Category: Through a Glass Darkly

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Lent and the Call of Love

There are a myriad of reasons we might choose to walk, with the Church, through lenten shadows, but I believe the most powerful call is love.

We love the goodness of life, and we must reckon with how the life we know strikes too many vicious blows against this goodness. We mourn for the wounds we’ve known. We mourn for others who have suffered too much and experienced too little of the beauty. It is necessary to have space for grief, to acknowledge straight-on where the darkness, we insist, must give way to light.

We love our bodies. We are not simply bloated minds, grotesquely extended with only ideas and assertions and theological propositions. Our body aches for ways to encounter what our heart knows – that our life contends with hope, that the promises to which we cling must test their mettle. Our whole person wants to resist evil. We are restless to enact a bold, unflinching no to our own destructive choices. We long to step into the weary but dogged line of courageous rebels, in solidarity with the whole of humanity, digging in our heals, clinching our fists. Our bodies are ready to engage this fight.

We love our world, and all our neighbors in it. In Lent, we do not carry only our sorrows but the sorrows of the world. We make space to sit with the brokenhearted and to grieve with those who fear that they are truly alone, that ruin is their end. Lent will not allow us to pretend that everyone is well. Lent allows us to practice the art of presence.

We love the promise of hope. Lent is the time when our hopes pull taut. The days lengthen (and this is the original meaning of the word lent), and our eyes rise toward the horizon. The muscles stretch. The dimness begins to break. We know brightness will be here soon, and we must hold on. We must be ready for the piercing joy. We will ready ourselves, and we will hold up those who are too weak to face the soon-coming glimmer on their own.

Whatever reason you might enter Lent – for God’s sake, do it for love.

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Love the World. This One.

Jean-Christophe Verhaegen
Jean-Christophe Verhaegen

A Christian has every reason to love this good old world. And I do not mean love merely in an ethical sense or as an act of Christian duty. I mean we, of all people, should be the ones most ravaged by the pink glow above the Blue Ridge on a crisp morning, the ones who linger the longest in front of a canvas colored with life, the first to delight in a French Cabernet or a slice of potato sourdough drizzled with wild honey. When we read how Virgil has died in the war and how Hannah must now brave her days alone and raise their daughter who will never know her daddy, we have reason to be first to wince at the pain, the first to give thanks for the power of the story and the first to sit with a tear and at least a little awe for the one who could tell us such a tale.

This world, with its land and its people, was God’s idea. God was the Creator who, at every twist along the way, couldn’t help himself, exclaiming over and again, “Good. Good. Good.” Then, when the whole shebang was done, God clapped his hands and let out a big guffaw and said, “Well, now I’ve done it. This, friends, is real good.”

Old Uncle Jack, one of Berry’s numerous characters teaching us how to be human, how to be a neighbor, spouse and friend, “lived all his life loving solid objects.” Old Jack took God at his word.

God said, “Now, this is good.” And Old Jack answered, “Don’t you know it.”

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The Good, Small Faith

Many insist that Christian maturity means our faith grows larger and larger, but I believe that as we deepen into good life, our faith actually grows smaller and smaller. I do not mean that we come to believe in less or to believe with less fervor (though a wise professor once said, “The older I get, the more I believe in a smaller number of things.”), but rather that our beliefs find themselves decreasingly enamored with abstract theological notions all the while more and more attached to people with names and stories, to places with histories and hopes, to our own sorrows and joys.

In this deepening, narrowing place, our faith finds itself inextricably woven to the neighbor who’s spent 56 years waking to the love of his life but now wakes alone, to the child who carries our love and our blood but also our crushing regret, to the friends and the questions and the work that has made us who we are. Faith is not a set of grand truths preserved in a hermetically sealed silo. Faith is what we come to know, to hope, as we live into our actual life with the God who promises to meet us and make us within these days we’ve been given.

This means, at the least, that when we find ourselves with eyes bright, heart quiet and love attuned, we’ve likely found a place where our faith is growing fabulously smaller. Gratitude and contentment will be your friends here. Do not spend a moment critiquing whether or not this is the brand of faith you have been taught to expect. Simply give yourself to the Spirit’s invitation and whisper “thank you.”

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Change

Many people I know and love are in transition. Some are packing their belongings and moving cross-country. Some are welcoming children into their lives. Some, for the first time, know an empty, quiet home. Some are saying “I do.” Some are lamenting how “I do” was not strong enough to hold them together. Some fear the future; some are eager. All will, in one way or another, be changed. All of us will.

Whenever we let loose of what we’ve known, or what we’ve wanted to hold tight, we experience true loss. It is right to grieve friendships or dreams or a way of life we can no longer keep near. Whenever we embrace a transition we’ve eagerly awaited, we find a brightness that enlivens. It is right to run forward, to give ourselves wholeheartedly to new possibilities.

Either way, however, we simply continue our story. We are becoming the person we are intended to be. When we move further into our life, we do not leave behind all that was before. Rather, we carry it with us (or maybe it carries us). The identity we’ve been given continues to form us and instruct us. We simply allow life to stretch us into new places. Our heart grows larger.

 

winter_wonderland

image by gareth weeks

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The Membership. The Real One.

We who spend our days in the ecclesial world feel a grave temptation to think of the church in idyllic terms. We often speak of The Early Church (and precisely this way, all caps) with hushed solemnity as if it were some perfected version of Christian life that we must scratch and claw to recreate. As if these little bands of would-be disciples did not have grumpy parishioners and troubled kids, as if their marriages weren’t on the skids and their fervor didn’t wear thin. As if they did not have their share of wild sex scandals. As if the apostles didn’t shake their heads at times in frustration for all the folks who were not “on mission” (whatever that happens to mean in a moment).

I wonder if our fascination with The Early Church exists because we are so disappointed with the real church. If we can lionize a community that doesn’t actually exist, then we can save ourselves from having to live in the grind of the one that does. The longer I pastor, the more I believe that we are to live in the church we have, with the people we have. This is the only church that exists right now, for me.

Wendell Berry’s Port William community exists in multiple ways as a midrash on our refusal to live well in the places where we are, with people as they are, welcoming all their grime and glory. Wendell describes Port William:

It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership…

A membership. A community that is bound together in a time and in a place. A membership that exists not because of its grandeur or vision or ability to accomplish things – but a membership that exists because, well, it simply is…

My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

michael costa

Image by Michael Costa

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Fourth Week of Advent: Courage

{This week, John Blase and I conclude our Advent reflections with the Gospel reading for the fourth week of Advent, Matthew 1:18-25}

Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid…

Each time I’ve read this text this year, my imagination falls on the description of Joseph’s response after he receives the gut-wrenching news that Mary’s expecting a baby. Joseph knew good and well he had nothing to do with this unseemly development, and Mary’s story about Spirit and angels and the like must have struck him as a particularly elaborate attempt to redefine the obvious.

Yet – and this is what gets me – Matthew says that Mary’s “husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.” Unwilling to expose her to public disgrace. In a world that sputters on the fumes of controversy and defense of the tribe, I wonder what it would be like (and I’m imagining precisely those places where we believe our identity most threatened – or those places of public discourse where we are certain so much is at stake) to be bullheaded in our unwillingness to expose another to disgrace.

We often equate courage with those who thump their chests and “tell it like it is,” but I believe that often the bravest thing is to relinquish the compulsion to be right, to possess a trigger finger for mercy, to live gently. It’s a good thing to honor others’ dignity with such vigilance that there are lines we simply will not cross. Winning the issue or defending our “rights” provides a sorry excuse for crushing another human.

Though Joseph exhibited heroic valor, this entire story leads to the angel’s charge for Joseph to not be afraid. This is the word angels speak whenever they hit the scene. Apparently it’s the word we all need to hear. The angel prodded Joseph to push his courage further, to not merely refuse to disgrace Mary but to rouse his truest instincts and embrace Mary along with all the uncertainty sure to accompany.

It requires courage to love. It takes courage to live with our guard down and our arms open. But this is what happens when God appears. This is what happens when Emmanuel arrives, God with us.

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Third Week of Advent: Patience

{This week, John Blase and I reflect on the Epistle reading for the third week of Advent, James 5:7-10}

Be patient therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord…

Advent commences the Christian year, providing an important corrective to the fables by which we live. We are accustomed to starts that bolt from the gate. Gusto. Exertion. Master plans. To such hubris, Advent arrives, pats us on the head and says, Hold your horses there, antsy. You’re not ready for all that.

To begin with Advent means we start with waiting. We rest and pause. We hope and watch. We Sabbath. James tells us it’s like the long-suffering farmer who “waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it…”

With it – I believe this to be the crucial turn. To be patient does not mean to merely hold back or to camouflage how annoyed we are with delay. Rather, true patience means we are learning how to be with our life, to be present and curious and perhaps above all, tenaciously hopeful.

Walter Wangerin, a writer to whom I owe much, reflects the patience Advent invites. His dance (Walter’s word) with lung cancer has brought Walter ever more present to his life:

The nearness of death has relieved me of the need to strive toward goals and triumphs. No need to prove myself. I walk a level plain. Today is today. Tomorrow will come. And though I continue to plan activities well in advance, living doesn’t depend on their accomplishment, nor would any of them define me. I am already defined. Today is today. Tomorrow is enough…We are. It is enough.

It is a gift to have our grandiose visions brushed aside, to be patiently available to this moment. It is a gift to sink into the restful hope that God writes the story’s end.

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Second Week of Advent: Wild Man

{John Blase and I continue our Advent conversation. This week, we reflect on the Gospel reading for the second week of Advent, Matthew 3:1-12}

John the Baptizer was preaching in the desert of Judea…and people poured out of Jerusalem, Judea and the Jordanian countryside to hear him.

Burning Man aflame in the Black Rock Desert has nothing on the Advent story. When a wild man settles in the badlands, then the rest of us close up shop, gather our provisions and set out toward the fire and the thunder. Numbed by our conveyer belt existence, our heart has forgotten so much. But it only takes a mere glimpse of a spark, a glimmer of real life, and our desire, longing and hope shakes off the slumber. Whoever said it was a bad thing to be the moth drawn to flame?

What actually made John the wild man, though? His camel-hair habit surely furthered his holy-man austerity, while the locusts and wild honey only encouraged his reputation as a man disinterested in modern convention. But these biographical details could not be the center of it. Jerusalem was no different than Charlottesville or Denver or Trenton – you only have to stroll downtown, or partake in the neighborhood BBQ for that matter, to catch more than a few odd ducks.

John was a man too-wild for our aloof, cold ways because he knew something, he had heard something. “Repent, God’s Kingdom has come near,” John announced. The crowds flocked to the wild man in the wild place because John told them what their soul most longed to hear: God is near.

I believe the great fear of the human heart is that God is, in the end, far, far. What sickness or sorrow, what loneliness or ruin, could we not endure so long as we believed in our bones that God was near? Yet when we’ve lost this hope, when God seems too remote to matter or too capricious to trust or too fanciful to believe, then our most precious flame dies. Our hearts and our hopes sink into ourselves. They sink so far we forget them and assume they will never rise again.

But then there’s a John, speaking the wild words. God is near. You are not alone. Hope is coming. If merely a single word, the tiniest flicker, finds its way to us, then there really is no telling what might erupt. Good words are dangerous.

From what I see, too many of us think that God’s message necessitates shrill noise. We denounce and correct. We draw our tribal lines. We build synergy toward our clan or our corrective version of faith. What we do not say, with our words or our actions, is the wildest thing: God is near. Have your cause if it’s worthwhile. Promote your distinctions if you must. But please, in God’s good name, do not forget to tell us that God is near. If we don’t hear these essential words, the flame will stay cold and the heart will stay hungry.

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This is the second week of the Advent conversation John Blase and I are sharing. So what I’m offering is only half of the picture. For his reflection on this same text, you’ll need to move over to The Beautiful Due.

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First Week of Advent: Surprised

{a meditation from the Gospel reading for the first week of Advent, Matthew 24:36-44}

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

Advent’s opening gospel reading gives our drowsy ears a jolt. Rather than visions of a rosy-cheeked Christ child, we hear of Noah’s flood that arrived with a shock, sweeping the world clear and an odd parable about workers sweating side by side – only, when the tale’s done, one has disappeared while the other stands alone, bewildered. There’s a final odd twist where Jesus likens God’s appearing to a midnight cat burglar who slips in through a window to pick a house clean while the family snoozes, a sentence that flies out of left field and should make every flatfooted preacher and every dry storyteller take very careful notes.

In each of these unlikely stories, the common theme is how God’s action interrupts and catches us off guard. The point is not to wag fingers so we’ll shape up and curtail the surprise, a kind of white-knuckle vigil. Rather, the narratives deliver a plain fact: God will surprise us. Whatever we figure God must do or whatever time table we insist God must follow, God seems to always manage something different. Like the lover who springs a proposal or the friend who shows up for the party when they’re supposed to be two continents away, God has panache.

Whether or not we receive God as a welcome surprise depends, I suppose, on whether or not we’re willing to be undone by love, whether or not we’ve got the moxie to say what the heck and exist at the mercy of God’s evocative – but always unruly – imagination. Our invitation is to live wide-eyed, aware that every single moment bears the possibility of God’s agile movement.

Advent, of course, is merely an occasion to remember what has always been true. God is never far. God is always near. And the only truly surprising thing would be if God were never to show up at all.

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This Advent, my friend John Blase and I are reflecting on the same text each week, on Mondays, from Sunday’s Lectionary readings. We aren’t talking about the texts ahead of time, simply reading and seeing where they take us. To enjoy the full conversation, hop over to John’s ruminations.

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The Bumbling Faithful

Wise spiritual voices invite us to welcome the humiliation of the ego. It’s a steady drumbeat: real freedom comes when we release the commitment to power, to being right, to holding our life and our possibilities in our strong hands. Writer Jim Harrison knows this well: “I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance.”

However, we do not want to embrace our limitations. Our anxiety piques in those moments when we have no answers, no options, no clear path forward. Some of us exert vast energies resisting the reality that we really are destitute or spent or absolutely clueless. Others of us have yet to arrive at our helpless place, but there’s plenty of time. Sooner or later, life has a way of ridding us of our illusions.

There is no reason to bemoan all this. Our inevitable bewilderment provides a gift. Once we surrender the silly notion that we have God or marriage or parenting wrapped around our pinky…Once we get over ourselves…Once we laugh off the ridiculous idea that we’ve got the world by the tail – then we can get on with our true life, our true selves. We need no longer lug the weight of perfection. We can enjoy the carefree life that only the bumbling faithful are able to enjoy.

Wendell Berry said it right. “It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

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