1 Christ revealed our frailty and our falling,* our trespasses and our humiliations.
2 Christ also revealed his blessed power,* his blessed wisdom and love.
3 He protects us as tenderly and as sweetly when we are in greatest need;* he raises us in spirit and turns everything to glory and joy without ending.
4 God is the ground and the substance, the very essence of nature;* God is the true father and mother of natures.
5 We are all bound to God by nature,* and we are all bound to God by grace.
6 And this grace is for all the world,* because it is our precious mother, Christ.
7 For this fair nature was prepared by Christ for the honor and nobility of all,* and for the joy and bliss of salvation.
--Canticle S, "Enriching Our Worship 1," pp. 40-41
We just had a rather unique reminder of being "bound by nature" here in northeast Missouri the last couple of days. Kirksville got pounded by 16 inches of snow Feb. 1, and the whole region came to a standstill Feb. 2.
I knew I had changed my expectations for the snowstorm when I was sitting in my priest's office and looking out the window and said, "Hey, it's doing better. It's not snowing horizontally anymore."
But I had gotten back to town just in time to BARELY be able to get into my driveway and off the county road. Next morning, I was firmly "socked in," literally only two feet from the road, unable to get out. So close and yet so far. It was not until the county snowplow came by that I could get extricated. So I spent the night with the full knowledge that I could not leave my own property except on foot...in a blizzard.
Even then, I was not really "free." Eight feet of drifted snow had covered the gravel road that crosses my road and gives us all access to Highway 63. The snow plow had gotten stuck in the road (I've never seen a stuck snowplow before!)
So in short, I owed by ability to escape from this snowy white prison to the grace of many people. Not just the guy who plowed my road, and directly released me, but to a team of people trying to clean out my neighboring road. Getting me free was the thing I most noticed directly, but the actions of the people not on "my road," but the road next to it, mattered just as much. Getting out of one's own driveway is meaningless if you can't go anywhere substantial.
One of the wonderful things about nature (if you choose to look at it this way) is it really gets us in touch with our powerlessness. What we are able to do is pretty small potatoes. Really, the only thing I did in getting my truck out was flagging down the county truck and sitting in it, starting the motor and steering as they pulled me out. In other words, not much.
What are we able to control in nature? Oh, we can control where we are in the middle of it, and that's about it--and sometimes we can't control very much of that.
The line in that Canticle that stands out for me is "We are all bound to God by nature, and we are all bound to God by grace." What does that mean in a sense of relationship with God?
Actually, more than one form of "nature" plays into this. There's the actual physical form of nature--our geography, the exact spot we occupy on the GPS. There's the form of God's creation in which we have chosen to be--rural, urban, outdoors, indoors--not just in the "GPS location" sense but the reason why we are in this setting at this moment. There's our human nature--those innate things about us we always carry with us. There's the nature of how we are feeling on that given day. There's the nature of our relationship with God. Quite a few forms of nature, in fact.
Then comes the second half--we are bound by grace. Grace seems to me to be one of those funny things that we know it when we see it, but we are never quite come up with a suitable definition when we are asked to define it. I think that is because the nature of grace is that there is a mystery to it that is beyond our comprehension. To me, it's rooted in the way Jesus describes concepts "beyond the law."
Think about the times in the Gospels when people are more or less trying to trap him in the corner about various aspects of Torah law, like say, in Mark 10. The Pharisees are trying to corner him about divorce. When Jesus has been faced with those lines of questioning, he often re-frames it, querying back, "What does the law say about..." or "What does Moses (the physical embodiment of the law) say about...?" The answers to those questions are basically legal answers, and have a certain implied degree of clarity in a legal sense.
But his ultimate answer to them is one we've hashed back and forth since the day he uttered it, and various denominations are yet to agree on what the "total" answer to that is. His answer, simply stated, was, "He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” Very concrete in that we have a clear answer that there is an adulterous act committed, but very unclear in whether that is an "instance" or a "constant state of being." Theologians have batted that one back and forth forever and probably always will.
I have come to realize that he said it the way he did, not to be the "final answer" to the question, but to open up everyone to all the questions. I've always found it interesting we often think we need to hear a "final answer" on that one and let the rest of the times he answers questions in similar fashion go; I suspect, frankly, it's because this question is, in a roundabout way about sex, and we become obsessed with sex. My opinion is he answered the question the way he did to ask us to ponder our relationship with all sin, not just sexual sin. For starters, adultery doesn't occupy a higher rung of the "sin ladder" than lying, cheating, or stealing in the general sense.
When we have lied, was that an occurrence, or, now that we have lied, does that make us in a constant state of lying? Well, the answer is a bit of both. When we lied, we transgressed in the speaking of that lie. But even if we never theoretically lied ever again, we will still have to constantly live with the possibility of a consequence of that lie rearing up its ugly head in a different form, whether it's the residue of that lie, or another situation that occurs as a result of the individual lie.
In short, this question challenges us to examine our lives both in an "in the moment" sense, and in the millieu of our life in total.
Well, grace is a little like that, but in a positive way, as opposed to transgressing against the law. The things that happen where we were given gifts which we had no control over--those things are instances of grace. Yet, as someone living within God's realm, we are also in a constant state of grace. Whether we can see or identify it or not, is irrespective of the fact we are present in that state.
So my answer to the question, "What is grace?" is that it is a state "beyond the law," and a constant state of the goodness of our relationship in God through Christ, yet punctuated by instances where we see it in the actions of those doing good, or situations where things worked themselves out.
In that sense, we are just as powerless over our "recipient-hood" of grace, as we are the forces of nature. Just as I could not, on my own, free my truck from its snowy prison, neither can I exit of my own accord from a state of grace.
We don't get grace via our own merits, and we can't remove ourselves from grace via our own actions. We are bound to Christ. We are there, anyway. All our protesting that we should be cut from the herd falls on deaf ears.
We need God and others to extricate us from the spiritual prison of our own character defects...and that is what living in community is all about.
(Icon courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Mark 5:18-20:
As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. But Jesus refused, and said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.” And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.
When I was reading the story of Jesus healing the Gerasene Demoniac as one of my readings in the Daily Office a few days back, I got to thinking about Jesus' instructions to the now demon-free man: "Go home to your friends."
My first thought was "What friends? The guy was crazy! He was out running loose, naked, in the cemetery, and the only friends he had were the dead! What in the world does Jesus mean by this?"
I thought about the various observations I have made about people with chronic mental illness that I have known for some period of time, and my own interactions in their process. One of the things that happens many times is they might have started out with a set of friends, an intimate partner, or, at the very least, a network of people who care about them and have some degree of love and affection. As their illness builds, they either push their friends and loved ones away, or they simply "wear out" the people who do care about them and they just can't deal with the person any more and remain sane, themselves. The friends find themselves being sucked into their own situational psychic pain as a result of the chronically mentally ill person in their life. They end up behaving in ill ways because of the other person's illness, and unlike the chronically mentally ill person, they know it has to come to a stop somehow.
So in this Gospel story, I sat one evening and pondered just who those "friends" were, and I thought about the times I had been involved in the mental illness of others, and when being in the middle of that drama led to times I behaved erratically myself, and caused others to push away from me.
I've had some interesting dealings with people with chronic mental illness. I've been involved with suicide attempts of friends and relatives. I had someone try to kill themselves by flinging the door of my truck open at 55 mph and threaten to jump out. (I was amazed at how, while still driving my truck, I managed to grab that person by the shirt with one hand and yank them back in the truck. Then I became ashamed how then I became the "crazy" one, pounding this person's head against the back window of the truck repeatedly, yelling at the top of my lungs, "You go kill yourself on your OWN time, if that's what you want to do, but don't you ever...EVER...use me as the means to do it ever again!"
I once had a bipolar medical student who I had befriended to do some "grunt work" around my house for extra money, and this person had mistaken my generosity for being "best buddies," and suddenly found this person in my house all the time, literally living in my house, using my hidden spare key. When I re-established my boundaries for this relationship, this person suddenly launched into game-playing about threatening suicide, always dropping hints of suicide, of which I was supposed to respond in a push-pull relationship fashion.
I had another student many years ago who was stalking me, who became obsessed with little details of my life to the point it was seriously creepy, who implied that we had a psychological intimacy far beyond reality, and when I reported this behavior to the authorities, it triggered malicious stalking and destruction of my property, and I constantly feared my pets would be harmed.
I think about a time I "finally did what had to be done" in alerting the right people about someone's mental illness, but it was complicated by other transgressions by this person, and complicated by my own reticence to tell, because I had been sucked too psychologically far into the situation, and "telling" would reveal that I had concealed the reclusive and erratic behavior, and I had sins of my own in that situation.
I also help monitor impaired physicians, and I have been involved of many phases of impairment and recovery--and that has involved reporting impairment when I knew that my reporting would make me the "bad guy" or being involved with the intervention and telling that person the truth of how they had harmed me.
But what I've learned from those situations is that these things can have a ripple effect. The illnesses of others can trigger our own harmful psychological tendencies, and our own broken pasts, and affect our relationships with others, even when we are not the chronically ill ones. Whatever we are prone to, can "rear up"--whether it's family of origin issues, attention span issues, obsessive-compulsive behavior, depression, or simply a sense that we are not firmly grounded in reality. We can end up "wearing out" other people as a result of someone wearing US out. If we have severed ties with the chronically mentally ill person, there's a place we really just don't want to deal with that person and we are trying to move to a healing place beyond that relationship, yet we might have created pain in the lives of others while we were doing it. At times, it can create feelings of hopelessness, of failure, of resignation. It's messy, it's never pretty, and it only rarely has "the happy ending we wished for," although there are other ways it can eventually be reconciled.
So in our Gospel story, I came back to "who are his friends?" Here is a man whose world shrunk so far in his illness, that he very likely went from being a social creature like the rest of us, in his community like anyone else, to a frightening, dark world of the dead, where even wearing the trappings of humanity--his clothes--was too painful. He had reached a place where he couldn't even bear the reality of his own humanity. Yet, by a miracle, he was healed of what most of us with a modern medical eye would clearly recognize as schizophrenia.
No wonder he wanted to go with Jesus instead of stay in his town. Now healed, he knew it was far easier to move on, start over, and simply "leave his past behind" to follow Jesus. After all, there was a precedent of sorts. The stories of how the disciples came to follow Jesus was full of just "picking up and going with him." I don't think it would have been out of character for Jesus to have let this man do that.
But that wasn't what Jesus had in mind for him. He was to go home to whatever he perceived as his "friends." My guess is the man knew exactly what that meant--going directly to the people he had harmed, the people he had worn out, and the people who tried to help him but he had pushed THEM away. That's a hard assignment, and one bound to illustrate that some of his relationships would remain forever broken in this world. We're only human. Hard memories can make it not worth the mental pain to "kiss and make up," to start from scratch, to start anew as if nothing ever happened. Things where rules and laws stepped in may even make it illegal to do so. For instance, it doesn't matter how "healed" a person is, a restraining order is a restraining order. Everyone suffers consequences for his or her actions.
We are not privy to the details of how this man did that or exactly what he did to, as Jesus commanded, to "tell people what the Lord had done for him and the mercy he'd been shown," but we do know two things. We know he traveled around the Decapolis in his attempts to do that, and that "everyone was amazed."
So what did that mean to travel around the Decapolis? Wikipedia tells me that this represented several cities that are now in modern Jordan, Syria, and Israel: Gerasa, Scythopolis, Hippos, Gadara, Pella, Philadelphia, Al Husn, Capitolias, Canatha, Arabella, Raphana, and Damascus. Some of these cities have changed names. (For instance, Philadelphia is what now is known as Amman, the capital of Jordan.) Gerasa is more or less in the south end of this group of cities. Only Philadelphia was further south.
I was joking with one of my Facebook friends when discussing this reading, "Yeah, I bet he started way out on the north end and worked his way back south, all things considered." Obviously, we don't know his route map. But this is one of those times I like to let my spiritual imagination loose to "let Scripture read me," rather than me read it.
Human nature being human nature, it was probably easiest to start telling this story at a distance, rather than in the town where "everyone knows your name." After all, even Jesus knew a prophet was without honor in his home town. I like to think that as he got better at telling his faith story in the more distant towns, he was able to gain confidence and experience, and began to be healed and strengthened by that "amazement" in the eyes of others...and, after a spell, he came back to Gerasa.
We don't know how many years or months or weeks it took him to do all this preaching. So it's hard to say if he was still telling this story weeks later or years later. But I have no doubt, his story was the hardest sell in Gerasa. It could be something as simple as "Hey, aren't you the guy who ran around naked in the cemetery at night, crazy as a bedbug?" or it could be more complicated. I'm sure he ran into the people he'd hurt or harmed as a result of his illness, and got a cool reception, ranging from "I believe you have changed, but I am done with you. You hurt me too much. I can't ever let you back in," to "I don't believe you," to "I don't care." (I realize the Gospel says "everyone," but I also know we use the word "everyone" in a colloquial fashion, that usually means "most everyone," or "the bulk of them." I also imagine Scripture is reading me a little here, too--that I am showing my own hesitancy if I were in such a situation.)
This has some carry-over in our own lives, too. It means, when we have harmed others, and are in the business of being transformed and restored, it means we are called to at least try to reconcile it. It means when we are the one who was harmed, that we are called to at least try to understand that person in love, even if things will never be put back "the way they were." I think about one of those situations I was in where I had to tell the truth about someone else's mental illness even though I had been psychologically thrown under the bus by that person. I said, "I am, have been, and ever will be this person's friend. But I'm pretty sure what I'm about to tell you won't be perceived as friendship by this person, and I'm pretty sure I'll never be spoken to by this person after I say this." I think about the times I went to someone to apologize and as much as I wished that person would say "all is forgiven," I was pretty sure that was not going to happen, and odd on, my efforts would be rebuffed. I was usually not disappointed there. It's only the rare time someone can start over when I've harmed them.
But in those painful things, we have to remember "God's time is not our time."
As I mentioned earlier, we don't know how long this process took for our man in the story. Time has a way of softening old blows. God has a way of working on people over time. Even in the things that don't turn out "right" by our way of thinking, we are invited to hope that time changes things and God's time will become evident to us--if not in this life, in the life to come.
("Show Me Your Keys," courtesy of stopnlook's Flickr photostream, via a Creative Commons license)
Matthew 16:13-20:
Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.
It's probably true that, in addition to my fascination with hands, I also have a fascination with keys. Of course, keys are used by hands. They probably tag-team each other very nicely in my mind.
But a lot of my fascination with keys stems from the fact my late grandfather, who I called Yogi, owned a route of coin-operated machines--jukeboxes, pinball machines, coin-operated pool tables, and, later, video games--and it seemed that there were more keys in Yogi's possession than anyone on earth. I've blogged about his keys before in the summer of 2010--you can read it by clicking on the link here.
There is no doubt--I thought his keys opened all the doors of the universe. He could always keep me fascinated as a child by letting me play with the keys on his key ring. Every time I see the scene in "To Kill a Mockingbird" when Atticus is putting Scout to bed and she is bemusing herself by playing with Atticus' pocket watch, I think about how that is how Yogi's keys were for me.
I still have the ring of keys that was in Yogi's pocket the day he died of a heart attack in November, 1990. I have found myself at times, when I am feeling alone in that way where we feel disconnected from our past, detached from all we came from, holding those keys in my hand as a prayer object, and working my way through holding each key on the ring much as how one would handle a rosary. There are still times I miss him terribly, and holding his keys helps me feel not so far from him. Just as we are told in Matthew that Peter will be the rock upon which "Christ's church" will be built, Yogi's keys are the rock upon which my life was built
This passage in Matthew is one that is related many times from the pulpit and in commentary. The interesting juxtaposition in the English translation of this for me is we are told that the keys are the keys "of the kingdom of heaven" as opposed to the keys "to the kingdom of heaven." I dug around in my Greek Lexicon a bit, (and remember, I have never formally studied Biblical Greek, I am sort of a "I can kinda figure it out like I'm reading the back of a Cracker Jack box" Greek student) and as best as I can tell, the article τῆς is truly "of." (I won't be offended if someone tells me I'm wrong. It won't change the mental exercise I'm about to undertake--it's worth doing even if I have no justification from the lexicon.)
So in my mind, it changes my attitude of what these keys are meant to do. I don't think they are "a set of keys I own here on earth to unlock the treasures of Heaven." I think it might be the other way around. Perhaps these are keys from Heaven that are meant to belong to locks here on Earth, and their purpose is for us to go out and find the corresponding locks.
In other words, there's something bound, imprisoned, and locked up on Earth, that God has assigned us to find, unlock and let free--not necessarily for any great treasure or reward on our part, but simply because it needs to be unbound so Heaven and Earth can intermingle and we can all experience God's Kingdom on Earth. It's an assignment that calls us to use not just our reason, skill, and intellect, but our faith and our desire to be a part of that kingdom ourselves. It requires us to go forth and find these locks for the glory of God, not for ourselves.
However, we should not see it as martyrdom, but rather an amazing display of trust.
I think about how hesitant I am to give up my truck keys or my house keys. I am more than happy to give someone a spare set of my keys, but when it comes to my keys--the ones I carry around in my pocket--I really truly hate for the person to get out of eye-shot. What if they forget? What if they get in an accident? How will I open my home? How will I drive my truck? If I so much as misplace them in my own pocket I freak out.
I know I am not the only one who feels that way. Some of the worst misunderstandings I have had with others, involved keys. Times when, despite my best efforts to be careful, I lost someone's keys because I had a hole in my pocket. Times when someone with dementia misplaced my keys and it was all I could do not to be angry. Times when I went out of my way to help find someone else' keys and ended up feeling somehow "accused of taking them." Times when I've accused others of taking my keys. Times when I thought I had given someone the "right" key, and they got to their destination only to find I had given them the "wrong" key, and there they were, stuck outside and angry. Times when I've dropped someone else's keys in the snow and can't find them (always a risk in NE Missouri in January!) Losing one's keys is almost always charged with raw, sharp emotion. So I realize giving up one's own keys is way different from giving up a spare.
In the context of this passage, these stories of my own life make me realize that these "Keys of the Kingdom" are the keys out of God's own pocket. Yet, we are allowed to keep them for God's service, and God not only "seems not to mind," but encourages us.
That level of trust, alone, should be enough for us to want to run out and joyfully search for their corresponding locks!
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Blog friend Klady has just recently suffered a hard drive crash. I offer this for her:
The Computer Owner's Creed
We believe in one Hard Drive,
the Motherboard, the Almighty,
maker of all that computes,
of all that is, online and offline.
We believe in one Operating System's Data,
whether Windows or Mac,
eternally begotten of the Univac,
Computer from Computer,
OS from OS,
true Computer from Computer,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with our hard drive.
Through it all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
computers down from heaven:
by the power of the Internet
they became incarnate from the CPU chip,
and were made functional.
For our sake Data was crucified under power surges and viruses;
it suffered death and was buried.
On the third day it rose again
in accordance with recovery software;
it ascended into heaven
and is seated in our replacement laptops.
It will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and its kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Backup Hard Drive Data,
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Hard Drive and the Data.
With the Hard Drive and the Data it is worshiped and glorified.
It has spoken through the Fire Wire.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Internet.
We acknowledge one backup for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the Hard Drive Data,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
(Niagara Falls at night, photo by Sujit Kumar, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Psalm 17:3 (RSV)
Weigh my heart, summon me by night, melt me down; you will find no impurity in me.
I don't often choose the RSV over the NRSV, but the RSV version of this verse in the Psalm seems to have a more powerful imagery of this phenomenon.
Have you ever had one of those nights, when it seems like the minute you put your head on the bed pillow, that the events that you've been walking through during the day seem to rush through your head in a torrent, just like Niagara Falls?
Yeah, I thought you had. Me too.
Our tendency is to fear those torrents of thoughts. After all, a quick Google search on "racing thoughts at night" would show that this is very quickly identified as one of the symptoms of anxiety, that it can be one of the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, can precipitate panic attacks, to one of the signs of schizophrenia. Quite honestly, there are medical reasons to fear them, and when one finds him or herself troubled by racing thoughts at night constantly or frequently, one should seek the help of a medical or mental health professional.
However, when this happens once in a while, or in response to a situation, and we know that it is situational or temporary, we probably shouldn't fear them as much as we often do. What we are probably experiencing are simply compulsive thoughts that are rooted in one of those three things that so often separate us from the light of God--shame, guilt, fear. St. Maximus the Confessor calls these "the passions," but he is not using passion in the same way you and I use it in the modern sense. We tend to think of "passion" as a virtuous thing, the thing that deep love awakens. His use of the word refers more to compulsive thoughts that sidetrack us and create repetitive loops that paralyze us. So when we talk about the "passions" in the philosophical sense, it is not quite a one-to-one correlate. To deal with that disconnect, I will use words like "compulsions" and "compulsive thoughts" instead.
What if, when those torrents of nighttime thoughts came over us, we started by simply recognizing that compulsive thoughts come to the forefront when the bulk of our mind is at rest?
We spend our waking days working, doing, solving, and attending to the cares of our lives--our jobs, our families, our friends, our personal needs. At bedtime, when our activities of the evening are over, the only thing we attend to is our physical need for sleep. Our natural rhythms are converting from "movement" to "rest." So it's quite understandable why these thoughts bubble up. There's nothing to distract us. Because of the "repetitive loop-like nature" of compulsions, what can start as a ripple on a calm pond can begin to seem like a river, a raging ocean, or a waterfall, and suddenly our focus changes from shrugging off getting a wet hand or foot to feeling like we are suddenly plunging in a barrel over the heart of Niagara Falls, to be dashed to our messy deaths by the rocks at its base.
What if, instead of seeing these compulsions as "oppositional forces to our sleep," we recognized them as something within ourselves where a thought somehow got amalgamated into the deep hooks in our soul that recognize fear, shame, or guilt?
I think time and time again about how one of the most powerful tools we have as human beings is illustrated in a rather obscure part of the Genesis creation story--the ability to give things names. One of the first tasks Adam gets from God in that story is to name all the animals. Sometimes I like to think silly things like "How does one figure out to call a possum a possum?" when I reflect on that story. But other times I think about it in a much deeper way. My ability to name things also allows me to be open to what something truly is, at its essential level, and rule out what it is NOT.
St. Maximus saw our compulsions as an aspect of sin, in that misuse of God's good creation is taking place. When we fall prey to our compulsive thoughts, they prevent us from engaging in the ongoing work of loving God and being followers of Christ by example. He talks about how we can overcome our compulsions by "separating the thought from the compulsion." One of the ways we can do that, I imagine, is by naming which one of the "big three"--fear, shame, our guilt--is "behind" the compulsion. That's simply a matter of coming to God with our own sins in the situation. Sometimes for me, that is simply acknowledging that the situation is one in which I have no control, and accept my powerlessness in it. It can be something as basic as actively choosing serenity over a desire to control--it doesn't have to be some big looming transgression.
When we give these compulsions names, we often discover that once they are separated from our thoughts--our thoughts to seek and serve God in a most holy way--it turns out we were not headed down Niagara in a barrel to our doom, but were sitting in a john boat on a lazy river. Not always, of course, but more than we might have thought at the time.
This is also where the knowledge of the prayers of others can be a comfort. Of course, many of us have no problem praying for others, but asking for the prayers of others on our behalf may feel "selfish" or praying for ourselves seems self-centered. Honestly, I am just terrible at asking for prayers for myself. It feels a bit manipulative. Over time, I've gotten a little better at it, but I'm not great at it. But I have come to realize lately that prayer is an ongoing, living, breathing hand of God all its own.
We conceptualize that concept in the Episcopal church through the Prayers of the People. The book of Common Prayer has a rubric that, during the Prayers of the People:
"Prayer is offered with intercession for:
The Universal Church, its members, and its mission
The Nation and all in authority
The welfare of the world
The concerns of the local community
Those who suffer and those in any trouble
The departed (with commemoration of a saint when appropriate.)"
That, by example, swings a pretty wide net.
Now, I don't think we do this because if we insert prayer concern A into tab B, in precisely this way, something magically happens. I think we do this to illustrate the breadth and depth of this "net of prayer."
But what it means when we are lying on our beds with those thoughts racing through our minds that seem on the verge of sweeping us away, is to remind us that we are held safely in this net of prayer, cast by a God who will not allow us to become hopelessly enmeshed in it, even in our physical sickness and death. It can help us, as we hear in Psalm 4, to hear God speak to our hearts in silence upon our beds.
(The Lord's Prayer, Pater Noster Chapel, Jerusalem, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
--The Lord's Prayer, p.97, Book of Common Prayer
"…we can attain to the unitive knowledge of God only when we become in some measure God-like, only when we permit God's kingdom to come by making our own creaturely kingdom go."
--Aldous Huxley
Every once in a while, I look at things that have been relegated to the world of "religious kitsch."
Like Psalm 23, The Lord's Prayer is one of those things. It shows up twice in the Gospels, in Matthew 6 and Luke 11, and they are not identical. We don't do much better. Protestants tack on the Doxology (the last two lines); Roman Catholics and Orthodox don't, and Episcopalians do most of the time, but with exceptions in things like The Great Litany. I always remember the time we did a joint service with the Presbyterians, and you could tell who's who because we said "trespasses" and the Presbys said "debts."
Really, the purpose of the Lord's Prayer was as a showroom demo. In both Matthew 6 and Luke 11, Jesus used it as a model of how to pray--the first Christian prayer rubric, as it were. Yet we use it AS a prayer in its own right.
When we look at it in an interlinear translation of Koíne Greek, it's far less flowery and far more confusing:
Father of us (the one) in the heavens;
Let be sanctified the name of you.
Let come the kingdom of you,
Let take place the will of you,
As in heaven also upon earth.
The bread of us for (the day) being give to us today;
And let go off of us the debts of us,
As also we have let go off to the debtors of us;
And not should you bring us into temptation,
But rescue us from the wicked (one.)
I blogged about a year ago about the cryptic issues with that "bread of the day" and the Greek word epiousion; you can read it here. But this post is more about that business of "thy kingdom come," or perhaps more accurately, "Let come the kingdom of you, God."
Here's my radical proposal:
Is it possible that elusive thing we call "God's kingdom" is actually already right in front of our noses, but veiled by that thing we know as our own ego?
We grow up thinking "Heaven's up there, and we're down here." I think it's probably because since the first thinking human looked up at the night sky, and could not wrap his or her head around its vastness, we humans have been prone to thinking that God is far away from us, in a vast place. Add to it the fact that this tired old world has plenty of broken-ness in plain sight--both human broken-ness and the broken-ness of natural disasters, disease, etc. There are plenty of things around us that scream "premature death." It's hard to imagine anything of God coexisting in that mess.
But, sci-fi geek that I am, many years ago, I started postulating the possibility that our temporal lives are merely a cloaking device--that we actually live them in a physical world that physically coexists in the middle of that place we call "Heaven," and the moment of our deaths is more like an unveiling, or a curtain rising on a new act of a play. I like the notion that sort of tag-teams with the Jesuit notion that "at the moment of death, all is revealed"--that the shell of our broken battered physical and temporal selves shatters and we expand into the vast majesty of all that we conceptualize as "Heaven."
The father of osteopathic medicine, A.T. Still, once postulated a century or so before me that our human selves are like eggs in an incubator, being prepared to "hatch" into our full selves--a rather agrarian version of what I like to imagine.
So what if, possibly, we are sitting smack dab in the middle of "God's kingdom" already, and when we are asking for its coming, we are really asking to see what is already in front of us? To tag-team on our friend Aldous Huxley's quote above, what if the key to seeing God's kingdom is to let go of our kingdom? What happens when we let go of our security blankets, our stashes and hoards of creature comforts over and above what we really need to live in this world, and become better stewards of our money, our throwaways, our "stuff?" What happens when we recycle, or buy only what we need, or use Earth-friendly products? What do we see of God's when we give up a tithe of our money to our church? In whose face do we see the face of God when we tithe our time to feed the hungry, minister to the sick, or visit the incarcerated? What do others see when they see our attempts to live God-centered lives?
What if all these things we do to both respect God's creation and each other punch little holes in that temporal, physical veneer that covers us? When is the last time you got a sneak peek at God's kingdom? In what setting was it? What happened? Sit with it. What did you see? How was the light of God manifested? These are questions each of us can only answer for ourselves, with God's help.
I encourage you to spend some time pondering these things. My guess is they will reveal the parts of our own kingdoms that need a dose of "letting go."
And though this world, with devils filled,
should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed
His truth to triumph through us:
The Prince of Darkness grim,
we tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure,
for lo, his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him.
--3rd verse, "A Mighty Fortress is our God," Martin Luther
Some of you on this blog know that, despite my complete and utter joy in finding the Episcopal Church, there are times that the little Martin Luther that sits upon my shoulder whispers in my ear and reminds me of my Lutheran upbringing.
Well, I have to admit that when I read this post by Sarcastic Lutheran, that little Martin Luther on my shoulder started whispering in my ear, "Now don't forget--you know in your heart you love to shout down evil--and that it has value."
Now, I'm going to be up front--I really don't believe in "the devil" in terms of an evil hobgoblin hiding behind lampposts who skulks around actively trying to trip me up. Personally, I believe what Luther and many others call "the devil" is composed of the darkness between our own two ears--those little thoughts that prey upon our minds and make us feel less than a complete and beautiful created child of God.
But I do believe the individual darkness in each of us can coalesce into things such as the tragedy in Tuscon--and in that sense, that collective darkness becomes a force...the force we know as "evil."
I have been slow to respond to the main story in the news from a week ago--the gunning down of people at a political town hall meeting--simply because it takes time for me to process "darkness." Pondering darkness is not easy for me, because I hear the noise it makes as it tries to suck us into it.
Until Sarcastic Lutheran reminded me I have the tools to shout down evil, I was feeling too powerless to respond. But now, being reminded of a slice of the church of my childhood, I feel strong enough to stand up to it. Not because I, myself, am so big and strong and imposing, but because I have been reminded of the power greater than me in my own baptism.
Ultimately, that force we know as "evil" resides most prominently in those two little letters i-f. As Sarcastic Lutheran points out in her sermon, when we read the Gospel stories of Jesus being tempted, Satan throws that if word around..."If you are the Son of God, well, then, do this, that, and the other." Jesus, being fully human as well as fully divine, would have been just as susceptible as the rest of us in the power of that word if to cast doubt in our hearts. If, as tiny a word as it is, has the power to cut to the marrow of any of our beliefs.
The word if, I believe, is the word that leads people into becoming atheists and agnostics. I have many friends who simply don't believe in God. So many times when they explain it, their explanation is framed in terms of the broken-ness of the world..."If there really was a God, why do good people die in floods/mean people get away with things/serial killers exist/good people get cancer, etc. etc. etc."
Well, and when you come right down to it, what I hear them saying, is something very heartfelt: "This is the God of my understanding/the God that I've been taught about/the God that got crammed down my throat, and that God really disappoints me. I can't believe in a God like that. So I'd rather just not believe or not deal with it."
I've never understood why the statements of non-belief of atheists, or doubt by agnostics, gets some Christians angry to the point of being incensed. That statement above is one that Christians should feel true compassion when they hear it, because it's a statement that the word if generated. We should feel love and compassion for those statements, because they are based in a very accurate observation that a force of darkness does exist in the world.
What I've seen as a result of the Tuscon tragedy is something similar to post 9/11, but from the other end of the political spectrum...a call to once again seriously look at gun violence in this country...a call to name domestic terrorism for what it is...hard conversations. Conversations that touch all the hot-button topics in each of us.
I think these conversations are so heated and so contentious, because they underscore the deepest ways in which we show where the word if has defeated us. Ultimately, if is manifested in our desire to control something we fear. Every single hot button political issue that we feel strongly about, is about our self-defeat that the word if generated. That's human nature, and it's never going to change. Our fear-based passions will always be there.
But here's a thought--what if we re-frame the power of if? What if we do take a page out of Martin Luther's playbook? Sarcastic Lutheran's sermon tells a story of when Martin Luther felt dogged by the darkness while holed up in a castle translating the Greek Bible into German. He wandered around the castle literally yelling at the darkness, "I AM BAPTIZED."
Notice the other two letter word here--AM. Not "was."
We are not talking about an "over and done" event, here.
We are talking about a continual work in progress that can be active all the days of our lives if we choose to let it be so. A power greater than us also has the power to re-frame if.
One of the things promised at our baptism, that we re-commit to every year when we renew this covenant, is to "persevere in resisting evil," and when we "fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord."
The prayer that is said over baptismal candidates asks "that all" (not just the one being baptized at the moment) "who are baptized into the death of Jesus Christ your Son may live in the power of his resurrection."
We need to stop saying, "I was baptized," and start saying "I am baptized." We need to stop acting like it's all over and done with, and re-align our thinking to accept we are part of a constantly moving, growing, living thing..
Baptism is not stasis. It's moving, flowing, running water. I laugh at how we all fuss about "dunking vs. sprinkling." What I love about baptism in the Episcopal Church is how the priest pours water on the person's forehead and it runs down his or her head. Moving water.
That image that we are riding along together in moving water, has the power to resist evil. We cannot do it alone, but we can do it corporately.
We have the power to re-define if. It starts with changing our attitude from "I was baptized," to "I am baptized."
