Learning

I do bonsai. It is a discipline of relationships. The trees I work with become a form of art, art that is never done. The trees need intensive care, care that is not the same from tree to tree. A maple and a spruce need different kinds of attention, water, sun, fertilizer, soil composition, pruning. To treat one like another is to abuse it and to ultimately invite its death.



I read a lot about trees to get to know what they need and so how to relate well with them. Just recently, I discovered I was prejudiced. I found out I was operating on a set of assumptions that had more to do with my ignorance than with the tree. Running into one’s own ignorance is a constant normality when we open ourselves to truth.



It’s easy to slide down that slippery slope. Consistency makes so much sense, even when we pride ourselves in being self aware. But perhaps that is the widest gate toward arrogance. We are so proud of ‘knowing.’ But what do we know? Our knowledge is a structure that makes sense to us. We’ve built it with that sense as a blue print. The universe has little respect for our plans and schemes. Our only hope is to constantly reach beyond our normality, our assumptions, our perspectives. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes sad, often frightening. Once in a while, too rarely we learn. We see clearly our limitations in time to do something about them. Each of those is a victory, a new hope.



Red maples need direct sunlight and a lot of water, every day, sometimes twice a day. So I moved the red maple and started watering it more. I hope it didn’t suffer too much. I hope its happy now, tree happy. I’ll prune it next spring.

Shell Shock

The weather reports were unanimous. A tropical storm was on its way, they named it. Bad weather is no big deal. This close to the shore, we’re used to it. The word ‘tropical’ raised hackles. Conversations about the weather were very different. Awkward silences punctuated any comment mentioning temperature, humidity, wind, or rain fall. When we heard the name, there were no cracks, ‘Dumb name.’ ‘I had a girlfriend named that.’ None of it. It scared us.



Last fall we were mauled by a beast named Sandy. It tore our normality to shreds. The ocean ate our beaches, our neighborhoods, our landmarks. It beat the crap out of our world. A named storm brought all of that back. It’s called post traumatic stress syndrome. You don’t have to be crawling around on the floor mewing like a kitten to experience your now being overwhelmed by the horror of a past that broke through the structures of sense in which you live. That specific then becomes a present power, though the war or the storm or the horror of then is long gone. It can be triggered by a phrase, a sound, a smell, or a weather report.



An older member of my church here came to me the week after 9-11, obviously upset and anxious. He was afraid to go to sleep. Nightmares owned his sleep. During World War II, he’d been a Navy officer who was in charge of a unit that cleaned out below decks of ships that had been torpedoed and made it back to port. His unit preceded the engineers and mechanics. They power washed and steam cleaned the soot, blood, and hair off the walls and out of the machines. He told me that the wind had been blowing our way from Manhattan since the attack. Two thousand people getting burned and pulverized made human smog. The smell took him back to the horror of those engine rooms. His courage and sense of duty had gotten him through the war. But the ugliness had come with him. Now that smell took him back there.



There is nothing cowardly about struggling with such demons. No one should have to live through such ugliness. All of us have limits. We may maintain our faith in God, our sense of self, and loyalty to family or flag, we may function like heroes, but the ugliness of the then that we wrestled with is now imbedded deep within us. They used to call this shell shock. But this isn’t just about artillery strikes or suicide bombs. Mothers and firemen and rescue workers get this condition. None of us are stuck with the torture of living with such ugliness. We can work through it. But we have to admit our pain, trust another, and go back to the event that washed over us like a storm surge and share. That’s hard. But it’s the only way to freedom.



Her name was Andrea, the tropical storm. It dumped a few inches of rain on us. A few of my conversations with people were a little longer than normal. Some of them went back to Sandy. I go fishing sometimes. Sometimes I catch stuff. We’ve been working on setting up our church house to make room for work crews to stay while they’re working on the wreckage. It makes a great segway. Beware of sneaky ministers going fishing. And beware of sitting on your horrors. Such eggs hatch dragons that will eat your soul.

Grand Slam

The Yankee’s first baseman Mark Teixeira is a great fielder and a monster with a bat. Just before the season began, he was injured. He finally got back from rehab, and everybody, including Teixeira himself said he didn’t expect much as far as hitting for a while. Last night in the third inning with the bases loaded, he hit a home run. Grand Slam! It doesn’t get much better than that.



Grand slams are combinations of so many small circumstances. Three people have to get on base. And then the ball, thrown at ninety miles an hour, has to get slammed three or four hundred feet, inbounds. That’s just this side of a miracle.



There are so many times when we load ourselves with expectations, ‘We always did it that way before,’ or ‘We never did it that way before,’ or any combination of should’s and ought’s that demand that we be something or not be something else. The terrible burden of these unseen demands is that we give away the present to some other tense, some other place. It’s almost impossible to be effective on any level when we’re not living in the here and now with all its limitations and possibilities.



Humility is more than not blowing your own horn. Humility is a deep sense of honesty. It rests in strength, not in its denial. If you meet a humble person, you meet a capable person, because they’re living in the now, able to make something of what presents itself. It is a sign that there is wisdom there.



So, Teixeira’s a wise guy. He also hit another home run tonight; only two guys were on base this time. I’d say he’s catching up just fine.

Shake Rattle and Roll

Our choir director is a miracle worker. Our introit this week was an arrangement of a piece written in the 1500’s. Our anthem was a spiritual that included clapping. The ancient one wasn’t a huge stretch. But for white bread Presbyterians to actually ‘git down’, clapping, swaying, and singing like they meant it, with hearts tuned to joy rather than anxiety of getting the right note, now that’s rough. The miracle part of it is, WE PULLED IT OFF! The congregation almost fell off their pews.



Religion is strange bird. It lifts its hands toward a multi dimensional reality whose purposes transcend our understanding while it intersects with us in very specific and overt ways. Such intersections are fearsome. They demonstrate our limitation and show us glory, glory too much to categorize or express systematically. And yet we try. Thus, religion.



It’s hard to find ways of recalling and expressing bits and pieces of the glory. Song allows us to shake loose some of the clods of mortality and limitation. It lifts us and joins us in ways concepts and words can’t. But even music can become locked and limited by our refusal to open to the glory. It has little to do with genre. The soaring glory of Bach opens ways toward the ‘Other’ as effectively as the enthusiasm and rhythms of spirituals, but only if we let it. Few are willing to be touched by Bach. We’ve become jaded in our now.



But that can happen with any key. It is sad. The issue is to be willing, to be open. The issue is to sing, ‘Hallelujah’ with heart, mind, and soul. Yup, she’s a miracle worker. “All praises be to the Lord our God, He is wonderful.” Amen.

Half Mast

Shrewsbury is a small town, used to be a farming town, now it’s a bedroom community for high end folks who work elsewhere and live here to have a safe and quiet place to raise the future shakers and movers. But some of the old fashioned stuff still pops up its head once in a while.

Memorial Day is one of those once in a while’s. The girl scouts march with the flags. The school band plays a medley of patriotic songs, fourth graders sliding trombones always makes me proud. It’s a long story. I stand with the firemen, the Rev and the boys. We stand behind the cops, next to the ambulance folks. One of the firemen who happens to be a woman sings the national anthem. She’s pretty good. Then a sixth, a seventh, and an eighth grader each reads an essay that speaks to What Memorial Day means to me. Then they read a list of the one’s we’ve lost, starting in the Revolutionary War and working all the way past Vietnam. Then they raise the stars and stripes and lower it again to half mast, while the pipes play “The flowers of the field ha’ all wiede away, followed by Amazing Grace” Then I say the benediction.

I always appreciate the whole thing. There’s something so real about it. But this year while they read the list, I started to tear up. The pipes put me over the top. Why? Each name seemed to be a personal loss, a tragedy. The terrible price of war stood up and spoke those names. And then it was my turn to talk, to send them out.

I climbed up next to the flag pole and looked over the crowd. They were waiting for something. People do that. They know something is about to happen, something that fits into the normality and might actually mean something. They wait for it.

“Tecumseh Sherman, hero of the Civil War, savior of the nation was asked to speak at the graduation of West Point the year after the war ended. They expected a two hour speech. He came to the podium and looked over the eager cadets and said three words. ‘War is Hell.’ He sat and looked at his shoes.

“Sherman knew. Every one of the people whose names we read died in Hell. They suffered and paid a terrible price so that we can live in peace. Now claim what they have paid for. Live in peace, each day, every day, live in peace. It has been bought with a terrible price. Amen.”

I don’t know if that was normal enough for everybody, but about twenty people told me that it made sense. Maybe that’s all we can hope for.

Sherman hung out with the guy who used to own my house. They drank bourbon in my dining room with another guy who’d been to Hell, Grant. I hope it was good stuff, they deserved it.

I Met a Prophet

When I was told I needed surgery, I got out my calendar and set it up, surgery Thursday, back to work Tuesday. Made sense to me. The doctor told me it would take a month, but I figured I could get by, what the heck. I don’t expect whether forecasters to be accurate. Why should I expect doctors to know what they’re talking about?

In our Tuesday morning Bible study, we’re talking about prophets. These scary people who are the mouth pieces of God, standing with one foot firmly planted in the world of here and now and the other in the clarity of the eternal now of the One who knows and sees all that was, is, and shall be. “Thus says the Lord,” has rarely been greeted with gladness or eagerness. We don’t like to be told that most of what we’re doing is wrong and will get us into a lot of trouble. We don’t want to hear that we shouldn’t smoke, or eat half a bag of Doritos, or judge people because they’re different. We don’t want to be any more generous, forgive our enemies, or reduce our carbon foot print. We’ve worked hard on our excuses. We’ve even find ‘good’ reasons to tune out all these weirdoes. Why should we listen to somebody that doesn’t agree with us, let alone believe what they say?

I’ve found inspiration in the prophets. Though nobody listens to them, they keep at it because their relationship with God drags them toward the clarity from which their inspiration comes. So, when I get slapped around or worse, ignored, I remember them and keep at it.

I doubt my surgeon considers himself a prophet. But I doubt he has any easier time convincing stubborn patients like me to believe the probabilities that are coming at them like an eighteen wheeler. Last week Chris told me it was nice to see the brightness coming back in my eyes. I looked at the calendar. Yup, a month. I have to tell my doctor about the prophets. And, I have to stop being such an idiot. I’m sure
that's going to happen, real soon.

Clean Desks

I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs personality preference profile a few times. Some of the insights it reveals about my personality are no brainers. I’m an extrovert out the whazoo. And then there’s the way I keep order. I don’t. I have a tendency to not worry too much about how my desk looks at any time of day, week, month, or year. True, I’m infamous for loosing things. But then there’s always the epiphanous moment when I rediscover them.

I was at a continuing education event once where we were sorted by personality type. We’d all taken the test and sent them in before we got there. So I was in a group of six other extroverted, disorganized ministers. Fifteen minutes into the exercise we were laughing at our shared normality. One guy put a trash can at the end of his desk every six months and emptied whatever was piled on it into the gaping maw of oblivion. I asked him, “Did you ever miss anything?” His simple answer was “Not unless you count all the anxiety I dump with the trash on my desk.” In another fifteen minutes we were trying to figure out where to go for beer after the class and I noticed the other groups. One of them had found and easel and markers. They were making a list. Another group was sitting quietly. I bet they all had clean desks.

I used to worry about the creation story that most people are familiar with. There’s an awful lot of ordering and separating and judging going on there. I worried that God was the ultimate bean counter. This god liked things neat. And the chaos that was conquered by all the ordering and separating and judging was more similar to my fly by the seat of the pants reality. So did that make me on the outside of God’s orderliness?

You might scoff, but I’ve been told point blank and almost diplomatically over the years that my lack of order was paramount to a failure in my moral system and a good reason why my spiritual leadership was questionable. The budget types wield powerful influence over the hearts and minds and pocket books of the church. And they are faithful workers in the vineyard.

It was pretty easy for me to get the idea that God’s image that we were made in didn’t include a nose. Creativity and separating and seeing that stuff was good were more in line with a family resemblance each of us receives, noses and such. But there’s more to our resemblance to God than some such specificity. Sure God ordered things. But the order included pretty intricate things like snowflakes and down right messy stuff like birth. And just because something’s messy doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And when the One decides it time to step outside the nice neat order of things and make something happen, we don’t call that wrong, we call that a miracle.

So in this convoluted manner, using whatever kinky form of logic my messy brain would allow, I decided that even if the writer of Genesis would disapprove of my lack of a coherent filing system, the Holy Spirit allowed for all kinds of loop holes. Even for people with messy desks.

Whew, what a relief. Now where did I put that sermon I was working on?