Wayside Pulpit

Every Friday is a Good Day

It is the end of the fifth day. Jesus moves away from his disciples into a small clearing in the forest. The trees of Gethsemane surround him; the fading sun turning their twisted trunks into mythical monsters. He is afraid. He puts himself on the ground and crosses his legs—a foot on each thigh. His hands rest near his stomach—left cradled in right. With eyes slightly closed and cast down he sees the shadows of remaining sun travel across the ground. His breath is shallow. In and out it quickly moves; his diaphragm collapsing and expanding in a rhythmic pace. He watches. He pays attention. He slides into the conscious compassionate awareness that he knows so well. The space holds him. His heart opens and all is okay with the world.

The sounds come from the distance—horses, men, and the clinking of swords. Torchlight moves through the trees, and step by human step it replaces the looming darkness. He puts his palms together and moves them toward his chest—thumbs touching his heart. Jesus bows forward and then rights himself just as the light covers his head. He takes in one breath, feels it move through his body and he says,

“We are here to end suffering.
If ending suffering is more important than anything, we will end suffering.
If ending suffering is not more important than anything, we will not end suffering.
If I am suffering, it is because I am choosing something over ending suffering.
We are not here to create and cling to beliefs.
We are here to pay attention.
We are here to use everything in our experience to see how we cause ourselves to suffer; so we can drop that and end suffering”(1)

Undiscovered Value

Recently, John Stuart over at Heaven’s Highway, featured The Wayside Pulpit in his glimpse into the world of progressive Christians bloggers. It was a quite a hoot to see the Wayside up there with such awesome sites such as, Street Prophets and Faith in Public Life.

John made an insightful comment about the spiritual loneliness that progressives seem to encounter in their journeys of faith. This is the loneliness that often comes from living a faith that is built on questioning, discovery – unknowingness. Not all those who find themselves living under the progressive label relate to this sense of chronic uncertainty, but I know many upon many that do.

What I find fascinating is that faith without certainty is often seen as something to be grieved. Those who have a faith that gives them that rock-foundation will often look at my faith with pity, the underlying, but unsaid thought being, “If you only knew what I knew then your life would be so much better.” I still feel some resentment when I get these kind of patronizing glances, but I’m learning, gradually, to let it go.

Why do we assume that faith is supposed to answer our questions, provide us with certainty and fill us with comfort? Why do we not instead believe that faith is meant to challenge, make us question and fill us with uneasiness about ourselves and the societies in which we live?

For me, there is a grief that comes with a faith that doesn’t explain it all. I am forced to face the rawness of life in all its bloody complexity. This standing as witness is hard, it is challenging, it is often lonely, it sometimes makes me want to run away.

But the truth of the matter is, there is a captivating beauty to be found in the unknown. It is a beauty revealed to all of those who stand staunchly in the midst of shifting sand regardless of the fear that may call them to bedrock. Only those whose bones have been touched by this beauty can understand why the loneliness, the uncertainty, the grief and the sickening spiritual upheavals are more than worth the price of admission.

Honestly God

Today at the hospital I was reading a prayer book that someone had left in the chaplain’s office. It had a prayer based on a verse from Isaiah. I can’t recall the verse, but the idea was that god can be trusted for the future because god has always been there in the past.

I read the verse a couple of times and realized that this has not be my experience. I have never felt that god has been there for me. I can look back over my life and list situation after situation from which I was not saved, healed or given comfort. In fact, I cannot recall a time when I felt that god’s presence was with me during a really nasty stretch of life. I know all about the footprints poem, where god is said to carry us, but I have not felt carried. I have walked through so much in my life and I have done so basically alone.

This lament of, “Why have you forsaken me?” is timeless. It is only in this timelessness that I find any comfort whatsoever. I can read all sorts of things from scripture to medieval poetry confirming that god has left many of us feeling completely abandoned.

My response to the Isaiah reading today was first to cry and then ask god why, “Why in fact have you never been there for me?” I didn’t get an answer, but then, I didn’t expect one either. However, in the asking, somehow the loneliness that permeates all the days of life was lifted just a tiny bit.

What Weighs Me Down

I was talking to a friend today and had a flash of realization. I really believe that the thinner I am, the smaller the number on the scale, the more loveable and competent I am. The inverse then is, if I weigh more or feel heavier then surely no one loves me and I am as worthless as a rock in a field.

I suppose I am not alone in this belief; the belief that weight and body shape define whether or not I have worth as a human. Still, I feel pretty alone and stuck in my head on this issue. The social conditioning about body image and weight has been so powerful in my life that I cannot imagine how it is not true. I know that it is simply a belief, but I cannot believe it is only a belief. It is as true as true gets.

My friend that I shared this with said, “Well, you can let that one go.” I immediately became defensive. It is so easy for someone on the outside to take a really thick socio-spiritual issue of someone else and just cast it away like an unwanted fish. If it were so easy to let go, trust me, I’d let it go. So much of the dissatisfaction of my life is rooted in the social conditioning I have in my head related to perceptions of my body, my weight and my beauty.

I don’t know how to let this go. Just like I really don’t know how to let go of many of my deeply held beliefs. I’ve seen a few evaporate into the nothingness that created them, but for the most part I’m still holding on pretty tight.

If I think about the two religions that touch me the most, Christianity and Zen, both are fundamentally about letting go of socially conditioned beliefs. This knowing about letting go is an open window; the knowledge that I can move beyond what society has programmed me to be. Yet, even with the window, I don’t know how to get the ideas that hold me to fly from the room.

As Mourning Doves

A number of days ago I found a baby dove in my front yard. I watched it for a number of hours, wanting to see if its parents were taking care of it. The bird was not quite a fledging, meaning that it left the nest a bit too soon. It was still covered in its downy infantile feathers. It just sat huddled in the sun.

The same day I found the dove I also had a visit with a patient whose leg had just been amputated. When we talked about it she told me, “I just can’t believe the leg is never going to come back. That is the hardest.” My visit with her was followed by another in which the patient is slowly dying from an infection that can’t seem to be stopped. He and I talked at length about his wish to die; the suffering is just too great.

As I watched the dove I thought of Matthew 6:26,“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” There was no food for the bird in my yard. Just as god did not save the leg or ease the suffering of the patients in the hospital.

I ended up bringing the bird in for the night. I fixed up a box, made a nest and decided that I was providing hospice care for the evening. The dove was small, barely moving and making no sounds. I had no assumptions that the bird would make it through the night. When I woke in the morning I opened the box and it was still breathing. I called a vet and figured out how to feed it.

Life is just plain awful sometimes – and god doesn’t always fix it. Yet, still, life takes care of itself. In this process of life, of god, some legs are saved, while some infections can’t be cured. Just as some birds die before they fly. The truth is, on a flat semantic level, god does not feed all the birds. However, if god is bigger than semantics, food is always being had.

Eden

I am a theoliterary Christian. I find spiritual meaning in the stories of the bible regardless of their questionable historical validity. However, I’ve never been much of a buyer-in of the Garden of Eden story. I guess I’ve never found anything in the story that has reached and grabbed my spiritual sensibilities.

There are many difficulties I have with the story. The main being that I don’t need a creation myth; science has given me more than enough ideas to chew on when it comes to how the universe began and how humanity populated the world. Also, the traditional Eden interpretation of humanity falling from grace is so imbedded between the lines, I’ve not been able to read the text a different way. Well, at least until yesterday.

In the story God says, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” The day we made the choice to live in a morally compartmentalized world is the day we died. Once society became based on right and wrong we lost the ability to live at center, to live embraced by god. Having to be a right way, compared to a wrong way, is why we are socialized. It is why we are molded to be what society says, rather than to be what we are.

What keeps us from God is all the junk we’ve been fed about how we should be. That junk is what was hung on the tree in the Garden of Eden. That junk is what humanity ate. God knew that once we created a knowledge of right and wrong there was no going back. We would be stuck in the cycle of trying to be a certain way, failing, beating ourselves up for it and then trying again. In this process we never find out who we are. We never find out who god is. Rather, we spin around and around hiding from ourselves and from the divine behind the sewed fig leaves of, “should,” “ought,” “don’t” and “can’t”

We never fell from grace, we fell into social conditioning.

Follow Me

“After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’” -- Luke 5:27

Follow me.

What if those two words are the core of the message of Christ? I mean, really, what if? What would it mean to look to the life of Jesus as a guide for living, instead of looking to his resurrection as a guide for salvation? What would it mean to follow?

Give up your money to those who need it
Change your livelihood to one that focuses on the oppressed
Sit in silence with god
Heal those in need of healing
Share meals with those who are very much unlike you
Preach about injustice
Walk in unfamiliar areas
Read the Hebrew Bible
Leave organized religion
Never whine about being a victim
Be involved in an intentional community working for change
Press against the prevailing social/political/religious system so hard you are executed for it . . .

This is so different than simply believing that one is to live by faith alone, isn’t it? How many Christians, if they were told tomorrow morning at church that THIS is Christianity, would keep being Christian?

I aspire to follow.

Unjust Rules

Today was just one of those mornings. The keys were lost, the dog vomited on the floor and every single pair of socks was dirty. I didn’t get it all together in time and my daughter was late for school. They had already started their morning assembly when we rolled into the parking lot. The rule at the school is to get a tardy slip before joining the assembly. So, hand in hand with my eight year old we went to the school office. I asked for an excused tardy slip. The school secretary handed me a small piece of blue paper and asked, “Why is she late?”

“She’s late because mom couldn’t get it all together this morning.” I answered.

“That’s not an excused tardy!” She snapped back, giving me a look that screamed, “Slacker mom!”

I felt my face heat up and I was angry. My thoughts were clear, “How in the world can you penalize a child for a parent’s mismanagement of time? She doesn’t drive. She can’t fly. How could she have gotten to school without me. She was ready to head out the door on time. However, I wasn’t.”

I looked at the secretary and asked, “Well then, what qualifies an excused tardy?”

Again sporting the same look of disdain, “A doctors appointment, something legitimate like that.”

I took a pen off the counter and filled out the excused tardy slip. When it asked why, I wrote, “Doctor’s appointment.” She was shocked. So was my daughter who has been told time and time again never to lie. I handed the slip to my daughter and in a genuinely nice voice told the secretary to have a nice day.

This afternoon when I picked the kid up at school we talked about the slip. I told her that some rules are unjust and this was one of them. I told her I felt badly about lying on the form, but I was not going to allow the system to penalize her (no recess for the day) for something beyond her control. She said to me, “Rules like the tardy rule make me think that the school doesn’t like kids.”

I replied, “I can see why you feel that way, the rule does not respect you and your rights as a child.”

We began talking about unjust rules and laws and that many of them need to be broken. We talked about Rosa Parks. We talked about San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and his response to the ban on same sex unions. We talked about the United States’ faulty immigration policy and illegal border crossings.

She’s questioning how the system works, just like Jesus did.

A Ring

A few days ago a small ad appeared in the Want-Ads of a local paper. The ad was simple, it said, “Ring found call to identify.” This morning when I opened the paper the front page of the local section had an article about this particular ring. Apparently the ring was a rather expensive wedding ring and the grief was quite profound to the woman who lost it. Also, the woman who found the ring was deeply concerned about returning the ring to its rightful owner. As a result, the ring was returned, much joy ensued and they made headline news.

The woman who lost her ring wrote the following, “My aunt prayed with me and told me that God loves me and knows my pain and that He has sent a Christian to find the ring and return it to me.”

It seems, from their perspective, that only a Christian would return a diamond ring. A Muslim, a Jew, an Atheist, a Buddhist, or really anyone that wasn’t Christian, wouldn’t be the type of person that would work to find the rightful owner of something precious.

The woman who returned the ring was in fact Christian (just like the overwhelming majority of people in the community), but she returned the ring because she was the kind of person who would return a ring. Did her Christianity make her more likely to find the owner of the ring? Maybe, Maybe not. Christianity doesn’t necessarily make a person good, it simply makes them a Christian.

Honesty, trustworthiness, kindness, love, compassion do not come from any religion, rather they come from the heart. Good happens in the world because people do good things, not because they follow any particular faith tradition.

Stagnant

I distract myself from things that I really want to do. If I was avoiding doing things I didn’t want to do, well, it would make more sense. But, these are things that I want to do, but seem to continually find reasons for not doing them.

I turn my attention, instead, to the internet, reading the newspaper, napping, going for walks, cooking elaborate recipes and doing “busy work.” These are tasks that are not moving me in the direction I wish to go, rather they are things, the minutiae that keep me in place. Still, I can’t seem to remove myself from their grasp, their hold on my life is stronger than I would like to admit. This all reminds me of Paul’s writing in Romans, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

What is it that runs much of what I do? I’m not exactly sure but I do know that when I start to push against “it,” with ideas of creativity and moving my life beyond the status quo, it pushes back. It makes dreams and desires seem unimportant, while the nap is the best I can do. It takes the fun out of most activities and labels them a waste of time. I sense it will do whatever it can to make sure that I do not carry out my creative ideas or even enjoy the life I am living.

What to do about all of this? I think, as in most things spiritual, the first step is awareness, knowing that this is how I have been conditioned to operate. I’ve been formed by society, by my upbringing and the structures in which I exist, to meet the norm, to stick with the way things “ought” to be, rather than moving toward a new kind of “could.” Seeing this is the first step to moving beyond it. Because it is hard to turn onto the road less traveled when all you see are the old sidewalk cracks beneath your feet.

The second step is walking beyond the conditioning. It is hearing the pleas for the naps, the extended surfing times, the myriad of distractions and simply letting them be. It is giving them no energy, no opposition, but also no agreement.

Paul asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” The answer for him was simply, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Center to Paul was Christ. Center for me is the breath. Center for some is god. Whatever you call it, it is your divinity that has the ability to transcend the limits that imprison you.