January 6, 2009

Bars

Bill Wilson, one of the prime founders of AA, writes about how it all got started when he was away from home wandering around a hotel lobby lonely and wanting a drink and how downright cozy the hotel bar looked every time he passed it. He called a number on the church directory instead, and one thing led to another. The Brits call them pubs, but by whatever name, they’ve a magnetism we churchers could get some mileage from if we only knew how.

I was thinking about bars this morning when the guys who’re soon to remodel for us a new bathroom came and for openers installed those safety bars and a new hand-held shower head in our current one. They’re impressive, not cozy, but reassuringly receptive in a place where it’s all too easy to fall and get banged up pretty bad, a risk that’s not all that different from Bill W’s hotel bar.

On the other hand, they’re a reminder that CP and I are coming out the other end of our youth faster maybe than we’d like. Humility’s a virtue, I’m told and have preached about, but in spite of its creeping reality and almost daily somehow reminding with age, I’ve never found it all that welcome. Hotel bars and their counterparts are part of my distant past, but shower bars have now become a part of my present future.

That’s the way it is with language and symbols. Signs of some reality, to borrow from sacramental theology, and no less a power of communicating life’s little graces. I suppose it is well and reassuring to get a grip now and then.

January 5, 2009

Camels

So now Epiphany season starts tomorrow. It doesn’t offer much for shopping.

Its symbols [whatever they are besides stars and kings and camels and more recently Amahl] don’t attract shoppers any more than they annoy the ACLU. The irony of God is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in creating us human beings in the first place and then choosing us as an icon, a window, through which can be seen not only God and ourselves, but through which, as well, the whole universe gets a shot at expressing and understanding itself. Epiphany. So?

Epiphany maybe last too long. We’re just now about to begin, and it’s already over for most of us. Christmas, with all its sweetness and light, is out of sight and out of mind. Now we can get back to nitpicking our great Scriptures and arguing about our tradition and the usual unreasonable foolishness and hooliganism about our reason.

The Nazarenes took their hometown boy about as seriously. But when he stopped preaching and went to meddling, their neighborly tolerance was soon down to its last nerve. There he was, in the synagogue of all places, a pre-teen reminding them of something they should have learned in kindergarten. They probably never called it Christmas and Epiphany, of course, but it was “show and tell time,” nevertheless. Tell that to the retailers.

January 3, 2009

Show & Tell

Epiphany

As the story goes, they were very wise, even smart enough to be kings. On top of that, they must have had an unlimited personal line of credit. Surely they spent a bundle on the gifts they brought and then left in hardly the kind of place where they usually stayed overnight. In addition, they read stars and altogether well enough to find their way across a perilous desert and all the way back home again.

It’s when they got home that makes me wonder what on earth they must have said.

That they found the one who made the very star they followed, the Ruler of the Cosmos, helpless on a bed of straw in a manger? When they began telling something like that around the courtyard, being a king and having executive privilege and all must have come in mighty handy.

No offense. But somehow, the record carefully neglects letting us know how it all came out back in their own precincts, save that history shows the Orient waited a lot of centuries before it ever heard the Good News.

You and I go to the manger every year and don’t seem to find it all that hard to locate. Just now, we’ve been once again. We’ve seen the star and borne the gifts, even if we do have a way of giving them to everybody but the one whose birthday we claim to be celebrating. We’ve made a lot of the usual fuss, often with considerable inconvenience and at great distances, and, heaven knows, we’ve spent a wad ourselves.

Like the three kings, we’re back on familiar turf, settling down pretty much to normal. Yet if we will, we, too, have a whale of a story to tell all about what we found in a manger.

But unlike those royal magicians, we don’t have executive privilege. We can’t expect people to believe what we say all just because we say it. We learned long ago — or should have — that nobody believes much of anything until they are shown.

We’ve found the King of the Universe at Christmas, we tell them, and by the way, he’s that baby in the cow stall. He’s the Word, the Prince of Peace, and he became flesh and moved into the only overnight place he could find. But nobody much listens. Nobody pays attention. Nobody, that is, until all our talk and song and tinsel and light itself becomes flesh. That’s when God’s peace and justice and good will and joy to the world comes alive in our time… in us.

January 1, 2009

Name

The Feast of the Holy Name

Perhaps more than any other season in the year, Christmas inundates us with its great repertoire of symbols, plowing and enriching our thoughts and feelings and visions with its universal time, its universal language of liturgy and music, its universal message of peace, good will, and joy to all.

Something similar is true of all the other symbols we use to communicate with one another. It is no different with art and the dance, with poetry and prose, with all our myths and stories and the language they require for their telling. This seems especially true of Christmas.

No wonder, the Wonder of it all.

It is common religious practice often to think of such symbols as icons, as windows through which one may prayerfully discover and perhaps experience a greater depth and power. We speak of sacraments in that way, as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace… as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace” (BCP 857). As well, it is not uncommon illiterately to make icons into idols, to admire — or to be offended by — to see only the window and to remain blind to the view, failing to discover deeper meanings altogether.

On the First Day of January in the very middle of these Twelve Days of Christmas, the church keeps a day whose symbol, whose icon is for Christians perhaps second only to the cross. We call it the Feast of the Holy Name. It recalls for us that this child of manger and miracle became through his flesh a son of the Old Covenant. And it recalls that through his naming as Jesus he became a symbol and bearer of the New. Thus this Jesus parable and paradox is a name above every name that, like the cross, anyone can use or misuse, but that is always rendered superficial until we can read through and beyond and behind the symbol.

The power of the Jesus icon has not been nor has it ceased to be the least source of great division in the Christian tradition. The study of this person and his work in our own time in the “Jesus Seminars” creates likely some of the most enriching and most controversial scholarship since the great credal councils themselves.

For in and through the window of the Jesus of history there is discovered the Christ of faith and the possible reconciliation of all humankind. Through the icon of his holy name is revealed the profound irony of the Word made flesh in Christmas.

Christmas, like anything else that ever happens, including you and me, enters history through this peculiar event and its peculiar people with whom we share our lives. If it is not a miracle, then it is such an exception that it might as well be.

It has been said that God’s sense of humor is perhaps no more apparent than in his creating human being. That irony of God, that reversal of events by surprising us with the most familiar, is perhaps never more apparent than in his choosing our human being for a window through which we can see not only into ourselves, but beyond that into our neighbor’s and into God’s very presence.

In the name of Jesus are we named. In the name of Jesus do we pray. In the name of Jesus are we made whole. What a remarkable way to begin a new year.

December 31, 2008

Mañana

We have three old clocks, the wind-up, pocketa-pocketa kind. I have an obsession about them that in spite of their age they simply must keep reasonably accurate time. Not Naval Observatory time like we needed when we flew over the Pacific during WW2, though that would be nice, but close enough so that the two that chime, chime within seconds of each other, preferably simultaneously.

Maybe it’s New Year’s Eve that brings this to mind. For this is the worldwide grand moment of timekeeping when the entire planet takes notice with clocks and calendars and fireworks. Only a few years ago on Y2K there was universal angst that we’d maybe never be able to do it again.

Perhaps one of our vocations as human beings is so that time never has to stop until we do. Time is not really running out, it’s just that we are. For that matter, time has really never run in It never was off stage in the wings, waiting for its entrance. The Big Bang was its cue.

Maybe the universe is one big clock, but so far as we know we may be the only ones who know it, but I doubt it. We keep time as if we think we’ll never have to give it away. We are the town criers. And the cosmos very patiently lets us think it’s important that we are. “Wait for me,” we shouted as soon as we could talk.

One of my handy word book crutches says that time comes from ti, meaning to stretch, meaning also more or less, the fit time, hence, the good time, prosperity, as in Let the good times roll. The early word for everyday time was tide, like in Yuletide, glad tidings, high tide, low tide, and laundry soap. It took the Greeks to find kairos for fat time and chronos for thin time, the one always full of it, the other just sort of bammin’ along, again, waiting for something to happen. Chronos waits for kairos. Guy Lombardo’s band’s yard-wide tremolo forever once brought the new year in with Auld Lang Syne, “times gone by,” for which we all drank a cup of kindness yet, and then started up the violence again the next day in the bowl games.

Mañana is really the rule of the day and especially of New Year’s Day. Iraq? Mañana. The environment? Mañana. Our international reputation? Mañana. The busted up church ignoring Jesus’s prayer that we all be one? Mañana.

Mañana? If there is one, it is us.

December 30, 2008

Victoria

“What’s Victoria’s Secret?” wrote a Brit friend in response to yesterday’s Holy Innocents OoN. The way he put the question revealed to me that Victoria has practically no secrets, but bares them all.

Gregory Dix made a parable of us when he wrote in his seminal “The Shape of the Liturgy” that his mother, attending his first mass, said that with all his circumlocutions up there at the altar, it looked like he had hold of a live crab and was trying to keep it out of sight.

Well, we’re still at it. Our spin on the gospel of peace and justice and love may be one of the best kept secrets in human affairs, its voice stifled by all our prejudices and infighting and parsimonious notions about morality. There’s a lot of messiness out there going overlooked by our seeming obsession to remain irrelevant.

So much for homiletic license. Another friend wrote about my claim yesterday to be wholly innocent. “You old lecher,” she commented.

December 29, 2008

Wholly Innocent

Today, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, recalls a time when each year we had an open house at the rectory for college students home for the holidays. Most of them, I suspect, were oblivious either to the day and certainly to our sardonic motives.

Foolishness like that, however, has a way of coming home to roost.

We’ve an elderly neighbor around the corner. (Actually, she’s probably not much older than we, but we try to avoid that kind of self reference as much as possible.) Yesterday, she brought by two catalogues she’d got in the mail and left them for me with CP, said she thought that if CP didn’t mind, I might enjoy them as a sort of holiday diversion.

The catalogues? The Christmas specials offered this year by Victoria’s Secret. Wholly innocent, I accepted them with grace.

December 27, 2008

DNA

About the middle of the last century, along came Oswald Avery, F. Griffith, James Watson and Francis Crick, to bring us DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), its double-helix, and its four-letter alphabet from which we could learn to spell life. A few years later Nobel writer Toni Morrison said, simply, that it’s language that make us human.

Preferring, perhaps, to honor more its mystery, it took old prescient John (whose saintly evangelical feast we more or less keep today) to say something similar but without all the bells and whistles. The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us. He seemed altogether content to satisfy (and confound) us with the Word becoming flesh. No mangers in his New Testament bag of tricks. And we’ve been trying to exegete it ever since.

One of the great joys of this season is its profound mystery, a precious gift, a present which includes both a past and a future that never seem to go away save, maybe, on courthouse lawns. Mystery is often the missing ingredient of our attempts to understand ourselves, to govern ourselves, to choose our leaders. We often call it charisma and seem to be content, if not altogether clear, with that. We call some “icons” and seem to equate that with “idol” thus missing the beauty of the word which means simply window — Paul’s dark glass that obscures the view — through which we peer at least into the boundaries of mystery.

One of the great joys of the scientific effort and method is how it often when it is at its best brings us over and again to those boundaries. Understanding John’s Word and its incarnation may never fully come to us. As we stand on the threshold of a major turn in our history which can open even more for us the mysteries of our founding as a nation, may this Christmas in particular open our eyes that we may see what waits.

O all ye DNAs of the Lord, bless ye the Lord.

December 26, 2008

Look down

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to discover that the contents of J M Neale’s Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas” are considered to be wholly imaginary. The old 10th century king himself, of course, is not. The carol says he “looked down (some say “out”) on the Feast of Stephen” (which is today), but is not all that clear whether this means from some distant and higher perspective (like maybe from wherever it is that saints peer) or from a merely lower level, something, say, like disdain.

The both of them are considered saints, Stephen, stoned in service to his Lord a few centuries earlier, and Wenceslas, knocked off by his own brother Boleslav probably in 929 AD. He was soon venerated as a martyr. A couple of years later, that same brother, himself, transfered his relics to St Vitus Church, Prague.

The tales of his dysfunctional family are too numerous for this space (cf Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2d ed, p 1466), but they do suggest that his spin on Stephen may be more out of admiration, rather than resentment, for getting his canonical credentials in a more orderly manner. Whatever, these worthies in our spiritual genealogy and their attempts to serve their Lord, figuratively or no, only help to enrich the joy of this season, make us proud to be whatever or maybe even whoever we are. Perhaps they’ll inspire us this coming year to a more exemplary stewardship of our Gospel tradition.

December 25, 2008

Reason

This is the irrational season

When love blooms bright and wild.

Had Mary been filled with reason,

There’d have been no room for the child.

– Madeleine L’Engle
1918-2007