2nd What You See is What You'll Get-- Greed Vs Need

PRAYER

"Great God of Truth, we grieve for the wounds of your beautiful earth, wounds inflicted by our own carelessness, ignorance, and greed. Merciful God, open our ears to the groaning of creation: glaciers melting into a rising sea, polar bears swimming to exhaustion in search of ice, wetlands drying to parched cracks, songbirds seeking ancient sanctuaries in vain, coral reefs bleaching in polluted waters, whales beaching themselves in despair.

Awaken us, Good Lord, to our responsibility for this earth over which you made us stewards. Give us your spirit of compassion for all you have made ... Help us to know deeply the truth of our interconnection with all creatures (and) perceive how the limited store of earth's elements cycle round from age to age, that we may keep committed to keep them clean and pure ... Teach us to so value our vocation as caretakers of creation that the earth and every thread of her living fabric may, as you have promised, come to share in the very freedom of the children of God."

Prayers for The New Social Wakening, edited by Christian Iosso and Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty.

Excerpted from a prayer by Marjorie J. Thompson.

Friends,

Winston Churchill is reported to have said, "Americans always do the right thing, but not until they have exhausted every possible alternative." I'm not sure Churchill is right about always but it does seem we're often prone do the right thing as a last resort. Why is that? No doubt there are many reasons. I propose that a primary one is that we don't feel the pinch of the consequences of our procrastination, self-preoccupation and bumbling until some kind of disaster happens -- such as the present economic crisis. It's a crisis caused in large measure by the seduction of not "right" alternatives to which we all too readily succumbed. Basically it was the seduction of greed and the misguided proposition that greed is good. The crisis was/is a painful way to learn that greed isn't good at all, but rather is corrupting and destructive.

Yet maybe that lesson still isn't painful enough for a majority of us to learn it. Consider that most of the talk about economic recovery centers on getting back as quickly as possible, with only minor adjustment here and there, to the way it was before the crisis. And who isn't looking forward to that -- to more shopping, more jobs making things and consuming them, making the wheels of commerce spin faster, having things which supposedly define our status and promote our self-esteem? Too many of us have participated a rerun of the story of Adam and Eve in Eden, namely willingly letting ourselves be seduced into trading one piece of fruit for the whole garden, as if that would make us like gods.

Of course, that is understandable. It was a way of exhausting alternatives. And it had some benefit, such as beginning an industries of making clothes and farming and other supporting businesses. But was it the right thing? Is it the right thing now? What do we really need to live well enough as human beings in a human family? Need is about what's sufficient and greed is about what's excessive. And that isn't just a subjective or personal choice, as many would argue it is. Nor is just about the freedom we insist we have to exhaust every possible alternative until we might finally get around to doing the right thing. The core of this issue is what it means to be human -- fully, responsibly, joyfully human which is really the truest and deepest need any of us have.

What I'm getting at is the urgency of global warming as a challenge we can't keep postponing until we're sure we've exhausted every possible alternative. We've already done that. We don't have much time to keep avoiding doing the right thing about global warming. We are close to global warming being an irreversible crisis. That's what every qualified scientist is trying to tell us. Our common need, for the sake of our own humanity and the human family present and future, is to do something about it now. That is the only right thing. How to do that, that's discussable, but not whether or when. It is time to get urgently underway discussing how and taking action.

In his new book, Our Choice, former Vice President Al Gore tells us that truth in clear, well-researched terms. The good news is that Gore adds that we have the technology, the tools to begin now to turn things around. And that as we do, we'll have the growing capacity to create a "green" economy that will put people to work in new industries: making and installing cheaper, more efficient solar panels; constructing a new continental grill to replace the present antiquated one to carry electric energy from wind, tidal and thermal sources to every corner of the country; building more energy efficient intra-/inter-city public transportation; developing and manufacturing electric cars which are already in trials. It can be done, and fast enough to reverse global warming before it's too late to do the right thing.

What keeps us from doing it? All of us do! What's lacking is the collective will. We still fall

for the sirens of greed rather than the summons of need: the need deeper than consuming and possessing; the need to respond to what our hearts know makes life enduringly meaningful and right. Being aware of our deepest need is a religious or spiritual issue because faith isn't something we have so much as it something we are and strive to be. It's a vision, an awareness of, even just an inchoate longing for, something or Someone who has us and summons us to be stewards of, and partners in, the ongoing creation. In essential ways that is the prominent theme of the gospel story of Jesus and his appeal to us.

In his book, Gore writes that his favorite quote is from philosopher Theodor Adorno: "The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power ... has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false." That pretty well sums up our ongoing struggle as human beings, as people with mustard seed size faith, and as stewards of our common home on earth. It will take hard work to mobilize public opinion -- meaning the will -- to resist the reducing questions of truth into questions of power, to resist those who exercise power greedily in the effort to prevent change, to promote greed in an effort to defend their entrenched positions to appeal to our own addictions and sell any and every alternative in the marketplace to avoid doing the right thing.

To resist means paying attention, joining organizations like Earth Justice or the Sierra Club or Common Cause or any of the many other groups working to reverse global warming and change

what is causing it. It means writing to our congress people telling them this isn't a partisan issue so stop the mud slinging and procrastination. It means promoting the business enterprises that shift to a green economy approach. It means being persistent, imaginative and courageous. For example, what if for starters we encouraged churches in this country to start installing solar panels on their buildings which are usually large and energy inefficient? What if we began doing that for our homes? What if we did all the little but crucial things we can to save electricity and use less fossil fuel and recycle everything possible? It can be done but not without us. Without me and you and you and you ....

In Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men (got a copy yet?) the old sheriff (think Tommy Lee Jones who played the part in the movie) asks one of his deputies, "What is it that Torbert says? About truth and justice?" The deputy replies, "We dedicate ourselves anew daily. Something like that." And the sheriff says as he goes out the door, "I think I'm goin' to commence dedicatin' myself twice daily, It may come to three fore it's over. I'll see you in the morning."

Feels a little like the tug of the gospel, doesn't it? You up for it?

Think about it. Ted

P.S. Damn, I do get carried away and long, don't I? Sorry, I'll keep trying to shorten up. In turn, maybe you can start dedicatin' anew at least once or twice daily.

1st What You See Is What You Will Get

Dear Friends,

After much reflection about it, I've decided to continue posting my blog, at least for a while. A knowledgeable friend advises me to make them shorter and in a more regular sequence. I'll try to do that, in part by writing briefer installments of my reflections on a theme. Here's my first effort.

Prayer
Praise be to you, gracious God, for this day, this earth, this life,
for the weave of miracles blessing us and for your quiet power sustaining us.

We praise you for times of laughter and tears. risk and reconciliation,
reflection and healing, and for the stubborn presence of your spirit
making it all sacred.

Praise be to you, awesome God, for the holy mysteries
of our struggling and wondering ... and all that moves us to awe.
to love, to pray, so serve, since it is your Spirit that moves us so
and is creating us still .... Amen.

Adapted from My Heart in My Mouth: Prayers for Our Lives.

In a recent column in The New York Times a British author, A.N. Wilson wrote about the startling invitation of Pope Benedict XVI to welcome disgruntled Anglicans laity and priests (even married ones) into the Roman Catholic Church.

Wilson gladly concluded that this move would make it impossible for the Church of England to survive and end the idea of there being an Established Church of England. Wilson concludes,

The paradox is that a move by a conservative pope to ease the tender consciences of conservative-minded Anglicans will actually be a move toward the complete secularization of Britain, and the acceptance of its new mulitcultural identity.

Far more critical than Wilson's circuitous thought process or the motives and complexities of the organized churches, is the question Wilson unintentionally raises about how to see the world, see the earth itself. Are we to see the earth in secular terms as primarily an economic resource to be used a our discretion?; or are we to see it in at least somewhat religious terms as essentially sacred gift to be respected as an inviolable trust?

Variations of this question run through most of the pressing issues facing us -- economic development, poverty, energy policy, living standards, taxation, consumer driven markets, international competition, weapons development and use, even armed conflicts.

And most critically, how we see the world, the earth is THE question regarding global warming or, if you prefer the less graphic term, climate change. The answer to the question has enormous consequences which might be summed up by a slightly different wording of the familiar phrase, "What you see is what you get", namely "What we see is what we WILL get."

For instance, concern for the economic impact of efforts to reduce carbon emissions, a major factor in global warming, generates great resistance to taking any serious action on the issue. If that's how we continue to see the world, what we'll get is a world become a cinder. And by "we" it may not be us of this generation, or just the poor, or the under-developed countries, or China and India, but the United States, our kids and grandkids. future generations, everyone from whom we will have stolen the gift of the earth.

So rather than putting protecting our economy the first priority shouldn't we put protecting our planet first, and begin changing our economic interests and practices accordingly, perhaps even altering our standard of living somewhat?

And that confronts us with what we see as the meaning of life, what its core value is, what its essential purpose is, and to whom we owe what and why. Those are basic human questions and, I think, religious questions -- not so much for religious institutions who seem to lose their fundamental purpose in pursuit of their own economic ends, but for the religious spirit, that is, the spiritual longing that keeps interrupting and summoning us in sneaky ways and curious times and reminding us. What you see, and how, will be what you get.

More later. For now, think about it.
Ted

Hope and Outcomes - Part Two B

PRAYER

For this wondrous world you created, and are creating still, mountains and seas, lands and peoples beautiful beyond all telling of it, we thank you, O God of us all.

For the common humanity you created us to be, our family joined in the mystery of you, yet babbled into many branches to challenge and enrich us all, and deliver any from arrogant over-reach, we thank you, O God of mercy and wisdom...

For your insistent call to hallow our lives by loving our neighbors as ourselves, our enemies as our neighbors and you above all, we would thank you with out lives as well as our lips, for only so will we become does of your will, fulfillers of your dream, members in truth of your human family, and beautiful beyond all telling of it, O Judge and Lover of us all ....

Excepted from My Heart In My Mouth: Prayers for our Lives.

Friends,

Before I temporarily suspend posting my blog until later in October, I decided to try to finish the one on Hope by concluding Part Two with section B. So here it is.

I think Cormac McCarthy is one of the most probing spiritual, Christian oriented authors of our time. In his novel, No Country For Old Men, tells the story of a tough old sheriff trying to catch a vicious killer. At one point, the old sheriff says, "People complain about the bad things that happen to 'em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I don't recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much to cause to smile on me. But he did."

To me, that seemingly simple observation tells a story of the grace of God. And it reflects something essential about Christian hope. People do complain about bad things that happen they don't deserve but seldom mention the good or what they did to deserve them. We all do that. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe we get some benefit from presenting ourselves as victims when we don't get what we want; or by claiming good things are our due, or should happen because of our virtues and efforts. But whatever the reasons, deep inside we know it ain't necessarily so, as the old song has it.

All of us really know, or surely can imagine, what the old sheriff meant when he said he didn't think he gave God much cause to smile on me but he did. We can all say that, too, can't we? Just for starters, being alive is one obvious example of being smiled on by God. The natural world is another. Beauty, music, being forgiven by others, being loved by someone -- the list is long once we honestly start on it. I used to ask my wife, Jan, why she loved me. You see, if she told me, then I'd assume it was all about irresistable me. I could emphasize whatever reasons she named and so "possess" her, to use a common term for a destructive and dehumanizing way to treat another person. But her answer was always, "Why do I love you? Just because I do."

Grace is God's "just because I do." It isn't something we do, something we earn or deserve, even if we claim it because our faith is so strong, or our good works so many, or our cause so right. Even though those claims we make might be partially true, they aren't even close to completely so. Life is a gift, each one's life, and loving and being love, and work, and struggle, and learning, and being creative, merciful, compassionate and being related to others. Its all a gift. It's all grace.

That's why Christian hope is based in gratitude, not in outcomes. Or to put it another way, hope is based in our being an outcome ourselves, that is, our living gratefully in the present, what the theologian Paul Tillich called "the eternal now." Ultimately, the engine, the fuel of ethical action isn't duty, or obedience, or some self-defined goal, though all those can be contributing motives or influences. But all of them are still primarily about us, our scorecards, so to speak. We act morally because it makes us feel good and that's not totally irrelevant. But as the novelist Francine du Gray Plessix put it so provocatively, "The greed for salvation is pretty much like every other form of greed." I'd argue that it isn't quite like every other kind of greed because at least it's pointed in the right direction, which is toward God, even though it needs a mid-course correction. Gray's point is an accurate correction and worth heeding. Since the truth is that our motives are always so mixed and rarely if ever pur, our mid-course correction is back to God's grace, and back to gratitude.

Gratitude is expressed not by what we say, considerate and appropriate as that is. Gratitude sharpens how we see the world, and how we understand ourselves, and so how we at least try to live. It generates courage, humility and honesty. It unbinds imagination, as Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynmen, described it: “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which really are there." Gratitude is the dancing partner of imagination and helps us discern what is really there in life. A result of that is several degrees of self-forgetfulness and so of freedom and joy. Hope is its staple ingredient because God never ceases to smile on us.

What I mean by the freedom and joy of it is that we can work, and keep working with indomitable good will and against whatever the odds about getting a particular outcome we measure as a success, whether it be for badly needed health care and climate change, or helping rich countries like ours to find ways overcome poverty that kills children and mothers even if it means cutting back on our wanton consumerism, or establish clinics and personnel to deal with kids and adults who have curable diseases, or respect and appreciate people of other religions and cultures than our own while at the same time rejecting the destructive ways of their terrorist fanatics as well as our own fanatics who advocate killing people we consider enemies. That list could obviously go on. It's about helping each other, helping the human family, to realize God does smile on us all. At last, maybe even at first, that's what hope means. We are outcomes of it.

Think about it. And please honestly let me know your thoughts about my blog Ted

Hope and Outcomes - Part Two A

PRAYER

O God of patience and of peace, more than sometimes we get damnably busy, and enchanted with it, over-reaching and insensitive, vain and irritable, careless of all else save paddling on the rapids of our self-preoccupation and ambition, while being increasingly terrorized by whirlpools of emptiness and regret, feeling as if you have abandoned us to our own fretful devices. Then a chance to change bursts in ... on the peach-pink lips of a pucker-up day like this, snuggles against us in bed, tickles us in a joke on ourselves ... confronts us in an exploited person's just challenge, and the world swells with possibilities again ... grace teems around us like new galaxies, the first wave comes singing into our hearts, sets them to singing their own songs in the shower, in boardrooms, voting booths, and malls, and compassion comes in on the second wave, courage on the third, commitment on the fourth, You and peace in them all.

Thank you!" Excerpt from My Heart In My Mouth: Prayers For Our Lives.

Friends,

My previous two blogs were about Christian hope not depending on hopeful circumstances or on particular, desired outcomes because that hope is not for something but in someone, namely God. In the last of those blogs I said that in this one I'd try to deal with the heavy questions of who or what's in charge of all this complicated tumult and uncertainty of creation and life? Anything? Anyone? Is there any purpose to whatever order and structure there is in our world?

The questions lead to the frequent lament: Why God does let bad, painful, what to us are obviously wrong things happen to us, or in the world. The old conundrum puts it this way: "If God is good, he is not God. If God is God, he is not good." The argument is about God being omnipotent or all powerful which must necessarily be what God is. So if God is good but can not prevent bad things from happening, then God is not really God, or there really is no God. But if God is God and could prevent those bad things yet does not, then he is not good and doesn't much matter. It's a simple argument and for many, it's persuasive. But if, or for Christians, since love is as essential an attribute or quality of God as is omnipotence, that simple argument gets less compelling.

At the heart of the issue is the truth that freedom is one of the greatest gifts love can give to the beloved. Amazingly, freedom is a gift laced all through creation, as physicists keep discovering. It includes the behavior of photons, atoms and galaxies as well as the material world we live in and it's creatures, and probably applies most emphatically to human beings as free will .

Of course, there are limits to that freedom. They provide the order and structure of life. Science has defined many of those limits as laws governing the universe and the world. That fact is the context that gives freedom its consequences. For example, for us humans the combination of freedom, limits and consequences means we are free to jump out of windows, but if we do, a consequence will be plunging to earth and being hurt or killed because we're not free to fly , at least without airplanes. Gravity limits that.

For us, then, the combination of freedom and consequences results in our having responsibility and accountability for our actions. We're free to think, choose, decide, act as creatures who are wondrously endowed and both remarkably free and independent yet inescapably interdependent and responsible. Mostly, we benefit enormously from being that mysterious mixture. In the process of living, it enables us to be creative, imaginative, inventive, productive, generous, helpful, ethical, cooperative, compassionate, communal and to enrich each other's lives as a consequence. In a vast majority of our encounters with each other we're supportive, caring, instructive, moral participants in the human enterprise.

At the same time, often in our encounters we make mistakes, bad choices, irresponsible decisions, betray, manipulate, unfairly discriminate, cheat or simply by chance, are at the wrong place at the wrong time as in the 9-11 tragedy. We can unaccountably suffer from a crippling disease, or cell gone wild or gene malfunction that severely restrict our lives. The same is true of other human beings..

So, as the saying goes, "S--- happens." We have collisions with other creatures like sharks, mosquitoes, infected birds, flocks disabling jet airplane engines, or with natural disasters like hurricanes, earth quakes, floods, epidemics. Most often our collisions are with other human beings: terrorists, exploiters, distracted drivers of cars, mean-spirited neighbors, bullying ideological or radical enemies at home or abroad, or just others like us who unfortunately show up in our lives at the wrong time and place, with emotions or motives at cross purposes with ours, or sometimes just innocently but which, either way, result in damaging collisions. Some collisions are small, others large, others catastrophic, some instructive but still painful and frustrating.

The point is, our control of outcomes is limited and yet not completely so. Never-the less, and this is a critical point, nothing happens that completely eliminates our freedom to decide how and what our responses to those collisions will be. That is the mystery of God's grace or love.

Probably the closest human example of such love is that of parents who nurture such freedom in their children while also exposing them to limits. They don't put their children in an antiseptic bubble or restrict them from any activity that may injure or harm them, as if that were possible. No, they nurture their children in their freedom by encouraging them to play with others, go to school, make friends, date, make their own choices, do risky things, make mistakes and discover the consequences, help children learn to think and decide for themselves, work out their problems, deal with disappointments and take responsibility for their own bad and thus become more wisely independent and responsible. Parents do that because they love their children and do not consider them pre-programed extensions of themselves.

All such analogies fall short but essentially that process and reason is what I believe God the Father-Mother of us all does as well. Love suffers as well as rejoices for the beloved. That's at least something of the meaning of Jesus' life and death. He confirms our love and yet critically redefines and expands it by showing that God's love mysteriously exceeds ours. That's why we call God's love ,"grace." In a nutshell, our love is always conditional because it's finite; God's is unconditional, infinite and unfathomable.

But what about God's omnipotence, God's power. Why doesn't God intervene to bail us out of those painful, bad things that happen? Well, think of it this way: suppose that God uses power not to control everything or everyone, but that God uses power to cope with everything and everyone. I believe that is what God's love or grace means. It isn't about whether God has power but it's about how God uses that power; it isn't about whether God loves or is good, but how God loves and is good which is different, more, than how we would be or do it. Humility is essential here because, all claims to the contrary, no one can fully know the how of God's ways. We only have important and sufficient clues enough to trust.

Consider two events in Jesus' life as examples. One is in Gethsemane the night he was taken to be crucified. He knew the extreme danger he was in and prayed, "Father, let this cup pass from me. Never-the-less, not my will be yours be done." The other is as he was being executed and prayed, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Two painful, bad things happening to Jesus and God didn't bail him out. What's the deal?

The deal is that for God there are no dead ends. That's what resurrection demonstrates. How's that for omnipotence and goodness? God copes by continuing to give us options and choices. That's what I was suggesting before in making what I called a critical point, namely that nothing happens to completely eliminate our freedom to decide how and what our responses to those collisions, those bad, painful things will be. Even death itself does not eliminate that freedom. That's the mystery of God's grace. I believe that the process of growing, changing, learning and dealing with our own challenges and relationships in all their marvelous, grace-full complexity will continue after death because I believe that's what God's purpose is. But that's a mystery. It's enough to trust will be with God, and God with us, in a different way than it is this side of death.

But on this side, we cam choose to trust that God responds to us by continuing to give us options and alternatives. Isn't that really our experience if we honestly reflect on it, namely that nothing deletes our freedom and responsibility to choose and action? That truth is the core of Christian

hope. It means we can grow wiser and more compassionate through experiences of trial pain, whatever bad things that happen because God gives us that choice again and again. Struggle, yes, and disappointment as well as delights, broken dreams as well as mended hearts, frustrations and accomplishments, injuries of body and psyche but through it all come unexpected possibilities, options, choices and chances for us because, by God's grace there no dead ends!

A true story from Sports Illustrated, August 24, 09 puts it powerfully. Marc Buoniconti was a outstanding college football player at The Citadel when he suffered a severe spinal cord injury in a game in 1985. He nearly died, spent months in a immobilized in a Stryker frame and was left a quadriplegic. He was consigned to a wheelchair which he moves by blowing through a tube. He'd been a careless student, a wild party guy, even a borderline delinquent as well as great football player. His father, Nick, had been a Hall of Fame player for the Miami Dolphins and the family joked with some justification that if Marc hadn't been paralyzed he would have ended up dead or in jail.

"If Marc hadn't been paralyzed ..." Well, maybe, even probably. But then who really knows what would have happened? What we do know, however, is what really did happen for Marc. According to the SI story, was this: "Once he felt himself he stopped grieving, once he felt himself cared for by so many selfless people, saw so many strangers give time and money to help cure him, Buoniconti began to believe: Being paralyzed didn't end his life. Being paralyzed saved it."

He became involved with the Miami Project a scientific research and treatment institute for paralysis including that of children Then Marc organized the Buoniconti Fund to raise money help push for a cure. He said, "This chair made me grow a conscience. I never had one before."

One of Marc's old teammates says of him, "He's more of a man in that wheelchair than I'll ever be with two arms and two legs. Because when he enters a room he changes people's lives. When they hear him speak, people want to be part of what he's doing,. Can you imagine being in a wheelchair 20 years and having the courage to say, 'I don't think there's any help for me, but I want to get other people out of wheelchairs.'"

God is sneaky and there has been help for Marc -- God's quiet grace. Marc's body is paralyzed but his soul flies. Grace gave Marc options and choices after his terrible injury and Marc responded in ways that change his life and made him "more of a man ..." which, man or woman, is much of what faith, hope and love are about. Marc significantly partnered in his own healing which, you see, is also a gift of grace. And through his responses, Marc became part of God's own work in the world. No dead ends for him, or for us. Just grace, powerful grace and choosing to be part of God's kingdom day by day.

Think about it. Ted

P.S. Friends,

This will probably be my last posting until at least mid October, maybe longer. I know I ask a lot of those who access and read my blogs. I know they are long and challenging. I know they are not typical down and dirty, quick and easy which I guess is the typical blog format. So this may not be my medium. Any comments you care to share on that would help me decide how or if I will proceed. If what I write helps anyone, that's very important to me but I'm not sure if that is the case. Blessings and courage and joy to you. Ted

Hope and Outcomes - Part One

HOPE AND OUTCOMES PART ONE -

PRAYER
Lord ... in your own time and for your own purposes, find us in our seeking, strengthen us in our relationships , abide with us in our restlessness, liberate us from fretfulness to serve your kingdom and care for our neighbors. Enchant us into becoming 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. Adopted from Loaves, Fishes and Leftovers: Sharing Faith's Deep Questions.

Friends,

One of our great difficulties in life, and with God, is how often we don't get the outcomes we want, plan, pray for, work to attain, insist are good, and hope mightily will result from our virtues, convictions and efforts. So we become discouraged, disheartened, feel defeated, turn cynical and frequently act that way. The confusion of it causes many people, as it does most of us, to struggle with our faith, even abandon it. We ask what's wrong with the whole shebang when the outcomes we're sure are right keep getting trashed? Why does that happen? What is God doing, if anything? So, unless we're masochistic, we start wondering "Why care anymore?God doesn't seem to, or many others either?" Frustration, anger, blaming, hostility, doubt rise in us like spiritual acid reflux. Hope burns out.

Now hang on here. In my last blog, I quoted Bill Coffin's helpful insight: "Christian hope doesn't depend on hopeful circumstances." I added that Christian hope doesn't depend on particular outcomes either. After all, who are we to insist that other people, or the world, or God come up with the exact results we want and hope for so passionately, whether they are personal or relational or societal or global outcomes? After all, we're finite, limited beings. We don't have the might or mind or right to impose our hopes on others or expect that the world, or God, deliver on them. If we try to do that, we cripple ourselves because creation doesn't work that way. Life and faith don't either whether the outcome we hope for is about health care reform, or global warming. or pervasive poverty, or nuclear proliferation, marital problems or career advancement or raising kids or getting sick. Okay, so how do life and faith work?

Well, as I see it, at its core the truth is that Christian hope is not for something. It is in something, or better, some One, namely God. Hard as it is to make that distinction, it's a crucial and liberating one. For a moment, let's begin to consider this pivotal issue together. None of us can even clearly track how we got to this moment and place in our lives, all that's involved -- the choices, chances, influences, twists and turns, serendipitous encounters, mistakes, closed doors, open doors, risks taken or avoided, loyalties, betrayals, dead-end successes, open-ended failures, etc., ad infinitum (almost). Even our own daily, short term hoped for outcomes often elude our control. That much seems obvious about how life works, and faith as well. But don't miss the less obvious truth of it, that however differently from our hopes our lives turn out, we still hold them as precious because they are. And by and large, we are grateful for them and live them as fully as we can.

This is in no way meant to deny or dismiss the painful, terrible, horrific, heart breaking experiences we've gone through in the process. But somehow many of us learned profound lessons from these experiences and they changed our lives in unexpected ways. Somehow, we endured and went on, limping perhaps, but often understanding life differently and more deeply. Others did not. That, too, is how life and faith work. Beneath those painful experiences, or because of them or sometimes in spite of them, we endured and carried on because of some undergirding sense that it was worth it. And the world made it as well, without our outcomes being accomplished. So did the human family in spite of all its casualties. Despite our confusion and complaints, our hope was not really snuffed out, not totally or permanently. That, I think, is partly how life and faith works. It's a process we participate in, benefit from but don't control. The truth is, essentially it's all a gift. A grace.

So, who or what's in charge of all this complicated tumult and uncertainty of creation and life? Anything? Anyone? Where does the degree of order and structure of life come from? Let's get to that in an upcoming blog as those are really heavy questions.

First, let's deal with a more immediate, concrete question. How do we live with sustaining hope in the mostly out ot our control, churning process of life and the world? The simplest and toughest answer is that we do what Jesus did, or what other compelling prophetic and spiritual leaders did or do. We live out what we believe about God's kingdom as humbly yet freely and fiercely as we can. Then we leave the outcomes to Him/Her. As a Christian we live out the love we see in Jesus: love of self, of neighbors as our selves, love of enemies we don't have to like, just treat with respect as brothers and sisters. We work for justice which, as I often say, requires "love with its sleeves rolled up." We keep working even when we don't get far with it. We stay generous, compassionate, forgiving, courageous, creative and light hearted in our struggles and at peace with ourselves. We stay stubbornly, ridiculously, insistently, passionately, contagiously hopeful because our hope outruns outcomes. Our hope is in God and so are we, all of us, all the time.

The wonder is that our efforts to live out that hope do make a difference. After a worship service years ago, an old, nearly blind, former teacher living alone on a small pension came up to me in the coffee hour. Everyone knew her as Miss Miller. She said, "The gospel is about not being afraid, isn't it? Surely it is! I mean, when justice seems out of reach, or peace does, or life is hard, I kept working for it all my life because that was my way of being with God, you know? Don't you ever give up hope." Then as she turned away she gave me a tightly folded piece of paper: "Please read this at my funeral." she said.

Suffice it here to tell you the poem's theme is that while never presuming that our little efforts will change the world, each of us still has the choice and the responsibility, " ... to choose which side/ Shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight." I never forget that. I smile and hope more deeply when I remember Miss Miller and her stubborn ounces. They embody what hope in God means.

The promise of it is in this: When my dear friend and colleague Joan Hemenway died a few years ago, there was a quote on her Memorial Service bulletin that I have on my desk. It was something Joan used as a kind of benediction at the final gathering of her classes of Clinical Pastoral Education students. It's the promise of Christian hope. "When we walk to the edge of all the light we know, and step into the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen: there will be something solid for us to stand on, or we will be taught to fly."

Friends, every day we step into the unknown with God. Step with hope because either of those two things are outcome enough.

Think about it. Despite the length of this, I hope it's worth it. Ted

As I promised, a little more about how it works will be my next blog.

Where's Hope

Where's Hope

Prayer

O God, you are the beginning and end of all things, and in your sight a thousand years are like an evening gone. Still, you have assured us that not even one 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 assurance is rooted our courage, peace and hope for each day and night of our lives.

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

Friends,

Hope seems to be a scarce commodity these days. With all the turbulence and conflict generated around health care reform, global climate change, economic shifts, pinches and uncertainties,the seemingly intractable challenges in the Middle East, shadows of fear and despair stretch to every corner of our days and nights. We wonder if anything will change for the better, whatever that is. Are we to continue to be plagued by the hostility and distortions (read "lies") of narrow, self-interest partisan political jockeying? Is fear our primary if not only fall back position when faced with complexity, change, challenge, uncertainty? A lot of pundits claiming "scientific" evidence insist that fear, the "fight or flight" reaction, is the strongest, most elemental human response to perceived danger. But whether they are right in that claim is always an open question because we aren't totally defined by biology. We aren't destined to be stuck in terminal fear. We have choices.

My dear departed friend Bill Coffin refined Vaclav Havel's writing about hope into one memorable sentence: "Christian hope doesn't depend on hopeful circumstances." There is a great freedom in that truth. That kind of hope isn't about our personal dreams, or our career objectives, or even our passionate ideologies, any or all of which might be thwarted without loss of hope. Our deepest hope, which I believe is at least as deep as our fear, refers to there being another Power than our own at work in human affairs and history. It's a Power with its own purpose which always outruns our own purposes and motives which however well intended are still tainted by our limited vision and persistent self-interest.

But is it really true that another Power is at work in life? Well, we're still here, aren't we? And we still have choices, don't we? But proof by scientific measures? No, we don't have that and never will, pro or con. But proof by living in that hope, Yes. We do have that, some of that, at least, enough to make a difference in and for ourselves and even in the world because that other Power can use our mustard seed faith and efforts for His/Her own purpose. We are free to work for justice as we understand it, to be compassionate, to love our neighbors and ourselves and our enemies, to sacrifice something big for something true and just. That keeps us free in the face of fear. That keeps us wildly, irresponsibly, creatively, joyfully hopefully.

This last word for now. Just as "Christian hope doesn't depend on hopeful circumstances" neither does it depend on particular outcomes. More on that soon in my next blog.

For now, think about this one. Ted

What's the Point?

A Prayer

Renew now our vision

of who you created us to be,

and what you call us to do,

of wild goodness and disruptive faithfulness,

of cheeky risks for justice,

of hearty inclusion of the rejected,

of death-defying insistence that are enough

riches of bread, of things and truth and beauty,

more than enough of the riches of grace and you,

for us all to gladly share and live in peace.

Excerpted from My heart in My Mouth: Prayers for Our Lives

Friends,

I wrote earlier that there are few certainties in life and that words can't do much to change that, intently as we try to force them to and intensely as we wish they could. But words can do something more crucial. They can help us "renew ... our vision of what (God) created us to be and ... calls us to do." Such words often begin in prayers when they emerge out of silence in the presence of life's mysteries and out of the depths our own reflection. Words also do that if and when they challenge unjust and dehumanizing situations in life. Not to respond out of our depths and lift a voice against those situations is to miss the point of who we are created to be.

It was Thomas Carlyle who said, "Speech is silver, Silence is golden." My friend, Robert Raines, used to say, "Sometimes silence is golden, but sometimes it's just yellow" - an old word meaning cowardly. Most of us have felt the shrivel of our "yellow" moments, haven't we? We may have tried to justify our cowardice, explain it with arguments about a "good" reason for not taking the risk of speaking against the injustice or cruelty being done. "What good would it have done?" we insist; "What would be the point of it?" Exactly the right question . What would be the point? Who knows whether it would have made a difference to anyone else or stopped an injustice at that moment? But it may have made something different at least possible and that small a chance would itself be enough. And it would make a difference to you if you'd raised your voice rather than chosen the yellow, shrivel of silence. You might have felt, at least momentarily, the exhilaration of being aware of who you were created to be and to do.

Elie Wiesel, who emerged from the Holocaust as a holy and prophetic voice, said, "Words are deeds." I haven't plumbed the depths of all he means by that but I have experienced some of the truth of it. Words can lead to severely damaged psyches, impoverished relationship, broken families, holocausts, terrorizing, brutalizing people because of their race, religion, gender, nationality, destroying communities, exploiting and ravishing the planet.

And yet, even more crucially, words can lead to healing, creating beauty and truth, embracing the forgotten and downtrodden, oppressed and ridiculed, reconciling enemies, summoning justice, nudging nations toward peace because words can lift a vision, make a witness, become an opening for more deeds. more hope, more compassion and a little more of who we're created to be and do. And that is to be a community in which all human beings, all creatures, are a cherished part and the "me first" mentality of private pursuits and personal privilege does not keep tearing us apart.

So what does this have to do with issues like personal integrity, intimate relations, family life as well as health care reform, or climate change, or renewable energy, or nuclear disarmament, or reducing poverty, or saving kids from curable diseases or ....

Well, isn't that the point we have to decide? Who are we?

Think about it. Ted