Category: Through a Glass Darkly

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Cycles of Mercy

the fabulous photographer michael costa
the fabulous photographer michael costa

Every morning, the sun rises without our help. Each evening, it returns to its bed of rest. We do not contribute to the sun’s labor, and our expertise or cleverness do absolutely nothing to keep this cycle in motion. What we do, our unique role in this grand life, is to prepare space to receive the sun’s heat and energy. We bless the light when it comes to us, and we bless the light as it departs. In the same way, we receive the gift of night, the rest and the leisure and the warmth of hearth and the warmth of family around the table. We welcome these moments, sometimes we contend with them, but we do not rule over them. We are at their mercy.

The Scriptures speak of the farmer who works the soil and then simply waits on the sun and the rain and the earth to do their work (or to not do their work as is sometimes the case). Few of us know this agrarian reality first-hand. But we do know what it is to have done our very best, to have prayed our hardest or exerted our last ounce of energy, only to be left with the bare fact that the only thing left to us is to wait. We wait for a child to come home. We wait for pain to release. We wait for just the smallest glimmer of light to break through.

Miska has created something of a homeopathic apothecary. On the window sill, in front of where I write, sits jars of hibiscus, calendula and chamomile, vanilla jojoba oil, comfrey and calendula. Miska has poured her oils and herbs into the Mason jars. Miska has done her work, and now they sit and soak up the sun which arrives over the Blue Ridge each morning. They sit here and keep me quiet company. Miska does nothing for them in these days. I certainly do nothing. It is no longer up to Miska what they become. This line of jars tells me the truth about my life. Everything is a grace. All is mercy.

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The Courage of Patience

There are seasons of our life when all we can do is put one heavy foot in front of the other. It’s tempting in these dreary places to think that something is wrong, that we must muster our energy or our faith and maneuver out of the long sludge. Around a breakfast table recently, someone asked me how I was. I sighed deep. “I’m tired, but I’m surviving.” Another pastor at the table chided me. “Surviving? You better be doing better than that.” Well, I wasn’t. And truth told, I was rather proud of my survival. It’s certainly better than the alternative.

The Scriptures tell us to be patient and to wait on the Lord. We often envision this patience as something born amid spiritual fervor, a kind of contented restfulness as our prayers settle on our still hearts – and we wait. Often, however, our patience, if we’re to call it that, comes when we’re at the end of ourselves, after we’ve exhausted all other alternatives. Over years, contentment and patience can become a pattern, a way of living with trust, with open hands. In the mean time, it’s find to just strap in tight, grip a hand near you and ask God for mercy. God’s fine with that; God has more patience than any of us.

St. Teresa of Avila offers a blessing for these moments, reminding us that all things pass, that the dark hole which threatens to consume is smaller than it appears. St. Theresa reminds us of the one essential: We can live in the very place where we are, this very place, because God is with us. And God is always enough.

Let nothing upset you, let nothing startle you.
All things pass; God does not change.
Patience wins all it seeks.
Whoever has God lacks nothing:
God alone is enough.

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Generous to Demons

Jesus is so kind, he’ll even say yes to demons if he’s able.

In a scene that could have been cut from The Walking Dead, two demon-possessed men roamed the graveyard, frothing at the mouth and ravaging any poor soul that attempted to visit the tombs. Jesus approached, and the demons went to talking, nervously. The demons apparently knew their gig was up, and they didn’t let Jesus get a word in edgewise. Apparently, they knew that the minute Jesus spoke, it was lights out. So the demons belted out a request. If you’re going to drop the hammer, would you send us into the herd of pigs scavenging the hillside?

Now I could think of a hundred better options than escape via swine, but perhaps when you’re flustered and time’s ticking, you just say the first thing that pops into your mind. I wonder if later, when they regrouped and were licking their wounds, if one demon slapped the other on the head and said, “Seriously? Pigs?”

At any rate, Jesus didn’t hesitate. “Yes. Go.” Into the pigs they went, as they’d asked. My hunch is that his doesn’t happen often, but on this occasion, Jesus answered the prayer of a demon. I wonder if there was a moment, after the herd of pigs went raving mad and hurled themselves off the cliff, that Jesus lamented the sad affair. “I only wish you’d asked for more. I only wish you’d asked for love.”

God’s impulse is yes. Like a doting Father who hates to say no, God will do a yes at every possible opportunity.

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Stop Talking

Reading through James, I’m struck by how persistently he warns us of the abuse of words. “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak…” I wonder what would happen if we took this as our motto for one solid day? Would our facebook and twitter feeds come to a grinding halt?

The theology of the first section of James 3 (with its descriptor of the tongue as a fire connected with the flames of hell and the tongue as a restless evil full of deadly poison) might be summarized something like this: if you want to sin less, stop talking.

James provides treacherous ground for those of us who spend our lives wrangling with words, but perhaps James only says something every writer or preacher knows, even if we fail to practice it. Listening must come before speaking. Watching must come before writing. We must receive the gift of another before we have any gift to give. If we are full of only our own words and our own self-absorbed visions, our words will prove to be scraggly and brittle. There will be no life in them. When we are more consumed with pronouncing to another than actually receiving the other, we have lost our way. Our listening should be quick, and our speech should be slow.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, grief-stricken over the capitulation of the German Church to the Nazi program wrote, “Sometimes I think Christianity will only live after this time in a few people who have nothing to say.” When I hear our angry rhetoric and our speed to announce final words…When I watch how we dash past the actual stories that surround us… I wonder the same thing.

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The Grace of the Short Life

The rabbis spoke of how “our lives are too short.” This wisdom was not offered with regret or with a gaze backwards, forlorn over what might have been. Rather, this was a humble word releasing our anxieties that continually mount alongside the ever-abounding recognition that our possibilities are endless, that all we wish for ourselves could not possibly come true. Not in our life. Not in a hundred lives. Our lives are too short for that kind of burdensome, grandiose vision. Rest easy, the rabbis would say. Praise to the Master of the Universe, our lives are simply too short.

I find solace in these words. We have so many options. So many places we can be and so many works we could do. It’s a grace to be time-bound, to have limitations, to know from the get-go that there will be much we cannot finish, much we’ll simply be unable to do.

Friends of ours have a daughter who is easily over-stimulated, a spiral effect that leads to massive meltdowns (a scenario we are familiar with in our own brood). This episode was replayed for them recently on a trip to the beach, but on their last day they discovered how much she loved to be buried, neck-deep in the sand with a towel covering her head. Closed off from the world, unable to budge and barely able to wiggle her toes, she was transformed. Her anxieties ebbed as she was closed in, closed off to all the sounds and sights and all the other (good, even) possibilities of play with her siblings. The wide ocean and never-ending shore was too much. She needed a few square inches in which to sit.

For most of us, that’s a good word. Find your few square inches. Find the people you are to love, and love them well, love them deep. Find the place you are to love, for now, and love it – love it in the steady, anxious-free way of one who does not obsessively hop, skip and jump from one option to the next. Pay attention to what you must do in your world, and simply do it. For any other posture, I surmise, our lives are simply too short.

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God Thinks Like That

There is a dog I sometimes take for a walk
and turn loose in a
field,

when I can’t give her the freedom
I feel in debt.

I hope God thinks like that and

is keeping track of all
the bliss He
owes
me.

                                       {Rabia of Basra}

I wonder when exactly my boys will figure out how easily they could take advantage of me. I challenge their mettle and help them stretch their courage and their strength and their patience, all the things necessary for becoming a good man, a good person. But what I really love best is to give them good things, to be extravagant, to delight them, to watch their faces break wide open with some unexpected pleasure. Thanks to a gift from friends, we’ll have a late Friday night taking the boys to the Parachute concert. In a couple weeks, I’ll be taking one boy to a Clemson game while the other boy will get party weekend with mom. When we were at St. George Island, I walked them to the surf shop so they could each pick out new boogie boards, and we spent hours and hours immersed in sand and water. These things are by far the better part of parenting, way better than the necessary duties – making the kids do their chores and monitoring video game consumption.

God knows exactly what I’m talking about. James tells us that God gives generously to all, without begrudging the gift. In fact the word translated generous includes the meaning of something done ‘in simplicity’ or ‘without reserve.’ In other words, God has a laser focus. God’s face is set like flint, fully intent on showering us with divine-sized largesse. It must be hard work for God when God must provide other kinds of grace, those things necessary if we are to be whole — but nothing so good as simple, lavish kindness.

So, the 7th century mystic-poet Rabia of Basra can rest easy. Apparently God does think at least something like that.

 

 

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The Anxious Church

The Martha and Mary story will not leave me, particularly Jesus’ tender concern for the burden Martha carried. An anxious heart will bury the soul, this I know.

I see a lot of anxiety these days. It’s tricky business to locate because anxiety can appear so helpful, so “concerned,” so righteous, so radically Christian. Most anxious people are not cowered in the corner biting their fingernails. Most anxious people are working like mad, intently focused, advocating, pushing. We rarely call a spade a spade here because anxious people get stuff done. Anxiety is a mighty potent fuel.

We’re anxious that we’ll louse it up as parents, so we frantically read and worry and jump expert to expert. We’re anxious for the injustices of our world, so we charge from cause to cause with no space for life or laughter or human frailty. But some day, these anxious fumes will burn out; and even if they blaze eternal, could we stop to consider the kind of life we’re burning to the ground in the process?

A great sorrow to me is that the Church (the very people to whom Jesus said, Go live, free as a lark and My burdens are light and Don’t be anxious. For real, don’t) is often the most anxious-laden place I know. We’ve got budgets to raise and mission to accomplish, a city to save for crying out loud. And anxious rhetoric gets stuff done.

An anxious church may be a prosperous church or a socially engaged church or an exciting church, but in the end it will prove to be a hollow church and a tired church. When the Spirit is active, our work is not a burden that buries us but a dance that invigorates us.

Whatever else we might accomplish, if our churches never guide us into places of deep rest (those green pastures the Psalms speak of), then we have surrendered the very life God has given us.

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One True Essential

christ-in-the-house-of-martha-and-mary-ca.-1618-diego-velazquez_12005
Diego Velázquez, ‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’, 1618

When Martha invited Jesus into the home she shared with her sister and brother, she couldn’t have known the splendid friendship she’d just instigated. You never know the remarkable string of events you’ll set in motion by something so ordinary as opening your door and laying an extra plate at the table.

Martha got right to it, cranking things up in the kitchen and preparing for the many guests who followed the rabbi into her living room. After a while, Martha grew agitated because there she was working her finger to the bone over a hot stove while Mary refused to leave Jesus’ side, soaking up every word. When Martha protested, Jesus, in the gentle tone every over-exerted person needs to hear, answered Martha, Martha, you are anxious and distracted about so many things. Then Jesus added, Mary has chosen the one thing most essential here. Let’s not take that from her.

It’s easy to think that in this short narrative Jesus takes sides in the long feud between competing spiritualities: the spirituality of action versus the spirituality of contemplation. This war rages on even now, between the justice-loving activists and the mystic-minded contemplatives. Of course, it would be silly to think Jesus was interested in, much less bound by, our divisions, the ways we like to codify paradigms and categorize everything and everyone according to some flavor du jour.

Jesus did not push against Martha’s labor, but rather against her distraction, her worry. God knows we need people who clear the fields and announce the truth, people who get antsy whenever we forget that there’s a world we must tend to. But God also knows that those of us who’ve recognized how much our work matters are tempted to think it matters too much, to forget that God and love stand at the center of our labor and our noble causes, to forget that our soul is our deep treasure – and that our soul can absolutely shrivel and die. There’s nothing more heartbreaking than to find a person who’s given themselves to a cause and then, amid their fervid exertion, completely lost themselves in it. Now, only a shell of a human remains, barking burdensome platitudes.

The truth is, however, contemplatives struggle just the same. When we too heavily emphasise “the disciplines” or “the practices,” as if they are a force unto themselves, we entirely miss the point. There are few things more obnoxious than a would-be mystic who’s worn themselves out (not to mention everyone around them) because they thought the work of silence or “spiritual union” was their mission they must accomplish.

What Martha and Mary needed, what we need – that one thing that is necessary – is Jesus. In our seasons of grit and grind as in our seasons of quiet and sabbath, what we need is Jesus. Jesus may come to us in a thousand ways, through Psalm and Gospel, wind and river, worship or children or wine or sweat or solitude – but we must choose him. We must choose that which is absolutely essential, the one thing that, unless we have it, we will die.

 

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Preaching

The idea of ‘preaching’ has fallen on rough times, often tarnished by those who claim to be friends. Perhaps I’m a hopeless idealist, but I think it’s a mistake to surrender a good word to the wolves.

At the same time, I also feel like Reinhold Niebuhr who confessed, “There’s something ridiculous in a callow, young fool like myself standing up to preach.”

At any rate, I continue my Church Words series at Deeper Church today, pondering the old, out of favor word: preaching. This subject gets me stirred up.

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Live Your Own Myth

One of the disadvantages of our over-broadcasted lives is that we encounter an ever-increasing temptation to live another person’s story. We humans have always been jealous creatures. With Cain and Abel, it only took one other person with which to compare and compete; yet that was plenty to instigate a fit of rage, one life lost and another life chained to restless wandering and sorrow.

Midrashic tradition asserts that Cain and Abel were not merely fighting over God’s pleasure with their sacrifice but also over which brother would marry the beautiful Aclima. Since history, for as far back as history goes, tells us that men have thumped their chests and sailed their fleets into bloody war in order to secure the beauty, this traditions seems at least plausible. The sad truth, however, is that we don’t need any deeper reason for the conflict or the tragedy that ensued. All we need, if we are to inflict violence upon another or upon ourselves, is fear.

Fear that we are nothing. Fear that our odd and marvelous peculiarity is not enough. Fear that when someone else knows great joy or splendid success, that this means there is less joy or success in the universe for us.

Of course, the opposite is true. The more we revel in another’s goodness, the more we find ourselves bumping into goodness too.

The tragedy of a small, fearful life is not only that we inevitably harm our friends (or someone who could be a friend, if our ego were not in the way), but also that we harm ourselves. When we waste our energy attempting to capture the glint from another person’s life, we completely abandon our life, the life that will tragically go unlived if we do not pull up our boots and get to it. As Rumi said: “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”

Another person’s life may be swell, but by the time it reaches you, it’s old hat. We don’t need another recycled life. We need you to get busy showing us your life. Whatever uniqueness your life exudes, the world is smaller if you do not give it to us.

Don’t mimic another’s voice. Don’t give too much time to the fantasy of what might be if you had only been given their opportunity, their smashing looks, their resources, their golden touch. Bless that person, I promise they’re fearful too. Then blaze ahead with your one life. Please.

 

 

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