Musings

Room for Christmas

My wife, Roberta Maran, and I live in a 620-square-foot house.  We love it.  In order to move in here, we had to sell or give away most of our possessions.  We hardly remember those former belongings.  We’ve enjoyed the lightness of living with less.

But then there is Christmas!  It’s a special challenge for us to prepare for it, since we have an enormous family and very little space to create handmade gifts, wrap packages and prepare holiday treats.  I’ve been struggling to get from one end of the house to the other without stepping on the projects in progress or on the paper, boxes, and completed gifts.

But this temporary clutter is a good metaphor for the spiritual question of Christmas.  Do we really have room in our lives for the limitless love that is known, among other names, as the Christ?

This question found its way into our house in the form of an empty box.  It was cleverly wrapped in paper from a Whole Foods grocery bag, with ribbon made from ripped strips of cloth.  It was made by our friend Molly DeVries, owner of Ambatalia Fabrics in Mill Valley.  Roberta was entranced as she was handed the box.  She said to Molly, “Your emptiness!  Thank you!”  Roberta was inspired to wrap empty boxes and name them with tags that indicated the precious but intangible gifts inside.

When I got home that day, she excitedly introduced me to the concept.  So we began making and wrapping empty boxes, and coming up with lines to put on the tags.  Our friend Leigh Markell came over and helped us.  Roberta made the gift cards in the style of her grandmother Cecilia, who used to glue a scrap of burlap onto the front of each one and adorn it with sisal cord and wooden beads in a unique pattern. That first week Roberta sold many of the boxes after worship at Sausalito Presbyterian, to raise funds for our church’s Action Against Hunger project that provides emergency food aid to people in famine-stricken areas of the world.

Here is a list of our tags, describing some of the priceless, pound-less gifts we can give and receive this season:

“This box contains:”

* Spare time
* The afterglow of 500 smiles
* A positive attitude
* Whatever you can imagine
* A ball of infinitesimally thin string which, if unrolled, will reach from you to the moon
* The egos of Jesus and Buddha
* All the nothing you ever wanted
* The laughter of 50 good jokes
* A scoop of wind from the top of Mt. Tamalpais
* A sigh of relief
* A groan of ecstasy
* A continuous round of applause for your accomplishments
* A secret memory
* A hint of your destiny
* The feeling Mother Teresa had when she served a destitute dying person in India
* An abandoned opinion 
* A bright idea
* An argument extinguisher – open in a relationship emergency and breathe the contents deeply
* A unique experience
* 200 UAU’s (universal adoration units)
* A “Wow, baby! You’re good!”
* It’s the little things….
* The knowledge that separation is only an illusion
* My emptiness which I give you, making room for you in my soul
* The memory of a baby’s touch
* A beginner’s mind
* Your creative spirit
* A hint of last night
* A new beginning
* The lightness you need to rise up to heavenly places
* A blend of: 25% kindness, 25% patience, 25% forgiveness, 20% hope, 5% brilliance – open in an emergency and breathe the contents deeply
* More oxygen and less CO2 – open after fulfilling your commitment to help end global warming
* Nothing that matters
* The silence between notes that makes music beautiful
* The sound of Buddha’s meditations
* The sound of Jesus resurrecting
* The weight of Jesus’ anger against his enemies
* What is left when I strip away all my illusions about who I am
* The essence of Rumi’s spiritual friend, Shams of Tabriz
* Enough oxygen to inflame your most precious passion
* The true meaning of Bob Dylan’s song lyrics
* The air from the horn of the big yellow taxi in Joni Mitchell’s song
* Nothing you can’t live without

May the emptiness of these boxes remind us to make space in our lives for the birth of the One who comes at Christmas, and at every other time when people share unconditional compassion with each other.

Complicated Simplicity

In recent years, I've done a lot of reading about the religious history of America. It is a fascinating subject, because so many remarkable innovations in Christianity have been spawned on our shores.  Consider the Mormons, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Christian Scientists -- to say nothing of the American manifestation of the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists.  Despite the complexity of American Christian traditions, there are common themes that I notice.  Foremost is the very American urge to return to what people define as the "original" church: what they presume to be the raw, uncut, unadulterated essence of Christian faith.  But in this typically American effort to boil things down to the fundamentals (is this why we spell it "color" and the British spell it "colour"?), Christianity has become adulterated even further.  This is evidenced by the elaborate beliefs of many uniquely American churches.  To get back to the fundamentals took a lot of explaining, and then the explanations became sacred.  When people started questioning the sacred explanations, the whole process of seeking the fundamentals started over again.  This cycle continues to this day in our country.  Europeans shake their heads at us in wonderment, boggled at the endless ferment and mutation in American religion.

It is sobering to read this history and see my own place in it.  I, too, am on a quest to get down to the basics of Christian faith and abandon many of the unhelpful accretions to Jesus' simple message of love for God and neighbor.  I had to write a whole book, after all, to explain how simple Christianity really is! 

I'm on the executive council of The Center for Progressive Christianity.  A few years ago, at a meeting of our council, we got into a discussion of whether or not to revise the 8 points of our Welcome Statement, which is a description of the progressive Christian movement.  Somebody said "No, we can't do that!  People count on those 8 points staying the same!"  But all of us, the speaker included, started laughing at the prospect that our group, dedicated as it is to opening the church to people who can't deal with dogma, would develop a fixed set of doctrines of its own.  The temptation to repeat history was strong.

This very American urge to boil religion down to the basics is a good thing, as long as we remember what can go wrong with it.   Christian faith really is simple -- it's about not much more than loving God and loving neighbor with heart, soul, mind and body.  In my church, we've been reading the Sermon on the Mount in our Wednesday night Bible study.  We see that it's simple, but not easy.  It's difficult to love God when bad things happen to good people.  It's hard to love difficult neighbors, and even harder to love the basically good but sometimes impossible members of our families.  It's hard to extend the concept of "neighbor" to people on the other side of the world, but more than ever, we are called to this challenge on our "globalized" planet.   The practice of Christianity is plenty difficult. There's no need to make it harder with complicated theology and bewildering, illogical beliefs.

So may history be our guide in keeping religion simple, so we can focus on the worthy challenge of living faithfully.

Is the Bible Fit for Kids?

I went to a Sunday School teachers’ convention over two decades ago.   It was a dull affair except for one workshop which I attended, entitled “How to Teach the Bible to Kids”.  The leader came into the room with a stack of musty old illustrated Bible story books.  He opened up one of the books, with its florid pictures of muscle-bound Philistines, heavily-bearded, grimacing patriarchs, and heavy-robed women kneeling in agonized supplication.  He then read aloud some of the most gruesome and salacious of the Bible’s stories, showing the pictures to the horrified Sunday School teachers.   

The workshop leader then closed the book and declared, “Kids love this stuff!”  He went on.  “Throw out that namby-pamby denominational curricula for Sunday School, and go to a thrift store and buy an old Bible story book and read it to your kids.  They won’t let you stop reading it to them.  They’ll be riveted.  They see violence on TV. It’s in the Bible, too.  They know somebody in their family or among their friends who has been molested or abused.  Stories of incest are also in the Bible.  They play computer games with action figures who perform amazing feats with miraculous powers, and that’s all in the Bible, as well.  The difference is that there’s more to the story, there’s redemption in the Bible, that is lacking in the mayhem on television and in the movies.”

His message stayed with me.  Just because kids discover that Samson slaughtered a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass (a fresh jawbone, the book of Judges would have us know), that doesn’t mean they will go and do the same.  Let kids see the many ways that the Bible describes the human and divine condition.  Let them see God described as a hoary, jealous tyrant sitting on a throne on the other side of the sky, and also let them see God described as the mystical ground of being and unconditional love.  Let them learn from the negative example of deceitful King David and oversexed King Solomon, as they also discover the wisdom of the Proverbs and the compassion of the Christ.  Let them reflect on life in full as they read the Bible in full, including both the sickening and the sublime.  I’m not in favor of emphasizing all the disgusting parts of the Bible.  But I do think a certain amount of exposure to it is not only okay, but a good thing for kids.

When my daughter was little, she loved it when I read illustrated Bible stories to her.  With trepidation I read her the story of the crucifixion when she was about 4 years old.  I told her that some folks were mad at Jesus because he helped people that they didn’t want him to help, so they killed him, and it was a terrible thing.  She was transfixed by the picture of Jesus on the cross.  I continued reading and flipping the pages, but Liz kept saying, “Jesus on the wood!  Jesus on the wood!” because she wanted me to flip back to that picture so she could look at it some more.  She was equally impressed by our visit to the old Spanish mission at Santa Clara when she was about 5 years old.  Inside, she stared for a long time, her mouth hanging open, as she faced the big statue of the beaten, bleeding Christ on the cross.  I wanted to whisk her away from it, but then I realized that something important was happening inside of her.  She needed to process that image of the tortured Christ in her soul, and begin to come to terms with the suffering and death that touches all of our lives.

Recently, during the “time with children” in our church’s worship service, I put our big, heavy pulpit Bible on the floor and gathered the kids around it.  I asked them, “What were your first words, when you were little?”  (My favorite answer:  “Mommy’s tired!”)  I then said that the Bible was a lot like little toddlers who learn how to talk with just a few simple words, and then as they get older they learn how to talk in bigger and more complicated words.  The Bible starts out talking about God as if he was a man who ruled the world like an old-fashioned king.  Then later on in the Bible, people grow in faith and begin to understand God as love that lives in our hearts.  After flipping through the pages of that big Bible, from start to finish, I flipped imaginary pages past the book of Revelation, illustrating that the Bible isn’t the end of the story of our growth in love, and that our children can add new and better chapters to it.

(For a list of Bible passages - none of them gory or gross! -  that I  recommend for children, see:  www.sausalitopresbyterian.com/spc/go/youth/byheart)

(To see a letter that reflects my deep concerns about the war in Lebanon, see www.pcu-la.org .  I've sent the President and my senators and congresswoman letters asking for an immediate cease-fire.  I hope you'll join me in speaking out about this terrible escalation of the violence in the Middle East.)

 

Spiritual Freedom

 

Some friends of mine, outdoor enthusiasts from Albuquerque, moved for a few years to Oklahoma City.  I visited them when I was driving across the country.  They took me to a restaurant in a big mall in Oklahoma City.  After dinner, we noticed a big wall made of faux rocks inside the mall.  My friends rushed over to it and began to climb it. Oklahoma is flat, and it was exciting for them to find a place where they could exert themselves vertically. 

But the people walking past them were offended.  "You shouldn't do that," they muttered.  "Get down from there!"  There was no rule that banned rock-climbing in the mall.  No city ordinance against it.  But people were not used to seeing it happen there, so it seemed wrong . 

In 1981, I went with a group of church peace activists to what was then the Soviet Union.  One cool fall morning, I went running along the Moscow River with one of my clergy colleagues.  Every head in each of the many trams that passed by us turned to stare at us, as if we had dropped down to Earth from Mars.  The fact that my running mate was a gorgeous young blonde might have had something to do with it.  But we both realized suddenly that in that vast city, we were the only ones running along the river. 

For all the many rules and regulations in that so-called "Evil Empire", a ban on running on the Moscow River was not among them.  But people didn't exercise that freedom, any more than Oklahomans exercised the freedom to rock-climb in the mall.

Faith is recognizing our freedom and exercising it.  We are free to see the world in many, many more ways than the media industry tells us to see it.  We are free to interpret our own lives in many, many more ways than our egos think we ought to describe them.  We are free to snap out of the humdrum existence we so often accept as life, and do it very differently, and delight in the vibrancy that surrounds us all the time.  The spiritual path leads us not only to discover that we can write sideways on lined paper, but that we need to do so now and again.

Once there was a man named Zacchaeus, a wealthy tax-collector who wanted to see Jesus when he passed through his town of Jericho.  He couldn't see over the crowd in front of him, so he climbed a tree.  I bet that the people around him were annoyed at him.  You can just hear them saying, "Get down from there!  You are a grown man, not a child! Get out of that tree!"  But there was no law against it, and Zacchaeus exercised his freedom.  What did he have to lose?  The people hated him anyway.  Jewish tax collectors were considered "unclean" because they collaborated with the Roman occupying forces in Israel. 

Jesus looked up in the tree and must have smiled at the sight of that little man waving at him.  One exercise of freedom inspired another: Jesus invited himself to dinner at Zacchaeus' house.  Every head turned on the spot!  It was socially unconventional.  It was not considered proper for a rabbi like Jesus to associate with such a sinner.  But Jesus was a man who knew and practiced his spiritual liberty. 

Zacchaeus was so blown away by Jesus' free-spirited choice that he decided to take a further liberty of his own.  When Jesus came to dinner, Zacchaeus declared that he was going to take the money he had creamed from the local people in the process of collecting taxes, and give it to the poor. 

We don't have to do life the way we've always done it.  We don't have to think the same thoughts we've always thought.  We don't have to categorize other people the way others do.  We don't have to stay stuck in our ruts, not nearly as much as we think we must.  And it would do us good, and do others good, if we actually employed our freedom a lot more.  Use it or lose it, as they say - as true for our spiritual liberty as it is for our muscles!

Love Is a Natural Fact

Love is in the air. It’s the beginning of spring here in Marin County. Blooming trees perfume the air and flowers explode with color. The birds and the bees are getting frisky. I stood below our sanctuary a few days ago and heard an unusual bird song. I looked up and at the very top of the old copper cross was a bird – I don’t know what kind – singing clear and loud. I think it was uttering an avian singles ad. Suddenly the bird got the response it wanted and it flew away in a burst of flapping wings. The cross has at least two paradoxically entwined meanings. It is a symbol of the human condition of suffering. And it is also the symbol of the transformative power of selfless love. That bird, in a voice so strong and sweet, brought the two meanings together in one beautiful song.

And it might also seem a paradox to combine Valentine’s Day with Evolution Sunday, a national event in which progressive preachers like myself are expressing the compatibility of serious science with religion. But what better time to remember that love is a natural fact, one that needs to be examined under the lens of science and also celebrated and enriched through the eyes of faith?

We go to school and we get sex education. And that’s a good thing. We do need to know how the plumbing works. We need a solid fact-based, scientifically-grounded understanding of the birds and the bees. Public school is good at sex education. But I don’t think it is very good at sense education. The spiritual, sensual, experiential dimension is what makes the plumbing worth using in the first place, isn’t it? And it seems to me that the church is a perfect place for sense education. The cultivation of the spiritual, aesthetic, moral, and emotional senses. We church folks pick up where the doctors and the scientists leave off. Here’s a line from the Song of Solomon in the Bible: “Make haste, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountains of spices.” Nothing about plumbing here in the Song of Solomon. Nothing about natural selection or survival of the fittest. No reference to body parts with Latin names. No, here we have the poetry of love. Here we have a meditation on what romantic love looks and feels like. Here’s a line from the first letter of John: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love.” There’s no talk here of x and y chromosomes, or of endorphins or adrenaline. No, here we have deep spiritual wisdom about the nature of love.  Let the public schools teach hard science and cold facts. And let the churches and temples teach about the feelings, the meanings, the purposes, the glories and the pitfalls of love.

Because love is a natural fact. It is what makes the world go ‘round. Really! Because if you look at it poetically, you might say that gravity is like love – a natural attraction that keeps the earth from zinging away from the sun and into the cruel cold of deep space. Natural selection, the survival of the fittest – the biochemical attractions that result in mating and reproduction of all creatures from single-celled organisms to ourselves – these processes, so far best explained by the theory of evolution, naturally results in higher and higher levels of consciousness. The capacity of our brains for reflection, for contemplation, for spiritual experience – this capacity is the result of evolution. Our propensity to come to church on Sunday is a natural fact – a consequence of billions of years of natural history and development. There are books that explore the biochemistry of spirituality, that explain the functions of the neurotransmitters that are activated when we have religious experiences. This is fascinating and wonderful stuff that definitely has its place. But so does the fuzzy, unscientific, imprecise realm of religion and poetry and music and art, which help us express the way it all feels, help us express what it means to us, help us express what we want to do about it. Religion helps us ask big questions. Some of those questions can be answered by science, and some cannot. Some can be answered only with poetry.

“Intelligent design” isn’t a theory because it offers no cogent explanation of how the “intelligent designer” did the designing. It has no place in science education because it amounts to circular reasoning – it presumes its own conclusion. The theory of evolution does not contradict our experience of God. On the contrary – it demonstrates the awesome wonder of divinity.

It’s easy to mix up religion and science. Fundamentalist Christians aren’t the only ones to fall into this confusion. I hear people mixing up quantum mechanics and spirituality all the time, in ways that don’t do either discipline justice. In particle physics there are subatomic phenomena that have fields that extend to the entire universe. It’s easy for otherwise educated folks to jump to the conclusion that therefore the fields of the subatomic events in your brain exist everywhere in the universe and can be picked up telepathically by others far away, enabling thoughts to travel. There might be a grain of truth in this leap of across the boundary of science and religion, but the cold, hard fact is that we humans do a rotten job of reading each others’ minds, even when we’re in the same room! The signal interference is terrible – worse even that trying to receive a cell phone call in mountainous Marin County.

Religion can inspire scientists to seek answers. Its moral power can impel scientists to find solutions to humanitarian needs, and it can provide metaphors and images for them to use in forming thoughts and solving problems. But religion does not provide a framework for rigorous empirical testing of these ideas. Likewise, science can inspire religion, providing it with ideas that can inspire poetry and liturgy and music that expresses our ineffable experiences. But if we try to quantify transcendence, we lose the poetry, and religion goes cold.

I do a lot of marital counseling because we do so many weddings here. So many of the couples I marry are between two very different people – different styles, ways of thinking and living. As long as they celebrate their differences and make best use of each other’s proclivities, they can be wonderful partners.

So this Valentine’s Day and Evolution Sunday let us pray that science and religion will romance each other in a way that honors their individuality and celebrates their distinct roles. Let us bring sex education and sense education together. Let’s watch Darwin and Jesus dance! Let us open our hearts to each other and celebrate the juicy truth that love is a natural fact.

Prayer for Wisdom

Holy Sophia, Mother Wisdom, through you I pray at this holy time of Epiphany, remembering the story of the learned ones from the East who came to visit the Christ child.

I pray for the kind of wisdom that is deep happiness, so that I may remain joyfully boggled by the shocking beauty of the natural world that surrounds me. I pray to remain blissfully awestruck with fascination at the people I encounter every day. I pray that my feelings of frustration will be moderated by deep gratitude that I am alive to feel anything at all.

I pray for the wisdom of attentiveness, so that I can be awake to the ways that I can show kindness to others. I pray for the wisdom of imagination, so that I can transcend the confines of problems in order to discover solutions, so that I can perceive beauty even in places where it seems absent.

I pray for the wisdom of humility, to know my small place in the grand order of things. I pray for an acute awareness of my constant state of ignorance, so that I will be eager always to learn more. I pray for the wisdom of humor, so that I can enjoy the comedy of my own errors.

I pray that your divine wisdom will be revealed to others, as well. I pray that the leaders of this country will be motivated by compassion and genuine curiosity, rather than by fear and predetermined ideology. I pray that the people of this world will act on the wisdom of solidarity, aware that we have so very much more in common than the few things that keep us apart. I pray most fervently for the wisdom of forgiveness, so that the future will not be determined by grudges from the past.

Dear Mother Wisdom, make each neural pathway in my brain, each subtle structure of my mind, each layer of my consciousness, into a channel through which your creative and reconciling energy can flow. Amen!

Prayer of Release

The experience of God is available to us all the time.  The love that is God is the very substance of our being.  So the spiritual quest is not about discovering God - it's about uncovering, getting past the barriers we put in the way of our awareness of the divine.

Attachments are the obstacles.  Negative attachments get in the way of knowing God.  Holding on to anger, resentment, hatred, prejudice - this leads to the very opposite of the love that is God. 

But, paradoxically, attachment to the good can get in the way, as well.  Clutching and clinging to those we love can sour our relationships -- not only with each other, but with God.  Grasping at wonderful possessions, brilliant ideas, physical pleasures, and beautiful things can result in evaluating them according to our relationship to them - instead of appreciating them for what they are on their own terms.  It can trick us into thinking we "own" these people and things -- when in fact they are good precisely because they are beyond our grasp.  When we see that others are truly other to us, having lives of their own, we can experience God through them.

To help let go of these attachments, and to open us to the experience of the presence of God who surrounds us all the time, closer to us than our own breath, I offer this meditative prayer.  It can be read silently or recited aloud slowly, with long pauses between phrases:

"I lovingly observe my attachment to my anger against those who offend me, and against my own thoughts and feelings that offend me.

"I lovingly release this resentment and open myself to faith that, in community with others, I can respond creatively and compassionately.

"I lovingly observe my attachments to my own body, mind, ego, thoughts, and feelings.  I lovingly observe my attachments to other people and things, the way I become unconsciously absorbed with them.  I notice the ways I think and act as if I own them.

"I lovingly release my own body, my so-called possessions, my ego, thoughts, and feelings.  I lovingly release my clinging to other people and things.

"I open myself to loving myself and all other people and creatures and things, as free, sacred, miraculous beings.  I open myself to delight in them, to enjoy them, to honor them, and to serve them as they may have need and as I am able.

"I open myself to Love, who is God.  I open myself to feel divine Love as the very essence of my being, to enjoy and serve God with my awe and my actions.  Amen!"

______________________

For California readers:

How I'm voting on the propositions on Nov 8:

Prop 73:  No.  It's got hidden language that could weaken abortion rights, beyond its putative goal of parental notification for minors. 
Prop 74: No. Teacher tenure isn't the problem with the schools. 
Prop 75:  No.  Employees of corporations get no say about how their bosses make corporate political contributions.  So why should a union, with democratically elected leaders, be forced to allow its individual members to opt out of their share of the union's political contributions -- when such influence is critical to the very purpose of the union?
Prop 76:  No.  Why have a legislature at all, if the governor has all the power over the state budget?
Prop 77:  No.  The governor wants to rewrite the district boundaries in the state so he can shift power to the Republicans. It puts the power to redistrict into the hands of just three people. 
Prop 78:  No.  This is the drug companies' weak, unenforceable proposal to deflect votes away from Prop 79.
Prop 79:  Yes.  An imperfect but needed step toward greater accessibility to prescription drugs.
Prop 80:  No.  Re-regulation would cause even more problems than de-regulation of energy.

Beyond the Fish Wars

We've seen the little symbols on the backs of cars. The "Jesus" fish, and the "Darwin" fish. The "Jesus" fish eating the "Darwin" fish. The "Darwin" fish eating the "Jesus" fish. It makes for entertainment while commuting, but this front of the "culture wars" won't be won or lost on the freeway.

The creationists realized that they were not getting enough traction in their bumpersticker campaign against the theory of evolution. So biblical literalists have come up with a new strategy: leave the word "God" out of the public argument, and come up with one that sounds more scientific. It's called "intelligent design". The President has endorsed it as one of the scientific theories of cosmic origins that should be taught in public schools.

But it isn't a theory at all. "Intelligent design" posits that the structure of life is so complex and delicate that it is unimaginable that it could have come into existence without having been designed by some intelligent force. Therefore such an intelligence must be responsible for it. But this is a conclusion that can be reached only by assuming that it is true in the first place -- a classic tautology, or example of circular reasoning, which has no place in science. It is not a theoretical alternative to evolution, because it suggests no other credible means by which this outside intelligence created the complexity of life. There is nothing in the theory of evolution, the only one that holds any water in explaining the origin of the species, that proves or disproves the existence of such an intelligent "designer". Even if one thinks of God as a separate, distinct being that manipulates the universe, "intelligent design" offers no intelligent reason to suggest that evolution wasn't God's chosen instrument of creation.

Circular reasoning doesn't belong in science education. "Intelligent design" is a thinly-veiled and inappropriate attempt to inject religious indoctrination into public schools. If it gets into school science textbooks, it will insult both science and religion.

The complexity of life truly is a wonderment. It's staggering to ponder our own existence, to consider how we came into being over the eons. The theory of evolution is useful in making sense of the process by which life emerges. But it hardly is the last word on the subject. Religion does have something to say about it, and it might be reduced down to one word: WOW! Just because you have a tentative explanation for a natural process, that doesn't mean that you have "mastered" it. That doesn't mean you have usurped God's place. Evolution describes a process, but it doesn't offer a meaning or a purpose for it -- such things belong to the subjective realm of our hearts and souls, the realm of religion and spirituality. The theory of evolution doesn't detract from our sense of awe and divine humility in the face of the miracle that is life. On the contrary. It's even more awesome, even more humbling, even more divinely majestic to consider that all this living diversity emerged from something akin to random trial and error. To consider that a rose is a result of such a prosaic process: what a marvel!

And to think that trial and error, survival of the fittest, led to the human experience of awe ... this, too, is divine. How amazing that a relatively simple function could lead to such a profound, powerful sensation?  I associate God with my experience of holy wonder, rather than thinking of God as an "intelligent designer" who exists apart from the universe, tinkering with it from afar.  Evolution just gives me one more reason to be awestruck.

This "awe-wareness" gives spiritual expression its rightful place alongside scientific exploration. We don't need the non-theory of "intelligent design" to make the claim that science and religion are compatible. God is manifested dramatically in the processes of nature that science relentlessly strives to understand and describe.

On Being a Christian

I am pleased to be the minister of a Christian church which includes quite a few active members and participants who don’t call themselves Christians. It’s a very good sign. It means that there is room for people to be fully involved in our community, very comfortable here, without having to hang any particular religious label on themselves. This adds to the rich diversity of our community.

It also gives us an opportunity to reflect on what it means to be a Christian – or not. It’s probably no surprise for me to say that indeed, I am one. I’ve been told repeatedly that since I do not accept the literal truth of the resurrection or the miracles of Jesus, it’s impossible for me to claim to be a Christian. But such challenges really do roll right off of my Christian head, arms, hands, legs, feet, and toes. There’s really no doubt within me at all that I’m a Christian.

But Christian as even my chromosomes seem to be to me, I don’t think of being a Christian as a very big deal. This identity is undeniable, but it isn’t what matters. What matters is how I follow the road of Jesus. What matters is whether or not I practice the compassion, seek the justice, and work for the peace of the Christ. What matters is whether and how I directly experience the love that is God. And of course you can do these things without being a Christian! Whether or not you or I am a Christian is a relatively trivial concern. It’s just a label -- a shallow, transitory definition that says only a little about who we are. It’s the wrapping paper, not the present. Christian identity is cheap. But Christian practice can cost you your life.

Cheap as it is, though, it has some utility. My Christian identity helps me to learn much from Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others. Being distinctly Christian has helped me discover the universal spiritual experience that transcends the boundaries of all religions. To claim your Christian identity doesn’t have to prejudice you against other religions. On the contrary, it can be a useful starting point for discovering and exploring other faiths, honoring the possibility that they could be as valid and good as our own.

And our religious identity offers access for others into the realm of the spirit. My Christian identity, at its best, is an invitation to others to explore what is good and useful the Christian tradition. Sure, there’s plenty about my religion that is embarrassing and downright dreadful. But the mystical wisdom, the treasury of spiritual experience, the sublime music, art, and architecture, the layers of significance in the scriptures – it’s staggering. If I can be a doorway into the storehouse of these spiritual riches, let me swing wide for those who wish to enter.

To those of us who claim to be Christians, I suggest that we make the best use of our religious identity while wearing it lightly. To those who don’t call themselves Christians, but are following the Christ as seriously as any of us for whom the label fits, I say – thank God for being living reminders that the contents matter more than the package.

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” (Philippians 2: 5-7)

In this passage, Saint Paul reminds us that Jesus himself wasn’t much concerned with his religious identity. He was focused entirely on the path he was walking, not on the divine names ascribed to him because he walked it. Jesus didn’t think of himself as a Christian. So those of you who follow his way but don’t think of yourselves as Christians are in excellent company!

Sanctuary

Roberta and I are just back from two weeks in Peru, visiting her son who serves there in the Peace Corps.  In our travels, we admired a number of churches.  Several times during our trip, I found myself kneeling in Catholic sanctuaries in the centers of the towns, pausing for moments of prayerful silence.  The churches were oases of calm amid the din of street vendors’ bells, honking taxis, the nasal falsetto calls of ‘combi’ bus conductors, and the rumble of flatbed trucks spewing diesel fumes.  For a few minutes, I was liberated from our itinerary, transported to a place that was independent of any national identity, palpably aware of a divine realm beyond boundaries.

Those precious interludes reminded me that for many tourists from all over the world, our church in Sausalito has the same effect.  When our doors are open, our building is a welcome break from the traffic and the multi-lingual chatter and the crush of camera-toting pedestrians down the hill on Bridgeway.  Into our house of worship they enter with a hush, savoring the quiet, absorbing the warm light streaming onto the pews from above.  Into our sanctuary they enter, bringing with them that deep hope implanted in every human heart, yearning for transcendent meaning and purpose.

What a blessing we offer to passers-by, simply by keeping open the doors of this lovely sacred space!  What a gift to be able to enter such sanctuaries, houses of prayer of many religions, as we travel.  And what a blessing to find such spaces in our own hearts.

Because a physical sanctuary is an expression of the inner sanctuary of our souls.  Christopher Alexander’s seminal book on architecture, “A Pattern Language”, devotes a section to houses of worship.  He says that a key feature of a religious sanctuary is the entrance.  He said that it should have dramatic, narrowing stages of entry into the front door, opening into an expanding area for worship, reflecting the soul’s journey to self-realization.   The process of entering the sanctuary has much to do with its spiritual impact.  Perhaps this explains why I am so often deeply moved by entering churches when I travel.  The very process of going to a faraway place adds greatly to the effect of walking up the steps and entering the sanctuary doors.  It is a reflection of the long and sometimes arduous spiritual journeys I take within my soul, traveling long and hard to get past fear and guilt, climbing up the steep stairs of anger and resentment, pulling on the heavy handles of the tall doors of ignorance and rejection.  And finally entering into the sacred space at the center of my being, where I meet God face to face, and feel the glow of divine, unconditional, forgiving, redeeming love.

We who pay for this building’s upkeep, and who maintain it with the labor of our own hands, will never know but a fraction of the ways and times that it has awakened consciousness of the sacred spaces in the hearts of so many perfect strangers.  Our pledges of money, and gifts of time and effort, grace the souls of people we will never meet.  People who pause for a moment to stand in front of our church and remember that they are more than bodies wrapped in touristy clothes, see that there is a realm that no camera can capture, know that there is a time that their watches can’t keep, and recall that they have a destination that will not appear in any travel brochure. 

Whether we fly to the other side of the world, or just sit quietly in a chair in our own living rooms, our inner sanctuaries beckon us to enter.  The ultimate journey leads to the place of silence and serenity within each of us – the sacred space that opens in every human heart.

Raw Faith

One of my church members, Dan, suffered a big health setback lately – and he already had plenty of physical challenges.  But when I went to see him in the hospital, he said, with a smile on his face, “Jim, I’m in a medical decathlon.  I’m entered in all the events!  And I’ve decided to enthusiastically embrace the inevitable.”  He’s looking forward to reading good books while on dialysis for hours on end, three times a week.  He has been sorely tested, but he still has faith, inspiring all who visit him. 

Dan has raw faith.  It’s not faith in a set of beliefs so much as it is a faithful approach to living.  I think Jesus had raw faith, too.  Jesus didn’t base it on some delicate structure of dogma or belief in the historical factuality of certain events.  His faith was a trust in his relationship with God, which led him to love and serve courageously. 

Christian faith is the emulation of Jesus’ faith.  It doesn’t depend on whether or not the resurrection was an historical fact.  That’s a matter that can be argued, but faith is beyond all that.  I believe that the story of the resurrection of Jesus is a powerful, life-changing myth.  The story resonates with my faith, and inspires it, partly because I don’t have to accept it factually.

It’s okay to believe it literally.  But the less our faith depends on belief in the unnaturally miraculous, the stronger our faith becomes.  When the theory of evolution came along, it was a lot harder to take the Biblical creation story at face value.  This frightened Christians who believed their salvation was at risk if they stopped believing that the world was created in six days.  But their objection was more a sign of the weakness of their faith than of the godlessness of science. 

Faith isn’t about facts.  The facts in front of Dan are ones could lead to despair, yet the man still has faith.  There are plenty of Christians who don’t think Jesus literally rose from the dead, and for many of them, their faith is even stronger because it has been liberated from dependence on the factuality of a highly implausible event.  Raw faith, devoid of evidence for its validity, is the toughest kind of faith.  It enabled Jesus to face the otherwise frightful facts before him on the cross.

 

“For we walk by faith, no by sight,” said St. Paul (2 Cor. 5: 7). 

Christian faith is a positive approach to life, a willingness to love and serve, despite or even because of visibly hopeless circumstances.   It’s the kind that remains, even if angels don’t swoop down to rescue us physically.  It’s the kind that gets us through the emotional, financial, and medical decathlons we enter, whether we like them or not.  It’s the faith that keeps us going  -- even when we think we’ve lost it.....

Working It Out

Each of us has to work it out in her or his own way.

Some of us go through years of therapy to get there.  Others become fitness fanatics and try to run or swim or weight-lift it out.  Others plunge into artistry, trying to paint or sculpt our way through.  Sometimes we go through nightmarish addictions to get there, nearly destroying ourselves in the process.

But one way or another, we must do it.  Somehow we must resolve the mighty struggles raging within us.

God went through it, too.  The Bible, in all its verbose majesty and travesty, might be reduced to the following short, mythical synopsis of God’s inner struggle: 

Before the beginning, God was alone, and desperately lonely.  So he decided to create a friend, and a world to sustain this friend.  But as soon as he created humanity, God was ambivalent about us.  God was afraid we would get the better of him, get too clever and take his place.  God wanted to keep us below him, but intimacy requires the risk of being an equal, or even being a servant, to one’s friend.  We wanted to go farther than God would allow, and this angered God, who kept changing the rules and limits he placed on us in an ever-more-frustrating attempt to manage us.  And God’s anger was so great that he hurt us in ways that far outweighed our alleged crimes.  He heaped terrible pain and loss on Job, who had been a loyal friend to him, punishing Job for no good reason.  Job complained bitterly to God, whom he had loved and honored.  God hated himself for what he had done to Job and to so many others.  So finally God could stand it no longer and gave up and became a human being himself, a human being who suffered the full weight of God’s anger, so that God would know what it was like to be cursed by God.  And as a human being he realized he needed to become better than the God he used to be.  As a human being, he became more God-like than he had been when he was God.  And as a human being, he showed other people that they could rise to a higher level of divinity, as well. 

He suffered and died, and then he was reborn as a new God, a God of mercy and forgiveness and compassion.  And this is the moment we celebrate at Easter.  Easter was the time when the old-fashioned God of vengeance and jealousy and ambivalence and rage was buried in the tomb, and then emptied it, reborn as a new form of divinity that would dwell in every human heart.  The God who died on the cross was reborn out of the tomb as the God of unconditional love, the God who rejoices in us just as we are, the God we can’t embarrass no matter how foolishly we behave, the God who is not afraid to be our friend no matter how clever or ridiculous we may be. This is a reborn God who decommissioned his thunderbolts and dried up his floods and quenched his hellfires. A God who died on the cross as a domineering male, and rose up as both male and female.  A God who died on the cross as a tyrant, and rose up as a servant.  A God who died on the cross as a rage-o-holic, and rose up as a gentle friend. 

We all have to work it out somehow, even in the strangest of ways.  At Easter, we celebrate the moment when we leave our inner turmoil behind, when we rise from the death of bitterness and resentment and frustration and disappointment, and take up the new life of peace, patience, kindness, hope, and creativity.  God got there at Easter, and so may we!  Have a Passionate week, and see you on this holiest and happiest of Sundays....

Love Practice

“Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love.”

Did Norah Jones whisper it? No. Did Frank Sinatra croon it? No. Did Maria Muldaur write it? No. Did Yanni sing it? No. This line comes straight out of the Bible – from the Song of Solomon, chapter 5, verse 1. Here’s some more:

“I gather my myrrh with my spice, I eat my honeycomb with my honey, I drink my wine with my milk. I slept, but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking. Open to me, my sister, my love; my dove, my perfect one; for my head is wet with dew, my locks with the drops of the night.”

The Song of Solomon is a steamy romance between a man and a woman. For thousands of years, Jewish and Christian theologians attempted to define the Song of Solomon as a long allegory about God’s love for humanity. God was the lover and human beings were the beloved. This was a creative interpretation of the text, but certainly not the first meaning that leaps off the pages.

Yet this spiritual, symbolic hearing of the Song was more than just an attempt to denature its very earthy sexuality. Across religious boundaries, there is a long tradition of blurring the distinction between human and divine love.

The medieval Sufi poet, Rumi, put it this way:

Lovers share a sacred decree –
to seek the Beloved.
They roll head over heels,
rushing toward the Beautiful One
like a torrent of water.

Is the Beloved a man, a woman, or Allah? Is God the Beautiful One, or is it the lover’s partner, or…. are they one and the same? Once we fall into the torrent of love, might we be carried away into the very heart of God? Whether it was God that made you head over heels in love in the first place, or another human being, is it not God into whom you will tumble?

There is so much about God to adore, so much about God that invites the title of Beloved. I often experience my relationship with God as a romance. Walking up the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, I make love with the Gorgeous One who made, and keeps making, the stunning scenery that surrounds me. I caress Her with my feet as I climb.

When Hindus greet each other, they bow and say “Namaste”, which means something like “I recognize God in you”. To recognize the divine Beloved in the human “beloveds” around us – this is a high spiritiual practice. If you seek God – the very essence of love itself – in the human beings around you, how much more likely that you will find the love of another human being along the way? Becoming enamored with God is an end in itself, but it is also great “love practice” for connecting deeply with others.

“The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice.” (Song of Solomon 2: 8-9)

Like a yearning lover, bounding toward us with desire, God waits and watches for us. And if we are ready to receive this hot and heavy love, ready to tumble into it, we might fall head over heels for each other, as well!

The Bible and Billy Collins

Billy Collins was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001-2003. Like many a Poet Laureate, he spent a good deal of his life trying to teach people to appreciate the medium. But a good deal of the time, he found it frustrating... especially in his role as a college English professor. Very often, people want to know the one, exact, unequivocal meaning of a poem.... when even the Poet Laureate is only dimly aware of the many potential interpretations that his own good work may hold. He experienced many instances of this frustration, and so he responded as good poets often do -- he wrote a poem about it.

And it is one in which I find resonance with my own profession. Very often, people in churches want to know the one, exact, unequivocal meaning of a passage in the Bible. But the Bible consists mostly of a sort of poetry, though it doesn't much rhyme. Few of its passages have any single, absolute meaning.

I am pleased to report that in preaching and teaching the Bible, I seldom have to deal with the problem that the former Poet Laureate so often faced when teaching poetry. I serve a self-selected audience that isn't obliged to fulfill "Humanities" course requirements for graduation. So I present his original poem, and my adaptation of it, not so much as a corrective as to remind us of the fathomless potential meaning that we can find in the scripture:

INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
Billy Collins (former poet laureate of the US)

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

***********

INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE
--with thanks to Billy Collins!

I ask them to take the Bible
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into the Bible
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the Bible's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of the Bible
waving at its many authors’ names on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the Bible to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

******

So together may we waterski across the gospels, waving happily at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as they stand, cheering us, along Galilee's shore!

Swept Away

From the perspective of natural history, the undersea earthquake that generated the recent deadly tsunami was but a hiccup. It was a relatively minor event, compared with the stupendous cataclysms that have shaped the earth’s landforms over the eons.

But from the perspective of human history, the tsunami towers over the social cataclysms that lately have occupied so much public attention. And it makes the challenges in my own life seem so much less daunting, compared to the devastation facing millions of people in South Asia.

The tidal wave drowned the categories into which I put current events. It washes out my assumptions about what is more or less important. Sure, my concerns and opinions matter at some level. But do they rise to the level of the waves that killed so many people the day after Christmas? Those issues I thought were so earth-shaking – do they really rock the world at nine points on the Richter scale?

Just eight points would be plenty to moot all political, religious, and cultural differences right here in the Bay Area. The only difference that would matter after such a quake would be the one between vertical and horizontal. And it could happen any time. Make that: will happen, any time.

But why wait? I ask myself. Why not let the tsunami in South Asia lay waste, right now, to my petty prejudices and precious preferences? Why not let that tsunami roar over the sea-walls that keep me from tasting the grieving, salty tears of others, far and near? Why not let it sweep away the breakwaters that keep me from comprehending how vastly much more I have in common than not with every other human being on this shaky, watery planet Earth? And aren’t we seeing this wave of compassion sweep over America? Our country radically re-arranged its priorities when 3,000 people died on 9/11. Will we change our priorities again, in response to fifty times as many casualties on 12/26?

Jesus said: "You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5: 43-45).” A rain shower was enough to convince Jesus of what it takes a tsunami to persuade me: that all differences and disagreements among people are relatively unimportant, compared to the wider divine purposes and processes of this world. And through this humbling message come waves of understanding, compassion, forgiveness, patience, and peace. Let them roll over me.

A Humbled God

God had it all,

He was on top of the world.

His acronym was listed on NASDAQ,

His identity was managed by a top PR firm,

His handlers kept him at more than arms-length

From everyone else.

But within God was a stirring,

An urge that he could not deny.

There was something he needed

That his money could not buy.

Against the advice

Of his masters of divinity

And his tax accountants

And his media consultants

And his personal trainers,

He concluded that his existential loneliness

Was more than he could bear.

The only thing missing from his omnipotence

Was the love of finitude herself.

His lawyers tried to hush her up,

His board of directors met in secret,

His spokespeople made no mention

Of his little indiscretion

With a certain Mary of

Nazareth

. 

But she was not embarrassed.

What others called a scandal,

She called a blessing.

She went public right away.

She sang, magnificat-ly, freely,

Turning down offers of cash from the tabloids.

Christmas is coming, she said, and soon,

God would have a face

Whether he liked it or not.

God, she said,

Was going to be outed,

And the whole embarrassing truth

About the incomplete creation,

The scandal of evil,

The rot in religion,

And the corruption of power

Would be revealed.

And, to add to the outrage,

This news would be delivered in a manger,

Wrapped in swaddling clothes, and

Would grow up to be a man

Who looked a lot like God.

Which would make it all the more surprising,

Since this man would be being kind and forgiving,

Just and faithful, caring and forbearing.

His divinity would embarrass his Father

Into behaving more humanely

Than anyone would have dreamed possible,

And inspire humans into behaving more divinely

Than they had ever imagined.

Three dark-suited agents

Descended on the manger

To buy her silence with gold and frankincense and myrrh,

And a corps of angels was sent

To sing loudly and drown out her every word.

A team of burly shepherds

Was hired to bounce the paparazzi and the press

Away from the manger door.

But Mary sang on, above it all:

Christmas is coming,

And heaven will come down to earth,

And there will be prophet-sharing,

And truth will begin to speak to power,

And justice will begin to prevail.

Christmas is coming,

And soon God’s little mistake,

His brief fling with mortal me,

Will save God from himself,

And us from him.

Christmas is coming, she said,

And soon God’s old idea of himself

And our old ideas about God

Will fly out the manger window

With the bathwater

And the baby Jesus will remain.

Christmas is coming, she sang,

And nobody and nothing can stop it!

Christmas is coming, and Mary still sings,

Sweeter now, and slow.

The three men have wisened,

And their faces have softened.

The angels merely hum,

And even the shepherds have come inside,

Preparing to meet their humbled God.

The Mossy Compass

Norman Spiker, the scoutmaster of my Boy Scout troop in

So often we reject or deny the usefulness of our shadow side.  We’d rather not even acknowledge our anger, pain, frustration, disappointment.  We don’t want to identify with our bad attitudes and potentially destructive inner tendencies.  Yet it is the shadow side that can guide us when we are lost.  The dark side of our lives can show us the way to go, show us the change of course that will take us in a better direction.  If I can step back and lovingly observe my anger, I can let it direct me to its source, and resolve it.  If I can step back and lovingly observe my pain, if I can calm down enough to let it inform me of its causes and the needs to which it can direct me, there is some chance I can find my way to relief.  Pain is a perfect compass, if I can take the time to watch where its needle aims.

So it is with Christmas.  At the darkest time of the year, when outer lights as well as inner lights are dimmest, we are best able to see the glimmer of the star that leads us to Bethlehem.  If we are able to embrace darkness itself, it can guide us to the wonder that awaits us in the manger.

So if you find yourself stumbling in circles, remember the lesson of Norman Spiker.  Look for the dark side, and let it lead you out of the woods, and into the presence of the Holy One.  Amen, and Merry Christmas!

Columbiana, Ohio, taught me many useful and enduring lessons about nature.  One comes back to me at this time of year. 

Norman would take us on winter hikes in the snow, and on one of them he taught us that if we ever got lost, we should look for lichen on a tree.  The side of the tree with lichen or moss on it faced north, because the north side of the tree got the least sun, allowing the lichen to flourish in the damp of the dark. Now this isn't always so -- there are plenty of trees with moss or lichen all around them, so you can't always count on it.  But in my experience, lichen on trees does provide some help in getting oriented.  This wisdom was much more useful in the flatlands of the Midwest than it is here in California, where we can reckon our location by mountaintops.  But I still smile when I look out my office window and see the moss on the cement wall in front of the neighboring buildings facing the church – moss that faces north, just as Norman told us.  As I write, the autumnal leaves of a Japanese maple glow in the sun behind that wall, while the moss grows in shadow.

Three Prayers

    Source and Center

Source and Center, Goal and Way

Friend and Lover, hear us pray

Keep our minds and bodies still

Let your Holy Spirit fill

The sacred silent empty place

Where we meet you face to face

         Grief's Gift

Thank you God for love I've lost

For love is worth the pain it cost

For giving me this heart to feel

The gift of grief that you reveal

          Baptism

To you, O God, my face I turn

Out in this desert stark and hot

I pray that I might here discern

Who I am from whom I'm not

And when you make my mission clear

Lead me to the river wide

And while your Spirit hovers near

Cleanse me from my spite and pride

No Name God

Last night, Roberta and I took a stroll down the main street of Sausalito near the church and heard live music coming from the No Name Bar, so we leaned on the open windowsill of the bar and listened for a while. Al, the bar's owner, came out to puff on a huge cigar, and we made his acquaintance. After a lot of friendly and funny banter, it came out that I was the minister of the church up the stairs. This surprised him, and he began waving his arms and talking excitedly about religion.

"Sorry," he said, "but I don't believe in God!"
"So what?" I asked. "That isn't what matters. I don't think Christianity is about belief in anything. I think it's about practicing and experiencing spirituality."
"Then what is spirituality?" he asked.
"I'm not exactly sure myself -- it's a fuzzy word," I answered, "but I aim to find out!"

This was enough to inspire Al to give me a cigar and offer us free drinks on the smoking patio behind the bar, where we sat with a group of folks and carried on a lively conversation about religion and just about everything else, late into the night.

Al and I have a lot in common in our understanding of God. The God he doesn't believe in is the same God I don't believe in, either. He thinks that makes him an atheist, while I think that makes me a Christian! I sense that neither of us believes in a supernatural God who lives outside the universe and meddles in its affairs capriciously, showing favor to some and not to others. Neither of us believes in a God who expects us to believe unbelievable things or expects us to think one particular religion is right to the exclusion of all others. Neither of us believes in a divine being who set up humans to "fall" and thus need a bloody sacrifice to get right with God.

For me, God is beyond belief. Instead of believing in God, I experience God. When I feel unconditional love from or for others, I experience God. When I am full of compassion for others and for the universe itself, when I feel compassion that comes from a Source beyond any one person or thing -- then I experience God. When I am filled with awe and wonder as I encounter the natural world around me, I experience God. When I experience the kind of joyful hospitality that Al offered us last night, I experience God.

This experience is beyond any name I can give it. This is why the great religions of the world have always handled the name of God with great delicacy. The Jews wouldn't utter the name of God (Yahweh) because it was too holy, so they used the word "Lord" (Adonai) instead. The Buddhists don't give God a name at all, since they feel that their Ultimate Reality is beyond such descriptions. They are sometimes accused of being "atheists", but that misses their point. The Muslims use 99 names for God (The Merciful, The Compassionate, etc, etc). They have a wonderful tradition that says that Allah really has 100 names, but only 99 of them are known to humanity. The hundredth name is known only to camels, and they aren't telling! - hence the knowing smirk on every camel's face. Hindu tradition says there are 333,000,000 names for God. Each of the many gods in their pantheon is really a manifestation of the one ultimate God. And one of those names, OM, isn't really a name or a "god" at all, but a sound that itself makes you one with God. All these religions have poetic, mythical ways of saying that the experience of God cannot be contained or limited by the words we give to (him/her/it?). Each religion, in its own way, worships a God beyond naming.

At the No Name Bar, Al and I had a brief chat about the No Name God. The No Name God can be experienced in a saloon as well as in a sanctuary, on a sidewalk as well as in a pew, and by an "atheist" as well as a "believer". If Al can graciously offer a place for me at his table, and give me a cigar, to boot -- the least I can do is to offer him, and others who disbelieve or question traditional religion, a place at the communion table....

Seeds of Listening

Seeds of Listening
5-7-04

Jesus tells a parable (Matthew 13: 1-9) about seeds cast on different kinds of ground. Some grew, some didn’t, some that grew did well, and others did not, depending on the ground upon which they fell. Jesus then says, listen -- if you have ears to hear.

His story is about seeds. And the story is a seed. Because Jesus is casting the story on his listeners, to see if it takes. Some will hear the words, but the words won’t take root. Their ears work, but they really aren’t listening. Others have ears, too, and hear the words, but not only do they hear, they also listen. The story goes down deep and takes root in their souls.

When I’m writing at my computer at home, and my wife tells me something while I’m typing, I say, “Yes, honey, sure.” And an hour later, when she asks me why I didn’t do what I agreed to do, I have no idea what she is talking about. My ears worked, I went through the motions, I gave her feedback, but I wasn’t really listening. She cast the seed on me, but it didn’t take root, because I was preoccupied. I was writing, paying attention to my own inner world, hearing her but not listening. She cast her seed on me, it sprouted, but its roots were shallow and it dried up quickly and blew away.

Seeds are mysterious, no matter how much you know about biology. Open up a seed and inside, at its center, is yet another “seed” – a little dot called the apical meristem, which consists of stem cells. How do all the different structures of a plant emerge from the identical cells of the apical meristem? Which part of the apical meristem corresponds to which part of the mature flower or grain stalk or tree? Answer: it doesn’t work that way. Each of the stem cells has the potential to multiply into all sorts of different kinds of cells in the mature plant, and the kind into which one particular cell multiplies depends on timing and triggers outside of itself. All this can be explained by biologists, at least up to a point. But it is still a true miracle that a tiny mustard seed, looking nothing like a mustard plant, can expand into all its mature shapes and structures.

Likewise there is a mystery about listening. You listen to somebody’s story with your full attention, you let it go deep, you let it take root. You remember what you were told. But the result of your listening is often a surprise. It has one shape as it goes into you, it has quite another when it sprouts. You listen, but your interpretation of what you heard may amaze you both. You might find something in the other person’s story that they didn’t hear when they heard themselves telling it. You share what sprouts out of you, and the person may find insight in it. Or the person may find no ring of truth in what you feed back to them. If you really are listening, you take this seriously and ask the person to plant more of seeds in your soul, until they sprout and bear fruit for you both.

Sometimes we plant seeds we don’t recognize. I’ve done that before – found a sack of seeds in my garage and didn’t know what they were. Are those seeds of purple hollyhocks, or white ones, or carmine ones? Let’s just put ‘em in the ground and find out. So it is with people who truly listen to each other. They help each other find out what is going on inside of them. They plant seeds in each other and see what sprouts and help each other identify what is growing within them. Often, we need the listening ears of others in order to understand ourselves.

I was serving as co-director of a high school-age church camp for a week last summer, and I found myself with a group of kids at the waterfall one hot afternoon. One of them, a girl, started telling me about how the scene reminded her of a camping trip with her family. She went into great detail about the trip, on and on, and for a moment I was getting bored, but then I gave it a little more effort and realized, this is some kind of moment, and if I listen longer and better, something really interesting might happen. I started to enjoy her story more and she kept going, but after a while the nature of her story began to change. I realized she was telling this story because it helped her understand herself. She said that the incidents in her camping trip with her family had revealed to her what kind of person she was, and what kind of person she was not. That she was a sort of tomboy, not interested in typical girly stuff. That she was a gregarious person – somebody who found it easy to get along with others. That she wasn’t competitive. That she loved reading novels, loved writing stories and poems. That she had no interest in being rich or famous or otherwise notorious, but really just wanted to grow up and have a family and go on wilderness camping trips with her husband and kids. All this self-discovery happened with hardly any of my intervention or direction. All I did was listen.

As the apical meristem of the seed has no agenda but growth itself – its cells can take any form in the mature plant – so we are called to abandon our agendas when we serve others by listening. Somebody is sick, and you go to visit them. You want to give them advice about how to handle the problem – what cures to seek, what strategies they can use to keep up their spirits, what words you think they ought to hear from you in order to feel comforted. But it’s very likely that they need none of this from you. It’s much more likely that they need your willingness to listen, without a scripted reply, to what they say.

Listening is what happens when the words of others go deep enough into our souls to take root. Like soil must be broken and tilled to be ready for seeds, our souls must be broken open in order to make way for what others need to tell us.

Invitation to the Quest

Invitation to the Quest
10-10-03

My message this week is addressed to everyone in our church who is under the age of 18.  But the rest of you are welcome to read it, as well.  Because those of us over 18 still have parts of ourselves that are under 18!  With some effort, all of us can see with those eyes...

That under-18 part of me still registers the feeling of anticipating an adventure.  I wanted to do something worthwhile, take on something bigger than myself.  I wanted to be on some kind of heroic quest, but it was hard to know where to start -- hard to tell what quest was worthy of my commitment.  I wish the 50-year-old "me" could have a conversation with the teenaged "me", to make it easier to find my way to the start of that quest, and then find my way along it.

If I could, this is what I would say:

You were born to take on a special challenge that will be exciting and difficult, sometimes thrilling and
sometimes painful.  You were born to take on a unique task of service, one that matters much to you and to other people. 

This heroic quest is yours!  It's not somebody else's. Neither I nor anyone else can show you the life
adventure that is uniquely for you to pursue.  You will have to find it for yourself.  It might take you
to strange and wondrous places far away from your home, or your heroic journey might happen right in
your neighborhood.  I cannot say.

Part of your quest is learning who and when to ask for assistance.  I and others can observe you and tell you what we see about your gifts and about the challenges that seem appropriate for you.  We can give you supplies for your journey, and directions along the path.  But only you can choose and commit yourself to take on the quest that was meant for you.

I think you will find that whatever your personal adventure may be, whatever your quest is all about,
the most challenging part won't be mental or physical. It will be spiritual.  Your adventure may leave your muscles sore and your belly empty.  It may keep you up late into the night, studying or thinking hard to solve, important problems.  It may take you to distant deserts, faraway jungles, exotic cities.  It may take you into the outer space beyond the sky or to the inner space of the atom.  But the biggest adventure, the toughest challenge, the hardest yet happiest quest of all will be the one you meet in your own soul.  Can you prevail over your fear of death, or even your fear of failure?  Can you resist the temptation to return the anger of others with your own anger? Can you act with kindness even when people say bad things to you and treat you poorly?  Can you keep a joyful spirit in a tough world?  Can you tell the difference between having good self-esteem and having an attitude of superiority over others?  Will you learn to know the ways of your soul, so that you can restrain your unhelpful impulses and release your positive ones?

The hardest, and I think the best, part of your quest will be to take on the challenge that Jesus laid
before us all in the 5th-7th chapters of the gospel of Matthew in the Bible -- words we call the Sermon on the Mount: to love even your enemies, to store up treasures in heaven (to invest in your spiritual
growth), to let go of worry, to serve others, to pray whole-heartedly, to pay more attention to inner
realities than to outer appearances.  You will have your own personal path to follow, your own adventure - but I predict that the toughest and best things you will do on your quest will be to do the hard and beautiful things that Jesus listed in those chapters.

The great teachers of the other religions of the world gave similar roadmaps through the realm of the soul. Religion offers a way to see and interpret the signs of the soul.  Christianity has been a very helpful tool for me in finding my way through my own adventure, a quest that led me to become a minister, work with homeless people on the streets for many years-- through marriage and painful divorce and remarriage, through the joys and tough times of parenting.  Through the hard work of studying and writing and organizing.  It took me through Russia, through Mexico -- it took me through even more amazing places in my own neighborhood!  But the greatest parts of my adventure have been those times when God gave me the strength do do what Jesus talked about in his Sermon on the Mount... the spiritual achievements are the ones that matter the most.  And from my spiritual failures I have learned the most, as well. From my spiritual struggles have come all the ways that I have been most useful to other people.  It is hard to climb the highest earthly mountain, through snowdrifts and wind, in breathtaking altitude.  Higher yet is the mountain of the soul, which Jesus invited us to climb in his Sermon on the Mount.

 I invite you, then, to find and take up your quest. The rest of your church community has so much to learn from who you are and what you will do.  You will be our hero as you take on the hard but excellent task that is meant only for you, and follow it as it leads you through the rugged range of your soul.