Musings

Bombshells to Church Bells

(Friends:  Please "LIKE" my Facebook page for my new book, HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA - there, you can contribute to an ongoing dialogue about soulful service with your stories and musings.  How have you been soulfully served?  How have you soulfully served others?  How can you move from charity to social change?  The book is a conversation-starter for individuals, groups, schools, and congregations in the quest for deeper helping relationships.)

(My next book talk/signing: Sunday May 5, 9:30 am - PLURALISM SUNDAY, at Seaside UCC Church in Torrance, CA - http://seasidecommunitychurch.org/ )

Bombshells and Church Bells

 

A few years ago, I discovered an unusual use for a pressure cooker.  I took a thin copper pipe, flared one end slightly, curved the pipe into a "U" shape, and fitted it over the top vent of a pressure cooker.  I put water in the cooker and brought it to a boil, and used the steam coming out of the copper pipe to froth and heat a cup of hot chocolate.  A cheap alternative to an expensive espresso machine!  And a lot better use of a pressure cooker than to make a bomb out of it, as the attackers did in Boston last week.

"He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." (Isaiah 2:4)  It's a beautiful and inspiring vision of the possibility of peaceful resolution of conflict.  Isaiah's imagination swings like a hammer on heated steel.  It's spiritual alchemy, turning the leaden hate into golden hope. 

 

About 15 years ago I was in a junkyard looking for metal to use for artwork.  In the muddy back lot, I found two brass artillery shell casings, about 3' tall and 6" in diameter.  I took one of them to the church where I was the pastor, and hung it up on a rope in the corner.  It's still there today at College Heights Church in San Mateo, used as the bell to gather the people for worship.  A artist who was a member of the church, Susie Stone, rendered the "swords to plowshares" passage in calligraphy, and it hangs on the wall near the bell.  

 

Now I am a member of Mt Hollywood Congregational United Church of Christ here in Los Angeles.  We recently sold our building, and now we rent a beautiful worship space in the nearby Hollywood Lutheran Church.  With the sale of the church building, we lost our beloved belfry bell.  So I mounted the other artillery shell casing on a moveable frame and placed it in our new sanctuary.  

 

This past week, at a conference at Esalen Institute on peacemaking among the Abrahamic faiths, a group of activists, scholars, and media producers gathered to consider how to turn swords into plowshares.  One of the attendees, Mohammed Dajani, is a Palestinian scholar and activist from Jerusalem.  He founded a movement called Wasatia - moderation - pressing for moderation, compromise, tolerance, and democratic values in all religions and cultures.  I asked him, "How do you get people excited about moderation?"  He laughed and said "We need help with that!"  Blowing up a bomb made with a pressure cooker gets more people excited than building a beverage steamer out of it.  The explosives in an artillery shell make a lot bigger bang than the lovely ringing sound of the shell casing being struck with a wooden mallet in a church.  But really, what's more impressive?  Any disaffected person can kill people with fireworks and a piece of common kitchenware.  But it takes high art, phenomenal patience, and astounding self-control to achieve peace after a long and bitter conflict like the one between Israel and Palestine. 

It can be done.  Think of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, in which he invoked "malice toward none, with charity for all".  He interpreted the Civil War as the wrath of God on all of America, north and south, for the shared national crime of slavery.  He invoked the "civil religion" of America - a simple, non-dogmatic expression of humility before God as the underpinning of our democracy - to lay the moral and spiritual basis for the peaceful reconstruction of the country. With soulful persuasion he fired the furnace in which swords could be beaten into plowshares, bombshells into church bells, pressure cookers into espresso machines. 

Calling all artists, musicians, poets, photographers, graphic designers, filmmakers, social media wonks!  We need creativity to fire the moral imagination, in order to magnetize humanity toward a future of reconciliation and economic and social justice.  The power of peer pressure that seduced the younger of the two Boston bombers must be steered toward the glorious challenge of making this world more peaceful and compassionate.  It has been done, and it can and must be done again.  

 

JIM BURKLO 
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Aiming High

(I'll be preaching on the themes of my book, HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA, and signing books this Sunday 4/21 at Fairfax Community Church in Marin  County CA at 10:30 am - hope to see some of you there!  I'll be doing the same in Torrance, CA, at Seaside Community United Church of Christ at 9:30 am on PLURALISM SUNDAY, May 5.)

I'm attending a conference at Esalen Institute near Big Sur this week. It's hosted by Esalen's Center for
Theory and Research.  It's focused on peacemaking among the Abrahamic faiths. After the first day of the meeting, I got into a rich conversation with Esalen's co-founder, Michael Murphy, two rabbis, and a medical doctor with Talmudic training.  For hours we talked about resurrection, reincarnation, and the far reaches of human spiritual and physical capacities.  Then I went alone for a walk, gazing over the ocean into the brilliant night sky, and this poem came to me:

Aiming High
While leaping to catch the moon,

    Orion tripped, his right foot caught
       on a silvered cloud

        hovering over the shivering Pacific

             beyond the high dark bluffs
                of Big Sur.

If he fell on Esalen Institute,

    would that be such a bad end

       to his reach for his full human potential?

 
JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter:
@jtburklo      See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Catch and Release

(I'll be preaching and doing a book talk/signing for my new book, HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA at Fairfax Community Church in Marin County on April 21, Sun, 10:30 am.)
(I'll be doing a HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA book talk/signing at the USC University Religious Center (URC building) Fishbowl room on 4/24, Wed, 4:30-6 pm - open to all.)

Catch and Release

Every Wednesday at noon here at USC, I lead a mindfulness meditation session in our University Religious Center.  We have a group of "regulars" who are a mix of students, staff, and faculty, and we always have "newbies" who come to learn meditation practice.  I open the session with a short introduction to mindfulness practice and then we keep silence for about 30 minutes.  There is great diversity in this group, from age to ethnicity to religion to level of meditation experience, and this adds richness to our time together.  At the end, we share briefly how our practice is going, offering each other encouragement to stay with it.

Last Wednesday, as I was meditating, an image came to mind that I shared at the end of the session.  It seemed to me that meditation is a lot like fly fishing for trout.  You snap the line onto the water, wait attentively, and catch thoughts or feelings as they swim by.  You pull them up to consciousness, contemplate them, then unhook them and toss them back into the stream.  Catch and release, catch and release.  I've never gone fly-fishing, but people tell me that it is a meditative sport.  Calming, relaxing, beautiful.  As I meditated I vividly imagined a placid stream in bright sunlight with gleaming fish darting under the water.  I caught that image, admired it, then unhooked it and dropped it back into the stream of my thoughts and feelings.

I led a group of six students to Tucson, Arizona for the week of Spring Break this past month.  It was a service-learning trip to explore the work of interfaith activists for border justice  in southern Arizona.  One of our stops was to the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration.  Their monastery is a beautiful compound north of downtown Tucson.  Our students were amazed at the physical, mental, and spiritual liveliness of these mostly older women, and the level of their engagement with the world despite their semi-cloistered way of life.  The sisters practice perpetual adoration of the blessed sacrament.  Their meditation practice is to stare at a box with closed doors, holding the wafer of the eucharist within.  An unusual job, is it not?  -- to perpetually adore a piece of bread.  We joined them for their vesper service, which begins and ends with adoration of the sacrament.  We stared at the box containing the wafer at the far end of their big, ornate chapel.  I contemplated the box itself, the idea of adoring the wafer, the wafer itself, the mysterious idea of Jesus and the Christ and God - and all of us and everything else - being one with that wafer.  I kept my gaze fixed on it. When vespers was over, I released that focused attention and noticed its "echo".  Focusing attention, and then releasing it, made me suddenly more awake to everything and everybody in the chapel. 

It turns out that this is also a form of Buddhist meditation practice - to focus attention narrowly and then release it, in order to widen consciousness.  I learned about it this summer from Arthur Zajonc, emeritus professor of physics at Amherst College.  I was attending a conference on the use of contemplative and meditative techniques in all kinds of classrooms in higher education.  He is a leader of the movement to use such practices in university teaching and learning.   He has his students look at powerpoint slides showing raw data.  He'll ask them to concentrate on one of these images, and allow for plenty of "dead air" time to do so.  Then he turns off that slide, and asks them what patterns or connections they noticed.  This discussion then leads into his presentation of the theory of physics that accounts for the raw data.  Arthur doesn't tell his students he's using a Buddhist "attention and release" meditation technique, but that's the basis of his teaching method.  He finds it very effective in enabling students to gain a deep and enduring understanding of the subject matter.  (New research on meditation practice, from UC Santa Barbara, confirms this sort of result.)

On Easter Sunday, preaching at my church, Mt Hollywood Congregational, I propped up a loaf of bread on the pulpit and invited my fellow congregants to adore (temporarily) the blessed sacrament.  We contemplated the Easter narratives in the New Testament, in which the resurrected Jesus offered bread to his disciples on the shore of Lake Galilee, and blessed and broke bread (and then disappeared) at Emmaus.  I asked us all to stare at the bread for a while, then release our attention and notice whatever "echo" followed that experience.  We caught the bread, and then released it.  The disciples caught a glimpse of Jesus at Emmaus, and then the vision released when he disappeared. 

We are streams of water flowing, with experiences swimming through us.  Catch, admire, observe, appreciate them.  Release them back into the stream.  Catch and release, catch and release....

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California