Birthday/Wedding Poem

Birthday/Wedding Poem
For Katie, b. October 28, 1991

“There is no Messiah”
Katie said.
“The world is screwed.”
Come unglued, that is,
Misconstrued,
A deconstructed rood.

But her hair is glamorous,
And her face pale but radiant
In the loud room,
Crowded with decked-out bridesmaids
And feathers.

Hypothetical Mess-iah,
This world is a Mess, and
IF you were to notice, and
IF you had a chance to do that stuff they talk about, you know,
The manger birth, the wedding feasts, the fishing trips, and
IF you had a chance to suffer pain, like we do,
Then maybe you would like it, (not the pain, you understand)
But like the whole idea of US,
Of Katie, of birthdays, weddings, and the rest,
And want to join us in the Mess,
And sit among the foo-foo and the feathers,
Sample wedding-cake,
And Mongolian barbecue,
And take part in other things we do.

Maybe you would.
And we are stuck here, so you should.


Jonathan
October 28, 2007

Dan Treece, friend and priest

Dan Treece, friend and priest

When Dan Treece died, it was like a mountain laid itself down one night between two older ridge lines and breathed its last. Next morning, the view seemed different, but no one could say exactly why.

In younger days Dan had been a geologist of the oil-seeking sort, roaming the western plains in search of promising topography and landowners willing to sell oil leases. But when I came to know him, Dan was a seminary student at the Nashotah House in Wisconsin, where we both studied to become priests in the Episcopal Church.

From my first encounter with Dan there seemed to be something rock-like about him, a gravelly aura of reliability and trust, something borrowed from Montana mountains and Oklahoma plains and translated into the reverent tones and movements of Anglo-Catholic liturgy, sacred gestures and words rendered by Dan in a gruff voice that made it seem as if God were being commanded to do the sacramental thing, sort of ex opera operato in reverse.

Dan was like an anchor, holding me down on the real world when the detached churchliness of seminary life sent me into unhealthy flights of theological fancy. He also taught me how to tie knots.

In those days we were just learning how to fish for bass using Rapala lures, hand carved from balsa wood by Finnish craftsmen for use in deep, clear northern waters very much like Upper Nashotah Lake, where we fished whenever we could. Dan knew how to tie a certain knot that would not slip on the high-tech monofilament line we used in that ultra-clear water, and I use it to this day, wherever I fish.

And whenever I tie that knot, I think of Dan, and give thanks for having known such a solid character and knowledgeable friend.

Dan fell on hard times as he grew older, and I realized things were not right with him on one of the last fishing trips we took together, perhaps fifteen years ago, when I noticed that Dan wasn’t fishing much at all, but mostly sitting on the bank watching me or just gazing into space. At the time I thought he was just being contemplative, but now I think it was because he had forgotten how to tie the knots in his fly-line.

Not long afterwards, Dan was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, and spent his last years in a Nursing Home in Bluff, Utah, where he and his wife, Jean, lived. After learning of his death, I spoke to Jean for the first time in quite a few years. I told her I was going to try to write something about Dan, and that I would send it to her.

I didn’t write fast enough, because Jean also died, not long after we had spoken. She had said nothing about any serious health problems. Now they are both buried there in Bluff, surrounded by the sacred mountains and stark beauty that had so enticed and humbled them.

Having known such grace, how can we lose hope? Even when the knots will not hold and memory fails. It may be that someday I will forget how to tie knots, and how to preside at Mass, and the other things that we so eagerly learned together. I devoutly hope that does not happen to me, but in any case I will still be tracing Dan’s footsteps, following an unknown trail into the mountains, bereft of everything but that which is most real, most holy, and most true.

More things about deer hunting

More thoughts:

Someone told me at a church meeting about how Native Americans believed the deer offered themselves as food for the people because otherwise the people would have perished during the last great ice age.

Offered themselves. The people survived, not because of their great prowess as hunters, nor because of their good luck, or any other factor but that the deer loved them.

I believe it. I enter the woods clad in thermal long johns, gortex, insulated boots, etc, and armed with sophisticated weapons. Those ice-age hunters hunted with sharp sticks and stones, and went naked until they killed something. If the deer did not “offer themselves” as food, our ancestors would have starved to death the first winter.

St. Hubert, the patron saint of hunters, was the greatest deer hunter of his time, but he renounced it all to become a fulltime man of prayer when a huge buck appeared to him in the woods and instructed him to do so.

That is what I need. The buck that offered himself to me as food must appear to me and explain what happened. Until that time, I cannot even renounce hunting a la St. Hubert, because it would be disrespectful, petulant, and leave open the possibility that deer do not offer themselves, that they do not love us, even a little. I cannot accept that conclusion, not only because it empties the world of magic and meaning, but because it would mean the old people all starved to death during the last ice age, and we do not actually exist.

So I am waiting for that buck to tell me I do indeed exist, and why I was not permitted to accept his offering of himself as food.

If this were to occur, it would not be the first time that deer have brought messages to me, although it helps to be asleep.

ONE MORE THOUGHT... the last deer I killed was 17 years ago. I have been at St. Stephen's, Troy, for 16 years. Every November I am (more or less jokingly) informed that a significant number of my parishioners are "praying for the deer." Is there a connection here? 16 years of prayers may have bestowed invulnerabilty upon any bucks in my vicinity. But this would not resolve the matter... what would God want me to learn by granting such prayers?

The Thing About Deer Hunting: November 21, 2007

Here’s the thing about deer hunting.

After seventeen buckless deer seasons, I was in the right place, at the right time. A buck appeared in gathering dusk, 30 feet away and framed unmistakably against a dusting of new snow. I raised my rifle, took aim through the telescopic sight, and fired. The deer bounded away unhurt.

There has to be a lesson, a meaning to this. Had I not put in a seventeen year novitiate, cultivating the thin strand of hopefulness that endures through hours of staring into empty woods? Had I not humbled myself, purified myself, emptied myself of haste and envy? Had I not trained myself to focus on the experience of being in the woods, at peace with myself and in communion with the deer? I can think of no reason why I should have missed that deer. If I had failed to get my gun up before being noticed, or if the buck had come from some unanticipated direction; if I had been dozing, or crinkling a gum wrapper, or any one of a thousand deer-hunting sins I have committed at crucial moments in the past, then I could reproach myself in all the familiar ways.

But this time I did everything right, at least as “right” as I am capable of doing them. So there has to be a meaning here, or else there is no “rightness” to be had.

Meaning 1) There is no meaning. Shit happens. Comment: And that’s not a meaning?

Meaning 2) Jonathan cannot shoot a gun any better than he can shoot a basketball. If it’s such a big deal, take some lessons! Comment: the only lessons that would help would be real-life scenarios with real deer looming out of the dimness, which, at seventeen-year intervals, would not provide much opportunity to practice.

Meaning 3) God is teaching you humility. Comment: I already learned that. In 1988. Ask Bill Moulton. He even wrote an unsolicited letter to the then-Bishop of Vermont to this effect. Can you top that? So don’t be telling me about humility.

Meaning 4) What’s the big deal about deer hunting? It’s not as if something really tragic happened. Comment: When a man who has not had a decent shot at a buck in seventeen years misses a buck standing 30 feet away, it doesn’t seem tragic, it seems stupid. At least tragedy is cathartic. Things like this are… boring? It feels bad enough to ponder, but not so bad as to break him to pieces. So it’s NOT such a big deal, and that relative insignificance is precisely why it has to have a meaning. Get it?

Meaning 5) maybe it was a ghost deer. Maybe the bullet went through him, just to show how the wild things are going to survive the death-dealing blows of technology and urbanization. Maybe, David says, it wasn’t a deer but a person-in-transition, a Webelow maybe, messing with my head on its way to the spirit-world. Comment: what person? It couldn’t be just any Webelow. It would have to be someone who has an agenda for me. I can’t think of who that might be… The former Bishop of Vermont? I doubt it. He never even answered Bill’s letter.

Meaning 6) came to me as I was sitting in the same place the next morning, the first day of the next phase in this long novitiate. “Live gracefully in a world that often seems graceless.” Comment: “That’s what everything means,” says David. Maybe so.

Unwrapping The Rapture: November 8,2007

With Advent impending, the church’s attention turns to somber thoughts of the End-Time, of Death and Judgment, and of the “Second Coming.” With Commercial Christmas upon us, no one else is thinking about such grim matters, but who cares? The church observes Advent anyway.

Well, maybe not “no one else,” as the vast popularity of the Left Behind novels attest. These books, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, claim the Book of Revelation as their authority for their version of an Apocalypse in which, according to New Testament Scholar Barbara Rossing, “the heroes are an elite band of born-again Christians called the ‘tribulation force’ who drive gas-guzzling Hummers and carry Uzis.’

I have not read these books, but I did read an enlightening article in the Fall, 2007 Anglican Theological Review by the afore-mentioned Barbara Rossing, a Professor at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. “The so-called Rapture that forms the basis for the Left Behind novels is not traditional bible teaching,” she writes, “but was rather a nineteenth-century invention of the British pastor John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren.” (p.555)

Yet The Book of Revelation can speak just as powerfully for Christians today as it did to the early church, claims Professor Rossing, “as a diagnosis of the illness of the imperial world, and as an urgent wake-up call about the future.” “What may be ending”, she continues, “is our unsustainable view of life [and]…our task must be to help people envision a way of life beyond empire, articulating God’s joyful and compelling vision for the future.” (p.553)

Rossing agrees that Revelation unveils the “end of the world,” but not in the sense of a destruction of the physical world (kosmos or ge in Greek), but the world as oikoumene, or “world order.” This Greek term is the one used in the New Testament in passages such as Luke 2:1, “…a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled.” It is that “imperial” world order that will be destroyed, not because God is a blood-thirsty avenger, but “through the logic of natural consequences,” (p.559). The heedless exploitation of people and environments has tragic consequences. “It is axiomatic (axios estin).” (Revelation 16:5) But “God wills not to destroy our world but to heal it.” (p.561)

According to Rossing, the Roman Empire represented a “toxic political economy” that “was built on deforestation, mining, slavery, [and] unjust globalized trade…” as colorfully described in Revelation 18:11-19. In contrast, Revelation “leads up to the wondrous vision of New Jerusalem…a vision… not of people being ‘raptured’ away to heaven, but rather, if anything, of God being ‘raptured’ down to earth (Rev. 21) to dwell with us… .” (p.560) “How can we reclaim our vision for planet earth?” asks Rossing. For her, it is “a vision of Jerusalem and all cities as places of justice and beauty, with a river of life flowing through the middle, welcoming all.” (p.561)

All Saints Sermon? Mother Teresa's dark night

thinking abt a sermon for All saints... thinking abt the way popular culture "canonizes" people like Princess Diana & Mother Teresa.Like some of the other commentators, I have been put off by the latter's conventional piety and submissiveness... but more drawn to her since the revelation re her doubt and interior bleakness.
How can God be anything but "absent"? I mean, Jesus was present with the disciples in Galilee, but only for a few years. His real accomplishments only began when he absented himself from the world and left the over-dependent disciples to finally grow up. I'm sure his absence was difficult for them, since they were used to being able to come whining to him over every little thing. But the odd thing about Christianity is the way that "absence" became a new sort of "presence", still vulnerable, still incarnate, and still strangely authoritative.
Maybe Teresa was too close to God. Maybe the God she experienced was so wounded, so crucified, that it precluded any joy, any experience of resurrection. Maybe she was really pissed off about all the suffering she saw in the world, but was too constrained by conventional piety to ventilate. I wonder of her spiritual directors ever urged her to dwell upon psalms such as 44 & others that criticize God in some graphic ways. She might have found some spiritual solidarity with Sudanese Christian women described by Marc Nikkel in WHY HAVEN'T YOU LEFT YET?, women who , in effect, stage protest rallies against (and, paradoxically, alongside) God. The "protest rallies" are prayer services, but they freely express people's anger about watching their children starve in refugee camps. Mother Teresa might have benefited from knowing some women like that.
Maybe she was so close to God she couldn't see God, like trying to see your own eyeball. Maybe she was too busy "being Christ" to see Christ. Anyway, it's too bad she didn't have more fun.
If religion is never fun, it gets depressing. Did she ever see , or enjoy, the irony in her own situation? Maybe that is something we can do for her. Maybe from her present vantage-point she will appreciate it and pray for us, or at least not get too pissed off.

2 Psalmic Compositions August 26,2007

Psalm for Jonathan Daniels d. August 20, 1964

Jon Daniels went down to Alabama * a volunteer, helping black

citizens register to vote.

He left his seminary studies back in Cambridge, * the green hills of New Hampshire,

his boyhood home.

He left the incense-haunted place of revelation, * and took magnificat to be his creed.

Guileless, he lived among the people; * their children trusted him.

Unknowing, he joined the group that went to Hayneville; * nonviolent, they spent the

night in jail.

Released in the morning, they went to get a drink, * Coca-Cola, at the nearby little store.

In the street, Tom Coleman shot him, * and Father Morrisroe his friend.

Tom Coleman, (was he a deputy?), * believing that he did God’s will.

Jon Daniels placed his body * between the shotgun and a teen age girl;

He died instead of her, * white for black, male for female, him for her.

His novice priesthood sacrificed, * his cup spilled, but covenant unbroken.

The reputed deputy went unpunished: * his jurors, twelve white men,

While, from the dust, another justice worked a silent plan * to heal the land.

PSALM OF SACRED IRREVERENCE

O how strange is your wisdom, O God, * how subtle your judgments, how masterful your

process of indirection!

Surely, Coyote is your emissary, * and Raven your plenipotentiary.

When Israel was enslaved in Egypt, Pharaoh commanded the midwives to kill the

little Jewish boys, * as soon as they were born.

Pharaoh commanded Shiphrah and Puah; * he commanded, and they had no choice but to

obey.

But they hastened very slowly, * whenever they were called for.

They explained themselves to Pharaoh, * they offered this excuse:

“The Hebrew women are too fast for us; * by the time we reach the birthing-place, they

have already delivered, and their new-born boys are hid from you.”

Thus were Pharaoh’s plans subverted, * and Israel preserved.

Pharaoh raged and cursed, * but the midwives rolled their eyes and said, “tee-hee.”

How ridiculous are the mighty, O God, * when they set themselves against you!

In vain do they wage war against infants, * and command the merciful to commit acts of

cruelty!

For awhile, they seem invincible, * but history soon forgets them, and robbers

desecrate their tombs.

But let Shiphrah and Puah be remembered, * and their names be praised in Israel.

Wherever childbirth is respected, * and midwives held in high esteem.

Wherever slaves move slowly, * to follow ruthless orders given by the strong.

God’s praise is sung among the lowly, * among those who act with kindness, even

when it places them at risk.

While the cities of the ruthless fall into ruin, * and sand blows over them.

Coyote howls among the fallen pyramids, * and Raven cackles at their tombs.

Exodus 1:15-21