Praise Be!

"Yes, Virginia, there is a God"

2011-12-06T18:17:00.001-04:00

Many yearsago our oldest son determined in 2^nd or 3^rd grade thatthere was no Santa Claus. This reallywas a terrific loss for him. “Well,” heconcluded, “maybe there is no God either.” When I shared this with some Sisters of St. Margaret, there werehorrified. But it is a little boy’sreasoning things out. It shows anintellectual curiosity. At the time, Ianswered that some things last and others pass away. I was thinking of Psalm 103, our days arelike grass in that they pass away. “But the merciful goodness of the Lordendures forever… and his righteousness on children’s children.” Now I didn’t cite chapter and verse butconveyed the general idea. As I considerour son’s loss and intellectual struggle now at some remove, I recall thefamous passage about love from Paul’s 1^st Letter to theCorinthians. “Love never ends…. When Iwas a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like achild; when I became an adult, I put anend to childish ways…. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” What lasts or abides is not the wonderfulstory of Santa Claus but the even more wonderful story that reveals a love andgoodness that is at the heart of all that is and is greater still, what we knowas God.

Over onehundred years ago a little girl named Virginia wrote her letter to The Sun newspaper in New York, “Some ofmy little friends say there is no Santa Claus.” It would not have been current then as it is now in the 21^stcentury to admit some of my little friends say that there is no God. This is not to belittle but to explore ourchildren’s intellectual curiosity. Oneof the things I like about the Godly Play ministry at Saint Paul’s is that itengages children’s imagination and wonder. The reporter Francis Pharcellus’ response in The Sunis still interesting. He begins with theimportance of humility. We seek masteryover our universe and well we should, but we need to take stock. The writer Walker Percy advised, “we ought tostop, every once in a while, and ask ourselves who we think we are. I’m not just talking ‘existentialism’ here; I think I’m talking about moralself-examination – as in exactly who do you think you are?! There are times when we get so full ofourselves – we’ve lost all modesty.”

Pharcellus inhis response to Virginia’s query next argues how dreary the world would be ifall were reduced to sense and sight. Wewould lose the sense of mystery and transcendence that draws out the best in usand gives us joy. I have been readingthe French paleontologist and theologian Père Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I liketo think of him as bilingual. He speaksthe language of science and he speaks the language of mystery and can shiftlanguage to talk about the same thing expressing it more fully andunderstanding it more deeply. There isnothing dreary in Teilhard’s world. Hewrites, “after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shallharness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world,(humanity) will have discovered fire.”

Our childrenmay struggle with loss at the passing of Santa Claus. In 1897 Virginia wanted proof. She wanted to see it in The Sun newspaper. Today,our children may want to see proof of God. But God is to be found more in relationship than in proof. We discover relationship in community. God is the love that abides, the goodnessthat endures. God is the one before whomevery once in a while we give ourselves moral pause. We may need more than one “language” tounderstand God and ourselves. We arethat deeply layered. We sit with ourchildren and as the days draw near we ask, “Wait. Something is missing! I wonder what it could be?” A baby is born, the Christ child, whoembodies the love and goodness of God. Some things pass away, but the “merciful goodness of the Lord enduresforever.”

Homelessness - comments on and prayer for Empathy

2011-09-29T09:23:00.000-04:00

I offered comments and an invocation at a meeting on homelessness and the associated trauma of abuse at a meeting with Bob DeSousa who is the State Director for Senator Toomey of Pennsylvania. The hearing included Lisa and Walter who had overcome homelessness through the Northwest Philadelphia Interfaith Hospitality Network and Project HOME respectively. Also present were representatives from the People's Emergency Center, Women Against Abuse, Catholic Social Services, Impact Services, the Salvation Army and the Altman Management Company. My comments and prayer were as follows:

"I am a pastor. Years ago when I ministered in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, when a family fell on hard times the neighbor across the street would bring over a pie. I think this is an expression of empathy. When we have experienced hard times ourselves it makes us better at empathizing with others when they hurt. If there is an upside to the downside the country has been experiencing, it may be our increase in empathy.

"One place this empathy continues is in the Church. At Saint Paul's in Chestnut hill we reach out to help the needy, especially those without homes who live with us for a time through the Interfaith Hospitality Network. There are many other partnerships you will hear about as well. Empathy is more than bringing comfort it is also a quality of leadership and action that attempt to heal or excise the cause of hardship. You will find a lot of us collaborating in this effort.

"We touch the hurt. We are on the ground. We ask government to join hands with us to create the conditions where families and individuals can move from homelessness to stability and health so that they in turn can empathize with others the way they first experienced empathy themselves (2Corinthians 1: 3-7).

"Let us pray -

Almighty and most merciful God, we remember before you all poor, all without homes, those who are broken. May we who know something of suffering ourselves, in small ways or large, lead in turning their sorrow into joy. We praise you and bless you for the gift of empathy that stirs us to action that we may be instruments of your peace and sources of well being to the glory of your Name. Amen."

Gospel Mandate for Peace

2011-05-20T15:12:00.002-04:00

Jesus said,
"If two make peace between them
in the same house,
they will say to the mountain
'move,'
and it will move."
Gospel of Thomas, logion 48

The Day of Resurrection teaches that God's love shows no partiality (Acts 10:34). No one is dispensable or disposable. There is a toughness to God's impartial love. We see this in the resurrection. God's love is stronger than death.

Frederick Buechner writes in his book Wishful Thinking: "One of the titles by which Jesus is known is Prince of Peace. And he used the word himself in what seem at first glance to be two radically contradictory utterances. On one occasion he said to the disciples, 'Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword' (Matt. 10:34). And later on, the last time they ate together, he said to them, 'Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you' (John 14:27). the contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle but the presence of love."

Peace also means the breaking down of boundaries in the Letter to the Ephesians: "For (Christ Jesus) is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups (Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female) into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.... so he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father" (Ephesians 2:14, 17-18).

One thinks of peace and the breaking down of boundaries as the President of the United States meets with Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, May 20. The dividing wall in Israel seems to be one that is made of much more than concrete. Come Lord Jesus, bring peace.

Passion for Peace

2011-05-20T14:57:00.002-04:00

Fr. Roy Bourgeois of the Maryknolls stayed at the Saint Paul's rectory on Saturday May 14. I had the privilege of presenting him with the Passion for Peace Award at the Friends' Center the next day. My first encounter with the Maryknoll order was in 1981. I was vicar of Saint Luke's Church in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Fr. Albert Reymann returned that year from El Salvador and found his way to our ministry among the poor at Saint Luke's. He was in Philadelphia recovering from a total breakdown after watching countless women and children killed over the past fifteen years of his ministry. He emphasized that the United States was at war in El Salvador not against communism but in the name of private business and even in the name of God. In 1981 on Easter morning Roy Bourgeois flew to El Salvador with a CBS camera crew. It was a trip from which he almost did not return. Salvadoran peasants risked their lives to show him the extent of their suffering.

The School of the Americas Watch was founded in 1990 by Father Roy Bourgeois after six Jesuit priests and a mother and daughter were massacred in El salvador by troops trained at the School of the Americas. The purpose of School of the Americas Watch is to close this school that has been used as a tool of oppression, to stand in solidarity with the poor and to educate the public about U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

A Prayer for Japan

2011-03-16T15:07:00.003-04:00

O blessed Jesus
whose spear-pierced heart
was tenderly left open
for all to enter in,
bring the people of Japan
- pierced by sorrow
overwhelmed by tsunami
overshadowed by radiation -
to your heart,
and in the hour of their trouble
hold them in your merciful grace.
Amen.

- based on a Welsh prayer -

To the Mother of a Gay Son

2011-01-19T11:13:00.004-04:00

"I am searching for a church and am wondering what your church's view is on homosexuality? I have a son whom is gay and this is important to me."

Dear M.:

The Vestry (the governing board of Saint Paul's) made it clear many years ago that all are welcome. "The vestry enthusiastically affirms that Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, Chestnut Hill, is an inclusive and welcoming faith community, open to all. Saint Paul's cherishes all its parishioners, both recent arrivals and lifelong members."

You would probably like a little more than this blanket statement that all are welcome. Our congregation includes gay and lesbian Christians in leadership positions as well as in the pews. Why this is so is based on our tradition as well as scripture. Let me explain.

Tradition
We say in the Episcopal Church that "praying shapes believing." As far back as 1967 an advisory committee of the national church instructed that "one of the characteristics of (Episcopal) tradition is that it holds unity - at least its own interior unity - to depend not so much on people thinking alike about the 'how' of God's action as it does on people doing Christian things, including the liturgical acts (worship), together." (1) We judge people orthodox by whether they wish to join in the celebration of God's being and goodness in the prayers and worship of our Book of Common Prayer. That is, all who listen to God's word spoken and preached, who recite the ancient creeds, who confess their short-falls with respect to God's glory, who join in the Great Thanksgiving of communion, come forward to receive Christ, and go out to work for the mending of creation, they are part of our community. Our prayer together shapes what we believe about ourselves as church, that we are "an inclusive and welcoming faith community, open to all."

Scripture
A scriptural view of homosexuality, to my mind, rests on our understanding of the Holy Spirit. The same Holy Spirit that was poured out upon the disciples (Acts 2) at Pentecost (50th day after Easter) is given to each person who is baptized. It does not matter whether you are homosexual or not. The Hebrew word for Spirit, Ruach, means wind or breath as well as Spirit. The Spirit is God's presence and creative power. Like the wind, "Spirit" always means something living and moving and not what is rigid. The Hebrew word ruach is likely related to another Hebrew word rewah that means breadth. (2) Spirit creates space. It leads out of narrow straits into wide vistas. As I prayed about the church and homosexuality, the scriptures that were given to me (by the same Spirit) were from the Psalms. Psalm 18: 20 - "God brought me out into an open place; he rescued me because he delighted in me," There is that Spirit that creates space - for me, for you, for your son, for gays and lesbians. And then again in Psalm 31: 8 - "You have not shut me up in the power of the enemy; you have set my feet in an open place." The psalm's "enemy" is that which constricts and binds. The Spirit instead leads us into wide spaces where we can unfold and be who we most truly are. Now does this mean anything goes? Of course not. It is Jesus' Spirit so that it is the Spirit of compassion.

For any who might question this reliance on the Holy Spirit for a scriptural understanding of homosexuality, I would only point to Paul and the way he dealt with issues of sexuality in his own time. When Paul is lacking a specific word of the Lord (that is, from Jesus) he invokes the Holy Spirit. In his day the issue was about sex and marriage. With regard to marriage Paul does have a word of the Lord - 1Corinthians 7: 10, "To the married I give this command - not I but the Lord - that the wife should not separate from her husband... and that the husband should not divorce his wife." Jesus did say something about this - "Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" (Mark 10: 9). Now, in the Spirit of Jesus most churches have recognized that sometimes marriage for very good reasons comes to an end, but we ought not to take it lightly. When Paul does not have a clear word of the Lord he declares, "I say - I and not the Lord, but I give my opinion..." (1Corinthians 7: 25). Then he ends the chapter by saying, "And I think that I too have the Spirit of God." (3) There's that Holy Spirit again.

Jesus said nothing about homosexuality. We have no word of the Lord. When we do not have such certainty or new situations present themselves, we need, like Paul, to invoke the Spirit. Again, in a Passover Psalm (118: 5), "From the straits I called to God. God answered me in a wide-open place." The church's view is wide-open when it comes to including homosexuals in Christian community. And I think that I too have the Spirit of God.

M., this is probably more than you needed to know. But the question is an important one and I thought I should give you a full response.

Notes:

(1) Bayne, Jr., Stephen F., "Theological Freedom and Social Responsibility: Report of the Advisory Committee of the Episcopal Church;" New York: The Seabury Press, 1967; p. 20. The Report is also referenced in Booty, John, An American Apostle: The Life of Stephen Fielding Bayne, Jr., Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1997, p. 147.

(2) The discussion of ruach and rewah is found in Moltmann, Jurgen, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994, p. 43.

(3) The discussion of Paul's use of the Spirit in 1Corinthians is from Stendahl, Krister, Energy for Life: Reflections on the Theme "Come, Holy Spirit - Renew the Whole Creation;" Geneva: WCC Publications, 1990, p. 43-44.

White tradition and the Indian world

2010-10-19T10:21:00.002-04:00

The Phillips Brooks of the (American) Indian Race and White Tradition
The Reverend E. Clifford Cutler
September 27, 2010

Introduction
In 2009 the Episcopal Church’s 76th General Convention voted to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery propounded by English King Henry VII in 1496. It held that Christian sovereigns could assert dominion over non-Christian lands they “discovered” with the full blessing of the Church. Each Diocese was encouraged to reflect upon its own history of colonization of indigenous peoples. If, as the resolution states, this doctrine continues to be invoked in court cases it deserves our repudiation. On the other hand, the more we look toward hierarchy and kings the more we miss the reality of relationship and interaction between Native and White that have existed over hundreds of years and is much more nuanced than what the resolution presupposes.

As I look at my ministry in mostly white churches it has been twinned throughout with Native history. The reason this surprises me is, I suppose, that we overlook what we oppress, like the many impoverished areas of our inner-city that we drive by on Interstate 95 but do not see. My ministry began in one of those areas, Kensington, the Indian name for which was Shackamaxon. The Lenni Lenape (meaning real or original people) Tribe of American Indians came to the Kensington area from the west and took this land from the Allegewi (from which we get the name Alleghany) Tribe. When the name Delaware was given to the river, the Lenni Lenape Indians became known as the Delawares. The name of their village, Shackamaxon, meant “the place of the chiefs.” The significance of this bit of history is that often Indians were settlers, too. They as well as whites were seeking security in the land. Historian John Mack Faragher observed, “The American conflict with the Indians came not because they were so alien to each other but precisely because they were so much alike.” (11, p. 6).

Penn Treaty Park on the Delaware River at Columbia Avenue marks the spot where according to tradition William Penn made a treaty with leaders of the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) Indians in 1682 concerning land rights. William Penn “purchased rather than seized Indian land partly for humane reasons, but also because he needed to clear it of prior titles in order to sell it to settlers. Penn was a benevolent colonist, but a colonist nonetheless.” (7, p. 18).

For many years in Penn Treaty Park there was a large elm tree under which the meeting was said to be held. The tree blew down around 1810, and in 1827 a marble monument was erected to commemorate the spot” (13, p. 18). In 1981 when I was there the words carved on the four sides of the monument were almost obliterated, but they could still be deciphered and read: “Placed by the Penn Society, A.D. 1827… To mark the site of the Great Elm Tree… Treaty Ground of William Penn and the Indian natives 1682… Unbroken Faith… Pennsylvania Founded 1681… By deeds of Penn.” A canvas painted by Benjamin West hangs in Independence Hall portraying this event. The 37 foot high statue of William Penn on top of City Hall faces this historic park in Kensington.

My next church was Saint Stephen’s Church in Cohasset, Massachusetts. The church was begun by Cyrus Bates who in 1868 left Cohasset for Minnesota. There he met the Episcopal Bishop Henry B. Whipple and his brother George, an Episcopal priest. Bates was so impressed by the care and love of these brothers for the 20,000 Chippewa in Minnesota that he became a communicant of the Episcopal Church. He left Minnesota in 1872 to return to Boston. Four years later Bishop Whipple would chair the government commission that met with the Sioux after Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn. When Bates moved back to Cohasset he missed the outward expression of evangelical faith that he had found in the Whipples’ ministry and in 1892 called for the establishment of an Episcopal Church in town.

Finally, my ministry has brought me to Saint Paul’s Church in Chestnut Hill whose second rector, William Hobart Hare wrote to our parish’s children from Minnesota shortly after Little Crow’s War in 1862. His letter was a response to having seen a crude sign that read: “$250 REWARD FOR THE HEAD OF A DEAD SIOUX INDIAN.” He wrote to the children in 1863: “I have not forgotten you nor your monthly collections since I have been away, and I now write because I want to interest you in the poor Indians of whom I have lately seen a good deal. There is a war raging in this state against them so that now we never see them…” Thirty years later, in 1892, Hare, now Bishop of Niobrara, ordained as priest Philip J. Deloria whose Dakota name was Tipi Sapa (Black Lodge). He “became an outstanding preacher and orator and was called the Phillips Brooks of the Indian race by people in the East who had heard both men speak.” (4, p. 61). Deloria is one of three Americans among the 98 “Saints of the Ages” in the reredos of the high altar of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Another was Phillips Brooks. None of Deloria’s family was invited to the unveiling of the statue. Tipi Sapa’s grandson is Philip “Sam” Deloria whose challenge to me is to learn my own tradition and allow Indians to find their own identity and live into their own path. And so this paper is a response to the 76th General Convention, a pulling apart the twinning of my ministry to examine my own tradition, and a response to Sam’s challenge. It is an exploration of my family’s beginnings in Massachusetts to Philadelphia and the Ohio to North Dakota where Saint Paul’s has taken its young people each summer.

The Great Migration – Arrival of James Cutler
Between 1629 and 1642 during what became known as the Great Migration, 20,000 English, mostly Puritan and Puritan sympathizers emigrated to New England. Among them was James Cutler, born in England and settled as early as 1634 in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Scapegoating – The Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
The New England Puritan worldview taught the English settlers that they were a chosen people. They had been “charged with bringing God’s message to a heathen land previously ruled by the devil.” (9, p. 295) By 1692 the New England Indians and Euramericans had been in armed conflict throughout the region for two decades. The witchcraft crisis in Salem, Massachusetts needs to be understood against the background of unrelenting frontier warfare. (9, p. 12) Less than a month after the devastating Indian surprise attack on the town of York the first person in Salem was identified as a witch. She was known to all primarily as an Indian. When the bewitched girls were asked who tormented them, they “named a woman with whom they were intimately acquainted, and who could be seen as representing the people who were then “tormenting” New England as a whole.” (9, p. 21) It was a classic case of scapegoating. Mark Heim in his book Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross, writes: “Scapegoating sacrifice is the prototypical ‘good bad thing’ in human culture, a calibrated dose of unjust violence that wards off wider unrestrained violence.” (5, p. 64) This worked by turning attention away from the ineffectiveness of the region’s leaders to the sacrifice of one who was innocent of the torment of which she was accused.

Race: Mary Rowlandson, Metacom’s or King Philip’s War
Mary Rowlandson, wife of a Puritan clergyman who during Metacom’s War was captured on February 10, 1675, belonged to that portion of humanity deemed by Europeans as “civilized,” whereas the natives were mere “savages.” (12, p. 27) Puritanism was a belief system in which colonists typically viewed “godly” people to be morally if not politically superior to the “ungodly.” (12, p. 8) Mary, however, reserved “her greatest contempt for native converts to Christianity” (12, p. 41) where one would have thought that conversion had brought them into the “godly” camp. This polarity between civilized and savage was terribly difficult to maintain. Frontier residents understood their world primarily through the face to face contact with others that included the Native people in their midst. So to a significant degree Metacom’s war was a war between neighbors. Mary in her captivity could communicate with her captors in English, found her leaders and militia often ineffective against flintlock-armed native warriors, and encountered anti-English Indians who professed Christianity. When the “savage” label could no longer be made to work in terms of religion or even culture, then it could and would be made to stick in terms of what the 19th century would call “race.” Neal Salisbury suggests that the long term effect of Rowlandson’s captivity narrative was this shift toward the issue of race.

The Question of Race in Pennsylvania
During the “long peace” begun by William Penn from the 1680s to the 1750s hundreds of thousands of Scots-Irish migrated to America taking the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road through Pennsylvania to Georgia and across the Appalachians. Colin Calloway writes, “People who had been colonized by England on the Celtic fringes of the British Isles brooked little restraint when they themselves became colonizers and carved out new borderlands in North America.” (1, p. 37) The racial prejudice against Welsh, Scots and Irish was a contagion that spread to the new world against Indians as devastating as the European-derived diseases such as small pox that eradicated On-a-Slant Village of the Mandan tribe near where our young people go each summer. David Preston sees race as a thread that is woven throughout our history. “Euroamericans’ mass killings of Indians at Kittanning (1756) and Conestoga (1763) seem to eerily foreshadow later massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee in the 1800s.” (11, p. 20) Pennsylvania’s Paxton Boys, Presbyterian Ulster squatters, made no distinction between “friendly” and “Hostile” Indians. In fact, they chose to kill the Conestogas “precisely because they were peaceful and lived under government protection.” It was their way of challenging the government authority. Their defenders argued that “killing Indians was a form of loyal opposition to bad government. This idea reached fruition,” argues Kevin Kenny, “during the American Revolution, when exterminating Indians became an act of patriotism. Unlike their counterparts in Virginia, revolutionary Pennsylvanians did not find the bedrock of white freedom in black slavery. Instead, they built their new society by annihilating the Indians in their midst.” (7, p. 231). Today, Kenny observes, “Pennsylvania Indians are much worse off than its other residents. They are four times more likely to live below the poverty line and twice as likely to be unemployed. Pennsylvania is one of only 12 states without an Indian reservation. And it is one of only six where no Indian tribe is recognized by the state or federal government.” (Inquirer, June 11, 2009)

William Penn and Colonization of Land
Pennsylvania did not start out to build its “peaceable kingdom” on the racial exclusion of its native Indians. Under the Doctrine of Discovery, I suppose, Charles II gave William Penn 29 million acres in what would become Pennsylvania, making him the largest individual landlord in the British Empire. Europeans moving in did not find a vacant wilderness. A 1677 map of southern New England, facing west, showed English towns dominating the landscape, with remaining Indians pushed to the periphery. This was certainly more covetous desire than reality. In 18th century Pennsylvania Indian farms and families still lined the Juniata and Susquehanna Valleys. “Penn naturally believed that land could be privately owned by individuals and that its occupants could permanently relinquish their title in return for money or goods. This idea ran counter to the ethos of Pennsylvania’s Indians, who held their land in tribal trusts rather than as individuals and used it to sustain life rather than to make a profit.” (7, p. 4) Penn found to be anathema both the ideas of “erasing” Indians from the mapped landscape, or that “unworked” land ought to be seized and made productive. He had respect for the original inhabitants of the land. Nevertheless, he was a colonizer.

John Woolman and pure universal Righteousness
The Quaker mystic John Woolman set out for Wyalusing, Pennsylvania in 1763 at the end of the French and Indian or Seven Years’ War. He hoped to “feel and understand (the Indians’) life and the spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some instruction from them, or they be in any degree helped forward by my following the Leadings of Truth amongst them.” (8, p. 127) Delaware and Shawnee warriors were attacking forts in Cumberland County, burning houses, fences and fields and killing the families that worked and lived there. Before Woolman left his home in New Jersey an express arrived from Pittsburgh saying that Indians had taken a fort and scalped English people. Still, Woolman set out comforted with the Redeemer’s prayer, “I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from evil (Jn. 17: 9).” (8, p. 123).

Woolman discerned a “pure universal righteousness” that bound all in mutual regard. He wrote: “… a weighty and heavenly care came over my mind, and love filled my heart toward all mankind…” Finally in Wyalusing at a prayer meeting Woolman found it in his heart to pray without interpretation so that only divine love would be heard. Chief Papunehang who lived from about 1705 to 1775 and was a spiritual leader of his people both before and after becoming a Christian listened as Woolman prayed. As the meeting broke up Papunehang said to one of the interpreters, “I love to feel where words come from.” (8, p. 133)

Manasseh Cutler and National Expansion
The Reverend Manasseh Cutler and I are descended from James who came to America in the Great Migration. He is descended from James’ first wife Anna while I am descended from James’ second wife Mary. The barest thread connects us. Manasseh was born in 1742 and undertook the mission to Congress for the establishment of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Ohio Purchase. Manasseh Cutler has been called the Benjamin Franklin of New England for his scientific achievement. When he actually met the aged Franklin he was in awe. The Ohio Company of which he was a director was formed for the purchase of public lands for settlement and to absorb the vast economic debt of the country after the Revolution. This meant not only making the purchase from Congress but also working with Congress to devise regulations for the settlement. Historian Colin Calloway writes, “The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 proclaimed that the United States would observe ‘the utmost good faith’ in its dealings with Indian people and that the Indians’ lands would not be invaded or taken from them except in ‘just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.’ However,” Calloway continues, “the ordinance also laid out the blueprint for national expansion.” (1, p. 40)

William Clark and Dependency without Resentment
In 1804 the Northwest Corps of Discovery made its way up the Missouri. In the month of the fall of leaves, October, William Clark, Meriwether Lewis and their party passed the abandoned ruins of On-a-Slant Village and met a Mandan hunting party. They stayed with them nearly 5 and ½ months. In the month of the Ripe Wild Plums, August (1806) Clark worked to bring a delegation of Mandan and Hidatsa chiefs to meet with President Jefferson. He viewed himself as an explainer of the Indian culture to whites and a defender of native peoples against white greed and violence. He took as inevitable the national expansion anticipated by the Ordinance of 1787 and envisioned white and Indian communities that would be similar but separate. His brokerage between the two peoples was paternalistic with respect to native peoples and had as its goal “dependency without resentment” (14, p. 86). “When Native Americans refused to play by his rules,” writes historian James Ronda, “Clark could speak only of punishment…” (14, p. 97).

Evan Jones, Brotherly love and Divine justice
In 1821, the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions in Philadelphia sent 33-year-old Evan Jones, his wife and four children to serve the Cherokee Nation. He and his son John would become “the most successful Protestant missionaries of their day.” (14, p. 99) Their names are still remembered with honor and respect even by Cherokees who did not become Christian. For the Jones’, God was not white or red. Unlike Manasseh Cutler and William Clark they doubted that God was the patron of white expansion. They encouraged the Cherokee faithful to make Christianity their own and not a white man’s religion, and did not deride those who clung to the old ways. They simply believed that the God of Jesus was a source of greater community, strength and justice. From the Bible they and their Cherokee brothers and sisters drew on passages that clearly portrayed God as on the side of the oppressed. After only a year Evan Jones began work on translating the Bible into Cherokee. And even though the Mission Board insisted that schools teach in English (the Indian languages being deemed too crude to convey the “complex concepts of a civilized, Christian society” 14, p. 108), the Jones’ taught reading and writing in the Cherokee language. They took up the politics of fighting a federal policy that supported frontier intrusion on the side of justice for the Indians they served. “Cherokee revitalization and not assimilation was their goal…” (14, p. 100)

Philadelphia and Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show
Interestingly, the Wild West Show caused consternation in its day on the part of Indian Bureau personnel and Philadelphia’s Indian Right’s Association because it showed the public tableaux of earlier Indian life before reservations had closed in. Those who promoted “civilization programs” to eradicate this way of life or assimilate it to white standards opposed Cody’s Show. The show brought Indians into contact with the eastern cities. Sitting Bull’s closest friend among Cody’s performers was Annie Oakley. According to her, in the tradition of generosity prized by the Sioux, Sitting Bull gave much of the money he earned “to the ragged children he encountered in the cities. Their presence had corroborated what he already suspected. Euramericans would not do much for the Indians when they let their own people go hungry. Indians must rely on themselves. ‘The white man knows how to make everything,’ Stanley Vestal quotes him as saying, ‘but he does not know how to distribute it.’” (14, p. 167). Of course the Show also exploited the Indians. In its Philadelphia performance, a young Lakota named Standing Bear from the Carlisle Indian School was in the audience. Years later he recalled Sitting Bull’s speech about ending the fighting and the need to educate children. He said that he and his friends were on the way to Washington “to shake hands with the Great Father and talk about peace.” The white man appointed by the show to translate gave a lurid rendition of the Battle of Little Big Horn that the chief had not mentioned at all! “He told so many lies,” recalled Standing Bear, “that I had to smile.” (15, p. 263).

William Hobart Hare, Education and the Intermingling of the Races
William Hobart Hare was born in Princeton in 1838. He graduated from Episcopal Academy, attended the University of Pennsylvania and at the age of 22 became the second Rector of Saint Paul’s Church, Chestnut Hill. He became Bishop of Niobrara to the Great Sioux nation in 1873. The next year he wrote to President Grant opposing the exploration by General Custer and 1200 troops of the sacred Black Hills. Sitting Bull valued Bishop Hare’s efforts to educate the children of his people. In 1884 at Standing Rock Sitting Bull declared the White Robes (Episcopalians, for their white surplices) to be the Indians’ best friends. Hare opposed the “civilization programs” of his day. “I say these people are an intensely religious people,” he declared in a New York speech. “You must not hand them over to mere civilization.” (6, p. 81-2).
Tipi Sapa’s granddaughter (Sam Deloria’s sister) Barbara Sanchez values Hare’s appreciation of the critical thinking skills of the Sioux. She notes: “Our people had to survive in the wild by observing, describing, evaluating, applying and synthesizing their environment.” Hare sought to provide the tools that were needed so children could become independent learners and participate in the new culture that was coming. Sitting Bull consented to have his thirteen-year-old stepson Little Soldier enrolled in Hare’s school. In the 1883 Annual Report Hare observed: “Six boys from the captive band of Sitting Bull have been in St. Paul’s School during the past year, an addition of three to that number who were there last year from that band. It sets one to thinking, the fact that there were no six boys in the school quicker to learn, more tractable and more ready to coalesce with the general life of the school than this group fresh from the wildest Indian life, which had spurned the control of the Government, and asked only the privilege of ceaseless hunting and roaming. How hard it is sometimes to square our theories with our facts!” (6, p. 230-1). Racial prejudice brought criticism of Hare’s efforts to educate. Hare wrote: “We all remember when it was thought by some of our emigrant population an offense for which a man’s head should be broken – that he undertake to teach a negro. It is a similar offense in the eyes of some people out on the frontier to undertake to befriend an Indian.” (6, p. 109).
Hare’s method was what he called “identification.” “(L)et there be identification with the subjects of our effort. This is an essential of Christian work always, everywhere, and among all classes. The fundamental of our Christian faith is the identification of the Son of God with the subjects of His interest. ‘He took manhood into God,’ and if He did this in His person He did it also in His life. He put Himself on a level with the woman of Samaria, identified Himself with her by asking a favor, ‘Give me to drink,’ before He undertook to touch the sore place in her heart. It was this Christ living in him that made St. Paul identify himself with the people of Lycaonia and say, ‘He gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.’ Our religion is a ladder whose top, to be sure, reaches unto heaven; but only as we enable men to see it set up on earth right alongside them, as God placed the ladder alongside Jacob in his vision, will men realize that our religion is for each one the gate of heaven. A well-meaning tract distributor once told me of his discomfiture by reason of failure to practice identification. As he passed along through the market he handed a butcher a tract. The butcher called after him, ‘Say, mister, have you read it yourself?’ And as he had not read it he beat a quick retreat.” (6, p. 337)

Hare identified with the wounded Sioux recovering in his mission church after the Wounded Knee massacre. After attending to needs on the Standing Rock Reserve, in late December Bishop Hare went to the Pine Ridge Reserve, “on which the Wounded Knee fight had just occurred.” (6, p.240) Our country had learned little since the killing of the Conestogas in Pennsylvania over a century earlier. In January, 1891, Hare wrote in the “Bishop’s Record” of The Church News: “My visit to Pine Ridge Reserve brought me to a scene which contrasted so shockingly with all the signs of progress and peace which have greeted me on my visits for six or eight years past that time will not efface it from my memory…. on entering the church, two sights presented themselves. On the church floor, instead of pews on either side of the aisle, two rows of bleeding, groaning, wounded men, women and children; tending them two military surgeons and a native physician assisted by the missionary and his helpers, assiduity and tenderness marking all…. Above, the Christmas green was still hanging. To one of my moods they seemed a mockery to all my faith and hope; to another they seemed an inspiration still singing, though in a minor key, ‘Peace, good will to men.” (6, p. 240)

Hare envisioned the eventual intermingling of the Indian and white races. He disapproved of the reservation system and thought the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 “an achievement of incalculable value.” (6, p. 279) It would open up 11 million acres to white settlers and force their intermingling, what we might call integration today. Tipi Sapa (Philip Deloria) and most of the chiefs were strongly opposed to the ceding of lands. Church business at Standing Rock kept Tipi Sapa away from negotiations about the giving up of land. Vine Deloria Jr. recalls, “We have always wondered if Bishop Hare did not create the church business that kept Philip from the meetings, since the bishop was a strong advocate of allotment and its role in breaking the power of the family in Indian political matters.” (4, p. 66)

Today
August 28 was set aside as A Day of Unity at the Central States Fair. “In West River,” reports Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, “Natives and whites, are working together to address and end the shameful race problems in South Dakota.” (Indianz.com. August 30, 2010, “Tim Giago: Some Positive Change in Race relations in South Dakota.”) Despite severe reductions to the size of reservations, Hare’s intermingling has not succeeded. That same month, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg criticized tribal selling of untaxed cigarettes. The racism did not go unnoticed. “You know,” he advised New York Governor David Patterson, “get yourself a cowboy hat and a shotgun. If there’s ever a great video, it’s you standing in the middle of the New York State Thruway saying, you know, ‘Read my lips: The law of the land is this and we’re going to enforce the law…” Barry Snyder, President of the Seneca nation replied that Mayor Bloomberg could use a refresher course on the U.S. Constitution and the need to honor Indian treaties. (Indianz.com. August 16, 2010, “New York Mayor wants Tribes shown ‘Shot Gun’ for Tax Issues.”) This past June in Montreal at a girls’ soccer game, white players and parents for the St. Hubert team playing against a Mohawk team made racist comments, featherhead gestures and called them “sauvages.” One of the reasons we send our young people to the Standing Rock Reservation is provide a peer relation with whites where there is respect.

Conclusion
There are some “canaries in our coal mine” that when they begin to labor, call us to pay attention to what Jung would call our shadow. Scapegoating should recall us to Jesus who died an innocent, sacrificial victim so that there would be no more victims but people with names and worth whose well-being is our concern because it is God’s concern. Racism with its source in Puritanism and the Scots-Irish emigration remains with us and gets unnoticed by the majority group, witness the recent New Yorker cartoon:

This Week's New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Winner: Pretty Racist

(Indianz.com responded)
“Look, we're all post-racial liberal elites here who love us some New Yorker cartoons. But we can't help but think this week's winner of the cartoon caption contest is a bit offensive.
“Seriously, New Yorker cartoon editors? You chose this as a finalist? And seriously, New Yorker readers? You voted for it?
“Here are a few other hilarious captions we imagine must have almost made the cut:
• Uh oh, Gov. Paterson is trying to tax their cigarettes again!
• Quick, have the federal government wage a decades-long campaign of genocide and displacement against them!
• Dang redskins tryin' to steal my Blackberry!
“Since when did (comedian) Carlos Mencia start judging the New Yorker cartoon contest?
“Update: Oh, also we should add that, as it's the New Yorker, this cartoon is probably meant to be an ironic commentary on the half-hearted reparations Indians have received in the form of the semi-autonomy which allows them to build casinos on their land, or something. But still—it's just dumb.
(Indianz.com, September 21, 2010, “Gawker: Offensive Winner of New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.”)
__________________________________________________________________

Positively, the white, Euramerican tradition also includes the “pure universal righteousness” of a John Woolman. There is expansionism and patronization for sure, but also the justice and political fervor of an Evan Jones. There is William Hobart Hare’s courage to risk teaching Indian children on the frontier and his naïve desire for “intermingling.” Our task as Sam Deloria declares is to learn our tradition and grow into the best of it: compassion, faith, mutual regard, bridging cultures and respecting differences (rather than eradicating them through assimilation), justice, peace, education, identifying with others, empathy.

Bibliography

1. Calloway, Colin G., White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal People and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

2. Cooper, Jr., James F. and Minkema, Kenneth P., Editors, The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689-1694; Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, distributed by the University Press of Virginia, 1993.

3. Cutler, E. Clifford and Hamrick, Scott, Editors, Coming Full Circle: St. Paul’s, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, PA in Partnership with Standing Rock Episcopal Community of North Dakota; Philadelphia: Visible Mission, Inc., 2009.

4. Deloria, Vine, Jr., Singing for a Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux, Sante Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1999.

5. Heim, Mark S., Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006.

6. Howe, M. A. DeWolfe, The Life and Labors of Bishop Hare: Apostle to the
Sioux; New York: Sturgis & Walton Co., 1913.

7. Kenny, Kevin, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiement, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.

8. Moulton, Phillips, P., Editor, The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman; Richmanon, Indiana: Friends United Press, 2001

9. Norton, Mary Beth, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

10. Potter, Tracy, Sheheke, Mandan Indian Diplomat: The Story of White Coyote, Thomas Jefferson, and Lewis and Clark; Washburn: Fort Mandan Press, 2003.

11. Preston, David L., The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

12. Salisbury, Neal, Editor, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Related Documents; Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997.

13. Twelves, The Rev. J. Wesley, D.D., “A History of Kensington,” Unpublished paper.

14. Szasz, Margaret Connell, Editor, Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.

15. Utley, Robert M., Sitting Bull: The Life and Times of an American Patriot; New York: Holt Paperback, Henry Holt and Company, 2008.

Truth-speaking, Reconciliation and Hope

2010-09-06T09:28:00.002-04:00

The following response to "At the End of Thirty Four Months" comes from Lay Preacher Carroll Sheppard, Ph.D.:

"I wonder if the conversation might be advanced further, and our own work of truth-speaking, reconciliation, and hope might begin, if Saint Paul's Church were to offer itself as a neutral venue for the formation of a discussion process that begins where we are today?" (See my blog entry: "A missed opportunity for truth and reconciliation") Carroll continues:

"One possibility for the creation of this process is for our Assisting and Retired Bishops, with the aid of a Bishop Chairperson from the National Church (the Rt. Rev. Clifton Daniel,III Presiding Justice of the Court of Review, for instance) to meet and develop a mutually respectful process for our diocese to move forward.

"Another possibility would be for our Deans, who are elected by their deaneries, to play such a role.

"Yet another possibility would be to bring in an outside moderator (would that we could persuade Archbishop Desmond Tutu to help us!).

"In any case, such a process must be practical, Christian, mature and non-codependent. Its goal must be the health of our diocese and ultimately our church. I would be proud to have Saint Paul's Church (which welcomed in 1865 former clergy from both the Confederate and Union Armies to stand together in worship before God) be a setting for such a process. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be the venue for "one step forward" toward unity and peace."

At the End of Thirty Four Months

2010-09-04T15:01:00.006-04:00

Bishop Charles Bennison returned to his office as Diocesan Bishop of Pennsylvania on August 16, 2010. Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold in 2006 had given information to a Title IV Review Committee which then returned a Presentment (charges) to Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori who in October, 2007 inhibited Bishop Bennison from all Episcopal, ministerial, and canonical acts. In July 28, 2010 after an ecclesiastical trial and many appeals, and after two years and ten months, the final Court of Review reversed the trial court's verdict of guilty to the charge of "subsequent suppression of pertinent information" about the bishop's brother's sexual misconduct. The Court of Review found that the statute of limitations had run out on the first charge of "contemporaneous failure to respond appropriately."

I am a pastor and not a lawyer. I had not intended to set out my thoughts on this nearly three years of litigation. Letters from my colleagues to the bishop asking him to retire or resign for the good of the church and concern from members of my own congregation have made setting down my thoughts unavoidable. I will first describe my observations about what has happened and some thoughts about power. Secondly, as members of the diocese we will need to take as our point of new beginning the world as it is and not the world as we might wish it to be. The final two points of discussion have to do with purpose and process. Purpose asks the question "why?" Why are we a diocese? What do we want to achieve together as a diocese by the grace of God? Process asks the question "how?" Here I will share some observations about codependence and need for the spiritual practice of detachment. It is interesting that as I began to organize my thoughts the psalm appointed for the morning (September 2, 2010) was Noli oemulari (Do not fret yourself), Psalm 37, Part I. It is a psalm of equanimity. Clearly, this psalm is informing much of what I want to say.

I. What Has Happened?

I think the clearest view of what took place is given by the Court of Review in their judgment of July 28, 2010. This Court critiques the Trial Court and presumably the Presiding Bishops for allowing the sexual abuse exception (from the statute of limitations) to be used without proof of actual sexual abuse. "This is especially true," the judgment continues, "under circumstances where the exception is invoked not so much to deal with sexual abuse but, rather, as an effort to use events in the distant past when the Bishop was a priest to remove a bishop during current times of strife within the diocese." To a church that has done its best to confront the problem of clergy sexual abuse in a transparent and deliberate manner, the Review Court offers a rather stinging rebuke. "To allow Title IV and the sexual abuse exception to the statute of limitations to be used in this manner diminishes the monumental efforts of the Church to address, punish and remove incidents of actual clergy sexual abuse." The last impression this church wants to convey at this time is a diminishment of efforts to combat clergy sexual abuse.

No less than six times the Court of Review found the Trial Court "erroneous" in its presentation of fact and in its conclusions. It appears the case was somewhat forced and one wonders what other motivation there might have been than a straightforward prosecution. It seems clear from the beginning that it was an attempt to remove the bishop, which brings us to the subject of power.

Power is at the heart of life. We talk about the power or energy of the Holy Spirit. Power is a life force. Leaders often stop at an "imperial" stage of power when a further stage of "interactive" power yields greater morale and accountability. Saul Alinsky (for those of my generation :-)) conveys the distinction this way: the leader "wants power himself. The organizer finds his goal in creation of power for others to use." There is nothing wrong with imperial power. The church tends to elect bishops with this particular character-set expressing charisma, vision, command and control. The church does not seem to encourage further growth to interactive or relational power. Imperial power is power over others. It is natural to hierarchy. Interactive power is power with others. It values mutuality. Forty years ago successful leaders in business exhibited imperial power. Today, because of the diversity and mobility of the workforce this leadership style no longer works. Instead, a more interactive style is called for. The church hierarchy and electing conventions for the most part (in my opinion) are back where business was in the 1970s. The presiding bishops, according to the Court of Review, exercised their imperial power to attempt to remove a diocesan bishop who was enmeshed within his diocese in conflict that seemed and may still seem intractable. Beyond the removal of the bishop there was no plan. Bishop Jefferts Schori when asked about this in a meeting of diocesan clergy replied that each constituent community should go back and work on its own health and thereby the diocese would be made strong. I remember thinking, I can do that, though I might have hoped for more. More interactive leadership would have been thinking of organizational goals and how parishes might work together to achieve them. There would have been a greater sense of purpose beyond the removal of a bishop. There might have been a guide proposed who could have encouraged more collaboration and accountability. Without this the Standing Committee fell into many of the same patterns for which the bishop had been criticized before.

II. Our Starting Point: the World as it Is

Dr. Richard O'Reilly, Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center, talked of the "kids who will face things down, they know exactly what is going on. They are able to face it, and somehow get above it." We are called to face what is going on, see the world as it is, and be activated by hope to somehow get above it. Our bishop has a blind spot to his own conduct as unbecoming a member of the clergy. The Court of Review noted, "The tragedy of this conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy is exacerbated by the fact that, during the trial of the case, the Bishop testified that, upon reflection on his failure to act... that his actions were 'just about right.' They were not just about right. They were totally wrong. The Bishop's testimony on this subject revealed impaired judgment with regard to the conduct that is the subject of the First Offense (Contemporaneous Failure to Respond Appropriately) and that is clearly and unequivocally conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy." We have to start there, and, in a way that is truer and more caring than the Bishop and stronger than the Presiding Bishops, be absolutely clear that in our diocese clergy sexual abuse will be treated with the utmost seriousness, care and safety.

We need to face into where we are in leadership on many levels that has been imperial, manipulative and controlling. We need to assert that in our diocese we will foster growth toward interactive, mutual and accountable leadership. The Standing Committee has made a good start in stressing "transparency, openness, and shared responsibilities."

Facing in to where we are has some very bright terrain. The diocese has not been static these last 34 months. The Standing Committee has noted some of these positive landmarks: strong pastoral support from the bishops; consultation teams working with distressed parishes; mission strategy planning; the diaconate; youth ministry; a review of canons and financial controls; and an active Cathedral Chapter and Council of Deans.

III. Purpose: What is it that We Want?

If we are to do better than (the Court of Review's judgment of) the presiding bishops, there needs to be a higher purpose than simply the removal of a diocesan bishop. In the last month my colleagues have written numerous letters requesting the bishop to step down. This is certainly not a new request. At the celebration of my new ministry as rector of Saint Paul's Church on February 4, 2006, the preacher was my good friend Bill Wood. The celebrant was Bishop Bennison. That week Bill in his role as President of the Standing Committee had asked the Bishop to resign. Needless to say it was an interesting way to begin a new ministry. The sense that the parish made of it was that Saint Paul's is a safe place for people who disagree to stand together before God. What we want is a turning - each to the other - in Christ.

My colleagues' letters express the desires of our diocese eloquently though perhaps in reverse as in "this will not happen with the reinstatement of Bishop Bennison." Maybe, maybe not, but I will come back to that. The purposed desire of the diocese as stated by my colleagues, in order, is for unity, reinvigoration, pastoral care, trust and safety (Safford); trust, mutual accountability and servant leadership (Allen); trust (Standing Committee); proclamation of good news, modeling a pattern of life in accord with Christ's teachings, defending the weak and vulnerable, a rhythm of penitence and thanksgiving (Cederberg); dynamic leadership (Zabriskie).

To all of the above I say "Amen." It is what I want for the Diocese of Pennsylvania. Living into such a purpose is not something that is given and may be received passively. It probably wouldn't be worth much if it was. Instead, members of the diocese are to be active in pursuit of their own common desires. We need to be a learning organization. To the extent that a leader enables the purposes for which we strive, they are to be celebrated. To the extent not, we shake off the dust and move forward.

IV. Process: What are the Steps Ahead?

The first step is to recognize and move beyond a diocesan system that has seemed to me, in the five years I have been here, codependent. Codependence is allowing one person's behavior to affect another who is in turn obsessed with trying to control that first person's behavior and round it goes. This is a destructive dance, and has extended to the national church itself. Everyone has gotten onto this dance floor. The Standing Committee and Bishop have been locked in codependence. The presiding bishops have been pulled in. We have the opportunity now to recognize what has been happening and get off this dance floor!

The way we sit out the dance of codependence is through the spiritual practice of detachment. This does not mean indifference. Teresa of Avila likens it to a silkworm building a cocoon that is God's grandeur. In order to do this, she says, we need to let go of attachments to earthly things and perform deeds of penance. Todd Cederberg and the Church of the Good Samaritan are taking a step in this direction with their penitential prayer service to be held on September 8. Through penitence it is possible to mourn and detach in love from the problem or person with which we are entangled. Gerald May observes that detachment often happens only when we have been brought to our knees: "We human beings naturally try to achieve satisfaction in all things through our own autonomous effort and control. This is just as true in our search for spiritual fulfillment as it is in the rest of life. We may yearn to 'let go and let God,' but it usually doesn't happen until we have exhausted our own efforts. There is a relentless willfulness in us that seldom ceases until we have been brought to our knees by incapacity and failure." Can we use the present moment as an opportunity to begin breaking the entanglement of codependence? I should say that everyone has been brought to their knees.

Detachment recognizes that we are responsible for ourselves to live into the purpose described above. We are responsible for building our own cocoon that is living actively into Christ, but not by relentless willfulness, or imperial power. Those who are attached to self-will are moving in the opposite direction from our purpose. We may have to let them go and "blow right past them" in our work for mutuality and accountability. We are responsible for the desires Christ has placed in our hearts. To act on this and enable others to take up their role imparts dignity.

Finally, detachment means living in the present. We do not need to solve everything all at once, or imagine that we can. We can take a crisis and break it up into specific issues. Then it is possible to do something about them. Today, we will work on this particular problem, for instance. We convert the "plight" into a "problem" and get to work.

2009-09-11T09:42:00.000-04:00

My friend Jack Walp send this conversation starter by by Frank M. Turner , the John Hay Whitney Professor of History and director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Yale University“The good that the Archbishop of Canterbury seeks to achieve is the unity of an imagined Anglican Communion that has virtually no existence in reality. In support of that unity he willingly sacrifices the ordination of women in some dioceses, the appointment of women to the episcopate in some churches, and the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from ordination and the episcopate. For the sake of unity of a communion that does not really exist, he has (perhaps unwittingly) fostered turmoil, dissension, and schism.”

Praise Song

2009-01-23T17:59:00.003-04:00

Praise Song for the Day, Praise Song for Struggle
by Elizabeth Alexander

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each others’
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of someone and then others who said,
“I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.”
We need to find a place where we are safe;
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”
Others by “first do no harm,” or “take no more
than you need.” What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp

—praise song for walking forward in that light.

—transcribed from the Presidential inauguration ceremony,
January 20, 2009© 2009, Elizabeth Alexander

Gene's Prayer

2009-01-23T17:54:00.002-04:00

+Gene Robinson's Prayer for President-elect Barack Obama
A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama.
By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire
Opening Inaugural EventLincoln Memorial, Washington, DCJanuary 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.
AMEN.

Grace at Meals

2008-12-29T13:16:00.002-04:00

Jewish prayers at meals were always blessings of God rather than petitions for a blessing upon the food or the recipients. The following is a grace adapted from the Jewish tradition:
"Blessed are you, O Lord God, King of the Universe, for you give us food to sustain our lives and make our hearts glad; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

This next grace is also a blessing of God, from the Apostolic Constitutions compiled at the latter half of the 4th century:
"You are blessed, O Lord, who nourishes us from our youth, who gives food to all creatures. Fill our hearts with joy and gladness, that having always what is sufficient for us, we may abound to every good work, in Christ Jesus our Lord, through whom glory, honor, and power be to you forever. Amen."

A grace attributed to Bridget, Abbess of Kildare, late 5th century:
"God bless the poor,
God bless the sick,
And bless our human race.
God bless our food,
God bless our drink,
All homes, O God, embrace."

A grace I adapted for the Christmas season from Marian Wright Edelman's book "Guide My Feet," page 35:
"Jesus, small poor baby of Bethlehem,
be born again in our hearts today
be born again in our homes today
be born again in our cities today
be born again in our nations today
be born again in our world today.
We thank you for this food
for the hands that planted and tended it
for the hands that prepared and provided it
and for the hands that served it.
And we pray for those without enough food
in your world and in our land of plenty. Amen."

A Spanish grace:
"O God, to those who have hungered,
give bread.
And to those who have bread,
give a hunger for justice. Amen."

"For what we are about to receive,
the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen."

There are graces found in the Book of Common Prayer on page 835:
"Give us grateful hearts, our Father, for all thy mercies, and make us mindful of the needs (and gifts) of others; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

"Bless, O Lord, thy gifts to our use and us to thy service; for Christ's sake. Amen."

"For these and all his mercies, God's holy Name be blessed and praised; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

A couple of graces learned from Bishop Lyman Ogilby:
"Christ in the wilderness five thousand fed
with two small fish and five loaves of bread.
May the blessing of the One who made this miraculous division
rest upon us and this provision. Amen."

"May the God who blesses, bless."

Sung graces:
(Johnny Appleseed)
"O the Lord is good to me
and so I thank the Lord
for giving me the things I need
the sun and the rain and the apple sees.
The Lord is good to me."

(Edelweiss)
"Bless our friends, bless our food,
come, O Lord, and sit with us.
May our hearts grow in peace,
may your love surround us.
Friendship and love
may they bloom and grow,
bloom and grow forever.
Bless our friends, bless our food,
come, O Lord, and sit with us."

(We plow the fields/Wir pflugen)
All good gifts around us
are sent from heaven above;
then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord
for all his love."

From the United Thank Offering's Graces for Children:
"God, we thank you for this food
for rest and home and all things good;
for wind and rain and sun above,
but most of all for those we love. Amen."

"We thank you, Lord, for happy hearts,
for rain and sunny weather.
We thank you, Lord, for this our food,
and that we are together. Amen."

More children's graces:
"Thank you for the world so sweet,
thank you for the food we eat.
Thank you for the birds that sing.
Thank you, God, for everything. Amen."

"For food, and all thy Gifts of love,
We give you thanks and praise.
Look down, O Father, from above
And bless us all our days. Amen."

"For every cup and plateful,
God make us truly grateful. Amen."

Seek the Peace of the City

2008-11-30T17:03:00.003-04:00

November 24, 2008

I. Introduction

“Seek the peace of the city,” wrote Jeremiah to the exiles in Babylon. The exiles, he knew, would be there an indefinite time. It would be best that they seek the city’s welfare. One might even say that here is an intimation of Jesus’ “love your enemy” (Matt. 5:44). In addition, the exiled, economically dislocated Israelites are to worship and pray to God there. The God of Israel is to be met beyond borders, even beyond the borders of Jerusalem. Seek the peace of the city.

This morning a funeral mass was held at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul for Sergeant Timothy Simpson who was killed a week earlier. He became the fourth Philadelphia police officer killed in the line of duty this year. His partner had been killed less than seven months ago. Violence against police in our city runs counter to the national trend of a one-fifth decline in officers’ deaths in the line of duty. Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said, “he had never witnessed such a toll on police in his 41 years on the job” (Inquirer, 11/19/08, p. A11). While police deaths are up, homicides in the city though still numbering 300 are considerably lower than in previous years. According to Lawrence Sherman of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, the conditions for violence include the high number of illegal guns on the streets, broken families and concentrations of poverty. Mayor Nutter addressed our Diocese (The Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania) on the issue of hand guns and safety. Sociologist Elijah Anderson in his book Code of the Street emphasized economic dislocation and the alienation and weakening of the family structure that goes with it as the condition for a street code of violence.

As much as anything the violence in Philadelphia was my motivation to join a Delaware Valley delegation of Jews, Muslims and Christians to visit Israel and the West Bank during this past Easter Week for the purpose of peace-making. Would a journey to the center of the world’s most intractable violence provide any insight for seeking peace at home? Upon return we have formed the Interfaith Community for Middle East Peace (ICMEP) in order to bring the faiths together in their capacity to be vehicles of peace.

This year’s violence in Israel included the death of Roni Yechiah in a rocket attack at the Israeli town of Sderot on February 27. It was the first death by rocket in nine months. In the fighting that followed over 120 Palestinians and 2 Israeli soldiers were killed. After only a week, on March 6, in retaliation for the Palestinian deaths in Gaza, an Israeli Arab residing in Jerusalem opened fire on the Mercaz Ha Rav Yeshiva leaving eight students dead and eleven wounded. On Easter Monday (March 24), two weeks later, we left for Jerusalem. In the air over the Atlantic I read the final verses of Mark’s Gospel appointed for the day: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that (Jesus) is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark 16:7). After the crucifixion of exile, officers killed in the line of duty, hundreds of homicides, rocket attacks and a revenge killing, I was going to see Jesus in whom there is that “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding…” (Phil. 4:7).

II. Listening

As a delegation we travelled with the purpose of listening. Our leaders were Maha El-Taji, an Israeli Arab, and Leah Green, the founder and director of the Compassionate Listening Project. Our thesis was that listening with the heart corrals differing experiences, pain from opposing causes, and holds them in a safe environment allowing for the appreciation of one another’s common humanity. The process of compassionate listening would create a shift from an attitude of defensiveness or a fixation on woundedness to what is at our heart – our loves, our deep desire for peace, and our empathy for others. The only way to help another get to this heart or core of empathy is for us to be in our own heart. By changing ourselves, by being more heart-ful, we can help another to make their own transformation. This was the idea.

Listening is at the heart of personal justice for Theologian Paul Tillich. In a small book entitled, Love, Power and Justice, he wrote, “In order to know what is just in a person-to-person encounter, love listens. It is its first task to listen. No human relation, especially no intimate one, is possible without mutual listening. Reproaches, reactions, defenses may be justified in terms of proportional justice. But perhaps they would prove to be unjust if there were more mutual listening. All things and all (people), so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen, they want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. They want justice from us. But we can give it to them only through the love which listens.” (p. 84)

Rami, a Jew who lost his daughter in a suicide bombing, beset with outrage, was able to utilize that energy creatively by speaking for peace through the Bereaved Parents’ Circle. Once when speaking to a Palestinian school, the principal warned the student body, “Don’t listen to him. He will make you weak.” The message is that a certain hardness is necessary for survival, let alone for fighting for what is right. The contrast is between what Tillich called the reproaches of proportional justice, and the mutual listening of creative justice. It is possible to listen deeply without being less assertive about what one believes to be right.

When listening is unexpectedly practiced at a checkpoint real human interaction and healing take place. There are about eighty checkpoints within the West Bank. Their purpose is to restrict the movement of Palestinians and so thwart terrorist attacks. In addition there are as many as 150 to 200 “flying checkpoints” that are set up for a few hours every day. Army vehicles stop along a road to check all Palestinian vehicles as well as Israeli cars carrying Palestinian residents. B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) observes that, “Cases of direct physical violence by soldiers against Palestinians wanting to cross the internal checkpoints have become an almost daily occurrence since the beginning of the second Intifada.”

We met with leaders of a Creativity for Peace camp held twice each summer in New Mexico for Israeli and Palestinian girls. After an experience there an Israeli came of age for military service and was a soldier assigned to a checkpoint. One day she noticed a small Palestinian boy waiting and terrified with a paper airplane in his hand. She made herself a paper airplane and together they played for a bit and he began to laugh. On another occasion, a man with severe diabetes came to the check point. He did not have the proper permit. It is hot and as he stands, he is suffering. She gets up and takes her chair and has him sit down while he waits. Her fellow soldiers give her looks and wonder what is wrong with her!?! She is listening to the needs of those who wait in line. In her small way giving them justice.

III. Dialogue

Dialogue or lack of it is seen in contrasting views of a Jewish spokesman for the settlement at Hebron and a Sufi Sheikh in Jerusalem. Hebron is the only Palestinian city on the West Bank (other than East Jerusalem) with an Israeli settlement in its center. B’Tselem explains, “Over the years, the army has created a contiguous strip of land in the city along which the movement of Palestinian vehicles is absolutely forbidden… At the present time (2007), the only persons allowed to move about freely along this strip are settlers and Israeli security forces. The center of this strip contains many sections of street on which even Palestinian pedestrians are forbidden.”

We asked David Wilder, a spokesman for the settlement, if he had any personal relationships with Palestinians. “You can’t converse with people who are trying to get you to leave,” he responded. “If you let down your guard they’ll slit your throat. Israel is at war. The only give-and-take we’ve seen is ‘we give/you take.’ People like Bin Laden will do barbarous things to you.” When asked what was his greatest disappointment, I was interested to hear him reply that he did not achieve enough. He seemed to me someone very much motivated by achievement. Though achievement is a fine motivation, it can lead some people to view others as obstacles and to be authoritarian as leaders. They may look at situations as a zero sum game – it’s either them or us. Compassionate listening provides an alternative to this expression of the achievement motive. Here is Sheikh Abdul Aziz Buchari, the direct descendant of Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (810 – 870). Muhammad al-Bukhari compiled collections of traditions (hadiths) in Sunnite Islam.

Sheikh Buchari said, “The Crusaders’ war was carried out under the name of religion. In reality it was not religion but conquering. When people say they are fighting over religion, it’s really over power that they are fighting. People are upset today over the dividing wall Israel is building, but the real wall is in our heads. If we want to overcome that separation we need to talk to one another. There are plenty of Muslims and Jews here, but we never talk to each other! Some people say, ‘Well, we might talk, but we have to find people in the other group who really want peace – then we’ll have something in common. We can’t expect to talk with extremists.’ But those are precisely the people we need to bring into the talks – extremists from both sides. If we do not include all the people of faith in the peace process, they’ll speak out in other, less constructive ways. We need to specifically include the ‘extremists.’”

IV. Anger

Rami, referred to earlier under “listening,” served with a tank crew in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. All together there were 11 tanks. By the end there were three. Rami lost some good friends. He came back from that war a very angry man. 10 years later Rami now married had a daughter who grew to be a vivacious and lovely girl. Then a few days before Yom Kippur at the start of the Second Intafada in 2000, she with several other children were killed by two suicide bombers. He spent the longest night of his life searching the neighborhoods for her, then the hospitals and finally the morgue. A husk of a man, during the seven days of Jewish mourning one thousand people came through his house. One visitor suggested a group for bereaved parents whose goal was peace, to whom Rami bitterly responded, “How dare you!”

Anger, he discovered, is double-edged. Rami had to decide what he would do with his anger. He began to think that vengeance would not bring back his daughter, another Palestinian death would not cause her return. Anger would just fester and eat away at him from within. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela in a book about the legacy of apartheid in South Africa writes that, hateful emotions “are a burden that prevent the victim from fully coming to terms with the trauma and moving on.” (96) On the other hand, anger was the energy to lift him above himself, to give his life purpose. He found that by telling his story through the Bereaved Parents’ Circle he could bring awareness, the humanness of both sides, the need for an end to the killing.

At the Creativity for Peace Camp an Israeli girl tells her story of losing two friends in a suicide bombing. It made such a difference to her to tell this story in the presence of the enemy. This is deep, emotional work. The process might start with a paper bag filled with twenty words such as Holocaust, checkpoint, suicide bomber and so on. The girls will write what they feel about those words. Then the fur flies! If a girl can say, “I hate you;” “I don’t trust you,” then it is possible for her to move toward love. But first there needs to be listening with compassion and authenticity. When there is the breakdown, then there is the possibility for break-through. Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela in her book, A Human Being Died That Night, explains “there are internal psychological dynamics that impel most of us toward forming an empathic connection with another person in pain, that draw us into (her) pain, regardless of who that someone is” (p. 127). After the Camp one Palestinian student in university listened as her professor said terrible things about Israelis. She stood up and said, “I have a different experience of Israelis,” and she told her story.

After visiting with leaders of the Peace Camp we went to Taghba on the Sea of Galilee which is where the trauma of Peter’s three-fold denial is confronted with Jesus’ three-fold question, “Do you love me?” (John 21: 15-17) It struck me that here was the same catharsis: breakdown, breakthrough and transformation.

V. Forgiveness

Esther Golan was born in 1923. She escaped the Holocaust with the Kinder Transport. Kinder Transport was a British response to the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938 in Germany remembered as Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”). German and Austrian Nazis burned and destroyed 267 synagogues, killed 100 people, smashed 7,500 Jewish stores (all that remained in the Reich), and incarcerated nearly 30,000 in concentration camps. Sponsored by the British Jewish Refugee Committee, 10,000 children left Germany in sealed trains to find refuge with foster families in homes, or on farms, group homes and orphanages throughout Great Britain Later Esther emigrated to Israel, and we met her at her home in Rehavia, Jerusalem. She says that in her natural family the word “hate” was not allowed. She concludes that, “hate brings hate brings self-hate.”

When asked about the Nazis and forgiveness, Esther replied, “Forgiveness can only be given to those who did the harm. The perpetrators in this case are all dead, so there is no forgiveness.” There is truth to what Esther says, and it is part of the case I might make against capital punishment. Still I wonder whether it is not possible for the victim to forgive a perpetrator who is no longer present. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela suggests that perhaps it is. She says forgiveness “is a choice the victim makes to let go of the bitterness” (p.97). She observes that forgiveness can open up for the victim a new path of healing and conversely not to forgive can mean closing the door to transformation.

Nevertheless, Esther noted the conversations that are currently going on between Israel and Germany. “If we can have conversation with Germans, then why do we not sit down with Palestinians?” The goal is not to ignore our disagreements. Rather, she said, what is necessary is to live under creative tension, to live with difference. Our aim of Compassionate listening is to move toward this experience of dialogue. Dr.Gobodo-Madikizela explains that this dialogue “is critical if victims (of whatever side) are to live again with perpetrators in the same society, or indeed if they are to live in greater harmony with themselves” (p.119).

VI. Hope

Combatants for Peace is an organization with both Palestinian and Israeli counterparts. They are Palestinians who have served time in Israeli prison and Israeli soldiers. Both have sworn off violence for peace. We spoke with the Palestinian Suleiman al-Hamri. He contrasted big dreams with small hopes. “There’s a difference between us and some who work for similar goals. You can either work for the Great Dream or for small hopes. The Palestinians who work for ‘the Great Dream’ – like Hamas – want to open their eyes one day and see not one Israeli still in the Holy Land. Likewise with Israelis – people like Lieberman (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs in Israel who advocates transferring Israeli Arab citizens to neighboring Arab countries) – their ‘Great Dream’ is to see the total elimination of all Palestinians. But we have chosen to work for what I call the small hopes: that Israelis and Palestinians will be able to live together in peace, and with mutual respect and understanding. We are ready to cooperate with all people and groups. To get there we are starting to work not only on the military issues we started with, but on social problems, on educational problems as well.”

At Wi’am, the Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem, its Director Zoughbi al-Zoughbi writes: “As a Christian, I am always hopeful… Hope is a matter of choice. Hope is not only an emotional thing but also a reasonable approach to fight against hopelessness and frustration, which will lead only to hate. Hope is the nonviolent approach to struggle that will not demonize the other but will invite the other to join. Hope is an oasis of interactions of people from different backgrounds and walks of life to see new possibilities. Hope allows people to adopt different approaches to create a healthy atmosphere. Hope is the gift of uplifting the spirits of the people who are paying a heavy price in pain. Hope is to walk with them, to share with them, and of course to help them see the possibility of a different reality. Through the work of Wi’am and through our partners, we see that hope truly soars even in the midst of trauma and injustice.” (Mission Study, p. 162)

On the second Sunday of Easter, the Psalm for morning prayer proclaims Suleiman’s “small hope”: “He has established peace on your borders; he satisfies you with the finest wheat” (147:5).

VII. Encounter

We spent our last night and morning in Israel at Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam, set up as a joint model village in 1972 by a group of Jewish and Arab Israelis. In the United States studies of Black and White racial identity have shown that the identity of a person of one race is constructed in the significant encounter of oneself through the meaningful engagement with those of the other race. In 1972, a group of Arabs and Jews decided to conduct an ongoing encounter by living together, and so Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam (“Oasis of Peace”) was born. It is a lived response to a history of division.

In 1976, this community formed the School for Peace. The youth encounters alone bring one thousand Jews and Arabs to the School each year. The School accepts young people aged sixteen and seventeen which is the age when they begin shaping their social and political identities. The School is affiliated with Hebrew University. One wall of the “Clubhouse” is a one way mirror through which, unseen, social psychologists may observe the group processes taking place. The School makes extensive use of Social Identity Theory which has grown from Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport’s “contact hypothesis” posited in his classic work, The Nature of Prejudice. The aspiration of the School is “to unravel and then reconstruct participants’ identities because only an encounter between confident identities can lead to a genuine meeting of equals and permit the option of building a more humane and just society” (Identities, p. 8).

The scripture reading for Tuesday morning before we left captured much of what our delegation had been about in this Easter Week and following. In First Peter 1: 22, I read:
“Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth
so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.”

VIII. Conclusion

The experience of violence and peace-making in Israel holds potential lessons for us here in Philadelphia. Certainly in both places there are political and systemic issues to be addressed. In Philadelphia these would include hand guns and public safety, job creation (that pays a living wage), and training.

I was struck by the importance of encounter between people with differences, particularly at the age of adolescence when political and social identity is being shaped. We see this through the sharing by members of the Bereaved Parents’ Circle in schools, peace camps and “schools for peace.”

There is clearly a spiritual dimension to peace-making, that includes listening with empathy that validates the other person, gives a degree of justice and shifts future behavior; dialogue that risks meeting the other whose position is diametrically opposed to one’s own; recognition of the energy of anger for creative difference-making; the transformative power of forgiveness; and the hope that takes small steps and includes people whose differences might otherwise divide them.

IX. Bibliography

Anderson, Elijah, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner
City, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999.

Gobodo-Midikizela, Pumla, A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Woman
Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
2003.

Goldstein, Stephen, Israel-Palestine: A Mission Study for 2007-2008, Women’s
Division, General Board of Global Ministries, The United Methodist
Church, 2007.

Halabi, Rabah, Editor, Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue: The School for Peace
Approach, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Tillich, Paul, Love, Power and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1954.

Lakota generosity and the sacred pipe

2008-07-23T10:33:00.003-04:00

This summer several of our young people from Saint Paul’s Church, Chestnut Hill, Charlie Affel, Maggie Olsen, along with me, travelled to North Dakota to the Standing Rock Reservation to work and play alongside Lakota young people at a church camp. After the camp was over a Lakota man invited us to be part of a pipe ceremony that conveyed the truth that “we are all related” and stewards of all that has been given us. Although the Christian and Lakota traditions are not the same, they touch each other at many points because each has a kind of “sacramental” way of looking at the world. Visible signs in the natural world communicate the sacred mysteries of creation.

It was a beautiful late Dakota afternoon. Puffs of cloud hung high against the blue sky. We sat in a circle representing reciprocity. What one receives or takes away in this life, one also must give back. It is a cycle of life – an outpouring of the Spirit and a pouring out to others of the Spirit’s gifts. Our teacher told stories and through them we began to understand some of the Lakota tradition.

Sage, which is plentiful around the camp, was lit with a prayer and then passed around the circle “sun-wise” so each might purify their hands, face, head, arms and body. In Christian worship purification takes place through the prayer, “Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.” Bits of red willow bark are used in the pipe ceremony as smokers might use tobacco but the filling of the pipe is much more impressive. A prayer is chanted to the four directions, a pinch of bark is added to the red-stone bowl of the pipe for the South, and then the West, next the North, and the East. Another pinch is added with a prayer to the heavens and finally one to the earth below. In this way the pipe bowl contains the totality of space and time, all of creation including humankind. The pipe is topped with a bit of sage to purify the whole. When the fire of the Great Spirit is added, there is a divine sacrifice so that all is brought within the divine presence. The ego is sacrificed so that self-centeredness is
replaced with the Great Mystery within. That is our true center allowing us to become what we already are – a fitting part of creation in a circle of reciprocity. Each of us – men, women and children – puffed on the pipe, reconnecting us, restoring us, and preparing us to give of ourselves for others.

It is not for us as Christians to appropriate this ceremony (enough has been taken from the Lakota) but we may be invited in as our group was this summer. It reminds us that God is the source of all things. We hear in the Psalms, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows God’s handiwork” (19: 1); and “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world and all who dwell therein” (24:1). We are related to the universe in every direction through the presence of God. We are part of a covenant of trust. Property and land come from God. Material things, abilities and time are given to us by God. We are trusted stewards of all God has given us, with not our self in the center but God. No longer ruled by self-centeredness, we are to give as God gave. We are to respect the dignity of all. In a society where all the pressure is to receive and take away, it is good to be reminded that at the heart of creation is the need to give back. It is a life-cycle; it is life giving; and it is joyful. No wonder generosity is a cardinal virtue of the Lakota. May it be so with us all.

A missed opportunity for truth and reconciliation

2008-06-11T09:33:00.002-04:00

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Wednesday on the "church trial of Episcopal Bishop Charles E. Bennison Jr. charged with concealing his brother's sexual abuse of a teenage girl decades ago." At Tuesday's session, the paper related, the abused girl now 50 years old, said tearfully, "I haven't wanted (the bishop) removed from his job. I just want him to acknolwedge his role." My fantasy is what would happen if rather than litigating innocence or guilt we called together a Truth and Reconciliation Committee?

Psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela authored a telling book about the legacy of Apartheid entitled, A Human Being Died That Night. She remarks “that the line separating good from evil is paper-thin.” She is interviewing Eugene de Kock, nicknamed “Prime Evil,” for the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. He has just told of his worst memory of a cross border raid. She observes: “A human being died that night in the murder operation. The reality seemed to hang between us. At that moment I thought I saw a man finally acknowledging the debt he owed to his conscience” (p. 51).

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela argues the importance of forgiveness for both perpetrator and victim. “Not to forgive,” she writes, “means closing the door to the possibility of transformation” (103). Conversely, hateful emotions “are a burden that prevent the victim from fully coming to terms with the trauma and moving on.” (96). Forgiveness, she says, does not “overlook the deed: it rises above it. This is what it means to be human,’ it says. ‘I cannot and will not return the evil you inflicted on me.’ And that is the victim’s triumph” (117). Finally, she observes hopefully, “it is within the grasp of ordinary people to forgive evil and to end generational cycles of violence” (118).

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela commenting on pain in South Africa wrote: “Empathy is a response to another person’s pain, even in the midst of tragedy, pain cannot be evil.” (p.100) And again, “there are internal psychological dynamics that impel most of us toward forming an empathic connection with another person in pain, that draw us into his pain, regardless of who that someone is.” (127) She adds that for many compassion “is deeply therapeutic and restorative.” (129) What will bring healing is not litigation but conscience, forgiveness and empathy.

So much, and the trial is no exception, of what we have seen played out on the diocesan and national scene is about power. In contrast, at Saint Paul’s, we are about relationship. While the press may sensationalize the sexuality of the case, in reality abuse is about power over others. Rather than “power-over,” our identity as Saint Paul-ites is one of relational power, the capacity to care for one another, to stand together before God. Our identity also is one of peace, that is the well being of all.

There is a particular quality to our witness that comes from the singular community of which we are a part. Saint Paul’s Church for over a century and a half has been a place of turning. You can call this conversion or conversation. In any case it is a “turning – each to the other – in Christ.” I like to call it our parish vision. This turning is part of the original energy of Saint Paul’s. Almost six months to the day after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in Ford’s Theatre, southern and northern clergy, enemies only a year earlier, stood before God at the altar of Saint Paul’s. They had gathered in Philadelphia for the Episcopal Church’s General Convention that year. At my celebration of new ministry in this church over two years ago, the preacher, President of the Standing Committee, had that week requested the resignation of the Bishop who was our celebrant at the Eucharist. They both were together before God at the altar of Saint Paul’s. It is our particular witness as a parish that people of great difference can stand as one, reconciled before God. In 1865 with so many southern clergy in the church, the rector at that time recalled years later that it seemed a great “omen of peace for the parish.” Peace is the second strand of witness that is particular to Saint Paul’s. Nearly a hundred years later the parish planted a Northern Red Oak, symbol of faith’s strength, in memory of Dag Hammarskjöld and all those who have given their lives for world peace. Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash in Zimbabwe while seeking to negotiate peace between United Nations and Katanga forces. This commitment to unity of those with differences and to peace has become part of our culture, part of the double helix (strands of unity and peace) or DNA at Saint Paul’s.

So my fantasy is a relational rather than litigious gathering. The reality will be a trial. The national church will litigate but will it own what has been broken? There will be accusations and defense, but will there be conscience, forgiveness and empathy? Will there be more “power over” one or the other, or will forgiveness rise above this? Will there be a turning away, or a turning – each to the other – in Christ? Will there be legal disputation or negotiated peace? "I haven't wanted (the bishop) removed from his job," the victim cried. "I just want him to acknolwedge his role." This is the cry for relationship, not for more institutional power.

Delaware Valley Interfaith Delegation to Israel/Palestine –

2008-05-06T09:40:00.002-04:00

On Easter Week, I joined twenty Jews, Muslims, Christians, a Buddhist and a Unitarian Universalist, in a Delaware Valley Interfaith Delegation to Israel/Palestine to practice Compassionate Listening led by Leah Green, Director of the Compassionate Listening Project, and trainer Maha El-Taji.

Over the Atlantic on Easter Monday I read Evening Prayer. The lesson was the final verses of the Gospel of Mark, chapter 16, verses 1 – 8. Verse 7 is what stood out for me: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him, just as he told you.” It struck me that we would be going to the Galilee where Jesus has preceded us. We would see him just as he told us. Jesus told us that we would see him in compassion.

“In those days when there was again a great crowd without anything to eat, Jesus called his disciples and said to them, ‘I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat.’… His disciples replied, ‘How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?’” (Mark 8: 1-2, 4).

In this desert of arid and harsh conflict, violence and retaliation cycling round and round, our Delaware Valley Interfaith Delegation came to give the bread of compassionate listening. This listening with the heart corrals differing experiences, pain from opposing causes, and holds them in a safe environment allowing for the appreciation of one another’s common humanity. This frees people to “express themselves and to go to the level of their deep concerns. It provides the basis of all meaningful relationships. It is the first step to reconciliation. It enables sustained dialogue. Dialogue then becomes the basis for problem solving and ultimately, for advocacy.”

The Theologian Paul Tillich wrote in a small book entitled, Love, Power and Justice, that in personal encounters creative justice entails listening, giving and forgiving. “In order to know what is just in a person-to-person encounter, love listens. It is its first task to listen. No human relation, especially no intimate one, is possible without mutual listening. Reproaches, reactions, defenses may be justified in terms of proportional justice. But perhaps they would prove to be unjust if there were more mutual listening. All things and all (people), so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen, they want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. They want justice from us. But we can give it to them only through the love which listens.” (p. 84)

Preceding our arrival, Roni Yechiah had been killed by an Hamas rocket fired down upon the southern Israeli town of Sderot on February 27. It was the first Israeli death due to these primitive rockets in nine months. In the fighting that followed, over 120 Palestinians and 2 Israeli soldiers were killed. 258 rockets were fired by militants having obviously little effect. B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied territories) that we would visit on Wednesday reported that “1,259 of the 2,679 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip (since September 2000) were not participating in hostilities when they were killed, and 567 were minors.” On March 6 in retaliation for the Palestinian deaths in Gaza, an Israeli Arab residing in Jerusalem opened fire on the Mercaz Ha Rav Yeshiva leaving eight students dead and eleven wounded. Rabbi Menachem Fromann whom we would see on Friday gave one of the eulogies.

Two and a half weeks after the Yeshiva shootings, on Easter Monday, we left Newark Airport on El Al for Tel Aviv. Tensions around the fighting in Gaza meant that some of the checkpoints we were near were very touchy. There were roads we could not use with our Palestinian driver. And when we visited with the Combatants for Peace on the West Bank, the Israeli party to that group did not feel safe meeting with the Palestinian side, so we only got to talk with the Palestinians.

The first day we had a three faiths tour of ancient Jerusalem that took us to the Temple Mount, the Noble Sanctuary. The Christian historian Eutychius wrote in 876 C.E.: “The Byzantines… neglected it (the Temple Mount) and did not hold it in veneration, nor did they build a church over it because Christ our Lord said in his Holy Gospel ‘Not a stone will be left upon a stone which will not be ruined and devastated.’ For this reason the Christians left it as a ruin and did not build a church over it.”

The tragic irony today is that some Christian Zionists want to rebuild the Temple. When I spent Thursday night in Hebron at the home of a Palestinian family, they invited a friend to join us. The religious question he wanted to ask was whether I believed that the Temple in Jerusalem needed to be rebuilt in order for the Messiah to return. The anxiety of course is the destruction of the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. I answered “no.” In fact, in the Christian tradition the resurrected Christ is the rebuilt Temple. The tradition refers to Jesus destroying the temple and rebuilding it on the third day, the day of resurrection. Israel, as you might imagine supports the Zionists. On Sunday we met with Daniel Seaman, Director of the Government Press Office. He expressed strong support for those he called evangelical Christians. These are really dispensationalist Christians who believe the world will experience a period of worsening tribulations until Christ returns. It is based on the biblical interpretation of the nineteenth century Anglican John Nelson Darby. The return of the Jews to Palestine is a key event in the preordained process that will lead to the second coming. In 2006 Michael Freund, former director of communications for Benjamin Netanyahu wrote: “Thank God for Christian Zionists. Like it or not, the future of the relationship between Israel and the U.S. may very well hinge far less on America’s Jews than on its “Christians.“

A week after our return to Philadelphia, CNN news reported on Pastor John Hagee’s march in support of Israel, and his Nights in Honor of Israel. His group, Christians United for Israel, raised more than $12 million to help settle new immigrants in Israel, including in settlements in the Occupied Territories. In 2006 John Hagee warned in his book Jerusalem Countdown, “The coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty. The war of Ezekiel 38-39 could begin before this book gets published.“ Hagee believes that Jews “have everyting but spiritual life,“ and that anti-Semitism is the result of the Jews’ “rebellion (against God)." Still the Anti Defamation Leagues’ Abraham Foxman declares there is a role for Hagee “because of his support for Israel." Though Pastor Hagee does not seem to say it directly, I think it is implied that he believes in the rebuilding of the Temple, prior to the Messiah’s return.

Next, we walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the holiest places in Christianity, said to be Jesus’ place of execution and burial.

Once inside one climbs a steep stairway 33 feet to the top of Golgotha where a Greek Orthodox chapel is built over the rock of Calvary itself. Under the altar at the spot where the cross stood is a silver disc through which one can touch the rock. The opening is not wide and it is not an easy reach.

The author Reynolds Price, in a short story entitled “An Early Christmas,” describes what a difficult reach it is to touch Golgotha. “‘Jesus – Christ – crucified – here’ … an Orthodox priest or monk… gestured hard toward the silver medallion…Then I bent to reach the disc. It ringed an actual hole, jet black; and one last break in my mind said no. But the monk said ‘Reach.’ I was half bent over. I put my right hand into the hole up past my wrist. The air inside was decidedly cooler than the odorous room; but when I felt around in the dark, my fingers touched nothing. The voice said ‘Reach.’ …I’d have to kneel to thrust deeper – why though, for what? I glanced to the monk. His hand was huge now and aimed me on. So I got to my knees nearer the hole, then reached till my elbow vanished inward. The voice said ‘Now. Golgotha – here.”

Compassionate listening means being vulnerable. Our minds want to say no and shut down. At Al Arroub Refugee camp, I felt the camp leadership wanting to impose their agenda on me (of course they did). My mind said no. My fingers touched nothing. Could I be vulnerable and let go of my defensiveness about being pushed or coerced? Could I hear in that the refugees own pain at being pushed and coerced by the occupation? I am not sure that I did very well at this, but the Voice says, “Reach.” And reach I shall. To do so, as at Golgotha I will have to kneel, that is I will have to practice being in a centered place. Then listening with compassion to the other in pain, I shall touch Golgotha.

Mazen Farraj and Rami Elhannan are members of the Bereaved Parents Circle (Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost members to the conflict). We are at the end of our first day. Their stories will also cause us to be vulnerable to a father who lost his daughter and a son his father. Can I be with them in their pain when to do so means setting aside my own fear of loss and pain? This is the challenge and glory of Compassionate Listening.

Rami’s Story

In the 1973 Yom Kippur War Rami served with a tank crew. All together there were 11 tanks. They ended with three and he lost some good friends. He came back from that war a very angry man. 10 years later Rami now married had a daughter who grew to be a vivacious and lovely girl. Then ironically a few days before Yom Kippur she with several other children were killed by two suicide bombers at the start of the Second Intafada in 2000. He spent the longest night of his life searching the neighborhoods for her, then the hospitals and finally the morgue. A husk of a man, during the seven days of Jewish mourning one thousand people came through his house. One man suggested a group for bereaved parents whose goal was peace, to whom Rami bitterly responded, “How dare you!”

Conversion

Eventually, Rami decided to attend a Bereaved Parents Circle even though he was sure that it would be a waste of time. He was still angry. As he watched parents and others with deep loss due to the conflict get off buses for this meeting, he saw people he considered Jewish heroes. He began to think there might something here. Then came a bus of Palestinians arrived. One mother wore a large circle pendant around her neck containing a picture of her deceased son. All shared their pain of loss. It was during this meeting that something inside Rami flipped. He is not a religious Jew and so does not have a language for describing or understanding what happened, but something changed. He felt newly broken open, able to see Palestinians as more than the laborers tat he passed in Jerusalem, or whom he shot at during the Yom Kippur War. They were human beings who also suffered.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela commenting on pain in South Africa wrote: “Empathy is a response to another person’s pain, even in the midst of tragedy, pain cannot be evil.” (p.100) And again, “there are internal psychological dynamics that impel most of us toward forming an empathic connection with another person in pain, that draw us into his pain, regardless of who that someone is.” (127) She adds that for many compassion “is deeply therapeutic and restorative.” (129)

Anger is double-edged

Part of Rami’s experience of “flip” was deciding what he would do with his anger. He began to think that vengeance would not bring back his daughter, another Palestinian death would not cause her return. Anger would just fester and eat away at him from within.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela writes that, hateful emotions “are a burden that prevent the victim from fully coming to terms with the trauma and moving on.” (96)

Anger also has been the energy to lift him above himself, to give his life purpose. He found that by telling his story he could bring awareness, the humanness of both sides, the need for an end to the killing. Rami spoke of the importance listening – Jew to Palestinian and visa versa.

Listening

Once when speaking to a Palestinian school, the principal warned the student body, “Don’t listen to him. He will make you weak.” The message is that a certain hardness is necessary for survival, let alone for fighting for what is right. The difference is between what Tillich called the reproaches of proportional justice, and the mutual listening of creative justice. It is possible to listen deeply without being less aggressive about pushing for what is right.

Mazen’s Story

Mazen Farraj grew up in a refugee camp outside of Bethlehem. His father always told him that he wanted a better life for Mazen and his siblings than he had lived. Mazen went to university. At a student protest Mazen was arrested and spent three years in prison. After release and returning home, Mazen and his mother got word one night that his father, her husband, had been shot and killed by an Israeli soldier for being a Palestinian. Mazen wanted to go to identify the body and to say his final good-bye. He had loved his father whose only desire was a better life for his children.

The refugee camp has a curfew during which no one is allowed out of their homes. When Mazen explained the situation to a soldier and asked to go see his father’s body, the soldier replied that they would send an envelope by the next morning. Mazen was not permitted to go to his father’s body. It was he said the longest night. When day broke, the envelope arrived and the family could claim the father’s body.

Not Allowed

At the end of the story by Mazen, he was asked if he would like a glass of water. “Yes,” he said, “if it was allowed.” All of us listening showed a start of disbelief at his comment. When he noticed our reaction, Mazen realized what he had said. Then he talked of what it is like to grow up in an occupation where so much is not allowed. Even the simplest requests cannot be taken for granted but must be checked to be sure they are allowed.

“The Things They Carried”

Mazen began his talk by saying how difficult it is to carry the needs, hopes and feelings of the others at the refugee camp. They are deported and feel de-humanized. They are suppressed, and feel humiliated. It is hard to carry, he said. I asked him what gave him the capacity to carry all that? Like Rami, he spoke of anger as an energy that could lift him above himself, so that he could speak up for his people and to act in hope rather than get stuck in recrimination.

He said the Israeli soldiers also carried much. At a meeting with Combatants for Peace we listened by video to an Israeli soldier describe his doubt and fear. He had entered the Israeli army as a teenager and had now risen to the rank of commander. How does that happen, he asked. Once on patrol, he entered a house on the West Bank. Naturally there were children. His soldiers were behind him. A small girl about seven years old ran toward him. Was she carrying explosives? Were his men in danger behind him? He thought of shooting her. Then fired a warning shot to the ceiling hoping the round would not hit any one. The girl froze terrified, hands in the air. The Israeli soldier could not forget that little girl. He told his superiors that he would not do that any more. He could no longer carry the indiscriminate violence, the guilt was too much to bear.

Renoir Landscapes

2008-01-12T11:18:00.000-04:00

My wife and I visisted the exhibition of Renoir Landscapes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. One garden painting seemed to hold an endless variety of color. A comment caught my eye that “the reigning principle of nature was irregularity.” I enjoy the paradox of principle and irregularity. It reminds me of God’s promise that is a possible impossibility! Life in the Spirit is full of surprise, joy, and possibility (even the colorful possibility of what is irregular and beyond our ken). – Cliff

Why Isn't Everyone Praising the Lord?

2007-12-28T10:21:00.000-04:00

It was a bleak time for me and the approach of Christmas wasn't particularly appealing that year. To cheer myself, I went to Philadelphia's Christmas season opening parade on Market Street East. It was great fun with floats, marching bands, antique cars and culminated with Santa climbing a fire truck's ladder into Gimbels at the Gallery.

At a few street corners along Market Street small portable stages had been set up to feature singers from various schools and institutions. The light snow flurries that were falling looked really pretty with the old fashioned colored lights that lined one little stage, so I stopped to listen. A small cheerful choir of teens sang a lively gospel song. Its title asked the question: "Why Isn't Everybody Praising the Lord?"

I wish I could remember where they were from. I have also searched the Internet many times, without success, to seek the words to that song. It's almost as if the whole evening was a dream, but it wasn't. It was instead a moment of sharp insight that lifted my spirit, changed my perspective, and until this day has helped prevent me from seeing life through the dark lens I'd been burdened with in the few months before that evening.

I hope those children, grown now of course, are all well and that each one still remembers that song. Although I'll probably never find the lyrics, the title itself has turned out to be enough for me. Why isn't everybody praising the Lord? I'm not sure. I just know I do often. - from Dean

Veteran's Day 2007

2007-11-11T17:22:00.000-04:00

It is good to be at the Cathedral of the Diocese of Pennsylvania on this Veterans' Day. I imagine the Cathedral as this stable place in the midst of flux witnessing to the fellowship of the Spirit. This Cathedral is a stable place in the midst of hostilities that envisions the healing of the nations. This Cathedral is a stable place where Christ is born. Here is a place of fellowship, healing and new birth. The Viet Nam Memorial, 25 years old on Tuesday, has a similar cathedral quality to it - a hushed place of fellowship, healing and new birth. A boy leaves a baseball card to remember his grandfather.

I am not a veteran. I sense that the experience of many veterans opens their eyes to God in the way that any of us when placed in harm's way, in situations where we are not entirely in control, look beyond ourselves toward a higher power.

I am a listener. My wife's cousin was a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam. He began talking of his experiences about ten years ago. I was privileged to be a listener. He told me of a door gunner (a perilous position in a helicopter) who had gone through life trusting in his own abilities to achieve what he wanted - confiding in his own strength, as the hymn says. One day in camp being shelled by mortars, it was so clear to him that he was not in control. He was not big enough to uphold his own trust. Only God was big enough for that. It was an eye-opening experience.

I am a listener. My father on a minesweeper in the Pacific told of swimming with nothing but two miles of water between him and the bottom. He said how unnerving it was. I have always felt that to be such a powerful image of what it is to be in the presence of God, to experience such depth of trust and redemption. It is unnerving. "Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord..." the Psalm says (Ps. 130). It was an eye-opening experience.

I am a listener. Parishioners who are vets speak of God's providential hand that brought them through. I can only imagine that those who did not make it were brought through to that heavenly place where the "waters of life flow from the throne of God" (Revelation 22). A parishioner who took a shot to the head that pierced his helmet and lived, finds every day a gift. In each case, eyes are opened and God is met in that which is big eneough for our trust, in the unimaginable depth of plenteous redemption, in the gift of life. For those of you reading this who are vets, your experience of being put in harm's way, out of complete control, out of one's depth, so close to death that every day is a gift, all of this is eye-opening. We, to whatever extent we can, appreciate that, as together we seek God and scan the horizon for the promise of the Spirit's fellowship and the healing of the nations.

Every Day is a Miracle

2007-10-18T09:30:00.000-04:00

When pianist Arthur Rubinstein was asked about religion he replied, “Every day is a miracle.” Yesterday walking by Morris Arboretum in this warm autumn, a bush was flowering in white, starry blossoms. I thought of the phrase from the Book of Lamentations ("God's compassions fail not; they are new every morning") and the John Keble poem: “Morning."

Why waste your treasures of delight
Upon our thankless, joyless sight,
Who day by day to sin awake,
Seldom of heaven and you partake?

Oh! timely happy, timely wise,
Hearts that with rising morn arise!
Eyes that the beam celestial view,
Which evermore makes all things new!

New every morning is the love
Our wakening and uprising prove;
Through sleep and darkness safely brought,
Restored to life, and power, and thought.

A Sprinkling of the Sacred

2007-05-13T14:38:00.000-04:00

Dean writes:

Our neighbor Peg died two years ago and her house remains unoccupied while her family struggles with repairing some serious structural issues before they can sell the property. In the meantime, her yard goes untended and many of the plants in her garden that borders our yard have invaded our lawn.

Today, just as I was ready to mow down some little purple grape-like flowrets that had infiltrated our lawn, I felt compelled to let them stand. A little voice inside told me that in these little flowers that Peg loved and cherished there was a sacred memory of her presence. I was quickly overwhelmed with the feeling that Peg was with us still in a way neither of us could have ever expected!

I think God sprinkles our lives with an endless variety of reminders, hints and clues to the eternal. And only the most "clueless" among us will not at one time or another be swept into a vision of eternity by the most simple of circumstances.

Such was the message of those little flowers to me. For them and for that, I give praise!

February meditations

2007-03-12T11:43:00.000-04:00

Dusting of Snow
The other day there was a dusting of snow that showed up like the free gift of grace. Robert Frost wrote of a “dust of snow (that) Has given my heart/ A change of mood/ And saved…” The imagery is one of nature’s baptism that changes a heart of stone to one of flesh, and saves us from a rueful day to one of hope and joy. Such transformation is what worship is all about.

Midwinter cold
These are days that chill to the bone. We feel hemmed-in, bounded by the overcoat and scarf that wrap us up. In this midwinter cold our attention narrows to a small circle of protective warmth. Psalm 147 refers to snow like wool melted by God’s word. This word lifts our gaze beyond ourselves that we might partner with God in healing the brokenhearted and lifting up the lowly.

Banking the fires
I like to think of the season of Lent as banking the fires for a new day. In a wood stove the live coal at night is covered by a blanket of ash so that it may breathed into flame the next day. I wonder if the ash of Ash Wednesday is a little like that? Perhaps we are like the live coal that is kept deep and nurtured through the dark to be fanned into flame at Easter.

Lenten Prayer
Lent is a time to find more balance in life. Christians do this through the practice of prayer. FNP (or Friday Night Prayers) is a 20-minute prayer group that meets at 6 p.m. in the baptistery of the church. Karl Barth wrote: “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” Join us for FNP.

Contra Casinos

2007-02-12T16:32:00.000-04:00

There are long term as well as short term drawbacks to casino gambling as a partial cure for our state’s economic challenges. They are both serious. In the long term the link between casino gambling and the state’s economy undermines the very purpose of a commonwealth. Turning to casino gambling to answer the state’s economic needs is shifting the burden from the whole community to a handful of Pennsylvania locations. Destination-style casinos place an undue burdenon their surrounding communities that can only partially be made up by gambling revenues. Destination-style casinos will pull away dollars from other entertainment and tourist destinations. The long term drawback to shifting the economic burden from the whole to a few localities, is the furthering of a fragmentation that is already eating away at the body politic evidenced by low voter turn-out and campaigns marked by negative advertising. The deepening financial challenges of the state in the long term require the commitment of the whole commonwealth, not a casino solution. There is a complexity and cost to our economic difficulty that is not amenable to a casino fix.

For those who argue that the state’s economic predicament is a result of an appetite for more and more, casino gambling only exasperates this unfettered desire. There is an addictive quality to gambling that leads to increased tolerance so that it takes higher stakes to give the same effect of pleasure experienced previously. This hardly seems an appropriate example for and influence upon the long term fiscal health in Pennsylvania.

Gaming is not playful but is loaded with the hopes and fears of economic outcome not only for individual “players” but for many state legislators seeking this answer to much needed revenue. What is wrong with the erosion of play? When the pressure-free space of play is lost the cost to society is the absence of room for experimentation and creativity as well as learning to work together as a team. The replacement of play with non-playful pressures to win at all costs have already undermined youth sports. To some parents the game is too important to be left to the players. Because of this pressure and exaggerated emphasis on winning 70% of all youth drop out of organized sports by age of 13. Casino gambling does nothing to contribute to a playfulness that has already largely been overshadowed in our society today.

The long term effects of casino gambling are a deepening fragmentation and break-down of the common good, an increased appetite for more, and further erosion of play for play’s sake. The immediate impact aside from the economic cost to the tourist and entertainment industry in Philadelphia, the site of two casinos, is the increase in number of people who will certainly succumb to compulsive gambling. This leads to lives out of control, families hurt, and the cost to society of such criminality as embezzlement. One has to at least ask the question of the personal and social cost of trying to solve a state economic challenge with destination-style casino gambling.

January Meditations

2007-01-25T10:26:00.000-04:00

Good night prayer on 11th Street
A rustle of blankets startled me as I climbed the stairs to the street. A gap-toothed man asked me to pray for him and I asked his name. The two of us prayed as night fell and the traffic roared. Afterward Ronald curled up in his blankets leaving a cigarette burning on the concrete like incense.

Loss
This week there have been two deaths and a friend is getting divorced. Letting go of relationships that have been precious is painful. The holding of memories and stories are ways we say good-bye, and move into new stages of esteem. The God who is eternal overflows with esteem, stronger than death, that values us and connects us eternally.

Anger
Anger seems to be in the air. What is the pain to which anger is the reaction? We use the phrase blind rage. Can rage blind us to hurts, real and imagined, and our distorted thinking about them? Perhaps rage can also blind us to compassion and the joy that is to be found in connection. In any case we need to discover in ourselves and our communities the stillness in which these questions can be asked and answered.

Dance
Last week 160 teenagers packed into our parish hall pulsing with the energy of dance. In a poem by the same name, Michael O’Siadhail writes: “Openness. Again and again to realign./ Another face and the moves must begin/ Anew. And we unfold into our design./ I want to dance forever…”

Praise Poem to God

2007-01-18T10:06:00.000-04:00

The Authorized Biography of Desmond Tutu has come out in which there is a chapter entitled, "Praise Poem to God." Tutu reveres a nineteenth century Xhosa prophet by the name of Ntsikana who emphasized prayer, penance, conversion from sin, submission to God's will and the centrality of resurrection. Ntsikana dressed in a leopard skin and worshiped in Xhosa song and dance creating a thoroughly African faith. Ntsikana wrote the "Great Hymn" in the form of a traditional praise poem to Ulo-Thixo Omkhulu ngosezulwini, that is, to the One, the Great God, who is in Heaven. Here is how this praise poem goes in translation:

The Great God, He is in heaven.
Thou art thou, Shield of truth.
Thou art thou, Stronghold of truth.
Thou art thou, Thicket of truth.
Thou art thou, who dwellest in the highest.
Who created life (below) and created (life) above.
The Creator who created, created heaven.
This maker of the stars, and the Pleiades.
A star flashed forth, telling us.
The maker of the blind, does He not make them on purpose?
The trumpet sounded, it has called us,
As for His hunting, He hunteth for souls.
Who draweth together flocks opposed to each other.
The Leader, he led us.
Whose great mantle, we put on.
Those hands of Thine, they are wounded.
Those feet of Thine, they are wounded.
Thy blood, why is it streaming?
Thy blood, it was shed for us.
This great price, have we called for it?
This home of Thine, have we called for it?

Martin Luther King Jr.

2007-01-09T05:57:00.000-04:00

From Jake: "This is a poem by Maya Angelou which I came across somewhere. It's appropriate for our time but I think especially now as we approach Dr. King's birthday. "

Christian by Maya Angelou

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I'm not shouting, 'I'm clean livin,"
I'm whispering "I was lost,"
Now I'm found and forgiven.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I don't speak of this with pride.
I'm confessing that I stumble
and need CHRIST to be my guide.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I'm not trying to be strong.
I'm professing that I'm weak
and need HIS strength to carry on.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I'm not bragging of success.
I'm admitting I have failed
and need God to clean my mess.

When I say..."I'm a Christian"
I'm not claiming to be perfect,
My flaws are far too visible
but, God believes I'm worth it.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I still feel the sting of pain,
I have my share of heartaches
So I call upon his name.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I'm not holier than thou,
I'm just a simple sinner
who received God's grace somehow.

-Maya Angelou-

The Christmas Story that We Carry

2006-12-29T12:53:00.000-04:00

In the Dixon House Library at St. Paul's is Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam testament, the book: The Things They Carried. In addition to food and the materiel of warfare, soldiers carried their stories. “That’s what stories are for,” O’Brien writes. “Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

Picking up this book the other day got me to thinking what is it that Christians carry? Certainly our story is one of the most important things we pack. Our Christmas story is among the greatest in the world (second perhaps only to the resurrection). Someone commented that this story is “so beautiful it must be true.”

Stories have a sense of place and character and a crisis that builds to resolution. The Christmas story has all of this. The story is a celebration and joy. Party atmosphere would be to take the story too lightly. This Christmas story that we carry is one that changes lives!

When someone is shown this story, and is captivated by it, then, like the court official in the Book of Acts, they want to understand it and be guided to its meaning for them. The next step is to enter into the story through the community of the church. For the court official in Acts 8, this means to be baptized. For others who are already baptized, it means to come to worship where the story is preached and explained, where the Holy Spirit inspires, and communion is experienced. This is more than being shown the story, it is becoming a participant in this story that is so beautiful it must be true. Then our lives become whole, despite life’s risk – our past is joined to our future. When we are lost, when we can hardly remember what got us to where we are, we are recollected. We take the bread with the words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” When all else is gone it is the story that remains and is sufficient. So says Tim O’Brien. It is one of the things we carry that is most precious.

Musings – no doubt prompted by Cliff’s sermon of 12-3-06

2006-12-29T12:41:00.000-04:00

Connectedness, and the route we follow.
Upon entering my study early this evening when night had already fallen, both hands full, I was entering a room that was dark. My instinct was to flick on the overhead light to see my way over to the computer. But my full hands could not do this. So I paused for a moment and then saw the small green and orange lights of the computer leading me to it across the room (which I then accessed with only one slight bang of the shin against the edge of the table in front of the lounge furniture).
Isn’t this the way, often, of our journey toward God through the light(s) the Law, the Prophets, and our Lord Jesus provide?

Diocesan Convention, Clergy Abuse and finding Home

2006-11-13T17:17:00.000-04:00

The Convention of the Diocese of Pennsylvania held on St. Martin's Day, November 11, generated tremendous feelings among the people gathered there. One friend found his palms perspiring so visceral was his reaction. There was fear, grief and anger. Fear can push us into powerlessness or it can lead us to a greater vulnerability and awareness of what it is to be human. It is out of our humanity and our awareness of one another as children of God that we can create safe and sacred communities. And it is this that we need to do. There was grief, from the Bishop's contrition over protecting his brother from exposure as a sex offender, to personal stories of others who had suffered abuse in their past. Though it is hard to use the word "past" as the experiences were still raw and painful. Grief is our response to the shattering of trusts and it is a realization that some significant change has taken place in life. Like fear, grief can be the soil out of which can come spiritual breakthrough. We need to work to make the church community a place of healing and new beginning. This is especially hard when the church has been a place of offense. There was a great deal of anger. Anger is our response to injury. We can express anger destructively or creatively. Anger can help us live justice-seeking and compassionate lives.

The response of the Convention took the shape of the following resolution: "Be it resolved that the Diocese of Pennsylvania initiate immediately a program of expanded education around the effects of clergy sexual abuse and other abuses and the damage caused by long-term secrecy and cover-up."

The damage caused can be glimpsed through this poem written by an anonymous survivor of clergy abuse in a book entitled, Defrauded. The title of the poem is "This is home."

In the small dark closet
I'm not there
I don't exist
No one can see me

Here in the dark
I can't see
I can't feel
No one can hate me

It feels right
To not be heard
To be all gone
No one to hurt

No one can hurt me
Or desert me
I'm alone
This is home

What a disfigurement of home is brought about by sexual abuse. The home that Jesus promises is the indwelling of God, Creator and Savior. "Those who love me will keep my word (of love), and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them" (John 14: 23). Earlier Jesus assured that we have a dwelling place in our Creator's house (home). There we exist truly and are seen for the child of God that we are. In this home of mutual indwelling we can feel and are listened to. We are all present and not alone. Come Lord Jesus. May we make our home in you as you have already made your home in us.

From Charlotte: The language of war and peace

2006-10-10T16:02:00.000-04:00

Sunday, 3 September. This is not the first time this summer the OT reading (Deut 4:1-19) says the Israelites are to "occupy the land" that the Lord is giving them -- with the warning that they obey God's commandments, so that they be an example to the nations and in fact
be God's chosen, exemplary nation/people. In Eph 6:10-20, Paul uses imagery/metaphoric language that borrows heavily from "righteous" wars. The "gospel of peace" that is his argument is all but obfuscated by the "armor, breastplate, shield,"etc. language. And Hymn 561 entreats "soldiers of the cross, the army of Jesus" to persevere through to "victory, till every foe is vanquished."

Were I an outsider, a seeker, or a curious Muslim, I would be quite perplexed and put off by these texts. Most especially given the world situation today (and certain absolutist or extremist arguments/justifications on whatever "side").
I am especially sensitive to these texts also no doubt because I am dealing with the iconic French epic, THE SONG OF ROLAND, in my survey of French lit course. While Roland is a hero because he defends his country to the end, thinking only of her and his honor, this epic poem, glorifying the militarism of the Crusades, is clearly flawed by even its basic premise: that the Sarrasins (Musulmans) do not worship God but rather worship Mohammed and pray to Apollo ! Misinformation > misunderstanding over the centuries! Locked into warfare.

Full inclusion for all - Jeanette responds

2006-08-29T10:12:00.000-04:00

I have to tell you, your story from "Does God have a Big Toe?" hits a real spot. The mission of the place where I work is committed to full inclusion for all persons regardless of any health concerns. We have fully embraced the "Recovery/Resilience" model for all. We see this model both for our work with those who turn to us for services as well as how we function as employees. It is not a piece of cake. Everyday continues to bring new challenges both from outside and from within. So that compact little piece is going to start showing upin all sorts of places.

Partnering with God and one another

2006-08-29T10:04:00.001-04:00

A friend shared this from a book of Bible stories called, Does God have a Big Toe? After God created the world, God said to his first human creatures, “I am tired now, please finish up the world for me.” The humans objected that they were not up to the task. God said you can do it, “but I agree to this. If you keep trying to finish the world, I will be your partner.” The man and the woman asked, “What’s a partner?” and God answers, “A partner is someone you work with on a big thing that neither of you can do alone. If you have a partner, it means that you can never give up, because your partner is depending on you.” I would also add it means you can never go it alone. We need one another in this task of finishing, mending, seeking well-being in our world.

Hurricane Katrina - "Don't push the water"

2006-08-28T15:41:00.000-04:00

One year ago today Huricane Katrina was causing havoc in New Orleans. The City and much of the Gulf Coast is still recovering. Hurricanes "push" the water. This phenomenon is called a storm surge. The eye of a hurricane can raise a dome of water fifteen feet high and fifty miles across. This build up of water moves ahead of the hurricane where water pushed by fierce winds can rise up to thirty feet. New Orleans sits below water level. It is no wonder that this was the worst natural catastrophe in the nation's history. We would do well not to emulate a hurricane in our own lives.

The Franciscan Richard Rohr suggests that life is like a flow of water. We are already in it. We do not need to push it. But of course we all do. We can be so goal oriented that we miss the flow of life around us. We conduct business on cell phones not just in the office but in the car and as we walk along the street. We are logged on, plugged in and wound up. Between 1973 and 2000 the average U.S. worker added 200 hours per year on the job. We can be a "hurricane" of activity. Yet if we were to let go even a bit we would discover a flow of life already moving through us. It is the natural movement of the grace of God.

We also try to "push the water" by being in perfect control. I suppose a "storm surge" of control is one way of putting the anxiety of change and chance at arm's length. But it may be that the experience of vulnerability and anxiety have someting to teach us, if we can only say "yes" to the flow of life, the grace of God, that bears us along.

It is instructive to watch Jesus at work. When Jesus is overtired he pauses to rest or withdraws to pray. On one of these occasions he encountered a Samaritan woman and asks her for a drink. What is interesting is that he does not push her but instead receives her story. It is a story of five husbands and a sixth who is not her husband. She herself has been "pushing the water!" Jesus does not surge forcefully back but gently orients her toward light and freedom, toward the flow of grace that is already around her.

Life is not about how high a storm surge we can create. It is not about a hurricane of activity or an all-consuming agenda. It is not about perfect control. It is about giving in to the flow of God's grace, the agenda of God's kingdom that is the mending of creation, then all the rest will be given. Life is part of a much larger stream than anything we can push. We just need to allow it to flow. Our ability to trust this flow of God's grace is what we call "faith."

Prayer is the artisan that shapes us when we are broken

2006-08-24T09:38:00.000-04:00

In Pastorius Park a group called "Time for Three" played a piece that was commissioned for the city of Pittsburgh where the decline of the steel industry has caused great loss. The music conveyed this pain as well as healing imaged by two rivers (the Monongahela and the Alleghany) flowing into one (the Ohio). I thought of the steel mill and the cauldron that contains molten metal heated to 3000 degrees. One steel company has used the image of the cauldron for dialogue between union and management. The conversation could become pretty heated and because it was contained or borne by this image of the cauldron it was also creative. It can be poured into a useful shape. One of the ways we bear life when it has become over-heated is through community and contemplation. Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141) wrote that prayer can be like an artisan that when we become broken and fragmented, melts us down or “liquefies” us. The fire that melts is the fire of divine love and we are poured into the likeness of Christ. To mix the metaphors like "Time for Three" did in their music, the melting and melding is like two rivers flowing into one.

Vermont Journal - II

2006-08-11T15:47:00.000-04:00

August 4
Years ago a large pine tree at the edge of a pasture was hit by lightning killing the tree and leaving a sixty foot pole with broken limbs angling hapharzardly toward the sky. This morning we saw an eagle perched atop this dead tree with its wings outstretched "as though in blessing," my wife said.
It happened that the morning's scripture was the Pentecost story from the Acts of the Apostles. All were filled with the Holy Spirit and a tongue of fire rested upon each.
The coincidence of the eagle and the Pentecost story recalled to my mind the 15th century Russian icon, "The Descent of the Holy Spirit." There from the wings of the Spirit, who appears dark like the eagle rather than white, come twelve rays. This is what called the icon to mind. The tips of the feathers from the eagle's outstretched wings seemed to angle down to the earth not unlike those of the Spirit in the icon. In both cases, the feathers point down like rays of divine energy upon all living souls.
The Spirit/eagle is seen above. It is uplifting, blessing, activating in us the divine love and our hunger for that love that our fractured world so needs. The fire of unity rests upon each, under wings of radiant power.

August 6, The Transfiguration
At a little church in Vermont a service in celebration of the Transfiguration began with a procession. The crucifer was an elderly gentleman with an obvious tremor. The heavy cross leaned out to the side. It seemed less to me that he was holding up the cross than he was being upheld by it. Rather than carry the cross, it appeared to carry him. As I watched, I thought, "My God, that's my life." It is the cross that I try to uphold that is actually holding me and carrying me. Our tremors are transfigured to tranquility.

Blessed Jesus, let me fly!

2006-08-11T15:38:00.000-04:00

Dean comments:
I was particularly moved by your July 25 entry for many reasons, but especially because I love birds and the wind and the notion that our spirits are like birds that should soar on the wind (Le Vent de l’Espirit,)

I imagine birds must feel joy when they fly. Just think -- these tiny creatures built of little more than feathers and hollow bones and powered by nothing more than a few grains of seed can defy gravity, master the wind and soar toward eternity. Sometimes as I watch them, I feel as if God is saying to me "Are you feeling a little weighed down? Why aren't you flying yet, my friend? What will your life be like when you finally shed the burdens that keep your spirit from joining mine?"

I felt really blessed when earlier in my net-surfing career, I stumbled across Desmond Tutu's 2000 commencement address at Brandeis U. It helped me crystallize my thoughts about my spirit in a way I never could have myself I have turned to its last paragraph time and time again for inspiration. Like so many other good and beautiful things in this world, its sentiments leave me with nothing else to say after I've finished reading except "Praise God!" and "Blessed Jesus, let me fly!".

Vermont Journal - the Crabapple Tree

2006-07-28T12:14:00.000-04:00

July 23
I opened the door and the two us, our dog Annie at my feet, looked out onto the yard at the crack of dawn. The sun had not yet risen to burn off the morning mist. Still on the threshold, both of us stared at two wood peckers on the crabapple trunk, tapping to the heart of the wood. Annie and the birds were thinking food, but my fantasy was the wonderment of what fine-pearled treasure the wood might yield if we could peck to the heart of it, for which one might be willing to sell all?

July 25
Phoebes. Phoebes nest under the eaves of the doorway to our common room. This morning the nestlings flew. I watched a little phoebe drop from the branch of the crabapple tree. She went straight down about five feet like a stone. After several hops on the grass, she flew up into the tree again.
For several months while the phoebes hatch and grow we do not use the doorway where they nest. We only cross that threshold after the young birds have crossed their own threshold into a new airbourne way of life. As can be seen it is not a transition without a few drops and hops.
I have thought of those transitional times when I too have plummeted like a stone. I hop, even get hopping mad. But it is true that God is never elsewhere than right where we are. Jesus reminds us that not one sparrow will fall to the ground apart from your Father. Then he adds, "you are of more value than many sparrows." So after a few hops, I learn to open myself to the wind of the Spirit so I can be lifted up, and become airbourne, or shall we say, Spirit-borne.

Fishers of Men, and Terror

2006-07-14T14:31:00.000-04:00

No sooner had we heard of the terrorist strike on Bombay, than Hezbollah terrorists kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. Israel responded with two days of bombing, the heaviest air strikes against Lebanon in twenty-four years. Hamas in Gaza kidnapped a third Israeli soldier leading to a forceful response there as well. The question is whether force is a deterrent for future acts of terror, or does it merely rachet up the violence? I suspect the latter. As to another sufficient response? Let me know your thoughts. The outcome, of course, is a heightening of chaos and instability, that I suppose is the point. Poet Susan Kiguli from Uganda, which is no stranger to violence, wrote this poem called "Fishers of Men."

The nets are out in the depths
Doing the job
The silver grey moon floats
On the surface of the waters.
Fishermen pull their nets
With big hearts waiting for fish!
Out come the meshes

Full of the moonlit harvest!
The fishermen flee
As the silver wonder
Turns into bullet riddled chests
And water logged eyes!

It is a terrible poem, in the meaning of terrifying and terror, and yet it describes the catch that is being pulled up in this sea of chaos. Jesus called Peter to be a fisher of people, but not in this way. We too are called to fish for people. It is a mark of the evil in the world and sinful domination of one over another that we pull up the dead instead of draw the living to life indeed.

Suffering and God

2006-07-14T14:20:00.000-04:00

The headlines this week brought news that terrorists in a Bombay rail blast killed 190. As I thought of the victims and their families a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1942 came to mind. He said in a letter to his twin sister “that suffering and God are not a contradiction but rather a unity.” God suffers over Bombay. God is near to suffering and loss. “To find God in this way,” Bonhoeffer said, “gives peace and rest and a strong and courageous heart.”

Giving that makes a Difference

2006-07-12T12:54:00.000-04:00

Leveraging a “foundational” difference in our country, surprisingly, most effectively takes place at the local church. By foundational I am not referring to foundations, but to a secure social and spiritual grounding that enables a community to have greater relatedness, tolerance, awareness, generosity, and hope, a better future. Several congressional representatives, Republican and Democrat, have admitted that government cannot do this. Especially today, the emphasis on divisive wedge issues and adversarialness do little for community. The media has been characterized as enthralled to the motto, “No fight, no news.” It won’t do to look there to leave a legacy of fundamental community. A new book by Chicago Marketing Executive David Goetz entitled Death by Suburb speaks eloquently of the pressures that families face and how hard it is for them to stand up to the juggernaut of social and commercial expectation. Families by themselves may be poorly suited to leverage a stronger society. Goetz next looks at how schools are also caught up in “our twenty-four-hour streaming advertising culture.”
"Today corporations hire agencies to sponsor field trips for elementary students – but not to visit Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium or kick over rocks for nymphs in the local stream. Kids ‘study retail’ at high-end sports stores. Students leave with a tote bag branded with the company logo. The school district gets cheap field trips. And no one gets hurt, right?"
Legacy gifts to schools may not contend well for a healthier world. What is left, then, is the local church. If you really want to leave a legacy for stronger community on a truly foundational level then the local church is where to turn.

Toni Morrison

2006-07-11T12:00:00.000-04:00

I was re-reading Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. There Baby Suggs describes her "call" to ministry: "slave life had 'busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue,' she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart - which she had put to work at once.... she became an unchurched preacher.... She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.'" Later in the novel Baby Suggs grows blind to that grace, but for now it burns brightly. As a church we need to imagine the grace spoken of by this unchurched preacher. This grace enfolds a woman, oceanographer bishop to preside over our church. Paul said, "there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3: 28). This grace guides us to an open place where all find shelter, Christians of every sexual orientation - God rescues us all because God delights in us all (Psalm 18: 20). If only we can imagine such grace.

Praise Poem

2006-07-10T13:16:00.000-04:00

Praise is my aspiration,
A high tide unebbing,
A salt sea lapping.
I laugh at my openness
Born of an openness That has no shore -
Being -
Stable, steady, oceanic.

A hopeful wind stirs the whitecaps
Of my moments
That turn sunlight to joyful flashes like some lighthouse
That saves a vessel passing by -
Praising,
Laughing,
Eye-opening,
Stable-being,
Hoping,
Saving -
A morning's ocean view.