Retired Angel

It's been a while....
A lot has gone under the metaphoric bridge.  Geographic differences, role differences, stress differences, lots under the bridge.
We're all in this business of living while the river runs.  So much changes and yet, too often we stand and watch with the same expectancy and anxiety.  Our position on the bridge seems the only thing that remains the same.  But the mirror and all else around us reminds us that we are no more constant than that river that carries all of life past, bits and pieces washed from other times and places, other perspectives, other hopes and dreams, done and gone. 
It sounds so dark and hopeless.  On the contrary.  In this new place I feel new sense of life.  I am not standing passive, watching life roll by.  Rather here, past the times of grinding labor and responsibility I find a freedom that I really did not expect.  Who knew?
I see myself and my place in this wonderland of living much more clearly.  Perhaps less grandiose, perhaps less bound and bordered, perhaps with more of a sense of mortality, perhaps a little more philosophic, and definitely a lot more humble.
It's good to be here.
So, it's been a while.
Let's see what comes up...

Refugees

 

 

I was listening to the ongoing tragedy of the movements of people, fleeing from and to.  From the horror of poverty and war to uncertain destinations defined only by less of both.  Theirs is the only hope.  We who are secure in our safety and security and wealth have little hope of doing much about this except shake our heads at the efforts of those between the sources of the flow and its destination.  These countries a bit better than the hells from which those fleeing come, have reached their limits.  They are building walls, shutting down railways, they have made being a refugee illegal and helping them equally punishable. 

I was wondering why I should be thinking that if only each of us could take one family into our own homes...  It occurred to me that I come by such sentiments honestly.  In the 1950’s when I was a small boy, a family came to stay with us from Hungary.  They were fleeing the failure of the revolution there, walking across minefields to seek something else, something safe.  I asked my father why they were coming to live with us.  He opened the Bible and read me the 25^th chapter of Matthew.  “Mercy is our business, David.”  It was that simple. 

I’m afraid nothing about this is simple.  There is no indication that happy endings necessarily go along with the strategies recommended by Jesus.  There is only the indication that to be about such business, to allow mercy to be our normality is to be changed by that same normality.  And to limit it is to remain secure behind our walls and status and excuses.  And if we pay attention to the lessons of history, there is no security there.  It’s that simple.

What’s our business?

Dumpsters

 

As I write, the carpet guys are tearing up the old floors in the church office and the lobby of the church house.  There are all kinds of analogies that come to mind about getting rid of the old to let in the new.  Jesus said we can’t put new wine in old wine skins.  You get the drift.  But I was wondering about all those old floors, ripped up, now discarded.  What do we do with them?  Piles of what we’ve torn up or down, getting in the way of the ‘new wine’ of our lives. 

Dumpsters.  They come on a truck, rooms with no ceilings, deposited on our property, ready to receive anything we lob or shove into them.  And then they disappear.  Poof!   Trash and garbage and anything that is not the new, improved, better, unbroken.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get dumpsters to park in our lives and use to rid ourselves of our bad habits, the twenty pounds we need to lose, the credit card debt we carry, our guilt, our anger, our fear?  Poof!  The psychic garbage company would come and take it away to be disposed of in an environmentally safe manner (some of that stuff is pretty toxic). 

The trouble is, we don’t want to let a lot of it go.  We come up with blame and guilt and excuses that keep us buried in our trash. Every once in a while when we find some exciting new part of life we’d like to claim, it’s hard to fit it into a trash infested house. 

I hope as I go on in life, I get better at throwing things out, that need to be tossed, and give things away that need to be kept, until my life is as clear as the life of our lord.  Then God’s light can shine through without any of my excuses in the way. 

Martyrs

 

The news is full of it.  ‘Nine dead in Charleston church.’  I face this with a terrible sense of fatigue.  The grim words that form sound bites, ‘Racism, violence, guns, mass murder,…’ seem worn by use.  The kid accused of it, isolated, shy, given a gift of a weapon by a well-meaning relative, seems a great subject for a clinical study of alienation and desperation.  And now they speak of the death penalty.  Hasn’t there been enough death?

The pastor seems to have been a laborer in the vineyard.  I heard a recording of him, confidently and without the awful emphasis of so many who know they’re being listened to, speaking of his church.  He sounded proud of the history and the heritage that the congregation was seeking to represent.  He was conducting a Bible study, sowing seed, telling the old, old story.  Perhaps I’m projecting, but there seemed a bit of joy in his speaking. 

People speak of the horror of having such violence in a place where they come for solace and peace.  I wonder if they’re really paying attention to the history of the church, of the price that the church has paid to preach peace, of the example the church’s Lord set so long ago?

It is a horror.  Evil is that way.  The pope came out with an encyclical demanding we pay attention to the horror we are perpetrating upon our home planet.  Good for him.  It was so exhaustingly predictable how many shook their heads and said the pope should stay out of politics.  Politics?  When our consumer society does exactly that to the planet we live on for the sake of economic gain, we have left politics and entered the world that pushed that young man to kill nine people because of the color of their skin.  The pope, and anybody with a shred of sanity, let alone morality, let alone faith needs to do more than speak out.  Something more than continuing to consume.

We are a family, bonded by our genetic makeup and very simply because we share a home.  There is no debate in that.  It’s our job to act like it rather than acting like horribly competent four year olds, ready and willing to try out our mobility and newly discovered motor skills by destroying our environment for the heck of it.  Whether we use guns or profit margins we’re still nuts.

 But our responses are so exhaustingly predictable.  I think it was Dostoyevsky who said that good families are good in simple and similar ways, while those who are not good are bad with infinite variations.  Something like that.  I disagree.  I think good is beautifully diverse, while evil is sadly and terribly consistent. 

Let’s stop being predictable.  Let’s listen to the pope.  Let’s listen to the martyrs.  Let’s listen to the voices for hope.  And let’s do something new.  Who knows, maybe we’ll grow up.

 

Weeds

I took a left turn off the country road, out into a field, cleared for plowing.  I followed the ruts left by tractor or truck.  The weeds were knee high.  Wild flowers stood out here and there, white Queen Ann’s Lace, yellow Butter cups, purple Clover, gifts to the coming equinox.  Birds were having a field day, literally.  Their trajectories bringing bugs home to the little ones nested in the tree line, wild roses and cedars giving way to maple, ash, and oak.   Others on the wing finding in the disturbed soil easy access to the worms that were making the soil more fertile by the minute.  I saw a chipmunk shoving his cheeks full of seeds up on his hind legs watching for the black and yellow snake hunting.  No worry.  The snake was twenty feet away and the munk had his eye on him.

The piece of blue plastic caught my attention, fluttering on the two foot stake.  New wood, blond and split, bought by the pack at the lumber yard.   It fluttered, caught by a staple, driven into the meadow.  It was clearly a marker.  I stopped and scanned the field, picking up three more at a glance, below the level of the growing wild flowers and grass, but bright enough to catch the eye.  There was another one. 

When grass sprouts in a pot of petunias, I pull it out.  It doesn’t belong there.  I get the root so it won't sprout again.  Then I heel a depression into a bald spot in the yard and push the rooted grass in.  With a little water it might take hold there. 

The plastic markers weren’t weeds, but they were going to destroy this blooming meadow.  They’d been hammered in and were about to guide the machines that would gouge and tear the earth, to plant roads and foundations and ranch houses, or center hall colonials.   The birds and the chipmunks, even the snake had no idea that their world was about to be paved over.  And I have this thing about wild flowers.

So I weeded.  I found ten of them.  I carried them down the road to a trash can.  But the blue flags will sprout again, fertilized by some obscenities.  The roads and the driveways will have their way.  Such is life.  But today, today the field belongs to the wild flowers, the birds, and the critters.  Today.

 

Resolutions

   It’s that time of year again, time to look back and forward at the same time.  We tend to be too busy dealing with the now to spend any time doing either one.  Our form of looking back is regret and guilt.  Our way of looking forward is planning how to fit more doing or running into the moments we see ahead.  Our way of looking back is mostly regret that fuels the anxieties that have something to do with the more doing and running.

   Such are not contemplative disciplines of the spirit.  Neither are they effective at pouring the footings for our construction of a creative life style. 

   With this in mind I try to spend some moments, sitting still, considering the successes and failures, the moments of joy and grief.  I try to put them into the context of who I’d like to be and to become.  It takes a while, and sometimes it’s hard to hold myself to the task.  I tend to drift away from the focus.  Anxiety and guilt have a way of tangling us in their sticky webs.

   The results of my excursions produce a list.  They are in reality a bridge from then to there, constructed of hopes and dreams as much as stuff.  They may be grounded in the common, everyday activities.  And they may be potential alterations of the landscape of my life.  Or better, alterations of my pathway through the landscape of my life.  I go back to them now and then throughout the year, to keep my moments of clarity in mind.

   It’s time.  Happy new year.  May it be full of moments of clarity for us all.

Fear Not

Luke 2:1-14

 

   Whenever I hear the words of the King James translation of this passage, chills go up my back.   The season trembles around me.  ‘And it came to pass in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.’  It’s a switch that initiates all the pageantry and wonder speaking from places of shadowed mystery.  It whispers of beings beyond our understanding, presenting themselves to teenaged girls and blue collar workers.  Poetic words that open an epic made of anything but heroes.           

   Woven into the all too human story are these beings from beyond, messengers from the creator of all that was, is, and shall be.  Ever since I was a child I couldn’t buy the way people spoke of and pictured these messengers.  They were cute, sentimental projections of anything but the majesty and glory that messengers from beyond our understanding could be.

   I can understand why the pictures and stories of angels are done so.  There is no way to portray such beings.  It is beyond our capability.  So we give them wings, we give them halos.  But more, we reduce them, because beings of power and glory intruding on us are fearful.  We don’t want to fear in this time of sentiment and affection.  We want the security and affirmation that Christmas stands for. 

   I collect angels.  Most of them are beautiful, graceful human figures with flowing robes, dancing through space.  In this season they change our home into a preserve, a safe landing zone in these three dimensions for these bringers of God’s Word, reflections of the Maker’s glory.  They still tell a story of grace, a very human story begun so long ago, at least according to our perspective.  It is not only a story of one child’s birth, but also of that birth here and now, in this house, in this family. 

   They speak of memories, of songs sung at birth and death, of moments of affection and the new joy of relationships.  They speak of new faith, of heart felt understanding where before there were only words and human traditions.  They speak of the miracles that are ours to embrace.  So the multidimensional conduits of God’s news here and now in these beautiful, yet limited forms speak of our limited apprehension of God’s mystery and glory.  They speak of this incarnate specificity, born to us a savior.  They play human instruments.  They read and sing from manuscripts.  And they remind us that this is a season for us, we limited, needy, broken beings.  And so the multidimensional beings, here and now are beautiful, graceful, winged dancers, rather than reason defying, sense violating, terrifying beings. 

   And the songs they sing allow us to rest in the Good News that we, as we are, are loved. 

 Merry Christmas.

“O rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.”