SAYINGS
Grace Cathedral and Muir Woods are very similar. The same muted silence. Something like the same quality of light. Both contrived, in different degrees, by human intervention. Both contrived by extraordinary leaps of divine imagination. Both containers for whatever “it” is, the magic “stuff” that constitutes the illusive difference between motion and action, energy and spirit, problem and mystery.
God=most real; most holy; most true.
I am grateful for having known the blessing of unmitigated joy…which always includes elements of loss, of surrender, of death.”
I cannot produce fish, but I can produce equipment for the cultivation of myths: boats; rods and reels; stories; knots.
I am reluctantly persuaded to hitchhike on the drama of other peoples’ heroic achievements. I exit at the next interchange, and go home to take a nap.
Upon my retirement I will no longer exist. All my words will have been spoken, all my sentences written- I will be empty space, a hollow place in the world, a grotto chapel chiseled from the walls of a ruined cathedral. No pilgrims arrive, no disciples come…
In reality, the big changes in my life have not come about by my own design, but as the result of chance meetings and graceful emergencies. I struggle to reconcile myself to God’s wild and reckless grace.
Sometimes it takes something like the impact of a car crash to get my full attention.
I don’t like it much, but I cannot escape the reality that God seems to be most active and present in my life when I am most uncomfortable.
By virtue of the limitations of thought and language, anything we say about God is always at least somewhat wrong. Does this mean we have to keep our mouths shut on the subject? Not entirely, but it should increase our humility when doing so.
From my friend and mentor Father James Jones, I learned that not only is it possible for prisoners to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ as truly good news, but, in reality, prisoners are the only ones who can hear it as such. To hear the gospel, we must first understand in what ways we ourselves are imprisoned.
To grasp the full significance of a “baptismal ecclesiology” it is necessary to become more intimate and honest with each other and within ourselves, to confront the demons, ghosts, and idols that afflict us from within and without.
We live in two worlds: one the one hand, we get up in the morning, eat breakfast, and go about our business; on the other, the world has ended, and we are breaking bread with our ancestors and the saints in heaven.
Even the macho God of Israel has a soft side.
There are two mega-metaphors for God: 1) the natural world; 2) human community.
Planet earth is doing to us just what Christ also does: break us down, shatter us, disassemble us- through the events of life, climate change, tectonic shifts geologic or otherwise.
It is understandable that people would hold back from participation in worship. Worship is like looking over a cliff into an abyss of sorrow, joy, brokenness, and infinite possibility… there is a strong temptation to watch from a safe distance, to dabble in spirituality, like watching Bassmasters on TV instead of wading into a river in the dark.
Like Jesus, we must join the grief-stricken crowds and seek to restore their lost joy. Only God can bring this about and most of us make changes only when we have to. In other words, when we are broken down, shattered, disassembled. Then we may be ready to become bread.
Our call: to live gracefully in a world that often seems graceless.
It is as if Christ wandered into our church on Sunday morning in company with some curious street people, wondering what all the fuss was about. “Is that me they are talking about?” he wonders. He looks around and sees the people ill-equipped to ascend the smoke-shrouded slopes of Mt. Sinai, with the earth’s crust shaking and cracking under their feet, and the wild Law-Giver spitting out commandments like molten pebbles from an outraged volcano…And so Jesus volunteers as a tour-guide, as Sherpa, an expert on volcanos who will take them to the fiery rim where they might safely view the face of God.
The odd thing about Christianity is the way “absence” becomes a new sort of “presence”, still vulnerably incarnate, still strangely authoritative.
“Sacred enchantment” involves a child-like capacity for trust, joy, and wonder, as well as a willingness to confront primitive feelings of awe and dread. When there is no healthy community surrounding it, the sacred loses its power to enchant.
When it comes to a relationship with God, mediocrity and a compulsive need for entertainment are greater obstacles than suffering, desperation, and outrage.
