The Corner

BACK TO SCHOOL WEEK: We plant seeds that one day will grow

In my home state, today is Parent's Day - i.e. the first day of school.  Summer is over (though the heat remains), football & other high holy days are nearing, it is a time of transition.

One of the ritual of this time of year is a "back-to-school" event for parents.  We went to one this past Saturday - 3 hours learning about where our daughter will be going to high school.  I was moved by the mission statement of her new school:

cultivate learning communities in which each and every student, parent, and staff member realizes their profound beauty, falls in love with learning, and lives with courage and authenticity

Powerful words, clearly honed over conversations & experience.  This mission statement can be counter-cultural in a world of standardized tests & fast tracks to top tier colleges.

For me, this mission statement is part of what I yearn for in the faithing of our lives.  Rather than weekly Bible studies or curricula that far too often ape the education trends of times long past, I wonder what faith communities would look like if we focused on helping one another realize our profound beauty, help one another fall in love with learning and live with courage & authenticity.  

It might not be neat & tidy, certainly would not fit in a weekly 1 hours slot, probably would not focus so much on the "sage on the stage" - but the faithing of our lives, whether we are 6 years old, 46 or 86, the faithing of our lives is about cultivation, much more than it is about planting or harvesting.

Over that past few days, I've chewed on this mission statement & my yearning for faithing our collective lives - my soul has come back to a prayer by Oscar Romero that I have found particularly nourishing:

We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

FYI - A number of folks are blogging about the spiritual formation of children and youth this through this week - for info, see Brian McLaren's blog.

in my dreams

image from markchadwickart

vivid        / (vĭvˈĭd)/

• Perceived as bright and distinct; brilliant: a vivid star.
  
• Having intensely bright colors: a vivid tapestry.
  
• Having a very high degree of saturation: a vivid purple.
  
• Presented in clear and striking manner: a vivid account of the incident.
  
• Perceived or felt with the freshness of immediate experience: a vivid recollection of their childhood.
  
• Active in forming lifelike images: a vivid imagination. 

In an article I devoured recently, anthropologist Pascal Boyer argued that the foundation of religion is our psychological readiness to accept vivid, memorable tales about the world around us.  Those tales may come from the sacred scriptures - stories of Eve or of creation or even of battle.  Those tales may come from the faith or family traditions that we find great affinity with - when Grandpa travelled to this country or how a certain shaman changed the life of a village.  They can just as easily come from sports or art or even just hanging out with friends.

I am fascinated by these vivid tales rising up from our dreams.  Dreams tend to ebb & flow for me in terms of my capacity to recall them.  As I have gotten older, I have begun to work harder at trying to remember them when I wake.  Some of the medication I take seems to make my dreams a bit more vivid, particularly if I wake up in the early light of the morning.  These dreams can be exhilarating, deeply moving, even sometimes frightening.  Sometimes, I feel like my most authentic self when I wake from those - other times I just wonder "what the hell did I eat that triggered that ?".

People who do research tell us that dreams are important for pulling together all the information we process on a daily basis and turning it into memories we can use later.  They have found that dreams are often a marker that the brain is working on the same problem at many levels.  From their research, they have found that the vivid nature of dreams reflects the brain’s attempt to find associations for the memories that could make them more useful in the future.

Christian scripture is filled with meaning found from dreams, lives being uprooted, even the direction of a tribe or nation changed from a dream.  In our rational, fact-based world - it seems almost ridiculous to consider dreams a source for wisdom or action.  These dreams are often counter-factual - they take real things and remix them.  But the immediacy, the intensity, the clarity - it beckons me out beyond all the models & facts & the brilliant insights.  I do not know why, but the research makes me feel a lot more assured that my dreams, vivid & non-linear as they can be, are crucial to the path I travel.

  

making exchanges

last week, i played hooky --- twice

I went to a local congregation - for a weekday Eucharist and a Sunday evening Compline gathering

over my vacation, I realized that I was feeling overdrawn - that I had deposited loads of ideas and teachings & images, with a host of debits around the liturgical markers that have been imprinted on me over 40 years.

the economic metaphors are intentional for me - part of my struggle in between trad'l & emerging faith communities is that my attention (what people thru the ages called devotion) is far too easily consumed with a rational faithing of my life, rather than the embodied gift of sacremental living.  in sermon-centric worlds, my emphasis leads to the idea "did I get it" - in liturgical setting, my own sense is that there is no it to get.

a recent article helped me a lot here - Christ and Capital: Money Changers and the Lord’s Table by  geoff holsclaw . geoff is co-pastor at Life on the Vine, as well as a doctoral student at Marquette University.

city and suburban dwellers, for texting crazed teens and overworked office managers, for over-styled moms and trying-not-to-be-too-savvy dads, the only place of worship is now within a mall crowded with devoted followers, practicing their religious exercises. Money has built its own temple, creating an idolatry and ideology with its own power and piety. For Philip Goodchild, a British theologian and philosopher, money does not merely facilitate the exchange of goods, but also “demands and shapes time, attention, and devotion” by replacing all previous social orders with its own values and commands (Buy! Sell! Borrow! Lend!), becoming the new god of our times. Because money promises the world (of goods) but only delivers itself, money rises up as a rival to theology by declaring an alternative faith, a faith in money involving a metaphysics, a politics, an ethics, and a theology

there was a moment in the Compline gathering where a sense of reciprocity of gift and return clicked for me.  a thurifer walked the aisles, as ~20 strangers stood after twilight in a must sanctuary.  a woman sung these words:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or
weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who
sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless
the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the
joyous; and all for your love's sake

that is a world out beyond ideas, as rumi would say, out beyond deconstruction & re-imaging.  a world where grace is freely given, where healing & comfort lavished, where everything is for love's sake.

i suspect some of this is neuro-science, that my soul is habituated to tuwn to common prayer, when the shopping mall model of faith leaves me ready to make an exchange.  but for that odd group gathered around a table, there was an alternative economy.

God is good...all the time. And all the time...God is good

most of you who read this blog do not know Kester or Rachel Smith.  they are both what we call here in texas "good people".

Something terrible, truly tragic happened to them last night.

God is good...all the time. And all the time...God is good

In Pakistan, a country that stands at the epicenter of terror, a flood threatens more than 3.5 million children.  Aid agencies are struggling to get funds for millions of Pakistan flood victims because the country suffers from an "image deficit".

God is good...all the time. And all the time...God is good

In his book The Promise of Paradox, Parker Palmer writes:

Contradiction, paradox, the tension of opposites: these have always been at the heart of my experience, and I think I am not alone. I am tugged one way and then the other. My beliefs and my actions often seem at odds. My strengths are sometimes canceled by my weaknesses. My self, and the world around me, seem more a study in dissonance than a harmony of the integrated whole

beauty in the midst of bad, bad stuff.  bad, bad stuff happening randomly.  joy emerges when there is no real reason why.

God is good...all the time. And all the time...God is good

life at the twilight

The prospect of death provides a POV that cracks open the distractions of rational, modern life. 

2 recent pieces of transcendent writing captures this for me.

In a piece in the New York, Atul Gawande writes about the complexity of What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?:

Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”

Yesterday, Roger Ebert wrote from his own experience about the faith that sometime accompanies this twilight of life:

I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence.

ladies & germs...presenting lawrence (rimshot)

if you are a person who follows the church year & the heroes that are celebrated, then today is...sorta funny.  intentionally so.

on august 10, one of the hottest days in the northern portion of the earth, one of the church's earliest martyrs is remembered.  Stories passed down for almost 2,000 years hold that Lawrence was burned or "grilled" to death, hence his association with the gridiron. Tradition also holds that Lawrence joked about their cooking him enough to eat while he was burning on the gridiron,  stating something along the lines of

"turn me over...I'm done on this side"

It is no surprise that this made Lawrence a hero to many cooks....and to many comics.

for me, comedy is divine.  the ectasy of laughing.  the art of a well-told joke.  the anticipation of a punchline.  it can be stupid, juvenile humor, high end parody or even something as basic as a "knock knock" joke.  i love to laugh, to make people laugh, to watch other people making other people laugh.

when I went to seminary, I always wished we could spend a class on this manifesto: