"In the mid-17th century, Spanish seafarers sailed up the west coast of the Americas to what is now known as the Baja peninsula. The cartographers of the time simply drew a straight line up from the Strait of California to the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington state. Consequently, the maps that were published in 1635 show very clearly that California was an island. For 50 years, then, the years of the most constant, most crucial explorations of the California coastline, those maps went unchanged because someone continued to work with partial information, assumed that data from the past had the inerrancy of tradition and then used authority to prove it. Finally, after years and years of new reports, a few cartographers, the heretics, the radicals and the rebels, I presume, began to issue a new version, and in 1721, the last mapmaker holdout finally attached California to the mainland. But - and this is the real tragedy, perhaps - it took almost 100 years for the gap between experience and authority to close. It took almost 100 years for the new maps to be declared official despite the fact that the people who were there all the time knew differently from the very first day." - Sister Joan Chittester, O.S.B. (from On Being with Krista Tippett)
Where are the gaps in our lives between experience and authority? Where do our "maps" not match up with reality, with the reality both within and around us?
For the adventure that awaits, may God grant us both imagination and courage.
And, if we don't consciously work at loving ourselves, how far do we expect to get with our neighbors?
Brother Curtis Almquist, of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, has said, "We love our neighbors the way we love ourselves."
Curtis reflects further,
"The hallmark of solitude is being on good speaking terms with oneself. Solitude invites you to be a very good friend to yourself, to enjoy your own company...Unless I can be a very good companion to myself, I probably cannot be a good member of a community, because I'm going to externalize, I'm going to project, a great deal of my longing, unwittingly and unfairly, onto other people, who simply are never going to be enough...You have to first be reconciled to yourself."
To love one another as God would have us love one another, first we must love ourselves: we must spend time with ourselves; we must, as Curtis says, be on good speaking terms with ourselves.
It's for our own good, yes; and for the sake of everyone around us.
The Rt. Rev. Michael Curry, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina
Recently, while visiting at Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City, Bishop Michael Curry was asked, "What do you see as the state of the Episcopal Church today?" His answer is worth reading more than once:
"We live in a profoundly pluralistic culture and world. We live in a world where we are interconnected in ways that we never imagined before. We know more about each other; some folks might say we know too much about each other. And I think one of the great challenges for faith is to live in this multicultural, pluralistic world, being people of faith who reflect the love of God and not the tyranny of God. I think that's one of our greatest religious challenges, and it has impact for different ages and generations of people. This is an Episcopal moment, a moment that is crying out for a way of being faithful that doesn't have to deny somebody else's way of being faithful. This is our moment."
Amen, brother.
I am reminded of a bumper sticker that one of you (a member of St. Paul's) saw and told me about: ENTHUSIASTICALLY EPISCOPALIAN.
It is indeed "a moment that is crying out for a way of being faithful that doesn't have to deny somebody else's way of being faithful."
Dr. Remen remembers the medical staff's reaction, "Now, were we in awe? Certainly not. We were frustrated. Obviously, someone had misdiagnosed him."
An intensive study of the case ensued, with expert opinion solicited from around the country. The conclusion of that inquiry was that the chemotherapy that had been discontinued eleven months earlier had suddenly had a delayed effect.
"The embarrassing part of the story," recalls Dr. Remen, "is that I believed this for the next 15 years."
"What do you think now?," asked her interviewer.
"I think that that was one of the purest encounters with mystery that I have ever had in my life. It makes me wonder about who we are, what's possible for us, how this world really operates. I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions. And those questions have helped me to live better than any answers I might find."
In this week's Word from Grace Street, Wallace+ reflects on the mystery and gift of the 25,000 purple martins ("bird-nados," as his son Nelson would say) that descend on Shockoe Bottom each summer.
"Even as you're standing right there watching, it's hard to believe. And it's beautiful. And a little hypnotic."
In this RTD video from the martin-watching celebration, you can hear an awed onlooker describe the birds' appearance as "a blessing."
"Archbishop Desmond Tutu reminds us of the midrash that an angel walks in front of every person, no matter man or woman, young or old, straight or gay, black or white or brown, Jew or not, an angel walks in front of us and announces, 'make way for the image of God, make way for the image of God.'" -- Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater
That every person walking the earth, and every person who has ever been, was and is created to show the world the Divine nature. To show all people what love is. To show what mercy is. What kindness and generosity are.
That we all represent God.
That we are all God's own emissaries.
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Of course we forget this sometimes. We forget it, about others.
And we forget this about ourselves.
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And so God sends a messenger, (angelos, in Greek), to remind us, "Make way..."
"The Gospels were written by simple men who earnestly and with a miraculous eloquence tried to report events which they themselves had never witnessed but of which they had been told. Even what these writers of hearsay set down we have never seen in the words they used, but only in the later Greek translations. Consequently the narratives of the four Evangelists as we read them are full of misunderstandings and contradictions and inaccuracies--as every lawyer knows any human testimony aiming at truth is sure to be--yet they throw more light than darkness on the heart-shaking story they tell. They are pitifully human and misleading, but drenched in a supernal light and their contagion changed the dreaming world." -- William Alexander Percy (1885-1942)
Will Percy was many things: a memoirist; a poet, with a hymn text to his credit (see The Hymnal 1982, Hymn 661); a lawyer; a planter; and the adoptive father to three of his younger cousins, one of whom was the novelist Walker Percy.
He was also a person of deep, and deepening, faith. In time, Percy grew beyond many of the conventions of the Roman Catholic faith in which he had been raised. Nevertheless, to the end, his faith was at the core of his life and, indeed, his being.
The passage above comes from a chapter in Percy's memoir Lanterns on the Levee. The chapter is entitled "For the Younger Generation." In that chapter, he, essentially, relays to his young cousins his faith and his hope. His hope for them, and his hope for the world.
More light than darkness. The heart-shaking story. Drenched in supernal light. The contagion that changed--and changes--the dreaming world.
"I can only say that segregation is wrong today, it was wrong yesterday. Segregation was never right. But it is one of the most lamentable frailties of mankind that when one's wrong is most grievous, his self-justification is most passionate, perhaps in the pitiful hope that the fervor of his self-defense will somehow prove him right. But this doesn't make it so. And he doesn't fool himself."
Richard Poff spoke these words, in the summer of 1971, as he looked back, with apparent regret, on his anti-civil-rights voting record in Congress, where he represented Virginia's Sixth District. Poff died last month and this passage appeared in his New York Times obituary of July 1.
Back in 1971, Poff was hoping for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination, thus the sincerity of his statement could be questioned. Regardless, there was and still is wisdom in his words, insight into the human heart, and the human condition, insight which, if indeed we are at all awake to our own frailties, we will recognize from our own lived experience.
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Yes, accountability is essential to any healthy human community, be it a nation, a congregation, or a family. Compassionate and mutual accountability. But, of course, for accountability to go anywhere, anywhere at all; for accountability to bear fruit, there must be a receptivity, an openness to receiving new and uncomfortable truth about ourselves.
May it be. May it be so, dear God, in our hearts, and in our own lives. For our own sake, and for the sake of those around us.
Rabbi Edwin Friedman, the late author and family systems therapist, has influenced countless people, among them legion upon legion of ordained ministers, across denominations and faiths.
Friedman wrote and taught about how human systems operate, be it a nuclear family, a nation, a baseball team, or an order of monks, providing deep and often witty insight for those interested in improving the health (the functioning) of those systems.
A very Friedmanian moment, from one of his lectures (a recording of which a friend passed along to me), has stayed with me for years: The rabbi remarked upon how, in many churches, people put up with a lot of unkind and unpleasant behavior out of a vague notion that it would be "un-Christian" to confront those behaving poorly. And, indeed, the rabbi continued, often in synagogues, people are unwilling to hold one another accountable for comparably bad behavior, out of the very same vague notion that it would be "un-Christian" to do so.
We get the rabbi's irony, right?
Of course there is no real community, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or otherwise, without, among other things of course, accountability. Compassionate accountability, yes; but, nonetheless, accountability just the same.
In a word, the un-Christian thing is not to hold one another accountable.
We had walked up the brook before, but probably only a matter of thirty or forty yards. This time we went, say, five or six times that far, planting our feet sometimes on the bank, sometimes on a straddling tree, but most often in the clear, jubilant water itself, which reaches two or, maybe, three feet where it pools.
Even with homes and a road just out of sight, there is a surprising and pleasing sense of remove, with a bluff sweeping up above. For stretches, small ferns blanket the ground.
Nelson would hold my hand at times, and occasionally I would lift him over a large tangle of woody debris, up onto the next rock, and we would continue on...
And, of course, this Christmas, tonight, and tomorrow, new memories are being made; a Carol sung, pure and exquisite; an old friend; warm, endearing words exchanged; a first Christmas for a new grandbaby; a candle lit, a face aglow, eyes agleam.
More than fifty times, in his published writings, Barth refers to the Grunewald image; and, indeed, usually, it is precisely in reference to John, and John’s relation to the figure of Christ; as he points.
Barth (and Grunewald before him) understood John’s sole purpose to be to serve as a pointer to Christ, a reference to Christ, a witness to Christ.
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