meditatio

There Are Worse Things . . .

2009-12-08T13:27:00.000-08:00

Archbishop Rowan Williams has invited the bishops and Standing Committees of The Episcopal Church to withhold consent to the election of Canon Mary Glasspool as bishop suffragan in the Diocese of Los Angeles. Why? Because she is an openly partnerned lesbian. ++Rowan's implicit threat if TEC consents is to kick us out of the Anglican Communion.

I'm reminded of these lines from Anthony DeMello's Taking Flight: A Book of Story Meditations:

A Hindu Sage was having The Life of Jesus read to him. When he learned how Jesus was rejected by his people in Nazareth, he exclaimed, "a rabbi whose congregation does not want to drive him out of town isn't a rabbi." And when he learned how it was the priests who put Jesus to death, he said with a sigh, "It is hard for Satan to mislead the whole world, so he appoints prominent ecclesiastics in different parts of the globe."

The lament of a bishop: "Wherever Jesus went there was a revolution; wherever I go people serve tea!"

When a million people follow you, ask yourself where have you gone wrong. ("Religion," p. 73)

There are worse things than getting kicked out of the Anglican Communion.

Just One Campaign

2009-10-22T15:31:00.000-07:00

Check out this short video and see how you and your congregation can make a difference in the alleviation of global poverty this Christmas.

On Anger

2009-08-09T15:12:00.000-07:00

In our culture, there is a lot of confusion, misunderstanding, and apprehension about anger and how we should deal with it. It is an especially difficult subject for many Christians, who often assume that feeling angry is a sin and that imitating Jesus requires us to be a doormat for the rest of the world to walk all over. The church is supposed to be a “no anger” zone where we learn how to be nice to each other; whether we want to or not. Here the repression of anger is the norm.

On the other hand, popular psychology has frequently taught us that we should express our anger. It operates on a “hydraulic model” that sees anger as a kind of energy that backs up and overflows our emotional reservoir, overwhelming us and others if we don’t get it out of our system. If you let it build up, you’ll explode, so vent your anger as it comes up. Anger is inevitable and you have to let it flow. Here the expression of anger is the norm.

And so we are left with very mixed messages about anger. My sense is that the Christian tradition and contemporary psychological theory are both much wiser and more subtle than either of their popular expressions. In fact, the ancient traditions of the Church, especially those derived from the astute psychological observations of the early monastics, anticipate much of the best of modern psychology. They agree on one fundamental point: anger is a choice. Anger does not have to be repressed or expressed. It can be transformed at its roots.

It may seem counter-intuitive to speak of anger as a choice. We can’t help how we feel, right? Feelings just “are;” well, yes and no. Human beings have a far greater range of freedom with respect to how we respond to the world than we want to admit, because it means that we have to take responsibility for our actions.

Consider, for example, a rather typical situation in which angry feelings arise. “Stella is standing in line at the bank. It is 1:20, and she is due back at her office at 1:30. She could make it in time if she is lucky and the line moves along. But things don’t go well. Two of the five tellers close their windows. ‘How dare they take a break when there are people waiting?’ she thinks. One customer is buying travelers checks. ‘Why don’t they have a special window for that kind of service?’ she asks the person behind her in line. The customer slowly signs each check as she cheerfully discusses her planned vacation. ‘Who cares about Florida in April? Just sign the [stupid] checks and get going for [the love of God],’ Stella muttered under her breath. By now Stella is impatiently opening and closing the snap on her purse. At another window an elderly woman is leafing through a huge, over-stuffed purse looking for something. ‘This could take all day!’ She sighs in exasperation. Her lunch, which she bolted down half an hour ago, sits like a rock in her stomach. The noise of other people’s conversations is annoying, and the two men standing behind her in line are too close. A young man is counting out the money he received from the teller and carefully tucking it into his wallet before he leaves the window. ‘Good grief! Just move it!’ she thinks.”

“By the time its her turn at the window, at 1:29, she’s in a rage. Her heart is pounding, she is breathing heavily, her mouth is dry, her hands shake. She’s made at the stupid, slow patrons and the inconsiderate bank tellers. She’s mad at her boss for making her feel guilty if she’s even a minute late and resents her job for only allowing a one-hour lunch break. She’s angry at the restaurant for its slow, inefficient service and the undigested food she can still taste.”

“Stella’s anger is a physical experience. All strong emotions – anger, fear, excitement – trigger powerful hormonal responses that cause body changes. These responses occur automatically in [humans] and other animals and are an important survival mechanism.”

“While the physiological experience of anger proceeds automatically once it is triggered, getting angry is by no means automatic. Stella’s anger is triggered by things that she tells herself while standing line: ‘Tellers shouldn’t take breaks while people are waiting . . . They should have a special window . . . Who cares about Florida? . . . and so on. It is Stella’s thoughts that actually start the emotional ball rolling, signaling her body to prepare for battle.”[1]

Our perception and interpretation of reality, our thoughts about our experience, give shape to our emotional energies in powerful ways. That perception is limited, and our interpretation can be mistaken; especially when, like Stella, we find ourselves operating from the stance that we are the center of the universe. We react to reality as we are – in bondage to resentment from the past or fears about the future – rather than reacting to reality as it is.

“Wrath is a reminder of hidden hatred, that is to say, remembrance of wrongs. Wrath is a desire for the injury of the one who has provoked you. Irascibility is the untimely blazing up of the heart. Bitterness is a movement of displeasure seated in the soul. Anger is an easily changeable movement of one’s disposition and disfiguration of soul.”[2] St. John Climacus points out that our perception and reaction can shift when we move from an ego-

centric to a God-centric perspective.

I think he is right about this, though I’m not sure anger is an “easily” changeable movement. Deep-seated patterns of resentment and angry reactivity to the world can be very challenging, though not impossible, to transform. Abba Ammonas said, "I have spent fourteen years . . . asking God night and day to grant me the victory over anger."[3] Learning to deal with anger takes time and practice.

The Letter to the Ephesians provides sound practical advice in this regard. “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger and do not make room for the devil . . . Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up . . . be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” (Ephesians 4:26-27, 29, 32)

First, be aware of how you are responding to your experience of the world. Angry feelings are not in and of themselves sinful. They simply signal a perceived threat or loss, whether physical or emotional, and prompt a response.

The issue is not anger itself, but what we do with it. We are admonished to be careful that our anger does not lead to sin – to the violation of relationship with God and other people – and that it does not “make room for the devil.” Anger that goes unchecked leads to the loss of freedom. When we are “in a rage,” we can not think clearly. We can not pray. We loose touch with reality, with a God-centered perspective.

It is this loss of freedom when overcome by anger that makes room for evil. This is what most concerned the early monastics of the Egyptian desert, who counseled practicing awareness of our thoughts so that we can acknowledge and treat disturbing feelings at their root, before we speak or act.

Be aware of your feelings, but don’t become attached to them. “Not allowing the sun to go down on your anger” means realizing that all feelings are transient. We don’t need to cling to them. We can let them go. Such non-attachment gives us the space we need to pray and talk with others about our perceptions and how best to respond.

Finally, we are encouraged to respond in ways that build up rather than destroy relationships, by being careful about our speech and action. Practice kindness and forgiveness in imitation of God, who has revealed his mercy toward us in the face of Jesus Christ. Such forbearance takes account of human imperfection. It doesn’t mean ignoring or excusing real harms done to us. It simply means refusing to be defined by those harms or to respond in ways that perpetuate cycles of rage and revenge. We can learn to respond with insight and compassion toward those persons and situations that threaten us.

St. Nilus of Mt. Sinai said, “When you pray as you ought, there may come into your mind things about which it seems right to be angry with your brother. There is absolutely no anger against your brother which could be justified. If you look, you will find that the question can be settled quite well without anger. Therefore do your best not to be moved to anger.” [4]

If we look deeply into the causes and conditions that generate harm, seeing with God’s eyes, we are given the freedom in Christ to respond creatively. Anger is a choice. When we are able to choose otherwise, then we are indeed free.

[1] When Anger Hurts: Quieting the Storm Within, pp. 23-24.

[2] St. John Climacus, “The Ladder of Divine Ascent,” (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1978), Step 8: On Freedom From Anger and On Meekness.

[3] Sr. Benedicta Ward, "The Sayings of the Desert Fathers," (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1975), pp. 25-28.

[4] "153 Texts on Prayer", St Nilus of Mt Sinai, "Early Fathers From the Philokalia," translated from the Russian text, "Dobrotolubiye," by E. Kadloubovsky and G.E.H. Palmer, eighth edition, (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1981), pp. 127 - 135.

Summer Reading

2009-08-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

I just by chance picked up Michael Plekon's book, Hidden Holiness. It is a beautiful and evocative reflection on the meaning of "sainthood" in our time. Plekon, an Orthodox priest, draws on a variety of sources from both the Eastern Orthodox tradition, ancient and modern, as well as some unlikely modern figures from across Christian traditions and even outside them, such as Etty Hillesum.

Hillesum was a Dutch Jew who died in the Holocaust. Discovering her story and Plekon's reflections on her life alone (which draws from Rowan William's meditation about her) is worth picking up the book. Here is a prayer found in Hillesum's writings from the concentration camp:

"You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last. There are, it is true, some who, even at this late stage, are putting their vacuum cleaners and silver forks and spoons in safekeeping instead of guarding You, dear God. And there are those who want to put their bodies in safekeeping but who are nothing more now than a shelter for a thousand fears and bitter feelings. And they say, 'I shan't let them get me in their clutches.' But they forget that no one is in their clutches who is in Your arms. I am beginning to feel a little more peaceful, God, thanks to this conversation with You. I shall have many more conversations with you. You are sure to go through lean times with me now and then, when my faith weakens a little, but believe me, I shall always labor for You and remain faithful to You, and I shall never drive You from my presence. (12 July 1942) - Hidden Holiness, p. 32.

And then, Rowan Williams:

"Remember that for Etty, the self's 'safeguarding' of God is inseperable from that careful attention to what is given room in the self's encounter with itself: making space for sorrow without it being crowded out by anger or hate, is bound in with the self's hospitality to God. 'God is in safe hands with us despite everything,' she wrote, in September 1943. She died in November. To see that what matters is not that you are - in any easy sense - safe in the hands of God but that God is safe in your hands is to turn upside down in consolatory version of faith, to stake yourself indeed on an 'eternal covenant.'" - Hidden Holiness, pp. 37-38.

This isn't a book about saints as extraordinary people distant from us, but about the way holiness takes shape in ordinary people in both mundane and extraordinary circumstances - and how such holiness is God's gift, a gift sometimes barely perceptible in the midst of suffering.

Perhaps it is this "sheltering of God" that is God "sheltering us" by desiring to make of even the utmost limits of human suffering an opportunity to be drawn closer to him.

This is a book well worth reading and praying over.

A Meditation on the Body of Christ

2009-08-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

From Symeon The New Theologian (949-1022):

We awaken in Christ's body
as Christ awakens our bodies
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly whole,
seamless in this Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous?
Then open your heart to Him

And let yourself receive the One
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ's body

Where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him.
And he makes us utterly real

and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him, transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely
and radiant in His Light.
We awaken as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.

A Biblical Love Triangle

2009-08-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

Sermon preached on June 28, 2009 at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church and resposted by request.

This morning as we mark Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Freedom Day, we find ourselves in the midst of a cultural and political battle over marriage equality for same-sex couples. This conflict has been acutely felt by all of us in California. Like many of you, I was deeply disappointed by the passage of Proposition Eight and the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold it. After so many years and so much struggle, I confess I was surprised to discover how hurt and vulnerable I can still feel in the face of blatant discrimination and relegation to second-class citizenship.

Heterosexual privilege – the notion that heterosexuals are morally superior to queer people and therefore entitled to a level of dignity and fundamental rights that queer folk are denied – a privilege enshrined in law and custom, is just as deeply rooted and intractable as sexism and racism. For too many heterosexual people, their sense of identity and security as persons is constructed over and against queer people. The reverse can be said of queer people too, I suppose, but the difference is that we queers don’t have the power to institutionalize privilege. We find it difficult enough to secure basic equality!

What is particularly ironic is that this heterosexual privilege is often justified in terms of biblical religion. The assumption on the part of many – both those who support and those who oppose marriage equality – is that the Bible is uniformly condemning of same-sex love. A few verses, often quoted out of context and with little understanding, are imposed as the lens through which we are compelled to read the whole of Scripture. I say that this is ironic because, in fact, the model of steadfast love at the heart of the biblical witness is in fact the love shared between two men. And it is this love which becomes the dominant image of divine love. It is God’s steadfast love for his beloved, David, a love that is homosocial and, indeed, homoerotic in its expression, that is the very model of God’s love for Israel and, later, the Church.[1]

Listen again to the words of David as he laments the death of King Saul and of Saul’s son, Jonathan, in battle against the Philistines:

"Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely! In life and death they were not divided; they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions . . . How the mighty have fallen in the in the midst of battle! Jonathan lies slain upon your high places. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." (2 Samuel 1:23, 25-26)

David’s outpouring of grief is the tragic climax of the greatest love triangle in the literature of ancient Israel: the tortured relationships between Saul, Jonathan and David. The love of Jonathan and David has often been remarked upon. In last weeks Scripture lessons, we heard the reading from I Samuel, in which David is first introduced to Jonathan.

"When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. Saul took [David] that day and would not let him return to his father’s house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and belt." (1 Samuel 18:1-4)

In this passage, we see the roots of the rivalry between Saul and Jonathan for David’s affection. Recall that King Saul had already chosen David as his armor-bearer: “David came to Saul and entered his service. Saul loved him greatly, and he became his armor-bearer.” (1 Samuel 16:21) In the homosocial world of ancient warrior cultures, the relationship between a warrior and his companion was one of fierce loyalty, courageous service, and tender intimacy. But Jonathan, the heir to the throne, also falls for David and enters into a covenant of love with him, seeking David as his own armor-bearer.

As the narrative quickly unfolds, David’s beauty and military prowess bring him great popularity with the militia and with the people. Saul begins to be threatened by David, but this threat isn’t just political. Jonathan, too, garners the affection of the people but perhaps what is even more threatening to Saul, he garners the affection of David. The plot only makes sense if we realize that Jonathan and David’s love unfolds against the background of Saul and David’s erotically charged relationship.

In his jealousy, Saul drives his beloved armor-bearer into the arms of his son, Jonathan. Saul becomes increasingly erratic, on one hand attempting to buy off David by offering his daughters as trophy wives, on the other hand attempting to kill David in fits of pique. He seeks to bind David more closely to him and, finally, to kill him if he cannot control him. But David escapes these plots, often with Jonathan’s help. We are told that when Jonathan secretly goes to meet David, who is in hiding, David “bowed three times, and they kissed each other, and wept with each other; David wept the more.” (1 Samuel 20:41)

What is amazing, however, is that even as David falls more deeply in love with Jonathan, he never fully forsakes his prior loyalty to his former lover, Saul. Even when David has the opportunity to kill Saul – on more than one occasion – he spares him out of steadfast loyalty and love. We might even say his love for Saul, however dysfunctional, prepares him for his later, more mutual and fulfilling, love for Jonathan. In fact, when things finally fall apart, and both Saul and Jonathan are killed on Mount Gilboa, David mourns for both these “beloved and lovely” men.

In the end this love triangle proves unstable and destructive. David becomes king in place of Saul, but the price he will pay is the death of Saul’s heirs; except for one: Jonathan’s crippled son, Mephibosheth, whom David promised to adopt and raise as his own son. Yet, in important ways, David’s steadfast love for Saul and Jonathan endures and prepares him for an even greater love.

The character of God, Yahweh as he is named in the narrative, is imagined, too, as a warrior-king. He chooses first Saul as his armor-bearer, but proves fickle in his love and later selects David as his beloved. Interestingly, what strikes Yahweh about both of these men is their great beauty. We are told that Saul was “a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he; he stood head and shoulders above everyone else.” (1 Samuel 9:2) Later, Yahweh rejects the aging king in favor of young David, who is “ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome,” Yahweh declares, “Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.” (1 Samuel 16:12)

And just as we see David progressing in his experience of love and loyalty as he moves through his relationships with Saul and Jonathan, so, too, Yahweh, who is a rather capricious and unpredictable god at the beginning of the narrative, seems to mature in his capacity for steadfast love and loyalty as he moves through his relationships with Saul and David.

It is as if David, by learning how to maneuver through his tragic human love triangle, is enabled to woo and domesticate fickle Yahweh. David’s covenant with Jonathan – a covenant of mutual love and loyalty – is paralleled by David’s covenant with Yahweh – a covenant that is consummated, if you will, with David dancing in a naked frenzy before the Ark of the Lord in chapter six of 2nd Samuel. As Yahweh navigates his own love triangle with Saul and David, he becomes a different kind of divinity, one whose steadfast love for David will become the paradigm of divine mercy and faithfulness in the biblical tradition.

So the next time you see a bumper sticker that says one man plus one woman equals marriage, consider these great love triangles of biblical faith, and the way in which mature, loyal love, both divine and human, is imagined in the relationships between men. Consider the possibility that an understanding of same-sex love as a sacrament, a sign of divine love, may well find its justification at the very heart of biblical faith – and, here, we might recall the love of Naomi and Ruth as well, but that is another sermon.

As I imagine David mourning the death of his lovers, Saul and Jonathan, I’m reminded of the deaths of so many lovers in the age of the great pandemic. In his memoir, Geography of the Heart, Fenton Johnson writes movingly of the life and death of his lover, Larry, a victim of AIDS. Upon learning of Larry’s death, Fenton’s friend, Wendell Berry, wrote to him saying “The disorientation following such loss can be terrible, I know, but grief gives the full measure of love, and it is somehow reassuring to learn, even by suffering, how large and powerful love is.”

How large and powerful love is. Those who have mourned their lovers like David howling on the mountaintop – they know something about how large and powerful love is. They know what it can cost us, and they know what it can create.

Shortly after Larry’s death, Fenton found himself driving to Muir Woods with his mother, reflecting on their memories of Larry, of love, and of loss. And then, his mother, rural Kentucky native and Roman Catholic convert, said something that completely stunned Fenton.
“I always thought of myself as tolerant and open-minded. I grew up with people who were gay, though of course back then we didn’t use that word. I knew some people in our town were gay, everyone knew they were gay, but I didn’t think much about that one way or another. Just live and let live, that’s my way of being in the world. And then you told me you were gay, and I guess I’d suspected it all along, and I just prayed that you’d stay healthy and find yourself a place where you could be happy. I prayed for all that and I was glad to see you get yourself to San Francisco, to a place where you could live in peace and be yourself. I was happy about that, but it wasn’t until I met you and Larry and spent time with the two of you together that I understood that two men could love each other in the same way as a man and a woman.”

“This speaking,” writes Fenton, “is the sacred thing, the gift from the dead to the living.”[2] From the death of his lover came the renewal of his relationship with his mother, bringing a new sense of intimacy, acceptance, and love. This was not the healing he was expecting, or even hoping for, and he never could have imagined what it would cost him. But even Larry’s death served to demonstrate how large and powerful love is.

If our burials are so moving, cannot our marriages be as well? If the death and grief of same-sex lovers can provide such a profound window into love, surely our lives and relationships can as well. It was true for David and Saul and Jonathan, and it is true for us today. Let our prayer be that of the psalmist: “Lord, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David?” (Psalm 89:49) And let us discover the answer to this prayer in the steadfast love of queer comrades. Amen.

[1] My reading of the Davidic narrative is taken from Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 3-66.

[2] Fenton Johnson, Geography of the Heart: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996), p. 233.

Discernment

2009-07-11T12:38:00.000-07:00

Truly, God and the whole world make it impossible for a man [sic] to find true consolation who seeks his consolation in created things. But he who would in created things love God alone, and who would love created things only in God, he would find true, just and unchanging consolation everywhere. – Meister Eckhart

Discernment is perceiving and responding to reality as it is “in God,” rather than to an illusion or projection. To love created things, including myself, “in God” is to love them as they are, and not as I want them to be. It is from within this stance of acceptance that we find the freedom to respond to reality in ways that are creative and life-giving. When we are, as Gerald May puts it, “in love” in this way, we find consolation everywhere, and God’s will is discovered with each breath, in each moment.

Discernment flows from this place of spacious, gratuitous, acceptance. Too often, I forget this and think that I have to “figure out” what God wants me to do so that God will be pleased with me, or so that I can manipulate God into fulfilling my desire. But discernment flows from receiving the gift already given, from satiety overflowing into life as we are given to desire as God desires, loving all things in God.

I take it that this is what William Barry means when, quoting John Macmurray, he states that “the universe is the one action of God, informed by one intention,” and that God has revealed that intention. God does not play hide and seek with us, or taunt us with guessing games. God’s consolation is everywhere revealed when we are “in love.”

When I remember this, I can let go the idea that if I only do X, Y, and Z God’s intention will be revealed. It already has been revealed. The question is whether or not I am ready and willing to perceive it. God’s one action and intention, as Barry points out, involves the work of human freedom. Discernment is the work of two freedoms, divine and human, and I can choose to become willing to perceive and participate in God’s intention, or not.

Our capacity to perceive God’s intention is a function of how free we are with respect to the present moment. Barry speaks of this in terms of our willingness to accept the past and to surrender to the future. I would prefer to speak of “consent” rather than “surrender,” but his point is well taken. If I am captive to the past or afraid of the future, willfully trying to control or manipulate my experience of reality, I will not be free to hear the Word that is being spoken in the present.

Contemplative awareness is the state of being free to respond to reality as it is, here and now. Such awareness is the “place” where discernment happens. We can best assist others with discernment by locating ourselves in this place so as to be available to listen to God with them. This sometimes requires attending to the ways in which we cling to the past or resist the future, so as to let them go. In any case, discernment is always about living in reality and responding to it in freedom and with compassion.

My prayer for our bishops and deputies gathered in General Convention is that their decisions emerge from discernment, and not simply debate; and that their discernment be rooted in freedom rather than captivity or fear. God already has revealed the divine intention in our Creation and Redemption in Christ Jesus: it is love, and love's consolation can be found everywhere. Even at General Convention!

Blocking, Holding, Releasing

2009-07-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

A conversation yesterday reminded me that contemplative practice is about working with the fundamental spiritual energy of the universe. Holy Spirit moves in and through our spirits, and we carry this energy in our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions. Much of contemplative practice is about opening ourselves to this energy, allowing it to flow through us rather than blocking it or clinging to it.

Blocking the flow of energy is a way of avoiding reality. Addiction is, perhaps, the primary expression of "blocking" in contemporary culture. The compulsive use of substances or activities (like work or sex) alters our awareness, dulls and narrows it, and undermines our capacity to integrate and make positive use of the experiences and feelings we seek to avoid. The relief is temporary, however, and leads ultimately to enervation and collapse, as the energy required to suppress awareness leaves one exhausted.

In my work with people recovering from addiction, they often find themselves initially overwhelmed by the energy of emotions long suppressed, but with patience they learn to become aware of the feelings and integrate them into their overall experience without having to be defined by them in a negative way. The learn to have feelings, rather than being had by them.

Holding on to emotional energy is equally problematic. We cling to anger until it becomes resentment; hold on to sadness until it becomes self-pity; become attached to our grief until it becomes despair; find ourselves defined by fears that lose specificity and become generalized anxiety. We can become attached to these feelings, holding on to them and taking our identity from them: "I am angry; I am afraid; I am sad." We become filled with their energy and are unable to make space for a more holistic response to life that holds in awareness joy as well as suffering.

Rather than blocking or holding energy, we are invited to release it. Contemplative practice is about allowing spirit in all its dimensions and expressions to come into our awareness, become integrated into our experience, and released back into the care of Holy Spirit. We do not have to defend ourselves or define ourselves over-and-against anything, but instead can simply observe and let go, observe and let go.

This is, at its heart, the teaching of Jesus on the Beatitudes: "blessed are the merciful, blessed are those who grieve" - we are blessed when we allow ourselves to be in the flow of energy, the exchange of love which is the very life of the Trinity. We don't have to block or hold "negative" feelings but can integrate them into our experience, glean what wisdom we can from them, without losing a sense of our fundamental identity as God's beloved daughters and sons.

This is "kenosis" - the self-emptying which Jesus expressed completely in his Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension - allowing Holy Spirit to flow through him without impediment. It is this capacity for "releasing" energy that allowed St. Paul to make astonishing claims such as "I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." (Col. 1:24) Paul could accept and offer his experience of suffering in union with Christ's suffering for the sake of the salvation of the world. Paul could willingly make sacrifices for the building-up of Christ's body, the Church, because he did not need to defend his ego or preserve his status.

Blocking, Holding, Releasing. Becoming aware of how we impede and cooperate with the flow of Holy Spirit in the energies of our bodies and our world is one of the benefits of contemplative practice. With this awareness and the acceptance it brings, we can begin to make of our lives a free offering in service to God's mission of reconciliation and healing. "Releasing" is the shape taken by the gift of Holy Spirit in our lives. Its content is compassionate service. "Let go" and become free to love.

Becoming an "Ubuntu" People

2009-07-08T08:03:00.000-07:00

One of the major issues facing the Episcopal Church at its General Convention is marriage equality, providing access to all of the sacraments for all of God's people. Integrity USA has created a wonderful 10-minute video that you can watch here, describing the importance of marriage equality.

Note: I was part of the team that secured initial funding from the Arcus Foundation, which made production of this video possible. And the couple from Missouri featured in the video had their civil marriage blessed at St. John's. What a joy to see the fruit of our labor!

The Great Transformation

2009-07-07T16:48:00.001-07:00

Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions provides a panoramic history of the religious breakthroughs during the period that Karl Jaspers referred to as the "Axial Age." Chronicling the period from 900 BCE to 200 CE, Armstrong writes compellingly of the experiences of suffering and transcendence that gave birth to biblical monotheism, Greek rationalism, and the great traditions of India and China.

While she occasionally succumbs to the risks of oversimplification (impossible to avoid in a narrative of this scope), Armstrong does a good job of summarizing and comparing developments across very different cultural traditions. Her treatment of each tradition on its own terms, while useful, is not what gives this book its compelling interest. Its real value lies in its invitation to see each of these traditions in terms of the others, providing a (mostly) reliable introduction to comparative religious studies.

While one can certainly disagree with this or that point in her presentation, the attempt to promote inter-religious understanding is admirable and timely. I highly recommend this book as a way to begin a conversation with and about our religious neighbors - who are now just down the street rather than continents away. At the same time, you will come away from this book thinking about your own tradition differently, seeing things about your own tradition reflected in the face of the religious "other" that you would not otherwise see.

The Wrong Thing, The Wrong Time, The Wrong People

2009-04-09T16:59:00.000-07:00

If you were to ask me to describe Jesus’ ministry in one sentence, I would put it this way: "Jesus’ ministry was largely a matter of doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people." Even the most ordinary actions: picking grain, touching a woman, going fishing, sharing a meal, washing someone’s feet, became strange and amazing events because of the way, and the time, and with whom Jesus did them. Jesus had a knack for seeing extraordinary possibilities in ordinary life, in ways that were both liberating and threatening, depending upon your point of view.

Now most of us probably experience doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people as a recipe for disaster. I have to confess that I’ve had more than my share of such experiences, from the girl I took to my senior prom (need I say more?) to getting into a power struggle with my ten-year old about making his bed. Guess who won that battle? Most of the time, such events are harmless enough and we manage to survive. But sometimes, we are called to do the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people to bear witness to God’s love for each and all.

That is what Jesus did so often, and so well, that it got him killed. In Jesus’ time, much as in ours, there were powerful forces at work to make sure that people didn’t do the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people. The guardians of social propriety are vigorous in their enforcement of the rules, making sure that people know their place and that public order is maintained. The forces of social convention are so powerful, so well internalized, that we often fail to even notice how they operate. So much the better for those who benefit from them.

In the midst of such a world, Jesus continually does the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people. This rather curious business of washing the disciples’ feet recorded in the Gospel of John is a good case in point. In fact, in John’s Gospel it takes the place of the Passover meal, the institution of what would become Holy Communion, as the symbolic action that reveals the whole meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. However obscure it may seem to us, this action of washing the disciple’s feet is crucial to our understanding of Jesus.

Washing his disciples’ feet was definitely the wrong thing to do, primarily, I would suggest, because it was an act of gender role subversion. Jesus’ humiliation consisted in his doing “women’s work.” Generally, commentators have interpreted the meaning of this action in terms of Jesus taking on the role of a servant or slave. That is true, as far is it goes. More to the point, however, is that Jesus takes on a female role. In all of the extant biblical and rabbinical references to the action of foot washing, it was done always by a woman as a practical act of hospitality for guests who entered a home after walking along dusty roads in sandals.

The English translation of Jesus’ action in the Gospel of John actually betrays a certain prudish reserve. The Greek text literally states that during dinner, Jesus took off his clothes, wrapped a towel around him self, poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet. This is a scene of tremendous intimacy and physical vulnerability. No wonder Peter responds initially by saying, “You will never wash my feet.” “Uh uh, I’m not going there!”

The physical vulnerability and humiliation of the Cross is prefigured here in the physical vulnerability and humiliation of a half-naked, gender-bending rabbi washing his disciples feet. For the community from which the Gospel of John came, it was this strange and disconcerting act of gender nonconformity that became the symbolic action par excellence of self-giving love. Jesus says to his (male) disciples in effect, “If you want to know what it means to love, you need to act more like women.”

My point here is not to promote traditional gender stereotypes about compassionate women and unfeeling men, nor am I suggesting that what it means to be a man or woman in 21st Century America is the same as what it meant in 1st Century Palestine. My point, rather, is that the liberation that Jesus offers in his death and resurrection entails freedom from bondage to the social constructions of “male” and “female,” as well as those of “slave” and “master” already transcended by the Hebrew slaves’ exodus from Egypt celebrated in the Passover meal. Our freedom to love and serve one another must not be constrained by social conventions of propriety. These conventions far too often serve to trap us in structures of sin such as racism
and patriarchy.

We need to hear the good news that God’s love shatters the bounds of social propriety to embrace the whole of humanity. Acts of humble service and hospitality to guests and strangers, even when such acts make us vulnerable to the chastisement of the guardians of social propriety, are part and parcel of what it means to love one another as Jesus loved us. This means defying gender roles or any other social expectations contrary to the New Commandment, that we love one another. Nothing is more important than the self-giving love that Jesus exemplifies for us and calls us to offer to each other.

Not only does Jesus’ love for his disciples entail vulnerability to charges of impropriety; it even embraces his enemies. Imagine what it must have felt like for Jesus to gently bathe the feet of Judas. How his heart must have ached to know that the love he offered so freely would not only be rejected; it would be betrayed. Now, perhaps we can imagine loving our enemies; at least enemies are known entities; sometimes, they are even honorable. But to love someone who betrays our trust, that is another thing altogether. And yet, we are commanded to love. Love is not a sentimental feeling, but an act of the will directed toward the good of the beloved regardless of whether or not the beloved “deserves” it. There is not one of us who is too good to wash another's feet. There is not one us who is so evil as to be denied such washing; not even Judas.

Tonight, as we fill these bowls with water and wash each other’s weary feet, we defy all kinds of notions of propriety. In so doing, we may feel uncomfortable, exposed, even a bit silly. Given the many messages we have internalized about what it means to be divine or human, male or female, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, undocumented or legal, stepping outside the bounds of what is considered “normal” can feel threatening.

We don’t normally wash the feet of people we know very well, much less those of strangers. Jesus calls us to go even one step further and wash the feet of those who have hurt and betrayed us. The lesson in this is that our willingness to love others through compassionate service must continually transcend the bounds of our safety zone. Jesus’ entire ministry was marked by the courage to challenge social norms that served as barriers to the expression of God’s love. His was not a juvenile flouting of the rules for the sake of self-expression, but a creative and challenging transvaluation of values for the sake of self-giving love. Jesus broke the rules for the sake of those oppressed by the rules.

This ritual of foot washing is an opportunity to examine the many rules, norms, and identities that we have internalized. Whom do they serve? Do they help or hinder me in following Jesus in the way of the Cross? Are they rooted in love, or in fear? As followers of Jesus, we are not called to be nice, or pure, or even politically correct. We are called to be holy, completely open to receiving and sharing God’s love; however foolish, vulnerable, and risky it may seem.

“Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the religious authorities so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Amen.

Whose Desire Are You?

2009-02-25T20:41:00.000-08:00

What are we to make of Lent? There is a part of us, more or less strong, that is resistant to this season of self-examination and penitence. We suspect that it is designed to make us feel bad about ourselves. And I would be lying if I promised that such feelings would not be a byproduct of our Lenten observance, arising as we grow in self-awareness.

Feelings of sorrow and regret, however, are transient. We are not meant to remain stuck in them, for they are not the point of Lent. Lent is an opportunity to reorient ourselves toward freedom; freedom for the sake of giving ourselves over to our most passionate desire. Perhaps our real fear is not that we will feel bad, but rather that we will feel really, really good. It may be that what we really resist is being given our desire from God, discovering that there is so much more to life than we dared hope, forever preventing us from settling for anything less.

Lent is about getting in touch with our desires, and Jesus is teaching us something very important about desire in his discourse on almsgiving, prayer, and fasting in Matthew chapter six. Typically, we think of our desires as self-generated, something that we possess. We operate, as James Alison describes, as if

There is a blob located somewhere within each one of us and normally referred to as a “self.” This more or less bloated entity is pretty stable, and there come forth from it arrows which aim at objects. So, “I” desire a car, a mate, a house, a holiday, some particular clothes and so on and so forth. The desire for the object comes from the “I” which originates it, and thus the desire is truly and authentically “mine” . . . Since my desiring self, my “I”, is basically rational, it follows that my desires are basically rational, and thus that I am unlike those people who I observe to have a clearly pathological pattern of desire – constantly falling for an unsuitable type of potential mate and banging their head against the consequences, or hooked on substances or patterns of behaviour that do them no good. Those people are in some way sick, and their desires escape the possibilities of rational discourse. Unlike me and my desires. (James Alison, Prayer: a case study in mimetic anthropology, pp 1-2)

Now, this view of ourselves may seem reassuring, providing a sense of control, balance, and security. In truth, however, when it comes to desire we know that the difference between us and those people is much smaller than we’d like to admit. Our desires are far less rational, manageable, and serene than we assume. It is not that “I” generate and control my desires, so much it is that my desires make “me” into the person “I” am. But if “I” am not the source and arbiter of my desires, than who is?

Jesus provides us a clue when he warns, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 6:1) The danger here is that we allow our actions to be dictated by the social other. We are driven by the approval or disapproval of others in such a way as to constitute our identity as we internalize and imitate their desires. Again, to quote Alison,

“We desire according to the desire of the other”. It is the social other, the social world which surrounds us, which moves us to desire, to want, and to act . . . gesture, language, and memory are not only things which “we” learn, as though there were an “I” that was doing the learning. Rather it is the case that, through this body being imitatively drawn into the life of the social other, gesture, language and memory form the “I” that is in fact one of the symptoms, one of the epiphenomena, of that social other. This “I” is much more malleable than it is comfortable to admit. And even more difficult: it is not the “I” that has desires, it is desire that forms and sustains the “I”. The “I” is something like a snapshot in time of the relationships which preexist it and one of whose symptoms it is. (Alison, pp. 3-4.)

Something like this account of desire is implicit in Jesus’ teaching. He assumes that we are imitative creatures run by the desires of others, who are continually seeking approval in order to know who we are and what we should do. This is neither good nor bad in itself. It just is.

This description moves into judgment when the question arises: Whose desire are you imitating? For Jesus, the issue is whether or not you are seeking your reward from the social other, or from the One whom he calls “Father.” Jesus does not question the truth that we are given to our selves, that we discover our identity, as it is reflected back to us in the eyes of another.

Yes, but which other? We know there is a social other which gives us our desires and moves us this way and that. But is there Another Other, who is not part of the social other, and who has an entirely different pattern of desire into which it is seeking to induct us? That of course is the great Hebrew question, the discovery of God who is not-one-of-the-gods . . . (Alison, p. 4.)

Jesus reveals the pattern of desire of the social other, what is often referred to in the New Testament as “the world,” to be driven by fear, rivalry, greed, and violence. It gives rise to an identity, an “I”, that is defined “over-and-against” some other through a process of scapegoating. The crucifixion of Jesus is testament to the reality of the violent lie upon which the world – and the self – is founded.

This is what is meant by the Church’s teaching regarding original sin. Original sin is simply our complicity, willy-nilly, with the pattern of desire that we internalize from the social other. Original sin is lodged at the level of culture, rather than biology, and is transmitted through socialization rather than sexual reproduction per se, but St. Augustine’s basic insight is correct. This sinful pattern of desire is massively prior to our birth and is simply “the way of the world” into which we are born.

Jesus asks us, “From whom are you seeking your reward – from the social other or from God?” The problem with seeking the social other’s reward is that we will receive it, and then cling to it. We will become evermore drawn into the pattern of desire established by the violent lie. We will seek the world’s approval and we will get it; or not, but either way we will be defined in relationship to it.

Jesus seeks to free us from bondage to the world’s pattern of desire, by giving us to learn God’s pattern of desire, and to be willing to have that desire shape our identity. This is what it means to receive our reward from the Father who sees in secret, the Creator who is not in any way in rivalry with us or defined over-and-against anything at all, but rather in relationship to Whom all things are meant to be an expression of life-giving love.

Jesus invites us to detach ourselves from the world’s reward system long enough to get a taste of the desire given to us by God; to practice justice, generosity, and self-denial authentically, in the service of others, and not as a religious veneer to the violent lie. Prayer is the key to realizing this freedom.

It is through prayer that we become aware of our desires and can begin to discern the internalized voices of the social other that drive us. This is a practice of radical vulnerability, in which we allow God to gently sift through this pattern of desire and become willing to have it transformed into a pattern that conforms to God’s intention for Creation. Rather than living in denial about our desires, or struggling to renounce them, the invitation is to simply share them with God.

Over time, such prayer reveals to us the source of the inner voices that drive us, and as we begin to discover the extent to which these sources are rooted in fear and violence, as we begin to acknowledge reality, their power drops away of their own accord. We don’t have to renounce or resist anything. They simply lose their appeal.

We can trust this process because at the same time we are being given to know that “Another Other,” God, is holding us in unending and unrestricted love and that what we really, really desire is to be given our identity by this Love. We discover a depth of passion we never knew we had, a passionate love for God and for all things in God in comparison to which the world’s pattern of desire seems pale indeed.

All this is the reward from the “Father” who sees in secret, operating surreptitiously to undermine from within the world’s pattern of desire. The instruction to go into our room and shut the door when we pray is Jesus’ way of saying, “Detach from the world’s reward system, give yourself some space to detox from the addictive and destructive pattern of desire into which you’ve been socialized. Share your desires openly with God so that they can be transformed, and receive a reward far greater than you could ask for or imagine.”

Lent is a time to detox from the world’s pattern of desire. It is painful to discover the extent to which we have been run by a reward system that is actually killing us, spiritually and even physically. But this realization is the first step in letting go of this old way of being; a way of being for which we already have been forgiven so that we can become free to receive the pattern of desire that only God can satisfy.

This is the “treasure in heaven” about which Jesus speaks, which, unlike the rewards of the world, is incorruptible. When we are passionately in love with God, completely given to the pattern of desire shaped by this love, then we will have found treasure indeed, and will no longer be willing to settle for anything less.

During this season of Lent, we are invited to courageously explore with God the question: “Whose desire am I? Am I an expression of God’s loving desire, or am I an expression of the world’s fear-based desire?”

Whose desire are you?

Becoming Human Again: A Homily for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

2009-02-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

For our meditation this morning we have two profoundly moving stories about the healing of leprosy: Naaman, the Syrian warrior who seeks out the Hebrew prophet Elisha, and the unnamed man who humbly implores Jesus to make him clean. In both these stories, the issue isn’t simply about a medical cure, but also about being made clean. Leprosy was much more than a skin condition. It carried a terrible social stigma, rendering one morally impure, dirty, literally untouchable.

To be a leper was to be beyond the pale of human community. It meant exile from even the most cursory human interchange. It was to be an outcast. For these men, then, healing meant so much more than curing a disease. It meant becoming human again.

This desire to become fully human, to be in communion with God and with one another, is our soul’s deepest longing. The stories of Naaman and of the unnamed leper are our stories, mirroring back to us our desire and our fear. There is something of the leper in all of us. We all want to be made clean.

Naaman immediately put me in mind of the Roy Cohn character in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millenium Approaches. Roy Cohn was a real-life lawyer and power-broker in New York, a right-wing demagogue and closeted homosexual whose bread and butter was the demonization of other homosexuals for political gain. From Joe McCarthy to Ronald Reagan, Roy Cohn was a key Cold War anti-communist and anti-gay crusader.

There is a revealing scene in Kushner’s play, in which Roy is sitting in the office of Henry, his doctor. The year is 1985, and Henry has just diagnosed Roy with AIDS. For Roy, it is not the threat of death that disturbs him, but the threat of being identified with homosexuals and drug-addicts. It is the threat of social stigma and powerlessness that he most fears.

Roy tells Henry, “Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry? . . . Roy Cohn is not a homosexual.”

Roy Cohn is representative of a certain class of closeted, affluent gay men, who in the early days of the AIDS pandemic were horrified to discover the ways in which AIDS stripped them of the cover that protected their privilege. Suddenly, they found themselves either in denial – Roy Cohn protested that he had liver cancer to the end – or else they found themselves in solidarity with drag queens and heroin addicts struggling to be made clean. In Kushner’s play, Roy is never made clean because he is never willing to accept the powerlessness revealed by his need. Ironically, it is a former drag queen, a black nurse, who cares for Roy as he is dying; irony, however, doesn’t lead to insight or healing for Cohn.

Naaman, like Roy Cohn, is a man of power and privilege who would never be seen with lepers. You can imagine his growing anxiety as the spots begin to appear on his skin, his mounting fear as he contemplates the loss of status that the progression of this disease portends. Unlike Roy, however, Naaman is willing to accept the reality of his condition, even to the extent of entrusting himself to the advice of a Hebrew slave-girl, who tells him of a prophet in Israel who can make him clean.

Naaman goes to Israel, but not without struggle. It is humiliating to go hat-in-hand to those whom he holds in contempt, people over-and-against whom he has defined his own superiority. He clings to his sense of privilege and is enraged when Elisha doesn’t just magically wave his hands and provide an immediate cure. But Elisha knows that real healing requires more. It requires a kind of baptism.

Naaman has to die to his self-image as one who is powerful and superior. He has to drown that image in the waters of his enemies, in the Jordan River, so that he can become simply human, no more and no less. Sure, there are purification rites and perfectly good rivers back home in Damascus, but only in the Jordan River can Naaman recognize the humanity of the Hebrews – the despised other – and see mirrored in them his own humanity.

The restoration of healthy skin, the outer change, is a sign of the deeper, interior transformation that Naaman undergoes. That deeper change is an acceptance of his own humanity, in all its vulnerability, and the humanity of those whom he formerly despised. Naaman recognizes his dependence upon the other, the enemy, the way in which healing is realized through acknowledging the intimate and inescapable interconnection of all things. He is restored to communion with God and with others.

We desire to be made clean. We want to experience this communion. But it means accepting our leprosy, our vulnerability, our need to accept those aspects of ourselves and of other people that we would rather deny or demonize – our imperfections, our weakness, our fear, our anger, our illusions – all those things which render us unclean, all those truths that would make us outcast if others only knew.

And it means being willing to simply ask for help. This is what is so affecting about the unnamed man who humbly kneels and begs Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Perhaps this man had undergone another kind of death, dying to his self-image as a victim, as one who deserved and simply had to accept being an outcast. At any rate, he can no longer deny his desire to be made clean.

We have the power to make one another clean. How? By touching each other, by refusing to believe the lies we tell to stigmatize some people so that others can feel better about themselves, smug, superior, and secure. Jesus made the leper clean by touching him, by acknowledging their shared humanity and refusing to treat him as an outcast.

I’m reminded of a story I once heard about Jon Bruno, the Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles. Bishop Bruno is a former football player and L.A. police officer. He is a big, imposing guy, not somebody you want to mess around with. Even his name sounds tough! In the early days of the AIDS pandemic in Los Angeles, Jon was still a parish priest. Young men were getting sick and dying all around him, social pariahs often abandoned by their families, sometimes even by other gay men terrified of the disease. Here was a new class of lepers.

But Jon knew how to make people clean. He kept a rocking chair in the corner of his office. As these dying men came to him seeking healing, Jon would hold them on his lap with his big arms wrapped around them, and gently rock them for as long as they needed to be held. Immediately, the leprosy left them, and they were made clean.

Jon is a disciple of Jesus, and he understands what Jesus knew so well. We have the power to make people clean, if we choose. And we, who so passionately desire to be made clean, can be whole again if we are humble and have the willingness to ask for what we need. Do you not realize how much we need one another for our healing? Do you not hear Jesus saying to you today, “I do choose. Be made clean.” Together, we can become human again.

Bishop Ed Browning famously proclaimed, “In this Church, there will be no outcasts.” Let us stretch out our hands and touch one another and make it so. Amen.

A Longish Post on Purity of Heart

2009-01-07T11:57:00.000-08:00

Recently, I’ve noticed a shift in my spiritual practice and understanding, a growing sense that I do not possess consciousness. Consciousness possesses me. It isn’t in me; I am in it. It envelops everything. Through the medium of consciousness God desires to commune with me. This communion takes place in a field of awareness, energized by the Holy Spirit. It is a place of deep Silence.

This Silence is not the absence of sound. It excludes nothing, but it is deeper than the absence or presence of sensations, feelings, images or thoughts. All things rest in this Silence. It is always there, on the edges of our awareness. When my awareness becomes wide open and receptive to this Silence, my soul rests in God. This communion with God is pure gift. It is what the Christian tradition refers to as “infused contemplation.”

In this Silence we are given to know our true selves. We experience Christ within us, the union of divine and human in each soul. We are in Love. This realization is the fulfillment of our deepest desire, the longing that only God can satisfy.

The contemplative tradition speaks of purity of heart as the necessary condition for this realization. Summarizing the teaching of the desert fathers, John Cassian in his Conferences, describes this realization variously as eternal life or as the kingdom of God, which is both in us and we in it.

. . . the aim of our profession is the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. But our point of reference, our objective is a clean heart, without which it is impossible for anyone to reach out target. (Conference I.4)

Our objective is purity of heart, which [St. Paul] so justly describes as sanctification, for without this the goal cannot be reached. In other words, it is as though he said that you have purity of heart for an objective and eternal life as the goal. (Conference I.5)

Purity of heart is described not only as sanctification but as perfection. Perfection, however, is not identified with moral striving or ascetical discipline per se. These are only means toward the end of perfection, and they must arise from and give rise to love.

Perfection, then, is clearly not achieved simply by being naked, by the lack of wealth or by the rejection of honors, unless there is also that love whose ingredients the apostle described and which is to be found solely in purity of heart. (Conference I.6)

In the same way, fasting, vigils, scriptural meditation, nakedness, and total deprivation do not constitute perfection but are the means to perfection. They are not themselves the end point of a discipline, an end is attained through them. (Conference I.7)

In fact, such good works without love are a barrier to the realization of communion with God because they serve only to reify a false self-image and sense of self-importance. Cassian argues that anything which can trouble the purity and the peace of our heart must be avoided as something very dangerous, regardless of how useful and necessary it might actually seem to be. (Conference I.7) Purity of heart requires us to relinquish our attachment even to our good works, for such attachments engender self-centeredness rather than love and divert us from our true end. To cling always to God and to the things of God – this must be our major effort, this must be the road that the heart follows unswervingly. Any diversion, however impressive, must be regarded as secondary, low-grade, and certainly dangerous. (Conference I.8)

In a reading of the Gospel story of Mary and Martha that is typical of the contemplative tradition, Cassian argues that the Lord locates the primary good not in activity, however praiseworthy, however abundantly fruitful, but in the truly simple and unified contemplation of Himself. (Conference I.8) Martha’s service was not bad – far from it. The problem was her preoccupation with it, her attachment to what was secondary to the primary end of communion with the Lord. This is a subtle matter of motivation and intention.

Purity of heart, then, is not a matter of moral perfection. It isn’t achieved by being busy with things human or divine. Purity of heart is desire without attachment and its preeminent sign is humility. This is not easily realized or understood. We frequently are deeply attached to the attainment of what we desire, perhaps especially our desires for such good things as peace, justice, and healing. In fact, it seems immoral NOT to be attached to “good” desires.

In a passage worth quoting at length, Gerald May points out that

The message of contemplative traditions does not come easily upon this scene. It is that attachments, even though they are an integral part of us all, are not really necessary for full, effective living. Desires are necessary, they not only signal our biological needs but can also spur us toward creative action in the world. Desires to care for others, to make the world a better place, to know God or to be in accord with universal law, to create and to forgive and to heal – all of these are not only worthwhile but may constitute our only hope for continuing as a species. But attachments, say the contemplatives, do nothing but confuse, preoccupy, and muddy our minds. They create needless personal suffering. And they impede one’s capacity to make creative, healing contributions to the world.

Attachment to any desire creates two fundamental problems that interfere with one’s responsiveness to the world. First, attachment adds a quality of drivenness to basic desire. One no longer simply needs or wants something but instead starts grasping, clinging, or clawing for it. There is an atmosphere of desperation about this process, a deep frenzy that pulls the fundamental need way out of proportion. Second, attachment causes distorted perception. Being so invested in our own feelings, we may totally misperceive and misinterpret the nature of things around us. In such instances, our behavior springs not from the natural and inherent requirements of a situation but from our preconceived notions. We see not what is, but what we crave or fear.

Either of these effects alone can create significant problems, but when drivenness is combined with distorted perception, as in vicious racial prejudice or religiopolitical crusades, the results can be awesomely devastating. Attachment, then, can be seen as a major determining factor in social injustice as well as in private psychological suffering. The more we are attached to the attachment, the more vicious that turmoil can become. But still we cling.[1]

May helps us to see more clearly that purity of heart is not about moral perfection but about awareness. The saints are people who have cultivated awareness of reality, who have acknowledged and let go their attachments so that their desire for the Good is unencumbered by egoism or distorted perception. Purity of heart is marked by humility precisely because its realization necessarily involves an acceptance of suffering, of responsibility, and of finitude – not an easy combination to integrate!

Purity of heart is the condition in which we realize the simple and unified contemplation of God. It is the state of desire without attachment because all desire is fulfilled in Love and there is no desire left with which to be attached. There is just being in Love.

The cultivation of purity of heart through contemplative and ascetical disciplines helps to prepare us for the gift of communion with God. We can’t make it happen, but we can dispose ourselves to receive it. We can become willing to let go attachments so that our desire can find its true fulfillment in communion with God. We can purify our desire for God and accept God’s desire for us.

And then we can act in freedom, free from the willfulness and distortions bred by attachment. We can engage in good works without being preoccupied with them in ways that sever our sense of rootedness in Love. We can begin to allow God to work through us, rather than simply bolstering our ego and assuaging feelings of insecurity or guilt. And we will does this with great humility, for the clarity of perception we are given reveals our spiritual and moral limitations as well as those of others.

Purity of heart is not an escape from the responsibility to ameliorate suffering. As John Cassian noted in a particularly poignant and prophetic statement,

As for those works of piety and charity of which you speak, these are necessary in this present life for as long as inequality prevails. Their workings here would not be necessary were it not for the superabundant numbers of the poor, the needy, and the sick. These are there because of the iniquity of men who have held for their own private use what the common Creator has made available to all. As long as this inequity rages in the world, these good works will be necessary and valuable to anyone practicing them and they shall yield the reward of an everlasting inheritance to the man of good heart and concerned will. (Conference I.10)

Purity of heart is desire without attachment. It is rooted in Silence, in Love, and in union with the One who desires us eternally, who frees us to live with awareness and compassion. Its sign is humility and its fruit is prophetic service for the healing of the world.

[1] Gerald May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1982), pp. 227-228.

Refuge in the Storm: A Meditation on Matthew 14:22-33

2008-08-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

Our Gospel story today is filled with familiar metaphors. We talk about suffering life’s “storms,” “drowning” in grief or despair, “waves” of emotion that leave us “tossing and turning”; “walking on water” as an image of rising above it all; and finding “refuge in the storm.” All of these expressions point to the universal experience of suffering and the desire to relieve suffering. This story touches on something deeply and profoundly human.

This story about how Peter and the disciples find refuge in the storm has a striking parallel in the Buddhist Jatakas. A young monk, a lay brother, is traveling to visit a spiritual teacher when he comes upon a roaring river. The monk is so filled with joyful thoughts of the Buddha that he begins to walk across the water. About half-way across he notices the crashing waves, and begins to sink. He immediately redoubles his concentration on the Buddha, and again rises above the waves and safely reaches the other shore.

The great spiritual traditions teach us how to find refuge in the storm. The reality of the “storm” is a commonly shared human experience. But so, too, is the possibility of finding refuge. This morning, I want to reflect with you upon the storm, and upon finding refuge.

The Storm

We’ve all had the experience of being wide awake at 3 o’clock in the morning, tossing and turning, filled with worry, drowning in grief or despair. We easily relate to the image of the disciples being buffeted by the waves in the early morning hours after being awake all night. The inner turmoil represented by the roiling waves is all too familiar.

But I think it is important to recognize that this storm imagery has a public and political dimension as well as a private and personal dimension. Roiling waves represent social unrest as well as inner turmoil. Recall that the disciples have just left a gathering of more than 5,000 people who came to Jesus looking for solace and leadership after the local governor, a puppet of Roman imperial rule, had executed John the Baptist. Together with Jesus this group constitutes an alternative community of hospitality and healing, a movement in opposition to the oppression of Roman rule, in which the hungry are fed and the sick receive care.

This gathering could only have been understood by the authorities as a provocation. And so I imagine the disciples were only too ready to leave when Jesus ordered them to go on an ahead of him. They no doubt wondered, “What have we gotten ourselves into?” Their inner turmoil reflected the social unrest of their time and place.

Our inner turmoil, our fear and despair, are not simply a failure on our part to be socially well adjusted; an inability to be normal like everyone else. It is the inner reflection of a sick system that is destroying the planet, impoverishing millions while the “lucky” few die of affluenza, and eroding the bases for both meaningful life and responsible liberty. To the extent that we internalize this cultural dis-ease, we become complicit in its perpetuation. We contribute, however unknowingly and even needlessly, to our own suffering as well as that of others.

The storm is real. Suffering is real, in both its internal and external dimensions, and these aspects are inter-related. How then do we find refuge from the storm?

Taking refuge requires three things: a spiritual teacher, a spiritual practice, and a spiritual community. The Buddhist tradition speaks of the “Three Jewels” or “Three Refuges”: “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha.” We might think similarly in terms of taking refuge in the Christ, the Cross, and the Church. These are the means by which we learn to walk on water and even calm the storm altogether.

Taking Refuge in the Christ

We begin with the need for a teacher, someone to show us how to live a human life even as the storm is raging around us. When Peter calls out to Jesus and begins to walk on the waves, he is taking refuge in the Christ. When the young monk concentrates joyfully on the Buddha as he walks across the river, he is taking refuge in the Buddha.

As the Christ, Jesus reveals our true nature, the divine reality at the core of our being that is untouched by the storms of life. As Jesus walks on the water, he manifests the truth that we, too, can rise above it all and come to see ourselves as we truly are, rather than as someone defined by fear, anxiety, injustice and oppression. In imitation of Jesus, Peter, too, begins to realize his true nature. He begins to walk on water.

We take refuge in the Christ whenever we connect with our true identity, but we need to see that identity reflected back to us in the face of another. Here I’m reminded of a friend who recently described to me how she began recovering from addiction. She attended her first 12-step meeting in the attic of a community center in the East Bay several years ago. It was September, and the room was stiflingly hot. There was a huge floor fan blowing in one corner of the room. My friend sat right next to it, week after week. The fan was so loud she could hardly hear what anyone was saying, didn’t know what to do, totally out of her element and feeling awkward about the whole thing.

But she kept coming back each week because of one guy who sat across the room. This person radiated serenity, a degree of inner peace and outer calm that my friend desperately wanted. She took refuge in this stranger until she was able to realize in herself the peace that he saw in him. She allowed him to become her teacher.

The Spirit of the living Christ is manifest in many teachers – the saints living and dead, all those who show us our true selves. When we take refuge in the Christ, we consent to learn from them our true identity, no longer defined by the storms raging within us and around us.

Taking Refuge in the Cross

Peter, of course, doesn’t walk very far on the waves before beginning to sink. Realizing our true nature isn’t magic – it takes practice. It requires commitment to a way of life that allows us to discover our identity in Christ, rather than in the storm. Devotion to the Christ is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to experience transformation as well.

The story is told of a very observant monk, Br. Joseph, who invoked the sacred name of Jesus repeatedly throughout the day. He would sit on his meditation pillow in his room for hours calling upon Jesus, undisturbed, in perfect solitude. One morning as he was meditating on the sacred name, another monk, Br. Thomas, began banging on the door to his room, calling out, “Br. Joseph, Br. Joseph.”

Br. Joseph ignored him. “Bang, bang, bang, Br. Joseph, Br. Joseph.”

Br. Joseph sat still on his meditation pillow, but he began to feel annoyed. “Bang, bang, bang, Br. Joseph, Br. Joseph.”

This continued for some time until finally, Br. Joseph flew off his pillow, yanked open the door, and bellowed, “What do you want, don’t you know I’m calling on Jesus?” “Yes, I know,” Br. Thomas meekly replied. “But I called out your name just ten times and look how angry you are. How do you think Jesus feels?”

Jesus is far more interested in our transformation than in our devotion. Br. Joseph, for all his devotion, still had a ways to go before becoming Christ. True devotion is inseparable from transformation, dying to our ego so that Christ can be born in us and so that we can be, in the words of Martin Luther, “as a Christ to our neighbor.” A spiritual practice that cuts us off from the reality of the present moment and from those calling out for help is merely an exercise in self-centered navel gazing.

That doesn’t mean we should throw away our meditation pillow. It means that we must practice the way of the Cross, the way of solidarity and self-giving love. Authentic spiritual practice leads us into greater awareness of reality, of life in all its beauty and pain, and evokes a deeper sense of wonder and compassion. Contemplative awareness and self-giving love are interconnected; with greater awareness comes a greater capacity for service unhindered by ego, and the more we serve the more we become aware of our need to cultivate contemplative awareness. We learn to take refuge in the Cross, in a spiritual practice for the benefit of all beings, and not simply for ourselves. Br. Thomas only has to knock once before we open the door.

Taking Refuge in the Church

Learning to walk on water may seem miracle enough. But we are invited to experience an even greater miracle. We are invited to participate in the miracle of calming the storm.

Notice in our Gospel story that when Peter reaches out to Jesus and begins walking on the waves, however falteringly, Jesus leads Peter back into the boat – back into the community of disciples. It is only then that the storm is calmed. Taking refuge is not something we can do alone. And so we must take refuge in the Church.

Whatever degree of refuge from the storm we may enjoy in our solitude, if we want to address the underlying causes of the storm we need a community – a community that will support us and hold us accountable to the practice of solidarity and self-giving love; a community that in its own life freely offers hospitality and healing to all.

Whenever we encounter a community of devoted and transforming practice, we encounter the Church. And any community, no matter how frequently it invokes the name of Jesus, that doesn’t practice the way of the Cross is not the Church. It may be a social club, or a museum, or a really weird kind of performance art, but it is not the Church. It is not a place of refuge.

But let me be clear about what is meant by a place of refuge. Do not think of a nature refuge, a wilderness place set apart from the rest of the world, so that every other place can be exploited and degraded. Do not think of a ghetto, a place where marginalized people can find safety, while those outside the wall continue to be terrorized. Such places provide a space in which to walk on water, to rise above the inner turmoil and social unrest so that we can see reality more clearly and realize who we are really meant to be, but they leave the storm untouched.

When we speak of taking refuge in the Christ, in the Cross, and especially in the Church, think instead of an alternative community, a subversive cell that infiltrates the larger culture, until it slowly, gradually permeates the whole. Think of the tiny mustard seed that becomes a tree for all the birds of the air to make their home, or the leaven that makes the whole loaf become a thing of beauty and nourishment. We take refuge, not to set ourselves apart, but to to sanctify the whole of life.

It isn’t enough to walk on water. We need to calm the storm. But we can’t do it alone. We need a community of commitment and practice so that the whole world becomes a refuge until no one and no thing needs refuge anymore.

I take refuge in the Christ,
the one who shows me the way to live;
I take refuge in the Cross,
the way of solidarity and self-giving love;
I take refuge in the Church,
the community that practices hospitality and healing.

Paul's Gospel of Inclusion

2008-07-27T15:18:00.000-07:00

Who will separate us from the love of Christ?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this question this week. “Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? Who will condemn? Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” St. Paul goes into rhetorical overdrive as he barrages his readers with question after question. Another way to put the question might be, “Who will exclude us from communion with God?”

That really was the heart of the matter for St. Paul.[i] His Letter to the Romans is a long, complicated, and rhetorically brilliant argument for the inclusion of Gentiles qua Gentiles in the early Jesus movement. Paul is a Jew engaged with other Jewish disciples of Jesus in a debate about the basis for inclusion of the Gentiles in the people of God. Must they first become Jews – accept circumcision and observance of the Torah – or not? Paul answers with a resounding “No!” They do not have to become Jewish converts to follow Jesus. They are included as they are.

At the same time, Paul argues that all Israel will be saved, “for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” (Rom. 11:29) If Gentiles are included through the faithfulness of Christ Jesus, that does not mean that Jews who are not followers of Jesus are excluded. Paul argues that “God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.” God will be merciful to all, whether Jew or Gentile. (Romans 11:30-32).

The tragic irony is that Christians have subsequently read Paul through the lens of the rejection/replacement argument; that idea that God has rejected Israel and replaced it with the Church as the new people of God. An inter-Jewish debate about the status of Gentiles became a Jewish-Christian debate about the status of Jews. This is actually the opposite of Paul’s argument, which is that through the faithfulness of Christ Jesus the Gentiles have been included in the people of God. It is an argument for inclusion, not for exclusion.

And so Paul assures his Gentile readers that nothing can separate them from the love of God in Christ, while also cautioning them against boasting about their status as if Israel is now somehow excluded from communion with God. Paul is eager to offer assurance, but he also is eager to correct an anti-Jewish misinterpretation of his teaching already current in his day. Thus he argues that all are beneficiaries of the mercy of God – the Jews, first, who respond to that mercy through faithfulness to Torah – and the Gentiles, second, who respond to that mercy through the faithfulness of Christ Jesus.

Now, all of this might seem of merely historical interest were it not for the reality of continuing anti-Jewish Christian teaching and practice, and the very contemporary question within the Church about who is or is not included in communion with God. Paul’s cultural horizon was limited to a division of humanity into Gentile or Jew; his field of vision did not include Buddhist or Jain or Confucian, and Islam had not yet been born. In fact, I don’t believe it even included Christians; Paul never uses that term and never identified himself as anything other than a Jew who believed that Jesus is the Messiah. Christianity was not yet something separate from Judaism. Even so, despite our vastly different cultural context, the basic principle remains: God shows mercy to all, and nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

As Christians, our communion with God through Christ is not dependent upon anyone else’s exclusion. No one else need be condemned so that we can feel affirmed. Our identity is God’s gift to us and does not need to be defined over-and-against anyone else. Neither do we need fear anyone else’s condemnation or rejection. “Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.” (Rom. 8:34).

This question of inclusion or exclusion has been in the forefront of the Church’s life in recent days. As many of you know, the bishops of the world-wide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, gathered this past week in Canterbury, England for the Lambeth Conference, the bishops’ once-a-decade meeting. Well, actually, approximately 670 bishops are there. One bishop, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, has been excluded from the meeting because he is an openly gay man in a faithful same-sex relationship. More than 200 other bishops have boycotted the meeting because the Episcopal Church has not been disciplined for consenting to Robinson’s election and consecration as bishop of New Hampshire.

For some people, not only Bishop Robinson, but any bishop who supports him should be excluded from the Communion. This past week, the Primate of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan, Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul, called for Bishop Robinson’s resignation and for repentance on the part of those bishops who support his ministry. "Gene Robinson has to be away from the Anglican world and be a normal Christian,” said Deng at an afternoon news conference. "If he is, as he always says, a Christian, he should resign for the sake of the church."

Asked if he has talked to Robinson, Deng replied, "I have nothing to say to him." He also said he cannot participate in the Anglican Communion's Listening Process because homosexuality is not "approved by the Bible" and "is not part of my culture, I cannot talk about it." Deng said there are no gay or lesbian people in Sudan. [ii]

We find ourselves in a situation where the cultural divide today between Archbishop Deng and Bishop Robinson is as great as that between Jew and Gentile in St. Paul’s day. Must gay people, as Archbishop Deng seems to believe, become or at least act “straight” in order to be included in the people of God? Must they be excluded so that others can be included in communion with God?

I would argue that we need to take our cue from St. Paul, who believed neither that Gentiles needed to become or act “Jewish” in order to be included in the people of God, nor that Jews who disagreed with him were beyond the pale of God’s mercy. Paul’s argument in Romans is the relevant biblical text with respect to the issue of inclusion. There is room at the table for both Archbishop Deng and Bishop Robinson when each can see the other in the light of God’s gracious love.

Here I am reminded of a very different reflection on the current Lambeth Conference offered by our own bishop, Marc Andrus. Marc writes that, “The Lambeth Conference brings questions of identity forward in our lives. We are with people of many different ethnicities, cultures, and languages. In the presence of great diversity our easy assumptions of identity are unsettled, and deeper ways to ground our identity can emerge. We can begin to see our life in Christ as the ground of our being, our identity.

As we are drawn deeper and deeper into relationship with one another we find that the descriptors that may catch our attention at first, those associated with ethnicity and culture, rich and capable of being explored in depth as they are, do not begin to sum up human life. Gender, sexual orientation, economic status, all these are important too. And then we begin to learn the personal histories of people, certainly conditioned and connected to all the above, but articulated in unique ways having to do with the inner life of people, their gifts and aspirations.

At some point we may come to understand, as we perceive the deepest aspirations of another person, their courage and hopefulness in the face of their own life challenges, that we are seeing Christ in that person. Christ speaks I AM from within all life, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

What Jesus, when he speaks of himself without metaphoric mediation is about is affirming the goodness of creation and the apprehension of the depth of human beings within that creation. He reminds us that we are all “offspring of the divine,” and have the divine image planted within us.

The Lambeth Conference is reminding me of the life Baptism has drawn me into and prepares me for each day. I am trying to look for Christ in each person here.”[iii]

As Christians, as the people of God, we are called not to judge who is included and who is excluded. God has already made that call and we are on the inside of God’s project of reconciliation along with everyone else. No, we are called, from within the perspective of the Christian story, “to look for Christ in each person.” Even more, as Bishop Marc has said on other occasions: “to look for the face of Christ in all of creation.”

A Guru asked his disciples how they could tell when the night had ended and the day begun.

One said, “When you see an animal in the distance and can tell whether it is a cow or a horse.”

“No,” said the Guru.

“When you look at a tree in the distance and can tell if it is a neem tree or a mango.”

“Wrong again,” said the Guru.

“Well, then, what is it?” asked his disciples.

“When you look into the face of any man and recognize your brother in him; when you look in the face of any woman and recognize in her your sister. If you cannot do this, no matter what time it is by the sun it is still night.”[iv]

So, let there be light. Let us accept that we are loved as we are. No one needs to become or pretend to be anyone else. Let us finally see each other as God beholds us: with a Lover’s gaze. Then we can become the people we are truly meant to be. Amen.

[i] My reading of Romans is indebted to John G. Gager’s Reinventing Paul.

[ii] Episcopal Life Online at http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/79901_99260_ENG_HTM.htm.

[iii] Bishop Marc’s blog at http://bishopmarc.vox.com/library/posts/2008/07/

[iv] Anthony De Mello, Taking Flight: A Book of Story Meditations, p. 161.

Keep It Simple

2008-07-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Amen. Matthew 11.28

A young woman who was newly recovering from alcoholism complained to her AA sponsor, a program veteran, “I just don’t get this whole God-thing, and prayer doesn’t make any sense to me at all. What am I supposed to do?”

Her sponsor replied, “Here is what you do. Every morning when you wake-up go into the bathroom, take a bar of soap, and write, ‘Help’ on the bathroom mirror. At the end of the day, just before you go to bed, go back into the bathroom, wipe off the mirror, and then write ‘Thank You’ on it with a bar of soap. Repeat the process daily.”

“But, but,” the young woman stammered, “Who am I supposed to be saying this to?” “Darling,” said her sponsor, “you don’t need to worry about that.”

The secret to spiritual well-being is really quite simple. It is a matter of having the humility to ask for help, and to be grateful for what we are given. When we do this, we discover that our burden is a whole lot lighter. Unfortunately, we tend to try to make life a whole lot more complicated.

No wonder Jesus says that these things are hidden from the wise and the intelligent, and have been revealed to infants instead. Our humungous brains are constantly elaborating, abstracting, and analyzing, and so we often overlook the simple truths of life. And if we are at all successful by the standards of our society, we tend toward an attitude of entitlement and self-sufficiency that makes it very hard to embrace humility and gratitude. Others might think we are weak if we ask for help. And why should we be grateful when we believe we’ve earned everything we have?

But if we are willing to see through our elaborate self-justifications and illusions about life, we know down deep inside the truth of our vulnerability. We require the help of countless others just to get through each day – from the bus driver who gets us to work, to the migrant farm worker who harvested our lunch, and the folks who remove our trash for us. And that doesn’t even begin to include our psychological and emotional needs to be seen, heard, and held by others.

Are we responsible for our birth? Do we make the air we breath? Did we set in motion the hydrological cycles that provide our water? So very much has been given to us – everything that we need, really – not because we earned it, but simply by virtue of our being alive in this moment. How can we not be aware of the infinite debt of gratitude that we owe to our ancestors, to our neighbors, to the earth, to God?

Asking for help and being grateful should be like breathing in and breathing out, the fundamental rhythm of our lives. This is what we are invited to learn from Jesus, who is gentle and humble in heart. We make life much harder than it needs to be when we try to do it all, figure it all out, and pretty much control everything our self. In fact, such a way of living is a sure recipe for feeling overwhelmed and isolated. How much lighter our burdens would be, if we spent half as much time appreciating what we have as we do resenting what we don’t have (and often don’t really need).

So, if this is all so simple, why is it so hard to do?

It is hard because we fear acknowledging our dependency upon others and, ultimately, upon God. We are not so sure we can trust that we will have a future if we are not in control of it. And so we substitute our own will for God’s will, and try to make God a prisoner of our own plans and projects rather than subjecting ourselves to the yoke of humility and gratitude.

We want to bend Reality to the shape of our will, rather than bring our will in line with Reality. We are like the enthusiastic young man, just graduated from plumbing school, who was taken to see Niagara Falls. He studied it intently for several minutes and then said, “I think I can fix this.” But what if the point of life is to enjoy it, rather than fix it?

Let me tell you a little secret that most religious people – especially the do-gooder types, whether liberal or conservative – seem unable to grasp: life can not be fixed if it is not first enjoyed. We can not heal what we do not love. We can not change what we do not accept.

“Someday you will understand that you are seeking what you already have,” said the Master to an intense disciple.
“Then why do I not see it now?”
“Because you are trying to.”
“Must I then make no efforts?”
“If you relax and give it time,” said the Master, “it will make itself known.”

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me,” said Jesus, “for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.” If we are willing to accept the yoke of humility and gratitude, we can relax and let God be God. We can begin to rest in the joy and wonder of the present moment, which doesn’t depend upon us one bit, and THEN perhaps we will be in a fit spiritual state to be of service to others.

Self-will is the heavy burden that we bear. Rather than fix our problems, we need to dissolve the ego that caused them in the first place. When we accept Jesus’ yoke, replacing self-will with God’s will, resting in Reality rather than trying to control it, many of the problems that used to trouble us seem to melt away. We can spend more time enjoying life rather than trying to fix it.

Let me give you a homely example. My work requires me to attend a fair number of meetings, generally meetings to discuss issues and plan programs about which I usually have an opinion. Now, I have a choice when I attend a meeting. I can decide that I have the answers and that I’m entitled to enlighten you with them, treating any resistance to my desire as a problem to be solved through persuasion if possible, domination or manipulation if necessary. If things don’t go my way, I’m a failure or others are bad and wrong, or both. You can image how pleasant meetings are when I show up in that way.

On the other hand, I can decide simply to be present to my experience in the course of the meeting. I can be vulnerable with others, admitting what I don’t know and when I am wrong, and grateful for the wisdom and forbearance that they bring to our interaction. Conflict will not be a problem to be solved, but an inevitable reality to be embraced. I can accept whatever outcome emerges, entrusting the process to God. Such meetings are a pleasure rather than a heavy burden.

Each week as we gather around this Table we have the opportunity to learn anew from Jesus, to lay down the heavy burden of self-will and take upon ourselves the yoke of humility and gratitude. We acknowledge our dependence upon God and one another, and we offer thanksgiving for all that we have received in our creation and redemption in Christ. We leave the fixing and controlling to God, and focus on the accepting and enjoying instead.

“Help” and “thank you.” It really is that simple. Amen.

Note: The story of the plumber is from Antony De Mello’s Taking Flight: A Book of Story Meditations and the dialogue between the master and the disciple is from his Awakening: Conversations with the Masters.

Letting Go of Fear

2008-06-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

Jesus said, “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.” Amen. (Matt. 10:27)

No doubt many of you saw the media coverage of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons at their wedding this past week. They were the first same-sex couple to be married legally in California, following the state Supreme Court’s historic decision in favor of marriage equality. Now, Del and Phyllis actually have been married since 1953. It just took the state 55 years to recognize de jure the de facto reality of their committed and courageous love.

At a time when the truth of same-sex love was whispered in the dark, Del and Phyllis were shouting it from the housetops. When they co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, the first lesbian organization in the United States, the nation was in the grip of an anti-Communist and anti-homosexual witch-hunt. As editors of The Ladder, the D.O.B.’s magazine, they brought hope to thousands of women who were living in the shadows of society, enslaved by self-doubt and fear. Great daring was required for them to advocate for the dignity of gay and lesbian people in the face of persecution and ridicule.

Later, they would become leading activists in the National Organization for Women, at a time when lesbians were marginalized within the feminist movement. They would publish landmark books on such hot-button issues as lesbian rights and domestic violence, derided by some who persisted in the false belief that “domestic violence” was a “straight women’s issue.” They helped found the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club in San Francisco when many thought that political party activism was too mainstream and bourgeois. And they championed the rights and dignity of elderly people long past the time when they had every right to enjoy a quiet retirement.

What accounts for such patient and persistent struggle for justice in the face of great opposition? What kept them going when others succumbed to despair and cynicism? Pondering their story, it occurs to me that the secret of their success was their refusal to be beholden to success. In other words, they were able to persist in the work of promoting human life and dignity without being attached to any particular outcome. Whether or not they succeeded was beside the point. The point was to bear witness to the truth of their lives, and to the lives of people too often denigrated and ignored, regardless of the cost.

In simple terms, they were not afraid; at least, they did not allow their fear to determine their lives. They did not submit to the power of fear that either renders us timid and invisible, remaining in the shadows, or else drives us to manipulate, intimidate and control others to secure our idea of success. Del and Phyllis were not so afraid that they refused to take risks for truth and justice, but neither were they so afraid of loosing that they would subvert the very principles for which they struggled in the effort to defeat their opponents.

Fear leads to withdrawal, isolation, and despair. Or it can lead to a cynical justification of whatever means are necessary to secure one’s desired end. It is very difficult to find the third way in between despair and cynicism, the way of engaging conflict without anxiety or attachment to outcomes.

I don’t know anything about Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons’ religious views, but their ability to walk this third way through fear illustrates well the teaching of Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ teaching was written to a Christian community that was facing great opposition. Fidelity to the truth of one’s experience of the Spirit of Jesus was tearing apart synagogues, communities, and families. In the midst of rejection and persecution, the early followers of Jesus were tempted to give in to their fear – either hiding the truth of their lives altogether, or else seeking to impose that witness on others rather than endure suffering.

In this context, Matthew’s Gospel recalls Jesus’ teaching about how to deal with conflict. First, we must get clear about our expectations. Conflict is normal and inevitable. Jesus begins by saying, “Look, the servant isn’t any better than the master. If I was treated so badly, why do you expect any better? Don’t think I’ve come to bring peace, but rather division. There are real risks involved in seeking truth, justice, and reconciliation in the world. Get used to it.”

At the same time, Jesus urges us to not be afraid of these risks. We can come out of the closets of our lives when we realize that God loves us deeply and intimately just the way we are. Our meaning and value is determined by God’s compassionate embrace of us – not by what anyone else thinks of us. There is a terrific saying in AA – “What other people think of me is none of my business.” The spiritual death that results from isolation and despair is far worse than the opposition and rejection we might face.

God’s compassionate embrace also frees us from preoccupation with outcomes. Since our life’s meaning and value is not determined by our success or failure, we are free to engage in the struggle for justice and peace in Jesus’ name without worrying about winning or losing. It really is much more about how we play the game. The spiritual death that results from cynicism, manipulation, and domination of others is far worse than any failures we might endure along the way.

There is life and then there is life. There is death and then there is death. We sometimes must lose our life in order to live. We must die to our fear of rejection or failure so that we can live with joy and freedom.

This spiritual struggle with fear is a daily challenge. Letting go of our fear to make room for God’s unconditional and abiding love isn’t a one time event. It happens in ways large and small over and over again, each time we choose to stay engaged with life’s challenges without anxiety – neither running away from conflicts nor running over other people in the process of resolving them.

I saw this spiritual struggle in action while I was on vacation in New Mexico last week with my step-father, Jay. Jay has been living with MS for more than a decade now, and his condition is slowly deteriorating. He becomes exhausted easily, with each movement of his arms and especially his legs feeling like he is moving underwater tied down by heavy weights. He can no longer walk without the help of a cane, and requires wheelchair assistance to travel any distance.

Over the years, I’ve watched Jay struggle against the tendency toward isolation. Early on, he was afraid to be seen in public, worried about what others would think about his uneven gate. Would they think he was drunk? Would they take advantage of him? I wondered if he would give in to despair and become a recluse.

Today, he struggles against the tendency toward cynicism and manipulation. It is hard to gracefully accept vulnerability and dependence. He is no longer in control of his own body, of his ability to get from one place to another. In such circumstances, it is tempting to want to blame others, to manipulate people to get one’s way rather than ask for help. Having overcome his fear of rejection, he now must confront his fear of failure. “Can I succeed in life by trusting others rather than controlling them?” This is a question with which all of us must struggle at some level.

Jay’s successful struggle with fear, like that of Del and Phyllis, has been a paradox: he has gained his life by loosing it, by embracing risk and vulnerability regardless of the result. Their struggles highlight a common feature of our spiritual condition. As a parent, I come up against it each time I ask myself anew: “Will I trust my ten year-old son so that he can grow-up, or try to control him to assuage my fear? Do I let him walk down to the corner store by himself? Middle school is just around the corner. Will I walk with him through his own inevitable suffering the pangs of adolescence, or will I distance myself from him to manage my own anxiety?”

As a congregation, we are in a period of transition in which conflict is inevitable. “What do we do about the budget deficit? What should our mission focus be? Can we trust the diocese and neighboring congregations enough to ask for help?” Here too, we are beset by the temptation of fear. Some of us may feel like running away, or whispering in the dark about this or that rather than confronting conflict directly. Some of us may be tempted to want to impose a particular solution right now, no matter what the cost, as a way to manage our anxiety.

Our spiritual challenge, individually and collectively, is to take to heart Jesus’ teaching about conflict: stay engaged without anxiety. Don’t worry about what other people may think. Let go of your attachment to particular outcomes. Trust that God loves you and accepts you regardless of success or failure.

Lose your life for the sake of Christ, for the sake of his way of justice and peace, and you will find new and abundant life. Do not be afraid. Amen.

Bishop Andrus' Pastoral Letter

2008-06-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

The following pastoral letter to the clergy of the Diocese of California was published yesterday. It is a fair and defensible position, which "encourages" rather than proscribing or forbidding. In my view, this is an "outside of the box" series of recommendations that provides a way forward during this transitional period. Thank you, Bishop Marc, for a brave and creative statement.

June 9, 2008

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

I welcome the ruling of the California Supreme Court affirming the fundamental right of all people to marry. I am writing to you now to recommend a path to use this decision to strengthen our support of our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered sisters and brothers, and our continued witness to God’s inclusive love. Clergy and lay leaders in the diocese have been working for the rights of LGBT people and for their full inclusion in our Church for more than forty years. Today, we continue to walk a journey that includes:

Bringing the witness of our LGBT sisters and brothers to this summer’s Lambeth Conference,
Combating a ballot initiative this November that will attempt to take away the rights recently recognized by the California Supreme Court,
Providing leadership at next summer's General Convention to bring our marriage practices and theology in line with our fundamental baptismal theology.

For far too long the onus has fallen on marginalized people to bear the burden of inequalities that exist within the Church, and the decision by our state’s Supreme Court has given us the opportunity to level the playing field. To that end, the Diocese of California seeks to provide, by advocacy and example, a way forward for The Episcopal Church so that the marriage of same-sex couples will be a part of our official marriage rites, without distinction. Although The Episcopal Church does not have canonical rites for same-sex marriage, it is our goal that all couples be treated equally by the Church, as they are equally loved by God.I therefore provide you with the following pastoral guidelines:

I urge you to encourage all couples, regardless of orientation, to follow the pattern of first being married in a secular service and then being blessed in the Episcopal Church. I will publicly urge all couples to follow this pattern.
For now, the three rites approved for trial use under the pastoral direction of the bishop, adopted by resolution at the 2007 Diocesan Convention (see appendix), should be commended to all couples (again, regardless of orientation) to bless secular marriages.
All marriages should be performed by someone in one of the secular categories set forth in California Family Code, section 400 (see appendix), noting that any person in the state of California can be deputized to perform civil marriages. The proper sphere for Episcopal clergy is the blessing portion of the marriage.
The understanding of The Episcopal Church currently is that blessings are an extension of the pastoral office of the bishop. I ask that you continue to inform me of all same-sex blessings.
Couples who have been married under the auspices of the California Supreme Court ruling must have the same pre-marriage counseling as that required of any couple seeking marriage or blessing of marriage in The Episcopal Church. This should be understood as an offering of the Church’s support for marriage.
I urge Episcopalians, clergy and lay, to volunteer as Deputy Marriage Commissioners. There are over 4,000 civil same-sex marriages planned in a short period of time in the city of San Francisco alone and the city is asking for help in meeting demand. I intend to volunteer for this at my earliest opportunity. This would be one sign of affirmation for the Supreme Court ruling from our diocese. By city requirement, clergy will not be allowed to wear collars when presiding at secular marriages. (For more information about how to be deputized, see the attached appendix.)
All people receiving blessings of civil marriages in the Diocese of California are free to use the same degree of publicity (e.g., newspaper notices).

These are interim measures as the Diocese of California and The Episcopal Church continue our journey in the context of this prophetic opportunity provided by the California Supreme Court’s ruling. I have already initiated a process to arrive at a more studied, permanent answer for Episcopal clergy presiding at same-sex marriages in this diocese. That process includes the formation of a panel of diocesan clergy to make recommendations about how to move toward equality of marriage rites for all people. These recommendations will be discussed across the diocese resulting in an official diocesan policy.

In the coming days, I will publicly state my opposition to the initiative to overturn the Supreme Court ruling.

The Diocese of California will publish advertising around June 17 celebrating the Supreme Court ruling and inviting same-sex couples to our churches for pre-marital counseling and nourishment in communities of faith.

As always, I welcome your wisdom, your insights and your input on these matters, and I continue in my commitment to work for a Church that sees all of God’s children through the same eyes that God does.

Peace,

The Rt. Rev. Marc Handley Andrus

Bishop

Appendix to Pastoral Letter Regarding Same-sex Marriage

Blessing Rites

The three rites approved by Diocesan Convention 2007 can be downloaded from http://marriageandblessing.org. Click on the link "CMB 2007 Report" to download a PDF. The Rites are found on pages 11 - 43 of the report.

California Family CodeSection 400-401400.

Marriage may be solemnized by any of the following who is of the age of 18 years or older:(a) A priest, minister, rabbi, or authorized person of any religious denomination.(b) A judge or retired judge, commissioner of civil marriages or retired commissioner of civil marriages, commissioner or retired commissioner, or assistant commissioner of a court of record in this state.(c) A judge or magistrate who has resigned from office.(d) Any of the following judges or magistrates of the United States: (1) A justice or retired justice of the United States Supreme Court. (2) A judge or retired judge of a court of appeals, a district court, or a court created by an act of Congress the judges of which are entitled to hold office during good behavior. (3) A judge or retired judge of a bankruptcy court or a tax court. (4) A United States magistrate or retired magistrate. (e) A legislator or constitutional officer of this state or a Member of Congress who represents a district within this state, while that person holds office. 401. (a) For each county, the county clerk is designated as a commissioner of civil marriages.(b) The commissioner of civil marriages may appoint deputy commissioners of civil marriages who may solemnize marriages under the direction of the commissioner of civil marriages and shall perform other duties directed by the commissioner.

Deputy Commissioners of Marriage in the County of San Francisco

If you would like to assist with marriages in the County of San Francisco, you will need to be deputized as a Deputy Marriage Commissioner. Help is needed from June 17 - 28, and you will be asked to work one of the following complete shifts: 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; 12:30 to 5 p.m.; 5 to 7:30 p.m. If you would like to volunteer, send an email to olga.ryerson@sfgov.org: include "Deputy Marriage Commissioner" in the subject line. In other counties, you can contact the County Clerk's office for information about how to become a Deputy Marriage Commissioner. As of June 9, 2008, there is no expressed need from other counties within the Diocese of California for volunteer Deputy Marriage Commissioners.

The Spiritual Life of Salmon

2008-05-21T15:33:00.000-07:00

God saw everything he had made, and indeed, it was very good. Genesis 1:31b

The Biblical Creation story reminds us that we humans are latecomers in the emergence of life on earth. We depend upon the sun, the water, the flowering seeds, the living creatures in all their variety. They can and have existed without us, but we cannot exist without them.

The Creation story also reminds us that everything that God has made is very good. The story does not provide scientific explanation, but rather spiritual meaning: the purpose of creation is enjoyment. The end of creation is Sabbath, rest, relaxing into the wonder and beauty of what is. To be created in God’s image is to participate consciously in the mystery of it all, to take our place as part of the whole with a sense of humility and responsibility. To be human is to be aware that we are humus, earth creatures.

So far, so good. But here, at the very beginning, there is a problem. The priestly scribes who handed down this story to us interpreted our relationship to the rest of creation as one of domination. God commands humanity to fill the earth and subdue it; literally, to make it a slave. At least, that is the story we’ve been told, but it strikes me as being in tension with the Sabbath observance, the command to rest in creation, to delight in it as part of it rather than over and against it.

This tension has had serious consequences. In our rush to dominate the earth, we have forgotten how to live on it. The history of civilization is the history of cultural amnesia, overshooting the limits of the land base to the point of ecological collapse. We keep forgetting how to live on earth, we keep forgetting to keep the Sabbath. We’ve only heard the part of the story that we want to hear.

In the past, ecological collapse was relatively localized and followed the rise and fall of various imperial regimes: the destruction of the fertile crescent in Mesopotamia, the deforestation and desertification of North Africa, and so on until today we are overshooting the carrying capacity of the whole earth. We are in danger of forgetting, finally and forever, how to live on earth.

But it has not always been so. For example, for more than 10,000 years the Yurok, Karok, and Hoopa tribes have lived along the banks of the Klamath river in Northwest California. These indigenous peoples have long lived in harmony with the land and water, with salmon at the center of their food supply and culture. That is, until the late 1960s, when dams and irrigation ruined one of the world’s great salmon fisheries.

Unable to reach their traditional spawning grounds upriver because of the construction of dams for hydroelectric power, and with reduced water flow diverted for farm irrigation raising the temperature of the water, the salmon are dying. In 2002, 35,000 chinook and coho salmon went belly-up in the lower Klamath within a five day period, their stench permeating the river valley for days.

The indigenous tribes, who depend upon salmon for their livelihood, are facing radical changes in their diet and social structure. Rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes have sky-rocketed since the loss of their traditional diet. Poverty, suicide, and social decay are following the loss of an entire way of life that maintained the health of the tribes and the ecosystem of the Klamath for millennia.

The fisheries have deteriorated to the point that on May 1 of this year, commercial and recreational fishing for chinook salmon in the ocean off California and most of Oregon was banned for the first time in 160 years by the National Marine Fishery Service. So few fish returned to spawn upriver last year, fishing had to be halted throughout the salmon habitat.

This, despite the fact that for years the tribes, along with conservationists and fishermen, have urged the removal of the four dams on the Klamath River that are destroying the salmon’s habitat. They have repeatedly appealed to Warren Buffet, whose company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns the subsidiary operating the dams. Even thought the amount of energy generated by these aging dams is negligible and easily replaced by other sources, Berkshire Hathaway has refused to act to save the salmon.

As beneficiaries of an extractive economy that supports unsustainable exploitation of the planet, we have become inured to a Sabbath perspective that acknowledges the spiritual life of salmon and our communion with them. I wonder if we can really even understand the plea of the Yurok tribesman who wrote,

“The existence of dams, these weapons of mass destruction, harms the life of our salmon brothers. That’s right, I say ‘salmon brothers’ . . . we believe all creatures are related as brothers and come from the same Creator. It is hard for me to lift a fish out the water that has been trapped in my net and not hear him call out to me for help. And with so few salmon in the river these days, it is always with great respect that he will be food for my family and my people. I thank him and the Creator for the sacrifice of his life so that all can eat. . . . The threats to my salmon brothers must be removed. The water quality and streambed access for spawning salmon must be restored. The Yurok Tribe will protect our salmon brothers and we call upon all who love the earth and the river to join us . . . Let’s not allow this moment to pass and be lost along with the salmon forever.”[i]

If we really believed in the goodness of creation, we would not destroy it in this way. If we really believed that we humans are made in God’s image, the God who delights and rests in the Creation, we would be in communion with the salmon and the rest of Creation, of which we are but one part. We must learn how to live on earth again. There is too much at stake.

As Derrick Jensen argues,

“When I talk about taking out dams, I’m not ‘just’ talking about liberating rivers, and I’m not ‘just’ talking about saving salmon. I’m talking about forests and meadows and aquifers and everyone else whose home this was long before the arrival of civilization. I’m talking about those whose home this is. You cannot separate rivers from forests from meadows, and it’s foolish to think you can. If you kill rivers, you kill forests and meadows and everyone else. The same holds true for all parts of these relationships, in all directions.”[ii]

The salmon put on 95% of their weight in the ocean, then swim upriver to spawn and die, bringing with them an explosion of nutrients. Prior to the destruction of the rivers, about five hundred million pounds of salmon swam up the rivers of the Pacific Northwest each year, releasing hundreds of thousands of pounds of nitrogen and phosphorous nourishing the trees along the riverbanks.

Bears and eagles eat the salmon. Gulls eat what the bears and eagles leave behind. Maggots eat what the gulls leave behind. Spiders eat the maggots-turned-flies. Caddisflies eat dead salmon. Baby salmon eat living caddisflies. And so the cycle continues.

Perhaps there is no better account of the spiritual life of salmon than the observation of Jonathan Moore. “I have seen sockeye salmon swimming upstream to spawn even with their eyes pecked out. Even as they are dying, as their flesh is falling away from their spines, I have seen salmon fighting to protect their nests. I have seen them push up creeks so small that they rammed themselves across the gravel. I have seen them swim upstream with huge chunks bitten out of their bodies by bears. Salmon are incredibly driven to spawn. The will not give up.” [iii]

Can we be any less committed to the preservation of life on earth than the salmon? What sacrifices are we willing to make for a sustainable future? Can we imagine living without four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River? Can we admit that the salmon have something to teach us?

We must remember how to live on earth again, acknowledging our debt to the salmon and to the Yurok and all those who never forgot. We must humbly ask them to teach us. We can not rightly honor God, the one, holy, and undivided Trinity, on this or any other feast day, until we learn again to honor the earth God has made.

In the words of the Ojibway people, let us pray:

Grandfather,
Look at our brokenness.
We know that in all creation
Only the human family
Has strayed from the Sacred Way.
We know that we are the ones
Who are divided
And we are the ones
Who must come back together
To walk in the Sacred Way.
Grandfather,
Sacred One,
Teach us love, compassion, and honor
That we may heal the earth
And heal each other. [iv]

Amen.

[i] Quoted in Derrick Jensen, Endgame Volume II: Resistance, pp. 631-632.
[ii] This quote and the description that follows are taken from Jensen, pp. 605 – 606.
[iii] Quoted in Jensen, p. 606.
[iv] Earth Prayers From Around the World: 365 Prayers, Poems and Invocations for Honoring the Earth, p. 95.

The Great Conveyor Belt?

2008-05-18T17:13:00.000-07:00

In his book, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World, Ken Wilber argues that “religion alone, of all of humanity’s endeavors, can serve as a great conveyor belt for humanity and its stages of growth.” (p. 192). This is because the great religious traditions are the repository of every level of human consciousness: from the archaic to the magical to the mythic to the rational to the pluralistic to the integral worldview and beyond. Every human being may progress through these stages in her own interior life, and the religions provide the map of the territory.

Not only do the religions contain within their traditions the stages of consciousness that each individual may recapitulate in her own development; they provide the religious and social legitimacy for each stage of development. In a world in which the vast majority of the population remains at a mythic level of spiritual consciousness, with religion at that stage too often providing absolutistic justification for egocentric behavior (the varieties of fundamentalist terrorism), this is of great importance. Religions also can provide the cultural resources, spiritual practices AND authority to legitimate higher stages of spiritual consciousness, aiding people to move through the mythic to higher levels.

Thus, Christianity is not only a religion of biblical fundamentalists. There is a mythic Christianity, a rational Christianity, a pluralistic Christianity, etc. – Christianity contains within its own spiritual line each of these stages of development (as do the other world religions). One of the important roles of religion in the postmodern world is to consciously embrace the work of assisting people to advance in their spiritual development to higher stages, incorporating and transcending the valuable insights of prior stages.

As Wilber points out, one unique resource that the religious traditions bring to bear on this work are the various techniques for attaining more expansive states of consciousness. People at every stage of spiritual development have the capacity to experience authentic spiritual states of consciousness through meditation, contemplation, charismatic experiences, and ritual observances. Granted that the “interpretive depth and inclusive embrace becomes greater at higher stages,” (p. 195), anyone can learn to cultivate these experiences.

Wilber argues that making contemplative states a core of their training is crucial for religions, because “the more you experience various states, the more quickly you develop through the stages . . . When you meditate, you are in effect witnessing the mind, thus turning subject into object – which is exactly the core mechanism of development (‘the subject of one stage becomes the object of the next’). (pp. 196-197) States-training is a necessary but not sufficient aid to advancing to higher stages of consciousness.

The modern and post-modern West is suffering from two related diseases: the secular culture’s repression of higher stages of spiritual development and the fixation of religion at the mythic level of consciousness. These serve to reinforce each other, with secularists assuming that all religions represent an infantile stage of human consciousness, and religionists acting in ways that reinforce the stereotype. The former reject religion, while the later become ever more defensive in their embrace of religion (at a particular stage). The problem is exacerbated by the repression of the contemplative traditions in Christianity, which provides an important antidote to the current lower-stage fixation (although as Wilber points out, it is possible to be both “deep” and “narrow”: experiencing all manner of mystical states of consciousness, while remaining fixated at a lower stage of spiritual development).

I think Wilber’s insights provide a way of understanding the current conflict within the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church as a whole, at least among its leadership, is intentionally embracing a commitment to transcend (while incorporating) the stage of mythic Christianity AND to retrieve the practice of contemplation: moving to higher stages and states of consciousness. The minority within the Church that is still fixated at the mythic stage is resisting this movement with all its might, justifying all manner of violence to the Body of Christ in the process.

This is exemplified by the criticism of our Presiding Bishop’s Christology: she is operating out of a pluralistic stage of Christianity, in which Christ-consciousness is available in other religions (by other means) and revelation is ongoing. Her critics are operating out of a magical or mythic level of Christianity, in which Christ is the only way of salvation, and everybody who doesn’t believe the (closed) revelation contained in the Bible is going to hell. Those on the lower level really can’t see or understand what she is talking about.

This is a description, not a judgment. People have every right to be at whatever stage of consciousness they are at, and deserve the care and support of the Church. What we can not allow, is those fixated at a particular stage to hold back everyone else. In a healthy system, the least mature members have to adapt themselves to the most mature, not the other way around. Otherwise, Christianity will no longer be able to serve as a great conveyor belt, and the religious fundamentalists will continue to terrorize, while the secular culture denies itself the benefits of spiritual development necessary to heal a planet in peril.

Bishop Marc Andrus' Statement on the California Supreme Court's Decision

2008-05-15T15:18:00.001-07:00

The California Supreme Court ruled today that in California all people have the constitutional right to marry and raise a family, regardless of sexual orientation. Below is the text of a statement from Bishop Marc in response to the ruling:

I welcome the ruling of the California Supreme Court affirming the fundamental right of all people to marry and establish a family.

All children of God should be afforded the same rights under the law, and this decision recognizes that all Californians, regardless of sexual orientation, have equal access to one of our fundamental human institutions.

This decision gives our church another opportunity to partner with our state to ensure that all families have the support they need to build relationships that strengthen our communities, state and country.

Jesus tried to free his disciples from a narrow definition of what it means to be his follower. In Matthew 10:42, Jesus says "whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward." God affirms the good in the world outside the boundaries of religious creeds and dogmas. In this spirit, we also affirm and rejoice in this decision by the California Supreme Court precisely because we are Christians.

Clearly, this momentous decision will have ecclesial implications for the Episcopal Diocese of California. I intend to be in prayerful consultation with the people of our diocese to see how we can use this decision to strengthen our support of our lesbian and gay sisters and brothers, and our witness to God’s inclusive love. The Diocese of California will issue an appropriate statement in due course.

The Rt. Rev. Marc Handley Andrus
Bishop of California

Speaking the Truth in Public, or the Descent into Hell

2008-04-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

May I speak in Name of God, in whom we live and move and have our being. Amen.

Jesus said to his disciples, “You know the Spirit of truth because it abides in you.” Stop and think about that for a moment: “The Spirit of truth abides in you.” I wonder if you really believe that. Is that what you were taught?

I suspect not. I would wager that most of us have been taught that the truth lies outside of us. Truth is given to us by parents, teachers, experts, politicians, priests, bishops, and other authority figures. Our job is to receive the truth and conform to it. The promise is that, if we do, we will be rewarded.

That is not the kind of truth about which Jesus is speaking. Jesus speaks of a truth that lies within us. It emerges from the inside out, not the outside in. The truth about which Jesus is speaking is the truth about our identity. He is assuring his disciples that they will know who they are if they listen to the Spirit within. We must unlearn what we have been taught and return to the self we were before we internalized the pattern of cultural conformity.

Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces . . .[i]

Like May Sarton, we wear other people’s faces, displaying to the world only what it wants to see or what we can bear to reveal. We spend the first part of our life trading in masks. But at some point, by God’s grace, we decide to become ourselves. We get in touch with the Spirit of truth that abides in us.

Jesus offers us a different pattern than that of cultural conformity. He offers us the deep pattern of his own life, a life transparent to God and marked by freedom, joy, and compassion. Jesus is wholly himself, secure in the truth that he is God’s beloved.

When Jesus tells his disciples “If you love me you will keep my commandments,” he is not calling for slavish imitation. He is inviting them to demonstrate their continuing love for him by discovering the truth within themselves through a similar openness to God. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ “commandments” refer to all that he said and did in utter transparency to God. We discover our true nature by following a similar path of vulnerability to God.

Jesus promises his followers that if they embrace the pattern of compassion and vulnerability that marks his life, God will send an Advocate to remind them of who they are, the Spirit of truth within them that will defend them against the temptation to live a lie, to become someone they are not.

Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya.’[ii] It is the same question we must ask if we are to be whole. God does not desire us to be anyone other than ourselves. A secure identity is not something anyone else can provide us. We can’t buy it, or earn it, or get it in any way. It is a gift, our birthright. It can only be remembered.

Do you remember who you were before you put on the mask of conformity, the protective armor beneath which you hid your true identity? Do you remember who you were before the sexual abuse began? Do you remember who you were before mom started drinking? Do you remember who you were before you were told that there were some things that only boys were allowed to do? Do you remember who you were before white people started to look a little bit afraid when you walked passed them on the street? Do you remember who you were before you were dissolved and shaken, before you begin to wear someone else’s face?

Sometimes, it takes many years and places to become ourselves, to throw away the masks. I was 35 years-old when I was ordained a priest. Before then, I spent many years struggling to discern a sense of vocation. As a young man I had internalized the cultural norm that a secure identity had to be earned and that it required success – status, wealth, power.

In college I majored in politics and aspired to public office. Although after graduating I ended up in seminary, after one year of theological school I withdrew and applied to law schools. I received a full scholarship to my alma mater’s law school and decided to return to seminary instead only at the last minute. It was hard for me to let go of the face of conventional success. It would take another decade before pursuing ordination.

But when I think back only a little bit further, I recall my nine year-old self playing “preacher,” delivering sermons to an imaginary congregation from my front porch. I was just being John. I’m still learning to accept that that is God’s will for me. Just to be John. That is the truth. The Spirit of truth in me, and in you.

But, as Jack Nicholson famously said, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” The truth about ourselves can be hard to bear. Sometimes we’d much rather deny it, even die rather than come to terms with the truth. I vividly remember going to the emergency room at San Francisco General some years ago to see a former parishioner, Mary Ann. When I arrived, the doctor informed me that he’d never seen a patient with such a high blood alcohol level who wasn’t already dead.

Miraculously, Mary Ann survived after several days of treatment. Upon her release from the hospital she took a cab to the nearest liquor store and bought the biggest bottle of vodka she could afford. It was only a matter of weeks before her brother found her dead on the floor near her front door, leaving behind an empty refrigerator and countless empty bottles in every room of the house. She couldn’t handle the truth. And so she died.

In his Inferno, Dante described the descent into hell that accepting the truth sometimes requires:

Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard – so tangled and rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I’ll tell what I saw . . . [iii]

However painful it may be, how ever long it takes, we must accept the truth about ourselves – the whole truth – accepting the shadow and the light, if we want to live. This requires great vulnerability and risk, for the truth can hurt. But the descent into hell, into the darkest corners of our self, can be endured for there is good there also. There is the root of healing, the possibility for integration and wholeness. It is the price we must pay to become ourselves.

The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life in this way
Turned over a whole history
Looking for the roots of what went wrong
Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.

Enough. The job is done.
Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that’s to come.
I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons –
The farmer plows to plant a greening season.[iv]

The truth about ourselves is often a hard-won truth. With it comes acceptance, even joy. But with it also comes freedom, and with freedom, responsibility. The Spirit of truth is not simply our private possession. Although it begins within, it is meant to make of our life a greening season, a bountiful harvest not only for our healing, but for the healing of the world.

We can survive the descent into hell and come back to tell the good we saw there. Consider Father Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest who was a chaplain to the African National Congress in Zimbabwe during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Listen to how he describes his story.

“Three months after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, I received a letter bomb hidden inside the pages of two religious magazines that had been posted from South Africa. In the bomb blast I lost both hands, one eye and had my eardrums shattered.

For the first three months I was as helpless as a newborn baby. People have asked me how I survived, and my only answer is that somehow, in the midst of the bombing, I felt that God was present. I also received so many messages of love and support from around the world that I was able to make my bombing redemptive – to bring life out of death, good out of evil.

Quite early on after the bomb I realised that if I was filled with hatred and desire for revenge I’d be a victim forever. If we have something done to us, we are victims. If we physically survive, we are survivors. Sadly, many people never travel any further than this. I did travel further, going from victim to survivor, to victor. To become a victor is to move from being an object of history to become a subject once more. That is not to say that I will not always grieve what I’ve lost, because I will permanently bear the marks of disfigurement. Yet I believe I’ve gained through this experience. I realise that I can be more of a priest with no hands than with two hands.

In 1992, I returned to South Africa to find a nation of survivors, but a damaged nation. Everyone had a story – a truth – to tell. In my work I’ve developed a programme called the Healing of Memories. Our workshops explore the effects of South Africa’s past at an emotional, psychological and spiritual level. I try to support those who have suffered as they struggle to have their stories recognised.”[v]

The kind of truth of which Jesus speaks is not an idea, anymore than the love of which he speaks is just a feeling. Both truth and love are demonstrated in action. I become fully myself in relationship to you and to the web of life in which we are embedded. We need to hear one another’s stories in order to be whole, to give ourselves back to each other, to remember who we are. In doing so, we discover our vocation. Vocation literally means “to listen,” to listen to how the Spirit of truth within calls us to participate in the healing of the world.

Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that’s to come.
I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons –
The farmer plows to plant a greening season.

Amen.

[i] May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself,” in Collected Poems, 1930-1973 (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 156.
[ii] Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), p. 251.
[iii] Robert Pinsky, Canto I from The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation (New York: Noonday Press, 1994), canto 1:1-7.
[iv] Parker J. Palmer, “Harrowing” in Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2000), p. 72.
[v] http://www.theforgivenessproject.com/stories/michael-lapsley.

The Fast We Must Choose

2008-04-25T15:32:00.000-07:00

People push to receive food distributed by the Kenyan Red Cross in the Mathare slum in Nairobi.

AFP / Getty

Yesterday I came across this headline in the Business Section of the San Francisco Chronicle: "Global Rice Shortage Now Hitting U.S. Buyers." Costco and Wal Mart's Sam's Club are now limiting the amount of bulk imported rice that customer's can buy. The world food crisis is beginning to affect U.S. consumers.

Perhaps you didn't know that such a crisis was underway. Food riots, violent protests, and regime changes have resulted from the escalating cost of food worldwide. Haiti's Prime Minister was ousted due to protests over rising food prices, and President Musharraf’s drubbing in the recent Pakistani election was due, in part, to similar concerns there. India, Egypt, Vietnam and Brazil are restricting rice exports for fear of shortages in their countries, and widespread unrest has been experienced in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

According to the Chronicle article,

In London this week, the executive director of the World Food Program, Josette Sheeran, warned that more than 100 million people will be pushed into poverty by a "silent tsunami" of sharply rising food prices.

"This is the new face of hunger - the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are," Sheeran said. "The world's misery index is rising."

Why the rising cost of food? What does it portend?

In February, Time Magazine reported that

The forecast is grim. Governments might quell the protests, but bringing down food prices could take at least a decade, food analysts say. One reason: billions of people are buying ever-greater quantities of food — especially in booming China and India, where many have stopped growing their own food and now have the cash to buy a lot more of it. Increasing meat consumption, for example, has helped drive up demand for grain, and with it the price.

There are other problems too. The spike in oil prices, which hit $103 per barrel in recent days, has pushed up fertilizer prices, as well as the cost of trucking food from farms to local markets and shipping it abroad. Then there is climate change. Harvests have been seriously disrupted by freak weather, including prolonged droughts in Australia and southern Africa, floods in West Africa, and this past winter's deep frost in China and record-breaking warmth in northern Europe.

The push to produce biofuels as an alternative to hydrocarbons is further straining food supplies, especially in the U.S., where generous subsidies for ethanol have lured thousands of farmers away from growing crops for food. "The area used for biofuels is increasing each year," says Nik Bienkowski, head of research at ETF Securities, a commodities-trading firm in London. To make matters worse, global stockpiles of some basics have dwindled to their lowest point in decades. Rice — a staple for billions of Asians — has soared to its highest price in 20 years, while supplies are at their lowest level since the early 1980s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, the global supply of wheat is lower than it's been in about 50 years — just five weeks' worth of world consumption is on hand, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization.

As always in a crisis, there are winners. The creeping fear that the world might actually run short of food — no longer simply the stuff of sci-fi movies — has led speculators to pour billions into commodities, further accelerating price rises. In a single day in February, global wheat prices jumped 25% after Kazakhstan's government announced plans to restrict exports of its giant wheat crop for fear that its own citizens might go hungry. Jittery officials in India and Egypt are also restricting food exports. "Prices have risen at a much faster rate in the last few months," says Fazlul Kader in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he coordinates rural projects for the U.N.'s International Fund for Agricultural Development; there, soybean oil alone has shot up 60% in a year.

. . . Last October, shortly before food riots began exploding across West Africa, the WFP's director in Mauritania, Gian Carlo Cirri, flew to a donors' meeting in Senegal and warned Western aid officials that "2008 will be a very dangerous year," with rising food prices increasingly liable to hurt middle-class city dwellers, "who are prone to demonstrating." Similarly, von Braun says he has felt "like a Cassandra" in Washington in recent years, as he tried to warn U.S. officials numerous times that a global food crisis was looming. Even now, he says, "the specialists share our sense of urgency, but it hasn't broken out of that circle yet.

Indeed, you'd think that a global food crisis, and the underlying problems of global warming and unsustainable patterns of agricultural production and consumption, would be a major preoccupation of the current presidential campaign. Yet, we've heard nary a word about it from any of the remaining candidates. As one Newsweek editorialist points out, global warming has been "curiously absent" from the campaign trail.

National polls show that the environment ranks fairly low as an issue that moves voters. In the Pennsylvania primary global warming was such a peripheral issue that exit pollsters did not even bother to measure voter attitudes toward it. Many younger voters wish the candidates would talk more about global warming. But most voters worry more about jobs and keeping fuel cheap. Aside from speaking in broad generalities and making vague promises, the candidates steer away from involved debate on global warming. (Enabled, it should be said, by political reporters. Of the more than 3,000 questions asked in the more than 20 presidential debates, fewer than 10 mentioned global warming.)

The current food crisis is a red flag for those concerned about the future of the earth. In his book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Bill McKibben notes that

The median predictions of the world’s climatologists – by no means the worst-case scenarios – show that unless we take truly enormous steps to rein in our use of fossil fuels we can expect that the globally average temperature will rise another four or five degrees before the century is out. If that happens, the world will be warmer than it’s been for millions of years, long before primates appeared on the planet. We don’t know exactly what that world would feel like, but almost every guess is hideous. Since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air, for instance, we can expect more drought in the middles of our continents where grain growing is concentrated, and more floods on the coasts where many people live. The World Health Organization expects vast increases in mosquito-borne disease. Researchers warned in 2006 that climate change could kill 184 million people in Africa alone before the century is out, destruction on a scale so staggering it has no precedent. We might as well have a contest to pick a new name for Earth, because it will be a different planet. (pp. 20-21)

Hurricane Katrina, food riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt, water shortages, rising fuel costs, increased instability and conflict in resource-rich parts of the world such as Iran and Nigeria; these are harbingers of the new planet we are creating through environmental degradation. And the problem, as McKibben points out, isn’t simply that we are doing things badly, e.g. failing to put a filter on the smokestack. The problem is that we are doing too much, consuming too much, using too much.

The Earth is reaching the limits of unfettered economic growth and its effects. While those of us who are rich have long passed the point where more equals better, we continue a lifestyle that ensures that those who do not have enough will not be able to get more. Global warming boils down to a problem of collective greed and selfishness.

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

The prophet Isaiah reminds us that sometimes we must choose to fast – to change our lifestyle for the sake of justice – so that others may eat at all. Will we choose to fast, or to allow millions to die? That is the question that our politicians have yet to answer this election cycle. We need to starting asking it.

A More Perfect Resurrection

2008-03-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

“Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’” Amen. (Acts 10:34-35)

Peter, a devout Jew, begins his witness to the resurrection of Jesus by assuring his new Gentile friends that God shows no partiality. Peter is learning through his own experience that at least one of the implications of resurrection is the transcendence of invidious racial distinctions that divide and disinherit the children of God. The resurrection of Jesus signifies God’s forgiveness reconciling all people with God and each other, without exception.

The catechism of the Episcopal Church teaches us that “The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (BCP, p. 855) To us has been entrusted Christ’s ministry of reconciliation. Like Peter, we are called to witness to an ever-expanding circle of resurrection life, new life, embracing all people and all things.

And so this glorious Easter morning, the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus touches upon one of the most difficult issues in the life of our nation – the issue of racial reconciliation. Like so many Americans; indeed, so many people around the world, I was captivated this week by Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race and politics in the United States. Quite apart from whatever influence it may have on his electoral prospects, I take his elegant speech, so filled with pathos and passion, to be an invitation to a renewed commitment to the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement.

God shows no partiality, but we do, we do. As Senator Obama cogently argued, the perfection of the union we share as a nation requires that we acknowledge the need for racial reconciliation in public life. This morning, I would like to suggest that a more perfect union requires something more: a more perfect resurrection. We need to set the issue of race and politics within the larger framework of Christ’s mission of reconciliation.

But what does it mean to perfect the resurrection? Wasn’t Jesus’ resurrection the perfect, complete, sign of God’s action to make whole what is broken? Yes and no. Recall that in John’s Gospel, on the eve of his death Jesus tells his disciples that “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.” (John 14:12) The resurrection of Jesus isn’t something that happened only to him, way back when. It is an ongoing, all-encompassing experience of new life in which all are invited to participate. The power and scope of the resurrection is being perfected in us, as we become united with Christ in his great work of reconciliation.

The work of reconciliation, the perfection of the resurrection, is not easy. It demands the best of us. It requires sacrifice, because reconciliation is the fruit of self-giving love. People do not become reconciled because they are intellectually persuaded to do so, or forcibly united, or enticed with rewards. The only way to become reconciled with another is to demonstrate to them the lengths to which you are willing to go to love them.

This truth is portrayed beautifully in Julie Scheers’ haunting memoir, Jesus Land, which chronicles her relationship with her African-American brother, David, who was adopted into her white family in rural Indiana.

“In preschool,” Julie writes, “color became a problem. There were kids who didn’t like David because he was black and there were kids who didn’t like me because I was his sister. Others were just curious and asked stupid questions. ‘How’d you get that color?’ They’d ask. ‘If you scratch your skin, are you white underneath?’ I’d thrust myself between David and his interrogators. ‘He was born that way, dummy!’ I’d say. ‘If you scratch your skin are you black underneath?’

But their questions never ended. ‘Is your blood green?’ ‘How do people see you at night? Are you invisible?’ ‘Is your hair plastic?’ They regarded him as a fascinating freak, and David dutifully answered there questions, letting them poke and prod at him. But as we got older, their curiosity turned into rejection. Insults were hurled on the playground – ‘Jungle bunny,’ ‘Poo boy,’ ‘Velcro head.’ They called us the ‘Oreo Twins,’ and we were often left to play alone at recess. That was fine by us, because we were best friends anyway.”

This vignette from Julie and David Sheeres’ life together captures so much of the tragedy of racism – how early it is learned, how it distorts the perception and poisons the soul of those it affects, how nobly it is so often borne by those who bear the brunt of it; but it also expresses the basis of hope for reconciliation – the experience of solidarity across racial lines, the fierce passion to stand against injustice, the reality of a shared identity that is so much deeper that skin pigmentation.

Julie could have chosen to pretend that David wasn’t her brother. She could have distanced herself, perhaps even joined in taunting him to fit in with their peers. She could have denied the common bond of their humanity, their being of one family. She chose instead to share in his suffering, to demonstrate the depths of her love and the unshakable reality of their unity. Together, she and David embodied a more perfect resurrection.

Julie and David illustrate what St. Paul meant when he wrote to his friends, “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” (Col. 1:24) Suffering that is chosen for the sake of love makes reconciliation possible. It is the path that leads to new life. The resurrection is perfected in us.

If racial reconciliation is one aspect of Christ’s resurrection, demonstrating that God shows no partiality, then we should not be surprised that the route to resurrection lies through the way of the cross: “in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” That is precisely what the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement did on our behalf. They became Christ for us through their self-offering, so that we might enjoy a more perfect resurrection.

This coming Tuesday will mark the 43rd anniversary of the martyrdom of Viola Liuzzo, a wife and mother of three children who came down from Detroit to volunteer in the march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama in 1965. As she was driving from Montgomery to Selma, a carload of 4 Klansmen spotted her, a white woman, with a black male passenger, 19 year-old Leroy Moton. Liuzzo and Moton had been transporting marchers back home after the triumphant journey from Selma to the state capitol.

Enraged by this display of interracial cooperation, the Klansmen followed them into the darkness and rural isolation of Lowndes County, where they fired shotguns from their car, killing Liuzzo while she was still behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. Moton managed to steer the car to a stop on the shoulder of highway 80 and escape from the murderers. Taken back to Selma by another car of marchers who later drove by, Moton went to the police station, only to be arrested himself.

Moton was released and the four Klansmen were arrested by the F.B.I. within 24 hours – only because one of the four was a paid F.B.I. informant, who fired his own weapon at Liuzzo. Not only did the informant fail to intervene to prevent the murder; the F.B.I., knowing that the Klansmen were hunting for victims that night, failed to place the car under surveillance. The informant accepted witness protection in a cover-up of the F.B.I.’s mistakes, and the other three killers managed to escape with a hung jury and then acquittals in two state trials, before conviction on federal civil rights charges.

Between 1963 and 1966, Viola Liuzzo was one of thirteen martyrs who gave their lives to the cause of human freedom and dignity in Alabama alone. But their sacrifice was not in vain. Their witness inspired a non-violent revolution, pricked the conscience of a nation, and led to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That year, Lowndes County Alabama, where African-Americans constituted an overwhelming majority of the population, would see large numbers of black folks voting for the first time since Reconstruction.

Our Easter celebration is a call to become one with Christ in the work of reconciliation, the great work of bringing new life and new hope to a suffering world. God shows no partiality, and so this work must include an unstinting commitment to racial reconciliation. That work begins with our own vulnerability, our own honesty about our experiences of race. Like Julie Sheers, like Senator Obama, we must acknowledge that this issue is personal, deeply touching all of us.

That work also requires us to acknowledge the pain and promise of our common history, a history that encompasses both the KKK and the martyrs of Alabama. The legacy of white supremacy and the scars, resentments, and guilt that we bear are still very much with us. We must be willing to endure suffering, completing in our flesh what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, for the sake of a more perfect resurrection beyond the cross of racism.

When we give ourselves to this great work of self-giving love we will experience the joy of the resurrection. “Joy,” writes Gerald May, “is altogether beyond any consideration of pleasure or pain, and in fact requires a knowledge and acceptance of pain. Joy is the reaction one has to the full appreciation of Being. It is one’s response to finding one’s rightful, rooted place in life, and it can happen only when one knows through and through that nothing is being denied or otherwise shut out of awareness.” (Will and Spirit, p.16).

If we would know the joy of the resurrection, we can not deny our complicity in structural racism and our responsibility for racial reconciliation. Painful as it may be, when we are willing to bring it into awareness, we can also begin to accept the love and forgiveness of the God who shows no partiality, and gladly accept our part in the creation of a more perfect resurrection.