Something Other than a Pencil

At four o'clock this morning I woke up with a pencil, a very well sharpened pencil stuck in my right eye.  Actually it just felt like that.  I've had this feeling before and I've tried to figure out exactly what it feels like.  I settled for the pencil.  I use pencils.  The big yellow ones with the erasers on one end.  I sharpen them with my pocket knife.  They're sharp.  That's what it feels like.

It's called Iritis.  It's an inflammation of the iris of the eye.  It's nothing you want to have or have long enough to figure out exactly what the pain feels like.  I wandered around the cabin.  Being on study leave, I'm in a cabin in the woods on the Connecticut River.  So I wandered.  The pencil went deeper.  It usually does.   So, I walked outside, trying to figure out what to do.

I drove to the hospital.  Dumb.  But in the long run it kind of made sense.  I found a mental institution.  Lots of bricks and a pleasant lady who wanted to know if I needed help.  With her and a great amount of grace I wandered into the emergency room.  The security lady asked me "How are you today?"  I took a moment, hand over my eye, spasms shooting into my head as some giggling demon jammed the pencil in and rotated it, just a moment to tell her that I've trained people who visit suffering souls in the hospital to never ask, 'How are you?'  They're in a hospital.  How do you think they are?  Teaching moments abound.

 They were nice to me.  I tried to be pleasant.  The doctor dropped this stuff into my eye that hurt like hell and then took all the pain away.  Wow!  He used a portable version of the thing my eye guy uses to inform me that I had some sort of mark on my eye.  It looked like a twisted knot imprinted on the cornea.  No Iritis.  Good news.  But somehow the druids reached me, in Connecticut.  Go figure.

I have little perspective on this whole thing.  Gratitude per usual.  But who gets a symbol of the eternal connectedness of all things etched onto his eye?  I guess it's better than a pencil.  But sometimes things are too strange to shrug off. 

I apologized to the guard lady.  She told me nobody had ever told her that before, but it made a lot of sense.  She told me it was good advice.  She hoped I felt better.  All that to teach a guard lady?

Luke 17:11-19 You Can’t Go Back

 

I’ve often wondered if I could go back in time, what would I be able to change without altering the future in some unspeakable way?  I’ve heard it called the butterfly effect.  If on our jaunt into the past we smush one butterfly, change something infinitesimal, as days and weeks and years pass, that tiny change would alter the future radically. 

But I’ve known people, myself included, who try to live in the now acting as if parts of our past didn’t happen.  We try to forget that moment of weakness or arrogance or foolishness.  Some of those moments are so powerful that we wince or worry or dream about them.  They may be buried by the monster dandruff of time and new acquaintances, logistical alterations, behavioral switches, new habits, new jobs, but those moments, those pot holes, those choices, those lapses, those horrors are still there.

Whether we like it or not, now is an amalgam of then’s that are the raw material for now.  No matter how we’d like to make them go away, they are part of the bed rock that our center hall colonial of now is built on. 

When I went to a reunion of my graduating class from High School, it was one of those moments of embarrassment and gratitude all stirred into the same pot.  They all knew me, geek, fencer, football team mascot (a great way to meet girls), singer, proto hippie, etc.  High School was a time of devastating awkwardness and loneliness.  It was full of those moments I would have gladly altered, removed from my time stream like teeth crooked and painful.  But the reunion revealed less pain than nostalgia and an amazing sense of gratitude.  Gratitude for what that time taught me, gave me as tools for the future and in retrospect laughter at our mutual silliness and audacity.  It was an amazing experience, especially since I had a lot more hair than most of the guys.

In my first book I recounted this story from Luke’s gospel about the ten lepers from the point of view of one of the lepers who didn’t go back to thank Jesus.  He couldn’t because he wanted to leave the horror of that part of his life behind him.  But no matter how he tried, it was there, following him, polluting him, holding him back. 

I do PTSD therapy for people who have been through horror and find themselves caught in those moments when the world stopped making sense and caved in on them.  The chief therapy is to get them to walk through the moment again and again until they can allow it to become a memory not a living nightmare.  They have to go back, they have to remember it to allow themselves to face the now.  A now that includes that moment in the past.

We are Christians.  At the center of our faith is the cross, a traumatic horror.  Our job is to embrace that event and accept our culpability in it.  Then we can move on to the Resurrection and transformed life. They are all a part of who and what we are.  They all make the bedrock of our faith upon which we build our hope and our abundant life.  Not only can we go back, we have to if we are to accept ourselves, forgive ourselves and others, and accept the miracle of life and life abundant that blooms before us every day.

At the reunion some of the same tormentors that used to make me sweat tried to pick on me again.  I laughed with them.  There we stood laughing.  But I noticed they were wondering what the heck happened to the geek.  I guess I grew up.

 

The Plague

 

 

Our struggle for survival has been an up and down affair since we dropped from the trees and shambled out into the grass lands.  It’s been a tale of ups and downs in our journey through history, periodically bringing us close to the endangered species list, if there had been one.  Now our numbers seem to pad such edges.  Thousands, even millions might die, but we make so many more, so fast that there seems no end in sight. 

Disease is frightening.  Contagious bugs that move from one to the other touch a cord, if not in our conscious minds then somewhere in memories passed down from ancestors who watched their families and even towns die from the Black Death, or Small pox, or Cholera.  Such specters have haunted us since we stood up.  They sneak into our fortresses, under our gates, past our privilege and bring us down, peasant and king alike. 

Are they punishments for neglecting our God?  Are they cruel tricks of some demonic spoiler?  Are they merely evidence of the vulnerability of all life?  Whatever they may be, they remind us of our fragility and demand that we climb down from our high and mighty attitudes and adopt humility not as a virtue, but as a way of life. 

But far beneath the discussion of cosmic perpetrators lies a more basic issue.  The plagues we fear are dwarfed by our own success at survival.  It has become a plague in itself.  The sixth great extinction that is shutting down polar bears and frogs and corals, bats and bees and bluebirds is not the result of some massive asteroid or even some silent virus, it is the result of the relentless pressure of our infestation of every nook and cranny of our planet, including its seas and atmosphere.  Our light, our heat, our noise, our lack of restraint have created a place where life is struggling to survive. 

It is hard to see ourselves and our off spring as a plague.  But what else can we call it?  Such dark thoughts trouble our dreams and darken our days. 

There is a Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’  Surely that we do.  The challenges of this day seem daunting to a species so young and too powerful for its small measure of wisdom.  Perhaps the impractical lessons that call us beyond our roots of dominance and self-importance, the ones that we are left with when we face Ebola, the ones that are the only options to fear could apply here as well.   We do have options, we always have options.  They may not be easy.  They may demand that we grow beyond the laws of tooth and claw.  They demand that we become more than the ultimate survivors.  They demand that we become truly human, even in these interesting times.

I’m pulling for us.  After all, we invented the cello and pecan pie.      

Master at the Craft

 

 

I’ve been doing this ministry thing since…  It seems since Biblical times.  My memories are artifacts that I excavate from the comings and goings of this present day.  They could fill a museum.  There are many difficult parts about aging.  We creak when we stand up after sitting for a while.  We run out of energy more quickly than we’d like.  We aren’t as good with our thumbs as anyone below the age of 15.  Our arms are too short to read things without glasses.  But there are good things as well. 

 

One of those is a sense of confidence about the craft of ministry.  Forty years of practice really does help.  Those of us that have been at it a while have seen situations come and go repeatedly.  We’ve confronted shortages and resulting panics, we’ve been confronted by angry, suicidal, addicted, disappointed, grieving, homeless, excluded, sick, dying, betrayed, cynical, arrogant, hopeless, seductive, bipolar, schizophrenic, sociopathic, terrified, nasty, immature people  (That being a partial list).  And we’ve lived through it all.  We’ve designed classes, stewardship campaigns, worship services, mission projects, funerals, weddings, sermons, receptions, roasts, and banners.  We’ve moved furniture, recalcitrant people, mountains of books, and the hearts and minds of congregations.  And we’ve made it through despair, poverty, death, loss, terror, and being wrong, coming out the other side with some scars and a lot of gratitude. 

 

An incredible amount of learning goes along with all that experience.  It is a gift to be here, with all of that to support and inform the now of life.  But there is more than that.  This job is about more than skill at diplomacy and knowing when to cut and run.  It is more than being good at working a room.  At the core of our work is a deep consciousness of being owned by that which is so far beyond our philosophy or theology or business sense as to be unknowable except through grace.  And the older this old war horse gets, the more I rely on that grace to provide what my skill or experience cannot.  I am His.  That’s my bottom line.  That’s my credential.  That’s my ground of being.  That’s my ultimate concern. 

 

 

Secret Identity

 

My father always wore tabs, the white strips that descend from the throat over the Geneva gown.  Mom starched them every week.  He insisted that wasn’t necessary, but she did it anyway.  I think she considered it part of her role.  I found out later that they stood for the tablets of the law.  The Old Covenant that was the foundation for the New.  It made sense to me.  Those starched tabs were diving boards from which my father’s words bounced into the flips and swans that thundered and whispered from the high pulpit every Sunday.

 

When I started my ministry I wore a shirt and tie with the black robe over.  In some ways I didn’t know what else to do.  I was working, unconsciously, on a style, a voice.  The tabs were from another era.  I did the easiest.  I was busy.  But as I moved into the jungle, I realized I wanted something to help differentiate me in my role from the other denizens of the forest.  I was a missionary, a warrior of the light, a Marshall come to bring order to Tombstone Territory.  I needed a badge, a uniform, something to let folks know the Rev had come to town (Can you tell I was and am an unrepentant romantic?).  So I shopped (It’s the all American thing to do).

 

The Protestant version of the collar, a stripe around the throat, kind of turned me off.  I have no idea why.  I opted for the Roman collar, with a notch.  I guess I’m secure in my Protestant identity, I can wear Catholic.  I wore and wear it for worship and during Holy Week.  It’s my discipline.  It makes sense to me. 

 

I subsequently found out that the collar is a symbol for slavery.  It’s a slave collar.  That reaffirmed the whole thing.  It gave me an angle.  It resonated with the Apostle Paul.  He spent a lot of time in jail.  He called himself an ambassador in chains.  But after 9-11 it became much more than an angle. 

 

I live near New York City.  A lot of my folks work there.  Some of them were there.  Some of them died.  I worked at Ground Zero with the rescue workers, helping them stay sane and at the family of victims’ center in the old ferry station in Jersey.  But I also wore my collar, every day, every where I went.  People stopped me on the street, in diners, wherever. They took my hand, they told me about their son or their sister or their cousin.  They asked for prayers.  They cried.  We all needed something we could depend on.  Our security was gone.  People needed a symbol.

 

It changed my attitude toward my collar.  It changed my attitude toward being a slave of Christ.  It’s closer to my old attitude of warrior of the light and it’s much more real.  I am part of God’s army, the host of heaven.   I am a pillar.  Lean on me.  But never forget, I am a slave.  And never forget the one I belong to.  It’s where I get my authority, my orders, my direction, my hope.

 

Spider Man, not quite.  The Rev, definitely.

Lord, preserve us.

Way back in the dark ages, when I was an impressionable child, my sister, who considered it her duty to bring me beyond the sheltered haven of my parents' protection, took me to see Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas duke it out as The Vikings.  I was blown away.  I still remember scenes and lines, not to mention bits of the score.  Every chance I got I became a barbarian.  My play mates were mystified.  I did research on the subject, without Google, the Web, and as an 8 or 9 year old could, finding out every scrap I could understand about these giants that came from the ice bound fjords, I loved to say that, to strike terror into the hearts of the sad and ugly English.  Hollywood had created a monster, with the aiding and abetting of my sister.


I remembered one image from the movie that showed a manuscript from those dark ages, recording a prayer illuminated with ancient images of people hiding in their castles.  It read, "O Lord, preserve us from the Vikings."  Simply put, but very clear in its terror, its horror, and its realization that very little but the hand of the Almighty could save them from this scourge from the sea.  It was said that the Norse raiders would come into towns and cleave the chests of citizens, removing their lungs and draping them over their backs, calling them Christian angels.  They were brutal, sociopathic worriers.


There is a group in the Middle East that claims no allegiance to a country or any other group.  They have left them behind.  They call themselves the Islamic State, or perhaps that's what others call them.  But it has become clear that there are few means they will not employ to reach their end of a purified Islamic State, a new Caliphate whose law and punishment and normality is terror.  And the prayer of Muslims and Christians alike is "Lord, preserve us from the IS."


Barbarians have no philosophy.  That implies a willingness to debate, which implies a willingness to listen.  They have no real desire to build a state or any structure of rule.  Talleyrand said, "You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them."  So, there is only conquer and destroy.  The brutality has no limit, so there can be no debate or discussion.  There is no law or rule of law except submit or die.  Such behavior is nothing new.  Most of us have such impulses muzzled and leashed by the lessons and teachings of our parents and those who worried and worked to make us better than Narcissistic sociopaths.  Some of us have enough reservation to couch our desires to rape and pillage within business or sports.  But not far beneath the civilization that leads us to stop at red lights and not slug our neighbor when they complain to us about the leaves blowing on his lawn, lies that battle axe wielding monster that gave rise to the prayers of the 'civilized English.'  


How are we to contest the world with them?  We cannot do it with reckless abandon, or vengeance.  Then the world will be taken over by the barbarians, those with the better weapons and better planning taking the prize.  We must be civilized.  We must be ruled by the law that makes civilization what it has become.  Tolerance, restraint, and a willingness to listen to even our enemies while we insist on the virtue of peace sound awfully philosophic or even religious.  But in a dark and brutal world, they represent the only way forward.  Oh, I forgot mercy.  What can you expect from someone who was so impressed by Kirk Douglas doin' his thing?


But when it comes down to it, I pray with all the faithful, 'Lord, preserve us from the barbarians.'

      

Labor Day

The summer is beginning to slip away.  Walnut trees are dropping yellow rain on the driveway, despite my vocal injunctions to stop acting as if it was October.  But at 8:30 tomorrow morning I have a class to teach.  There will be a room full of sophomores, half asleep, showing up because they're supposed to, that I have to drag into semi consciousness and invite on a journey of discovery.  Whew. 


The lush growth and dripping heat is only part of what I miss about the season of tomatoes and corn.  I miss not even considering what to wear, unless I'm trying to be appropriate or impress my lady.  I'll be emptying my drawer of T shirts soon.  I miss the switch from remembering what night of the week I  have to work, to do I have an evening off.  I miss reading for the hell of it.  I miss digging in my garden, and communing with my bonsai.  I miss long slow dinners in the gazebo by candle light.  I miss sand in my shoes. 


Don't you?