It occurs to me…

“There is good news and there’s better news – the good news is that there is a God.  The better news is that it’s not you!”         James Martin

I am not sure which is worse, just plain forgetting there is a God or thinking that I am He/She.  Reluctantly, I admit to both.  Neither failure of mine makes sense of course.  In fact, both defy the ample empirical proof.  Life, certainly life as I know it, is full of evidence that there is a God.  My frequent mistakes in life are certainly ample evidence that I am not God.  Still, I seem to forget one or both of those points from time to time.  In that sense, I guess, “Thank You” (in response to the many blessings God showers me with) and “Duh!” (exclaimed after yet another mistake I make) are powerful reminders of God’s existence  as well as genuine forms of prayer.

A hard lesson on giving today from C. S. Lewis:

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give.  I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.  In other words … if our charities do not pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.  There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.”

Ugh!  Granted, this seems harsh, but heck, compare it to the parable of the rich young man (Luke 19:16:24) who, proclaiming he has kept all the commandments, asks Jesus “What do I still lack?”  Jesus of course tells him that if it perfection he is seeking, “sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.  Then come follow me.”

Well, that perfection thing is WAY overrated.  What was the C. S. Lewis option again?

Fifteen years.  In a way it doesn’t sound very long.  I have lived four of those blocks of time, and one of them was post 9/11.  Yet in a way it seems like a long time ago that I was in the office watching things unfold after planes crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.  And just as it seems like it was a long time ago, and then not so long ago, that day seems to have changed a lot of things, and then not to have changed much.  Okay, when I go through security at the airport today it is a lot different than fifteen years ago, and much in the news can be tied back to that day, but did that day really change us, change me?

Ultimately, I don’t know the answer to those questions.  I am still trying to make sense of that day, and of the aftermath of it, and suppose I will spend a lifetime doing so.  But the images are there — the photos of the planes headed to the buildings, the ash covered woman, those who jumped, those who fought, those are all etched in my brain, as is the thought of what was going on in the minds of those in the planes, all of them.  What were they thinking?

To wash that away, I generally end up with the tune Show the Way from David Wilcox rolling in my head giving me some comfort, because while I can’t make sense of 9/11, I can make sense of the song.  And whether it is a statement or merely a wish, “Love can show the way” makes sense.  Lord knows we have tried everything else in the fifteen years since.

Show the Way – David Wilcox

You say you see no hope
You say you see no reason we should dream
That the world would ever change
You say the love is foolish to believe
‘Cause they’ll always be some crazy
With an army or a knife
To wake you from your daydream
Put the fear back in your life

Look
If someone wrote a play
To just to glorify what’s stronger than hate
Would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late?
He’s almost in defeat
It’s looking like the evil side will when
So on the edge of every seat
From the moment that the whole thing begins

It is love who mixed the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone
In this scene, set in shadows,
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way

Now the stage is set
You can feel your own heart beating in your chest
This life’s not over yet
So we get up on our feet and do our best
We play against the fear
We play against the reasons not to try
We’re playing for the tears
Burning in the happy angel’s eyes

It is love who mixed the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone
In this scene, set in shadows,
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way

Writing on people in crisis, in Traveling Mercies Anne Lamott writes: “[S]ometimes you get to see just how little you’re actually in charge of.”  Well, there’s being in charge and thinking I am in charge.  The former is a small list, the latter considerably longer.

Photo taken earlier this year in Cloudcroft, New Mexico .  I ran across the Woody Allen quote later.

It makes sense, doesn’t it.    Hot bands have an opener.  So in that context the Chapter 1 heading of the book of Mark makes sense – “John the Baptist Prepares the Way.”  Only we know how that goes.  As the opening act prepares the way we may still be in the parking lot, or going to find a restroom, or a souvenir tee-shirt.  But we have all likely had the experience, the disappointment of arriving just before the appointed time only to find that there is an opening act, though it was not stated on the ticket.  But sometimes, sometimes we sit and we listen, and, well, we actually enjoy the opening act.  They have something to give us, something of value.

So in that regard, I have always felt a little pity for John the Baptist.  He had the hard gig, being the one who prepares the way being the opening act.  But of course he had something to say, something of value, so long as people listened and weren’t too fixated on the Headliner.

God can and does work in mysterious ways.  That much I am sure of.  It occurs to me  that sometimes, perhaps often, I miss the message because I am waiting for the headliner to deliver it and ignore the opening act.  I am reminded here of Hebrews 13:2:  “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

Reading the Prodigal Son parable this morning I was struck by this passage from the older son (from the King James version. Luke 15:29):

“Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest to me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends.  But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured they living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.”

The interpretation from Peterson’s The Message puts it in modern language:

“Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends? Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!”

It is easy to sit back in judgment of the elder son – too easy.  But as I do so today I feel self-righteous and see his point.  He has been the faithful son, the good son, and feels slighted, understandably so.  Yet it occurs to me that the error the elder son has made, one I make often, is to look at relationships as transactions.  In a transactional world, if you do something, particularly something for someone, you expect (expressly or tacitly) something in return.  Even the younger son was in the transactional mode.  He headed back home with a deal for his father – take me in and feed me and “make me as one of thy hired servants.” Luke 15:19.  The father, of course, would have none of that.  He alone understood that love is not meant to be transactional.  The father says as much when he notes in Verse 31: “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine,” but that seems a bit obtuse to me.  I like the way Radney Foster puts it in Baby, I’m In: “Love doesn’t come with a contract.  You give me this I give you that.”

That is, of course, the ultimate “untransactional” thing – to give anything of value without expecting anything in return.  It seems so, well, so uncertain.  Hell, I’ll say it.  It seems un-capitalist, un-American.  Foster hits it on the head with as to why with the follow up verse: “It’s scary business.  Your heart and soul is on the line.”  Still, it is what I am called to do.  It is one of, if not the, lesson in the parable.

Oswald Chambers writes today (My Utmost for His Highest) of John 7:38 (streams of living water”), of persistence and rivers.  Among other qualities, he notes that a river “is victoriously persistent, it overcomes all barriers.”  Chambers writes:

“You can see God using some lives, but into your life an obstacle has come and you do not seem to be of any use.  Keep paying attention to the Source, and God will either take you round the obstacle or remove it….  Never get your eyes on the obstacle or on the difficulty.  The obstacle is a matter of indifference to the river which will flow steadily through you if you remember to keep right at the Source.”

When a wall arises, some barrier, I tend to be inclined to simply push against the wall.  Granted, I might possibly, eventually push/knock the wall down (picture that occurring by me repeatedly beating my head against it) but there is a lesson from the river – one can be “victoriously persistent” by less direct approaches that are not as egocentric.

It occurs to me that perhaps the best example of this in my lifetime was the ultimate destruction of the Berlin Wall.  Despite countries and armies being supremely able to directly and immediately tear down the wall for nearly thirty years since its creation, despite President Regan’s Brandenburg Gate speech where he urged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” it was ultimately the forces of freedom that were “victoriously persistent.”

Be “indifferent to the obstacle” and “keep right at the Source.”

There are  days when no matter how much I stare and ponder, the thoughts do not come and the characters do not assemble on the screen to make me sound/feel wise.  Most days I fight that and slog on.  Today, I consider the thought that perhaps I currently have nothing meaningful to commit to a page, and accept that.

I keep running into grace, literally, and literately, in things I pick up and read.  Or does grace run into me?  In either event, there are worse things in life.

Today, Anne Lamott writes on grace in Traveling Mercies and I am not sure anyone explains it better – to the extent grace can be explained.  Grace is:

“the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook.  It is unearned love – love that goes before, that greets us on the way.  It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking an most charming charm have failed you.  Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”

Later, she writes: “I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”

All of this can best be summed up in Lamott’s reference to Auden: “I know nothing, except what everyone knows – if there when Grace dances, I should dance.”

It occurs to me that grace takes us from Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation” and “does not leave us where it found us.”  It drops us into a room full of similarly (but differently) imperfect people with the music blasting loudly.  There, then, we should dance.