“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Lent is always a good time to ask questions, so here are a few for today, reflecting on the Gospel we’ve just heard.
First, how does the crucifixion of Jesus mean salvation for us? How does it appear, not as a masochistic son placating an angry and sadistic father, but as a sign of life, as a sign of life meeting and transcending death? How can we make sense today of this crucified Christ who waits to meet us at the end of the road we follow in this Lenten season?
Second, working from that first question, how do we live out our understanding of this saving life and death in our own living and dying, as friends and followers of this Jesus? How do we live our lives, order our priorities, spend our days? How can we be real and religious at the same time? How do we do truth here and now?
So, let’s look at the Gospel. John is setting out two very complex patterns of truth, two threads interweaving like a strand of DNA in the very centre of the story he tells. First, there is the majesty of the savior walking through history, the king, the son of a king, coming among us and reminding us who and whose we are. In the royal pilgrimage we see the story of a great holy hero, the picture of Jesus reminding us of the immeasurable distance between humankind and God, as scripture says elsewhere, “My ways are not your ways.” John focuses us to see the immensity of God, the transcendence, how big the reality of God is, how far it all extends, how long it might go on.
But St. John also lets us know how close God is willing to come in the way of Jesus: close enough to meet foreigners and fallen women, noisy tax-gatherers and inquisitive temple personnel, self-proclaimed saints and sentenced sinners too. To every one of us, Jesus comes to offer the ultimate intimacy of God, to speak love, make love, let love live in us: meeting with us in the very middle of reality, closer than the polarities and disparities of in-group and out-group, “us” and “them,” success and failure, life and death. In the great majesty of Christ, God comes closer to us than we are to ourselves. And we come here to practice the ongoing discipline of a kind of double vision in order to see it clearly in all its immensity and intimacy. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said to the World Council of Churches in South America last month:
‘We are the servants of a monarch, the monarch of a nation set free by God’s special action to show his love and strength in their life together, a monarch whose authority belongs to the present and the future as much as the past. We are witnesses to the consistency of a God who cannot be turned aside from his purpose by any created power, or by any failure or betrayal on our part. We are more than servants or witnesses, because we are enabled to speak as if we were, like our king, free to be intimate with God; God has stepped across the distance between ourselves and heaven, and has brought us close to him. When we speak directly to God, we speak in a voice God himself has given us to use.’
Big and small together, majesty and familiarity, for what might appear to be two and are really one. In the Gospel we see the mighty picture of a monarch who has come from so far to be close to us in the value and the voice and the face of the friend, the sibling, the lover. All this is in the fourth Gospel: both a mystery and a love story. And all the time it is pointing further and deeper into the story, into the mystery, into the moment where Jesus prays that we may be one with him as he is one with the Father. “I in them and they in me… so that they may be one as we are one. That is the connection, the communion we are called into, the closeness that comes to us, comes to all of our life, all of it!
All of our lives: that is the tough part of the Good News; not just in the peak moments, the happy travels, the good years, the precious harvest. But in the times when life is spare and sad, when crops fail, when death seems to stalk us, in that time as well. When the crowd comes unfriendly and the end is in sight and is nothing we would have hoped for: Then he is one with us as well, God and Jesus intimate with each of us: meeting our failures and our endings: when the snakes bite, the wolves come, the story pours out to a sad ending. But the question then is, how can that take place?
John writes: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” It is an odd picture isn’t it? But it is such an odd and very complex world.
My niece in California has been studying homeopathy for quite awhile. I know almost nothing about it, but I think it works on the principal that a little of a bad thing is a good thing, a little poison, an infinitesimal amount, carefully applied, can save you from a larger poison. It’s close to more mainstream medical methods that use dead or weak cells from a virus contained in the right package to teach your body to kills live cells from the same virus. There can be trouble when the cells are stronger than the person they are supposed to cure, so care needs to be applied.
So if we are one body in Christ, than that cross, which is the last place we would look, may be the very place where Jesus meets the poison, turns the corner, takes the cure. Maybe (like the miracle of the serpent in the wilderness) the cure comes when we can see him take the road we were fated to walk and find the light there that we could have never seen. Maybe that’s the instance where the DNA gets a new start, finds a new path, a wider road. And from the place, he lights up the way, shows us the way home right through the darkness.
Listen, if anyone shouldn’t die, it would be him. So if he dies, meeting death as we all will, and if we are, as he says, one with him, then all our deaths meet his death and his life there. In Jesus, God love sews the thread of a majestic love and a deep connection, which stay down there in the middle of everything. That unspeakable intimacy, where God hugs the world with the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross, threads through life and death, success and failure, ending and beginning, weaving past, present and future into one eternal now where love is all in all.
It is important to state that it is not easy to understand how this could be. As a person who still doesn’t know how his computer printer works or when it is going to run out of ink, I honestly don’t worry too much about the mechanics of it: how all the parts fit together or how it might be diagramed. For, as I go along the Christian way, I worry less about the names or the lines on the map and learn to rest more in the heart of the journey and the assurance of coming home at the end. But what I do know, and what is very important to say and remember and to relax into is the fact that we are created, redeemed and sanctified, breathed, by the God who can, and would will to, take this kind of route, to go to any length to bring us home.
But we’re not there yet, we’re still on the road. Sometimes we get hints, guesses, keeping hope alive, and other times we seem to be lost in a dark way in the middle of the journey. But the Gospel tell us the good new is that God is on the way as well, has taken this route, walks besides, will see us home. All we need to do is live towards the light, do what we can, to allow God to live in us, begin again, day after day, now after now, to learn over and over to live in that love, face that face of forgiveness, mercy, renewal, humility, hope. And to keep letting God love us when all that seems impossible anyway, when everything falls flat and all we can do is cry, “Where in this hell are you and why have you forsaken me now?” The Good News, though it might not seen good at the time, is that God can be there, has been there, will be there, too.
Rowan Williams said this at the council:
the nature of our conviction as Christians puts us… in a certain place, which is both promising and deeply risky… where we are called to show utter commitment to the God who is revealed in Jesus and to all those to whom his invitation is addressed… We are not called to win competitions or arguments in favour of our ‘product’ in some religious marketplace… [instead] we have to be ready to witness, in life and word, to what is made possible by being in the place of Jesus the anointed – ‘our reasons for living, for loving less badly and dying less badly’... And we do so by giving prayerful thanks for our place and by living faithfully where God in Jesus has brought us to be, so that the world may see what is the depth and cost of God’s own fidelity to the world he has made.
Amen.
St Georges' Anglican Church, East Ivanhoe 26 March 2006
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Friday, March 24, 2006
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
My Recent Definition of Spirituality
For the Body Mind Spirit People:
On an interesting Wednesday morning, here are some tentative definitions of what spirituality might mean.
Spirituality is perhaps what happens when the air gets fresh, when we feel reinspired, remembered, reconnected to ourselves and others on the most radical and integral level, in a way that enables us to recall our deepest desires, deepest vulnerability, deep rootedness in a community that might include nothing less than everyone and everything. Some people get there by prayer, meditation, bodywork, stretching, preparing food, silence, conversation, singing, good sex, reading a favorite book, but not all at the same time. Some people get to that renewing place by simply being still. So in this definition, Spirituality is what deepens us into ourselves.
To use a three word quote from another context, Spirituality could also be, “truth mediated by personality.” And that might balance the first definition with an interpersonal dimension. Mystics from most of the wisdom traditions over world history have said that each and everyone of of us has particular value, is a unique offering, manifestation that needs to be manifest. So that each of us is a kind of gift, picture, word, poem, sermon, even dance or song, to the whole world of which we are a part.
Like some of the scientists are telling us about DNA, something of the fullness of life, hope, truth, God even, is contained in each particular manifestation of life: in the seed, the cell, the drop of rain. All seems to point to the chance that there is a deep specificity and integrity in the style of the whole universe that needs to be honoured individually. So that we, each and everyone of us, might be containers of ultimate and infinite integrity and truth. If this is true, it means we can take the chance to open and honour the place where our deepest desires, joys, needs, and sometimes even scars are found, for they all could be places that have essential purpose in the larger way of the universe.
So perhaps Spirituality is that which opens our hearts, minds, being, and communities to take the chance of being ourselves for the sake of all the world.
On an interesting Wednesday morning, here are some tentative definitions of what spirituality might mean.
Spirituality is perhaps what happens when the air gets fresh, when we feel reinspired, remembered, reconnected to ourselves and others on the most radical and integral level, in a way that enables us to recall our deepest desires, deepest vulnerability, deep rootedness in a community that might include nothing less than everyone and everything. Some people get there by prayer, meditation, bodywork, stretching, preparing food, silence, conversation, singing, good sex, reading a favorite book, but not all at the same time. Some people get to that renewing place by simply being still. So in this definition, Spirituality is what deepens us into ourselves.
To use a three word quote from another context, Spirituality could also be, “truth mediated by personality.” And that might balance the first definition with an interpersonal dimension. Mystics from most of the wisdom traditions over world history have said that each and everyone of of us has particular value, is a unique offering, manifestation that needs to be manifest. So that each of us is a kind of gift, picture, word, poem, sermon, even dance or song, to the whole world of which we are a part.
Like some of the scientists are telling us about DNA, something of the fullness of life, hope, truth, God even, is contained in each particular manifestation of life: in the seed, the cell, the drop of rain. All seems to point to the chance that there is a deep specificity and integrity in the style of the whole universe that needs to be honoured individually. So that we, each and everyone of us, might be containers of ultimate and infinite integrity and truth. If this is true, it means we can take the chance to open and honour the place where our deepest desires, joys, needs, and sometimes even scars are found, for they all could be places that have essential purpose in the larger way of the universe.
So perhaps Spirituality is that which opens our hearts, minds, being, and communities to take the chance of being ourselves for the sake of all the world.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
after a long silence
Hello there,
It has far too long since I've written anything here, but, well, I've been busy.
First, while I was in Santa Barbara a month ago, I received an email asking if I would like to be the Senior Chaplain at RMIT University, one of the two schools in Melbourne where I've been working for the last year. After some prayer I said yes, and since then I've spent a lot of time trying to get a shape of where this new ministry might be going. It is a very exciting prospect!
Then (and I didn't tell you 'cause I know how you worry) early this year I was diagnosed with high blood pressure and started to take medication to bring it down. At the same time some tests indicated there might be an irregularity with my heart and that was scary! But in the last few weeks the new has been good, the blood pressure is fine now and two weeks ago I had the test and my heart is fine - the Dr. even said I could exercise without restriction, and should do so. That brings on a whole new constellation of concerns, but they're much lighter ones.
Anyway, I will be better about writing in the next few weeks. I promise!
It has far too long since I've written anything here, but, well, I've been busy.
First, while I was in Santa Barbara a month ago, I received an email asking if I would like to be the Senior Chaplain at RMIT University, one of the two schools in Melbourne where I've been working for the last year. After some prayer I said yes, and since then I've spent a lot of time trying to get a shape of where this new ministry might be going. It is a very exciting prospect!
Then (and I didn't tell you 'cause I know how you worry) early this year I was diagnosed with high blood pressure and started to take medication to bring it down. At the same time some tests indicated there might be an irregularity with my heart and that was scary! But in the last few weeks the new has been good, the blood pressure is fine now and two weeks ago I had the test and my heart is fine - the Dr. even said I could exercise without restriction, and should do so. That brings on a whole new constellation of concerns, but they're much lighter ones.
Anyway, I will be better about writing in the next few weeks. I promise!
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Friday By The Bay - as Herb Caen used to say...
Friday morning, at the neighborhood coffee house and wireless connection. Yesterday we went to the new de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and I liked it a lot. It was great to see several paintings I’ve loved all my life in the new venue, although the wonderfully massive marble piece of King Saul brooding is not on view. Started to walk to the Legion of Honour to see an exhibit there and realized I was galleried out.
I’ve walked through so many areas where I’ve had some history, and it makes me realize that San Francisco is a haunted city for me: too many memories evoke old songs, I hear old voices, remember old stories, recall old fears, hopes, dreams, victories and defeat as I pass by places which trigger old associations. They all return. The vestiges of my personal, familial, corporate, historical memories: a neighbourhood where my great grandfather was born, the place where his grandfather had a warehouse on the waterfront in 1852, now several blocks from the Bay, the church where my parents were married in 1939. Moving past places where I worked, played, had intense conversations and more with friends and strangers about various matters of great importance now forgotten: all these landmarks which mix memory and desire – Thank you, T. S. Eliot - and make me glad to live somewhere which has room for new memories, new associations, new possibilities.
It has been wonderful for be back in San Francisco, and I am glad – very glad – that I live in Melbourne now.
I’ve walked through so many areas where I’ve had some history, and it makes me realize that San Francisco is a haunted city for me: too many memories evoke old songs, I hear old voices, remember old stories, recall old fears, hopes, dreams, victories and defeat as I pass by places which trigger old associations. They all return. The vestiges of my personal, familial, corporate, historical memories: a neighbourhood where my great grandfather was born, the place where his grandfather had a warehouse on the waterfront in 1852, now several blocks from the Bay, the church where my parents were married in 1939. Moving past places where I worked, played, had intense conversations and more with friends and strangers about various matters of great importance now forgotten: all these landmarks which mix memory and desire – Thank you, T. S. Eliot - and make me glad to live somewhere which has room for new memories, new associations, new possibilities.
It has been wonderful for be back in San Francisco, and I am glad – very glad – that I live in Melbourne now.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Living with ethics in the post-red-mustang-convertible world
Yesterday we returned the archetypal Mustang, after a top-down ride the night before down Lombard Street, up Telegraph Hill and around the Embarcadero to Market Street As we approached the Tenderloin we raised the top. It is so sad to see so many people sleeping on the streets, it reminds me of the pictures of New Orleans after Katrina; except there has been no hurricane here, simply a system that rewards the rich and suffers the poor to sleep on the streets in the richest nation on the earth.
I am proud to be an American. I speak as someone who’s always been proud to trace ancestry back to the roots of this country, so don’t make a protest that I don’t have a right to speak about my own homeland. But I recall the pictures I saw from Katrina and the sights I saw with my own eyes last night, speeding through the streets of San Francisco, and I think of the Hebrew prophets in the Scripture, railing against the injustice of Israel, and it makes me scared; for my country and for myself as a citizen.
I have reason to be concerned. I am staying in a neighbourhood where the average house sells for 1.2 million, I was somewhat depressed yesterday when Brooks Brothers did not have a wool-cashmere blazer in my side, I always hope for an upgrade to business class when flying. I am no saint. Bob Egan, a Jesuit who was my spiritual director for much of the ‘80s said one of the big questions for anyone who was interested in being a Christian is this: “How uncomfortable do you allow yourself to be for the Kingdom of God, the new creation?” I still mull over that one and my answer is usually, “not very uch at all.” But I wonder about the voices of the prophets, the call of God’s righteousness, and how it might speak, what it might say, about the disparity of rich and poor in this city, this nation, my own country in these days.
In “For the Time Being,” W. S. Auden writes that “God’s will will be done.” If any of this God stuff is true, if the poor are really blessed and if those who work for righteousness will be fulfilled; then I wonder how that might happen in this city in this world. And I wonder how I might be more concerned and connected to that kingdom, working towards that end, that hoped for harvest for all humankind, all creation. Going back to scripture, how can I keep awake?
San Francisco is still my favorite city,and it is still the place from which I define the world. The view from Coit Tower, driving down upper Market Street, Yerba Buena, Union Square, the wooden houses in bright colours climbing halfway to the stars, Tony Bennett is right, I left much of my heart here; and that heart sings for the beauty here and is saddened by the people who still sleep nightly in the doorways around the Civic Centre and for the rest of us as well. Can I live in that paradox for awhile, can I learn and build from it? Where can this prayer lead me to change my life and my work?
I am proud to be an American. I speak as someone who’s always been proud to trace ancestry back to the roots of this country, so don’t make a protest that I don’t have a right to speak about my own homeland. But I recall the pictures I saw from Katrina and the sights I saw with my own eyes last night, speeding through the streets of San Francisco, and I think of the Hebrew prophets in the Scripture, railing against the injustice of Israel, and it makes me scared; for my country and for myself as a citizen.
I have reason to be concerned. I am staying in a neighbourhood where the average house sells for 1.2 million, I was somewhat depressed yesterday when Brooks Brothers did not have a wool-cashmere blazer in my side, I always hope for an upgrade to business class when flying. I am no saint. Bob Egan, a Jesuit who was my spiritual director for much of the ‘80s said one of the big questions for anyone who was interested in being a Christian is this: “How uncomfortable do you allow yourself to be for the Kingdom of God, the new creation?” I still mull over that one and my answer is usually, “not very uch at all.” But I wonder about the voices of the prophets, the call of God’s righteousness, and how it might speak, what it might say, about the disparity of rich and poor in this city, this nation, my own country in these days.
In “For the Time Being,” W. S. Auden writes that “God’s will will be done.” If any of this God stuff is true, if the poor are really blessed and if those who work for righteousness will be fulfilled; then I wonder how that might happen in this city in this world. And I wonder how I might be more concerned and connected to that kingdom, working towards that end, that hoped for harvest for all humankind, all creation. Going back to scripture, how can I keep awake?
San Francisco is still my favorite city,and it is still the place from which I define the world. The view from Coit Tower, driving down upper Market Street, Yerba Buena, Union Square, the wooden houses in bright colours climbing halfway to the stars, Tony Bennett is right, I left much of my heart here; and that heart sings for the beauty here and is saddened by the people who still sleep nightly in the doorways around the Civic Centre and for the rest of us as well. Can I live in that paradox for awhile, can I learn and build from it? Where can this prayer lead me to change my life and my work?
Sunday, February 05, 2006
God, Traffic, Superbowl and American Holidays
I am in San Diego; here for a few days to visit friends before driving back to the Bay Area. It has been 20 years since I drove on the LA freeways. We left Santa Barbara after breakfast at the monastery and arrived here around 2:30, taking time out for lunch in Newport Beach, but aside from the lunch, the time between was a meditation on something, and I am not really sure what.
Driving through LA has to be linked with the worse of the 20th century: fast cars, smog, the threat of road rage, people in Humvee’s – I hope I spelled that right – cutting across lanes like mad marines in some near-eastern country. It was absolutely exhausting and I ended up with a feeling of being completely drained: the image that comes is from years ago when I was working in a 28 day rehabilitation house for people coming off abusing substances. There was a deep craziness on that road, a kind of narcotic of speed, change, danger and the always out there promise of progress. It was lucky that we were in the carpool lane much of the time, which meant we could only be in danger from cars to our right – discounting the lesser threat of the oncoming traffic in 4 to 8 lanes coming in the opposite direction across the barrier to our left. It was a high pitched insanity that left me feeling depleted in the same way as when I was helping some speed freak try to figure out what reality might look like after too much time in psychosis-ville. Next time I will try the train.
Tomorrow we start the drive north, but as it is Super-Bowl Sunday, one of the biggest religious festivals on the continent, traffic will be much easier! Thanks be to God!
Driving through LA has to be linked with the worse of the 20th century: fast cars, smog, the threat of road rage, people in Humvee’s – I hope I spelled that right – cutting across lanes like mad marines in some near-eastern country. It was absolutely exhausting and I ended up with a feeling of being completely drained: the image that comes is from years ago when I was working in a 28 day rehabilitation house for people coming off abusing substances. There was a deep craziness on that road, a kind of narcotic of speed, change, danger and the always out there promise of progress. It was lucky that we were in the carpool lane much of the time, which meant we could only be in danger from cars to our right – discounting the lesser threat of the oncoming traffic in 4 to 8 lanes coming in the opposite direction across the barrier to our left. It was a high pitched insanity that left me feeling depleted in the same way as when I was helping some speed freak try to figure out what reality might look like after too much time in psychosis-ville. Next time I will try the train.
Tomorrow we start the drive north, but as it is Super-Bowl Sunday, one of the biggest religious festivals on the continent, traffic will be much easier! Thanks be to God!
Friday, February 03, 2006
A voice from the past - Mt Calvary 1977
Through the miracle of computers, and my trusty iBook, Chip, in particular, I have the story I wrote in the spring of 1977 after I had spent three weeks as a pilgrim to Mt. Calvary Retreat House, where I am visiting today. What I quote below was the central part of a larger story, which was in turn a way to make sense of and write down an experience of the sacred, of an awareness that God was in love with me, liked me, was desirous of being with me lot less than everywhere and all the time. It was pure gift, a time of clarity after about a year of struggle and confusion. In reality, there was no one monk, but a variety of words and experiences: all boiled down to what I wrote here several months after the three weeks I stayed here. In many ways it is a message I am still coming to understand and live out.
What the Monk Said.
"What I want you to do is nothing. No more trips to Santa Barbara or Isla Vista to check up on the real world. No polysyllabic discourses with the other guests. I don't want to find you reading the Fathers of the Church or trying to sum up the Summa. If you have to read then try something like the Narnia books, nothing heavier, just keep it clean and light. I do want you to start attending the daily office, there is a rhythm there that will do you good. And I'd like to take a walk up the canyon everyday between lunch and tea. Take a towel in case you feel like swimming and find a rock and listen to the water in the creek. Lay back and let life sing its song to you, Let life happen in its own good time.
"I am not too popular with people from the Southland. Once I told a group from a church in Beverly Hills that if all Los Angeles spent three days in prayer the smog would vanish. They said that the area would all but vanish in the sense that nothing could happen. I said I though that was an added benefit. They didn't agree. What I am saying is that sometimes you just have to sit and wait.
"I want you to fill yourself with religion while you are here. A religion of action, I want you to choreograph your day with the daily office and festoon your night with prayer. I want you to allow the possibility that the world is a holy place and I want you to see that religion points to a fact that religion points too a fact, a statement about the universe that is beyond your wildest preconceptions, a reality that reaches out and in and under everything that Is. I want you to allow the possibility of God and I want you to use the way of religion.
"Religion serves man as a reminding sign, a directional signal, a road that points towards, and sometimes people forget that. They get to the point where they are supposed to learn, where they can remind themselves, and they forget to go on. That can and does happen with every bit of religious activity and every myth. It also happens with Kiwanis or Rotary, with business or academia. As soon as you have an image of some facet of truth the tendency seems to be to sit down and talk about it, think about it, write about it, everything but going on. When Dante went to his Paradise he saw some men who looked like mountains, and when he asked them who they were they said they were the ones who always go a little bit farther. Just a little but farther, to the unconstructed image, to the house of God.
"You see to go one, to follow the whisper of a hint, the glimpse of a vision, takes almost a superhuman amount of courage. It would be beyond any man if it were not for two things. First the wave that carries towards this sought for land is one of grace; we are carried by the current. And this graceful action is the most natural thing in the world. We have gotten to the point in this world where we call a young man normal if, after the proper amount of schooling, he spends the rest of his life selling insurance. In the name of all that is holy, don't worry about what is normal! Just have faith. Follow the hopeful moments, become a firm friend of the fact of life.
"I think that is what happens to the holy ones; whether Jesus , Buddha, Merton, Krishnamurti, or those we haven't heard of yet and perhaps never will. They kept going on a little further. They kept their ears open and their eyes clear and they becomes friends with life. They met her and mingled with her and looked at creation and found that it is good beyond belief. So they melded into life. each in their own way. that is all we have to do, go on in our own path, each bearing our unique gift. That isn't so very much to ask, to taste the savor of God. Dame Juliana said there were three things about that world that are important. The first is that God creates it, second, he keeps it, third he loves it.
"Look at where you are. Open your eyes and see! You are light dancing in the eyes of God. For that reason be what you are.
"This is the last time we will meet together, I am leaving for the mother house soon. I am not ordering you out the door, but I do think that it is time you were heading back to Davis. I have one more chance to talk to you and I have one more thing to say. I want you to trust your own conception of God. I want you to allow the wild possibility that God may be exactly as you are at your best, but larger, containing more diversity, unlimited options and combinations. Allow the possibility that God is not only lovable, but that he is likable, and since he is, so are you, St. Paul says that we are hidden in Christ, and the reverse in true as well. Christ is hidden with us; the wedding feast, the last supper, crucifixion, resurrection and pentecost are all hidden in our lives as well. We are the life of God acted out in time and space, the grace of God happening outside eternity, God dancing God's dance of perfect time, the epiphanies of God in process of happening, the eyes of God in the process of seeing.
"Tonight I want you to spend an hour in the Chapel before Compline. Go in and sit, or kneel and pray if you feel like praying, but mainly just wait for the silence. Just be ready."
What the Monk Said.
"What I want you to do is nothing. No more trips to Santa Barbara or Isla Vista to check up on the real world. No polysyllabic discourses with the other guests. I don't want to find you reading the Fathers of the Church or trying to sum up the Summa. If you have to read then try something like the Narnia books, nothing heavier, just keep it clean and light. I do want you to start attending the daily office, there is a rhythm there that will do you good. And I'd like to take a walk up the canyon everyday between lunch and tea. Take a towel in case you feel like swimming and find a rock and listen to the water in the creek. Lay back and let life sing its song to you, Let life happen in its own good time.
"I am not too popular with people from the Southland. Once I told a group from a church in Beverly Hills that if all Los Angeles spent three days in prayer the smog would vanish. They said that the area would all but vanish in the sense that nothing could happen. I said I though that was an added benefit. They didn't agree. What I am saying is that sometimes you just have to sit and wait.
"I want you to fill yourself with religion while you are here. A religion of action, I want you to choreograph your day with the daily office and festoon your night with prayer. I want you to allow the possibility that the world is a holy place and I want you to see that religion points to a fact that religion points too a fact, a statement about the universe that is beyond your wildest preconceptions, a reality that reaches out and in and under everything that Is. I want you to allow the possibility of God and I want you to use the way of religion.
"Religion serves man as a reminding sign, a directional signal, a road that points towards, and sometimes people forget that. They get to the point where they are supposed to learn, where they can remind themselves, and they forget to go on. That can and does happen with every bit of religious activity and every myth. It also happens with Kiwanis or Rotary, with business or academia. As soon as you have an image of some facet of truth the tendency seems to be to sit down and talk about it, think about it, write about it, everything but going on. When Dante went to his Paradise he saw some men who looked like mountains, and when he asked them who they were they said they were the ones who always go a little bit farther. Just a little but farther, to the unconstructed image, to the house of God.
"You see to go one, to follow the whisper of a hint, the glimpse of a vision, takes almost a superhuman amount of courage. It would be beyond any man if it were not for two things. First the wave that carries towards this sought for land is one of grace; we are carried by the current. And this graceful action is the most natural thing in the world. We have gotten to the point in this world where we call a young man normal if, after the proper amount of schooling, he spends the rest of his life selling insurance. In the name of all that is holy, don't worry about what is normal! Just have faith. Follow the hopeful moments, become a firm friend of the fact of life.
"I think that is what happens to the holy ones; whether Jesus , Buddha, Merton, Krishnamurti, or those we haven't heard of yet and perhaps never will. They kept going on a little further. They kept their ears open and their eyes clear and they becomes friends with life. They met her and mingled with her and looked at creation and found that it is good beyond belief. So they melded into life. each in their own way. that is all we have to do, go on in our own path, each bearing our unique gift. That isn't so very much to ask, to taste the savor of God. Dame Juliana said there were three things about that world that are important. The first is that God creates it, second, he keeps it, third he loves it.
"Look at where you are. Open your eyes and see! You are light dancing in the eyes of God. For that reason be what you are.
"This is the last time we will meet together, I am leaving for the mother house soon. I am not ordering you out the door, but I do think that it is time you were heading back to Davis. I have one more chance to talk to you and I have one more thing to say. I want you to trust your own conception of God. I want you to allow the wild possibility that God may be exactly as you are at your best, but larger, containing more diversity, unlimited options and combinations. Allow the possibility that God is not only lovable, but that he is likable, and since he is, so are you, St. Paul says that we are hidden in Christ, and the reverse in true as well. Christ is hidden with us; the wedding feast, the last supper, crucifixion, resurrection and pentecost are all hidden in our lives as well. We are the life of God acted out in time and space, the grace of God happening outside eternity, God dancing God's dance of perfect time, the epiphanies of God in process of happening, the eyes of God in the process of seeing.
"Tonight I want you to spend an hour in the Chapel before Compline. Go in and sit, or kneel and pray if you feel like praying, but mainly just wait for the silence. Just be ready."
A Suspicious Epiphany
This morning these words went through my mind:
"I am the beautiful reflection of my loves affection
A walking illustration of his adoration
His love makes me beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful.
"I ask my looking glass what is it, makes me so exquisite,
The Answer to my query, comes back deary
His love makes me beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful.
"And women loved is woman glorified
I’ll make a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful bride!"
Leaving aside the gender-specifc language, this is what I feel today in Santa Barbara. God’s love is blooming me in this blooming lovely place, and it is probably always the case, but I don’t usually see it, live in it, enjoy it, and hear this particular song in my heart.
Ah, the song. It is a tune written for Funny Girl, a Broadway musical and movie starring Barbara Streisand as a young Fanny Brice. She sang this song as a Zigfield Girl, dressed as a bride, with the addition of a pillow that made her appear to be very pregnant.
So the words above had a different context in the film than what they have today on these prayer-filled hills over looking the Pacific on the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, the mass which will be celebrated later today. And yet it makes perfect sense.
I have always tried to have a more conventional spirituality; but God often shows up in my life in a slightly common, humorous, even vulgar way. Thirty years ago I had a series of dreams where a cook from a diner showed up, walking from the kitchen with a white apron over a t-shirt that was stained with food preparation, to ask what I wanted to do with my life, and that was the time when I realized that my deepest and most intimate desire was to minister. Those dreams, and I have no doubt that it was God behind that well-used apron, led me to change my life.
So Barbra Streisand and a Broadway musical give me the song of God’s love, written in the words of the creation, on this wonderful California winter day, and help me to remember, on this feast of the Virgin, that I am also Theotokos, God-bearer, a pregnant bride with a surprising song of how intimately the love of the universe can come to take place in an indivudual life.
I am having a wonderful holiday!
"I am the beautiful reflection of my loves affection
A walking illustration of his adoration
His love makes me beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful.
"I ask my looking glass what is it, makes me so exquisite,
The Answer to my query, comes back deary
His love makes me beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful.
"And women loved is woman glorified
I’ll make a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful bride!"
Leaving aside the gender-specifc language, this is what I feel today in Santa Barbara. God’s love is blooming me in this blooming lovely place, and it is probably always the case, but I don’t usually see it, live in it, enjoy it, and hear this particular song in my heart.
Ah, the song. It is a tune written for Funny Girl, a Broadway musical and movie starring Barbara Streisand as a young Fanny Brice. She sang this song as a Zigfield Girl, dressed as a bride, with the addition of a pillow that made her appear to be very pregnant.
So the words above had a different context in the film than what they have today on these prayer-filled hills over looking the Pacific on the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, the mass which will be celebrated later today. And yet it makes perfect sense.
I have always tried to have a more conventional spirituality; but God often shows up in my life in a slightly common, humorous, even vulgar way. Thirty years ago I had a series of dreams where a cook from a diner showed up, walking from the kitchen with a white apron over a t-shirt that was stained with food preparation, to ask what I wanted to do with my life, and that was the time when I realized that my deepest and most intimate desire was to minister. Those dreams, and I have no doubt that it was God behind that well-used apron, led me to change my life.
So Barbra Streisand and a Broadway musical give me the song of God’s love, written in the words of the creation, on this wonderful California winter day, and help me to remember, on this feast of the Virgin, that I am also Theotokos, God-bearer, a pregnant bride with a surprising song of how intimately the love of the universe can come to take place in an indivudual life.
I am having a wonderful holiday!
Thursday, February 02, 2006
On a Holiday
I write this from the veranda of a monastery in Santa Barbara, California. I've been coming here for 30 years and they now have wireless! I am in the middle on a long vacation visiting friends and family, plus attending a conference at my seminary in Berkeley, and now staying at the retreat house of an Anglican order of monks who have been part of my life since 1974.
It is a very rich time. Connecting with the past, remembering what endures, putting some things to rest, touching base with some people and places that bring renewal, being simply surprised by how good life is. I have lived in Melbourne for almost 5 years now, and I love my life and work in Australia, but this trip is reminding me of the best of California, what I have had here, who I have known here. I've been connecting with friends who go a long time back, people who've seen me through big changes in old times, and it has been pure gift.
Yesterday a friend and I drove down the Big Sur road from Carmel in a rented - free upgrade - Red Mustang convertible, and if that doesn't bring out the archetypes, nothing will. So many memories came back, from that road and on so many journeys, of grace and good friends, the many detours in my life, with much forgiveness, numerous follies and endless love. This has been one of those times when I see how much I am sustained by love: with old friends, family, persons and places and from God. It is a real holiday. I will write more later.
It is a very rich time. Connecting with the past, remembering what endures, putting some things to rest, touching base with some people and places that bring renewal, being simply surprised by how good life is. I have lived in Melbourne for almost 5 years now, and I love my life and work in Australia, but this trip is reminding me of the best of California, what I have had here, who I have known here. I've been connecting with friends who go a long time back, people who've seen me through big changes in old times, and it has been pure gift.
Yesterday a friend and I drove down the Big Sur road from Carmel in a rented - free upgrade - Red Mustang convertible, and if that doesn't bring out the archetypes, nothing will. So many memories came back, from that road and on so many journeys, of grace and good friends, the many detours in my life, with much forgiveness, numerous follies and endless love. This has been one of those times when I see how much I am sustained by love: with old friends, family, persons and places and from God. It is a real holiday. I will write more later.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
After the Epiphany
I've been bad! In that I haven't written for so long. Partly that is because my routine is different over holidays, partly because the creative urge is currently occupied elsewhere with some new projects taking time, but I didn't mean to let this blog go silent for such a long time.
The last time I wrote was just before Christmas and I wrote something about waiting to be surprised. It came in the middle of the Eucharist, looking to my right and watching the people come to eat the body and blood of God as if it was an everyday right, something they were created with every right to do whenever they wanted; which is of course exactly right and wonderful to see!
It reminded me that, even though we arrange it within the architecture of holiness, there is, in the middle of the Eucharist, something wonderfully everyday: the just plain stuff of consuming the reality of God's love and presence and outpouring creativity in every moment of life, and probably much more beyond that. The reality of communion with God is both so beyond all understanding and closer than any mediation, radically here and there at the same time. Does any of this make sense?
One more time I am reminded why I am no kind of fundamentalist: I believe - and it is at the centre of my hope - that Jesus is the word of God for me, but this is no written down, codified, connect the dots and win the prize, kind of word, it is more a word spoken in particular moments, a word carried by a warm breath from the face of a loving, forgiving, challenging friend or stranger. The surprising gift of the conection with the God of the universe, opened, enligthended, pointed out in the particularity of an instant in time, in a consistency of newborn caring truth. It is not easily understood, still less easily thematised into a systematic or dogmatic theology, though these exercises can help mightily in preparing the ground for the gift of grace. But in that moment looking at the meeting place at the altar, where people came from many places to take part in, consume the deep truth of who they are and what they're about, I was reminded one more time that the world is full of gift. Thank God. Have a great new year!
The last time I wrote was just before Christmas and I wrote something about waiting to be surprised. It came in the middle of the Eucharist, looking to my right and watching the people come to eat the body and blood of God as if it was an everyday right, something they were created with every right to do whenever they wanted; which is of course exactly right and wonderful to see!
It reminded me that, even though we arrange it within the architecture of holiness, there is, in the middle of the Eucharist, something wonderfully everyday: the just plain stuff of consuming the reality of God's love and presence and outpouring creativity in every moment of life, and probably much more beyond that. The reality of communion with God is both so beyond all understanding and closer than any mediation, radically here and there at the same time. Does any of this make sense?
One more time I am reminded why I am no kind of fundamentalist: I believe - and it is at the centre of my hope - that Jesus is the word of God for me, but this is no written down, codified, connect the dots and win the prize, kind of word, it is more a word spoken in particular moments, a word carried by a warm breath from the face of a loving, forgiving, challenging friend or stranger. The surprising gift of the conection with the God of the universe, opened, enligthended, pointed out in the particularity of an instant in time, in a consistency of newborn caring truth. It is not easily understood, still less easily thematised into a systematic or dogmatic theology, though these exercises can help mightily in preparing the ground for the gift of grace. But in that moment looking at the meeting place at the altar, where people came from many places to take part in, consume the deep truth of who they are and what they're about, I was reminded one more time that the world is full of gift. Thank God. Have a great new year!
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