through the coming of Jesus.  But the fullness of baptism is manifest only when the believer and the Church are wholly conformed to the image of Christ… Baptism is, at least in my tradition, a non-repeatable event based on God’s faithfulness rather than our own, our baptismal identity being simultaneously an ongoing process, leading and growing us toward more total holiness.  It’s a new status, and a recognition of the status we’ve always had in God’s eyes.

And that’s very theological, and fancy.  In fact, it’s a bit of excerpt from a paper I wrote this winter on my theology of the sacraments.  I got an A, which was nice of course, but rereading it and Rasmussen’s chapter, I realized I would like to rewrite it.  Because it doesn’t say what I really think, at least the core of what I think, baptism is about. It’s water, after all, at its heart.  When I was baptized, I felt different.  I was different.  It’s the only moment in my Christian experience that I might actually talk about as a conversion, even though my behavior didn’t really change… I simply knew in a visceral way, when that water poured over my head onto my clothes, that God and I would be okay, together.  This is a big deal, for me.  That water was cleansing, but it also felt connecting.  I now was connected to every other person who’d ever been baptized before, every one.  We are linked in water.  I was nineteen then, and not very aware of the world.  Now, I still know that I am connected to my sisters and brothers in Christ through that water, but I know too that I am joined just as tightly to my entire human family in it.  The waters of life, living water, is redundant.  Water gives life and is life.  We’re made of water, our world is made of water, we can survive without it only for a miniscule amount of time.  There’s only so much of it to go around, and it’s essential.  It’s our essence.  My baptism means that I’m tied to other people and to the billions of organisms on this planet through the waters that poured down over my forehead a decade ago, that water pouring into the air and into rivers, leading across oceans and under the soils of the world into the drinking pots and thirsty cells of God’s creatures, into the clouds and into the water tables of God’s creation.  I breathe vapor and that air mixes with the air others inhale.  The water I depend on gives life to all of us.  It is life.  I wonder if that’s why the prophet Amos chose to say that justice rolls down like waters… that the renewal of the earth in Revelation comes as a stream flowing out of Eden,  that out of the deep waters God created the universe, that out of the waters of the Jordan Jesus was baptized into his calling.  It is all so essential. Nothing has more necessity or more is-ness than water.  It is the single most connecting element of our world, and of our faith.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

{ January 20, 2009 @ 6:53 pm } · { personal reflection, spirituality }
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Percy Bysshe Shelley once said, in defense of poetry itself, “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”  I wonder sometimes if this isn’t what theology is, the knitting together of brokenness, the picking up of various pieces of experience, some lovely, some jagged, others jarring and discordant, remaking it into something new.  Transformation.  Relearning to see and hear.  Feeling anew about things we’ve thought, unclenching our fists from around our grimiest, most treasured conceptions and opening them to new light.  The road leading toward the end of seminary seems strewn, more than ever, with obstacles to step around, scramble over, slash through.  I’m exceptionally tired.  Theology, or as it’s called sometimes, “faith seeking understanding,” doesn’t come much clearer to me now than it did two and a half years ago.  I’ve learned some tricks, most of which are short-hand for making beautiful that which is distorted.  I have to say, there are two that have saved me from throwing myself to the ground a couple (alright, more than a couple) of times and pitching an all-star temper tantrum in a fit of exhaustion and frustration with how slowly I seem to learn this stuff.  With how unwillingly I apply it to who and what I am to be and become in this world. 

The first: the ability to say, without evasion and summoning up as much wonder as I can muster, “It’s a mystery.”  Mysterion, the secret counsel of God, this is simply something I have been learning to accept.  Even more, to value.  Really, believing that there is mystery, a sacred thing that is beyond me to comprehend or appreciate, to dissect and label, this is a gift.  Because humility is a gift, and that’s what mystery casts upon us.  Well, on me, anyhow.  It is comforting sometimes to feel small, because that means that there is something much bigger than me, and It understands and sees what I don’t.

The second: the all-purpose question, “Where is God in this?”  Try it.  This is a question you can ask of nearly any circumstance, personal or global, terrifying, ugly, awesome, curious, paradoxical, lovely.  Where, how, is God in this?  It’s odd to me, but the question forces us to allow God back into the picture.  The question isn’t a lament, “Is God in this?” but a statement of faith… yes, God’s in here, somewhere, I just haven’t been looking well enough.  God isn’t hiding here, I simply need to crack open the heavy eyelids of my heart and actually try to see.  Distortion is the impermanent but unfortunate ruining, the altering, of something that is not naturally the way it’s being perceived at that moment.  With the right mirror, its beauty returns and it’s seen as it was meant to be.  How, that’s a mystery.  But it’s God’s mystery, and I’ll take it.

The spirit of discipline.

{ November 26, 2008 @ 12:05 pm } · { personal reflection, spirituality }
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The list seems endless: prayer, meditation, fasting, journaling, “spiritual reading” (whatever that is), tithing, charitable acts.  Spiritual disciplines are so intimidating.  I googled “spiritual disciplines” and got 824,000 hits.  Just “prayer” got 88,700,000.  88 million people have written about prayer on the internet.  Each person has a different idea of what it means to pray, what it “does,” how it “works,” what the point of praying is.  You see, lately I’ve been realizing how hard it is to define what my own spiritual practices are.  For years, I’ve flowed in and out of certain habits.  Journaling is helpful sometimes, but usually after a month or so I tire of it or (more usually) tap out whatever guide I’m using and can’t quite get into the spirit of another one.  I never return to what I write, anyhow.  If I do reread my journals, I find myself wondering who the person was who wrote “that.”  It always feels unfamiliar, like stepping into the life of someone I know only from the news or TV.  The scene is familiar, but everything else seems foreign.  I love quiet, but sitting still isn’t my cup of tea unless I’m reading or on the computer, so meditation and prayer are a challenge.  For a long time, I’ve felt pretty heavy guilt about the irregularity and (might I say?) undisciplined nature of my spiritual practices.  Hit or miss, nothing like some of the people I admire so much who have doggedly pushed their way through the entirety of the Bible every year for decades or those who pray every morning.  Despite my admiration, I just can’t do that.  It simply isn’t who I am. 

But recently I’ve been trying to think about my own sense of spiritual practice differently.  I realized that the language we use about prayer and other disciplines is that of “fitness,” as though if we simply find the exercise that will “work” best in our own life and stick to it, our holiness muscles will be strong and toned, the solution to accessing God found through sheer sweat and self-will.  Discipline.  Well, I think there is certainly some very serious truth to this way of viewing spirituality… after all, if you don’t show up, it’s quite unlikely you’ll be doing very much listening to God, and practice does make perfection, after a fashion.  I remember, for example, a time when I really made a commitment to journal daily during Lent a few years ago.  The first weeks were painful.  I hated sitting there, attempting to speak to God and be silent so that God could speak to me.  But over that forty days, I became more able to wait patiently with my pen, not so sure of the truth of what I was saying, had a growing willingness to question my own assumptions about the things I was reading and thinking.  I felt guided.  A growing sense of peace about things I couldn’t control settled over me as I started to recognize patterns in my prayers and complaints.  But then, Lent ended and so did my commitment. 

So fitness might be a helpful metaphor… but I also think it limits how I think about what it means to live out my faith, using spiritual disciplines as a way to learn more about God and my relationship to God.  One of the 88 million websites (I confess, I didn’t keep track of which) said this, which I find enlightening:

“These disciplines can’t save you; they can’t even make you a holy person. But they can heighten your desire, awareness, and love of God by stripping down the barriers that you put up within yourself and some that others put up for you. What makes something a ‘spiritual discipline’ is that it takes a specific part of your way of life and turns it toward God. A spiritual discipline is, when practiced faithfully and regularly, a habit or regular pattern in your life that repeatedly brings you back to God and opens you up to what God is saying to you.”

Reading that, and thinking about what my spiritual life looks like right now, I realize that there are a number of wonderful things I’m a part of that absolutely “count” as spiritual disciplines, despite the fact that I don’t practice them daily and they aren’t on any “official” lists.  They are, yet and still, patterns in my life that do turn my heart and thoughts toward God and change the focus of the lens through which I view the world. 

  • Reading a variety of newspapers from around the globe
  • Putting myself in the presence of people who are deeply different from myself, either in opinion or experience
  • Noticing the beauty of the world, whether it’s in nature or the lives of other people
  • Taking joy in random moments, and not resisting my own spontaneous response to – a song on the radio, hearing a child laugh on the street, those times when a conversation with a friend is exactly the right thing at the right time
  • Spending time with people who have a deep connection with the holy or who have a generosity and openness of spirit
  • Writing this blog
  • Doing justice – making daily choices, as much as possible, with the well-being of other people across the world in mind, advocating for causes in line with my faith, living simply
  • Doing household chores.  This is one time when I really do pray.  God and I talk better when I’m doing dishes or making dinner or washing windows.  The physical activity seems to busy my mind in such a way that God can bypass all of the junk floating through my head the rest of the day. 

All of these things are ways I live my life.  They permeate my experience of the world and of God, and they help me listen more fully.  They aren’t an hour a day with my Bible.  They certainly do not make me holy and aren’t saving me on their own.  But each of them breaks down the barriers between myself and God and other people and God’s Creation.  They bring me back to God and remind me of all the mundane places where God is, all the daily things that in fact are sacred. 

I wonder, having read this, if you have anything similar in your own life?  One of the things I’ve found during my time in seminary is that we simply don’t talk about what our spiritual disciplines are – a vast majority of us (90% of Americans) say we pray, but what does that look like?  How do you practice spirituality?  What patterns turn you toward God?  How are you listening?

Anarchist priests and establishment Christians.

{ November 10, 2008 @ 2:49 pm } · { personal reflection, political, spirituality }
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During the last few weeks, I’ve been studying the life of Fr. Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who, somehow, has managed to hold together the in his own life the words “faithful” and “anarchy.”  Throughout the 1960′s, and still today, Father Berrigan has confronted the broken and awful possibilities of world destruction, first as a nonviolent protestor of the Vietnam war and then for all manner of causes related to universal peace, especially regarding nuclear arms.  He has done this through ultraresistance and nonviolent actions, by taking literally Isaiah’s prophesy of turning swords into ploughshares – taking mass arms and reshaping them into tools of peace – by spilling his own blood on weapons and the steps of the Pentagon, and most famously, by participating in the Catonsville 9 action in which he and 8 other faithful Catholics, lay and clergy, burned Selective Service files with homemade napalm.  But for him, poetry, the shaping of words into indictments and love-filled lamentations or hope, has been central to his calling.  In Vietnam, risking his own self to release American flyers in direct opposition to the order of his own superiors in the Church, Berrigan wrote this as he ducked into bunkers as American bombers straifed the area in which he was working:

I picked up the littlest/ a boy, his face/ breaded with rice (his sister calmly feeding him/ as we climbed down)/ In my arms fathered/ in a moment’s grace, the messiah/ of all my tears.  I bore, reborn/ a Hiroshima child from hell.

Aside from the stringent, stark beauty of the words, there is a heaviness of sensation, of presence, something that couldn’t have described in any other way the experience of that moment of huddling behind broken concrete with the whine and thud of bombers going over head, holding a child with the face of the savior.  The words do something no activism could have.  I have a weakness for people who are both poets and activists.  I think Jesus was a poet.  I think, too, of Thomas Merton, Teresa of Avila, Ammon Hennacy, Ani DiFranco, Dr. King, Toni Morrison, Allan Ginsberg… people with a sense of the spirit, a gift for ruthless beauty, and a challenging, hopeful voice ringing into the darkest corridors. The list is endless, certainly.  It seems like people who want to change the world, even in some small way, often wrestle with how to articulate that change, and the pain that comes before and during transformation, in words, symbols, and color.  The chaos of the real, lived, intense, immediate world seems like it can only be organized and captured, a snapshot, in poetry.  Timely, yet simultaneously timeless.  On one hand, this (like all art) creates emotion and connection in a way nothing else does.  Symbol is precious.  I experience the same intense magic (if I dare use that word here) in the offering the bread and cup during communion.  Simple juice, basic grain, but holding universes of meaning, worlds of transformation.  “This is my body… do this in remembrance of me…” These are not only words, but also performative.  They create even as they simply “are.”  Being and doing are simultaneous in them.  And yet, they are specific to an experience, universal but still meaningful to context, time, place, setting, circumstance.

This is what amazes me about people like Father Berrigan.  In a world where we ask all the time, “But what can we do?” he, and others like him, remind us to ask as well, what can we be?  The Catonsville 9 stated that their crime, for which they were imprisoned, was that they burned papers rather than children.  That simple, 15 minute action, during which they spread napalm on draft cards, lit a match, and then joined hands and prayed the Our Father, peacefully submitting themselves to arrest, wasn’t really doing anything.  They didn’t stop anything, start anything, change anything, do anything in the sense that we think of as being “productive.”  But the poetry of their action was a powerful catalyst for other people’s view of the Vietnam war.  They simply were: the Our Father was performed.  Your Kingdom come.  Your will be done.  On earth, as it is in heaven.  These things happened, the Will was done, simply by being stated.  When we say that prayer, when we live in that poetry, the Kingdom is here, despite the fact that it appears not to be the case.  We put hoped-for alongside with already-is.  And so with the 9.  By standing witness and putting things into juxtaposition that would otherwise never have been associated in that way (the definition of metaphor, I imagine, and the central tenet of Jesus’ parabolic teaching), they managed to alter the course of an entire government, one heart and mind at a time.  I know the Catonsville 9, and Daniel Berrigan in particular, are not soley responsible for changing how an entire country feels about a war, but I recognize in them the real power of living and acting poetically.  Perhaps when no one will listen to reason, art (performance, poetry, prayer) is the only weapon for peace that we really have.  To live and witness to truth and whole-ness with a sense of the poetic, the symbolic, the parabolic, perhaps that is what changes history.

Fasting for a change.

{ October 19, 2008 @ 9:02 pm } · { personal reflection, political, poverty, spirituality }
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Okay, so I admit I’ve been thinking alot about food lately.  Actually, about being hungry.  In a weird confluence of events, I’ve been studying the gospel of Luke (known by some as the gospel about the least, last, and lost) and the 14th century Italian mystic Catherine of Sienna, who fasted herself to death, at the same time that I’ve been working on a Poverty Initiative through my school internship and the world’s food shortages and economic crises have come to terrifying head.  People are hungry, all over, in every country (even ours) and have been for various reasons throughout history.  It is a universal experience.  A book I’m reading right now, called Hunger: An Unnatural History, explores what it is that makes hunger so powerful – as a tool for oppression, a political statement, evidence of our hatred for our bodies or the bodies of others, in the lives of children and political prisoners, teen girls and the poor.  Throughout the book runs the question, what does it mean to be hungry? 

Of course, as a woman in what one of my friends irreverantly (but aptly) calls “Jesus School,” in my mind hunger is deeply tied to the world of spirituality.  Whether you claim a particular faith tradition or simply claim to be a part of the human family, I think we can all agree that there is something in this world that is larger than all of us -  God, a Supreme Being, energy, physics, the human spirit – whatever we call it, something ties all of life together into community.  Every living thing relies on other living things to survive.  So it seems to me that when there are children dying of starvation on an average of every 6 seconds every day, we’ve lost our connection.  People are hungry because other people are overfull.  Two years ago, I visited Haiti on a medical mission trip and saw terrible scarcity, “grocery store” shelves with 2 cans of beans and one 5 pound bag of rice as their sole inventory, women making pies out of dirt, water, and salt in order to feed their families.  Returning home, I walked into a Target Superstore to restock my own refrigerator and stopped cold and nauseous in the first aisle, where thousands of pounds of Halloween candie waited on clearance.  The much-ness of it was overwhelming.  In Haiti, not even the basics.  In the U.S., in my home town, food after a holiday, with the wrong packaging, being readied for the garbage.  And last week, driving at a fast-food drive through with my nuggets and fries in hand, I saw a man perched with a bedroll and pack on the curb next to a dumpster.  He was meticulously, carefully eating a single bun.  Tiny bites, watching each piece disappear.  He’d obviously gleaned it from the garbage.  Not even the basics, but in my lap, a greasy feast I didn’t even finish.  That sucks, you probably are saying.  But what does it have to do with this spirituality you’re talking about?  Yeah, that’s tricky.

I am not hungry for food.  I am not what Jesus called the ptochos, the poor, someone dependent upon others for their daily support, destitute, poverty-stricken, or in extreme want.  But I am someone who has a wealth of resources available – perhaps not much money on my debit card, but a 401-k, decent food in my fridge, a roof over my head, clothes to keep me warm, a good education, family.  Rather, I’m comfortable.  So comfortable, in fact, that it’s rather easy, on a day to day basis, to forget that there are many, literally billions, of people in the world who would look at my life with awe and think that I am the most fortunate person they’d ever met.  And I would be.  But this is not a gift from God.  I did not earn this privilege.  Other people are hungry because my life is full.  The food I eat cheaply is grown by men and women who make slave-wages without health benefits.  My clothes, sown by their families.  I received a good education and will continue to find work with little effort partly because of the privilege of my race, while my minority brothers and sisters are equally qualified for the same jobs and will be passed over.  I am not hungry because others are.  The connection between us has been broken.

We all must be aware of this injustice and look for ways to redistribute wealth, whether economic or political, so that every human being has a chance at a full life.  Dare I say, this is fact?  However, I am also aware of a great mystery, and it is that while we are surrounded by evidence of an economy of scarcity, a great pie with a limited number of pieces, another economy exists, as well.  I believe in an economy of abundance.  Despite the fact that our reality teaches us that there is not enough for everyone, it is an elaborate lie.  There is enough food in the world that, were market forces regulated to protect those without economic power, we could feed every child on the planet.  Enough money to insure, provide healthcare to, house, and educate every person.  If I really believe that God is working for the good of the world, then I also am forced to believe that people who claim to follow that God can renounce our insecurity, our fear of scarcity, and be a part of that good by providing for our fellow human beings out of our abundance.  There is enough… it’s just not in the right hands yet.

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