Musings

Ebb Tide

I walked along the Sausalito shoreline last Sunday – a beautiful afternoon. There’s one stretch of marsh south of Schoonmaker Beach with a short-cut path around it that is sometimes partly covered in water. But this time, the tide was low and the path was clear. And out in the marsh, flotsam of boards and rusty iron was visible, coated in greenish-brown muck. The tide was so low that the secrets of the deep were revealed – an interesting sight, though not necessarily a pretty one! Shreds of broken dream boats, splintered planks from shattered harbors, anchors aweigh-ed no more.

Life at ebb tide reveals all that, and more. When contrary currents drain away your soul, you get a view of what lies at its bottom. You are confronted with memories and feelings that once you hoped would sink out of sight forever.

I have never suffered from anything close to a debilitating depression – knock on wood. I did, and I do, nothing to deserve my generally temperate disposition. I have my tides, but they are nothing like those in the Bay of Fundy in Canada, where the sea level rises and falls up to fifty feet. But every now and again, I wake up at 3 in the morning, when my tide is at its very lowest, and I get a taste of what depression might be like. At that hour, the ebbing tide of endorphins in my brain reveals a worry. And then a grudge. And then a bad memory. And then an unresolved conflict. And then a resentment. All are covered in greenish-brown muck. The best I can do is take deep breaths, observe my sad state as calmly and compassionately as I can, and try to remember that the tide will turn. Eventually I fall asleep again, positive brain chemistry quietly and imperceptibly flows back in, and I wake up, usually with a good attitude.

The same ebb and flow comes with the passages of my life. A few years ago I went through a family crisis that was, quite literally, a draining experience. And again, in my most drained moments, I noticed that I obsessed not only about the immediate causes of the crisis, but also about everything else that was wrong. When I’m drained by one thing, everything else lying at the bottom seems to come to the surface. But those are times when I’m least capable of dealing with them. When times are really good, as they are for me today, I am too busy enjoying life to want to clean up the bottom-dwelling problems that I see when I’m drained!

The best I can do is to take the role of the observer, looking with calm and care at the broken jetsam that emerges when the water level sinks. Prayer is like a hike along the shore of the soul, whether it’s full of dancing waves, or drained to reveal the mud and the junk. The observer within me, and within us all, is God – the unbreakable pier, the boat that stays afloat -- divinely attuned to the ebb and the flow of the heart.

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

Fall Color

As clear skies yield to clouds, the land bursts with insistent color that cheerfully protests the darkening of the days. Shiny acorns drop from the oaks hovering over the fresh soft grass that sprouts like a fine fur through the dead stalks on the rolling hills.  In the canyons, buckeyes gleam on the ground below their denuded parent trees. Clusters of manzanita berries brighten the shadows. Figs shrivel under broad and brilliant leaves. Olives, ripening at a random rate, weigh down the leafy branches they spangle. On the ground below the towering eucalyptus trees, the button-caps of their seed pods emit a pungent odor when crushed underfoot. The mottled leaves on the vines begin to drop on the tilled soil between the rows. Walnuts lie on the damp soil, emerging from their blackened husks, waiting to be cracked open to reveal their rich meat.   Delicate clusters of bright berries dangle from the lacy, languid branches of the pepper tree.  Bay - berries drop and quickly their hues change.

With the season, moods change hues too.  Perhaps from hot to cool, as days shorten, nights lengthen.  But friends seek each other out as November falls, brightening each other’s hearts.  Is it any wonder the biggest holidays of the year draw near?

In these days when we recover from focusing only on red and blue, black and (white), a fall walk in the country is a reminder that life -- in all its rich diversity and stubborn self-expression -- does indeed go on. Thank God for it!

Principalities and Powers

On television, on the radio, on the internet, in the papers, election results are about the analysis of numbers. They’re about blue states versus red states. Electoral college counts. Then there are the pundits who try to explain it all. Did people vote on the issues, or mostly on their tastes? If it was about morality, what kind of moral compasses guided the voters? If it was about the war in Iraq or the “war” on terror, did people vote for a known leader, rather than voting for someone they didn’t know as well?

That’s how it looks through the lens of the media. Then there is the view of the election as seen through the eyes of the heart.

I’ve spent the last few days talking with lots of people in our church, and others, about the outcome of the election. A lot of people are heartsick about it. Suffice it to say that it is becoming a special kind of pastoral emergency. Suffice it to say that a lot of people have taken in the results personally.

The temptation is to take it out personally, too. And blame certain other people for the outcome.

But Jesus tells us (Mark 7) that it is not what you take in, but rather what you take out on others that can defile you. If this election is upsetting, it’s good to remember that bad news doesn’t poison us – the only thing that can poison us is the poison we dish out to others. So we need another way to look at this election besides through the eyes that identify numbers and colors and names.

With the eyes of the soul we can see what St. Paul saw in Ephesians 6: “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers…” The true struggle is with forces much larger and more dangerous than individual politicians or voters. Invisible forces, sometimes subtle, but very real.

The real contention in this election, before and after, is with the power of fear. It’s with the principality of vengeance. It’s with the power of anger. It’s with the principality of greed. It’s with narrow-mindedness masquerading as morality. It’s with chauvinism posing as true religion. It’s with nostalgia for a past that never was. It’s with addiction to violence as the solution of first resort, rather than last. It’s with blindness to possibilities for promoting the greater common good. It’s with shallowness that focuses on style more than substance. This election is but a skirmish in a long struggle with something other than flesh and blood – though it certainly has physical consequences. As long as we avoid pointing fingers at individuals, there is hope that compassion can prevail.

So let us cling to our faith, which tells us that new Supreme Court justices can’t nullify the law of love. Let us cling to our vision of justice, which can’t be blindfolded in prison. Let us cling to our vision of peace, which can’t be bombed into submission. Let us cling to our vision of compassion, which can’t be stopped with legalized assault weapons. Let us cling to our hope, which can’t be cut from the budget of the soul.

There is much to be done. Let’s get going. With love, with patience, with perseverance, without malice, without bitterness, let us name the powers and contend with the principalities.

All Saints' Day

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us...."
(Hebrews 12:1)

When my daughter was about 4 years old, she was sitting on her great-grandmother’s lap one day. Nanie was about 85 years old and her face was a globe of happy wrinkles. Liz was poking around on her great-grandmother’s face. And then, while pointing at a certain spot among the wrinkles, my daughter said: “We live riiiight here!” Fortunately, Nanie thought it was funny – and her wide smile spread on her face.

Nanie died several years back – as the Bible said of the patriarchs and matriarchs, she was old and full of
years. She lived long and well. And was blessed with that unforgettable smile until days before she died. A smile made unforgettable to me, because my daughter
inherited it from her. A striking similarity, a distinctive grin, passed down a few generations.

We are surrounded, as the Bible says, with a cloud of witnesses – so many saints that have gone before us, from whom we’ve inherited so much. My daughter oriented herself with her great grandma’s face – she
found her place in the world by poking around in her Nanie’s wrinkles. Our saintly ancestors do just that for us – their memory orients us, gives us a sense of our place in the sweep of history. A history that isn’t over with us, much as we might be in denial of the fact that one day, we’ll join that cloud of saintly witnesses.

Sometimes I wonder at my own strong impulse to make myself memorable. To do things that will last beyond my mortal frame, to claim some fame that will outlast
my body. When my book was published, I had an especially happy moment when I went to my favorite independent bookstore, and found my book on a shelf in the religion section. That felt really, really good. Like there would be something that indeed could immortalize me – or at least less-mortalize me! It felt good for a few minutes, until I got bored by staring at my book in the bookstore rack. Until I started looking at other books, and considered that there were at least 10,000
books in the bookstore, and only one of them was mine. And the bookstore had but a tiny fraction of the books in print. Mine was but a miniscule speck of moisture in the fogbank of books in the world. Suddenly I felt mortal again. Sigh – immortality was nice while it lasted.

Jesus was said to have healed people miraculously. But if having the secret to immortality was the punch line of his story, what about the fact that all those
folks are now dead? Including Lazarus, raised from the grave? There's got to be more to the story than the miracles themselves. I think the plot is about
how death is a sub-plot of life, and how life is not a sub-plot of death. That my daughter’s great grandmother died full of years, and her smile is very much alive and well on my daughter’s face today. That
the everyday kindnesses of forgotten people hundreds of years ago, including those with no physical offspring – those unsung acts of goodness created and maintained a civilization which you and I have inherited, a pattern of common decency that we barely notice until an unusual breach of it occurs. Those individuals are gone and their separate, distinct identities have faded into the cloud of witnesses. But they call us to account, inspire us to decency and kindness and caring every day. The saints who have gone before – they are witnesses to the good news that life puts death in its place.

This is a day for all saints, a day to re-orient ourselves by remembering our ancestors, as well as the gifts we've inherited from those whose names are forgotten...