Jelly Beans and Bunnies

I have a problem. One of the heirlooms entrusted to me is a ceramic Easter Bunny, complete with pastel lederhosen, pulling a ceramic two wheeled cart. It’s a candy dish decoration for the pagan celebration of fertility, better known as Easter. We tend to do a lot more with the pagan part of this holiday than with the resurrection of our Lord. I guess it is more fun to have egg hunts and chocolate bunnies than crosses and cemeteries, torture and death. Even in church we tend to pay a lot more attention to lilies and whoopee-doo than empty tombs. Most people don’t come to church on Thursday or Friday. They just skip to Sunday.



Anyway, I want to put out the heirloom. Easter is coming up, just a few days from now. But that’s just it. Those few days are why it happened. How do we decorate now? Deny it? Or do we have one room for mourning and the other with the ceramic bunny as a center piece?



Sometimes I feel my life is like that. If I pay attention to the suffering of the world, how do I find time to giggle? Or shall I live in denial so we can decorate and celebrate? Maybe it’s appropriate that Easter is crammed up against the cross. The victory of life rising out of the worst and most painful we can come up with. Maybe that’s Easter’s meaning. ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.’



Yup, I’ve got a problem, if you want to look at it like that. Maybe it’s more of an opportunity. No denial. No surrender. Tonight, we’ll celebrate the Last Supper, betrayal, death. But the bunny’s coming out. Take that darkness.

Dirty feet

I have a hard time with Holy Week. I used to think I was so grumpy on Palm Sunday because I was pooped from Lent. I used to think that Maundy Thursday was rough because I was so busy getting everything in order for all the services. I used to think… Since I gave up thinking everything’s been much easier.

One year the calendar put communion on the day for having the kids parade into church with palms. I got up to do communion and I started to cry. I realized I was so mad it hurt. Everybody was whoopiedooing and He was crying. Where the hell do any of us get off being as obtuse as everybody was then? How can we be so self centered? How can we ignore the Christ in His pain? Whew! Took me a minute to get that set of monsters back in their harness. People told me I ought to get some rest. I must be really tired from Lent. They were lucky I remembered my mother telling me it wasn’t nice to knock people down and punch them in church. Yo! His heart is broken and you’re discussing how to make little crosses with leaves?

Since then I’ve approached this whole thing a lot differently. And they have too. Funny thing. Maybe we spiritual leaders need to spend more time with the Lord. Might do us all some good.

But this washing the feet thing still gets me. Since I paid attention to what was going on during this week, the relationships and all their gives and takes are so poignant, so loaded, I don’t know how He got through it. Here He was, knowing what was going on (I really don’t think it required the Great Kreskin to figure out what was ahead), and they’re having a party. That would leave me somewhere between walking out on the idiots and getting Gabriel to fry them. But He stuck in there, even without a pension to preserve. He moved inside all the self centered idiocy and gave them a lesson they would never forget. He wounded them with the only weapon that would leave them with anything except embarrassment and self defensive excuses. He washed their feet. Talk about counter intuitive.

It left them abashed. It leaves me absolutely positive that I am not worth His concern. I am still so angry about His pain and their unwillingness to pay attention to it, I know I haven’t learned what I need to.

But that’s the point isn’t it. We’ll never learn. Even at our best we’re a lot less than good at this growing-up-into-our-potential-as children-of-God business. Our own anger and pain and lack of vision and faith and generosity and compassion and courage etc, etc. will always, sooner or later, put us in the shoes of the Pharisees or Judas or Peter or good old naked John. And that’s when we’ll see Him kneeling in front of us, taking our feet in His hands as He tells us that He loves us.

I don’t know about you, but this guy gets under my skin, dirty feet and all.

Monster dandruff

My journey through life has offered opportunities at every turn. When I was unemployed after seminary I had the opportunity of pumping gas and working in a leather factory. I learned things and grew in ways that I am very grateful for. One would think the ministry would be such a place, full of fertile ground in which to grow and become and develop. But the ministry is a job. It entails a lot of meeting deadlines, going through the motions, living up and down to expectations, just like any other job.

One of the hardest disciplines for me is to deal with the day to day, the routine and not get buried under the monster dandruff. When I was green in the business, I made sure that I adopted mentors. I visited them regularly and pumped them for how’s, when’s, where’s, and brilliant tidbits that I could claim and use to make things work. One of these saints shared with me that the people would put up with just about anything I had to say as long as I “paid the rent.” I asked him what that entailed. Very simply, visit them. Or more accurately, let it be known that you are visiting them. He told me most of them don’t want you to come to their house, but they want to know that you are doing that for the people that “really need it.” I thought that was rather cynical. But after thinking about it I realized that what they need to know is that we care about them on a personal level. That’s how they figure it out. OK, it made sense. But putting it into action, getting out of the church, away from classes to teach, and counseling sessions, and crises to deal with was hard. Breaking the inertia of my priorities to sit with someone who didn’t really have any pressing problems seemed…, like paying rent. The drifts of bits and pieces of hours and days, of routine business, of times when inspiration seemed far away, and a cup of coffee was my only defense against fatigue, all of it piled up and made it hard to let light shine.

Back in the days when I played and sang in bars and coffee houses and anyplace I could get a gig, I learned a trick. Most of the time people don’t listen to you. They treat you like elevator music and ignore your efforts to bring beauty and soul into the moment. So I used to sing to one or two people in the room who seemed to be paying attention. And if it was a hard house where no one was with me, I’d try to worm into the song and let it speak through me. I’d put me into the song.

So, I started to do that with my visits. I’d try to find something about the person to celebrate. And if they were ornery or nasty, I’d wrap the moment around me and try to find something interesting or hopeful in the environment. It started out as a survival mechanism, evolved to a habit, and now I treasure it as a gift.

It’s easy to get buried. There is so much that sandbags our gifts and makes our moments dim and difficult. But we are gifted. We are gifts, if we are willing to invest ourselves in the moment.

But honestly, sometimes it ain’t easy.

We’re not in Kansas, Toto

Being born a Presbyterian of Presbyterian father and Evangelical Lutheran mother, the pope was never much of a figure head to me. There are so many bits and pieces of me that lie far beneath choice, assumptions that preclude the entire idea of such a figure of authority let alone veneration. But as I have formed a personal mythology including mid-evil figures of nobility and authority, tangled with devotion to a very personal Lord makes Mr. Pope more intriguing. The concept, the focus, the incarnate power that all rest on those terribly human shoulders. And so much of the church’s direction depends on that one person’s willingness to reach beyond what has been or what’s comfortable. It's called potential.



All of that came clear to me when the new Bishop of Rome said that the church should be of the poor and for the poor. Something in me lit up. It was more than simply good news about a comment by an important guy. It was a light shining in the world and in my life. It gave me inspiration and motivation to be a more faithful follower of our Lord.



This past Sunday was a train wreck of teaching, worship, preaching, meetings, pastoral work, pre marital work, junior high fellowship, and a concert of sacred music. In the middle of the deluge a homeless young woman came wondering if she could find a place to sleep for a couple hours. Without thinking I opened my office, bedded her down on the couch there, gave her a blanket, got some shoes and sox from my wife and pizza from the youth group. I think my sense of normality, offering without thinking, at least part of it bubbled up from Frances’ statement. See what I mean?



I’m not in the process of converting. The protestant bed rock is still there. But it is nice to have an inspiration in a position of authority. And a Jesuit no less. We’ll see how it goes. I doubt he’ll be wearing the red shoes.

Alma Mater

Chris found a piece of mail I’d sidelined for recycling. It was from Lafayette College, my alma mater. We don’t have the resources, time or money to play in those waters. This was from the fencing team. I was one of them, they guys with the swords and knickers. Actually, I was captain of the team. She told me this would be a good way to decompress.



So, we went back. We went back to the place that put up with my adolescent development and still managed to teach me more than I knew there was to learn. We went back to a place that has changed in a number of ways. Buildings, women (that my friends, is a monster), resources for students, and attitude. There used to be 17 fraternity houses. Most of them are now dorms or administrative buildings. And a student we talked to said that she found there was little room to experience independence. She thought it was more like a prep school.



Construction and social trends aside, it was still Lafayette. Kirby Hall still had the Marquis de Lafayette’s coat of arms carved in high relief over the door, with the family’s motto, ‘CUR NON,’ ‘Why Not.’ That has been one of the pillars of my life. Then, plodding to class I’d pass it and smile, wondering if the stogy philosophy professor that I really couldn’t stand had a clue how revolutionary the stone work on ‘his’ building was. Chris and I climbed to the library of Philosophy and Law there, it still smelled of leather and old books. The reading tables still had the lamps with the green glass shades. The bronze busts of the giants that began our outrageous experiment in democracy still watched whoever came into the place. I used to have conversations with Ben Franklin. His slight smile always brought a bit of wistful humor to my doubts and confusion.



Time warped and my present and past overlapped. But anchoring me in the now was a new glory, a love that smiled at my joy. And even more, when we went to the gym, she got excited as Lafayette beat Lehigh on the basketball court. Go Pards!



The new gym already smells like dirty sox. Maybe they pipe it in.

Pain

Life has a lot of pain. Sinus pain, headaches, broken, dislocated, sprained, fingers, ankles, arms, ankles, bee stings, paper cuts with lemon juice, and so many other forms and incarnations of that four letter word. Eskimos have something like 23 different words for snow. Don’t you think there should be more words for pain?



Anyway, I just discovered another. This morning it felt like somebody drove a nail into my thumb. Arthritis. Either that or some little gnome worked his way into my joint and used a tiny little claw hammer and roofing nail in there. My son asked what was wrong and I diagnosed myself to him. I think it was weird for him to hear his father complain about one of those things that tends to be a curse of age. For him, it was painful to hear that. And then it was painful to see him react like that.



Pain. Ben and Jerry don’t have as many flavors as there are permutations of this tiny word. But down at their base there’s a lot there that gives us information we need, information that opens realities and possibilities that we wouldn’t consider or imagine. In spite of all that good stuff, sometimes I’d rather have a gnome or two. Then again, ewwuu.