Stumbling on Holy Ground

On a day of many tears, a day in which I found it hard to leave my bed, a day when time passed ploddingly, two friends shared poems to greet me as I retired for rest and respite.

Energy to greet the day was slow to come.  I awoke at a reasonable hour, but listening to the rain beat on the roof and thinking of the tasks I ought to get started on, I stayed put through the morning.  Apparently it was a condition that had struck the whole household, for I ventured forth to find Mom and Dad eating a very late brunch of eggs and bacon.  We slowly stirred ourselves toward the day.  Mom made her project the addressing and stuffing of Christmas letters to friends and family.  She put Dad to writing personal notes on some of the letters.  I decided to make my task keeping Mom settled rather than restless as she deals with the slow healing of her foot.

Nevertheless, I was grappling with restlessness, too.  Today, four days from Christmas Day, a season that for thirty-three years I have spent with Everly, and for all the years since their births, with three children, I am spending with none of them.  I'm not begrudging the children's absence, having agreed that they should do what they are doing.  Still, the absence of all four is palpable.  So I bugged the kids to text me a report on their days, which they lovingly and faithfully did, warming my heart.

I made a couple of laps, at different times of day, walking around in the yard, inspecting the results of the rain that is watering my seeds and bulbs.  The mail came.  It included a Christmas card from the Relay for Life organization that raises money for cancer research.  Last April, Naomi led the organizing of a Relay for Life Team, and our whole family, along with Ruth and Emily, walked, danced, and sat vigil for most of the evening, with a few staying the entire night, raising lots of money and supporting Everly in the fight against cancer.  Of course, the organization did not know of Everly's death, and yet opening the card addressed to her, a card intended to offer her encouragement in her struggle, was tough to bear.  It follows on a couple of Christmas cards from friends, arriving at the end of the week addressed to Mike and Everly, because they had not heard the news of her death.  Just the thought of telling them the news was an emotional challenge.

So it was a moping kind of day.  I got up with some energy and made a tasty and nutritious dinner which we all enjoyed.  Then it was back to biding time with the television on.  So when I found these poems this evening, they surprised me by casting a new perspective on the day.  I found new thoughts arising to frame the season.  Philip Thompson posted a poem by W.H. Auden.

If the muscle can feel repugnance, there is still a false move to be made;
If the mind can imagine tomorrow, there is still a defeat to remember;
As long as the self can say "I," it is impossible not to rebel;
As long as there is an accidental virtue, there is a necessary vice:
And the garden cannot exist, the miracle cannot occur.

For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent,
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.

Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking:
The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;
The Real is what will strike you as really absurd;
Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly a dream of your own;
Unless you exclaim -- "There must be some mistake" -- you must be mistaken.

W.H. Auden, For the Time Being

I found myself in that looking everywhere for the garden and finding only desert, yet clinging to the assurance that "the garden is the only place there is."  Studying the events of a life, the fragments remembered, the wishing for what was--all these dovetail into not being able to imagine tomorrow.  To what have I consented?  Certainly not her death and not today as destiny!  That I might live without her is of all things most absurd, a dream, one from which I cannot escape, feeling it must be mistaken.  And why not rebel, doubting that the garden can exist? 

It was a day of being between things, when nothing seemed quite present:  living as though it were 39 years ago, my sister having moved away from our household, and Mom, Dad, and I sharing a house.  A dream of lost time, of a reversal, of passage that dissolves at the edge of being, of a memory banging away at that edge, more real than what is seen, yet itself invisible. 

Well, so much for gobbledygook language that comes of trying to analyze my inwardness.  Auden had much more to say here than what I have drawn out of it.  He speaks of alienation of the human condition from many angles.  I'll stop there for now.  Thanks to Philip Thompson for posting the poem.

The disorientation that is at the heart of Auden's poem is a theme of the other verse, by Wendell Berry, shared by LeDayne Polaski.

Remembering that it happened once,
We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns
Toward the long night’s end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall
(A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there,
Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air
Around them joyful as a choir.
We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.

It is a Christmas poem, focused on Christmas eve's birth of Jesus in a barn.  Berry frames it as a working farmer on a working farm, making a regular trek to check out something in the barn.  As he sees the story unfold in Luke 2, he realizes that it could have been his barn.  He could have had the same surprise as the shepherds, finding the Holy Family where no one would expect, in an animal stall.  Looking into another world, yet this same world.  Seeing in a brand new way, challenged by the moment even to breathe, he, and now we, stand on holy ground that we thought until now was just plain ground.

What a realization, a decentering and recentering, a disorientation and reorientation, a demoralization and remoralization!  Seeing what I have seen over and over again, but seeing something completely new in it.  What a gift to be able to see that in my own old barn!  What a gift to see it in my house, in my yard, on my street, in my beaten-down 55-year-old body, my cataract-growing eyes!

And what it brought to mind was the holiness of Everly's last morning.  On July 18, I awoke to a day that I knew must come, but did not want to come.  I started out to try and keep the routines going as they had been.  Eventually, I sat beside the bed and watched as Everly persevered a holy struggle.  She clung to her life, breathing heavily and rapidly, each rhythm of oxygen and carbon dioxide a word of love for her children, for her loved ones, for me.  She lay on the bed, eyes closed, seeing what was, and perhaps what was to be, her thoughts and feelings somewhere between holding on to us and being set free.  She knew, and she had told us many times, it was time to go.  She was ready.  And now, no longer able to speak, only to breathe, to suffer a beating heart full of love, she was being transformed from one glory to a greater degree of glory.

It was the same room as every day before.  The guest bedroom in Salado that had become our interim home, our very home.  Everly's things arrayed in all their organizational glory surrounded us.  A rented hospital bed and recliner arranged for her comfort were the prominent fixtures.  I have walked into this same room hundreds or thousands of times.  Wearing clothes I wear every week, seeing clocks showing time as they do every day, touching objects as I do at any time, I was with Everly in the room.

And on that day it was holy ground.

So today, reading Wendell Berry, I realize that I "cannot turn away the thought . . . that we / Ourselves are living in the world / It happened in when it first happened."  Shepherds stumbled on a baby in a manger in a stable.  Berry had second sight one late night in his barn.  I get it, too.  It was "a night like any other night," and Darrell Adams's poem now comes to mind.

A night like any other night,

The census time at hand,

A weary couple, a child near born,

A place called Bethlehem,

A wooden stable where cattle sleep,

A bed of straw for the lamb…

Refrain:

Sing hush-a-bye loo-low-loo-low-lan.

Sing hush-a-bye loo-low-loo.

Sing hush-a-bye loo-low-loo-low-lan.

Sing hush-a-bye loo-low-loo.

A time like any other time,

The rulers called it peace.

A subject nation groaning for

Someone to set them free,

A leader, a soldier, a mighty king--

A star or a stable they see.

Refrain

A child like any other child

Of poor and humble birth,

Lowly shepherds see where the great are blind:

The humble savior’s worth.

May we see with their eyes this low-born babe,

A sign of peace to earth.

Refrain

A night like any other night,

But a hush is on the land.

A weary couple, a child just born,

A place called Bethlehem,

A wooden stable where cattle sleep,

A bed of straw for the lamb…

Refrain

A night in which the unexpected lurks amid the expected, when glory astounds the humble while the rulers and teachers can't see "light / That lights them from no source we see," was a night like any other.  Some lady had a baby in a barn.  Heaven and earth met in a cow stall.  Dirt, straw, manure--all that seared-bleared-smeared-smudged-smelly place is charged with God's grandeur.  It's holy ground.

And by the analogy of being, on a street corner in Salado, in a bedroom where a family gathered, earth and heaven met.  Everly held our hands and her Faithful Friend's hand.  An old piece of carpet, a mechanical bed, cotton sheets--all these jammed-in, jumbled, familiar artifacts of our lives became holy ground.  And if we can see like shepherds, with gratitude for the grace of God that in Everly showed forth in all its glory, we can grasp that on that day we glimpsed two worlds, finding that our own place was also holy, "although we knew it not."  And continuing with Gerard Manley Hopkins, our doubled vision, our holy-in-ordinary day, invaded that room

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Halloween, Masquerades, Bandits, and Burqas

I wrote this guest post for Stan Dotson's blog "Daily Passages."  Check out his blogs and other great work at his website In Our Elements.

Friday, July 1st, 2011

Fellow Travelers:  This week’s Pastoral Passage (2 Corinthians 3:12-18) transports us to childhood play and childhood fear.  Children hide their faces on Halloween to play a game that promises lots of free candy.  Part of the game is shouting a mostly empty threat, “Trick or treat!”  Dressed in costumes with masks, the little ones see others who are also wearing masks, and sometimes the fear overwhelms the fun.  Adults laugh when children turn around running to Mom or Dad or Big Sister to escape a masked figure too scary to pass by.

Many, if not most familiar occasions for wearing a mask circle back around to conjuring up fear. A masquerade party aims at fun, but part of the fun is the uncertainty and fear that come from not knowing who one might end up talking or dancing with.  In a less playful vein, bank robbers and bandits use a ski mask or bandana to hide their faces, knowing that their anonymity arouses the fear that they will act more violently since their faces can’t be identified.  Part of the fear of Islam in the 21st century often gets focused on the burqa or niqāb, sartorial interpretations of the Qur’an which encourage women to cover their faces.  French legislators outlawed this sort of Islamic dress in public, in part for fear of what the “foreigner” may be hiding, and in part for fear of the loss of hegemonic French cultural identity.

The Apostle Paul retold a story about Moses and a mask in this letter to the Corinthians.  Actually, it was a veil that Moses wore after he came down from Mount Sinai with the two stone tablets (Exodus 34:33).  The people saw him coming, and his face was shining like a light.  They were afraid and would have run away, but Moses called out to them so they would know who he was.  Aaron and some of the leaders got the courage to go meet him.  After he talked with them for a while about what God had to say, he put on a veil.  So in this case, the mask was a way to calm down the fear rather than stir it up.  Don’t ask me to explain how Moses’ face got shiny.  I’ll just let the story stand as it is.

Paul isn’t particularly concerned with the details of Moses’ veil and its purpose according to Exodus.  He’s out to make another point.  He says that Moses put on a veil so that the people would not keep staring at him while the shiny face faded away.  Paul seems concerned that people might have stared at Moses and become mystified.  Instead of recognizing the unrestrainable, indomitable, effusive glory of God as having left a residue on the prophet who talked with God, Paul says that back in the day people missed the whole point.  They might have fixated on Shiny Moses himself, as if he were the source of all this glory, the Divine Lawgiver in the flesh.

Then Paul says something else completely about the veil.  He says the thickheaded and offbase thinking of the ones who were afraid of Shiny Moses is a kind of thickheadedness that endures down the ages in all humans who can’t see the signs of the glory of God when they show up.  Barry Harvey, in Can These Bones Live?, writes about the persistent inability of humanity to understand the presence and work of God when we try to “read the book of the world.”  Paul sketches a picture for us of people who are not interested in having God lead the way, going around like we have a veil on our faces.  The veil makes everything blurry and fuzzy, and we end up stumbling over things that should have been in plain sight.

The shocker of this story comes when Paul explains why things don’t have to be that way.  He says that God in Jesus Christ has come to set us straight on how to recognize God's leading, prodding, nudging, and dragging us toward our purpose in this world.  When we turn to look at the Lord Jesus, the veil gets lifted.  He’s the Rosetta Stone, the Rand McNally Road Atlas, the corrective lens that makes it possible for us to see what God is up to.  But I said there was a shocker, didn’t I.  Here it comes.

When the veil gets lifted, when we turn to look at Jesus, we find out that this man born of woman, this humble servant who is God incarnate, is the true image of the race of humans.  He’s the pattern, and we find ourselves and our lives when we look at him.  So with unveiled faces, the glory of God shows up in the mirror.  As brothers and sisters of Jesus, we come to see the truth about us is that we “sort of favor” Jesus.  We may not be his spitting image, but the image is there, growing, becoming visible in our faces because the Holy Spirit is transforming us.  The glory of God is visible when humanity lives in the mutual giving and loving goodness of the Triune God who loves immeasurably in eternity.  Look in the mirror, brothers and sisters.  Don’t you see it?  It’s right there as plain as your face.

Don’t be afraid to lose that veil.

How about you? Where does this Pastoral Passage take you on your journey of faith? Feel free to comment.

What Are We Waiting For? Part 2

Here is the second part of the sermon, continued from the previous post.

What Are We Waiting For?
Part 2

Romans 8:12-25

Paul wrote in verse 19 that all creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. He goes on to say that creation groans in labor pains for redemption, for the renewal of creation, the new creation that God has already set in motion in the redeeming work of Jesus. All of creation groans. We try to make our way in life by using fossil fuels, but the system of manufacturing and consumption spins out of control until the world’s climate starts to be changed, pollution affects our air and waterways, and finally competition over limited supplies of fuel drives gasoline prices higher and higher. Creation groans in labor pains for redemption.

The two young men long for a world in which people treat one another well; they long for it without hope that it can really happen. The people across the Middle East and Africa long for rulers who will not sacrifice the lives of the people of the land in order to hold on to their power. They long for the powerful nations of the world to stop playing power games over their resources and lives. All creation groans for the children of God to be revealed. The poor people of this country long for their leaders to invest in people’s health and lives rather than more and more weapons. Creation is groaning all around us. The children of the world long for the opportunity to eat, learn, be healthy, and grow up to have families and homes, rather than being forced to work in sweatshops, to wander as refugees, or to be kidnapped to become child soldiers or part of the modern slave trade. All creation groans, longing for redemption.

Two Sundays ago, I had the opportunity to visit a former Duke Divinity student who is a pastor at a small town on the north side of Burlington, Vermont. Driving down through Vermont, along Lake Champlain and across the three large islands in the northern part of the lake, I had the privilege of seeing another piece of the beauty of God’s creation. This week in Kentucky a group of professors I was meeting with hiked up into the mountains to see a natural stone arch formed by the power of waters which once flowed where now there is a deep gorge and a thick forest. We don’t have to look very far beyond our parking lot at Mt. Level to see the great variety and complexity of the vegetation, animals, and landscape that make up the earth on which we are blessed to live.

Maybe if I could just step outside, get out of the rat race, and look at the beautiful countryside, I might be able to convince myself that things are just fine in the world and that nothing remains to be redeemed. But even in the midst of this beauty, I suspect you could tell me why what seems to be beautiful and complete falls short of perfection. Divisions among people because of skin color, social status, and economic opportunities no doubt affect the lives of people in Vermont just as they do in North Carolina. Economic and political decisions made in Washington, D. C., Beijing, Moscow, London, New Delhi, Jerusalem, and Teheran play a role in how many refugees are compelled to seek asylum or a new start. Offshore outsourcing of industry has turned the economy of places like North Carolina, Kentucky, and Vermont upside down, as factories close and jobs go away. Creation groans for our redemption.

Yes, all creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. Who are these children of God? What will we see in their revealing? What are we waiting for? First we should note that they are joint-heirs with Christ. They have been adopted through a new birth into the very family of God. They are God’s children. Previously they were orphans, living without love or hope, with no purpose or meaning, nothing in which to place their faith. But having been adopted, now they are heirs of all that God has given in creation. They are a new race of God’s children, acknowledging with Paul in Athens that God has made all nations of people of one blood. They are joined to Christ as the beloved of God, and they are joined to Christ in the mission of God’s love. They have received the Spirit of God that sets them free.

Why is the gift of the Spirit a gift of freedom? Having been joined to Christ and the Spirit, the children of God can set aside their fears of what the powers of the world might do to them. They can give up their fears of people who are different from them. They are free to live and love with the kind of self-giving commitment Jesus had. They can give up their own privileges for the sake of others as Jesus did. With their lives joined to Christ and the Spirit, nothing can destroy them. They can even risk their livelihood and their lives, knowing that God will be with them in life or in death. The whole of creation awaits the revealing of the children of God, a people who like Jesus are willing to suffer if they must to see God’s demands for justice carried out. They know that the blessings they receive from God are not for hoarding but for sharing. I think I would like to know that kind of person. I’d really like to have that kind of person live in my neighborhood. I’d be eager to meet a group of people who lived that way.

I hate to say it, but when I read about church people, I don’t always see people like this. When I talk to church people, I don’t always hear about the risks they are taking for the poor and marginalized, the beloved of Christ. Too often, so much attention and effort goes into managing the organization that the church forgets about being God’s plan to display the character and nature of God in the world. We may be the only image of Jesus that people ever see, so we don’t want to be out of focus and blurry.

Paul teaches us in Romans and elsewhere that the community of people who live God’s way are the very definition of the glory of God. He says that as we grow in grace, as we grow in our Christian lives, as we grow as God’s people, we will be transformed from one degree of glory to another. In this way, it will be as if we see the glory of God in a mirror. Did you get that? The glory of God is something Paul says we should see in the mirror, not because God is satisfied with us to stay stuck where we were on the day of our baptism, but because God will walk this road of life with us to change us to be more and more in the image of the true humanity revealed in Jesus Christ.

Jesus, our joint-heir, is the measure and standard of our humanity. He is the firstborn of many brothers and sisters who bear a family resemblance. Joined to him in baptism, we commit ourselves to become like him in his humility, his generosity, his faithfulness, his gentleness, his peacefulness, his patience, his kindness, his meekness, his hunger for justice, his purity of heart. People who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God are the very purpose God had for creation, the true image of God in humanity, the revealing of the glory of God. This is why all creation groans, longing for the glory of God to be revealed in the children of God.

So on the day of your baptism, you probably could not see all that God intends for you to be. Even years later, we see our failures and our shortcomings. We have far to go to take hold of that for which God has taken hold of us. So we press on toward the high calling. We run with perseverance the race set before us because of the glory that is being revealed to us and in us. We hope in Christ, for Christ is the hope of glory. With patience, we await that for which we have hoped, a creation which measures up to the goodness, beauty, and justice God has intended from before the foundation of the world.