Two Concerts at Christmastime

We attended two concerts in the last two nights. We watched the first one, Messiah Rocks, at the DuPont Theater, and performed the second one, Festival of Light VI, at Skyline. Whether listening or singing, I experienced a surprising sense of celebration and joy. 

I had sung the Messiah several times in college, graduate school and while serving at my first church, Bethesda UMC in Salisbury, MD. I know the tenor part of the Hallelujah chorus by heart, as well as several more of the choruses and tenor solos. But Jason Howland's fresh approach to Handel's classic oratorio opened a window of fascination for me to hear and see (and to participate in) the celebration of God's gift of the Messiah in a new way.

From the opening guitar and violin riffs, as the tenor sang "Comfort" with an easy confidence and infectious enthusiasm, my tears told me that these old songs had discovered a new way to speak to the deepest longings of my heart. The concert Friday night reminded me what its like to breathe the fresh air of (there's no other way to say it) salvation.

I'm not talking about a ticket to paradise. Nor do I mean some imagined divine seal of approval for a particular religious understanding. By salvation I mean the foundation of the hope of creation and the joy of life in all it's fullness. Perhaps because these concepts are so mysterious, they can only be glimpsed in the majestic mystery of song. How telling Friday night when the performers repeatedly invited us all to join in that song: "For all of us a child is born!"

Then of course, we had our own songs to sing the following night. It was the concert that shouldn't have been. We faced so many obstacles and scheduling crises, they ceased to surprise us. And for an hour Saturday night, we came together as a band in a way I could never have imagined. 

And it was fun.

For most of the previous five Festival of Light concerts we have put on at Skyline, the music has involved far more work for me than play. For one thing, the project of an hour-long concert involves many hours of creative, musical, interpersonal and technical skills. And for various reasons, the task of music selection and rehearsal direction has fallen to me. 

For the past five years at Christmastime, I have felt too keenly the responsibility of pulling everything and everyone together for the FOL concert. And before last night, I had always assumed that this crushing responsibility came with the territory of taking on such a difficult task. Last night should have been worse because of all of the difficulty we had pulling everything together in the days and weeks before the concert.

But perhaps because of the over-the-top difficulty we navigated en route to the concert, adapting became a part of the plan. Gregg McCauley said it best after the show when we were backstage together: "life is improv". In the weeks leading up to the concert, and during the Festival (in every sense of that word) I discovered the joy and not the cynicism of that statement.

I've been reading a bit of philosophy lately. Through the tough sledding, I've discovered some insightful statements about the nature of life that invite me to focus on the simple daily transactions between our experiences (life that happens to us) and our creative response to life (so much more than merely reacting). 

So much of the life we experience runs counter to what we expect, we run the risk of being immobilized by our frustration that nothing goes according to our plan. Recently I read an evolutionary sociologist's contention that without forgiveness, community would be impossible - because humans consistently fail each other's expectations.

Sometimes, these failures involve moral violations. But most of the time, failed expectations signify only that we are vastly diverse creatures. I suppose they also remind us constantly of our limited perspective of the world. And in one sense, that nagging reminder of our blindness and contingency only adds to our anxiety, fear and loneliness.

But in another sense, we can interpret our boundedness on all sides as a vast network of experience, perspective, and creative response that expands our sense of self and profoundly connects us to the human community. Two people standing back to back see completely different views of their world, but together they can see a range of nearly 360 degrees.

The secret involves recognizing that the limits of our perspective, precisely those places where our expectations are thwarted, form the gateways to the vast frontiers of human community. Repeatedly as the concert approached, I found it easier to look beyond the frustration of my failed expectations of others because new possibilities emerged - both in my (new) reactions and the creative wonder of others' lives.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul celebrates a God               
"who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us" (Ephesians 3:20). Our thwarted plans make way for new possibilities beyond what we can ask for or imagine. So when another person does not (or cannot) meet my expectations, I am learning to expect a creative response (from both of us) that expands my imagination.

This year's FOL concert far exceeded my expectations and imagination. I stood amazed at the many unexpected creative gifts of people connected to me with bonds of forgiveness, understanding and creativity. And I learned to be amazed at myself - especially at the ways I am learning to look beyond my frustration to the very real possibility of amazement and wonder.

So we sang. And we danced. And we were not for a moment trapped in anyone's expectations (least of all mine!) of how a concert should go. We were singing love songs to our Savior, who confounds and expands our expectations of ourselves and of others every moment. The words and the music flowed. A child joined us and danced while we sang. And the music flowed far beyond our ability to perform it - in everyone who was present not merely to witness but to participate in the joy of a Festival of Light.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never overcome it!

Cultivating Gratitude Year-round

Brooks Twilley shared with me a recent (11/22/10) NPR radio interview between Dan Gottlieb Ph.D, host of Voices in the Family, and Dr. Robert Emmons, professor at University of California, Davis. His primary interests are in the psychology of gratitude and the psychology of personal goals. He's the author of "The Psychology of Gratitude." The show's a rebroadcast and originally aired in November 2009. Brooks asked me for my thoughts about the conversation, which I felt was so meaningful that I wanted to share them in this blog.

You can listen to the conversation here.

I like boiling happiness down to faith (hope), forgiveness (grace) and gratitude (praise). I heard once that persons who commit suicide suffer from a catastrophic contraction of their perspective of these aspects in their lives. Suicide, in this sense, becomes a fatal symptom of depression. They talked about the truncation of options in life being related to ingratitude later in the program.

I also enjoyed Dr. Robert Emmons' definition of gratitude as thoughtfulness and remembrance. Another way of thinking about the way they talk about the physical/neurological/psychological (as well as spiritual) effects of gratitude, thoughtfulness and remembrance is meditation, or perhaps contemplative prayer. Vicki recently read a great book titled "How Prayer Changes Your Brain" that explored the power of prayer from a neurological perspective. Some of this reminds me of the Psalms that catalog the good things that the community of faith remembers and celebrates God doing among them over time, and the old hymn: "Count Your Blessings".

The concept of movement beyond self focus to connection to others is the sine qua non (without which none) of any authentic religious practice and understanding. And I liked the concept of distinguishing between gratefulness as a desire or attitude rather than a feeling. The conversation about giving up the illusion of control (and self-sufficiency) and gratitude as acceptance was powerfully helpful in articulating what happens in religious, transformational experience of "the Holy".

One caller struggled with his inability to believe in a God/god who could receive his thanksgiving. When the host talked about giving thanks to the animals and the people who brought the food to the table, I was reminded of the prayers in the Cormac McCarthy book, The Road. I don't think being grateful to specific people and not wanting to deflect this feeling of gratitude to a transcendent reality (god?) because a person does not have an experience of God/god is necessarily a bad thing. I love that the caller felt a tug drawing him to experience what the AA group calls a "Higher Power", and I believe that to settle for anything less would prevent him from experiencing the blessing of getting in touch with the reality of what I call God.

To put it another way, I think the pathway to experience the transcendent reality of God/The Holy/The Divine is precisely through the immanent/incarnational relationships with real people in real circumstances of life. Ironic that I was just reading in 1 John 4 this morning:

16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.
18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
19 We love because he first loved us.
20 If we say we love God yet hate a brother or sister, we are liars. For if we do not love a fellow believer, whom we have seen, we cannot love God, whom we have not seen.
21 And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love one another.

The caller who talked about raising a special needs child and being grateful for every little thing hit home with me, as a sibling of a special needs person, and as a parent of foster children. The issue of the human need for the contrast of adversity in life (between good life and bad life) in order to "wake up" to gratefulness says something about the question of the necessity of evil in a cosmos/universe/world created by God - and of the necessity of suffering. Near the end of the conversation, I loved the observation that people who have experienced great loss are the most grateful - for all of the little things in a life that becomes precious in every little moment. I remember a book by (social scientist) Dan Ariely called "The Upside of Irrationality" in which he described persons who had endured great pain and healing (as he had, as a burn victim), even partial healing, had a far higher tolerance for pain than people who had not experienced great pain and healing - precisely because those who had suffered a great deal believed things could get better through the pain of suffering.

What a fantastic conversation to share with people struggling in times of deep uncertainty.

Washing Dishes and Walking the Talk

Tom DiCampli read from an obscure visionary passage in Daniel in worship at Skyline yesterday and ironically claimed (twice) that he was "no theologian". Then, after confessing the unintelligibility of the text for him, he shared an explication of the meaning of the text he had discovered through a process of reflection and meditation: he read to us from a prayer journal in which he had recorded his reflections in a burst of insight he received while washing the dishes.

I thought of Brother Lawrence, a simple spiritual sage of another time who celebrated the practice of the presence of God in all of life experience - particularly while doing mundane tasks such as washing dishes. I wondered at the courage it must have taken Tom not only to read the scriptures for us, but to follow his heart and to share such powerful, intimate testimony - to recognize that we must not merely be hearers (or readers) of scripture, but that all scriptural encounters can become invitations to a living interpretation of the profound truths embedded in the stories and mysteries of scriptures.

I also recalled the first time I witnessed the miracle of speaking in tongues in a Pentecostal worship service, when after the sermon, a member of the congregation spoke in an unknown language for perhaps a minute, followed immediately by an interpretation by another member of the congregation. What struck me was two simultaneous and related insights: first, how utterly mundane the translation of the mysterious language was; and second, the miraculous sense of God's presence among us that we experienced by witnessing the spiritual courage of the two among us who made themselves totally available to God for the sake of us all.

Jesus taught that we know the tree by its fruits. Perhaps no theology can unlock for us the mystery of faith. But all theology must stand or fall on the fruit to which it bears witness and which it inspires. Tom inspired me not necessarily by the content of his epiphany, but by the tremendous courage it must have taken for him to bear witness to it's reality in his life. Jesus also made a great deal of fuss about the absolute necessity of bearing witness to our experience of God's presence and realm - and the consequences of our choosing to bear witness or to extinguish the light under a bushel. Tom's witness set the stage for similar encounters with God among everyone in worship who listened to his powerful testimony.

After Tom read the scripture from Daniel, shared his testimony of spiritual insight, and prayed over Vicki, I listened as Vicki shared the stories and reflections she had experienced in her reading of the text. She also complained about the apparent impenetrability of the text, but (like Tom) ironically went on to explicate the story for our time and experience. Once again, I marveled at the courage and faith Vicki demonstrated by walking a path on which she was ostensibly lost, yet walking with confidence and complete trust that there was a way regardless of her ability to perceive it.

And perhaps the greatest irony of all was the fact that the essential kernel of insight both Vicki and Tom sought to communicate to us was an assurance of God's sovereign, benevolent care of the world regardless of the delusions and pretensions of events and experiences that seemed to contradict our faith in God's loving presence and redeeming power among us. Each of them in their own way bore a living testimony to God's reality and reign even as they could not fully realize those realities. Vicki also shared a collection of stories and testimony from others from within and beyond the Christian tradition reinforcing this message of hope in the reality of God, which gave me a sense of powerful assurance tat something far more powerful was at play in the confluence of these diverse human testimonies of experience than mere wishful thinking.

Then Vicki called Dr. Lee Anderson to join her and to share with us the story of a journey of a calling that the Governor of Delaware recently celebrated with an award for excellence in service to the community. Dr. Anderson bore witness to the power of God to dismantle even the barrier of death that pretended to separate her from her father. And once this barrier had been overcome, she experienced a succession of walls that came tumbling down and made possible the restoration of suffering families, kindled the power of forgotten life legacies, and created a profoundly miraculous community of former prisoners freed from hopelessness for joyful service and love toward one another.

Not surprisingly, the congregation at Skyline celebrated Dr. Anderson's story with a spontaneous standing ovation. It reminded me of the way we recently celebrated the recognition (again, by the Governor) of Joe Masiello as Delaware's Teacher of the Year. He is another of the Skyline saints who dares to believe that his faith can draw out the best in children in a classroom or in a refugee tent in Haiti.

Now, as all of this celebration of the signs of the assurance and power of God's presence in our midst was going on all around me, and as Vicki lifted up a picture of our community of faith as "dangerous" to the powers that pretend to rule this world, I began to experience a healing vision. The vision extended to a place of peace a nightmare I had in seminary over 17 years ago - a nightmare I had not thought of again until this week, when I stood helplessly watching as doctors and nurses tried to determine the nature of a health crisis earlier this week that left our daughter, Joy, in pain and unable to walk for several hours.

In the dream, I led a party of pilgrims into a vast desert wasteland in search of a holy place of refuge. We traveled for days - weeks - in the hope at I could lead the party safely to our destination, an oasis of spiritual and physical refreshment and healing. One night, after everyone else in the party had succumbed to sleep, and I sat alone by the dying embers of a fire under a vast expanse of stars, I came to a startling realization: I was hopelessly lost. Moreover, I was profoundly alone, as this realization came with an acceptance of the fact that I would have to carry this burden alone, in order to preserve a measure of hope among the pilgrims who trusted me.

There was much more, of course, involved in my carrying the burden of despair alone among the pilgrims. In the movie, Das Boot, a senior enlisted man upbraids an officer to whom the task of command has fallen when the captain dies. The inexperienced acting captain has shared his angst with the crew and has admitted to them that he has no idea what to do next. The burden of command, lectures the senior enlisted man, involves bearing the hope, the sense of mission of the crew even when hope is lost or imperiled by circumstance or fate. In a similar way in my dream, I felt a sense of grave responsibility (even trust) for and among the community for rising in the morning and for leading us all with purpose and faith, regardless of my doubts or despair.

Some Gethsemane prayers must be prayed alone - while the rest of the company sleeps.

My sense of helplessness, fear and anger by my daughter's bedside ushered in a fierce remembrance of this long-ago dream on the eve of my ordination as a Methodist pastor. But as I experienced the palpable hope of group of pilgrims at Skyline in worship the following day, I caught a glimpse of the dawning of a resurrection of hope in what I had mistakenly named a nightmare. As we sang, prayed, testified, witnessed, and proclaimed the hope of the world among us Sunday, it dawned on me that another way to think of my lostness in the dream was of a disorientation/reorientation experience of transformation.

In other words, what if, in the morning after the dream takes place, I realize that we have in fact arrived at the place for which we have been looking: and the place is a community of pilgrims, celebrating God's presence on the way. To discover such an epiphany, one (especially one bearing the responsibility of leadership) must necessarily undergo the despair that creates a way for a new understanding of direction and purpose to emerge. And Sunday, as I celebrated a sense of having arrived in a place for which I had long searched, I celebrated the nightmare of failure that made possible that realization.

If I would save my life, I must lose it.

Today is Monday, as it happens, and the realities of what it means to lead a community of faith in the midst of uncertainty and doubt make themselves at home in my life. The financial report does not look promising and bills abound. People struggle with stubborn personal failings and with the pain of the personal failings of others around them - they wrestle with prayers for healing of body, mind and soul seemingly unanswered. Yet on we pray and on we walk in faith.

Pondering the End Times - and What That Means Today

Human history is replete with cycles of ominous political or environmental circumstances attended with prophets confidently predicting the end of all things. We witnessed this phenomenon most recently as 1999 clocked over to 2000, and it appears we are witnessing it again. Logic says that at some point (astronomers tell us that in 2 billion years when the sun consumes half of our solar system, including the earth!) the prognosticators will be right. History tells us that there is always a crowd that will be drawn to these prophets, even when they are wrong (when the date passes peacefully and the world continues).

I read an interesting book about this phenomenon a couple of years ago – Michael Shermer’s “Why People Believe Weird Things”. His answer: Because we want to. There must be something comforting about knowing how or when it all ends, even if that means trading away a future. Shermer devotes a chapter to apocalyptic prophets and their followers over the last two centuries in America and Europe. I was particularly amazed at his finding that when the prophet was proved wrong, his followers typically hung in there with him when he announced that he had made a miscalculation and adjusted the end date to another time in the not-too-distant future.

I have always taken my cue from Acts 1:6-8.
“So when the apostles were with Jesus, they kept asking him, "Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?" He replied, "The Father alone has the authority to set those dates and times, and they are not for you to know. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere-- in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (NLT)

Jesus’ authoritative “[These end times] are not for you to know” followed by his command to tell people about him everywhere seem straightforward enough to me. Getting all wrapped up in predicting and worrying about “those dates and times” is an age old human temptation Jesus addressed in the Sermon on the Mount:

32 These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs.
33 Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.
34 "So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough for today. (Mat 6:32-34 NLT)

That said, since our own scriptures include sections of apocalyptic literature, I have a theory about why – which has little to do with knowing or predicting things that Jesus tells us are not for us to know. I believe that the apocalyptic stories and visions are not about the future, which, thanks to God’s gift of free will, is an ever-unfolding tapestry of our making as co-creators with God. I believe that these stories and vision are about our own time – our present. They are a warning, to be sure, of the probable end points of a trajectory of our present actions and behaviors, perhaps. But I think that even more, they are a way of understanding what is happening now, and how we might make better choices, by adopting a perspective of one who looks back toward our present from one possible, nightmarish future.

I believe that apocalyptic literature is like the game we play with ourselves at times when we imagine what a person from the future might say to us – the advice they might give to us, given what they know about the consequences of the decisions we make now. One key element of apocalyptic literature lost on the false prophets who use it as a scare tactic for gullible believers unfamiliar with the teachings of Jesus involves the triumphant way in which God’s kingdom rule prevails. If we have faith in such a future, we can live in hope that this will be true regardless of the many ways in which our senses tell us otherwise – and make choices as if it were already true. So ironically, apocalyptic is not about the end of all things, but a new beginning of hope in the midst of chaos – it’s a way for the blind to see.

In our upcoming worship series: “Letters from the Future: Daniel’s Apocalypse” we hope to explore the many messages of hope from this apocalyptic message written in the between times of the Bible, when the prophets were silent and shortly (a century or two) before Jesus’ birth. The book of Daniel looks both to the past (the exiles in Babylon) and to the future (to a time when the Ptolemies no longer desecrate the Temple and Jewish culture. The upshot is that the people whose lives are enriched by the stories are empowered to live in their own time with a renewed sense of God’s rule in history. And in that sense, they (and we) create a new future by the way they live in the present.

In addition to the worship series, I’m offering a Sunday morning Bible study linking scripture texts with a series of apocalyptic movies from the past five years, starting October 17. If there is enough interest, I’d be happy to offer the course during the week as well. I pray that looking at these tales of a dark and terrible future will enable us to live now as if our lives and the choices we make have significance in creating a new future – a future where all people recognize and rejoice in the Kingdom of God drawing near to us all.

Peace,
Bo

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (to what it means to be human)

Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic tale The Road compels you to travel to places you might not want to go. The slow moving story traces the agonizing journey of a boy and his father who walk across a barren, hellish landscape toward the death of all things. Along the way, they struggle to remember and to act as the "good guys" in a landscape haunted with roving bands of "bad guys" who threaten their survival (and the survival of their identity) at every turn in the tortured road.

"You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? He said.
Yes. We're still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay."

(P. 77 - the man has just killed one of the bad guys)

The Road cuts life to the bone in search of the essence of life - that which survives until the bitter end - perhaps the foundation of life and or love and hope. McCarthy's experiment or perhaps parable makes its home among our most terrible fears about the thin veil of modern sophistication straining against a postmodern universe of nihilism and despair. I have been impressed of late at the proliferation of apocalyptic tales that one reviewer theorizes cropped up in the wake of 9-11. All of them seem more to me about our present than some nightmare of a future. The Road journeys through the landscape of our lives, asking the kind of penetrating, uncomfortable questions that we've been too anesthetized (by comfort) to ask.

"They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe into it being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart."

(P. 57 - the man's wife leaves them both for death)

McCarthy invites us to explore the ashen barrenscape of life without labels, where the labels have ceased to carry meaning because even the memory of the things the names represented has vanished. The names of people, for instance, relationships between people, the names of dates and years, species of animals long extinct, and plants and foods that have vanished from a burning, cold planet. The Road points to a destiny worse than death - a road that leads to annihilation of existence and memory - of nearly any meaning humanity could have imagined in our sojourn on planet earth.

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of it's referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

(P. 89 - by the fire at camp)

On the Road, we experience only the silent, menacing present - all past and future have been obliterated. Stories of these time frames have been exposed for the lies that could not protect us from our inevitable end - books are good only as fuel for the dying fire. And our beleaguered anti-heroes choose only when they will die - most likely by suicide - as they walk from oblivion into oblivion. Yet on they walk, improbably, as the man blows on the embers of the "fire" he claims the boy, especially, carries within him.

It is not the fire of the scorched earth, but a fire of warmth and light, that keeps the two wanderers alive in body and spirit on each successive, relentless cold night. Like their campfires, the crushing reality of despair mutes this fire within - yet it stubbornly refuses to wink out forever while there is yet one human being to tend it. The man lives only that the fire within the boy will never go out, and we know from early on that there will not be enough fuel for the fire within both of them.

The Road defines humanity as a pilgrim species, forever on the move as we bear this fire. One of my favorite passages reveals the way our life in the present reshapes our past into a future we stride into with each step we take in the present. When we don't know where we are going, we refuse to stop (though some of us do refuse) and continue to put one foot in front of the other. Though we never learn the details of the catastrophe that brought humanity to its knees, The Road renders this memory moot in relation to the task we face in each present moment. McCarthy beckons us to step into the eternity of each unknown moment free of the determination of the past or of the future.

"Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake up from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning and thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

(P. 131 on dreams, reality and memory)

Without spoiling the ending, I mention here only that McCarthy invites us to consider the monstrous cost of attempting to control or to assure our destiny, or the destiny of those we love. The Road paints a monochrome vision of hope and also of grace in a harsh environment that appears to deny both. We cannot know what the end of the road looks like, or where it leads. But the boy, especially, asks the man in us all to count the cost of looking too far down the road.

I was glad to be released from this dark and haunting vision, and yet it remains with me like the smell of smoke in my clothes after sitting by a campfire at night. While there are still fish in the waters, birds in the sky, and cattle on the green earth, a boy and a man whisper relentlessly in my ear to attend carefully to the map of the universe borne by every form of life - including my own - on my leg of the journey. We, too, carry a fragile but relentless fire, capable of ravaging or renewing the earth and others on this journey who wonder whether we are bad or good.

Unity and Agency - Divine and Human

I've done some more thinking about God this trip. I was experiencing gratitude for the journey I have thus far experienced in my life of faith - or in my life illuminated by faith. Having received it from my forebears, I have come to own my faith, even as I realize more and more each day how much "my" faith redefines and claims me.

Unity and agency have consumed my thoughts about faith this trip on a couple of my walks and rides. Unity has become the foundation of my new faith home, of late. Agency presents my mind with far more misgivings, so that I begin to wonder whether agency is more useful as a way to anthropomorphize God than it is a way to describe God.

Agency (at least agency as we understand it) involves the ability to affect action - not in some way that merely calls the nature of the thing so affected the agency of divinity (a la Clockmaker) - but action that in some sense reflects the consciousness of divinity. Agency is God's action in the world that reflects and results from the consciousness of God. Judaism and Christianity call this God's will.

And because the universe is a closed system, the way we think of God's agency must change or die, because the present concept of divine agency violates the observable laws of the known universe - at least in terms of Newtonian if not necessarily in terms of quantum physics. What is more, any conception of direct divine intervention in human affairs must account for the apparent amoral (or immoral) caprice or indifference that prompted the Greeks to imagine a divine game of dice on Mount Olympus.

One handy fallback position invokes the tawdry "God's ways are not our ways" cliche, a meaningless attempt at theodicy that ignores the imago Dei aspect of the Jewish tradition and incarnation of the Christian conception of God. Philip Clayton calls God's agency the push of the divine Spirit communicating with human beings, who must decide to act or not on these experiences of divine nudging. I begin to wonder if our (religious adherents') inability to comprehend God's agency stems not from the inadequacy of our theodicy, but from a misapprehension of how agency might "work" from a perspective that takes seriously a spectrum of existence from quantum to cosmic.

To put it another way, I propose to consider agency from a perspective of unity of all existence, at all levels of existence. From such a perspective, the human agent ceases to be the primary referent for agency. In fact, such a unifying perspective not only allows for a reconsideration of divine agency, it transforms our comprehension of human agency itself.

Ironically, the best way for me to begin such a project involves reexamining our notions of human agency, as well as our notions of selfhood. My chief assumption about my own agency involves my creation of a reality outside myself that initially takes form within myself - in my mind or in my will. I think; therefore it is. I want to do something and I do that something.

I think of this process most powerfully in any act of creativity, art or handiwork. I conceive and design a bookcase; I build a bookcase. What I conceived in my mind, I brought into the reality I share with others as an object that more or less reflects my original conception. The act of composing a text (poetry, prose, or a play) involves this process of willing some idea into action or reality.

This will-to-action process serves as a basic definition of agency for any agent we could consider. Such a definition links agency to consciousness, which is why an inanimate object could not exercise agency. This definition also leads to the notion at any animate creature could exercise some form of agency - exerting some form of change on it's environment based on conscious or instinctive will.

But I do not have to explore the boundaries of this definition (sea anemones, a virus or plankton) to expose some serious dilemmas attendant to this definition of agency. And the immediate problem this conception of agency faces is the ubiquitous relational nature of all possible forms of agency.

Take for instance the example of an author composing a text. The language, grammatical conventions, style, form, models of inspiration, and potential recipients of the text (including the author) all precede and inform the text before the "author" conceives it. In the case of language, grammar, literary form, and cultural context, these preconditions of the text bind the text in a way that dictates what any author can conceive or create.

Any agency an author might exercise would be culturally and relationally contingent to such an extent that to consider the text solely the creation of an author-agent would require an act of Herculean myopic blindness in perspective. How else could any other reader ever understand or appreciate such a creation? Yet this blindness to relational and cultural contingency results from the ubiquity of the phenomenon itself: we can no longer see what pervades our existence. Here is the chief problem with our notion not only of agency, but of our understanding of the individual self.

Not only human will, but human identity lies in the vast context of relational and cultural contingency. We cannot comprehend ourselves other than relationally. Cultural norms and values define the spectrum of possible manifestations of self and give comprehensibility to any possible manifestation of self. Any personality trait lies within a spectrum of similar manifestations of this trait. We do not understand these traits other than in comparison these other manifestations. Any self is only comprehensible as a self in terms of it's relationship to others.

Thomas Jefferson Questions

Thursday, July 29, 2010
Smith Mountain Lake State Park, Virginia

Enough of that.

I wanted to write about my experience at Monticello before the trip is over. I want to write about several things that struck me about the place and about the man:

1. The ways in which we are trapped by our time and the ways in which we are able to transcend our time. It would also be important to think about the many ways in which my own time hems me in as well as creates new opportunities to launch me into transcendence.
2. The necessity of reading, reflection and tireless observation to feed a hungry mind.
3. The fleeting nature of achievement and what it means to truly succeed. Jefferson listed his top three achievements when designing the epitaph on his grave monument - serving two terms as president of the United States did not make the list. And on a related note - Jefferson listed his occupation in the 1800 census as "farmer" and felt profoundly humbled by his appointment to follow Dr. Franklin as US Ambassador to France.
4. The importance of designing one's surroundings to enhance creativity and inspiration (this is one of the most important veins of thought I'd like to pursue.
5. Jefferson's young wife died in childbirth near Vicki's age when she barely survived giving birth to Eli. If Vicki had died then, what would the widower Bo have to say to me now about my relationship to Vicki in the ensuing years of our life together? How could I keep this favor and my deep gratitude for it always before me?
6. How would I design a house tailored to my needs and aspirations? Where would I build this house?
7. What does it say about Jefferson that he bequeathed to Virginia a institution of higher learning, to the Library of Congress the bulk of his substantial personal library, but to his family a crushing debt that forced them to sell his beloved Monticello and nearly all of their belongings?
8. On a related note, I'd like to think some more about Jefferson's decision to build his house with a minimal stairwell and nearly useless dome room...

Now the fire is settling to embers and we are sleeping our last night in the woods on this trip before packing for home tomorrow morning. I'm standing fire vigil and getting a few last thoughts on disk before retiring with my family. We've had a great trip and coming home will be chaotic by comparison.

Misty Mountain Musings

Sunday, July 25, 2010
Misty Mountain Campground, Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia

We have holed up here for a few days (since arriving Wednesday night, late), mostly lazing around in the intense heat and humidity. We did get to Charlottesville on Thursday and took the walking tour of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Ate some ice cream afterwards. The kids spent some time in the pool here and have been glad to have the WiFi access and their iTouches and cell phones. I think we've all read a little bit, except for the boys.

Each of the four mornings we've spent here, I've gotten exactly what I came for - peaceful mornings by a little creek in the woods to read and think in silence, while the cicadas and birds sang to me their love songs. Most nights, Vicki and I have been able to walk together (though it's been a purposeful walk to get points). The kids seem to be getting along well together - especially Eli and Elijah.

We've taken a number of calls from people in our church - about someone threatening suicide, another leaving the church because we aren't the kind of pastors they wanted us to be, the sadnesses attendant to the dissolving of a marriage union, and whether to hold worship in the Grove this morning when it's going to be another scorcher.

For some reason, we have not felt too overwhelmed by this seeming inability to "get away" on our vacation. Thanks to the WiFi, I uploaded Ruthann's sermon notes and Pat's weekly announcements to the church web site on Thursday. Two things come to mind: the community of people we have come to love so much is never far from us, and we are indeed well away here in this place of serenity.

I've finished three books so far on this trip. The first, a collection of sayings of fourth century desert fathers edited by Thomas Merton, has profoundly reminded me of the necessity of humility and patience in my life. Oddly enough, a trip like this gives me the perspective to appreciate the wisdom of these twin foundations of an undivided life.

The second was a follow-up book by Dan Ariely on the nature of human irrationality. He stressed the value of testing our many irrational but cherished assumptions about life and human behavior. He also advocated apologizing, showing our appreciation for others, driving hard through bad experiences without pause, and breaking up good experiences so as not to get used to them and devalue them.

One thing he wrote caught my attention particularly. We often make decisions that repeat earlier decisions we have made, according to his research. We repeat patterns of behavior because we are creatures of habit, but also because we like to affirm things we have already done. When we make rash decisions in the heat of emotion, Ariely has found, we later repeat those rash actions without thinking - or even without the heated emotion that led to the original decision.

This pattern makes a case, Ariely writes, for thinking very carefully when we are angry or sad or carried away emotionally. And for sleeping on a decision we feel the need to make in the sway of these emotions. The decisions we make now set in motion a pattern for the future. We can escape this pattern only by the kind of deep introspection that we typically avoid in our daily life. Patience pays off rich dividends. So say Ariely and the desert fathers.

Another of Ariely's gems involved advice to anyone looking for love. He has little positive to say about dating sites, which cater to the needs of databases, rather than people, and which only confirm our bias for the appearance of beauty. Instead of comparing our statistics, Ariely counsels, we would be far better off engaging in virtual dates, sharing our thoughts and stories and learning about each other - as far as the online dating scene goes.

This counsel seems obvious enough. But it was the canoe metaphor that caught my attention. Ariely wrote that paddling together in a canoe places a couple in a strange and challenging social situation that enables each of them to witness how their potential partner behaves when faced with a challenge - and especially how they treat someone in a relationship when challenged. Very good advice. If they can't find a canoe, any atypical social endeavor would probably do.

The third book, Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," examined relationships from an entirely different point of view. In a vicious story, the love of a woman proves fierce and undying. Meeting such a woman results from grace, not planning. The love the results from such an encounter demands only gratitude and appreciation; it refuses to judge but remains true.

Extending Beyond Ourselves in the Body of Christ

There is a beyondness to life I have held in the hands of my soul. A place where the parallel lines come together (though I have not seen this place). Throughout human searching, we have posited this place in a far away realm, though there was one who taught that it encroaches upon us everywhere.

I have not seen this place, but the notion that we swim in it tastes of the kind of irony that calls to me (and that refuses to let me go). To say "beyondness" gives me a way to put my fingers on this relentless, undeniable itch of my consciousness - a maddening truth that eludes me just when I look for it, but that teases me like a cricket in the corner of my bedroom. I live in this place.

The Body of Christ and the Kingdom of God. The Way. These keys, these talismans create a framework for exploration, for exploring the beyondness. Yet for many they seem to stand for the end of the journey - they circumvent the journey altogether. We - all of us - can only attest to what we know. And some of us must guard the walls while others are driven to move out ahead in the darkness.

The Body of Christ holds together the grace of the incarnation, Immanuel; the sacrificial healing work of the crucifixion; and the miraculous hope of the resurrection, both in the person of Jesus (who becomes the Messiah) and in the lives of all who follow The Way. The last two cannot be teased apart - the resurrected body and the body of his followers and disciples - who have unfortunately come to be called (and who identify themselves as) merely believers.

Life in the Body of Christ goes far beyond belief. We who are members of this body do not accede to some principle or doctrinal concept. We give our lives entirely over to the will of Christ. I write in the general sense of this yielding, because not one of us can live each moment in the path of the Master. Yet his hold on us is fierce and unrelenting, perhaps especially when we attempt to thwart it and go our own way.

I offer this caveat when writing about anything (will, desire, identity) that could be construed as "mine": the Way of following Jesus the Messiah involves coming to know myself from God's perspective, reconstruing the way I understand who I am. This process leads to what Christians call "dying to self" and the miracle of "new life in Christ".

Jesus leads me to a larger comprehension of who I am - a relational understanding of myself as a member of the Body of Christ a body which encompasses all of creation, and not merely the church, or any subset of that creation). The themes of dying and rising again are typically thought of primarily in an ethical sense, but if the definition of "sin" includes this larger sense of life in God, then dying and rising "in Christ" contextualizes all ethical considerations (good and bad behavior) as manifestations of my understanding of "self".

Here is what I mean: if I understand my identity solely from my personal perspective, I also define "the good" from that perspective as well. Self-preservation and gratification become the highest aims and drive all my ethical considerations. In the epistles, this ethical behavior is called the way of "the flesh" and "captivity" to (false or distorted) desire. But if I understand myself as a member of the Body of Christ, the perspective of my desires enlarges beyond the narrow horizon of my "self" and I identify with the "other" (and by this I mean any "other") as part of my self.

Anyone who has experienced love for another person (or perhaps also for another animal, or even a special place) can attest to this enlargement of perspective and desire. As love grows, what begins as a largely selfish desire can expand imperceptibly but powerfully into life with and for another. The Prayer of St. Francis celebrates this love in the phrase "for it is in giving that we receive". When the desire of my partner (or friend, or child, or parent, or lover) conflicts with my own, we seek a mutual reconciliation, or offer each other the gift of subordinating our self-limited desire in order that the one we love might be fulfilled. Sacrifice is certainly one manifestation of this giving attitude, but so also is mutual fulfillment.

The Pauline correspondence includes a statement about a spouse whose desire is for her (or presumably his) partner. When my "self" becomes inextricably related to all "others" in the Body of Christ, my desire expands to consider the needs and concerns of others, in the spirit of a marriage partnership (a union where two are joined as one). As Paul writes, when one experiences joy or sadness, all experience joy or sadness in the Body of Christ.

This unity of identity, perspective and desire in the human community (and perhaps also in all creation - the community of the cosmos) relates us all to what humans have for ages called God. Jesus the Messiah lived in a constant state of awareness of his relatedness to God (a state he consistently called "The Kingdom of God") and invited his followers to experience the "drawing near" of this Way of being in community with others and, through them, with God.

The fourth Gospel includes Jesus' bold claim that he was constantly motivated and moved by the will of God: "The Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise (John 5:19 NRSV). This understanding of God's will involves not necessarily (or merely) knowledge we can know; those who inhabit the Kingdom of God experience life animated by God's desire - God's love for all creation and all humanity. Life in Christ cannot be reduced to a system of belief - it reorients my identity entirely in union with God and the whole of creation. And this radical reorientation makes possible a new life in Christ, inspired and empowered by God's love for all.

Dallas Willard, a contemporary Christian theologian, has defined the Kingdom of God as "that place where God's will is perfectly done". The opening petition of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples in Matthew 6:9-13 bears witness to the fact that "Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" and connects the concepts of God's Kingdom and God's will. Later in the same prayer, Jesus reverses the formula, where God's forgiveness of "us" reflects our own forgiveness of "others".

Like the Body of Christ metaphor, the Kingdom of God encompasses all creation in a cosmic perspective that redefines our identity. New actions and behaviors that reflect a deep respect and regard for others flow from this identity "in Christ". Jesus radically defined this new identity for his disciples by inviting each one of us to become a "servant of all". Thomas Merton, in his introduction to The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings of the Desert Fathers of the fourth Century writes: "Love takes one's neighbor as one's other self...It is hard to really love others if love is to be taken in the full sense of the word. Love demands a complete inner transformation - for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother [or sister]. We have to become, in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our own being, our own self."

Choosing to serve others involves a mastery over the delusion of our selfish desires that frees us to love others. Laying down (aside) our lives for the sake of God's love for the Other leads us to share in the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah in our lives. We become the Body of Christ dwelling in the Kingdom of God. Doing for others as we would have done to ourselves results from this expanded notion of Self - this behavior signifies that Jesus has accomplished the transformation of our individual, solitary life into the life of God. We are One, even as Jesus and the Father are One.

Kevin Roose Finds Friendship at Liberty

I recently read "The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University" which describes Kevin Roose's semester "abroad" at Liberty University in an attempt to bridge the gulf that separates evangelical culture from the mainstream. Liberty, the school that the Rev. Dr. Jerry Falwell built in the heyday of leading the Moral Majority movement, stands at Ground Zero of the culture war between Christian Fundamentalism and Secular America. Roose, a sometime Quaker at Brown University who assisted A.J. Jacobs writing "The Year of Living Biblically", spent a semester as a student at Liberty to search beyond the distorting stereotypes of evangelicals to find friendship and understanding.

Roose's ground rules (matriculate incognito and no cheap shots) dictated that this bridge crossed one way from his progressive point of view to the more conservative, dogmatic religious point of view. When Roose came clean and identified himself the following semester (during a return visit to Liberty from Brown) as an undercover writer, his friends at Liberty lamented the lost opportunity to reconsider the ways they might have cleaned up their act if they had related to him as an observer rather than an insider. That said, they trusted what they felt was a genuine friendship with "Rooster" enough to look forward to his book about his experience with them at Liberty.

That, and they grieve that he is not in fact a born again believer in Jesus.

The chief learning of this study involves the transcending power of friendship. If Roose fails to thoroughly explore the impact of some of the negative aspects of evangelical culture (e.g., tolerance for violent language toward homosexual persons and an educational model that stifles inquiry), he takes pains to describe Liberty students as a far more diverse, interesting and sympathetic group of people than their opinions reveal.

From the outset of his experiment, his family and friends fear that he will not be able to hide and will be singled out for ridicule. But their worst fears involve what might happen to him if he converts to evangelicalism - a fear Roose shares. In fact, he does convert to admiration for the power of profound support (love?) in this closed community. So while he refuses to cow to the young earth creationism taught at Liberty (one of only twelve post-secondary schools that teach it in America), he appreciates the depths of analysis involved in his Bible survey and religious and theological history courses. And though he cannot reconcile himself to the casual attitude about hostility directed against homosexual persons, Roose comes to crave the experience of love he feels when a Liberty student or professor prays over him.

During Roose's semester at Liberty, a student at neighboring Virginia Tech went on a killing rampage that prompted Liberty students to pray for healing for the victims (as well as interpreting the killing as a mysterious if troubling aspect of God's will). At the end of the semester, the legendary Dr. Jerry Falwell himself succumbed to a heart attack and died, days after Roose authored the last print interview Falwell granted. And as with the Liberty students themselves, Roose paints a complex picture of Falwell, ultimately praising him for his authenticity, even when that authentic style demonizes others in God's name.
Throughout the book, Roose wonders what will change in his life as a result of his semester "abroad" at Liberty. And though he is unwilling to acknowledge Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior by semester's end, he returns to Brown powerfully affected by his Liberty experience. A Liberty professor articulates for Roose the power he has experienced in prayer by telling him that whatever else prayer accomplishes, prayer changes the one who prays. This change and the experience of being cared for and loved when being prayed over, stand as the most powerful aspects of Roose's experience at Liberty.

The other major impact Liberty has on Roose involves the "liberty" inherent in the many restrictions of the "Liberty Way", a massive code of conduct restricting everything from movie watching to relationships between women and men. On the down side, Roose questions Liberty's hyper focus on sexual morality while ignoring social morality. Yet Roose acknowledges the freedom he experiences as he attempts to live within the confines of the highly restrictive moral code.

At Liberty, Roose enjoys waking up in great physical health on Sunday mornings, refreshed instead of dehydrated and hung over. And the Liberty dating experience, confined to chaste conversation and chivalry, opens up an opportunity to relate on a powerfully intimate level that sexual intimacy ironically circumvents, in his experience. Even the worship experiences, while not convincing Roose of the soundness of the ideology in the sermons, nevertheless draw him into an experience of being cared for by a community that surrounds him with support and calls him to join in their expressions of praise and joy.

When Roose reveals his ruse, his former friends at Liberty express their dismay only that he has refused to receive the gift of salvation in Jesus they have offered and with which they have surrounded him at Liberty. Even so, they encourage him to take the better parts of his experience as to season the "world" outside Liberty with salt and light. And though Roose will never again threaten passers-by with eternal damnation in order to evangelize them (as he did as part of a Spring Break evangelization team in Ft. Lauderdale), he does offer to pray for a friend who travels to a dangerous country.

Perhaps the saddest moment in the book involves a statement a Liberty student makes after a day of "cold call" evangelism. After negative encounters with nearly everyone she approached, the woman tells the group that she has resigned herself to a life isolated from the non-Christian community, whose members will shun and ridicule her for her beliefs.

Roose stakes his semester on the premise that evangelical followers of Christ can enjoy friendship with non-evangelicals and people of other faith traditions, or no faith traditions, setting aside their theological and ideological differences. The fact that he managed to do so only by posing as an evangelical student at Liberty fails to support his thesis. Yet Roose was certainly aware of the divide, and managed to enter into genuine friendships with most of the students at Liberty. And while he did not convert to evangelical Christianity, he returned to Brown having made peace that passes understanding.

Oil Spills, Prayers and Babies with Eyedroppers

The Louisiana legislature officially declared Sunday, June 20 a Day of Prayer in the wake of repeated failed efforts by BP and the US government to stanch the relentless flow of oil into the Gulf in what has become the worst environmental disaster in modern history. The lawmakers invited people to invoke the hand of Providence to heal this wounding of the earth and it's inhabitants because we have grown frustrated with humanity's efforts to handle this crisis.

This call to prayer prompts in myself and in our society an exploration into the nature of prayer and the God to whom we pray. We refer to disasters of this scale caused by storms as "Acts of God" regardless of our theology. Predictably, reaction from the New (read: "loud and proud") Atheists among us assumes the knee-jerk caustic tone of mockery and derision. God is a delusion, they say, and an infant sucking up an eyedropper of oil on the beaches accomplishes more than the prayers of any deluded multitude.

Yet religious adherents of any flavor would be hard-pressed to deliver incontrovertible evidence of the kind that skeptics demand that prayer actually "works". And it would be hard to imagine anyone, regardless of their religious fervor, who in their heart of hearts expects that the combined prayers of the faithful will in some demonstrably miraculous way turn the tide of this monstrous environmental disaster. More on that thought later. For starters, if prayers somehow moved God to intervene in a way wholly inconsistent from the way of the world in which this disaster occurred, we would be forced to contend with an incomprehensibly capricious God.

The skeptics compare the apparent passivity of prayer to action and agency (the ability to affect action) in the world. Entering this debate, I am intrigued and frustrated by the false dichotomy of action/inaction or cause and effect presumed by the principal antagonists. My love for God-in-others informs and in enriched by my search for Truth. I spend much of my time listening to stories of ways in which the practice of hope creates fertile ground for new life - in a symbiosis that transcends the boundary between the spheres of the physical and metaphysical. The Scriptural invitation to "pray without ceasing" recognizes the ubiquitous nature of prayer, not only in this boundary zone, but extending deeply into all realms of existence.

My daughter senses this symbiosis in prayer. We talked about the false dichotomy implied by the debate between skeptics and believers over the "usefulness" of prayer in response to the current environmental disaster in the Gulf. She suggested that the most powerful promise of prayer in this situation would be the creation of a sense of culpability and repentance in the experience of prayer. This experience of repentance, she believes, would lead to a communal response to this crisis and to the cultural practices that fostered it.

Prayer, in this perspective, serves as an analog to the efforts of BP to drill relief wells that will render the frantic, ineffectual efforts to cap the damaged wellhead moot. Like the relief wells, prayer holds out the possibility of reaching the foundation of a cultural pattern that has inevitably led to this current disaster. I join the skeptics in using the word "possibility" above because the practice of prayer cannot guarantee this broadening of perspective, nor can it determine the actions or effectiveness that might follow such spiritual and communal consciousness. Yet without this awakening, ignorance and chance must necessarily govern all "action", like leaving the cleanup to an army of infants with eyedroppers - the blind leading the blind.

We who follow Jesus the Messiah grope in this kind of darkness as well. Yet moments of clarity and vision dot the landscape of uncertainty, creating enough of a pattern and perspective - even a Presence - we are boldly hopeful enough to name God. Our prayers enfold us in God as they bind us to all humanity and all creation. The prayers of the faithful (and hopeful) create a vision that makes possible a life free from the prison of systemic evil. We hesitate because we know that the power of prayer lies precisely in it's relentless call to die to the blindness we confuse for sight in order to raise us to new lives in a realm where God's will is perfectly done.

In America we have learned to hedge our prayers by passing the ammunition (and in this case, the eyedroppers). Yet if this present crisis could catalyze something truly transformative, we (believers and skeptics alike) would do well to put away our childish notions of effectiveness and open ourselves to the possibility of new life in a vast communion that extends far beyond our garages and climate-controlled SUV cabins. What a tragedy it would be to simply clean up our mess while hurtling toward the brink of greater disaster in the blindness that causes this and many other disastrous collisions of unconsciousness.

So I will continue to live in a state of prayerful awareness and anticipation. I join others, skeptical and faithful, who have ceased a fruitless search for a bigger eyedropper. Though I am still captive in a world encompassed by myself and those I love deeply, surrounded by strangers and darkness, I have yet seen intimations of a larger, more comprehensive creation that refuse to leave me alone in my delusions. And with each moment in prayer, the realm of God draws nearer - and with it a new birth into a communion far, far beyond the confines of this womb of myself.

Holy Week 2010 - A Resurrection of the Body of Christ

During this season of Lent, I've been consistently invited into sacred spaces of waiting - with people who are dying to this life (and wondering without knowing what happens next), within silence together with other pilgrims not searching for answers but content with stillness together, experiencing worship itself as a pilgrimage (and enjoying the journey together), and waiting in the confusing timelessness of the hope of healing from an injury.

So much of this waiting is new to me - though it shouldn't be - that it feels in many ways like a new birth. This season of Lent, I have with the earth shaken off my slumber - even as my (limping) pace has slowed to allow time for silent waiting in the presence of God (?) that defies any attempt to contain or explain it (or even to claim it). As the earth leans again into the warming rays of the Springtime sunlight, I have been reminded everywhere I turn that while I can participate in Spring, I cannot hasten its arrival. So, too, with God.

Lent this year has been a journey of waiting - but as I have slowed my spiritual pace, I have begun to notice many things that escaped my attention before. As I have settled into places of tension in my life, and in the life of my family and church community,  I have found that submitting to the death of my attempts to flee or to relieve this tension in destructive ways has given rise to the realization that this tension will not kill me - it becomes a catalyst for creativity and abundant life.

I have begun to see the community of people gathered at Skyline for the treasure we are - by no means perfect but holding onto a vision of God's love for all people with passionate intensity and faith. Seeds that have been nurtured in the warmth of the tension we have experienced for several years now are beginning to sprout and to give some indication of the potential explosive growth in grace and love through our life together: in reaching out in love in many tangible ways to people in our surrounding community (people searching for sanctuaries of wellness, healing and recreation for the body and the soul).

Jesus, who invites us to this place of tension and creativity, paid with his life for his refusal to bow to the pretend gods of convention and compromise in his day. Yet he continues to invite us all to follow him into a realm of God's presence and power breaking in on all who are willing to wake from our contented sleep into a vision of a world where peace, love and merciful justice prevail. And because that vision conflicts constantly with our world and with our lives, to walk into this vision is to walk into unbearable tension. Jesus reminds us with his life and with his death that this tension cannot kill or silence us - only our fear of it.

Love binds us - binds the poles of tension to relate them if not to reconcile (or to remove) them. In this love we live and move and have our being. Jesus reveals this Love to us and calls us to life in Love - Love that birthed us into existence, and that now calls us into Life in all its Abundance. Follow me, he calls relentlessly and patiently. To the cross, where you will surely die to a false notion of your self-hood that hopelessly traps you in a prison of your own making.  Follow me through the cross and beyond, to a place of existence beyond yourself - to a place of being for others, of communion in that Body that transcends all dividing walls and participates in an ongoing ministry of reconciliation for all people - for all creation.

So don't let's rush too quickly into Sunday. How can we ever hope to interpret the emptiness we will find there unless we have watched and waited with Jesus, who knows and shows us to be the Way where he is going? It's Wednesday, time for silence. And tomorrow the time of our betrayal will come. Yet he will not refuse us a place at his Table, knowing what it means to dip bread together with us in a common bowl. Then the howling crowd, and the terrible silence of Friday afternoon, when he will have to die alone because we will have deserted him (not wanting to walk into that pain). And a Sabbath that forces us to rest in (an uneasy) peace. And then (we know) another week will begin. A dawning of a new creation as the Spirit hovers fitfully yet purposefully over the face of the deep darkness.

Let there be Light. And he will shine in us.

Skate Park Revisited - Meeting Tonight 3-23-10

We've got a lot to talk about tonight! Here's some of the things I'd like to share with you.

1. I was unable to attend the public planning meeting about the Newark, DE skate park on Paper Mill (at the Curtis Mill site), but you can sign a petition here in support of the park and see the plans options (Option 2 does not include a skate park) here.

2. I'm hoping that we can sponsor a Skate Jam (Day) on or near June 21, 2010, Go Skateboarding Day. The good folks at Switch Skate Shop in Newark, DE are interested in helping us by contributing some elements for use that day. Epworth UMC in Rehoboth  Beach, DE has sponsored several of these events, and one of their pastors, the Rev. Pat Laughlin, has passed along some good advice about how to run such an event that I will pass along to you this evening. Pat also put me onto a YouTube video called "Nowhere to Go" advocating a public skate park in Rehoboth Beach - like the one in Smyrna, DE.

3. If you don't already know about it, Family Life Church has been running a Skate and BMX Park under 141 in Newport, DE for over 12 years. For the past few years, a group in Wilmington has been raising money for a public skate plaza in Wilmington near the Blue Rocks stadium. The guys at Switch told me that some skateboarders in our area like to go to a privately run skate bowl constructed by a Christian in PA (20 miles from here) who runs a ministry called threesixteen skateboarding.

4. Even putting together a day-long event requires some careful planning to avoid what skatepark planners call the "Crashup Derby Factor" (poor arrangement of elements that contributes to skater collisions is what our underwriter is most concerned about). I ran across a site called Skaters for Public Skateparks that has lots of info about planning a park and ordered a Public Skatepark Development Guide for us to take a look at. Last summer, we saw some skateboarding elements in a campground in Wisconsin made by a company called SunRamp. Switch skate shop can also help us with plans for elements.

5. If all of this seems a little overwhelming, consider this: there are scads of kids in our area who like to skate - and very few places for them to do so legally and safely (think of the many "No Skateboarding" signs the litter our public spaces). Sakteboarders already use our parking lot to gather and skate. I have driven through Deacon's Walk streets so crowded with kids on skateboards and their friends that I had to stop the car and wait for them to part. Churches that want to offer skateboard facilities typically do so with a price tag attached (attend Bible study in order to skate). I'd like to think that at Skyline, we offer people Christ by living his love in such a way that people won't have to be coerced into falling in love with God.

In short - the time is right! Thank you for being a part of this dream.
Bo

The Inside Scoop for "Let it Snow" Sunday

Sermon Notes for Luke 6:43-45

Key verse: Luke 6:45 “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart.”

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Our passage today comes from the section in Luke called the Sermon on the Plain and is parallel to the more familiar Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. Here, Jesus talks about the nature of discipleship as more than just words. He invites us into a relationship with God which will change our hearts and in turn change our behavior. Recent studies on religion show that Christian leaders used to believe that the change pattern began with belief: believe, behave, belong. In other words, people believe in Jesus first, which changes the way that they behave which in turn gives them a feeling of belonging. However, postmodern people prefer to belong first; they long to be in authentic relationships which then impact how they live. The pattern now looks more like this: belong, behave, believe. As people relate to others and get a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, they begin to live differently which then leads to seeing life differently, through the eyes of belief. Jesus seems to imply this relational-based pattern here: a relationship with God changes our hearts which changes our behavior and then leads us to see Jesus for who he really is. Faith involves more than just saying the right words or believing the right things or even keeping the right laws. Instead, the relationship with God changes the very essence of who we are.

What does this have to do with our topic on measuring success? Many times we become tempted to succeed at all costs because it makes us look good and we think we can do good things. But, if we lose our integrity in the process, we accomplish nothing. We may all nod our heads in agreement with this, but living it is harder than it seems. The world does not reward doing what is right; it rewards doing what is profitable and what looks good. So, we find bankers facing lawsuits because they stretched or withheld the truth in order to make profits. What about ourselves? Do we cheat on our taxes because it gives us more money? Do we step on people in order to promote ourselves? What is the cost of all of this? Jesus also asks: “What good does it do for a person to gain the whole world and lose their soul?”

So, how can we keep our soul intact? Jesus says its about bearing good fruit, which comes from a good and healthy heart. In reflecting on this passage, several others come to mind. Read the verses below and reflect on how Jesus may be calling you to cultivate the love in your heart in order to be successful in heaven’s eyes.

Jeremiah 17:10 (The Message) “I, God, search the heart and examine the mind. I get to the heart of the human. I get to the root of things. I treat them as they really are, not as they pretend to be."

Matthew 7:16-20 (New Living Translation) “You can identify them by their fruit, that is, by the way they act. Can you pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree can’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit. So every tree that does not produce good fruit is chopped down and thrown into the fire. Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions.”

Matthew 12:33-35 (New Living Translation) “A tree is identified by its fruit. If a tree is good, its fruit will be good. If a tree is bad, its fruit will be bad. You brood of snakes! How could evil men like you speak what is good and right? For whatever is in your heart determines what you say. A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart.”

Psalm 1:1-3 (New Living Translation) “Oh, the joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or join in with mockers. But they delight in the law of the LORD, meditating on it day and night. They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do.”

Ephesians 3:16-19 (New Living Translation) “I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.”

Ultimately, then, we do not make our tree good; a relationship with Jesus does. It changes our hearts and our lives, our actions and our beliefs. Then, we find true success in the eyes of our Creator. How might Jesus be calling you to cultivate this heart of love? How can you spend time basking in that unlimited resource? How can you let that love overflow into your words and actions and relationships daily? How can our outer lives reflect our inner hearts?