Ted Loder

MID BLOG REVISION AND EXPLANATION

2012-01-16T13:09:00.002-05:00

Friends,

First, I decided that Chapter 6 of The Longing Way Home was just too long so I’ve divided it into two chapters - i.e. First Speed Bump Question - Chapter 6 and Second Speed Bump Question - Chapter 7. In addition to minor editing, this editorial change means writing two Memoir Supplements, one for each chapter. If you’ve already read the longer version of Chapter 6, the not previously written memoir supplement for that chapter, will be new, as will be the memoir supplement for Chapter 7 which you might already have read since it was originally part of the first version of Chapter 6. In addition, I’m also working on Chapter 8 - Third Speed Bump Question which I alluded to at the end of the original Chapter 6 and is now the end of Chapter 7. I apologize for any confusion this causes readers.

Second. I suspect that anyone who follows my blog book totally agrees with the fact that my blog posts submitted as chapters of a book, are challengingly, even distressingly long, especially for a blog which is typically short. I really do not know how to remedy that problem and still try to write a blog in the form of a serious book. I have experience writing books but not blogs so to try to bring those two enterprises together could be a demanding if not impossible undertaking.

I am saddened by the shrinking of print media accompanied by the difficulty of locating publishers for religious books that are not mainstream oriented which, in my view, is a bit of an indictment of mainstream churches or self-serving or institutional priority forms of Christianity -- or at least a significant number or portion of them. I admit that may be too harsh and unfair a judgement but it does explain something of my view and my dilemma. I do not mean in any way for this explanation to be an expression of self-pity or to single myself out as a victim of changing kinds of communication. It is simply an admission of my limitation in how to address the issue in a reasonably effective way and my discouragement with the process of writing a blog book which takes time that tries readers’ patience as well as my own. I have suggested, and do so again now, that if possible readers of my blog book print out each chapter and read it as if it were a book. I’m not a great technological wizard, or even close, but maybe you are and can easily do that. I do it by copying the computer version of the blog book, opening the Word Perfect of whatever program you have for printing material you write, opening a clear page, hitting the Paste option, then making the copy whatever size or font you chose and printing it. Try it if you want to. Or not.

I have seriously considered ending my effort to write in this form and am still wondering about whether that would really be the best alternative for all concerned. I may be walking alone down a blind alley with this effort, or better, walking with others who have tried to do a blog book and decided to give it up as a waste of everyone’s time. Right now, I am committed to finishing the two pending memoirs and Chapter 8 - Third Speed Bump - The Longing Way Home and its memoir supplement primarily to satisfy myself and fulfilling a promise I made to do that. At that point, I’ll see where I am and what direction to follow from there. I hope your patience will not runout before then. Thank you for going this far with me on The Longing Way Home.

God bless you always, in all ways,

Ted

Second Speed Bump Questions - Chapter 7 - The Longing Way Home

2012-01-13T16:12:00.010-05:00

Inevitably, the Chapter Six subject of "Says Who?" or what/who constitutes authority in our lives raises again the danger of idolatry. I trust I've spent enough time for now on that issue except to remind you of Martin Luther’s succinct definition of an idol, a false god: “That from which you get your sense of worth, and to which you give your loyalty, is properly your god.” All of us need to hit the Pause button frequently and think about how easy it is to attribute more authority to finite entities than they warrant and how hard it is to wrestle our way out the consequences of that. We have a constant challenge to sort out our answers to "Says Who?” Sooner or later, if we’re at all discerning, we discover how disillusioning or inadequate our little gods, our chorus of “authorities” turn out to be. It isn’t a matter of denigrating or discarding them. Rather it’s about determining what good, necessary and rightful place they have for us.

So we come to the second speed bump question, namely, "What's at stake?" This is a particularly thorny question because it has several responsible, yet contingent, answers depending on the circumstances of our lives at various times and stages.

The question, “What’s at stake?” implies there are moral, spiritual qualities by which we evaluate what our day to day choices and personal investments mean to us and about us in honestly shaping our answers.

So let me begin with a sort of preamble. As the pace of life constantly quickens, as the “rat race” accelerates, it’s crucial not to avoid the question or take our answers for granted. the invention and escalation of technology - computers, the Internet, cell phones, iphones,ipads - have taken our lives to near warp speed. But it’s not those technological advances that control us and accelerate our lives; it’s our choices to use them as though they did. That’s what makes our “What’s at stake?" question so crucial.

Technology enables us to do amazing things, expanding our options while also limiting our face to face and reflection time if we let it. For example, pediatricians warn against using television for baby sitting, having TV’s in the bedrooms of 2 year olds, computers for 4 year olds and reducing the interaction between kids and adults that is essential to their growth in language, imagination, problem solving. And there’s our “What’s at stake question?” When the tsunami hit Japan with its terrible nuclear reactor damage leading to radioactive contamination spread around that nation, and to some extent the rest of the world, we once again hit the speed bump question, “What’s at stake here?” There are a plethora of more personal examples of how over-investment in careers, or acquiring money wreaks damage to individuals and family life when the question of “What’s at stake here?” doesn’t get asked or honestly answered.

Sooner or later we usually realize that many of our fevered disagreements and arguments as well as our hurried actions really have little at stake beyond our pride or ambition. On the other hand, many of the things we value and to which we give allegiance are good and necessary things. Our work, family, friendships, country, causes, political parties, institutions of education, art, music, medicine, human rights have just that kind of importance in our lives, and should have.

Investing our care, thought, active interest, time, support in those good and right things is not only a key to personal integrity but equally important, it is the way to project our personal values and concerns into the public arena in accordance with Jesus' parable of the Samaritan.The critical condition of such investing is to make every effort to have it be rooted in our longing for the quality of life which is eternal.

Please understand: I do not mean “eternal life" in the sense of getting to heaven, which is about God’s grace, not our achievements. Rather, I take "eternal life” to mean living in the finite present a life grounded in that revealed in Jesus. Such grounding empowers us to do everything we can to do justly, to make peace, to love neighbor and enemy, to care for the poor and be stewards of the earth while leaving the outcomes of our labors to God. It gives us the energy to persist in the struggle and not to despair or give up because such grounding in God’s grace delivers us from taking the good and valuable things we invest in as sufficient in themselves. Good, Yes; sufficient, No.

In my view, many of our problems come when we claim OUR good to be THE best. After all, that's what the pharisee and the scribe did in Jesus parable, and in a different way, so did the lawyer. It wasn't that they weren't committed to doing good things, it was their claim that the way they were, what they stood for and how they practiced it was absolutely the best. Therein lies their hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Therein lies our own constant temptation and common trespass.

Certainly, it is always possible, helpful, even necessary that our good become better. We can always see, or be shown, ways to become better persons and find ways to make conditions for ourselves and for others better because those two efforts are inevitably linked. We can, and should grow in discernment, empathy, compassion, courage, hopefulness, faith (as in the epileptic boy's father's response to Jesus' healing his son, 'I believe, help my unbelief).

Better is always within our reach, best is always beyond it. A lot of grief, ours and others, could be avoided if we keep that in mind. Or better, if we keep praying about what matters most to us. Prayer goes deep, is a kind of a parentheses or time out, (or maybe a time in) in which we weigh who we are or are trying to be. It’s a reach for integrity or wholeness to life. Henri Nowen is on target here: “The real question is not ‘What can we offer each other?’ but ‘What can we be for each other?’ Prayer is about the ... greater gift of our own life that shines through all we do.” More often than we might realize, "What’s at stake?” is the integrity and the core meaning of our lives, and therefore, of life itself as we discern it. What’s at stake is what we can be for each other.

As I write this chapter, the pedophile scandal of Penn State University’s football coaches and program is swamping the entire university, the alumni, the state of Pennsylvania and the country’s college athletic programs, along with some degree of corollary damage to the wider public. What’s most obviously at stake is the legal issue of why the acts of the offender weren’t reported to the police at the time. Indisputably, serious mistakes were made by those in authority leading to tragic consequences for the abused boys.

But the issue goes beyond the legal, even moral, ramifications to the deeper one of misjudging what was really at stake in the matter. That misjudgment prompted the iconic coach Joe Paterno and school administrative leaders to put protecting the reputation of the university and its football program above their ethical responsibility to protect children from a predator who also needed help for a serious psychological illness. For one thing, all of us who are fans of collegiate and professional sports have contributed to establishing the closed, self-serving, institutional aggrandizing, nearly sacred culture of athletics in this country. Surely that culture and our collusion in it, needs our thoughtful examination and confession

For another thing, the nature of the response to the tragedy by the media and general public, which includes most of us, is also at stake. The response has been nearly universally self-righteous and arrogance in the assumption that we would have certainly handled things differently and ethically. Yet, there are dozens of incidents of crimes and serious offenses committed in which people neither intervened or reported. More over, who doesn’t know, remember and regret making bad mistakes we wish we hadn’t and though not criminal still hurt others, even our own kids.? What honest person won’t admit how easily losing our way can happen and how alert we need to be to our own frailties and to misdirecting our deepest loyalty and longing toward objects or purposes that are deficient and damaging for us and those around us. That is not in any way to excuse the offenders who caused the PSU tragedy. It is only to confess our own flawed humanity, our sin, and be more gentle and compassionate in our judgment of others. A part of the summons of our longing is to keep asking ourselves, every day, with every choice, “What’s at stake? What can I/we be for each other ... and for God?

The truth is that we don't have to insist that our good is the best in order to be effective activists for what we believe. In fact, if or when we claim the best for ourselves or our “good,” we betray our selves and, more importantly, we actually mock what we value most and what we truly long for, namely, a deeper love of self, neighbor and God. In truth, the “Best” always stands as a kind of corrective judgement and course correction as well as the liberating assurance of the truth that our lives, thoughts and actions are, good, can be better, but never best. That is the rock bottom of what's at stake for us. That's the core integrity undergirding our commitment to the good we chose, and the better towards which we reach in ourselves and through the actions and involvements that reflect what we value and believe.

The outcomes are beyond our control and ultimately up to God. Dag Hammarskjold, the second secretary general of the United Nations and a deeply religious person, put his view of his work this way: "The United Nations was not created to bring us to heaven, but to save us from hell.”(1)

Hammarskjold’s analysis compelling and accurate. Our challenge, the challenge of faith, lies not in making heaven on earth but in saving ourselves, our neighbors, humanity, the earth, from hell. Since my mother frowned on swearing, when I was a kid, often when asked how they were doing, men would say, “I’m working to beat hell.” I loved that. It seemed a legitimate to use the cuss word that way. Now I believe working to beat hell is what we are all called to do what we are called to do. Hammarskjol’s perspective has it memorably right. Attend to the summons of your longing and remember: insisting that our views, ways and works are “the best” often escorts us to “hell” while “the good” saves us from it. That’s what's at stake for us and something of what the mystery of our deep longing is about.

I’m a grateful citizen of the United States, and yet, I find it disturbing that we habitual proclaim our country as "the best in the world," the most exceptional, most important and exemplary, indeed, God’s chosen people. That is one of the most dangerous idolatries of all. It is in itself, a betrayal of the very foundation of our country. It distorts our relationship with other nations as well as our personal perspective and values. It also betrays the longing for a love, a grace not to fulfill us temporally, or temporarily, but to sustain us in our life journey in this world and time.

The notion of “the chosen people” stretches way back in human history. It is a factor in the establishment of the Hebrew people and the nation of Israel as "God’s chosen people”. The claim of being God’s chosen people extended to Jesus followers, then to the the church which was defined as the body of Christ. In that process, being called “God’s chosen people” came to mean being a special, privileged, superior, “the best,”people, certainly in their own sight and, they assumed, in God’s sight, too. Everyone else who did not convert to their view and creed were deemed the unacceptable, the enemies of truth and goodness, the damned to hell which, incidentally, is another version of hell we need to save ourselves and others from. More often than not, the claim of being chosen got extended to people not only of a single religion, but of a single race, or gender, or class, or nation, which is to say, - i.e. us and ours, perhaps most notably, our country.

But when God first chose Abraham and made a covenant with him, it was to make him and his family “ ... a great nation ... and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (2) That means a chosen people are chosen for responsibility for others, not for separation from them. Chosen people are not chosen for privilege, or preference or elevated status but to be humble, generous, compassionate, merciful. We are chosen to love God with all our hearts ... and our neighbors, even our enemies, as ourselves. That is what’s at stake in life. It is not easy or simple; it’s complicated and hard. But there is some nurturing sense of okay-ness or rightness about it and about the direction in which it takes us. Yes, our “good” and even our “better” falls short. We are finite, limited creatures. None of it satisfies our longing, but it does clarify it little by little. Accompanied by God’s grace, it’s the longing way home.

I want to share something Toni Morrison said as 2011 Commencement Speaker at Rutgers University. "I have long wished that Jefferson had not used the phrase 'the pursuit of happiness" as the third right -- although I understand in the first draft it was 'life, liberty and the pursuit of property" ... so I suppose happiness is an ethical improvement over a life devoted to the acquisition of land, acquisition of resources, acquisition of slaves. Still, I would rather he had written 'life, liberty and the pursuit of meaningfulness' or 'integrity' or 'truth.’ ...Personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of steady commitment to social justice, that’s more than a barren life; it's a trivial one. It's looking good instead of doing good.”

Morrison’s challenge to those graduates, and to us, underscores the relevance of the speed bump, What’s at stake?” It’s about us working to beat hell. And, Yes, those are a huge and complicated questions played out on a larger stage than is our personal venue. But the challenge also pertains to our every day choices and involvements, from the arguments we have with each other over trivial matters to the way we treat our families, do our jobs, relate to neighbors and the community, use our money, pick the causes we support, attend to our spiritual life, chose the groups we join, spend our time. It’s about everything we think, feel and do in our daily round. “What’s at stake in all this?” It’s about what we can be for each other, about who we are, who we want to be, what we really believe and care about.

No one of us can save the world from hell or change things much by ourself beyond what the Good Samaritan did. But together, we can change a lot. AS has been said, Good Samaritans need to get organized and become active in the public arena. A few weeks ago, dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial was dedicated in our nation’s capital, a just and earned tribute to him as another Father of this country. King was the preeminent leader of the Civil Rights movement that changed the racial discrimination laws of this country.

But the key word is, “movement.” I march many times for civil rights. I was one of thousands to be march the last stage of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. It was one of the most privileged and memorable moments of my life to be part of that historic occasion. I carried the coat and bag of a black woman as I tried to keep up with her as tears rolled down her cheeks and jubilation rolled off her tongue. We marched through streets crowded with people cursing at us, threatening to kill us, calling us ugly. obscene names. The march never faltered. The people in it never turned tail or backed off. It essential ways, it was the church, certainly the black church, that was on the march. Together with all who signed on with it.

After the march ended, some of these haters made good on a few of their threats. Viola Liuzzo was killed as she drove home. Others were beaten. But that march and that movement helped change the country. It helped King’s composite “Dream” come closer to fulfillment. It helped bend the long arc of history toward justice, as King so graphically put it. It wasn’t a safe time or an easy time. One way or another, most times are not. So Dr. King’s words are as relevant to us in our time as it was that day: “The ultimate measure of a man (or woman) is not where he (she) stands in movements of comfort and convenience, but where he (she) stands at times of challenge and controversy.” The key is to stand together, to go public with our personal beliefs, to be brave and wise putting them in action TOGETHER.

Sister Mary Scullion is the Mother Teresa of Philadelphia. I am blessed to know her as a friend. Years ago, she began a ministry to homeless people, street people in this city. starting in an abandoned building. She called it Project H.O.M.E. which meant Housing, Opportunities, Medical Care, Education and Employment. She’s enlisted hundreds, even thousands to her project as volunteers and supporters. Now there are projects in ten additional urban locations with a myriad of services.

Sister Mary, and her co-founding friend, Joan Dawson, received from Notre Dame University the 2011 Laetare Medal, the most prestigious honor given to American Catholics. They received the award at the Commencement ceremony at which they gave the speech. In it they identified what’s at stake for us and our society. Here are some excerpts.

“We live in a complex and deeply challenging times. Our society, we believe, is one most often measures the value of a person by his or her productivity alone and discards the unproductive along the way.

"We live in a society so mesmerized by its view of success that it considers only that real which can be touched and weighed, measured and counted, a culture in which human and spiritual values have almost vanished from consciousness

“We must refuse to be blinded by the false values of excessive individualism and phony materialism. We must instead reignite the quest for the common good … "Strive to live a life you admire, rather than one you envy.” (3)

Far too often, our values, our faith, seem to be primarily a personal matter. And yet, to consider it as that is a cop out. Of course, the "What’s at stake?” question has to be asked first of all of each person, each of us. But we can’t stop there. Each of us are a neighbor, have neighbors so Jesus parable of the Good Samaritan is a call to take faith into the public area.

Please, do not take that as in any way advocating for a theocracy in our country. Such advocacy would violate a faith in God’s grace and our own humility and love. We do not have to claim to be the best in order to be good. Our country’s constitutional separation of church and state not only protects the church from dominance by the state but equally important, and I would add, Christian, it protects the state from dominance of the church or other religious institutions.

That only emphasizes the relevance of the “What’s at stake?” to involvement in and our potential influence for justice and compassion on our society, our political process and economy, even to our global economy and diplomatic relations with other nations. My point here is that to ask the question of ourselves personally has implications for the larger human. By asking it of ourselves, we are, or should be, asking it in some form to our society as a whole. The attitude of assuming we are helpless to make a difference in the larger community is immoral, and unChristian.

I hold that to be true because I am tired of hearing about Christ as our Savior, and to insist that our enemies are God’s enemies, is to dismiss Jesus as an example, a leader who cared passionately about poverty, sickness, children, the oppressed, the exploited, the least of these in the human family, who lived that out publicly and calls us to live likewise.

The issue isn’t that we are helpless, it’s that we are frightened. Jesus risked confronting the entrenched religious and political power. He held them accountable for their indifference, their hypocrisy, their deceit, their pretentiousness and and self-righteousness. And it cost him a price he was willing to pay, a sacrifice we well know. That frightened his disciples as it does us.

But the mystery is that Jesus did that because he loved the persons he confronted. He wanted something different from them and for them. That changes our easy, sentimental version of love, of grace. God grace includes God’s justice, holiness and righteousness as well as God’s mercy and reconciliation. Someone once put it this way: “The Gospel is bad news before it is good news.” It takes courage to accept and apply that truth, to keep asking ourselves, and our community, our country, “What’s at stake?” as we live and labor and love God and our neighbors as ourselves, That takes courage and courage is the partner of faith without which faith is pap.

So, how do you answer the essential but often muted longing in the question, “What’s at stake?" in the choices and actions of our every day living?

(1) Quoted by Brain Urquhart - New York Times column - September 17, 2011
(2) The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, 1971 Edition, Thomas Nelson Inc. - Genesis 12:3
(3) Project Home’s DWELLING PLACE - July 2011 - all quotes page 1 & 2

First Speed Bump Question - Chapter 6 - The Longing Way Home

2011-08-04T15:42:00.189-04:00

Friends,

I’m beginning to come to terms with the truth that as we age, we get slower which means that I’m several times slower than I used to be. I know that’s a lame excuse for length of time between posts of chapters of my blog-book, if in fact you’ve noticed. However, I do hope you haven’t stopped following my blog-book and I do know it’s hard to keep up interest over the intervals. So, once again, as a partial antidote to the problem, I’ve decided to post whatever I write as I write it. My intention is to include you in the process and maybe stimulate you to offer comments or questions or suggestions to consider as I write rather than just afterward.

Also, it’s been suggested to me, and I agree, that since the length of the posts of my blog book are much longer than are typical, the easiest way to read mine is to copy the blog version and then paste the copy on whatever your computer version of Word Perfect might be, make the necessary adjustment of print size and then print the copy to read at your own pace. Try it and let me know if it works. Blessings always, Ted

FIRST SPEED BUMP QUESTION - Chapter Six - The Longing Way Home

I’m not sure how to focus the various thoughts that have been tromping around in my mind in recent weeks (June-November 2011). As probably you have, I’ve trying to sort through and understand what’s going on in our country these days. Most of it is summed up by the nasty hassle of the debt ceiling negotiations of political ideologues butting heads like mountain goat’s over rutting rights. And that narrow-mindedness seems to be a growing trend as the 2012 election begins to heat up.

The urgent question is, “How do we track and respond to what’s going on, here?” To answer, begin with what Bill Moyers said about it: “This is the most dangerous moment in American history. Either we’re going to be a nation of, by and for the people, or of, by and for corporations.” (1)

If that sounds too simplistic, too dire or exaggerated, I would still contend that Moyers is very close to the truth about a complex issue. Add to his warning something James Surowieck wrote about the situation: “You might think that there are benefits to putting negotiators under the gun. But, as the Dutch psychologist Carsten de Dreu has shown, time pressure tends to close minds, not open them. Under time pressure. negotiators tend to rely more on stereotypes and cognitive shortcuts. They don’t consider as wide a range of alternatives, and are more likely to jump to conclusions based on scanty evidence. Time pressure also reduces the chance that an agreement will be what psychologists call ‘integrative’ -- taking everyone’s interests and values into account.” (2)

If de Dreu’s insights applied only to the political negotiators and processes, they’d be interesting but limited. But the truth is de Dreu makes two constructively relevant points about us all: 1- The effects of time pressure on our thinking and deciding; 2- That pressure, among other factors, generates outcomes that are not “integrative." Both points relate to Moyers statement. No one can really hold that what’s going on in our nation takes “everyone’s interests and values into account.”

For the most part, the same holds true for what’s going on in our own lives. Most of us collude in generating none-integrative outcomes by the frenetic pace that whips us into non-integrative lives bouncing to the jig of a thousand enticements or the rap of incessant anxieties which drowned out the soft hum of our deepest longing.

Equally, if not more serious, is that non-integrative outcomes do not address the lives and needs of those in the shadows of our society -- the poor, the sick, the aged, the homeless, poor and middle class children, yea, the middle class as a whole --people who are under stress. Not only are too many of us more economically marginalized but we're spiritually shriveling to "non-integrative” obsessive self-interest parties rather than those having “integrative”

consideration of the interests of others as well as their own. Increasingly it seems people are buying into the deceit and intransigence of politicians and corporations without realizing that by doing so, they are going against their own and their neighbors true interests. Add the effects of the non-integrative outcomes of our stereotypes and cognitive (and spiritual) shortcuts on millions of poverty stricken people around the world and where does that leave us?

I contend it leaves us in the company of the lawyer and the man beaten by thieves and left half-dead on the road to Jericho in the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke's Gospel. It goes like this, remember? The lawyer steps out from the crowd and asks Jesus, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” In turn, Jesus asks him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” The lawyer answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart ... soul ... strength ... and mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus tells him, “You have answered right; do this and you will live.” According to Luke, the lawyer, “to justify himself,” then asks, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds to the question with the parable.*(Luke 10:25-27)

In the parable, Jesus makes it clear that our neighbors definitely include not just our close, comfortable friends but those strange, chancy ones in need, like the beaten person by the road who others passed by in their haste to do whatever things they considered more important. To really emphasize how widely inclusive the circle of neighbors is, Jesus makes a Samaritan the prime example of what is means to love them. Remember, Israelites considered Samaritans to be unclean, outcasts, religious heretics, and enemies of the Jewish people. To use such a one as an example of a merciful, loving neighbor, and a destitute, write-off, beaten man as a neighbor to love, was a radical view.

But I think that in his parable Jesus gives two additional messages. One is that it's possible, even probable, that the lawyer’s first question,“What shall I do to inherit eternal life?,” is not just to set a trap to embarrass or expose Jesus as a heretic, but that his question actually expresses something of the lawyer’s human longing, a longing we all share. If so, that adds a broader more inclusive dimension to the exchange, namely, that Jesus is inviting the lawyer to realize he is also a needy neighbor like the beaten man on the Jericho Road, as well as an unloving neighbor who, like the priest and Levite, ignores and walks past the beaten one.

That indicates that the lawyer's problem isn't just his hypocrisy and indifference; it's also his refusal to identify with the beaten man and thus to recognize the flicker of longing in his first question as a key to his real identity. You see, if Jesus’ parable is taken as a vignette of the human situation at large, then we, like the lawyer, are called not only to love our neighbor as he Samaritan did, but to realize we are a neighbor who has a deep longing for abiding love, and so need other neighbors to love us and help us love them and all other neighbors. That means we should see ourselves as part of the human network of neighbors. And yet, most of us know how hard it is do to that, don't we?

The second message is that the Samaritan is a neighbor, too. He is the neighbor who loves and is an example of what it means to love God, and so, to love another neighbor as himself. So the rest of the message of the parable is not just that by his actions the Samaritan is a neighbor who loves, but is also a neighbor to be loved -- and is, at least by himself in attending to the summons of his longing. Think about that. Isn’t that what it means to love your neighbor as yourself? As a Samaritan man, he knows what it is to be despised and rejected emotionally and spiritual. That is another version of being “beaten” in a way we all experience one way or another. So, the Samaritan also longs to be loved just as he loves the other “beaten man” on the Road to Jericho, and by responding to his longing for that, he is loving himself in the process. That kind of loving reflects the first part of the commandment, or invitation, to love God with all your heart in response to God loving you with all his/her heart. To love your self in that way is what it is to begin trusting the grace of God.

At its depths, the parable is “good news’ but also it is demanding news, not exactly the kind you'd expect if you think Jesus is essentially "gentle, meek and mild." That's makes it sharply relevant to us and the present social, political scene. For the most part, what we heard during the recent national debt crisis haggle, and since, was and is spouted not only by arrogant politicians and self-declared presidential candidates, but also by temper-tantrum voters, probably including many of us. It consists mostly of stereotypes and cognitive shortcuts. Not many, certainly not enough, advocate for the range of alternatives that justice, compassion and innovation require.

Ergo, the “solution” and its fallout puts most of the burden on the 80% of our society who are the shrinking middle-class and the poor, old, sick, leaving the upper 15% doing increasingly well, 5% of them being billionaires many times over. The “debate” seems less about ideas and trying to solve problems in an integrative and just way than it is about ideologies and grabbing power. How many times does the Good Samaritan parable have to be repeated before we all get it?

But the issue cuts an even wider swath we might first suppose. Though there are many Good Samaritans in our society, thank God, (and surely many of us are among them) and though we certainly need as many more as will step up, the critical challenge is to try to prevent as many victims as we can. The challenge is to try to change the unjust, non-integrative choices and conditions that leave so many “beaten” people tossed aside on our contemporary versions of the Jericho Road we’re all racing on.

That is a hard, complicated, long term challenge. But it’s an unavoidable one if - if - we are to be who we claim we are and want to be, and really are, namely neighbors to love and be loved by, others rather than just being individuals hastily pursuing supposedly "more important things.” I believe this public aspect of the parable is also an essential part of what Jesus is conveying when he has the Samaritan not only rescue the beaten man but transport him to an inn and pay for his care. As I see it,by doing that, Jesus expands the context of being a Good Samaritan from just the personal to the public.

So back to psychologist de Due’s finding that “ … time pressure tends to close minds, not open them. Under time pressure. negotiators tend to rely more on stereotypes and cognitive shortcuts. They don’t consider as wide a range of alternatives … “ Our inclination is to blame others for what’s happening around us, and often to us, but that just doesn’t wash. It disguises both our own accountability for our personal and communal actions as well as our own need and deep longing for true community and meaning.

The truth is many, if not most, of our time pressures are self-imposed and we’re typically inclined to argue they are justifiably necessary, just as the priest and Levite would argue as they hurried past the half-dead man by the side of the Jericho Road. For example, a large majority of us, 87%, are angry at and blame congress and the President for the crises in our country. But only 37% of us voted in the 2010 elections which resulted in the present make-up of that non-integrative congress. How many of us were in the 63 % who didn't vote? How many of us worked for candidates who most closely represented our values? How many of us support organizations who work to change the way big money influences elections?

If this all sounds too politically biased or too concerned with political issues, I do not intend it to be that. What I am trying to lift up is the painful truth that our political hassle and economic squeeze mirrors much of human history as well as our own lives. Isn’t part of that hassle what a large portion of our time pressure is about? Another name for it is the rat race. It’s a dehumanizing race because its first consequence is to misdirect our deepest human longing by promoting lies about what we really long for as well as what really makes us most human.

So, the first speed bump question about the “rat race" is, "Says Who?" Whose voice is our authority? On what basis do we make choices? Amid the din of the day or in quiet times afterward, who guides, challenges, nurtures us, troubles or assures us? To whom or what do we feel or think we’re eventually accountable? It is worth noting, for example, that each gospel records Jesus as having authority. *(Matthew 7:29, Mark 1:22, Luke 4:32 - RSV)

We all have personal beliefs or values we say we try to live by. Yet, those beliefs and values fade under the pressure of time and busy-ness. We make critical choices without realizing that’s what we’re doing. We end up thoughtlessly conforming to society’s hustle and hustlers promoting the market of things to pursue, possess, consume, entertain and the competition for status, money, power. Even as our life styles are already much higher than most of the rest of the world, so are the expectations they engender. We become uncritically loyal to our habitual social/cultural processes, traditions, groups, churches, political parties, institutions, economic systems, our beloved nation, even when they may be functioning in ways contrary to the values and beliefs we profess.

Can these really be the “Says who?” sources to whom/which we feel or think we’re actually, truly accountable? How do they match up to our deepest longing? On second, or third, or thirtieth thought, might there actually be a different authority for our lives? There’s the first rat race speed bump.

A somewhat humorous example of the bind that speed bump puts us in. Once, a friend of mine challenged her beloved mother about her support of the President’s decision to launch our country into a war. My friend pointed out to her mother, a devout Roman Catholic, that the Pope had come out against the war, too. In a snit her mother responded, “Well, the Pope must be wrong.” Anything feel familiar about that scenario?

The point here isn’t whether or not you agree with the Pope or Roman Catholicism. The simple point is to illustrate how easily and often our “values” get lost in the shuffle. More critically, it illustrates how difficult life decisions are often made reflexively and without reflection on the question, “Says who?” Unless we frequently and consistently consider the core question "Says who?," we end up with non-integrative outcomes for our personal lives as well as for our "neighbors" and larger society. Part of our human dilemma is our need for an authority to help us with our finite limitations on one hand, and on the other, to counter our tendencies to give allegiance to those that seem easiest and most self-serving to us, that it, those who reflect the going coin of the realm, and we see our society valuing.

Other compelling dimensions of the "Says who?” question are, "Who am I? What kind of person do I long to be?” Just a consumer? A competitor? Winner? Wealthy? Well known? Or maybe a neighbor, a good Samaritan? Push the question to yet another dimension: "To whom do I ultimately belong? -- ultimately, not just in a time sense but a trust sense, a longing sense. Is it some substitute god like your self? A friend? Spouse? The Company? Employer? Club? Lodge? Cause? Political Party? Country? Mall? Bank? A Christlike God, maybe? Who am I, or Whose? The answer that really matters is the one from our core, our heart, not just our lips? We need to ask ourselves the question very often, probably several times a day. Our answer(s) require struggle, honesty, humility and prayer, lots of prayer.

More crucially, our struggle to come up with a core answer to “Says who?” tests our willingness to learn to live courageously and hopefully, even joyfully, without absolute certainty. Our longing for "eternal life" can only be tentatively met in our finite lives. Living without absolute certainty means stepping out on the promises. That's exactly what faith means and our deepest longing calls us to do. Only finite authorities peddle certainty which is why they are so seductive. But true authority is not authoritarian or dominating or tyrannical or controlling or seductive or scheming. It is open, inviting, teaching, challenging, creative, promising and unfathomably loving.

In their book on science and religion entitled Questions of Truth, mathematician Nicholas Beal and quantum physicist John Polkinghorne. who later became an Anglican priest, put it this way: "The creation of the God whose nature is love will not be a kind of cosmic puppet theater in which the divine Puppet-Master pulls every string. The gift of love is always the gift of some due form of independence granted to the beloved ... The history of the universe is not the performance of a fixed score, written by God in eternity and inexorably performed by creatures, but it is a grand improvisation in which the Creator and creatures cooperate in the unfolding development of the grand fugue of creation." (3) Think hard about that discernment of two distinquished scientists. Let it soak in to your very being as one of “the beloved."

I believe our awareness and participation in the "grand improvisation" is rooted in our primal longing and is not about a "fixed score." Suzanne Guthrie tells of leaving a Greenwich Village jazz club late one night and walking toward her train. Suddenly the sound of a single saxophone broke the lonely night. Guthrie says it was a prayer rising to its god on the solitude of a city street. She was deeply moved and remembered the sound. It changed things for her. She says, "The voice (of that saxophone) cries for me to turn every particle of my being toward the loneliness, to orient my life so that I live in a way that accommodates God's existence." The voice of the sax slowed her down to her loneliness and nudged her to make a course correction.

The authority of our deepest longing is something like that, like a quiver of the soul at the urge of a distant pitch note through the quiet of night, or a phrase of a song heard under the rumble of the day. It comes as a dogged reminder, a haunting promise, an unavoidable challenge, calling us to orient our lives its direction in order to find our longing way home - home to a kingdom, to a "neighborhood," by loving our neighbors as ourselves, our very selves. On the way, perhaps we'll learn, if only bit by bit, how a Christlike God loves us fumbling neighbors.

(1) Thom Hartman - Conversations with Great Minds: Bob Edgar - August 5, 2011

(2) James Surowieck - The New Yorker, August 1, 2001 - The Financial Page

(3) Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief - John Polkinghorne, Nicholas Beale - Westminster John Knox Press - Louisville, Kentucky - Pg. 15

Memoir Supplement - Chapter Five - The Longing Way Home Draft

2011-06-14T16:48:00.052-04:00

Friends,
As always, comments, suggestions, questions and criticisms are welcome as I, or we, continue writing this memoir. Ted

Memoir Supplement - Chapter Five - The Longing Way Home

I’m not much of a planner, at least not the long range kind. I thought that was a serious deficiency of mine until years ago when I read David Herbert Donald’s superb biography Lincoln. In the Preface to the biography, Donald quoted Lincoln on how he approached governing during the Civil War: “The pilots on our Western rivers steer from point to point as they call it - setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see; and that is all I propose to myself in this great problem.” (1) The rest of the bio basically confirms that attitude as Lincoln’s approach to life as well as to governing.

In that way, if in no other except being tall, I’m like our 16th President. I’ve never done much long term planning or strategic planning in my life beyond the next week or two, unless it was in preparation for meeting a deadline that forced me to extend my usual planning process a bit. That has been pretty consistently my MO even in choosing a college, what graduate school to apply to, what profession I’d enter, what career moves I’d make or goal I’d work toward, what sort of woman I wanted to marry, or how large a family I would have.

When, by a zigzag route, I ended up as a minister in, the United Methodist Church, I resisted engaging in the popular Five Year Plan churches used. Instead I urged the congregation to decide on which direction to move determined by the purpose of its Christian mission in response to present “conditions on the ground” -- such conditions being the immediate needs, challenges and opportunities confronting us. I thought we might miss those by adhering to a long range plan. That was my “point to point” way of navigating.

Granted there are serious risks in that approach and some risks lead to sorry outcomes, even painful ones. I know that about my MO through personal and professional regrettable experiences. Among those regrettable consequences was getting married when both of us were too young (barely 21) and quite clueless about all that was involved in that decision, traveling across the country to Yale when relatively broke, having children too soon, our first child being born in New Haven when we were also a clueless 22, followed by three others each born roughly two years apart, my needing to work full time while attending Yale Divinity School full time, resulting in seriously curtailed study time.

Though I was awarded a graduate fellowship, the pressure finally made it impossible for me to continue study for a Ph.D. and a possible teaching career. Necessity pressed me into full-time ministry and two years later I broke down emotionally and was on the verge of suicide for weeks. I tried to hide my breakdown but David Parke, a young doctor in the congregation, picked up my symptoms and helped me find a psychiatrist. Thus began several years of tough therapy during which our marital floundering intensified and finally culminated in divorce.

Since the therapy ultimately put me together in a different way, I suppose it could be argued that my ‘point to point’ MO was justified. But was it? There’s no denying that it also inflicted painful wounds everyone, leaving in its wake many casualties, primarily our four kids whose lives were left indisputably scarred by a mismatched and misguided marriage as well as the divorce. Though I’m grateful for its ultimate outcome, I remain deeply penitent for my bumbling which was related in part to my mode of navigating.

Yet, I’m still wary of professional and/or institutional long range planning because, in my view, it tends to be inflexible, controlling, and inclined toward security rather than the more open, imaginative and innovative possibilities of “point to point” planning. At the same time, I’ve become rightly tempered by the awareness of its limitations and am more appreciative of

longer term planning and and receptive to the need to need to extend my planning time frame.

For the past thirty years I’ve been, and continue to be, happily and gratefully married to a woman who is a long range planner. As a result of some “warm” conflicts and “cool” accommodations, we’ve learned together that there is a time, place and need for both long range and "point to point" planning. I/we’ve learned we can set the direction of our planning and then negotiate when, for whatever reasons, we need to adjust the specifics of out planning,

So, why all this attention on planning? For me, it relates to how I became a "point to point” planner in the first place. I don’t believe it’s an inherited family trait or a neurological glitch, or only a matter of temperament? Nor do I believe it’s a moral weakness or reflection of irresponsibility. I believe to a significant extent the tendency to be a “point to point” planner is a learned process which was etched in my psyche by early life experience.

The first 14 years of my life were during the Great Depression, the ongoing drought and Dust Bowl of the Midwest, followed by World War II. It was a time when life was necessarily pretty much a hand-to-mouth, day-by-day process. No one could plan much past the weekly pay check, women wearing dresses of stitched together flour sacks, abandoned farms in the wake of mass emigration or, after the war began, the strict limits of the rationing of many food and hardware products as well as gasoline, all set in the fog of chronic anxiety over the war news. Growing up in that context left an imprint on me that was deep and abiding. During those years I learned how tentative all planning had to be, and so, to be grateful for daily bread and to focus only on immediate challenges and small delights. I’ve already sketched out some of them.

Added to those overall conditions was the family pattern of frequent moves which precipitated changing neighborhoods, towns, schools. Those changes were increasingly anxiety charged. As I’ve reported, because of my Dad’s work, we moved from Huron to Aberdeen, South Dakota in March of 1943 and the months though that spring and summer were hellish for me. But when school started again that fall, things changed for the better. I became integrated into eighth grade society, blossomed in school, liked my teachers, loved the Y, valued the church Youth Group (with reservations), won increasing recognition for my athletic ability and began to deal, somewhat awkwardly, with the heightened appeal and daunting mystery of girls. The beginning of that school year was a very happy one for me.

Then it happened again. Just before Christmas, my Dad decided to leave his Nash Finch Co. job and go to a suburb of Portland, Oregon to join his father in the insurance business. He left in early January to begin his transition to another profession while I, Mom, my sister, Rosemary, a High School Senior that year, stayed behind to finish the school year.

Oregon? It seemed like another country. What would it be like? Where would we live? What would school be like in such a different place? Would I have any friends there? All my hopes and dreams of playing on the Aberdeen Eagles basketball and football teams crashed. My sister had to completely rethink her college plans, apply to the University of Oregon, which she’d never heard of or seen. and leave her adored, talented piano playing boy friend. Her emotional dilemma rightly marginalized and overwhelmed mine. I retreated further into introspection and anguished over how I, or we, could ever get through the next week or month or half year, or moving again? There was no counting on anything. Like it or not, that’s what I learned about planning. About living. Gnawing anxiety took up residence in my spirit.

We left Aberdeen for Oregon on my 14th birthday. The night before I visited the basement apartment of the prettiest girl in the 8th grade, the one I, and every boy in class, had a crush on. When I left, she went into the hall outside her family’s basement apartment and we kissed, my first kiss of that kind. I ran home, feeling guilty, rubbing my mouth all the way to wipe off, any possible incriminating trace of lipstick. Guilt, anxiety, flickers of gratification, dismay, sadness, anger, confusion were churning uncontrollably in me. I felt quite lost; homeless, somehow.

Here’s the kicker. The morning of the day before we were to leave for Oregon, I was riding my bike in front of the main Aberdeen Post Office, a couple blocks from the Y where I was headed for the last time. A man from “Youth For Christ” who had spoken at the church and a couple of older kids were standing there. The man called and motioned for me to stop. So I did. He one of the kids began talking to me about God’s plan for my life and how everything that happened was part that plan. They said God planned we’d be meeting and talking as we were. I asked, “You mean God planned for me to be right here, at this minute? And where I’m going next?” The man said, “Absolutely. That’s what it means that God cares about you.” I replied, “I have no choice in the matter?” “Not really,” he said. "Just accept that, accept Jesus, and you’re saved and joyful. It’s all part of God’s plan.” he said, I started to cry and yelled, “Why do I have to be saved? From what? I don’t believe God’s like that. We’re not robots.” With that I rode away toward the Y and Oregon in anxious confusion.

As I peddled along somewhat aimlessly at first, a new level in my awareness began to dawn in me that sparked a life long struggle with issues of love, faith, ethics and eventually theological exploration. However, that morning, on my bike, I had only a vague notion of what was involved in what had happened in my sidewalk exchange with those people, or what it any of it meant. What I did know was that I just couldn’t accept the idea that God plans everything for everyone. Why would God do that? Such planning that way didn’t make sense to me. I felt in my bones that having choices, not being controlled, is what love is about and that we, not God, were responsible for the consequences of what we did or didn’t do. Wasn’t that what Jesus meant about loving our neighbors as ourselves? Why else would he teach us to pray for God to forgive us as we forgive others? Wasn’t that more or less what Church Confirmation Class was about?

I just couldn’t have gotten it all wrong. Damn it,I just couldn’t have.

When I got to the Y, I sat for a long time on the entrance steps thinking about what our moving to Oregon was really about. Was my Grandmother Alice’s death in a car accident part of God’s plan? Did God arrange for my Grandmother to be killed so her youngest son, Dwight, who was driving at the time, would feel guilty enough to leave law school and become a minister? Was it God’s plan for my Grandfather to be so shattered by grief that he wandered aimlessly around for two or three years until he ended up going to Oregon to help his cancer stricken brother in his insurance business? And when his brother died, did my Grandfather really have no choice but to stay in Oregon because he didn’t have any place else to go? If all that was a grand plan ahead of time, how explain all that heartache and lonely caring? Was human courage and compassion just a sham? Was that what our moving amounted to? That notion deeply upset me. I couldn’t believe God was like that or did that, was no matter who said otherwise.

Sitting there, it began to occur to me that there had to be some distinction between a plan and a purpose. From what I’d learned from family and church, it felt better to say God had a purpose in creating us and sending Jesus to us than to believe it was all some empty game with every move determined ahead of time? If it was all a foregone conclusion, why would we go to church and say a prayer of confession for things we did wrong or good things we didn’t do? Or why say any prayers if that was the case? What purpose would there be in anything then?

Dimly I began to sense there had to be another way for life and God to be than everything being all planned out ahead of time. Why bother, if that’s how it was? Strangely, I started feeling a little better when I started thinking that way. Maybe our family moving to Oregon had a purpose, but wasn’’t just a pretend kind of plan we had to follow like dimwits. It helped to imagine there was a real purpose in our move, like my Dad’s choosing a different and maybe better kind of kind of work and we making a better family life and not moving all the time. Maybe for that purpose and we could all do things to help make that happen even though right then I didn’t have a clue about how to do that. I had to wait and see and that was the hard part. Isn’t it always? But as I sat there that morning, with tears on my face along with a sort of smile, felt some of the same way I remember feeling the long ago Christmas, a feeling I later realized was longing. That’s what I felt there on the Y steps, a longing to longed to belong somewhere, to belong to a family without having to perform perfectly, which I couldn’t do, to just belong, that was all. Often I feel that way all these years later

When I was growing up, my family prayed before every supper. We joined hands and said together, “Thank you God, for this food and all our blessings. Give us health and strength and courage and patience to do your will. In Jesus name, Amen.” Not fit your plan but do your will. It meant choice, responsibility. It meant asking for strength and courage and patience. And for the faith to pray.

I’ve spent a long time writing about the sources and emergence of my point to point temperament and the continuing struggle of it. I’ve intended it a section of my memoir though it may seem dense and pedantic. But I’ve written it to intentionally invite you into one of the deepest recesses of my spirit, of the way I’ve lived my life, and at least something of its why.

Let me close the loop of it by going both back to the beginning and the Lincoln biographical quote and to how it applies to my present state.

Remember how in his preface, David Herbert Donald quoted Lincoln’s explanation of his way of governing being like the river boat’s captains steering from point to point and setting their course no farther than they could see. I had the audacity to claim I was like Lincoln in that regard, and I am. But not completely. For Donald goes on to add that Lincoln’s point to point way of making decisions and taking action reflected another quality of what defines an exceptional person. Here is an excerpt of Donald’s additional description: "Lincoln in his own distinctively American way had the quality John Keats defined as forming 'a Man of Achievement,’ that quality which Shakespeare possessed so enormously … Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’” (2)

Not meaning to quibble, I’d suggest that the key word in this description of “negative capability” is “irritable” - i.e. “irritable reaching …” I think irritability in that context is the basic reaction to the lack of certainty, and that is what drives not so much the reach after fact and reason, but rather is the underlying blind passion and fear that reaches toward illusions, delusions, premature closure, denial … anything to achieve a sense of certainty though certainty be unachievable. I think that sort of reach is the greatest temptation, if not failure of nations, institutions and religion. Or conversely, I think negative capability is the essence of faith, the fiber of trust, the foundation of honesty, the fuel of hope, the fruit of love in the midst of uncertainties, doubts, Mysteries (capital referring to those of God).

It is also a capability I have only to an inadequate and incremental degree. I keep praying for it and trying in every way I know and can, to enlarge that capability as a Christian person. That is my purpose for myself and which, I passionately hope, is God’s purpose for me and for us all as we live our lives as finite beings. How about you?

Now, on to Oregon and further but next time. I hope your up for the trip.

Ted

(1) Lincoln - David Herbert Donald - Simon & Schuster Paperbacks - New York - 1995 - pg. 15

(2) Ibid

Promises To Keep - Chapter Five -The Longing Way Home -

2011-03-08T16:16:00.118-05:00

Friends,

Once started, even a blog-book takes on something of a life of its own. What's been written poses the ever new question, "Where do I/we go from here?" Sorting that out requires a lot of wondering and thinking. And time. At least for me.

Since I excerpted the title of this chapter from a Robert Frost poem, I'll use a quote from another in this little preface. "The Road Not Taken" begins, "Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood/ And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler, long I stood/ and looked down one as far as I could/ To where it bent in the undergrowth…" The final stanza is: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --/ I took the one less travelled by,/And that has made all the difference." (1)

As in life, so in writing, there are always choices to be made, diverging roads to take, and Frost is right, it makes a big, though not necessarily"all," the difference, which you choose. As did the poet, I "... looked down one as far as I could …/Then took the other as …/ having perhaps the better claim…" The path I chose constitutes this chapter. You may decide I should have chosen the other one. If you do, let me know why. I'll try to address it the next chapter.

Thanks for hanging in with me. Ted

PROMISES TO KEEP - CHAPTER FIVE: THE LONGING WAY HOME

You probably recognize that the title of this chapter is from a familiar Robert Frost poem,

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening. It closes with these evocative lines: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep./ But I have promises to keep./ And miles to go before I sleep./ And miles to go before I sleep."(1)

It seems like a prayer, doesn't it? Who can't relate to the almost reverential feeling and tone of the verse? Who doesn't identify with pressure of feelings gathered in the pivotal word, ""But …" on which so much in the future turns, one way or another. "But …" carries the critical weight of choosing, again and again, between the enticing lure of "lovely, dark and deep," and the hopeful call of "… promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep." Don't you imagine that repetition of the last phrase is a whispered awareness of the strange power and mystery of promises?

Frost's poem speaks to our hearts. These feelings, this decision, this seminal realization are profoundly familiar to us. In some compelling way this is our recurring inner conflict, our struggle, our dogged, if mostly sub-conscious, determination: "But I have promises to keep./ And miles to go before I sleep."

And yet, even as we identify with the poet's promise keeper, a tumble of questions follow: "What promises do we have to keep?" "How do we keep them?" "Why do we make them?" "What happens if we don't keep them?" The list could go on, along with our answers. So would an inevitable joust of comparisons, conflicting judgments, confusing arguments and turbulent frustrations. Our proposed answers wouldn't necessarily be wrong. But they would be premature, partial and shallow because we'd be missing the basic question.

That question is: "What is a promise?" That question ushers us into the mystery of our deepest longing for, and our elemental connection to, God and each other. It's a connection that can be ignored, muted, disguised, dismissed but never totally broken. A promise is an echo of our longing for that elemental connection. It's a move in a direction which meets our primal need to be truly with an "other" or "others," just as a young tree in the shade begins to lean toward the sunlight in order to live and grow.

Even more enigmatically, a promise signifies a reflexive response to a sense, however dim, of longing's reach toward us as well as ours toward it. The more heartfelt the promise, the greater it manifests both of those dimensions of longing, though we may remain mostly unaware of that. A promise is not a specific legal contract. Spoken or unspoken, a promise is a commitment to a direction toward connections that are indispensable to life's deepest meaning. Nor does the probability that we are only dimly, if at all, aware of those elements being involved in a promise mean they are not intrinsic to what a promise essentially is.

What I'm getting at is this: a promise is an undertaking entered into by at least two persons. Certainly one of those "persons" may be, in some way must be, that essential part of one's own self which is accessed through that inner dialogue we often refer to as "talking to yourself." Even so, a promise can be made within one's self, by one's self, for one's self but it inevitably relates one to others as well.

The point is that in every instance a promise is relational, made by one person with or to him/her self and/or another person. It is confirmed by one's self and the other or others. In some sense it is kept and/or broken by both parties, however unequally. A promise establishes a bond or coherence between the persons who are party to it and who trust that it will be kept. If, or more accurately when, it isn't kept, all the parties involved suffer some degree of injury or loss.

Here's the heart of the matter: redressing and working through the injury or loss of partially kept, or totally broken, promises is a crucial part of the ongoing process of making and trying to keep promises because no human promises are fully kept, nor do they ever completely satisfy the need for which they are made.

That is so because the persistent but myserious longing that suffuses our finite promises is not slaked by either the partial keeping or breaking of them. That truth does not diminish the importance of promises or our need to make them. In fact, the very partialness of the keeping or breaking of our promises tends to amplify our longing. That is what takes promises out of the realm of the inconsequential or trivial. Promises are intimations of our inborm longing for those sustaining, meaningful connections which are the essence and energy of hope, love, joy, justice, life and a relationship with God.

Now on to point 1A of this chapter which so far as been mostly an attempt to clarify the nature of longing itself and to introduce promises as one expression of that longing relative to human connections. Herb Reinelt is my very dear friend going back to our days at Yale Divinity School where we began our shared experiences and theological dialogue. Herb got his Ph.D. in Philosophical Theology at Yale and went on to be a university professor while, for family reasons, I had to give up my fellowship and drop out after one year of Ph.D. study. That tilted the scale of theological proficiency Herb's way. But it also unleashed my own less academically constrained theological imagination. The result has been that over the years our friendship and dialogue have been a treasured gift and an abundant blessing to me.

With that background, I quote the following except from what Herb recently wrote to me about my blog: "I think … we yearn (long) for what Royce called the Great Community. That community would be the home that we yearn for beyond our individual homes. It would included the joy of reconciliation with God (which HRN* saw as the work of Christ and the church) and the reconciliation of ourselves with others and the whole creation. I suspect that you would agree … *H. Richard Niebuhr, a seminal theologian/professor at YDS

"You say that 'best friends' can't cure being lonely, I agree, they are not a complete cure, but they are a partial cure. They are real (though partial) answer to loneliness and, insofar, a foretaste of the Great Community. We really do long for them, not just for God. One might say that we can't get right with others unless we get right with God, but I think it also works the other way. Your emphasis is on longing as the way home to God, but I want to say that the longing for God is not all we long for; we equally long for each other and the longing for the other can be the way home to God."

As always, Herb makes thoughtful and stimulating comments. For the most part, I agree with him, with one key exception with two related parts:

1st, I do not contend that “… longing is the way home to God, only that it is a primal connection to God and that and paying it attention is crucial;

2nd, I agree "that the longing for God is not all we long for…" but I don't agree that "we equally long for each other …" I think longing itself reflects a primal connection to God and thus is the genesis of all other corollary forms of longing as well as pervading them, however faintly. I agree there's an inseparable connection between the longing for God and all other longings, but I don't agree that they are equal or identical. That may seem to b a relatively insignificant difference but I don't think it is.

Here's why I don't: To make longing for any finite other equal to our longing for God sooner or later results in nagging disappointment and disputation In response to the fear and anger of our disappointment, we are prone to ramp up our investment and loyalty to the finite objects or subjects to which we attach our longing until our investment and loyalty becomes blind, idolatrous. Our over investment frequently results in the kind of destructive behavior and dogmatic claims which are corrosive to the "Great Community” which I view as essentially the whole human family. Consider, for example, the partisan rancor and divisiveness that is tearing at the fabric of our country and the world right now.

As I see it, it isn't possible for any finite subject or object to fully satisfy a longing for an eternal being or relationship. When that truth is ignored, tit can, and often does, result in idolatry, generate arrogant claims and counter-claims of certainty about the particular, finite subjects or objects of our"longing." Thus, in the service of our little gods we fall into divisive conflicts between persons, members of families, groups, religions, causes, political parties, social or economies classes, nations.

The problem is that our anxiety driven claims of certainty make us self-righteously defensive and evokes destructive reaction to, and from, every other "particular, finite claims made for the objects or subjects of longing." Part of the destructiveness resides in our refusal to openly acknowledge our disappointment over finite broken promises we make or are made to us in response to our longing. So we stop short of "addressing and working through the injury or loss of (those) partially kept, or totally broken, promises …" - i.e. our particular, finite expressions of our "longing." Rather than doing that, we become increasingly dogmatic about our claims and hostile to those of others, and via versa, ad nauseam. And there's sin's fertilizer.

I believe that all we finite beings need to acknowledge that we cannot claim infinite truth for ourselves or our dogmatic positions or promises. Something, Someone, namely God, is more, and in crucial ways other, than any or all our finite longings or promises.

Realizing and accepting that can lead us to a process of reconciliation; that is, of addressing and working through the injury or loss resulting from our partially kept promises and the inadequacy the objects of the misplaced attachments of our longing. That is the ongoing challenge of being, or becoming more human as creatures who carry the image of God but not the fullness of God's being or truth. I believe most, perhaps all, expressions of longing and the promises they generate carries a trace of our longing for God to varying degrees, if and when we pay it attention.

It is paying attention to those varying degrees, some more basic and compelling than others, that enables us to discern the value, direction, integrity of the longing and its consequent promises or intentions. For example, to say that nothing totally satisfies our deepest longing is not to say that the longings we have or the promises we make are irrelevant and unimportant to our decisions or how we attempt to live by them. On the contrary, the efforts we invest in making and trying to keep promises keep us linked to our deepest longing if we keep evaluating the direction they take us.

Recognizing and accepting the claim of that if are the work of trust and love . Ignoring that if leads to hypocrisy. self-righteousness and dogmatism. Our capacity to keep setting and resetting the direction we take in our lives forges a link to Grace. It focuses and shapes our thinking, deciding and actions in intensely relevant but not totally explainable ways. It is a fundamental ingredient in reconciliation with others, and God.

The directions we choose to take are the most essential component in life. The efforts we invest in making and trying to keep promises keep us linked to our deepest longing if we keep evaluating the direction they take us. Recognizing, accepting and implimenting the claim of that if are the work of trust and love . We may long for others in ways that are destructive to them and to ourselves when we make them objects, when we use them, exploit them for our own gratification or advancement.

We can make corrections in our directional course and the relative state of our promises by referring to our spiritual orientation's GPS. That orientation is linked to our longing for God however dimly or falteringly we might discern it as being. Through the process of referring to that GPS, or spiritual orientation we are able to keep resetting and going in a direction toward some gripping vision of the good, or of what matters most even when we never quite get "there" because we're not exactly sure where or what "there" is." We just sense* when were heading in the right direction, when it's "right" or "just" or "peaceful" or "beautiful" or "loving" or whatever is truly precious to our hearts. *See references to David Brook's book coming up later in this chapter.

The truth is that never quite getting "there" and yet with an innate urge to keep "pushing on" is what it means to be finite, mortal beings. The process of "pushing on" is what is profoundly hopeful about us and life. As we go, our lives are laced with , experiences, hints, intimations, interludes of wonder, of joy, of sacredness, of grace. All of them are transitory but none-the-less genuine, powerful, encouraging, inspiring and real. Moments when we're aware of "The Great Community," as Royce and Herb put it, are not occasions to stop but inspiration to go on.

Okay, okay, I agree that this chapter has become increasingly abstract, dense, murky, somewhat irrelevant, not very helpful and needs a good editor. Truth is that I've spent many weeks going back over this draft and trying to edit it which proves that I need a good editor. This is not meant as a some kind of obsequious apology. It's a sincere explanation. You have my hearty permission to do whatever editing on your own that might help me out here. Meantime, I’ll try to clarify my thoughts by first repeating three key ideas from a few previous paragraphs which may have been lost in the screech and screen of words around them:

1) "I believe most, perhaps all, expressions of longing and the promises made by them carry a trace of our longing for God to varying degrees, if and when we pay it attention";

2) " The directions we choose to take are the most essential component in life. The efforts we invest in making and trying to keep promises keep us linked to our deepest longing if we keep evaluating the direction they take us. Recognizing, accepting and implimenting the claim of that if are the work of trust and love …"

3) "We can make corrections in our directional course and the relative state of our promises by referring to our spiritual orientation's GPS. That orientation and process is linked to our longing for God ... we can keep resetting and going in a direction toward some compelling vision of the good, or of what matters most even when we never quite get 'there' because we're not exactly sure where or what 'there' is."

In the context of those statements, I'll try to lay out some more specific ideas about what I mean by them. *I start by referring to David Brook's recent, fascinating book, 'The Social Animal". Among other pursuits, Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and a weekly commentator on PBS Newshour. The sub-title of his book is "The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement" and the examination of those sources constitutes the purpose his book. If that purpose seems vaguely reminiscent of my purpose in writing The Longing Way Home, you're on to the reason I'm referring to it. I'm not above hooking my tail to a celebrity's kite.

In an article on his book, Brooks writes;"Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologist, economists,and others have made great strides in understanding the inner workings of the human mind … A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story to go along with the conventional surface one." (2)

In the Introduction of his book, Brooks further sketches out the profile of that "different sort of success story." This is what he writes: "If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception. If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money and applause, the inner mind hungers for harmony and connections -- those moments when self-consciousness fades away and a person is lost in a challenge, a cause, the love of another or the love of God." (3)

There's an intriguing connection between Brooks' commentary on the unconscious mind and my exploration of longing. The basic connection is reality and nature of love and it's time to make that clear. From shared experience, we might agree that love is an obvious form of longing. But are we now also ready to see that longing is itself a form of love, a love that is not so much romantic as it is the principle direction we are strangely or mysteriously summoned to seek. Longing is the form of love that is the source of "the invisible bonds between people” because it is a element of creation itself and an invisible bond between human beings and God.

When we respond to our longing by choosing a direction that rejects, distorts or dismisses those invisible but real bonds we violate ourselves and others. I believe the lives of all of us, certainly including mine, are scarred and marred by the many occasions when we have foolishly or selfishly chosen a damaging direction for ourselves which has also hurt others. In so doing we become less than human to some lesser degree. In the long history of theological discussion about whether Jesus was fully human or fully divine, or how much of each he was, more recently some have proposed that Jesus was the most fully human of us all, and the rest of us struggle to become more fully human. The love of God that haunts our longing and is revealed in Jesus helps us in our struggle.

Let me clarify my understanding of love. Love is a feeling, of course, but more than that it action. Love is what we choose to do, how we choose to live, how we choose to relate to others even when we don't "feel" drawn to them. We can choose to love our neighbor as ourselves and love our enemies, even when we don't like them, just as we don't like ourselves sometimes. Love is work in all aspects of life, from intimate family relations to close friends to neighbors to anonymous people who are poor, sick, hungry, of a different gender, age, sexual orientation, race, nationality, belief system or lack thereof, the whole human family.

I've long insisted that justice is love with its sleeves rolled up. That's one of my most felicitous statements and succinct ways of putting it. Love is most fully revealed in the life of Jesus who is mistakenly portrayed elsewhere as meek and mild because that is not what love is or how it acts. Love is gentle, tender, patient, humble and kind. But love is also direct, honest, bold, assertive and forceful. Love is risky, brave, creative, innovative and holds itself and others accountable. Love is longing for the fullness of life with God which issues in just, peaceful, joyful relations with others. felicitous

Moving toward the end of this chapter, I refer to another of Herb Reinelt's views of longing: "The "Great Community" is the redeemed community in its relationship to God; it is not just human to human relationships … But I do want to hold that sometimes we get closer to God by following out our longing for God and sometimes we get closer to God by following out our longing for others … I think that the longing for God can arise and be felt in our human relationships. And that seeking loving relations to others is a way to become aware of God."

I agree with my friend but with a question or two. One is, Doesn't using the word "redeemed" to define human to human relations, or the "Great Community," unnecessary, even unfortunately, raise issues about the limits of that community and who determines those who qualify to be included in it. I put that question, and implied answer because in utter disregard of the mysterious reach of God's grace, so many persons and factions presume to claim that right for themselves? Hence, because of that mystery, I believe loving neighbor and enemy as ourselves means that we should recognize that all human beings, the whole human family, are to included in that community, at least is so far as the direction, concerns and actions that emanate from our primal longing for God are concerned. Justice seems to me to be an imperative applying to all of us, even though in our finitude we fall short in its implementation. I pretty sure Herb agrees. If he doesn't he should and owes me a cup of coffee for his dissent.

The other question is, How can we get closer to God by following out our longing for God? I’m not sure I know how to do that as an independent enterprise. I think Herb is persuasive in suggestion that our longing for God necessarily involves following out our longing for others and I agree as long as the two are not seen as separate, or equal. For another example: A life devoted to prayer and meditation, either solitary or in a reclusive community, may be a calling for some, but even in such instances, the prayers are at least partly for others, thus confirming the invisible bond between people.

Though prayer is essential for all of us, we also need to be part of the answer to our own prayers if we are to live the direction of our longing and love. To do that necessarily involves making choices and taking concrete actions to extend justice to everyone. Yes, we live in a complicated world in which our choices are mostly in the gray area. But that is not a reason to defer or bow out. Most often unjust conditions and those who suffer them are clear and compelling enough for us to risk action to try to address them. But love without risk is empty.

As I said earlier, in long past moment of inspiration, I came up with the insight that justice is love with its sleeves rolled up. I've insisted there is a priority and distinction between longing for God and longing for others, but there is not, indeed cannot be, any disconnect or separation between them. If there is, it leads to a misdirection of life and the risk, if not inevitability of idolatry, of raising some non-God to the level of God. In case you don't remember my reference to Martin Luther’s definition of our “gods’ and the constant risk of idolatry, here it is again: "Whatever you give your loyalty to and get your sense of worth from, is properly your God."

That said and that distinction made, I hold. as I think Herb does, that longing is first a stirring in us of love for God which, either faintly or intentionally, moves us toward loving others as ourselves by working toward justice for all. Loving some others is certainly easier and more enjoyable than loving others as well as enemies, for God’s sake -- and there you have it, “For God’s sake”. Genuine spirituality, or the persistence of longing, necessarily has a social application. All good subjects or objects of our loyalty don't have to become idolatrous if we keep alert to how easily that can happen.

The possibility, yea, the probability is that in working in the direction in which our longing calls us, we can nurture and expand relationships, community. We can at least limp on in the direction of our longing and partially our promises to love one another. But longing unheeded or disavowed, or its elusive quality yet holy persistence reduced to dogmatic certainties, will curdle it and diminish us as those seeking to become more human.

The "promises we have to keep" are claims of justice and compassion and peace to which love summons us in all our human relationships And always, "There are miles to go before (we) sleep. And miles to go before we sleep."

Please know that I am not naive or innocent. I do not in any way believe, think or claim that what I propose is easy, or simple, or a cure all for the challenges, complexities, hostilities and conflicts of our society, our country, our world. (More on that in the next chapter.) What I am attempting to do is present a way of seeing ourselves and each other, of recognizing glimmers of the longing we experience as bearing some degree of what it means to throw the "little ounces of our weight, to tip the scales of humanity toward justice" and leave the outcomes to God.

So this last question, perhaps the key question of all: "What are the promises made to us that keep us?" That's an enormous question and we'll keep encountering it as we move on toward the "home" alluded to in the title of this blog-book. Essentially, I believe the short and concise answer is the history of Israel and the life, example, teaching, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are the promises that keep us. From those two reveal sources come other dimensions of awareness just as daylight reveals what darkness covers.

I am deeply moved and strangely sustained by Marilynne Robinson's beautifully written and spiritually inspiring novel, Gilead which has rightly been called “a hymn of praise. Two brief images she shapes for us carry, at least for me, what I mean by those “dimensions of awareness f the mystery of the promises that keep us in our Longing Way Home.

Gilead is essentially the reflection on his life by an old Baptist minister, Reverend John Ames, who has spent his life in Gilead, a town in rural Iowa. It is full of awesome insights. One of them is this written in a letter to his prodigal son: “They say an infant can’t see when it is as young as your sister was, but she opened her eyes, and she looked at me. She was such a little bit of a thing. I know she didn’t really study my face … But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something and I’m glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face … It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider it to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.”(4)

I don’t think we have to be as old as John Ames to grasp, or be grasped by, the powerful longing and love this old pastor expresses in that scene. “… nothing more astonishing that a human face,” the faces of those you naturally love, the names faces of those you see every day, faces of neighbors, even of enemies, your own face. Each face, each person “has something to do with incarnation.” Each is the embodiment and challenge of what life is about, what it means. Each reflects at least a little of what we long for, and the promises of God that keep us.

The other awesome insight John Ames writes somehow follows on the first. “This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success, I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eight decades walking around in it. People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that’s true. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That’s clearer to me every day. Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind though my eyes …”(5)

Like Adam? Maybe partly, as in Adam’s amazement at creation, and of course, Eve’s as well, and that’s what old Ames is directing our attention to, really. And yet, perhaps not necessarily like Adam who missed the point of it and lost his direction. I confess that too many days, I stumble as he did. But not every day. Not when I pay attention to my longing and try to follow it as best I can, not being like God, or trying to be. But trying to be more fully human by rolling up my sleeves and embodying love of self, neighbor, enemy, the whole human family by trying to do justice. That’ what I think it means to trust the promises that keep us.

How about you?

(1) The Poetry of Robert Frost Edited by Edward Connery Lathem Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1969 p.224

(2) The New Yorker magazine, p. 27, January 17, 2011

(5) Ibid - pg. 66

Memoir Supplement - Chapter Four - The Longing Way Home

2011-01-14T16:34:00.042-05:00

Friends,

Again, it's been a while for reasons I won't go into. Tardy though it may be, here I am again whether you missed me or not. All I can say is that trying to write a book is equal parts inspiration and pain-in-the-ass labor. And sometimes it's just pain, period, brought on by the prospect of labor without any inspiration. But since writing is probably as much, or more, for the sake of the writer as it is for the reader, the time comes when I, presuming to be a writer, have get down to it before I feel up to it. So, I'm parking my pained ass in a chair and starting to work. My hope is that inspiration will begin to trickle in from the muse, or down from the mind or up from the heart, then out onto the empty page in the form of words. So, let's see. Here we go. Give it your best effort and I'll do likewise. Blessings. Ted

MEMOIR SUPPLEMENT - CHAPTER 4 THE LONGING WAY HOME

Years ago, a friend passed along this quote: "People put their best foot forward when it's the other one that needs the attention." I'm not sure where he got it, but the observation makes a provocative point. Plus it helps explain why Mark Twain, among others, insists that no one can write an honest or complete autobiography which, reviewers say, Twain proves in his recently published effort. In that, he's like the rest of us, wanting to hide faults and failures, those things and times in life we're ashamed of and want to keep a secret. So we keep our best foot forward while keeping the other back and out of sight even though that stance is unsteady and makes it hard to move except in circles.

But the rest of the problem is that more often than not, it's hard to know which foot is the best and which isn't, and how do we really tell the difference. Is best about performance, making impressions, conforming, popularity, avoiding risks? What, exactly does best mean? What's so inexcusably bad about the other foot, or the outspoken, bumbling, irritating, sometimes mean spirited, confrontational, earthy, creative, experimental, even objectionable part? Without pressing the issue, which was Jesus about doing? Best foot forward in our terms would never have dumped over any pots of hypocrisy or given a hot foot to any injustices. It seems to me, the best foot could be either foot, best experiences at the moment might not be recognized as such, nor the worst really turn out that way. In any case, here is an attempt to share some of that mixture about my life.

Turning eleven years old marked the beginning of an even more intense period of anxiety and bewilderment in my life. Probably it was not completely unlike the adolescent season of most lives but this was my life and not all the changes were inside my body and mind. Those few years were strewn with challenging changes around me as well. That combination haunted me for what seemed an interminable span of days and nights. It still haunts me in some ways.

In 1941, close to my actual eleventh birthday, we moved across town in Huron, South Dakota, to the first home my parents had ever owned. The house needed many repairs but it was theirs and they determined to make them. It was a momentous step for them. So we moved from 1315 Illinois Street to 640 Idaho Street. For me it was like moving from the state of Illinois to the state of Idaho, totally new town. I felt upset and helpless. Why did we have to move again?

It meant saying "good by" to the house I loved and could navigate in the dark. It meant "good by" to my old buddies and leaving the alleys and short cuts, the vacant lots for games and the hiding places of the neighborhood I knew like the back of my hand. It meant a tearful "good by" to the red brick building with the big windows and gaveled playground just three blocks up the street called Lincoln School after my favorite of all presidents. It meant "good by" to the band of students in different grade levels but of the same school brand; "good by" to dear teachers, the surveillance of George Washington's unblinking eyes from his picture over the blackboards and pendulum tick-tocking of the classroom clocks; "good by" to the low ceiling of the gym where we had to learn to shoot baskets without much arc on the ball and to the spicy smell of the dust compound the janitor used to sweep down the halls. It meant a self-conscious "good by" to girls I'd gone through the first five grades of Elementary School with and who lately had become much more interesting and appealing than they'd been before.

It meant having to start everything all over again and really not knowing how, or what, or who, or why, or if I could. I wondered if I'd ever have friends, or teachers I'd like or if other girls in a different school could or would be interesting in that different way or if I could make the sports teams in the new school so I could become a high school football and basketball player which I dreamed of being before the move when where we'd lived only two blocks up the street from the high school football field and maybe five blocks the other direction from the gym where the basketball team played and practiced. Suddenly, all my certainties and dreams seemed as far away as Idaho Street seemed from Illinois Street. It was all disorienting. I didn't know where I belonged, if any where. And yet, it was just the beginning of the world changing radically for me and for everyone.

The big State Fair was held in Huron every late summer. Most of the time, I went to it with my parent. Both of whom grew up in small towns in the farm country of Nebraska and liked the exhibitions of cattle, pigs, horses and seeing which in each category won Blue, Red or White ribbons. But one day that summer of 1941, I went to the Fair alone to just wander around. There was a section called "The Midway" which had lots of games of skill in which contestants won prizes of stuffed animals or trophies of some kind. There were also a section of rides, my favorite being the Ferris Wheel from the top of which you could see for miles in all directions in that prairie territory.

That summer day I got into an argument with one of the men who ran a skill game by my contending it wasn't possible to toss a circular wooden band from the edge of the booth toward a display of prizes in a table in the center of the booth and have the small band settle over the major prizes on blocks of wood only slightly smaller than size of the band. In anger, he ordered me to leave and flipped his lighted cigarette at me. It hit me in my eye and the pain was intense. I found a water fountain and ran water into my eye to help with the pain, and that turned out to be the best thing I could have done.

Never-the-less, the injury to my eye was serious. My cornea was badly damaged and the doctor didn't know if I would be able to see out of that eye again. There was no guarantee. I felt very frightened and alone. Every day for a week, I laid on the old couch in the new living room while every few hours my Mother lifted the bandage and put drops in my eyes. I couldn't read, which I loved to do and worried if I'd ever be able to do again. I listened to hours of soap operas on the radio and wondered if the people in them would ever get through their terrible problems, or I through mine.

During those days, I began to realized more sharply and painfully how fragile and vulnerable things are, we are, I am, life is. I was also felt overwhelmed with how complicated everything is, even though I didn't have the right words to express that feeling. I never forgot that feeling or those insights even though my eye recovered with only minor lasting damage that didn't compromise my sight.

Actually, I think that experience deepened my already melancholy nature as well as triggering a tendency to hypochondria which has plagued me all my life. For at least two years after, I worried about my vision, especially whether the eye injury would jeopardize my athletic chances. I'd nag other kids to devise tests to determine whether they thought I had any problem seeing clearly. I needed constant reassurance, but I realized much later, my need was really reassurance for something deeper than my eye sight, something more than I could know or name about myself at the time. No one ever could, or can, make the fragility or vulnerability of life go away, or the eliminate the risks living involves. It was a lifelong, slowly learned lesson with profound implications beyond the grasp of an eleven year old kid. The feelings remained embedded in my psyche.

In September, I started 6th grade at Jefferson School and I really don't remember much at all about my year there which is perhaps a symptom of my trauma over the change. Then, came an event that changed the world for everyone and added immeasurably to my fear as well as that of the country that was beginning to emerge from the ravages of the Great Depression. On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and World War II began. We all wondered whether an invasion would follow, or attacks on mainland United States. Uncertainty prevail. What would we do as a country, as a state, as a family?

The Japanese went on to invade the Philippines, driving the small number of American troops there into the peninsula called Bataan that was the last bastion of our little army, precipitating a battle our soldiers fought heroically and vainly to protect against overwhelming odds. The battle was lost at a great cost of our soldiers and ended in what was called the Death March of American survivors. General McArthur was evacuated with a few of his staff as he made his historical promise, "I shall return." It was a dark, scary time. I had trouble sleeping for weeks.

In the Fall of 1942, I started 7th grade at the Junior High School to which I walked a dozen or more blocks to yet another building. The most vivid and searing memory of that year's experience was the late Autumn day a U.S. bomber crashed in a field at the edge of town near my old 1315 Illinois St. house. Growing up, I used to play baseball with my buddies on that field. We crowded around the big school windows and watched black smoke swirl up in the distance. After school dismissal, I walked with a lot of kids to see the crash. Wreckage was scattered everywhere and the stench of burning metal was heavy in the air. No one had survived and we spotted what we thought was a smoking body or two amidst the debris. Motionless, I stared at it for a long time. It all seemed unreal, yet very real. No one talked about it much then, or afterwards. But the scene is seared in my memory along with a welter of questions and feelings. Why did it happen? How did a playground become a killing ground? What was it like to die? The world was suddenly very threatening. What did it all mean?

To further unsettle and disorient me, just before Christmas in 1942, my father was transferred again. This time to another town, Aberdeen, South Dakota., about 90 miles north of Huron. He had to start his work a week later,on January, 2, 1943. My parents decided that he and my older sister, Rosemary, take residence in a hotel room in Aberdeen so she could finish her Junior year of high school and become introduced to kids and integrated in the school as the best way to prepare for her Senior year to follow. My mother and I were to stay n Huron where my Dad and Sis would visit on weekends as often as possible. One of my jobs was to be in charge of the coal burning furnace, putting coal in, banking the embers to last through the night, and shoveling out the ashes and clinkers. I felt both grown up and continually overwhelmed.

The arrangement seemed very strange. The reason for it was the house had to be sold before the entire family could move. Then, almost miraculously it seemed, some rich man from out of state who liked to hunt pheasants in South Dakota came to look at the house. Fifteen minutes later, he peeled off $2,200 from a wad of bills in his pocket. In late March, we all moved into a rented house on Kline Street in Aberdeen. I finished the last couple months of 7th grade in a Junior High only a couple of block down the alley but full of kids I didn't know and who, quite understandably yet callously showed little interest in getting to know me. Their friendships and alliances were already set.

Actually, the only good thing about the move at that point was that Aberdeen had a YMCA across the street from the Methodist Church we started attending. Guess which one I liked better. I spent hours in the gym, shooting, dribbling, playing pick-up games with whoever was there, even older guys. But in spite of that, I remained terribly homesick.

That summer, 1943, the war was going better for us but lots of things were rationed, including gasoline which meant no visits to family in other areas of the Midwest. It was then I started obsessing about finding a "best friend." Of course, there were many tributaries to that river of preoccupation: being new in town, feeling lonely, living in a strange house, and possibly. though sub-consciously, the fact my Mom had given still birth to two potential brothers. I didn't know why I was so focused on finding a "best friend" and I didn't much care. I just wanted one more than anything.

To help me get acquainted with more kids in Aberdeen, my parents enrolled me (read required me) to attend the Junior Youth Fellowship at the Methodist Church. I felt like a fish out of water there because everyone quoted the bible and we held candles and sang soupy songs and it felt sort of phony to me. The kids were nice, maybe too nice, I learned things I was glad I did and I along well enough. But there was no "best friend" in that group, friends, maybe, but not best.

My parents also signed me up for Boy Scouts, which I didn't like because the Scout Master acted like a top Sergeant ordering us around and telling us stories about his war experiences. In July I went to Boy Scout Camp where I felt even more lost since we slept in a tent invaded by clouds of mosquitoes and everyone was working on merit badges to become Eagle Scouts, in which I had no interest. Not only that, but out door latrines we had to dig weren't too appealing plus we were camped on what was euphemistically called a "lake" but actually was about two feet deep with another foot of mud under the water and you could walk across it, after which it was just a swirl of muddy water. I was desperately homesick. There were no best friends in sight in that venue.

To top the summer off, my parents signed me up for YMCA Camp which sounded more promising, and was okay for the first week. The Camp had an asphalt basketball court and we were assigned to play on teams. My team won. That part was fun and I was so good that one of the counselors who coached a high school team in the area asked me to come to live with his family and play on his team: heady stuff, but the very idea scared me.

Everything went downhill from there. Other boys had their pre-camp buddies and, outside of basketball, I was pretty much alone, even in group activities. Shortly after the second week began, I went off by myself and cried for a long time. Finally, I went back to the main building and told the Head Counselor I was sick and they sent me home with someone going the 30 miles to Aberdeen to pick up something for the camp. There was no best friends in that setting either.

When I got home, I cried intermittently the next few days. I felt wrong for lying to get home, for being a baby, a coward, a failure for not sticking it out, for embarrassing my parents, and myself, since I was sure other kids would make fun of me when school started again. I sat with my head in my arms, sobbing, telling my Mother, "God must have put me on earth to show other people what not to be." Melodramatic? Probably. Part of the trial of puberty? Maybe. A passing trauma? No, not close to that. Those boyhood feelings of inadequacy, of being wrong, of shame, can still shudder me like the whack of the wind and the choke of dust storms on those Dakota prairies.

So what's the point of this, other than a rigmarole of remembering? Well , I think there are several points, not just one. The first, and before any other, is that most of us have variations of my experience because it is part of being human and transitioning from childhood to some degree of maturity, which is really, a lifetime process. Looking back on it, I realize that there was a tenor or sense of a kind of homesickness or better, a sickness for a home beyond mine, beyond imagining, like the way off in the distance note of a flute, the indecipherable message of it and the eerie feeling it evokes of something or somewhere haunting and beautiful, beyond reach, yet at the same time, inescapable.

Okay, talk about indecipherable, that attempted description of my experience probably fits -- too florid, convoluted, murky, whatever. But somehow I wonder, I trust, that if you scrape down through your long trashed childlike feelings, those you thought you'd buried or dismissed as ridiculous, irrational, outgrown; perhaps way, way down under the more manageable, acceptable, supposedly rational religious profile you've projected, down, down to something --

memories, feelings, there's A LONGING, an elusive but insistent part of you, your psyche, your spirit, your soul, your "self." There, I've said it. I'm writing about longing as a kind of sickness for a "home" of which any we know as finite beings is at best a fleeting glimmer.

Another point is that being lonely in some deep sense is an inescapable part being human. It's not the same as being alone. It's commonplace to be lonely in the midst of a crowd, or a small gathering, even more disturbingly, in an intimate twosome. Perhaps we feel it more at certain times than others, but it's always lurking, as longing, at the edge of the hustle, habits and worry, of the one more task of our days, or the mind race, play-over, toss-turn, wrinkled sheets nights. It's in the nibble of an inchoate hunch that something is missing in it all, so if we could just figure it out and get it right, everything would be fine. After all, isn't that what magazine articles tell us and self-help books and TV ads and, sadly, too often politicians, even preachers?

But when all is said and done, we feel lonely because in some essential way we are finite, limited, and yet unique; the only one who will ever be you, or me, or whoever. Best friends are precious but they don't cure being lonely. They just help confirm and help define longing as a resource and existential reminder. It took fifty years for that truth to dawn on me.

Yet another point is how easy it is to feel sorry for yourself. But self-pity shouldn't last more than ten minutes, max. The world record is probably ten years or more. My personal record was closer to two intervals of maybe three months each with both being expunged because of my inexperience at the time. Yet, as I said earlier, those feelings still blow through me for ten minutes every so often. Now I recognize them pretty quickly and don't wallow in them.

Here's the issue: self-pity is often presented and interpreted as humility. It isn't. It is not! You are not the only hurting one in the world. To think that is perverse pride. It's pride in disguise. It's manipulative and hypocritical. I know about and have indulged in those distortions a few times to my own determent and the injury of others.

I stopped decades ago when I returned to therapy I because of a devastating blow from someone who betrayed me in a deeply personal way. The psychiatrist, who'd worked with me for years and knew me well, listened as I cried and complained. Then he asked, "Ted, what's broken, your heart or your pride?" I knew the answer immediately: my pride.

It had been a long time learning and came as a great relief and release. It wasn't easy to move in another direction, to accept myself and experience the healing challenge of a fundamental truth and the freedom of it. It took courage and a heavy dose of real humility. It was a gift of grace. I've never forgotten the question and have had many occasions to ask it of myself as well as others.

It's one you can ask of yourself. It's about honestly accepting your own imperfect humanity which curiously makes you more human, not less. Less is what we become pretending or trying to be more than human. Pay attention to your longing which abides even when desire, dream, accomplishments, hopes, goals, expectations are met and stored away. Real humility bears scars but is the beginning of peace within.

The final point is this, or has been the point all along, so in a way is rather a summary. What this section of my memoir is about is longing. It's the longing beneath the struggle of those early years of my life and I had no clue to it. I think recognizing the longing in our lives may come only in the biblical sense of the fullness of time, the right moment when we are ready. Or maybe it never comes because we mute it with all our self-justication, our denying something in ourselves, about ourselves, we try to hide or disguise and forget until it bites us in the ass, or conscience, or soul.

The "bite" is the truth that we are just finite, mortal beings. None of us is perfect, or close to it. The "there" we are so hell bent to get to is really out of reach and it's okay. It's a resource to accept that, to heed what it tells us about ourselves and what it is to live as a human being. It tells us we have a core, a strange essence we name as a soul. It tells us the pursuit of perfection is a fantasy. We are not perfectible. Let go of that illusion and relate to others honestly as just other human beings, precious but imperfect just as you and I are. To expect or demand perfection of yourself or others, is to live under self-imposed tyranny. Don't duck away from your longing. Pay attention to it. Accept the mystery of it. Heed it as something claiming you beyond all you can see, or understand, but can trust and live with in increasingly free ways. Trust the God in and behind it.

Have I done that? Obviously, not always, or even often. But I'm trying. How about you?

Think about it. Pray about it. Try it.

With longing, Ted

Picking A Dance Step - Chapter 4 The Longing Way Home

2010-10-27T15:53:00.067-04:00

Friends,
I don't in the least presume that anyone has been waiting for the next chapter of "The Longing Way Home" while I've been mulling and trying to sort our some ideas. They have been rather big, complicated ideas that resist my capacity to make clear even to myself, let along anyone else. In one sense, the ideas have to do with the gallery of gods we all have and which we change periodically almost as easily as we change our socks or underwear. Mostly we don't realize we're doing that until our expectations of whatever god of the day we're counting on doesn't cut the mustard. Even then, we wouldn't usually consider that we've hung our expectations on anything like a god and besides, there's always another one in the gallery we can substitute for the one who didn't make the cut this time. In fact, we can have one or more of those interchangeable, substitute, minor gods in play all the time, shuffling them in and out as needed.

To unravel the snarl of all that and try to reach some helpful insights about how that process doesn't work is too much for a single attempt. So, I'm tying to break the whole ball of wax down into smaller candles to shed some light on the core claim of this book which is that longing is one of God's most primal connections to us. It helps to remember that this is a first draft of the book we're undertaking, not the final addition. That means if and when you read this chapter, or any of the others, your comments, criticisms and suggestions are needed and welcome.

Thanks for your patience and here we go. Think with me and don't forget that thinking is part of praying. Ol' St. Paul may have missed the mark in a few things but he was got it right when he said, "I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also." That's Corinthians 14:15 if you're interested. Ted

P.S. Yes, I know it's a long chapter, but you never know, it may be worth reading anyway. After all, it took me a very long time to write it. So, again, thanks for your patience and comments about what you think

PICKING A DANCE STEP - CHAPTER FOUR: THE LONGING WAY HOME

Whenever I hear or read some bromide of supposed wisdom, I sigh, cuss and roll my eyes. Lately, I'm doing that a lot because of a number of fatuous verdicts much in vogue these days. Here's one such banality first peddled by advertisers, then parroted by all types of self-promoters and practicing narcissists: "You deserve the best" which gets transposed to "I deserve the best" to which I mutter, "You do? And what would that be? According to whom?" Then there's this additional head-scratcher: "It is what it is." about which I ask, "Do you mean what it is right now, which is sliding into the past as you speak and as the world whirls to a different place? Or do you mean always and forever, because nothing changes and no effort matters? And, by the way, what is the definition of 'is' anyway?" (Apologies to Bill Clinton but more relevant in this context.)

But to me, "Life isn't fair" wins the most trite utterance award for now. "LIFE isn't fair"? All life? Everyone's? Everywhere? Your whole life? The claim reminds me of a baby's tantrum, throwing toys and tears, fists, arms and legs in all directions because something makes him/her angry; or a teen ager screaming and stomping around because he/she can't do something they want to, or have to do something they don't want to, or "deserve" something they didn't get.

Or, to be honest, it reminds me of me when I run into snags and hitches or something triggers my temper by not conforming to my efforts and intentions and I slam my fists at whatever - the door, the desk, the wall, even a person a couple of times years ago and that doesn't include words spit out in a flurry of fury or cold, cutting comments at those who "don't get" what I get or "don't do" what I think they should. And you? At the very least on occasion, and probably without actually saying so, which of us hasn't felt that life is somehow unfair? The "Stomp, Point, Bow Polka" or SPB Polka surely must be one we all know -- the stomp of anger, the point at someone else to blame, the bow of devotion to some substitute god

Okay, anger and blame we all get that. But bowing and devotion? What's that about? Try this for an example. My friend Bill Coffin, at the young age of 34 but probably near 60 in experience, was appointed Yale's chaplain, he reports being interviewed at a gathering of alumni. He wrote, "I had barely been introduced before an older alumnus said, 'You look awfully young to be chaplain of Yale, but I guess it's all right as long as you believe in the free-enterprise system.'

Fortunately, another chimed in, 'Jim, I thought you were going to say the Trinity.'"*1

And there it is, the bow toward two substitute, minor gods, one after the other. The first, "free-enterprise" is the most blatantly erroneous minor substitute god but just as dangerous as any. The second,"the Trinity," though a traditional theological and doctrinal Christian affirmation about how to view the nature of God, is still just that, an "affirmation about" God. It is a creed crafted in human terms reflecting human efforts to define God. It can helpful, thought-provocing, even a devotional guide. But for those very reasons, it can go undetected as a minor and false god because no matter how sacred we might hold the concept to be, it should never be substituted for God, any more than a map or road sign is to be taken as the destination itself. Home isn't in a creed.

You see, orthodox doctrine can be its own form of idolatry and impose on people a closed religious position or system that designates which views of God are correct and which aren't? Even Jesus might not make that cut. Any religious view that promotes some form of tyranny in the name of God is essentially idolatrous. Tricky, these substitute, minor gods, this bowing in devotion, isn't it? And soooo easy to fall into and join the SPD Polka.

Now, in the interest of fuller disclosure, and as another illustration of this point, as you may have guessed, I'm a political progressive, or liberal, because to me that is the closest public stance to my orientation as a Christian who tries to live out what Jesus said and showed as the way of love of neighbor as well as enemy. I see it as an important way for "would be" Good Samaritans to get organized. But I confess I am prone to hang too much laundry on that line of belief. Therefore, in effect it becomes a kind of god for me according to Martin Luther's definition that "whatever you give your loyalty to and get your sense of worth from is properly your god." Given the fact that I'm still in recovery from the recent "shellacking" my party/god got in the November election, I'm learning again how easy it is to slip into a contemporary kind of idolatry and end up in yet another ramble around in the desert of disappointment and despair. Now do you get it? Sure you do.

Where am I going with this? Back to the Golden Calf episode in the Exodus to begin with. That's when, newly freed from Egypt, the Israelites practiced the SPB Polka. Surely, you remember! It's one of the most widely referenced events in the bible and surely is familiar to even those who never read the bible. There the motley band is, camped out in the Sinai peninsula on the way to an unknown destination and they're a little antsy about it all. Moses has gone up on the mountain, supposedly to talk to God though the sweaty, sore-footed Israelites weren't too sure about that since he'd been gone a while. They feared he'd abandoned them in the trackless desert and they'd become food for whatever critters might be lurking out there.

So Aaron, Moses' brother and second in command, offered to placate them by molding a golden calf out of whatever jewelry they could gather up and when it was done, this incredibly credulous bunch proclaimed that this Golden Calf was the god who brought them out of Egypt and would take them to a land of milk and honey. You'd think that knowing how the thing got made, and out of what, they'd know better. But no, they made sacrifices to this Golden Calf, and danced around it in revelry. It was the SPD Polka: the stomp of anger because things weren't going the way they want them to, the pointing at Moses and Yahweh to blame for the situation, the bow of devotion to the idol of the Golden Calf. Ir was the polka of guile, of cunning deceit, primarily self-deceit, which is always the first stage of guile.

I won't go into the details of what happened when Moses came down from the mountain and found the Israelites shimmying and shouting around the Golden Calf. It wasn't pretty. Moses was enraged, and reportedly so was God. The Calf got ground to powder and mixed with water which Moses made the people drink. Whether it was that, or God's wrath, or something else, a significant percent of the Israelites were "blotted out," to use that biblical euphemism. However you interpret the thinning of the herd of Israelis that day, the essential point to file away here is that the SPB Polka always has grim consequences one way or another.

So file that in your mind and let's come back to the present and to the recent election as another example of how the SPB Polka happens, and doesn't work. It's redundant to describe the political climate in this country as polarized, ideologically judgmental and divisive, and the election campaign harshly caustic. The political pundits spoke and wrote incessantly about how angry the voters were and listed the things people were angry about, primarily the economy but other things as well. So did the candidates. Obama and Pelosi were named the culprits behind every problem.

Noted New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote this in the September 12, 2010 Sunday edition, beginning with a quote from Robert Samuelson: " 'The unstated assumption of much school reform is that if students aren't motivated, it's mainly the fault of school and teachers.' Wrong, he said. Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don't like school, don't work hard, and don't do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 28 percent cited 'student apathy.' "

Friedman suggested: "There is a lot to Samuelson's point and it is a microcosm of a larger problem we have not faced honestly as we have dug out of this recession: We had a values breakdown -- a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism. Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot.com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs … Our big problems are unfolding incrementally -- the decline in U.S. education, competitiveness and infrastructure, as well as oil addiction and climate change. Our leaders never dare utter the word 'sacrifice.' All solutions must be painless … So much of today's debate between the two parties, notes David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment visiting scholar, 'is about assigning blame rather than assuming responsibility. It's a contest to see who can give away more at precisely a time they should be asking more of the American people.' "

And who is it demands painless solutions to our problems and challenges? It couldn't be us, could it? Quick now, blame must be assigned, right? Let the SPB Polka begin: Altogether now, Stomp, Point, Bow to the Scape Goat that's replaced the Golden Calf for us. Someone else is surely to blame. We'll never run out of offenders.

Plus, we can ultimately blame God. After all, why does God let bad and painful things happen to me/us/whoever? How many variations on that theme are there, and don't we all play some of them? Well, to answer that probably we should begin by asking why does God let good and beautiful things happen, like composing symphonies or cures for diseases or incredible paintings and dramas? Maybe then we could ask if we really think we're the only free creatures in creation or might not freedom be laced all through creation from photons and atoms and cells to meteors and solar systems as scientists are finding to be the case? Okay, I'll write more about this issue later but in the meantime, think about where blaming God takes you, or us. Here's a hint: nowhere.

Now, one step down and back to the SPB Polka we're free to dance, or not. How many Aarons are at large in your network who continually shape the Scape Goat(s) for you, and the rest of us, by pointing the longest finger and plucking the loudest tune we dance to: Falalalalalala, someone else is always to blame.

But are they always to blame? No, at least not exclusively! And Yes, to hold others accountable is an honest, ethical, even prophetic way to live. It's how Jesus lived and, to some extent, why he was put to death. Well, death is not a likely outcome for those among us who do that, but the odds are that some form of retribution might be. That threat gives most of us pause.

And yet, to hold others accountable is part of loving them as ourselves. And that's the kink of honesty in the pointing finger, isn't it? " … as ourselves" as in "love your neighbor as yourself." To hold others accountable requires we be held accountable ourselves, and first of all by ourselves, even if we need a kick-start in starting the self-examination. Of course, there's alway enough blame to go around, at least a couple of times, and a significant portion belongs to us. The wonder is that, at its core, the process of holding ourselves and others accountable is a crucial piece of loving your neighbor as your self. Otherwise, any show of love is counterfeit.

Here then, is a little help in starting to walk the maze of our own selves. If you step back from the SPB Polka for a moment and cock an inner ear, you'll realize that the Polka is always seriously off-key. Why? Because under most anger is anxiety. Take another step and keep listening: What are you and I really afraid of? That's a big question. I wrote something about it in the last chapter and I'll probably write more about it later,

In any case, each of us would likely give a different answer to the question of what it is we fear. But from my own ongoing self-examination, and years if listening to others I counseled, I think there might well be a somewhat common undercurrent in them. The eminent psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan wrote of three basic mental images that help us understand ourselves and the world. In recent years they've opened a crucial long locked door in my my understanding my own life and self. I offer them here, in summary:

The first image is the "good-me" which is what we like about ourselves, focus on and openly share with others.
The second image is the "bad-me" which is about things about ourselves that are considered negative and repulsive. We tend to try to hide those things from others, even from ourselves, but under certain circumstances, the "bad-me" crashes our party, leaks anxiety that turns to some form of "life isn't fair" defensiveness and anger.
The third image is the "not-me" which refers to all those things that imply such crushing anxiety we can't accept them as part of us and try all our lives, in every way, to avoid, and deny entry to our conscious self. But unconsciously, that anxiety sneaks around the psyche undercover, twisting us into various forms of destructive feelings and thoughts, even that of not being at all, blotted out somehow..

I think the answer to what it is that we fear is some combination of the "bad-me" and the "not-me." The consequences are a crippling lack of self-awareness and self-acceptance that distorts and impoverishes our own lives and relationships. We become as those who the poet T. S. Eliot memorably described this way entitled a poem The Hollow Men: "We are the hollow men/ We are the hollow men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!/ Our dried voices, when/We whisper together/Are quiet and meaningless/As wind and dry grass/Or rats' feet over broken glass/In our dry cellar."*2

Granted Eliot's imagery exceeds gloominess and seems a bit over-stated and outdate in our present technological modes of communication. But don't scoff and miss the point. When we deny parts of who we are, we do become hollow, empty, heads filled with the straw of anger, whispering together in dried voices our familiar self-justifying half-truths, trying to stem the leak of anxiety of our 'bad-me" or worse, our "not-me" but not being totally able to stop the trickle of it, even as we do the SPB Polka.

Depressed yet? Don't be!! There's another dance we can learn if we choose to. The first step is courage, the second is honesty, the third is trust. It's called the CHT Jig and the three steps are interdependent.

But start with the step of courage. It takes courage to really examine your self, all the bits and pieces, especially the bad- and no-me parts we don't want to face because to do that seems too threatening. And in some ways, it is. It threatens the distortions that trick us into feeling safe.

And it exposes our illusions about the world. In his story The Cardinal's First Tale, Isak Dinesen has a scene that powerfully makes the point:

God asks of a candidate for some spiritual position, "Do you take it that I have meant to create a peaceful world?"

"No, my Lord, the candidate answers.

"Or that I have meant to create a pretty and neat world, or a world easy to live in God asks.

"O good Lord, No!" the candidate says.

"Or do you hold and believe that I have resolved to create a sublime world, with all things necessary to that purpose in it, and no one left out"

"I do," the candidate replies.

"Then …" says God, "take the oath."

Do you understand how that "oath" is close to the core of living a true, honest human life? Can you imagine how such an oath begins to deliver us from the illusions of privilege, entitlement and exceptionalism, the toxicity of self-righteousness, the corrosion of hypocrisy? Can you grasp that taking such an oath, as surely Jesus' disciples must have, would enable us to live as a finite human being unburdened from the grinding load of self-importance and pretending you have to be perfect, or can even come close? Can you see how courage is essential taking that oath and that it requires a lifetime to begin to embody it? Carlos Castaneda helps to clarify it; "Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it -- what weakens us it feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of others, Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone." I would add, what a waste that is. I takes courage to take the oath and keep trying to apply it to your self and your life, no matter what anyone else try to sell you.

Then take the step of honesty and examine yourself without filters or excuses. No one of us is without flaws, limitations, faults, failures. No one is perfect no matter how hard we might try. as I did for far too long, persuaded that nothing less would be acceptable, and breaking down in that process. The question is, "acceptable to whom?" Perfection is a fantasy, a pretense, and curiously enough, Christians can be particularly susceptible to buying into it, practicing it, suffering from it and causing others to suffer because of it. Honesty is one way to argue that sin is the most "provable" Christian affirmation and honesty counts us all "in" or it's all in us. Thats why I always hang on to Luther's advice, "Sin on boldly but believe more boldly still." That isn't to advocate for sin, just to acknowledge its pervasiveness and what to do about it.

Honesty is about wrestling through the demons of pretension and self-righteousness to reach find our souls. It is to dismantle the emotional and mental armor of defensiveness and duplicity and gratefully accept who we are. It is to tune our hearts' music to the pitch note of longing whence we muffle with our illusions and realize that the longing that abides beyond all our successes and failures, lies and idolatries is the truth about who we are and are not, and whose we are, and are not. Psychologist James Hillman helps here. He says, "The dimension of the soul is depth (not breadth or height) and the dimension of our soul travel is downward." I assume "downward" means down into the depths of your self. That is the first direction of the step of honesty. And I would differ with Hillman's statement that the dimension of the soul is only depth. From depth comes the breadth and height of the soul. Look at Jesus' life.

Here's a song that sums up what I'm trying to say here. It's entitled Anthem and Leonard Cohen wrote the lyrics. In paRt, they go like this:

"The birds they sang at break of day,

Start again I heard them say.

Don't dwell on what has passed away

or what is yet to be …

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in …

You can add up the parts

but you won't have the sum.

You can strike up the march

there is no drum.

Every heart, every heart

to love will come

but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack, a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in."

There is a crack in everything. Mortality, finitude is a crack of sorts. Limitations, failures, flaws, mistakes, heart breaks and aches, disappointments, loneliness, are cracks. Losses, crises, wounds, anxieties, rejections are cracks. The list could go on. But it is not a list of woes and laments, or of anger and accusations. Cracks are how the light gets in. It's the light of that glimmer of longing that won't fade even if you don't attend to it. It's the light of hope that doesn't depend on hopeful circumstances as my old friend Bill Coffin used to say. It's the light of the grace of God, the love that doesn't seek worth but gives it to each and all of us. It's the crack in us and around us that's how the light gets in. We need to keep learning that.

And the final step of the CHT Jig is trust. Trust is not so much something we have, like faith or belief which, of course, are spiritually essential. And I am always encouraged and repeat the words the father said when Jesus healed his epileptic son; "I believe, help my unbelief." I repeat those word so often because I think faith or belief is a process and it involves facing into our unbelief as well as our belief.

But trust is something we do, how we live, what we earn from others who our lives touch. In that sense, it is fused with love. I'm always glad we don't have to like those we are called to love, anymore than we like ourselves all the time, or what we sometimes do that is unlikeable.

But love goes past liking. It's about being fair and honest about ourselves with others, meaning what we say and saying what we mean, being just, generous, compassionate, empathetic, peace making, actions we can live by and with no matter how we feel.

Of course, it is trusting as much of God as we know, as we can, as we will take risks for and get our sense of worth from, again, no matter how we feel. Trust is about how we live and what love is about when the chips go down and we make our choices. Trust is about ringing the bells that still can ring and there are an abundance of them once we forgo the illusions of our "perfect offerings."

When Joan Hemenway, a beloved colleague and friend, a marvelous leader in the Clinical Pastoral Education field, died, this benediction she used with her CPE groups was printed on the cover of her Memorial Service bulletin: "When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and step into the unknown, one of two things will happen: either there will be something solid for us to stand or we will be taught to fly." That's about trust and it touches on the freedom we can live in when we do.

Another benediction in stammer out as often as I can is like it. We often used it as an Affirmation of Faith in the church I served. It's Saint Paul's affirmation: "I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, not height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord," or the love of God revealed in anything or anyone else ever.

My own personal version of trust, which I try to hang onto, better onsome days than others, but is always my close to my soul. I've never verified its source though it's attributed to Charles Spurgeon but I read it first in a book by the Scottish theologian, Donald M. Ballie. I share it now as a sort of benediction for this chapter and a summation of trust, indeed of the CHT Jig:

"Let me no more my comfort draw

from my frail hold of Thee.

In this alone, rejoice with awe,

Thy mighty grasp of me." Amen.

*1 - William Sloane Coffin, Jr. - Once To Every Man - Atheneum - New York - 1977 - pg.134

*2- T.S. Eliot - A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry - Charles Scriber's Sons -1946 pg. 292

9-27-2010 Progress Update on The Longing Way Home +

2010-09-16T10:41:00.005-04:00

Friends,
I hope you understand that writing a blog as a book is not a quick, seamless process. At least it isn't for me! If that sounds like an
excuse, it probably is. Among other things, I'll be away from my study for a couple weeks which means, despite my intentions to try to squeeze in a few writing sessions on "The Longing Way Home" it isn't likely I'll make much progress while in an unfamiliar setting devoid of my usual inspirational resources.

So if you happen to be waiting for Chapter Four, please be patient. If you're ever in the mood to do so, please take seriously my invitation to send me whatever ideas, comments, critique, suggestions or questions that what I've written so far have provoked, It would help and encourage me in what is the long hours of "blood, sweat, toil and tears" required in the process of trying to write something truly worth reading and thinking about. I assure you I'm committed to posting Chapter Four ASAP.

Thanks for your interest and blessings to you and those you love, Ted Loder

Memoir Supplement - Chapter Three

2010-08-18T16:13:00.038-04:00

Guilt was big in my family and probably in most families at the time, 1930s & '40s. It was used in my "moral education" from a very early age through at least high school. I suppose an argument could be made that guilt outweighed my moral education by two to one since morality was pretty much defined by my parents rules pertaining to right and wrong and their rules reflected those of the midwest, small town culture in which we lived. There was little ambiguity, gray area or room for discussion about what being moral entailed. It was mostly aligned with puritanism with a dose of piety thrown in and topped off with a serious protestant work ethic. When the superintendent of schools in Aberdeen, South Dakota, was ticketed one night for driving under the influence he was summarily fired the next morning before breakfast and any inquiry.

In my case, one example of many is that once, when I was ten years old, my fifth grade basketball team played another team at that schools gym across town, Huron, South Dakota. The school was no more than a mile or so from where I lived and the game was probably over by 4:30 P.M. But I hung around with other kids and didn't get home until 6 P.M. or so. There was my father at the door, my first inkling I was in trouble. He sat me down in the kitchen and gave me a lecture on how irresponsible, thoughtless, insensitive and wrong I was to cause my mother such terrible worry. I knew the next usual step was that we'd go to the basement where I'd get spanked with a piece of wood of some kind. From the beginning of the lecture, tears were rolling down my face. I couldn't have felt worse. I just wanted Dad's words to stop and the spanking to begin because it wouldn't hurt nearly as badly as the lecture.

My Dad, Theodore (Ted) W. Sr., was not a mean man at all. He was the oldest of four boys in his family and as such took very seriously the tacit responsibility that often goes with that birth order rank. He was big, strong. handsome, popular, outgoing, sang in the Elks Chorus, went to church every Sunday, was devoted to my Mom, my sister, Rosemary, and me. He loved sports, had been a football player until he blew out his knee in college. At the time they had no way to repair the damage so he had to live with a very loose, painful knee. He worked hard, leaving home as early as 5:30 A.M. and working until 6 P.M or later in those dust bowl ravaged, harsh depression days.

In spite of my lurking fear of him, my Dad was my hero. I idolized him and more than anything, I wanted to please him though it seemed I seldom did until I became an All State football and basketball player in high school though the effort to please him took some of the fun out of playing sports. As I said in Memoir Two, Dad's temper had a short fuse and he was constantly stressed, anxious about his job and taking care of us. As I also said earlier Dad worked for a big wholesale company that supplied grocery stores all over the midwest in those days before big chain stores. It was a dicey business and no matter how good he was at his work, or maybe because he was good at it, Dad got transferred from one branch to another without any say in the matter so the family was in constant flux.

Dad never complained, at least in my hearing, and he drilled into me the conviction that being tough meant never complaining. From a very early age, I must have sub-consciously realized I'd never be the man I believed my father was and that weighed on me. It wasn't until many years later that I realized my father wasn't the man I believed he was either. No one could be. I had to break down emotionally and get a lot of therapy before I was able to see (squint at) Dad more wholly, and so accept, love and be grateful for the very good man he was.

My Mom, Bess, as I wrote earlier, seemed fragile though she really wasn't, which was confusing. She was very beautiful, gracious but quite shy, a somewhat strange combination. She had her ways of getting her way: a grim sigh, pursed lips, a steely look, teary eyes, the flare of a nostril, the ominous sound of her silence. Unquestionably she was the fuel, fulcrum and shaper of the family. It was she who tended the scrapes and cuts of our bodies and the sprains and bruises of our egos and emotional crises and was the consoler of us all, sometimes to an excess that frequently made me feel ashamed and squeamish.

And yet, despite her manifest strengths, Mom was curiously lacking in self-confidence. It's beyond knowing for sure what caused that deficiency or the sadly futile ways she tried to camouflage it. I do know her lack of confidence, as well as her compensations for it, were contagious and personally infected my sister and me, which makes trying to sort out the what and why of it is especially relevant to me. Was it the result of her small town upbringing? Was it the traditionally and legally designated subordinate position of women when she was a young since she was already 18 when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed giving women the right to vote? Was it society's widely held assignment of women to the role of wife, mother and homemaker? Was it her accepting for herself the embedded myth of male superiority? Or did it result from from the deep influence of her little church which espoused women's deference as a virtue and element of faith?

Squinting back at her now, I see her lack of confidence probably came most seriously and sadly from the religious factor but includes some combination of all of the other possibilities with that of her church being the most significant and permanent. Of course, there could have been other less identifiable causes as well. In any case, my Mom used to tell us that when she had trouble with arithmetic in school - i.e. why 1/3rd was more than 1/4th when 4 was more than 3 - she would tell herself the her confusion didn't matter because her future husband would take care of such things. And yet, she felt insecure and stupid dumb for not knowing herself.

My mother's children, her family and her church were the heartbeat of her life. She leaned toward social and political liberalism in moderate conservative, populist, midwest, though my Dad was a bit slower to come to that view. In 1940 she voted for Socialist Norman Thomas instead of F.D.R. or Wendell Willkie because Roosevelt drank, Wendell Willkie was an unknown businessman, Thomas was a Presbyterian minister and therefore must be a teetotaler. Her father, Jacob Pflug, was a strong advocate for women's education and sent his three daughters to college as well as his four sons. Mom, fourth of the seven and the oldest girl, went to Nebraska Wesleyan for two years to get her teaching certificate, and coincidently, to meet and bond with my Dad. While he finished college, she taught first through sixth grade in a one room schoolhouse. By then she must have mastered enough arithmetic to at least teach those young students.

I think my Mother also felt even more intensely lonely. guilty and inadequate because of her two miscarriages. They were loses that deeply wounded her though I knew of only the second which happened when I was four. The other one happened before I was born and I learned of it later. Both miscarriages and their consequences undermined her in subtle but painful ways which also impacted my life in ways I began to understand much later in my life but subconsciously sensed as a child. That also involved looking back from the different angles of time and reflection.

Her work was to be a mother and homemaker because there really weren't many other viable options and she was as good at that one as it was possible for anyone to be, given the limited psychological and sociological resources available at that time. She fully invested herself in my older sister, Rosemary, and me. Clearly there were many benefits of her care. There was also a cost to us as well as to her. For Rosemary and I the cost was the burdensome, inescapable sense of owing her, of nagging indebtedness which we were expected, and somehow came to expect ourselves, to pay by shaping our selves to her expectations and not giving much weigh to our own inclinations, wishes and hopes.

For our Mom, it was the stultification of her own talents and energies about which I learned and appreciated decades later. The lesson came most forcibly when helping my parents move to another apartment in a retirement home, I found some superb paintings tucked away under their bed. She had done them as a young woman, then given up her art when she got married. I teared up looking at them. Truthfully, they helped me squint even harder to see both my Mom, and Dad, and certainly myself, in a different way than before.

What I saw was her, and more obliquely, Dad's, unfortunate, misdirected and ill-fated longing which had sadly constricted her life. That misdirected longing not only squeezed their lives but burdened those of their daughter and son. Of course, Dad in his own way, and Mom in hers, blessed us with their work, provision, devotion, spirit, attention along with a good sense of values and helpful lessons. Her life, and his, were gifts to us.

The painful and somewhat debilitating glitch in their gifts was the implied expectation that Rosemary and I return their investment in us by being and doing what they wanted us to be and do. They were misguidedly trying to fulfill through us their disappointed dreams for their own lives. We could not do that, hard as both of us tried. Given what I believe longing is, namely a permanently unfulfilled primal link to God, no human being can do that for another, or even completely for themselves, common as that subtle expectation is in our human relationships.

For many years, the effort my sister and I made to meet Mom and Dad's expectations resulted in frustration, anxiety, guilt and grief that lasted for years. The irony is that it was the gift of their mutual courage, faith, spirit and unspoken but implicit belief that help me see I could be my own version of the quality of persons they wanted so much, that finally helped me, at least, squint and see them and my self more wholly and begin to lay down some of the burden she inadvertently put on me. In her own, different way, my sister did the same.

For now, I add this final word, about which I'll no doubt write more later. One way I tried to meet particularly my Mom's expectation for me was to become a minister. I didn't want to go in that direction and resisted in whatever way I could, but to no avail. I took as rebellious a course toward that designated outcome as I could, but take it, I did. I knew almost nothing about theological schools but assume Yale Divinity School (YDS) would be the top one since it was a department of Yale University. So I applied and, miraculously, was accepted. I got married at the end of my Junior year of my undergrad study at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and a day or two after graduating, Dory and I started for New Haven, Connecticut in a secondhand Dodge coupe with everything we owned in it. Talk about being naive. It was the beginning of a tough journey with many twists and turns.

Happily, YDS was indeed a great school and I took course of study would which lead to post-graduate study and a Ph.D. and again, was admitted to that program. To get housing and a squeak by income, I took a part-time appointment as a student minister of small church in a village near New Haven. By then we had two baby boys, Mark and David, and were expecting a third who turned out to be a little girl, Karen. Shortly after her arrival, the church began to grow because of the housing boom that turned farms and orchards into suburban sub-divisions. The church needed a full-time pastor, asked me to take the job with better pay and I agreed, thinking I could just take a break from my studies for a year or two and then go back to my Ph.D. program and plan to teach college. I persuaded myself that only temporarily would I be… what else, a minister? Two years later, we had another boy, Tom, and any thought of going back to finish a Ph.D. completely faded. Within a few months, I had a terrible emotional breakdown and began several years of therapy. That turned out to be a seminal, life changing experience to which I'll return to expand on later.

That was over fifty years ago. I always say, rightly, that I became a minister because that's what my Mother wanted me to be. But that isn't the complete story, is it? The rest of the truth is that I may not have wanted to be a minister but, obviously, I didn't want to do something else enough to stand my ground against becoming one. Squinting back now, I see that outcome was not a huge mistake. I became a pretty good minister if a somewhat unconventional one, making every effort to not be phony or hypocritical in the process and sometimes paying a price for it. It was worth it!!

The mystery of it is that someone, or Someone, squinted, perhaps through my Mom's eyes along with some others along the way, and saw me as someone who could serve better in unsought calling and larger purpose in ministry than in any other way. It's safe to say that I never thought for a minute that being a minister was what or who I longed to be and it was misguided for my Mom, and secondarily, my Dad, to feel that my being one would satisfy her or their longing, or after all these years, satisfy my own. But one thing I've learned over those years is that longing abides beyond all attempts to satisfy it and is the mysterious whisper of God to pay attention to it, and the Eternal Father-Mother of us all.

Start Squinting More- Chapter Three: The Longing Way Home

2010-07-19T14:51:00.119-04:00

Friends,

You may not have wondered about it but I want to explain the long hiatus since I've written another chapter of our book, The Longing Way Home (TLWH). Actually, so far it hasn't been "our" book since I've received no questions or suggestions to ponder and/or include in it which is not exactly encouraging.

Never-the-less, I'll keep on keeping on even when there's an occasional lapse in the process. The most recent one happened when I signed on to write an article for another publication which took time and thought (and required more of both than I assumed it would) away from TLWH.

Another was a rupture in a waste pipe from a second floor bathroom that damaged the kitchen and basement powder and laundry rooms and the repairs are still underway in those rooms and there is dislocation everywhere.

Even so, I'm back and here we go again. Thanks for your patience and whatever comments you're moved to send which always mean much to me.
Blessings in abundance. Ted

*************************
CHAPTER THREE - START SQUINTING MORE - THE LONGING WAY HOME

I keep remembering something novelist Leo Rosten said: "We see the world not as it is, but as we are." I find that statement persuasive, yet disconcerting, especially if we include that we see each other as part of the world we see as we are. Mostly we see each other hurriedly, superficially, partially, even a bit suspiciously as critics or rivals, often as someone to be won over,used or defended against rather than as human beings to be respected.

So we live almost constantly in relative degrees of tension, strife and anxiety in a world of "others" we readily criticize as flawed, even threatening, without acknowledging that we see them as we are. The problem is that the way we see them provokes them into seeing and responding to us that same way, too, and that causes all sorts of antagonism and acting out behavior by a majority of us.

But the insidious quirk is that we tend to see ourselves as the world sees us, that is, as others or society or culture see us. And there's the creep of the astigmatic view! The trouble is that we collude in seeing ourselves as the "world" sees us. That is, we start seeing ourselves as objects, as Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, pro this or anti that, consumers, upper, middle, lower class, poor, white, black, Latino, successes, failures, saved, damned, whatever, the list goes on ad nauseum.

Here are two somewhat extreme examples: if society, culture, marketers, advertisers, see women as sex objects, women begin to either see and act that way themselves or risk being seen as dull, unattractive loser, old maid types -- until at least some women don't! If society, culture, marketers, advertisers see men as insensitive, unemotional, aggressive, belligerent, men start to either see and act that way themselves or risk being seen as geeky, undesirable, impotent wimps --until at least some men don't. Keep those "until at least some don't" in mind as we move deeper into this chapter.

One consequence of seeing ourselves as others see us is that it cons us into adopting some variety of one or the other, or an unstable mix, of two deceptions:

The first deception is being drawn into and acting out the illusion that we're more that we really are, more virtuous, innocent, right, faithful, intelligent, liberated than we are. or could ever be, as imperfect, limited beings, and in that process earning graduate degrees in hypocrisy and emptiness;

The second deception is submitting to the view that we're less than we really are, not competent or smart or good or creative or lovable or whatever enough to matter much and thus spending much of our lives compensating and hiding and all the while being carriers of anger, self-pity and gloom. Both of those views muffle and/or misshape our longing and mangle how we see ourselves, others and the world.

How and why does such astigmatism happen? For clues, go back to Adam, Eve and the serpent in Eden. Remember, in the story God first created Adam from dust, then from Adam's rib, created Eve as his equal partner and put them in the garden to be together: capable, sentient, unashamed, wondrous and beautiful in their nakedness. God entrusted them to tend the garden and thus participate in creating it, i.e. to share in God's creating activity. Out of love, God gave them each other, their freedom, talents, purpose, responsibility, accountability … and, yes, longing, longing as a faint, mysterious clue to who they were, and whose. That was how they were to see themselves and it was enough.

The ugly snag is that isn't how they saw themselves. They didn't quite trust God, or even begin to sense the mysterious depth of the longing mixed in the breath of life God breathed into them. There was just one thing God told them not to do which was mess with the tree in the middle of the garden. That did it and off they went to the middle of the garden to check the tree out. From the first, they misconstrued their longing and attached it to the tree's forbidden fruit.

When along slithered the serpent, they were ripe for seduction. All the serpent had to do was recast their longing by persuading them to see themselves as able to be like God. All they had to do was to dump their charge to be tenders of the garden and eat the off-limit fruit of that suddenly irresistible tree. The only ones who could keep them from doing that were themselves and they weren't about to. They preferred the image of seeing themselves like God so they chucked their charge and chomped away on the fruit.

Only that didn't make them like God. Instead, it swamped them in anxiety and shame so they quickly covered their nakedness with fig leaves to try to hide themselves and pose as though they were no different from the other animals in the garden. They must have thought that would make them no more guilty for their action than animals who had no capacity for such guile.

When asked by God what they'd done, Adam and Eve came up with the first variation of fig leaves by blaming each other and the serpent, trying to somehow hide from God and from themselves. What they failed to see was that in essential ways they were really not like the other animals in the garden. Here's how they were different:

First, God continued to address them as the human beings He/She created however badly they'd acted.

Second, by laying out to them the consequences of their betrayal and sending them out of the Garden, God confirmed their responsibility and attendant accountability as human beings.

Third, God confirmed their continuing worth and the capacities he'd endowed them with by giving them difficult tasks to do in order to provide for themselves.

Fourth, and most importantly, God went with them, giving them clothes to replace their sticky fig leaves, a clear metaphor for covering their shame with mercy and grace!

But Adam and Eve were so blinded by anxiety and drained by shame, they missed all that and what it meant about who they were. I wonder, "What would be different about how they viewed themselves and God if they had just 'fessed up to they'd done and their accountability for their abuse of their freedom, and asked God to help them use their compromised but still ample freedom more responsibility and vigilantly in the future?" The answer doesn't matter for them but never-the-less is relevant to us. We'll stumble onto that later, so keep it in mind.

Why all this fuss about an old Bible story? At least two reasons. The first is because it's true even if not literal. It confronts us with real, crucial questions about life and ourselves. Here are a few which I hope you will think over and come up with your answers:

Hasn't Adam and Eve's story been repeated in every generation of human history?
In some variation, how much of it is part of your personal history?
How often are we tricked into seeing ourselves as like God if we'll just buy the views of society's hucksters and the mirage of promises of they make?
How often do we see ourselves as victims, blame others for whatever's wrong and excuse ourselves and, in the name of security and self-defense, advocate and act out that view of ourselves in nasty ways that actually harm us and those around us?
How often are we blinded by anxiety, drained by shame, driven to hide in pretense and hypocrisy from our longing and miss its faint signals of our real identity?
If we admit that we are not like God, does that make us the same as the other animals of creation with an excuse to live a "dog eat dog" existence?
However the millions of intersections and turns were negotiated to bring us from the "Big Bang" to where we are, like it or not, don't we have responsibility for each other and other creatures in the garden, that is, in creation itself?
Isn't it possible, even probable, that false ways of seeing ourselves end up keeping us from seeing that the essence of our difference from other animals is what our longing is about and who we are not only meant to be but really are in spite of our foibles and fallibilities, if we look hard enough and speak our "don't" to the way of seeing ourselves as the world does, with our collusion, which is superficially, partially, distortedly, defensively, destructively?

Okay, time's up. Probably my answers are obvious and support the point of this book. But just so you can be sure, here they are:

1. You betcha 2. Not in every detail 3. Causes my nightly acid reflux 4. 364 days a year, except July 4th. I'm patriotic after all 5. Only before and after breakfast. 6. Only occasionally at ball games 7. Earthling types, Yes, but not Klingon types 8. Absolutely but the question is too long and it's tough losing big bucks saying, "Don't."

If you got at least 6 right, we can move right along. If you got less than 6 right, we can also move right along. After all, this is about thinking and reflecting together about longing, not necessarily agreeing about things.

So, the second reason for the Adam and Eve fuss comes with a quote from theologian Reinold Niebuhr: "Evil is done ultimately not by evil men but by good men who do not know themselves." In Niebuhr's day, the term "men" referred to human beings so don't get hung up by his chauvinist terminology. And don't get distracted by arguing whether his assertion includes "all" evil. Even some is quite enough and to our point. Niebuhr is addressing the human condition in both its personal and social dimensions. Not to know one's self is to overlook and/or disregard essential truths about ourselves which warps how we see, think, feel and act and leads to destructive (evil) consequences for others as well as ourselves.

Here's how poet Robert Frost echoed Niebuhr's evocative insight: "Something we were withholding made us weak/ Until we found out that it was ourselves."(1) What is it we withhold if not honest, critical. penetrating, balanced self-knowledge? The truth is all of us are both participants in nature and time, and also have intimations of transcendence and the eternal. That is our consecrated and challenging place in creation. It is awesome to be human and, at the same time, it is exceedingly difficult to keep our balance as such. It always has been. We tend to keep trying to reach up to be like God or squirm down to indulge, then excuse, our lowest animalistic impulses. Either way we lose our balance and crash. Every one of us can describe the wreckage.

It is our mistaken view of ourselves that makes us weak in ways that are dangerous. We exaggerate our capacities and disguise or excuse our limitations and that makes us defensive, self-righteous, entitled, angry, manipulative. Those traits often lead to commit dozens of kinds of violence from lies, slurs and accusations to discrimination, exploitation and oppression to guns, bombs and missiles.

How do we "find out" it's ourselves that make us weak and dangerous? One way is to start squinting more often, squinting at the world, at others, at ourselves which means to look a little askance, obliquely, at an angle, off to the side, which isn't way and where we usually look at life or ourselves. Remember when I said earlier to keep those "until at least some don't" women and men in mind? Well, some people do squint is why they don't see themselves the way the "world" does. They see themselves more truly.

If I now quote Emily Dickinson to advance the point, it may seem I'm on some show-off poetry roll here except that it's often writers, artists and poets who show why squinting matters so much. That's what Dickinson does in her poem,, only she uses the word "slant" instead of squint but it means the same thing.

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise.

"As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanations kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind."(2) ***

*** Comments on poem:
* I think Dickinson uses the word "Circuit" to suggest circling truth to see it from differing, unusual angles, or see it "slant" -- which is what I mean by squinting which precedes telling.
** I interpret "Explanations kind" as telling truth, not lies, to children in simpler ways to ease their fears which truth can do when told compassionately and that applies to adults as well. See Jesus and parables.
*** As I said, I believe to "tell all the truth … slant" implies first seeing it that way which is necessarily "gradually," in order. first to integrate it and then to avoid blindness.

I believe squinting is the way to keep our balance as humans who teeter between two poles. One pole is being inescapably part of, but not completely bound by, the the complex, stunning processes of nature for which we're grateful while often falling for its baser seductions of self-indulgence, unbridled hunt for gratification and cruel preying on others.

The other pole of our teeter is truly being unlike other creatures of nature and having the extraordinary capacity to experience moments of transcendence, enlightenment, moral discernment and the realization of our responsibilities for all of life, while often succumbing to the delusion of the claim to posses Godlike knowledge, judgement, moral certitude, spiritual superiority and requiring the deference of others or their vilification.

All that teetering and tripping up makes maintaining our balance in life a tough but essential challenge. I hold that it requires squinting as often as possible, squinting to see gradually, through lifetime, our longing as a core truth of us, our primal, indelible link to our Creator no matter how numerous, various and frequent are the illusions to which we attach it by not squinting at ourselves.

One serious caution concerning Dickinson's plea to "Tell all the truth but tell it slant …" applies to the word "all." If and when anyone … anyone … claims to know or tell "all" the truth, starting running away as fast as you can, especially if it's "all the truth" from or about God, as in "straight from God's lips to theirs" about who's saved and who isn't, who's in and who's out, who's going to heaven and who to hell, what God absolutely wants us to do about what, when, where and to whom -- except love them as ourselves which includes far from all the answers to the "how" questions we're left to figure out. So the "all the truth" folks give spirituality, ethics, theology, religion, Christianity, churches, and especially God, a bad rep.

In fairness, the illusion of infallibility also plagues people who argue that "all the truth" resides in the "fact" that since there is no way to prove the existence of God by logic, reason, or scientific research, it proves the contrary or negative, namely that there is no God and ultimately everything, i.e. "all the truth" concerning the what and why and how of creation, human life, consciousness and experience, can and will result from logic and scientific experimentation and inquiry. The response to such supposedly infallible insistence about "all truth," is to ask, "Well, to begin with, what about a totally conclusive explanation of why there is anything rather than nothing?" Since there isn't one, that's always a stumper even to such narrow-vision rationalists who's intransigence gives reason as well as science, education, art, music, creativity and sacrificial love a bad rep.

Here, then, is the conundrum of our human existence: of the incredible number of what we human beings can do and know, "all" and "everything" are not among them; not about nature, not about human history in large sweep or small particulars, not the universe or every element of earth, not even about ourselves. Even when we squint at ourselves, or others, we can never see or know all or everything about us or them. As mortals, we simply cannot completely transcend the boundaries of time and space that necessarily define us. It is precisely those inescapable "limits" that make our longing such a gift, such a clue, faint as it is, to who and what we are. We cannot know/experience/see all or everything but we can know and see enough essential truth to dazzle us to live abundantly.

As mortals, seeing and "telling ... the truth slant", that is, squinting at ourselves from as many angles as we can, involves coming gradually to a glimmer of truth that dazzles. The word is "gradually" which emphasizes the finite limitations that apply to us as humans. It suggests that temples gradualness requires patience, trust, courage, humility and honesty. Our squinting is never finished because our longing is never over no matter how much we ignore, distort, misdirect it. That's why our longing is a primal link of mortals to the eternal, mysterious God who created us in whatever way it happened, and keeps happening with our participation because love gives freedom to the beloved while holding them accountable while not abandoning them.

So after all this pondering and floundering, where are we? Surprise, surprise: how about back to my after the fact (okay, story) question about Adam and Eve scratching in their fig leaves, stammering their excuses to God without a squint in mind? Now the question gets put to us, "now" meaning hourly, daily, constantly, even when ignored: "What could/would be different about how you/we see yourself/ourselves and God if you/we just fessed up to the messes you/we make of life and accept accountability for the abuse of your/our freedom, and asked God to help you/us to use your/our chronically shortsighted but still squint-able use of freedom more responsibility and vigilantly to make things better for you/us/others?

Here are some possible answers from which to choose yours:
a) No difference. b) It depends. c) Maybe a little to me, not much to others. d) Some. e) Who knows for sure? f) Worth a try. g) Why bother to find out, things are bad/good enough as is?
h) Can I do the "ask God" part without the "fess up, accept" part? i) Don't understand the question.

I'd say the only suspect answers are a) and g). I hesitate to rank the others but prefer f). But the point goes deeper and is more elusive. The point is about longing which eludes answers and has more to do with the certainty part of uncertainty. Okay, that's really oblique, slant, a squint eyed view of who we are. There is a certain sense of direction, or filtering process, about uncertainty which gives uncertainty a certain positive quality, a gradual truth dazzle about what isn't certain that we take as being so when it isn't, things we settle in with or for rather than going on in uncertainty with our longing for what we can't satisfy but which keeps summoning us and, one way or another, won't leave us alone.

There are many images that might partially fit the ambiguity of our longing and so of our view of ourselves. I think "home" intimates it best because home refers to where we come from and where we long to be or go, not necessarily our literal home but something at once more inclusive and elusive. When I was a kid, my mother did needle work and she made one that was framed and hung in the living room. It included words from Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave but not our hearts. The link may lengthen but it never parts." At least that's how I remember them and in significant measure the words are right and stretch past memory into imagination, intimation of something even more real than we consider reality to be. It has to do with those faint finger prints our Creator leaves on our souls, like a mother leaves on our hearts, prints that point to something present but beyond our grasp. Yes, it's a mystery, a holy mystery, the mystery of God, a truth that dazzles gradually and partially lest it blind us and turn God into some kind of celestial seeing eye dog.

One next to last word about longing and home for now. Home isn't Eden. We may fantasize about home that way but it isn't really some idyllic, comfortable, beautiful, innocent place or time we long for as if our history and identity doesn't matter at all. Remember, it wasn't Eden or God that changed because of Adam and Eve's distorted view of themselves and each other. It as their betrayal of who they really were. It was Adam and Eve themselves. That is still how it is for us, isn't it? In a sense, Eden went with them when they left the garden because Eden was creation but they couldn't see it that way. And God went with them as well, was with them as He/She was in Eden.

So actually "home" is who we really are, not a where, not a place we occupy, or ever can this side of eternity. So just like Adam and Eve and every generation since, our critical challenge is to squint as often as possible until we gradually see ourselves more fully, more truly. And that is also our most vexing problem. For most of us, in spite of using all our psychological, sociological, cultural lenses and making all our claims of being aware, insightful, honest about ourselves, we leave something out because we want to be sophisticated and smart in each others eyes. What we leave out is any sense of God, any admission of a longing too amorphous to be completely reasonable and definable. What we leave out is something primal about ourselves.

So I repeat what I've repeated through this whole chapter: we need to squint more often, much more often in following hints to being home in and with ourselves. And that would make a difference worth finding out about. It would throw some penetrating light on what it might mean to "love our neighbor as ourselves" as well as to "love our enemies." Go figure try to figure out and live out what that might mean, my friends.

Here now is my truly last, beautifully simple, profound insight about squinting to see ourselves as "home." It comes from Marilynne Robinson in her incredible novel, Gilead. Toward the end of the story she has the old pastor write these words in his journal: "There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us. Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. 'He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.

"Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that also allows us to be brave --- that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and that to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing." (3)

To which I presume to add that longing is surely a form of prevenient grace and prevenient courage.

You may have labored to get to the end of this chapter which may be too dense, long and contorted to easily follow. You may also have sensed that I labored to write it as well. Let's hang in together with our longing anyway. And I hope and pray that these words of this old man I am will help you be in touch with your longing, squint to see and be your real self, and allow you to be useful and generous along with me.

(1) Robert Frost: "The Gift Outright" pg. 424, The Poetry of Robert Frost Holt Rinehart Winston 1962
(2) Emily Dickinson: Poem "1129" pg. 506, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Little Brown 1960
(3) Marilynne Robinson: Gilead pg. 245-46, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2004

Memoir Supplement - Chapter Two

2010-06-19T15:01:00.045-04:00

I've always had a strain of melancholy running through my being. Not that I don't have fun, or laugh and joke, or like being with people and being socially active. It's just this note of sadness that tolls in the distant background, louder at times, haunting me. I don't know why or where it comes from exactly, just that it's there as part of who I am and has to be paid attention. Only once, when I was older, did circumstances flood to overwhelm and drag me down to nearly drown in it. But that comes later in the story. For now, I trace at least some of it to childhood experiences which may, or may not, be quite similar to those of most people.

My mother, Bess Mary, was born April 5, 1903, the fourth of seven children; three older brothers, one younger followed by two sisters. Her mother, Rose, married Jacob Pflug, who the family whispered was a Jew, though never that was never confirmed or spoken aloud and remained a family secret. When we visited he'd take me to his store where he sold John Deere farm implements and I'd walk around holding his hand, feeling happy and important.

Mom's family lived in a small farming community, Ohiowa, Nebraska, with maybe 1,000 or so inhabitants, , all of them on the same telephone line with a a particular ring for each phone to indicate an incoming call to which everyone listened in. Since people had to rapidly turn a little handle of the side of the big wooden-encased wall phone to ring up the town operator, that sound also signaled everyone of the so called party line to pick up the received to listen in, everyone was pretty tuned in to all the news and gossip of the day. That was the entertainment of that time, along with church services and socials.

My grandmother, and then as a young girl, my mother played the piano for the morning and evening worship services in the small, clapboard church which the whole family attended. as did my Grandfather Jacob though he sat in the back pew and never joined as did the others. And yet, my mother told me that when his brother had a "nervous breakdown," it was my grandfather gave him a home, took care of him and read the bible to him every night.

When I grew up, I was proud of having a Jewish ancestry but my memory of my Grandfather Jacob is shadowed by another time when we drove all night to visit mother's family and he was lying very still in a bed in a room off the wood stove kitchen. Everyone was quiet and kept wiping their eyes with their handkerchiefs. I was told he'd had a stroke, whatever that was. All I knew was that he was sick and silent, my mother was sad and worried, so I felt lost and cried, too.

That memory blends into another which must have been very shortly after. There was a fire in my grandparent's house and I watched it from the window of a house across the dirt alley leading to the barn. Following that is the image of my grandmother, Rose, standing off to the side of a gathering of people looking at her house and furniture and my mother telling me the bank was selling their house and everything because there was a big Depression and Granddad had died and Grandma had no money and no home now.

I didn't understand much of what she said except it was bad and I was very scared because my mom was squeezing me so hard and making strange noises as her tears ran down into my hair. I remembered the night not long before when the truck with the whirling red light took my mom to the hospital and I wondered if something like that was going to happen again that very day. I clung to my mom and sister, who was standing with us. I just knew I had to be very good so that my mom wouldn't leave me again. That didn't happen, but I knew it might someday, who knew for sure. I never forgot that terrifying feeling.

My father, Theodore William, Sr.,was born November 7, 1902, the oldest of four brothers. His mother, Alice Snyder, and his father, William, also lived in a small agricultural town named Waverly, Nebraska. My grandfather, with his father, ran what was called a dry goods store in town. The store sold groceries, buttons, pickles and flour from barrels, cloth for sewing, and other things people needed. I remember being fascinated by the story and the stories my dad told about how he, and his brothers in turn, worked in the store as they grew up. I also remember that railroad tracks divided the little town, most businesses being on one side, most houses on the other and listening to the plaintive whistle of trains going through and the rhythmic pump of the steam engine and being strangely stirred lying in bed as those haunting sounds floated though the night air and wondering where the train was going.

My Grandmother Alice was very special to me. My mother and father, and sister, Rosemary, left me with her when they drove to the Chicago World's Fair when I was just four years old. My grandparents still had a horse and buggy, as did lots of the people of Waverly and the surrounding farms. So the horse, Dan, was a great attraction to me as a little boy. The kindness of my grandmother was evident in tying Dan to a post near the back steps and letting me sit on him as I ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. How did she know I'd remember that, and her, forever? She just did. It was grace personified.

So were the stories she told when putting me to bed. And a song she taught me I still sing to myself sometimes:

"Come, little leaves/Said the wind one day;/Come to the meadows/With me and play./Put on your dresses/Of red and gold;/For summer is past,/And the days grow cold.//Soon as the leaves/Heard the wind's loud call,/Down they came fluttering,/One and all./

Over the meadows/They danced and flew,/All singing the glad/Little songs they knew.//
Dancing and flying,/The leaves went along,/Til Winter called them/To end their sweet song./
Soon, fast asleep/In their earthy beds,/The snow lay a coverlet/O'er their heads.///

It was New Years Day after that summer, when my Grandmother Loder was killed in an car accident when returning home from visiting us in Clinton Iowa. The accident happened after the two memories I shared in Memoir One about my mother's fall and miscarriage and the profound sense of longing I had on Christmas night that year. My Grandfather Jacob's awful sickness and dying, my Grandmother Rose's having to sell her house and everything, my Grandmother Alice's death, all seems to strike out of the blue while everyone was doing what they had always been doing, just as had my mother's fall and miscarriage and being taken away, leaving us behind. Why had all that happened? What went wrong? Couldn't someone stopped it from happening. Couldn't I have? The world seemed increasingly scary to me.

I remember my Dad driving us all to the hospital where my Grandmother Alice and Grandfather William were. We arrived late at night. Everything was dark and quiet, even inside the hospital where we walked down a long hallway with doors on each side. My Grandmother was behind one of those doors. I have a vague memory of entering the room, standing at the foot of a bed, standing on tip toe to look over a board at the end of it, seeing only a white sheet pulled up to the top and nothing else, nothing moving. I heard my dad cry, my mom whispering to him and saw other figures like shadows around the bed. not understanding what it was all about except it was bad.

I remember gathering later at my Uncle Ed's house Lincoln, Nebraska, which was near Waverly later and seeing my Grandfather being helped into bed, his side tapped up where, I was told, his ribs were broken. I heard them talking, Uncle Ed, Uncle Doc, Uncle Dwight who was pounding his fist on the arm of his chair. Someone had gone through a stop light and caused the accident. Who was it? How could whoever it was do that? Why was my Uncle Dwight, who had been driving the car my grandparents were in, pounding on the chair? Where was my Grandmother Alice? Indeed, "Dancing and flying,/The leaves went along,/Til Winter called them/To end their sweet song.//Soon, fast asleep/In their earthy beds,/The snow lay a coverlet/O'er their heads./// It was like my Grandmother Alice's song, only not just leaves. but everything churned out of place

Or was it in place? What did it mean that not only leaves but people, grandmothers, go fast asleep in their earthly beds? It seemed a bottomless mystery though I then didn't have words to call it that, or identify the lost, lonely feelings I had. I was just 5 and a half. Now, more than seven decades later, the mystery is less frightening but just as real. Less frightening because it has to do with God, and as Isaiah reminds us, God says, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (1)

So, there is always something unfinished about our mortal life for all of us, however fast we run, however busy we are, however hard we work, however much we have or don't have, however many good works we do. And those feeling of being lost and lonely? That strain of melancholy running through me and my awareness of the mystery of it all, even in seasons of joy and deep love? I realize they are the gates what open to longing, and the way home.

(1) Isaiah 55: 8-9 NRSV

Off To Somewhere - Chapter Two: The Longing Way Home

2010-05-26T16:00:00.045-04:00

Friends,

Here's Chapter Two of The Longing Way Home. All the conditions listed with Chapter One are still in place. I hope we can keep this work going for the near future, anyway. You can help me immeasurably by letting me in on your thoughts, suggestions and questions. Or just by letting me know you're reading it as I write it. I consider it a joint effort since it explores what I think is a basic, primal human connection to God. Thanks and blessings. Ted

OFF TO SOMEWHERE - CHAPTER TWO: THE LONGING WAY HOME

The title of this books, The Longing Way Home is meant to suggest my conviction that all through our lives we are on the way somewhere even when we don't completely know quite where or even seriously think much about it beyond choosing a college, a marriage partner and a job or career. Usually we're a bit like Woody Allen who says about himself, "Wherever I am, I wish I was somewhere else."

Our somewhere else is usually not a geographical place so much as it is a higher rung we desire on the status ladder with various degrees of intensity and tend to label with variations on the theme "Our Way of Life." We're constantly urged by every well meaning group to take the readily accessible ways, including "education, hard work, ingratiation, connections and conformity," to get to that somewhere which supposedly anybody who is anybody is headed toward except ... "you know, those who aren't our kind." (And who exactly are they? Martians maybe?)

Still, life as we live it isn't as dependably structured or easily defined as that. As is life itself, our particular lives are an always unfolding, dynamic process, never a static, stable condition. However imperceptibly, that process conditions our thinking, our emotions, our behavior, our relationships, our self-definition and direction. Much of our process of going somewhere is so routine it's almost knee-jerk. and usually relatively short term but fairly repetitive. It involves the sort of logistical choices, plans, intentions and schedules we put together as we set out for the day, or a week, or whatever the next stage is in the drama of our life.

Our short term motives and objectives in that process are quite specific and relate to our work or a meeting, a shopping expedition, an appointment, schlepping kids around, standing in lines. going to social events, the various activities it takes to keep things going without very much reflection on the more crucial somewhere we're headed beyond the checklist in our head or date books. For the most part, any larger or over-arching or undergirding sense of where or what somewhere is gets mostly taken for granted, tucked away in that seldom opened file, "Way of Life," the direction toward which we assume everyone else is generally living, too, as well as how and why.

But the hard truth is that neglected examination of our way of life can slowly change that way until it becomes something different than we assume or profess it to be. Even as we implement our short term choices, plans and goals they continually change because of unexpected encounters, interruptions, conflicts, claims that alter our thinking and decisions however slightly or severely. Those alterations require adjustments in the how, what and why of our seeking as we proceed both in the present moment and in the immediate future.

Those adjustments, however, are usually only practical ones and are made with pretty much the same proximate goals or desires that drive us. Those sort of experiences are so familiar to us that we scarcely give them much thought. We come to deal with them reflexively rather than reflectively, that is, without considering the cumulative impact they have on the way we live or how they dull our consideration of the somewhere toward which, however subconsciously, we might have thought we were headed. In the haste and swamp of all kinds of information, much of it just huckerism, we can become numbed to ourselves as well as the people around us, reducing everyone to objects and just part of the landscape.

An example of what I'm referring to is from an experience which Annie Ernaux had in a subway car in Paris and reported in her haunting little book, Things Seen: "A voice sounds in the RER: 'I'm unemployed. I'm living ... with my wife and child, we have 25 francs to live on a day.' What follows is the story of ordinary poverty, repeated probably ten times an hour, in the same tone of voice. The man is selling Le Reverbere, a newspaper. The words express humility: 'I'm not asking a lot from you, just a bit of small change to help me.' He makes his way through the car. No one buys the newspaper. When it comes time to get out, the man shouts threateningly: 'Have a great day and a good weekend.' No one looks up. The irony of poor people does not count ..." *1 Then over time and almost unnoticed, no one counts. Numb's the word.

That scene could be in any city in the United States from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, Chicago to Phoenix. and smaller towns around the country. How often has something similar but slightly different, happened to you midpoint on your way to somewhere? Probably we don't keep track, or remember, or just lose count because those experiences simply become minor annoyances, like some little pile of trash on the sidewalk we have to walk around or a flecks of lint to brush off the shoulder of our ever distracted humanity. Numb's the word and slowly becomes our reality.

So little by little a great deal changes in and for us. The sad thing is that is exactly what we're numb to. In the process, the somewhere we assumed we were going toward moves a little further away and in a different direction while we unthinkingly keep changing our course in yet another direction a little at a time, just enough to add another mini-degree to the cumulative and debilitating change in the way of life we thought we were living even as we go on living it anyway, one way or another?

The irony is that our successes in living the process of "our way of life" can be might even more deceptive yet instructive than our assorted irritations and anesthetizing experiences with it. What our way of life successes or achievements reveal, sooner or later, is that none of them really satisfy or quiet the longing in us. Instead, they continually pose the unanswered, if not unanswerable, question, "What's enough?" which leads quickly to another, "Will more of it make any real difference?" The answer to the second question is, "No, almost never."

Let's take, for example, the exciting, pleasurable, delightful experience of sexual relations, one of the most desired and intimate experiences of our lives. It's often referred to as "making love" which it really is not! At best, sexual relations express love rather than making it. And Yes, they can also just be pleasurable, enjoyable activities on their own. But sadly, they can also disappointing and dehumanizing in using of others for our own ends or even be a brutal, criminal act of rape.

Still, the point is, when they are truly intimate and satisfying in the moment, few human experiences can put us more in touch with our longing than do our sexual experiences. However close, however sensual, however fulfilling, however wonderful they are, or just because they include those good qualities, sexual relations seem finally to leave us sensing that we've been brushed by something that tapped into a persistent but vague longing for something mysteriously deeper and more fulfilling but always just out of reach .

Of course, wanting more sexual experiences is programed into us as is hunger, sleep, survival. And yet, however many we have, no number of sexual experiences can truly quiet or satisfy our longing. Now, many "experts" assert that the reason is that the desire for sex is for the survival of the human race. That's true but it misses the point here. As I stated earlier, my point is that desire is not the same as longing. If we pay close attention to our longing we sense it isn't really for more of something, it's for something different, something beyond or deeper than any finite, limited experience can be.

What our finite experiences can do is either orient us in the direction our longing mysteriously summons us toward, or they can misdirect us to something less than that. That's the point of my using the example of our sexual experience. I think the same essential truth holds for other temporarily realized desires such as wealth, status, learning, stylish appearance, popularity, material possessions, honors, leadership positions, whatever is on your list or anyone else's.

An experience Annie Ernaux reports in her book gives a hint of how our finite experiences an nudge us in the direction our deepest longing calls us toward. She writes: "Today, for a few minutes, I tried to see all the people I ran into, all the strangers. It seemed to me that, as I observed these people in detail, their existence suddenly became very close to me, as if I were touching them. Were I to continue such an experiment, my vision of the world and of myself would turn out to be radically transformed. Perhaps I would disappear."

However much we talk about wanting our lives to be transformed, we aren't too

clear about what that means except perhaps being vaguely better, more peaceful, content, happy, less anxious or whatever. But what Ernaux suggests about her vision of the world and of herself being radically transformed is quite scary to most of us. What would that be like? What would it mean to "disappear"? Who wants to do that? Intentionally? Thanks, but no thanks. That cannot be in any way what my or anyone's longing could be about. If it is, I'll stick with temporary satisfactions.

Okay, we can leave it at that but with an uneasy feeling. Perhaps our uneasy feeling might be tempered if we gave some thought to what Ernaux might mean when she says: "Perhaps I would disappear" if she continued with her experiment of trying to see all the people she ran into on one day. Or at least, if we considered what I think it could mean to say that.

I think the "I" she mentions and means might disappear is not her "self" but rather her self-strangulating entrapment in her ego, her stupefying preoccupation with her own protective, isolating, little personal, private concerns. I think the "I" she refers to would disappear by expanding and deepening into more significant relationships with other human beings.

That is, I think it means her "I" would begin to disappear as an isolated, self-promoting, entitled me first "Way of Life" toward a who in hell knows somewhere. Maybe, her true self, like Lazarus, would reappear from the tomb of her disappeared "I' and become a person of love and in love. I think she would lose her "I" in order to find herself, as Jesus said was necessary, because we are essentially alive only in relationship with others and creation itself.

Now, you may be thinking I'm trying to make too much out of too little, that I'm trying to make a hearty stew from too few ingredients in my effort to examine the process of our "Way of Life." As result, it may seem I've concocted only a thin gruel of unwarranted conclusions concerning the nature of our persistent, mysterious experiences of longing.

Well, that's certainly possible. But it's only Chapter Two, after all, and we're still trying to figure things out together. Like all process, writing a book can hit snags or wander track which reminds me of a line in Edward Albee's quirky play, "The Zoo Story." Maybe you know it.

Jerry, a strange young man in his thirties encounters Peter, forty something man in a park near the zoo in New York City. The two get into somewhat disputatious conversational jousting. When Peter asks Jerry what he was doing before he came to the park to go to the zoo. Jerry answers, "I took the subway down to the Village so I could  walk all the way up Fifth Avenue to the zoo. It's one of those  things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very  long distance out of his way to come back a short distance  correctly."

In some way, trying to find the longing way home may involve variations of going a long way out of the way to come back a short distance correctly. To my knowledge, the subject, or experience, of longing is not one with many, if any, even sketchy road maps so this effort is not only an experiment, it's also an exploration. It's not always clear what the correct distance is, so to determine that requires what may seem is going out of the way to explore territory and connected issues which it turns out are really critical.

So I end this chapter with another hint about longing for you to ponder. It is another vignette from Annie Ernaux in Things Seen. It's a different version of the earlier one about the man begging in a subway car and no one pays any attention to him. This one is about a woman in a another subway car at Christmastime.

"The subway car is full. A woman's voice is raised, powerful. 'Act a little human.' Absolute silence. A terrible voice, that tells of her misfortune, accuses people of selfishness. their asses nice and warm, etc. No one looks at her or responds to her anger, because she is telling the truth.
"On the platform, she collides with people carrying bags of Christmas presents, hurls abuse at them, 'You'd be better off giving money to the unfortunate rather than buying all that crap.' Again the truth.
"But we do not give to do good, we give to be loved. Giving to a homeless person just to prevent him from dying altogether is an intolerable idea, and it would not make him love us anyway." *3
And that, I suppose, is another truth. So what hint is that about longing? Well, I think, contrary to the song version, longing may be a hint of what love's got to do with it, even if Ernaux is right in saying giving to a poor person would not make him or her love us anyway. But there's another possibility here, another pointer toward longing, which is that such giving might be a start at loving your self. A start. Didn't Jesus say we should love our neighbor as our self? Hmm.

*1 Things Seen: page 17 University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London
Ernaux, Annie

*2 Things Seen: page 13 University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

Ernaux, Annie

*3 Things Seen: page 46 University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

Ernaux, Annie

Memoir Supplement - Chapter One

2010-05-19T19:32:00.013-04:00

Friends,

You probably know I am experimenting by writing my blog as a book entitled The Longing Way Home. That means each post will be one chapter of the book with a second post being part of a Memoir that accompanies the preceding post/chapter.

It also means that my Blog's Posts are long and, hopefully, challenging and helpful as well as thoughtful and spiritual. Any and all comments, questions and suggestions are welcome, indeed invited, and I will respond to them in the best and most direct way I am able. Thanks for hanging in with me and thinking as well as feeling about it. Faithfully, Ted Loder

MEMOIR Supplement = Chapter One

Childhood memories are usually fragmentary and sporadic rather than coherent narratives. They bear little clear meaning apart from their singular intensity. Only later, upon recall and refection, do those remembered incidents yield clues of their significance and their influence on your life.

My Dad was a salesman and manager for a large, Midwest wholesale grocery company called Nash Finch. It was during the Great Depression and my Dad was stalked by the terror of losing his job. Like sheet lightning in the prairie sky, his depression terror would flash through the family bullying us toward cover. That was a common experience because in those grim days, everyone who had a job was constantly worried about losing it. Migrant hobos in wrinkled, stained suits and frayed shirts often knocked on the backdoor asking for food in exchange for doing a chore. My kind hearted Mom would give them a small peanut butter sandwich.

Whenever Dad was transferred, we moved. It always happened just after Christmas near the first of the company’s fiscal year, which unfortunately came at the middle of the school year. That made those moves even harder for me. Leaving familiar surroundings and friends made me increasingly anxious as I was growing up. The challenge of going to different schools, finding new friends, making the sports teams, even as early as fifth or sixth grade, seemed overwhelming to me as we moved from Crawford, Nebraska, where I was born, to Clinton, Iowa, to Huron, South Dakota, then across town in Huron which meant changing schools, then to Aberdeen, South Dakota.

Finally, on my fourteenth birthday, June 10, 1944, after my Dad resigned from Nash Finch, we left Aberdeen, drove west to Milwaukie, Oregon, a town bordering Portland, where we moved into a rooming house and Dad joined his father in a small insurance agency. By then anxiety had become my constant companion, the worry that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I’d be rejected or have some awful thing happen to me. My sister, Rosemary, was four years older, talented, beautiful, socially gifted and effervescent, handled those moves much better than I did. She was definitely the life of the potluck party family dinner table, sharing what seemed to me every boring detail of her day’s events and conversations. I always ducked and loved her from afar.

Gradually, I slipped to the outskirts of the family. Clinton, Iowa was a rather short stop of about 18 months on the family’s journey. And yet, I now realize two memories from that time were of critical experiences in shaping my character. The first was when I was about to start kindergarten. What I remember is seeing my Mom sprawled on the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t move. She told me to get a chair to stand on so I could reach the phone on the wall to call my Dad for help. She told me how to make a call and gave me the numbers to dial one at a time though I was crying and unsure.

I must have succeeded because the next fragment of the memory is being very scared as I watched my Mom being put in a red and white truck with a whirling light on top and taken away. Later, my Dad told me Mom was okay and she’d be back home soon. He said she had lost a baby who would have been my little brother and the doctor had to take care of her for a few days. I didn’t understand much except Mom was okay and I wouldn’t have a brother.

I immediately began to miss him. For years I wonder if it was my fault he was lost, that I didn’t call for help the right way, or I should have helped my Mom more. I felt sad and bewildered about it and vaguely scared without knowing why. I kept wishing for a brother. As I got older the longing for a brother transposed into urgently wanting a best friend but never seeming to find one either because we moved too quickly, or I didn’t deserve one.

Sometimes, in family gatherings, I heard references to Mom having miscarriages. I dimly realized that meant she lost babies. Had Mom lost another baby brother before I was born? I was confused and anxious about what it was all about. Where was he? What did "lost" mean? I was only sure it had something to do with me, something frightening that in someway troubled me for much of my life. It made me long for something I couldn’t have, some good I could never achieve, some peace I could never find. Something unfathomable in me was slowly making its presence felt. It still is. It is primal longing.

The second of those early experiences was another kind of initiation into the mystery of longing but in a less traumatic way. This time I was a five-year-old kindergartener. It a memory of a time near nightfall on a Christmas day after the few quite practical presents had been opened and the festive casserole dinner eaten. My slightly frazzled family was sprawled about the small living room, my sister and I on the floor, everyone quietly reflective, or perhaps just tired. It was an unusually comfortable, pleasant gathering, one commonly associated with holidays.

But slowly, then more rapidly it all changed for me. Everything began to feel very weird, unfamiliar, and remote. In part it may have been because my Mom was still recuperating from losing a baby. Or it could have reflected the Clinton was still a largely unknown town to us. Perhaps it had something to do with it being 1935 with the cloud of the great depression clinging to everything like the pervasive scent of decay and anxiety. Probably those factors did influence that experience, but not consciously. When you’re a kid, whatever your circumstances are seem normal to you.

My feeling was tinged with something like disappointment, though not exactly that. It wasn’t that I hadn’t gotten something I wanted for Christmas since I really hadn’t wanted anything special and was glad for what I did get. It wasn’t because I was unhappy about something; I wasn’t. It wasn’t because I was angry about something or worried; I wasn’t. It was just that something was missing. I couldn’t say what was missing except that it felt very important and wasn’t more of what was already there. It was just … missing. Maybe it was the brother I didn’t have because of Mom’s fall but it wasn’t that focused. It was more that something of me, or in me, or about me, was missing but at that moment I had no notion of that either. I was five years old! I got inexplicably sad. I wondered what was wrong with me.

A few nights earlier we’d gone to see a nativity scene laid out on a large hillside of an estate or farm on the edge of town. There were figures of angels and wise men and shepherds with what I thought were real sheep and maybe they were. What seemed a large number of cars were parked nearby surrounded by people commenting appreciatively on the scene. I was delighted to be there and knew, from Sunday School, what the scene us supposedly represented but that the figures themselves weren’t real. It was all like make believe play about something from long ago and far away, something somewhere out of reach of that hillside and that night. I wished I could see that somewhere, the real thing I could only imagine. Where was that? What was that? Those questions were still with me that Christmas night in my feeling of something missing. If it was real as it felt, why couldn’t we go there, see that?

I realize now that what I was feeling that Christmas night was longing, nearly overwhelming longing. Those many years ago I wouldn’t or couldn’t have called it that. That night I only knew it made my eyes tear up, a lump come to my throat and a dim sense that whatever was missing would probably stay missing and I had no idea what it was.

It was only later that I could identify what I experienced that long ago Christmas night was longing and what was missing would indeed stay missing for me, for us. I can identify it as longing because I’ve had some form of that experience nearly every Christmas of my life. In fact, I’ve come to believe that an experience of longing is one of the sacred gifts of Christmas and is close to what the celebration of Jesus’ birth is about – the stirring of longing for our truest home and for what is missing in the partiality of life, however much we might pretend or wish it to be otherwise. It’s the keen awareness of living in exile.

Living in Exile - Chapter One: The Longing Way Home

2010-05-03T17:35:00.012-04:00

Friends,

As I indicated in the first post of The Longing Way Home this is an experiment in writing a book as a Blog - at least for me. Beginning with this one, I propose to submit successive posts as chapters of the book. Following each post, I'll add a segment of a memoir to illustrate the personal ground from which the book and, as closely as possible, the preceding chapter emerged. I'll also do this as an attempt toward limiting the length of the chapter as well as shifting the tone and character of the writing.

I am not at all sure how this will go, or what degree of interest it will evoke from those who may access my blog and posts. For that reason, as well as for critical response, I invite you to raise questions or make comments as I/we proceed. It may be that this experiment will not work and I'll abandon it or continue it in some other way. Your responses will help me make that decision so I thank you for them in advance.

I must necessarily add that any and every part or portion of the written form and substance of The Longing Way Home, including this blog and all posts, is under copyright, 2010, and all rights reserved. No part can be reproduced in any manner except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews without prior written permission from the author.

That said, here we go.

LIVING IN EXILE - CHAPTER ONE: THE LONGING WAY HOME

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. Isaiah 55:8

Beginnings need a compass, an operative North Star. Otherwise what follows from them is often rather pointless meandering; interesting perhaps, or entertaining, even challenging or vaguely satisfying, but as a rule more than vaguely disappointing.

That observation applies to any subject. Even more crucially it applies to life itself. The difficulty is that life’s North Star, its point, its dogged meaning, usually takes time, perhaps a lot of it, to be discovered or discerned. It may take thirty or forty years, or longer. Or it may never happen. The point is there but we miss it, or mistake it, or dismiss it. And during those years, life can be experienced as a rootless wandering without a compelling point or with too many points that are more confusing than clarifying. These memoir-meditations are about life itself, including my own. They do have a point. Over the years, I’ve discovered and rediscovered it countless times. Since it’s a process that constantly involves me, I am constrained to disclose it at the outset. To do that, I have to start nearer the end than the beginning of my life.

My point is longing – yours, mine, everyone’s -- for I believe longing is a common human experience. Our longing is persistent. It is insistent. It is unquenchable. Although it takes many different forms, the longing itself is universal. It can be intense, it can fade but it never ends as long as we live. So I suggest that longing is our primal connection to God, and is the ground of faith. Longing is a basic way God relates to us more deeply than our belief systems, creeds, scriptures, practices, philosophies, institutional expressions of religion, or the rejection of any or all of these. I also suggest that longing is a gentle, quiet but trustworthy guide in our lives. Simon Weil, a Christian mystic, says, perfect attention is prayer. In that profoundly spiritual but unconventional sense, I believe paying close attention to our longing is essential to spiritual life, indeed to our very humanity.

These are huge, perhaps presumptuous assertions. I’ve arrived at them over the course of many years, nearly half of them as a minister, author, theologian, husband, father, grandfather, as well as a lifetime of being a mortal, seeking, struggling, flawed, awed, blest, grateful human being. These memoir-meditations are about how I’ve come to these assertions. I write them in the hope they will engage us in a dialogue together.

To begin with, longing is hard to define precisely even though it’s a prevalent, frequent experience. Often it’s assumed to be the same as having a dream, or passionate desire, or wanting, craving or wishing for something. While longing can be similar in some ways to those views, or a factor in them, it is not quite the same. To me, desire, wanting, wishing, dreaming have a more specific and limited quality to them. They are typically directed toward a particular person, object, status or goal, many, even most, of which can be reached or achieved and the desire or wanting can be satisfied at least temporarily, sometimes permanently.

In my experience, longing is much more elusive. Rather than relating to specific things, longing infuses our experience of nearly everything. It persists even after any specific desire, dream or wish is met. It lurks unabated at the edges of the glow or exhilaration or satisfaction of the most personal or intimate experiences or achievements or triumphs. It also remains unwavering through disappointments, disillusionments and defeats. That is, longing refers to an enduring condition that is unquenchable and yet is irresistible and unavoidable. That paradox is the abiding mystery of longing while constituting its spiritual quality and power.

Spiritual is a term that usually makes me uneasy. Too often it is used to refer to a new age types of personal, basically private self-improvement ventures which are accountable to no one or nothing other than the attitudes, preferences and objectives of the individual or his/her mentor. While that can be a quite accurate view it’s perhaps a too narrow one. I’ve come to occasionally use the term spiritual to designate a generic human impulse hardwired into each of us. It’s pre-religious and, as I said, does not necessarily find resonance and expression in religious communities, creeds and practices. I posit longing as that essential condition of spirituality that affects all of us whether personally acknowledged or not.

Therefore, our common spirituality makes longing relevant as a guide and teacher in life for everyone and is accessible both within and outside of any particular religion. Being a Christian and serving for 45 years as a minister, I contend that paying attention to the prompts of our longing is a critical factor in the continuous reformation and renewal of faithful persons as well as religious institutions and life itself, certainly of Christians and their churches. That’s a large piece of what I’ve learned in my life and why I’m beginning nearer the end than the beginning of my life. In truth, that contention is a deeply held belief and a major motivation for writing this book.

Home is a powerful new novel written by Marilynne Robinson as a companion work to her beautiful, almost devotional book, Gilead. It’s set in the same small prairie town of Gilead, Iowa. It deals with some of the same Gilead characters later in their lives, in particular retired, old Presbyterian minister, Reverend Robert Boughton and his two middle-aged children: Glory who has come back home to take care of her father after the breakup of her engagement to a duplicitous man; Jack, the rebellious, black sheep agnostic of the family who left and stayed incommunicado for twenty years and reappears at the family home one day without much explanation to anyone. The core of the novel is the dynamic between these three characters.

So Home explores the questions, “What is home?” and “What does it mean to come home?” In one of the most poignant lines comes toward the end of the book as Robinson sums of the experience of Glory and Jack this way: “Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile?” (1)

That question comes close to the heart of the human condition. It’s what longing is about. A sense of exile! No matter how comfortable or troublesome our place on earth may be, no matter how safe or threatened we may feel, no matter how much we know or don’t know, or have or don’t have, no matter how certain or shaky or absent our beliefs may be, our longing keeps whispering to us that somehow we are living our lives as exiles. Or as one reviewer summed it up, “Eden is exile, not Heaven.” (2) Put simply, living in exile is to be living away from our own home country.

There can be many explanations for our intuiting that condition – neurological, political, choice, war, being taken there among them. But the most existential reason is simply that as human beings, we are actually born into exile. However close to Eden, or the promised land, we may strive to be, even feel or think we are, we are still away from our real home, away from the country or kingdom to which we most fully belong but at best only partially belong now.

At strange times and in curious ways, we sense that partiality. It happens through the common, public arena of science as physicists try to pulverize atoms in the effort to discover and share with us the secrets of the origin of the universe, of matter and life, of where humans came from and are going. It happens in neuroscience which explores brain function to try to determine how or whether it conditions our relationship to reality or if it's the other way around. It happens in the social, political area as we go through the ritual of reciting our complaints and failings and argue over how deal with them in order to fashion a more perfect future. It happens in the intimate personal arena in those fleeting fragments, slivers of moments, glimmers of awareness, those occasions of either delight or defeat when we feel personally, however vaguely and briefly, that somehow we really are prodigals in a far country and a kind of homesickness stirs in us. That is a condition of mortality, of finitude. That is the refrain longing keeps humming to us in those times when we listen. That is why I maintain that longing is our primal connection to God. Reflecting on personal experience has led me to this conviction.

(1) Marilynne Robinson, Home (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 282

(2) James Wood The New Yorker, September 8, 2008 78

The Longing Way Home - Prologue

2010-04-26T17:58:00.008-04:00

Friends,

For a long time I've been thinking of writing a book on longing as an essential link to God. I even began writing it about a year ago and for several reasons postponed continuing it. Recently it occurred to me to start writing the book again but this time as my Blog on which successive chapters would be presented as Posts. I'm writing now to tell you I'm going to give that idea a try. Before I begin, I want to suggest, or perhaps warn you that this means my Posts won't be any shorter and possibly could be longer.

So if what you want are short Posts, my writing is probably not for you and you can long on to other posts more to your liking. It also means that my purpose in writing is to share ideas and experiences about what I consider to be critical life and faith issues about the meaning of life from a religious or theological view. That means it won't necessarily be boring or tedious but neither will it be a quick, easy read. However, my hope and intent is that each Post it will be worth the time and thought it takes to be helped, stimulated, even inspired and blessed by what I write.

If so, stay with it and respond any way you find appropriate. If it isn't, your likely response will be to shut me down but I'd be grateful if you'd let me know why. One additional note about this effort to write a book as a Blog is that I want to blend personal memoir with spiritual reflection. I'm not sure if, or how, that will work but the point is to make the book incorporate my life experiences into my reflections and thoughts. Any comments about that are welcome.

The title of this Post is the proposed title of the book. I've started each of my Posts with a prayer. The book's Prologue, this first Post, is such a prayer.

THE LONGING WAY HOME

A Prologue

O Holy One, Creator of all and everything,

when you first snapped unquenchable light,

scattering the glistening dust of it as far as forever,

white whirling scythes of galaxies cleaving the darkness,

O Lord you knew, didn’t you? Yes, you knew

that light would set us against our own darkness,

this insistent pelting, this dazzling inhaled air,

this silent pulsing energy would unleash longing’s urge

and pull our souls like sap, like slowly fermenting wine,

through cell, fin and claw, tail, thumb and tongue

until life became weeping, singing self-aware.

Of course, you knew that light would spin our longing,

would set creativity, imagining, climbing like vines

along the double-helix string of gene and promise;

that it would glisten our eyes with unflinching hope

and lump our throats at beauty we can scarcely bear;

that longing would be what life would wrap itself around

and by it we'd gradually discover wonder to be its truest guide.

Yes, at the genesis you knew, lest light be waste and life absent.

Longing is in us, rising red-warm as blood - you stirred it there.

It surges with wiser passion as day’s light slants and cools,

and gratitude turns insistent, longing to praise real as love.

Life’s autumn light is long and slow, as are the longings of age,

a slanting, not a blazing one, and so, clearer and more steady,

a gentler embrace for mind, heart, soul to more easily gather

to hear unspoken stories, hum unscored songs, see dim visions.

Longing leans to touch the thin veil 'tween known and unknown,

and sketches on the here what it senses of the “could be” there,

signals like the scent of a summer garden on a pitch-dark night.

The sin, if it be that, has always been failing to inhale, to attend,

to heed the undying light that agitates and complicates the dust,

that sigh-sings its secrets into the bud, tells its stories to the blood.

Now, out-back in autumn’s weary, browning yard the stubborn roses

make their last, determined witness to the whiff of beyond what is.

Mums, a weary, waning petaled congregation, lift their secret liturgy.

These scruffy yet mute sentinels still display the strange summons

of longing reaching toward the promise, even in the dimming light,

of a season yet to come, a greater beauty, a more glorious garden,

the sought of all seeking, author of its stories, composer of its songs,

the You who's call, like a mother's, ever lingers in the air to come home.

Amen.

Help Me Out Here!

2010-04-13T15:53:00.014-04:00

PRAYER

O God of children and clowns, as well as martyrs and bishops, somehow you always seem to tumble a jester or two of light through the cracks of my proud defense and into the shadows of my sober piety.

Grant me, no, an enchantment of heart that, for a moment, the calliopes of your kingdom may entice my spirit, laughing, out of my sulky self-preoccupation into a childlike delight in the sounds and silences that hum of grace; so I may learn again that life is never quite as serious as I suppose, yet more precious than I dare take for granted even for a moment, that I may be released into the possibilities of the immediate ... and rejoice to travel light, knowing there is little I have of need except my brothers and sisters to love, you to trust, and your stars to follow home.

Excerpt from Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle Ted Loder

Friends,

Here's a short post at last.

A few days ago a friend of mine told me the story (by now you may have heard it but never mind) of a certain Horace Johnson who prayed all the time to win a million dollars in the lottery. He began praying for that in high school, continued all through college, then on into his marriage and working life, every day without fail. He prayed regularly through the scrimping years of his children's' childhood and adolescence, their needs, struggles, education, weddings and the arrival of his grandchildren.

One night as he was praying that after all this time, God, please would enable him to win the lottery, a light suddenly surrounded him and out of the light he heard a voice say, "Horace, help me out here. Buy a ticket!"

Okay, it's just a funny story. But is that all it is? Doesn't its point have at least a dozen applications? Whoever wrote the Letter of James in the Bible, put one of them this way: "What good, is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? ... If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food ... and yet you do now supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? ... For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead."

Care for the poor? Health care for everyone? Create jobs for the unemployed? Assist senior citizens? Initiate a green economy? Turn back global warming? Reduce nuclear weapons? Invest more attention and funds in public education for everyone? Achieve full gender and racial equality? Nurture personal and world peace? Live the gospel? Believe, yes. Pray, certainly. But buy a ticket. Sign up. Pay up. Stand up. Join up. Help out here.

Enough for now. The key here is deciding how the point of the story applies to and for you!

Think about it. Ted

Humility? What's That? #2

2010-03-11T15:26:00.026-05:00

PRAYER

O God, it is hard for me to let go, most times, and the squeeze I exert garbles me and gnarls others.

So, loosen my grip a bit on the good times, on the moments of sunlight and star shine and joy, that the thousand graces they scatter as they pass may nurture growth in me rather than turn to brittle memories.

Loosen my grip on those grudges and grievances I hold so closely that I may risk exposing myself to the spirit of forgiving and forgiveness that changes things and resurrects dreams and courage.

Loosen my grip on my fears that I may be released a little into humility and into an acceptance of my humanity ...

Loosen my grip on my ways and words ... that letting go into the depths of silence and my own uncharted longing, I may find myself held by you and linked anew to all life in this wild and wondrous world you love so much. so I may take to heart that you have taken me to heart

Excerpted from Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle by Ted Loder

Friends,

I confess that I am not a patient person. It's also true that over the years I've learned to be much less impatient than I used to be. From that distance I've gotten a glimmer of what Paul meant when, in his familiar ode to love in his letter to the Corinthians, the first word he uses to describe the subject is, "Love is patient ..." He had to start with a damnably hard trait, didn't he? No wonder I'm still working on patience. I do a little better at it with my wife, Jan, and slightly better with my kids and grandkids. But from that little knoll in my personal landscape, patience slides downhill like Lindsay Vohn on skis. With friends and neighbors my patience is a occasional; with strangers it's sporadic; with enemies (and ridiculous car drivers) it's rare. That gives you keyhole peep at my rather flawed love life.

You see, patience sets the bar very high for love's other qualities according to Paul. For him, there's not much of fluttering hearts, soaring moods or beguiling aura about love, not that those things aren't wonderful, delightful experiences for us. But essentially, I think Paul is right because even those delightful experiences won't last long or be re-experienced very often without patience. Love that is deeper, stronger, more authentic than that is quite improbable without patience.

Why? Doubtless you can figure it out by skimming the traits of love that follow, or more accurately, depend on, patience: "love is kind ... not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude ... does not insist on its own way ... is not irritable or resentful ... does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." We may not "rejoice in the truth" that no matter how long we've been at it, we're all beginners in being patient and, consequently, in loving like that. We just have to keep trying until we make some progress at it!! There's always some giving in to love, but never any giving up!!

And Voila, we're back to humility! Most of Paul's list of love's traits, with which I suspect most of us would agree, also fit humility. The two are joined at the hip, or better, at the will, or heart, or soul. Each require the other if either is to be realized in our lives. Love is humble; humility is loving.

I dare to remind you that what I said about humility in my last post apply equally to love. Both humility and love are assertive, not passive, take the initiative and are not reluctant. Both take risks and make sacrifices of something (like our egos) for the good of friends, neighbors, even enemies because both love and humility live in personal pronouns - us, we, our, you. Neither is pretentious, timid, manipulative or self-promoting. Neither insists on its own way but both are persistent, open to compromise, that is, to giving something in order to get something for the good of the other as well as the self. Mark it: There's some giving in to both humility and love, but there's no giving up!

Confession two: I'm not much better at giving in than I am at being patient. One annoying symptom of that people often tell me about is that I can be overbearingly helpful, with the overbearing part negating the helpful. And they're right. Come to me to talk over a problem and I'm compelled to give you the solution and at least infer that it's the right and true one. Same with social issues, political problems. I suppose that's a little like being a benevolent dictator when you think about it. Benevolent intent, oppressive consequences. I've learned, slowly, that what people want most deeply is to share their lives with me, warts, pain, problems, joys, whatever, not for me to take over their lives for them.

It's about control, isn't it? We like to feel we're in control and none of us like things to be out of control, not for ourselves, or for anyone else around us because it makes us anxious. So we we keep trying to control things, which includes controlling people, processes, outcomes. And yet, we can't!! Control is an illusion but an addictive one. And a destructive one!

What we can control is our selves, our actions, thinking, responses, how we deal with circumstances beyond our control. We can contribute, make some impact, help, innovate, interpret, share but not control. We can participate, engage, speak out, organize, negotiate, never play the victim, never blame, always accept responsibility for our mistakes, never assume all is lost when we don't get our own way and never give up doing whatever we really can and ought, then willingly paying the cost for our actions and trusting that however much or little it does to benefit the plural pronouns of life matters more than we know. That's humility. That's love. That's patience.

The nub of it is this, in my view. We don't really live in an either/or world: either good or bad, right or wrong, win or lose. Most of the time, life is a both/and process, a mixture of right and wrong, good and bad, win and lose. Our choices are seldom between absolutes. Oh, we do choose between options, this one, not the other one, and in a sense, that is an either/or choice.

So let's put it this way, we live in a world of serial either/or choices or decisions and most of those decisions may be more good than bad, right than wrong but they still have portions of both in them. One good does not eliminate all bad, or most bad. The wonder is that we never run out of choices, of decisions to make. For me the wonder of the inexhaustibility of choices we have in life reflects the grace of God. I don't believe God exercises power by controlling everything. That is not love. I believe God exercises power through God's capacity to cope with whatever happens, whatever the outcomes are of decisions and choices we make. There are no dead ends in life.

One of the last things Paul says about love there in his letter to the Corinthians, is that "love never ends." Of course, you and I end, at least as residents of this world. But love does not. And we can trust and live in the promise that though we do not fully love the way Paul maps it out, God does. So, love really does never end. If that's so, then the loved ones, the beloved, don't either which means, we don't either. Those we love, whether we like them or not, (we don't have to like anyone to love them, thank God!) don't end either.

To trust God and sin on bravely, as Luther put is, is to give in to being loved. We can stop trying to control things or other people. We can stop being so damnably anxious, so easily made afraid. We can humbly live the plural pronouns and love the best way we can, battling for our vision of justice, truth, compassion, mercy, reconciliation, peace, and then be at ease with whatever small steps we can mutually take in that direction day by day. We can stop measuring our lives, our love lives, by whether we win or lose, are right or wrong, good or bad, or who is saved and who isn't, because the mystery is we all are both and do both in some way beyond our understanding and none of that is finally up to us, anyway. We can leave that up to the gracious power we can trust is at work in our lives, our world, our history, our future since, 'love never ends." It's all about giving in but never giving up.

Toni Morrison's incredibly moving novel Beloved is about the demonic inhumanity of slavery and the unfathomable, almost terrifyingly beautiful love of slaves. At the end of her novel, two slaves who have been close friends, are reunited. The woman, Sethe, comes to the door of the house of Paul D, the man. She is sick, exhausted and collapses in a chair by the window. Both have managed to escape and take a long, hard, dangerous, almost lifetime journey to Ohio, to freedom. Paul sits and looks at Sethe sitting next to him with her eyes closed. As he does, he remembers what a slave friend had said about the woman in his life: "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

Paul keeps looking a Sethe, thinking of her that way. 'The wet dress steaming before the fire. Her tenderness about his neck jewelry -- it's three wands, like attentive baby rattlers, curling two feet into the air. How she never mentioned or looked at it, so he did not have to feel the shame of being collared like a beast. Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers." Friends, can you feel the humility, patience, love in that scene?

Faith is something we have, more or less. Humility, love, patience, trust is something we do. Something like giving in but never giving up. Something we do with and for each other. Something we do to put our story next to the plural pronouns of our lives.

And most of all, putting our story next to God's, the Mother-Father whose love never ends.

Think about it. Ted

Humility? What's That? #1

2010-03-03T17:39:00.020-05:00

PRAYER

Lord, we come together with each other and with you in a serious time, with serious concurs about serious matters. Enable us to take ourselves less seriously that we may take you more seriously and be lightened by your Presence and your grace ... Enchant us into becoming more like children, laughing, asking, imagining, and trusting you as the God and Father-Mother in whose spirit we live and move and have our being, and pray. Amen

Excerpt from Loaves, Fishes and Leftovers: Sharing Faith's Deep Questions - Ted Loder

Friends,

I don't recall which Justice came up with the memorable description but when the Supreme Court was struggling to define obscenity one of them said, "I know it when I see it." I suspect most of us have the same struggle when we try to define "humility" except these days we don't see enough of it to be sure we'd recognize it if we did. The rarity of humility is a serious problem for us, our country, our world. There is a lot of arrogance, privilege, entitlement, dominance, superiority around and I suppose it could be said the humility is the opposite of those traits. In a sense, that may be helpful but, again, the opposite of those traits in our midst is nearly undetectable. Besides, being the opposite of something is too vague a definition.

So, let's give a try to defining it in a more positive way. Most often, humility is thought of as being being submissive, obsequious, passive, compliant, docile, lowly. But, as the old song has it, "It ain't necessarily so!" Not at all! Once when I was a guest preacher in Richmond, VA, the Senior Pastor asked me to accompany him to a men's breakfast meeting at the church. It turned out the focus of the discussion that morning was humility. It was such a slippery subject that no one could get a hold of it. Most men associated it with weakness, groveling, timidity, cowardice, loser. Finally, the pastor asked me what I thought. Being on the spot, I rather causally suggested, "Perhaps humility is the willingness to be humiliated." I am not sure where that thought came from. I suppose it somehow seemed obvious, maybe even a little humorous.

But the gathering didn't see it as obvious or funny, but took it as something of a serendipitous idea. Then I realized maybe it really was that and started seriously considering the idea. I decided, with some of the others there, that my definition was on target but not quite a bulls eye. But at least it was a starting point needing more tweaking than was possible in the limited time of the meeting.

I've since concluded that essentially humility is not really a willingness to be humiliated because you can't be humiliated unless you let yourself be, and if you do you aren't being humble, your letting yourself be a victim for whatever advantage is in being that. Of course, there are exceptions to that view such as those who suffered slavery, the holocaust, collateral damage in war, random violence of crime and you can probably name others. There are people who are truly victims but not because of being humble. They're victims of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or chance circumstance. In a profound way, those victims mostly did not, and do not, let themselves be humiliated. They usually did and do act in ways more noble, more moral, more human than their perpetrators.

But among other things to be considered later, I've concluded that humility is essentially the capacity to think, act and live in plural pronouns. A biblical scholar once said that the most important words in the prayer Jesus taught are, "Our," "Us," and "We." Those words, along with "your," emphasize the community or communal or social dimension of human life as being the key to what it's about. It takes humility to live accentuating plural pronouns.

The word "humble" has its roots in the Greek word for "earth" and "on the ground." It isn't much of a stretch to connect that basis for the word humble to the more primal Genesis story of creation in which God "formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." I believe that in significant part, humility is grounded (pun intended) in keeping that mythic truth constantly in mind -- mythic referring to truth that is too large to be contained by scientific fact, though actually this one is quite close to the theory of evolution in which life started in the muck of earth and took a few millions years longer than in Genesis for human beings to emerge. Either way, both truths refer to the mystery and miracle of life itself, and the origins of human life which we all share in common.

That commonness of us is the focus of the plural pronouns of living with humility. Being humble is to think, act and live for the common good and it is hard to do. It is contrary to the norms of our present society and governance. Evan Thomas, journalism professor at Princeton, wrote this about our present predicament in Newsweek, , March 8, 2010: "Our problem is not the system. It's us -- our 'got mine' culture of entitlement ... Our leaders are paralyzed by the very thought of asking their constituents to make short-term sacrifices for long-term rewards ... lately, politicians seem to have lost the most essential element of the art of governing -- meaningful compromise. In its pure form, compromise means mutual sacrifice. On Capital Hill, there is only getting ... Still, to get something you have to give up something. That is the true test of compromise." This issue of Newsweek came a couple days after I started this post (and Yes, it takes me at least a week to write one) but I'm grateful for Thomas' piece because it gives a more powerful example than I could of why humility is so needed these days.

It would be easy and wrong to conclude that our problems result solely, or even primarily,from the vicious partisanship in and out of Congress even though those leaders do have some notable responsibility for the situation. But Thomas is right, "Our problem ... (is) us." Why? Because our leaders in government are afraid they'll not get re-elected if they ask us for even short-term sacrifices for the common good. And they are right. History shows that, apart from wartime, if leaders ask us to sacrifice any of our "got mine," they lose in the next election. Our leaders reflect us rather than lead us. Only the great ones lead us, like Washington, Lincoln, Martin Luther King among others you know.

In any case, just at this point is where humility becomes definitely assertive, believe it or not. Because humility is willing to risk personally giving up something in order to respect and get something for the plural pronouns, the common good. Humility is not passivity, it is activity. Humility is pragmatic as well as visionary. It fights for its side yet makes compromises in the battle to get something, some portion of what it values, its vision of the good. It sacrifices something like ego because humble people know they are not infallible, not always totally right, and insisting otherwise is to end up with nothing for the common good via the exercise of empty arrogance. Humility is willingness to stay grounded in the common rather than claiming to be exalted above others. And that kind of humility is what helps a country's governance work, helps states, cities, towns,and communities, neighborhoods, and certainly families work.

The problem is us. What if we "got it" about humility and aggressively work to help others "get it" including our representatives in government, our family members, our colleagues, our neighbors. What if we stopped being angry promoters of "got mine, want more" self-interest or sulking passive whiners and blamers. What if we started advocating for sacrifice, for the common good, for brothers and sisters of the plural pronouns, and began living in and for those plural pronouns -- "us, we, ours, yours" -- instead of single ones -- "I, me, mine."

What if we entered the public arena, engaged in the controversial issues by enlisting in organizations with those plural pronoun goals like Common Cause, Earth Justice, Bread for the World, Oxfam, Church World Service, find your own as there ere many. What if we got humbly active in politics and told our leaders we are ready to make sacrifices for our nations good and will work for their re-election if they legislate accordingly? Pipe dream? Maybe. Make an impact? Possibly, if we persist. Build community? Would help. Solve the problem? Not solvable without it. Add humility to the human mix? Like leaven in the lump. Begin to give humility recognition? Doesn't need that, only a good try. Worth it? Up to you, and the future.

More about this later? Count on it.

Think about it. Ted

Important Invitation

2010-02-27T11:49:00.006-05:00

Friends,

I know my blog posts are long and dense attempts to explore critically important theological, spiritual, religious subjects and how I see their relevance to contemporary personal, cultural, social, political issues.

To assist me in that effort and to ensure my posts address what interests and matters to you, I warmly invite you to send me your questions, issues and suggestions for future blogs and how I might make them better. You can do that either by making a comment on a recent post or send them directly to me at theoloder@comcast.net

Think about it, and thanks. Ted

Faith's Twin - #4

2010-02-16T15:36:00.026-05:00

PRAYER

O God, you are in the beginning and end of all things, and in your sight a thousand (ages) are like an evening gone. Still, you have assured us that not even a sparrow is forgotten in your sight. In our sight, then, that makes our evenings at least as precious to you as they are to us, and we even more precious to you than we are to ourselves and each other. In that assurance is our struggle to grow in awareness, trust and love. And in that awareness is rooted our courage, peace and hope for each day and night of our lives ... Excerpted from Loaves, Fishes and Leftovers: Sharing Faith's Deep Questions by Ted Loder

Friends,

For several reasons I won't go into, I've been delayed even longer than usual in publishing this post but one of them was that when I tried the first time I mistakenly deleted much of it. So I had to rewrite it after finally recovering my cool. I suppose this apology for the delay is not needed by any of you but I need to record it anyway. Sorry!

Without further delay then, we come to the last of my reflections on courage being faith's indispensable twin. In that effort I've referred to three thoughts or convictions of the remarkable theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr because of their particular relevance to the subject. Two were the focus of preceding posts.

Now, in Niebuhr's own words: "The third conviction which ... underlies the former (ones) ... is that Christianity is 'permanent revolution' or metanoia which does not come to an end in this world, this life, or this time. Positively stated these three convictions are that (humans are) justified by grace, that God is sovereign, and that there is an eternal life."

The Meaning of Revelation by H. Richard Niebuhr.

It's refreshing, enlightening and compelling to realize that Christianity is permanent revolution. That concisely stated definition is why authentic faith requires courage because it indicates that the Christian faith is a continuing, transforming process rather than a fixed, secure state or condition.

At least since the Reformation, Christianity as permanent revolution recognizes that no assertions or descriptions of God are absolute and final. It recognizes that religion's institutions, scriptures, creeds and practices are formative but not divinely ordained repositories of infallible truth. They guide, support but do not justify us or our actions to ourselves, others or God. Christianity as a permanent revolution means that being born again is neither a qualifying necessity nor a decisive indication of anyone's rank in the kingdom of God. A more accurate application of that metaphor would be that Christian faith is about "being born again and again and again," perhaps two or three times a day, maybe once before lunch in my personal history.

Remember what Luther said so incisively: "Whatever you get your sense of worth from and to which you give your loyalty, is properly your god." The truth is that all of us frequently succumb to the constant temptation to get our sense of worth from and give our loyalty to one or more of the finite gods or idols of our society. After all, no one wants to, or really can, long endure feeling worthless. So we take the worth ("you deserve...") bait of our culture's little gods and loyally go with them. Our idols are our insistent pre-occupation with ourselves, our ingrown self-centeredness and inflated self-promotion. They're our self-serving groups, associations, institutions; the status rank of our racial, gender, ethnic factions; our respected occupation, income, class, national identities, even our sports teams, any and all of which bestow on us not only a sense of worth but of superiority similar to the way we scream, "We're number One" when our team wins or, after an hiatus, even when they don't.

The list of our little gods goes on to include family, possessions, sex, economic system, technology, political party, country, patriotism, military power, whatever makes us feel worthy, proud, popular, confirmed, rewarded, well-off. All of them promote the experience of feeling all warm and fuzzy -- and that's the problem, isn't it? Warm and fuzzy doesn't last very long or deal well with the cold sweats in the night or some kind of a weary hangover in the morning.

Doubtless it's true that "After all, no one wants to, or really can, long endure feeling worthless." But, if we're honest with ourselves, the "after all" always hits when some inkling of the "after" starts nagging at the edges of our lives, a vague but stubborn feeling that none of our little gods, even added together, really come close to being "all." So there we are, caught in the between of all and not all.

Of course, many of our little gods are good things, good pursuits, good gifts which is why they are so appealing. To some extent they genuinely make us feel worthy, and the rightly require a degree of our loyalty. And yet, that good is always limited and relative. Sooner or later the insufficiency of our little gods dawns on us and the "after all" becomes, "Is that all?" Sometimes that happens at the end of a day, or week, or month, or year such as a mid-year crisis, our 40th or 50th or 60th birthday. But even then we tend to just run faster and harder after our little gods or turn in despair to other little gods like booze or drugs or affairs or self-pity or viral fear or judgmental rage or stoic cynicism, and begin to die a little every day.

Friends, to face and live fully with all life's uncertainties takes the faith and courage to join a permanent revolution against all our little idolatries, to face into and trustingly live out those nagging questions with no absolute answers, to persist in the process of faith and to travel light in it. That's what it means to be "in" or "with" God who is always "on the move" and always more that we think or know or understand. It takes courage for faith to be that humble albeit that daring. Never-the-less that is what it is to be justified by God's grace. Faith holds, or better, is held by, the truth that God doesn't seek worth, or demand it - God gives it! That what love does, and God's love does unqualifiedly - gives worth. That's what grace is. That's the love that gave us life, the love we live and die in.

Faith requires courage to trust and live in that love. Repeat with me, "faith is a process." It isn't so much about a conversion, a Pauline "knocked off your horse" dramatic event, as it is a slow, continuing acceptance and living out of God's love. A courageous faith discerns anew and yet anew and anew again what it means to live not for, but in and from God's love. Faith is about trusting the worth God gave us at birth and keeps giving every day because for God there is no "after all" and so there isn't for us either. Niebuhr puts it simply: there is an eternal life.

When you hit the bottom of those "after all," middle of the night, or whenever, sweat soaked questions, there's that no ducking the truth that if nothing else does, death makes brothers and sisters of us all. No matter who we are, we are all going to die. Death is the chilling, often denied and inchoate question lurking at edge of everything, under all questions about what life means. Woody Allen asked it this way when portraying his boyhood: "Since the world is going to end in a million years anyway, why do my homework?"

One way or another, some form of Woody's question is really everyone's question, isn't it? Stripped of all the heady nuances and split hairs, answer it one way, and nothing really matters much, it's dog eat dog, or rich eat poor, my way eats your way, our missiles eat your missiles, and yet who really gives a damn because anything goes, or better, everything goes around and down the abyss drain.

Answer it another way, and nearly everything and surely everyone, matters, and the permanent revolution goes on because death can't stop it or stop God. That revolution affirms that, by God!, each life is of eternal worth, that justice and mercy, reconciliation and peace, beauty and compassion are worth our effort, that love is not just a feeling but more what you do, the quality of your life, how you live and why, and though none of it is easy, it's about living your worth, our worth, which is truly joyful.

His close friend, Lillian Ross, said in her Remembrance of J. D. Salinger, that he was so delighted after he bought a washer and dryer, "that the salesman had quoted Ruskin to him, 'Something about where quality counts, price doesn't' (and) that he was sure that the line wasn't part of the man's spiel." (The New Yorker, Feb. 8, 2010). I love that line, don't you? It has many applications. To me, one of them is that where the deepest quality of life counts, the price to live it doesn't. That's what it means that faith takes courage to be in the process of permanent revolution and living in and with the grace of God.

Paul put it this way which is creed enough for me: "I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all create, will be able to separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus."

You're worth thinking about it. Ted

Faith's Twin - #3

2010-02-03T16:03:00.022-05:00

PRAYER
Wondrous Worker of Wonders,
I praise you, not alone for what has been, or for what is,
but for what is yet to be,
for you are gracious beyond all telling of it.
I praise you that out of the turbulence of my life
a kingdom is coming, is being shaped even now
out of my slivers of loving, my bits of trusting, my sprigs of hoping,
my tootles of laughing, my drips of crying, my smidgens of worshiping;
that out of my songs and struggles, out my griefs and triumphs,
I am gathered up and saved,
for you are gracious beyond all telling of it.
I praise you that you turn me loose to go with you to the edge of now and maybe,
to welcome the new, to see my possibilities, to accept my limits,
and yet begin living to the limit of passion and compassion until, released by joy,
I uncurl to other people, and to your kingdom coming,
for you are gracious beyond all telling of it.
--From Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle

Friends,
With all the problems entangling us these days, it's easy to get discouraged, even a bit despairing. Throw in the late winter blues of "lasts forever February" doldrums seem to be the order of the season. How's that for a segue to this post on my blog series concerning courage being faith's indispensable twin? If it doesn't seem to connect, hang in and let's see why I started this way.

In my last post, I stated that the seminal theologian H. Richard Niebuhr was the major influence on me when I studied at Yale Divinity School. In his book, The Meaning of Revelation, Dr. Niebuhr laid out three convictions that underlie his thinking. Each seem to significantly relate to the topic of courage being indispensable to faith. In my last post, we examined the first, namely that self-defense is the most prevalent source of error in all thinking.

Here's Niebuhr's second conviction for us to consider: "... the great source of evil in life is the absolutizing of the relative, which in Christianity takes the form of substituting religion, revelation, church or Christian morality for God."

At first, that seems a disturbing, discomforting assertion. But think again. It isn't that we can't find any degree of spiritual or psychological truth, or bit of insight into God, or semblance of justice and goodness in our lives and relationships, or our religious heritage; it's that we should not and cannot claim for any of them the status of an absolute or universal or inviolable truth or statement of a permanent state of reality. To claim that for any of them unleashes great harm or evil on our world and the human community. To accept that everything is relative is to realize that it's all conditioned and by time, by changing historical situations, new knowledge, varieties of experience, our always compromised spirituality and our finite mental capacity.

In simple terms, for Christians it means that though Jesus is our primary clue to who God is, there is still impenetrable mystery about God because God is more than we can see in Jesus: not completely other and yet more than we see in Jesus in ways we cannot grasp being mere mortals. To insist, to proclaim, to demand otherwise is to dehumanize others and ourselves.

How? Absolutizing our finite grasp of truths reduces human life to a power struggle between contending "absolutes." It distorts human relations into struggles for dominance and against submission. Both are dehumanizing and generate evil consequences. It inflicts great damage by insisting, even forcing others to accept and confirm to our "absolute truths." We do that by any means at our disposal from manipulation, subversion, institutional authority and intimidating warnings, to exercising all kinds of physical, psychological, economic power, even threats or acts of violence.

In personal relationships we do it by gossiping about others, distorting their views or actions, demeaning them, disrespecting them while exaggerating our own. Listen to how you and others talk about mutual "friends, neighbors, colleagues, social acquaintances when they're not present. That's a form of absolutizing our own relative views and behaviors. To practice any of that kind of absolutizing, or pieces of it, in society, or nation, or personal affairs, does in fact unleash evil on ourselves, others and the world. Think racism, sexism, gay bashing, ethnic discrimination, arrogant nationalism, war, nuclear proliferation, classism, economic manipulation, religious discrimination and pretentious claims as ready examples.

Recently I went to see my granddaughter, Lyle, act a small part in an off-Broadway production of Arthur Miller's, The Crucible. I assume you know the play. It's about the Salem
Witch hunt in the late 1692 and after. In his comments about the play, Miller wrote about the practice in that time of appointing a two-man patrol to check on whether people attended Sabbath worship services and behaved themselves properly and to take the names of any persons who did not and give them to the magistrates to take action against the offenders.

Miller goes on to write,

This predilection for minding other people's business was time-honored among the people of Salem, and it undoubtedly created many of the suspicions that were to feed the coming madness ... so now they and their church found in necessary to deny any other sect its freedom, lest their New Jerusalem be defiled and corrupted by wrong ways and deceitful ideas. They believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief, and it has helped and hurt us ...The times, to their eyes, must have been as out of joint ... seemed as insoluble and complicated as do ours today. It is not hard to see how easily many could have been led to believe that the time of confusion had been brought on them by deep and darkly forces ... it is too much to expect people to hold back very long from laying on (others) all the force of their frustrations.

Miller wrote those words, and The Crucible, in 1952 in the time of Senator Joe McCarthy's witch hunt of communists he saw lurking behind hundreds of desks and positions in Washington, D.C. and all across the country. Millions of citizens supported the witch hunt and many careers were ruined by it to say nothing of its destructive affect in international circles. It is subtle and yet insidious to define ourselves, or our nation, as a "New Jerusalem" in constant danger of being "defiled and corrupted by wrong ways and deceitful ideas." But it is devilishly easy to do that.

Do you see any connection of this to what we are experiencing in our time? Does absolutizing the relative have anything to do with the ugly partisan battles of our political parties, with making slanderous attacks on anyone who doesn't conform to our absolute positions from other nations to the President to large swathes of voters in our own country, with demonizing all Muslims (No, I am not in any way in favor of terrorists of any kind), with the constant postponing of action on global warming and erecting road blocks to health care reform because government regulations are contrary to the absolute good of free market capitalism? Do you see any connection of this absolutizing process to racism which is still alive in the country, or the dismal record for helping the poor here and across the globe, or the slow progress of gays for equal rights, or the inaction on immigration reform? Or do you sense of it in any of your strained or increasingly distant relationships, catch a whiff of subtle witch hunting at work, among colleagues, or neighbors, or friends, or even families, because we all tend to absolutize our views or positions and gather exclusively with those who agree with us? To some degree we all do because that's the temptation to which we tend to succumb.

You may think I'm overstating the point and perhaps I am. But I don't think by much. It's that evil sneaks up on us, or out of us if we don't pay close attention to our inclination to absolutize our views. Evil isn't easily identified by appearing with a forked tail, horns and pitchfork. It slinks around like a mould, a leak in the exhaust pipe, a thoughtless, ill-tempered choice, a faith curdled by cowardice into making us feel proudly secure in our rightness, or more accurately, self-righteousness by doing what Niebuhr warns us of doing, namely "... substituting religion, revelation, church or Christian morality for God" -- and I'd be bold to add a few other substitutes like country, class, cause, comfort, certainty.

It's that last one, certainty, that's the clincher because it is damnably hard, or better, blessedly hard, to live without it. That's why the whole issue comes down to courage being the indispensable twin of faith. That is why I do not in any way want to have this post read as collaboration in a nurturing sense of despair, or of the midwinter blues that run from January to November, and if you get that from what I've written, I haven't been clear enough.

So, PLEASE, stay with me as I make the effort. First this: However destructive our knee jerk absolutizing of our relative views may be, that is still no cause for throwing up your hands, or sinking down in spirit in chronic despair or spiritual paralysis. No human situation, no personal crisis, no national or international condition is that overwhelming or immutable. To think or say that is just another form of absolutizing. That's the good news here. Really!

You see, when faith is fused with courage, we can begin to live with uncertainty but without anxiety, even if it takes a lifetime to achieve that condition. Or to quote the prophet Isaiah, we can "wait for the Lord ... renew (our) strength ... and run and not be weary ... walk and not faint" as we move in the direction of living with uncertainty with the courage of faith.

Faith twinned courage enables us to live with uncertainty in the honest realization of the evil consequence of absolutizing our little relatives but also to live with the awarenesss that such realization has with two good consequences:
One is the relief or freedom of spirit in realizing that God is not limited to our little relative views but is at work in human life and history in His/Her own gracious but mysterious way and according Her/His own purposes which exceed but do not necessarily exclude our little relative views or faith;
Two is the freedom, the relief, of realizing that we can add our little bits and pieces of truth to the work God is about in human life and history. To do that also involves faith with courage.

Those two consequences enable us to work persistently and gladly, but humbly as well, for whatever relative views we have of justice and peace, compassion, love of neighbor and enemy. We can do that because of our gratitude to and love of God who will use our efforts as He/She determines. We can do that with a kind of joy precisely because we aren't absolutely wed to having a particular outcome result from our efforts at a specific time or particular way.

So here's the so called bottom line. Courageous faith is not in, or defined by, our side, our view and values winning whatever fight we're in. It is not in achieving a particular outcome we hold to be the only right, true and good one. Our courageous faith is in God and His/Her mysterious ways. So, we're free to be humble, open and attentive to other views, and yet daring, persistent, intelligent guerrillas of grace, as I titled one of my books.

Adam Gopnik says the what made van Gogh such a powerful painter was that, unlike so many artists who paint to be popular in a sort of flamboyant, self-aggrandizing way, he had the spirit, passion and courageous faith to risk "making something that no one wants in the belief that someday someone will." As a young man, van Gogh set out to be pastor of a church but then felt himself called by God to be an artist. He was on speaking terms with God all his short life.
That's what he painted and we are in that someday and among the someones who want the something he had the courage of his faith to give us.

We're not alone in our struggles and it is not ALL up to us. Yes, God can and does use our efforts,surely in ways we don't fully understand. That doesn't matter. But how we live, for and with whom and Whom, and for what does matter. And that's more by far than enough.

Think about it. Ted

If you're willing, give me your suggestions and criticisms.

Faith's Twin - #2 -Edited version

2010-01-24T12:40:00.025-05:00

PRAYER

O God of miracles and multiplications ... (at your invitation) we dare to measure ourselves not by our fears or failures or frailties, however large they seem, but by our hope and faith and love, however small they may be. (So) we pray that by your grace we (in) our boldness will become miracles of leaven in the lump of this world. Multiply our courage that we may be a source of life and justice and peace for those we carry in our hearts and on our consciences. Multiply our faith in you that all our struggles, all our joys will be steps taken toward what it means to be human, to be sisters and brothers, and to be yours.

Excerpted slightly edited from My Heart in My Mouth: Prayers for Our Lives

Friends,

In my last post, I stated my conviction that courage is an indispensable twin of any authentic faith. Shorn of courage, faith is pretentious, irrelevant, self-serving and produces conformity. Of course, thank God, there are many exceptions of persons, churches and institutions to that condition but in my view, not enough. The consequences are corrosive to society, state and church.

How did we, as persons and a people, get to this state of affairs? I want to share a way of understanding it. In my study at Yale Divinity School the seminal theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr, was most influential. Doctor Niebuhr had three convictions regarding our situation. Let’s examine each of them in turn beginning with this post and following up in 2 subsequent posts because I believe each of them speak to the contention that courage is necessarily the twin of faith.

"The first is the conviction that self-defense is the most prevalent source of error in all thinking, and perhaps especially in theology and ethics ... and (we) can hope to (avoid) this error... in (our) effort to state Christian ideas in confessional terms only ... “ Quote taken from The Meaning of Revelation

Begin, then, with self-defense, or defensiveness. Most of us as individuals, and/or as members of groups, have a knee jerk reaction to any problem or crisis. It’s to blame someone else for it and deny any responsibility of our own. Such defensiveness is cowardly, hypocritical, destructive and all too common. It has cut a trail of ruptured relationships, violence, discrimination, exploitation and oppression through human history. Its consequences are accelerated by such modern technology as cable TV, the Internet, cell phones until it has become a political, social, marketing art form. Defensiveness is prevalent in interactions from Main Street to Wall Street to halls of Congress, from living rooms, bedrooms, meeting rooms to many church sanctuaries and lecture halls.

Defensiveness causes dysfunction, disables trust, and paralyzes relationships in families, neighborhoods and society. It fuels partisan conflicts that breaks down the legislative process. It generates stereotypical social class sniping, subtle racial discrimination and unethical, dangerous distortions of scentific warnings of global warming. It breeds hucksters of fear and hate whose lies smear whoever the targeted "guilty" parties happen to be. Perhaps not surprisingly, the blamed party is often God as in "Why did God let this happen to me, to us, to whomever?" Is that what authentic faith does or is? Emphatically not!

Friends, it takes the twins of courage and faith to resist the perversity of that kind of defensiveness and blaming. It takes faithful courage to admit our own responsibility for our part in the mistakes that hurt others, responsibility for our own small and large personal betrayals of such espoused beliefs as "doing to others what we would have them do to us" in our relationships in family, neighborhood, work place, town, city, state. It takes courage to strive to be honest rather than hypocritically charming, to listen thoughtfully rather than accuse automatically, to give due credit rather than false blame. It takes careful attention to be trustworthy rather than popular or seductive because without trust, love is a charade. That's what it means to state our ideas in "confessional terms only" and not in absolute, dogmatic, inerrant terms. That's what gutsy faith rather than gooey faith is about.

It takes courage to live out the faith which summons us, even in hard times, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love and pray for our enemies, to not be afraid or act out of fear, to help the homeless, tend the sick, welcome the stranger, free the oppressed rather than claim they caused their own plight. It is cowardly and wrong to blame others for our personal or societal or economic problems or to step aside and insist that others should make things better for us. It takes courage to let our faith take us boldly but humbly into the arena of human struggle for justice and peace, mercy and compassion. It takes courage to live with integrity, which is the opposite of hypocrisy, the trait which Jesus most harshly judged. It takes courage to actually step out on the promises of faith rather than distorting faith into some feel-good security blanket of defensiveness.

If this seems too abstract, let me refer to something columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times a few weeks ago, which, by the way, racks high on the list of the most slandered and blamed newspapers in the country. Friedman identifies several reasons why we as a country seem unable to forge good solutions to our problems. Among the reasons are the negative affect of money in politics made worse by the recent, the Supreme Court decision removing all restrictions on corporate campaign funding; cable TV culture which segregates people into their own political echo chambers; the Internet which, can open the way for new voices, but often provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs that attack anyone not of their specific orthodoxy.

Then Friedman concludes, "So what do we do? The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who as them to do the hard things. Otherwise folks, we're in trouble." Italics and bold print mine.

To me, Friedman’s diagnosis is spot on. The “standard answer” (“that we need better leaders”) is defensiveness in its multiple variations. The “real answer” (“that we need better citizens”) is a challenge to courageous faith.

Yes, Friedman's comments carry political implications but are not partisan or defensive. They’re a wake up call for us to stop the blame game in our lives and to assume responsibility for our part in all the led us to whatever ditch we’re in personally and as a society. It is a summon, a rather sacred one, to join the never ending struggle for justice, peace, compassion and take whatever steps we can, and there are many, to live and work to put our faith into action wherever we are, in every way we can. It encourages, even requires us, to stop being defensive and blaming others and claiming we’re innocent, or in other words are empty, victimized, impotent.

Of course, the sacrifice Friedman refers to involves doing is hard things, but fulfilling things. Those things are to make faith real and vital, even joyful, by linking it to courage. They are an opportunity for us to make a difference in our lives, and with our lives.

Think about it with me. Then do whatever you decide to do to make your faith real. Ted

More in subsequent posts.

Faith's Indispensable Twin

2010-01-12T13:48:00.008-05:00

PRAYER

O gracious and holy One ... deepen our gratitude into openness to new learning, our learning into courageous living, our living into accurate loving of you in each person we meet, each challenge we face, each gift we receive, each disappointment we endure, each sacrifice we make, each joy we experience, each breath that we draw, each chance that we take; through Jesus our Lord and brother. Amen

Excerpted from Loaves, Fishes and Leftovers: Sharing Faith's Deep Questions.

Friends,

Let me get right to it: faith takes courage. The two are inseparable. It might seem that courage doesn't take faith but it does, perhaps not in a typical religious sense but in the sense that there's a purpose in it, a conviction that something, some goal or value or vision, is worth the courage it takes to live by and toward it, no matter what the odds. The point is that is faith, whether we define it as religious or not.

But the rest of the point is that without courage faith is neither religious nor does it matter much. Why? Because, as Adam Gopnik says in an article on Vincent van Gogh in the January 4, 2010 edition of The New Yorker, "Courage (is) the one essential virtue on which all others depend ..." Now, I do not consider faith a virtue as much as it is a process, a quality of life, a way of becoming who we really are if we are to become fully human. But faith does involve characteristics that in some way could be defined as virtues, such as compassion, justice, humility, empathy, forgiveness, truthfulness, all of which take courage to live out, embody, stand for, no matter what the odds.

In his novel, All the Pretty Horses, one of my favorite authors, Cormac McCarthy, has a young man in tough circumstances put it this way, "That night I thought long and not without despair what must become of me. I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards

of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what ... I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always him/(her)self that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily. I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it. That desire was the thing itself."

That way of seeing it makes as clear as anything I can say why to me faith's indispensable twin

is courage. I hold that to be especially true of religious faith, particularly the Christian faith which is not limited to the church. I believe that our value, our soul, our spirit, is not something we achieve but is something given to each and all of us by our Creator. To live by that constancy takes courage because without courage, that faith is shallow, just a vacuous, feel good betrayal of anything that could be meant by compassion, or justice, or empathy, or being fully human. Without courage, faith, religion itself, becomes conformity with a smile and pretty vestments and avoidance of controversy and irrelevant. Okay, enough with this rant.

The thing is, the truth is, that courage is a struggle but anyone can have it if they desire to, if they are willing to risk it, dare to be different, to trust the value he or she has by being in this world and to endure the difficulties and disappointments, and yet the satisfactions, the fulfillments, the fun, the joy of it. In the next post I want to apply my point to some specific issues we are all facing in our society and world.

But let me end by quoting Gopnik who wrote about van Gogh and his relationship to another artist he lived with, Paul Gauguin. compared them and their work this way: "When you see a Gauguin, you think, 'This man is living in a dream world.' When you see a van Gogh, you think, 'This dream world is living in a man.'" Put aside Gopnik's choice of the word, "dream" and instead think of "vision," as if a vision of a different reality or dimension of life which faith is about. And then put yourself in Gopnik's comparison. Is your "faith" like living in a dream world of comforting but empty images and practices, primarily concerned with surface appearances, primarily or exclusively a matter of self- promotion and self protection? Or is it about something living in you, a soul, a spirit, a value that requires courage to make real in the world, and for those who share that world with you?

Think about it with me. Ted

Time To Head For Home

2009-12-28T16:32:00.024-05:00

PRAYER
Go with me (Lord), to keep me from getting lost,
or being too reluctantly ashamed to take the first demanding steps
that will be the beginning now of that lifetime journey
to the self I so passionately long to be,
to those I love and lost awhile,
and to those in the shimmering web of this human family I'm in for good,
and so to you, who, I'm praying,
waits to welcome and go limping home with me.

An excerpt from My Heart In My Mouth: Prayers For Our Lives

In Alice McDermott’s novel, Charming Billy, two older vets of World War II sit smoking in the dark on the porch of an inherited, rundown little house on the shore of Long Island. For the first time ever, they'd spent the day walking by the sea and in a nearby village. They are awed by the experience. One of them says , “... It makes you wonder what else you don't know yet?"

“Plenty.” the other answers.

As they sit thoughtfully in the darkness, the first one, named Billy, thinks to himself about something he could not explain, wondering: “ what else did he not know about yet that would strike him ... in the very first moment of apprehending, of seeing and smelling and tasting, as something he could not, from that moment on, get enough of and could never again live without.”

Billy's thought, there in the darkness by the sea, reflects a sense of awe that's at least vaguely familiar to us for it touches on the deepest longing of our human hearts. Surely all of us have known some moment, perhaps many moments, of apprehending, of seeing, smelling, sensing something we cannot get enough of and yet can never again live without.

How has such a moment happened for you? Maybe when you’ve stood at the window with a cup of coffee and watched the early sun run its fingers through the tree tops, or when your heart pounded with the sensation of falling in love with someone, or when you watched brave little legs carry a reluctant little face off to school, or when you gathered in tears with a few others around an open grave into which the casket of someone you love was being lowered as you hopefully commit her or him to life beyond death. Or maybe the moment broke in through a doctor's diagnosis that ripped away the taken-for-granted facade of your life, or in the shudder of an accident which reminded you of how fragile it all is, or when a phrase in a prayer or in a song became a keyhole you glimpsed another world through, or in the "Why?" of a youngster's insistent curiosity that suddenly made the world new again for you.

Those moments are clues to the awesome mystery of all we do not know yet but long for. Those moments sneak in through ordinary times and ordinary places, feeling like an soft tap on the shoulder, or a ripple of the soul, or the sudden flutter of a breeze out of nowhere, or like a mother’s voice in the distance calling you home.

How have such moments affected you? Or have they, do they? Maybe not much because for most of us the trouble is we too quickly turn away from them, dismiss them as just a bit of sentimentality and quickly get back to the rush and clatter of business as usual. We don’t trust such moments for what they are — a key turning the lock on the vault of our heart of hearts, opening them to the deep longing we keep stored away there. And yet, by God’s grace and patience, those moments keep happening when we sense something we cannot get enough of and can never live without, the great pull of the mystery of all we do not know yet, or ever know completely. It's the pull of awe. Whatever spirituality and religion involve, awe is at their source and awe is what those pregnant moments bear.

So I suggest that, as we take the first steps through the door of the New Year, we gather up those moments and attend to some of them and the longing they open in us. If we do, we might begin to realize that they point to what the image of home means to us most deeply. They might also remind us that home is not so much where we leave from, as it is more where we are always leaving for because our longing is for the home which embodies belonging, being accepted, held accountable, forgiven, strengthened, loved, and no human home quite brings that off but only hints toward.

The old mystic, Meister Eckhart, was right when he said, “God is at home. We are in the far country.” Then isn't home what we long for, perhaps glimpse in those moments, and back out of them - if we pay attention. That longing throbs most deeply in those moments when the mystery of all we do not know summons us by making clear that we can never settle down in what is past, or even what is present, but need always to break our necks, or habits, for home. And isn’t turning and heading toward home what faith is about? How do we do that? Several ways, of course. Choose your own. But choose! Begin to move toward what you most long for.

One thing you might include in doing that is to pray. I believe those moments of awe when we sense something we cannot get enough of and can never live without are a call to pray. For whatever else it is, whatever way we do it, prayer fundamentally is a referral to a transcendence, to a power greater than our human power, to a God who cares about us; that is, to One who call us toward home, and to whose call prayer is our answer

A few years ago, I discovered Ann Lamott’s delightful, insightful book, Traveling Mercies. Ann comes close to what prayer is when she writes, “Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me,’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’" At least those prayers are addressed to God and are an honest, no frills first move toward. But when you think about it, you realize Ann’s on to something profound because when you start fairly regularly filling in the blanks of “help me” and “thank you,” you’re pretty much up to your breaking neck in prayer.

Once, in desperation, when my garments of sophistication and religious propriety were pretty much shredded, I often prayed that “Help me, help me, help me” prayer about the future and what to do about it and in it. I would go over options and worries, and then one morning it came to me, a kind of nudge, a glimmer. I don’t want to overstate the case, but for a few moments, and then for days after, including now, the words, “Be who you are” kept knocking softly in my head. At first I thought that must be my idea but I’m not that smart or that confident. Then I thought it sounded like some self-indulgent New Age slogan that had seeped in when I was unaware, Or maybe was a condensed, slightly altered version of the trite, misleading Army recruiting slogan, "Be all you can be." But, like the biblical Jacob, my resistence couldn’t shake the words out of my wrestle with the angel of awareness: "Be who you are."

Then it dawned on me to ask, “Well, who am I?” And I said to myself, “Now Loder, there’s a question to occupy you for a while, and shape your prayers.” So I’ve come to realize, more all the time, that what I can’t get enough of and can’t live without is the promise that I am one of God’s kids being called home. An old kid, yes, not a little one, just as my kids are not little anymore, but are still my kids. And I’m old enough to know this much for sure: the way home to what I can’t live without is littered with tough issues and challenging choices about what it really means to be one of God’s kids. It’s littered with all I don’t know about being that kid yet, and all the ways I screw up what it means a dozen times before lunch every day. But I've also moved on to the "Thank you, Thank you, Thank you" prayer as much as the "Help me, help me, help me” one. God is home, we are in the far country. Don't you suppose that, moment by moment, we need to be about breaking our neck for home?

Think about it and have a blessed new year full of awesome moments. Ted