Putting on a Robe of Grace

I have found the time leading up to Thanksgiving to be one of the most reflective times of the year. It’s the time of year to don the robes of grace that have made us, good, bad or indifferent as human beings this past year and look ahead bravely to the future.

Our life is marked by sorrows and joys, but it is largely behind us, and I find it helpful to look back on where the journey has taken us, me and you. 

Those sorrows and joys, those unbidden events are all invitations to accept the grace of God and enter into the next year of your life.  The point is to live into the future, lean into the possibilities that are beyond what has past, and in so doing remember that you are alive.  While my daughter Fiona and her family still lived in Hood River, OR we hiked up a trail head to a waterfall far into the Columbia Gorge. We literally had to scramble up a dam of giant pines, 20 feet tall, and wade through a freezing stream up to our waist to reach this waterfall.  I love water, and so I tore off my jacket and my clothes and down to my shorts stood underneath that mountain water. I was reminded of what Annie Dillard once wrote:

“What does it feel like to be alive?

“Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly backup, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling! It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through time and the beauty and grace of God, reminds you that you are still alive.”  (From Tinker at Pilgrims Creek)

I stepped out of that waterfall and Francis handed me my jacket which I donned as a robe of grace, still warm from her body, for I could only stand under that waterfall for a few minutes.

Living in the presence of life is like this.  Most often we live our lives at the edge of the waterfall. Occasionally, we feel compelled to step in either because someone has a great need, or a death is impending, or life has dealt us an unexpected loss.  Then is when we are most alive.  And when the uprush is done, and we step away from that waterfall again, we feel the glow of grace that is our life.

I am told that child birth is much like this.  A woman is being pounded by pain so intense she can barely hold on and then comes a child, a baby Jesus of her own, and there is a glow unlike any other. We don’t need child birth to be reminded that there is grace waiting to be worn. We need simply look around this time between the years to see what was, acknowledge it and look ahead.

Perhaps the greatest exercise of grace in our lives is when we find the room to accept those who are different than us, whether they are gay, straight, poor, homeless or politically different.  Facing grace is learning to make room for those who not only believe differently than we do but who are radically different than we are.

A surprising statistic has emerged in recent weeks; there is one demographic group which is seeing a rapid increase in mortality. White middle aged men who are not college educated. They are dying at an alarming rate. What are they dying from? Drug and alcohol overdoses, diabetes and heart attacks. But as Steven Williams Mayor of Huntington, WV told NPR, these men are really dying of hopelessness. With so few jobs, men who used to support their families are taken to alcohol and heroin as a way out – and they are dying of overdose and related deaths. In a passionate interview Mayor Williams said, what we need to do is hold on to them, through drug rehabilitation, social services and human contact, we need to hold on and not let go. (adapted Morning Edition, NPR 11/6/15) We need to drape a jacket of love over their shoulders.

 This Thanksgiving, who will you wrap up in a robe of grace? Who will you step up to and offer a drape of love and forgivness?

With Grace and Grit, John

Thanksgiving Grace

“Martin Luther King Jr. had been dead 11 days. His assassination fresh on her mind, Harriet Glickman, a teacher raising three kids in suburban Los Angeles, sat down at her typewriter.

"Dear Mr. Schulz," she wrote, "since the death of Martin Luther King, I've been asking myself what I can do to help change those conditions in our society which led to the assassination and which contribute to the vast sea of misunderstanding, hate, fear and violence."

Mr. Schulz was Charles Schulz. Glickman thought the creator of the popular Peanuts comic strip could play a small part in promoting tolerance and interracial friendship by including a black character in his strip.

She sent off the letter, not expecting a reply.

Schulz did write back, to say he had considered her suggestion. But he worried that if he created such a character, black parents might think he was condescending to their families.

With Schulz's permission, Glickman asked two of her black friends to send him some ideas on how to make a black character relatable. A few weeks later, the cartoonist responded.

"You will be pleased to know that I have taken the first step in doing something about presenting a Negro child in the comic strip during the week of July 29," Schulz said. "I have drawn an episode which I think will please you." (Adapted from Morning Edition 11/6/15)

Just like that, Franklin was born. And on Friday the Peanuts movie opened.  This is a sermon about wearing grace like a garment of light. Harriet Glickman offered her ideas to Charles Schultz as a coat of grace. In this one small corner of the world, she said, won’t you offer some change to relieve the mighty struggle of racism. At first Schulz declined, but then when further encouraged, he accept that grace, that gift of respect and raised a small ladder against the tall white walls of segregation which were all very high.

As you know I write and preach often about grace, the unexpected gifts of life that seem to beckon us on to daring rectitude.  I named my blog facing grace, as well as my upcoming title; because I believe we need to stop excusing this good fortune as good luck, accept it as an unbidden call for a new and better world.  People who use their wealth or good fortune to make the lives of others better are called by a more cynical world foolish.  Generosity is so often mistaken for careless wealth.  And while it is true that some will take advantage of that generosity, far more benefit from it than we realize.

It’s about making room for Grace.  Just grace.   Allowing for grace between the moments of our lives in which we are the takers out of necessity, and when we are the givers because of gifts we did not expect. Grace opens us up to the possibility of change. We practice Grace in so many ways, from comforting a friend, to serving this church, to serving our larger community. We continue our commitment in this coming year to partner with the Beardsley School, Mercy Learning Center and our work with a village in Kenya. But grace is far more than just receiving and giving of our abundance, it is allowing for a large enough heart to recognize those who need love and acceptance. What I have found in this darkest time of the year is that as the contemplative Richard Rohr says “All grace comes precisely from nowhere—from silence and emptiness, if you prefer—which is what makes it grace. It is both you and yet so much greater than you at the same time, which is probably why believers chose both uprushing fountains (John 7:38) and downrushing doves (Matthew3:16) as metaphors for this universal and grounding experience of spiritual encounter. Sometimes it is an uprush and sometimes it is a downrush, but it is always from a silence that is larger than you, surrounds you, and finally names the deeper truth of the full moment that is you.”

I have found the time leading up to Thanksgiving to be one of the most reflective times of the year. It’s the time of year to don the robes of grace that have made us, good, bad or indifferent as human beings this past year and look ahead bravely to the future.

Our life is marked by sorrows and joys, but it is largely behind us, and I find it helpful to look back on where the journey has taken us, me and you. 

 

With Grace and Grit,  John 

The Truth Can Set You Free

Several years ago I met a woman who had been imprisoned within a cult.  She recalls how she and her husband believed that they had been saved by this pastor who persuaded them to give everything they had to the church.  They slept in a communal house.  They would work at jobs but turn most of their income over to the pastor.  They would spend their free time preaching on the beaches.  She started to get sick and she couldn’t understand why.  She started to have nightmares.  Finally, a friend from work convinced her to see a doctor.  It was the doctor who started to figure out that she was imprisoned by this predatory truth.  She told her to leave the church.  But to leave the church would mean she would have to leave her husband.  Finally, she found the strength to do that.  And yet, she was afraid and lonely and hungry for community.  She wandered into my previous church.  She sat in the back.  She left right after the service. I would come up to her and ask how she was but she didn’t want to tell me.  She told me later she was afraid of me.  Not me but pastors who controlled people.  Finally, she told me this story.  We met several times as she worked through the false truth and the only real truth which is that what she believes shouldn’t be coerced, shouldn’t be punishing.  True faith is freeing I told her, we are free to ask questions, to explore, to doubt and to find a community like this one that accepts her as she was. 

 

Our truth in the open nature of the Spirit, in love and compassion freed her from the truth of sin and damnation and self-loathing.  As my friend Alan Taylor puts it “it’s not so much what your believe but how you live your life that matters.” She was with that UU church for about six months, and then she told me she was moving to be closer to her sister.  She said she would attend a UU church there as well.  We helped to save her life.

 

What communities such as this one do believe in is the pursuit of truth, with a small “t”.  That is the faith we share and that our new members have joined with us in. Not a belief in the Big T truth, but in the pursuit of that truth that helps you live a better, more generous, and more integrated life.

 

With Grace and Grit, John

Out of Many, One

“So you’re a preacher” he said. It was late about 9:30 in Chicago and it was cold, the January wind tearing at my jacket. I was standing on a train platform waiting for my two hour commute back to northern Indiana where I lived. I told him that I was a seminary student and yes, I was a “preacher”. “How about that” he said, “a man of God.” I didn’t have the heart to clarify just what kind of God he thought I might be a man of. But then again, it didn’t matter. “Just great, just great” he said, “I’ve always admired a man of the cloth”. He continued, “Just found Jesus myself” he said. I shifted, not sure if my discomfort was with the wind or where this conversation was going. My new found friend went on in great detail: he was a bricklayer, he was on this third wife, he had six children and was finally in AA. As he explained his conversion I couldn’t help but notice the sound of contentment in his voice, it was almost contagious. That was a difficult year for me: I was struggling over my new identity, with the death of a close friend and with this expansive faith of ours which required such a broad knowledge. I yearned, I admit, for a simple faith, perhaps the comfort of Jesus.

As we boarded the train together, he naturally sat down right next to me He pulled out a well-worn copy of the bible and recited his favorite passage from the Gospel of John, “No one shall come onto the father but through me.” I knew that for him this meant that he was already in the arms of a loving God. That in the end, with all his troubles, he would be all right. I have come in the many years since this encounter to feel and know what it is about a simple faith in Jesus that is so refreshing and comforting: If you believe you are saved than there is nothing this world can do to you to hurt you more than for a moment. This kind of faith is not about reason, it’s about feelings. Many of us don’t understand this allure.

But this man understood. He was quite sure of his own salvation. And equally worried about his sister’s soul. She was a Muslim. “What about you, Reverend? What church do you belong to?” he asked. “I’m a Unitarian Universalist” I replied, trying to let the 10 syllables fall out of my mouth slowly. He was quiet for a moment trying to recall where he had heard that before. Then the gleam of recognition, “Oh yeah, I got a friend who is into the Unity stuff – real spiritual.” Alas, we fall again to the arrows of misrecognition. I started to explain the difference, but his stop had arrived and he thanked me and got off. 

Perhaps just as well. I would rather have him leave with that warmth. Many days have passed since that cold night. Many more sermons, deaths, births and doubts and I am still before you, a humble servant of the spirit, searching as you are for that faith which will sustain us; the faith of a community like ours with so many different beliefs. A faith that out of our many paths we will find one faith, one theology, a meaning to which we are that draws us together in more than just a freedom to believe.  Because my friends the freedom to believe is not an end, but a means to an end, still and always in process before us. We come here out of many branching streams to find ourselves in the current of this beloved community bound by covenant to one another.

With Grace and Grit, John

The Promise of Forgiveness

On Oct 2, 2006, Charles Roberts IV, a milk tanker driver, distraught over the death of his infant daughter, pulled up to the West Nickel Mines Amish school house in Southern Lancaster County, walked through the door carrying a semi-automatic pistol and ordered the teachers out and the boys to carry in lumber from his truck before ordering them out. He then ordered the ten girls age 13 to 6 on the floor and barricaded the door. In less than 45 minutes just as the police stormed the schoolhouse Roberts shot all ten girls, killing five and wounding all the others before turning the gun on himself.  The horror of this shooting stunned a nation. The Amish, the most devout of the Anabaptist peace churches seemed the last safe place for children in America. There are no metal detectors, no phones and on that warm fall day the door was wide open.

The grief of such a tragedy effected everyone; the close knit Amish community of Georgetown, PA, the police, the non-Amish, Roberts’s widow, Amy, indeed the entire nation. And yet, within 24 hours, even before the girls had been buried, representatives of the Amish Community came to the Roberts home to express their forgiveness for Roberts. Reports of this forgiveness further stunned the country. Most of us found it the most courageous and powerful testament of faith and humanity they had ever encountered. More than one editor asked how would our lives been changed if George W. Bush had forgiven the hijackers attacks on 9/11.  Others were not so sanguine. Some commentators remarked that it was too soon to forgive such a crime.  That such forgiveness would only excuse evil acts. Some complained that the widow was not the one to receive such forgiveness. Nevertheless, the fact remained that the Amish of southern Lancaster county had forgiven the crime.

To be sure, they had not forgotten the tragedy. They had not forgiven his heinous acts, just the man. And the Amish never asked the families to offer that forgiveness (although every family would later proclaim they did eventually forgive Roberts). The forgiveness was offered by Amish leaders in the name of the church community itself.  And to be sure, it is one thing to forgive a killer who has taken his own life, quite another to forgive a killer who survives.

What the public did not know is that forgiveness is one of the highest virtues of Amish culture. Taken from the Gospel of Matthew, wherein Jesus dying on the cross says “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do” and the sermon on the Mount in which Jesus commands his followers to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. In other words, forgiveness for the Amish is rooted, deeply rooted, in their faith. Amish talk of the mortal prison of vengeance and anger but the most compelling reason the Amish make such a cardinal virtue out of forgiveness is quite selfish, as one Amish minister put “How can we be forgiven is we do not forgive?”  the fate of their mortal souls, the Amish believe, is rooted in forgiving those who trespass against them.

Forgiveness is not the same thing as a pardon.  And for the Amish, forgiveness does not mean a criminal should not be punished. In fact, those straying from the order within the Amish community are forgiven but not always pardoned, unless they choose to repent for their transgressions. Nonetheless, I offer this radical form of forgiveness as a beginning to considering the complexity and the promise of forgiveness in our own lives.

While the Amish root their impulse to forgive in a faith in God, I contend that we too might consider such an impulse, not as commanded by scripture, but as compelled by the Unknown God, Spirit, Force, Humanity that dwells within us; the inherent worth in all. We may not forgive the acts of evil but we can forgive the actors.

Our theology points towards the circle of life.  When one part of our circle is damaged, it does no good to commiserate about the damage; this only keeps the circle broken. Finding the strength to deal with these issues as maturely as possible, starting with watching what we say and do, goes along way.  Often times the best thing we can do for ourselves after a painful tragedy is to carry on with the mundane and joyful details of life that remain.  This does not belittle or bury the sorrow but places it where we can work on it best.

Of course, and I want to stress this, forgiveness is not always immediate nor does it entail forgetting.  Women who have been abused may never be able to forgive their abuser, and they should seek and receive justice for the crimes committed against them. But as I have known all too often in my own life, holding hatred keeps us imprisoned, indeed victimized for the rest of our lives.

The 19th century French Poet Charles Baudelaire once wrote “Hatred is the most deadly of poisons; it is made of our blood, our health, our sleep and two-thirds of our love.”

In the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hassana has ended and we are just about to welcome Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, in preparation for which Jews are commanded to forgive those who have wronged them. Indeed, forgiveness, as complex and heart wrenching as it is, is the only means to atonement,  At- One – Ment with God, with our integrity as human beings.

With Grace and Grit - John

In The Memory of Trees

I had the opportunity to spend some time in the woods that bear John Muir’s name north of San Francisco.  I wondered what would happen if we tugged so hard on growing our nearby cities if this beautiful wood so close to the metro Bay area.  Would these giant trees, those towering redwoods fall to climate change?  Already, we could see the remnants of the giants fallen.  How many years had those trees been standing there, what had the seen, what could they tell us?  Muir woods was dedicated by Teddy Roosevelt almost a century ago, more as a preserve for game than beauty.  Those same trees stand there today.  What would they tell us if they could speak their being? “Memory doesn’t come of the blue” writes Thomas Moore (in Enchantment of the Soul) “it requires a temple carefully built and maintained.”

Our temple is falling down.

If trees could speak from memory they would tell us they are broken, in fact, we are broken.  We have lost the interconnection with all life as we are called to affirm in our last and seventh principle, ‘respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are apart’.  The trees would re-mind, remember for us, that we are not so different than them. 

All life springs from the same stuff, mother earth, human, humus, humility.  All the same.  Trees are often sacred simply because they can remember for us… not directly but as the symbols of it.  If trees could talk they would tell us to take this much more seriously than we do.  If trees could talk they would remember that we are extensions of them, walking, talking, acting, trees.  Where we, like all life are sacred. Whales and men. Elephants and children.  All of us are part of the stuff of stars.  And that is what connects us to this day of memory.  After this service we will remember those who have died, those who have left us for another dimension. Regardless of whether you believe in an afterlife at all, our memories endure, our lives endure in how they have affected the world in which we have spent our time. You see, even though trees fall, their energy endures, in the humus that they become in the new trees that are gone.

I received a card from a member who is not able to come most Sundays.  It was a picture of the Redwoods and a simple note, “some things endure” the meaning of which I took to be his life’s work endures, our time together endures, we may change form but we are, and always have been part of the great web of existence.

Perhaps God, if such there be, hoped we would see the sacred in every living creature.  The Garden of Eden not so much a place but a memory of how it was supposed to be.  But at least once before we failed.  And the Hebrews teach us that God forsook our world and built another kind of ark, an ark of survival, to float above the world washed clean.  No ark can be built for us now.  We are not going to float above our errors, this blue boat home is our only craft to sail the wide ocean universe, upon its infinite fathoms.   The trees remind us that we too are rooted, even as we move, on this same fragile planet, sharing life as one.

“Dorothy Day said:                 

People say, what is the sense of our small effort,

They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.

Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless.

There’s too much work to do. “

There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

The trees remember for us, but we must remember for them.  What if we could actually live like we are all interconnected?  What if this great recession was an opportunity to enliven a great expansion of concern?  Avoiding box stores, shopping locally, buying as much of your food from home vendors.  What if we started our own produce table right here?  What if we gleaned our gardens and brought the food – whatever was in season – and put it up for the taking, a small monetary contribution to the church?  What if we didn’t have a lawn?  The trees survive, they always do.  What if we lived in the earth as much as upon it?

We live on the earth and we are also so much a part of the earth, that is what endures. It’s not so much that we lived but rather what we did with the life that we had.  It doesn’t have anything to do with God or heaven or hell.  It has to do with life, the spirit of life, that makes us the same as the trees and this entire planet.

 

With Grace and Grit, John

Free to be WE

The following is from a sermon I preached to my congregation in California after I had informed them that I was taking up a new calling with the Unitarian Church in Westport, CT.

"I believe that it has been the WE of all of you that has given me the faith and you the strength to journey into the next phase of life as a congregation. It is no accident that I will also receive my Doctor of Ministry degree next month, on the thesis that we can as different as each of us is; create a common theology, a faith stance to save the world from the relationships, the WE that we are. I believe that all of us have a theology that defines who we are and how we can make our world a more beautiful place. I believe that too often Unitarian Universalists are overly concerned with the horizontal relationships of meaning; giving breadth to our spiritual understandings and welcoming those who are different into our midst. Rarely do we give adequate attention to the vertical dimension; exploring how our individual and communal meanings deepen our purpose to a greater power. Giving name to those individual theologies will be part of our journey together. I am, broadly speaking, a natural theist, an enchanted mystic with leanings towards the Holy. Through my spiritual practice and luminescent experiences I have felt the presence of a power in my life much greater than me. I reluctantly call this power “God” or God/Power. However, because I also believe in the use of reason to explain the universe, I am unable to define this God/Power beyond these fleeting encounters. I do believe God/Power is made manifest through what Henry Nelson Wieman terms the “creative interchange” we have with one another. We can, and often do, create deep meaning and hope out of our relationships with one another when it seems impossible to do so by ourselves.

I believe God/Power holds an attraction that pulls each of us towards each other in what the feminist theologian Monica Coleman terms “Gods calling”. The attraction of God’s calling is therefore calling us forward into the world as agents of change and hope. And yet, my explanation for our place in the cosmos is tentative at best since God/Power exists beyond the rational. My theology rests in my belief that we are here to make our world a better place within the larger cosmological context of an expanding universe. While I can’t say with certainty that the “universe is good” I can say that we have a responsibility as co-creators with God/Power to make the universe, or at least our little corner of the universe, better. This is what I mean by the freedom you all have to become a new kind of WE.

 

There are theological values we can hold up in common: Hope, Love, Grace and Beauty to name a few. Whether individually or collectively, I often describe our religious tradition as “more process than product”.

Theology does not tell us what to believe –that must be determined through a careful reflection on our experience, reason and intuition – but rather what we should do with what we hold ultimately meaningful. If I believe that OUR calling is to co-create God/Power in the world, then I am equally called to create that good which I believe represents that God in the world. I am called to create a theology with a congregation that can reach beyond such relativism to the bold possibility that we are here for a greater and more unifying good than ourselves as subjective beings in the world.

You gifted this theology, this faith to me and I will take that precious gift and share it with the world.  Even more importantly you have that theology with you and you will give it meaning as you stretch into a new vision of yourselves as congregation.

It is no secret that we have suffered some deep loses over the years.  Amidst our dreams of building a new world, among the weddings performed, the babies named, and meals served, we have seen many of our most precious people die. I have conducted 52 memorial services in ten years.  By any measure that is staggering amount of loss. Most of those we bid farewell to were older but a few were younger. I remember a 43 year old woman who had just married her lesbian partner and died three weeks later. I remember Bruce Barr, a 48 year old father of two, who died of oral cancer even though he never smoked.  It is a tremendous privilege to have journeyed with these beloved ones at the end of their lives. Many of our elders are grieving that I won’t be here to journey to the end with them. But amidst all that loss I learned one more precious lesson, one more gift that is embedded in the WE.

It came from Dr. Bob Bloomfield.  Dr. Bob was a pillar of this church. A successful family physician he had done so much for us at the end of his life. He started our senior pow wow that, despite its culturally inappropriate name, has helped seniors navigate the terrain of old age with grace and courage.  Just before Dr. Bob died he and I had a long and private conversation in the hospital.  He told me he didn’t think he would survive this next surgery. I didn’t argue with him, it was a long shot. He said “I have lived a long and good life, John. I think I have done some good in the world.   But I really didn’t know what good was until I started coming back to church when you arrived.  Good lives inside the love we share with one another. Good is its own reward.  And I see now what you meant by our ministry together saving lives.  I always argued with you that it was too strong a phrase, that doctors save lives but not ministers.” I smiled. He went on “But a life is not just our bodies, a life is our happiness and our purpose. WE as a church have saved some lives, Rev. John, starting with my own.”  Dr. Bob died the next day.  WE are and always have been stronger than any ME. Long after I am gone, you will still be that WE, you dreamed you would become. So stay my dear people, stay and help make that WE together, freely now and for those hundreds who will come. Our time is precious; let us fill it with Love.  Amen.

Who Was Jesus?

Jesus was a thirsty man.  He was and remains a “spirit person”, a demi-god like figure like the Greek God Dionysus and the Egyptian God, Osiris who came to earth to bring completion and wholeness to humanity. The so- called Gnostics believed that the end of the world Jesus spoke of was only a death unto the suffering of life, believed that Jesus was part of a complicated myth of redemption.  Once we find our way home, once we stop our wandering we will cast aside our wandering status and become whole.  Jesus claimed that he was sent by “Abba” (Jesus’ Aramaic word for God which means “Daddy”) sent as an messenger to be a spiritual bridegroom to resurrect the marriage between the Goddess earth and the God father sky in the guise of love for humanity. The cross references to language of the gospels with the imagery of Greek, Egyptian and Near Eastern religions is startling. Some of the symbols such as the chalice, used for the Last Supper come right out of the goddess cults of Canaanite Mesopotamia two thousand years before Jesus was born. The essential message of this myth is that Jesus was himself a Jewish version of the mythological “savior” which pagan religions had recognized for thousands of years and that he came to symbolize the initiation and transformation of the sinful into a cult of love. A myth which claims that Jesus never really died, because he never really lived. And that his relationships to the marginal in his society and to women, the poor, the sick, the outcasts - was meant to deepen the spiritual understandings of patriarchal Judaism. Somehow say these folks, the early church took this story and tried to make history out of it, and in so doing missed the boat entirely creating some twisted and sick commercial deal: One dead Jesus for our eternal salvation.

There really was a man named Jesus who had tremendous charisma and power, who wandered in search of the lost and lonely, those seeking refuge to find a new home where they could be fed. I really don’t care if he lived or died or even if he ate his Wheaties each morning. What I care about is what he means to me and to you and to millions of others who are looking for a forgiving hero, a symbol to give their life meaning.

Who was Jesus? He was the healer. The one who defied expectations and laws to simply touch and heal those in need. One of my other favorite stories is when he healed the blind man on the Sabbath. Or the chronically menstruating woman on the Sabbath, or the lepers all on the Sabbath, why? Because compassion for those who are suffering knows no conditions. Beyond the laws, the customs, the prejudices, and the national hatreds, Jesus represents the Buddha heart of love, just do it! Just love. Jesus as healer holds great meaning for me personally. I reminded of him each time I give a wino five bucks.. I know he will spend it on drink, so what? For a moment there is peace.

Who was Jesus? Perhaps he is the redeemer, not for our depraved nature but for our brokenness, which is really all the word sin means. We are all broken. All in need of forgiveness. Jesus taught us though that we need not follow the laws and make a submission to some “higher power” but simply believe that we are worthy in and of ourselves and that no fault, no mistake is so great that it cannot be forgiven. He called it faith. A faith that we can always be made whole again. And yes, while he called for a reversal of the world order, was he not also calling for a reversal of the human condition. Even the richest amongst us suffer, how can they find forgiveness. The real power of Holy Week is for me, not in the orthodox sense of payment for guilt, but in the transformation from triumphant life, to falling down, to even the death of my ego, and the grace which gives me life again. I have fallen, you have fallen, we all we stumble, but a new day will come and we will start again.

Who was Jesus? Perhaps he is the one who suffered. We spiritual liberals like to poo-poo the symbol of the cross as barbaric, and it many ways it is; the Roman cross was the most barbaric form of death imaginable. But its symbolism is powerful to those who ARE suffering. Not because they have good company in Jesus, but because they understand that God suffers with them. The shortest two line in the entire bible are when he was dying on the cross: He wept. And before his last breath, he moaned, I thirst Here was a man who understood what the Buddha had understood. Life does hurt. There is pain. But there is a way beyond that pain. Here the feminine side to the mysteries of Jesus come through in shining glory. Jesus was the first world prophet to EVER welcome women into his community. Why? Because women understood the essential nature of suffering as something we go through not around. Women understood forgiveness. The feminine archetype of Jesus, claimed the great Carl Jung, was in his acceptance of suffering, not in resignation, but in forgiving recognition.

Who was Jesus?  Perhaps he was a peaceful warrior. The power and mystery of non-violent resistance and loving thy enemy has been shown to be the most sustainable and effective agent of change on earth. South Africa, India, our own civil rights movement. What would Jesus do with Sept. 11th? Hold the suffering, speak out in love? Who can say? The most courageous billboard I saw after the 11th was at a little Christian church down the street from our house. It read: “Jesus said ‘Love thy enemies’.

Who was Jesus?  He was forgiving of all us who search for home.  Jesus reminds us that we all wander but we need not be lost.  That those who are suffering, the poor, the undocumented, the unjustly imprisoned, need our help.  We are all yearning for a life of the soul, searching for that deeper meaning which gives our life purpose.  There is a little bit of Jesus in each of us, wandering in search of meaning and hope; seeking forgiving, seeking wholeness, seeking home.

I met Sister Mary Alice over 30 years ago working for a credit union. She had come in to take out a personal line of credit to help someone with their medical bills. Part of my job was to ask her why she needed this money. I mean, didn’t they have other means. She had one of those truly brilliant faces, she smiled and her eyes twinkled. It was the first time I have heard what has become a rallying cry for universal health care “Without insurance, life turns out differently. This was her insurance for this family. ‘This family’ were Salvadorian refugees. The father had diabetes and she was paying for dialysis so that he might live a few more years. I was a little more arrogant back then “But sister” I asked, “Why are you paying to help them?  They aren’t even legally here.” Still smiling, she touched my hand “Because young man, Jesus forgives all of us, Jesus would want me to do it, I am called to do it.” I shook my head and approved the loan.
Only recently have I come to understand which Jesus she was speaking of  in this story. It’s not about reason or certainty, it’s about faith. And faith, a faith in life and life’s promise, a faith that each of us and the entire world is worthy of forgiveness, is what Jesus is really about.  We are all looking for the kingdom of  love  again.  Jesus is calling on us to remember who we really are.  

With Grace and Grit, John

Against Spiritual Tourism

I don’t watch a lot of television, but I have been recently enamored with the situation comedy “Parks and Recreation” a biting satire about life in a small town Indiana Parks and Recreation department, complete with an under functioning, arch conservative director, Ron Swanson, who would just as well like to see government privatized and an erstwhile assistant director Leslie Knope played by Amy Poehler who wants nothing more than to make her department a paragon of public virtue and service.  At one point in the story, Leslie, heartbroken asks Ron why her current love interest is so interesting but so emotionally distant.  Her boss, in a moment of uncharacteristic sensitivity explains it all this way:

‘He’s a tourist, Leslie. He vacations in people’s lives, takes pictures, puts them in his scrapbook, and moves on. All he’s interested in are stories. Basically, Leslie, he’s selfish. And you’re not. That’s why you don’t like him.’

The problem with tourism, whether it is visiting a destination, having an experience or searching for life’s deeper meanings is that it lacks authenticity and commitment.  After all we just go there, we don’t live there. A tourist isn’t invested in the outcome of what they are visiting; they are just consuming that experience. There is no authority in just visiting anyplace or experience. It is empty of the larger meaning that comes from being a living part of where you are. Like all tourists, we vacation in other’s people lives and traditions but we don’t live there.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I actually love being a tourist. I love to travel and visit places I have never been before. But I am very clear about my role in a new place or new experience; I am there to learn and appreciate. I am there to spend my money which their economy depends on. I am not there to change their world to what I think it should be.  I have a hard time with the so called eco-tourism idea. You can and should be a responsible tourist, but to pretend that your cleaning up the jungle is actually making a difference is ethnocentrically arrogant.  Rarely, do these eco tourist companies actually ask the people who live there what they want.  Instead they make assumptions about what we, the well healed tourists wants.  Our desire for a certain outcome while self-satisfying and perhaps even laudable lacks the conviction and authority of the people who live and experience that part of the world.

So it won’t come as surprise to you then that I am not fond of anything that resembles spiritual tourism either. Even worse than assuming what people need by those who don’t live their lives are those who sample from the spiritual buffet and dabble in Buddhist Chanting, Christian Taze, Sufi dancing, gospel singing and any number of traditions to which the tourist has no intention of learning more deeply and committing their lives to.

Sadly, this is what America’s religious life has largely become.  We visit a shrine or a church or a temple and we partake in the gifts of that experience but we are unwilling to stay especially at the first sign of difficulty.  Such consumerism borders on voyeurism; a sort of looking in from the outside without owning the inside. It lacks depth and meaning. It lacks the authority that comes from actually diving in a little deeper.  I was thrilled to have the Tibetan Buddhist group here two years ago as they spent a week making a beautiful sand mandala. I thought it deeply powerful to witness the ritual destruction of that mandala during a Sunday morning service. But how many of the 240 people from our neighborhood who came to that ritual sweeping away actually came back to our church? I wonder how many became Buddhists.

The power of any religious practice lies not in what you “get” out of it in the short term, but what meaning it gives your life, how it changes you in the long term.  I have known hundreds, perhaps even thousands, who have come through the doors of our churches hungry for spiritual nourishment. That is, after all, one reason why we exist; to nourish the spirit. But sadly, they don’t understand the give and take of spiritual practice. It’s not just about you, in fact, it’s really not about you at all.  You are just the recipient of a by-product of participating in a religious community.  And then, at the first disagreeable moment, a congregational meeting, the minister says something you don’t like, the music disagrees with you, or they aren’t serving sushi for lunch, you leave.  It’s like spiritual pornography, all images, no real love. 

No, my friends, the real love, the authority of a spiritual practice, comes with the commitment. And it becomes the very bedrock of what holds you through the storm and brings you out the other side. Do you think Martin Luther King could have done what he did if he did not have the faith of Christian and the blessing of his church, who he served faithfully for years behind him? His authority came from his spiritual practice, his committed spiritual practice, not from being baptized the day before he marched on Selma.  Meaning is made from the authority of our spiritual commitment.

With Grace and Grit,  John

We Are The Hands of God

I went into the ministry looking for God. It wasn’t until I started working with a Catholic priest doing work with AIDS patients that I really understood God. I was in my first ministry in South Bend, IN. A Catholic town in the shadow of the University of Notre Dame. I had largely written off the Christian concept of God.  For much of my early adult life I believed that Christianity was mistaken in its insistence that we are all fallen and that only by believing in the saving power of Jesus Christ can we be saved. This redemptive theology struck me as self-serving at best; of course they would say that, I thought, it ensures more followers through no fault other than being human. It wasn’t until I worked closely with a Franciscan monk who was tending to the spiritual needs of AIDS patients in the early 1990’s that I realized I might be wrong. Brother Mike (I will call him) spent his days hearing the confessions and laying on hands of healing to those in the final days of their lives. This was in the early days of the epidemic when little was known about the causes and treatment of AIDS/HIV. The cultural condemnation of AIDS patients was based on the mistaken assumption that these gay men were being punished by God for the sins of sexual deviance. The fear was palatable and to minister to these men was considered risky. I was working with Brother Mike as part of my outreach as a new minister.   As we went from bed to bed, I would listen as Mike heard their confessions. Most of those confessions were heart wrenching. Some of these men told of sleeping with scores of other men.  Some told of using dirty needles for their drug addiction.  Some were monogamous and clean but their partners were not. Brother Mike offered no judgment. He heard their confession and he held their hands and he forgave them their sins, intentional or otherwise, that is such a part of human nature. As he did this, I watched waves of relief roll over these tortured men. I realized they were sacrificing their pride in confessing. I realized Mike was sacrificing his judgment and maybe his welfare in this ministry. I realized that together each was sacrificing the illusion of control before the inexorable march of fate, life and death. Sacrifice is part of our human religious project. There is power in letting go. There was power for me. Suddenly, I saw in those men and in Brother Mike the suffering of humanity that we need to let go into the hands of God. I was freed from the illusion that Christianity was all a sham; I saw how a personal savior can actually save a life. I haven’t become a Christian but I understand the power of Christianity. I was willing to give up my antagonism for a new found respect. Not agreement but respect. By giving up my condemnation of Christianity, a condemnation that supported my liberal theology, I was adding to my faith in pluralistic theology that includes the redemptive impulse of Christianity. And it was here that I found my God: the force of love in our lives that becomes manifest in the hand of ours that serves.  I have come to the conclusion that we are then the hands of God.   With Grace and Grit, John