Deuteronomy 6:4-9:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Every now and then, I look at the stats on my site meter.
Turns out that for a long time, the most common "hit" I get on this site has not been any post full of great and erudite spiritual food, but a 2007 post I made showing off my triquetra tattoo when I got it (above.)
I think ever since the show "Charmed," triquetras became hot items in the tattoo parlor. I get hits all over the word from people Googling "triquetra tattoo."
Hrummmph.
Yeah, there is a part of me that wishes it was one of my more pithy spiritual ramblings. But actually, I'm okay with that.
I've come to the conclusion that tattoo can be a form of ministry.
It's not quite a "sign upon my hand or forehead," but I got it to represent the Trinity, and how Trinity-Kirksville became a part of my life. I figure if someone stumbles across it merely searching for a design for a new tattoo, they don't just visit this page and "hit" it, they discover the opportunity to visit my whole blog.
The number of folks with tattoos these days is a rather sizable number of the younger to middle aged population, and a lot of folks these days also get a "wild hare" and get one, and the number one reason folks get one is that they are wanting express something--a thought, a feeling, a person or life situation dear to them. Often they are to affiliate themselves with something bigger than themselves--a school, or a branch of the military, perhaps--and they are placing it upon their body as an outward sign of this affiliation or expression.
Well...isn't that what we want our transformation as Christians to do? Don't we want what is inside of us to become a visible and outward sign of our life in Christ as a child of God? Don't we want the light of God to be "tattooed" all over us?
People looking to connect others to a story of their life shop for tattoos. People looking to connect others to a story of their life also seek to connect to God. I figure it's always possible for a person who started out "scoping out tattoo designs" temporarily put that on hold to nose around my blog for a spell. Looking at my site meter, it appears that about one in 20 to 25 hits on my post with this tattoo spend longer on my blog than they had planned. I can see where they started out Google searching for a triquetra tattoo, and then instead of exiting it a couple of minutes later, they hit a few more pages...usually they go to the newest posts.
Sometimes I wonder what happens from that. If all they wanted was to get some ideas from my tattoo design, great. I'm glad to share. But I wonder if once in a while, they don't get a little more curious about God than they realized they were.
All of them are in my prayers.
(Photo by Michael Nejman)
Colossians 1:24-29:
I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. I became its servant according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil and struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me.
One of the things I constantly struggle with in my online EfM class is trying to understand Scripture with something beyond my limited 21st century mind, and try to see the minds and hearts of the people who wrote it thousands of years ago.
This year, year two in my EfM journey, is the New Testament. One of the things I often think about as I study my lessons this year is how the culture at the time shaped the Jesus story--especially at the time the early church started to move from being "disaffected Jews" to reaching out to Gentiles. Paul's letters speak almost constantly of the tension in this regard. Their had to be a place where these early disciples, rooted in their Jewish tradition, had to feel comfortable enough to give the Jesus story away beyond the context of "how it fit in Judaism." They had to, in what we now know from Benedictine hospitality, embrace the concept of "welcoming the other."
This article also piqued my imagination in this regard. Our parish, in this interim period, took on the task of "exploring our abilities in hospitality." We had some town hall meetings where some "touchy truths" came out. One touchy truth was that we thought of ourselves as very hospitable to "the other" but it was easy to say that when 85% of our parish is either faculty, staff, or student at Truman State University. It brought up a hard question--what does our statement mean, in light of our demographic? Does it mean we can be hospitable to the community with the right doorways in place? Does it mean we have never been tested on the edges of this community? Or did it mean we really weren't as hospitable as we thought we were?
Our town meetings in the beginning phase of our search process spoke to this. Some who were part of the "other 15%" spoke up as to feeling excluded. Some of the 85% admitted they really liked being surrounded by their friends on Sunday or among a more educated community, because they really didn't know how or were uncomfortable talking to people who were "much" different. Some expressed a desire for the community to be more heterogeneous.
More illustrations came out in the Town Hall meetings. One is that although we identify ourselves as a very "musical" church (our little choir is known throughout the Diocese) some people thought there was "too much music." We also have a sizable minority of "quiet, contemplative worship loving" types. Some thought that although we love our music, if we are true to our desire to get some younger newcomers, our love of four-part harmony and the hymnal won't cut it. I always thought music was truly the one sacred cow this parish had, and I watched people gently prod the sacred cow. That truly surprised me in these meetings.
I know I worked very hard to hear what people were saying in the meetings, and I came to realize that taking on being earnest about wanting hospitality might well be the best endeavor we could have picked, but it will also be the raggedest growing edge.
What it made me realize is in order to "welcome the other," we first have to admit there is an "other" and let the "other" speak to us.
Proverbs 18:24:
Some friends play at friendship, but a true friend sticks closer than one’s nearest kin.
Part of the Gaelic tradition still practiced by the modern day Irish is the concept of the Anam Cara--the true "soul friend." In Irish culture, these are the friends in your life that seem to always be a part of your life no matter what the ebb and flow of both lives--the ones that when you hang together, everything "fits" and you can even simply be comfortable together in wordlessness. They are not necessarily "The friends you spend the most time with," although there are times in your life when they might be. They are the kind of friends that when you have not seen each other for years, you pick right up where you left off. When they leave, you find yourself pining or longing for them but it dissipates and you know it will be fine until the next time.
In short, it is a friendship that is a form of true love.
American culture does not handle this type of love well because, in my opinion, we don't have enough words for "love." We have the word "love," and it has to make do for everything from how we feel about cherry cheesecake to who we partner off with for sexual intimacy.
The ancient Greeks did this one far better. They had eros and filios and agape--sexual love and love like a sibling and a more or less "awesome love" where we just find ourselves in awe of people for who they are. They were wise enough to give these loves different words.
My theory is that when we love another human being, that love is composed of a mixture of all three of these types of love, and a love that falls under the Gaelic idea of anam cara is heavy in filios and agape, and eros doesn't really play a huge part in it. One of your soul friends might be your sexual mate (probably ought to be, really), but "desire to be sexually intimate with the person" is not a requirement.
That's another place where American culture falls on its nose a little. We seem a little squeamish about being the least bit psychologically intimate with people with whom we don't plan to be sexually intimate--less so than many other cultures, and less so even than with Americans of the past. Think back to old photos of baseball and football teams in the 1890's. They are not lined up like soldiers, but are more relaxed and intimate. For instance, study this picture of the University of Michigan football team:
(Click on photo to enlarge)
Look carefully at how many of the young men are touching each other. The two men on the left are touching hands and both hands are rested on the one young man's knee. Imagine what would be said if a modern football team sat like that for their team photo! But in an era when it was not unusual for young people to die of infectious disease, accident, and childbirth, people weren't so squeamish about a certain level of physical intimacy or psychological intimacy. Perhaps when life was shorter and more unpredictable--when the hand of death was a more real and felonious object in day to day life, it made people a little more likely to "talk flowery" to each other and allow a certain level of spiritual intimacy that now, we have no room in which to place it. We don't seem to know quite what to do with it in a healthy way, and we are so attuned to the pathological manifestations of inappropriate intimacy, I worry that we have lost the ability to safely return to being able to love and be loved in some of the ways our ancestors did.
I also worry that we don't have the ability to understand the "up" side of celibacy, let alone the ability to discuss it.
It's a subject I wish were more open to discussion outside the circle of "vowed Roman Catholic religious and a few other vowed religious." Here's the problem...
When a person is celibate for a period of time, it's very hard to discuss with non-celibates because the knee-jerk reaction is, "You're just sayin' that to make yourself feel better, because you ain't gettin' any." But it is my belief that just as we are called to our secular professions, some people are called to secular expressions of celibacy for indeterminate periods of time. These periods may be temporary or permanent.
But it's not like people are clamoring to hear what celibacy has to add to one's spirituality. Celibacy is viewed too much as simply "the absence of sexual activity," and it gets constantly blamed for the root cause of sexual pathology in the church. It has become an even worse "aberrency," in some ways, than being in a same sex relationship has.
What I have discovered when I have been able to talk to secular people who admit their present celibate state, and as a person presently in that category (I jokingly refer to myself among my closer friends as "The Accidental Celibate",) is that being without a sexual partner does NOT excuse people from withholding love. There is always a need to love and be loved. It is simply part of the human condition. Healthy celibates learn to be attuned to opportunities to practice filios and agape. Some find that they actually fall in love with the ability to see the love of Christ in people in a way they would not have been aware of, if they had devoted the love and energy to loving a single person for the purpose of gaining regular sexual intimacy. Some find they can be more in love with the world than they thought was possible.
I can only speak for myself on this one, but I think back to one of the most frequent complaints a past intimate partner had with me, that ultimately broke us up. He said, "I want you for myself. I get tired of having to love a whole damn crowd of people." He wasn't being selfish--I think he only wanted what society expects of intimate pairings. But in retrospect, I realized I wanted to be in love with a bigger world than just one person, and truthfully, I was a failure at being able to devote my attention to him in the way he expected. He wasn't pathological, or needy, or a bad person at all. He just told the truth as he saw it. Unfortunately, it took me a couple more intimate pairings to realize I might be called to loving the world as a form of a soul friend more than I was being called to love a single person as an intimate partner...and when it happened, it wasn't like I woke up one day and said, "Today, I will be celibate until God tells me not to." I just sort of drifted to this celibate place and one day realized, "Gee. I like who I am much better than when I was trying to force paired relationships."
But these are conversations that we can't seem to have in the church. Many church "singles groups" exist solely as a meat market. We only seem to promote celibacy among teens, and for many churches, that message is simply, "God says don't have sex until you're married." Our climate with dealing with sexual exploitation makes it difficult to talk about celibacy outside of a vowed religious life, and even then we question the psyches of those who vow to be celibate. You must be a little pathological to even consider it, right? What are you hiding? Are you gay and just don't want to tell anyone? Are you a pervert who feels guilty? Are you impotent or frigid?
It's just not a healthy climate in the church to even have these discussions. But maybe we need to, simply to explore the notion of "three part love." Maybe we need to have these discussions so people who are in committed sexual relationships don't feel so squeamish about loving others with the love of filios and agape.
I don't know any answers, but I know we are long overdue to talk this one out at the kitchen table.
By his blood, he reconciled us.
By his wounds, we are healed.
--from Eucharistic Prayer C, p. 370, Book of Common Prayer
I was reading an interesting article in one of the "trade journals" some while back about "occupational injuries in pathology." It should come as no surprise that the most likely place on the body that pathologists get injured is along a C-shaped line running from the back of the thumb around the web of skin between the thumb and first finger of the non-dominant hand.
It makes total sense because the non-dominant hand is the hand in which we hold the tissue that our dominant hand is going to cut with a knife.
I was thinking about that the other day when I was praying. I tend to look at my own hands a lot when I'm praying. If I'm outdoors, I like to gaze in my chiminea fire. If I'm indoors and have candles, I tend to gaze at the candles. But when there's no fire to gaze upon, or no nature to gaze into, I tend to look at my own hands during prayer. I realized I have some pretty significant scars on my non-dominant hand. Not all of them are from cutting tissue and having something slippery get loose, but several of the scars are.
It made me realize something. Many of the wounds we carry on our skin were accidentally self-inflicted, and sometimes with the best of intentions. But they are wounds just the same, and the scars become a reminder that in this world, this happens a lot. In the case of this article, it's a reminder that anyone who cuts tissue for a living WILL wound him/herself. Period.
Wounds--all wounds, whether accidental, self-inflicted, or inflicted by others, give us pause.
I have spent much of my adult life around people in the "healing professions." I know a ton of folks not just in medicine, but in social work, church work, rehab work, etc. The titer of "wounded healers" is incredibly high in all of them. It could even be our wounds that drive us to those professions. What's odd is we are there, and we most likely will also not only bring our old wounds with us, but experience new wounds in our various professions, and often, remain in those professions anyway...or switch to a different healing profession. We rarely leave "a life of healing" totally behind. Sure, sometimes people leave and go a totally different direction--if they do it often is to become money driven almost to the point of being mercenary about it--kind of a full reverse of sorts--but mostly we remain healers of one sort or another.
We spill our own blood in various forms of self-sacrifice in the hope that others can be reconciled, and in the hopes we are reconciled to higher things. We find our own healing in the stories of others' healing that they share. Life sure has a tendency to mimic the Eucharist, doesn't it? Perhaps the old saw of "imitation being the sincerest form of flattery" holds true there.
But the fact remains that wounded "wounded healers" lose their power, and healthy "wounded healers" gain power.
Part of that health for us is to recognize what we are imitating. It's interesting to note that every time I hear the above words in Eucharistic Prayer C, I silently think about Christ's wounds and my wounds mixing together like ingredients in the bread and wine. I think about them being transformed from sickness and pain into food and drink. Something that gets in the way of life becomes not just something to sustain life but to renew life, and not just my life, not just the lives of people I touch, but life I scarcely know about.
That is simply an awe-filled level of healing, and it makes me realize that the world runs on an army of wounded healers. We have a choice every day to be a "wounded" wounded healer and opt out, or be a "healthy" wounded healer and opt in. It is our choice.
I wish you not a path devoid of clouds, nor a life on a bed of roses,
Not that you might never need regret,
nor that you should never feel pain.
No, that is not my wish for you.
My wish for you is:
That you might be brave in times of trial,
when others lay crosses upon your shoulders.
When mountains must be climbed and chasms are to be crossed,
When hope can scarce shine through.
That every gift God gave you might grow with you
and let you give your gift of joy to all who care for you.
That you may always have a friend who is worth that name,
whom you can trust and who helps you in times of sadness,
Who will defy the storms of daily life at your side.
One more wish I have for you:
That in every hour of joy and pain you may feel God close to you.
This is my wish for you and for all who care for you.
This is my hope for you now and forever.
--Traditional Irish Blessing
I was thinking about a certain personality I've seen in laboratories for my entire career.
Every hospital lab has at least one. Here's kind of the stereotype:
Female laboratory technologist or pathologist, older, they range from a little quirky to somewhat crochety to downright difficult at times. Either never married, or was married once to a total SOB and finally divorced him; never remarried. Sometimes there are grown children in the story, or grown nieces/nephews/peripheral relatives who sponge off of them. Totally, TOTALLY seem married to the job. Many times the rest of us are not even entirely sure WHAT they do outside of work. They retire--sometimes a little later than they ought to, and when you never see them again, you, on occasion, worry that they have no life.
Sometimes that stereotype is true.
But more often than not, you discover a surprise.
Time passes and they die. You go to the visitation or the funeral, thinking, "I ought to go; for all I know, there won't be 15 people there." You've been telling people how sad and boring and lonesome their life must have been. It's a pitiful story.
But then you walk into the funeral home or the church, and the place is packed. A lot of them are people you don't know, or people you had no clue knew the person...and in chatting with folks, you discover they had an incredibly full life. Just one totally outside the realm of work, and they were just incredibly good at keeping their work life and their outside-of-work life very separate. You look at the pictures on the "memory board" and you find they had traveled to places you never knew they'd been. You discover things about their past you never knew. You find out things like they were a master gardener or a ranked bridge player. But, since it was never "work," and they were so dedicated at work when they WERE at work, they just didn't waste time with idle chit-chat about such things.
For a while, this knowledge is uplifting; you're pleasantly surprised.
But then you feel sort of ashamed of yourself after a few days...because you realize in all those years of knowing them, you never took the time to find these things out when you worked around them. You wasted a chance to discover an interesting life.
I was thinking about that when I watched the video above, because it reminded me about how God's presence is among each of us sometimes.
All this time you thought they were lonely, and it turns out you were the one that was the "isolated" one.
The line in the prayer above about wishing the recipient to feel God in every hour of joy and pain reminds me of the quote by Desiderius Erasmus, "Bidden or not bidden, God is present."
Just as the quirky techs I've met over the years had an entire life that was always there, whether I saw it or not, the presence of God is always there in each of us, whether I see it or not in others, or whether I feel it or not within myself. I thought of that in a different way drinking my coffee outside the other morning. This really great gentle morning breeze was blowing. I thought to myself, "You know, the air is always here, all around us. But it's only when the wind blows that we bother to acknowledge it."
Just as I have experienced that initial pleasant surprise at the funeral home, I get a similar surprise when I have "discovered" the presence of God in a place I've never seen. But that initial discovery is also often followed by the similar, and sadder, realization that it was there all along, and I never bothered to see it, or ask about it, or be joyful in it. How much of our lives do we waste "not noticing?"
"hope it is a great trip and will exceed your expectations. It seems to me that is how God often works - exceeding whatever it is we can imagine! Praying for your safety and air in your tires while you are traveling! You can probably get some kind of blog post out of that -your priest praying for air - some connection with the breath of life."
--portion of e-mail from our parish's priest associate
Well, there's a story in this, of course...
For the two weeks prior to my trip out to Casper, Wyoming, I dealt with a pesky flat tire problem. Four flats in 2 weeks--all the same tire. It eventually resulted in me replacing the tire just before I left. I was getting a lot of razzing from various sources about that.
Our parish's priest associate is pretty down to earth and practical. Her spontaneous prayers are pretty straightforward and not at all lofty and ethereal. So I got a pretty good grin about her actually praying for air--specifically the air in my tires. It seems like "praying for nothing" but in this case, air is everything.
I had read her e-mail en route, and it got me to thinking on the 14.5 hour drive about all four of the elements--how the Holy Spirit is fire, and how the "bread of life" comes from the earth, and how our lives are connected by the waters of baptism--but particularly about that "breath of life" in each of us.
Without that air in my tires, at a pressure higher than that outside the tire, we're sunk on any car trip, whether it's to the grocery store, or halfway across the country. We can no longer move forward. This is not as easy as it seems. For that air to stay in that tire, at the proper pressure, it requires a sturdy and solid tire with no holes AND a wheel rim on that tire that allows the tire to fit properly to the wheel. It has to be the right size of tire.
In a sense, that air within the tire, under the right amount of pressure, becomes "more than air." It becomes something solid. Too little and you either have a flat or risk damaging the walls of the tire via under-inflation. Too much and the tire may develop a breach when hitting a road hazard that the tire ordinarily would handle fine.
The Hebrew word used for "breath of life" in the Genesis creation story is "nyshamah." It is a word not used much beyond the early books in the Old Testament. "Nyshamah" is not an easy word to translate. It means a type of "breath" that is a combination of human breath, God's breath (spirit), and the breath of every living thing. It also implies a "creative breath" and is used contextually in the Old Testament in the theme of creation.
This is a little different than the Greek word "Pneuma," although that is how the Greeks translated "Nyshamah." "Pneuma" implies a certain degree of "wind" or "movement," such as the moving of the Holy Spirit. In looking at the two words in online lexicons, I don't think they are exactly the same. "Nyshamah" is more like the air in the tire--air that just IS, air that is simply "our being"--whether the tire moves or not. It's air that gives us shape and form and purpose.
What it makes me realize that a very simple prayer for a very simple thing--air in our tires--becomes very profound when we think of the air in our spiritual tires. What a wonderful prayer it makes to pray for the element that shapes our being, enables us to move OR simply stand still, and challenges us to journey with God despite the road hazards!
Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
--A prayer attributed to St. Francis, p. 833, Book of Common Prayer
I always think of my own very short version of what the gist of the St. Francis prayer means to me:
"Lord, bless (person who messes with my head); change me.
Lord, grant peace and healing to (situation I can't stand); change me.
But whatever happens, change me."
Sometimes I joke that I have a tendency to forgive someone before I really understood what I was forgiving them for in the first place, and maybe that's not so bad--because every time I want to re-visit that situation, to replay my anger and get angry all over again, I sort of stop and glance up and go, "Oh, yeah...I forgave them already. Damn."
But I find in doing that, I am much more likely to live up to what I told God, than if I let it sit and fester.
Some versions of the prayer use the words "forgiving" and "forgiven" instead of "pardoning" and "pardon."
"Pardon" is a rather old-fashioned word, and in some ways, its meaning has changed a little. You hardly ever hear people say, "Pardon me," in these parts--most people around here say "Excuse me," or "Scuze me." "Pardon" seems so formal. "The governor gave him a pardon." These days, it seems more associated with a crime.
But in reality, the word has lost a little in translation. It comes from the Latin word perdonare, which actually means, "to give wholeheartedly." Not exactly the same as the word "forgive."
"Forgive" implies the ability for the one who was wronged to have power over the transgressor. I'm not really sure we truly have power over those who wronged us; in fact, I am pretty sure we don't. But the word "pardon," in its original sense, does not seem to be a "control word." It is more of a liberating word--it raises the possibility that the pardonER is giving up any claims over that person.
But at least to me, the word "pardon" implies a willingness to give up control--to let things go as they may, with, ideally, no future need for control, and no need to feel one way or the other about the outcome.
Really, the act of pardoning is transformational for both the person granting pardon AND the person being pardoned...a transformation that mimics resurrection. Death turns into life. I often think of Lazarus, in his grave and stinking, and have often wondered, "When he came out, alive, did he still stink, and the stink kind of wore off after a spell, or did he come out not stinking?"
I am sure many of you all will want to scrap with me on this one, but I kind of want to believe he still smelled bad, and everyone around him had to adapt for a few days, as did he. I say that because when I have been the one pardoned, it took me a while to trust that I really WAS pardoned.
Thinking back to the last time someone truly pardoned me, I remember it took me a while to believe it. You see, I had learned decades ago the old "abuser-codependent" game where you say "I'm sorry," just to get someone to stop a bad behavior. Then they say they're sorry, they won't do it again, etc. etc., and you know and they know that they will, and hopefully you both will repeat as needed. So when people tell you that your transgressions are forgiven, you just sort of learn they really aren't, that they will be brought back up in your face again, and that is how people can take ancient history and keep fighting the same wars over and over again.
But some time ago, I remember apologizing to someone who didn't do that game, and being told, "We're going to put that behind us and start over, ok?...and I mean it, really mean it. But you have to believe I mean what I say there. I know you're not used to it being this way."
I thought, "Ok, I am going to give this a try." But over the next several weeks I kept a very wary eye on "whether this was for real, or just the same old crap." I probably even tested it a couple of times. But over time, I recognized that pardoning was for real.
Now, that's not to say this person hasn't hurt my feelings or disappointed me in a minor way since. That doesn't mean I haven't gotten on that person's raw nerve a few times. But it turns out, as far as I can tell, I really WAS pardoned. But I still had to walk around with the stench of my own death in my nose about it, and let that smell wear off.
Transformation is simply not usually an instantaneous thing; rather, it is more likely to happen in inches, and over some unspecified length of time. It is not a timed event, either. No two transformations happen in the exact time frame. Nor, I believe, is transformation a "single" event. To me, they appear ongoing, additive, and synergistic.
For isnstance: Perhaps we have an initial transforming event. We might have needed transformational event "A" as a prerequisite for transformational event "B" to even begin to occur. Then event "B" becomes stronger and more genuine because of the power within event "A." Over time we might discover that originally that power was "A" plus "B" but as time marches on, it becomes bigger than the power of "A" plus "B" because we see many other transformations occurring as a result of its power.
Looking at transformation in this way creates something that literally feels like it defies the laws of the universe--and you can't beat a trasnformation like that!
