Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
I love the joyful enthusiasm of this household.
Despite the hint of lower economic status suggested by their location next to a convenience store on a busy avenue, they cheer us every year with the “reckless exuberance” of their Xmas lights.
Blessèd be,
Michael
In Praise of Self-Deprecation
by Wislawa Szymborska (born 1923)
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.
The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.
The killer whale’s heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.
There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.
—translated from the Polish
by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. McGuire,
republished in A book of Luminous Things:
An International Anthology of Poetry,
edited by Czeslaw Milosz
Some Questions You Might Ask
by Mary Oliver
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?
—Published in House of Light
and New and Selected Poems, Volume 1
This past year, I’ve been using C.S. Lewis’ anthology of selections from the writings of George MacDonald as my morning devotion. Mom gave me a copy of this book years ago, and this is probably the third time I’ve read through it. Here is a link that tells about MacDonald and his influence on Lewis.
Yesterday it happened that I read selection 305:
Difficulties
It often seems to those in earnest about the right as if all things conspired to prevent their progress.
This, of course, is but an appearance, arising in part from this, that the pilgrim must be headed back from the side-paths into which he is constantly wandering.
There is a core thing I am learning (the hard way) about living on God’s path:
Pay attention, both outwardly and inwardly,
acknowledge when, in either realm,
I observe something which seems not as it ought to be,
and then center down
and wait for clearness
about what is the next thing to do.
Not the whole solution,
just the next thing.
It is a scary approach to life. It feels as if it runs counter to our biologically hard-wired instincts of self-protection.
In fact, though, it is a way to freedom.
What human consciousness adds to our inbred animal wisdom is the ability to imagine and plan—yet it also adds, on the dark side, the ability to worry and despair.
Animals just do the next thing. God has created them to do the best next thing instinctively.
God has created us the same way as well. Our added gift of consciousness enables us to avoid anticipated dangers and to redirect our paths toward promise. Yet consciousness also distracts us from what God would show us, were we attending.
Human animals are no different than other animals in one sense: we can only put one foot on the path at a time.
My sense is that MacDonald is writing about how, very frequently, we get distracted onto these side-paths and need to stop, center down, remember that God is present with us, and wait until we once again see the light we were following and take another step in that direction.
The New Testament Greek word which is usually translated as “sin” is ἁμαρτία (hamartía). Is is more accurately translated as “missing the mark,” as one does in archery when one’s aim is distracted.
Ever since I learned this in early 1970s, I have made that substitution in my own thinking. Rather than obsess over “sin” as a moral failure, I challenge myself to note as soon as possible—sometimes just with chagrin, and sometimes with shame, repentance and amends-making—whenever I have “missed the mark,” either through inattention and distraction, or through willfully looking toward the wrong target.
Difficulties call my attention to my missing of the mark.
They don’t necessarily show me how to aim correctly. Resuming MacDonald’s metaphor, they don’t necessarily show me the easiest way back to the path.
Yet if it becomes my habit to stop, center down, remember that God is present, and wait, it usually happens that I notice God’s light shining on the next step.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be,
Michael
The notion in some traditions that saints are just a few especially pure and devout people is countered in others by the notion that any sinner who makes good faith efforts to live in God’s kingdom can be counted among the saints.
Pastor Ed Searcy of University Hill Congregation in Vancouver writes:
When Paul writes to his distant congregations and addresses those letters to the saints, he is not singling out certain particularly faithful members of the church…[He] writes to everyone in the congregation….
The saints are those who live with aching brokenness, great grief or chronic despair and yet know the saving love of the God met in Jesus.
Three years ago on this blog, I wrestled at length with Jesus’ parable of the weeds in the field (sometimes called “the wheat and the tares”).
At the heart of that struggle was my deep doubt that Jesus himself, Yeshua, would center his teaching parables—as Matthew claims in his interpretation of this one (Matt. 13:36-43)—on the matter of who is or is not included in the kingdom.
At the heart of my faith is a visceral awareness that Yeshua challenges us any time we try to exclude anyone based on our human notions of what G-d wants. To me,
Yeshua’s parable focuses upon how we are not to try to determine which are weeds and which, wheat. How we are to nurture the growth of every plant in the field. How it isn’t our business to pluck out those whom we don’t believe should be in the Kingdom.
Another way of considering this matter arises out of a tradition of Pagan Europe. Here’s an excerpt from an old Walhydra’s Porch post about the “Dumb Supper“:
The final harvest [of the year] came right at the cusp of Winter, around October 31st. But this was also when people believed the veil between the living and the dead was the thinnest, when those whom Death had harvested could return to share a meal with their loved ones.
In Gaelic, the festival was called Samhain, “Summer’s End.” It was Christianized as All Hallows Eve (Hallowe’en), preface to All Saints Day.
Folk gathered for an end-of-season feast to which they believed they could invite the dear departed by setting out extra places of food and wine. The dead could speak through the stories, jokes and laments their survivors told about them. They called it a “Dumb Supper.”
Granted, the dead these folks spoke for were most likely people they knew and cared about. Yet what resonates for me in this practice is the acknowledgment that mortality need not separate us. It is fear of mortality which separates us.
During my counseling career, I sometimes dealt with particularly hurtful behaviors on the part of a clients. I sometimes had to fall back on a counter-intuitive principle of therapy: however hurtful a behavior might be, that person believes there is a good reason for the behavior. The challenge is to help the client discern what that “good reason” is, and then to help him or her find humane means to address the need—or to cope with that need remaining unmet.
It is fear of mortality which separates us.
I believe that, at some level, everything we do which is hurtful to ourselves or others is ultimately motivated by fear of death. Of loss. Of the anticipated pain we imagine death and loss will bring us. Even the person who hurts me or my loved ones most brutally, most sadistically, is at root doing so to “avoid” death.
I’m not excusing anyone by asserting this. What I am doing is challenging myself to let G-d be the judge over if and when and how that person might enter the kingdom.
Meanwhile, I—we, all of us—do our best to sit humbly and tenderly with each other on the friendship bench, waiting for the openings which show us how to forgive and care for each other.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be,
Michael
