when we stand in unison to recite the creed, I join in because I understand that the Church has always (since 325 or 381 AD or thereabouts) done this as a token of our unanimity that something beyond our imagining happened in the man Jesus whom we call the Christ, something which gave us the clearest image we’ve ever had, before or since, of what God is about; but at the same time I understand that these words are only the vaguest token of what happened, not a precise and literalist encapsulation of the Jesus event, not the be-all and end-all of faith statements. It is a token, a pretty incomprehensible token, and nothing more. The creed is not a sword to conquer the world, or to fall on. It is a token to hold onto when feeling desperate; and little more. As a statement of all that is necessary to eternal salvation, it is a farce. But I agree to join in with your recitation of it because this church is the spiritual home I have always belonged to, I want no other, and this is one thing we do; we say these words together, to affirm both to ourselves and to each other our belongingness.
But as I have begun to explore, and search, and wander the spiritual world in which I find myself these days, this creed is no guide, and is not even a hedge to keep me safe. (Although it could hedge me in, keep me back from any useful reaching out to know God, to have intimate intercourse with whatever is the ultimate. But then that holding-back might be, historically, the real intention of a creed.)
And what if the God I am coming to know does not fit inside this creed? What then?
But on the other hand, all these words I have just written about the creed comprise a linear, logical, rational world view. And I’ve written them just after I tried to say a few intelligible words about the imaginal. So after I’ve mastered the creed and all that other seemingly linear, rational stuff, my hunch is that the imaginal is my only route beyond, an alternative to the linear, toward the Eternal. But I’m not much good at the imaginal, am I? So maybe at this point I should say along with Lilly Tomlin, “Oh, never mind!”and get on with it.
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Easter V, 2008
I made no notes to myself during the sermon on Easter morning. They would have been embarrassing. I’ve spent most of my lifetime in a ministry for which Holy Week and Easter is the very core, the defining moment, the most important moment of the Christian year. But now I am no longer sure what these moments are about (was I ever sure, or just “putting it on”? And have I lost my faith, or merely begun to wander somewhere beyond it?) So my notes would have been embarrassing. I would have admitted to myself that Easter morning is always a let-down for me, always has been, has never lived up to the hype. Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, even Holy Saturday, these I can get into. These are human events; they are about the very down-and-dirty moments and events of our lives. They are real, and I can dig my fingers and intellectual claws, my emotional claws, into them. So when I wake up on Easter morning I expect more of that, only much more intensely, excitingly. (It’s gotta be at least a little better than searching out an Easter basket full of chocolates and an opera cream Easter egg.) But it’s not! Lots of wonderful colors and sounds and smells and tastes, with pounds and pounds of frappery and gingerbread. So much preparation and promise, and then, the same old liturgy with a few kinks thrown in. The week was about real, human stuff; but this is about something way outside the human. Something ineffable, untouchable, something beyond. It’s about what cannot be said, defined, or described. And the hoked-up celebration just doesn’t make it for me. I always hope it does for others. But after all these years I’ve come to not expect much any more.
So Eastertide begins to drag for me. After that Easter morning let-down, and then six Sundays of preaching about John’s post-resurrection stories I began to run dry and wish for some of the Pentecost season readings from the Hebrew Scriptures, rich, powerful, human stories you can really sink your teeth into. And then this morning we arrived at the story of Stephen, the new deacon who left off deaconing and took up preaching and got himself stoned to death for it. Had a vision as he was dying, and as he shouted out his vision, well, I thought, that’s what happens to mystics; they get stoned, and then someone accommodatingly stones them to death. Happened to the prophets. Happened to Jesus (except execution by suffocation, shock and exposure on a Roman cross instead of rocks). Now it’s happening to Stephen. And others will follow. Mystics are just too off-the-wall, too loose-cannon-ish, too outside the limits, beyond the pale. They can’t be tamed, and so they can’t be tolerated. They can’t be controlled, and they dream weird things, wheels within wheels and hundred-eyed indescribable critters, things that point beyond the texts, beyond the codified experiences, beyond the expectable. And those dreams point toward mysteries not captured (perhaps not even hinted) in the holy writings, mysteries more indescribable than trinities, mysteries more fundamental than even YHWH.
And I, fool that I am, have a yen for some mystical experiences. I think they might open understandings deeper and richer and more elemental and more extensive and more profound than the tales of Hebrews and their images of the eternal. I would hope for glimpses, mere glimpses mind you, of the chasms and abysses that illuminated and motivated Jesus. Souls are willing to be stoned to death for things like that, and some people are always willing to accommodate them.
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Feast of Pentecost and Mothers’s Day—May 11, 2008
Nancy and I took Ed and Marvine to their church this morning, a small, very country church with an average age of about seventy-five. Found myself reflecting on what a different circle of standing stones this was. A country UCC church, farmers and such, just coming off a short, bad pastorate with a gal they should never have called, now being interimed by a senior pastor who’d served here before, but only as long-term Sunday Supply. She fits them well, seems as country and down home as they are. And I reflected (though I’d been here before and reflected on this community before) how different an experience this was from our normal St. Luke’s, Episcopal experience. No formal liturgy here to speak of. But lots and lots of family. What happens in this circle of stones? A reinforcement of this as a chosen extended family. These folks seem to like each other, feel at home around each other (I’ve no hint what ancient animosities and dividing biases separate them; they keep those monsters hidden even from themselves). The first minutes were taken with greetings around the room (time is deliberately or accidently given for this), and the formal service began after this was completed. The pastor began with a folksy litany built around “This is for mothers who . . . .” Folksy, country stuff that said “You’re okay, we’re okay.” Not stiff Anglican liturgical material. A lot of (hidden) stuff was going on (I felt). Not clear how much of it was Christian. The words of the service were built around the Pentecost readings, but I was not clear that the underlying messages were; they seemed to me more American, mid-Western, farming country messages, and I suspect you need to be a seasoned member of this community to comprehend the underlying, subtle, not explicitly voiced messages. But values were being reinforced. And the pastor knows how to talk with them, country-folk. So a kind of matriarchy was going on. At announcement time one mother touted her son’s perfectly pitched baseball game the day before, seventy-five pitches for the whole seven innings. A round of applause felt appropriate, though not given. As a preacher she seemed to me somewhat scatter-shot with Pentecost messages about getting some mission going, and the Interim’s messages about some things that need to be happening here, get with it! Not my kind of tight and obviously erudite piece of scholarship. And no Communion; but that was missed only by my Anglican fixation on Eucharist. But these were folks who were enjoying seeing each other for an hour, and then anxious to get on homeward. This circle is about such different things than my St. Luke’s that it is kind of amusing (though to say that would sound deprecating, which I do not intend). And I can only hunch what things are given voice and enactment within this circle; I’m deaf as a post to their language, unable to hear what is being said in between and underneath the words. This is not my circle of standing stones.
Perhaps at St. Luke’s we are reaching out to touch the numinous in our very stiff and formalized, ritualistic, liturgical ways; while here they seem reaching for family, farm community, for keeping-it-together kinds of things
