Meditation on a Drawing by Fritz Eichenberg

Born in a manger

Announced by angels

Tracked by comets

Greeted by shepherds

Welcomed by gentle animals

Sought by ruthless kings

Found by curious magi

Adored by generations:

Remember the children

Save the church

Calm the avenger

Heal the rivers

Restore the fish

Reconcile religions

Restrain demons

Depose idols

Deploy angels

Whatever it takes.

CHRISTMAS, 2011

May mirth and merriment prevail in your households and in your hearts.

Jonathan+, Nancy and

Jason, Jayden, & Teagan (Troy) Caitlin & Michael (New York City) James (Troy) David (Detroit) Zack (Flint, MI, soon to be Bedford, IN) Katie (East Lansing, MI)

Hunting and Hunted

Advent: Hunting and Hunted

Why is it that I seem to flourish during Advent?

“It’s because he gets to go deer hunting,” you are thinking, and that is partly true.

Yet there is more to Advent, even for someone who cherishes the rituals of deer camp only a

little less than those of the church year. As the weather grows more harsh, something in the heart

of the world seems to soften. As the leaves wither and dry, something in the trees comes alive, as

if listening. As the first snows soften the landscape, something warms the spirit, just as a

woodstove warms a frigid room.

“There he goes, back to deer camp again,” you may be thinking. But it was in Advent, 1958,

that I first attended a silent Retreat, and first allowed myself to become submerged in the flow of

divine reality around me. It snowed heavily during those three days, wrapping the Retreat

Center in a shroud of silence. For the first time, I found myself spending long periods of time

sitting quietly in church with no service in progress, no organized activity at all, only the tangible

sense of a silent and living presence.

If you think that was odd behavior for a sixteen-year old, remember that I was used to sitting

for hours in the woods listening for the sound of a deer’s approach. Listening for God isn’t that

much different, except that you don’t wear blaze orange and you don’t have the intention of

shooting God if given the opportunity.

But in Advent we are “hunting” for God, and, amazingly, God comes “hunting” for us. So the

hunter becomes the hunted, stalked by a ghostly presence. Yet this powerful being is the most

gentle of predators, the kindest of adversaries. To be swallowed by God is the happiest of fates.

To be ambushed by God is to cast out all fear. To be preyed upon by God is the epitome of

prayer. To die with God is to be reborn with Christ at Bethlehem, in Michigan, or in Paradise.

These may not be your Advent thoughts, nor were they mine in the winter of 1958. But every

Advent has its own surprises, its own brand of silence. All we have to do is listen.

Random Reflections: The "Great O Antiphons"

Random Reflections: The “Great O Antiphons”at Christ Church Cranbrook, 2^nd Sunday of Advent, 20-11

Latin phrases often evoke strange, and sometimes bizarre, associations for me. Last Sunday at Christ Church Cranbrook, as I listened to the choir chant the traditional Advent “O Antiphons”, these are some of the random thoughts that occurred to me, and I wrote down…

O sapientia. O wisdom. O intelligibility. O logic. O sanity. O mathematical equations. O sentence structure and syntax. O coherence and structure and form. If objects are indeed intelligible, “does not the intelligibility of the object presuppose an intelligent ground?” (Bernard Lonergen)“O O O O that Shakespearian Rag— It’s so elegant So intelligent…” (T.S. Eliot) O sapientia, “quae ex ore altissimi prodisti, and covered the earth like a mist.’ (Ecclesiasticus 24:2) O O O O.

O Adonai. O mighty. O fire of the Burning Bush. O consumption unconsumed. O point dimensionless, at which Being emerges, unexplained, from Nothing, at this moment coaxing atoms into material existence from the vortex of whatever whirls at their center, at this moment spinning us off from the limitless center, spinning us off as atomic dervishes, whirling mightily, whirling on the seamless line where Nothing ends…

O radix Jesse. O root. O radish. O turnip. O beet. O rutabaga, O root vegetables of every kind, buried safely under earth and snow, beyond the need for retaliation or revenge, beyond the need to hurt or destroy in all the holy mountain, feeding us far into the winter, feeding us when all other food has failed, feeding us jam noli tardare – never tardy, rarely served in fashionable restaurants, barely noticed by government inspectors, ever abundant, ever prodigal, ever rooted/radix/radical/ and real…

O clavis David. O key. O combination to the lock. O password. “You open and no one closes; you close, and no one opens”. Sedentum in tenebris et umbra mortis… sedimented in darkness and under the umbrella of death… buried under yards of earth alongside the beets and radishes… buried, but here unearthed by the descent of a mighty silence, its power unlocked by chant, loud organ, and this clavis David…

O oriens- O rising dawn. O morning star. Directional orientation for every nomadic tribe, gravitational force without magnetism, center without circumference, beloved of navigators, goal of every compass, hope of the lost …(disoriented in thick woods, I came across my own boot-prints in the snow, consulted my compass, saw how lost I had become, saw, astounded, how much counterintuitivity would be required to become unlost again. From whence did all these benign themes originate? Hope for the lost…release of prisoners… kindness to strangers… peace among peoples… food for the hungry…water in drought-stricken places… a universal vision of gentleness and mutual peace… how did such notions come to swirl together with such force within the literature of one small middle-eastern country?... How do such far-fetched notions come to resonate so powerfully with us still?

O Rex gentium… O ruler of the unruly and the alien, the unbelievers and the unsaved…O rock and cornerstone…lapisque angularis…

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

W.B. Yeats, Lapis Lazuli

We are the long-legged bird, lifted by the music for a bird’s eye view, lifted high above the angle of the rock, our lapisque angularis, which is our listening-post, our perch, our launch pad, and, if we ever hope to come to earth again, our landing-zone.

O Emmanuel… O God-who-is with, with us, with it …with our children in an unknown future, with these singers in a flourishing past, with us witless pilgrims come from outer space, washed up unexpected on what Holy Isle?

King of Bullies

CHRIST THE KING OF BULLIES

I can’t stand bullies. Once, when our daughter Caitlin was in Middle School, I was watching her play soccer and overheard the opposing coach tell his team to “trip those other girls.” (In fact, he said it loud enough so everyone in the stands could hear). Without thinking, I said to Nancy and our other children sitting beside me, “If somebody trips Caitlin I’m going to burn his car.” No one got tripped, and I have never burned anyone’s car, but my violent aversion to bullies remains. Thus, I take great pleasure when, at the end of each episode of “CSI: Miami” or “Criminal Minds”, the depraved bad guys get blown away by Horatio Kane or some other representative of heroic goodness.

I think many people feel a deep-seated urge to see evil brought down and righteousness vindicated for all to see. In the First reading for “Christ the King Sunday”, the Prophet Ezekiel reflects this same concern when he depicts Israel’s vindication in terms of a shepherd who destroys the bullying fat sheep and establishes safe, bully-free pastures for those who had been oppressed.

“Thus says the Lord GOD: I shall judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide… I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy.” (Ezekiel 34: 20/21, 16)

You might say that God is going to punish the false shepherds of Israel by burning their cars.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The summer I turned 18 I went to work for a church agency in Chicago that ran a summer camp for troubled boys. Some of the campers were the same age as me, and some were expert bullies, but I can state with certainty that all of them had been bullied themselves, some by abusive or negligent parents, some by the system, and some just by life. Knowing these boys as I did, it became impossible for me to demonize them. It seemed clear that, if there was to be any healing, any change in the cycle of violence, it would not be the result of any form of revenge or punishment, much less burning someone’s car.

I would say the same thing about the way God works. If Christ is “King” in any sense, it is because he establishes an entirely different sort of kingship. In Ephesians 1:20, we read how “God put [the divine] power to work to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion…[and] put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things…”. That sounds like standard kingship language, except for the part about “far above.” I take this as an indication that the “power” of Christ is of an entirely different sort than that which, as Mao Tse Tung put it, “grows out of the barrel of a gun”. Christ is a king who rules from the cross, without armies or police to enforce his decrees. His authority is exercised in forgiving, healing, and blessing, without coercion, and without revenge.

In one way or another, we are all bullies, and therefore have lost all claim to serve as righteous avengers. Christ the “King” appears among us as a “Good” shepherd, seeking out the lost and restoring the scattered flock. When he himself is scapegoated and bullied, Christ the nonviolent Lamb absorbs the violence and renounces vengeance. When the resurrection occurs, it does not result in some vast public vindication of his kingship, but only in confirmation of what his message had been all along: nonviolent discipleship, compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation. Christ is a “king” who appears incognito, hungry and in need of food, sick and in need of treatment, homeless and in need of shelter. According to the Gospel reading for Christ the King Sunday, there is only one way to become a citizen of this kingdom, and that is the way of compassion. “What you have done to the least of these, you have done to Christ the King.”

As always, there are ways we can exclude ourselves. We can insist on our prerogative to burn the cars of those we regard as bullies, and then expect that we ourselves be exalted as heroes. We can insist on the standard version of kingship, power, and dominion. It seems clear that God will let us do that, but in the gospels it is even more clear that God will not desist from subverting our violent righteousness, exposing our pretentious rage, and enticing us into a kingdom “prepared before the foundation of the world.”

“…it is most profound, most provocative, at…the level at which the author comes fully to realize, to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts, nothing avails, not even art; especially art.”

John Banville, in a review of Blue Nights, by Joan Didion, New York Times Book Review, November 6, 2011.

After my father’s death, Paul Mueller (a friend of my brother’s, and great admirer of Dad’s), wrote a poem, The Burial of Henry Sams, that summoned the full weight and wonder of that occasion for me. This was “art”, and I suppose it did “avail” against that awful onslaught, in much the same way as did the huge song of frogs and insects that drowned out conversation as we sat by the River the night after Dad’s funeral. But what does it mean to “avail”? And does the croaking of frogs constitute “art?” I remember reading somewhere in a Norman Maclean story, “I felt my life turning into a story,” a quotation I have not been able to locate since, so it may be apocryphal, especially since I know exactly where, in A River Runs Through It, Maclean wrote “But life is not art.”

The author James Agee describes how he lived with families of North Alabama sharecroppers as he collaborated (with photographer Walker Evans) on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In the book Agee agonizes over his self-perceived role as voyeur, as parasite, and provocateur, invading the privacy and presuming upon the hospitality of poverty-stricken hosts, while hijacking their hard-won dignity and pride in the name of “art”. To the extent that a writer, or photographer, or preacher, swoops down onto human events like a buzzard onto road kill, it is parasitical, like any other exploitive enterprise. Perhaps it is this kind of self-scrutiny that John Banville perceived in his review of Joan Didion’s book, the awareness of a moral priority, even a majesty that “life’s worst onslaughts” bring out in human beings overshadowing any attempt to use or exploit it, artistic or otherwise.

In The Gospel of John, Jesus says, “this man was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” (John 9:3) Does the revelation of God’s healing power “avail” against the enormity and randomness of human suffering? Again, it depends on what is meant by “avail”.

Neither miraculous healing nor artistic commentary can remove the contingency of the world and the helplessness of the human condition. In his poem, Paul Mueller wrote of my mother, “her consolations broke my heart,” but he also knew that her eleven-year widowhood was a time of inconsolable loneliness, a loneliness that prompted her to write as follows…

AFTER DEATH

“I shall but love thee better?

Yes, I do. But must despise the term.

Better is blacker than our ancient car.

Better is sadder than our old dog’s death.

Better is saltier than all my tears.

Better is longer than the longest day,

The longest week, month, year.

Better is wakeful in the nightingale hours.

Better is dreaming of you as you were.

Ah yes I love thee better, bitter, better, now.”

Such words do nothing to remove suffering. For me, the effect is more the opposite: they invite me deep into my mother’s inconsolability, and into her transcendence of it, while it yet abides. Jesus did not heal the Man Born Blind as a stunt, to demonstrate divine power over adversity. Indeed, to do so could serve to deepen alienation and despair, since the obvious question is, “why did God wait so long to act?” Or, even more obvious to me, “What about all the other blind beggars?” Jesus’ healings, in addition to being expressions of compassion, were expressions of solidarity with all those scapegoated and cast out as “sinners” by the pious. In doing so he, symbolically, gouged out his own eyes, forged a bond with every blind beggar and forlorn widow, and foreshadowed his own rejection and scapegoat’s death upon the cross.

So the artist is not a Savior, whose work “avails” to insulate us against life’s worst onslaughts. Not even The Savior is a “Savior” in that sense. The best writing, and preaching, and praying, lifts, expands, and deepens our experience of the world, so that we do feel “our lives turn into stories”, and our hearts swell and break and disappear and resume their beat again, and the night-song of frogs and bugs becomes a choir, and the works of God are revealed in us.