In the August 7 Travel Section of the NY Times there was a long story written about fly fishing on Montana's Big Blackfoot River. The author was drawn to this location by reading Norman Maclean's novella, "A River Runs Through It", and the Robert Redford film version of the same. Near the beginning of the article the author writes about fly fishing on the Big Blackfoot, "I am not  religious person, but I'll be damned if I didn't feel something holy."
    He is not alone in his perception of the holy. From the time my brother and I, and our father as well, first read "A River Runs Through It" in the 1970's it has served as a kind of 5th gospel for us, putting into words a whole set of intuitions, values, and memories that have conveyed whatever it is that the theological word "grace" is supposed to mean. There is no "something" about it.
    My earliest "religious experience" came at about age 6 when my father returned from fishing in the Delaware River with a stringer full of Smallmouth Bass. I was astonished to learn that these mysterious creatures came from a region beyond our sight, from beneath the shining surface of the water-world, and that they could be coaxed to reveal themselves by engaging in a traditional ritual called "fishing", and that one could learn the elements of this ritual from practitioners such as my father, who would teach me. Hence I came to know that if I was quiet, and patient, and humble, as well as skilled, I could invoke a relationship with beautiful beings from an unseen realm, and they would feed me, if need be, and, in any case, bless me.
     Later, in my teens, when I learned about "God", and "grace", and the techniques of liturgy, it all seemed quite familiar, although I had been hitherto innocent of religion. Prayer, it seemed, was much like casting a fly out onto the opaque surface of the world, in anticipation of affirmation from unseen depths. Sacred behavior, the solemn movements and gestures, the exaggerated  respectfulness shown to participants and symbolic objects, all reminded me of rituals I had performed many times by streams and rivers. So it was not "faith" that informed my fishing, but rather fishing that informed my faith.
     There is a holiness that is invoked by fishing that comes, I suspect, from the embedded memory of our ancestors who, by accident or by grace, discovered the saving mystery of the fish. They discovered that by a combination of skill and luck they could lure fish to their nets and spears and hooks, and find themselves blessed and supplied with food. They could lure the fish, but they could not create them: that was a gift, and it astonished them and filled them with gratitude. It is from this astonishment and gratitude, most likely mingled with fear that the gift might be withdrawn, that "religion" came to be. So not only "something" holy, but rather, the source of holiness and genesis of sacred meaning.
   
   
    In the film-version of "A River Runs Through It" there is a sequence where Norman Mclean is with his father and brother beside the river after an abundantly successful day of trout fishing. "My brother stood before me, " Norman's voice recites, "not on a bank of the Big Blackfoot River, but suspended above the earth, free from all its laws, like a work of art." Or, I would say, like an icon, or a sacrament.
    That occasion was to be the Mcleans' last together, as Norman's brother was killed a few days later in a gambling dispute. In the film, Norman's commentary states that "I knew just as clearly that life is not a work of art and that the moment could not last."
I wonder about that. While it is true that "life" does not fit neatly into  an artistic paradigm, and churns with random eruptions of absurdity, mindlessness, and triviality, yet it does seem to organize itself around certain key events like this transcendent moment by the Big Blackfoot, not a "work of art" in the sense of having been contrived by any human hand, but a creation nonetheless, a graceful confluence of disparate choices, actions, and meanings, "suspended above the earth" like a Dali crucifix, or a hatching mayfly. Mclean's character in the film says "the moment could not last," and of course that is literally true. But, in a sense, such moments do outlast their duration in the flow of time. Such moments transcend duration, and  partake of that quality of "anemnesis" invoked at the Eucharist, as well as by trout streams.
   "Eventually," Norman Mclean writes in both the book and film versions of "A River Runs Through It", "all things merge into one, and a river runs through it." So it sounds to me as if there is a sense in which the moment does "last," does ascend into heaven, as it were, does straddle the boundary between time and eternity.

      Here's how I expressed it after a day fishing in the Au Sable River downstream from Mio, Michigan, in 2007.
     
"What we had been doing was more than a fishing expedition, it was an immersion in the symbiotic relationship between fish and insects and river, and in their collective relationship to us. In this setting we were the intruders, the witnesses, the priests who, alone among the actors in this drama, could behold all the elements of the plot, and all the relationships between the players. We could even masquerade as legitimate members of the cast, disguising ourselves as bugs so as to gain backstage admittance, where we could don our neoprene vestments, and wave our sacred wands over the river, beseeching acceptance.
Our lives proceed from such lavish abundance, and end the same way. Love is not scarce, nor is grace in short supply. The problem for us is not how to beat each other to the fishing hole… it is to find a way to inhabit the abundance with humility and grace, like a native, like a mayfly, like a trout."

Thoughts on The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Thoughts on The New Jim Crow: Thoughts on Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander, The New Press, NY, NY. 2012

This book puts forth the startling idea that the current system of criminal justice and imprisonment is but the third manifestation of an intentional strategy designed by American elites to maintain over all white supremacy and maintain a ready supply of cheap labor, as well as maintain an on-going hostility between working class whites and African Americans who might otherwise make common cause. There is nothing startling about the idea that slavery, and then segregation, were consciously designed strategies to accomplish these and other economic, social, and political goals, but many people who regard themselves as well-informed would be surprised at the idea that a system akin to slavery and segregation is still operating in the United States and still causing the same kind of misery, suffering, and division as those former, and more blatantly evil, institutions. 

Put oversimply, this author points out the obvious fact that convicted felons, even after release, are discriminated against legally, economically, socially, and politically, just as aspiring black voters were stigmatized in the segregated south, and slaves before them. The chief instrument for this mass disenfranchisement, Michelle Armstrong argues, has been the “War on Drugs”, a systematic network of policies that has resulted in an increase in the U.S. penal population exploding from “around 300,000 to more than 2 million” since the mid-1980’s, so that the “United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates in nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran…[and] the United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”

To some, the argument advanced here will lack cogency if it is seen as comparing apples to oranges. It may be argued that segregation and slavery were imposed on Black people, whose only alternatives were to move to places in the north where segregation was less institutionalized, or, in the case of slavery, to buy one’s freedom or run away. The effects of the new Jim Crow, however, can be at least somewhat deflected by choosing to abstain from the use of illegal drugs. Gains in the American civil rights movement occurred when the public could no longer ignore the injustice of police power in the south being used to prevent Black church people from registering to vote. The same empathy is less engaged by young black males convicted of using drugs.   

As Alexander points out, however, “studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates” yet white youth are far less likely to serve time in prison for their drug use. This is true for a host of reasons, none of which involve less strength of character on the part of black youth. Alexander’s thesis is that the architects of the New Jim Crow have hit upon the ideal mechanism for maintaining their new system of de facto white supremacy, trading on the fears of middle class people both white and black, and directing government and other resources away from health care, economic development, and recovery programs used by other countries to address drug abuse. Instead, resources are directed toward the construction of new and larger prisons, and increasingly, subcontracting their operation to for-profit corporations that have every motive for resisting any effort that might reduce the number of customers in the criminal justice pipeline.

I have not yet reached the place in Alexander’s book where she makes specific proposals. I assume she will advocate an end to the “War on Drugs” and a change in mandatory sentencing, the drastic expansion of prisons, and their privatization. But, as Michelle Alexander is quoted by Cornel West in his Foreword, “It is [a] failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of social control and every racial caste system that has existed…”.

Even among those who may take issue with aspects of Michelle Alexander’s analysis, it is hard to see how The New Jim Crow will not result in a shift toward away from naïve unexamined assumptions, self-serving rationalizations, and a pervasive “failure to care”.    

  

St. Zelda The Fortune Teller

Last Sunday we read from The Acts of the Apostles that Paul, "very much annoyed", cured a slave girl of possession by a "spirit of divination", thus depriving her of her livelihood and causing a riot. "Acts" goes on to tell all about Paul's deliverance from a jail cell, but shows no interest in what happened to the fortune-teller.
Jesus' ministry was one that exalted the humble and meek, but, even in apostolic times, the church has often been prone to forget about those whose lives are disrupted by our well intentioned efforts. The Book of Acts may not show interest in the fortune-reller's fate, but Jesus never forgets about anybody, and neither should we.
  I proposed in my sermon last Sunday that the Fortune-teller girl be regarded as a saint, and that churches be named after her and serve as havens for those who have been hurt, ignored, or forgotten by church or clergy. Trouble is, The Bible doesn't tell us her name, but, in my experience, fortune-tellers have names like "Zelda", so I guess my hypothetical churches could be called "St. Zelda's".
   Except every congregation I have served was already "St. Zelda's" in practice, including St. Andrew's, where I now serve. All these have been communities that had undergone their share of disappointments at the hands of the clergy. Sometimes this was the result of betrayal or outright abuse, but more often a matter of well intentioned efforts having unintended consequences that

we fail to even notice.
    But God isn't finished with any of us yet. By God's grace, St. Zelda's sometimes strident voice will continue to recall the church to see the world through the eyes of Christ, who never forgets anyone.

Air travel, the 12 steps, and Thomas Aquinas

Air travel, the 12 steps, and Thomas Aquinas. 

Air travel over long distances is an exercise in powerlessness. We place ourselves entirely in the hands of strangers, as if we were all passengers in a giant metal womb. While we doze and watch silly in-flight movies our mother the airplane takes a running start and leaps over the Atlantic Ocean. We surrender to her cramped but competant control until she slams down onto the tarmac in this ancient city, the impact of her descent having removed any illusions of her being anything but a hunk of unwieldy machinery.
Believe it or not, I woke up thinking about Thomas Aquinas, except from a "12 Step" perspective. instead of an "Uncaused causer" or an "Uncontingent =-Being-Without-Whom-Contingent-Beings-Could-Not-Exist-But-They-Do-So-Ya-Da-Ya-Da-Ya-Da" I am contemplating "The-One-Who-To-An-Ultimate-Extent-Is-Uncontrolable-By-Us-Or-Anything- Else."
I am not advocating for "God as the uncontroled controler." I don't know how or if God controls anything. I am sticking with the airplane landing and the Step 2 feeling of "Sanity Restored" as we emerge from the Heathrowian birth-canal into bright sunshine and an opportunity to stretch out in our hotel room and take a nap. Is this what we mean by grace? 
Or maybe its just jet lag. If the plane had crashed, maybe I could be putting these questions directly to the Source. But then again, that is something over which I have little or no control.
     From 2013 holy island pilgrimage.

More islands and rivers...

When I was growing up my family spent summers on an island in the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. Although we lived most of the year in Chicago, it always seemed to me that life by the River was our “true” life, and the Island constituted the “real world.” On the Island it seemed that even the trees and rocks were our cousins, and the River a grandmother to us all. The summer days flowed by slowly, like the current that carried us downstream to our favorite fishing holes. On the Island things were as they should be, and people were at their best.   

When Eucharistic Prayer C in the Book of Common Prayer speaks of “this fragile earth, our island home,” I think at once of the Delaware, and “our” Island, except we share this fragile earth with 7 billion of our human cousins, and, in place of the Delaware, we are blasting outward through an ocean of darkness. Is the space around us in any sense a grandmother? Is this earthly hunk of rock in any sense a relative? Given our self-destructive bent, how can human beings hope to restore things “as they should be”? How can we create conditions where “people are at their best”?

At every Eucharist we are invited, and even urgently called to cross the threshold of an Alternate Reality, a Universe Under Construction, a New Creation. To enter, we need not, ought not, go in search of better planets or unspoiled islands, but rather “open our eyes to see [God’s] hand at work in the world around us” (Prayer C again). The “real” world is the one we are already inhabiting, but to perceive it we have to develop our capacity to see with “sacramental eyes.”

In 1955, Hurricane Diane caused the Delaware River to rise in catastrophic flood, inundating our island and washing away the cabin which, a short time earlier, we had evacuated in a rowboat. But, for me, that drowned Island still reassembles itself at every Eucharist, and rocks and trees resume the shape of cousins, and interstellar space wraps our island home in a grandmotherly embrace, and, in that Eucharistic moment, things are as they should be, and people are at their best.    

   Jonathan+

Omitted from last Sunday's sermon for reasons of brevity...

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. John 13:34

I OMITTED ABOUT 1/3 of what I had intended to say in last Sunday’s sermon. The sermon was plenty long as it was, but I liked what I had prepared, so here it is…

NANCY and I watch network TV shows like NCIS, Hawaii 5/0, and Criminal Minds. The shows are formulaic, violent, and (in the case of Criminal Minds) depict sadistic cruelty to an extent that can’t be healthy to watch. So why do we watch it? In our case it is because we are drawn by the relationships among the principle characters, and in all of these action/crime dramas there is a “team” that routinely places its collective self in harm’s way in defense of the common good. The characters have damaged or nonexistent personal lives, and are living examples of John 15:13, “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” When one of the regular cast members leaves a series, it causes us grief, and connects us to the experiences of loss that have marked our own lives.  We miss Ziva and Warrick, and regret (and resent) Gil’s resistance to intimacy.  

OF AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SORT is the British drama shown on PBS, “Call the Midwife.”  There is no gun play in this series, but it is more realistic, gritty, and believable than those aforementioned programs. The stories are set in a poor part of London in the 1950’s and 60’s, and involve a community of Anglican nuns and their lay associates. The nuns are devout but flawed: one is plain crazy; another is plain grouchy; and another, their leader, fits my definition of a saint. The many crises, tragedies, and reconciliations that occur are depicted with an accompanying soundtrack of the sisters in their chapel, chanting the (to me) familiar psalms of the monastic office. “Whosoever dwells under the defense of the most high * abides under the shadow of the almighty.”

For these nuns, the “shadow” under which they abide is a love that motivates all they do, and even more all that they find themselves unable to do. Love is the alpha and omega of their lives: love for the innocent and helpless; love for the unloved and unloveable. They are deeply traditional, yet reluctant to judge and open to change. In other words, Anglican, at least in the forms I have encountered in 60 years as an Episcopalian.

Women in the Bible...some new stuff

At clergy conference with colleagues from the Diocese of Michigan...topic is "Bible Women", led by The Rev. Lindsay Hardin Freeman. She points out out that 93 women speak 14,056 words in the Bible. A small fraction of the air time given to men, but still greater than what appears in the source books of other most other world religions, and what women do contribute is essential to the development of Judeo-Christian tradition.
     Here are some of her conclusions:
1. When woman in the Bible do speak, it is with a startling boldness;
2. Biblical women push against patriarchal restraints (a consistent pattern, which I find remarkable given the patriarchal bias prevailing in both Jewish and Christian scriptures...why were these proto-feminist voices not edited out of the tradition by vigilant male scribes? True, they may have been blind to the implications of what they were transcribing...but I see the hand of God at work nonetheless.)
3. Biblical women "climb out over the transom" to serve as God's agents, subverting social norms and outsmarting the duly constituted authorities charged with keeping them in line.
4. Many are unmarried, widows, or in some way outside the structures of social control.
5. They suffer horrible loss and are treated like pawns on a chessboard yet appear in scripture as bright lights in sacred history;
6. Are occasionally found in scripture as occupying positions of power ordinarily assigned to men, without any note of explanation or acknowledgment within the text that this represents anything unusual. What's up with that?
 Lindsay Hardin Freeman and her husband, The Rev. Len Freeman, assert that, as a group, the outspoken women of the Bible functioned as the "social media" of their day, which I take to mean that they carried on a sort of unofficial, grassroots counter-narrative to what the "mainstream" media has passed on to us. In any case, this presentation has demonstrated, once again, that you are never too old to learn something new about the Bible. A fine day.