Living Complete

I grew up in half-finished houses.  In many ways my family lives up to its name: We are the Morehouses, those in more houses, all of them far from complete.  In fact, our home in San Pedro is the most complete home I have ever lived in.   In large part because Frances is a doer and not just a dreamer.  She dreams one day and it’s done the next. 

 But growing up there were always bare studs in some addition, a pile of sheet rock, a box of nails, half-finished foundations, as if to call us on to work until we die.  The fact is we never finished any home I lived in until now.  It seemed to be a badge of honor for my New England family to not finish what they had started.  That sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote “People wish to be settled; only so far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”  By that standard I grew up around a whole lot of hope.

Our lives will end without being finished. There is wisdom in accepting that we are finite beings living in a finite world, and that is somehow very  freeing.  

This all came home to me when we went to see a financial planner.  She asked me how much longer I planned to work.  “I don’t know, forever?” I answered, “after all a lot of people depend on me”.  She said “Let me re-phrase that.  How much longer do you think you will be able to work?  You are at your working prime right now” she told me, “but twenty years from now, not so much.  What if you get sick?  Or lose your, er, mental capacity?”  Now she was scaring me.  But it was a real moment of theological truth for me.  I wasn’t going to work until I dropped, not that I wouldn’t try, but eventually, I just won’t be able to.  We all have to stop, even my Dad who retired at 80!  We are finite beings and isn’t that really a good thing?

If all I did was try to keep working, and made no room for the next generation, when would my ability to share wisdom cease to be more important  than just being in the way?  Our living is made complete when we step out of the way to let others finish what we have started.  That is what I have learned.  And whatever happens beyond this life now is not for us the living to worry about.  The point is to live and let live and then to steward others behind us to take our place at the hammers and nails of life.

With Grace and Grit,  John

After Each Storm

We hardly need reminding that life is precious and fragile.  On Friday I attended the funeral for 43 year old man who died from a staph infection.  He left behind his wife and their three little children.  This family had been members of my church before moving away.  It is hard to imagine the grief his wife and children are feeling.  His widow's storm, her grief is so immense that she can only breathe for now.  Still she is surrounded with love and family and friends.  For now it is enough but not by much. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, Dave Rickard a UUA consultant  and dear friend who was just with my church two weeks ago, died suddenly.  What is it that gives us the strength and peace of mind to weather such storms as these and those so much greater in our own lives? In three words: Time, Imagination and Friends.

For everything there is a season, turn, turn, and we have turned once again.   Those who do choose to stay through real weather storm seem to be of two kinds.  The first are the young adults too young to appreciate nature’s power.  The second are the older ones who think they have the right stuff.  There are times when it is important to stay through the storm.  When what we gain by the trial is greater than the suffering of it.  All of the great saints endured some storms.  There are times when we need to struggle to the other side.  And there are times, most like this one wherein we have little choice.  Time heals but it also calls us on.  It was Hippocrates, that great Greek philosopher of medicine who wrote, “Healing is a matter of time but it is also an opportunity”.  In every memorial service I conduct I make note of the opportunity this passing has for us the living.  For those of us left after the storm has passed, there is an opportunity to share the same compassion that was shown to us during it all.  It’s more than just making us stronger; it’s about stretching our capacity for love through the tragedy itself.

I must admit that as a younger man I had less understanding of aging and death.  I do now.  I understand and I appreciate what a struggle and blessing time in body can be.  As we become older we fuse with time and trouble, Confusion is really just fusion of a body failing with a mind free to wander and remember.  And in that memory we understand the power of just living, and it is enough. (James Hillman The Force of Character)

It’s very freeing really.  Once we accept the fact that we are going to die we can get on with living in the time we have, storms and all. Here I apply what I call my “theology of persistence.”  As the psychologist Albert Ellis put it so poetically “the art of love is largely the art of persistence.”  To understand the place of the Holy in our lives we have to wait until after the storms of life to find the meaning in living.  Meaning is more often found after a storm, at the end of the dark night than before it.  This is why I sign off so often with the paradox of grace and grit; grace for the everyday miracles of being alive, grit for staying alive long enough to make it mean something.

With Grace and Grit,  John

Finding Inner Peace

I am actually by nature anxious about the world. I worry that we won’t have enough to go around.  I worry about my children.  I worry about you all as well.  My entire spiritual practice is built around trying to find and hold peace at the center of my life.  I meditate, I walk, I read, and I breathe, deeply.  I have come a long way.

Recently I heard a story from my colleague Rev. Denis Paul about a boy who was very anxious.  It was his first day in first grade, in a new school.  He had hurried to get to class and had forgotten to go to the bathroom before he left home.  He knew he had to go but he didn’t want to be singled out, so he tried to hold it in.  His new teacher, kind soul that she was, saw him fidget.  Just then, without any warning he could feel his leg warm with the very accident he so wanted to avoid.  He hadn’t been able to hold it in.  He was mortified as the yellow pool gathered under his desk.  He knew he would be the laughing stock of the whole school.  

Just as he was about to raise his hand the teacher, picked up the fish bowl from her desk, walked purposely down the aisle and pretended to trip dropping the fish bowl, water, goldfish and all, at the feet of the boy.  Water went everywhere including onto his lap and all over the floor.  The teacher apologized profusely and other kids went to get towels and helped to clean it up.  Someone saved the gold fish.  And suddenly the boy, went from the potential of deep shame to heroic victim. 

It’s not so far from a scared little kid who has an accident in the first grade to being a community leader if we understand that at the center of life is peace; glory and grace be to that impulse which still beats within us. As Lao Tzu put it so poetically:  “The one with outward courage dares to die; the one with inner courage dares to live.”

With Grace and Grit,  John

In His Memory: A Easter Meditation

When I searched for Easter at the library, the first three sources listed had to do with bunnies and children’s stories.  Not that those aren’t important. Chocolate and lambs and eggs and bunnies are all ancient symbols of fertility in keeping with the original intent of Easter, the pagan celebration of the earth goddess Ostre whose holiday was appropriated by Christians in the second century. Easter can be confusing.  Some of you remember the little Unitarian girl who was attending a Lutheran pre-school.  The teacher asked her little class what the holiday of Easter was all about.  One little boy raised his hand and “Isn’t that the day we have fireworks?”  “No” replied the teacher “that is the fourth of July.”  Another boy raised his hand “Isn’t Easter when we eat turkey?”  “No” again said the teacher “that is Thanksgiving” Growing more impatient, she heard from two other children, about Christmas and Halloween.  Finally the UU girl raises her hand, “I know” she says “Easter is when Jesus died on the cross, was placed in the tomb, and on the third day the stone was rolled away, and he emerged and if he saw his shadow there would be six more weeks of winter.”

Bunnies and groundhogs aside the Christian meaning of Easter is clear: Jesus has risen! Easter is the primary story in much of the Christian church. This morning, I want you to lay aside your own skepticism as to the factual truth of this event and journey with me into the powerful metaphors it has to offer. The Christian Easter story is a powerful one. The march of Jesus into Jerusalem, the show down at the temple, the last supper, his betrayal, his arrest and his trial are all powerful symbols of our own lives. I ponder the brutal crucifixion and those who stayed by his side (all of the women if you remember), I think of his cry of anguish and the death. I think about the tomb he was laid in, and the huge stone that was placed over the entrance.  After the Passover feast the women went to the tomb to anoint his body only to find the great stone guarding the entrance rolled away and man….dressed in white…and he said unto them “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here…” (Mark 15-16). 

We actually don’t know what happened to Jesus and his body.  Crucifixion was a brutal tool of execution and oppression by the Roman Empire.  Jesus died on the cross, not as atonement for our sins, but for his radical and seditious message that the first shall be last and the last shall be first in the coming Kin-dom of God.  It is highly unlikely that the Roman authorities gave him a trial before the Jews, even more unlikely that his body was laid in empty tomb.  Much more likely, Jesus was dropped into a common grave, in the so called Potter’s field which was occasionally set on fire to dispose of the corpses.  Much more likely is the lament in the Gospel of John by Mary Magdalene, his closest disciple who cried.  “They have taken my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:13).  Her anguish, so familiar to so many of us, is the anguish of a world lost in her love for the man who showed such promise.  I can imagine Mary wailing that Proverb of Ashes from the Book of Job to the disciples: “Your words are only proverbs of ashes; nothing but clay.”  A fitting agony in a field of carnage, at the base of a cross which had taken the life of the one she so loved.

So the question becomes this on Easter Sunday:  If Jesus body is lost to history, a proverb of ashes, what did his life mean?  What was truly resurrected in his memory?

I would offer you this:  Jesus embodied the hope that all will be well again.  That suffering will pass and life restored in this or another to come.  I offer you the possibility that we are made new by being together through our struggles towards a new day, a new season, a life yet to be lived.

Happy Easter, John

Jesus Saves

Much of Christianity today is marred with the belief by the general public that Christians only care about whether your soul is going to heaven or going to hell.  The fact of the matter is that many Christians believe in the more welcoming message of Jesus; that those who are suffering will find peace especially if we do our best to bring the world of love into being.  Too often we equate Christianity with the hate filled messages of the Westborough Baptist Church which believes that homosexuality is a sin punishable by hell fire for eternity.  Sadly these misguided adherents picket the funerals of people they don’t even know and proclaim the deceased if gay is going to hell.  That emphasis on the saving nature of Jesus – either you believe and are saved or you don’t and you are dammed – is a much later development in Christianity.  Many, if not most Christians I know, believe in a kinder Jesus, a Jesus that shows compassion and radical acceptance.  Christianity is in the process of recovering this older version of Jesus.  “For many younger Christians the “born again” experience is only a beginning. What follows is a long term process of applying the teaching of Jesus into the here and now” wrote David Kirkpatrick in the NY Times (“The Evangelical Crackup?” 10/28/07)

Still this punitive message of Salvation isn’t without history. 

Jesus and Satan had a discussion as to who is best at writing theology. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest, with God as the judge.

They sit themselves at their computers and begin. After having each read 437 books they are pretty sure of their ability to write their papers. They type furiously for several hours straight. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over.

He asks Satan to show what he has come up with. Satan is visibly upset, and cries, "I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out." "Very well, then," says God, "let us see if Jesus fared any better."  Jesus opens his word processing program and there is his paper - in all its perfectly sourced glory. Satan is astonished.

He stutters, "B-b-but how? I lost everything, yet Jesus' paper is still there! How did he do it?"

And God replied, "Jesus saves." (thanks to Katie Culbert, for her paper “Jesus Saves” Meadville Lombard Theological School, March 2013)

In fact, Jesus saves is an older understanding of Christianity one brought about from the idea of original sin promulgated by Augustine in the fourth cent.  The earlier message was one of forgiveness and re birth, the lamb and the baptism, the heroic in the face of adversity.  The early churches were small communities held in people’s homes.  The service included a baptism, a cleansing of those who are new, a washing of the feet of the strangers, much like the new pope will do this Thursday in an Italian prison.  The first pope to ever do this.

This kinder Christianity of the first and second century was made real by desperation so many felt at the hands of a brutal empire.  Tax rates for peasants were upwards of 60% of their earnings and harvest.  Rents from the rich extracted the rest.  There was no health care, pension or disability of any kind save what families could do for those in need.

Jesus brought a new message of redemption and with it an early religious movement bent on reversing the social order:  the first shall be last and the last shall be first.  He proclaimed that the kingdom of God was coming to earth, “like the son of man on the clouds of heaven” meaning for everyone.  We too often jump to the later Christian understanding of a harsh and punishing God who sends babies to hell because they have not been washed in the blood of Jesus but the early Christian movement and the Christianity that I believe is being resurrected is very different.  Imagine the poignancy of hundreds of poor Palestinian Jews lining the dusty road into Jerusalem shouting “Hosanna” literally “save us” to a gaunt young man seated on a donkey riding straight faced into the center of the city, eyes set with firm determination to face his death.  His donkey rode across a road of palm leaves (thus today Palm Sunday) a traditional sign of royal honor meant to lessen the dust of the road.  Here was the ‘messiah’ literally the anointed one who would bring forth the kingdom of God on earth.  Its been up to us to bring about this kin-dom ever since.

With Grace and Grit, John

Better Loving Through Marbles

About a month ago as I was going through some of my father’s papers in an effort to get a handle on his memoir which I promised him I would finish for him, just before he died.  In it I found a picture I must have made for him for father’s day.  Two stick figures playing marbles.  

You see my dad loved to play marbles and he tried valiantly to pass on that love to me.  He gave me bags of marbles over the years, and while I could appreciate their beauty and smoothness I could never quite feel the thrill he did.  Marbles were just not my thing.  But they were his thing and I wanted him to know in my seven year old mind, that I appreciated his love for marbles.  That he saved this picture is remarkable.  This is the folder where he also saved my report cards from the school in India (high marks in English, poor marks in math), newspaper clippings of my various business endeavors, articles I had written, some of my first sermons (which were pretty rough) and this most outlandish proposal I made to him to help me raise $300,000 to build a wind farm in Iowa when I was 26.  Marbles I realized were a symbol of his connection to his own childhood through me, his eldest son.  And that little drawing was my way of saying; I love you, even though we are so different. 

Love and justice. Life and death.  Last week I preached about how we can’t begin to change the world unless we can first find the brilliance in our essential brokenness.  Love is understanding this essential mystery.  Love is first seeing that you are broken and then going on. I realized this as I read through what my father had saved of my life; in it were letters I had written him in love, a few in anger and one or two in deep grief as I struggled with the breakup of my first marriage and the loss of my business.  In other words, his love was seeing – and holding on – to all I was.  That is the meaning of love.

And for my father, as for me, there is a direct connection between that love and the work of saving the world, the work of justice.  As I a young man and a new father, I remember asking my dad why he did what he did; why was it that he was out saving the world anyway?  His answer surprised me: "It’s really quite selfish", he said, "I am doing this to make a better world for you and my grandchildren".  His answer was honest enough despite its incongruity. Dad wasn't exactly a family man.  

Isn’t that what we really want? To leave the world a better place for our children even if they don’t love marbles?  George Dowdell once wrote: “Love without justice is sentimentality, Justice without love is legalism.”

Think about it.  For those of you who have struggled in your relationships (that should be all of you by the way) have learned all too well, Valentine’s day cards and candy are sweet but being respectful of the ones you love, sitting by their side as they are fading, caring for those you know who need you, is what really counts.  That is justice with love.  And that is what marbles represent to me.

We are broken, we are imperfect, but still we try to make the world better with love.  And trying counts.  It really does.

With Grace and Grit,  John

Broken and Called

I met David just two weeks ago in Hawaii where Frances and I were guests of her sister and family.  We had signed up for an All-Terrain Vehicle trip through the rain forest in exchange for listening to a sales pitch to buy a time share.  We had no intention of buying a time share mind you, but this was the dance of comedy we had to make.  The ATVs started off and we were bouncing along merrily in the jungle until we came to a waterfall which was down a steep embankment.  The ATVs were all parked and it was then that I noticed David swing his legs by his hands over the side and pull out two canes from the back. He was barely able to walk. He hobbled down the embankment with the rest of us and some of us (well only two of us, myself and my brother in law Jim) jumped into the ice cold water under the waterfall.  We then dried off and headed back up the hill.  We waited a long time, because David could not climb back up the hill, and was pulling himself up backward on his fanny with his hands.  I had never seen such determination.  When he got to the top we all cheered.

Later over lunch, I introduced myself and asked him what had happened.  “I used to teach Sky Diving” he said, “but my chute opened too late and I broke my back.  I was pronounced a paralyzed from the waist down, a pronouncement I refused to accept.  For the next five years I willed myself to walk again, not like I did of course, but I manage.”  I realized then that the ATV trip was perfect since he only controlled the vehicle with his hands.  “This is my son Garrett” he said, and I introduced myself to a young man of 17.  They were on an adventure together.

He asked me what I did for a living, a loaded question to be certain.  “I am a minister” I said.  “Oh” David replied with a frown, “I don’t believe in God. I am an atheist” he said almost defiantly. “That’s fine” I said “Many members of my church are atheists, for all I know I may be one too. I probably don’t believe in the God you are thinking of either” I replied.  This really threw him for a loop.  He hadn’t expected that kind of answer.

He asked me about my religion and I told him that for most of us, God is not a chess master who causes tragedies like his, but rather a force we work with to make the world a better place.  “Well, I could never believe in a God that what do this to me or in some plan that makes me climb back from the edge like I had to do.  It wasn’t fair or right.  I suppose I am still pretty angry.”

“Perhaps you are God” I said, “perhaps you are own force of will and change is divine” He thought about that for a long time.  “Perhaps” he said, “but why did this happen? It was a freak accident. God is supposed to know these things, isn’t he?” “I don’t know what God knows David.” I said, “But I know you have some fierce power to overcome this injustice to your life.  And that, for me, is God.  And, you are showing the world, your son, most of all yourself that you have the power to go on even when your life has been broken.”

As we said good bye, he gave me his card.  “If you ever want to go Sky diving” he said, “this is my company”.  “You still sky dive?” I asked with amazement, “Only with a partner. But I teach people to sky dive every day.”

Here was a man broken, even angry but sure in his resolve to undo the injustice that life had dealt him.  I don’t know if he feeds the homeless or stands for immigrant rights but I do know that his faith in the power of his own humanity has stood in the face of justice and fought back, despite being broken.  All of us are broken and all of us have the power to reclaim our brilliance as an act of justice making.  All of us live within the paradox of being both broken and called.

With Grace and Grit,  John

The Light Has Gone Out

It is a haunting tale. 

 The little match girl was sent out every day by her abusive father to sell matches on the street which the family made in the hovel of a home. If she did not return with all the matches sold and money in her pocket she was beaten. It was a cold, cold day before Christmas and the little match girl bundled up as best she could against the wind and the snow. “Matches for sale, matches for sale” came her weak and tired voice over the wind. 

It was so cold. No one seemed to be buying matches that day, as if they would all blow out if they bought them. Try as she might she had not sold a single box. Hungry and exhausted she found shelter from the snow and wind in a doorway. She couldn’t go back home without selling at least some of her matches. She tried again “matches for sale, matches for sale” but no one stopped. The rich hurried home to their warm homes in this dark time of the year.

The little match girl so cold, so hungry, looked into the widow of one the houses on the fine street she was on. There were lights in the windows and inside people were warm and a great feast was spread on the table. And around the table were people, well dressed and warm and laughing. A girl her age was there. Oh, she longed to be there. She ached to be in that room. The wind blew again, but the light in the window didn’t even flicker. 

She stepped from the window, finding the shelter of the doorway again. She was cold, so cold. She knew she couldn’t go home so she lit one of the packs of matches to stay warm. They glowed against the fading sun, warm in her hands. Ah, it felt so good. The little match girl lit another pack and this time she closed her eyes as she felt the matches warm her face. She imagined herself inside the lovely house, feeling the warmth of the fire. It felt so wonderful. When that pack burned out she opened her eyes and suddenly she remembered where she was and the cold returned. So she closed her eyes again and lit another pack, and now she imagined she was once again in the house with the light in the window eating all the good food, turkey with stuffing, potatoes dripping with butter, peeling back an orange she felt its sweet spray in her face, it all felt so good. The pack of matches died again but this time she didn’t feel the cold, in fact she couldn’t feel anything but her fingers holding that burned out back and the glow on her face.

She had only one pack now, and she closed her eyes and lit it again, transported into the room with a light in the window, warm and well fed and the little match girl remembered who she really was, not poor and cold and alone, but here in this family. She was home. And they remembered her! They called out her name. She felt home and she stared out the window beyond the candle into the snow beyond. It was so good to be home.

They found the little match girl’s body the next morning. All the matches had been burned and lay in a pile by her feet in the doorway. She had a smile on her face; she had found her way home.

Hans Christian Anderson’s story of the little match girl is perhaps the most troubling story of the Christmas season. Some have seen it as a justification for a better life in the hereafter for those who suffer in this. While in some sense that may be true, I find it instead to be bitter testimony to the tragedy of poverty. I think there is a deeper message which incorporates both the spiritual release and indignant justice this story suggests. 

 And it has something to do with a light in the window. John Turrant in his book The Light Inside the Dark writes “Everything new needs to be held, needs a place into which it can be born. The container which hold is character…character is the vessel which holds our swirling selves. We do not always have a say in all that befalls us but we do have a say in the shape of our character…” As the little match girl dreamed her character as a brave little girl transformed her in spite of all reality.

And of course, we need an even brighter light with the horrific murders of 27 people, 20 of them little children who will never see the light of their earthly homes again. Our hearts ache for the families, for the loss of innocence, for a country that still allows this madness of gun ownership to trump the rights of the innocent to come home ever again.

The light has gone out. It is up to us to light it again.

With Grace and Grit, John

Coming Home to Buddha

With the second of our Four Horsemen of the Holiday Apocalypse behind us (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's) we contemplate the place of home in our lives. 

Throughout this month we will be exploring the meaning of home from its promise through its disappointments. There is so much expectation packed into this time of year that it is little wonder many of us teeter on the edge of a breakdown. Whose home should I go to? Where do I go if I can't or won't go home? What should I bring to this season of giving that feels like home? How can I even afford to give at all?

Normally, I would be contemplating the advent of Jesus' birth this time of year. Rest assured, there will be a place and time for that, But let me first suggest another prophet equally suited to the holiday season: The Buddha. The Buddha taught that the root of suffering in the world was our expectations of how life should be. And aren't expectations the very reason for this season? The holidays should bring me joy but I feel worry. The holidays should bring me gifts but I only feel the guilt of not being able to give. The holidays should make me long for home but I am not even sure where home is. It is so easy to be disappointed with the expectations of this season.

So this holiday season I say RELAX. Less things, more people. Less worry, more joy living in the present.  Be in community, enjoy the company, the music and the food. Make this your homecoming.

With Grace and Grit,  John

Invited to the Feast

Remember the story of the Good Samaritan? 

A young lawyer, a Hebrew Scholar concerned with Torah asks Jesus  “Who is my neighbor?” to which Jesus replies:  "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and left him half dead by the side of the road.  Now by chance a priest was going down that road and when he saw the beaten man passed by him on the other side.  So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed him by  on the other side of the road.   But a Samaritan, as he journeyed came to where he was and when he saw him, he had compassion and went to him, bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, then set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn and took care of him…And the next day he took out two denariie and gave them to the innkeeper saying “Take care of this man and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I return”.  Which of these three, Jesus asked, the priest, the Levite or the Samaritan, proved neighbor to the man who fell among robbers?  And the lawyer replied  “The Samaritan, the one who showed mercy upon him”

Most of us have heard this story before.  But how many of us have thought of the story beyond its moralizing and guilt ridden message.  All of us, myself included, have crossed the street to avoid the panhandler.  And what do we feel?  Guilty.  To get the full impact of what I have to say we have to have a little biblical context.  Jesus’ choice of characters in this parable was intentional and courageous to his first century audience.  The priest, the very image of purity for Jews, was charged with upholding the law.  And part of that law included mercy and compassion.  It was the height of hypocrisy to suggest that a priest would not help the fallen.  But perhaps, said the Jews of his time, the priest was late for the temple.  

Well what about the Levite?  Well, the Levites were one the 12 tribes of Israel who traditionally acted as subordinate priests and functionaries in the temple.  They cleaned up after the slaughter.  So they were a little less holy than the priest but still pretty pious and bound by law, a common man with divine intentions.  But the Levite passes by the fallen man as well.  So along comes the Samaritan.  Now what made this story so very outrageous is that the Jews had utter and absolute contempt for the Samaritans.  Samara was a little country between the northern and southern halves of Israel not too unlike Palestine today. Samara retained the “mixed blood” of Jews and Babylonians who had intermarried. It was, in Jewish eyes, a pigsty of half breeds.  So for a Samaritan, a stranger, to help a fallen Jew, while his fellow Jews passed him by was outrageous.  Not only was it unclean, it was an insult to Judaism.  But then again Jesus wasn’t known for being subtle.

All of us has crossed the street to avoid the panhandler. I would hope that we are mature enough to have a conscience that moves us towards pity.  The meaning I am looking for here is actually a deeper one.  Why was it that Jesus picked an alien, a real stranger in his midst, to help the fallen?  What was he trying to say?  I believe the deeper point is this: helping those we know may not be enough, the true calling to our humanity is to help those who are not like us, the Samaritan helping the Jew, the American helping the African, the Democrat helping the Republican, the Unitarian Univesalist helping the Christian.  Not agreeing with, but helping.  I believe the deeper point to this parable is that we are all invited to the feast of life but it’s up to the rest of us to be sure there is a chair.  And we need to find more chairs. 

 And remember, it may not be about  you.    The hospitality we enjoy is not just a nice meal.  A feast of the spirit. We are called to search for the chairs, to welcome those to this feast, yes, even if we don’t agree with each other.  Isn’t that the real story of Thanksgiving?

Charles Eisenstein wrote a fabulous book entitled  Sacred Economics in which he talks about money not as evil but as a blessing.  Up until the advent of modern capitalism, people used to take care of one another in communities.  Now we hire it done.  Money has come to no longer represent our best intentions but our fears.  We need more and we hold on to more.  I have personally given away several fortunes in my life and each of them has been returned to me.  Eisenstein talks about money as the grave of the commons.  What used to be the commons of our community; cards, friends, taking care of each other’s kids, caring for the elderly, has become something we pay for.  Communities are spiritual commons, a place wherein we can be fed and feed others not just physically but emotionally with greater meaning.  Isn’t this what we are all hungry for?  A place where we are welcomed as we are and affirmed? 

Yesterday, I served at the Habitat for Humanity build site in Lynnwood working with people of other faiths to renovate a home for someone in need.  The reason I think Habitat is so important is because it pulls us out of our comfort zone and helps others to sit at the table of love.  Mildred Fuller and his wife were fabulously wealthy and utterly miserable, their marriage was on the rocks, they had lost their faith until they heard of this idea to build and renovate homes for those who were the working poor, a hand up, not a hand out.  Over 500,000 houses later, HfH is going strong here and in 91 countries around the world.

Would any of us be willing to take the homeless to the nearest hotel and put them up with Breakfast in the morning and put it on your Visa?  I sometimes do this for people in need.  Some of you have gone to extraordinary lengths to help those you don’t even know. It feels right.  You get double green stamps on the Karma scoreboard for helping.

But what if those we are helping to find a seat at this feast of life aren’t like us?  What if you knew that the person you are helping supports my country right or wrong, prayer in school and is against abortion?  Still willing to help?  Put it another way, what if we had to invite the wounded and struggling of our society to live in our home?  Really.  Because that is what Jesus was asking the rich man to do:  sell everything you own and give it all away.  It’s much more than just saying we are open.  We actually have to be open to the other.  It makes true Christianity much harder than we hear it portrayed, what was it that G.K. Chesterton said? “It isn’t that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, it is that it has hardly been tried.”

For me the essential meaning of this parable lies in the idea of the stranger.  Perhaps our greatest human fragility is not greed or fear but strangeness.  The word stranger, means different, at odds with the whole, as in the word, estranged. The antidote to the fear of the stranger is to make their acquaintance.  Those Mexicans, those Christians, those whatever, are not those if they are sitting with us at the table. Its one thing to be invited to the feast, but quite another to come and be searching for a chair.

What would it take for us to accept and honor another’s belief in say their profession in Christ?  How would we respond to someone who is here, perhaps right now, wondering if they are saved from the hell of their own lives?  We carry much more pain and struggle than most of us know.  I know, I am your minister.  But are we really open to hearing from each other and the those new in our midst about what pains them

Beyond that there is much more hospitality to be done. The point is to invite each other to the table of life, this table we call this church, and to be open to what they bring.  We cook the turkey, others bring the fixings.  Finding a seat means being willing to scoot your own fanny over a bit and share the chair.

Invited to the feast .  Its about each of you.  Some of you will have family to gather with this week Some of you will wish you didn’t have to have family over.  Some of you will share thanksgiving with our own Sandy McNeil.  Remember the ideas behind our Guest at Your Table drive.  Everyone needs a seat at the feast.  Live and let live.  Learn to see the familiar even in those  you know perhaps too well.  Listen to what they love, relate to them on that common ground, say a blessing in the name of universal religion; love, the great commandment of Jesus.  Don’t be afraid to talk politics, or religion.  We have much to say about what is right and wrong even if we don’t use the same book. You too can speak that truth.  But listen as well.  That is what it means to find a seat for someone else. And for those who are not with family this Thanksgiving, take heart, we are your family.  There will always be a seat here.  We are not strangers once we have met.

We are surrounded by so much, sometimes we forget why we really are here.  Or as Saint Francis de Salle wrote, “whom do we love least?  That is the degree to which we truly love at all’  (adapted).  We are here to change the world, one stranger at a time, whether it is in this church, in our homes, or in our neighborhoods.  Strangers aren’t strangers once they find that chair at the table of life and you can be the one to pull up a chair.

Happy Thanksgiving, John

Expanding Faith Against Evil

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and the storms of division preceding our presidential election, I offer the following reflection from last Sunday's sermon about the nature of real evil and our response to it.  While I don't believe nature commits evil acts, our human response to natural tragedy depends upon which side of moral divide we place ourselves.  Most of the time we are well meaning, good doing creatures, but we have the power to submit to the dark side of our natures.

There is no evil in who we elect as our president only in the prejudices and the hurtful acts we attached to these men.  Evil is real and it resides in our own hearts.  What we do with that evil is the place of faith expanding.

"Our faith is expanded when we fight against evil. Yes, I said good and evil. Let me start with evil. Regardless of where you think evil comes from; we have to believe evil exits. It is not merely the absence of good. It is a force unto itself. The perpetrators might not call themselves evil but the taking of innocent life is the worst manifestation of wrongful doing. Evil exists in our world. Accept that as a faith statement and face it squarely.  Now the question is what can we do about it? This is the place of good. We believe in good. 

Who hear remembers the story about the Old Italian couple who planted new grape vines in a vineyard they would never see to fruition in the shadow of a coming war? The impetuous young man walks by and asks “Old man, why do you plant what you will never taste the fruit of?” The old man smiles and says, “I plant because the good never dies”. 

As we work towards justice I commend to our faith the belief that while we may never see the fruits of our efforts in this life time or even our children’s children's lifetime, we move the arc of the universe forward but acting and being good. This is why we do teach a moral code here. It’s not the Ten Commandments but its close. (And it’s certainly not the Ten Suggestions as many jest we would have if Moses had been a UU). 

We hold good and right these virtues; honesty, compassion, humility, courage, and the freedom to choose. I can say I would defend those virtues to my death. I hope you would consider that as well. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the human heart” wrote Alexander Solzenitchen, it is right that we believe and act in the good so as to keep the evil as bay."

Happy All Souls Day,  John 

When Elephants Weep and Dolphins Laugh

Growing up in the woods of the New York’s Hudson Valley, I never spent much time thinking about “nature”. It was just “the woods”, a place to get away from my sometimes sad existence as a rather inward and awkward young boy. I spent countless hours walking through the woods, gladly not yet suburban, and hopping odd streams, swinging at trees with sticks and climbing large rocks. When I did have friends over we would head into the woods, to play fort, army, or Indians. As always our dogs were with us. The Nature was a part of my life, much like cars are for us adults today, an extension of me.  I was Nature, not the same nature as a plant or bird, but of that same Nature.

It hasn’t been that long in the march of history for us to have gotten to a place where we now worship this “thing” called Nature. Our hilltop sanctuary, is revered for its sweeping view of the canyon, the red tailed hawks soaring over head. We have moved in a broad anthropological sense from seeing ourselves as no different from Nature,  Native people’s anywhere, to an exploitation of Nature, bequeathed to us by some biblical injunction, to the necessity of worshipping Nature as if this thing were inert.

I have always been of nature, even now, which is why I need occasional sojourns into the wilds to remind myself of that.  And part of my nature has always been dogs.  I grew up with dogs, two dogs, always two to keep the other company.  Cats too, but mostly dogs.  Dogs are domesticated wolves, and contrary to myth, they are more comfortable in families, than in packs.  In fact, Temple Grandin, a professor of animal behavior and an autistic, points out that most packs of dogs have just created their own families. And dogs not only have an emotional live, they are, I am convinced deeply spiritual.  Animals have souls, as any one of you here today with a pet can tell, but it wasn’t so long ago that Christian Orthodoxy taught they didn’t; after all wasn’t the devil portrayed as half beast?  Think about it, after all dog is god spelled backwards.  Maybe they are gods, laughing at us all the way.  One flea turned to the other on the back of a dog and said, “you know I am beginning to wonder if there really is a dog”.

Mammals and possibly reptiles and other sentient beings have not only emotions but a spiritual center that they teach us from.  Elephants never forget, which is why they are known to weep, dogs inspire us to our better selves, “be the person your dog thinks you are”, dolphins laugh, which is one of the reasons I live here and walk along the ocean, and cats, well, they call us into humble servitude don’t they.  As the author Jeff Masson puts it “Perhaps one central reason for loving dogs is that they take us away from this obsession with ourselves. When our thoughts start to go in circles, and we seem unable to break away, wondering what horrible event the future holds for us, the dog opens a window into the delight of the moment.” (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs)

Temple Grandin in her work, Animals Make Us Human, outlines a fascinating dichotomy that we share with all sentient beings, almost Buddhist in its simplicity.  Animals, including us humans, make meaning from two or three competing emotional states, on one side, such emotions as Fear and Mortality and on the other Curiosity and Play.  We need both the positive and negative to survive.  The negative helps us survive, the positive helps us thrive.  Big game animals that are allowed to roam and explore are vastly healthier than those who are kept confined.  I personally boycott zoos.  I find them cruel and, here’s an ironic word, inhumane.

Animals are so important to us, and not just for food or research.  They actually remind us to be fully human, fully faith full to the project of protecting life and community.  And animals remind us of the sacred power of that common ground between surviving and thriving that we call a community,

With Grace and Grit,  John

Crossing Borders

There are many kinds of borders we are asked to cross in our lives.  Borders of class, relationships, jobs, cultures, age, and religion to name a few.  In many ways all of us are immigrants crossing borders, if not temporarily, then more subtly.  

I think of my friend Tom, who came from an upper middle class family, his father was quite wealthy.  Tom went on to college fully expecting to work in the family business.  Until his dad died in car crash on his way to visit him.  Tom, whose mother had died years before, now was alone, with a new found wealth which he quickly squandered.  He crossed another border literally when he came to California and tried to rebuild his life after the drugs and the booze.  Married, divorced and finally married again.  He lives a very quiet life as a therapist helping hundreds of people cross the borders of their own lives.

Of all the borders people are challenged to cross, crossing a country’s borders is the most dangerous of all.  Immigrants whether they are documented or undocumented have little if any of the rights that we as citizens take for granted.  No habis corpus, no right to a trial by jury, virtually no appeal.  Documentation only lessens the danger, and of course, undocumented workers face even more troubles.

Every day, thousands of migrants, risking their lives and in terrible conditions, cross borders to reach the land of their dreams. What attracts people to migrate are the lifestyles, the commodities of the rich countries, the ability to earn money to buy things and to escape from poverty.. In the contemporary world, despite the current economic crisis, the lifestyle of people in the rich countries is the prevalent paradigm.

Crossing a physical border into a land where you have nothing in hopes of a better dream is an act of courage.  How many of us, as American Citizens wish we could cross a new border into more meaningful work, safety from economic calamity and the realization of our dreams for our own children now?  How many of you?  I know I do.  We have six kids and all of them face more uncertainty than I ever did.  Is it any wonder those who are worse off than us materially, cross our borders?  Isn’t this a matter of human survival and worth?  Ultimately, isn’t that what we are talking about? As the song goes, We aren't crossing the border, the border is crossing us.

With Grace and Grit, John

Called to Good Work

Labor Day means something more than just a celebration of organized workers…it is a holiday that celebrates work.  

All of us need to work, no matter what our age.  And as our retirees know all too well, work doesn’t end when you retire.  You may not get paid money for it but you do get paid, and you can live a tremendously busy and fruitful life up until the day you die.  As the Catholic mystic Matthew Fox put it “There is a priesthood of all workers (all who are doing good work are midwives of grace and therefore priests) and this priesthood ought to be honored as sacred and workers should be instructed in spirituality in order to carry on their ministry effectively.” (from The Reinvention of Work, 1995)

When we think of work, we too often think of it as a function – what we do to get “it” done – and so the vocae of our souls are left to chance.  We may or may not find meaning in what we do for money.  The problem of our modern working life has less to do with efficiency and much more to do with the lack of meaning in what we are called to do. Repetition of tasks, whether they be with our hands or with our heads pushing paper and keys from one place to another robs us of the meaning we crave. 

It is never easy to reconcile these contradictions in our lives.  The better paying jobs are more often than not the ones that lie at the edge of what we value as a people.  

Single parents who struggle to raise their families and not quite so able to just give up a well paying job and maintain the environment they want for their children.  

I do believe that money does make a difference in raising a family.  But I am asking us to examine the gap between what we do and what we value.  And just as we should question making money at a job that has little meaning to us, we need to also question making enough money at a job that does have meaning.  It is a tragedy that some of our most socially beneficial vocations pay far below what the people do them need to live on. 

Answering the call to good work, then, is doing what we find meaning in.  “Right work” wrote the Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh “is the result of being present in the moment of doing”.  Whatever we are doing becomes meaningful when we pay attention to all that the work means.  The process of working, whether it is paid or not, whether it is your vocation or your occupation, it is a spiritual opportunity. 

With Grace and Grit, John

Swimming Towards The Light

Just before I left our island home to come back to California, my granddaughter Iris, who has a fierce devotion to living things, found an injured frog at the quarry where we swim.  She was on the far side of the quarry, and storm clouds were rolling in.

“Grandpa”, she yelled, “I need you.  This frog is hurt and I can’t swim across with him in my hands.”  

So I dove in and I swam with all my might.  Iris jumped on my back with injured frog in hand and we swam across the quarry as hard as we could.  I could feel my own limbs burning against the water, and her own little heart racing with passion and purpose as she held my neck with one hand and a wounded frog with the other. 

When we reached the other side, rain drops started to fall and everyone clapped.  Either for our passion, the drama or perhaps just for the frog.  The frog found a safe haven and we dried off and I thought of my Dad who had just died, of any of us who go through the storms of life with passion and resolve.  We can do it.  

We were made to do it.

We dream of how the other could change, or perhaps how we might change, but at the end of our lives it won’t matter how many titles we held, how much money we had, what accomplishments we saw.  What will matter is that we went through the storms with only a glimmer of light that tells us to hang on. Just keep swimming. 

With Grace and Grit, John

Going Through the Storm

We were on our way back East, Frances and I and Madeline and our blind pug, enjoying a glorious day in Yellowstone.  Driving along the glacier lake, I was seized with a sudden urge to go swimming.  “Pull the car over” I asked Frances.  “Where?” she said.  “Anywhere… by the shore.  I… I need to go swimming.”  So she did, a little off the road.  I got down to my skivvies and jumped in the icy cold water.  I thought my heart would stop.  I came crashing to the surface and when my breath came back I yelled as loud as I could “YES!”.  God that water was cold!  I climbed out grabbed my clothes, dressed and we were on our way again.  “Odd decision” my lovely wife said to me.  “Yes” I agreed, “odd”.  Not sure why I felt so compelled to do that.

About an hour later as we neared the end of the lake, my cell phone buzzed,  we had been out of range, it was a message from my brother.: “Call me now”.  We pulled over along the shore.  I had just enough of a signal to get through.  “Dad had a heart attack about an hour ago.  While swimming in the pond.  He’s in a coma.  I need you here.  Now.”  I told him I was on my way.  I would find an airport and fly to home.  As we came out of Yellowstone down the Eastern side of the Rockies into the rolling prairies of Wyoming, I was on the phone for the next hour, finally finding a flight out of Billings, MT two hours to the north that would connect me to the Twin Cities and onto New England.  As we raced through the open prairie, my thoughts raced through a thousand memories, many of them having to do with water.  My father and I share a great love for water, he for the ponds and rivers of New England, me for the mighty oceans we spend our lives near. 

Just then, as we were driving, a storm came upon us.  Not one of those placid storms but a real drencher.  A gully washer as they say.  It rained buckets. Lighting and thunder.  “Should we pull over?” asked Frances.  “No”,  I said, “we have to through it.”  Through the storm, with determination and passion.  I was so glad she and Madeline were with me and with such calm as the storm in my heart raged as much as the skies around us. 

I caught my plane in Billings, and in Minneapolis and then to Hartford.  As I turned on my phone taxing to the gate, there was a message from my brother.  My dad died while I was in the air, above the storm clouds.  He simply slipped away.

As I drove from the airport to the hospital in Northampton, MA I suddenly realized what had happened.  I dove into that glacial lake in Yellowstone at the precise moment that he had a heart attack swimming in pond in Mass.  Our hearts had passed through the storm.  His heart was all done now after 83 rich years.  Mine still beating through the many more storms before me.

With Grace and Grit, John

Standing Up for Love

I arrived late Saturday night  from Phoenix and our General Assembly of Unitarian Universalism, a gathering of the tribe, replete with drumming, dancing, laughter and, this year, more than a few tears.  There are always tears at GA, in part because of the realization of the wounds of our world and the great work we have before us.  It might also be due to the heat this year, where the average temp was well over 100 degrees. Its a dry heat but then so is your oven. I had a small part in the process that chose the site although my advice was anywhere but Phoenix. It was between Long beach, downtown LA and Phoenix, oh, and hell, hell was also on the short list.

This was the year we marched in support of our undocumented sisters and brothers in protest against SB 1070 right up to Sheriff Joe’s tent city door.  It was immensely moving.  Stories abound of the grace of love and strength that came from strangers meeting to protest the human and civil rights abuses the State of AZ visits upon its Latino population.  One of the most moving stories came from ayoung man who had served in the Marine Corps but was jailed unjustly for DWM –Driving while Mexican because of the color of his skin and because he didn’t happen to have his license on him.  What are we to make of those who have been lost by our confusing and painful times?  In some ways I believe our country is in a new cold war of values, between those who sincerely believe that a rule of order and religious values should override the rights of those who look and act differently and those who see the role of government to help others.  It’s still a war and in the end nobody survives intact without all of us picking up the pieces.  Regardless who wins in the election.

As I was walking back to my hotel, I was approached by a homeless man who asked who all these yellow shirted people were.  I told him we were Unitarian Unversalists and we were here to protest SB 1070 and call for the humane treatement of those detained.  He smiled.  He had friends who had been arrested.  It wasn't right he said.  And then he asked me for five dollars.  As I handed him the money, I  thought how much of a difference it makes to show up and stand up for love.

With Grace and Grit, John

Grace. Period.

Amazing Grace is my favorite hymn.  I really can’t tell you why.  It was my mother’s favorite as well.  The tune, the words, have such a stark truth they haunt me.  “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me” (although we of course give you a theological choice to change wretch to soul, but that is another sermon for another day). John Newton, the son of a Methodist ship captain who had squandered his fortune as a young man found himself conscripted aboard a slave ship.  Through hard work and because he was white, he won his freedom and made captain, now himself plying the evil trade for many years.  On a return trip to Africa, facing a tremendous storm he prayed for deliverance , with the promise he would give up the trade if saved.  The storm abated and Newton kept his word for the first time in his life.  He married his long lost love and became one of England’s most ardent anti-slavery proponents of his age.  It would take such later activists as William Wilberforce  in parliament to eventually undo the slave trade in England and it took a civil war for it to end here.

The words we sing are altered for UU Sensibilities and are frankly somewhat tame.  Grace will lead us home, sure enough, but the fourth stanza of the original is much stronger “The Lord promised good to me, His words my hope secures, He will my shield and portion be, as long as life endures.”

That line gets to the heart of what makes grace so powerful for Christians.  God has promised us a gift, no matter what we are or have done.  We Unitarian Universalists assume that we are not the wretch the song proclaims nor do we need to be saved, we even  have our doubts about God.  But despite this, I still believe Grace is a powerful idea especially now.  The real power of the song and the idea is that we are always given another chance.  And sometimes, when we least expect it or even earn it we are given some gift, if only the breaking of hope when days are dark.

We belittle grace by assuming that only we have control over events.  After all we are a religion of deeds not creeds.  We end our service with the words “now the service truly begins”.  But doing good in the world does not negate grace.  Grace happens.  You need a solution, the phone rings and someone has an idea.  You don’t know how you are going to pay the bills and you receive a bonus, or even a job offer.  You have learned you are dying of cancer but your family heals and comes together because of it.  Grace happens all the time.  Some will call it chance, or serendipity, but I like Grace better.

Sometime grace even comes through suffering.  Many years ago I was invited to lead a service for “Families of Murdered Children”.  The service was outdoors in a park. During the service we would plant a tree.  During the service I noticed a lone man standing at the edge of the park.  The service, very moving, ended and everyone left except for this young family.  I knew their story, they had lost their three year old son to a drunk driver.  This was their first service of this kind and it was very hard for them.  As they stood and turned the mother gasped, staring at the man across the park, her husband’s fists clenched, this was the man who had killed their son.  Slowly the lone man walked towards them, I was trying to play through what I would do if this turned violent.  He stopped about ten feet away. Tears were streaming down his face.  He whispered with as much voice as he could manage.  “I’m sorry”. The silence which followed could have birthed triplets.  The husband put his arm around his wife and nodded and the man turned and left.  The mother broke down.  The whole exchange lasted less than two minutes but changed me forever.  Here I understood what Newton meant when he said, “I once was lost but now am found”.  Not that the killer or the family or anyone was saved, just found.  Found their humanity again.  Found life.  Grace given and received just like that.  Grace. Period.

As the Dutch theologian Henri Nowen observed “Who amongst us doesn’t want to come home?  Who amongst us does want to be forgiven?” Forgiveness is what helps grace along most of all.  John Newton’s father never forgave his son for squandering his future.  God and perhaps even Newton forgave himself for the evil he had done.  More importantly, grace was made real as Newton worked to undo what he had done.  In the period between failing and rising again, grace happens. Sometimes grace lies just inside a new day.  One of my favorite poets W.H. Auden wrote of grace “In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start, in the prison of his day, teach the free man how to praise.”  Amazing and mysterious and as old as time, grace comes unbidden to each and every one of us.  “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun.  We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, Then when we’d first begun.”

With Grace and Grit,  John

Faith in the Post Modern Age

I believe that post modernism is destroying us. It has robbed us of the generalist view that allows for cross disciplinary solutions both in fields such as medicine but also in education and even ministry. I am buoyed by recent attempts in universities such as MIT and industries to look at the world in something larger than our little box of concern. In fact, our own Mercury project, a collaboration of three or four committees towards the end of growing our church is most decidedly not post modernism. Protecting our turf is. Post modernism makes us cynical and culturally sterile. After all, what can I do about global warming? Isn't that a national policy problem? What can I say to someone who is suffering from depression? Shouldn't they see a therapist? Yes, they should. BUT WE can still provide hope, faith that they don't travel alone by simply listening. We used to call that cheering up, some call it friendship. WE CAN still plant this garden and march in the streets. WE CAN still write elected leaders. WE CAN in fact, do a lot more. With faith.

And faith is my answer to post modernism. The simply profound and utter belief that WE can make a difference by simply acting, witnessing and doing. I titled this a faith in the post idea age; because I do believe post modetnism has one thing right: most, if not all the great ideas, have already been thought. What we are doing is post idea work, re-working, re-invigorating ideas to make them new and that is tremendously powerful and useful. You do this all the time at work. You hopefully do this with your families; when relationships breakdown, we try to re­invent them building or- the same love which was always there. That is the faith: to believe that old ideas, if they approach wisdom, can be re­done in new ways. Unlike post modernism, OUR faith must embrace not the particularity of relative belief but the meta-narrative of such luminaries as Albert Schweitzer, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson all Unitarians, who believed that humanity was as a whole basically good and worth saving.

Sure we live in a world of Facebook, internet and twitter. But could we imagjne these as sort of a new front porch? What if there was a way to say, "howdy neighbor, would you like to come in for Some pie and coffee"?   The point is this: we are still people, who can work together, who can think about old ideas in new ways, and who can, with a little faith, solve the most complex problems around us.

With Grace and Grit, John

When Easter Interupts

The story of Easter, whether Christian or not is a story of suffering and meaning making.  When Jesus died, when any of us die to some part of our life that is no longer, our world is interrupted.  His disciples, his followers, the women who were so much a part of his life were shocked, bereft and lost.  How do we make sense of his suffering, our own suffering, how is it possible to be re-born in this life again?

I think the real answer to that question is how we look at suffering itself.  Suffering in and of itself is never good.  This is what the church had so tragically wrong; there is no redemption in suffering.  But suffering’s interruption can teach. Not always for the sufferer but those of us who respond to that suffering with compassion. “To live the moments we have and not grieve the moments we lack” as the poet Gilbert Friend Jones put it. 

What was reborn wasn’t so much a physical Jesus as a different reason to go on with life in spite of the suffering. When tragedy strikes us, when our life is interrupted, we are forced to come down off the cross of fear, climb out of the tomb of despair and face the new reality

With Grace and Grit, John