Sunday, January 26, 2014

Seeing our bodies #4 -Fig Leaves


Seeing our Bodies

Part 4 – Fig Leaves shame and separation

 


  1. The Torn Veil

            I’ve been struggling to write about this portion of the story of Adam and Eve when Adam and Eve envisioned their bodies after they had partaken of the forbidden fruit.  I do not believe that I communicated well what I hoped to communicate through the blog I did on Adam and Eve seeing their bodies naked and yet being unashamed in the beginning.  Perhaps I should have written with greater bluntness.  What if the whole of creation was the original intended temple, a temple where everything in it was a display of the honor and glory and attributes of the invisible God?  What if we were originally created especially and specifically to be physical expressions of the image of God in this specially created physical universe?  What if when we were naked and ashamed it meant that we by nature communed with God in our communion with one another and with creation?  What if when we transgressed that one command we defiled chiefly ourselves but desecrated the temple and created separation?  Would the clothing we made for ourselves be an unconscious veil describing how now we were separated from creation, from one another, from God, from the holy of holies?  Could it be that garments made by human hands, sewn from fig leaves in desperation after seeing your nakedness only serve to reveal the separation between you and everything in the original created temple of the universe?  Would all future temples merely be symbolic copies of how creation had been intended to be celebrated in the worship of God?  Would future temples be provisions of God to show us the way back to where it will be in the end as it was in the beginning when heaven is brought into union with earth and no man will say this is the mountain of the Lord, but every place will be the place where those who worship in spirit and truth worship the Lord?  I didn’t convey that very well.  So maybe it doesn’t seem to some that when a child takes the reins of a horse in hand and gallops across a field enjoying the power of the horse and the partnership with a horse there is a sense that one enjoys God for one can realize that God is the author and sculpture and painter who brought life to all.

            I’ve been delayed writing this blog.  I’ve been delayed wanting to write something not having to be changed after posted.  I’ve wanted to make sure not to serve the wine before its time.  But also I have been feeling miserable from a cold and the patent medicines I take for my cold.  I am reminded of what a Russian once told me about colds.  The Russian said “In my country we have a saying, if you take no medicine for your cold you will have a cold for seven days, but if you take medicine you will get rid of it after only a week.”  Sometimes with colds I feel the Russian was right.  I wonder if that is why Adam and Eve decided to make fig leaves when they saw they were naked, when they knew they had transgressed, and knew something was not right in their universe.  They were ashamed, and like me with a cold they wanted to feel like they were doing something to solve the problem.  So they made garments from fig leaves.  There was at least another thing going on with Adam and Eve after they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  I will save the second part for another blog to follow this one.  But they felt naked, felt the need for clothing, for a veil to separate themselves from the creation, from each other, between them and God, between them and the holy of holies.  When they heard the voice of the Lord they hid.  They hid not to separate themselves from God, but because in their transgression they had already separated themselves from God.

            These garments made of fig leaves magnify our separation.  Let us consider how we were separated:

            We were separated from the liturgy of creation.  This is what much of modern man misses about the creation story.  So much emphasis is placed upon the power of the fiat word of God, when God says “Let there be” that so few realize that these are words of a creative liturgy to which the creation sleeping full of potential energy awakens and responds.  God said let the earth bring forth vegetation, and the earth responds and brings it forth.  In the evening of each day of creation God looks at the response of the universe and he declares what he sees as good.  There is a liturgical relationship through which the universe at first a void shapeless darkness is brought to light, life, beauty, and order.  It is the work of liturgy through which the creation takes shape.  But we who were created to especially show the image of God and must be most free are given a single command to follow and to not do.  It is a part of the liturgy.  We transgress and separate ourselves from the liturgy of God speaking to his creation.

            If you have looked very often at what the Bible describes as hell, it is most similar to the created existence prior to God’s liturgical formation of the creation in those six days of creation.  Jesus described the place of eternal punishment as the outer darkness.  It is the place where everything with shape and order is broken down.  One passage either a part of Mark in the original that was lost or a portion inserted at a later time describes how the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.  There are problems with this verse from a textual consideration, but they present a similar perspective to the nature of punishment described by Jesus in being cast into the place of outer darkness. {see note at end}  If we persist in refusing to hear the words of grace then we shall be granted our desire to have a life separated from the liturgy of God’s creation and we shall gradually retreat into the darkness of the chaos that was before God began to speak to the creation.  It is a frightening scene that is described when given the chance to repent men and women call for the rocks and mountains to fall upon them.  While this is not the main story set before us in the Gospels it is part of the story told in the Gospels.

            But for those of us who have begun to hear the liturgy of Christ we live in a world recovering from the tragedy of those days.  We understand the separation by what we feel needs to be overcome in ourselves.  We feel the sense of separation with the world in which we live.  This present earth is as much a display of the bloody red claw of survival as it is of the beauty and glory of the attributes of the invisible God.  This creation is a temple defiled.  We struggle to find common ground with men and women in varied relationships, whether formal, of informal, familial living under the same roof or strangers meeting in a narrow aisle in the store; or husband and wife trying to make a connection when they have each experienced days putting them out of joint.  Then there is God, and how many are the times when he would call to us, that we hide from him in a thousand pursuits?  I suspect after they had transgressed Adam and Eve saw they were naked and felt the separation from everything and so put on clothes hoping as an old song may have put it to hide from others the emptiness felt inside.
            “We drank a toast to innocence
              We drank a toast to now
              And tried to reach behind the emptiness
              But neither one knew how.”
Dan Fogelberg, 1980. “Same Old Lang Syne”

{Denise, a well-informed reader pointed out the disputed text is a quote of the final verse of Isaiah, so Biblical for all concerned}

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Seeing our Bodies - Part 3 Naked and Unashamed


Seeing our Bodies

Part 3 – Naked and without shame in a Very Good Creation
 

{An image of Adam and Eve should go here, but they all looked so European;
And how can two Europeans work as an image expressing the origin of all humanity?}
 

            I had it all figured out what I would say about Adam and Eve, freshly created, aware of creation, of one another, of God, being both naked and unashamed.  I had it all figured out but then I realized all I was doing with what I had thought to say was to write what would amount to being a remake of a common Protestant script about how man was flawless and then fell into sin, and so we lost that original state.  I decided I shouldn’t try to rewrite “Paradise Lost” in a blog.  If you wish to read “Paradise Lost” don’t bother with a blog, let Milton speak to you in his originality.  Then this morning I saw an article someone posted on Facebook describing the beauty of “story.”  Jennifer Percy described in this Atlantic Monthly article how she switched her university major from Physics to Literature because she began to see literature as a more satisfying way to approach and consider life’s complexities.  A narrative, because it tries to express human life captures a scene where the complexities of human life and human characters are caught up in a moment.  The scene that is framed is complex because human life can be understood in many ways looking on a single expression of human life.  Milton and Protestantism have captured a relevant perspective concerning the story of Adam and Eve, but there is more to the story.  There is always more to a human story.

            I gradually remembered I was drawn to write about Adam and Eve’s ways of looking at themselves because of a heart wrenching letter written by a thirteen year old girl.  I am Protestant enough to acknowledge that even thirteen year old girls have sinned in some way or another.  But to try to immerse a thirteen year old girl’s perception of herself as “fat and ugly” into a Protestant explanation of sin seems forced and extremely inhumane.

            So I wondered how I should write about Adam and Eve perceiving their naked bodies and remaining gloriously unashamed.  Yes, part of the story is that they had not sinned, nor had sin yet entered their world, this world which God described as “very good.”  I have come to believe that God wants us to see and feel more in this scene than to walk away saying “damn it, we lost it all back then.”  This story is too much of a human story for that, expressing the complexity of a humanity that has been devastatingly damaged by participation in sin, but to see only that is to miss that even fallen we have been created even in our own imperfection to show forth something of the sense of the image of God.  Surely even in imperfect human beings there remains a sense within our souls of an understanding of what it means to be naked and unashamed.

            So I take another look at the story of our ancestors, of Adam and Eve; and I am sure if I understand the Scriptures that their story is more than just their story, but also my story and your story.  I see the context in which Adam and Eve are living as they are naked and not ashamed.  They are surrounded by a beautiful creation, a very good creation.  Adam has awakened to see the woman created for him and sees her as beautiful and is moved to combine intellect, physical desire, spirit and soul to speak poetry to his mate.  Together they are to explore this universe.  The Lord at this time we are told later would walk in the garden and pay them visits and it is in this world they found themselves.  I think of a thought expressed by C.S. Lewis.  I am not sure but think it was in Surprised by Joy.  He describes seeing a brilliant sunset over a lake or a sea.  The sight captivates him.  Later he remembers this wonderful feeling he had as he gazed upon the sunset.  He tries to later regain that feeling by trying to capture a sunset at just the right moment.  But slowly he realizes that he can never manufacture again that same sense of the beauty and grandeur he had seen in the sunset.  He concludes that the feeling was not a feeling to be chased, but was merely a symptom of being drawn outside of himself into communion with the glory and beauty of the sunset.  Lewis realizes that we were meant for communion with creation, with one another, with God.  What makes us most happy is not the feeling we experience but the communion that for a moment allows us to be lost wholly and completely in something other than ourselves.  It is in such a time that nothing seems to separate us from what we are enjoying.  It is at such a time that perhaps we are closest to experiencing what it is to be naked and not ashamed.

            I wonder if the meaning of redemption isn’t something like a refocusing of a person from a poor way of being lost to the best way of being lost.  We can be lost in ourselves, separated from everything; doubtful if there is meaning in this universe.  Or we can be lost to the world of creation, to our brothers and sisters within humanity, and to the God who has created us and placed us in a universe in which he has created all things to express his glory, so that we in enjoying all things might enjoy him.

            That makes me think of a thirteen year old girl who wrote the sad report of how she saw herself as fat and ugly.  She probably did when in a melancholy moment she wrote a letter to her future self that would be living ten years in the future.  But if you had seen that same thirteen year old girl in a different setting, I think you may have seen a different view of the same girl.  What if instead of seeing her through a morose letter, you saw her aboard a wild roller coaster with her best friend forever?  Would she have been thinking of how she was fat and ugly?  What if she were mounting a strong horse, taking hold of the reins in her fingers, sensing that this horse was about to be a partner in an adventure?  With a slight tap of a heel to the horse’s side the horse would know it was his turn to fly, to go at a powerful gallop across a field.  She would sit in ecstasy as a breeze from the speed of the steed would wrap about her cheeks.  She would hear the pounding of hooves into the ground as if they were always falling somewhere just behind horse and rider.  They would fly forward to where and when no one cared to know.  Maybe she would not have thought of herself as naked and unashamed.  But I wonder if Adam and Eve were watching her story they might have said, “She knows what it is like.”  I am sure in such a moment the thirteen year old girl would not be giving the least thought to her looks, as far as that was concerned she might as well be naked and not ashamed.  I am sure we will know this feeling more in depth when our lives are unaccompanied by sin.  But I am sure we are meant to partake of at least a taste of this before we reach that day.  As for Adam and Eve we know that they were naked and were not ashamed.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Seeing our Bodies - Part 2 - The Creation Account


Seeing our Bodies

Part 2 – The way I understand the Genesis Creation Account

 


An Algonquin translation of Genesis chapter one,

An image of the creation account drawn from a Google search

 

If you are like me, you become cautious when reading considerations drawn from the Genesis creation account by someone you don’t know.  That is true no matter what side of the debates about creation you are on.  For this reason I want to familiarize readers with my general viewpoint in how I look at the Genesis creation account.  I hope that even after you know my viewpoint you might indulge me by reading the later blogs in this series regarding three scenes in the stories of Adam and Eve regarding how they saw their beings and bodies according to the Genesis account of creation.

I have spent most of my life as one rooted in the Evangelical wing of Christendom.  That said my spiritual journey in this mostly Evangelical wing of Christendom has carried me from a beginning in which I was mostly a narrow fundamentalist to where I today embrace a historical form of Anglicanism in which it is important for the believer to integrate the authority of Scriptures with tradition and reason.  It is a perspective that can be messy.  It is a perspective from which when one reaches a fresh conclusion he might begin to be concerned that he is on the edge of heresy and apostasy.  Also from this perspective when one finds himself standing firmly with a conservative viewpoint he might worry that his conservatism might be a sort of Pharisaic intransigence against the Holy Spirit’s breath of freshness over the face of the earth.  I have embraced this approach to the Christian faith because I see it as a way that hears what others say to us, listens to the Scriptures, and replies with respect to those with whom we engage and dialogue.  I am sure many other Christians, with a similar or even a different methodology are pursuing the same goal I pursue in these matters.  It is simply that this goal made sense for me when I found myself embracing Anglicanism and an Anglican perspective of the truth.

What about my perspective regarding the creation account?  That is my reason for writing this particular blog, that I may be honest about with you concerning where I stand.

I have never reached a point in my life where I can simply discard the Genesis creation story, and I have never reached a point where I can say that I do not respect my brethren who hold a literal understanding of the Genesis creation account.  I consider carefully their concerns when they warn that so many of the truths of the Christian faith are developed from an understanding of the Genesis creation account so that when one begins to give up portions of the creation account then their understanding of the faith will likewise begin to unravel.  This for the literalist is a concern, and it is a proper concern for many of the teachings found in Scriptures, in the prophets, in the Apostles, in Christ are firmly rooted in the Genesis account of creation.

That said, I believe that one is able to accept the possibility that God expresses the truth of creation in an account that blends both the literal and the figurative in the story of creation.  I will explain this view chiefly by describing how God’s revelation about the ancient forming of creation is perhaps in some ways similar to how God revealed the distant future in the mystery of prophecy.  While much of the Bible is written by personal witnesses who wrote about what they saw, heard, and believed; prophecy speaks of what no man had yet seen and was revealed through both literal and figurative means.  The Biblical writing on the creation has similar features.  Adam and Eve were present only for a portion of day six in the creation.  On days one through five there were no human beings present.  The whole of creation in those six days is described as a calling by God who speaks to his creation and the creation responds and there is a movement of the Spirit of God speaking by the Word of God to bring from darkness and chaos; life, beauty, and order.  If we were being given a strictly historical account there would be no mystery but when God addressed Job and his friends in Job 38, they respond not with what they learned from Genesis but with silence and awe, for who among men can explain the work of the creation?  So I feel confident that what I am told in Genesis is like unto a parable that I may grasp that in understanding I learn that understanding is ultimately yet beyond the scope of my ability to comprehend.  So I feel that every word is important, given to us not to know so much how God created the world in a comprehensively historical or scientific way, but rather how he has ordered the universe that I might participate in it with relationships to the creation, to other human beings, and to the majestic God in whose image we human beings have been formed.

I do not begrudge the scientist the use of his methodology to seek to understand the creation.  I do not argue with him.  I am sure I can learn much from him.  But also I hope he may come to learn that there is grandeur in the grammar and poetry of this old story.  I believe it is God’s story about the creation.  Just as importantly I believe God created this story not to give us all the facts but to tell us we are all part of this story, it is about us and not just about them, and it is about them and not just about us.  So I invite you to consider a few more blogs on some story pictures given in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve.

Seeing Our Bodies - Part 1


Seeing our Bodies

Part 1 –Response to someone’s confession that they were fat and ugly

 



Mirror, Mirror, tell me am I pretty?

“Girl at Mirror” taken from the cover of a Saturday Evening Post, 1954

 

            Today I am beginning a series of blogs on three different scenes of how Adam and Eve perceived their own bodies, according to the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis.  I will start with a blog today telling you why I decided to write about the three word pictures found in the account of Adam and Eve relating to how they saw their beings and bodies.

            I recently read a woman’s blog of how at age twenty-three she read a letter written to her by a thirteen year old girl she had known in her past.  The thirteen year old girl confessed to the twenty-three year old young woman how she was a fat and ugly thirteen year old.  The younger girl then asked the young woman, “Did you grow up to be beautiful?”  The young woman’s roommates expressed how sad it was for a young girl to think about herself that way.  Everyone present knew that the thirteen year-old girl had written the letter to be read by her twenty-three year old self in ten years’ time.  So the twenty-three year old woman who read the letter to her roommates was the grown up version of the young girl who had suffered as she thought of how she looked.  The twenty-three year old tried to assure her roommates that she no longer felt that way about herself.

            But the same woman, presenting her story in the blogosphere went on to acknowledge that a couple of years later she had gained twenty pounds in one year’s time and now her perspective regarding how she looked was once more being tested.

            I appreciate so much of what is written in this story.  I appreciate that a thirteen year old would write a letter to be read by her older self in ten years’ time.  I wonder if the thirteen year old realized how few of us adults really understand or remember how we thought or felt about our lives at age thirteen.   I remember, in my high school years vowing that I would never tell a young person that their lives in grade, junior, or high school were the best years of their lives.  For me, getting through those growing up years was painful.  Still I don’t remember much about the pain, mostly the vow that I would not tell a high school student these were the best years of their life.  Life for me got better after I got out of high school.  The twenty-three year old lady who received this letter from her thirteen year old counterpart was given a precious gift.  There it was in black and white, the feelings and thoughts of a child at age thirteen.  I also admire the twenty-something year old who read the letter to her roommates, and then blogged about her experience leaving the truth about what she was experiencing so that others could know they were not alone in feeling some of the same things.  I thought of how Adam and Eve, in the Bible stories about them, saw themselves and their bodies in at least three different ways according to the Book of Genesis.  I couldn’t help but think that these word pictures in the Bible were themselves ancient expressions of the same sort of feelings we think now to be modern forms of angst and self-doubt.  Perhaps the account in Genesis has something to say to these sort of feelings.  I decided to write a series of blogs and express what I see and others can decide if what I see contributes to understanding this phenomenon or if I am just another Christian thinking he has some insights when all he really has is some opinions and clichés.

            So I will be blogging on the stories of how Adam and Eve viewed their bodies.  In one setting, they were described as “naked and they were unashamed.”  But shortly thereafter they were desperately covering their nakedness with fig leaves and hiding from God lest he should see them.  Then at the last God makes garments for them out of animal skins.  It seems to me that these pictures of Adam and Eve are poignant portraits of some of the ways we human beings view our own beings and especially our bodies.

            Today is the beginning.  I will try to keep things short so that the reader is not bombarded by too many thoughts.  But as you look forward to other blogs in this series think of what you have felt about your bodies.  Are you comfortable with them?  Do you feel they are beautiful, ugly, or that thinking of your own bodies in these ways just seems strange?  Think about how you perceive your bodies.

            Tomorrow I will be writing about how I view the creation account in Genesis.  You may want to know how I view the Bible’s expression on creation before you can trust me with handling the Bible’s creation stories.  I can understand that no matter what your perspective on the Book of Genesis is.  So I will do that tomorrow.  Then we will begin our series of blogs on these three perceptions of their own bodies in the stories about Adam and Eve.  I do not plan on having anything good enough to say to make this the final word on the subject.  So I hope that you will know I invite thoughts and viewpoints on what I say.  I hope until then that God will help give to you a way of viewing yourself, which will help create in you a sense of joy, fulfillment, direction and purpose.  These words have bearing on my own life for I am medically classified as “morbidly obese.”  I begin this series sure of one thing.  Success in life morally or spiritually is not built on a foundation of our being ashamed.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Book Revew- The Sound of One Hand Clapping


My First Read of 2014

A review of Richard Flanagan’s

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

 

            An Australian woman, a lover of books, wrote in glowing terms of reading a book by Richard Flanagan, and thinking something like “Here I have in my hands the book which might take the Miles Franklin Award and they all just want to watch the Bachelor.”  She was referring to a different book by Richard Flanagan, and the Miles Franklin Award, a prestigious literary award given for a “novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases.”  I had come to know of this Australian woman through Twitter and decided to try to find the book and failing to find it in America discovered how The Sound of One Hand Clapping was available.  I asked her about the book and she spoke of it as powerful and unsettling.  That it is.

            Somewhere as the past year morphed into a new year, another friend from Twitter posted a link to an article that said on average an American reads “0” books in a year.  The average American does not read a book in a year.  I had managed to do only slightly better than that last year, and over the years I have read only a few books a year, some years very few.  I wanted that to change, and so I decided to read at least fifteen pages a day from at least one book until I finished a book and started on another.  I hate to admit how many years I have passed without reading a novel, so I started by reading this one.  I am grateful for having been drawn to this choice.

            It is as my Australian acquaintance noted an unsettling novel.  It is a book which takes you inside the evolving lives and self-understanding of a father named Bujan Bulow and his daughter Sonja.  Their lives evolve not in chronological order but in the order of their memories as they gradually perceive who they are and how they fit into the world.  They don’t fit all that well but where there is life there is the possibility of a turning point in life.  There can be the turning point where one moves towards a downward spiraling descent towards self-destruction.  Or there may be a turning point where one begins to sense a meaning and purpose upon which a life may grow and take hope and be shaped towards the possibility of the future.

            The novel brings to life many of the modern issues, not in a preachy way but in the form of the human beings presented.  Faith is not central in the words describing it, but its possibility is hinted at in such a way that it is clearly not something merely peripheral to the human experience.  Bujan Bulow’s life is haunted by a past that included his being caught in the malaise of the World War II’s horrendous “Eastern Front.”  It is also shaped by his life as an immigrant, a wog, who lives in Australia but will never really be viewed as an Australian.

Flanagan masterfully connects the shaping power of suffering in life to the possibility of a horrendous cycle of ruined lives.  The cycle that began in wartime atrocities, generates haunted persons forming dysfunctional families, resulting in self-destructive vices and ruined self-perceptions that seem to further predestine a hopeless result for the future.  But still there is the human spirit capable of discovering revival and yet also fragile that a movement towards personal renewal can be so easily snuffed out by a single moment when the fragility of the human soul gives way and despondency overwhelms the desire for renewal.

            There is a sense in which Bujan Bulow’s life and the life of his daughter Sonja are inescapably connected and belong together.  Yet their stories are still distinct and individual.

            I don’t want to ruin the plot for you if you haven’t read it.  But one of the features I love in the book is how the book is written to promote a sense of the changing self-perceptions of how Bujan and Sonja perceive their lives.  Their self-identities are not shaped by mere chronological progressions.  The present is always shaped by the past, and yet the past is always remembered by the changing sense of the present, and the self-perception of both builds a sense of what can be accomplished and expected from the future.  So Flanagan takes us on a journey from the 1950’s to the very early 1990’s in which life goes back and forth, experiencing, remembering, expecting back and forth as self-perception is shaped, reshaped, and directed and re-directed.  This is how this novel becomes not just a book with a plot but an exploration of humanity.   A dismal past and a dismal present may create a fatalistic sense of total inability for one to hope or expect anything but more defeats and destruction for one’s own future.

That is part of the unsettling nature of this book.  For when one has no sense of hope, there is a perception that life is brutal, and if life is brutal then one survives only by learning to be hard and brutal.  How can one hardened and brutalized in life begin to take hope?  For one it might be a decision to stay somewhere and not to flee their unfolding life as they have always fled the struggles abounding in life.  For another it might be that however horrible the life of a wog, and the lives of fellow wogs might be, there is still something that one lowly wog can do to create a bit of beauty in life for another lowly wog.  So somewhere small there is a nearly imperceptible change, but that change is something that can be built on, that helps make the present meaningful, helps to remember the past differently, and creates a different possibility for the future.

            This is my first book finished in 2014.  It is an accomplishment to finish a book so early in the year.  I am grateful for the person who recommended it to me, for while it is true that this book can be deeply unsettling it can also be wonderfully glorious.  I count it a masterpiece, but I’m not a literary critic, just someone who happened to read a book that captured his imagination, his heart, and his soul.

Tossed to and fro


Tossed to and fro

            In the last months I have been tossed to and fro, betwixt old and new ideas, old and new faces, as if having been called upon to live in the no man’s land at Verdun, while smelling the putrid air of the Somme or caught like a dog between machines and artillery and rifles at Kursk.  I have been tossed to and fro and the experience has left me shaken and changed, angry and yet hopefully more kind, and surely never able to return to whence I came.  I am tossed on to an island but am contradicted for before I have read that there are no islands, that no man can be an island or on an island.  We are connected one to another beneath the heavens and cannot be separated but by an act of the one who is the shepherd who separates the flocks with his divining rod and takes the sheep to one side and the goats to another.  So I stand alone on an island as if I were an island.  The contradiction with all I have thought to be true worries me, and I wonder if I have wandered astray from the shepherd’s flock.

            I slowly stand with a broken thought.

            I have heard “Judge not!”  Have I understood you who are in the heavens as to what this means?

            Does it mean that I am not to condemn another?

            Does it also mean that I am not the one to justify another?

            Does it mean I am not the one to condemn myself?

            Does it mean I am no more the one to defend and justify myself?

            Does it mean I am to be silent when your word speaks regarding my actions?

            Does it mean that when I am called to give account I will be silent?

            Does it mean that unless he who speaks is called upon to speak from the right hand of God that all, yes every word is vain and is but the empty words of men without knowledge trying to decipher the meaning as if they could discover meaning when they jingle the coins in their pocket?

            My silence is followed by my touching of my head, of my heart, one shoulder and then the other.  I speak only to say “Lord Jesus be merciful to me the sinner.”  I repeat these words and continue repeating them.  They seem to have no meaning but I repeat them, mumbling them over as if to say to him in heaven let these words fill my heart, consume my soul, and become my strength.

I slowly take notice that I am not on an island at all, but on a vast continent.  The sun shines, the birds chirp, the waters have fish and fishes.  The land is covered with plants of green, at least they will be green come spring, and there are trees rising from the ground to give shade even if dormant in winter’s gray.  There are before me small creatures barely capable of being seen, multitudes more that must be unseen, four legged animals some that must be some child’s pet, some child whether eight or eighty.   I see people walking about.  I have hardly seen before how beautiful and how weary and often times how lonely these faces are.  Mine must look much the same.  Mine must be plain for mine reflects me.  But there is something different and exotic in every other face I see, a face of someone other than me.  I thank the heavens for someone besides me.  I begin to faintly smile for it is not so bad to be placed in the midst of ideas old and new, betwixt people old and new; not on an island but on a continent beneath the heavens, here on this earth that you have made for yourself.  Yes for yourself and also for the creatures whom you have created to live and whom you delight to see play before your eyes.  Yes and for me and for humanity for which you gave your life.  And so if thy judgment is swallowed up in your mercy so shall mine be swallowed up in your mercy.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Epiphany Meditation 1


Meditations on the Season of Epiphany

What is the Season of Epiphany?


            In the church calendar used by many of the most ancient traditions in Christendom, there is a season following Christmas known as Epiphany.  Epiphany is taken from a Greek word which means to reveal or make manifest.  In the progression of the liturgical focus in the church calendar the season of Epiphany leads us to consider how God led people in growing numbers and various ways to see Christ as one who has come into this world as a unique person, one who is God made manifest or revealed in the flesh.  Yet this uniqueness of the one who came into the flesh, into humanity and into human society does not separate him or place him above our lives, but rather serves to bring his life and the life of God into our human experience.  Christ who is uniquely fully God and fully man has come into human society so that each of us in our own unique individual lives, and all of us together being gathered into one humanity may be drawn together through this one whom God is making manifest in the human experience.

            I have lately been reading the latest work by N.T. Wright, massive and scholarly, and sometimes a bit too much to take in all at once.  But one point he makes is that the people who waited for Messiah to come were people who saw themselves as part of the story of Scriptures.  The Scriptures were to them not only the history of a people or a tradition, but a living story incorporating those born after the time mentioned in the stories of the Holy Scriptures.  Modern Judaism retains this in the practice of Passover wherein Israel’s children are to see themselves in Egypt, surviving the plagues, crossing the Red Sea on dry land, entering the wilderness, waiting in the wilderness, and entering the land.  They are not to see themselves as outsiders looking through history to a story, but as insiders made a part of the story by God who has made the story of the Scriptures for us.

This was likely the mindset of the early Church when it came to Epiphany.  We remember how Christ was made manifest to humanity in various ways and we are meant to be a part of the story.  The story of Epiphany did not end when the Magi went home by a way that bypassed Jerusalem.  For what was made manifest to them, that a great king and more than a king, one to be worshipped had been born to Israel; is what is revealed to us through its inclusion in the Gospel’s account.  This is true of each of the different stories of manifestation contemplated in the Gospel accounts during the season of Epiphany.

My church uses the 1662/1928 Book of Common Prayer observance of Epiphany, which at points may be slightly different in the Scriptural passages used in the observance of the weeks of Epiphany from some other traditions.  Hopefully for others of you, who do not normally follow a strict church calendar, you will enjoy visiting these pages as we develop a theme of Christ being manifested in Scripture passages that you have long loved and enjoyed even as we do even if we do or not like liturgy.

In some years Epiphany which is celebrated on January 6 is followed by as many as six Sundays in the Epiphany season.  Some years are less than six because Easter is a moving holy day, and if Easter is early there will be fewer Sundays allotted to the season of Epiphany.  But when there are a full six seasons in the observation of the season of Epiphany there is an interesting progression showing how we are part of the story of Epiphany, of God making himself manifest to us.

On January 6 we celebrate Epiphany remembering the coming of the Magi, the wise men bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh as they came to view Israel’s king and offer him worship.  Upon seeing them they worshipped him.  This is the general meaning of Epiphany.  Christ is made manifest and we are drawn to worship him.

In the following Sundays we see Christ as a twelve year-old in the Temple, being baptized by John the Baptist in the waters of the Jordan, turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana, healing a leper by touch and a centurion’s servant from a distance, then in the parable of the wheat growing among the tares; and finally there is the Gospel promise how we shall yet see him when his glory is revealed when he shall appear like lightning out of the east.

Of these manifestations, most are connected to events in the past.  But these events are for us as much as they were for the ancients who were there, for in the Gospel we are invited to see these stories and to be present in spirit, and to have them impressed upon our lives so that what has been made manifest may actually become a life inspiring epiphany within our own understanding of faith.  That we are part of the story of Epiphany is brought home to us in the parable of the wheat growing among the tares in the next to last Sunday of a full Epiphany season.  That is where we are all living in the faith.  Finally the story of Epiphany is not a story only of the past with present considerations, for we are part of the story of Epiphany in that we await the great revelation and manifestation of the Son of God who shall appear in glory as the lightning flashes from the eastern sky.

Epiphany is the story of Christ being made manifest.  This story involves us.  We are in this story looking for its glorious conclusion.

For those interested I have written a poem, it’s not a great poem, do manage to force an ABBA rhyme scheme into it, but I try to tell the story of Epiphany in the poem.  You can read it here.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

A Poem for the Season of Epiphany


Manifestations and Epiphanies
                    

Exotic wise men see a star manifest in the sky
Gold bring as if expecting to see a king’s rod
Frankincense an aroma worthy to worship a God
But also myrrh a fragrance for one born to die

A child staying not left behind in the temple
Parents’ discovery and their sudden terror
What is his thinking that explains his error
What – my Father’s business – it is that simple.

Honey, locusts, camel hairs but what is this
What need has this one for Jordan’s waters
Or is this for Israel’s sons and daughters
A dove, a heavenly voice, signs not to miss

From the beginning, a man and a bride
No wine, cheap family dishonors guests
My son can you do anything for this mess
Water to wine  for love I will provide

A broken leper wishes to be made clean
This requires the touch of a kind and gentle hand
A soldier says you needn’t leave where you stand
And left his miracle done even when unseen

A garden with the good seed hidden in weeds
The gardener sees his seed so fragile and weak
says Let my seed the sun and rain seek
At harvest good seed will be seen in good deeds

Manifestations we have seen so to him we do now refer
Others with lesser signs like vultures will pluck and take
Sun and moon Joseph’s dream heaven’s order to shake
So we await one more Epiphany our hearts to stir

 

A poem of sorts based on the Gospel readings of Epiphany and the six weeks of Epiphany in the Book of Common Prayer, 1662 and 1928 versions

Hope


HOPE

HOPE :
Having Optimistic Patterns Expectations
Seeing darkness expecting the dawn
Seeing evil expecting redemption
Feeling resistance expecting triumph
Having sinned expecting to overcome


HOPELESSNESS:
Hope lost forgotten despairing
Living in the moment without a future
Falling in air grasping at wind
Struggling with burdens without relief
seeing in every sight a catastrophe fomenting


RESOLUTION:
Sin is but hopeless grasping
A mad striving sown in despair
Holiness results from a sight
Of the Divine by a living expectation

LESSON REMEMBERED:
As Don Quixote battled windmills
So have I attacked a neighbor’s sins
And I have flayed at mine without success
For holiness is hatched from hope
while evil springs as surely from despair
So I must battle in hope for the spread of hope