Advent I—November 30, 2008
In the reading this morning the prophet pleads, “Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence, as when the melting fire burneth . . . .when thou didst terrible things . . . . Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness . . . .behold, thou art wroth; for we have sinned . . . we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags . . . .we are the clay, and thou art our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand. Be not wroth very sore, O YHWH, neither remember iniquity for ever: behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people” (Isa 64:1-9). He pleads with God. For why? What has he seen? What has this prophet heard?
I suspect that this speaker, this prophet is a visionary, that he has just had a vision so earth-shaking and so unspeakable that he cannot tell it to people, it is undescribable, inexplicable. He can only plead back toward God on behalf of the people of his birth. And I can hear his anguish. But I cannot see his vision.
And what shall I make of that? As I step back and ruminate, I can hear, and almost touch, smell his horror. But it is not mine. Nor was it productive for his people. They were still exiled (perhaps already so at the time of this vision). Perhaps this is a tiny bit of evidence that there is an inexplicable God. But I cannot make much more out of these words, except, perhaps, that we ought to be paying more attention. And this prophet certainly is describing, pointing toward a different God than J, E, D, or P.
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Christmas Eve—December 24, 2008
Just finished reading Betty J. Eadie’s book, Embraced by the Light the story of her second near- death experience. She spends some time in the afterlife, and comes back to tell us about it. Nancy warned me that it was an easy read, and she was right. I do not mean to make light of it, but I was not much informed, or impressed. I am certain that she had a truly visionary, mystical experience which was life-changing for her and her family. But her take on it, her apprehension and comprehension and explication of that experience are similar to others’s stories, no more informative than them, and a bit thready. Bill Byers’s8 take is deeper, more inclusive, and more confidence-inspiring.
My first impression is that hers is a thin metaphysic, it is insufficient to take in, to sustain much of the heavier, darker side of life and reality, at least as I see it. While she does step outside the Christian box, her metaphysic is too simplistic to be inclusive (that judgment from a mind that loves, craves complexity). It is too sweet and light-filled. My sense is that she is searching for a clear, and very simple, single core-truth to all reality and life. And that, having had a very deep and thoroughgoing mystical experience, her mind grasps at a few very simplistic themes to make sense of and to explicate that profound experience.
Hers is an educational model of after/other life. The goal of all life is to learn, to grow. But the whole is founded on, boils down to love. The outcome is too neat, too nice, too simple. While not quite Christian Scientism, her metaphysic could take in and incorporate Christian Scientism. Looking at her story from a psychological point of view, given the little bit she tells us of her personal history, there is no surprise in her metaphysical interpretation of her experience; while, in my ignorance, I do not see any traces of her Native American background (my only touch stone is Tony Hillerman’s Navaho-describing detective stories), I can sort out traces, bits and pieces of her Roman Catholic and protestant histories which she has bundled together and used as pitons to anchor her interpretation of her mystical experience. A few, carefully selected, Christian niceties seem to be her foundation stones. But for myself they are insufficient. They strike me as a nuclear family oriented comprehension of metaphysics, exactly what I might expect from her background. But they cannot cope with Hitler-and-holocaust, Mugambe sorts of realities, with the ongoing dynamics of unrefined evil that drive much of the world. Her tiny and insignificant finger-hold on evil (a personal satan who attempts to seduce individuals away from good-doing and is easily defeated by good spirits) will not stand up to the real world I witness. So I quail at some of her verities; “Insincere prayers of repetition have little if any light [i.e., power]” is a pitifully superficial and ignorant careen from contemplative prayer and folk-religion, and discourages me from taking seriously many of her broader assertions. Only the similarity of her over-picture to the metaphysics offered by a few others keep me from discarding hers altogether.
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Still Christmas Eve—December 24, 2008
I find myself in a very strange place this Christmas Eve. This has become a secular holiday celebration for me. We will go to church this night, sing the songs, enjoy the mysteriosity of it all. But the birth of Christ feels oddly empty for me. Have I turned some corner?
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Epiphany IV—February 1, 2009
I can’t recall what sent me off wandering this morning, some prayer, some tiny bit of liturgy, some word from Stephen’s mouth. But it sent me wondering. What was the church to me when I was young? a lad? What did I expect when I turned my attention to it and began to imagine myself a priest within it? And then, what was the church to me during my professional life. And what is it to me now, now that I am retired, and old, and reflective, and more thoughtful, less dutiful? And then I wondered, what are these others expecting out of this? A touch of God? A vision? A hint of transcendence and a rule for living?
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Lent V—March 29, 2009
When I studied Jack Miles’s book, God: a Biography I was struck by the similarities between the YHWH of a particular book and the needs of the nation: during the enslavement an ombudsman, organizer, leader; during the early kingdom a family friend and moralist who stood to the side, during the eighth century a critic and pleader and then an anguished but unrelenting judge, and finally after the exile a disappearing absentee. So it is a simple step to reasonably turn all that around and see that changing of YHWH not as any variation in the godhead himself, but rather of the people’s perception of God. Maybe, after all the study and ingestion and rumination and regurgitation of Scripture, our perception of the God is hardly more than a projection of our needs. A collection of the best we can imagine and the tiny scraps of wisdom we can glean and gather. God, or rather our perception of a God, may be simply a collection of what we hope for in our best moments and the hazy axioms we intuit about how best we live together on this planet.
This is not to say anything about the existence of God, only that what we perceive about that God may be far more projection than verifiable observation or deduction.
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Palm Sunday—April 5, 2009
We do this quirky little oxymoronic liturgy of palm branches and triumphal entries, and then move swiftly into the reading of the whole passion story, and a beginning of the last week of Jesus’ life. Nineteen hundred and seventy-five years ago this prophet cum seer cum healer cum teacher became too threatening for the Judaic authorities to tolerate, so they put him away, publicly, with lots of show and denunciation and renunciation and some Roman cooperation. And today I stand here celebrating that, commemorating. How odd!! What did he, this Jesus guy, do? What did THEY do? What was this whole scene, this doings all about? And what happened then? The resurrection? I mean, if I had been there, with my twentieth-century slightly-scientific understandings and methods of perception, what would I have perceived happened? And what difference would it have made? I suppose much, or an incalculable amount of this last-week story is historic fact, that it did in fact happen. But did it have some objective, supernatural effect? Or was it only metaphor, was it only impressing upon us a difference rather than effecting some objective,
