Breathing

I have a friend who is tremendously giving. The only problem is that she is not too terrific at taking in compliments or receiving gifts from others. So i wonder about her health. Giving without receiving is a lot like exhaling without inhaling - eventually you will pass out from lack of oxygen. And by the way, the opposite is also true - all receiving with no giving is like inhaling but never exhaling; eventually the build up of carbon dioxide will cause you to pass out as well.

So what we really have to pay attention to is breathing god's abundance. We can not do one without the other. It is not better to give than receive - nor is it better to receive than to give. Life and the abundance of the creator are like the air we breathe - to be taken in and given out, in full and measured balance.

My Lutheran stoic heritage would have me believe that I am to be self sacrificing and self-effacing. I should feel guilty for even asking for help but should never turn another's request away. But that is not the breath of life god meant for us to share. Isn't it funny how distorted we have made the gifting of the almighty.

Giving and reciving - like inhaling and exhaling - are the basic elements of life. Do both or suffer the consequences of losing consciousness!

Meeting The Challenge

"Nature does not do bailouts!" I was reading a recent article by Al Gore (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122584367114799137.html) where I came across that line. It is so true, and it is what has been bothering me about this whole damned fiasco since the beginning of the discussions. It is the drug mentality all over again! We live in a society that has come to expect a quick fix for any ailment that besets us. More Valium, Prozac and Xanax are prescribed and used in America than all other over the counter and prescribed drugs totaled. We have an industry built on surgical procedures to alter obesity. We want instant gratification, instant solutions, and, yes, bailouts.

Sorry, that isn't how it works! Development and maturity are the result of meeting challenges and adapting our childish need for "having it our way" into some other way that lives in harmony with the world. It is critically important for us to learn to live life on life's terms, not ours, and that seems to be where the train derailed some years ago. Part of the science that started engineering our planet in an effort to provide for improvements and cures grew into a larger-than-life Frankensteinian monster that now stomps about out of our control. We (collectively) learned that we don't have to suffer and that generalized into anything that might be even the slightest bit disconcerting. Continuing down this line, we will atrophy our ability to create any true solutions and adapt to our surroundings, and that just reads like a bad sci-fi novel.

It is time that we reverse the trend and face the music. Meeting this challenge (market correction) head-on for the truth it teaches us won't be easy. Our "problems" carry a truth - a lesson - in them that is important to capture and which is conveniently stepped over when we get bailed out. Overspending, gluttony, consumption, leveraged credit all are lies, the consequences of which we have to face. And there is always a consequence, you don't get away with anything - even though you think you can. Life does not work that way! This is hard, it is not easy to meet such challenges head on, but bones become brittle and porous if they don't carry a load, muscles weaken and shrink it they aren't exercised, and minds go senile if they aren't sufficiently challenged. The consequences of a bailout may be more severe down the road than those of sticking our faces in the mess and working through the painful process of dealing and adapting. But the result of the latter is nature's way, and life's process of healthy living.

Why Do You Call Me Good?

Can you say humility, Neighbor? I knew you could! (I miss Mr Rogers) Today's scripture lesson in church was the story of the rich man who asked "Good Teacher, what do I have to do (yada yada yada)?" and is often the springboard to a homily about not being attached to worldly possessions, and so on. But did you ever notice Jesus's response starts with a simple and confusing question: "Why do you call me good?"

'Scuse me? The speaker of that phrase is either the Messiah (if you believe in him) or at the very least one of the most value-driven, ethically pure and selfless men to walk the planet. What is wrong with this picture? Why would he say that? He is the good one and I am allegedly the bad one. So it is I who should say, "aw shucks, don't call me good. I'm just a worm." But that is the problem. You see, I don't say that. In fact I do wish people would recognize the good things that I do. I try to do good in the world, hopefully to offset the not-so-good I also do. But deep inside I hope and pray that the good outweighs the bad enough so that at least someone will notice and call me good.

And then I read this, and there is a hollow in the pit of my stomach. Who am I to be called good, to wish to be called good when he won't even allow that adjective for himself. Oh don't hear that as some in-bred Lutheran or Calvinist guilt. It just hits me like this huge lesson in what humility is really supposed to be like. It is doing all those same things without ever thinking of or wishing for praise. I can and often do all the right things for the wrong reasons. What I have to get to is that station where I just do them because they are what I do. Oh my, I do have such a long way to go on this road!

Tis the Season - Already?

I overheard two people talking over the weekend. One said that their family was going to have a simple Christmas this year - no big gifts and overspending. It was half said out of sadness and half out of relief. We actually have a reason to start looking at Thanksgiving and seeing what we are thankful for, we have a chance to embrace the miracle of Hanukkah, and we have a shot at feeling the joy and the spirit of Christmas.

Oh My!

In the last few years the commercialization of these coming holidays has gotten out of hand, ridiculously gluttonous, and downright embarrassing to be around. Children have come to feel entitled to all of the gifts on their wish list, and like Dudley Dursley, whine, "but there were 34 presents last year, is that all?"

When did it all happen? When did Christmas get to be only about presents? When did we okay the ads starting before Halloween? Enough! I am grateful for a recession that forces to look at less and maybe see beyond the stacks of Barbies and model AK-47s and see that we actually are celebrating a rather special version of god's twisted little game - a surprise entrance where we least expected it - with a pregnant out of wedlock teen, displaced with her fiance to a place where no one welcomed them, to give birth in a stinking barn. Leave it to god to pull off that one!

So don't be surprised when godliness makes a guest appearance or shows up, like the oil that kept burning, and refuses to be what we expect. Don't spend this holiday. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with family. Pray in church and at home - not for our selves or for our wish list but for others, for enemies, for people who have even less. Fall is the season of gathering - gathering the apples and the harvest - gathering together. Maybe we have a chance to do it in an uncluttered way this year.

Praying the Rosary

Yesterday I had an appointment at one of the large teaching hospitals in Boston that has a significant women's practice. And as I was walking away from my appointment I came across a small group or protesters with signs about abortion being murder and killing and such. But what struck me was the elder man in the middle of the group in what was an obviously different state. He was praying the Rosary, working his way around a string of beads. I hadn't heard the Rosary in years and the whole vignette stopped me in my tracks.

I don't know what your beliefs are on the subject, but I know mine, and while different in many ways from the philosophy on the signs, I was moved by this man's presence. First of all, I don't see many people praying in public, at least not many who are not at all concerned with what others may think. There was not self-important "look at me pray" element like some TV evangelist. The man WAS praying and clearly deeply into it. His state reminded me of what I read in one of Merton's texts, that prayer changes us not god. It was spiritual and holy, not righteous.

But beyond that, his presence reminded me of my lost practice of ritual prayer. I fancy that I have some kind of conscious and real conversational relationship with the god of my experiencing, and so my prayer over time has become more of a fireside chat than formal. But what Merton says is true - for me, as well, if I recall. There is a power to ritual prayer that is not present in my conversation, even if some of the associated "theology" and concepts are contrary to my current set of beliefs and experiences. The power is that ritual lifts us from normal space/time experience into what Rohr calls "liminal" or threshold experience - that space where we are neither here nor there and we can become open and opened to what is trying to make its way into our consciousness. I remember that I experienced my calling, way back when I was 17, after pulling an all-nighter prayer vigil where I literally prayed every ritual prayer over and over for something like 12 hours.

It is something I too often forget, but thanks to a bunch of people I might never have talked to, I got re-grounded in a tool of spirituality that I had forgotten for some time. Even if I don't believe in Mary's intercessory role or ability, I am grateful for the man and his Rosary.

The Purpose of Religion

It would appear as I ask this question that the world is divided into a few camps on the purpose and relevance of religion. What got me here was an intensive course on Max Sackhouse's in-depth coverage of "God and Globalization" or the theological and moral basis of of global business. Max's camp would seem to believe that religions inform societies' meaning-making by establishing the values, morals and ethics by which those societies operate. He contends that, in fact, all societies are based in religious beliefs (even lumping Marxist/Communist countries in under that umbrella). So to Stackhouse the real purpose of religion is to define the rights and wrongs for societies so that they might come together and work together with some mutuality.

There are those also whose belief seems to be that the purpose of religion is to scare people into submission. These people hold a Machiavellian belief that the rich and powerful created dogma and doctrine to oppress the masses, and while there have been periods of history where that appears to be true, I do not think that over time this is a true purpose. To be sure religion is powerful and power will corrupt. So there have been Pastors and Popes who have sought personal gain from the institution of religion. But these are aberrations.

Yet a third camp feels that religion's purpose is to assuage the pain of being human just living this broken life. Life is pain and we seem to have evolved to this place where pain is neither allowed nor accepted as part of it. So religion comes to the rescue like some great vile of Prozac or Percoset (I don't know which is worse). Prayer and meditation are supposed to place you in the loving arms of the benevolent who will make it all better. Or at least that what it seems like from this side.

Then there is this little island of people (I audaciously assume that there are others) who believe that the purpose of religion is to teach and develop - actually, to provide the tools that teach and develop us as humans on this wacky trip of life. From this perspective, I admit that life is pain (and joy, yes, but lots of nasty painful things happen) and I admit that there are forces and powers far greater than we are and with each of these we must cope, no doubt. How? That is the operative question. Unlike Stackhouse, I do not believe that any religion can map out all of the scenarios that provide a handy dandy rule book of right/wrong. So into the gray and unknown and painful and powerful we venture - but not alone. Taken as lessons, the pains, our "sins" or our foibles, the forces of nature can be seen as things that teach us who we are and how we are to be with each other. Failure is the greatest teacher - think of it. And Jesus, as far as I can tell, never once got mad at or chastized a "sinner" or a fallen person or someone caught doing something "wrong.". The only people he called out were the self-righteous!

Sacred texts are most often inclusive of confusing and contradictory stories. Of course they all contain the obligatory short list of do's and don'ts but the bulk of them are life stories of men and women struggling into the void of not knowing - not, however, as examples - but as case studies meant to force our thinking to adapt. Like the koan, most of these stories don't have an obvious answer. They force us to think. And that I believe is the real purpose of religion - to force us and guide us to thinking and acting in an ever-adaptive and spiritually grounded way. It is not the easy interpretation (rules are a lot simpler way - just tell me what to do) but it works for me.

Trinitarian Experience

My wife is Jewish and wonders at times about my belief in what, to pure monotheism, may appear to be polytheistic - the trinitarian god experience of father, son and spirit. So this morning I was thinking about my experience of god. In particular I was thinking about how we all experience god. Uniquely, freshly, each time that experience happens.

I do not believe in a monolithic god - a one-size-fits-all god. In fact I do not believe in a god that is a "thing" at all. There can be no "thingness" to a god who is all things, unless that thing is everything. And if that be the case, then each individual experience of god is perfectly that which the one experiencing it needs, wants and believes it to be. Add to this Pascal's famous axiom that "we do not see the world as it is but as we are," and the result is that we experience (see) god exactly as we are or as we need at that moment.

But how is it that we experience our world, our life and therefore our god? Simply put, we tend to describe our living realms as mind, body and spirit. I relate to my world first from what I think and know - and that informs my overall meaning making. It is the source for all meaning making - that is, it "fathers" (you women-folk in the studio audience can translate that to "mothers" or "births") meaning. Secondly, I come to know my world through my body, my physical being. This a pure flesh-and-blood experience of life incarnate - the ultimate experience of humanness. And thirdly, I experience life in wonder, and belief, and the pure miracle of the life itself that breathes in me or perhaps that breathes me.

So then, if these are our three ways of knowing, it seems only a logical extension that theologians across the centuries should describe their collective experiences of god in those same ways - as source (father/mother), as flesh (a being like us that walked and talked and lived among us) and as the spirit, the essence of life itself. The triune god, the trinity, is simply a handy dandy way of describing the channels through which one experiences god. What do you expect? We are human and cannot do otherwise. Our containerization of god in no way diminishes the all-everything-ness of the Divine. But it has gotten in the way for millions as, over time, the labels became the thing. At the end of it all, I think the Jews got it right in refusing to even speak god's name; they knew better. God's blessings to you all - in everything that may mean to each of you!