Archive for March, 2015

Transfiguration Sunday

March 6, 2015

So Peter and John behold Jesus in a new way. Their teacher and prophet encountered as the Son of God.  Confused Peter tries to define Jesus as one of the great prophets, like Moses and Elijah.  Probably he had no better frame of reference to interpret this transcendent moment.  Understandable! Yet, clearly, the Gospel writer wants us to see Jesus as dramatically different from all others. 

Today we are confronted by constant change at a mind numbing pace. Messages storm our senses from many sources and it is difficult to sort truth from fiction, serious information from emotional hyperbole.  We are forced to make quick decisions and calculate how to maneuver through daily life. We have a difficult time accepting such scriptural rhetoric. The scene seems to cry out for and reduced to an illusion or a puzzle.  
The gospel seeks to put down a marker in the story identifying Jesus as the one, the one who is, who was, and is to come.  This is information that calls us to put down the IPhones and pay attention. 
This message takes us out of the everyday world and propels us to a place where the Holy reigns. Normal experience can not find words to explain the absolute depth of love and concern, the majestic gesture, portrayed here. 
Today we are invited to stop, look, and listen. Today we are shown how the world is made new. It is innocence to experience made innocent again. It is reality made a blessing to all humankind. It is the creator inviting his creation to creator a cosmic ball. We are asked to dance with God on His earth. We are sent a message from beyond time.  No matter your past experience from this day forward you are in the presence of a mystery that conquers history. You are asked to live in the presence of the Lord of history for all time. Welcome!

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Lenten Silence

March 6, 2015

Silence refers to an absence of sound, but pregnant with possibility. 

Silence is an enormous room where we can waste time, spend energy, or create.  It can be a source of healing if one is willing to embrace the moment with courage and a sense of purpose.

Silence is a time when nothing happens. It is an interval with creative potential wrapped in the possibility of boredom and escape.
Silence can open doors and help close others.  It makes space where one can live deeply into mystery or run in fear.  In silence one can let your heart be a teacher.  It is also a time when carefully built constructs will be threatened, when things we know and believe are tested.  To ponder mystery and measure certainty in the echoes of past behavior and belief is risky business.  Many people will scurry away to put in a load of laundry rather than knock on the doors in silence.
Pray reflection may open the door to our hearts and bless the mind with struggle.  Out of darkness a world was created, a son was born, a light to the world. Life freely given, blesses all life.  Jesus loved life to the end. Such love heals the sick and brings the sinner home.

Our lives move in three directions future, past, and present. ‘To live into’ each has a specific meaning, as each direction or orientation requires us to use different frames of reference to understand what is required of us.  Each orientation spins us on the face of time from chronology to kairos, from clock-time to miracle moment. Our direction turns endlessly from past to future on the axis of the present.  We struggle to the summit, straining to gain perspective, only to find still higher places to climb.  We balance each direction against the claims of the other, searching for a lever to move the world and guarantee the right direction, the correct path to success. Does our past explain our future or does it cause what is to come?  The archaeology of the future may reveal the truth of the past, or the present may be filter for the past, like a miner who pans for golden moments in the shifting streams of history.
Future oriented living takes one in the direction of the possible, things and events one hopes or plans to make happen. A world where entrepreneurial spirit and leadership may take charge. The future is often tethered to our past. It seduces us with what is possible and practical. Our ability to live into the future will be limited by the tourniquet we make of our past.
Past oriented living takes one into memory, things recalled as the way things were or are. The past is fixed, unchangeable. It can dictate the way we live. But we don’t have to worship there.  In fact, to do so is a form of idolatry. To live under the control of the past is a betrayal of life. To do so is to act as though life is a formula, no different than two plus two equals four.  I was abused, thus an abuser.  I was a slave to tobacco, alcohol or drugs and so I will always be. I have failed to achieve my goals so I am a failure.  Such mantras lead us to accept a gray future.
Abba Anthony once advised a  novice to “have no confidence in your own virtue, don’t worry about a thing once done and keep control of your tongue and your belly”
A significant event, a piece of history from our lives, scripture, or a tradition may provide insight or good information but it is demonic to let them dominate the possible.  All lessons are not intended to be mathematical equations or truth with a capital T.  The past can serve as a touchstone for future dreams and a standard for present judgements about what is correct behavior or good and evil.  But we should not allow it to determine the scope of our future. Such worship of the past confines us to a closed future, limiting our growth and development as free human beings.  It is the essence of sinful living as when the Israelites reverted to worship of the golden calf to alleviate their fear and satisfy past needs.
Abba Anthony’s advise to his novice not to worry about a thing once done is wise.  Past oriented living confronts us with a memory of things done which no one can change: one does not need to be victimized by it. Let it go. One cannot change it or make it better by worrying over it. The best one can do is confess the past openly, express joy for what went well and regret for what went wrong and move on.  Learning from the past is the way forward, worshipping the way things were is a trap. One must be careful with the way one relates to the past.  An example are scripture passages used to tell us what God judges sinful.  These are idols set up to past tribal beliefs that have no value today.
Remember God said my ways are not your ways. God is not bound by time or history. God rules history.
Living in the present is widely praised. Modern living is the cool, finger snapping moments that shape and add flavor to everything.  However, it is a deceptive orientation too.  The stuff of advertising and consumerism. Humans are fond of talking about living in the moment, but it tends to be hard to maintain.  To live in the moment you must be aware of the hold of the past. Otherwise you will repeat old patterns and call them new cloth. The past will slip up on you with comfortable habits and old patterns that have become second nature. We use our habits and past practice to orient ourselves in the world and to guide future decisions. Living immediately, in the now, is difficult because our past informs the present and modifies our expectations. We don’t just hang in the moment without some orientation to the past.  Here silence and or solitude may help. But silence can only do so when we focus on untangling our lives from the grasp of the past, extinguish the hold it has on our direction and purpose and float free.  This meditative state is powerful but scary because you are intentionally letting go of ties to expectations on which you have relied to light the way forward.  To live freely, one must take up the cross of Christ.  This is not about carrying wood but an intentional state of mind that recognizes the burden of sin, which is the common state of humankind. How many of us pray daily to be granted a future like the past you have known, trusted and, yes, even worshipped. We love the familiar smells and bells, they make us feel at home. They are also safe traps. It is a hard struggle to desire a world open to possibilities that exceed human habit.  The way of the cross is to easily seen as a sad and tortuous way because the Gospels tell the story of Jesus dying to show how he lived even when things did not go well. But the point is the future. The point is that we are all led to the resurrection. A moment free of past and its disappointments. A time beyond time when our expectations are shown to be small and weak.  When the glory of the Lord of Life triumphs and we are blessed with a future that exceeds all understanding and lifts us into the arms eternal love. A place where all expectations are quenched by a future unbounded by the past and available to all.
I wish you silence for a time, peace for reflection,
and struggle with the life you lead here and now and in the future. May it be open to the way of Christ. THH
Happy Lent THH

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Identity politics and personal growth

March 6, 2015

I vote, advocate and support things, ideas, programs, and people with whom I agree. 

This theme captures the meaning of identity politics; what is right and just conforms to my beliefs and interests. This provides a basis for decision making in the world. 
The problem is we have to search and find truth beyond our limited world views.  When all you trust is what confirms your beliefs, you risk isolation. Doesn’t this lead a person or group to a potential dead end? A parochial vision of unrealistic ideas that risks one’s ability to get along in the broader world. How does one transcend, see beyond, the structures that give you comfort and confirm your beliefs? How does one grow beyond what one knows?
My identity is equated with what I believe and this leads me to act in conformity with belief. Clearly one doesn’t usually choose to act against what you believe to be the case. So on what authority can I base decisions that don’t echo my identity? To learn to accept new information is critical to growth and survival. It requires a flexibility. To incorporate new ways of thinking and acting in one’s life, you must step beyond past tethers into new realities. 
To act in a way contrary to my world view is destructive of my identity. How could I risk doing that? Similarly my family, my neighborhood, my town, my religion, my nation act like the concentric circles rippling out from my center of being and are bound to me by this same familiarity, a sense of identity. The sense that each circle protects who I am, agrees with what I need.  This agreement forms a social network that makes each level of community mine, that is, not other, not strange or foreign. The agreement makes my world mine.
It is the process of growth and change that clashes with these identity structures and creates a dialogue and at times a cacophony of meaning that cracks the hard shell of identity and forces each of us to risk embracing some level of difference. 
How we negotiate this process speaks to our personal ego strength and tolerance for difference. Are we egg shells waiting to be cracked? Or are we chicks strong enough to peck our way into the world, huddle under our mothers warmth and eventually seek out the farm yard? 
Some choose to maintain a very rigid world and closely held personal beliefs. They seek the comfort of what has worked and seek to maintain it against all assaults. Others have boundaries they seek to expand, incorporating larger lives. They can be swept up in the powerful streams of belief from beyond the small world in which they began. If you think about an ideal setting for growth one might conceive it as the rippling circles radiating out from the the center where the pebble of our soul has sunk into the depths of life’s pond. Visualizing the result provides a model for healthy development. The initial splash awakes our consciousness. The waves of belief, norms and expectations surround you. You are cradled by a world of sensation that laps against your center of gravity. You begin to expect warmth, food, a sense of being held closely. You are guarded (unbeknown to you) from ripples outside your immediate circle that might drown your being until you can begin to sit up, walk, and see beyond the confines of the first circles of family and friend. Slowly your experience begins to encompass waves of information that buoy you up and out of the family circle. Thus begins your life adventure and you must learn to swim with the waves of experience. Sometimes being carried into the outer rings of experience and at others resting on the tidal waves that may lift you back toward your center and the arms of family.
How you learn to negotiate the ripples of conscious experience determines your grasp on reality. It provides a tool kit to analyze and decipher experience so you can construct a sense of self that is neither so rigid that you risk cracking up or so adventurous that all personal boundaries are erased and dissipated. 
What are the tools that allow you to discriminate truth from myth and lies? On what can you rely to make your way in the world? 
Some ideas include family values, religious dogma, scientific experiment and reason, tribal identity, national pride, cosmic myth of origin and purpose just to name a few.  The solitary individual treads water amongst the rippling waves of these social and ideological tides. Some are swamped by then. Others are buoyed by them. All must learn to swim there.  Life’s pond can be a pleasant community of ideal balance: nature and nurture, individual freedom and community responsibility. It can also be a riptide that pulls even the best swimmer under or a very rough sea that buffets the senses and drowns many in storms and cold waters.  
So how do terrorists form their identity
So how do republicans, evangelists, rationalists, democrats, and libertarians

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Preparing the Way for Us: an Advent meditation

March 6, 2015

Proclaiming the infinite to the finite.  Are we capable of living as if our lives are expressions of infinite value?  

John the Baptist preached repentance in the face of a coming revelation, of the presence of Emmanuel (God with Us). Soon he proclaimed we will be under the reign of God. He was preaching to the people of Israel (the people who struggle with God), when he warned of the coming kingdom.  Make yourself ready, purify yourself through repentance (amendment of life) for the Kingdom is near. Such statements envision something fantastic around the corner. A power such that even he is unfit to untie the shoes of the One to come. His words demand humility from his hearers.  His call to repent and be baptized is the only act they could perform to prepare for this something, this holy other breaking into the world.
Such expectations are foreign to most of us. We may long for divine intervention.  We may hope for God to save us or let us win the lottery.  But these wish prayers don’t take us to a new vision of creation.  We remain under the same authority and world order that comes with each new day. We live in a world that demands our time and attention.  
…and blunt the prospect of even considering the advent of such astounding power.  We are enamored by texting, not scriptural texts. We hear such proclamations with a knowing smile that says, that’s nice, but it is a seasonal story, not much more. We read it over and over, year after year. 
Besides who lives this way? I’m not interested in ranting in the desert or downtown for that matter about what is coming. Most of us live in little bubbles with carefully outlined expectations. These settings are chosen, planned, or at least accepted as reasonable approximations of the good life. We know about planning our days, running errands, and shopping; longer term we engage in estate and tax planning.  Many are quite proud of the careful plans we have made, and all the precautions we have taken to ensure stable futures for ourselves and our families.  All this careful planning for our futures is understandable, but can you hear that wild man screaming at us?  He is standing by the river, half naked, like a homeless veteran back from some foreign war, beseeching us to look up from our computers, asking us if we are ready for what is to come.  It will flow into our lives around the next bend in the river.  It may rush in on us like rapids or hang like a watery precipice that we do not see until to late.  The river carries us without pity or mercy along its course. It is the inexorable passage of our lives from womb to tomb that cruises along while we gaze happily at the scenery until the crash slips up on us from around the bend. 
Dimly, hidden behind the careful constructs of straw, wood, and brick, depending on your circumstance, lies a hidden reality; one that John eagerly waves before our sleepy eyes, trying to wake us up. It is a reality which we may hope for at some level, but also one many of us fear to face.  The scenery of our daily lives is so much more relevant.  We deny the possibility of encountering the eternal in our lives.
We fears this uncertain possibility because we have paid scant attention to it. We may have just poo pooed the whole idea that anything dramatic will ever come into our world. So we focus on scrapping together money for Christmas gifts after necessities are covered.  Or we take on more debt to make sure family and friends receive something in their stockings. It is all about immediate needs being managed respectably. 
Today we are busier than ever.  All we do is in the context of iPhones, iPads, and laptops that expand our horizons globally, but we leave us cloaked in our pedestrian settings. We worry about housing, food preparation and clean clothes and schooling for the kids, not the immanent raid of the infinite on the immediate life we inhabit day in and day out. Usually we pay lip service to the possible impact of God walking in our garden door.  It’s, oh yeah, that could happen or will happen –someday.  As for now, I have to fix dinner for the kids and write the rent check for the landlord.  I will worry about the infinite tomorrow.
So what are we to make of this wild man in strange clothes, living off the land telling us to repent and change our ways. Does he expect me to live like him? Well may be but more likely he is calling our attention to the world we inhabit hear and now. He is asking us to consider our lives in a larger context, than the immediate pedestrian concerns of food and housing. He is screaming at us and demanding we stop, turnaround, and look at what is on the horizon. He is proclaiming that our expectations are to low. He demands we look at our lives and our world, our justice and peace, in the context of heaven, the eternal, or the infinite.  He is pointing at us like the fool on the hill, laughing at all we fail to see, at all we fail to make room for in the daily happening of our lives. He is asking for a moment of contemplation to think again about who we are, about what we are doing, and asking us to breathe in the infinite grace that supports, sustains and constantly blesses our lives. This grace happens quietly most of the time, behind the curtain if you will. John is telling us prepare, for no one knows when the curtain will be drawn, and reveal the infinite reality of God with us. The time is at hand. Look up, look around, rejoice grace like honey is everywhere. 
John wants us to live with a constant thank you on our lips. No matter the conditions under which we live we are blessed.  The survival which we struggle so mightily to maintain against all odds is 
We struggle to survive.  We struggle with God.  Their is irony in the mutual exploration of both.  The struggle is complimentary. We must survive to struggle with God. The struggle to survive requires hard work in the finite world to maintain resources for living.  

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