This is my Father’s world:
I rest me in the thought
of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
his hand the wonders wrought.
I like the abstract pattern in this picture, taken in the woods at Heritage Park. The strong lines move from bottom to top, and the light and dark interplay with one another.
Sunday we went to the First Presbyterian Church for an installation of their new co-pastors, a clergy couple from Indiana. A representative from the presbytery preached in a Geneva robe with white tabs, very Reformed.
At the end of the service the new pastors answered the nine constitutional questions asked of ministers and lay elders and deacons in the church. The first two questions affirm commitment to Jesus Christ and the Bible. The third question is this:
Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church as authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do, and will you be instructed and led by those confessions as you lead the people of God?
This sentence contains 52 words. Note the doubling: receive and adopt, authentic and reliable, instructed and led. What a weight of words, each one pressing down on the next. And there are still six questions to go. My wife, a Disciples pastor, shakes her head at all the Presbylanguage.
You could shorten the third question: “Will the confessions of the church guide you as you lead the people of God?” This gets at the same core issues and uses only 15 words, about the limit stylists recommend for a clear sentence.
I work in a United Methodist congregation, but my ordination remains in the Presbyterian Church USA. I’ve answered yes to the nine constitutional questions more than once, and will again if asked. Only I began to wonder, sitting in the pew on Sunday, why the language grows and complexifies so. I don’t understand the need for many words. How can a mind hear a sentence of 52 words and grasp it? Hearing them again I remembered Kathleen Norris’s first foray into church — the sheer weight of language exhausted her, and she went home afterward and slept.
If I wrote the rules, pastors would answer only two questions: Will you seek to love God and neighbor? Will you serve to the best of your wisdom and ability? I see no reason to weigh pastors down with lots of words.
A half dozen men stood outside the store, migrant workers with brown hair, dusty jeans and callused hands. My ears caught bits of Spanish as I walked by them. A gulf separates their world from mine, but for a few seconds Wal-Mart brought us into proximity.
The word migrant comes from the Latin migrare, to move or to change. By this definition we are all migrants, unless we never grew up and left home. St Thomas Aquinas said the key evidence of life is self-movement. If I move myself, if I migrate, then I am alive.
The journey theme is so popular in religious writing that for all practical purposes we’ve exhausted the word journey itself — it needs to disappear for a while, like overused baby names that slip into limbo. Please don’t tell me about your faith journey. But the word migrate has fresh possibilities, like a flower with a bit of bloom left on it.
In 1986 I traveled to the Philippines to serve as a mission worker for six weeks. I got around Manila squished into the back of a colorful Jeepney, the main form of public transportation. I often caught other riders glancing at me, the stranger on the bus, because blue-eyed Americans seldom rode in Jeepneys.
The image of a stranger in an alien environment runs through the whole Bible, from Abraham, Moses and Ruth, to the author of Hebrews, ‘Here we have no enduring city, but we are seeking one to come.’ And there is Jesus himself, who has ‘no place to lay his head.’
The migrant workers I saw outside of Wal-Mart were laughing, their white teeth contrasting with cheeks darkened by the sun. I wouldn’t romanticize their life, but they appeared happy, content and well fed, like men who have found a place to lay their heads, if only for tonight.
Umberto Eco laments the lost art of handwriting. Among its many benefits,
writing by hand obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think.
My Dad had lovely handwriting, print and cursive. For years after his death I kept a grocery list he made just to have a sample of his writing. Mine isn’t awful, but my cursive deteriorates after a couple of paragraphs.
Many phrases and paragraphs posted here began on the pages of a notebook. Moleskine notebooks are a nice indulgence, but they don’t make me any smarter. My favorite pen is a black Pilot V Ball Extra Fine. I tend to print.
But I like writing at a keyboard too. A semester of typing in high school has brought many dividends in the last 28 years — I know the basics of touch typing. When my wrists began to hurt a few years ago I switched to a bent, ergonomic keyboard, and the pain went away.
Both writing by hand and by keyboard have advantages. By hand offers flexibility in the when and where of writing, and a keyboard makes it easy to shape and experiment with phrases. So I keep both methods in play.
I must have picked up a bug in one of seven hospital visits this week. Ever since my pneumonia two years ago, colds settle in my lungs and sap my energy. Not much mental juice left for thinking and writing.
So I offer this paragraph from Ruth Haley Barton on the relationship between exhaustion and spirituality.
One of the most sobering things I learned as I listened to my exhaustion and allowed God to minister to me is that when I am dangerously tired I can be very, very busy and look very, very important but be unable to hear the quiet sure voice of the One who calls me the beloved. When that happens I lose touch with that place in the center of my being where I know who I am in God, where I know what I am called to do, and where I am responsive to his voice above all others. When that happens I am at the mercy of all manner of external forces, tossed and turned by others’ expectations and my own compulsions. These inner lacks then become the source of my frenetic activity, keeping me forever spiraling into deeper levels of exhaustion. ~Invitation to Solitude and Silence
I am tired, not exhausted, but her words must apply to all levels of fatigue.
Monday night we attended an ecumenical peace service at St. Joseph Catholic Church on Ormsby Street. Inter-faith services don’t appeal to me. I’m the child who doesn’t want foods on the dinner plate to touch one another, let alone mix together in a big lump.
So I gave my attention to the art in the sanctuary. To the left of the chancel hung four icons of the Evangelists in counter-clockwise order, and to the right a large icon of the Holy Family. Statuary presented Jesus on all sides: a crucifix above the altar in the center, stations of the cross on either wall, and in an alcove to the right the Pieta. The dying of Jesus surrounded us.
The presence of all this art reminded me of the poverty of Protestant art, particularly visual arts. Compared to St. Joe’s, my sanctuary is a plain thing. The architects angled the chancel wall to suggest an open book, but no one notices unless you point it out. The stained glass pleases me, as do the banners and paraments, but it’s not enough. Protestants do well at art for the ear — music and sermon — but we’ve not learned what to do for the eye.
Not that I want to worship surrounded by statues of the dying Jesus. For me the ideal church sits out in the woods, with large sheets of glass to let in as much natural light as possible. The beauty of creation would please our eyes as we sang praises to the Creator. God’s handiwork makes all human art look poor by comparison.
Images of Jesus are present in the woods too. Simone Weil said the beauty of nature is Christ’s tender smile coming to us through matter. Each tree is the hem of his garment.
My wife and I have ritual things we say to one another throughout the day. In the morning as I leave for work, I kiss her and say, “I love you. Think about me twice today.” Not too much or too little — two times in a day is enough.
At the end of the day one of us will say to the other, “What was the best part of your day?” A lifespan of 80 years has over 29,000 days, and each of them offers its best part. Sometimes it’s right then as we stretch out on our bed.
The best part of yesterday happened during Sunday School. Our church school director invited me to sit in on her class. Since they’re learning about the Fruit of the Spirit, I talked to the children about St Paul. I mentioned Paul’s feet that walked miles and miles to tell people about Jesus, and I asked the children the farthest distance they’d ever walked. The consensus was five miles. I spoke of Paul’s pen that wrote letters we still read today. The children told me about letters they’d written or received themselves.
After this they put together snack bags with pretzels, nuts, M&Ms, and dried cranberries. They practiced kindness, a fruit of the Spirit, by giving the plastic bags to parishioners at coffee hour. The best lessons involve food.
But I’ve omitted the best part of the day, the reason for this post. During class a blond girl turned around in her blue chair and said to me, “You were at the donut shop yesterday. I saw you.”
“Yes,” I replied, “I was there.” Caught with my sticky fingers at the donut shop, my favorite place.
She smiled in triumph. She’d seen her pastor buying donuts. Confirming the sighting, letting her display a bit of intel in front of her peers, proved to be the best part of my day.
What was the best part of your day?
D. H. Williams, a patristics professor at Baylor University, draws guidance from the spirituality of St. Gregory of Nyssa. The key is mystery — specifically how we can know God, whose being is unknowable to us. The path involves a desire for God, coupled with a quest for the virtue and purity needed to see him. The result is a not light but darkness:
The divine darkness is not the kind of blackness we experience stumbling into an underground room with no lights. This darkness is a positive reality that helps us to discover God, and hence is called “luminous.” Although it sounds like a contradiction in terms, a luminous darkness is one filled with God’s presence, and by faith, the soul can begin to perceive God in darkness. In fact, the closer that God comes to the soul, the more intense the darkness becomes; it is then that all other things of this world are cleared away. The soul looks up to the Lord and never ceases to desire him.
God is light. Imagine a light so bright and brilliant, it incapacitates the ability to see and creates a perception of darkness. This darkness adds perspective to the plaintive cry in the Psalms, “The darkness is my closest friend.”
I visited a woman who will die soon. She lay asleep in her nursing home bed, a plastic mat on the floor in case she fell. A black and white photo of her as a young woman hung on the wall next to her dresser. I anointed her with oil and sat quietly with her for a time. A ministry of presence is a simple thing.
A nurse in blue scrubs stopped by the room. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“No thanks,” I said, surprised by the offer.
“If you need anything, just ask,” he said and walked on. I said nurse, but he may have been a CNA, certified nursing assistant. Whatever he was, he was kind and attentive to my needs as I sat with a dying woman.
It was then I saw next to my chair a wooden cart with soda pop, ice, water and a basket of cookies. I poured a cup of ice water and munched on a Fig Newton. Later my wife told me of other nursing homes who provide these hospitality carts for those who sit with the dying. I hadn’t noticed them before, or maybe I thought it was for someone else.
A touch of hospitality matters. You remember it afterward.
Jesus visited a house once and noticed an absence of hospitality from the host. “You did not give me any water for my feet… You did not put oil on my head,” gestures of kindness in his day. He turned the omission into an opportunity for teaching about love.
Hospitality grows in the soil of love. To love another means to set aside your affairs for a time and attend to their needs, or their very reality. Oil on the head or a basket of cookies — the details of hospitality speak more than words.
I remember times at church when someone said hello to me, and I replied as I walked down the hall intent on my errand. A better host would pause and greet them, giving them full attention, even if only for a few seconds.
A touch of hospitality matters. A pause, a gesture or a cup of water. These little things make the difference.
Our local Salvation Army hosts Share the Warmth, a homeless shelter during the coldest months, beginning this year on November 1st. Forty folks gathered last night for an informational dinner. Trays of ham and macaroni and cheese sat on the serving table next to an artificial grape vine on the wall with the saying from scripture, “I am the vine; you are the branches.”
After the meal, the leaders showed a promotional DVD made by an area church involved in the program, and they distributed copies for us to show in our churches. A former homeless man spoke about his experiences in Share the Warmth – he credits the shelter with helping him get his life straightened out. He works two part-time jobs now and lives with his wife in an apartment.
Captain Knight took everyone on a tour of the facilities used for the shelter. A gymnasium serves as a common room and sleeping area for men. Everyone gets an air-mattress, bedding and space on the floor. A door off the gym leads to a smaller, separate room for women. There’s a third room for the hosts, a male and a female volunteer who agree to spend the night, one of them always awake. Local churches sign up for a week and supply the volunteers.
Instead of his uniform, Captain Knight wore blue jeans and a gray T-shirt to emphasize this isn’t a Salvation Army program. It’s a community effort. “It’s a beautiful example of the body of Christ coming together,” he said.
Two other members of my congregation were there. We’re hoping to sponsor a week this season. The shelter runs until April 30th.
The benefits of being silent are often seen in the fruit it bears rather than in the experience of silence per se. Adele Ahlberg Calhoun
I need more silence in my life. To this end, I’m experimenting with silence in two ways, using ideas from Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook.
During the work day I slip away for a few minutes to a quiet place where I sit in silence, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. The youth room in our church works well for this purpose – it’s dark with comfortable couches. I set the timer on my phone for ten or fifteen minutes so there isn’t any need to watch a clock. I disable the ringer in case someone calls. I sit in the quiet and listen.
I absorb the silence and let it spread throughout my body. I pay attention to my breathing. I imagine a river floating by me, and I place in its current the cares and concerns that trouble me. I let the peace settle in me. When done, I return to my work and carry the silence with me.
Scripture based practices like lectio divina feel like I’m preparing a sermon or devotion. The same problem appears when reading from a prayer book — this feels like what I do in my job. But as a spiritual practice, being silent is different than these things — it’s like nothing I do as a preacher. Silence is the antithesis of my religion. This is why it’s appealing.
In a second practice, I’ve stopped listening to the radio in the car. I drive along in silence. When I begin to talk to myself behind the wheel, processing the day’s events or rehearsing things I might have said to someone, I catch myself, stop speaking and return to the silence.
It’s strange not to have the car radio on. No music, no news. Ordinarily I’d have been listening to the recent health care debates play out on public radio and talk radio. But I haven’t, and my soul has benefited — the discord hasn’t slipped into my blood stream the way it has for so many people.
It’s too early to see lasting fruit from this practice of embracing my inner Quaker. My history with spiritual disciplines is spotty anyway — I have the consistency of a gnat with ADHD. But already there are hints of more peace and serenity. Silence helps me to ‘rekindle the gift of God’ within. (2 Tim 1.6)
I’ve discovered being silent is a delicious thing. How hard it must be to live and work in a setting with no place or opportunity for silence.
In ScienceNews, Bruce Bower summarizes current research on the moral development of children. Recent studies indicate in learning good behavior children would rather parents reason with them than shame them.
At the end of the article, he offers observations on the morality of lying:
Studies directed by Turiel [a psychologist at U.C. Berkeley] indicate that U.S. teenagers and married couples label honesty as “good” in principle but see certain types of deception as justified. Most teens said it was OK to lie to get around parents’ demands seen as morally unacceptable, such as staying away from peers of another race, or as invasions of a personal domain, such as directives not to date a certain person.
Husbands and wives generally judged it acceptable for either sex to lie in order to further personal welfare, such as a wife lying to her husband about attending an alcoholism support group because he thinks the sessions are useless. Lies about keeping a secret bank account and seeing friends on the sly were rated as more acceptable for wives than husbands, especially by women who worked outside the home. Those women may view such fabrications as necessary to preserve an equal status with their husbands, Turiel speculates.
Successful marriages from Beijing to Boise may thus maintain a delicate balance between morally inspired truth-telling and lying.
When is it okay to lie? If lying protects your own safety, or the safety of your loved ones, then it’s acceptable. But lying to protect your image or reputation doesn’t seem right to me. We need to tell the truth even when it makes us look bad. Some people are better at lying than others. I’m a poor practitioner in the art of lying — guilt will consume me afterward.
But dishonesty is dangerous. Once you’re known as a liar, your credibility disappears. Fama volat — reputation flies. And if your credibility is gone it doesn’t come back easily, if at all.
When do you think lies are acceptable?
The prime minister of Bangladesh has banned men’s suits and neckties in government offices. The country suffers from a serious energy shortage — power companies cannot keep up with demand. The changes in dress will allow for less air-conditioning in government buildings, thus saving energy. In addition to having open collars, men may now leave their shirts untucked.
The post offers this history of neckties:
Despised by all but the most inveterate masochists, the necktie traces its origins to the uniforms of 16th century Croatian mercenaries in the employ of King Louis XIII of France. In a sartorial choice that has baffled and dismayed people ever since, upper-class Parisians adopted the mercenaries’ knotted scarf, which they called a “cravat” – a mispronunciation of the word “Croat” probably caused by a restricted larynx.
The cravat eventually “evolved” into the modern necktie, which was eventually paired with an outfit consisting of a heavy jacket and flimsy slacks, a design that guarantees that its wearer will be uncomfortable regardless of the ambient temperature.
It has always appeared odd to me that the chief article of male fashion is a piece of colored cloth knotted around the neck. Now I know its origin. A necktie must feel less uncomfortable than the high heels many women wear, so there is small cause for complaint. Still, the disappearance of neckties altogether would make me happy. Ties don’t suit me well.
A small group from Adrian walked five miles across the Mackinac Bridge this morning. The yearly bridge walk draws up to fifty thousand participants.
I was supposed to join them, but events pulled me home a day early. So I missed the walk. But I did worship on the shore of Lake Louise yesterday.
And I ate ice cream at this fine establishment…
When you can enjoy ice cream with your friends at the Whippy Dip, it’s a pretty good life.
A tall oak tree stands east of fellowship hall. On many afternoons I park my little white car in its shade. Sometimes I stand next to the trunk, under the long limbs, and trace the ridges of the bark with my finger. Or I pluck a leaf and press it in a book — I love the distinctive shape of oak leaves.
Brother Lawrence traced his conversion to a winter day when he was eighteen. He saw a bare tree and remembered how in a few months its leaves and fruit would return. In that moment he was overwhelmed with a sense of God’s love, presence and providence. So a whole spirituality of ‘the practice of the presence of God’ began when an 18-year-old boy looked at a tree.
I love to look at trees and wander near them. They are my silent partners in life. They don’t need to talk or brag. They endure through the seasons. Their roots sink into the earth, and their branches stretch to the sky. They own nothing, but they possess everything they need. They remind me of the poor in spirit Jesus called blessed.
I performed a funeral Tuesday for a man with no church affiliation. I met with his family Monday before the visitation. In their stories he appeared a latter-day version of the Good Samaritan, a man always ready to help others.
When I asked whether he’d ever belonged to a church, they said, “He was a Christian by his deeds.” So he was an anonymous disciple. At his service he received military honors and a Christian funeral.
Afterward a dark-haired woman came up to me. “Did you know him?”
“No, but his family told me about him.”
“I wonder if he accepted Christ and really crossed over.”
Not knowing what to say, I replied stupidly, “That’s a good thing to wonder.”
We drove 30 miles to Pettisville, Ohio, for the committal. I saw the woman standing beyond the green tent at the edge of the mourners. I looked over rows of gray stones and wondered what qualifies someone for a Christian burial.
This man fought in the Battle of Peleliu in his youth, and in his old age he cared for a wife with Alzheimer’s. He lived an admirable life. But in the New Testament, deeds alone do not make you a Christian.
On the other side, to accept Christ in Billy Graham fashion is only one way of being Christian. Christ determines who his disciples are anyway, anonymous or not.
This experience has left me with a question. Is it incongruous to give a Christian burial to someone not explicitly in the Christian fold? I don’t know the answer. I have no qualms about open communion, but a funeral is a different thing. Shouldn’t the language match the person? In 15 years of ministry I should have figured this out by now.
I seldom do these kinds of funerals, but if I perform more of them it may be wise to seek out a generic funeral rite.
Yesterday in Morenci I anointed a dying woman and recited the 23rd Psalm to her. Thou anointest my head with oil.
I flipped her wall calendar from August to September — the new picture shows the US Capitol dome. Time applies less and less to her, but the date matters to her caregivers.
Since she can no longer speak, and I’m not a great talker, I sat in silence next to her bed for half an hour and listened to her oxygen machine groan.
I thought about Auden’s September 1, 1939, which turned seventy yesterday. He wrote it at the outset of World War II, when the everyone felt
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
In these lines the p-s sound in hopes leads into the s-p sound in expire and joins the two words together.
As the woman lay in bed, her face looked uncertain and afraid, as if her hopes had expired and she couldn’t comprehend the losses that had come through her life. I prayed for God’s mercy to enfold her.
Lately my work feels like I am hiking across a desert of fine white sand. The needs are too large and too deep, and too many people are hurting. With each step forward my feet sink down into the sand.
But yesterday I flipped a calendar and sat as a woman’s silent companion for a half an hour. Silence comes easy to me — I’m not a great talker.
The poor economy has forced people in Tennessee to move into tents.
At a time of downscaled dreams, it’s a harbinger of how closely many Americans are walking the knife-edge between a roof and a tent flap. But for many, like Tammy Renault, who lives in a tent with a husband and four kids, there’s virtue to be found even in a muddy tent floor.
“This tells you what you’re made of,” says Ms. Renault, a devout Christian whose faith has been steeled, not diminished, by her family’s crisis.
Her story is a snapshot of the American edge: After the family moved to Tennessee, her husband Troy’s contracting business failed. The choice soon became paying the rent or the electric bill. They set up camp here nearly four months ago.
The link includes a picture of Tammy. Her eyes look left, and her hands come together an unconscious gesture of prayer. She must worry for her family.
Life is a scary thing. A couple of families I know are facing crises of their own, and their struggles are weighing on my mind today.
Saint Paul says we all live in tents: “In this tent [our body] we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling.” So the vulnerability of life in a tent is our natural lot.
Meanwhile, he says, “we walk by faith, not by sight.”
