The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.
~Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
Obijuan April 17th, 2008
70 degrees one day, snow the next.
I’ve lived in a lot of communities that have taken strange pride in their weather quirks. They’re all lightweights compared to northern New Mexico.
I have locusts in tomorrow’s weather pool.
Obijuan April 8th, 2008
Worlds collide! (Things that my congregants love to talk about and things that make me a big big geek, specifically)
Slashdot announces that Richard Dawkins will appear in a later episode of the current season of Doctor Who, supposedly as himself.
(For extra “I’m a geek” credit: Dawkins is married to Lalla Ward, a former classic series companion and ex-wife of Tom Baker. I need to get out of the house more, I know.)
Obijuan March 24th, 2008
Case in point re: this post.
War Protestors Disrupt Mass at Holy Name Cathedral
Squirting fake blood on Easter Sunday Mass-goers? This gets the soldiers home faster, how? What’s the point?
In a statement issued Sunday afternoon by Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War, the group said it protested at Holy Name “to reach both Holy Name’s large Easter audience—including Chicago’s most prominent Catholic citizens, who commonly attend Easter mass at the church—and the many more viewers and readers of the local press, which usually extensively covers their services.”
Hey kids, when staging a protest, it’s generally wise to try and reach the right audience, not just a large one. Unless you’re more interested in publicity than actually, y’know, protesting the war — in which case you’re just a media whore. The name Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War suggests the latter, especially considering only one of their number is young enough to conceivably be a Catholic schoolgirl (and one in remedial classes, if that). Starved for attention? Poor attempt at hipster irony? Guerilla theatre, perhaps? At least try committing to the name more next time and put on some plaid jumpers. Better yet, just stay home next time and complain over your Sobranies about how hating the war was so much cooler before everyone started doing it.
Whatever. Shame on the lot of you. (No, not you. Them. I like you.)
Obijuan March 23rd, 2008
“How We Rise”
given at the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos
23 March 2008
The room is large enough for a small dinner party and not much else. It is not a room one would want to live in. When you are ten or more in number, the space quickly becomes unbearable. And yet, this odd mix of men has been hiding in this very room for over a month now. Their fear has tied them to this place beyond the point where any other human being would have broken free.
The master is gone. He’d made promises about eternal life to all of them and to everyone who came to hear him; now he himself was dead. Had they left their homes, their families, and their responsibilities for a lie?
The master had made promises he could not keep, had angered the wrong people – now he was dead, and they were wanted men, as good as dead themselves. Either they would spend their last days withering away in this godforsaken room, or they’d eventually be found and end up dying the same horrifying death as the master.
They felt like fools for believing and following. What was it again, they each wondered, that had made them do something so rash? Had the message been worth the sacrifices they had made?
Later, of course, they would feel foolish for having felt so foolish. Later there would be talk of tongues of fire and of miracles. Some would even say that the master himself was still alive.
But that was later.
Now there was just this room and themselves and the fear that filled them and the spaces in between them.
It would take a miracle to get them to walk out that door again.
***
In high school, my theology teacher loved to debunk the miracles in the Bible. He wanted us to know that there were perfectly rational explanations for the occurrences, that amazing things did happen, but that they had just been jazzed up for the purpose of poetic grandeur. Take, for example, the parting of the Red Sea. Despite the imagery of Cecil B. DeMille, the parting, he told us, was really just an extremely low tide marked by extreme shallows and uncovered portions of the seabed, allowing the Israelites to cross without hardly getting their feet wet. A conveniently timed low tide, to be sure, but Fr. Bob had to leave some room open for the possibility that God still had his hand working in human history, even if it was in a less than cinematic manner.
The list of shattered myths goes on. The transformation of the Nile into blood was merely the stirring up of red clay sediment. The multiplication of the loaves and the fishes was really a result of excellent motivational speaking and disciplined crowd control. Manna from heaven was really droppings from beetles (I can’t imagine why they’d want to rewrite that little tidbit). For every miracle, there was a solid, sensible explanation. For Fr. Bob, human beings back then saw God in events that today’s mind would explain away without a second thought. Miracles were merely an exaggeration of the mundane.
Fr. Bob was half right. There is much deemed miraculous that can be reasonably explained. However, it’s not just mere superstition or overactive imagination that led those who penned these Biblical stories to tag these events as miraculous. Why else, then?
***
I’m a big fan of horror and science fiction stories. Much of my non-work related reading is devoted to the likes of Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Clive Barker, and Neil Gaiman. One reason I enjoy these types of stories so much is, admittedly, the escape factor – the sheer fantasy of it all. More important, though, is the human factor contained in most of these stories. With the fantastic happening, it becomes comforting to latch on to the human and familiar. In the process, the authors are able to comment on aspects of human life that are otherwise difficult or perhaps too frightening to explain – Stephen King uses the mask of a horror story to tell a more frightening tale about the effects of alcoholism on the family. Harlan Ellison creates a dystopian, fascist future in order to comment on our own increasing micromanagement of our time. Beyond this, very often in these genre stories, the best qualities of humanity come to the fore. Triumphs over the most extreme adversities are commonplace. Unlikely heroes arise.
So it is with miracle stories. Fr. Bob was only half right. Yes, miracles may have rational explanations, but there is a human factor to these stories that is equally miraculous, if not as grand in imagery. One only needs to look to rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Bible to see these small miracles made plain. Take the parting of the Red Sea again. There is one school of thought that says it is miraculous that such a bizarre natural occurrence happened at just the time it needed to in order to facilitate the flight of the Israelites.
There is another school of thought that says the real miracle of the story didn’t occur until the first Israelite gathered up the courage to take that first step into the breach.
Miracles, such as the resurrection that defines this day, are ultimately human events. Everything else is just a flag marking its importance.
Where is the human story in the resurrection?
***
Oscar Romero was not supposed to be a martyr and a hero. Romero was a compromise candidate, selected by conservative bishops because he was essentially a nothing – an orthodox bookworm who had been known to make critical remarks about the liberation theology that was becoming popular in his home of El Salvador. Liberation theology was the tool of the peasants. Romero was supposed to be the puppet of the landowners. Romero was chosen because his sense of justice was dead. It would not stay that way.
Three weeks after his installation as archbishop in San Salvador, Romero’s friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, was ambushed and killed on a country road along with two of his parishioners. Grande had been targeted because he had defended the right of the peasants to organize, and he had dared to speak out against the repressive policies of big landowners. That night, Romero drove out to the countryside to see the bodies of Grande and the old man and child who were murdered with him. He preached a funeral mass to a church packed with peasants. Looking into their eyes and seeing in them the bodies of his friend and the others, he found his sense of justice resurrected. He found Grande resurrected in him. “The world of the poor teaches us,” he told them that night, “that liberation will arrive only when the poor are not simply on the receiving end of hand-outs from governments or from the churches, but when they themselves are the masters and protagonists of their own struggle for liberation.”
The violence would continue as the years passed. Two hundred of those attending that funeral would be dead within the next year. Over the next twelve, nearly three million more would be either dead or homeless. Throughout all of this, Romero continued to broadcast his support of the poor every week throughout the country. His fellow bishops turned their backs on him. The rest of the civilized world ignored his pleas for intervention. He had no friends left in the world except for the poor that he championed.
On March 23rd, 1980, Romero broadcast a homily openly inviting the peasants that made up the bulk of the body of the Salvadoran military to mutiny against their commanders. “You kill your fellow peasants,” he told them. “No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God.”
The day after his challenge to the military, Romero celebrated a mass outdoors. Reflecting on the scriptures in his homily, he told the people, “One must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us.” Minutes later he was gunned down by a sharpshooter. The military feared him, and so they murdered him.
Romero knew he was walking a dangerous path, that he was endangering his own life. “I do not believe in death without resurrection,” he said. “If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.” At his funeral mass, sharpshooters gunned down forty mourners outside the cathedral. Still, the peasants he supported continued the long fight. It would be another twelve years before a treaty ended the civil war. To this day, the Salvadoran people invoke the spirit of Romero and continue a fight against the oppressions of the political parties that grew out of the ruling landowners, in spite of any fear of reprisal.
***
Fear is perhaps the most debilitating of all emotions. In almost any given situation, it will trump any other strong emotions on the table, because the target of fear is almost always the unknown.
We refuse to act in the world because we cannot predict the outcome, or, like Romero, because we know the price and fear we cannot afford it. We remain alone because we fear the possibility of harm through human contact, or we remain in bad relationships because we fear that this is our only chance of human contact. We remain in situations of pain and suffering because the routine of it brings about some perverse comfort — betting against the possibility of something more or better. Fear will trump all else contained within us if we let it. Fear puts us in a position of believing that our continued suffering is an acceptable alternative to an unknown. What a horrible trick for our minds to play on us, creating a relative scale of misery and degradation and then placing our current sense of that misery somewhere in the middle of the scale – somehow being able to conceive of feeling worse than we do now.
Fear is a funny emotion that way. It is, in its own strange way, an agonizing death. It is the death of hope, and those in its grip die a little bit – or a lot – every day. Some people are never able to leave these places of fear. Encyclopedias of sin have entered into our world because of the seemingly insurmountable and paralyzing nature of this fear of the unknown – racism, sexism, terrorism, and intolerance of all kinds in some way come from a starting place of fear.
But this fear can be transcended. We celebrate Easter because this paralyzing fear cannot paralyze forever. We celebrate Easter because the death that is this fear needs not be a permanent one.
This is the human element we search for in the miraculous story of the resurrection. Ten or more frightened men in a tiny room in Jerusalem, afraid for their very lives, are in some way touched by the spirit of hope – whether that spirit comes from within themselves or from tongues of fire is beside the point in this moment. Something bigger than their fear reached them. Something made them decide that, in the words of Bishop Romero, they could no longer “avoid getting involved in the risks of life.” The message that they had thought was worth giving up their lives for was, in the end, still worth that sacrifice.
It is this same spirit that reached out to Oscar Romero, transforming him from puppet to prophet. It is this same spirit that calls to you on this Easter morning, daring you to reach out toward the source of that hope and transcend your own fears.
And so Jesus rises.
And so Romero rises.
And so I rise.
And so you shall rise.
Happy Easter.
Obijuan March 21st, 2008
A little over four years ago, while serving as a chaplain intern in a south suburban Chicago hospital, I had the opportunity to attend a Clinical Pastoral Education conference, and worship with a few hundred other chaplains on a Thursday evening. The preacher on that evening was Jeremiah Wright.
That night, Wright relayed a story of a friend of his who’d been teaching a night school course. People of various ages and races were attending the class. One young, black man, Wright told us, was particularly exuberant while joking around, his speech laced with profanity. An older woman, sitting a few rows away listened on, horrified. The teacher, sensing the growing discomfort in the room, asked the young man to stop swearing. Thy young man looked confused for moment, then proceeded to continue his harangue with his friend, cursing up a storm, all the while the older lady looks on, growing paler and paler.
“Please stop cursing,” the teacher asks again.
“I ain’t swearin’,” the young man replies.
“You’ve been swearing since you arrived, now please stop.”
“I ain’t swearin’!”
“Yes, you are. Please stop.”
The young man looks completely baffled. Why is he taking such abuse? He turns to his friend for some defense.
“Would you tell this motherfucker I ain’t swearin’!!”
The collective gasp among the worshippers that evening was palpable. Did the preacher just say what we think we heard him say? From the pulpit? During worship!?
As the country has come to discover in the last week, Dr. Wright’s homiletic style can be, shall we say, a touch provocative. A curse like that might now seem mild in comparison to some of the harsher statements being broadcast around the clock on the cable news outlets.
But, Wright’s provocation that night four years ago served to make a deeper point, and an ironic one in light of the current firestorm. He juxtaposed his story that evening to the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:5-30). Wright wanted us chaplains to understand the importance of meeting people, especially our patients, where they are at. Jesus meets the Samaritan woman where she is. His teacher friend, however, is much less successful with the young man in his class — a young man who is quite obviously speaking a different language from his teacher.
The chaplains in my weekly group debated the merits of swearing in the pulpit — sometimes appropriate, never appropriate, etc. In the moment, the shock seemed to detract from Wright’s deeper message that evening.
In the long run, however, he seems to have done his job well. I have not forgotten the story, nor the message it was designed to illustrate.
Understanding in human relations begins with the difficult task of meeting the other where they are. The memory of that story and of that message is what has made this past week so infuriating for me. The very discipline that Wright so passionately argued for then is the very discipline that is so blatantly lacking in the melee surrounding the recent video release of some of his more incendiary comments from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ. Very little of the outrage expressed is tempered by any sort of understanding of the place where Dr. Wright or his congregation is coming from. Even more frustrating, this lack of understanding seems gleefully willful (as though we revere schadenfreude more than we do understanding). (And, if you’re interested in beginning to understand “where he’s at,” I recommend starting here.)
Given this failure to even meet the church where it’s at, this incident also shines light on the lack of religious literacy in this country (I’ve been reading Stephen Prothero’s book of the same title, so this is on my mind).
The question repeatedly asked is, “Should Obama be held accountable for what his pastor said?”
Now, UUs and UCCers are going to immediately answer, “No!” We understand, soaked into the core of our religious understanding, the ideas of the free pulpit and the free pew. No self-respecting religious liberal is going to march in lock-step with their pastor (I’d die from shock if everyone in my congregation agreed with me every week). But the default cultural understanding of religion is one of orthodoxy — the pastor speaks, the flock obeys (and I realize this isn’t true of all orthodox religions, either). In the world of the pundit and the twenty-four hour news cycle, “religion” — in spite of fundamental differences among the religious — is some monolithic entity with absolute control over its adherents lives, and it’s easier to comment on that “religion” than it is to do the homework and get the context — you know, act like a real journalist. Perhaps I’m asking too much.
Obijuan March 20th, 2008
Sully links to this op-ed in the American Prospect about the latest Code Pink protest in Berkeley.
This sums it up well:
What worked for the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is not going to work today. And the truth is that comparing the civil-rights marches to a bunch of people carrying signs with “No more war!” on one side and “Free Mumia!” on the other is an insult to everyone who took part in the civil-rights movement. The civil-rights activists weren’t just looking to feel good about themselves. The political actions they undertook were carefully planned and well executed. They knew exactly which levers of mass and elite opinion they needed to press and how to do it.
I’ll admit, I watched The Daily Show do their thing with this story last week, with my face in my palm through most of it. Perhaps we need to send some of our protest leaders for remedial courses at Highlander Folk School?
Obijuan January 9th, 2008
We sat down with the kids to watch E.T. the other night. I don’t think I’d seen it since some time before high school. It was my all time favorite movie when I was much, much younger — probably something to do with being the same age as the protagonist when it came out (I was nine or ten). I don’t remember how many times I saw it before I “outgrew” it. I owned the soundtrack record and would listen to it obsessively. (At some point, one of my relatives even gave me Neil Diamond’s “Heartlight” album, which I listened to not quite so obsessively, but — guilty admission — I listened to, regardless)
It was something else watching it again after so many years. All the familiar emotions in all the same places came right back. Plus, as an adult I noticed things about the film that my ten-year-old brain missed — most notably that Spielberg shot it in such a way that the only adult face ever seen (until the heartless government agents swarm the house) is the mother. All the other adults are shot from waist level, only hands or legs (or backs of heads) seen. The intentionality of the child’s eye view surprised me, and probably explains why ten-year-old me connected so strongly twenty-five years ago. The kids loved it, and I had a good cry (can a thirty-five-year-old admit to still crying at E.T.?)
Obijuan January 5th, 2008
I mentioned below that today was art day. My pastels have been sitting in the garage pretty much since we got here, a combination of time constraint, lethargy, and a desire to not spread toxic dust all over the house has kept me away from creating — an activity that’s supposed to be part of my daily practice. A helpful chat with my mentor a few weeks ago led to the idea of trying a different medium for a while, at least until it’s warm enough to take the pastels outside, again.
After working on some Sculpey Christmas ornaments with the kids last month, I decided this was a route I wanted to try. I had a picture in my head of small tea light chalices to give to my covenant group facilitators as we get the small group ministry program up and running this month. So, off to the craft store (oh, darn) and home with some nice pearl and granite tone polymer clays.
I experimented with making a small chalice “cane” to slice up for decoration. And then laid layers of granite textured clay over a wire form, followed by a nice translucent clay cup laid into the granite base.
Here’s the result of today’s experiment:
And the translucent clay when cured looks really nice with a candle lit inside.
I need to work on smoothing out some of my fingerprints before I cure it, and come up with a better strategy for laying in the translucent cup, but, all in all, I’m pretty pleased with my first attempt.
Obijuan January 5th, 2008
A few years back, I posted this around the New Year. I find myself returning to the theory again. When I met with my covenant group facilitators this week, I asked them the question: “What do you unresolve?”
What are you going to let yourself off the hook for this year?
‘Round about December 30th, all of my conscious and unconscious resolutions seemed to center around my self-care habits (or the lack thereof). I had resolved to write something every day, stick with my daily bible reading and other daily meditative readings, make art every day, exercise, and on and on.
By the time I got to “finish the novel,” I realized that the real problem I’d had over the last year (aside from the stress that goes along with major transition) was the sense of self-inflicted obligation. I had turned “I do these things because they bring me peace and joy” into “I do these things because I have to.” That does not make for healthy self-care or spiritual practice. At all.
So, this year, I have “unresolved” this sense of self-imposed obligation, and it’s already made quite the difference. My daily readings are back on track, and I spent today on art (something I haven’t done since we arrived in New Mexico). I’ve entered into a general sense of less stress and more accomplishment. We’ll see if I can keep this up past February. I’m not obligating myself to that goal, either.
- Next »
Obijuan likes New York in June. How about you?.
There are 413 Posts and 572 Comments so far.
All comments are subject to moderation. Posts are automatically closed to comments after twenty-one days.
