On Faith
"It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple... If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up."
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
But In Thy Dark Streets Shineth
23 December 2012
O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie...
Like so many other families, we have a creche, a nativity set that we assemble every year at Christmas and display somewhere in the house. You see quite a range of these, varying in size and style, from small and realistic to large and cartoony to medium-ish and impressionistic. I've always preferred those that leaned toward the realistic look, perhaps because I just found it easier to connect real-looking figures to a real event than cartoony or abstract ones. The vague forms never really made their point with me, never really moved me to contemplate the significance of the scene they were very vaguely depicting. This, I imagine, is a simple matter of taste.
When I was growing up, my family had a creche that my dad had built before I was born. It was made in three sections and entirely of wood, none of it sanded. This latter detail gave it a rough-hewn character, little grains and splinters perceivable with every touch, the coarseness of the materials visible to the eye even through the dark brown paint and making the whole model immediately believable as a stable for livestock. The detail was intricate, including little support beams and two ladders to the hayloft above the main section, and a completely shingled roof. I can't imagine how long it must have taken my dad to cut all of those little shingles.
It sat in the same place every year, on top of the upright piano that dominated the corner of the living room and that both my sister and I played daily. It was impossible not to gaze into it any time I sat down at the instrument, and I remember staring at the plastic molded figurines for what felt like hours sometimes, imagining what that night must have been like two thousand years ago, wrestling with the tension between the enormity of the event and the humility and quiet of the scene in which it resided.
What really gave the whole creche its impact was a little piece of ingenuity my dad had cobbled together: a tiny incandescent light bulb, soldered to a DC power adapter that had come from who knows what. The bulb was twist-tied to the "ceiling" of the stable, right at the back, and glowed with a soft golden cast that seemed to mimic firelight, just enough to illuminate the whole space of the stable when most of the other lights in the room were out.
Between the figurines, the unfinished character of the wood, and that ethereal light, I couldn't help but stare. A beautiful event had been given an evocative and elegant tribute in this humble depiction my dad had built.
It is that same creche that sits in my living room now. The figurines have had to be replaced, though I'm not unhappy with the ones we were able to find. My wife seemed to realize very quickly the significance of this creche to me, and she has always given its assembly its due importance in the Christmas decorating. My first son, now five and a half, has grown up with it, just as I did. My youngest, now just two and half months, probably hasn't yet noticed it.
But last year as we were putting it away, that old DC adapter was dropped, and the decades-old plastic casing shattered. I knew it couldn't be made to work anymore. But I didn't think much of it until this year when I set it up anew.
It was wrong. The wood was the same, the figurines, though relatively new, were familiar enough. But without that light, it was not what it ought to have been. The nativity should not be dark; it should not exist entirely in shadow. And it was not simply that the scene was missing something, but rather that the absence of light made it something that it should not be. It was an event choked out by obstacles, a thing that could be obscured and forgotten, a moment that needed some other spark to expose it.
This will not do, I thought.
My first attempt at a repair didn't go well. I had an old adapter in a drawer somewhere, the appliance for which had long since been discarded. The small plug end had already been cut off, so had only to strip the wires and solder them to the leads of a white Christmas light bulb. But the adapter ran at nine volts, and burned the brilliantly-shining bulb out in minutes. So I went instead to another adapter we had bought a few years ago for another purpose, one that had a switch on it to vary the voltage. I did the solder job, dialed the adapter down to three volts, and plugged it in.
And things were set right. The bulb glows a little more brightly than my dad's original, but that doesn't seem to be that important. There is light. The nativity is its own light.
And perhaps that is the element of the whole thing that really attracted me to that creche as I was growing up, though I would not have been able to identify it at that age. Every other light in the house could be out, and yet the Nativity would cut through the darkness. It was a quiet and soft light, but it was powerful; no amount of darkness could ever quench it. And that seems to me to be so in keeping with the character of God, in that he upsets and inverts the expectations of humanity. We have this stubborn insistence that real power make itself known with fanfare and pomp and circumstance, and that any power which does not do so can be easily dismissed or defeated. We expect that a real God would arrive before the nations with terrifying force and unquestionable might. Instead, He quietly arrived as a baby, the son of a simple carpenter as far as anyone was concerned, on an otherwise completely unremarkable night in an unremarkable town in what is now the West Bank.
And yet for all that, somehow, that unremarkable event still shines through all of the black of twenty centuries of history. Into a world of "an eye for an eye" came "love thy neighbour as thyself". Into a world that praises riches came "Blessed are the poor". Into the throng of vengeful humanity came "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." The source of all our hope and the answer to all of our fears entered history, and what was done could not be undone.
The Christmas tree in the corner of my living room is bright, and colorful, and exciting. It dominates the space, to be sure. And yet my eye is drawn to the creche, its manger as yet empty in liturgical tradition (the Child will be placed there Christmas Day), its single quiet and humble little light burning like the light of Grace itself. Being absolutely everything it should be.
But in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.
So Said the Saint
St. Patrick's Day, 2011
"I arise today by the strength of Heaven:
Brightness of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendour of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.
-St. Patrick of Ireland
Not Like It Was Your Last
9 March 2011. Ash Wednesday
"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
So said the priest tonight in the service, as he made the sign of the cross in ash and oil on the foreheads of the parishioners. It's one of those quiet, subdued, somber services, though nothing like Maundy Thursday. That's a ways off yet.
Here at the gate of Lent we meditate on our mortality. Father Steve made a number of points as to why this practice has a certain wisdom to it: appreciation, perspective, motivation. Of course, the idea came up of how to live day to day. I've always struggled with that somewhat. We hear all the time in songs and see all the time on posters or mugs or trendy shopping bags that we should live each day as though it were our last.
If I did that, I wouldn't get up and go to work tomorrow. And if the world didn't end, I would go broke and my family would starve. So this advice seems kind of absurd.
And so it was refreshing when Father Steve spoke to exactly that. We can't just ignore our responsibilities - we have to do what we have to do, and we have to assume that we're going to wake up tomorrow. But rather than decide what we are going to do today, perhaps it's more poignant to decide who we are going to be today. Because we can choose to change that, even drastically, without compromising the future that, in all likelihood, really does lay before us. We can get up and go to work and use a patience we didn't use yesterday. We can think of how to win an enemy over instead of how to strike back. We can be different people in the same places and doing the same things, and it will matter. And others will remember.
I propose a shift in the cliche. We can't live each day as though it were our last. But we can try to live each day as though it were the only one anyone would remember, and I imagine that if we could do that, we wouldn't go far wrong.
I know, I know. Easier said...
On Earth as it is in Heaven
13 February 2011
Back around the beginning of last year, just after the massive earthquake hit Haiti, a story hit the internet about a bizarre "relief effort" directed at Port-au-Prince. Some religious organization was trying to raise money to purchase devices which, put simply, did nothing but audibly play a recording of the Bible, or portions thereof, in Creole. If I'm not mistaken, each of these units ran a little over a hundred bucks American, and someone was calling for donations to send as many of these things as possible to the devastated capital.
Not surprisingly, this was met with both anger and ridicule by secular bloggers, and I'm not sure they were wrong. There are segments of Christianity - and this outfit was presumably one of them - which believe that a person's physical or emotional or even mental well-being here on earth is of no importance, and that the only thing the Christian ought to be concerned with is the final destination of someone's soul. The extension of that perspective is to believe that sheltering the homeless, protecting the helpless, feeding the hungry or treating the sick is pointless, and that the effort is better spent trying like mad to convert them before they inevitably die.
I'm not sure that there was never a time when I believed that myself. It sounds sickeningly familiar, and in my youth, I might have looked at things nearly that way. What disturbs me more is that there are still churches asking themselves whether Christianity ought to be concerned with social justice at all.
Susan delivered the sermon this morning. She's not a priest yet, but real sermons are part of her seminary training, and though the lectionary threw her in the deep end this morning, she swam like a natural. The gospel came from Matthew 5 - the Sermon on the Mount - and dealt with how we approach the Law, the Ten Commandments, the "rules" of the faith. I smiled a little when she brought it back to the Summary of the Law, which comes from Matthew 22, and is quoted in the Book of Common Prayer thusly:
Our Lord Jesus Christ said, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the prophets.
This Summary is recited to the congregation by the priest at the beginning of every one of our services. I was disappointed to see that the Book of Alternative Services, which most Anglican churches now use, dropped it from their liturgies. But I've always been happy that my particular parish still insists on using the BCP, and the constant reminder of this summary is one of the reasons why.
To ignore the very real and immediate needs of our neighbour, then, seems an unacceptable option for the Christian church and the individuals in it. And Christ Himself, at every turn, called us to action in immediate ways. If He had had no concern for physical life, why then would he have bothered healing the sick? Why would he have raised the dead? And at the Judgement, in Matthew 25, Jesus does not condemn people because they lied or stole or drank too much, but because they failed to feed the hungry when they saw them or clothe the needy when they passed them.
And as Father Steve pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the Lord's Prayer itself is a call to action: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven", it says. The Gospel allows us no room to believe that God is unconcerned with suffering here. This world isn't second-rate, or a shadow of reality, or merely a "test" for the afterlife. It is God's beloved creation, as real as our very souls and spirits. And if we are "the salt of the earth", we have no cause to be alarmed at how hopelessly outnumbered we are; it's a rare individual who eats food and salt in equal proportions.
"Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public." So said Cornel West, and Susan quoted him this morning in her sermon, to great effect. Justice will not be achieved with more cops or better lawyers. It begins - and ends - with the love that Christ taught, put into practice here and now, on earth as it is in Heaven.
I don't know about you. But I know I've got a long way to go.
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First Sunday in Advent
29 November 2010
Yesterday morning, we opened the service with hymn number eighty-nine in the Book of Common Praise, and it will be the opening hymn of every service until Christmas. I'd been looking forward to it for weeks, as had others in the choir, and probably throughout the parish. Its time had come, the city now blanketed in snow and nightfall coming before most of us get home from work. And like a dominant drum, it delivered a heavy and resounding beat in the liturgical rhythm of the year, making minds and hearts bristle with the anticipation of the joyous significance of what was soon to be observed with its iconic first line: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.
The green linens on the altar had been exchanged for purple, and the advent candle stood on a small table just in front of the sanctuary. Father Steve commented as he lit it that he was considering moving it from the right side of the sanctuary to the left, as parents with small children typically sit on the right, in the front pew. "Fire is attractive", he said with a chuckle, and several parishioners chuckled in agreement.
He spoke on the imagery of light in the Gospels, of Christ as the Light of the World. Pointed out the beauty of that particular image. The light shines in the darkness, wrote St. John, and the darkness did not overcome it. Water can quench fire and air can wick away water. But all the world's darkness is powerless to stop a single speck of light. Too often, something is lost in the way we talk about Christ, as though Christmas marked simply the arrival of that which would, eventually, make a legalistic sort of payment for the sins of humanity.
There is a beauty in forgiveness, to be sure, but it is not the entirety of grace. If we think of Christ only as a sacrificial lamb, then we can think of ourselves only as bad people needing something to paint us good. It's a disheartening thought, and offers us little but guilt. Fortunately, that is not the proposition the faith gives us. That perspective misses what is perhaps the point: that when He arrived, the rightful King had landed, Heaven had broken into Earth, and nothing would ever be the same. He was not simply the means by which our debt would be paid. He was the means by which we would be changed, the means by which a broken world could be put to rights. The curtain was torn, and light irreversibly spilled into the darkness.
There is a teaching in the Orthodox church that is fundamental to their theology, and in my mind, ought to be fundamental to ours. "Christ did not come to make bad men good," it teaches. "He came to make dead men live." It has been many years since any single teaching has put the hook in me like this one did. It says so much with so few words. It says, like Christ Himself did, the Kingdom of God is at hand. It attests to the abundant life we are built to have now, here on earth, and lets the afterlife worry about itself. It says that yes, we have made mistakes, yes, we have gone wrong, and God intends not to punish us, but to make us what we truly are, to make us more alive than we can be by ourselves. Here and now. And that contagious light has arrived. Emmanuel, says the hymn, using the Hebrew. God is with us.
And so we arrive at Advent, as yet recollecting the voice of one calling in the wilderness, but looking ahead to the rift in the veil, the lighting of the beacon, the spark of hope that the black of a thousand nights cannot swallow or diminish.
Rejoice. Rejoice.
Emmanuel, indeed.
By Any Other Way
14 September 2010
I'm fairly sure that had someone told me thirteen years ago that the circumstances of my life would be as they are now, I would have laughed. A vocation in the trades and membership in a liturgical church weren't things my thinking was pointing to back then, back when I was starting university as an aspiring academic with a cultivated distaste for institutionalized faith.
Some, from a distance, may look at me now and wonder, shaking their heads, what went wrong. What wrench fell off the cowling and into the gears. There were times, I think, when I wondered that myself. Or at least, wondered whether something had gone wrong.
They say that hindsight is always 20/20. But the older I get, the less convinced I am of that. I think that hindsight does, perhaps, grow clearer with time. But what it views at first as a grave mistake may prove, years later, to be the gold nugget you tripped over, the rock face you slid down to the clear and cool lake you never would have found otherwise.
I make it sound so accidental when I don't believe it actually is. Because this past couple of years, it has seemed, more than ever before, that I am exactly where I ought to be. Everything I have pursued, every endeavor I have undertaken, all of my achievements and especially my failures, have brought me here, to these spaces now, in the midst of these people and privy to these conversations and a part of these stories. Places to give and receive, places where I am both nurtured and nurturer. Learning what I was not ready to learn before, and giving what I could not possibly have given before, able now only by the path that has brought me here. Had I come to it by any other way, this place might be wasted on me.
I know the plans I have for you, saith the Lord.
Sometimes, when pieces fall into place, I cannot help but wonder at the perfection of God, who can use not only my strengths but also my greatest weaknesses and my most colossal failures. The Anglican church teaches that faith does not make you someone that you are not; it helps you become more who you truly are. And in this wonder, I become not a small, insignificant automaton or a grovelling, unworthy wretch, but rather, a human being made more fully alive by an elegant grace.
Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Thy book they were all written,
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.
In Both Feet
21 July, 2010
The Roman Catholic Church just can't seem to keep itself out of the news these days. For a minute there, things were sort of quiet, after Pope Benny made his statement that the child abuse cases were a result of sin within the church, not without, and that "forgiveness is not a substitute for justice". It was a step, albeit a small one, in the right direction, though miles remain to go. Even so, the critics quieted down for a little while, and seemed to be waiting. And watching.
What were they waiting and watching for? This, apparently.
I've had a couple of discussions regarding this now. What shocks me is how normally reliable media have treated this case. Both the New York Times and Time magazine ran articles online making the claim that the Vatican considers the ordination of women just as morally despicable as child molestation. Naturally, a lot of people are bent out of shape over this one.
One commentator made the observation that the Vatican seems to never miss an opportunity to shoot itself in both feet. While I'd hesitate to disagree, this one just doesn't seem to be their fault.
The Vatican never said the two offenses were equal. Where the confusion comes from is the fact that both are mentioned in the same document. That was enough, it seems, for the fine folks at the NYT and Time to presume the worst and announce it to the world with full conviction. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the two offenses against Canon Law were put in completely different categories, and were in no way equated morally. Kind of like bank fraud and rape - both are illegal, both will land you in jail, but there's no question that one is more reprehensible than the other from a moral point of view.
Of course, even if I'm right about this, the world still has plenty to be angry at the Vatican for. It's beyond dispute now that they deliberately concealed child molesters and shielded them from investigation. Of course, that has given some the idea that the Roman Catholic Church is a welcoming pervert club, and that they protect pedophiles because they like to. In reality, "protecting" pedophiles was an unforgivable by-product of their primary goal: protecting the Church from scandal. I doubt they were thrilled at the necessity of their actions (though I realize that necessity was only perceived, not real - they could have done right from the beginning).
I make no excuses for their past sins. It seems even the Pope himself has a lot to answer for, and I quite sincerely hope that he does. In the meantime, Benedict XVI has done more than any pope before him to tackle the child abuse issue head-on. He hasn't gone far enough yet, but the pieces seem to be moving on the board. Whatever else I may vehemently disagree with him on, he may yet do some good in the course of his term. Hopefully, more good than harm, though it remains to be seen.
Some would wonder why I would defend the Catholic Church, given that I'm not actually Catholic. My reasoning is something like this: they're what the world looks to when it thinks of the Christian faith. I'm associated with the Vatican whether I like it or not. And if they can get their house in order, they stand to do a great deal of good. I'm all for them getting their house in order, and I won't stand by and watch them get kicked while they're down, which is what this latest news story amounted to. Let them deal with their issues. Let them make their changes. Put pressure on them where it is needed, but don't needlessly throw rocks at them when they're trying to put the past to rights.
"Speak truth to power", goes the old Quaker saying, and Paul often reminds me of it. And amen to that. We've had enough of lies from all sides.
12 May 2010
You're finally starting to say the right things and point the finger in the right direction. It's a start. I can only pray you'll put your money where your mouth is and follow through on this.
Because we need you and yours. Not just for your sheer numbers, but because whatever and however great our differences, at the end of the day we are under the same flag. The rest of us need to be able to feel like it's a flag we want to be under. The world is watching to see what exactly that flag represents, and all of their eyes are not on us. They are on you.
An enormous chance lays before you now. There is so much to lose and so much to gain. Don't flinch. As forgiveness is no substitute for justice, talk and sentiment and statements on airplanes are no substitutes for action.
Now's the time for you and your very fine hat to show us what you're made of.
2 April 2010. Good Friday.
We stripped the altar at the church last night. Right at the end of the service, after the eucharist was finished; it's how the Maundy Thursday service ends. I don't know how old the practice is, but it represents the abandonment of Jesus by his disciples in Gethsemane and the stripping of Jesus by the soldiers before his execution. The hymns appointed had all been sung; my work on the piano was done, and the priest asked me quietly if I could help him, along with two others, with the somber task. I had not expected to be part of it.
Against the reading of a plaintive psalm (I think it was Psalm 22), read aloud from the back of the nave by the assistant, we went to work. Everything behind the communion rail that wasn't bolted down was taken. The chairs the assistants and the priest used, the brass crosses on their posts, every hymnal and prayer book and water glass. The microphone stand. The massive Bible and Prayer Book.
The assistant's deep voice and the solemnity with which he read made the whole event decidedly eerie. The linen cloth that always covered the alter was folded ceremoniously and taken away. The bread and the wine, already blessed for the Good Friday service, were taken from their place and moved out of the room altogether, down the short corridor and into the sacristy. The doors of the cabinet they are normally kept in, built into the wall behind and above the altar, were left open, making the absence of the elements glaringly and disturbingly apparent.
And as all this went on, everything else was quiet. All those who had attended sat silent in the pews, watching. I could not help but notice the looks some faces bore; somber, pained even, like what was happening, and what it symbolized, was just beyond the edge of comprehension.
And once everything was gone and the reading was finished, the lights were turned off and the whole church fell into darkness and quiet and emptiness. No one spoke. Most, I think, were kneeling. After a minute or two, slowly and one by one, people got up from their pews and quietly shuffled to the door at the back.
Goodbyes were spoken in whispers at the door, even though there was no one praying or otherwise engaged in the church at the time. It was just understood, somehow, that quiet, if not total silence, should be kept.
This morning was the Good Friday service, carried out in front of a bare altar. The bread and wine from last night were to be used entirely, so that none remained. Some of us were given two or three wafers at communion. Once the eucharist was finished, there remained no blessed bread or wine anywhere in the church. As far as I know, this is the only time of the whole year at which that ever occurs.
I cannot wait for Sunday. When the glad shout of Alleluia! returns to the dismissal. When the solemnity is finished and the altar is restored. When things come back to life.
1 March 2010
The past month, perhaps, has been filled with motion. Some things moving madly, others speeding up slightly, and some, perhaps most importantly, just stirring quietly to life.
And those stirrings, those might-be-beginnings, are both promising and frightening, because I don't know how to do this. I've wanted this, even prayed for this, over and over again. And now it might be here, and I'm stricken with indecision and uncertainty.
I knew a girl named Jill once. A quiet sort of thing that mostly kept to herself, but with a uniquely bright smile and a sarcasm that carried no hint of malice, once you got her going. An understated jeans and t-shirt style that kept her from standing out too much and a face that neither wore nor needed any make-up. I don't think she ever knew that I had a little crush on her, back when we were fifteen or so. I think now that perhaps it was the way she didn't stand out that I liked, just grinning at the jokes the rest of us made hanging out in the church basement at youth events, seldom making any of her own.
We graduated, went separate ways. I found out later she went to college somewhere, and took up carpentry in her spare time. I'm told she turned out to have a natural talent for it. That, and an unswerving devotion to both her faith and the compassion it taught.
I don't recall now when the accident happened, or even how many people perished in it; I just know Jill was one. I believe her sister was another. There was a van, a few passengers, and an Alberta highway. I think they were on their way back from Caroline. That's all I remember for details.
What I remember most was her funeral, held at the Alliance church in Spruce Grove because the Baptist church we had attended wasn't big enough to hold that many hundreds of people. People I hadn't seen in years. Paul Kemp came and said hello and told me he was the organist in the Lutheran church on ninety-sixth street now. The day was full of those tense conversations, with people you haven't seen in years, and are happy to see, but not like this. Circumstances, you know.
Her father was surprisingly composed, I recall, as he spoke from the podium. It was clear he was grieving, but he spoke as though he had a peace unheard of in a parent who is in the process of burying half of his family.
They had printed, on the back of the funeral program, a quote that had been found, handwritten and with no name beneath it, among Jill's papers when they cleaned out her room. It read:
When you come to the edge of all you know
And are about to step out into the darkness of the unknown
Faith is knowing that one of two things will happen:
Either there will be something solid to stand on,
or you will be taught how to fly.
Those words never left me, imprinted below the photo of her smiling face in my memory. I've carried them with me for years now. I've seen variations on the quote; I know it wasn't hers, but it hardly matters. It was what she left to me, and to God-only-knows how many others who found themselves in that church that day.
And now, in the midst of these stirrings and the uncertainty they bring with them, those words come to me yet again. And I'm happy, in a way, to be at the edge of what I know, because in this case, what I know will simply no longer do. I'll be happy to walk off that edge once I find the courage to do so, and those words create a stirring of their own in me.
So thank you, Jill. For today, and for all of the other days in the past few years when I needed the memory of your life and the way you lived it. You have not lived - or died - in vain.
Be at peace, child of God.
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29 January 2010 (the wee hours)
Bono said there was a silence that comes to a house when no one can sleep; but the greater silence, in my experience, comes when everybody but me is asleep. The not-quite-three-year-old who didn't take a nap today dropped off to sleep with little trouble, and a diligent but exhausted wife was in bed before even her son.
I am sure that it is quieter when they are here and asleep than it is when I am home alone. Perhaps because I tread more softly as not to wake them. Yet even the animals seem to keep their peace at such times as this.
Add to this the still of winter outside my window, and you have a rare kind of quiet, the kind that makes standing at the sink doing the dishes a contemplative act. Going over my list of tasks for the night as the sink fills, a strange content falls on me. Perhaps because of the stillness in the house. But it is strange insofar as it comes when so many mundane tasks lay before me.
These are not the things that get in the way of life, it finally occurs to me. They are the stuff of life itself. Washing dishes and picking up toys and sweeping floors and tending to paperwork are necessary and natural parts of living in a corporeal world. And there is a shift in my perspective that makes sense of the content. If this world of matter and energy is not second-rate, if the creation is truly loved, then every element of existence in it, every necessary part of making one's way through a mortal life in it, every meal and every shower, every bit of the work of my hands by which I make my living and every pause I take to enjoy its many beauties, is a hallowed act. Like a monk scrubbing the monastery floor, washing the dishes becomes almost an act of worship.
If even so mundane a task as this can be hallowed, what then, O Lord, is unimportant in Thy sight?
I finish the dishes, wipe the counter clean, and set to a general tidy of the kitchen. In a pile of flyers that has come in the mail, I find a new issue of a magazine I subscribe to; immediately sidetracked (my wife will testify I'm prone to it), I spend several minutes perusing the headlines. And then I snap back to the task of tidying with an almost comic feeling of guilt. Not the normal I-should-stop-goofing-off guilt that comes when you get distracted doing monotonous work - a little greater than that. But not a heavy moral guilt, either. Rather, the sheepish kind of guilt that you feel when you find your mind drifting to last night's movie during the Sermon.
The countless toys in the living room don't even seem to test my patience when I get to them, but I don't notice this. Not until I am halfway through cleaning the first of two rabbit cages do I realize that I am not even hurrying. I've stopped to pet Dusty, rubbing the top of his head with the back of my index finger. He presses into it; rabbits love that, even though they almost always look frightened. This chore is not in the way. It is not an interruption, as it almost always has been on any other night. It is not a duty that delays a thing; it is the thing itself, right now, in this moment.
If this, too, is worth doing as unto You, what dare I deem trivial?
The rabbits tended, I sit before my laptop in the living room and tend to an insurance matter. I find myself being unusually thorough. It takes only a few minutes, but in that time all three cats have gathered in a circle around me, waiting on their nightly treat that is, in fact, just a vehicle for a medication that only one of them needs.
Treats for the cats. Then finely, dare I say lovingly chopped orange pepper for Timmy the Crab. For what are pets, after all, but creation entrusted to our care in a special arrangement? 'Until you have allowed your heart to love an animal,' Anatole France said, 'a part of your soul remains unawakened.'
Frustration and annoyance just didn't show up tonight. Could every day be like this?
The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night, and at the last a perfect end; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be with us this night, and for evermore. Amen.
18 January 2010
So Pat Robertson has said his piece regarding this earthquake in Haiti. Apparently, it was their own fault for being such bad people, and God is punishing them, like he punished America for hedonism with 9/11. And once again, his word is being taken by many as the "Christian" stance on the matter.
And I think I can see why. There were two striking comments made over on atheistrev.com regarding this guy, and they're worth attention.
First: "Pat Robertson has a long history of making this sort of claim, most of which have only contributed to his influence and resulted in little blowback from mainstream Christians."
And second: "I understand that many Christians are reluctant to admit that Pat Robertson and others like him speak for them, but this does not change the fact that he does indeed speak for them."
The thing is, both of these statements are completely true. Which is a problem. Why do comments like his receive such little blowback? Of all the Christians I know, not one of them agrees with Robertson on the "reasons" for this earthquake. At best, they do try to take the stance that "he doesn't speak for us".
But he does. He is speaking for us, whether we like it or not, whether we agree with him or not. He makes these statements under the banner of the faith we profess. And we are, for all intents and purposes, powerless to stop him. So then, what do we do?
If you can't stop someone from speaking for you, then start speaking more loudly for yourself. And it will take more than a reactionary "No, I don't agree with Pat Robertson". If we do not share his stance on Haiti, then what stance do we take?
It seems to have gone unnoticed by the world that churches everywhere are calling madly for donations and support to go directly to relief efforts in Haiti (of note is ACT International). And yet somehow, one man's comments have constituted "the Christian stance".
We would do well to ignore Robertson and spend more time just helping. The authentic Christian stance should not be "Pat Robertson is an idiot" (though that may well be true). The Christian stance ought instead to be "Hustle with the help, because a lot of people in Haiti are suffering".
Do what you can.
11 January 2010
It is as though we forget, in winter, what a thunderstorm feels like. Not in the sense that we can't recall it, but in the sense that it leaves our minds and must be consciously recalled. There's that part after the rain has started, but is just spitting a little, not really coming down, as though the clouds haven't yet committed. And then there's my favourite part, that swift crescendo when the sky opens up all at once, the air is suddenly thick with water and the massive drops, moving earthward with real force now, make impact with elegant violence.
It is the closest thing to the feeling of prayer that I know of. If someone were to ask me if I find prayer relaxing, I would have to give them an emphatic no. It is not. At least not usually. And why should it be? To be a point of intersection of Heaven and Earth, to stand on the fault line, is not something we should expect to be calming. It is elegant and violent and tumultuous and wrenching and pulls you apart like it's making room between the two halves for something. Like a freight train passing right through the middle of you. The beauty of it is astounding.
Of course, individual results may vary.