Wiggle Room

Reflections on  Matthew 16:13-23, 1 Corinthians 13:12 and Isaiah 43:19

I use to pride myself on being a light and efficient packer. I was meticulous about folding and organizing, so as to maximize what could be packed in a small amount of space. I could afford to spend time on folding and arranging, because I didn’t have children, or pets, or other obligations for whom I had to pack. At that time, I packed in a traditional suitcase with sturdy sides and a molded, slightly curved top. There was little to no wiggle room, a finite amount of space for all my essentials and that is how I liked it. I would not have preferred a soft-sided duffel over the solid framework of a suitcase. My belongings felt protected in my suitcase … protected from the outside elements, from careless airline employees, from the wind and the rain of the tarmac. Protected also from damage within, from wrinkles and disorganization. You can’t protect your clothing from wrinkles in a duffel bag. Neatness and organization are virtually impossible ... too much wiggle room.

Image: geishaboy50

Life is a lot like packing. We want everything to fit neatly in rectangular boxes, in a finite space that feels secure and safe.  Whether we are packing clothing or organizing our thoughts on life and faith, most of us prefer solid boundaries … toiletries, undergarments, shirts, pants … black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. Life is just easier that way. There is safety and certainty in solid boundaries and who doesn’t long for that?

“But who do you say that I am?”

Peter was certain of his answer when Jesus pulled the disciples aside and asked them that question. Without hesitation he proclaimed, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  And he was right. Jesus said that that insight came straight from God. That's a suitcase you want to pack your faith in, solid, clear boundaries, no wiggle room, or so Peter thought. In Peter’s mind, he knew exactly what was packed within the framework of “messiah.” He was certain of what that title meant and where it would take Jesus and those who followed him. So when Jesus started going on and on about going to Jerusalem where he would suffer and die and on the third day be raised, Peter rebuked him. Peter REBUKED Jesus. There was no room in Peter’s messianic luggage for the suffering and death of the messiah. That did not fit within the clear boundaries of his hard-sided suitcase.

“ … you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.”

Peter went from hero to zero in a matter of several verses and Jesus called him on it. He said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” (I hope never to hear that from Jesus, but who knows.) It seems that Peter, while receiving one truth from God, took that truth and imposed his own solid and safe boundaries around it, leaving no wiggle room for God to work, no room for mystery or surprise, no room for things to get a little messy. And that is a very human thing to do, imposing safety and certainly where none is provided.

"For now we see in a mirror dimly ..."

Today we live in a world that has been created out of the fear and uncertainty that was born from the events of 9/11 and resulted in a world at war against terrorism abroad and at home, as well as a huge economic meltdown right in our own backyard. We don’t feel safe and little seems certain. In such a world how do human beings tend to respond? We respond by shoring up our boundaries, not just our geographical ones, but intellectual ones, pulling tight our framework, boxing in our thoughts, creating certainty were there is none. We draw lines between right and wrong and us and them. We create a false sense of certainty, a false sense of security with opinions that we have packaged as truth. It doesn’t really matter if you fall on the right or the left, both sides are so sure they are right (that they are correct) that they can’t hear each other. So tight are our boundaries that there is no wiggle room for conversation, for dialogue, for new possibilities. All that is left is animosity and finger pointing. 

This is not a new phenomenon and it isn’t just political. It is what we humans do when fear and uncertainty get the better of us. We are just as likely to impose false boundaries around our faith, as we are our politics. Why does God allow bad things to happen? Why another flood, an earthquake, continued economic hardship, why? It must be God’s judgment on what we are doing or allowing. God is trying to get our attention. We need a reason that will make our circumstances make sense. We need a box to store what we see happening around us, so that it will seems less scary and we will feel, in some small way, empowered to do something about it or at the very least to explain it. Out of fear, Christians are digging in their heals on marriage and issues of sexuality, on the person of Jesus Christ and the authority of scripture. The same way Christians of the past had dug in their heels around slavery and the role of women, on issues of the person of Jesus Christ and the authority of scripture (some debates are timeless).

We have always longed for safety and certainty. And it has always been true that faith, just like life, is neither safe nor certain.

Faith is the opposite of fear. Fear draws boundaries and refuses conversation. Faith has soft-sides and wiggle room which fosters dialogue. Fear closes us off. Faith opens us up. Fear manufactures answers when none are given. Faith learns to operate in the midst of ambiguity and mystery. Faith takes risks.  Fear takes none. Faith says, “yes” to God, without inflicting our will on God. Faith holds what God has given us in a duffel bag, not a hard-shell case.

"I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth.  Do you not perceive it?"

With reluctance, I have traded in my sturdy, plastic suitcase with the rounded top, for a discounted, canvas duffel bag with someone else’s initials on it.  I am cautiously risking uncertainly and surprise and even a little wardrobe chaos. I am learning to leave a little wiggle room for God to work. 

Picking Up The Pieces

Reflections on Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, Matthew 19:26 and Patsy Cline

I fall to pieces …

           

Terri’s life was beginning to feel like a country western song.  While that certainly wasn’t her taste in music, it was the music she was raised on, with a father who yodeled to bluegrass and a mother who loved The Grand Ole Opry.   Of late, the radio in her head kept repeating Patsy Cline’s, I Fall to Pieces ... just the chorus, as if there was a skip in that old record.  It was no wonder really.  In the fall of her forty-second year, the business that she had started with her husband failed and they declared bankruptcy.  It wasn’t long after that that his drinking, which had always been a problem, became abusive.  In May, Terri had left her husband and moved in with her parents.  As if that wasn't enough, within a month, Sammy, her twelve-year-old Jack Russell terrier, had to be put down after a sudden series of seizures.  In between jobs, in the midst of a divorce and having lost her most loyal companion, Terri’s life had indeed fallen to pieces.      

The First Lisburn Presbyterian Church had fallen to pieces too, in an instant.  The year was 1981 and Northern Ireland’s troubles were well established and flashes of violence were not uncommon.  On a Wednesday evening in August, as local shops were closing, a car, that had been parked on Market Street, just around the corner from the church, blew up.  In that instant, shops and offices and the church were devastated.  Of greatest concern to the members of the Presbyterian congregation was the lost of seventeen stained glass windows, some shattered and in pieces and some left twisted in unimaginable formations of lead and glass.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

The writer of Ecclesiastes understood life’s propensity for ups and downs.  There is a time and season for everything: the good, the bad and the indifferent.  There is a time for success and a time for bankruptcy.  There is a time for love and a time for marriage and even a time for the divorce, cutting your loses and demanding better for yourself.  There is a time to enjoy the unconditional love of a canine companion and a time to say goodbye.  There are times for love and times for loss.  There are times for independence and leaving your parents’ home and occasionally times to return.  There are times when you have it all together and times when it all falls to pieces.  Life is just that way.  And although it seems at times meaningless and haphazard, there is something more, a thread that weaves hope in and through the broken pieces.

God has made all things beautiful for its time.

The members of the First Lisburn Presbyterian Church couldn’t bear to toss the pieces of broken stained glass in a dumpster as if they were trash.  Even before a plan was hatched, the pieces were gathered, because what was broken was still highly valued.  It wasn’t long before the way forward became clear:  these colored shards of glass, once beautiful could be beautiful again and this time more profound in their beauty.  Soon a new stained glass window was commissioned, a window to be made from the broken pieces.  In 1987 the new window, entitled The Resurrection Window, was dedicated with the following inscription:

The Resurrection Window

“This window is a memorial of the bomb-blast of 5^th August, 1981 and the subsequent restoration of our church and halls.  It is a tribute to our neighbours in shops and offices and their will to overcome disaster.  It is an echo of the motto of this town: EX IGNE RESURGAM (I will arise from fire.)  It is a witness to our faith in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Terri too had broken bits of her life to contend with, her heart and her dreams had taken a hit.  They were in fact shattered, but she was not willing to throw them away either.  Her heart and her dreams were still of great value and so she picked up the pieces and kept them safe until the times and the seasons began to change.  And change they did. 

…with God, all things are possible.

God indeed can make beauty out of broken glass and broken people.  In God’s time, seasons change and beauty is crafted out of pain and even loss.  I don’t know how God does it, but I have seen it again and again.  Broken hearts and broken dreams pieced together by a loving and purposeful hand. The result is never what is expected, but always beyond what one could imagine.  However, God can’t heal what we toss away, only what we gather up.  Sometimes all that separates one season from the next is the picking up of broken pieces. 

Bluebonnets

Reflections on Luke 24:8-11

Having found the tomb empty and being told that Jesus had risen, the women share their epiphany with the other disciples:

... returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and all the rest.  Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles.  But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

***************

In the spring every region has its particular beauty.  I am from the northeast and we glory in the tulips and the hyacinth and then the forsythia, the rhododendron and the azalea.  And that is not even to mention the flowering trees, the dogwoods and the cherry trees.  We are spoiled in the northeast.  There is so much color to our spring.  In other parts of the country spring comes less auspiciously. 

I was in Austin, Texas in April of 2010.  I was attending a conference with friends, two of whom are Texas natives.  I wasn’t expecting much from Texas in April.  What kind of spring could Texas possible have?  I confess, I came with prejudice in my heart.  Texas and I are not on good terms.  I have yet to forgive the state for the disaster that was my sixth grade year.  (That is another story)  So suffice it to say, I was not expecting much from my visit to Austin.  However, I had been told, more than once, that Texas bluebonnets were a sight to see. 

I flew into San Antonio, where my friend, Katheryn, pastors a church.  She picked me up at the airport and we traveled together by minivan to Austin, north on Highway 35.  We had a lot of catching up to do.  There was talk of the glory days of seminary and of course crazy church stuff, friends we had in common and enemies too.  Pastors so rarely get the chance to vent, it was a shame we didn’t have farther to travel.  There was so much to say.  In the middle of one long tale, out of nowhere, Katheryn gasped.  Literally G A S P E D.  I was looking out the passenger side window, away from Katheryn, lost in thought, focused on the trials and tribulations of church service, when Katheryn unexpectedly took in a whole lot of air.  My heart nearly jumped out of my chest.  I was sure that I was no more than a second or two from meeting Jesus face to face and I didn’t want that to happen while I was telling tales out of school.  I snapped my head to the left, in Katheryn’s direction.  She was pointing to her left, out the driver’s side window.  “BLUEBONNETS!” she exclaimed.

Are you kidding me?!  It took a moment before I could make the transition from impending death to wildflowers.  It took more than a moment for my heart rate to drop back to near normal.  In the mean time, before I could respond, I saw them.  Little specks of blue scattered in and among the tall grass on the median strip that separated the northbound and southbound lanes.  Little flowers, not in mass, not bunched together in a blaze of glory, but scattered randomly, haphazardly, maybe two-dozen peaking out in a sea of tall grass.

All I could say was, “oh,” with a tone of relief, rather than awe.  While it was certainly better than death on a Texas highway, and it obviously meant something to Katheryn, to be honest, it was underwhelming.  I have to say, the build up was better than the reality.  I expected a sea of blue outlined in grass, not a sea of grass with specks of blue.  I expected a wildflower patch like you see on the highways in the southeast where dense, purposeful swatches of color are framed by highway on-ramps and exits. 

That is the nature of an epiphany.  It is as individual as our taste in wildflowers.  The Holy Spirit opens one person to a truth, a revelation, through a walk in the woods or the words of a song or a happenstance at work, any of which on any other day or for any other person might convey nothing out of the ordinary and even if that walk or song or happenstance is shared with another, one might have an enormous God-moment, while the other remains unaware and untouched.  Katheryn’s reaction to the beauty she saw in the bluebonnets drew from her a physical and audible reaction, a gasp, as if to say, "If you saw what I just saw, surely you would gasp too."  But I did see what she saw and I was not moved in the same way or even moved at all. 

There is a truth in that simple scenario that speaks to our desire to force our epiphanies on others.  We believe that if we can lead someone to the place of our own revelation, if we can point to what we saw or heard, put words to what we felt or what we had, in a holy moment, come to understand, then others will see or hear or feel or understand it too.  If I was moved, you will be too.  We want to share our epiphanies and we think we can make it happen.  But an epiphany is a work of the Holy Spirit, not a human creation.  It finds us when the time is just right.  It finds us in God’s time.  We cannot manufacture or control it.  It happens to us, not because of us and subsequently we can not make it happen for others. 

We can’t force the Spirit’s hand, just as the Spirit chooses not to force our will.  The Holy Spirit woos individual hearts and minds toward holy truths at God’s pace, a timing synched to our own individual personalities and circumstances.  It may take a lifetime for some to see the beauty of God’s creation on the median of a Texas highway, while others seem ready to oooooh and ahhhhhh at birth.  This, should we grasp it, gives us cause to be patient with those who cannot share our epiphanies, who fail to be impressed with what moves us to the core.  The Holy Spirit isn’t finished with them yet, just as the Spirit isn’t finished with us.  Epiphanies come when we are not looking, not expecting.  They take us by surprise.  They make us gasp.  If a co-worker, acquaintance, family member or beloved friend, cannot share the enormity of your revelation or inspiration, it doesn’t mean that they never will, only that this time is your time not theirs.  This epiphany is for you, a gift from the God who loves you, who knows you, who created you.  Their time will come and perhaps already has with a different message, another insight, something you can’t quite see yet, but perhaps someday you will. 

Our epiphanies are individual affairs.  The truth is, you can lead a person to bluebonnets, but you can’t make them gasp!

Katheryn sent me this picture just the other day.

Apparently a rainy winter has made for a spectacular spring in Texas this year. 

Had I seen this, I may have GASPED!

Easter ... Dreams Lost and Found

Reflections on Luke 24:5

Carrie and John had talked about having children from their first date.  It seemed presumptuous then, but quickly it was clear theirs was a lifetime romance.  They were married within a year and started trying to create the family they had dreamed of right away.  Within six months, Carrie was pregnant and shopping for baby paraphernalia on her lunch hour and John was busy making ready a nursery.  The miscarriage came as a shock.  It just never occurred to Carrie that things would not go as planned.  But her doctor told her it was not uncommon to miscarry a first pregnancy in the first trimester.  So they tried again right away.  Four more pregnancies and four more miscarriages.  The door to the nursery was kept closed and Carrie no longer shopped on her lunch hour.  It was clear that something was wrong.  Still, it felt like a death when her obstetrician sat them down together and told them they would never be able to carry a baby to term.  A dream, their dream, their vision for their future was laid to rest in a doctor’s file. 

Mike dreamed of a career in business, one that would start as soon as he received his college degree, but in the fall of his junior year, his father was severely injured in a tractor accident and he was needed at home to work the family farm.  His dream died and was buried in a cornfield. 

Terri loved to dance.  She often said she lived to dance.  Her childhood was a blur of classes and recitals.  Her parents insisted she attend college, so she picked one with an excellent, extra-curricular dance program and majored in dance and minored in her studies.  Her dream was to dance at Lincoln Center.  Upon graduation she went straight to New York City.  It turned out that her dreams were bigger than her ability.  Audition after audition ended in bitter disappointment.  After two years, she buried her dreams in a city dumpster along with her lucky ballet slippers and headed for home.          

Paula simply dreamed of growing old with Jack, her husband of 19 years.  She loved him more than she thought possible, but it wasn’t enough for him.  Her dream died in family court, the Honorable Judge Raymond Walters presiding over a divorce decree that freed Jack to marry Emily, his co-worker and mistress of nearly three years.  Paula’s dream was laid to rest in the home she was forced to sell in an effort to split their assets.

***************

Jesus wasn’t the only thing sealed behind a large stone, laid to rest in a dark tomb.  With him were buried the hopes and the dreams of all those who had left behind hometowns, jobs, even families to follow the itinerant rabbi who spoke of the coming of the kingdom of God.  Those who followed Jesus had dreams about how Jesus would make the world, their world, better.  Some dreamed of a land freed from Roman rule.  Others dreamed of justice.  Some simply dreamed of enough ... enough food, enough shelter, enough cash to be secure.  Some thought, that with the coming of the kingdom of God, the end must surely be drawing near.  They dreamed of being found on the right side of God’s certain judgment.  Maybe some just dreamed of God, drawn to Jesus because he made them feel close to the divine.  Maybe some were thrill seekers or the chronically curious, regardless, each person had a dream, a vision of how life would be for them, for Jesus, for the world, as they followed him into Jerusalem.  And each of them watched their dreams die with Jesus on that Roman cross just outside the city.  Those dreams where buried with Jesus, as surely dead and he was.

And then came Easter morning.  According to Luke’s gospel, the women, who had followed Jesus’ body to the tomb on Good Friday, whose hopes and dreams had also died with him, having observed he Sabbath, returned with spices to anoint his body.  What they found was the stone rolled away and the tomb empty.  The body was gone.  In its place, two men, perhaps angels, tell them:

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, but has risen.”

Photo by Jaime Owens

It would be an understatement to say that they didn’t see that coming and neither did the other disciples, who received the news from the women as an “idle tale.”  Yet the truth, God’s truth, a truth beyond all hope or expectation, won out in the end.  The one who had escaped the tomb appeared to them again and again over the course of forty days.  And with him, was born, in the hearts of those who followed Jesus, new dreams, bigger dreams, dreams that they could never have dreamed on their own.

***************

Sometimes we have to let what is meant to die, die, so that what is meant to live, can live.  What was laid to rest in that tomb was not what emerged.  The resurrected Lord was glorified; the same, yet changed.  He appeared and disappeared at will.  At times he was recognizable, with the marks of his suffering plain to see, but at other times he appeared incognito, revealed only in the breaking of the bread.  And what of those dreams that were buried with him?  They too had been transformed, changed.  The disciples could never have dreamed of how the world, their world, would change after Jesus’ death.  They didn’t see the resurrection coming … and neither do we. 

Our dreams die too.  Things don’t always go as expected.  Life doesn’t unfold as planned.  But letting die what must die, leaves room for resurrection and with resurrection comes new dreams, divinely inspired dreams that will surely carry us beyond what we could ever imagine on our own.

That is how the kingdom comes.  Dreams lost.  Dreams found.  The world, our world ... changed.  Resurrection!

Good Friday ... A World Without God

Reflections on Mark 15:34

It did not begin with the absence of God.  It began with good news of God’s kingdom come near.  Good news for the poor and the blind and the sick and the weak.  It began with light and life and God was not absent.  But in this last moment, as the story appears to be coming to an end, the light goes out and the miracles cease, no power is left, there is only a cry … a cry so painful that it is hard to hear for what it is.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In this last moment, God was absent.  Jesus was abandoned.  Through Jesus there had been miracles for the sick, the lame and the blind.  There was power to calm the sea and to heal the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years.  There were words to confound the self-righteous and feed the down trodden, but on this day there were no miracles for Jesus.  There was no power to escape this end or ease his suffering.  There were no words to make sense of it.  No words for those who mocked.  No words for those who grieved.  No words to make it all better.  There was only a cry, a cry of abandonment.  My God, my God … why?

There is something very human about wanting to know why.  We are cause and effect people with the intellectual capacity for reason.  And so we push beyond the bounds of our immediate circumstances and we look back and we look forward and we wrestle with the why, so that we can make sense of it all.   That’s all we want really.   We want everything to make sense.

In that moment, Jesus wanted his pain, his suffering, his torment to make sense.  And we want that too.  Why God, would you turn your back on an innocent man, a man whose life was given in the service of you?  Why would you be so fully present in Jesus, only to abandon him in that last hour?  It is not how I would have done it, if the script were mine to write, but of course that is silly.  It is neither my script to write, nor yours and so we sit uncomfortably at the foot of the cross wanting to know why.

I have no answer for that question.  The why of God’s abandonment is left to dangle before us like a moldy carrot on a stick, one that we would like to do away with and be done with it.  I do not know why.  I only know the affect that the anguish of that moment caused on those gathered around the cross and those who through out the centuries have dared to take a long hard look.

Matthew says that the light that had dawned with Jesus arrival had gone out.  He writes that darkness fell over the whole land and with Jesus’ cry the earth shook and rocks split as if the whole created order felt in that moment the absence of God.  It was as if the rejection of Jesus was the rejection of God.  And in that moment we were given a glimpse of a world without God in it.  A world where miracles cease and words fail and humankind is left to grope alone in the darkness and how great is that darkness. 

************************

I remember as a young child when things weren’t going my way.  I would fantasize about running away.  I would pack a small bag and leave.  I would be free to do as I wanted.  Free to play when I wanted and eat what I wanted.  I would just go.  I must have dangled that carrot out in front of my mother a time or two too many, because one day my mother had had it.  “If things are that bad” she said, “so bad that you feel you need to leave, then I will spare you the trouble.  I will go.”  And she did go.  She packed up a small bag and walked out the front door.  She got in her car and she left.  And I got a little taste of life without my mother in it.  Before you bring my mother up on charges of neglect, my father was home at the time, but that was of little consolation.  I was devastated.  I experienced a rush of emptiness that took my little breath away.  I dissolved on the spot and was inconsolable. 

************************

The affect of God’s absence, God’s abandonment of Jesus, in that moment was so palpable that all of creation felt the loss.  The weight of that loss came crashing on all those around.  So great was the terror of that moment that the Roman centurion was heard to say, “Truly this was God’s son.”  As if to realize what they had done.  As if to realize what they had lost.

No doubt, I realized what I had done as a child.  My father was on the phone to my mother within minutes.  She was at the neighbor’s waiting for the signal to return.

This last moment, this last cry from the cross was, thank God, not the end of the story either, but to embrace the end of the story, to find the true wonder and joy in Easter morning, you have to sit in the darkness of Good Friday in a world without God in it. 

It did not begin with the absence of God and it will not end with the absence of God.  But in that dark moment, when God was absent, the whole world changed. 

Time-Out

Reflections on 1 Corinthians 7:14-25 & John 6:31

I knew that if I could just get out of the car I would be free.  It was an unusually warm February morning, almost fifty degrees.  The sun danced on the waters of the Delaware River just a stones throw from the parked car. Leafless trees and a blanket of week-old snow, marked only by the restless wanderings of squirrels and deer, made the invitation to come almost tangible.  There is something about bare winter trees, all bark and branches, unencumbered by summer’s leafy greens, which exposes a truth that is both shameful and beautiful.  These are the days postcards are made of, I thought to myself.  And still I sat, buckled in, keys in the ignition, windows up and doors locked. 

I do not understand my own actions.

 For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

1 Corinthians 7:15

I had come with the intention to walk, just to walk.  I had come to shake loose the cobwebs that had grown thick around my once active imagination.  I had come seeking inspiration … motivation.  I had come to take a first step toward something bigger than the laundry list of daily chores that had occupied so much of the past several months.  It is amazing how fast you can lose yourself in the details of day to day living.  Picking up this and that, keeping three children in clean clothes and erasing fingerprints and toothpaste splatters from bathroom mirrors.  It is a dangerous endeavor to pay too much mind to the details.  Details can be the undoing of creative promise, a convenient distraction, an excuse to hide behind when fear gets the better of us.  Like so many leaves on a tree hiding the brokenness and the beauty that lies beneath, petty details hang like scales before the eyes of those who have forgotten their dreams.

***************

Jesus had big dreams … kingdom-of-God-sized dreams.  Big dreams require lots of work and Jesus was no slacker.  He logged a lot of miles in those sandals, traveling from town to town, healing and teaching and gathering those who longed to share his dream.  Everywhere he went he drew a crowd and soon word of his coming preceded him and crowds formed in anticipation of his arrival.  There was no end to the people who wanted and needed something from him; a dying child, a leprous man, a bleeding woman, the blind, the accused, the cheaters, the religious leaders.  There was so much to do on any given day that twenty-four hours just wasn’t enough.  And still Jesus found time to get away, time to put the to-do list on hold and take a walk around the lake or a hike up a mountain to pray, to think, dream, to find a little inspiration … a renewed sense of motivation.  He gave himself permission to walk away for a short time and he taught his disciples to do the same.  I could be mistaken, but I think those little time-outs provided fuel for the dream.  They helped keep the dream alive and in focus.       

***************

I had almost forgotten my dreams.  Had I forgotten them altogether, I suppose I wouldn’t have been sitting in a parked car facing the banks of the Delaware.  I almost didn’t come at all.  There were so many pressing reasons to stay home.  I had several years’ worth of medical bills to file.  The kitchen floor needed to be mopped.  It always needs to be mopped.  The basement was a disaster.  It has never been otherwise.  The doors to the bedrooms needed to be scrubbed.  Why hadn’t I seen that before?  And when was I going to get around to painting the molding around the new front door … the one that was installed almost a year ago?  I am, it seems, passive aggressive toward my own best interests, subconsciously manufacturing reasons to delay doing the things I most want to get done, so that the anxiety that results renders me unable to get my lazy rear in gear.  It is a cycle of subversion that spirals faster and deeper, until I am dissatisfied with everything and everyone with of course, only myself to blame.  I am aware enough to know that I am, at times, my own worst enemy and that is enough for me to compound guilt with a twinge of self-loathing.

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

1 Corinthians 7:19

The upside is that this is only me at my worst.  There is another side to my slightly complicated self and that was the side that I was hoping to rediscover along the river’s edge.  I just needed to get out of the car.  I had driven fifteen miles from my home with every intention of getting out of the car.  I was dressed for success … sweatpants, sweatshirt, sneakers and my favorite fleece vest with an inside pocket for my iPod, which was charged and ready to go.  There was some forethought here and that was encouraging.  So, even I was surprised when I pulled in the parking lot and found my body at odds with my plan.  Why was it so hard to get out of the car?

Wretched one that I am!  Who will rescue me from this locked car?

1 Corinthians 7:24 (sort of)

*************** 

The disciples had been busy, very busy.  Jesus had sent them out in pairs to preach and cast out demons and heal the sick.  There was no end to the people who wanted and needed something from them.  When they returned and submitted their reports to Jesus they were spent, but the work was not done.  That is when …

Jesus said to the disciples, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.”  For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure …

Mark 6:31

   

There was a Time ...

Reflections on Mark 10:13-16

Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. 

There was a time when I could go to the moon or sail an angry sea or hide from the bad guys all from the inside of a cardboard box.  There was a time when a blanket was all I needed to be a super hero or to build a fort.  There was a time when the whole neighborhood would gather around the back of my house, to the spot in the corner of the driveway, where new gravel was delivered.  All we needed were a few Hot Wheels cars, some Tonka trucks and a garden trowel to build an entire city in one day.  There was a time when my friends and I spent hours and hours in the woods tracking Mr. Brown, the neighborhood nemesis, who hated children and carried a shotgun.  There was a time when I delivered the Gettysburg Address, balancing precariously on the arms of a fire hydrant in my front yard, because President Lincoln’s train was delayed.  There was a time when my best friend and I went on dates with the Mickey Dolenz and Davy Jones riding on the backs of our bikes (remember the Monkees?).  Davy always rode with me.  There was a time when anything was possible.

***************

People were bringing little children to Jesus in order that he might touch them and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 

***************

There was a time when cardboard boxes were for throwing away and blankets were just for keeping warm.  There was a time when the only hot wheels I was interested in where the four wheels of my mother’s gold, Buick Skylark.  There was a time when my biggest nemesis stalked the hallways of my junior high school, armed with words that could really wound.  There was a time when delivering a speech in class made me so self-conscious that I would tremble and stammer and break out in a cold sweat.  There was a time when those I wanted to date, didn’t want to date me and those who wanted to date me, I had no interest in.  There was a time when all the pretend of earlier days seemed silly and strangely shameful. 

Childhood was for play.  Adolescence was to be survived.  And then adulthood came crashing down.  Imagination, long ago replaced by reality, was now but a wistful dream.  Adulthood is the time when cardboard boxes store mementos of my childhood in a dark and damp basement.  It is a time when curling up under my own blanket at the end of long day is the closest thing to free.  It is a time when the reality of owning and maintaining a car or home or anything for that matter is a weighty responsibility.  It is a time when finding my voice and the courage to use it is mandatory.  It is a time when accepting and embracing me, the good, the bad and the various degrees of ugly, is a pre-requisite for relating to anyone; friend, family or foe.  It is a time when how life is takes center stage over how life could be.  It is a time when possibility seems limited.   

***************

But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them,

“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them;

for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

***************

Something is lost and something gained when we leave childhood for our grown up lives.  I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t go back to age 5 or 8 or 13 or even 30.  But there is something we know as children that we forget as adults when we trade imagination for maturity.  There is something about imagination that unlocks the kingdom of God in a way that reason cannot.  Henry Ward Beecher once wrote, “The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.”  The kingdom that Jesus ushered in cannot be seen with reason.  Our adult eyes are far more attuned to all that is wrong and broken in the world, but the eyes of imagination, the eyes of children, look beyond what we see.  They see hope when we impossibility.  They see potential in those we have learned to judge.  They see magic and wonder where doubt has clouded our vision.  With God, we are told that all things are possible and so too with children.  Imagination makes it so.

In the apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth he wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”   That, I think, is a shame. 

***************

“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  And Jesus took them up in his arms, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.

The Plea of a Concerned Parent

Reflections on Mark 9:7

This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!

It happened quickly.  First, her husband of 63 years passed from cancer of the everything and then her children took over.  I mean took over.  It had been years since all five of them talked, let alone worked on a project together.  And what was the project that brought them together … MOM.  With the death of their father, who was going to take care of her?  There were going to be decisions that needed to be made and by God, none of them wanted to be left out that. 

Five siblings, five opinions, but the one thing they all agreed on was that mother couldn’t make it alone by herself in the house she had shared for 53 years with her husband, Ed.  She was going to have to move somewhere where she would not be alone.  She couldn’t live with Vicky, her eldest, because Vicky has a job that requires sixty-plus hours per week, including a Saturday every now and then.  Not to mention the 3 grandchildren that she sits for on Sundays. Jen can’t take her, because she lives on the other side of the country, too far from the rest of the family.  Mike is out because he has his new younger wife and her three teenage daughters to think about and that would be too much to ask of of them.  Kevin is flat out irresponsible, has been his whole life.  Nice guy, but no help.  Sue, the baby at age 43, is willing to take mom in.  She is recently divorced and economically strapped, but willing.  If she takes mother however, the rest will have to supplement her income to make it work, including financing an addition to her home so mom can have a bedroom and bathroom on the ground floor.  The others suggested she sell her home and move in with mom.  But Sue isn’t willing to give up the home she fought to keep in the divorce or to move her twelve year-old son to a new, less accomplished, school district.

photo by Chalmers Butterfield

So Marilyn sits quietly in her living room, next to an empty chair that was Ed’s, as her kids discuss her future in the kitchen.  They think that she is napping.  She has been known from time to time to sleep in her chair, but she is not napping and she hears almost every word.  She hears Jen argue for an assisted living facility and already has several in mind.  Mike and Kevin seem to agree.  Kevin always agrees with Mike, so that is no surprise.  Vicky would like to see her mom with Sue, but is worried about her own retirement and cannot commit to indefinite financial support.  Sue of course has made her pitch and has dug her heels in when Mike suggested, yet again, that this would be so simple if she would just move two towns over and live here in mom’s house.  Kevin wants Mom and Dad’s 1994 silver Ford Taurus and that turns the conversation to who gets what, since it seems a forgone conclusion that mother will have to move.

Marilyn can’t help but tear up as she listens without comment from the living room.  She knows that her children love her and she is so grateful that they are all here, but not one of them has asked her what she wants, what plans she has made, and she has made plans.

***************

Jesus had plans.  He had his sights set on Jerusalem.  As the gospel writers tell it, he knew what awaited him there and he tried to share what he knew with his disciples.  But they would have none of it.  Peter even went so far as to pull Jesus aside and rebuked him.  No doubt the disciples had been talking on the side, plotting and predicting great things for the Jesus they had left their homes and families for and those great things did not include arrest and suffering and death.  They refused to listen to what Jesus was trying to tell them.

Then one day Jesus went on a hike with Peter, James and John.  They climbed a high mountain for a little quiet time, a chance to get away, but when they reached the peak they were not alone.  First, Jesus transfigured before them, framed in light and dressed in clothes dazzling white.  Then Moses and Elijah showed up and engaged Jesus in a conversation as the mouths of the disciples dropped to the ground.  That is when Peter took over.  He started to organize.  “James you go to Home Depot.  John you get the others.  I will lay out camp with three dwellings, one for Moses, one for Elijah and one for Jesus.”  And Peter knew he was right.  Jesus wasn’t going to Jerusalem to die.  He was going to Jerusalem to shake things up, with Moses and Elijah by his side.

But before Peter could hand the credit card to James, a cloud overshadowed them.  A strange combination of darkness and light swirled around them and the voice of God could be heard as if being spoken not in front or behind them, but all around them … as if God where cupping the faces of the disciples with God’s own hands in an effort to get their attention.  “This is my Son, my Beloved; listen to him!” 

“Listen to him!” the plea of a concerned parent and the command of an omnipotent God. 

How often do we make our plans and set them in motion without listening to the divine whisperings of the Holy Spirit longing to get our attention?  How often do we stumble into a future that is not meant to be, like bulls in the proverbial china shop, leaving hurt feelings and broken promises in our wake, making messes that damage and stain us and those around us?  How often do our actions serve as a rebuke of God and the life that God has called us to?  How often do we refuse to listen because we are afraid of what we will hear?  How often do we think that we know better?

***************

Marilyn has a plan.  She and Ed had finalized it in those last weeks of his life, but no one has bothered to ask.  As her children go on and on in the kitchen, she sits in her chair and wonders how she will ever get their attention and if, in the end, it will matter.

Life Lived in Reverse

Reflections on Luke 17:32

Remember Lot’s Wife.

We moved a lot when I was a kid.  Pittsburgh, Houston, Kansas City and back to Pittsburgh all in the three and half years between sixth grade and the end of the first semester of ninth grade, the prime wonder years.  I was excited to leave the neighborhood I had grown up in in exchange for what my mother promised to be a grand adventure.  Only it never occurred to me how hard adventures could be.  I was shyer than anyone imagined I would be.  I didn’t mix well at my new school, in a new state, in a new neighborhood with no kids my age.  I was miserable and I think I made my parents miserable too.  In six months we were off to Kansas City … another new school, new classmates, and a new neighborhood.  This time I tried a little harder.  The end result was that I was cornered on the playground by a welcome wagon of bullies who promised to make the new kid miserable, and I was, for a time. 

Sixth grade turned to seventh and things got better.  It took awhile, but I made friends, good friends.  In Kansas City my neighborhood was huge and my school friends lived within a short bike ride of my house.  It was the seventies so you didn’t need a play date scheduled by your mom to visit your friends.  My new posse of girlfriends expanded with the onset of puberty to include boys.  On weekends we gathered in rec rooms and basements playing records and dancing to the Bee Gee’s Saturday Night Fever and Gary Wright’s Dream Weaver album.  There was always drama, but it was harmless, junior high, drama …who liked whom and who asked whom to dance.  We passed notes at school and tied up our parent’s phone lines.  My first official boyfriend was the older brother of a member of my posse.  We didn’t talk.  We just slow danced at night and passed notes by day.  I was in love.

Then it was time to move … again.  Chuck and I had finally found each other and my Dad wanted to move us back to Pittsburgh.  I pouted, slammed doors, refused to be pleasant, isolated myself in my room for days, maybe weeks, but we moved anyway.  We packed the Ford Grand Torino Station Wagon and drove east for two days.  I cried the whole way.  I wrote Chuck Gibson all over by white Keds sneakers between sobs.  I was determined to me miserable in Pittsburgh.  And of course I was.

***************

Jesus would have told me to remember Lot’s wife, just as he reminded the disciples in Luke’s gospel.  Of course that wouldn’t have meant anything to me as a fourteen-year-old.  My Sunday school education was not substantial.  It would be a few years or more before I would become aware of the fate of Lot’s wife as they packed their bags and headed for the hills.   God called them forward, told them it was time to move on, but Lot’s wife looked back.  She lost sight of the present and the promise of the future and instead looked longing over her shoulder and ceased to exist.  She crumbled on the spot.   

I get it.  There is nothing worse than the feeling that the best is over … that the best times have past … that the best love is lost … that the best success has been had … that nothing will compare with days gone by.  There is nothing sadder than the conviction that nothing ahead of you will match what is behind you.  I understand her need to look back.  She wasn’t fleeing bad times.  She was saying goodbye to the good times.  She was leaving behind the home her children grew up in and her own circle of friends.  She was leaving what she knew and heading into the unknown.   Okay, so Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t the ideal location to raise a family, but still so much of her life happened there.  And besides, the minute the present becomes the past it is open to reinterpretation and of course romanticization. 

It is the sin of nostalgia.  Nostalgia comes from the Greek roots meaning homecoming and pain.  It is an ache for the past, often a past that did not exist, at least not as we remember it.  Many of us are prone to selective memory and embellishment that paints the past rosy in comparison to the present.  As a result we move through life not face forward, but with necks stretched back, looking over our shoulders and longing for the good old days.  It is a life lived in reverse, which come to find out is no life at all, if the lesson of Mrs. Lot is to be believed.  She looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.

***************

I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt, but I missed out on much of the life that was happening all around me.  I remember little of the end of my ninth grade year and even less of my tenth grade year, because there isn’t much to remember.  I spent the better part of that time mourning what I had left behind … remembering, recasting, projecting a future that would never be.  I was a silly adolescent, but this lesson isn’t just for the young.  It speaks to anyone who believes that the present pales in comparison to the days gone by; who fears that life has little left to offer.  It is a lesson for all who are living life in reverse.  God calls us to face forward.  God gives us life in the present and hope in the future and what is left for the past?  Simply gratitude.

I am about to do a new thing: now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Isaiah 43:19 NRSV

Passing Through

Reflections on Luke 19:1-10

Jesus was entering Jericho and was passing through it.

Almost ten years ago now, Lisa lost her husband in a tragic kayaking accident.  She was left alone to raise their two young daughters.  It is one thing to be a single mother by choice, but this was not Lisa’s choice.  It is also one thing to be single by choice, but this again was not Lisa’s choice.  In one catastrophic moment Lisa lost her husband and her parenting partner.  She was, in an instant, both alone and playing the role of mother and father.  It was clear that life was not going to wait for her to grieve.  The work of grieving would have to been done in tandem with changing diapers, shuttling to and from play dates, packing school lunches and answering the question, “where’s daddy?”

Every day is hard in its own way when you are grieving the loss of your spouse, but Lisa found Valentine's Day to be particularly painful.  A day that celebrates love and companionship only pulls at the emptiness, which now each day must be negotiated.  Somehow that day would need to be redeemed.

***************

Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem.  He had a divine appointment.  According to Luke’s gospel he knew what was waiting for him there.  He knew he was both following God’s lead and heading into a hornet’s nest.  He said as much to his disciples.

“See, we are going to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished.  For he will be handed over to the Gentiles and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon.  After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.”  (Luke 18:31-33)      

It was a tall order and he was resolved to see it through.  He was on his way to Jerusalem when he passed through Jericho.  He didn’t have an appointment in Jericho.  There was nothing recorded in his calendar, no reason to stop.  He was just passing through on his way to somewhere else.   Still, a crowd gathered to get a look at the guy whose reputation preceded him.  The miracle-working storyteller was a hit wherever he went.  Even Zacchaeus, that dirty, rotten, rich, Roman sympathizing, crooked tax collector came out to get a look.  He even climbed a tree to get a better look (add short to his resume).  But Jesus didn’t have a story or a miracle for the crowd.  Jesus was just passing through.  He was just passing through on his way to somewhere else when he noticed Zacchaeus in that tree.

The rest, as they say, is history … or perhaps legend … or whatever.  It is the stuff of Sunday school songs.  Jesus, who came to bring good news to the poor, spots the one the rich guy in the crowd, sees something redeemable in him and invites himself to dinner.  Zacchaeus was changed, maybe even transformed by the encounter, for Luke tells us that salvation came to Zacchaeus’ house that day.

***************

For a widow on Valentine’s Day it would be easy to plow through the day, just passing through with blinders on, filling it with all the routines of just another day in order to survive the day and move on.  But you can’t redeem what you don’t acknowledge.

For seven years now, Lisa has made it her habit to embrace the day, to live fully in it.  Not in the arms of a new husband.  Lisa has not remarried.  Still, she has found in Valentine’s Day an opportunity to reach out to others who have lost a spouse and know the irreparable emptiness that that leaves behind.   

This year on Lisa’s list was a secretary at her daughter’s school.  Last fall, Lisa became aware that the woman had lost her husband.  She was one of four stops on Lisa’s Valentine list.  Lisa stopped at her house with flowers in hand only to find no one at home.  She debated about leaving the flowers on the front step and that would be that, but decided otherwise.  She was going to check with a neighbor to make sure she wasn’t away, but halfway up the neighbor’s driveway she changed her mind and decided to head home where she would give the woman a call.

At home with the phone book in hand, she discovered that she had visited the wrong house.  Without hesitation she jumped back in the car.  The woman was at home.  She thought Lisa was a florist making a delivery on behalf of her grown children.  Lisa explained that her own daughter was a student at the school and that she had become aware that the woman’s husband had passed away the previous year.  Lisa explained further that she too was a widow and knew firsthand how hard Valentine’s Day could be.  She invited Lisa in and burst into tears.  She shared with Lisa what Lisa already knew about how hard the day had been, filled with the ghosts of the past, memories, good memories that made her heart ache all the more with the loss.   She was wrapped in a prayer shawl that some friends had knit for her and had been praying just before the doorbell rang that God would give her some relief.      

***************

You can’t redeem what you don’t acknowledge.  Jesus was just passing through on his way to Jerusalem when he acknowledged that wee little guy in a tree.  And Lisa, rather than merely surviving another Valentine’s Day in order to get through it, acknowledge it, embraced it and found a way to redeem it, for herself and for a stranger.