Important Invitation

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

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

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

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

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. Gopnik 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

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

Four character Christmas Story - 4th - Daryl -

Friends,This copy right story Christmas Story I wrote of Four Characters should be read sequentially in order and comes as four posting on my blog. Stay alert and have a blessed Christmas. Ted

Character Four - DARYL

I don’t talk much. Think a lot though. About things I see. And not just with my eyes. I get what some people call visions. I call ‘em hunches. It’s like I can see the future. A little hazy but good enough.

Like one night Hank and me was goin’ through a dumpster behind a Burger King. It was awful dark in there. Hank was ready to give up lookin’ ‘cause we couldn’t see much let alone find anything. So I told him not to give up. I had this hunch we’d find a couple of half-eaten Whopper if we kept diggin’. So we did and we found the Whoppers. Ate ‘em sittin’ right there inside the dumpster.

Hank was impressed. He said I must be pre-sy-ant. I asked him what that meant and he said it was like having second sight. I told ‘em I call ‘em hunches but maybe I am pre-sy-ant if that’s what havin’ hunches means.

I thought about it and hunches is sorta seein’ things like you would if you was in a real dark place. Like in an abandoned house with the windows all boarded up. You squint around and sometimes spot a window that’s got a hole in one of its board so a little ring of light gets through from outside. So you can make a few things out. That’s how a hunch starts.

So you crawl over and look out through the hole and check out where the light’s comin’ from. It looks like a different world when you look at it through a light hole like that. There’s more to it than you usually thought. That’s what a hunch is. Like that. Seein’ different things than usual. Seein’ what’s gonna happen. Or might happen. Or could happen So that’s what I think of a lot. My hunches. Things I see like that. Thing is, I get hunches almost any time day or night. When I first got ‘em I thought I was freakin’ out. Then I realized things I seen in my hunches really did happen afterwards. Sometimes.

So I started thinkin’ about all that. It made havin’ hunches a spooky thing. But I liked havin’ ‘em, too. In fact, sometimes, to help ‘em happen, I make a little circle out of my fingers, like that hole in the boarded up window where the light comes through. Then hold that finger hole up to my eye like you did when you were a little kids

I look through that finger hole at things to see if a hunch would come about what I’m lookin’ at. Sound’s weird, I know. But doin’ it helps focus the light. Only when people see me doin’ it, they think I’m bonkers. Even more than they are, or everyone is, particularly when no one’s lookin’, you know?

Anyway, havin’ these hunches, I thought maybe was a special gift God gave me and I was supposed to do somethin’ with it, like bein’ a priest or somethin’. I tried that out by goin’ and helpin’ a church where a friend of mine’s uncle was some kind of bishop or somethin' like that, he called himself. But the guy turned me off by actin’ better than anybody else.

Plus people didn’t like it much when I’d make my finger hole and look at ‘em through it. They didn’t get that I was just tryin’ to get up a hunch about ‘em, see ‘em in a different light. Anyhow, a lot of ‘em didn’t like my hunches about ‘em or what could happen for ‘em, like they didn’t want nothin’ different to happen that what was happenin’. So I wish’d ‘em good luck and God bless ‘em and left off thinkin’ about bein’ a priest or clergy and wearing one of them stiff white collars. I figured those collars musta choked off blood to their brain, bein’ how they acted. At least the ones I met.

But I didn’t leave off thinkin’ about God. ‘Cause I was pretty sure my hunches were a gift from God. Especially the light that’s part of a hunch comes from God. So when I heard Maude talkin’ about seein’ Hank’s face by the light of his cigarette the other night, my ears perked right up. I figured God had somethin’ to do with that. That maybe I was somethin’ like them wisemen in the Bible story of Jesus bein’ born.

When I told Maude and Hank and Lil that, they commenced callin’ me Wisey ‘cause I was so set on the specialness of the light. Like the star them wisemen was set on followin’ in the Christmas story. Thing is, I didn’t mind ‘em callin’ me Wisey. Actually, I liked it.

It don’t matter how I come to be homeless and more or less end up with Hank and Maude and Lil. Upshot of it is that when I was workin’, I kept makin’ my little finger hole to look at things and people like my bosses took it wrong. So I’d end up losin’ my job. I guess they thought I was even stranger than they were. Finally, I was homeless.

But now whenever I look through a finger hole like this, see, or talk about hunches, people don’t pay no mind since that’s the sort of stuff homeless guys do. So I like it when Maude and them call me Wisey. I think they do it ‘cause they got a little light to see by, too.

Anyway, after Hank told Maude his story that night, and me and Lil listened in from the shadows, we all walked over here to this Bed and Breakfast to see if Hank’s lost kid, Maggie, comes back again. Now here’s the thing. Since we got here, I been thinkin’ and lookin’ at things through my finger hole. And I got this hunch.

Or maybe it’s more than one hunch. Maybe it’s a bunch of hunches that run together into one big hunch. Like in the story of Jesus’ birth, the parts about the angels and shepherds and those old wisey’s and Mary and Joseph and the baby all run together. And that off the track innkeeper guy, and mean old Herod making it hard for everybody.

Anyway, my first hunch was that Maggie is gonna come back to the B&B all right, but not for quite a while. Seein’ it that way, I began pokin’ around this place. Went out back. They built a new woodshed out there, right up next to the bigass house. It’s brick.

But the old woodshed one is still there further back. They got a padlock on it, but I got a hair pin so gettin’ in wasn’t no trick. They keep the lawn mower in there and some garden stuff. I could tell no one had been in it since way last summer. So imagine my shock when, sorta over to one side, I see this log settin’ up with a little sea shell on it, just like Hank said he found a few years ago. Seems someone else had a hair pin, too, and snuck in the shed and left that sea shell like that.

Who would do that but Maggie? My hunch was right. If Maggie had come back that recent, she wouldn’t be comin’ back again right away. But leavin’ that sign and hopin’ somehow Hank would find it showed she’d keep comin’ back sometime. When I showed Hank and Lil and Maude the sea shell, they saw it that way, too.

Second hunch was when I look at the B&B through my finger hole like this, and focused the light, I kept seein’ a “For Sale” sign on it. The sign’s not up yet, but I’m pretty sure it will be soon enough.

Then the big hunch come to me. It began with me rememberin’ Hank tellin’ us his story about how he gave his wife the B&B as part of the divorce deal and how she sold it and made a pile since she had no sense about how to run it.

So I’m thinkin’ that since he did that when he was feelin’ bad, maybe he could go back and try gettin’ back from her half of what she sold it for. I'm seein' maybe a lawyer could help ‘im do that.

I brought it up to Hank, and he asked why would he do such a thing? I told ‘em I had this hunch the B&B was gonna get sold again and he could buy it back. Now that’s a bigger hunch than the one about those Whoppers in a dumpster but Hank looked at me without blinkin’ for a minute. Then he asked me why he should even think of doin’ that.

Which brings me to my third and biggest hunch which is the rut buster. I told Hank he could buy the B&B and we could run it as a shelter for homeless. Word would get out about it. Maggie would hear about it. She’d see it as a sign. And she’d be sure to come back again sooner than otherwise. That’s what I told ‘im. Him and Lil and Maude. Every one of ‘em got all excited about my hunch and called me Wisey all the more.

So every night for the last four night we been huddlin’ in the old woodshed behind the B&B, thinkin’ together about my hunch. Hank says when he tells his ex-wife about it, she’ll most likely help ‘im without ‘im goin’ a lawyer. Seein’ as it’s a way to find their daughter Maggie.

There’s lots to think about when we buy the B&B. Like how we’ll pay the bills. Stuff like that. There’s lots to think about. When someone starts thinkin’ it’s all too hard to do, Hank just says, “Remember Wisey’s hunch about the Whoppers. Keep diggin’” So that’s what we do. Keep diggin’ for our homeless shelter. We know Maggie ‘ll come soon. That’s what the sign of the sea shell means. Like a star she’s following so as to come back here to us.

Plus I’m teachin’ Hank and Lil and Maude how to look at things through a finger hole to see things in the better light. They doin’ it all right but I gotta admit, they do look a little weird when they do. And funny thing is, they say they see things, well, better that way, focused like, without it bein’ all cluttered up the ways things can get lookin’ at ‘em unfocused like and still missin’ them.

Like I said, they call me Wisey all the time now, Lil and Hank and Maude. So I keep thinkin’ and sayin to ‘em stuff about that story, you know, how the wise men went home from the manger a different way? You see, what I think, or see through my finger hole, is that the star that got them to the stable and Jesus, got them back home, too. See what I’m saying? Nobody says nothin’ about that.

But I have a hunch it was the star led them back a different way. Or some light like that. Maybe some little light like Hank’s cigarette. Or Lil’s baby Zach. Or a hunch like a light hole in a boarded up window of an abandoned house. It’s enough light to see by. Enough to follow into the world in a different way, like. I think the wise men had that kind of light. I think that light is Jesus. Same light we have.

That’s my last hunch about this. When I make a finger hole like this, and hold up to my eye, I can see the light comin’ from Jesus. I can. I mean, I really can. It’s like the finger hole is a sort of manger like. That there’s the light Hank and Lil and Maude and me are following now. When you look at it like that, the world really is a different place. I mean, try it. Actually try it. Try being a little, you know, different, crazy like, what old Hank calls pre-cy-ant, like me.