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I have never been able to sustain a discipline of journaling for more than a few days at a time. But at this Christmas Eve service I found my mind wandering. Not intentionally. Not even absent-mindedly, nor out of boredom. And the thoughts seemed substantive, worthwhile. So I paid attention. I suppose these bits may have been the beginning of my spiritual wandering. You might want to watch for that as we proceed.

St. Luke’s in Granville is my circle of standing stones. What I mean by that will become apparent as you read.

December 24, 2007, Christmas Eve—11:20pm

I sit and listen. I sit and luxuriate, I wallow in the atmosphere. I sit and wonder. I suppose the midnight Christmas service has always been my favorite. As Susan Lehman suggested in my theological infancy, the Jews had it right, the Christians got it wrong when we switched from Friday evening to Sunday morning. I know the historical and theological rationales for the change. But they are ex post facto. And whatever rationalizations they scream in my ear, they still got it wrong. The reality is that evening times, midnight and pre-dawn are the magical times for worship. So the Christmas Eve midnight service has everything going for it, as does the Easter Eve Vigil. The hour and the colors and the smells and the cold, crisp breezes (maybe even snow!) outside, but inside the warm, friendly faces and bodies crowded together, enjoying being together, and surrounding, embracing, enfolding it all the dark and candlelit, mysterious night.

I cannot really remember my first Christmas Eve church service, but it was certainly in my pre-teen years. That and New Year’s Eve were the only times I was allowed to stay up that late. It was a rare privilege, a special occasion. The very dark, small, old, clapboard church, candlelit (long before fire marshals thought to shut down such operations), one of the rare times when it was very filled with people, with two lighted balsam trees perfuming the air with Christmas aromas jammed inside the tiny sanctuary, so it was nearly impossible for the priest and acolyte to maneuver inside the altar rail, swatches of pines hanging from the window sconces and pew ends, red bows everywhere, and wonderful music, the organ and the singing choir, familiar but special Christmas carols. It all worked together to make that dark hour magical, and filled with mysteries intended to be savored, not solved. Warm, very tender memories. Powerful, healing memories. Binding, life-giving memories.

So tonight, an old man now, I sit and watch, and listen, and sense, and wonder: what’s it all about? Oh, I know the theological content, the rational and supra-rational content. It’s been my profession for over forty years. But tonight I sit and wonder what it’s all about. Stephen preaches, thinner stuff tonight than his usual (but that’s alright, because the preaching of the word does not carry the message this night; the darkness and every other wonderful thing inside this building convey the complex of messages), so I sit and hear the words, but my listening is more inward, a wondering: what’s it about? What is wanting to be said to me? To be heard by me? The secular Christmas has become such an impossibly heavy, jangling and jarring noise (an annoying, no, a disorienting cacophonous racket I want to creep away from, really). What’s the real message here in the dark quietness?

And here, in the dimming years of my life, I wonder what it’s really all about, this Christian stuff? I’ve learned it and recited it and preached it and taught it for six decades now, but more and more in recent years I quietly wonder, what’s it really been about? As I age, and the experiences of my spirit wander outside the boundaries of accepted and promulgated Christian orthodoxy, I wonder. And that’s what these pages are about, my wonderings. Call it “speculative theology.”

So as I sit in church on this Christmas Eve and wonder these days, I say to myself, “Now, Bowers, this is your chosen standing stone circle. So, what’s it about? What is going on here, at the describable level, or at the unknowable?” The answer comes quietly, muttered deep inside myself in mumblings incomprehensible and unrepeatable, but significant. I can almost hear the words, the ancient truths, but not quite. Not yet. But I keep listening. And anticipating.

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Palm Sunday, 2008—Sitting in Church

Palm Sunday has never been satisfying to me, as a liturgist or as a participant. It is such an odd perversion of the regular Sunday liturgy. We begin with that curious little blessing of palm branches which are then given to all without instruction what to do with them (the kids’s notion of sticking them in each others’s eyes might be the best suggestion). And then we sing a hymn, sometimes processing about inside, or outside, or from outside to inside (Stephen’s favorite) or watching others (the choir and crucifer, for instance) process around, all very messy and poorly organized. My sense and experience is that congregations don’t like this falderal. But then, that’s what I (as liturgist) have always intended, that they should be very discomforted by it. After all, it intends to capture just a smidgeon of what the disciples and bystanders might have felt, doesn’t it?

Back in our usual (translate “accustomed”) places, we go through some regular prayers and readings and such, standing and sitting (perhaps even kneeling), until we find ourselves sitting(!) in the middle of the Gospel reading, listening to the priest read (or having the Gospel read as a dramatic reading by members of the congregation) with all of us shouting “Crucify him, crucify him!” the whole Passion Story (and t-t-t-that, folks, is why we are wont to call this Passion Sunday, because we read the whole passion story in case some here won’t make it back before Easter morn). The preacher preaches, trying to make sense of this and linking all of Holy Week together. And from there on out it’s a regular Sunday Eucharist.

I’ve never felt it worked. But then in seminary and ever afterward no one taught us how to make it work, or what “work” might mean even in this context. What should this Palm Sunday liturgy do for us, or to us? We know that probably it’s all most will see of Holy Week until Easter morning (although this week is the very core of what it’s all about, not just Easter morning, but all of this week [yet few will participate on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. And gawdforbid they might do anything about it on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Saturday], and then they’ll wonder why Easter turned out to be a let-down, not the whoop-tee-doo we want it to be.)

Holy Week tells the center and depth of the story, what Christianity is all about, how in Jesus’ self-sacrifice God’s redeeming of His people was worked out. This week is really the only liturgical work of the Christian year, and everything else is build-up or follow-up (or towards the end of Pentecost let-down). So this is it! How do we make it spiritually richer for people (assuming that they, like me, want it richer)?

And then I muse, “When you (Bowers, or anyone else still listening) have mastered all this (the Passion story, and the liturgy, and the Scriptures, and standard Christian theology, and all the exercises and stuff that goes with it), then do not give up, do not stop to rest a while. Do not think, “This is it, this is all I need.” Because this is only a beginning place, one foundation stone, one among several possibilities, on which to build our spiritual lives.” There are other foundation stones too: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, naturalism. They all are reaching toward the same, toward the Eternal. And while we proclaim that ours is the best way, maybe even the only way, I’m not so sure there are not other ways, equally good, perhaps better ways, to discover the Eternal in our lives. But I am thinking that this stuff, by itself, will not do it!

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Gors Fawr

Near the beginning of my pilgrimage sabbatical in Wales I hired a guide to carry me from St. David’s at land’s end down to Tenby on the southern coast, and enroute to show me some of the more powerful ancient ruins strewn along the way. I was on my way to the Cistercian monastery on Caldey Island to write my second book, daily prayers written in the Celtic tradition (i.e., of Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica) with a brief, opening exposition of Celtic Christian spirituality to buttress and inform the readers of my daily prayers. Terry John was my guide that day, a native of the region, well-educated, who had taught in London most of his years, but was now retired back homeward. And being a native he had the credentials to ask questions of his native elders and peers, questions about ancient lore and beliefs and traditions. So he carried within him ancient lore that is nowhere in the books. He took me past a single standing stone that on a certain night each spring is painted white. No one in the community seemed to know, or, more likely, was willing to admit, who did that. Nor had anyone any idea (or was willing to admit) why that was done. It had always been. I asked him to take me to a circle of standing-stones among other things. I wanted to experience it more than see it. I’d seen others, but always when I’d been in groups. I wanted to have quiet time alone in a circle, to feel whatever might be felt there, to sense whatever might be sensed. He took me to Gors Fawr. It is a modest circle of seventy-three feet with sixteen local stones, none being more than thirty inches tall. I wandered among the stones. He told me facts about the stones and the circle. After some time I asked him, “What was this about? I know some people claim these circles were astrological observatories, others that they were the site of religious ceremonies. What do you think they were?” He was quiet for a few moments (as though considering whether I could be trusted with his answer), and then shared that he thought the circles were multi-purpose. That they served as a community gathering place, and certainly were constructed with astrological dimensions for agricultural purposes, and were possibly also market places, might have been used for ceremonials and religious rites, perhaps for political and civic and governance gatherings. He found it significant that the circles were often within sight of other circles, so they must have had some larger-than-community purposes as well. And that all made sense to me. I did feel something at that circle, particularly at one of the stones, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you what I felt, certainly not something I’m aware of feeling in everyday happenings and places.

So these days when I find myself in church I usually am asking myself, “Bowers, this is the circle of standing-stones you have chosen, and that seems to have chosen you. What’s it about? What’s going on here today? Why are these people and I gathered here? If this is our metaphor, our circle of standing stones, what is it saying? What is it pointing toward? To what unknowable and inexpressible reality is it trying to give voice? What am I listening for here?”

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The Liminal

I need to wonder aloud for a few minutes about the liminal. A Latin word, limen which we translate “threshold,” that member of the doorway which we step over as we go in and out the house, or maybe we linger on it as we briefly contemplate the day ahead. The ancient Celts considered thresholds to be sacred places, places where we are most likely to encounter the holy, the sacred, the spirit world, the LORD. Not just doorway thresholds, but all kinds of thresholds, places of transition, when we step from one place, one time, one life into another. All primitives who live close to nature know about limens and liminality. Where the water of a spring which has spent eons underground unseen in blinded blackness, suddenly gushes forth cool, clear, fresh into the light and air for drinking and giving life. Where the river courses along the bank carrying flotsam and boats. Where the mountain top touches the sky. When the day meets the night, and night the day. Where the forest touches the open plain. At equinox when the dark of night becomes longer than daylight. Where the wilderness meets civilization, or one country warily touches another. When drowsiness slips into sleep. Where death overtakes life, and when new life is born. Thresholds, transitions, boundaries, crossings, moments when all creation seems to pause and breathe deeply, silently, watching to see.

I have learned that dusk and pre-dawn are the best times to pray; God is most willing to be present, or perhaps we are most open to Her presence. The instant when I discovered my wife dead, God held me back from tumbling down into the black abyss of chaos. When Nancy and I stood before our gathered family and friends and said “I do” to each other and to the gathered community. I have sat on the boulders at Govan’s Chapel tucked into the gap in a cliff side as a gale blew sea foam around me and over the cliff top and knew I was with God. All places and times of transition are limens, moments when, for an instant, we are in between. My dad used to talk about “Hobble-de-hoy, neither man nor boy,” in between being a child and becoming an adult. Limens are everywhere once we begin to recognize them and watch for them. And they can be very important moments in our spiritual lives, moments when we are vulnerable, and can be very present to God.

I have been in lots of liminal places. Sometimes Nancy and I make that an element, a goal of our travels, to discover and collect a few more liminal experiences. In-between places, in-between times. Places where time seems to slow and pause for a little before moving on to tomorrow. Places where the land ends, and I creep as close as I can (I’m acrophobic) to the edge of a cliff and look down eight hundred feet at the waves crashing on the rocks, and ask . . . (there are no words). Caldey Island is a liminal place where time itself doesn’t quite stop, but becomes unimportant, where the ancient and the present collapse together, and I could stand in one place and ask all the questions that had never been answered, no matter that there was no one, and nothing to answer. But there came an answer, not in words, not even in ideas or forms or images. Locked in a burial chamber in Loughcrew. Spaces for wondering. Sitting on the rocks at land’s end and watching the waves crashing for hours, and hearing non-voices uttering, perhaps in my imagination, or in the rhythms of the seas and the pounding of the waves. Places to listen—and to hear the sound of the great nothing that lies beyond it all.

The illustrating example of the liminal commonly given is of the tribal initiation rites for boys-becoming-men. The boys, about to become un-children are taken from their families and villages to a remote ritual site and subjected there to various ordeals or humiliations (sounds much like hazing rituals), trained by older men. The dark is often an integral part, as in a darkened hut, at night, in a cave. Sometimes mutilations such as tattoos or scarification or circumcision. This may go on for a few days or months or even years. There is often some encounter with the gods or the ancestors. They may be taught skills. At the end, a highly ritualistic reunion. The boys have died and are now reborn as men, sometimes with new names, sometimes needing to be taught to recognize relatives and friends. The liminal is a “betwixt and between” time, no longer boys, but not yet men. All old is stripped away, and the new is received, like recruits in miliary barracks stripped of “civies,” dressed in ill-fitting uniforms, given rifles, and forced to live in an unnatural community. For a period the boys have no family or friends, just each other and a few older men as guides, so new relations must be built, without status or class. This is an in-between time when you give up the old and prepare to take on the new, get ready to become something, someone you have not been before. It is a time given to begin the processional from the known to the unknown. And it is a time to consider what it will be like to be a man. A honeymoon is a very palpable liminal time in which we stop being an individual and become a mini-community.

There are liminal places (boundaries, no-man’s-lands, crossroads, land’s ends, mountain tops, seashores, river banks, artesian springs, sacred worship places, cemeteries), and liminal spaces (two-dimensional plots of land, one-dimensional pathways and ley-lines, zero-dimensional omphalos [translate: navel] and axis mundi [translate: axis of the earth] the dream time (i.e., of Australian aboriginals), and liminal times (the New Year, equinoxes and solstices, birthdays and anniversaries, dusk and dawn, initiations, waking from sleep, “Once-upon-a-time” [of faerie tales]), and liminal events (births, marriages, deaths, life-changing happenings), and liminal journeys (pilgrimages, retreats, dyserts, sabbaticals), and even liminal living (persons of lameness or disabilities, babies born with cauls, hermits, tramps, priests and monastics and such, contrarians, fools). Liminal is stepping from the known to whatever lies beyond.

God is very close, very present, very accessible in liminals. Or perhaps, inversely, it is we who are, can be, more open to God in liminals. When I came down the stairs and discovered Suzy cold and dead, God clasped me tightly in Her embrace.

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Maundy Thursday, 2008—Thoughts

We stand, we kneel, we sit, we sing together, we listen to the priest and to the choir, we recite in unison memorized ancient pieces, we read others aloud together, we speak responsively back to a reader. Liturgy is multi-sensual: splotches of colors, beautiful brocades, the sight and smell of candles (and in some other churches, the luscious, choking smell of incense rolling up in clouds), the sounds of the organ and piano and on occasion other instruments played with deep devotion, of voices singing, speaking, chanting, the taste of fish food wafers and wine, the warmth and smells and sensuousness of gathered bodies. And in the midst of all that we imagine we are speaking to God.

What does it mean tonight? This Maundy Thursday? We commemorate and symbolically enact the last meal Jesus had with his disciples. Tomorrow on our liturgical clock he will die! But this is tonight. And we try to live it out by commemorating the eating of that last meal, a Passover meal, the betrayer fleeing the room, the ragtag procession to Gethsemane, their sleeping vigil, his pleading “Take away this cup from me!” with gobs of bloody sweat, the clanging and chinking noises of steel weapons as the soldiers work into the park to take him, his surrender, him led away to trial, the faithful followers’s stark terror of flight, scared shitless, running for their very lives. We commemorate. Tonight.

So tonight we gather as it is darkening, to go through the regular, familiar liturgy with only minor variations. The music is darker this night, heavier, to try to capture the mood of that last supper. Or perhaps to capture our own moods as we think forward to the gruesome execution tomorrow morning, as though we might be there. The rest of the liturgy is not so very unlike the way we celebrate it every other day. Until we get to the end. And then, in silence, they strip the altar. Take away every piece of color, every bit of shiny metal, every candle and bit of light. They veil the cross. They remove every moveable thing that makes this space look and feel liturgically lived in. While we watch, in silence, listening to the awkward noises. Noting the slight disorganizedness. And finally we leave in silence, sombered, as the place is darkened and some one lonely person prepares to spend hours here in this darkened, empty, spooky space, vigilling. In some places there is an unnerving variation, we wash each others’s feet! Because he did it. In other places there is one additional piece; after they have stripped the altar, and everything else they can, they wash the altar, as we silently watch, not with soapy water to make it clean, but with wine and water to ritually purify it, to make it ready for the sacrifice. And what does all that mean?

This is the circle of standing stones that I have chosen for myself and which seems to have chosen me as well. So tonight I have to ask, “What does it mean? What is it about? What, beyond the obvious and the stated, is going on here? Why do we bother to do it? What is its power, for us? What are we here to commemorate? To do? Does it make ANY difference whatsoever?”

Eucharist (making thanks) is always about community about this community of the faithful (whoever they happen to be). In this very symbolic, very stylized meal we celebrate our community, we enact our chosen community, we reinforce and solidify this community we each have chosen for ourselves and for each other, this community that is for us the living body of the risen Christ. And as this community gathers we imagine that the Christ is present in every person who joins the circle, and in the gathered circle itself. Christ is here. Now. At this very moment! Or so we imagine.

But what is different about this night is that tonight we celebrate not just the community, but the community disassembled, torn apart, shredded, scared witless and running for our very lives. Community shattered. Obliterated! And what would it be like without community? That is the metaphor this evening. And what does the metaphor point toward? What truth, what reality beyond the limen does it open out for us?

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The Imaginal

Several months ago I stumbled across the notion of the imaginal I recall not where. I Googled it and came up with three articles, which, I must confess, is all I’ve read on the topic. But I must also confess that the notion fascinates me, and I suspect it is one, if not the primary, gateway into the world of mysticism. Briefly the notion is this: that the faculty of the imagination enables us to enter, be in relation to, communicate with, be educated by non-physical cosmologies which are every bit as real as the physical/material world in which we live this material life. The articles I read, one by Dr. Gerald Epstein, a psychiatrist who uses the imaginal in his practice, and two by Henri Corbin, an interpreter of Arabic and Persian texts (perhaps an authority on Shi’a, Islamic mysticism, certainly conversant with it) introduced me to a strange new world.

The imaginal is very difficult for me; I am very much dedicated, both by psychological make-up and by ingrained training, to the left-brain, rational, linear kind of mental life. My personality type (INTP in Myers-Briggs) is such that if something is not logical, then it is nonsense. But the imaginal is the mental life of the right-brain. And I think I may have missed something potentially very significant for my life. I will not pretend that I understand this term “imaginal.” I only know it seems to make sense to me.

Evidently we of the western world have been trapped and held captive by René Descartes (1596-1650) when he proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am!” (though I was taught in Philosophy 101 “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”). And ever since we have locked ourselves into a thought system in which the linear, the logical, the left-brain is dominant, and right-brain processes are largely discarded as dealing with unrealities. In the West it is thinking alone that is important and worthy of being worked with (and it must be logical, linear thinking, dealing with the empirical, the hard-data stuff of this material life). “Imagining” and “imaging” are considered illogical, irrational, non-linear and therefore fictitious, unreal, and not useful. We bear this burden of logicality, perhaps to our souls’s detriment and ill-health, and maybe even death. In consequence we have carefully learned that our imagination is the gateway to fantasy, fiction, the unreal, “made-up stuff,” but not possibly to anything in any sense real or worthy of serious consideration, certainly nothing that should influence our lives.

I’m told that most of the peopled world do not feel so limited. In Eastern cultures they proclaim existence by saying simply, “I am,” (i.e., not compelled to prefix it with a condition of rationality). That includes the imaginal as well as the logical. And that, in turn, opens worlds hidden from us Westerners by our insistence of logicality. In particular the Chinese, Tibetan Buddhist and Islamic (Shi’a) cultures are open to and make much use of the imaginal. Epstein suggests that linear (left-hemisphere) thought processes deal primarily with factuality and the past, and cannot effectively cope with the future, whereas right-hemisphere (gestalt) processes, can deal effectively with the present and future, and are therefore much more potent and realistic for dealing with some kinds of psychological issues. Corbin is quite clear that imaginal processes open to us vast universes, very real universes of knowledge, experience and possibilities not apprehended through linear processes.

William James saw a progression for a religion evolving from the mystical experience of a seer, through a codification stage which begins to develop logical constructs for the mystic’s vision, and on to a final institutional stage which is constructed for the consumption of the masses attracted by the mystic’s vision. It is the mystic’s vision which is enervating, exciting, life-giving. But his vision can not be apprehended by the rest of us. His vision must be captivated, and shaped into something translatable for the rest of us. And finally it is institutionalized into a form which, while fixed, stable, and in a sense dead, the rest of us can cling to, something we can ingest without getting indigestion. Jesus was the founding mystic whose vision so captivated the masses; and Paul was the initial codifier (though perhaps he was himself a mystic with his Damascus road experience and his ascent into the third heaven) who began the process of shaping Jesus’ vision into something the rest of us could grasp and cling to. And the bishops of the third and fourth centuries were the institutionalizers who built it all into a church that Constantine and the rest of us could live into. In essence, only the mystic, the visioner has the deeply religious experience, the face-to-face encounter with The Other, which the rest of us, in whatever insipid ways, attempt to emulate, in the light of which we warm ourselves.

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Reciting the creed

Every Sunday we stand up in unison and recite together the creed. The Nicene Creed of course, that ecumenical statement of what we, the whole church universal believe. That tersest, densest, briefest definition of the faith constructed by the bishops of the early church at the behest of the emperor to unify the church. That hedge which protects the church from false beliefs and divisiveness, that says, “To believe inside this hedge is safe, okay; adhere to this; but if you believe outside this, you perish, eternally.” It tells us that believing is what this religious stuff is all about, holding tight onto a linear (more or less) statement of facts (some material, some immaterial) about the construction of this metaphysic. That is what is crucial, clinging onto THIS basket of words, lined up in THIS order. Knowing God, having intercourse with God does not enter into it.

This credo was composed in the fourth century, phrased in the metaphors and imagery of the fourth century, with all the metaphysical and physical and biological assumptions of the fourth century built into and standing behind it. The earth is flat and has four corners. There is water underneath, land and water here, and above the dome of the sky more water. Hell is a physical place somewhere down there, and heaven an equally physical place up there somewhere in which God lives. And this earth is the center of the universe, and man the most important creation in it, the apex of all God’s creation. And the male carries the seed, is the sole procreator, while woman is only the incubator, has no part in conception, is a mobile uterus to house the seed until it grows able to live outside the uterus. All of that comes along with this basket full of creedal words, some of which I cannot even pretend I understand. So, when we stand up to say the Creed together, professing that this is what we, all we, believe, can I do that without biting my tongue? Or am I allowed to cross my fingers so that I do not perjure myself?

Marcus Borg covers himself by saying that he understands this creed to be an historic statement made by the church at a certain time and in response to certain circumstances; and he recites it along with us in that context. And in response to the question, “Is Jesus the second person of the Trinity?” he would answer both “No” and “Yes!” And I think I must nod my head in painful agreement as he speaks. You want a simple, straight-forward answer where I think there is none. I cannot even conceive of what you mean by a Trinity, which is what the Nicene Creed is supposedly about. How can one God be three? The math doesn’t work for me. (And to call it a “mystery,”i.e., not to be solved, makes it no more apprehensible or useful for me; been there, done [or tried to do] that, didn’t work, at least for me.) How can Jesus have been fully man (which necessarily entails mortality, and all the other human limitations) and fully God (which we have always understood to mean immortal and unlimited). These two things cannot be one and the same. So I covertly step across the aisle and stand alongside Borg, and mutter the words with my fingers crossed. If you intend these words to mean precisely what they say and nothing else, then I have to quietly confess, “No.” But if you might allow that they comprise a sort of window that offers (in ancient language that is almost entirely incomprehensible to the twenty-first-century Western mind and with a whole set of assumptions that I know to be quite inaccurate and inadequate for today’s world and metaphor) a sort of window that will give the merest vague and ephemeral glimpse of the Eternal which is in reality far beyond our scope of vision and power of comprehension, then I can quietly nod the slightest agreement.

So when we stand in unison to recite the creed, I join in because I understand that the Church has always (since 325 or 381 AD or thereabouts) done this as a token of our unanimity that something beyond our imagining happened in the man Jesus whom we call the Christ, something which gave us the clearest image we’ve ever had, before or since, of what God is about; but at the same time I understand that these words are only the vaguest token of what happened, not a precise and literalist encapsulation of the Jesus event, not the be-all and end-all of faith statements. It is a token, a pretty incomprehensible token, and nothing more. The creed is not a sword to conquer the world, or to fall on. It is a token to hold onto when feeling desperate; and little more. As a statement of all that is necessary to eternal salvation, it is a farce. But I agree to join in with your recitation of it because this church is the spiritual home I have always belonged to, I want no other, and this is one thing we do; we say these words together, to affirm both to ourselves and to each other our belongingness.

But as I have begun to explore, and search, and wander the spiritual world in which I find myself these days, this creed is no guide, and is not even a hedge to keep me safe. (Although it could hedge me in, keep me back from any useful reaching out to know God, to have intimate intercourse with whatever is the ultimate. But then that holding-back might be, historically, the real intention of a creed.)

And what if the God I am coming to know does not fit inside this creed? What then?

But on the other hand, all these words I have just written about the creed comprise a linear, logical, rational world view. And I’ve written them just after I tried to say a few intelligible words about the imaginal. So after I’ve mastered the creed and all that other seemingly linear, rational stuff, my hunch is that the imaginal is my only route beyond, an alternative to the linear, toward the Eternal. But I’m not much good at the imaginal, am I? So maybe at this point I should say along with Lilly Tomlin, “Oh, never mind!”and get on with it.

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Easter V, 2008

I made no notes to myself during the sermon on Easter morning. They would have been embarrassing. I’ve spent most of my lifetime in a ministry for which Holy Week and Easter is the very core, the defining moment, the most important moment of the Christian year. But now I am no longer sure what these moments are about (was I ever sure, or just “putting it on”? And have I lost my faith, or merely begun to wander somewhere beyond it?) So my notes would have been embarrassing. I would have admitted to myself that Easter morning is always a let-down for me, always has been, has never lived up to the hype. Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, even Holy Saturday, these I can get into. These are human events; they are about the very down-and-dirty moments and events of our lives. They are real, and I can dig my fingers and intellectual claws, my emotional claws, into them. So when I wake up on Easter morning I expect more of that, only much more intensely, excitingly. (It’s gotta be at least a little better than searching out an Easter basket full of chocolates and an opera cream Easter egg.) But it’s not! Lots of wonderful colors and sounds and smells and tastes, with pounds and pounds of frappery and gingerbread. So much preparation and promise, and then, the same old liturgy with a few kinks thrown in. The week was about real, human stuff; but this is about something way outside the human. Something ineffable, untouchable, something beyond. It’s about what cannot be said, defined, or described. And the hoked-up celebration just doesn’t make it for me. I always hope it does for others. But after all these years I’ve come to not expect much any more.

So Eastertide begins to drag for me. After that Easter morning let-down, and then six Sundays of preaching about John’s post-resurrection stories I began to run dry and wish for some of the Pentecost season readings from the Hebrew Scriptures, rich, powerful, human stories you can really sink your teeth into. And then this morning we arrived at the story of Stephen, the new deacon who left off deaconing and took up preaching and got himself stoned to death for it. Had a vision as he was dying, and as he shouted out his vision, well, I thought, that’s what happens to mystics; they get stoned, and then someone accommodatingly stones them to death. Happened to the prophets. Happened to Jesus (except execution by suffocation, shock and exposure on a Roman cross instead of rocks). Now it’s happening to Stephen. And others will follow. Mystics are just too off-the-wall, too loose-cannon-ish, too outside the limits, beyond the pale. They can’t be tamed, and so they can’t be tolerated. They can’t be controlled, and they dream weird things, wheels within wheels and hundred-eyed indescribable critters, things that point beyond the texts, beyond the codified experiences, beyond the expectable. And those dreams point toward mysteries not captured (perhaps not even hinted) in the holy writings, mysteries more indescribable than trinities, mysteries more fundamental than even YHWH.

And I, fool that I am, have a yen for some mystical experiences. I think they might open understandings deeper and richer and more elemental and more extensive and more profound than the tales of Hebrews and their images of the eternal. I would hope for glimpses, mere glimpses mind you, of the chasms and abysses that illuminated and motivated Jesus. Souls are willing to be stoned to death for things like that, and some people are always willing to accommodate them.

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Feast of Pentecost and Mothers’s Day—May 11, 2008

Nancy and I took Ed and Marvine to their church this morning, a small, very country church with an average age of about seventy-five. Found myself reflecting on what a different circle of standing stones this was. A country UCC church, farmers and such, just coming off a short, bad pastorate with a gal they should never have called, now being interimed by a senior pastor who’d served here before, but only as long-term Sunday Supply. She fits them well, seems as country and down home as they are. And I reflected (though I’d been here before and reflected on this community before) how different an experience this was from our normal St. Luke’s, Episcopal experience. No formal liturgy here to speak of. But lots and lots of family. What happens in this circle of stones? A reinforcement of this as a chosen extended family. These folks seem to like each other, feel at home around each other (I’ve no hint what ancient animosities and dividing biases separate them; they keep those monsters hidden even from themselves). The first minutes were taken with greetings around the room (time is deliberately or accidently given for this), and the formal service began after this was completed. The pastor began with a folksy litany built around “This is for mothers who . . . .” Folksy, country stuff that said “You’re okay, we’re okay.” Not stiff Anglican liturgical material. A lot of (hidden) stuff was going on (I felt). Not clear how much of it was Christian. The words of the service were built around the Pentecost readings, but I was not clear that the underlying messages were; they seemed to me more American, mid-Western, farming country messages, and I suspect you need to be a seasoned member of this community to comprehend the underlying, subtle, not explicitly voiced messages. But values were being reinforced. And the pastor knows how to talk with them, country-folk. So a kind of matriarchy was going on. At announcement time one mother touted her son’s perfectly pitched baseball game the day before, seventy-five pitches for the whole seven innings. A round of applause felt appropriate, though not given. As a preacher she seemed to me somewhat scatter-shot with Pentecost messages about getting some mission going, and the Interim’s messages about some things that need to be happening here, get with it! Not my kind of tight and obviously erudite piece of scholarship. And no Communion; but that was missed only by my Anglican fixation on Eucharist. But these were folks who were enjoying seeing each other for an hour, and then anxious to get on homeward. This circle is about such different things than my St. Luke’s that it is kind of amusing (though to say that would sound deprecating, which I do not intend). And I can only hunch what things are given voice and enactment within this circle; I’m deaf as a post to their language, unable to hear what is being said in between and underneath the words. This is not my circle of standing stones.

Perhaps at St. Luke’s we are reaching out to touch the numinous in our very stiff and formalized, ritualistic, liturgical ways; while here they seem reaching for family, farm community, for keeping-it-together kinds of things through a very loose, flexible, transparent kind of liturgy.

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My Circle of Standing Stones

So each Sunday I make the pilgrim trek to my particular circle of stones (I pass two other Episcopal ones enroute, one because the pastor is a proudly self-proclaimed red-neck who preaches a funny, backwoods version of Americanism with some gospel stuff occasionally thrown in; and the other because the now-moved-on rector chased Nancy and me away with her incompetent temper tantrums) and wonder, “What am I getting from this community, circle of stones?” and “What is this community, this circle of standing stones needing or wanting of me?” I know I am trying to reach far beyond what this circle can open to me. I can still enjoy and engage in the intellectual musings of this community; they are fun, but in the end insufficient to fund my searching. And I’ve thus far found no one standing in this circle whom I trust to search alongside. So that is not its drawing for me, not a place to deepen and extend my search for the eternal.

And the liturgy? Well, it’s mine, it’s what I grew up with (despite the superficial changes of the 1979 Prayer Book revision), it’s what I was trained in and practiced professionally for so many years. I am accustomed to and feel most comfortable with it; it is my liturgical home. And it is a limen for me, in its own way, a doorway that opens in a very limited way, to whatever lies beyond, a tiniest, halting baby step toward an Eternal. But I have come to understand that liturgy is a communal thing, it is done to foster the community; it cannot, is not designed or intended to feed the individual’s soul. No one has told me that; I have gradually uncovered that for myself, and I do not know if that is true for anyone else around me, or whether anyone else has ever discovered it. So my soul-feeding must happen elsewhere, through some other limen or imaginal. Liturgy has become comforting, but not illuminating, and is instructive only to a minuscule degree. It is a comforting metaphor, but I am unclear for what.

And while I like the people who gather in this circle, and enjoy being with some of them, this is a very artificially chosen extended family for me. They are not intimate family or friends for me. But then I am a very alone person who has, or needs very few intimates or compatriots.

So what is this circle for me? I am no longer sure. It draws me back, and I willingly participate. It yields me some little time, some little place, some little focus to muse, to recall, to re-sort, to review and reframe. It causes me to pay enough attention to ask, “What is happening here? What is this about?” and “What is it pointing toward? For what is it the metaphor?” Probably without this time and place I would not take the time to wonder, much less to ask. It does that much. And perhaps it does much more. Perhaps it reminds me that there is something much more than what is happening here, something to which I, Jack Bowers, need to be paying attention. It invites me. But to what?

And what is this circle of standing stones needing of me? I’ve so little notion of what I have to give, and even less a clue as to what it is in need of. What do I bring that it wants, or needs?

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A Saturday—September 20, 2008

And now I place one foot outside my standing stone circle, and begin to wonder, perhaps to wander. Odds and ends begin to pile up, bits and pieces, and to join up, and to form a vague alternative to this particular circle, a not-yet-viable alternative, an only vague one.

I’ve been scouring, even teaching Jack Miles’s book, God: a biography. He tracks the YHWH of the Hebrew Scriptures, from Genesis through Chronicles, watching simply what He does and says, and asking “Who is He? What is He?” The portrait that emerges is not pretty, from a majestic and then bumbling creator-friend, into a demanding family protector, then on to a violent and sometimes cruel war-god and coercive law-giver, compact-enforcer, next a jealous and loyalty-demanding overlord who moves on to take up international roles, and then, when his covenant with his chosen people fails, a half-insane (manic-depressive?) God who, alternately pleading and then abusing, abandons his people, condemns them into exile, and after they return, becomes an increasingly absent God who, while not totally abandoning, fails to make any significant difference. I have not done a similar study of the God of the Gospels and early Christian writings, but at a first glance, the picture is only slightly more attractive.

I’ve been plowing my way through Karen Armstrong’s book, A History of God, in which she tracks the development of the several images of God in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, just barely touching Buddhism and Hinduism. It is fascinating to watch the evolution, from familial and tribal gods, through Scriptural presentations, and as those prove insufficient, through further evolving images. I get a portrait of a God who, when frozen into Scriptures, wanes insufficient, and is then further explored with philosophic (on the rational side) terms and in mystics’s (on the imaginal side) terms. Several things become clearer:

1) Armstrong points out (and others echo) that the mystics’s ways are for the few, that not many of us can achieve mystical vision, but that on the other hand, religions begin with the mystics’s visions full of energy and magnetic excitement, but that as the mystic’s vision is codified into a religion it becomes frozen, static and unmoving. The religion is the lay (i.e., non-mystic) person’s effort to respond to the mystical vision, but it is doomed to fail (i.e., to not be as inspiring and motivating as the mystical vison itself).

2) Each major religion has evolved its own mystical side, but that side is always on the fringe, too radicalizing to be at the center, and while it may subtly and gradually shift the focus or direction or center, it is at the same time threatening and at odds with the center.

3) Those mystical visions often wander off in directions quite different from the center’s vision, and are sometimes even antithetical. The God of most mystics is quite unlike the YHWH of Genesis-Isaiah. And

4) Armstrong, along with others, points out that Christianity in the West has been taken captive, and held hostage, by rationalism, spurns the non-rational, the irrational, the imaginal. We in the West have little patience for the mystical visionary, we give him only slight berth, and certainly ignore his wisdom, while most of the rest of the world, particularly Islam, values his contributions and leadership. We are, religiously, out of step.

And I’ve forced my way (with elbows and shoulders and knees) through William James’s lectures, Varieties of Religious Experiences a book I should have read thirty-five or more years ago. While those lectures are now a hundred years out of date, in some ways they are still seminal, in other places they’ve not yet been heard. On reading him I momentarily understand the fundamentalist mind set (not completely, not really, certainly not sympathetically). James divides us into two sorts, those of “healthy-minded” or “mind-cure” religious experiences (not so positive as those words might imply), and those of “sick-soul” experiences (sometimes as unhealthy as those words imply). Or in other words, those of us whose faith grows slowly vis-a-vis those whose faith, like Paul’s, is marked with a dramatic conversion experiences. And as I read James with twenty-first-century understandings and insights, I can only wonder to what extent our religious experiences are hard-wired genetically or hormonally etched into our neurological pathways. Is it possibly written in my bones that I will have or require a conversion experience, or that I will not and will instead slowly mature into my faith? Or that I will have no faith at all, no aptitude towards a god of any sort? (I am not referring to the recent discourses about the possibility of a religion gene within our DNA; until it is proven otherwise I think that a stupid notion.)

And I wonder about the imaginal. There is a part of me would have liked to be a mystic, to experience the God directly, without any mediation. I understand that at my age, and lacking as I do the essential discipline, and being probably completely without aptitude, that is not a possibility; but those reasons do not appease my yearning. Yet I can imagine. And I think I could learn to accept my imaginings as another reality.

As I reckon up this small pile of odds and ends, clods and droppings, I begin to wonder about the whether of Christianity as the religion. Is this belief system any better that any other. Or is it simply the one I grew up with, the one scribbled on my tablet by my parents, and the neighbors (most were Catholic) and the culture. Could I have been just as content (or discontent) as a Muslim? Or a Buddhist? Or a Kabbalist? Is this Christianity no more than one way godward among many? Is it mine simply because it was the most marketable religious system in the fourth-century Mediterranean world? I think that might be. A system grown out of the mystic Jesus’ experiences, codified by the brash, enthusiastic genius of the mystic Paul. Did it simply make the most sense for the most people throughout most of the Mediterranean basin in 200 AD? Was it simply better coinage than the state religion and folk piety of that day? I remember Dr. Solomon at Bexley Hall commenting in an aside about folk piety. Though I cannot recall his words, I do not remember that he disparaged folk piety, rather he seemed to be alerting us to it. I had never heard the term folk piety before, but had come to Bexley deeply imbued in it. Christian folk piety was my religion when I arrived, and I was in the process of exchanging it for a much more intellectual, and intellectually acceptable religion, orthodox Western Christianity. But in retrospect, was the orthodoxy any better than the folk piety? And was it any closer to a relationship with God himself? Or was first century Christianity simply the more marketable folk piety of its day? And converted by those early Church Fathers into a supremely acceptable (for its day) intellectual religious system? And I inherited it. And it’s no closer to God that the other stuff, loved mainly because it could claim a real, live martyred human Jesus as its founding mystic?

I am wondering. And wandering. But not feeling lost!

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XIX Pentecost—September 21, 2008

Arrived at church a quarter of an hour before the service, greeted warmly Drew, now a cancer survivor, and settled in to muse a few minutes. Ed Burdick sat down beside me, asked if I was working on my sermon. Notes were appearing, scribbled on the front of my bulletin. It was a productive morning, the musings just kept coming, so cryptic notes kept filling up the blank spaces on the bulletin cover.

I get occasional glimpses. Susan says she doesn’t give a hang for the unseen God. And while I sympathize with her disinterest, I do (and just how-hard wired is that need, I wonder?) I am curious, but more than just curious. There is a vague yearning, one which I suspect will never be satisfied, at least in this life, to experience God for myself. My occasional glimpses are so vague as to be indescribable. The divinity I glimpse is not the very personal, but very incendiary and inconstant, very human and anthropomorphic YHWH of Hebrew Scriptures. Nor the warmly loving Abba of Jesus’ gospels. The God I glimpse (“It,” I am inclined to say) seems remote, impassive. I cannot tell from this perspective whether It has concern for me, for us. My yearning is to see Its face, though, as in the Hebrew writings, to see Its face may be to die. So far I’ve glimpsed only what seems to be Its backside and I’m still alive. Still, maybe in some sense I have died; at least that ancient, childish comprehension of God has died, and the more matured, Christian comprehension has died as well, along with my clinging to those. In the glimpses I get the God does not seem to care that I am peeping at It, yet I sense It may care in some vague sense. I read others’s words, that everything exists within God, and that somewhat expresses what I sense, and yet It is transcendent, out there, separate but still united with the creation.

Then I suddenly realize how much my thinking, my intuitions have been so shaped by the culture, by what I’ve learned, by all the forces that have gone into the shaping of this being, of this mind which I hold at this moment, that I don’t know what to trust. Which images of God arise out of my glimpses of the infinite and which lurch out of the muck of my own unconscious shaping?

Still Pentecost XIX—September 21, 2008

As Ed Burdick joked about my making sermon notes, I remembered what I’d learned long ago, that the word “sermon” in the Latin (which stands far-distanced behind our use of it) meant a conversation, a discussion, a talk. And I recalled a story about a rigged dialogue sermon Jack Bishop and Bill Jamison cooked up for one Sunday morning four decades ago, when Jack climbed into the pulpit and purposely wandered off into a slightly tangential, uninteresting direction and on cue Bill, then the Senior Warden, stood up and said loudly enough to be heard throughout the nave something to the effect of “Bullshit,” and Jack reacted, and they proceeded to hold an across-the-nave dialogue centered on the topic and direction. I thought, what a creative and daring way to engage the congregation, and why can’t we do that every Sunday morning in the sermon time? Hold a real dialogue, wrestle with the issue(s), allowing everyone to grab hold and go home convicted by their own words? And celebrating our diversity! Why should I get up there in the pulpit every Sunday and pretend that I know what they need and ought to hear? Make the sermon a real sermon, a dialogue, a discussion, a multi-logue? But, alas, I was never daring enough to try it. Too bad!

And maybe that had been possible in the very early years of the church, that the elder could facilitate the members’s sharing about the Scripture readings among the saints. But then Constantine legalized us, and the Constantinian need for us became that the elders shape us into good citizens of the empire, loyal, obedient, faithful, subservient, conforming citizens. And for the elder, in loyalty to the emperor, to instruct us in our duties and behavior as good citizens. Oh, what a seduction was in that! And, still today we preach at the people.

And in the midst of my musings and Stephen’s sermonic monologue these words sprang into my consciousness, “From your perspective, young man, that may make sense, but from mine, as an old man, it does not make much sense.” And I have NO idea what those words were about!

But I still yearn for a richer, deeper, fuller, more complete, less conflictful experience and sense of “It,” of God. And I know that will never happen within this comfortable circle of standing stones.

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Pentecost XXII—October 12, 2008

This morning at the coffee hour discussion Brad Bateman framed his discussion about the relatedness of religion and the economic life by citing a sociologist of religion who posited that what we get out of our religious life, out of church is a 1) sense of the transcendent along with 2) rules for daily living. He underlined that by confessing that is what he gets through the liturgy of the Episcopal/Anglican Church. And as I ruminated this morning, sitting in my circle of standing stones, that made sense to me. For me a combination of liturgy and intellectual life of this Episcopal Church offers transcendence, and the force of this circle of people offers a sense of what they and I (and therefore God?) think would be good, useful, beneficial behavior on my part, and what would be outside the pale of acceptability, what would be unhelpful, or even destructive behavior from me toward them (and beyond). Transcendence, that which is greater than me, than us, than all of this; and rules for daily living within and beyond this circle.

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Pentecost XXVI—November 9, 2008

The first reading today is Joshua 24:13, the covenant renewal ceremony of choosing for YHWH. But the reading asks me why I choose YHWH. And that throws me back to the paradigm of mystic-codifier-institutionalizer. Joshua was the codifier, the people were the institutionalizer. In that day the religion of the leader was automatically the religion of the people. In 1 and 2 Kings and in the eighth-century Prophets the leaders are apostate, so people’s devotion to YHWH languishes, which is the ultimate sin, the failure to devote oneself (i.e., the nation as a unit) wholly and solely to YHWH.

The discussion at coffee hour today was about death. Scattershot. Ed Burdick states the key, we have no way to talk about death. The wall is unbreachable We can know nothing about the other side. All the talk about death/heaven/afterlife is metaphor, really talking about here/now/us. Giving structure-meaning-direction to my life, to this community, to my living in this community.

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Advent I—November 30, 2008

In the reading this morning the prophet pleads, “Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence, as when the melting fire burneth . . . .when thou didst terrible things . . . . Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness . . . .behold, thou art wroth; for we have sinned . . . we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags . . . .we are the clay, and thou art our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand. Be not wroth very sore, O YHWH, neither remember iniquity for ever: behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people” (Isa 64:1-9). He pleads with God. For why? What has he seen? What has this prophet heard?

I suspect that this speaker, this prophet is a visionary, that he has just had a vision so earth-shaking and so unspeakable that he cannot tell it to people, it is undescribable, inexplicable. He can only plead back toward God on behalf of the people of his birth. And I can hear his anguish. But I cannot see his vision.

And what shall I make of that? As I step back and ruminate, I can hear, and almost touch, smell his horror. But it is not mine. Nor was it productive for his people. They were still exiled (perhaps already so at the time of this vision). Perhaps this is a tiny bit of evidence that there is an inexplicable God. But I cannot make much more out of these words, except, perhaps, that we ought to be paying more attention. And this prophet certainly is describing, pointing toward a different God than J, E, D, or P.

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Christmas Eve—December 24, 2008

Just finished reading Betty J. Eadie’s book, Embraced by the Light the story of her second near- death experience. She spends some time in the afterlife, and comes back to tell us about it. Nancy warned me that it was an easy read, and she was right. I do not mean to make light of it, but I was not much informed, or impressed. I am certain that she had a truly visionary, mystical experience which was life-changing for her and her family. But her take on it, her apprehension and comprehension and explication of that experience are similar to others’s stories, no more informative than them, and a bit thready. Bill Byers’s8 take is deeper, more inclusive, and more confidence-inspiring.

My first impression is that hers is a thin metaphysic, it is insufficient to take in, to sustain much of the heavier, darker side of life and reality, at least as I see it. While she does step outside the Christian box, her metaphysic is too simplistic to be inclusive (that judgment from a mind that loves, craves complexity). It is too sweet and light-filled. My sense is that she is searching for a clear, and very simple, single core-truth to all reality and life. And that, having had a very deep and thoroughgoing mystical experience, her mind grasps at a few very simplistic themes to make sense of and to explicate that profound experience.

Hers is an educational model of after/other life. The goal of all life is to learn, to grow. But the whole is founded on, boils down to love. The outcome is too neat, too nice, too simple. While not quite Christian Scientism, her metaphysic could take in and incorporate Christian Scientism. Looking at her story from a psychological point of view, given the little bit she tells us of her personal history, there is no surprise in her metaphysical interpretation of her experience; while, in my ignorance, I do not see any traces of her Native American background (my only touch stone is Tony Hillerman’s Navaho-describing detective stories), I can sort out traces, bits and pieces of her Roman Catholic and protestant histories which she has bundled together and used as pitons to anchor her interpretation of her mystical experience. A few, carefully selected, Christian niceties seem to be her foundation stones. But for myself they are insufficient. They strike me as a nuclear family oriented comprehension of metaphysics, exactly what I might expect from her background. But they cannot cope with Hitler-and-holocaust, Mugambe sorts of realities, with the ongoing dynamics of unrefined evil that drive much of the world. Her tiny and insignificant finger-hold on evil (a personal satan who attempts to seduce individuals away from good-doing and is easily defeated by good spirits) will not stand up to the real world I witness. So I quail at some of her verities; “Insincere prayers of repetition have little if any light [i.e., power]” is a pitifully superficial and ignorant careen from contemplative prayer and folk-religion, and discourages me from taking seriously many of her broader assertions. Only the similarity of her over-picture to the metaphysics offered by a few others keep me from discarding hers altogether.

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Still Christmas Eve—December 24, 2008

I find myself in a very strange place this Christmas Eve. This has become a secular holiday celebration for me. We will go to church this night, sing the songs, enjoy the mysteriosity of it all. But the birth of Christ feels oddly empty for me. Have I turned some corner?

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Epiphany IV—February 1, 2009

I can’t recall what sent me off wandering this morning, some prayer, some tiny bit of liturgy, some word from Stephen’s mouth. But it sent me wondering. What was the church to me when I was young? a lad? What did I expect when I turned my attention to it and began to imagine myself a priest within it? And then, what was the church to me during my professional life. And what is it to me now, now that I am retired, and old, and reflective, and more thoughtful, less dutiful? And then I wondered, what are these others expecting out of this? A touch of God? A vision? A hint of transcendence and a rule for living?

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Lent V—March 29, 2009

When I studied Jack Miles’s book, God: a Biography I was struck by the similarities between the YHWH of a particular book and the needs of the nation: during the enslavement an ombudsman, organizer, leader; during the early kingdom a family friend and moralist who stood to the side, during the eighth century a critic and pleader and then an anguished but unrelenting judge, and finally after the exile a disappearing absentee. So it is a simple step to reasonably turn all that around and see that changing of YHWH not as any variation in the godhead himself, but rather of the people’s perception of God. Maybe, after all the study and ingestion and rumination and regurgitation of Scripture, our perception of the God is hardly more than a projection of our needs. A collection of the best we can imagine and the tiny scraps of wisdom we can glean and gather. God, or rather our perception of a God, may be simply a collection of what we hope for in our best moments and the hazy axioms we intuit about how best we live together on this planet.

This is not to say anything about the existence of God, only that what we perceive about that God may be far more projection than verifiable observation or deduction.

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Palm Sunday—April 5, 2009

We do this quirky little oxymoronic liturgy of palm branches and triumphal entries, and then move swiftly into the reading of the whole passion story, and a beginning of the last week of Jesus’ life. Nineteen hundred and seventy-five years ago this prophet cum seer cum healer cum teacher became too threatening for the Judaic authorities to tolerate, so they put him away, publicly, with lots of show and denunciation and renunciation and some Roman cooperation. And today I stand here celebrating that, commemorating. How odd!! What did he, this Jesus guy, do? What did THEY do? What was this whole scene, this doings all about? And what happened then? The resurrection? I mean, if I had been there, with my twentieth-century slightly-scientific understandings and methods of perception, what would I have perceived happened? And what difference would it have made? I suppose much, or an incalculable amount of this last-week story is historic fact, that it did in fact happen. But did it have some objective, supernatural effect? Or was it only metaphor, was it only impressing upon us a difference rather than effecting some objective, out-there difference? Some eternal forgiveness of sins?

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Pentecost VIII—July 26, 2009

I have begun reading Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. So far a re-sorting of ancient historical theology. Makes great sense, but blasts enormous holes in the Scriptured story. Follows man’s earliest notions of gods/spirits through hunter-gatherer cultures, shamanism, chiefdoms, early city-states, empires: a multitude of polytheisms gradually become a polytheistic pantheon, then a monolatry, and finally monotheism. I’ve got far to go in the book, but it’s making profound sense. Wright taught philosophy at Princeton, then religion at Pennsylvania. He started life as a hard-shell Baptist child, got the altar-call, was baptized, and now no longer calls himself a Christian, but refers to a moral compass. Neither affirms nor denies a God. But tries to align himself with the moral axis of the universe. Wright puts me in a new place, a place of saying, “Yes, it really is all metaphor, and it gives us no clues as to how the metaphor relates to God.”

So I find myself sitting here this morning asking from a different posture, from outside the metaphor if you will, “What is this all about?” If Wright is correct (or at least more correct than wrong), then what is this, my circle of standing stones, all about? What is going on here? This morning we baptized an infant Owen into this congregation and church. Why? And what did we just do? What difference did it make? To Owen? To us? To this community? To this church? To this world? Surely it was a very pacific, and harmless initiation rite. Was it anything more than that? I think so, but am unable to say what more. I’m puzzling, what is this church stuff really about? What difference can it possibly make? What is its influence? And on whom? And to what end? The preacher (the infant’s grandfather) proclaimed that we were not doing magic, that this was a beginning that we were not about making a better citizen of Owen or providing moral direction for him. But he did not say what we are doing.

So I find myself wandering through a strange landscape today. For sixty-five years it had been a familiar landscape, and through the years had been increasingly filled with landmarks and sign posts and direction markers that I could read with ease. It was a landscape I knew well, and better and better as I aged and grew wiser, one which I knew well enough that I could give others some direction and guidance. But today it is an unfamiliar and different landscape. The markers and signs are gone, obliterated, or erased. And it is somewhat a wilderness. Not a frightening wilderness, just a not-as-well-featured-as-before wilderness, a place where the only markers and sign posts are the ones I discern for myself, the ones I set up, a somewhat barren wilderness. And I am wandering, searching out my own way. Yet I do not feel lost. Just a little lonely. Squinting toward a tiny light on the distant horizon, looking toward a small, somewhat unconcerned figure far way on my horizon whom I cannot make out clearly, and who glances back at me from time to time, with a little curiosity. A quiet and small part of me may enjoy being out in this wilderness alone.

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August 29, 2009

Much water over (or perhaps under) the dam since last I wrote to this. Primarily Robert Wright’s book The Evolution of God, a fetching, though somewhat misleading title. He’s not really talking about God evolving, but about our image(s) of God evolving.

Wright is not so much a scholar, though a prolific reader, as a journalist. He collects and disburses information, vast quantities of it. But so far as I can tell he does not do much digesting of it, more like regurgitation. With an interesting beginning, as a Oklahoman Southern Baptist background in his teens, including the traditional altar-call, self-dedication and dunking (as though an adult) baptism, then on to a first year in a fundamentalist college, next moving to Princeton and a thorough going eastern, head-trip education. He writes. And sufficiently well that he has been invited to teach undergraduate courses in religion and philosophy. He seems at this point in his life enamored of cultural evolution and game theory and in his work he seems to base his study and reporting around those two foci. So he reads pretty traditional but quite up to date historical criticism of both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures through those two lenses, cultural evolution and games theory. It makes for an interesting and unsettling read. I have read him. I am now occupied with ruminating. This cud requires heavy-duty and long-ongoing rumination, re-chewing all I’ve read, studied, and thought over all these years. I guess I see my theological understandings and formulations as in flux these days, and myself as wandering through, as re-making-sense-of. I have announced to Steve and Stephen that, while willing to celebrate Eucharist, I am no longer able to preach, that there are no more sermons in me, at least for now, and will not be until I emerge with a new understanding of it all, and some things worth being said, both to myself and to others. But for now I am in preacher’s limbo with nothing in hand or head or heart to be said.

Where do I start? By reciting what I’ve read. Wright leads through prehistoric understandings, images of god(s), and traces the evolution of spirits to polytheistic god-images through these stages of cultural evolution understanding that it is the facts on the ground that drive our understandings/images of god(s), and probably not any mystical, god-driven revelations that shape man’s understanding. And who can tell whether the god(s) are evolving? Instead Wright is pretty clear that he is uncovering the culture’s evolving needs of god(s) and whether the god itself is evolving is moot and non-discernable. Then he moves on to the evolution within Hebrew Scriptures from polytheism (the worship of many gods simultaneously) through monolatry (the insistence of devotion to one god exclusively in the midst of many co-equal or hierarchical gods), and finally to monotheism (the conviction that there exists only one God), a late, third to second-century BC achievement in Hebrew devotion. His primary tool in doing this is the JEDP schema, unraveling those threads and putting times to their authors. What emerges is that those four authoring sources, writing in different periods, have differing needs of god, imagine the god differently in both word and deed. And Wright sees an evolutionary pattern in those differing images, a gradual movement, albeit in fits and starts, toward greater transnational and transethnic inclusiveness.

He sees this pattern continuing in the early Christian writings, Paul’s letters being the earliest (first generation), then Mark (circa 70 AD), the Q source, Matthean source, Lucan source, and finally John (probably post 100 AD). Wright sees Jesus as very much in the prophetic-healer mode (preaching the immanent, Isaiah-like kingdom). In Mark Jesus uses the word “love” only once, in the Great commandment (Love God, and neighbor as self.) Jesus’ God is not the Christian God of love we have received, but rather a God of judgment. Without Paul Jesus would probably have been forgotten and his sect lost within a few generations. Paul introduces and emphasizes the love theme, building his new congregations around love, i.e., transnational and transethnic inclusiveness, a taking care of each other (e.g., “See, how they love each other”). Paul’s version of Jesus is probably more important than Jesus himself, what he taught and did. It is those caring communities which Paul created in the urbanizing and industrializing (impersonal, oppressive, dehumanizing) Roman empire that made Christianity so vital and attractive. And Wright also points to the alternative, competing versions of Christianity (Gnosticism, Marcionism, Ebionism, et cetera). Paul’s Christianity was one of several (many?) versions, all competing with other mystery and pagan religions across the Roman Empire. The facts on the ground were that the empire had stopped conquering and was in a consolidating, unifying mode, and Paul’s version best met those needs. And then Wright tracks the evolution of the dominant theological doctrines: Jesus as savior, the kingdom as heavenly (vs. earthly and militant), born-againness, original sin, et cetera.

With all that regurgitated, where does the experience of reading his book leave me? I think Wright and I handle the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures differently. He seems to treat them mainly as fabricated (albeit unconsciously) fictional history, though he allows they might be inspired without exploring how that might be or what that might mean. He does some obligatory light wrestling with whether God really exists, remaining agnostic and coming to no conclusion. He allows that he cannot believe in the Judeo-Christian God, though he is fairly convinced that there is a moral directionality to history, and to cultural evolution guided by non-zero-sumness, and that there is a moral axis built into the universe, and finally that his good consists of aligning himself as well as he can with that moral axis. And that is as close as he can come to allowing a God.

Most of what Wright reports I find makes profound sense to me. I probably should explore his authorities on the dating and unraveling of JEDP, just to satisfy myself that Wright’s reporting is accurate. He does fairly thoroughly rip the Scriptures to shreds, and leaves those shreds in a disorderly pile. I found that ripping apart process somewhat disconcerting for me, although it does not offend my sensibilities, but rather lends some grounds for my own wanderings away from the Scriptures and orthodoxy and toward the mystical.

I would guess that my own growing sense is one of assurance that our Scriptures (Hebrew and Christian) are inspired by mystical visions, and to that extent are validated. But they are no more (nor less) inspired than the holy writings of other major religions (Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, et cetera). And I’d go farther to accept that the reporting and interpreting of those mystical experiences are certainly very shaped by the facts on the ground in their respective moments. And while I can empathize with Susan’s not giving a hang for the invisible God, still I yearn to touch God for myself, fully aware that whatever that experience might be, it cannot be communicated to others by any means, and that however I apprehend it will be violently shaped and filtered by the facts on the ground as well as my own ground-into-my-bones training and sensibilities. It cannot be otherwise.

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Pentecost XVII—September 27, 2009

A string of Marcan teachings, including “He who is not against us is for us.” Margo commented on my taking notes during the sermon. I was arrogantly self-assertive enough to disabuse her, “No, I’ve already preached that text many times.” I had been starting notes on prayer, a knotty topic that I need to address. But in overhearing Stephen’s preaching, I was reminded that I’ve not yet come to any useful (to me) conclusions about the function, the purpose of the sermon, just what is that monologue (or dialogue) about? Throughout my active ministry I considered the purpose of the sermon to be the explication of the gospel text for the day. I began my ministry with the understanding (however mistaken or misguided) that people knew very little about our holy Scriptures, and that one of my primary tasks, if not the paramount task, was to acquaint them with the texts, at least as I understood them. So my goal was to present them with a viable twentieth-century understanding of the scriptural text of the day. My imagined (coached by Herr Spielmann) concept was that in the early church, in the dark of the morning as the congregation straggled in (there being no alarm clocks and Sunday, the Lord’s Day, being a working day in the Roman Empire) the elder, presbyter, forerunner of the priest, interpreted the Scriptures to fill the time as the congregation amassed, following the synagogue’s precedent. So I saw my task in that light as interpreting the Scriptures to the gathered congregation. I told the story, offered the latest critical understanding and some thoughts, or at least a couple of questions about how it might be applied in our lives. A noble model (I mused to myself).

But with my present sense of my faith, of the faith of understanding the story, the Scriptures, the whole ball of wax to be not fact but metaphor, without a clear sense of exactly what stands behind that complex of metaphor, I’m very unclear what I have worthy of being preached. Perhaps, as Wright suggests, the closest I can get to God is as the moral axis of the universe; then the most I have to offer from a pulpit is my sense of how I think that moral axis is tending at this moment, in this circumscribed situation. And, Lord knows, my sense of that right at this moment is no better, no more guiding than anyone else’s (though perhaps a scuidgeon better than Dick Cheney’s but with nowhere near his self-confidence). So I’m not feeling I have any right to preach, nor any thing to preach these days.

So what is the sermon? A moment of moral guiding? But by whose authority?

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Pentecost XXIII—November 8, 2009

Musings: after William James’s, Jack Miles’s, Karen Armstrong’s, a couple of Jack Spong’s, and Robert Wright’s books I find myself left with a creator and a moral axis and all the rest is a metaphor which ill-defines the creator and the moral axis. Maybe the deists had it right: the creator made it, set it to running and walked off, leaving us a moral axis by which to run it. Good luck! And it’s up to us to sense the direction in which the moral axis is pointing and then make it happen.

So a sermon then, is a conversation in which I prompt the people to discover along with me the directions in which the moral axis prompts/points/compels us. But it’s my (the preacher’s) responsibility to first discern the moral axis and in which way it’s pointing, and then in conversation to direct their attention and thoughts in that direction. And all the while I feel no more apt (perhaps even less apt that many of the wiser of them) than the rest of the people to do that discerning and to point their attention and thoughts in the right direction.

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Advent 1—November 29, 2009

We talked about Luke’s Little Apocalypse (Luke 21) at coffee hour. My take, that we need to not bother asking historo-critical questions about it, but instead step back and ask what was the prophet’s mystical insight, and what is that saying to us today? In the words of behavioral psychology, that all behavior has consequences; in the prophet’s metaphor that there will be a payday, there will be a reckoning; in Robert Wright’s words that there is a moral axis to the universe, and that it will prevail! All the other speculation is adulterated manure, not even suitable for composting.

The sermon could not catch my attention (nor Nancy’s), so I wandered Are we the final product of all evolution (preposterous!) And then what do we need to be watching for? And what is our moral responsibility toward that? Will our preclusion be even perceivable to us (evolution happens so slowly). And if that is the case, then how is God active in the world? . . . and how active is God in the world? And then, my poor, nettlesome, demented cardinal, compulsively flying at my window (one male cardinal has concluded that its reflection in my office window glass is a territorial competitor and he has spent most hours of every day this whole summer throwing himself frustratedly against my window) a tiny bit of God’s magnificent beauty gone irritatingly awry!!

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Easter III—April 18, 2010

I have finished my interim ministry at Chillicothe (only Sunday Supply December 1, 2009 through Easter 2010) where I presumed not to preach any sermons, but rather to reflect upon their situation and condition. And now I am back to my chosen circle of standing stones, St.Luke’s in Granville. And I mused this morning during the sermon. I think my own faith has traveled a fair distance since last I wrote to this collection. I think Robert Wright (The Evolution of God) was the last nail in the coffin of my former faith/belief system. He is assuredly not a scholar, but a journalist, with a capacity to engorge a huge bodies of information, and after barely beginning to digest, disgorges, almost as projectile vomiting, so that you have to digest the mess yourself if you want it. But he did bring me to conclude, not so reluctantly, that the sacred writings we have received are indeed a hodge-podge collection of politically motivated scribblings by YHWHists. Perhaps they thought them the mutterings of the deity, but perhaps they were very self-consciously aware that they were creating out of whole cloth sacred writings which they could attribute to the deity for emphasis/authority’s sake (I know not which). But Wright pointed in the direction (though he could not himself authenticate the pointing of his finger) of understanding the pieces of Holy Scripture therein gathered as wholly politically motivated and shaped (e.g., J, E, D, and P were written at different times in different situations, and betray quite different viewpoints and messages, even though jammed together by the redactors as though they were one and the same). And on my own I make huge leaps of faithlessness to conclude they have little more, perhaps even slightly less spiritual utility than the sacred writing of some other religious bodies, of Islam, of Buddhism, of Hinduism, or perhaps even Confucianism or Shintoism, all merely point vaguely and unauthoritatively in the vague direction of whatever it is that we may call God.

So this morning, instead of wondering what was happening within my circle of standing stones on this Sunday morning, I concluded that I am present with these others within this circle of stone precisely because it is the circle of standing stones that I have chosen, not because of what is going on there this morning, or any morning, but because this Christian stuff is indeed my circle of standing stones; and I have chosen it, not consciously or deliberately, but culturally, because it is my birthright, because I was fed it from age eight (and earlier) and because it has fed me through all these decades. And because I have suddenly come to recognize that it is merely one among several dominant religious metaphors, that does not make it any less my metaphor, the only one I know well, the one that has gotten me this far in life, and the only one so far that is pointing me beyond itself. I am much more comfortable intellectually with the few, feeble understandings I have of Buddhist thinking than I am with traditional, orthodox Christian rationalizations; and much of the Christian metaphor is repugnant to me, less than useless; certainly many of the rabidly reactionary, far-right ravings of self-proclaimed Christian groups/cults/denominations/sects are positively demonic to me, so far off-target and misdirected as to be dangerous, both to themselves and to others. Still Christianity is my metaphor; Buddhism, however desirable it may look to me, is not my metaphor, nor could I ever make it mine. I might like it, might become enamored of it, but it can never become my metaphor, at least not in this lifetime. So for now, I stand within this circle of standing stones, and know it to be mine; and within this circle I am able to wrest my freedom to wander spiritually in the directions many different winds are wafting me. Many breezes are gently pushing in many different directions, but all (my metaphor tells me) are the breath of God.

This morning I listened to what of the guest preacher’s sermon I could tolerate, knew it was far, far too literal and embracing of Scripture and orthodoxy for me, and could only wonder “Has she nothing of her own to say? What does she see out there where she lives? Or is she simply too young, too inexperienced to have anything yet to offer?”

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Easter IV—April 25, 2010

At coffee hour we talked about John’s Revelation and were fascinated with the details. And that’s the trap! The devil is in the details! The message is not in the details, but in the overall tone. I realized as I listened to it read during the service that this book almost more than any other, needs to be listened to, not read. Stay away from the details, listen to the tone. Listen broadly, without questioning. The devil (temptation, misdirection) really is in those details, they will lead you astray.

And then, keep in mind that this corpus was penned in the first century, under Roman oppression, by one who thought himself sorely oppressed, and was written about that time and oppression. But it is merely a curiosity today, has no relevance! It is not future-telling. It is hope, it is vengeance, it is a dreaming. But John foresaw nothing that others were not hoping, dreaming, yearning for “Vengeance on these fucking Romans!” My theory: either John had some mystical experiences which he seethed in his hatred of the Romans and Roman oppression, and shaped them as predictions about God’s coming vengeance; or they were pieces copped from existing Hebrew writings and cobbled together into this format and given a very vaguely Christian overlay (in as much as the book shows no knowledge of the Jesus of the gospels or his God). But whichever of these two (or any other option you want to offer), this revelation is dead and irrelevant now, and was so when it was adopted into the canon by Athanasius in 374 AD at which time Christians were legal and pagans illegal, irrelevant even then! So, it was a mistake to include it.

And, I reflect farther afield, it must be nice, for some, to hold the certainty and sureness of this gospel (i.e., the good news of Jesus the Christ), but I think the details of that, too, are often misleading, misdirecting.

Susan loves the stories (Hebrew and Christian), and trusts them to tell us about human nature, about who we are and what this world is. And I agree with her that they are good stories. However I think they are Rorschachs, ink-blots, projective images onto which we project our own sensibilities, our moral directions, our own sense of the direction in which morality points. I do not trust the stories, but use them as tools, to elicit out of myself and help others elicit out of themselves their hunches, their sense of the moral axis of the universe, the only thing of God that we can lay hand on.

While not a mystic, and even less a student of the mystics, I think I trust the mystics’s mystical experiences, but hold their expressions (verbal or visual) to be shaped by time and culture, the crudest and most inexact statements of what the mystic experienced. Once again, the devil is in the details, misleading and misdirecting.

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Pentecost VI, 4th of July—July 4, 2010

Reciting the Nicene Creed today, I found myself asking “What mean these words? What this ceremonial, what these formularies? What means all this? These words? These gestures? This fish-wafer dipped in red wine?” And I was driven back to several weeks ago when something out of my fantasizing asked me,

Q. Is this the true faith? Should I believe it? Can I receive it as valid?

A. If it works for you. Does it urge and enable you to be a better person, and to align yourself more closely to the moral axis of the universe? Does it help you see reality more clearly? Does it put in your mind the presence and compassion of the others around you? If it is yours, then it is true, believable, valid.

Q. Is it all relative? no absolutes?

A. Misstated question! For you it is absolute, if it works, if it’s yours, if it aligns you. For you it may be Christianity, for someone else Islam, or Judaism or Buddhism.

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Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist—October 18, 2010

Patron Day, with a full house, thirty in the choir, a brass quintet accompanying the organ for the festivities and the rededication of the building after all the work. But earlier this morning I considered that, given all the craziness, greed, power-mongering, senselessness, amorality and madness rampant throughout the world, I could easily conclude that man is nothing more than an evolved mammilian, no soul, no more immortality than the fish in the ocean from which we probably evolved, even though we might have a touch more self-awareness or self-consciousness, albeit we have no clear evidence; it may be that some other creatures may have some degree of self-awareness as well. The evidence Robert Wright sees which suggests there is a moral axis to the universe is so sketchy and vague to my eyes, so unreliable and inconclusive that I have to stretch my credulity in order to concur. And when that is stacked against the horrors and amorality in this world that seem unchecked in any way—given the amorality of even our own leaders (their only ethical yardstick is to get re-elected). Then I wonder if there is any moral force for good to be reckoned with. Or are we as a species morally adrift completely, unanchored, wafted by any breeze, any whim?

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Susan suggests that Freud thought the first stage of development is the naive, unknowledgeable innocence before the child begins to differentiate. Could then the mystic be doing naught more than remembering his intra-uterine experience, which most of us cannot recall?

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Pentecost XXII—October 24, 2010

At the Grounds for Discussion Coffee Hour Stephen started to share his learnings from the courses he took on sabbatical. He titles his presentation “The Once and Future Church” and intends to lead the conversation into the issues of how we should be reshaping St. Luke’s to move into the future. But I am in a different discussion. I’m not concerned with how we should reshape the church. I’m asking the much more basic questions for which I suspect there are no answers. And I have no notion what the responses should, or even could be. What could the church be, what should the church become, what ought to be the mission/task of the church today and tomorrow?

I think that saving the world for Christ, and selling Jesus to every human being have become stupid missions. We need to radically rethink just what Jesus wanted us to be about, and what we think we ought to be about, religiously and morally. Convincing everyone that Jesus is the way, the only way has become dysfunctional, counterproductive, dangerously divisive and antagonizing. It’s not merely repackaging the product that’s needed. It’s rethinking what we’re trying to accomplish. Jesus is no longer the product we’re selling. It’s whatever Jesus and Buddha and Mohamed and Moses were all about, what they hold in common, what is the root of all religious thought and action.

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Pentecost XXIV—November 7, 2010

I think it has become time for me to start writing, but how to start? Maybe with the linchpins I have in hand today (I seem to be swinging ape-like, from one set of linchpins to another, towards something, or just indiscriminately?).

(1) I am reading about mystics. They seem to be among the great innovators, re-directors of the church, of the faith, in other religions as well. But I wrestle with “What are they?” Rare persons who really can be in touch with god, the divine, the Absolute? Or merely special persons able to do . . . . What? In deep contemplation to put things together, develop insights, experience? Or re-experience prenatal comfort/memories? What are these mystics? They seem to provide some common ground across religious boundaries.

(2) Robert Wright makes deep sense to me, debunking the Scriptures, talking about cultural evolution, sensing a moral compass built into the universe. But where do you go with that?

(3) I see/hear/experience the Dalai Lama, a person with a truly remarkable comfortableness, humility, an informed naivete, some very profoundness, but in this world extremely improbable/impractical insights. He truly makes (Tibetan) Buddhism sensible, more sensible than the Christian gospels. It all makes the Hebrew YHWH seem quite childish. Yet the Dalai Lama is silent about God, as though God makes no difference (which may be correct). Buddhism is a system about living not a metaphysic about pre-universe. Attractive, but not my circle of standing stones. Our Scriptures are a Rorschach; ergo tradition must move to the center, replacing the Scriptures, traditions about the hows of interpreting Scriptures, i.e., what and how to project without violating (whatever).

(4) I become more and more convinced that Christianity is just one expression of what lies beyond, one expression among many equally valid expressions. But what does lie beyond?

(5) Sin is an outmoded, unuseful, misleading notion. Buddhism’s interdependency and intertwinedness is a much more functional model, but does it sufficiently cope with the evil in the world? Really need to work on that.

(6) All religion, all religious ideation/language is purely metaphorical. Yes, but how to more adequately conceptualize what lies beyond the metaphor? And so I need to completely rethink what our religious language and ideation means in this twenty-first-century world/universe. And especially re-think whatever the mystics are trying to convey to us.

(7) The main business of the church is to stay in business. The truly religious/spiritual/ spiritually enervating things happen outside the church, at the fringes of the church, and never can be at the center. When the main, dominating mission of the church is to stay in business, to survive into the next millennium, then any mission emerging out of spiritual insight must take place outside the church or it will simply be overwhelmed, swallowed up by the survival efforts of church.

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I’ve spent my life’s work theologizing, and I simply can’t turn it off. I can stop priesting and sermonizing but not theologizing.

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Advent I—November 28, 2010

So, as I wrote John Kauffman, the Christian metaphor has gone dry and dusty for me. I can bemoan and grieve that, or I can move out into the wilderness. It seems useless, non-productive and pretty stupid to waste my energies screaming about inconsistencies, inaccuracies, misdirections and such. Instead, the real and productive challenge is to look through the storied metaphor as a lens that may help see beyond the physical, and learn to search out what lies beyond. I know the God is not in the story. But what clues does the story give me to what is beyond? And to see beyond the God, to see what is it about?

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Epiphany VI—February 13, 2011

Another take on this morning’s gospel reading, Matthew 5:21-37 (from the Sermon on the mount). I need to begin with a footnote: the Buddha lived and taught some half-millennium before Jesus. There is only the vaguest, unlikeliest possibility that some of his teaching may have reached Jesus’ ears. It is only a slightly less vague possibility that, both being mystics, they taught similar things. And further, it is similarly the distinct possibility, nay, probability that Jesus’ followers wildly misunderstood some of his teachings, and in particular this set of teachings. End of footnote.

Matthew the Hebrew, preaching to an orthodox Jewish community, presents these teachings like a reformist Pharisee, as intensifying the take on Torah and the concurrently developing oral midrash. He fills the law up thereby making it so much more stringent, so much more as to make it impossible to keep. That take I think quite misunderstands Jesus’ intent. I think it quite perverts his intent and misdirects our attention. I think what Jesus is trying to teach is not a more stringent law which we are doomed to fail, but rather a wholly different understanding of law, of the sweetness of Torah (sweeter than the honey-lemon lozenge the rabbi places on the child’s tongue to give her/him a taste of the sweetness of Torah). Following the gaze of Matthew’s misdirection we come to understand law/justice and mercy as opposites, as mutually contradictory, oxymoronic. Instead I think what Jesus alludes to is a wholly different understanding of law and of grace. When we live in right relationship with our fellow man, then mercy and law are the same thing; when we live in love among ourselves, then we fulfill Law/Torah without thinking about keeping laws, without intentionality, without any need of being restricted or directed. It is a matter of basic attitude toward our fellow-beings. When we live in whole, healthy relationship, then there is no murder, no adultery, no false witness. Those simply are not options within such relationship.

The Buddha rejects our concept of sin or sins, understanding instead in its place ignorance of the most basic reality, that we are all one, that we are totally intertwined and inseparable, that only when we live in deep compassion with our fellow beings, with the whole of creation of which each of us is merely a tiny intertwined fragment (i.e., an emanation of the whole), only then are we healthy, whole, unignorant. I have to stretch very hard to grasp that notion, but I confess it makes far greater sense, invokes a far greater sense of the integrity of human existence than Augustine’s damned fancy for original sin or our more common Christian notions of sins and sinfulness, which I am convinced are themselves completely debased and worthless coinage. And in its place the Buddha reaches out to grasp compassion. If we live with and in compassion, then there is no need, there is no occasion of murder, adultery and false witness. Jesus too calls us, not to greater stringency and purity, but to the deepest compassion.

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Epiphany VII—February 20, 2011

At coffee hour discussion we heard about Mormonism. John Smith was fourteen when he had his first vision (still in testosterone drenched puberty). At the age of twenty he had published his translations of the eighteen plates. Why should we put any credence in the religious ravings of a pubescent male? I can give no credence to that foundation of Mormonism. And yet in reflection, why should I put any greater credence in Christianity? I come up with three reasons why my Christian stuff feels so much more credible.

1. It’s mine. I grew up with it,

2. Smith’s stuff is just too radically revisionist, and

3. His stuff, and the rest of the Mormon stuff is just too bloody convenient (e.g., regarding visions about polygamy and race).

Definitely mystical stuff, but weird, deviant formulations, going off in its own direction. Compare to Norwich et alia. The choice is mine, not the divergent.

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My journaling ends abruptly here, but the wondering and wandering did not. Several months after this entry I had my one session with John Kaufman and learned that my wandering was not so odd, not so heretical. In fact I seemed merely to be growing spiritually, growing beyond the boundaries of conventional doctrine, though not beyond, nor out of synch with where others have been before. Some months later I discovered a group of people who were also wandering in this wilderness and who seemed ready for conversation about the reaches of our several pilgrimages. We dubbed ourselves the Beyond Orthodoxy group and talked for three years. Then I began to write this book.

8. A friend from seminary days, also a retired priest, active in healing ministries and a practitioner of reiki, who through regression therapy has experienced several past lives.