Instead of a sermon on Sept. 11, 2016, we saw a brief clip of the film Divided We Fall and did an interactive dialogue exercise called "Crossing the Line." Below is the letter Mother Tracy sent out to the congregation before that Sunday:
What do you do when the 15th anniversary of 9/11 falls on a Sunday?
This is the question pastors all over the country have been asking this week. Do you acknowledge it in the sermon, in the prayers? Do you pray for first responders and have a special blessing for them? Do you just go on with life as usual, not wanting to draw too much attention to what may be too traumatic to remember for many? Has enough time passed that we don't "need" to acknowledge it anymore?
Since the events of 9/11 and its aftermath profoundly changed my life and influenced the way I do ministry, and since this anniversary falls on a Sunday and is a significant number (15 years), and since the lessons for this Sunday seem in some way related to the themes of 9/11, I've decided to observe the anniversary in this way:
This Sunday, at the sermon time, we'll have an opportunity to share with each other about our own 9/11 experiences. Instead of a sermon, I'll show the opening 3 minutes of the film "Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath" (www.dividedwefallfilm.com), the documentary film on hate crimes after 9/11 that I've mentioned to you before, that I worked for as communications director. After that clip, I'll lead the congregation in a participatory dialogue exercise designed to illustrate our shared experience of 9/11 and also the ways in which our experiences of that event highlight our differences.
Because time won't permit during the service, the debrief and discussion of this exercise will take place after the service in the parish hall. As we make sandwiches for the outdoor church for the homeless in Hayward (as we do every second Sunday of the month), we'll share reflections about how the dialogue exercise during the service and our own experiences with 9/11 relate to our scripture passages for this Sunday, which have a theme of sin and repentance.
I hope you'll join us, and bring friends: the more diverse the crowd we do this exercise with, the better.
To prepare for Sunday, if you'd like, you can actually watch the entire film online (1.5 hours) -- the filmmakers have partnered with the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights group, to make the film available to the public online for FREE from now until Election Day, to showcase one way in which love can overcome fear and hatred.
Watch the film here:
http://dividedwefallfilm.com/
You can also read the scripture passages ahead of time, here:
http://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp19_RCL.html
These passages call us to think about our own sinfulness and God's great mercy. They call us to remember that "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners," that Jesus "welcomed sinners and ate with them," that "all are corrupt and commit abominable acts." How do you hear these passages with the memory of 9/11 in the forefront of your mind? How do you hear them in light of our current context, fifteen years later?
Some may ask, why even commemorate the "anniversary" of a horrific event, anyway? Shouldn't we focus on remembering positive things?
Certainly, an "anniversary" is often something we celebrate, but not always. Consider the ways in which you mark the months or years after the death of a loved one or another traumatic event in your life. Yes, sometimes it can be best not to dwell on it, but sometimes the healthiest thing to do is to dig into it and process the remaining grief and find a way to hold on to the relentless hope and optimism that is at the core of our faith. To find a way to look at the darkness and say, in the words of the Gospel of John, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."
On this 15th anniversary of 9/11, we'll both see the darkness and affirm the strength of the light. Join us in worship this Sunday, at 10 a.m.
Many blessings,
Mother Tracy+
Showing posts with label prayer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prayer. Show all posts
Sunday, September 11, 2016
Sunday, July 24, 2016
Teach us to pray
Sermon delivered Sunday, July 24, 2016 (The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 12, Year C (Track 2)), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text: Luke 11:1-13
“Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples ask. “Teach us to pray.”
Jesus responds by giving them an outline of the kinds of things they should pray for and then tells them a parable about the efficacy of prayer. The fact that he tells this parable in response to their question about how to pray leads me to believe that maybe the disciples were asking out of a sense that they weren’t doing things right, that Jesus might know a different way to pray that would get them better results. “How can we get our prayers answered” seems to be the underlying question, not just “teach us to pray.”
Jesus’s answer to them is: just keep asking. He says to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”
Although the friend initially turns down the request, he ultimately gives in because the person knocking at his door just won’t give up. Jesus’s message seems to be: if you know that persistence and constant asking can be effective in finally getting what you want from other broken and sinful human beings, who do not always have your best interests at heart, how much more should you be certain that God, who loves you and does have your best interests at heart, will give you what you want if you are persistent in asking?
This parable is unique to Luke, but Luke links it with a saying of Jesus that appears in some form or another in all four Gospels: “ask, and it will be given to you.” The same exact words appear in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-8). Mark and John do not have this exact passage, but the same theme appears in those Gospels as well. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” Jesus says in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:24). And in John 14, Jesus promises the disciples, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” (John 14:14)
These passages seem to suggest that all we have to do is ask, and God will give us whatever we want. They can easily lend themselves to a “vending machine” view of God, where all we need to do is insert prayer, press D4, and whatever we have prayed for will promptly be deposited into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine. But I expect that most of us have found that prayer does not always work that way. It does not seem to be as easy as “ask, and you shall receive,” as “select your desired outcome and it will be delivered to you, no questions asked.” Although sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered exactly as we have asked, most of us have plenty of examples of times when we asked for something from God and did not receive it.
This is not a new problem for the “modern believer;” the earliest Christian communities already recognized that they did not always get everything they asked for from God. The author of the letter of James deals with this issue by arguing that the people are not receiving what they ask for because they are asking wrongly, because their desires are not in line with the will of God. James 4, verses 2-3, says this: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” James’s answer for why some prayers go unanswered is that people are asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. That can be a helpful interpretation when we know deep down that our motives in asking for the things we are asking for are probably not the most godly, that they may be motivated by selfish desires. In those cases, we can accept that our prayers are not answered because we were not asking for the right things. But what about the cases in which we ask for something that we believe to be in line with the will of God, when we ask for the very things God has promised us, like life and health and justice and mercy and resurrection and peace, and we do not receive them?
One need only turn on the news in the past few weeks to find plenty of examples of unanswered prayer. “Oh, please, Jesus, don’t tell me he’s dead,” Philando Castile’s girlfriend prayed on the video she took after he was shot by a police officer at a routine traffic stop. And that prayer cut right to the heart of so many of us because we too have prayed that prayer. “Please, Jesus, no.” We know the pain of crying out to God, “NO,” of praying earnestly that whatever horrific thing that is happening in front of us would somehow be undone, and yet the situation remains unchanged. God seems to be silent.
Jesus tells the disciples that they will be able to heal in his name, and in the Gospels and the Book of Acts we have stories of the disciples healing the sick and raising the dead, but I have never known a Christian who was able to literally raise the dead. The prophets constantly tell us that God has promised to “restore the fortunes of Zion,” and yet the conflict in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas continues unabated. The prophets tell us that God wants “justice to roll down like waters,” but we see oppression and injustice continuing in our own society and around the world. So how are we to reconcile these unanswered prayers with Jesus’s words that “if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it”? That “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”?
Again, this is not a new question. The biblical authors also struggled with unanswered prayers. The psalmists asked, “How long, O Lord?” How long will you hide your face from us, how long will you not respond to our prayers, to our cries for help? As we survey the violence that has wracked our country and the world in recent weeks and months, the biblical prophets give voice to our collective weariness and grief. The prophet Habakkuk asks, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2) Job cries out to God, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7). In Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus quotes while dying on the cross, the psalmist says, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer. By night as well, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).
In figuring out how to deal with the agony of unanswered prayer, the biblical prophets are a good place to turn, because they know that pain themselves, deeply, intimately, as evidenced in these and many other passages. And what do they do? They express their anguish about unanswered prayer to God, not only to other people. Significantly, they never take the step that so many people do today, to assume that the fact of unanswered prayer must mean that God does not exist. The biblical writers “keep the faith” even in the midst of unanswered prayer, even when God does not turn out to be their own personal divine vending machine. They stay in relationship to God and express their anguish to God, even if no answers are forthcoming.
They also remember the times God has answered prayer and how many blessings they have received from God. In the same chapter as Job cries out that there is no justice and his prayers are not answered, he goes on to say that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Immediately after the verse in Psalm 22 about crying to God but receiving no answer, the psalmist goes on to say, “Yet you are the Holy One… our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them… you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast” (Psalm 22:3-4, 9). In the midst of laments about unanswered prayer in the Bible, there is almost always a recall of times that prayer has been answered, when we asked and it was given to us, when we sought and did find, when we knocked and the door was opened to us.
A priest mentor of mine once told me that when people come to her and say, “I’ve lost my faith,” she asks them, “When did you last see it?” – the same kind of question you’d ask someone if they were looking for a lost wallet. You had it with you at some point, so where did you last see it? When did you last know, without a shadow of a doubt, that God was with you? That God loves you? That God has your best interests at heart? Because just like that lost wallet, if you retrace your steps, you can find it again.
Jesus never promised us a life free from pain and suffering. But he did promise “to be with us always, even until the end of the age.” We may never have a satisfactory answer for why God leaves some prayers unanswered, even those prayers that are for the very things we believe God himself wants for us and for the world. But that need not stop us from affirming those times that God has answered prayer, that we have felt God’s presence, that we have seen God’s hand at work guiding our lives. We can hold the two in tension with one another and, with the biblical prophets, continue to cry out in our grief, confident that God is still there.
Sermon Text: Luke 11:1-13
“Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples ask. “Teach us to pray.”
Jesus responds by giving them an outline of the kinds of things they should pray for and then tells them a parable about the efficacy of prayer. The fact that he tells this parable in response to their question about how to pray leads me to believe that maybe the disciples were asking out of a sense that they weren’t doing things right, that Jesus might know a different way to pray that would get them better results. “How can we get our prayers answered” seems to be the underlying question, not just “teach us to pray.”
Jesus’s answer to them is: just keep asking. He says to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”
Although the friend initially turns down the request, he ultimately gives in because the person knocking at his door just won’t give up. Jesus’s message seems to be: if you know that persistence and constant asking can be effective in finally getting what you want from other broken and sinful human beings, who do not always have your best interests at heart, how much more should you be certain that God, who loves you and does have your best interests at heart, will give you what you want if you are persistent in asking?
This parable is unique to Luke, but Luke links it with a saying of Jesus that appears in some form or another in all four Gospels: “ask, and it will be given to you.” The same exact words appear in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-8). Mark and John do not have this exact passage, but the same theme appears in those Gospels as well. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” Jesus says in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:24). And in John 14, Jesus promises the disciples, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” (John 14:14)
These passages seem to suggest that all we have to do is ask, and God will give us whatever we want. They can easily lend themselves to a “vending machine” view of God, where all we need to do is insert prayer, press D4, and whatever we have prayed for will promptly be deposited into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine. But I expect that most of us have found that prayer does not always work that way. It does not seem to be as easy as “ask, and you shall receive,” as “select your desired outcome and it will be delivered to you, no questions asked.” Although sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered exactly as we have asked, most of us have plenty of examples of times when we asked for something from God and did not receive it.
This is not a new problem for the “modern believer;” the earliest Christian communities already recognized that they did not always get everything they asked for from God. The author of the letter of James deals with this issue by arguing that the people are not receiving what they ask for because they are asking wrongly, because their desires are not in line with the will of God. James 4, verses 2-3, says this: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” James’s answer for why some prayers go unanswered is that people are asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. That can be a helpful interpretation when we know deep down that our motives in asking for the things we are asking for are probably not the most godly, that they may be motivated by selfish desires. In those cases, we can accept that our prayers are not answered because we were not asking for the right things. But what about the cases in which we ask for something that we believe to be in line with the will of God, when we ask for the very things God has promised us, like life and health and justice and mercy and resurrection and peace, and we do not receive them?
One need only turn on the news in the past few weeks to find plenty of examples of unanswered prayer. “Oh, please, Jesus, don’t tell me he’s dead,” Philando Castile’s girlfriend prayed on the video she took after he was shot by a police officer at a routine traffic stop. And that prayer cut right to the heart of so many of us because we too have prayed that prayer. “Please, Jesus, no.” We know the pain of crying out to God, “NO,” of praying earnestly that whatever horrific thing that is happening in front of us would somehow be undone, and yet the situation remains unchanged. God seems to be silent.
Jesus tells the disciples that they will be able to heal in his name, and in the Gospels and the Book of Acts we have stories of the disciples healing the sick and raising the dead, but I have never known a Christian who was able to literally raise the dead. The prophets constantly tell us that God has promised to “restore the fortunes of Zion,” and yet the conflict in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas continues unabated. The prophets tell us that God wants “justice to roll down like waters,” but we see oppression and injustice continuing in our own society and around the world. So how are we to reconcile these unanswered prayers with Jesus’s words that “if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it”? That “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”?
Again, this is not a new question. The biblical authors also struggled with unanswered prayers. The psalmists asked, “How long, O Lord?” How long will you hide your face from us, how long will you not respond to our prayers, to our cries for help? As we survey the violence that has wracked our country and the world in recent weeks and months, the biblical prophets give voice to our collective weariness and grief. The prophet Habakkuk asks, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2) Job cries out to God, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7). In Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus quotes while dying on the cross, the psalmist says, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer. By night as well, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).
In figuring out how to deal with the agony of unanswered prayer, the biblical prophets are a good place to turn, because they know that pain themselves, deeply, intimately, as evidenced in these and many other passages. And what do they do? They express their anguish about unanswered prayer to God, not only to other people. Significantly, they never take the step that so many people do today, to assume that the fact of unanswered prayer must mean that God does not exist. The biblical writers “keep the faith” even in the midst of unanswered prayer, even when God does not turn out to be their own personal divine vending machine. They stay in relationship to God and express their anguish to God, even if no answers are forthcoming.
They also remember the times God has answered prayer and how many blessings they have received from God. In the same chapter as Job cries out that there is no justice and his prayers are not answered, he goes on to say that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Immediately after the verse in Psalm 22 about crying to God but receiving no answer, the psalmist goes on to say, “Yet you are the Holy One… our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them… you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast” (Psalm 22:3-4, 9). In the midst of laments about unanswered prayer in the Bible, there is almost always a recall of times that prayer has been answered, when we asked and it was given to us, when we sought and did find, when we knocked and the door was opened to us.
A priest mentor of mine once told me that when people come to her and say, “I’ve lost my faith,” she asks them, “When did you last see it?” – the same kind of question you’d ask someone if they were looking for a lost wallet. You had it with you at some point, so where did you last see it? When did you last know, without a shadow of a doubt, that God was with you? That God loves you? That God has your best interests at heart? Because just like that lost wallet, if you retrace your steps, you can find it again.
Jesus never promised us a life free from pain and suffering. But he did promise “to be with us always, even until the end of the age.” We may never have a satisfactory answer for why God leaves some prayers unanswered, even those prayers that are for the very things we believe God himself wants for us and for the world. But that need not stop us from affirming those times that God has answered prayer, that we have felt God’s presence, that we have seen God’s hand at work guiding our lives. We can hold the two in tension with one another and, with the biblical prophets, continue to cry out in our grief, confident that God is still there.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Persistence in prayer even when we do not get what we ask for
Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 20, 2013 (22nd Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, Proper 24) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, on Luke 18:1-8.
“Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” (Luke 18:1) Luke tells us that today’s parable, about the widow and the unjust judge, is about persistence in prayer. It has a similar theme to another parable Jesus tells earlier in the Gospel of Luke, about the friend at midnight. We heard that parable earlier this year, at the end of July, but let me refresh your memory. The parable of the friend at midnight is in Luke 11:5-8:
“[Jesus] said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, “Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.” And he answers from within, “Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.” I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.’”
“Because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.” Although the friend initially turns down the request, he ultimately gives in because the person knocking at his door just won’t give up. The same is true with the widow and the unjust judge. Though the judge cares nothing about the woman or about granting her what she asks for, he finally gives in because of her persistence and tenacity.
Jesus’s message in both these parables seems to be: if you know that persistence and constant asking can be effective in finally getting what you want from other broken and sinful human beings, who do not always have your best interests at heart, how much more should you be certain that God, who loves you and does have your best interests at heart, will give you what you want if you are persistent in asking?
These two parables are unique to Luke, but Luke links the parable of the friend at midnight with a saying of Jesus that appears in some form or another in all four Gospels: “ask, and it will be given to you.” The parable of the persistent friend at midnight in Luke is followed by this passage, which appears to be commentary on the parable: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Luke 11:9-10). The same exact words appear in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-8). Mark and John do not have this exact passage, but the same theme appears in those Gospels as well. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” Jesus says in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:24). And in John 14, Jesus promises the disciples, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” (John 14:14)
These passages seem to suggest that all we have to do is ask, and God will give us whatever we want. They can easily lend themselves to a “vending machine” view of God, where all we need to do is insert prayer, press D4, and health and wealth will promptly be deposited into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine, ready for us to grab and tear into like so many candy bars. But I expect that most of us would bristle at that concept of God, because we know that most prayer does not work that way. It does not seem to be as easy as “ask, and you shall receive,” as “select your desired outcome and it will be delivered to you, no questions asked.” Although sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered exactly as we have asked, I’m sure that most of us have any number of examples of times when we asked for something from God and did not receive what we asked.
This is not a new problem for the “modern believer;” the earliest Christian communities already recognized that they did not always get everything they asked for from God, that not all their prayers were answered by a fulfillment of the requests they had made. The author of the letter of James deals with this issue by arguing that the people are not receiving what they ask for because they are asking wrongly, because their desires are not in line with the will of God. James 4, verses 2-3, says this: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.”
James’s answer for why some prayers go unanswered is that people are asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. That can be a helpful interpretation when we know deep down that our motives in asking or the things we are asking for are probably not the most godly, that they may be motivated by selfish desires. In those cases, we can accept that our prayers are not answered because we were not asking for the right things. But what about the cases in which we ask for something that we believe to be in line with the will of God, when we ask for the very things God has promised us, like life and health and justice and mercy and resurrection and peace, and we do not receive them?
Jesus tells the disciples that they will be able to heal in his name, and in the Gospels and the Book of Acts we have stories of the disciples healing the sick and raising the dead, but I have never known a Christian who was able to literally raise the dead. The prophets constantly tell us that God has promised to “restore the fortunes of Zion,” and yet the conflict in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas continues unabated. The prophets tell us that God wants “justice to roll down like waters,” but we see oppression and injustice continuing in our own society and around the world.
So how are we to reconcile these unanswered prayers with Jesus’s words that “if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it”? That “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”?
Again, this is not a new question. The biblical authors also struggled with unanswered prayers. The psalmists asked, “How long, O Lord?” How long will you hide your face from us, how long will you not respond to our prayers, to our cries for help? The prophet Habakkuk asks, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2) Job cries out to God, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7). In Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus quotes while dying on the cross, the psalmist says, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer. By night as well, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).
Significantly, though, the biblical authors never take the step that so many people do today, to assume that the fact of unanswered prayer must mean that God does not exist. The biblical writers “keep the faith” even in the midst of unanswered prayer, even when God does not turn out to be their own personal divine vending machine. They express their anguish about unanswered prayer to God, not only to other people. And they remember the times God has answered prayer and how many blessings they have received from God. In the same chapter as Job cries out that there is no justice and his prayers are not answered, he goes on to say that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Immediately after the verse in Psalm 22 about crying to God but receiving no answer, the psalmist goes on to say, “Yet you are the Holy One… our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them… you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast” (Psalm 22:3-4, 9). In the midst of laments about unanswered prayer in the Bible, there is almost always a recall of times that prayer has been answered, when we asked and it was given to us, when we sought and did find, when we knocked and the door was opened to us.
Perhaps this is what it means to be persistent in prayer: not only to keep asking over and over again, but to stay in relationship with God even when we do not get the things we ask for in that particular moment – to ask questions and struggle with God even when the door seems to be closed. To remember, even in those moments, Jesus’s promise that God has our best interests at heart and will in fact grant us the justice and the good things that we seek – even if it might not come in the ways we expect or desire. The biblical writers continued to affirm the goodness of God despite their unanswered prayers, and Jesus invites us to model their persistence not only in making continued requests for what we want, but not to lose heart as we ask – to remain steadfast in believing that the God to whom we pray does indeed have our best interests at heart.
“Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” (Luke 18:1) Luke tells us that today’s parable, about the widow and the unjust judge, is about persistence in prayer. It has a similar theme to another parable Jesus tells earlier in the Gospel of Luke, about the friend at midnight. We heard that parable earlier this year, at the end of July, but let me refresh your memory. The parable of the friend at midnight is in Luke 11:5-8:
“[Jesus] said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, “Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.” And he answers from within, “Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.” I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.’”
“Because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.” Although the friend initially turns down the request, he ultimately gives in because the person knocking at his door just won’t give up. The same is true with the widow and the unjust judge. Though the judge cares nothing about the woman or about granting her what she asks for, he finally gives in because of her persistence and tenacity.
Jesus’s message in both these parables seems to be: if you know that persistence and constant asking can be effective in finally getting what you want from other broken and sinful human beings, who do not always have your best interests at heart, how much more should you be certain that God, who loves you and does have your best interests at heart, will give you what you want if you are persistent in asking?
These two parables are unique to Luke, but Luke links the parable of the friend at midnight with a saying of Jesus that appears in some form or another in all four Gospels: “ask, and it will be given to you.” The parable of the persistent friend at midnight in Luke is followed by this passage, which appears to be commentary on the parable: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Luke 11:9-10). The same exact words appear in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-8). Mark and John do not have this exact passage, but the same theme appears in those Gospels as well. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” Jesus says in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:24). And in John 14, Jesus promises the disciples, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” (John 14:14)
These passages seem to suggest that all we have to do is ask, and God will give us whatever we want. They can easily lend themselves to a “vending machine” view of God, where all we need to do is insert prayer, press D4, and health and wealth will promptly be deposited into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine, ready for us to grab and tear into like so many candy bars. But I expect that most of us would bristle at that concept of God, because we know that most prayer does not work that way. It does not seem to be as easy as “ask, and you shall receive,” as “select your desired outcome and it will be delivered to you, no questions asked.” Although sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered exactly as we have asked, I’m sure that most of us have any number of examples of times when we asked for something from God and did not receive what we asked.
This is not a new problem for the “modern believer;” the earliest Christian communities already recognized that they did not always get everything they asked for from God, that not all their prayers were answered by a fulfillment of the requests they had made. The author of the letter of James deals with this issue by arguing that the people are not receiving what they ask for because they are asking wrongly, because their desires are not in line with the will of God. James 4, verses 2-3, says this: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.”
James’s answer for why some prayers go unanswered is that people are asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. That can be a helpful interpretation when we know deep down that our motives in asking or the things we are asking for are probably not the most godly, that they may be motivated by selfish desires. In those cases, we can accept that our prayers are not answered because we were not asking for the right things. But what about the cases in which we ask for something that we believe to be in line with the will of God, when we ask for the very things God has promised us, like life and health and justice and mercy and resurrection and peace, and we do not receive them?
Jesus tells the disciples that they will be able to heal in his name, and in the Gospels and the Book of Acts we have stories of the disciples healing the sick and raising the dead, but I have never known a Christian who was able to literally raise the dead. The prophets constantly tell us that God has promised to “restore the fortunes of Zion,” and yet the conflict in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas continues unabated. The prophets tell us that God wants “justice to roll down like waters,” but we see oppression and injustice continuing in our own society and around the world.
So how are we to reconcile these unanswered prayers with Jesus’s words that “if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it”? That “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”?
Again, this is not a new question. The biblical authors also struggled with unanswered prayers. The psalmists asked, “How long, O Lord?” How long will you hide your face from us, how long will you not respond to our prayers, to our cries for help? The prophet Habakkuk asks, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2) Job cries out to God, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7). In Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus quotes while dying on the cross, the psalmist says, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer. By night as well, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).
Significantly, though, the biblical authors never take the step that so many people do today, to assume that the fact of unanswered prayer must mean that God does not exist. The biblical writers “keep the faith” even in the midst of unanswered prayer, even when God does not turn out to be their own personal divine vending machine. They express their anguish about unanswered prayer to God, not only to other people. And they remember the times God has answered prayer and how many blessings they have received from God. In the same chapter as Job cries out that there is no justice and his prayers are not answered, he goes on to say that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Immediately after the verse in Psalm 22 about crying to God but receiving no answer, the psalmist goes on to say, “Yet you are the Holy One… our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them… you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast” (Psalm 22:3-4, 9). In the midst of laments about unanswered prayer in the Bible, there is almost always a recall of times that prayer has been answered, when we asked and it was given to us, when we sought and did find, when we knocked and the door was opened to us.
Perhaps this is what it means to be persistent in prayer: not only to keep asking over and over again, but to stay in relationship with God even when we do not get the things we ask for in that particular moment – to ask questions and struggle with God even when the door seems to be closed. To remember, even in those moments, Jesus’s promise that God has our best interests at heart and will in fact grant us the justice and the good things that we seek – even if it might not come in the ways we expect or desire. The biblical writers continued to affirm the goodness of God despite their unanswered prayers, and Jesus invites us to model their persistence not only in making continued requests for what we want, but not to lose heart as we ask – to remain steadfast in believing that the God to whom we pray does indeed have our best interests at heart.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Two widow's sons raised, two similar yet different messages
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 9, 2013 (3rd Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, Proper 5) at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (1 Kings 17:8-24, Luke 7:11-17)
It’s no coincidence that our lectionary pairs today’s reading from 1 Kings with our Gospel passage from Luke. Jesus’s actions in raising the widow’s son at Nain are in some ways an echo of the story of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath – and certainly, his Jewish followers and audience would have seen “Elijah themes” in this event in Jesus’s ministry.
The stories about Elijah were and still are some of the most beloved stories of the Jewish faith. Elijah is considered one of the greatest prophets, and is closely connected with prophecies about the Messiah: it is believed that Elijah must return before the coming of the Messiah. This is why Elijah pops up in discussion frequently in the New Testament stories. As Jesus’s followers and the community around him began to connect him with messianic prophecies, they struggled to figure out who Jesus was in connection to Elijah.
You may remember that Elijah’s earthly life ended when he was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:1-15). Tradition held that he would return on his chariot from heaven before the coming of the Messiah. Even though there were many messianic-like things about Jesus, no one had seen any chariots of fire yet, which led to two possible conclusions: either Jesus wasn’t the messiah because Elijah hadn’t come back yet, or maybe Elijah had come back in a different way. Stories like this one about Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain had enough parallels with stories about Elijah that some people began to think, “Hmm – well maybe this guy isn’t actually the messiah, but is Elijah come back again!”
Immediately after the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Luke, the disciples of John the Baptist go to Jesus and ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Lk. 7:19) That seemingly vague statement was actually a very specific question about Jesus’s identity: Are you the messiah, or are you Elijah? Are you “the one,” the promised messiah to come, or are you Elijah, the messenger who has come to announce that “the one” is near? Jesus’s response to the questioners is, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Mt. 11:4, Lk. 7:22) – all of which were things that the messiah was expected to do (see Isaiah 61:1-3, 42:7). Although he does not say directly, “Yes, I am the one who is to come, the messiah,” they would have gotten the message as Jesus identified himself with the prophecies about the promised messiah.
In Matthew’s version of the story, after Jesus identifies himself with the messianic prophecies in his answer to John’s disciples, he goes on to explicitly identify John the Baptist as the returned Elijah figure. In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus calls John the Baptist “more than a prophet” (Mt. 11:9, Lk. 7:26), “the one about whom it is written, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you’ (Mt. 11:10, Lk. 7:27) – the role that Elijah was to play for the messiah. But in Matthew’s version of the story, he goes on to say specifically, “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John came, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (Mt. 11:13).
In pairing these two stories together in our lectionary, of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath and Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain, we are invited to notice the parallels but also the differences between Elijah and Jesus. In noticing the parallels between the stories, we can begin to understand why some people in Jesus’s day would have confused him with the prophet Elijah, but we also notice a key difference between the stories. While Elijah appears confused and upset by the death of the widow’s son and questions why God has brought calamity on this woman by killing her son, Jesus does not seem confused and distraught by the death of the widow’s son. He has compassion on her, yes, but there is no impassioned plea like Elijah’s begging that God would restore life to the son. Instead, Jesus appears calm and in control. He does not plead with God to restore the man to life; he commands it to be so himself. “Young man, I say to you, rise!” (Lk. 7:14) Jesus says, which is quite different from Eljah’s prayer: “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again” (1 Kings 17:21). Jesus’s words presume an authority and omnipotence that Elijah’s do not. The story also refers to Jesus as “Lord,” and although that word could be used of earthly lords and masters, it was also the word that had come to be used to refer to God. Jesus commands the son to rise as if speaking with the authority of the Lord God himself. It is not entirely improbable that the disciples told the story of Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain in this way precisely to emphasize the distinction between Elijah and Jesus – Elijah was great, and there may be similarities between Elijah and Jesus, but Jesus is greater than Elijah.
Another interesting point of contrast between the two stories has nothing to do with the comparison between Elijah and Jesus, but speaks to our own struggles with prayers for assistance and healing. Although the Elijah story implies that the widow’s son is raised because his mother has shown hospitality to a prophet, and that righteous prophet prays for him to be raised, in the Gospel story we hear no mention of faith or righteousness as a prerequisite for Jesus raising the widow’s son. We are not told anything about the faith of the widow or of her son, although we might be able to safely assume that they were Jewish, since they lived in Nain, a town not too far from Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth in the Galilean region. But in contrast to so many biblical stories, the widow does not seek Jesus out and ask him to do anything for her. He simply happens to be passing by as the funeral procession comes out of the town and takes it upon himself to restore this man to life, without being asked to do anything.
To me, this is a rather refreshing reminder that sometimes God simply acts to bestow mercy and grace upon us, even without any action on our part. So often the theme of healing stories in the Gospels is, “your faith has made you well,” which can carry the implicit message that if you haven’t been made well, then perhaps it’s because your faith is not good enough or strong enough. What about those of us who pray earnestly without ceasing for healing, but healing never comes? We might begin to think that this a sign of God’s judgment on us, oh we of little faith.
But Jesus’s raising of the widow’s son at Nain shows that faith is not always a prerequisite for healing, and that in some cases, we don’t even have to ask for God’s healing for it to come to us. If this is so, then we can’t blame our lack of healing on a lack of faith.
Although this is somewhat freeing on the one hand – to think that it doesn’t all depend on us, that we don’t have to have the right kind of faith or a strong enough faith for God to heal us – it is also somewhat unsettling because it removes any sense of control that we might think we have over the situation. We are left at the mercy of a God who we cannot control through saying the right prayers or offering the right sacrifices.
And it raises the question of why God deals differently with different people. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son at Nain, but not the man’s father who asks Jesus if he can return home to bury his father before coming to follow Jesus (Lk. 9:59-60)? In the case of the widow at Nain, Jesus’s reaction to her loss is compassion and a restoration of her loved one to life, but when a man Jesus calls tells him he must first return home to bury his father, Jesus’s response is the classic, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk. 9:60), in what comes across as a rather brusque and uncaring response to a man in grief. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son and not this man’s father? Why are some people healed and others aren’t, when both are equally prayed for by the same community?
I wish I had answers to these questions, but I don’t. Ultimately, I think we have to trust that we are in the hands of a God much greater than we are, and even when it seems God has ignored our prayers or abandoned us, God is actually still working for what is best for each one of us.
The psalms are a model of this kind of trust in the midst of unknowing, of loyalty even to a God who doesn’t always give us what we want. The psalmist cries laments of pain, asking God why God has abandoned him, why God allows some people to prosper while others suffer, seemingly for no reason, but the psalmist always ultimately comes around to a statement of praise. Most poignant of all the psalms to us in the Christian tradition is Psalm 22, the one that Jesus cried on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it begins in verse one. But by verse 21, the psalmist affirms that despite his suffering and apparent rejection by God, he will still praise God: “I will declare your Name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” The psalmist always recognizes the sovereignty of God, that God is ultimately in charge, even if he doesn’t always like the way God is running things!
We don’t have to understand God’s ways in order to be able to stand in awe of him as the one “who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 146:5), and our faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead encourages us to affirm that even in the darkest moments of humanity can arise light and salvation. Even when all we see is silence and unanswered prayers, we can affirm with Paul in his letter to the Romans that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And we can be encouraged by the fact it doesn’t all depend on our faith and our actions – that sometimes, like the widow at Nain, God may send blessings into our lives when we haven’t even asked for them.
It’s no coincidence that our lectionary pairs today’s reading from 1 Kings with our Gospel passage from Luke. Jesus’s actions in raising the widow’s son at Nain are in some ways an echo of the story of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath – and certainly, his Jewish followers and audience would have seen “Elijah themes” in this event in Jesus’s ministry.
The stories about Elijah were and still are some of the most beloved stories of the Jewish faith. Elijah is considered one of the greatest prophets, and is closely connected with prophecies about the Messiah: it is believed that Elijah must return before the coming of the Messiah. This is why Elijah pops up in discussion frequently in the New Testament stories. As Jesus’s followers and the community around him began to connect him with messianic prophecies, they struggled to figure out who Jesus was in connection to Elijah.
You may remember that Elijah’s earthly life ended when he was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:1-15). Tradition held that he would return on his chariot from heaven before the coming of the Messiah. Even though there were many messianic-like things about Jesus, no one had seen any chariots of fire yet, which led to two possible conclusions: either Jesus wasn’t the messiah because Elijah hadn’t come back yet, or maybe Elijah had come back in a different way. Stories like this one about Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain had enough parallels with stories about Elijah that some people began to think, “Hmm – well maybe this guy isn’t actually the messiah, but is Elijah come back again!”
Immediately after the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Luke, the disciples of John the Baptist go to Jesus and ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Lk. 7:19) That seemingly vague statement was actually a very specific question about Jesus’s identity: Are you the messiah, or are you Elijah? Are you “the one,” the promised messiah to come, or are you Elijah, the messenger who has come to announce that “the one” is near? Jesus’s response to the questioners is, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Mt. 11:4, Lk. 7:22) – all of which were things that the messiah was expected to do (see Isaiah 61:1-3, 42:7). Although he does not say directly, “Yes, I am the one who is to come, the messiah,” they would have gotten the message as Jesus identified himself with the prophecies about the promised messiah.
In Matthew’s version of the story, after Jesus identifies himself with the messianic prophecies in his answer to John’s disciples, he goes on to explicitly identify John the Baptist as the returned Elijah figure. In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus calls John the Baptist “more than a prophet” (Mt. 11:9, Lk. 7:26), “the one about whom it is written, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you’ (Mt. 11:10, Lk. 7:27) – the role that Elijah was to play for the messiah. But in Matthew’s version of the story, he goes on to say specifically, “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John came, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (Mt. 11:13).
In pairing these two stories together in our lectionary, of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath and Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain, we are invited to notice the parallels but also the differences between Elijah and Jesus. In noticing the parallels between the stories, we can begin to understand why some people in Jesus’s day would have confused him with the prophet Elijah, but we also notice a key difference between the stories. While Elijah appears confused and upset by the death of the widow’s son and questions why God has brought calamity on this woman by killing her son, Jesus does not seem confused and distraught by the death of the widow’s son. He has compassion on her, yes, but there is no impassioned plea like Elijah’s begging that God would restore life to the son. Instead, Jesus appears calm and in control. He does not plead with God to restore the man to life; he commands it to be so himself. “Young man, I say to you, rise!” (Lk. 7:14) Jesus says, which is quite different from Eljah’s prayer: “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again” (1 Kings 17:21). Jesus’s words presume an authority and omnipotence that Elijah’s do not. The story also refers to Jesus as “Lord,” and although that word could be used of earthly lords and masters, it was also the word that had come to be used to refer to God. Jesus commands the son to rise as if speaking with the authority of the Lord God himself. It is not entirely improbable that the disciples told the story of Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain in this way precisely to emphasize the distinction between Elijah and Jesus – Elijah was great, and there may be similarities between Elijah and Jesus, but Jesus is greater than Elijah.
Another interesting point of contrast between the two stories has nothing to do with the comparison between Elijah and Jesus, but speaks to our own struggles with prayers for assistance and healing. Although the Elijah story implies that the widow’s son is raised because his mother has shown hospitality to a prophet, and that righteous prophet prays for him to be raised, in the Gospel story we hear no mention of faith or righteousness as a prerequisite for Jesus raising the widow’s son. We are not told anything about the faith of the widow or of her son, although we might be able to safely assume that they were Jewish, since they lived in Nain, a town not too far from Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth in the Galilean region. But in contrast to so many biblical stories, the widow does not seek Jesus out and ask him to do anything for her. He simply happens to be passing by as the funeral procession comes out of the town and takes it upon himself to restore this man to life, without being asked to do anything.
To me, this is a rather refreshing reminder that sometimes God simply acts to bestow mercy and grace upon us, even without any action on our part. So often the theme of healing stories in the Gospels is, “your faith has made you well,” which can carry the implicit message that if you haven’t been made well, then perhaps it’s because your faith is not good enough or strong enough. What about those of us who pray earnestly without ceasing for healing, but healing never comes? We might begin to think that this a sign of God’s judgment on us, oh we of little faith.
But Jesus’s raising of the widow’s son at Nain shows that faith is not always a prerequisite for healing, and that in some cases, we don’t even have to ask for God’s healing for it to come to us. If this is so, then we can’t blame our lack of healing on a lack of faith.
Although this is somewhat freeing on the one hand – to think that it doesn’t all depend on us, that we don’t have to have the right kind of faith or a strong enough faith for God to heal us – it is also somewhat unsettling because it removes any sense of control that we might think we have over the situation. We are left at the mercy of a God who we cannot control through saying the right prayers or offering the right sacrifices.
And it raises the question of why God deals differently with different people. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son at Nain, but not the man’s father who asks Jesus if he can return home to bury his father before coming to follow Jesus (Lk. 9:59-60)? In the case of the widow at Nain, Jesus’s reaction to her loss is compassion and a restoration of her loved one to life, but when a man Jesus calls tells him he must first return home to bury his father, Jesus’s response is the classic, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk. 9:60), in what comes across as a rather brusque and uncaring response to a man in grief. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son and not this man’s father? Why are some people healed and others aren’t, when both are equally prayed for by the same community?
I wish I had answers to these questions, but I don’t. Ultimately, I think we have to trust that we are in the hands of a God much greater than we are, and even when it seems God has ignored our prayers or abandoned us, God is actually still working for what is best for each one of us.
The psalms are a model of this kind of trust in the midst of unknowing, of loyalty even to a God who doesn’t always give us what we want. The psalmist cries laments of pain, asking God why God has abandoned him, why God allows some people to prosper while others suffer, seemingly for no reason, but the psalmist always ultimately comes around to a statement of praise. Most poignant of all the psalms to us in the Christian tradition is Psalm 22, the one that Jesus cried on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it begins in verse one. But by verse 21, the psalmist affirms that despite his suffering and apparent rejection by God, he will still praise God: “I will declare your Name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” The psalmist always recognizes the sovereignty of God, that God is ultimately in charge, even if he doesn’t always like the way God is running things!
We don’t have to understand God’s ways in order to be able to stand in awe of him as the one “who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 146:5), and our faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead encourages us to affirm that even in the darkest moments of humanity can arise light and salvation. Even when all we see is silence and unanswered prayers, we can affirm with Paul in his letter to the Romans that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And we can be encouraged by the fact it doesn’t all depend on our faith and our actions – that sometimes, like the widow at Nain, God may send blessings into our lives when we haven’t even asked for them.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?
Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 7, 2012 (19th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 22B), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn. (Job 1:1, 2:1-10)
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
Job’s question is a poignant one, coming from a man who had experienced unspeakable loss. Our lectionary passage leaves out most of the first chapter of Job, which describes the loss of Job’s livestock and the death of his servants and all ten of his children. Then Job is stricken with a painful illness. Things are so bad that his wife comes to the conclusion it would be better to die than to continue to live with the suffering Job is experiencing, and encourages Job to curse God and die.
But Job refuses, continuing to accept God’s sovereignty over his life. “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), he says when he learns of the death of his children. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asks (Job 2:10), in response to his wife’s words of anger and despair.
This question could be the “topic sentence” of the entire Book of Job: Are human beings willing to receive the good at the hand of God and not to receive the bad? It is the question that Satan, or “the Accuser,” asks in the heavenly court. “Of course Job is faithful and upright,” he says to God, “It’s easy for people to be faithful and give praise to God when things are going well for them. But what about when things are tough? How much will they love you then?”
The entire “game” that the Accuser plays with Job is an experiment to answer that very question: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” Will Job continue to be in faithful relationship with God even when his comfortable life is stripped away from him?
Now, before we go any further, let me say a word about the disturbing opening of this story. What kind of God, you might ask, would agree to let all these calamities befall an innocent person just to win a “bet,” if you will, with an unruly angel? Does God also send death and destruction upon us intentionally, just to see if we’ll cave under the pressure? Are the suffering of our lives a result of God making a similar bargain with the Accuser?
In my understanding of God, the answers to those questions are “no” and “no.” It is helpful to understand that the Book of Job was never intended to describe actual events that happened to a real person. Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright describes the book of Job as the ancient equivalent of a “Dr. Seuss” story, a story meant to illustrate a particular question or topic through creative imagination. The story of Job describes a perfect man with a perfect family in a made up land (no one knows where “the land of Uz” is) with a made-up name (“Job” is not a Semitic or Hebrew name, or a name common to any of the surrounding cultures). This is the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of a story about the Whos down in Whoville. The description of Job is a kind of stereotype of perfection that does not exist completely in real life. But the author of the story posits the existence of this hypothetical “perfect” person to explore a significant theological question: Is it possible to remain faithful to God in the midst of unexplainable suffering, suffering which we have done nothing to deserve?
The story of Job is something like a parable, through which we are invited to consider our own lives of faith. Are we “fair-weather” friends of God, happy to praise him when things are going well, but quick to curse him when they are not? Are we like the seed in Jesus’s parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-15) that was sown on rock, who receive the Word with joy when we first hear it, but when troubles arise, we fall away?
Reading this passage from Job at this particular point in time, I cannot help but think of the response of the Sikh community in Wisconsin to the shootings at their place of worship two months ago. Despite enduring the horror of a violent attack during a worship service and losing six members of their community, the Sikh community has responded with love and compassion, continuing to be at prayer and to encourage one another to remain in chardi kala, a state of optimism and high spirits that is central to the Sikh faith. My friend Valarie Kaur, a third-generation Sikh American from California and a nationally-known interfaith activist, went to Milwaukee to be with the community in the days and weeks after the shootings. She gathered first-hand stories from the people there and began sharing them through op-ed pieces, blog entries, Facebook posts and tweets.
One of the most powerful stories she shared was that of Santokh Singh, a 50-year-old man from India who came to the U.S. to serve the community in Milwaukee as a granthi, a devotional singer who recites prayers from scripture in Sikh worship services. In the attack on the gurdwara in August, he survived two gunshot wounds to the stomach. In reflecting on the shooting, Santokh said, “I have no hate for the gunman. What happened was done by God. How can I wish ill upon the gunman if it is God’s will?”
“The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
In the face of unspeakable loss, the Sikh community in Wisconsin, like Job, has affirmed an acceptance of God’s sovereignty in their lives. “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” says a Sikh prayer. Turning to prayer for solace in the days and weeks after the shooting, Sikhs received the gut-wrenching pain of their loss as a gift from God. “One does not turn away a gift, or bury it, or rage against it, but receive it with an open heart,” Valarie wrote in an article for The Washington Post, describing the community’s theological response to the tragedy.
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God but not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
But Job’s acceptance of his fate and his poignant words of faith and trust are not the whole story. In this book of 42 chapters, Job’s strong statements of trust and acceptance of God’s will appear only in the first two chapters. From chapter three onwards, Job begins to lament his loss. He says it would be better if he had never been born, and question God’s justice at allowing such pain to come into his life.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me,” he says. “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26). This is a far cry from the calm acceptance of his fate and peaceful worship and blessing of God that he expressed when he first lost his children and livestock. After the loss has a chance to sink in more deeply, the raw pain seeps out, perhaps even against his will, since Job was a deeply pious man who most likely would have wanted to remain in chardi kala, as the Sikhs would put it, optimistic and faithful despite his sufferings. But the pain was too much.
And it is too much for some members of the Sikh community in Milwaukee as well. Not all members of the community are able to trust that the shootings were a part of God’s will with as much peace and grace as Santokh Singh. Valarie also shared stories of members of the community who continue to see images of their loved ones lying on the floor in pools of blood, who continue to hear the gunshots in their dreams, who cannot sleep at night. The trauma of the shootings strips away their sense of peace and violates their most sacred space.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26).
So what are we to do when we are unable to stay in chardi kala? When the pain and grief are simply too much, when we cannot honestly thank God for this supposed “gift” that he gives?
Well, we can do what Job does. Job expresses his anger, his frustration, his despair, and his pain to God. He does not give in to the temptation to beat himself up, to agree with the unhelpful suggestions of his friends that surely God must be punishing him for some sin he has committed. No, Job maintains his sense of integrity by insisting on his own innocence, and in questioning God’s justice in allowing innocent people to suffer.
But in all this, Job never curses God, as his wife suggests. He still acknowledges that God is in control, even if he doesn’t like it! He makes his complaints about how God is running the world known, and at the end of it all God actually affirms Job’s response over the response of Job’s friends, who support traditional wisdom in saying that God rewards those who are righteous and brings suffering upon those who are wicked. In the last chapter of the book of Job, in a passage you won’t see in the lectionary when we get to this section at the end of October, God scolds Job’s friends, saying, “My wrath is kindled against you, …for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).
Accepting God’s will and God’s sovereignty over our lives does not mean denying the feelings of frustration, grief, anger, and despair that well up within us when inexplicable suffering comes to us. With Job, we can say, “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), but still cry out in pain. With the Sikh community in Milwaukee, we can say, “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” but still acknowledge when the grief is too much to bear – and seek help from friends, family, and professional counselors to get us through. And we can be gentle with ourselves in that place of both/and, of faith and doubt, gratitude and despair, because the important part is that we stay in relationship with God – not that we say nice things about God or always like God and never question God – but that we are in authentic relationship with God – a God who knows something about the depths of inexplicable pain, whose desire to be in authentic relationship with us led him to death on a cross.
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
Job’s question is a poignant one, coming from a man who had experienced unspeakable loss. Our lectionary passage leaves out most of the first chapter of Job, which describes the loss of Job’s livestock and the death of his servants and all ten of his children. Then Job is stricken with a painful illness. Things are so bad that his wife comes to the conclusion it would be better to die than to continue to live with the suffering Job is experiencing, and encourages Job to curse God and die.
But Job refuses, continuing to accept God’s sovereignty over his life. “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), he says when he learns of the death of his children. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asks (Job 2:10), in response to his wife’s words of anger and despair.
This question could be the “topic sentence” of the entire Book of Job: Are human beings willing to receive the good at the hand of God and not to receive the bad? It is the question that Satan, or “the Accuser,” asks in the heavenly court. “Of course Job is faithful and upright,” he says to God, “It’s easy for people to be faithful and give praise to God when things are going well for them. But what about when things are tough? How much will they love you then?”
The entire “game” that the Accuser plays with Job is an experiment to answer that very question: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” Will Job continue to be in faithful relationship with God even when his comfortable life is stripped away from him?
Now, before we go any further, let me say a word about the disturbing opening of this story. What kind of God, you might ask, would agree to let all these calamities befall an innocent person just to win a “bet,” if you will, with an unruly angel? Does God also send death and destruction upon us intentionally, just to see if we’ll cave under the pressure? Are the suffering of our lives a result of God making a similar bargain with the Accuser?
In my understanding of God, the answers to those questions are “no” and “no.” It is helpful to understand that the Book of Job was never intended to describe actual events that happened to a real person. Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright describes the book of Job as the ancient equivalent of a “Dr. Seuss” story, a story meant to illustrate a particular question or topic through creative imagination. The story of Job describes a perfect man with a perfect family in a made up land (no one knows where “the land of Uz” is) with a made-up name (“Job” is not a Semitic or Hebrew name, or a name common to any of the surrounding cultures). This is the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of a story about the Whos down in Whoville. The description of Job is a kind of stereotype of perfection that does not exist completely in real life. But the author of the story posits the existence of this hypothetical “perfect” person to explore a significant theological question: Is it possible to remain faithful to God in the midst of unexplainable suffering, suffering which we have done nothing to deserve?
The story of Job is something like a parable, through which we are invited to consider our own lives of faith. Are we “fair-weather” friends of God, happy to praise him when things are going well, but quick to curse him when they are not? Are we like the seed in Jesus’s parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-15) that was sown on rock, who receive the Word with joy when we first hear it, but when troubles arise, we fall away?
Reading this passage from Job at this particular point in time, I cannot help but think of the response of the Sikh community in Wisconsin to the shootings at their place of worship two months ago. Despite enduring the horror of a violent attack during a worship service and losing six members of their community, the Sikh community has responded with love and compassion, continuing to be at prayer and to encourage one another to remain in chardi kala, a state of optimism and high spirits that is central to the Sikh faith. My friend Valarie Kaur, a third-generation Sikh American from California and a nationally-known interfaith activist, went to Milwaukee to be with the community in the days and weeks after the shootings. She gathered first-hand stories from the people there and began sharing them through op-ed pieces, blog entries, Facebook posts and tweets.
One of the most powerful stories she shared was that of Santokh Singh, a 50-year-old man from India who came to the U.S. to serve the community in Milwaukee as a granthi, a devotional singer who recites prayers from scripture in Sikh worship services. In the attack on the gurdwara in August, he survived two gunshot wounds to the stomach. In reflecting on the shooting, Santokh said, “I have no hate for the gunman. What happened was done by God. How can I wish ill upon the gunman if it is God’s will?”
“The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
In the face of unspeakable loss, the Sikh community in Wisconsin, like Job, has affirmed an acceptance of God’s sovereignty in their lives. “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” says a Sikh prayer. Turning to prayer for solace in the days and weeks after the shooting, Sikhs received the gut-wrenching pain of their loss as a gift from God. “One does not turn away a gift, or bury it, or rage against it, but receive it with an open heart,” Valarie wrote in an article for The Washington Post, describing the community’s theological response to the tragedy.
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God but not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
But Job’s acceptance of his fate and his poignant words of faith and trust are not the whole story. In this book of 42 chapters, Job’s strong statements of trust and acceptance of God’s will appear only in the first two chapters. From chapter three onwards, Job begins to lament his loss. He says it would be better if he had never been born, and question God’s justice at allowing such pain to come into his life.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me,” he says. “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26). This is a far cry from the calm acceptance of his fate and peaceful worship and blessing of God that he expressed when he first lost his children and livestock. After the loss has a chance to sink in more deeply, the raw pain seeps out, perhaps even against his will, since Job was a deeply pious man who most likely would have wanted to remain in chardi kala, as the Sikhs would put it, optimistic and faithful despite his sufferings. But the pain was too much.
And it is too much for some members of the Sikh community in Milwaukee as well. Not all members of the community are able to trust that the shootings were a part of God’s will with as much peace and grace as Santokh Singh. Valarie also shared stories of members of the community who continue to see images of their loved ones lying on the floor in pools of blood, who continue to hear the gunshots in their dreams, who cannot sleep at night. The trauma of the shootings strips away their sense of peace and violates their most sacred space.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26).
So what are we to do when we are unable to stay in chardi kala? When the pain and grief are simply too much, when we cannot honestly thank God for this supposed “gift” that he gives?
Well, we can do what Job does. Job expresses his anger, his frustration, his despair, and his pain to God. He does not give in to the temptation to beat himself up, to agree with the unhelpful suggestions of his friends that surely God must be punishing him for some sin he has committed. No, Job maintains his sense of integrity by insisting on his own innocence, and in questioning God’s justice in allowing innocent people to suffer.
But in all this, Job never curses God, as his wife suggests. He still acknowledges that God is in control, even if he doesn’t like it! He makes his complaints about how God is running the world known, and at the end of it all God actually affirms Job’s response over the response of Job’s friends, who support traditional wisdom in saying that God rewards those who are righteous and brings suffering upon those who are wicked. In the last chapter of the book of Job, in a passage you won’t see in the lectionary when we get to this section at the end of October, God scolds Job’s friends, saying, “My wrath is kindled against you, …for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).
Accepting God’s will and God’s sovereignty over our lives does not mean denying the feelings of frustration, grief, anger, and despair that well up within us when inexplicable suffering comes to us. With Job, we can say, “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), but still cry out in pain. With the Sikh community in Milwaukee, we can say, “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” but still acknowledge when the grief is too much to bear – and seek help from friends, family, and professional counselors to get us through. And we can be gentle with ourselves in that place of both/and, of faith and doubt, gratitude and despair, because the important part is that we stay in relationship with God – not that we say nice things about God or always like God and never question God – but that we are in authentic relationship with God – a God who knows something about the depths of inexplicable pain, whose desire to be in authentic relationship with us led him to death on a cross.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
On memoirs, old friends, and parenting
I always liked Stephanie and felt drawn to her -- she had a calming spirit about her and an amazingly sweet smile -- but we were never close friends... not even friends, really -- more like co-workers. I knew her on an acquaintance level. When graduation neared and I asked her what her plans were for the fall, she said she'd been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study Muslim understandings of Jesus in Damascus, Syria. "Wow, cool," I said, or something of the sort, and that was about it.
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| Stephanie |
So when I started to plan this trip, I got in touch with her. I told her I would be coming to Israel this summer and I'd love to reconnect with her. I asked her for advice on renting a cell phone and other practical considerations of my trip. And I planned to get together with her when I was in Jerusalem.
I'd been meaning to read her book for some time, but hadn't gotten around to it yet. So, before I left for the trip, I ordered a copy (along with my "spiritual tour guide" books) to take with me on the trip. The fact that her book was a memoir about time spent living in the Middle East made it seem especially appropriate to read as I traveled to Israel, and plus, I wanted to have read her book before I saw her in person so I'd be able to talk with her about it.
From the minute I picked it up, I was unable to put the book down. I couldn't sleep on the flight over, but that didn't bother me too much since it meant I got to read more of Stephanie's book. Memoirs are one of my favorite genres, and I've read tons of them, but this was the first time I'd read one written by someone I actually knew in real life.
It was an interesting experience, reading about many aspects of Stephanie's life and past that were intensely personal -- things I certainly hadn't known about her through our acquaintance-level relationship. It felt almost intrusive, in a way that it hadn't to read similarly personal things about people I didn't know at all. It was a weird dynamic between reading the book as a book (as I'd done with other memoirs) and reading the book as a source of information about someone I knew. It made me think a lot about my own desire to write a memoir, and what it would be like for my friends and family to read such a book, and what it would be like for me to know they were reading it. I'd be comfortable sharing my journey with complete strangers, but those in-between people who aren't quite friends but aren't strangers either, but who might buy my book because of that "oh, I know her!" factor -- would I really want them reading the details of my personal life and journey?
After I got to Israel, Stephanie and I kept playing phone tag/email tag as we tried to get in touch and schedule a time to meet while I was in Jerusalem. On Wednesday, June 1 (the day after I arrived in Jerusalem and went out exploring, not realizing it was Jerusalem Day), I had called Stephanie to touch base and she said she'd call me back after she talked to her husband about their schedule. I didn't hear from her later that afternoon or evening, but the next morning as I was out walking to meet up with Rachel and Kevin to go to the Dead Sea, I ran into her on the street!
I had just left the Old City via the Damascus Gate and was walking up Ha Nevi'im Street when I looked up and there was Stephanie, pushing a stroller and wearing a baby carrier.
"HEY!!!" she shouted at me across the square, at almost exactly the same instant that I noticed her.
"Hey!!" I echoed, rushing up to her. She embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks. I wasn't surprised, given that she's immersed herself in Arabic culture and married a French guy. "Wow, what are the chances that I'd just run into you like this??"
She was on her way to drop her younger son off at day care and then to spend the day with her older son, who had the day off of school. We chatted for a minute or two and then went on our ways. I walked away amazed at the smallness of the world -- halfway across the world from home, I just happen to run into someone I know!
I didn't get together with Stephanie until Sunday. We touched base after church and I met up with her in the Old City and walked back to her apartment with her, just outside the Damascus Gate. (I couldn't believe how close she lived to where I was staying in the Old City -- literally a 10 minute walk or less. (And Jerusalem's not a small place!))
As we walked, her 9-month-old son, Sebastian, stared up at me from the baby carrier on his mom's chest with huge, inquisitive eyes. I kept asking small-talk questions like, "So how old is he?" while Stephanie was distracted by more important matters, like stopping to give some money to a woman who was sitting on the side of the street, holding her young, handicapped son. A twinge of guilt went through me when I saw her stop. I'd noticed this woman sitting there before, holding her son, whose body was twisted at an abnormal angle, but had generally been avoiding the street beggars since I assumed I wouldn't be able to communicate with them -- and if they were calling out something, asking for help, I wouldn't even know that they were talking to me or what they were saying! Stephanie spoke to her in Arabic and smiled her sweet smile, blessing the woman with her presence and her generosity. The woman smiled in gratitude and spoke back in Arabic. I thought about the spiritual journey Stephanie went through during her year in Syria that she wrote about in her book, and how I could see the fruits of her deepened faith in her compassion for this woman.
Just a few steps down the street, another woman ran up to Stephanie and smiled and embraced her. "Merhaba!" Stephanie said, and they exchanged a few words in Arabic.
I was struck by how comfortable Stephanie seemed here, moving among the streets and interacting with the local people. She was clearly at ease, a stark contrast to the slightly-anxious tourist vibes I'm sure I was giving off in my wanderings. I was glad I was with her -- I felt like I "blended in" more -- and found myself envious of her ability to communicate with people in their native language.
We went back to her apartment, sitting in her fabulous living room, decorated in Arabic style with a large rug on the floor and cushions against the walls to sit on -- no couches or sofas. Thomasjohn and I had talked about arranging our living room that way and had even experimented with pillows on the floor and using small coffee table as dining tables, and I found myself thinking how much he'd love this set-up.
"So, if you read my book, I don't need to tell you anything about my life," Stephanie had joked as we walked through the Old City. "So what's up with you? You're married now, I saw?" We filled in the blanks of each other's lives, fleshing out the skeletal outlines we'd been able to gather from each other's Facebook pages.
Soon her husband Frédéric and her older son, Joseph (who is three), came home. They'd all been out to eat in the Old City after church, and then Frédéric had taken Joseph to get a hair cut. Joseph strutted around with pride, showing off his new "do" -- though Frédéric revealed that he'd cried the whole time, not wanting his hair cut -- until he saw the finished result, which he apparently loved.
Like my friends Naomi and Yinon in Tel Aviv, this was another bilingual family, Stephanie an American and Frédéric a Frenchman. I watched Frédéric speak to Joseph in French and Joseph respond in fluent French, and without batting an eye, turn to me and his mother and begin firing off rapid sentences in English. Joseph is a year older than Aya (Naomi and Yinon's daughter), so he was a bit further along in his bilingual language development, and it was fascinating to see.
Although when I'd first met Joseph on Thursday morning as his mom pushed him through the square in a stroller, he'd turned away and half-hidden his face when I said hi to him, today there was no trace of shyness in this kid! He was a ball of energy, jumping all over the living room and insisting that I "LOOK!!" at whatever it was he wanted to show me.
"No no, JoJo," Stephanie or Frédéric would say, using their pet name for him as they tried in vain to corral the unbridled three-year-old energy.
When I pulled out my map of Jerusalem to ask Stephanie and Frédéric about where something was, Joseph seized it and began to underline certain things and trace the various roads, very intent on showing me something. "Wow, thank you so much, Joseph," I said. "You're really helping me a lot." He smiled and continued to carefully mark out what was a mystery to any of us except him, talking to himself the whole time.
With both Stephanie and Frédéric and Naomi and Yinon, I was very impressed with how gentle they were in their parenting style. They never snapped at their kids or took the "you do what I say cause I'm the parent" kind of attitude that seems to be common in Southern parenting. They were kind and gentle, even in their discipline, and it seemed to work.
Even if Aya was throwing a mini-fit over something she wanted, Naomi would just calmly say, "No, Aya, this isn't for Aya. This is for adults," as she pulled the knife away from her two-year-old who screamed because she wanted to cut her own avocado! "Ok, thank you," Naomi would say calmly, smiling and just ignoring the temper tantrum, and very quickly Aya would calm down and return to normal functioning.
Stephanie and Frédéric were similar in the way they related to Joseph. They'd tell him "no," but they always explained the reasons why he couldn't do whatever it was he wanted to do, even though he was only three years old and even if he didn't ask why and they probably could have gotten away with simply barking "NO!" at him. Naomi did the same thing with Aya, explaining things to her as if she were an adult, not baby-talking at her and "dumbing things down."
It reminded me of the ways I'd seen my friend Jennifer Self and my sister Ashley interact with children -- treating them as people, as fellow humans, not using sub-human baby talk or voices similar to how you'd talk to a pet. I know I do the whole baby-talk, treating-them-like-a-pet thing in my interactions with children, and every time I see someone who doesn't, it makes me want to stop doing it myself. There is such a respect for children in the ways that these people approach them, and I want to be similarly respectful myself. Naomi and Yinon and Stephanie and Frédéric offered me a model of the kind of parents I hope Thomasjohn and I can be if we have children.
I'd been meaning to read her book for some time, but hadn't gotten around to it yet. So, before I left for the trip, I ordered a copy (along with my "spiritual tour guide" books) to take with me on the trip. The fact that her book was a memoir about time spent living in the Middle East made it seem especially appropriate to read as I traveled to Israel, and plus, I wanted to have read her book before I saw her in person so I'd be able to talk with her about it.
From the minute I picked it up, I was unable to put the book down. I couldn't sleep on the flight over, but that didn't bother me too much since it meant I got to read more of Stephanie's book. Memoirs are one of my favorite genres, and I've read tons of them, but this was the first time I'd read one written by someone I actually knew in real life.
It was an interesting experience, reading about many aspects of Stephanie's life and past that were intensely personal -- things I certainly hadn't known about her through our acquaintance-level relationship. It felt almost intrusive, in a way that it hadn't to read similarly personal things about people I didn't know at all. It was a weird dynamic between reading the book as a book (as I'd done with other memoirs) and reading the book as a source of information about someone I knew. It made me think a lot about my own desire to write a memoir, and what it would be like for my friends and family to read such a book, and what it would be like for me to know they were reading it. I'd be comfortable sharing my journey with complete strangers, but those in-between people who aren't quite friends but aren't strangers either, but who might buy my book because of that "oh, I know her!" factor -- would I really want them reading the details of my personal life and journey?
After I got to Israel, Stephanie and I kept playing phone tag/email tag as we tried to get in touch and schedule a time to meet while I was in Jerusalem. On Wednesday, June 1 (the day after I arrived in Jerusalem and went out exploring, not realizing it was Jerusalem Day), I had called Stephanie to touch base and she said she'd call me back after she talked to her husband about their schedule. I didn't hear from her later that afternoon or evening, but the next morning as I was out walking to meet up with Rachel and Kevin to go to the Dead Sea, I ran into her on the street!
I had just left the Old City via the Damascus Gate and was walking up Ha Nevi'im Street when I looked up and there was Stephanie, pushing a stroller and wearing a baby carrier.
"HEY!!!" she shouted at me across the square, at almost exactly the same instant that I noticed her.
"Hey!!" I echoed, rushing up to her. She embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks. I wasn't surprised, given that she's immersed herself in Arabic culture and married a French guy. "Wow, what are the chances that I'd just run into you like this??"
She was on her way to drop her younger son off at day care and then to spend the day with her older son, who had the day off of school. We chatted for a minute or two and then went on our ways. I walked away amazed at the smallness of the world -- halfway across the world from home, I just happen to run into someone I know!
I didn't get together with Stephanie until Sunday. We touched base after church and I met up with her in the Old City and walked back to her apartment with her, just outside the Damascus Gate. (I couldn't believe how close she lived to where I was staying in the Old City -- literally a 10 minute walk or less. (And Jerusalem's not a small place!))
 |
| Sebastian |
Just a few steps down the street, another woman ran up to Stephanie and smiled and embraced her. "Merhaba!" Stephanie said, and they exchanged a few words in Arabic.
I was struck by how comfortable Stephanie seemed here, moving among the streets and interacting with the local people. She was clearly at ease, a stark contrast to the slightly-anxious tourist vibes I'm sure I was giving off in my wanderings. I was glad I was with her -- I felt like I "blended in" more -- and found myself envious of her ability to communicate with people in their native language.
We went back to her apartment, sitting in her fabulous living room, decorated in Arabic style with a large rug on the floor and cushions against the walls to sit on -- no couches or sofas. Thomasjohn and I had talked about arranging our living room that way and had even experimented with pillows on the floor and using small coffee table as dining tables, and I found myself thinking how much he'd love this set-up.
"So, if you read my book, I don't need to tell you anything about my life," Stephanie had joked as we walked through the Old City. "So what's up with you? You're married now, I saw?" We filled in the blanks of each other's lives, fleshing out the skeletal outlines we'd been able to gather from each other's Facebook pages.
 |
| Joseph and Sebastian |
Like my friends Naomi and Yinon in Tel Aviv, this was another bilingual family, Stephanie an American and Frédéric a Frenchman. I watched Frédéric speak to Joseph in French and Joseph respond in fluent French, and without batting an eye, turn to me and his mother and begin firing off rapid sentences in English. Joseph is a year older than Aya (Naomi and Yinon's daughter), so he was a bit further along in his bilingual language development, and it was fascinating to see.
Although when I'd first met Joseph on Thursday morning as his mom pushed him through the square in a stroller, he'd turned away and half-hidden his face when I said hi to him, today there was no trace of shyness in this kid! He was a ball of energy, jumping all over the living room and insisting that I "LOOK!!" at whatever it was he wanted to show me.
"No no, JoJo," Stephanie or Frédéric would say, using their pet name for him as they tried in vain to corral the unbridled three-year-old energy.
When I pulled out my map of Jerusalem to ask Stephanie and Frédéric about where something was, Joseph seized it and began to underline certain things and trace the various roads, very intent on showing me something. "Wow, thank you so much, Joseph," I said. "You're really helping me a lot." He smiled and continued to carefully mark out what was a mystery to any of us except him, talking to himself the whole time.
 |
| Frédéric, a young Joseph, and Stephanie (pre-Sebastian days) |
Even if Aya was throwing a mini-fit over something she wanted, Naomi would just calmly say, "No, Aya, this isn't for Aya. This is for adults," as she pulled the knife away from her two-year-old who screamed because she wanted to cut her own avocado! "Ok, thank you," Naomi would say calmly, smiling and just ignoring the temper tantrum, and very quickly Aya would calm down and return to normal functioning.
 |
| Aya and Naomi |
It reminded me of the ways I'd seen my friend Jennifer Self and my sister Ashley interact with children -- treating them as people, as fellow humans, not using sub-human baby talk or voices similar to how you'd talk to a pet. I know I do the whole baby-talk, treating-them-like-a-pet thing in my interactions with children, and every time I see someone who doesn't, it makes me want to stop doing it myself. There is such a respect for children in the ways that these people approach them, and I want to be similarly respectful myself. Naomi and Yinon and Stephanie and Frédéric offered me a model of the kind of parents I hope Thomasjohn and I can be if we have children.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Haifa: Elijah's Cave
The organization and structure of the Baha'i gardens, both in the careful and meticulous landscaping and in the way visitors were managed, was a stark contrast to the somewhat chaotic site of Elijah's Cave in Haifa that I visited next.
First of all, there were no signs in English directly at the site of Elijah's cave; the woman at the hostel had warned me that it was "not obvious" where the entrance was. I saw several tour buses parked by the side of the road and crowds of Jewish people with yarmulkes walking down the mountain on an elevated pathway. "Well, that must be it," I thought. I found my way to an entrance to a walkway and made my way up the mountain, following the flow of people.
As I neared the top of the ramp, I heard loud Middle Eastern music playing (it wasn't clear if it was Hebrew or Arabic to me) and smelled food cooking. Suddenly I worried that I was in the wrong place; perhaps I was headed to a restaurant or some kind of park area where these folks were all having a big cook-out party! I cautiously continued up the last flight of stairs, and spotted a small plaque to the right of the gate that had an English translation: "Elijah's Cave," it said. "O-kaaaay," I thought, and headed on in.
The courtyard area indeed looked like it was a public picnic area, with kids running up and down and a large grill area with some kind of food smoking on it and lots of people sitting down eating at tables. I followed the stairs up to the next level and saw a large elaborate chair with Hebrew written all over it -- "Ah!" I thought, "This must be Elijah's chair -- the chair that is left empty at every Passover dinner with the expectations that the prophet might return." There were stations for lighting memorial candles, although I'm not sure for what, since everything was in Hebrew.
I followed the steps up to the entrance to the cave area, and saw a large room with a divider down the middle of it. "Women Side / Men Side" said the sign, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English -- and that was the extent that there was anything written in anything other than Hebrew in the entire place. There was a box of scarfs by the entrance, and since I'd forgotten to bring mine (it was in my backpack back at the hostel), I picked one up and put it on and entered the women's side.
The area where the actual cave space was was covered with a thick velvet cloth, with a Star of David on the front of it. I assumed this meant that it was off-limits, that people weren't allowed to go in there. I looked at the displays on the dividing walls, since there were many pictures, even though I couldn't read the descriptions. There were depictions of Elijah from various biblical stories, and against the wall where the cave was, several tablets with the tetragrammon -- the four consonants of the Name of God in Hebrew.
Off to the left side of the large room was a smaller nook with an area where there was a Torah scroll, with a curtain drawn in front of it as well. Women were going into that space and resting their hands and faces against the curtain, saying prayers. There were pieces of paper shoved into the cracks in the walls -- like at the Western Wall in Jerusalem -- representing prayers offered by the pilgrims who had visited here. There were also all kinds of scarves and hair pieces -- clips, rubber bands, etc -- tied to the metal wires in the ceiling of this cave area. I wasn't sure what the significance of that practice was, but clearly it was a "thing" that people did here.
I sat down in the Torah nook area to read the story of Elijah fighting the prophets of Ba'al from 1 Kings, along with the prayers and reflections in my Jewish pilgrimage guide. After a while, a young woman in an Israeli military uniform joined me, sitting on the rug facing the Torah area and reading her prayer book, rocking back and forth in the methodical way Jews do at prayer. On the other side of the dividing wall, a group of men were praying together, loudly, a leader shouting phrases in Hebrew punctuated by the group's vigorous "AMEN!!"s. In the background, the blasting music from the courtyard drifted in on top of it all.
As I sat, some new women walked into the larger room area, and I watched them walk up to the curtain that I had assumed was sacrosanct and untouchable and grab it and fling it back with all the hutzpah and casualness as if they were pushing past someone that was in their way in a shopping mall, and step right inside the cave. "Oh!" I thought. "I guess we CAN go in there after all!" I watched as a whole group of women came in, a few at a time, paying their respects to this place where Elijah was said to have stayed, some with deep reverence, others casually, with a plate of food in one hand even as they stepped inside the cave.
After the crowd cleared away, I went and stepped in the cave myself. It was just me and one another woman, who was leaning against the wall and praying with her Hebrew prayer book or Bible. As I placed my hand on the wall, I felt the same shiver of holiness that I had felt as I stood beside Baha'u'llah's grave in Akko.
I was struck by how opposite this was from the utter silence and stillness that the Baha'is were so careful to protect around the shrine of Baha'u'llah in Akko. In place of structured, beautifully manicured and landscaped gardens, there was dirt and grime and trash and the scent of food. Instead of silence, there was shouting prayers and throbbing music. The Baha'i site reminded me of the "frozen chosen" denominations of Christianity -- valuing silence and stillness and order and beauty -- and Elijah's Cave reminded me of the Pentecostal or more spirit-led denominations of Christianity.
In reflecting on one of my "guiding questions" for the trip -- "How do I experience God in the sacred spaces of other traditions?" -- I found that I experienced both places to be sacred, in their different ways. The structure and order and meticulous attention to detail were beautiful, but so was the chaos. Just as I am not satisfied with one kind of liturgy or experience of the Christian faith, I would not have wanted to have visited all sites like the Baha'i gardens or all sites like Elijah's Cave. I like both… I need both.
First of all, there were no signs in English directly at the site of Elijah's cave; the woman at the hostel had warned me that it was "not obvious" where the entrance was. I saw several tour buses parked by the side of the road and crowds of Jewish people with yarmulkes walking down the mountain on an elevated pathway. "Well, that must be it," I thought. I found my way to an entrance to a walkway and made my way up the mountain, following the flow of people.
As I neared the top of the ramp, I heard loud Middle Eastern music playing (it wasn't clear if it was Hebrew or Arabic to me) and smelled food cooking. Suddenly I worried that I was in the wrong place; perhaps I was headed to a restaurant or some kind of park area where these folks were all having a big cook-out party! I cautiously continued up the last flight of stairs, and spotted a small plaque to the right of the gate that had an English translation: "Elijah's Cave," it said. "O-kaaaay," I thought, and headed on in.
The courtyard area indeed looked like it was a public picnic area, with kids running up and down and a large grill area with some kind of food smoking on it and lots of people sitting down eating at tables. I followed the stairs up to the next level and saw a large elaborate chair with Hebrew written all over it -- "Ah!" I thought, "This must be Elijah's chair -- the chair that is left empty at every Passover dinner with the expectations that the prophet might return." There were stations for lighting memorial candles, although I'm not sure for what, since everything was in Hebrew.
I followed the steps up to the entrance to the cave area, and saw a large room with a divider down the middle of it. "Women Side / Men Side" said the sign, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English -- and that was the extent that there was anything written in anything other than Hebrew in the entire place. There was a box of scarfs by the entrance, and since I'd forgotten to bring mine (it was in my backpack back at the hostel), I picked one up and put it on and entered the women's side.
The area where the actual cave space was was covered with a thick velvet cloth, with a Star of David on the front of it. I assumed this meant that it was off-limits, that people weren't allowed to go in there. I looked at the displays on the dividing walls, since there were many pictures, even though I couldn't read the descriptions. There were depictions of Elijah from various biblical stories, and against the wall where the cave was, several tablets with the tetragrammon -- the four consonants of the Name of God in Hebrew.
Off to the left side of the large room was a smaller nook with an area where there was a Torah scroll, with a curtain drawn in front of it as well. Women were going into that space and resting their hands and faces against the curtain, saying prayers. There were pieces of paper shoved into the cracks in the walls -- like at the Western Wall in Jerusalem -- representing prayers offered by the pilgrims who had visited here. There were also all kinds of scarves and hair pieces -- clips, rubber bands, etc -- tied to the metal wires in the ceiling of this cave area. I wasn't sure what the significance of that practice was, but clearly it was a "thing" that people did here.
I sat down in the Torah nook area to read the story of Elijah fighting the prophets of Ba'al from 1 Kings, along with the prayers and reflections in my Jewish pilgrimage guide. After a while, a young woman in an Israeli military uniform joined me, sitting on the rug facing the Torah area and reading her prayer book, rocking back and forth in the methodical way Jews do at prayer. On the other side of the dividing wall, a group of men were praying together, loudly, a leader shouting phrases in Hebrew punctuated by the group's vigorous "AMEN!!"s. In the background, the blasting music from the courtyard drifted in on top of it all.
As I sat, some new women walked into the larger room area, and I watched them walk up to the curtain that I had assumed was sacrosanct and untouchable and grab it and fling it back with all the hutzpah and casualness as if they were pushing past someone that was in their way in a shopping mall, and step right inside the cave. "Oh!" I thought. "I guess we CAN go in there after all!" I watched as a whole group of women came in, a few at a time, paying their respects to this place where Elijah was said to have stayed, some with deep reverence, others casually, with a plate of food in one hand even as they stepped inside the cave.
After the crowd cleared away, I went and stepped in the cave myself. It was just me and one another woman, who was leaning against the wall and praying with her Hebrew prayer book or Bible. As I placed my hand on the wall, I felt the same shiver of holiness that I had felt as I stood beside Baha'u'llah's grave in Akko.
I was struck by how opposite this was from the utter silence and stillness that the Baha'is were so careful to protect around the shrine of Baha'u'llah in Akko. In place of structured, beautifully manicured and landscaped gardens, there was dirt and grime and trash and the scent of food. Instead of silence, there was shouting prayers and throbbing music. The Baha'i site reminded me of the "frozen chosen" denominations of Christianity -- valuing silence and stillness and order and beauty -- and Elijah's Cave reminded me of the Pentecostal or more spirit-led denominations of Christianity.
In reflecting on one of my "guiding questions" for the trip -- "How do I experience God in the sacred spaces of other traditions?" -- I found that I experienced both places to be sacred, in their different ways. The structure and order and meticulous attention to detail were beautiful, but so was the chaos. Just as I am not satisfied with one kind of liturgy or experience of the Christian faith, I would not have wanted to have visited all sites like the Baha'i gardens or all sites like Elijah's Cave. I like both… I need both.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Preparation
Today was filled with preparations for my upcoming trip. I took a day-long trip to Nashville so I could run errands, get my International Driver's Permit (yes, I'm going to rent a car -- just during the time I'm in the Sea of Galilee area, though, where public transportation is less accessible), and meet with my spiritual director.
In my spiritual direction session, I was saying how I wished I had done a better job of preparing for this journey. Yesterday, I ordered a few books from Amazon that I had first looked at back in February but then forgotten about. One of them, called Israel: A Spiritual Travel Guide: A Companion for the Modern Jewish Pilgrim, is written by Lawrence Hoffman (who is a rabbi), and recommends taking three weeks to prepare for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the three-week motif borrowing from ancient rabbinic wisdom about preparing for Passover (17).* The rabbi offers two ways of moving through his eighteen reflections -- one each day for three weeks, or six reflections on each of the three Sabbaths leading up to the pilgrimage. As I read the rabbi's words, I felt a twinge of guilt:
"Whether you cover one reading a day or six on each Shabbat, the main thing is to take three weeks to go through them all. Do not cram the night before you leave." (17)
Gulp. This book will arrive on my doorstep tomorrow, May 18. (I'm able to quote from it now by using Amazon's "Look Inside!" feature.) I leave May 19. What was this about not cramming the night before you leave? Whoops. Sorry, Rabbi Hoffman.
My spiritual director asked me what it would look like to be "spiritually prepared" for such a journey -- i.e., what do I wish I had done in the weeks preceding this trip?
My answer was that I wish I had read and meditated on more Scripture, and kept more silence in order to open myself to whatever stirrings within may be communicating God's word to me at this particular moment. I've done a pretty good job of the physical and logistical "preparations" -- hence my frantic day of errands today -- but I have neglected the spiritual preparations.
In the course of our meeting, my spiritual director offered that she thought it might be a good practice for me to remember to be still during this pilgrimage. My mind (and my mouth!) tends to run a million miles an hour at times, and slowing down has always been an important spiritual discipline for me. During my discernment year in Nebraska (2006-07), I discovered the immense spiritual value that silent retreats have for me. I made it a goal to spend one full day in silence each month. I did that for the rest of my time in Nebraska, but once I moved to Atlanta I never recovered the practice and I haven't since then.
Lately I've been allowing myself to go months without a day of silence, relying only on the seminary's required "Quiet Days" twice a year to give me space for silence -- and they aren't really quiet days anyway, considering that at least half the time is spent listening to a speaker. My idea of a quiet day is that NOBODY talks, all day. I don't talk to anyone and I'm not talked to either. I need the intentional stoppage of the constant informational input in order to be still long enough to listen to God. That's not something I can do in one hour of silence between lectures. I need a good eight hours or more before my mind really starts to quiet down.
I've intentionally designated several days during the three weeks to be silent days. After my meeting today, I think I'll give a bit more attention to those days.
* Numbers in parentheses refer to the page number in the aforementioned book where the material comes from.
In my spiritual direction session, I was saying how I wished I had done a better job of preparing for this journey. Yesterday, I ordered a few books from Amazon that I had first looked at back in February but then forgotten about. One of them, called Israel: A Spiritual Travel Guide: A Companion for the Modern Jewish Pilgrim, is written by Lawrence Hoffman (who is a rabbi), and recommends taking three weeks to prepare for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the three-week motif borrowing from ancient rabbinic wisdom about preparing for Passover (17).* The rabbi offers two ways of moving through his eighteen reflections -- one each day for three weeks, or six reflections on each of the three Sabbaths leading up to the pilgrimage. As I read the rabbi's words, I felt a twinge of guilt:
"Whether you cover one reading a day or six on each Shabbat, the main thing is to take three weeks to go through them all. Do not cram the night before you leave." (17)
Gulp. This book will arrive on my doorstep tomorrow, May 18. (I'm able to quote from it now by using Amazon's "Look Inside!" feature.) I leave May 19. What was this about not cramming the night before you leave? Whoops. Sorry, Rabbi Hoffman.
My spiritual director asked me what it would look like to be "spiritually prepared" for such a journey -- i.e., what do I wish I had done in the weeks preceding this trip?
My answer was that I wish I had read and meditated on more Scripture, and kept more silence in order to open myself to whatever stirrings within may be communicating God's word to me at this particular moment. I've done a pretty good job of the physical and logistical "preparations" -- hence my frantic day of errands today -- but I have neglected the spiritual preparations.
In the course of our meeting, my spiritual director offered that she thought it might be a good practice for me to remember to be still during this pilgrimage. My mind (and my mouth!) tends to run a million miles an hour at times, and slowing down has always been an important spiritual discipline for me. During my discernment year in Nebraska (2006-07), I discovered the immense spiritual value that silent retreats have for me. I made it a goal to spend one full day in silence each month. I did that for the rest of my time in Nebraska, but once I moved to Atlanta I never recovered the practice and I haven't since then.
Lately I've been allowing myself to go months without a day of silence, relying only on the seminary's required "Quiet Days" twice a year to give me space for silence -- and they aren't really quiet days anyway, considering that at least half the time is spent listening to a speaker. My idea of a quiet day is that NOBODY talks, all day. I don't talk to anyone and I'm not talked to either. I need the intentional stoppage of the constant informational input in order to be still long enough to listen to God. That's not something I can do in one hour of silence between lectures. I need a good eight hours or more before my mind really starts to quiet down.
I've intentionally designated several days during the three weeks to be silent days. After my meeting today, I think I'll give a bit more attention to those days.
The Kabbalists [Jewish mystics] begin their prayers by saying, 'Hin'ni mukhan um'zuman' -- 'Here I am, ready and prepared.' But why both 'ready' and 'prepared'? Why the redundancy? 'Ready' means outfitted physically -- prayer book in hand, dressed correctly. 'Prepared' means outfitted within, like an athlete or musician who knows that running shoes and tuned violin strings are only half of what goes into a great performance. The other half is kavvanah [literally, "directed intention," a rabbinic term used to describe mental devotion in prayer.] .
--Lawrence Hoffman, Israel: A Spiritual Travel Guide (18)
* Numbers in parentheses refer to the page number in the aforementioned book where the material comes from.
Friday, April 15, 2011
House of All Souls, Chattanooga
On Friday, April 15, our urban ministry class visited the House of All Souls, a permanent residence home for disabled, chronically homeless men. The house is maintained by the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, where we visited earlier in the semester, and Brother Ron Fender, Episcopal monk, is the house manager. He lives with the men at the House of All Souls.
The idea for the House of All Souls came when Brother Ron was living at St. Matthew's shelter in downtown Chattanooga. During his four years of residency there, he observed that many of the men who lived in the shelter would do well while at St. Matthew's and while in the treatment program there, but as soon as they got out of the shelter and got their own places, they'd wind up back on the streets again.
These men were used to living in community, Brother Ron observed, and an empty apartment with no furnishings, no pots and pans, no toilet paper, no basic essentials at all -- was not an answer to their needs. Sure, it might give them a roof over their heads to call their own, but as one of the men at St. Matthew's once said to Brother Ron, "A home is not four walls and a ceiling: that is a cell."
So, Brother Ron had the idea that he could start a communal living home for formerly homeless men. As a monastic, he believes strongly in the practice of living in community, but his religious order does not have a religious house where the monks live: they live all over the country in their own homes; some of them are even married. (The Brotherhood of St. Gregory, Brother Ron's order, is part of the "new monasticism," which challenged and changed traditional monastic practices such as living in cloistered communities and being celibate and single.) So why not create an intentional community living situation for these men who desperately needed community?
The Community Kitchen partnered with Rosewood Supportive Services (an organization that had built group homes for disabled and mentally ill people) to build the House of All Souls, which opened a little over a year ago, in March 2010. The house provides permanent housing for up to eight men who are disabled and have been chronically homeless. Right now, Brother Ron said, they have six men living in the house. We met one of the residents, Phillip, who is autistic and told us about how he had lived on the streets and in substandard tenement housing in downtown Chattanooga, until he "left that dump to come live here with Brother Ron," he said, with a big grin on his face.
The house has a library and a chapel upstairs, bedrooms converted into alternative use space. The library has posters of Jack Kerouac and Bobby Kennedy and Tennessee Williams on the walls, and includes sitting chairs and bunches of books and magazines. The walls of the Brandenberg Chapel (named after a homeless man who helped Brother Ron dream up the idea of the House of All Souls) are painted a deep green, and it houses an altar, two pews, an upright piano, and a lectern on which the daily lectionary readings were placed. The altar (pictured at left) was built by two members of the class of 2010 at Sewanee's School of Theology (the altar's design echoes the design of the altar in the seminary chapel), and was given to the house as the class of 2010's senior gift.
Brother Ron said that he prays the Daily Office in the chapel each day, but that the members of the house do not have any regular, corporate prayer services there. "A lot of people on the streets have been hurt badly by religion," Brother Ron said, "so they often won't come to corporate worship services. But the men do spend a lot of time in the chapel, individually."
I was very much impressed with the beauty of the home, situated in a lush, green thicket just off a main street in Chattanooga, with a nice-sized yard, a screened-in back porch, and beautiful rooms painted deep reds, cool greens, and neutral beiges. The living room was warm and cozy, and very clean and tidy. It was certainly not what I was expecting: when I'd heard that Brother Ron lived with some of the formerly homeless men from the Kitchen, I'd assumed it would be in a small, cinder-block, grungy, shelter-like environment. What a wonderful surprise to find this gorgeous house, providing a true home for these men, not just the "cell" of four walls and a ceiling.
All the same, though, Brother Ron shared with us that they have already had several men move out of the house, in the little over a year it's been in operation. Those that leave often cite "the happiness" as a reason why they can't stand to live there. One man who decided to leave told Brother Ron that Christmas has been the breaking point for him: "I just couldn't stand all that happiness," he said. Brother Ron explained how many of these men have been so bitter and angry and numb for so long that they simply do not know how to adjust to being happy.. and are afraid to give up their bitterness and anger because it seems to be so much a part of their identity. One man who Brother Ron was trying to convince to stay in the home refused, shouting at him, "I'm NOT going to be happy! You can't MAKE me be happy!!"
I was reminded of a scene from the film Peaceful Warrior, in which Dan (the main character) is struggling with his alter ego, the side of him that holds on to fear, anger, bitterness. In a dramatic visualization of the psychological drama he is undergoing, Dan is on top of a large tower, wrestling with his alter ego. Finally, the alter ego falls over the side, but is still holding on to Dan's hands.
"YOU CAN'T LET ME GO," the alter ego screams, its face contorting ghoulishly. "DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO YOU ARE WITHOUT ME?!?!?"
"No," the real Dan says calmly, but lets go anyway, plunging the alter ego to its death, then wakes up, shaking and shivering and utterly disoriented. But it is the beginning of a rebirth.
It is my prayer that all those angry souls out there who do not know how to be happy could release that alter ego and begin to know their true selves, however scary or how far of a fall it may seem to be.
The idea for the House of All Souls came when Brother Ron was living at St. Matthew's shelter in downtown Chattanooga. During his four years of residency there, he observed that many of the men who lived in the shelter would do well while at St. Matthew's and while in the treatment program there, but as soon as they got out of the shelter and got their own places, they'd wind up back on the streets again.
These men were used to living in community, Brother Ron observed, and an empty apartment with no furnishings, no pots and pans, no toilet paper, no basic essentials at all -- was not an answer to their needs. Sure, it might give them a roof over their heads to call their own, but as one of the men at St. Matthew's once said to Brother Ron, "A home is not four walls and a ceiling: that is a cell."
The Community Kitchen partnered with Rosewood Supportive Services (an organization that had built group homes for disabled and mentally ill people) to build the House of All Souls, which opened a little over a year ago, in March 2010. The house provides permanent housing for up to eight men who are disabled and have been chronically homeless. Right now, Brother Ron said, they have six men living in the house. We met one of the residents, Phillip, who is autistic and told us about how he had lived on the streets and in substandard tenement housing in downtown Chattanooga, until he "left that dump to come live here with Brother Ron," he said, with a big grin on his face.
Brother Ron said that he prays the Daily Office in the chapel each day, but that the members of the house do not have any regular, corporate prayer services there. "A lot of people on the streets have been hurt badly by religion," Brother Ron said, "so they often won't come to corporate worship services. But the men do spend a lot of time in the chapel, individually."
I was very much impressed with the beauty of the home, situated in a lush, green thicket just off a main street in Chattanooga, with a nice-sized yard, a screened-in back porch, and beautiful rooms painted deep reds, cool greens, and neutral beiges. The living room was warm and cozy, and very clean and tidy. It was certainly not what I was expecting: when I'd heard that Brother Ron lived with some of the formerly homeless men from the Kitchen, I'd assumed it would be in a small, cinder-block, grungy, shelter-like environment. What a wonderful surprise to find this gorgeous house, providing a true home for these men, not just the "cell" of four walls and a ceiling.
All the same, though, Brother Ron shared with us that they have already had several men move out of the house, in the little over a year it's been in operation. Those that leave often cite "the happiness" as a reason why they can't stand to live there. One man who decided to leave told Brother Ron that Christmas has been the breaking point for him: "I just couldn't stand all that happiness," he said. Brother Ron explained how many of these men have been so bitter and angry and numb for so long that they simply do not know how to adjust to being happy.. and are afraid to give up their bitterness and anger because it seems to be so much a part of their identity. One man who Brother Ron was trying to convince to stay in the home refused, shouting at him, "I'm NOT going to be happy! You can't MAKE me be happy!!"
I was reminded of a scene from the film Peaceful Warrior, in which Dan (the main character) is struggling with his alter ego, the side of him that holds on to fear, anger, bitterness. In a dramatic visualization of the psychological drama he is undergoing, Dan is on top of a large tower, wrestling with his alter ego. Finally, the alter ego falls over the side, but is still holding on to Dan's hands.
"YOU CAN'T LET ME GO," the alter ego screams, its face contorting ghoulishly. "DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO YOU ARE WITHOUT ME?!?!?"
"No," the real Dan says calmly, but lets go anyway, plunging the alter ego to its death, then wakes up, shaking and shivering and utterly disoriented. But it is the beginning of a rebirth.
It is my prayer that all those angry souls out there who do not know how to be happy could release that alter ego and begin to know their true selves, however scary or how far of a fall it may seem to be.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Planet Altered, Chattanooga
Today our urban ministry class visited two locations in Chattanooga, Planet Altered and the H*Art Gallery. Planet Altered is a self-defined "community creative arts center" that offers a fair-trade gift shop, an art gallery, and a community space room dedicated to art classes and, on Saturday afternoons, a non-traditional, non-denominational, artistically-guided Christian worship service. The H*Art Gallery is a gallery that exhibits art created by homeless people.
At Planet Altered, we met with founder Linda Sines, who said she felt led by God to establish this space for art and worship in the middle of Chattanooga. Although the driving force behind her establishment of the center is her Christian faith, she told us that most of the community doesn't even know that the center is Christian-based -- intentionally. Her goal is to reach out to "non-traditional" church-goers, and so she keeps the overt Christian imagery and language to a minimum -- billing herself instead as a "community center." The back room hosts art workshops and a program called Cafe Grants, a community gathering and soup dinner where artists are given an opportunity to talk about their art (painting, singing, etc) to an audience of 35 people from the community who each pay $10 for the evening, and the community votes on which artist to give the $350 from the evening to. Planet Altered hosts these gatherings once a month for five months (from October to February). But on Saturday afternoons, it hosts a worship service.
But as Linda will tell you, the worship doesn't look like your traditional church service. The main focus of the service is creating "worship art," communal art projects that the gathered community works on together. There are some readings from the Bible, but no set liturgy, and no music.
"We don't use music," Linda explained, "because people tend to think of music as 'doing the worship' for them. They go and hear a beautiful choir sing some music in a church, and they think that's worship. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to see what else could do the worship."
She showed us examples of some of the art they'd created in worship: three mask-like faces hanging above the coffee makers, painted in brilliant colors, that had been created the Sunday after Katrina, as a meditation on the passage from 1 Kings 19 when Elijah encounters God at Mt. Horeb (God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the "still, small voice" -- or, more accurately translated, the "sound of sheer silence."). Or the rose created from coffee filters, emerging from a charred, burnt heart. (The group didn't believe the rose was truly made of coffee filters until I got up and looked closely at it and reported back that indeed, it was made of coffee filters.)
Linda kept using words like "experiment" and "facilitate" to describe the way she led worship, and I watched the faces of my seminary colleagues grow somewhat puzzled.
"But, so, do you have, like, a liturgy?" someone asked, trying to figure out how someone could possibly lead worship without a set structure and ritual.
"No," Linda said. "It's different every week. There's always the component of scripture reading, and an art project, and some kind of interaction with the community, and sharing of how God is moving in everyone's lives. But I don't plan the worship, per se. Sometimes I show up and I'm not sure what's going to happen. I think we get so caught up with planning in churches sometimes that we don't leave room for the Holy Spirit to do its work."
I looked around and noted blank or hesitant looks from many of my colleagues.
"So how do people know about the service?" someone else asked. Linda explained that it was largely by word of mouth, and that she did not advertise or list the service in any newspapers.
"But... why wouldn't you want to advertise? Why wouldn't you want people to know what you're doing? How are people going to know about it?" someone asked, looking consternated.
"God brings people here as they need to find it," Linda said. "We're not about trying to promote ourselves, but just about seeing where the Holy Spirit guides us."
Finally someone asked the elephant-in-the-room question: what the heck was this lady's religious background or affiliation? (She surely wasn't Episcopalian, seemed to be the underlying assumption.)
Linda told us that she was raised by missionary parents, in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but that she considers herself a non-denominational Christian and she doesn't like the "arrogance" that is often manifested between different denominations.
I could almost hear a collective "hmmm" from the gathered group of future Episcopal priests. At a coffee shop later, some of my colleagues said that what Linda was doing was great for a sort of alternative space like she had, but it would "never work for Sunday morning."
I wonder about that, though. Why wouldn't it? Just because "we've always done it" this other way? Maybe it would work for Sunday morning for some people -- for people who aren't going to the traditional Sunday morning services we continue to have as an homage to the past?
Our class will be going back to Planet Altered later in the term to actually experience one of Linda's Saturday worship experiences. Unfortunately, that's the day I'll be running my half-marathon in Nashville, so I'll miss the group's reactions to whatever they experience. I'm hoping I'll be able to go back on another Saturday to experience it myself.
Hearing Linda talk reminded me of my experience with a Monday night interfaith devotional gathering hosted by a group of local Baha'is in Decatur, Ga. That gathering was an intentional sacred space where there was no agenda, but an open time of sharing scripture, song, and story from our various traditions. In many ways, it felt more holy and Spirit-filled than anything I'd experienced in an Episcopal liturgy -- with the exception of maybe a few moments at St. James's in Cambridge (my first Episcopal parish). I was reminded of how much I appreciate these kind of alternative spaces for worship and how boring and stifling I can find traditional, repetitive liturgy (in fact, it was for that reason that I left the Lutheran Church in which I was raised -- much of the worship there felt like empty ritual to me). Although I do feel a certain sense of "at home-ness" in the Episcopal Church, this experience of encountering someone doing something different and some of the obvious uncomfortability or uncertainty of my (future) priestly colleagues reminded me of just how "not at home" I can feel in this tradition as well.
At Planet Altered, we met with founder Linda Sines, who said she felt led by God to establish this space for art and worship in the middle of Chattanooga. Although the driving force behind her establishment of the center is her Christian faith, she told us that most of the community doesn't even know that the center is Christian-based -- intentionally. Her goal is to reach out to "non-traditional" church-goers, and so she keeps the overt Christian imagery and language to a minimum -- billing herself instead as a "community center." The back room hosts art workshops and a program called Cafe Grants, a community gathering and soup dinner where artists are given an opportunity to talk about their art (painting, singing, etc) to an audience of 35 people from the community who each pay $10 for the evening, and the community votes on which artist to give the $350 from the evening to. Planet Altered hosts these gatherings once a month for five months (from October to February). But on Saturday afternoons, it hosts a worship service.
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| The fair-trade store in the front of Planet Altered. |
But as Linda will tell you, the worship doesn't look like your traditional church service. The main focus of the service is creating "worship art," communal art projects that the gathered community works on together. There are some readings from the Bible, but no set liturgy, and no music.
"We don't use music," Linda explained, "because people tend to think of music as 'doing the worship' for them. They go and hear a beautiful choir sing some music in a church, and they think that's worship. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to see what else could do the worship."
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| Linda talking to members of our class in the "back room" space. |
She showed us examples of some of the art they'd created in worship: three mask-like faces hanging above the coffee makers, painted in brilliant colors, that had been created the Sunday after Katrina, as a meditation on the passage from 1 Kings 19 when Elijah encounters God at Mt. Horeb (God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the "still, small voice" -- or, more accurately translated, the "sound of sheer silence."). Or the rose created from coffee filters, emerging from a charred, burnt heart. (The group didn't believe the rose was truly made of coffee filters until I got up and looked closely at it and reported back that indeed, it was made of coffee filters.)
"But, so, do you have, like, a liturgy?" someone asked, trying to figure out how someone could possibly lead worship without a set structure and ritual.
"No," Linda said. "It's different every week. There's always the component of scripture reading, and an art project, and some kind of interaction with the community, and sharing of how God is moving in everyone's lives. But I don't plan the worship, per se. Sometimes I show up and I'm not sure what's going to happen. I think we get so caught up with planning in churches sometimes that we don't leave room for the Holy Spirit to do its work."
I looked around and noted blank or hesitant looks from many of my colleagues.
"So how do people know about the service?" someone else asked. Linda explained that it was largely by word of mouth, and that she did not advertise or list the service in any newspapers.
"But... why wouldn't you want to advertise? Why wouldn't you want people to know what you're doing? How are people going to know about it?" someone asked, looking consternated.
"God brings people here as they need to find it," Linda said. "We're not about trying to promote ourselves, but just about seeing where the Holy Spirit guides us."
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| Art supplies storage above the large sink in the "back room." |
Finally someone asked the elephant-in-the-room question: what the heck was this lady's religious background or affiliation? (She surely wasn't Episcopalian, seemed to be the underlying assumption.)
Linda told us that she was raised by missionary parents, in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but that she considers herself a non-denominational Christian and she doesn't like the "arrogance" that is often manifested between different denominations.
I could almost hear a collective "hmmm" from the gathered group of future Episcopal priests. At a coffee shop later, some of my colleagues said that what Linda was doing was great for a sort of alternative space like she had, but it would "never work for Sunday morning."
Our class will be going back to Planet Altered later in the term to actually experience one of Linda's Saturday worship experiences. Unfortunately, that's the day I'll be running my half-marathon in Nashville, so I'll miss the group's reactions to whatever they experience. I'm hoping I'll be able to go back on another Saturday to experience it myself.
Hearing Linda talk reminded me of my experience with a Monday night interfaith devotional gathering hosted by a group of local Baha'is in Decatur, Ga. That gathering was an intentional sacred space where there was no agenda, but an open time of sharing scripture, song, and story from our various traditions. In many ways, it felt more holy and Spirit-filled than anything I'd experienced in an Episcopal liturgy -- with the exception of maybe a few moments at St. James's in Cambridge (my first Episcopal parish). I was reminded of how much I appreciate these kind of alternative spaces for worship and how boring and stifling I can find traditional, repetitive liturgy (in fact, it was for that reason that I left the Lutheran Church in which I was raised -- much of the worship there felt like empty ritual to me). Although I do feel a certain sense of "at home-ness" in the Episcopal Church, this experience of encountering someone doing something different and some of the obvious uncomfortability or uncertainty of my (future) priestly colleagues reminded me of just how "not at home" I can feel in this tradition as well.
*Disclaimer: All "quotations" of people in this blog post are re-created after the fact from my (rusty) memory and are not meant to be taken literally as the EXACT words these people spoke. And my apologies to any of my colleagues whose expressions I may have misread during this class... this reflection may be more about my projections than anything else!
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
A confession
In the spirit of the season of Lent, I have a confession to make.
I have never really had a sense of God's abiding presence in my life.
Sure, I get flashes of insight from time to time; I've heard a "still, small voice" within that has guided me when I've prayed for discernment in my life; and there are moments when I truly feel a sense of God's presence: when I'm singing with a group of people and we finally hit that note at just the right pitch and in just the right tempo and chillbumps run down my spine; when I'm walking through the woods and I feel the wind at my back or my eyes are opened to new life sprouting forth from the earth; when a moment of deep pain turns into a moment of solidarity between fellow human beings on this planet. But I don't walk around on a daily basis feeling like God is right there with me, that God is my closest friend.
In college, I had a roommate named Susan who had a sense of God's abiding presence in her life. I could tell this just by looking at her and observing her on a daily basis. Each morning, she would wake up and read her Bible, and just the way she opened the book and fingered the pages exuded such love and devotion that I could tell that she was enraptured in a conversation with her Lord. Whenever something was really troubling me, I could go to her and ask her to pray for me, and in the deep sincerity in her voice I could hear her connection with God. When I asked her to pray for me, I knew she would do it. She was a true intercessor.
During my college years at Furman University, I was a part of some on-campus religious groups that I would characterize as "Evangelical." There were many people in these groups who had that same aura about them that Susan did. In fact, it was precisely that that drew me to them. I knew they had something I didn't, and I wanted it.
But I never got it. In fact, my feelings that I was lacking something in the spiritual department were a big part of why I had never even considered that I could be called to ordained ministry until others started to suggest it to me during my time at Harvard Divinity School (I'd gone there not to pursue ordained ministry, but with thoughts of being a religion reporter for a newspaper or a documentary filmmaker, or a high school teacher of religious studies). Compared with these people who seemed to be so in touch with God, I felt I wasn't a "good enough Christian." Certainly I could never be a leader in the faith!
Eventually I drifted away from the Evangelical communities, largely because I felt some of their views, both theologically and politically, did not jive with my understanding of who God is from the Scriptures. (Isn't that the age-old story of schism in the church??) To use the words of Diana L. Eck, who became my professor at Harvard Divinity School and my boss at The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, I did not feel I could live with "intellectual and personal honesty" within those communities.
Although I drifted away from many of the friends I'd made during those years, Susan and I remained close. Many years later, I asked her about this sense of God's abiding presence that she had. She responded that when she was growing up, she was the "odd one out" in school since she was a Charismatic and not a "normal" (for her hometown) Methodist or Baptist. Many of her friends did not understand or approve of some of her church's practices, like speaking in tongues. So Susan couldn't rely on a sense of "normalcy" or "givenness" in terms of her understanding of God. She had to turn to God as a personal presence. She talked to God and sat with God and was comforted by God. God became her friend, an "ever-present help in trouble."
Yesterday, I had a meeting with my spiritual director in which I explained to her the struggles I have had over the years with maintaining any kind of regular prayer life, and with my sense of a lack of God's abiding presence in my life. My spiritual director responded by telling me I should talk to God more as if God was my friend. "You develop a relationship with another person by spending time with them," she said. "You have to do the same with God."
As I listened to her, I was struck by how similar this advice was to what I had heard in the Evangelical communities, and realized how, despite some of our political and theological differences, we are really not so different as Christians. The bottom line is the same -- to get to know God, spend time with God. Spend time reading Scripture. Spend time in prayer.
In some ways, this similarity made me a bit uncomfortable. Here again, I was confronted with my lack of a real, deep, two-way relationship with God. I can hide this better in the Episcopal Church than I could in the non-denominational, Evangelical communities, because most Episcopalians don't walk around talking about the time they spent talking with Jesus this morning, but here it was, all the same.
To cover up for my lack of a sense of God's abiding presence, I had begun to scoff at people who said they had one -- especially if they used the "friendship" language. "Jesus is not your FRIEND," I would think. "He's GOD -- transcendent, majestic, etc." I laughed condescendingly at the lyrics to one of my favorite songwriter's takes on the Lord's Prayer -- "lead us not into temptation / and deliver us from those who think they're You," she sings. One of the verses pleads to God to "deliver us from the politicians / who drop your name in every speech / as if they're your best friend from high school / as if they practice what they preach!" The song is indeed very clever, and I think makes a good point -- but a lot of the reason I identified with that verse was the bit about "as if they're your best friend from high school." "Hummph. Please! Right!" I'd say condescendingly, thinking about "those people" who say God is their "best friend" and how "silly" that is.
But then I found myself in an Episcopal priest's office, confessing my lack of sense of God's presence, and she was telling me to think of God as my friend.
Um.... whoops. As usual, God was serving me up a nice dose of humble pie. Why does God have to be so good at that???
When I explained my background, a lot of what I have just shared here, my spiritual director backed away from the "friend" word. "If that bring up bad memories for you, don't think in terms of that language. Find an image or a metaphor that works for you."
So this is my task this Lent. How can I develop a deeper sense of God's abiding presence? How can I spend more time with God? How can I just "be" with God, have a conversation with God? I'm exploring ways that this might work for me. I hope to be able to share some positive results. Your prayers would be appreciated.
I have never really had a sense of God's abiding presence in my life.
Sure, I get flashes of insight from time to time; I've heard a "still, small voice" within that has guided me when I've prayed for discernment in my life; and there are moments when I truly feel a sense of God's presence: when I'm singing with a group of people and we finally hit that note at just the right pitch and in just the right tempo and chillbumps run down my spine; when I'm walking through the woods and I feel the wind at my back or my eyes are opened to new life sprouting forth from the earth; when a moment of deep pain turns into a moment of solidarity between fellow human beings on this planet. But I don't walk around on a daily basis feeling like God is right there with me, that God is my closest friend.
In college, I had a roommate named Susan who had a sense of God's abiding presence in her life. I could tell this just by looking at her and observing her on a daily basis. Each morning, she would wake up and read her Bible, and just the way she opened the book and fingered the pages exuded such love and devotion that I could tell that she was enraptured in a conversation with her Lord. Whenever something was really troubling me, I could go to her and ask her to pray for me, and in the deep sincerity in her voice I could hear her connection with God. When I asked her to pray for me, I knew she would do it. She was a true intercessor.
During my college years at Furman University, I was a part of some on-campus religious groups that I would characterize as "Evangelical." There were many people in these groups who had that same aura about them that Susan did. In fact, it was precisely that that drew me to them. I knew they had something I didn't, and I wanted it.
But I never got it. In fact, my feelings that I was lacking something in the spiritual department were a big part of why I had never even considered that I could be called to ordained ministry until others started to suggest it to me during my time at Harvard Divinity School (I'd gone there not to pursue ordained ministry, but with thoughts of being a religion reporter for a newspaper or a documentary filmmaker, or a high school teacher of religious studies). Compared with these people who seemed to be so in touch with God, I felt I wasn't a "good enough Christian." Certainly I could never be a leader in the faith!
Eventually I drifted away from the Evangelical communities, largely because I felt some of their views, both theologically and politically, did not jive with my understanding of who God is from the Scriptures. (Isn't that the age-old story of schism in the church??) To use the words of Diana L. Eck, who became my professor at Harvard Divinity School and my boss at The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, I did not feel I could live with "intellectual and personal honesty" within those communities.
Although I drifted away from many of the friends I'd made during those years, Susan and I remained close. Many years later, I asked her about this sense of God's abiding presence that she had. She responded that when she was growing up, she was the "odd one out" in school since she was a Charismatic and not a "normal" (for her hometown) Methodist or Baptist. Many of her friends did not understand or approve of some of her church's practices, like speaking in tongues. So Susan couldn't rely on a sense of "normalcy" or "givenness" in terms of her understanding of God. She had to turn to God as a personal presence. She talked to God and sat with God and was comforted by God. God became her friend, an "ever-present help in trouble."
Yesterday, I had a meeting with my spiritual director in which I explained to her the struggles I have had over the years with maintaining any kind of regular prayer life, and with my sense of a lack of God's abiding presence in my life. My spiritual director responded by telling me I should talk to God more as if God was my friend. "You develop a relationship with another person by spending time with them," she said. "You have to do the same with God."
As I listened to her, I was struck by how similar this advice was to what I had heard in the Evangelical communities, and realized how, despite some of our political and theological differences, we are really not so different as Christians. The bottom line is the same -- to get to know God, spend time with God. Spend time reading Scripture. Spend time in prayer.
In some ways, this similarity made me a bit uncomfortable. Here again, I was confronted with my lack of a real, deep, two-way relationship with God. I can hide this better in the Episcopal Church than I could in the non-denominational, Evangelical communities, because most Episcopalians don't walk around talking about the time they spent talking with Jesus this morning, but here it was, all the same.
To cover up for my lack of a sense of God's abiding presence, I had begun to scoff at people who said they had one -- especially if they used the "friendship" language. "Jesus is not your FRIEND," I would think. "He's GOD -- transcendent, majestic, etc." I laughed condescendingly at the lyrics to one of my favorite songwriter's takes on the Lord's Prayer -- "lead us not into temptation / and deliver us from those who think they're You," she sings. One of the verses pleads to God to "deliver us from the politicians / who drop your name in every speech / as if they're your best friend from high school / as if they practice what they preach!" The song is indeed very clever, and I think makes a good point -- but a lot of the reason I identified with that verse was the bit about "as if they're your best friend from high school." "Hummph. Please! Right!" I'd say condescendingly, thinking about "those people" who say God is their "best friend" and how "silly" that is.
But then I found myself in an Episcopal priest's office, confessing my lack of sense of God's presence, and she was telling me to think of God as my friend.
Um.... whoops. As usual, God was serving me up a nice dose of humble pie. Why does God have to be so good at that???
When I explained my background, a lot of what I have just shared here, my spiritual director backed away from the "friend" word. "If that bring up bad memories for you, don't think in terms of that language. Find an image or a metaphor that works for you."
So this is my task this Lent. How can I develop a deeper sense of God's abiding presence? How can I spend more time with God? How can I just "be" with God, have a conversation with God? I'm exploring ways that this might work for me. I hope to be able to share some positive results. Your prayers would be appreciated.
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