Marketing God: What Separation Wrought in the Church

 

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

 The first part of the first amendment of the Constitution, written at a time when a state-proclaimed and -authorized religion was the order of the day and citizens could be prosecuted for practicing any other. Look carefully. It was not designed to protect the state from religion, but religion from the state.

And when the First Amendment put up the wall between church and state, something else happened. Religion became a new marketplace. New faith systems, and splinters from those faith systems, sprung up from disgruntled and fractionalized believers, creating a landscape of hundreds - literally hundreds - of different denominations. In the process, they made themselves compete for believers in a way not much different from the way competing advertisements praise their laundry soaps or SUVs. 

A cynic might shake their head and muse that, of course their mandate is to preach the gospel to all the world - they need to fill their pews and increase the target pool, though that is not likely to be their main motive. After all, the command to preach is part of the gospel and assuming it wasn't one of those add-ons that are uprooted from time to time, needs to be taken seriously from a viewpoint beyond marketing. However...however....

The result of abolishment of a national religion cannot be denied. We have churches that unabashedly appeal to those who demand entertainment and an uplifting, but often shallow, Sunday morning experience. We have religions based on doctrine or atmosphere rather than an experience of God. We have parishioners who stay in a church only so long as they are not challenged or offended, then readily migrate to the next one. We have every kind of worship practice from rock bands and strobe lights to snake charmers and Bible thumpers. 

It's hard to look at the total landscape of divisive faith flavors and not wonder what in the world this has to do with the Jesus they (or at least some of them) claim to follow, the Jesus of the sermon on the mount, the Jesus who had no church building, or anywhere to lay His head, and apparently needed none to effectively follow His Father. 

image: religious freedom/Old Life

The Sun is Always Rising

 

I took this photo from the middle aisle of a 787 on the way to Rome. I'd been tracking our progress: Chicago, Michigan, Toronto, Montreal, Nova Scotia, and then this. A brilliant full moon over what I knew was nothing but miles of ocean. A full moon that dazzled the eye of the plane window. A moon and nothing else but black sea below. 

But I knew the direction we were heading - the plane was flying to Rome - East, directly toward the rising sun. The moon wouldn't last long. We were leaving it behind.

It's always that way. The sun is always rising somewhere even when all looks black where I happen to be. Today, I get to catch up to it and hold it almost in my hands, possessing its power to turn the world bright and hot again. 

The way home, which I took in a little over three weeks, holds the same sun in stasis for hours, like it did for Joshua at Gibeon, daylight getting neither shorter or longer, until we land back in Chicago after ten hours in the air, but at almost the same time of day. 

The world is big and round and we could, if we wanted to stay in motion, experience a constant rising sun, a world of unextinguishable hope and possiblity. All we have to do is stay above the surface, gliding along it at the same pace as the globe is turning, and we never have to leave the brimming daylight behind. 

This is not a practical possibility, of course. We have to live a life somewhere in the process, but it can be a sustainable state of mind. We can, if we want, remember on our darkest days that the sun is still rising somewhere.

Defining Beauty

 I'm back in Florence.

This time, I took the whole family. There are nine of us - children,  one of the spouses, and all five granddaughters. And me. And this time, they made the itinerary. I told them to choose whatever fascinated them the most, hoping of course, they would see in it what I did: the grandeur of the Renaissance, the beauty of the art, and the history of politics, and the glory of God. And, of course, they did not. They chose very differently. A favorite winery, an interactive museum, a fortress town from a video game. Except  to see the David, no one wanted to go near an art gallery. Except for the Vatican and the  Pantheon, no one was interested in a church. 

It's not generational. It's more temperament, I think. Anyway, whatever it is, what brought me to Florence, and what keeps me going back, is the beauty. In art, in architecture, in science, in literature, in music, in the easy statliness of the ringing bells and the delightful lilt of Italian voices. It is all beautiful, and weaves an intoxicating web that catches me every time. I don't care much about the shopping or the gelato. I do care about the chanted rhytum of the nunc dimitis and the graceful swing of the bells in the campanile. I care about the marbeled eyes of a hero that seem to really see.

 I care about the medallion in the Piazza de la Signoria commemorating the hanging and burning of my favorite renegade monk, Girolamo Savanarola, 

I care about the  second floor garden that confined the imprisoned Galileo. I care about trying to figure out whether the Medicis, who largely financed Renaissance art, were benefactors or tyrants (they were probably both).

Lorenzo the Magnificent

For a long time, I couldn't figure out why I cared about any of this, then Simone Weil told me:

"Beauty is the incarnation of God in the world so all first rate art is inherently religious. Beauty is the real presence of God in matter."

That's exactly it. Beauty is how God shows Himself in the world. That's why we all recognize it in some form. God is in all of us, but the extent to which we seek out God determines the extent to which we are able to appreciate beauty. Beauty is part of our blood and bone in the same way as is oxygen or iron. There's a disease in Florence called Stendahl Syndrome - literally a malady characterised by dizziness or fevers- that is the result of too much beauty too fast. 

Beauty is the way we bridge the gap between God and man. Another piece of Weil wisdom: 

"Workers need poetry more than bread. Only religion - God - can be the source of this poetry. Its deprivation explains all forms of demoralization. Slavery is work without the light of eternity." 

And we are meant to bridge that gap. That, I think, is our main job as humans. That's the reason for the Eucharist - to apply the glory of God to material cells. 

"Manual work is time entering the body. Through work, man becomes matter like Christ in the Eucharist. "

Exactly. God gives us Himself. In bread. In art. In work. In beauty. 

Florence image: History Extra

David image: Fine Art America

Savanarola image: Alamy

Lorenzo image: Wikipedia

More Simone Weil: The Choice or: Nobody Ever Wins a War

 Every once in a while, not often mind you, a philosopher will say exactly the right thing in a short, concise form that really hits home. Today, Simone Weil did that for me.

"Whoever takes the sword will perish by the sword. Whoever lets go of it will perish by the cross."

Perfect.

Now let's do a little unpacking. The first part will be familiar to most people. Jesus said, "Whoever lives by the sword will die by the sword." We get that, well, in theory anyway. None of us do it. Not really. Everybody doesn't have a basement full of guns and ammo, but almost all of us are inclined to take God's justice ("Vengence is mine; I will repay, says the Lord" - Deut 32:35) into our own hands. Defending the defenseless, or even giving the bad guys what we think they have coming to them, seems like standard procedure. What else are we to do? 

Well, maybe take God at His word. Don't do it. Just don't. 

But what then, some of us wonder. What if no one stops the playground bully? He grows up to be Don Trump. What if no one stops Hitler? We all end up speaking German and clicking our heels. Or do we? I mean, no one really knows what would happen because no one has really tried. 

OK, a few have - Ghandi and Martin Luther King, for example, but things didn't go really well for them, did it? Minor victories, but nothing universally world-changing. And yet we admire them for what they did do. We know on some level that humans were not meant to exact violent revenge on one another. We were not meant to kill each other. Even in an effort to save innocent lives.

I've often wondered what would happen if we stopped taking revenge, or even defense, against a clearly evil enemy. First off, I think a lot of innocent people would die. A lot more even than in the fighting, perhaps. And at the end of it. we would still be stuck with a tyrant. That's not a happy ending, and it kind of proves Simone's second point. Once we lay down our weapons, we will die anyway, but by the cross, by sacrifice, without personally perpetrated, heart-destroying violence. It could happen, and I can't help feel there's some kind of salvation in it. After all, nobody wins a war. Ever. 

That's one thing about philosophers. They are some of the few people who admit everyone is going to die and really believe it. That's most of the cause of all their angst, but it does lead to a good, heavy dose of reality. We have to choose how we are going to live and in doing so, choose to a great degree how we are going to die. Because we will die, you know. We all will. And what will we be holding onto at the end? The self-righteous end of an .357 or  the cross? If my own death is going to count for something, let it speak of love.

Image: Sportsman Outdoor Superstore

What is Your Myth? - or - Living with Comfortable Fictions or Taking the Red Pill

 

We are obsessed with truth. We want it. From everyone.

But do we really? My late husband Dave had a reputation, not always a good one, for always telling the truth, a reputation that included unwelcome truths as well as welcome ones. Some folks thought this some kind of superpower, but some thought it anathema and issued warnings to anyone asking his opinion about anything. 

We spend so much of our time keeping company with pleasant truths, you see. Did you ever watch a Hallmark movie? Did you ever just want someone to tell you that, in spite of appearances, everything was going to be all right? I do. And I want to hear it because I know that often, it won't. Pleasant fiction.

John F. Kennedy has something to say about this when he gave an address at Yale University in 1962: 

"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived, and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

Oh, boy.

Myths. Preconcieved ideas. Cliches. Ideas that look like truths but feed vacant wishes. Premises that distort all of our possible futures with unlikely or impossible promises. Happily ever after endings.

That just isn't life. 

But we still color our outlooks with worldview. Here are a few examples:

• The Cleavers - the concept that there is or was a perfect family whose every member understood their role and lived contentedly in it, not making waves, and smiling when they took out the garbage.
• John Wayne - the idea that there is a simple world where black is black and white is white, where the good guys wore the right hat so you could recognize them and always win in the end without being scarred by the men they had to kill to get there.
• Consipracy Theory - the worldview that knows nothing is what it seems, that everyone you meet is out to get you, that no one can be trusted
• That Old Time Religion - A basic assurance that everything one needs to know about God is in the Bible, that church structure can be trusted implicitly, that nothing good can ever be added to or subtracted from what one hears in church on Sunday
• Blood is always thicker - the idea that family precludes every other relationship, that blood relationships inevitably tie people together no matter what, that even though people grow and change, family will love one and respect another forever.

Forgive me if these betray my own personal prejudices - they undoubtedly do - but I know folks who hold these worldviews and even though they are a source of consolation to them, a comfortable way of living in a confusing world, they are also a source of almost constant disillusionment because, well, because they're not true. 

No worldview always applies. No overall ideology works in every circumstance. They are myths. Myths that help us cope, to be sure, but myths nonetheless. 

The truth is that the world is a constantly changing combination of goods and evils shifting every moment, necessitating that we keep on our toes if we are going to stay within rails of reality. In short, we have to THINK. We have to go through the agony of figuring things out if we want to live in the real world. We have to take the red pill. It isn't always fun, but at least it's real. 

Image: The Telegraph

Being Blind Bart

 

Years ago, I was the fortunate writer of and participant in an annual passion play my Richland Center, Wisconsin church wrote and produced called "The Keys, the Cross, and the Kingdom." There are lots of stories and memories arising from those years, but one of the enduring is Blind Bart's. You know, Bartimaeus the blind, annoying beggar from Mark's gospel:

Then they came to Jericho. As Jesus and His disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus, was sitting by the roadside, begging. When he heard it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, "Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!" Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more. "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" Jesus stopped and said "Call him." So they called to the blind man, "Cheer up! On your feet! He's calling you." Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus. "What do you want me to do for you?", Jesus asked him. The blind man said, "Rabbi, I want to see."  "Go," said Jesus, "your faith has healed you." Immediately, he received his sight and followed Jesus. --Mark 10: 46-52.

Good old Blind Bart, persistent Blind Bart, annoying Blind Bart. I like him. There he crouched, in the middle of a pressing crowd, yelling at the top of his lungs to get Jesus’ attention. People around him told him to shut up and he wouldn’t. And what did Jesus do? He stopped dead and looked around, telling his disciples to bring this loudmouth closer and when Bart got there, Jesus looked at this blind beggar and asked him a question. “What do you want me to do for you?” SERIOUSLY? Here’s this guy, blind, ragged, and dirty, and Jesus doesn’t know what he wants?

Of course He does. But He wants Bart to know it, too. He wants Bart to say it. 

Something similar happened to my late husband and I years ago. When my husband was very ill near the end of his life, he was referred to a doctor who looked him right in the eye and told Dave he would not get better, that he would continue to sicken and at some point not too distant he would die. That took courage to say and for us, courage to hear. But the part that came next was the most important. Dave was given homework. He was to determine the thing he valued most about life, that thing should he be left without, he would not want to get up in the morning. Then he was to focus what remained of his life on that thing. Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like Jesus.

Predictably, Bart says, “I want to see”. Ironically, that’s what Jesus wants for him, too. In fact, that’s what Jesus wants for all of us. To see. He wants us to see Him. He wants us to see ourselves through His eyes. He wants us to understand what we’re asking for when we pray and to look deeper than our latest catastrophe. He wants us to acknowledge what we desire and more importantly, why we desire it.

When Jesus asks us “What do you want me to do for you?” it may be that the best answer is to remember that He is already in us. Maybe the best answer is for Him to help make us holy.

Image: Jesus Film Project

Jesus vs Germs: Who Wins?

 I just love Martha of Bethany. She's so relatable.

Pretty much everyone who knows the story about Martha and her sister Mary at the dinner they gave for Jesus and His disciples knows about how Mary sat at Jesus feet, listening to Him the whole time while Martha ran around cooking and serving and cleaning up and - oh, yes - griping about it. 

Jesus loved them both, of course, but gently reminded Martha that Mary, in her reverent attention, had chosen the better part. Hang on to the eternal, the supernatural, He seemed to say, and the natural may not take care of itself, but it will be seen to sooner or later in its own proper time.

Well, Martha's second faux pas doesn't get as much press. When their brother Lazarus died and Jesus showed up late, both women expressed their faith that whatever Jesus did or, presumably, didn't do, would be the right thing. But when Jesus instructed the gathered people to move the stone from the mouth of the grave, Martha was horrified. "But he's been in there four days! He will stink!", she said.

She was right, of course, but saw no contradiction between Jesus' ability to do miracles and her idea that He was unable to overcome natural decay. As if He could do one but not the other. In the end, He did both, of course, but like the dinner incident, we are invited to see our contradicting selves through Martha.

One of my favorite places to see a modern contradiction is in our refusal to received Holy Communion in a common cup. Here's my reasoning:

Communion is a miracle of faith as much as any healing or raising from the dead. Bread and wine become a pathway to and encounter with God. But we won't drink it from a common cup because the cup has somebody else's germs. We might get sick from it. It's unsanitary. It might even be dangerous. 

Really?

God can turn bread and wine into Himself but not protect us from illness or danger in the taking of it? He can make the elements holy but He can't make them safe? 

This is not only a logical contradiction worthy of our old friend Martha. It's a lack of faith. 

Communion is communion both with God and in solidarity with each other - a risk only if the communicant doesn't believe God or doesn't believe there is any sacrament in the eating and drinking of it at all. 

So, who wins in Jesus vs. germs?  Jesus, of course. Now we just have to act like it.

Image: St. Benedict's Table, American Magazine

Whose Side is God on, Anyway?

 

Memorial Day is here again and I'm finding patriotic holidays increasingly uncomfortable.

There. I said it. 

It's not just because the U.S. becomes harder and harder to love (it does), but I'm starting to wonder whether it should even be an object of love and fealty at all.

The more I study this, I can't find a single place where God encourages love for country. Not one. 

He encourages us to obey our leaders (Hebrews 13:17) and to render unto our governments what rightly belongs to them (Matt 22:21) but beyond that, our commanded affiliation is to God and God alone. We are to love God first and then our neighbor. Period. 

We all know of conflicts in which both sides claim God's preference for them and that, of course, is impossible. He can love all men equally, but to prefer one side over another when they espouse opposite aims is not who He is. He loves the humans He made. All of them. And we are supposed to do that, too. 

If we're honest, though, we WANT God to be on our side of whatever conflict we're in. Who wouldn't? But at the same time, we also see the impossibility of opposing forces each allied exclusively with God. This is where philosophy comes in handy, because this is a logical contradiction. God cannot logically agree with both the invader and the invaded. A cannot equal not-A. God loves all combatants equally.

But what DOES God have to say about nations?

First, that He made them all (Acts 17:26) "From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth." God's nation is not defined by boundaries, but by His creation of them.

Then that He should and will be exalted among those nations (Ps 46:10) (Ps 86:9) (Is 60:3)

Also that no nation is righteous in itself but only insofar as it follows and worships God (Zech 2:11) "And many nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall be my people." (Gen 22:18) "And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”

A nation is not favored by God because of history, heritage, location, boundaries, language, declaration or constitution. It is holy simply when its people seek and worship Him and any allegiance is to be sworn to Him alone. In this, all people sharing that allegiance are one. 

God's nation is not the United States of America or any other humans gathered within a man-marked border. We are to have but one sworn identity and that to God, even Israel. When God said,

“For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth." -(Deut 7:6),  He began a work that would eventually encompass every single human being He made. 

"And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him." (Dan 7:27)

As for Memorial Day, my husband fought in the Vietnam War and his combat experience shortened his life by as much as 20 years. Dave never regretted his military service, but its greatest cost to him was not conscripting the years of his life, but putting him in situations that led him to doubt God's mercy and justice. It took him more than 40 years to recover from the scars this war left, but God sent grace enough so that he could again stand before Him with confidence. God and some bizarre national allegiance God might have was not responsible for the damage done. The country Dave fought for was responsible - the United States, the one whose flag we wave on Memorial Day, the one who we say is under God, the one to whom we swear allegiance without remembering all of its lies and errors. 

If a country is good, it is good because enough of its people pay attention to what God demands of each of them individually, not because of some restricted ideology that defines we are smarter, better, stronger, and more righteous than those humans who live 10 or 100 miles beyond a particular demarcation. 

                               (Dave around the time he worked undercover in Southeast Asia.

He burned his green beret in disgust)

The country Dave fought for betrayed him, plain and simple. It didn't act according to its precepts. All countries do this sooner or later. That's why God tells us to identify ourselves with Him, not with them. 

On this Memorial Day, I can honor those who acted according to what they thought was right by fighting and dying for their country, but I can no longer honor the country they fought for. It does not deserve it. 

Images: Dreamstime

Answering the Unanswerable: Why People of Faith Study Philosophy

 

I went back to school yesterday and was reminded of something important. I remembered why I went in the first place - to make sense of things. 

This is what the whiteboard looked like at the end of class.  Let me translate.

We were studying Kierkegaard, an angst-ridden Dane who had some of the same questions I did. Can God exist (in  philosophical terms, He can't - more later) and what in the world are we doing when we look for Him? Can He be found? And if He can, what does He look like?

Yes, this actually happened in a public university classroom and nobody cast aspersions. Nobody walked out. Nobody even objected. In fact, this is probably the only place anyone can ask these kinds of questions anymore. You can't ask them in church. Try it sometime. I have, and what we get is a combination of outrage and deer-in-the-headlights. Here, in school, when taught by a person of faith, we can arrive together at reasonable, thoughtful answers that can provide a platform for actual living.

So what does this mean? It started with whether God can exist. In philosophical terms, He can't because existence includes some kind of material presence. A pure spirit does not have that kind of existence.  And that's OK. That doesn't make God less God. In fact, it accommodates exactly what He claims to be. More than this world. Not made of a thing of any kind. 

And then there is telos. This is one of Aristotle's terms used to describe the final or highest cause of a person or action, the highest good of any living being, a fully realized consciousness, even the state of ultimate happiness. In short, Absolute Telos is the philosophical description of God. See the words underneath? These are the words philosophers have used to describe God. Highest Good, Transcendent, Unconditional, Impossible. All words for God. 

Why do we need these words? Because the best religion can do is vague references to God as being beyond understanding, or moving in mysterious ways. Blah. That doesn't help. Philosophical descriptions provide more - a starting point for understanding just what is the difference between God and everything else in our spiritual experience. They don't just paint a foggy picture. They establish a baseline, one we can expand on.

The expansion comes with the list to the right on the board, the list of relative telos. You see, in philosophy, states are separated into absolutes, those things that exist independently of anything else, and relative, those things whose definition depends on something else. In this case, God is an absolute telos, but our lives are lived primarily through relative ones. A relative telos might be the good that comes from careful parenting, or studying to graduate, or stopping at red lights, or putting your shopping cart back at the grocery. It is a goal we recognize as working toward accomplishing personal peace or social justice. 

The thing about relative telos, though, is that we usually do them (if we think about it at all, which philosophers do) to get beyond them. We don't just want to graduate, we want to have an ultimately satisfying life. We don't just want to be good parents, we ultimately want to do our part in making the world a better place for everyone. We engage in relative telos to achieve whatever of absolute telos we can muster. We do good in this world to find whatever we can of God. 

And this was Dr. Magnusson's last powerpoint slide, the point to which he built the lecture, which was to remind us of the goal we all want. 

Some people simplisticly call it heaven, but the philosophical idea of heaven is exactly how Sunday school might define it using different words. In Sunday school, Heaven is some undefined place up there where we are completely with God. In philosophy, the same state is found as we progress through relative telos, always with our eye on the absolute, when our orientation changes us every time we find a piece of that absolute, until we find we can "live in the finite, but not have our roots in it." 

This is where we find heaven, but not some pie in the sky we get after we die, a heaven available whenever we have the focus and faith to reach for it. 

That's why people of faith study philosophy. 

Bookends - Looking at the Big Picture

 Define miracle.

Go ahead. What event or series of events qualifies as a miracle?

Google thinks it's an extraordinary event that defies natural law and is often attributed to divine intervention. 

That's a pretty good definition, I think. The world chugs along, after all, according to specific and understood rules, ones that bear equations and formulas that are provable and repeatable. This is a good thing. It helps us maneuver through life. Even if we didn't make the rules, at least we can predict them. A dropped rock, for instance, will always fall down, not up or sideways, on planet Earth. An action causes an equal and opposite reaction. Energy is not created or destroyed. But you know all this.

Jesus, however, got famous partially for breaking these rules and we call these instances his miracles. He healed people who just touched his clothes. He brought dead people to life. He made food appear from nowhere. It's interesting, though, to consider the first and last of his miracles - the miraculous bookends in his manipulation of physics.

You probably easily remember the first - the changing of water to wine at a wedding feast. As his miracles go, this was a pretty innocuous one. No one was spectacularly cured or brought to life or magically fed. It was just a favor he did for a friend of his mom's.

But fast forward three years and move the venue from a party to an upper room, from public frivolity to a hideout. There's a cup in front of Jesus that is already full of wine and what does he do with it? He declares it to be his own blood. Not actual blood, mind you. It still smells and tastes like wine. But the declaration broke a law nonetheless - not a material law this time, but a supernatural one. 

At this point in his human experience, everything is escalating. The Cana incident at the wedding was easy to understand for anyone there who knew what was going on. In this world, water cannot spontaneously become wine. It defied physics. But the second incident involved much more. The wine in that case became blood not in the natural realm but in the supernatural one. It no longer nourished the body but it fed the soul. Each result was appropriate to its need. The wedding guests had something proper to drink and the disciples, who shared the cup of consecrated blood, had something of their teacher that was uniquely their own and would sustain them over and over until they, too died.

In many ways, these two incidents, the first and the last transformations Jesus enacted during his human life, became perfect bookends - the second as the completion of the first, almost as if he'd planned it that way from the beginning.

Oh, yeah. He did.

Images: How Stuff Works, Etsy

Made for Each Other

 

What is more important? The spirit put into me by God's hand in creation or the body with which He surrounded it in specific intent? Surely they were meant to live together, one  not necessarily superior to the other except as pertains to longevity. The spirit lives both before and will live after the body but, while they cohabit, they can both be used for the glory of God, since He both conceived of and created them both. Reaching for God and finding Him glorifies what He put in the spirit. Using the body in charity, in communion, in profitable physical labor and in giving and receiving love fulfills what it was made for.  

The body, contrary to what so many religions teach, is neither corrupt nor despicable unless it is used for a corrupt purpose. A life of destruction will destroy it. A life of looking for God, of searching out the connection between body and spirit, elevates both of them and God. Things to seek out - 

To see and be seen:

Comprehend that the world is the vehicle we are given as a mirror for us to find God at whom I cannot directly gaze but who in reflection will find my own face.

To hear and be heard:

Harmonica and violin, birdsong and baby's cry, the sigh of final breath and triumphant hallelujah. The sound of my own careful breath against velvet silence.

To taste and be tasted:

My tongue on sharp lemons and plump chocolates. A lover's tongue on my own salt and musk. The holiness of blessed bread and sacred wine. God with us.

Body and spirit. While the body lives, they can't be separated. At the end, though, God peels them carefully apart, leaving only what is most like Him, spirit made moreso by how the body has increased it while it lived. 

See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.

Holy body, holy spirit.

Made for each other.

Images: Spirit of Man - Christ, shutterstock

Not Just the Two of Us

 

"The exchange of love is illegitimate if consent on both sides does not come from that central point in the soul where YES can only be eternal. - Simone Weil

A friend of mine makes bets at weddings regarding how long the marriage he is witnessing will last. It's harsh of course, but chilling and pragmatic also. After all, we all know the statistics. Half of marriages end in divorce. My own history bears that out. I've been married twice. One ended in divorce and the other survived until death.

The one that didn't last was not founded on love of any kind, but on appearance and convenience. It never had a real chance to succeed. The second was founded on love, but not the kind Weil was talking about. The love was carnal, not eternal. At least not at first. The marriage managed to last because part way through, we adopted a new focus. Part way through, we decided to put God front and center - to follow Him and trust Him to bring us together in common purpose and He did. I daresay that marriage, too, would have ended in divorce otherwise.

It's no wonder that Weil's quote hits home. There's only one way to have a love founded on the eternal because God is the onlly eternal entity to whom we have regular access. 

The sad truth is that two humans have a hard job of it to love one another properly because, well, they're human. Weak sometimes. Fallible often. Well meaning, perhaps, but hurtful anyway. We are not to be totally depended on. Ever. 

Two people holding hands and walking into the sunset or staring into one another's eyes with love and longing are little equipped by one another's weakness to manage a satisfying, long-lasting union. But two people side by side following God are. Now that's a marriage that can last. A marriage, or a friendship, or a partnership of any kind can last only if it is supported by the eternal.

Image: Pinterest

Who Wants to Hear the Truth, Anyway?

 

I'm re-reading Atlas Shrugged, a 1000+ page novel written by philosopher Ayn Rand in 1957. It's a startling book I first read during my first year of college in 1970 and it changed my way of looking at the world and the way we live in it. Rand describes what fear and disconnection do to human beings and ultimately their society, destroying both their joy of achievement and their respect for morality. She's been generally despised for unveiling this world and how it operates but I didn't realize until now, more than 50 years later, that I've been living in the world she predicted the whole time.

Rand describes a world in which neither innovation for ambition has value, where a person's ability to think clearly, take responsibility, and act on those thoughts has no place, but where following orders, even questionable ones, is the only way forward. Around 1977, I had a job as a purchasing agent in a small plastics company near OHare airport and I had an idea to combine and change purchasing patterns to save money and enhance reliability. My boss, the owner's plodding son, told me I was not paid to think, but was paid to do as I was told. He used Rand's exact language and just like Rand's characters did, I quit that job.

Rand also describes a world in which the appearance of a thing is more important than the fact of it and that the players in the resulting schemes collude to cover up injustice. I remember when, as Vice President of a small steel company in the 1980s, I was told to obtain a price increase from our best customer when the conditions contractually allowing that increase, an increase in the price of steel, had not been met. I was expected to take a falsified invoice to the customer and I refused to do it. My employer was upset, of course, but not because I questioned their methods. Their only demand was whether I was declaring myself better or more virtuous than they. They never considered whether what they were asking could be honorably done (it couldn't). They just wanted to know if it was presentable. In the end, after my refusal, someone else did the deed and I learned that all involved on both sides of the table were aware of the subterfuge and knew the supposed negotiations to be a false mockery, a cooperation of farce. I quit that job, too.

Rand further describes a world where government regulations strangle creativity and productivity and in which people work ever harder and realize less benefit for either producer or consumer, leading to the breakdown of supply systems and in the end, the society they are supposed to support. Last week's New Yorker profiled a Kentucky farmer stymied by government controls on crop prices while he watches food being shipped overseas to poor countries even as local family farmers struggle to exist in the financial framework their own government allows. The farmer predicted a world where family farms, the backbone of our food supply, no longer exist and the food supply cannot recover.

In 1970, I didn't expect, really, that any of Rand's predictions would come true but they are - in these few and many more - in instances where we watch the government perpetuate itself rather than acting in the interests of a vital, alive future.

Frankly, hardly anyone likes Ayn Rand. My philosophy classmates once booed me for saying I did, and I still disagree with her in many ways. But in these ways, at least, she has told the truth. Come to think of it, that might be why she is so unpopular. The truth is, too.

Image: Thoughtco

The Danger of Indecision OR: What's for Dinner (AGAIN)?

 

A friend of mine once reflected that no one ever told her that getting married meant having to decide what's for dinner every night for the rest of her life. And she was right. It's true. It's just a fact of life. We have to eat and when we share life with someone, that's a decision someone has to make. Every day. 

But that's not the problem. It's not the decsion itself - whether to get Chinese takeout or throw some burgers on the grill - it's the incessant necessity of making decisions to the point of wanting to flee.

Sometimes decisions are unrelenting, pressing in from all sides, demanding attention in the guise of work or responsibility to friends or community obligations. Decisions are what can transform an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, any Wednesday afternoon, into a long tunnel that makes you feel like coiling into a little ball and rolling yourself under the nearest couch with the dust bunnies and hiding.

It would be such a relief to just put one foot in front of another awhile and nothing else, just to leave the determining of fate to someone else, to release into an effortless few days without the insistent pressure of the next move.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!

Nope. No can do.

And this is why:

The minute we lay down the responsibility of decision for our own life, we hand over the privilege to someone else and, unless that person is God, they are not up to the task. 

No one else knows what we want from life but us. No one else is capable of our conviction or purpose. No one else knows what we are or are not willing to sacrifice to achieve something. No one else understands who or what or how we love.

Oddly enough, it matters less which decisions we make than that we just make them. Almost all poor decisions can be redeemed in one way or another, but letting go of the reins we were meant to hold means that the horse is likely to run wild, out of control in the wrong direction.

One thing I know for sure is that, assuming the Matrix really is fiction, I live. I have been given a life and that life is a pure gift, meant to be LIVED. 

Life means something. It has a purpose and it is my joy and privilege to find mine. God gave me something very fine and I will, until it is taken away from me, show Him I love Him by directing and using my life rightly.

This is not done by accident. It is done by decision.

So decisions can be at their least, a pain, or at worst, dangerous, but bring 'em on. I won't get through unscathed, but that's all right. What I will do is use the life I'm given for the glory of Him who made it, bringing in the process satisfaction to us both. 

So, anyway, what IS for dinner tonight?

Images: Shutterstock, Adobe

Exquisite Pain: Yin and Yang

 

You've heard people say it. 

"God never gives us more than we can handle."

And you know that's not true. 

He gives us more than we can handle all the time.

Or it feels like it anyway.

The bills we can't pay. The illness that won't go away. Betrayal. Accident. Death. As beautiful as it sometimes is, life sometimes sucks, too. And we can't do anything about it.

I swear, the objection to faith in God I hear most often is wondering why He permits so much evil in the world - why children die in horrible wars, why planes crash with whole skating teams on them, why neighbors thinks it's necessary to shoot the guy next door. And I don't blame the people who do the wondering.

The Right Question

The problem is that they're asking the wrong question. 

The rotten things in life aren't separate from the wonderful ones. They are all part of one thing, and that thing is life.

Even Jesus said we would always have poverty. (Matt 26:11).  God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good  (Matt 5:45). 

Get it? 

The right question is not why God allows evil and struggle. 

It's why we aren't taking a harder look and trying to understand the world that God actuallty made.  He didn't make a Disney world, with dragons and prince charmings duking it out to see who wins. He made a world where the horrible exists side by side with the wonderful.

The One

That's why our Asian friends use the yin/yang comparison. One life. One thing, With evil and good existing side by side in exquisite tension and in beautiful pain. 

We have one God and He made one life for us, one that includes both blooms and death, and we are to love Him and one another through it. 

It's actually quite a beautiful thing, when you think about it. Not treating trouble and pain as adverseries but as teachers that have their place. 

Something will eventally kill us all, after all. It will be good to understand that whatever does is part of the plan.

Image: Woo-Han, Substack

Love as the Consent Not to Reign

I've been reading Simone Weil.

If you've never heard of her, that's no big surprise. She's part philosopher, part mystic, and neither makes for a reputation anywhere near that of Stephen Colbert or Ozzie Osbourne. Simone has an interesting history. Jewish and living only until the age of 34 in prewar France, she began as a firm agnostic and gravitated slowly to Christian mysticism, remaining at the edge of organized religion, preferring a pragmatic rather than an emotional or more entirely spiritual approach to faith and wove ideas from Greek, Egyptian, and Hindu practice into her view of the eternal. It made for an interesting worldview.

But she has some important things to say. This is one of them:

God brings the universe into existence by agreeing not to command it even though He has the power to do so, but instead He allows the mechanical necessity of matter and the autonomy essential to thinking people to reign in His stead. His consent to do this is love. - Waiting for God

She sounds like a philosopher, but she applies her capacities of reason unapologetically to God. 

Unpacked, this makes for some deeply affecting resonance. 

First, it allows that God is responsible for creation, not only its physical components - earth and sky and the physics that govern them - but for humanity as well. However, it also sets apart his only thinking creation, humans, as separate entities altogether, given discrete privileges not granted the rest of creation. In an echo of the metaphorical Adam and Eve of the Bible, Simone applies both philosophy and theology simultaneously to what she observes to make sense of it. Physics, she says is what God made it and its mechanics run His universe without interruption or excuse, which is God's customary way of operation. God steps aside, however, when it comes to all matters of will. He has a will of His own, of course, but does not impose it and this, she says is how God loves us.

Then there's Simone's idea of our response to this:

God gives us our being so that we can give it back to Him. He allows us to live apart from Him and it's up to us to refuse the authorization. Humility is the refusal to exist apart from God - Gravity and Grace 

So there is a beautiful harmony in our intended relationship with God. God withholds the imposition of His will, deferring to our independence, and we withhold the exercise of that independence, deferring in turn to Him. 

That is communion. Perfect.

Image from The Drift

Staring at the Sun

 

I have a basket of flowers in my house. They are old and dry, many dusty from fragile years of saving. It's my basket of love, I tell anyone who asks its origin - roses and mums and others given in thanks or in consolation or congratulation or with any kind of empathy that seemed at the time like sweet fellowship. They retain some of their color, but aren't really a decoration. They are a reminder of love given and many times returned. A reminder of the parts of this life that were well-lived and tenderly remembered.

Yesterday, I found a poet who described why I've kept them.

Master, how serene
Are all the hours 
We waste

If, as we waste them,

We place them in a vase

Like flowers.

There are no sorrows

In our lives

Nor joys either.

Let us learn, then,

Innocent sages, 

Not to live life

But to pass through it,

Tranquil, serene,

Taking children

As our teachers,

Eyes full

Of nature...

Beside a river,

Beside a road,

Wherever we are,

Living life

With the same

Light ease.

Time passes,

And tells us nothing.

We grow old.

Let us learn almost

Mischievously,

To feel ourselves leaving.

There is no point

In doing anything.

There is no resisting

The monstrous god

Who devours

His own children.

Let us gather flowers.

Let us bathe our hands

In the calm rivers,

And from them

Learn their calm.

Sunflowers eternally

Staring at the sun,

We will leave life

Tranquilly, not even

Regretting

Having lived.

--Ricardo Reis

Image: Farmer's Almanac

A Spiritual Workout - Yearning for the Life

 

 

Last week, a friend of mine mused out loud that he thought he might give up Lent for Lent. Just Lent. I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but it may be the thought that Lent just doesn’t work for many people and, if that’s what he meant, I think he might be right. The whole idea of giving up something, or even of doing something extra, for 40 days just doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t if we just look on the face of it. It seems kind of silly. Until we do it in earnest, trying to look at it from God’s point of view.

Jesus gave some pretty simple instructions:

First, He said, "Follow me." The early disciples did it. They left nets and families and literally traipsed along beside him. They traveled and listened and learned. We are supposed to do that, too. 

Then, He said, (paraphrased) "Do what I do." Or more correctly, "Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I say?" That's a good question and I have an answer. Two of them. Because I'm human and because it's hard. But I keep forgetting something important. 

Being human isn't just something "only". Being human is being designed by God in the pattern of God. Being human means that we are more than flesh and blood. Being human means that we are infused with longing for perfect love, unfailing trust and justice, and an assurance that what we endure in this life ends in a condition that is beautiful and complete. It doesn't matter whether a person believes in God or not. We all want these things. The thing is that if we're ever going to get them, we have to DO something.

I broke my arm in mid-November and it's taken me until mid-February to regain most of my ability to do the things I used to do. In the meantime, I was necessarily sedentary and lost a lot of strength and vitality. Now that most of my maneuverabilty is back, I have to start moving  - yoga, dance, lifting weights, stretching. All that stuff. Not stuff usually on the top of my list for fun, but I know what the result is, having been this way before. I will become a person more fit for the life I want to lead. It's not the body I'm after. It's the life.

The same goes for my spiritual life. I have to spend time in the spiritual gym to prepare myself for the spiritual life I want and quite simply, as far as I'm concerned, there is no spiritual quest but the one toward more of God. More grace. More joy. More union. And I'm convinced that's what he wants for me. "The kingdom of God is in you". And I want to let it out.

God will do lots of things for us, but this is something WE have to do. 

So what equipment is in our spiritual gym? For me in this season, the weight I have to lift is restraint. Self control. Self denial. Jesus said that "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." He meant it. The qualites that make this life most worthwhile are not those that amuse and satisfy ourselves. They are the long-term struggles that we can look back on and know that we have done something lasting and worthwhile. Neither doing a job well or raising children is fun most of the time, but afterward, we know we have done what is right and builds up not only our own world but the world of the people around us. 

Spiritual weightlifting is like that. Restraint, that is holding back our power and abilities to achieve something greater, is like that. And Lent is kind of the kindergarten for restraint. It puts restraint in a box for a time and tells us, "Don't do this destructive thing. Do this other thing that builds up for eternity. Do this other thing that will still matter tomorrow and will not build a thing you keep for yourself but will build a thing you share with God."

So Lent is kind of silly if all you do is stop drinking coffee or stop eating your daily M&Ms, but it's not silly if we can take the larger view. After all, God isn't ever small. We have to aim high and climb if we're ever going to get closer to Him.

Image: Terri Gillespie

The Dream that Doesn't Die

 

I'm going to see Bob Dylan live in concert for the first time on March 30. In preparation for that, I've been listening to what I hope will be, before then, all of his music, knowing that I'd missed so much of it after the early 70s. I want to hear all his music in order before then and now that I'm pretty far into it, am finding him sunk in some places deep into what sounds like a real life exposure to Desolation Row.

Listening to the music and how it changed along the way, I'm trying to figure out what happened. He got lost somehow. Something vital drained away. He deflated away into a memory of the inspired genius that had made him someone we looked toward for a glimpse of what we might be - outraged at the venality and mediocrity of a world we knew could be better - a constant prodding toward beauty and the glory of humankind - a voice that said not 'get more' but 'be better', 'think', 'act'. A command to not only 'love' (if loving could ever be an only) but 'Be love'. 'Be real.' 

And then it all stopped. Or more like it, braked to a gradual, deflating stop. It took years for him but it happened, I'm thinking, to the rest of us, too.

That's why the 60s were special. That time has been called a brief, shining moment for some of us. There were real palpable dreams for the possibility of what we might be. And what we might be had faces - Jack. Bobby. Martin.  

In the end, they had to die, of course. Mediocrity is jealous. It does not harbor excellence or dreams of egalitarian glory.  Glory, because it reminds us of what we cannot hold in our hands or even easily imagine, has to die, too. Jesus should have helped us remember that but although his name is often evoked, what he taught never quite caught on in spite of the crowds still in churches every week. 

Glory necessitates reaching beyond flesh and blood - not only beyond our own grasp but beyond our comprehension, forced to be content with desiring most what we can only approach but never attain. 

Dylan wasn't the only one who lost it. We all did, but some of us never stopped looking for it again - the beauty that just seeped away. Everyone looked in different places and some got lost in drugs or in corporate striving. Me, as it turned out - I went to Italy. I remembered the beauty of the Renaissance and recognized it as what we'd grabbed by the tail once long ago. There, I could literally reach out and touch genius, the kind of genius that is supernatural or metaphysical. More than flesh and blood. More even than mind.

Once that kind of genius is actually touched, even for a little while, everything else looks small and insufficient, because it is. I am still disappointed in the everyday that does not aspire to lift human souls to what can only be termed a kind of heaven. And that's what I saw in Italy. In the Farnese Hercules, I saw the disillusionment of doing what we think will make things right and finding that it doesn't:

In Michaelangelo's David and the ceiling of the Sistine, I saw physical representations of the discovery of human glory:

In Donatello's Magdalen, I see how these glorious discoveries can ruin flesh, can throw what we are and what we could be into a conflagration that cannot be resolved:

And this is where we are left today. The beauty of what we are made to be still calls. It's harder to get near now because we have no one alive who knows how to lead there, but the yearning still lives, and not just in this old hippy's heart, but in so many people who have been born to ask questions and wonder why the world is the way it is. I still believe that the dream of glory never dies. 

"You can be in my dream if I can be in yours.: - Bob Dylan said that.

First Image: Stereo Times

Old Lady Racing: How to get out of a Speeding Ticket

 

Back in the 80s, I used to drive a race car. Of course, that was then. These days, I don't have nearly as heavy a foot as I used to, although ironically, my street cars are more powerful. That's just the way cars (not trucks or SUVs - those don't count in my world) are made these days. 350HP and doubly aspirated, but with a two-body trunk and a back seat that easily accepts a car seat. Go figure. 

Driving is a weird thing. For some, it's independence. For some, it's just a way to get somewhere. For others, like me, it's like holding onto a hurricane. When I press the ignition button in my cockpit, feeling again the push of pistons against the fire that moves them and hearing the low growl of heat and air moving through the system, I smile. Something will happen when I step on the accelerator. Yes.

Then there are those days, of course, when a little too much happens. That's another thing about my car. It has plenty of power, but wears it secretly, hiding behind efficient mufflers and noise dampeners. Sneaky. And just a little dangerous. 

Like when I pull up alongside 4 16-year-olds in a convertible 5L Mustang on a sunny summer day. Grandma in her sedan. Ha. I've had two of them. Sneaky sportscars. The first was an SHO. Yowser, it was fun. Pure muscle and guile:

Until a truck nosed its way into somewhere he didn't belong and power couldn't get me out of:

That was a sad day. So I got a hot rod Lincoln. Ahh....

So when the light turned green for me and the Mustang, I'm a quarter mile down the road before they've left the light. Oh my, that feels good.

Not so good, though, when there's a patrol car up ahead with a not-so-friendly county sheriff in it. It's happened more than once, and I don't like that part one bit. These days, however, I have a secret weapon. 

My granddaughter, Autumn. 

She's gotten me out of two tickets. She didn't mean to, of course, but she sure did it.

The first time, she was in her car seat in the back. I'd just pulled out on the highway on the first leg of what was to be our first road trip together and just before engaging the cruise control, he caught me. Way too fast, like 20 miles or so too fast. 

"Why is the policeman coming here, Grandma?"

"To keep us safe, honey."  Yeah, right. 

I rolled down the window, smiled, and handed him my license. Then he saw Autumn in the back seat. 

"I want to be a policeman!" she told him. That's all it took. He scolded me and let me go. Well done, girl.

It happened last Friday, too, and this time Autumn wasn't even in the car. Going only 12 miles over on a minor highway in a small Wisconsin town was enough to trigger the blue lights, though. 

"Where are you going?" 

"To my granddaughter's choir concert."

"Where is it?"

"Salem School." He knew the school was just down the street. It was a test. And again, he sent me on my way. 

Score. Not so bad for a grandma driving a sneaky sportscar. It's been more than 5 years since I've gotten a speeding ticket. I don't look too dangerous, after all. And Autumn surely doesn't. Good thing they can't read my mind. 

Please excuse me while I do a few donuts.