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One Heart and Soul
In my "Markets and Morals" colloquium no long ago, our text was a co-authored volume in which two economists, who happened to also be persons of Christian faith, alternated essays and responses on a number of important issues. As their weekly writing assignment in preparation for seminar, I asked students to select a point of disagreement between the authors (the disagreements were legion), describe briefly the position of each author on the selected issue, then take a side supported by argumentation. Two-thirds of the way through the semester, my sophomores should be able to do this—identify issues, fairly and accurately describe various arguments, and take a position that is both fair to other relevant positions and supported by evidence and argument. So I was disappointed when more than one student ended their essay with something like "I prefer X's position because Y sounds a lot like socialism."
Sigh. In my comments on such papers, I always include something like "That's a description, not an argument. It's related to another sort of description masquerading as an argument: 'I disagree with Z, therefore Z is wrong.'" Part of my job as a professor is to convince my students that a liberally educated human being earns the right to have her opinions. Unearned opinions are like body parts—everybody has them. Plato lists "opinion" low on his ladder representing the climb from ignorance to wisdom. Moving up this ladder one or two rungs from "opinion" to something closer to knowledge involves learning that just believing something does not make it true, realizing that disagreement is the beginning of justifying one's beliefs, not the end. It's always discouraging to realize that someone can make it to almost half way through their undergraduate college career and not have learned this.
But I digress. What got me to thinking about this most recently was a story from The Acts of the Apostles that will be one of the Sunday texts in a couple of weeks :
Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
It's one of my favorite passages from the New Testament—as I heard it, I thought of my student. "Dude!" I thought, "It's a good thing you didn't hear this—because this really sounds like socialism!" In the past I have used this text in class to poke at the unquestioned assumptions carried by students who, often coming from a faith-based upbringing in an upper middle class or wealthy household, believe that somehow their capitalist free-market attachments and their background framework of religious values will fit seamlessly together as if by magic. "They sound like a bunch of communists!" more than student has remarked in shock, and indeed they (anachronistically) do. Welcome to the lifelong task of trying to live a life of coherent belief and commitment!
This passage from Acts is sometimes linked to the familiar story of "doubting Thomas" that was yesterday's gospel reading from John. In spite of the bad rap Thomas has gotten over the centuries for being the one disciple loser who refused to believe that Jesus had risen until he had seen him and touched him first person (of course, none of the other disciples believed until they had first-hand contact either, but let's not go there), he is one of my all-time heroes. By both personality and profession I am naturally skeptical–I think that doubt is closer to godliness than cleanliness. Just as I take the great skeptic Michel de Montaigne as a model for how to do philosophy, I consider Thomas as one of my models for how to approach the spiritual life, something I share with many of my spiritual guides ranging from Kathleen Norris, Christian Wiman and Joan Chittister to Anne Lamott, Rowan Williams and Barbara Brown Taylor. Most homilies about this gospel draw the moral of the story from Jesus' gentle criticism of Thomas' attitude: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." But there is seeing and then there is seeing. Except for a select few, those who have committed themselves to Jesus in any way have never seen him physically. But without a direct encounter—without truly seeing something worth committing to—faith commitment can easily become sterile religion.
Why, I have often wondered (and have often asked my students), did the early Christian communities choose to organize themselves economically in the manner described in Acts? They are close enough in time to Jesus' physical presence that undoubtedly some of their members actually knew him in the flesh, or at least knew some people who did. But if the vision is not going to fade, such communities cannot rely on first-hand remembrance of the source. Practices and attitudes reflective of the values the community is committed to must be embedded in the very fiber and structure of the common life of the group. At some point, given that a new community of followers of the Way was seeking both stability and faithfulness to the message, someone must have asked "How would Jesus have organized this community if he were here?" Somebody remembers the parables, another person recalls the Beatitudes, and pretty soon they become a small, primitive laboratory for the Gospel. How to truly become Jesus in community form? By putting into action what the man supposedly said and lived. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Shelter the homeless. Love each other as God loves us. This wasn't church for them—this was life. Most likely their very survival depended on it.
Two thousand years later, persons who profess a Christian faith share a lot in common with these early followers of Jesus. We have not seen Jesus in the flesh, just as most—and pretty soon all—of the members of these early communities had not. We are bound together by having seen Jesus in ways far deeper and more profound than physical vision. And our challenge is the same as theirs, to figure out what it means to actually live it rather than just say it. As I often do, I fall back here on the prophetic words of Micah who asked, just as these early communities did, just as we do today, "What does the Lord require of us?" Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God. And, I might add, doubt is an appropriate seasoning for each of these.
This entry was posted in Bible, books, Catholicism, Christianity, Development of Western Civilization, faith, family, God, history, human nature, humility, Jesus, justice, philosophy, seeing, teaching, truth and tagged Anne Lamott, Christianity, Christopher Wiman, Development of Western Civilization, faith, God, Jesus, Joan Chittister, Kathleen Norris, Montaigne, Rowan Williams, teaching, Thomas on April 24, 2017 by vancemorgan.
We Had Hoped
"Now abide faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love." These concluding words from chapter thirteen of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians are heard at many, perhaps most, weddings. Everyone wants to believe that love is the greatest, especially on their wedding day. Faith seems to be part of my DNA—challenging it, trying to get rid of it, redefining it, being confused by it, and generally struggling with the "f-word" (as I call it in the classroom) has shaped me for as long as I can remember. I'm not so sure about hope. A few years ago I asked Jeanne what she thought the opposite of faith is. She first answered "despair," then immediately took it back saying "I guess despair's the opposite of hope." After a quick check on Google, I found that she was right (again). The immediate etymological root of "despair" is the Old French despoir: hopelessness. So what is hope?
Although Easter is certainly about love and faith, I think it is mostly about hope. There is no shortage of material to consider on Easter—the empty tomb, Peter and John racing to take a look, the authorities scrambling to explain what happened, the poignant exchange between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Perhaps my favorite Easter-related story is Luke's account of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. It's such a human story—the bitter sadness and devastation of Cleopas and his unnamed companion (call him George) is palpable. The usual spin on the story is, of course, that Jesus is risen and walking with them, and Cleopas and George are either too dense or blinded by tears to know it's him. Jesus gives them a free theology lesson, and as soon as they recognize him after he breaks the bread at lunch he vanishes. What a guy—the amazing, vanishing Jesus! It says something (I'm not sure what) about me that I always thought the ending of the story was funny when I was young. Young Baptist boys have to get their laughs where they can find them. But three words are particularly resonant: "We had hoped that it was He who was going to redeem Israel." We had hoped. And our hope was in vain.
Hope is a tough nut to crack—of the big three at the end of the passage in I Corinthians, love and faith strike me as easier to get a handle on. Every human life is marked by "we had hoped" moments that we never quite get over. I hoped that I would be concert pianist. Jeanne hoped she would marry someone who knows how to dance. But the dashed hopes of Cleopas and George are far more crushing. It's easy to criticize Cleopas and George for failing to recognize that what they had hoped for was walking with them for seven miles, but that's actually not true. True, Jesus does turn out to "redeem Israel," and everybody else for that matter, but that's not the redemption Cleopas, George and others were hoping for, a political redemption and establishment of an earthly kingdom by the Messiah. And it's very telling that the Jesus-guided tour through the Old Testament touching on prophetic texts indicating that the Messiah would suffer and die doesn't do anything for Cleopas and George. It's not until the three of them have a meal, a human experience rather than a classroom experience, that they see it's been Jesus all the time.
That is where the story usually ends, but it gets even more interesting. Cleopas and George run back to Jerusalem and report to the disciples what happened; in the middle of their story, the amazing, vanishing Jesus reappears! And another human, all too human moment—Cleopas, George, the eleven disciples, and everyone else are scared shitless. They think he's a ghost. It's not until Jesus lets them check out his body with its scars and eats a piece of fish in front of them that they realize it's really him. The whole story is fraught with humor, fallibility, and humanity. Entertaining, yes; but what is God up to?
In her wonderful book Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris asks "Does it ever surprise you that God chooses to be revealed in so fallible a fashion?" Well as a matter of fact, Kathleen, yes it does. All the time. Even when our greatest hopes are satisfied, it's always in some sideways, back door, behind the scenes, fuzzy and oblique sort of way. And that can be frustrating. As I participated in the various Holy Week services this past week, it continually struck me that Jesus' resurrection, the most spectacular and crucial event in human history, is surrounded by so many instances of mistaken identity, fumbling around, uncertainty, and missteps that it is truly comical.
But it makes perfect sense, and brings the central pillars of the Christian faith—the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection—together. The whole idea of incarnation, of God becoming human through and through, is outrageous and ludicrous at its core. What self-respecting creator of the universe would do it this way? Only one that loves what was created so much that becoming part of it, miraculously, is not only not a step down but is actually the only way to accomplish what has to be accomplished. We know that we are flawed, incomplete, jumbled and messed up creatures, so why should we be surprised that our hopes get addressed in that way? The divinely infused cycle of death and resurrection is around us everywhere, in nature coming alive after a long winter, in church services populated by octogenarians and toddlers, in the annual arrival of new late teens ready to be taught on campus, just to name a few examples from my own daily life. It is not at all surprising that the resurrected Jesus, the hope of the world, was revealed in the midst of the daily and mundane rather than in power and glory. Kathleen once again: "In a religion based on a human incarnation of the divine, when ideology battles experience, it is fallible, ordinary experience that must win."
This entry was posted in Bible, certainty, Christianity, Easter, faith, family, grace, hope, human nature, humor, incarnation, Jeanne, Jesus, love, miracles, Religion, teaching, theology and tagged Christianity, Jesus, Kathleen Norris, Old Testament, religion, theology on April 16, 2017 by vancemorgan.
Conversion is an odd phenomenon. I've often observed that those who convert, who "tum around" radically in some aspect of their lives, tend to embrace their newly adopted beliefs and behaviors with a sense of urgency and commitment that can border on fanaticism. Thus those who quit smoking become front line enforcers in the "No Smoking" brigade, those who cut caffeine (or sugar, or anything significant) out of their diet will regale those of us who have not quit with endless data about why what they just quit ingesting will kill us, and someone who just lost fifty pounds looks at the ten-pound-overweight person with a judgmental eye.
But such converted commitments pale in comparison to the righteous energy of the religious convert. I've known many people who professed a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus type of conversion experience, reporting that while once they were blind, they now see. And that new vision often looks more like tunnel vision than anything else. The beliefs and accompanying rules of their newly found religious perspective, beliefs and rules that they either rejected with disdain or were entirely ignorant of just yesterday, suddenly become the instruments according to which they measure the acceptability quotient of those outside their group. And the outsiders are generally found to be seriously wanting.
I was raised in a religious environment in which such "once for all" conversions were the hallmark of membership. But since I never had such an experience, I felt something like an outsider on the inside during all of my childhood and adolescent years. Although I stopped thinking of myself as a part of that religious community many years ago, issues of my religious identity were frequently front and center during my sabbatical residence a few years ago at an ecumenical Institute on the campus of a Benedictine University and Abbey.
I am comfortable as a non-Catholic in Catholic surroundings, having spent my last twenty-five years teaching philosophy in Catholic higher education. This was different, though, because the whole focus of my sabbatical experience turned out, unexpectedly, to be about my own spiritual identity. I've always called myself a "person of faith," even a Christian, but was no longer sure of what I meant by that—all I knew was that the usual definition of "Christian" was becoming less and less meaningful all the time. Seeking some sort of reawakening I took full advantage of the daily prayers at the Abbey, eventually receiving a behind-the-scenes green light from one of the monks to receive communion if I wished, in total violation of Catholic exclusivity.
So I was somewhat taken aback by a conversation with a fellow resident scholar at the Institute shortly before the end of my four and a half month stay. The topic of conversation was a former Institute scholar who, during two year-long residencies at the Institute in the early nineties, wrote two books that spent several months at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. She's now a very famous author, and made a couple of brief visits to the Institute, Abbey, and campus while I was there. She even ate corned beef dinner with the current residents on St. Patrick's Day; I got to speak with her for ten or fifteen minutes and, just like any other groupie, got her to sign my copies of three of her books. I wrote more about this author not long ago:
http://freelancechristianity.com/strange-and-beautiful/
Although she was on campus for several reasons during her brief stays, it was clear to me that she, as non-Catholic as I, was getting her spiritual batteries recharged as she sat a few seats over from me during morning, noon, and evening prayers. So it surprised me when one of my fellow Institute residents, a Catholic convert whose powerful intellect and even more powerful spirit I'd come to respect and admire, expressed annoyance at the famous author's behavior. "It bothers me that she for years has come here to the Abbey, and to other monasteries (as described in her books) to bask in the liturgy, take full benefit of the prayers and services, and get reviled, yet she remains non-Catholic," he said. "If she's going to reap the gains, she should also have to suffer through the shit that we Catholics have to put up with on a daily basis."
I assured my colleague that Catholics have no comer on dealing with religious excrement; my whole stay at the Institute had focused on struggling with the constricting grave-clothes of my own conservative Protestant upbringing. Furthermore, I reminded him, the transformation of spirit and soul that had been taking place in me over the past months, about which the two of us had conversed many times, had centered around my full participation, as a non-Catholic ,in the liturgical and prayer life of the Catholic Abbey. "Your criticism of her applies to me too," I said, to which he replied "but this is all very new and unexpected for you."Implied but unspoken was his expectation that I would eventually convert to Catholicism.
But I won't be converting to Catholicism, any time soon or ever. I used to think this was because of the powerfully top-down hierarchy of the Catholic Church, as well as its positions on any number of issues including the ordination of women and abortion. I still believe its positions on these issues are utterly wrong. But I know many Catholics, including the one with whom I was having this conversation, who long for the day when the Catholic Church will adopt a stance that engages honestly with all of the complexities of the abortion issue and will finally come to the realization that women are full-fledged members of the human race and are just as suited, perhaps more suited, to pursue ordination as men.
The real reason I won't become Catholic is because I have no desire to become anything with a recognizable religious label other than committed seeker after God. I am officially an Episcopalian, confirmed in my late twenties as a response to a church whose liturgies and music I loved and to a specific faith community that embraced and nurtured me when I badly needed to be embraced and nurtured. For years I was not a regular attendee at any church services, Episcopal or otherwise, and my current regular attendance at Trinity Episcopal began three or four years ago when a close friend became their interim rector. But I find that many of the Episcopalians I know are perfectly willing to accept into their circle persons with all sorts of religious histories (or none at all). As I often tell people unsure about the rules and limitations of Episcopal worship, if you have a pulse, you can participate in the Eucharist at an Episcopal church.
I told my fellow resident at the Institute that, as far as I was concerned, what happened to me at the Abbey had nothing to do with its being a Catholic place of worship. It had everything to do with its being the place that, unexpectedly, I met the Divine in a new and exhilarating way. Under different circumstances, it could have happened in a synagogue, a mosque, on a mountain-top, or in my chair at home. "Oh, I have to disagree with you there," he said. "I know you do," I responded as I thought "but it is my encounter with God that I'm talking about. That's bigger than any religion."
This entry was posted in Baptists, Benedictines, Bible, Catholicism, Christianity, Collegeville, faith, God, Islam, Judaism, Protestantism, sabbatical and tagged Christianity, God, Kathleen Norris, St. John's Abbey on February 3, 2017 by vancemorgan.
In a recent interview with Krista Tippett on NPR's On Being, Jesuit author and spiritual advisor James Martin spoke of how we have sanitized the Christmas story into something appropriate for polite conversation, crèches, cards, and movies.
I think it's been tamed. It's not only been commodified and commercialized; it's been tamed. It's a nice, pretty story about two nice, good-looking people, usually white, who had a pretty baby in a manger. But in a sense, it's a terrifying story in terms of what they had to undergo. And it's also—I have to say—it is a shocking story. It's not just a baby. It is God being born in human form. And I think we've tamed it. And in a sense, it doesn't demand our belief. We can just kind of look on it, and say, "Well, that's cute" . . . And I actually have to say, I am really getting to the point where I'm starting to loathe the Christmas season.
One of the ways to avoid loathing the Christmas season is to pay close attention to what the gospel narratives actually tell us about the people chosen to usher Jesus into the world. They are just like we are—normal, challenged, hard-working human beings, just living their lives, who unexpectedly found themselves in the middle of events larger than they could comprehend.
Each new lectionary year begins with Advent, and each year a different gospel is on display. This year, Year A in the three-year lectionary cycle, we get the first of the four gospels, Matthew. It is a book written by a Jew for Jews about a Jew. Scholars tell us that this gospel was written 30-40 years after Jesus' ascension; its author's primary focus is to look back to events a half century past and convince a Jewish audience that Jesus, a Jewish man who was crucified as a common criminal, was actually the promised Messiah. The author's intentions are clear from the start when the gospel begins with a genealogy that traces Jesus' ancestry all the way back from Joseph through King David—from royal tribe of Judah from which the Messiah is to come—to Abraham. The author even points out some interesting details in this genealogy that the well-versed Jewish reader or listener would not miss.
It turns out that there are some questionable women in Joseph's family tree. Salmon, David's great-grandfather, for instance, marries Rahab whose story is told in the book of Joshua from the Jewish scriptures. The invading children of Israel send spies into the Promised Land to scout out the area; they end up in Jericho, a walled fortress that is the most important and powerful city in Canaan. They end up in the house of a prostitute named Rahab (what were they doing there?), who hides them from the king of Jericho and helps them escape from the city by dropping a rope from her window so they can climb down the wall to safety in the middle of the night. For her efforts, this non-Israelite prostitute and her family are the only inhabitants of Jericho spared when Joshua and his army, using information from the spies Rahab saved, conquers and destroys Jericho a few chapters later.
Salmon and Rahab's son is Boaz. Perhaps it is because he is a half-breed that he is willing to marry the foreign widow Ruth. The story of Ruth and Boaz is beautifully told in the Book of Ruth, a hidden and seldom-read gem in the Hebrew Scriptures. During a famine, Naomi and her husband Elimelech leave Judah with their two sons in search of sustenance, which they find in the neighboring land of Moab. The sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth, something which the Mosaic Law prohibited (just as it prohibited Salmon from marrying a foreigner, let alone a prostitute). But all of the men in the story die. Devastated by loss and with no means of support, Naomi sets out to return to Bethlehem after saying goodbye to her former daughters-in-law. Orpah sadly heads back to her family home, but Ruth will not leave Naomi, touchingly saying "Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God."
It's the beginning of an unexpected love story—foreign woman meets wealthy Jewish guy (Boaz). Ruth and Boaz's grandson, Jesse (who is no more than half Jewish), has eight sons. The eighth son and runt of the litter, consigned to writing poems and killing lions while tending sheep, is David whom Samuel anoints as the second king of Israel. The line continues through Solomon, who is the product of David's adulterous relationship with Bathsheba. Even the Messiah's line has its questionable elements and characters—which should tell us something about the divine plan and priorities.
The birth of Jesus is set up by Matthew not with the women of the story, Elizabeth and Mary, in central roles but rather with Joseph, the descendant of David. He is the central character both in today's gospel reading as well as the text in two weeks when he runs to Egypt in the middle of the night with his young family to escape King Herod's murderous plans. What do we learn from Matthew and from Luke, the only other gospel in which Joseph appears, about Joseph? First, Joseph is the strong, silent type. While other major players in the stories of Jesus' birth and formative years get major speaking parts, we have no record of Joseph ever saying anything. Mary gets the Magnificat, angels are singing and messaging at the drop of a hat, John the Baptist gets to yell "Repent," Zachariah has the "Song of Zachariah," the wise men have a brief speaking role, and even the minor character Simeon gets to contribute a song before he dies. But Joseph is silent. In reality, I suspect, he was capable of speech when necessary, such when he' trying to find a place to stay in Bethlehem for his wife who has gone into labor, but he gets no gospel speaking role.
Second, Joseph is in touch with his inner self in a way that would make modern therapists proud. He pays attention to his dreams and acts on them. Mary briefly argues with the angel at the annunciation in Luke, but Joseph hears an angel in a dream, wakes up, and acts on what he's heard, both in this week's gospel and two weeks from now. No questions asked. In fact, he's perhaps the greatest dreamer in the Bible other than his namesake and distant ancestor Joseph from Genesis. The difference between them is that Joseph in Genesis is not the strong, silent type, can't stop blabbing about his dreams to everyone, and ends up in a well. Joseph knows that some things are meant to be acted on and not talked about.
Third, Joseph clearly is flexible and able to roll with the punches. One would think that the angel Gabriel might have made the annunciation to Mary and Joseph together, but no. Only Mary gets the message. We aren't told if Joseph finds out that Mary is pregnant because she tells him her story or because he happens to notice that she's putting on weight, but because he is a "just man" he chooses to break their betrothal privately rather than making a public display of it as the law would have allowed. Finally, an angel gets around to telling Joseph in a dream and the betrothal is back on—but no sex until Jesus is born. The New Testament and tradition indicate that Mary and Joseph did have several children in the years after Jesus was born, so at least that worked out.
Finally, Joseph was a stepfather. As part of a "blended family" for the past three decades, I have had the opportunity to observe the challenges of the impossible job of step-parenting from close range. I wonder how Joseph processed being handed an impossible job, with no blueprint or instruction manual. All he wanted to do was marry the person he loved. God said, "Okay, but here are a few other things you get to do too." I wonder if Joseph and Mary, overwhelmed with the task before them, threw themselves so wholeheartedly into the process of making this step-family work that they neglected for long periods of time to pay attention to their own relationship with each other. Did Joseph ever wonder when it would be "his time," when he would be valued for who he was rather than for what he could do for Jesus, or Mary, or God? I wonder if Joseph ever saw "you're not my real dad" in Jesus' eyes or actions. Did Joseph ever resent Jesus' biological connection with Mary, something that nothing Joseph ever did or said could possibly balance out? I wonder if Jesus ever told Joseph, at least when he had grown up, that he appreciated Joseph and that he apologized for the times he'd been a jerk.
In Santa Fe, there is a little church called the Loretto Chapel, located for the past many years on the grounds of a downtown hotel, which contains a "miraculous staircase," built by a stranger with a donkey and a toolbox who showed up in answer to the prayers of the Sisters of Loretto. The newly built chapel needed a staircase to the choir loft; those who knew about such things said it would have to be a ladder, since a regular stairway would be too invasive of the chapel space. The stranger built an architectural marvel, a spiral staircase containing two 360 degree turns with no visible means of support and held together with wooden pegs rather than nails. The stranger disappeared without being paid after completing the staircase; not surprisingly, legend has it that the donkey-riding stranger was none other than St. Joseph, patron saint of carpenters.
I tend to consider such stories to be apocryphal legend; we don't even find out that Joseph is a carpenter until much later in Matthew when the people of Nazareth reject Jesus because this "carpenter's son" claims to have fulfilled Isaiah's prophecy concerning the Messiah. But this does sound like something that Joseph would do. There's something spectacularly ordinary and efficient about Joseph. Something needs to be done, and he does it. After dealing with a pregnant fiancée he's never had sex with, sleep-talking angels, a murderous king, lost reservations at the inn, delivering a baby in a barn, and being a stepfather, building a staircase that defies gravity for a bunch of nuns is nothing. Bring it on.
As I had the opportunity this semester to discuss some of the seminal texts of the Christian faith with my freshman students, I reminded them that at the heart of the Christmas story is an outrageously ridiculous, but beautifully attractive, idea: God chose to become human. God continues to engage with the world through humans. We have surrounded ourselves with all sorts of distractions in order to avoid grappling with a most basic truth, a truth worth remembering as we head into the final week before Christmas: God loves us. That changes everything.
This entry was posted in Angels, beauty, Bible, change, Christianity, Christmas, faith, family, friends, God, hope, Jeanne, Jesus, listen, love, mythology, silence, teaching and tagged Christianity, christmas, family, God, Jesus, Kathleen Norris, Old Testament, St. Joseph, teaching on December 19, 2016 by vancemorgan.
Who Is Their God?
I recklessly thought that if something could save this election, it would be the faithfulness of Christian followers on a spiritual journey of seeing creation as God does – worth fighting for. Christians would be the ones exercising their witness in order to defeat a whiteness that does not care whom it has to destroy on its path towards power, and ultimately toward a perverse kind of deification . . . God's followers are supposed to rebel against this idolatrous notion. I hoped that most white Christians would resist this idolatry, that they would refuse to join their white identities with the ideology of whiteness. I was wrong. Oluwatomisim Oredein, "White Christianity, and How Hope Was Wrong"
Late in the evening of Election Day, as Jeanne and I watched a slow-motion train wreck unfolding before our eyes, the results of exit polls kept reminding us of which demographic was responsible, despite virtually every poll running up to the election, for what appeared to be happening. "I'm really getting tired of white people," I said. Nothing that has happened over the days since has changed my mind. But there's one particular subset of my skin-tone demographic that I particularly am confused by. White Christians.
Over the past many months, I have occasionally written on this blog and social media outlets about my confusion as to why evangelical Christians were supporting Donald Trump in large numbers. Truth be told, though, I treated it as first a humorous, then a puzzling phenomenon, but never seriously thought it would be ultimately more than a curiosity and a footnote to this strangest and nastiest of campaigns. But upon learning in the aftermath of the election that more than eighty percent of self-identified white evangelical Christians voted for the President-elect, I find myself suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance and general sadness.
Paragraphs such as the following from an article a few days ago in The Washington Post don't help:
In the age of Trump, what is a Christian?
"It really makes you feel great to be a Christian," one person told The Washington Post. "I think Christians took a big stand this time and said we're going to stand up for our faith," said a second. Referring to Trump, a third said, "I feel like we actually have an advocate now in the White House."
Perhaps as a Christian I should not admit this, but everyone time I read or hear something like this, I have a serious WTF?!?!? moment. The problem is that I know the evangelical Christian world intimately. I was raised in it, the foundations of my faith and my moral code were laid in it, and many members of my family whom I love are still squarely in the middle of it. Although for various important reasons I have not placed the adjective "evangelical" in front of my Christian commitment for decades, I have been regularly grateful for much that I learned about my faith, about scripture, and about myself under the tutelage of conservative, evangelical Christianity. But what I learned did not include xenophobia, racism, misogyny, sexual abuse, boorishness, or building walls. I must profess that I am thoroughly and profoundly confused.
I was reminded when reading a similar article in The New York Times a couple of days ago of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's famous 1963 "Letter From Birmingham Jail," a text that I used to teach frequently toward the end of the final semester of my college's four-semester "Development of Western Civilization" course that I regularly participate in. From an Alabama prison cell, Dr. King wrote that when he was drafted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Ala., he believed that the white Christian church would support him. Instead, he discovered some white ministers were outright opponents; others were "more cautious than courageous and . . . remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows." In the face of blatant racial and economic injustice, King expressed disappointment at seeing white church leaders "stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities." He spoke of travelling throughout the South and looking its "beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward . . . Over and over I have found myself asking: 'What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?'"
I have wondered the same things many times over the years, but never as frequently as during the past two weeks. I understand the various reasons why people might have voted for the President-elect, although I think their choice is one that they and our country will soon bitterly regret. But packaging such a vote as a resounding victory for Christian belief and commitment not only baffles me—it offends me. I have always believed that the Christian faith is a large tent. It must be if someone like me can accurately call himself a Christian. But I'm not sure that any tent is large enough to cover both a person who believes our President-elect is a God-given answer to prayer and me. If the President-elect is truly a standard-bearer for how the Christian faith is to look in practice, count me out. I want nothing to do with it. But because I am convinced that this is not the case, and since—as I often say—I am a liberal because I am a Christian, I continue to believe that Jesus does not call us to exclude everyone but those most like us, does not call us to build walls, and would have us neither disrespect women nor mock persons with disabilities.
In an opinion piece written less than a week after the election, the former editor of the largest evangelical Christian publication in the nation wrote the following:
I was an evangelical magazine editor, but now I can't defend my evangelical community.
The night that Donald Trump was elected president, I got very little sleep. Surely the wine I sipped as a wave of red swept from east to west across that horrible, televised electoral map didn't help. But I managed to have one vivid dream. In it, I'm standing on a stage in a stadium full of fellow Christians. And I'm telling them that they voted for the wrong candidate, and that Trump's presidency will prove to be a grave mistake.
Wednesday greeted me as it did half the voting population, with waves of grief. But since then, the grief has turned into a more complex emotion — something like soul abandonment.
I pray for healing, clarity and enlightenment for persons of all faiths, as well as those of no faith, as we seek our ways forward.
This entry was posted in Baptists, belief, Christianity, Collegeville, Development of Western Civilization, ethics, faith, family, God, Jeanne, Jesus, philosophy, politics, Protestantism, stories and tagged Christianity, Development of Western Civilization, Donald Trump, Dr. Martin Luther King, faith, family, God, Jesus, Kathleen Norris, Providence College on November 21, 2016 by vancemorgan.
My twenty-plus years teaching at Providence College have afforded me an opportunity every semester for team-teaching in the large interdisciplinary program that is the heart of our core curriculum (a program I directed for four years ending last July). Team-teaching is fun, exhilarating, and demanding; this begins with the planning of the next semester's syllabus. Faculty from different departments having different experiences with and notions about pedagogy bring all sorts of ideas to the table and do not always agree, particularly about the amount of daily and weekly work to schedule for our future students. My contribution to the discussion is always the same: "They should read until they drop, then write until they drop again." In that order—there's nothing that feeds intelligent writing more effectively than reading.
It is strange that I temporarily forgot this important connection between reading and writing during the past few months. The working highlight of the first half of my sabbatical was an intense spurt of writing from September to Thanksgiving, surely energized by a bicycle mishap in early October; I all of a sudden had to find something to do with the four to five hours per day during which I had been riding my bicycle and getting into the best shape of my life prior to the mishap. In addition to completing a second draft of my current book project, I was able to maintain my established blog routine of two new 1200-1500 posts per week—something that my most famous writing friend, Kathleen Norris, suggested last May that I would probably not be able to do while writing a book. It didn't hurt, of course, that the book is closely related to my past three-and-a-half years of blog work.
But since Thanksgiving, the writing energies have begun to dry up. I still have been able to produce new blog posts, but a couple of them seemed forced and I was often writing under self-imposed deadline pressure. The proposal that needs to be written for my book draft wasn't getting written. Just a few days before Christmas I realized one of the main reasons for my current writing malaise— I haven't been reading much for the past few months. There are a number of excuses I might offer, but none of them fully explain why, when I actually have more unstructured time than any grown-up should have, I have been neglecting my first love—reading. I've even gotten out of the habit of reading the daily psalms every morning. Very bad idea.
A quick review of my blog posts from a year ago was illuminating. Many of my late December and early January posts either mention or focus directly on either Barbara Taylor Brown or Christian Wiman. Why? Because just before Christmas break last year the work of these two authors was recommended to me by two different friends, so I spent Christmas break reading several of Brown's books and a memoir by Wiman. The point? I write about what I am reading—the ideas, images, and insights of a good book never fail to be evocative. Since I think best when I am writing, that's where these ideas, images and insights become my own.
Awareness frequently produces change, and this time was no exception. Awareness of my reading slump caused me to pick up Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch, a biography/memoir centered on George Eliot's masterpiece (and my favorite novel). Sure enough, several passages inspired by Mead's book are central to my New Year's Eve blog post, and others will form the core of my forthcoming Valentine's Day post for Jeanne. Then for Christmas Jeanne gave me The Good Book, a collection of essays, edited by Andrew Blaumer, in which thirty-two writers from all sorts of angles write about their favorite passages and characters from the Bible. Although the older I get the less I believe in mere coincidence, I "coincidentally" opened first to "The Womb and the Cistern Cell," an essay by Brooks Hansen about John the Baptist.
John "just happens" to be one of my favorite characters from the New Testament; twice in the past four years I have had the privilege of giving an Advent sermon on John the Baptist Sunday in early December. On one end of his life is a miraculous birth narrative that in my estimation rivals that of his younger cousin Jesus, and at the end of his life he finds himself in a dungeon (a cistern well) and a state of despairing doubt. He sends a question via his disciples to Jesus: Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another? These are the last words we hear from this man, the first person recorded to recognize adult Jesus for who he was. Hansen finds this remarkable, and so do I; he concludes his essay by reflecting on the intimate connection between belief and doubt.
Light is born of darkness. Darkness is the necessary precondition of light. Belief, likewise, is born of doubt, which is its necessary precondition. Doubt is the soil from which faith grows. Therefore, if one is determined to imagine John the Baptist as the first and most authoritative voice to recognize Jesus as savior—the first, in other words, to believe—then John must, by that token have been the first to doubt. That, too, is Law. And if we ever encounter any teaching, or feel ourselves succumbing to any creed or system of belief, that does not admit this, and does not struggle intimately and often—in the cistern of its soul—with the fear that it is mistaken, misdirected, falsely premised, or corrupt at its heart—we should take heed:
That is not faith. That, in fact, is a fairy tale.
I wish I had read this before my most recent sermon three weeks ago—it would have made the cut. I frequently say and write that in just about all aspects of belief, certainty is vastly overrated—Hansen makes the same point much more eloquently. This is why reading feeds writing. Reading enlarges one's vocabulary, broadens one's perspective, and provides examples of the richness of language and experience. And it is fun—what's not to love?
This entry was posted in attention, Bible, bicycling, books, Christmas, family, God, Jesus, literature, Providence College, sabbatical, stories, teaching, writing and tagged family, God, Jeanne, Jesus, john the baptist, Kathleen Norris, Providence College, teaching on January 4, 2016 by vancemorgan.
Strange and Beautiful
Forgive me for name dropping, but I went to dinner with a New York Times best-selling author earlier this month. Twice. Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota, The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, and a number of other wonderful books is a visiting scholar at Providence College this academic year and occupies an office that is literally across the hall from mine. I have known Kathleen for a number of years, but she was responsible for changing my life before we ever met.
I am currently in my final semester of teaching before a year-long sabbatical—it is still unclear exactly how it will all shape up and shake down, but I'm pumped. It seems like only a few months ago, but eight years ago I was in exactly the same situation—a sabbatical semester (the second of my career) on the horizon. During my first sabbatical, all the way back in 2002, I didn't go anywhere; instead, I holed up in my office and wrote the first draft of a book that was published two years later. As I began to think about my second sabbatical on the horizon, I wanted to go somewhere for at least part of the semester (that's what normal academics on sabbatical do), but my career has been shaped to fit the campus where I have now taught for twenty-one years. I didn't even know where to begin.
A few months earlier I had picked up a book called The Cloister Walk while wandering around Borders. I liked the picture on the cover, a cover that also announced that the book was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and contained the following review excerpt from The Boston Globe:
This is a strange and beautiful book . . . If read with humility and attention, Kathleen Norris's book becomes lectio divina, or holy reading.
The Cloister Walk became my bedtime reading—a book that defies description or summary. Following Norris's quirky faith through the liturgical year was both strange and beautiful just as the NYT reviewer promised; as another reviewer wrote, "she writes about religion with the imagination of a poet." I had no idea before I picked the book up that this was exactly what some unknown part of me had been looking for, nor did I know that on a practical level it would point me toward where I would spend my sabbatical semester a year later.
Kathleen's experiences that frame The Cloister Walk occurred during two separate residencies at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research on the campus of St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. While there, she immersed herself in the daily Liturgy of the Hours with the Benedictine monks at St. John's Abbey about a ten minute walk away; she writes that the Benedictines refer to their daily office as "the sanctification of time." The Cloister Walk is the fruit of that liturgical immersion—a "strange and beautiful book" written by a woman who I would come to know as equally strange and beautiful. As I read, I unexpectedly resonated with the eclectic spiritual vision of a fellow traveler steeped in Protestant tradition as I am— except that she was strangely attracted to the Benedictines and their ancient Rule.
An important aspect of monastic life has been described as "attentive waiting." A spark is struck; an event inscribed with a message—this is important, pay attention—and a poet scatters a few words like seeds in a notebook.
I was familiar with the notion of "attentive waiting" from Simone Weil, another strange and beautiful person whose work had been the focus of my own spiritual journey as well as academic research and writing for at least fifteen years (Simone would have loved the Benedictines), but embedding such activity in the pressures of the "real world" had pretty much escaped me.
Kathleen describes in The Cloister Walk the frustration that her fellow resident scholars at the Institute felt with the poetic and decidedly non-academic energies she brought to their collective work, a frustration that I must confess I as an academic also occasionally felt when wandering through the intuitively organized labyrinth of her book. But then, those who seek God must learn that there are as many paths to the divine as there are persons following a path.
When it comes to faith . . . there is no one right way to do it. Flannery O'Connor once wisely remarked that "most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow," and Martin Buber implies that discovering that means might constitute our life's work. He states that "All [of us] have access to God, but each has a different access. [Our] great chance lies precisely in [our] unlikeness. God's all-inclusiveness manifests itself in the infinite multiplicity of the ways that lead to him, each of which is open to one [person]."
I had no idea at the time just how badly I needed to hear that. On a deep level I had ceased hoping to find my unique spiritual path over the years, weary of running head on into what a monk described to Kathleen as "the well-worn idol named 'but we've never don't it that way before!' And people wonder how dogmas get started!"
At the time I did not trust my ability to hear a possible word from God—I entirely relied on my intuitively attuned wife to do that for me. But as I worked my way through The Cloister Walk I realized that something more than my usual resonance with a fine writer's craft was going on—I wanted what she was writing about. Literally. I contacted the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, applied to be a resident scholar for my sabbatical semester during the first five months of 2009, and on the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated as our 44th President, a crystal clear Minnesota day with a high of zero degrees, I found myself in a tiny apartment situated in the very same complex and on the shores of the very same lake I had read about eighteen months earlier. What on earth was I doing here away from Jeanne and my dachshund Frieda, all alone surrounded by a bunch of people I didn't know? The only good answer was that I wanted what I had read about. And the rest is (my recent) history.
Professionally what I carried from that sabbatical was a new way of writing (that a few years later turned into this blog) and a bunch of academic essays that as of yet have not been published (because I haven't sent them out). But I was changed from the inside out. I immediately tested the waters of daily noon prayer with the monks up the hill at the Abbey, a commitment that within a few weeks became a three-times-a-day habit. The prayers were important, but inhabiting the Psalms as a collective body opened a "deepest me" space that I have come to recognize as the place where the divine in me hangs out. Every possible human emotion and every possible encounter with the divine is in those ancient poems.
God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systematic theology.
The value of this great songbook of the Bible lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential for praise, that without them, praise is meaningless.
[The Psalms'] true theme is a desire for the holy that, whatever form it takes, seems to be a part of the human condition, a desire easily forgotten in the pull and tug of daily life, where groans of despair can predominate.
One day at noon prayer one of my friends from the Institute nudged my attention toward the row behind us. "That's Kathleen Norris!" my friend whispered in a slightly too-loud-for-noon-prayer voice. I don't know what I was expecting a famous author to look like, but it wasn't this. That evening Kathleen—on campus for a university board meeting—visited the Institute for dinner. For many of us it was like a visit from the Beatles. Like any groupie I made sure Kathleen signed my copies of her books (I had them all in my apartment) and we spent three or four minutes in one-on-one conversation (which I was sure she would not remember). But just meeting the person whose book had brought me to this wonderful place in the middle of nowhere was enough. A year and a half later, while I was back in Collegeville for a writer's workshop at the Institute, Kathleen and I were both staying at the Abbey Guesthouse (I forget why she was on campus). We had several breakfasts and lunches together, enjoyed some conversation on the guesthouse patio overlooking the lake, and a friendship was formed. I particularly enjoyed the envious looks on my workshop colleagues' faces when they observed me lunching with a world-famous author in the cafeteria one day. And now, several years later, she's our current endowed scholar on campus and inhabits the office across the hall.
When my birthday came a couple of weeks ago, Jeanne and I took Kathleen out to dinner—she's a great conversationalist and we had a wonderful time. Our plan had been to include our good friends Marsue and Robin (Marsue is also a Norris groupie), but our umpteenth snow storm of the season made that impossible. So the next week we did it again, and this time Marsue got to meet one of her literary heroes in person. It's strange how things work out. Last August, just a few days before the beginning of the new academic year, I was sitting in the atrium of our student center minding my own business and I heard a voice from the stairs behind me—"I know you!" It was Kathleen. "And I know you too," I thought. "You're the person who changed my life."
This entry was posted in beauty, Benedictines, Bible, books, Catholicism, Collegeville, faith, family, friends, introverts, Jeanne, literature, liturgy, Marsue, philosophy, Protestantism, Providence College, sabbatical, Simone Weil, writing and tagged Christianity, faith, God, Jeanne, Kathleen Norris, marsue harris, Providence College, Simone Weil, St. John's Abbey on March 23, 2015 by vancemorgan.
Myths and Stories
I spent two hours of seminar last Friday with twelve honors freshmen enjoying the wonders of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the source of many of my favorite stories as a child. I was so taken with ancient mythology that I read it in secret at times I was supposed to be reading the Bible. The seminar reminded me of one of my earliest posts on this blog a couple of years ago–how stories shape our lives.
Some of my favorite stories growing up come from Greek and Roman mythology. Edith Hamilton's Mythology was one of my regular reading companions–sort of like a mid-twentieth century Ovid–so much so that my parents must have replaced a torn and worn out copy with a new one at least three times. What's not to like? Action, violence, sex—they were better than comic books! The Olympian deities are gigantic projections of human beings, with all of our strengths and shortcomings, likes and dislikes, jealousies and kindnesses, massive egos and even more massive insecurities. Human beings in these stories, if they are smart, look (usually unsuccessfully) look for a place to hide when the deities start throwing their divine weight around, as the fallout frequently lands on unwitting and innocent mortals. Yet occasionally mortals are able to manipulate the blundering gods and goddesses by offering the right sacrifice, stroking the right part of a divine ego, making deals that the less-than-omniscient deities fail to recognize as guaranteed to end in results that will thwart their purposes. I think the main reason I took four years of Latin in high school was simply because it gave me to opportunity to be immersed deeply in the ancient myths . I spent fourth period senior year with Ms. Thomson and one other Latin geek translating large portions of Ovid's Metamorphoses—nothing better.
My mother used to occasionally try to get me to put down Edith Hamilton and pick up my Bible. But I knew the Bible stories backwards and forwards from the hours and days spent in my home away from home, church—I'd even memorized a lot of the dialogue and plots of these stories (in King James English, of course). My mother worried that I wasn't paying sufficient Baptist homage to the Bible stories as opposed to the pagan Greek stories. When she couldn't pry me away from Edith, she would say "you know, of course, that these are only stories?" Opposed, that is, to the stories in the Bible, which are true, meaning that they are factual reports of things that really happened, not stories at all. As a good son, I paid lip service to the distinction that my mother, out of concern for her heretic-in-the-making son, was insisting upon.
But I never bought it. The stories in the Old Testament (by far the most interesting Bible stories to a young kid) were just too much like the Greek and Roman myths for me to make a sharp distinction. God in the Old Testament is just as arbitrary, whimsical, loving, nasty, powerful, and petty as the various Greek deities. He gets into arguments and debates with various mortals and sometimes loses. He sometimes gets into a snit and goes silent, while at other times you just wish He'd shut the hell up and leave people alone. If a skilled psychologist sought to identify all of the various, conflicting personalities of God in the Old Testament, I'm sure they would be at least as great in number as the residents of Olympus. The "truth" of the Bible stories for me did not depend on whether they "really happened"—they were true because they rang true in a deep place.
At a very young age, for instance, I resonated with Jacob in Genesis; he's still my favorite character from the Bible. As the younger of two sons, I identified with Jacob's preference for his mother and for hanging around the house rather than going out hunting and killing things, something my older brother did with my Dad. Jacob's ability to regularly outsmart and manipulate his doofus older brother Esau rang true, because I was sure I could get my equally challenged doofus older brother to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted . I was sure that if Baptist fathers gave special and exclusive blessings to oldest sons, I could get my older brother to hand over his blessing in exchange for a can of soup. Jacob is persistent and smart, but he's also a conniver and occasionally has a very difficult time being truthful and transparent to himself and others. He loves his family, but some of them more than others. He's courageous at times and a total chicken at others. He wants to know God, but wants to write the script according to which that knowledge will unfold. Every time the divine breaks through in a vision or dream, Jacob immediately wants to nail it down and contain it by naming it. In other words, looking back, my original attraction to Jacob makes a lot of sense, because he's a lot like me.
A couple of years ago, when I read Kathleen Norris' definition of "myth" in Amazing Grace as "a story that you know must be true the first time you hear it," I was jerked up short. I knew this definition to be true the first time I read it. In ethics classes with nineteen to twenty-one-year-olds who are predominantly survivors of twelve years of parochial education, I lean heavily on Alasdair MacIntyre's insight that we human beings are "story telling animals"—we understand ourselves and each other by telling stories. Through the stories we tell, we make sense of our past and do our best to recreate the world by telling better and better stories projected into the future. We are lived stories, in the middle of a "never-ending story" with themes and characters that we catch only brief glimpses of. At the outset of The Gates of the Forest, Elie Wiesel tells the story of a rabbi who confesses to a young listener that he's old, his memory is failing him, and all he can do is tell stories. But, the rabbi concludes, "It is sufficient. For God made man because He loves stories."
If my mother were here (and how often I wish she were), I'd try to convince her, with scholarly support from Plato through Nietzsche to Rorty, that my childhood conviction was right, that the stories from ancient mythology and from the Bible are true in the same, human affirming and life defining ways, mirrors of what we as human beings are and suggestions of what we can hope for and perhaps become. I'd end with "Q.E.D., Mom–What do you think of that?" And she'd reply, "That's wonderful, honey, but the stories from the Bible are really true."
This entry was posted in Baptists, Bible, books, Christianity, family, God, grace, hell, listen, literature, mythology, philosophy, power, stories, truth and tagged Alasdair MacIntyre, Christianity, Elie Wiesel, God, Jacob, Kathleen Norris, mythology, Old Testament on November 26, 2014 by vancemorgan.
Fearless Passivity
Last Sunday, Jeanne and I stumbled across Oliver Stone's 1995 movie "Nixon" as we were surfing through the channels. In the last few minutes of the movie, on the same evening that he signed his letter of resignation from the Presidency, Richard Nixon (played by the always-brilliant Anthony Hopkins) gets a reluctant Henry Kissinger to kneel with him to pray in the Oval Office. A jarringly out-of-place activity, it would seem, for the disgraced and apparently unrepentant Nixon–but then prayer has seemed jarring and forced to me for most of my life. I reflected on that about a year ago in the essay below.
Wednesday night prayer meeting—yet another opportunity to go to church. As a creative youngster, I usually was able to find something in every foray to church to pique my interest, however briefly. I liked some of the hymns we sang on Sunday morning and evening, for instance, and enjoyed the stories in Sunday school. But we didn't sing on Wednesday nights—people gave testimonies, and then we prayed. For a very, very, VERY long time.
Many Christians seem to regard prayer as a grocery list we hand to God, and when we don't get what we want, we assume that the prayers didn't "work." This is privatization at its worst, and a cosmic selfishness. Kathleen Norris
I remember prayers that were more like speeches than anything else, insistent, complaining sorts of speeches whose intent was apparently to wear God down. Not that the things being asked for were unimportant—"please bring X to a saving knowledge of you," "please heal Y of diabetes," "please help Z find a job"— but the tone was often strange, petulantly childish, demanding, insinuating that this time, for once, God had damn well better get off His ass and do something. Of course anyone actually saying that at Wednesday prayer service would have been in danger of hellfire, but that's the atmosphere I remember.
How to pray was a mystery to me—I recall my mother saying frequently that I should just "talk to God the same way I talk to her." That never struck me as one of my mother's better pieces of advice, since I clearly couldn't talk to an invisible, far away, scary "something" in the same way I could talk to her. But I did learn, as all good Baptist kids learned, how to make up a convincing sounding prayer at the drop of a hat. It's just that it never seemed to go past the ceiling.
Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already. Annie Dillard
Remnants of my Baptist upbringing reared their head the first time I saw the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. The whole idea of written, non-spontaneous prayer was foreign to me, despite the beauty of many of the petitions in the book. I've gotten used to the idea, though, since I've spent my working career with people trained in the "prepared prayer" camp . As the chair and only non-Catholic in a large philosophy department, for instance, it fell to me to ask a colleague to open our monthly meetings with prayer. I was expected, of course, to ask the professionals, one of my priest colleagues, so I took great delight in occasionally asking a lay colleague just before the meeting. Without fail, you would have thought I had asked the colleague to solve several problems in differential calculus on the spot—apparently Catholics aren't used to praying on a moment's notice, with priests in the room and no prepared text at hand. Well, at least I thought the reaction was funny.
My overall attitude about prayer over the years has been, sad to say, an angry one. Prayer is supposed to be such a central part of the life of faith, but the transactional model I had been taught revealed God to be arbitrary, powerless, uninterested, or hard of hearing. Angry prayer doesn't do much to establish a prayer life with one's spouse, especially a spouse who, like Jeanne, seems to take to prayer as naturally as a duck to water.
There is an affinity between cursing and praying . . . both forms of discourse address what is out of human control: one with a destructive and the other with a creative purpose. Both praying and cursing flow from frustration. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
One day after expressing my frustration about the whole prayer thing to her, Jeanne said something that, for the first time, began to chip away at my icy attitude about talking to God. "Vance," she said, "for you thinking is praying." And since I do much of my thinking in the context of reading, I took that to mean that maybe when I'm reading I'm praying too.
When the minister finally got to say his "Let us pray," we were ready. We had been praying, all along. We had been being ourselves before God. Kathleen Norris
That was the most helpful thing anyone ever said to me about prayer and, in turn, it freed me to hear from my teachers what else prayer might be.
Among the writers who have been most important to me over the past several years, there turns out to be an amazing consensus about what prayer is and is not. It definitely is not begging, asking, bartering, transactional, projecting religious white noise into the void. Rather, it has to do with openness, with waiting, with an attentiveness that does not fill in the silence but, as Adorno said, is "fearlessly passive."
"Writing is prayer," Kafka, that most afflicted one, said. And writing, certainly, isn't wishing; it is witnessing. Patricia Hampl
Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love. Iris Murdoch
Attention, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer. Simone Weil
Experiencing Benedictine noon prayer over the past few years has helped me with this. There is more silence than speaking in their petitions, between the lines of the psalms that we read together and between each portion of the rubric. I've heard "Be still and know that I am God" since my childhood, but finding myself a part of it in action is transformative.
As a new attitude of attention develops, it has slowly been possible to return to spoken prayer without all of my previous baggage. Yet for the most part, prayer is an attitude rather than something verbal, an attitude that begins with finding the silent space inside. Some days are tougher than others, the sorts of days when Anne Lamott's insight that the best prayers are often "Help! Help!" or "Thank you! Thank you!" rings true. But when Jeanne said to me a while ago that my prayers aren't angry any more, I was both thankful and aware that a change had indeed begun.
The essence of prayer is a song and men cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us, but prayer may make us worthy of being saved. Prayer is not requesting. There is a partnership of God and men. God needs our help. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
This entry was posted in attention, Baptists, beauty, Benedictines, books, Catholicism, Christianity, Episcopal, faith, family, Jeanne, literature, prayer, Simone Weil and tagged Abraham Heschel, Adorno, Anne Lamott, family, Iris Murdoch, Kathleen Norris, Patricia Hampl on August 20, 2014 by vancemorgan.
Tell Me a Big Story
A retreat at a Benedictine hermitage means the opportunity to plug into the daily cycle of psalms and prayers that has been going on for over fifteen hundred years. I learned five years ago as I experienced this daily cycle for the first time that something deep in me resonates with its rhythms. One June morning last summer, at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur bright and early at 5:30 Vigils, Psalm 5 began as a cry for someone, anyone, to listen.
To my words give ear, O Lord,
give heed to my groaning.
Attend to the sound of my cries,
my King and my God.
As so often with the psalms, the psalmist has a story to tell and insists that it be heard. And so it goes with all of us; the stories that define and shape us, that clothe the bare facts of our lives in fancy dress, are only the sound of one hand clapping unless there is someone to receive the story on the other end.
My early story was enriched by the presence of all four grandparents during my formative years. Visiting my paternal grandparents was always an event that took several days of careful and intense planning. We lived in northeastern Vermont; they lived on the outskirts of Erie, Pennsylvania, still in the house that my father grew up in. It was an almost six hundred mile trip, with the first two hundred on narrow two-lane roads before finally hitting the New York Thruway headed west, so some serious entertainment planning on my brother's and my part and food packing on my mother's part for the trip was always in order. My grandfather worked for General Electric, wrapping the coils in the back of old-time refrigerators by hand around a mold. He had forearms like Popeye—one of his favorite parlor tricks was to bet someone that he could make them close their hand just by squeezing their wrist in his vice-like grip. He never lost the bet.
Grandma was loving and had a great sense of humor, but also was noisy and abrupt, sort of like my Dad, and was a horrible cook. I don't remember any item of food—meat, vegetable, fruit or starch—that my grandmother could not reduce to tasteless pulp after what seemed like endless hours sweating and complaining in the kitchen. But she sure could dish up ice cream. Her signature dessert, usually served in the early evening in front of some mindless thing on television, was to open a half-gallon carton of vanilla ice cream, cut it in quarters with a knife so large that my brother and I were warned upon pain of serious comeuppance (one of her favorite words) to stay away from it, then serve a quarter to each person in the room with so much chocolate sauce and so many peanuts slathered on top that one would forget that it was vanilla ice cream underneath. This, of course, was before healthy eating habits were invented. A dessert designed to make one forget the less-than-palatable meal that preceded it.
The Erie homestead was nothing special, just old with creepy and creaky bedrooms upstairs. My other grandparents' home in the Finger Lakes region of southern New York State was far more interesting and "homey," probably because that set of grandparents was more touchy-feely and grandparently than my Dad's folks. But the fun of going to Erie was not the house—the fun wasn't really even my grandparents. What made Erie a favored point of destination was that my grandfather, in addition to being a blue-collar factory laborer, was also a "city farmer." Stretched behind their house on a busy road in what served as suburbia in the early 1960s was two acres of land upon which my grandfather ran a small farm, complete with a barn, horse, cow, chickens, tons of barn cats, an outhouse, a huge vegetable garden, a dozen long rows of grape vines, and a lower field where hay always seemed to be growing unnoticed. My other grandfather was the real farmer who made a living growing fields of potatoes, but my gentleman farmer grandfather in Erie is the man of the soil I remember most clearly. When I take delight in digging around in the flower beds, pruning bushes, watering things and watching them grow, I am channeling my Grandpa Morgan.
In addition to their farm animal menagerie, my grandparents had a dog named King. King died of old age before I was ten years old, but if he actually looked like my memory picture of him, he was probably a collie/shepherd mix of some sort. We had two dogs at home, a collie named Lassie and Rex our German Shepherd; if they had ever mated (which they didn't) , their offspring might have looked something like King. King could do two things that neither of my dogs could do. To begin with, King was the first dog I ever met who would chase a ball and bring it back to you over and over again until your arm got too tired to throw any more. At home, if you threw a ball for Lassie to chase she would look at you with a "You're kidding, right?" sort of look as she laid down, and a ball thrown in Rex's direction would most likely bounce off his head. I thought King must be a genius with his ball retrieval abilities and should be on the Ed Sullivan show; it wasn't until much later that I learned that ball retrieval is a normal dog activity and that my dogs at home were just strange.
King's other trick was vocal in nature. My grandfather or my Dad would say "Tell me a big story, King, tell me a big story!" in a certain tone of voice and King would immediately raise his snout heavenward and start howling up a storm. The story King told was sad and full of pathos, dramatic and primal, with the mournful tones of his wolf ancestors. But King was selective about who he would tell stories to. Only my grandfather or Dad would do. In response to such requests from my grandmother, my mother, my brother, me, or any of my aunts and uncles who lived in the area, King would stare in mute silence. King's stories were meant only for the chosen few, those who knew how to ask properly.
Our best and most important stories should be, and usually are, saved for the ears of those who deserve it. Because woven into every story worth the telling is the intended listener. A story is far more than a linear reporting of facts; by fashioning facts into a narrative the storyteller reveals a great deal about who he or she is as well as about what he or she considers to be of ultimate importance. In Yann Martel's Life of Pi, in response to a demand for nothing but the facts about what has happened, Pi responds that "a story always has an element of invention in it. . . . Isn't telling about something—using words, English or Japanese—already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon the world already something of an invention? The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?" Yes it does. And by sending his cries and groans heavenward, the psalmist is weaving a fascinating character into his story—a God who listens. This is the hope of the believer, that there is not only something greater than me , but something that knows me better than I know myself, that listens, and promises a response. Sound like a fictional character, someone from mythology? I hope so, because as Kathleen Norris writes, a myth is a story that you know is true the first time you hear it. By including God in my story, I create a space in which God can show up.
This entry was posted in Bible, Camaldoli hermitage, Christianity, dogs, family, flowers, God, listen, philosophy, prayer, stories, Vermont, writing and tagged dogs, God, Kathleen Norris, Old Testament, Yann Martel on July 9, 2014 by vancemorgan.
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