Going to the Promised Land

I have always loved the exodus story despite its contradictions. Why did God have to harden Pharaohs heart and make it so hard to let the Hebrews go? And why did God have to make it so gruesome at the end, with killing all the Egyptian first borns while smearing the blood of dead lambs on the Jewish door posts to protect them? And why did the Jew wander for 40 years around the desert? Oh, right because like all men, Moses couldn’t stop and ask for directions. Passover is a time of new creation, a time of remembering the struggle of our past and being delivered into a new land. How many of us here long to be renewed, to a new you, a new creation and a new land of love and opportunity?  

I remember with heartache my own failures, when I lost my marriage, my first business, and I believe for a time, my sanity. My best friend was a bartender. I was not at all worthy of being around.  Then a friend of mine, a truck driver invited me to travel with him on his 18 wheeler for a few days. As we headed across the open road I could feel the weight of my misery growing lighter. He was a Christian, in the best sense of the word, a recovering alcoholic, and a man who wore his sorrow on his face. He told me as the miles fell under our wheels of such desperate times as driving his rig blind drunken down the Rockies  hoping he would die. Until the day he almost did. His brakes gave out and the runaway ramp was miles away. As the adrenaline pumped into his body he prayed. God, spare me this and I will give my life over to love. Somehow he managed to get to the runaway ramp but he was doing over 80 miles an hour with 60,000 pounds at his back. He hit the ramp fishtailed in the gravel and stopped inches before the end. That runaway ramp proved to be his promised land. He was good to his promise, got sober, fell in love, married, had four kids and went looking for sorry cases like me to help them create a new life.  He would tell me often that the exodus story was his favorite, a reluctant prophet Moses once a prince of Egypt who led his people out of bondage. Who doesn’t need to be led from bondage he asked me. With his help I began to free myself from the misery, sell the business, move back east, meet Francis, fall in love have a bunch of kids and follow my call to ministry.

What makes us creative enough to find the promised land? It starts with a willingness to be open to the possibility. 

With Grace and Grit, John

Stones: A Post Easter Meditation

What would it take for any of us to experience a resurrection? “Life” observed an old friend of mine “is the tomb”. We are surrounded by finitude. There is only so much time to fill, only so much money to spend, the people we love die or they go away and our days are, more often than not, filled with sorrows punctuated by happiness. The Buddha said, “life is attachment, and with that comes sorrow.” What would it take to roll away that great stone of our troubles, and feel the sunshine on our faces once again?

Think about those new directions that your life took after some failing in another; the death of the loved one, a divorce, losing your job. The good news is this: Each of has an Easter awaiting. It’s not reserved just for the holy, or even the courageous. Each one of us has the power of resurrection, right here and right now. Today, one of you is feeling the pain of a separation, today one of you is struggling with the demons of addiction, today one of you is feeling numb after seasons of meaningless labor, today, more than a few of us are feeling the chill of winter’s sorrows. We want to feel spring but it’s so hard!

What stands in our way? Stones. Big stones. Stones of doubt, control, and fear. One of us must face a life of new choices but feels powerless to move. The stone of fear. A marriage seems stuck and while others have suggested how to get it going again we resist. The stone of control. We feel anger at a loved one for an almost unspeakable hurt. We know we need to forgive but how? The stone of anger. We need to make a decision about our future and soon, but what if the path we are considering is the wrong one? The stone of doubt.

I have no illusions here, my friends, I have been through some of these troubles. These stones are not easy to roll away from the tomb of our lives. There is a lot more to resurrection than daffodils and bunny rabbits. This can easily be the most difficult work you will ever face. But you can do it! I know that we can roll away those stones and walk again into the light.

How? With trust and hope. So it is with any of us. We will rise again from our struggles to a new day with trust and hope. Trust is what underlies our hope. So it is there that it must begin. Resurrections are only possible when we begin with the ones we love. When couples struggle in a relationship their ONLY salvation lies in trusting again. These can be big stones; doubt that the person will not hurt us again, fear that we will be hurt again, and our desire to control the relationship so that we won’t be hurt again.

Trust is the leap into love that says “it’s going to be o.k. to open up again even if the worst does happen.” Trust says “whatever happens, it will be all right”. Trust rolls away the stones of fear and control.

It is the depth of our struggle that gives us hope as long as we can trust that it will get better. Resurrection doesn’t mean freedom from life’s struggles but a renewed willingness to live through those struggles. One old friend used to say “It’s a great old life as long as you don’t weaken.” But you know what? It’s a great life even if you do weaken. Because rolling away the stone has more to do with openness than strength. 

With Grace and Grit, John

Liberation and Learning

Liberation is the path to power.

In fact, the biggest cause of despair among the unemployed isn’t a lack of money but a lack of hope. Unemployed people are more likely to follow someone who gives them hope than someone who offers them money. When you have hope – even just a shred of it – you start feeling self-efficacy. (Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, )

This would be why the highest rate of suicides is white working class men out of work. They have lost hope. You want to understand why Donald Trump is surging. Look at the those who, powerless, are attracted to his power. Somewhere beneath his outrageous hubris, is the promise of power and liberation.

Learning and liberation go hand in hand. Why learning and liberation?  Because I think it takes learning to be liberated. It takes spiritual education, or what we now call faith formation, to liberate ourselves from the consumerist mentality that we are a part of. The learning takes many forms here; from the  small group ministry to spiritual practice to engaged social justice initiatives. In order to be liberated we need to become learners.

With Grace and Grit, John

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