The Roots of Love

“Roots hold me close”, wrote Carolyn McDade, in her prayer, now made a hymn “Spirit of Life”. Hold me within the love of my people, and hold in my place in the cosmos. We may not fully understand how powerful love is as root to our existence but love’s longing is powerful. Patricia Monagen in her work The Fourth Genre told of losing her husband. She was never much of a church person, preferring the Sunday paper every time.  But when her husband died she was lost, not enough to go to church, yet, but still lost.  And then came the incident of the keys.  There were five keys bound together on big brass ring.  They were the keys to what remained of her life: one to the front door, one to the garage, two to her office and one to which she had forgotten its reason.  Anyway, she lost the keys, No big deal people lose their keys all the time.  Methodically she searched the house, twice. No keys. Nowhere.  She started to cry, again, what she would do without the keys.  She cried as she had been but stronger than before, crying from exhaustion of having taken care of her husband until died, crying from loneliness, crying from anger.  She stopped crying and started to look again.  Still no keys.  And then she started yelling, at Bob for having died, at life, at God, at the trees in her front yard.  She was not a believer in the afterlife.  But her husband had been.  She loved that about him, his faith and his integrity, until the end of his life, while in pain and scared, he was brave and certain.  But until that day of the keys she had admittedly refused to settle for what religion had to offer, some harpy afterlife to fill the cosmic void.  But these keys made her wonder again for the very first time.  What if?  What then? Did you hide my keys Bob?  She yelled despite herself, is this some kind of a joke?

And that is when it all changed.  She accepted she had no keys.  She went and called a locksmith.  She got on.  But she wondered about the keys almost every day.  Can the world beyond what I see manifest itself?  Can there be something beyond what I am so certain is here.  She reflected on some of her husband’s last words, “our universe is full of facts and opposites, everything happens for a reason and yet as if nothing exists as all.”  Damn you Bob, she thought, you and your Zen koans.  But she couldn’t let go of the keys disappearing.  The lost keys were becoming keys to accepting the possible as greater than the knowable.  Yes, she thought, what could be is as plausible as what we do know.   Why not?  Someday it might just be different.  What Heisenberg called the Uncertainty Principle actually applied to the afterlife.  A lack of evidence in one realm does not mean evidence is lacking in another.  Matter doesn’t disappear, it is transformed and not always as we assume it will be.

A year later almost to the day of this emerging revelation, Patricia was staring at the door to her study.  Nothing special.  There was poster tacked to the back of it.  She stared and noticed it look odd.  She stood up and felt the bottom of it.  There was a bulge.  She pulled the poster up and there were her keys, behind the poster on the back of a door.  She tried throwing them at the door to see if they would hit the door and slide behind the poster.  She tried tossing them in the air.  No. Those keys were not put there, or even thrown there.  It was not possible.  And there they were.

She recalled yelling at Bob in her grief, telling him to give back the keys.  Was this an answer?  Still she resisted.  And then she yielded that physics moved in a new way.  She yielded and felt a new understanding emerge.  Bob was not gone.  And neither were her keys.  “Death” Einstein once said “means nothing, people like me who believe in physics know that the difference between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”  Roots extend deep into our love.  (adapted from Patricia Monagen in her work The Fourth Genre)

With Grace and Grit, John

A New Year Revolution

I spent a  quiet New Year’s eve at home, thankful, I think to not be drinking more than I should. As one friend reminded me after a New Year’s eve when I had most definitely been over served by the bartender, “you know what happens when a drunk resolves to stop drinking on New Year’s eve? They are more than likely to just give up thinking instead.”

Sitting at his computer preparing to write about his New Year’s resolutions the Quaker Parker Palmer’s spell checker changed resolutions it to New Year’s revolutions, perfect he thought, resolutions are too boring anyway. Here is what he wrote in On Being:

“The past year brought a floodtide of human suffering…the plight of millions of refugees, the spate of mass killings in public places, the persistence of racism and the violence it fosters, the growing number of people living in or on the edge of poverty, the failures of our justice system, the downward spiral of a democracy en route to becoming an oligarchy, the ongoing degradation of Earth itself. That’s why we need some revolutions in the New Year.

“Revolutions that succeed are always for something rather than merely against this or that. But if we’re serious about what we’re for, we need to name what we’re willing to stand openly against. It’s not enough to say “Yes!” to things like love, truth, and justice without saying a loud, clear “No!” to their ruthless enemies, risking reprisals as we do. Pete Seeger had these words inscribed on his banjo: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

“What Pete did with his music, we need to do by word and deed in our families, among our neighbors and friends, in our workplaces, religious communities, and the public square.” (Parker Palmer “On Being” 12/30/16) 

Revolutions are the most active form of social resistance, and while Parker Palmer is correct, a revolution starts as a movement of resistance; a promise that is part of our faith.

Just what is this promise we make as part of our faith; what I call so often as our spiritual imperative?  In short, it is the need for us to create a better world. For hundreds of years, our forebears, who have been part of this country since its founding, devoted their lives to the creation of a religion dedicated to building a better world. Above all, they wanted to build a world where justice took precedence over self-interest. They wanted to help the disadvantaged and the poor. They wanted to build strong social institutions based on equality. They wanted to put an end to discrimination. They believed that we should be about creating a better society on earth, not worrying about an eternal life beyond death. More interested in getting heaven into people than people into heaven.

We have lost that revolutionary fever.  

We have become deadened to the power of those with money over our lives.  You know that the first thing a conquering people do to the conquered?  They establish a system of debt.  If you owe money, than you are enslaved at a moral level much more powerfully than if we put you in chains.  Think about it; why are so many people still holding on to property that is worth less than what they owe.  Because there is moral stigma to not paying your debts, even if the debt is only a contract secured by property.  I contend that our struggle with immigration reform is just such a debt.  We are forcing people into dangerous journeys across our borders, denying children brought here by their parents a fair education, and tearing families apart because we have made being here a moral debt – the debt that to be here you have to be born here -  despite the fact that 99 per cent of immigrants are law abiding, tax paying people regardless of their citizenship status.  There ought to be a revolution.  And we ought to be part of it!

Happy New Year, John

Thanks and No Thanks

What are you not thankful for? Was it the green bean casserole at your thanksgiving table? The uncle who couldn’t stop goading you on about Donald Trump? The evangelical cousin who did quite believe in your secular grace and said another just in case? I have found it very helpful to save some room for what we are not thankful for after thanksgiving; a sort of spiritual purging of the soul. If only we would have said no thanks to the second helping of pie. It is possible to go too far: You all have heard of the man who climbed up to the roof to out wait a storm, he prayed to God to deliver him. Just then a boat came by “jump in” said the owner, “No thanks, I am waiting to be saved by God”. The boat man shrugged and off he went. The water level started coming up the roof, just then a second boat came along and again the same answer.  Finally, a rescue helicopter flew overhead and they shouted out “grab hold of the ladder”. “No thanks” came the reply, “I am waiting for God to save me”. The floor overtook him and he drowned. Upon reaching heaven he asked God “Why didn’t you save me?” to which the Almighty replied “I tried. Apparently two boats and a helicopter weren’t good enough for you.” So post-thanksgiving we know what we are thankful for but how about what we are not thankful for. I am thankful for the rich bookish world and academic grounding of my heritage, but not so thankful for its cool emotional distance. Others are thankful for wealth, others for love. But my point here is that your name, like your past represents a part of you and in some way we can all be thankful for what it has given us. I often say that no experience goes unlearned. There are those around us who have suffered enormously. I know of one woman who had been abused by her family, married twice and divorced by the time she was 19. She had had 4 different last names. When I met her she had chosen her own name from a novel and went to the courthouse to make it hers. Despite her hard past she still gave thanks though for the lessons she learned. She is a tremendous human being, kind, caring, a good judge of character and had the life experience to relate to almost anyone. It was as if in choosing her own name and leaving all those other names behind her she had moved on to what her life had taught her and what she was truly thankful for.  Thanks for the lessons of life, she said, but no thanks for those markers to the past that were so painful. With Grace and Grit, John

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