Building a Life, Stone by Stone

 

Did you know that when the builders in the Middle Ages erected their cathedrals with their great barrel vaults and pointed arches and flying buttresses, it was the not the mortar between the stones that kept them standing? The mortar didn't serve as medieval masonry glue but as a thin layer of leveling, smoothing the imperfections between them, one to another, to provide a continuous contact surface so that when one brick sat on the one before it and was followed by the rest, their combined weight would press them into a geometric shape whose weighted thrust extended in straight lines right through them into the ground.

It wasn't the mortar that kept the building together. It was the horde of gradually assembled stones that wouldn't work until each had taken its place. Not until that had happened, and the stones had time to sink into one another firmly by virtue not of a masonry glue, but only by their own accumulated pressure, would the great soaring structure be finished.

And so it is that the weight of years forms a life.

It has often seemed that as the years of my life increase, so does the weight of them so that I carry them as a kind of burden, like a sack I have to throw over my back before I can go anywhere. But I've been looking at them wrong, I think. Maybe they aren't a burden, but a building - a magnificent cathedral of lived days that I don't carry, but live in, roaming its rooms, examing its structure, admiring its beauty. Each stone has been laid painstakingly on the one before it day by day, adding weight, yes, but also creating stability. 

My building isn't complete yet until I've lived my last day, but it is taking shape into something I couldn't see coherently until now, when the building is nearly complete. What began as a fortress has morphed into a cathedral of Gothic lace, and I can't help but think that is what it was meant to be all along. 

And it is beautiful.

Who's Your Daddy?

 

I gave the following message at the First Congregational Church, Rochester, WI, January 21, 2024

I’m going to talk about Abraham today and I’m going to start with the lyrics of a song, not a hymn, but a song Bob Dylan wrote in 1965....

God said to Abraham, kill me a son.

Abe said, man, you must be putting me on.

God said no. Abe said What?

God said you can to what you want to, but

Next time you see me coming, you better run.

Abe said, where to do you want this killing done?

God said out on Highway 61.

 

Okay, so I used this because it’s fun, but also to show not only how famous Abraham’s story is that even a not so good Jewish boy from Minnesota knew his Old Testament well enough to write a protest era rock song about Abraham. But also to show how easy it is to get stuff within the story wrong. Dylan got the killing part right, but he missed something important about God.  Anyway, Abe’s story starts a long time before the killing incident, so we’ll start with a brief review.

Abraham, one of the Old Testament patriarchs, is often said to be the biblical example of faith. Born almost 2000 years before Christ, Abraham did a lot of traveling under God’s direction, but didn’t start until he was already an old man. When he was 60, he left his home in Ur to go to Haran because God told him to “Leave your country and go to a land I will show you. I will make of you a great nation.” He didn’t know where he was going but he believed God, so he did it.  Fifteen years later, when Abe was 75, God sent Abraham to Canaan. God said, “I will give this land to you and your descendants” and this was harder to believe because Abraham and his wife, Sarah, had no children and he couldn’t figure out how, at their age, that was going to work. He didn’t understand, but Abraham still did it. A year later, after he took his family to Egypt to avoid a famine and returned to Canaan, God said again, “I will give this land to you and your descendants.” This time, Abraham spoke up. He asked God how in the world he was going to do that because he still had no children. By then, Abe’s wife Sarah thought God might need some human help, so when Abe was 76, Sarah told him to sleep with her handmaid and sure enough, Abraham had a son, Ishmael, but God was not distracted by that. Ishmael was not the promised son. Finally, 24 years later, when Abe was 100 years old, after they’d waited 40 years and Sarah was 90, she finally had a baby by Abraham – Isaac. Isaac was the promised child. Isaac would be the future of the Hebrew people. They were overjoyed. Their belief had been rewarded. Abraham, through Isaac, WOULD be the father of a great nation.

This is how Hebrews 11 summarizes the story: By faith ^qAbraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place ^rthat he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. 9 By faith he went to live in ^sthe land of promise, 10 For he was looking forward to ^vthe city that has ^wfoundations, ^xwhose designer and builder is God. 11 By faith ^ySarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered ^zhim faithful who had promised. 12 Therefore from one man, and ^ahim as good as dead, were born descendants ^bas many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

So far, so good.

Then when his son Isaac was 33 years old and in the prime of his manhood, God told Abraham to kill him. After all the moving and waiting, God was asking Abe to do the one thing that would make all God’s promises impossible. He for sure didn’t want to do it. He loved his son. But he also wanted to obey God. It didn’t make sense to kill Isaac, but it hadn’t made sense for God to send him moving from place to place either and God had made all of that work out. Everything had happened so far exactly as God promised. So Abe would kill Isaac to obey God and God would after Isaac was dead, make him, through Isaac, the father of nations. He just didn’t know how God would do that. So Abe went, not to highway 61 but up to Mount Moriah, to do the deed. He took His son, and a rope, and tied him to an altar meant for sacrifices. And Abe raised the knife.

This is what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about what Abraham did and why he did it. We’re going to talk about how Abraham believed and who he believed in. And we’re going to talk about how it would look for us to have the same kind of faith.

 

The thing about faith is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A person has faith in SOMETHING. Faith doesn’t exist apart from the object being believed in. In order to have faith at all, we have to have a clear picture of the thing believed. And then, because of what we believe, like Abraham, we DO something.

 

For Abraham, he believed God was his sovereign King and he acted like it. He listened and obeyed. He also believed God was trustworthy. God had promised the birth of Isaac against every common sense and delivered on his promise. God had also promised him that Isaac would be his inheritance and his gateway to a nation of descendants. Abe, standing on Mount Mariah with the knife in his hand, didn’t know how God was going to do build a nation from his descendants if he killed his only son, but he knew that somehow, God would do it, just like he’d done everything else.

 

Now we have to figure out who WE believe God is. Think about it a minute. Answer the question for yourself. Who is God? Complete the sentence - God is blank. Then fill in the blank.

 

How many of you thought God is Love? You’re not alone and there are lots of similar ways to express that love: faithful, good, kind, steadfast just.

the Bible agrees:

1 John 4:16 God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

Listen closely. That’s not only a definition, It’s an instruction. It tells us to do something. It tells us, that if we love, we must abide.

·      So, if God is love, we abide in Him. That means staying close. It means remembering God in everything we do. It’s making sure he has a chair at every table, a seat at every meeting. It’s whispering to him like pillow talk in prayer. It’s holding hands with him while we walk. It’s spooning with him in sleep. It’s staying so close to Him that he’s like an extension of ourselves and we couldn’t walk away even if we wanted to.

·      If God is love, we also expect and accept forgiveness for sins. Abraham never knew Jesus, but this kind of love was the reason Jesus was born and died. This love is God’s assurance that there’s nothing we can do, as long as we love Him, that’s irredeemable and even when it seems like we’re lost beyond God’s reach, we’re not. It’s having confidence that God never acts out of anger or revenge, regardless of how it looks from our point of view. This is what Dylan got wrong. God doesn’t threaten us with destruction if we go wrong. He forgives.

·       If God is love, we are loyal and forgiving not because a person earns it but because God is. We give the kind of love He gives. We treat everyone as equals because He created us all and we are equal. We look past our differences to our similarities. We act humbly and inclusively, not boasting or excluding anyone. Anyone. We’ve all heard about the tax collectors and prostitutes Jesus hung with. If God is love, we take care to recognize our own tax collectors, our own prostitute. They are there, waiting for us to love them. I was recently reminded that people who treat us badly often do it because they are afraid of being hurt themselves. We look past our prejudices by always ascribing a worthy motive to someone else rather than judging them. We think good of them, not ill. That’s what loving someone else as we love ourselves means.

God is a lot of other things, too: omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful), eternal, sovereign (in charge of everything), and of course, holy, but the idea of transferring our understanding of who God is into action is the same for all of these cases. This is the kind of faith Abraham had. And, in a perfect world where we can do all of this, we would, too. However, what really happens can look quite different.

 Faith in action can be hard. It was for Abraham, too, because faith is more than knowing God exists. Understanding that God exists is a starting place waiting to be made into flesh and blood. Real faith is built in individual communion with God.

 

Like Abraham. He didn’t tell anybody what he was going to do when he took Isaac  to the mountain. He didn’t tell Isaac, or his wife, not anybody. Abe’s act was not a public one –It was a one on one interaction with God. He didn’t expect Isaac to survive. He expected him to die. Abe didn’t know what God would do after Isaac’s death, but knew He would do something.

 

Isaac was Abe’s whole world and future. He was the promise. In Abe’s willingness to kill him, Abe gave his everything to God. He resigned all his plans, all his future and that of his people into the unknown. Why? Because he believed. And because He believed, he trusted because if God is love, we also trust Him. We behave with confidence in whatever circumstances come, no matter how they look, remembering that God always – ALWAYS-has our best interests in mind. If the circumstances are hard, we know that the difficulty is good either for us or for someone else or both. If the circumstances appear to be evil, we remember that Jesus came to have victory over evil, so no evil can confound God’s plan. We don’t  worry about what we don’t have or what we want to happen or spend a lot of time trying to make things work out our way, but instead letting God arrange them his way.

 

The thing is, God doesn’t always, or even often, leave easily recognizable signposts saying “Here I am” and as a result, we spend a lot of time guessing, and sometimes getting it wrong. And that’s okay, because God is love, remember? It’s not about getting things right every time. It’s about wanting to. It’s about leaning into God all the time and looking for Him right there with us, because He is most likely to show up in places we least expect Him, like in a burning bush or on Mount Moriah, taking the knife out of our hand.

 

God, because He is unimaginable, lives in the place we can’t imagine and He reminds of this us every time He does something we didn’t think of or don’t want to happen. God lives in the unthinkable because He Himself is unthinkable. When He tells us not to fear, it’s not because nothing scary will ever happen. It’s because our plans are the only ones that will be upset. His will not.

 

But when our plans are upset, what happens? We worry. We’re afraid. We can’t sleep. When the unexpected comes, it takes us by surprise and confidence in God isn’t always our first response. So when it’s not, then there’s something in the adage Fake it Till You Make It. It works. Abraham did it. If we’re scared, behave as though we are not. If we irrationally worry, do what we should. We disarm our fears not by running the other way but by entering into them, grabbing them and shaking them until they reveal the damage they are doing. Making them show their real face. Does that take courage you don’t think you have? You bet it does.

 

One of my favorite stories is about the a Chinese Christian mystic named Watchman Nee. He was considered a holy man and one night, while he was just hanging out smoking his pipe in his living room, a demon appeared on the staircase. Now the demon was doing scary, demony things like growling and snarling and cursing him. After a minute or two, Nee stood up, walked over to the demon, looked at him and said, "Oh, it's only you." He was scared when he did this, of course, but the demon didn't know that. All he heard was Nee saying, "I know who you are. You can't hurt me because I know who God is."  The demon had no defense against Nee’s faith.

 

Remember, God only brings us what we’re supposed to have. He means us good, not harm. It’s a trust fall. Did you ever try one? To stand in front of someone and just lean back and let go without asking first, without looking to see if they’re paying attention, and just collapse and see whether they’ll catch you. It’s an amazing experience, and God wants us to do that with Him. Every time. We can fall into His arms with complete confidence regardless of our fears and reservations because that is the only way to faith, the only way to find out how magnificent God really is.

 

Remember that God asked the worst, the hardest thing of Abraham and Abe walked right up to it and he raised the knife over his son. Do you think Abe’s hand wasn’t shaking? I’m willing to bet it was. He does the same with us. God gives us situations we don’t like and puts the knife in our own hands and asks us what we will do next. When we have the faith and courage to raise it, he will say, see! Look what I am doing. I am making all things new in a way you could never have imagined.

 

To God, unexpected change cannot unmake His plans. To God, death cannot unmake His plans. When we act according to what we believe rather than how we feel, God meets us there, hands out to catch us, because we know who He is. He is love, and he is just, and he is sovereign and he is holy. When we reach back to him in return, we find, like Abraham, that God moves His heaven and his earth to give us faith and bring us rescue. That is Jesus’ story. That is Abraham’s story. It is meant to be our story, too. May it be.

Image courtesy of Third Hour

Requiem

 

Requiem

December 18, 2023, New York Times: U.S. Steel to Be Bought by Japanese Rival 

 

Pure power.

I saw it once.

Showering from the pregnant mouth of a smelter in liquid stars.

Birthing its own dawn,

cascading into wide waiting trenches,

consuming every atom it approached.

scorching even the air.

 

What began as iron and cool coke

exploded to life and purpose

from a chemist’s dream,

not steel but vision

grown into monument

carrying us shoulder high

wide as invention,

broad as courage

solid as unbound minds.

 

It was so beautiful.

 

It lost no grandeur

even as it grayed into slab,

cooling as it moved.

Dignified even while consecrated to

hot rolls pressing it to near paper,

and rocketing out, thundering, into coils,

bending into the place mortals live

to meet a Hephaestion future forged in its own furnace.

 

But when future came,

the god lingered and lagged.

Grandeur and dignity faded,

romance reduced to pragmatic function.

 

Steel still breeds from formulaic components

but the spark smoldered and died.

No fresh sun rises to the blast.

No new charge promises a bloom.

 

There is weeping in Gary.

 

Image courtesy of Science Photo Library

First Snow 2024

 

Everyone begins in the dark, stumbling, grasping for purchase.

Looking for the way to light. Footsteps to follow.

Hearing hollow echoes, distant owl-sounds,

Emptiness so complete that breezes make the only noise, and

snow muffles even that.

 

Mother-love is not enough, the breath of God that bolsters only infants.

Beauty nestles there, and warm refuge, but no passage.

Giving little revelation when delivered into an urgent, constantly turning world  

both whirling on itself and wheeling through a star-cast space

That forces motion without specifying direction.

 

Show me the way.

 

Ah! A companion!

Reason, logic, formula, rule,

Discernable patterns with stable roots.

Frames. Handholds. Stakes in the ground.

Paths marked by firm signposts that climb clear one on another.

Someone to walk with. Aristotle’s salvation.

 

But that path tends toward a crowd, bending in common direction,

All finding the same solace in coherent method:

Syllogism. Analytics.

Forward circles on itself, becoming backward in helical stasis, patting itself on the back.

Leaving Beauty behind. And Grace. And Good.

The din of agreement going nowhere.

 

Nearby, nearly unnoticed, a cagy Socrates and refined Plato leave their marks.

 Ignoring the crowd, they stalk, leaving reasoned steps behind, to a riverbank. 

They point to where measured feet have no place to land and where only the willingness to flow allows movement.

 

The crowd scatters.

The way forward, effortless and punctuated only by geese rising, laughs in delighted rapids

And the place to rest appears.

All images photographed by the author

Trust Fall

 

I was thinking this morning of something I used to do.

From time to time, usually in the confined space of our galley kitchen, when I was standing casually in front of Dave either cooking or talking or generally doing something else, I would collapse. I'd just let go limp and fall to see whether he could catch me before I reached the floor. 

It was a test of some kind, I guess, because we both knew I had trust issues, like a lot of us do. It's hard to relinquish control, after all. We work so hard to get it and when we do, don't want to let go. After all, who knows what would happen if we actually fell? It's true. 

Of course, we all know that whatever control we think we have is an illusion. We are, in the end, all subject to forces way beyond our control, but who wants to admit that, much less live it? 

But you know what I learned? It's freeing. It feels absolutely fabulous to the point that, even if I actually fell, it wouldn't matter. It would be absolutely worth that one moment of freefall. 

In time, I came to understand that the trust fall thing was just a metaphor for something else. What I really wanted wasn't just that single moment of freedom, but an assurance that there existed somewhere a kind of erasure when the bounds of what divided me from the rest of the created world, even from God Himself, slipped away. 

It was about more than trust.

It was about a momentary union with the infinite, a kind of flight that released me from all the strings I was trying to hold, all the future I was trying to weave, all the security I was trying to purchase with the precious energy of my life. We can't do it, though, and if we live long enough, we realize that. Eventually, what we work so hard building melts away in a single moment beyond our control.

That's why, I think, Jesus told us to build up treasures in heaven. He didn't mean not to live our life, but to live it with what really lasts in mind. Circumstances twist and turn, but the energy we invest in building up God's treasures, the world and people He made, well, that lasts. It shatters the boundaries that separate us not only from each other, but from Him.

I don't intend to erect or fortify one more barrier in this world. I have little time and no constructive energy for it. And, when I remember what it feels like to trust that God really does intend the best for every one of His creatures, I can fall into His arms with ease.

It's reassuring to remember, too, that He reinforced that thought in the last thing I was able to do for Dave while he lived - to catch him, to keep him from falling when he was too weak to stand on his own, and to tell him, "Don't worry. I've got you." He had done it so often for me, never failing to make the catch. Of course, all those catches were illusions, too. In the end, it was God doing the catching every time. 

Photo courtesy of Maestri Gallery

Standing in the Prow of the Ship: A Lesson from FDR

 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to describe the porch at his "little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia as being as "high as the prow of a ship." He established Warm Springs not only to bring him a place to rest and rehabilitate in the face of a depression and wartime presidency coupled with the ravages of a twenty-five year detente with polio, but to provide the same for other polio victims. He described it, however, not in terms of a fixed place on earth, but in terms of motion, of vast strength, and of unlimited space. Not the usual frame of reference we expect from someone living with a handicap.

There is a lesson here, and it grows from two aspects.

The first is pretty obvious - FDR was crippled. He had no use of his legs for half of his adult life but before the affliction, he grew up in New York, close to the ocean, and before he became President, served as Secretary of the Navy. He knew well the feel of being on the water - not just a lake or river, but a watery expanse of biblical porportions, with no end in sight from any angle. No landmarks, no obvious road ahead, and no guideposts. Just water in every direction. That boundless view, along with his natural optimism, kept him from focusing on a world collapsing in on itself because of physical disability. Rather than looking inward and seeing his world shrink, he looked out and saw it without restriction. He saw is spreading out on all sides before him, split by the prow of a great ocean liner, steaming ahead into a future he not only welcomed, but helped engineer. 

The second is seeing, if only in retrospect, that FDR's disability could have been the single qualification that made him most uniquely able to guide a floundering country through the 30's and 40's. As a nation, we were faced with a brokenness we'd not known since the Civil War and had no idea what to do next. FDR did, every time he remembered his useless legs. He knew what it took to go on when the future looked hopeless. He knew that handicap and death were not the same thing. He knew that, even the boundless ocean has a shore somewhere, and had already developed the grit needed to hold firm in search of it.

Those of us who are aging have the same choice to make. We may not have polio, but we have other maladies and restrictions to endure. We can let the horizons close in, or we can board our own ship, raise our eyes to the horizon, and welcome each broad sunrise, engaged to the full limits of our ability, aware that storms will come, but so will the rainbow.

We are exactly where we're supposed to be. Every time we are given is intentional - a trust, a gift. Like FDR, we have something to do and the only way to begin is to take whatever step we are able, with or without legs that work.

Death is not the worse that can happen. Missing the life we're given is.

Photo 1: View from QM2 via Facebook group Queen Mary 2 Experiences and Advice

Photo 2: FDR sailing a yacht in 1933, photo courtesy of ebay

Being a Human

 Yesterday, one of my Philosophy professors lectured about being human - about how a bird knows how to just be a bird and a dog just a dog, but we are not nearly as good at being just a human because we can reason. It's the reasoning that puts a distance between the borders of our skin and the rest of the world, that draws a line around us and says: This Is Me. And because we are so aware of ourselves, that awareness interferes with our just being what we are. The same reason that makes us more than animals also makes us less somehow. It might be that the most successful humans are the ones who leave at least some of their reason untapped, trailing down behind them like a thread hanging from the bottom of their pant leg, forgotten, unaware, not missed.

It is a lie this reason, this awareness. It tells me there is more, something shining and bright hot, that feels like a spirit, and that this is what makes us most human beyond the flesh and blood we share with animals. Maybe it's not completely a lie - maybe it's partly true, but only partly because this bright center is also what makes me unhappy because it is always just out of reach. 

The leaves are coming down. Yesterday I kicked through a yellow pile of them lying next to a curb on the way to walking to the edge of a big lake whose border is so far away that it lies beyond the visible horizon. The leaves may mean that another year of growing things is dying, but they just might mean that dying things can be beautiful. Or they just might be lovely leaves.