I-YOUniverse

You dig out of a hole many different ways. The truth is, often it’s somebody else who gives you a hand up. In Lord of the Rings, the movies, a hand up is an important symbol. Frodo gives Sam a hand up into the boat (in contrast to Isildur who drowns at the beginning); then Aragorn offers Wormtongue a hand up, which he spurns. Galadriel offers Frodo a hand up as he struggles beyond Shelob’s cave. Of course, it’s Sam who gives Frodo the ultimate hand up by carrying him toward the crack of doom, when he’s totally out of juice.

Counting my blessings is an antidote for the blues. Here’s a sampling:

I am

… grateful for my wife, who loves me in spite of my faults. It’s her nature to love. We’ll celebrate 38 years of marriage this anniversary.

… grateful for my son, who showed up at 7:30 a.m. last week so that I could get to church. Sandy had to be there all day, and Jim made it possible for me to go for one hour. We also had pancakes and real maple syrup. My son is a man of integrity. I’m grateful he’s part of my life.

… grateful for God’s good gifts of a functioning brain, good eyesight, hearing, the ability to move about. (If you’re young and able-bodied, you may not get it. But one of the secrets of successful aging is to focus on the things you have, not the things you don’t have.) This is something I learned in the retirement center. People ate themselves alive by dwelling on the negatives, and overlooked many positive gifts they had.

… grateful for the scripture. The 90^th, 130^th psalms to name just two.

 … grateful for friends who come to the house every Tuesday evening, every Thursday morning (at 7 a.m.) to study the Bible. Bible study is so much richer when in a small group.

… grateful for Bible study tools like the New Interpreter’s Bible. What a commentary!

…grateful for my African friends’ safety and well-being.

… grateful for a peaceful home, full of goodness.

…grateful for the riches of literature. As I do when I hit a bump in the road, I returned to Tolkien. I haven’t  read LOTR in a couple years, and it always renews and refreshes my spirit.

… grateful for a cat who curls up in my lap in the wee morning hours.

… grateful for the chance to write a blog, and for you who take time to read it.

My first 20 years I lived at the foot of the Franklin Mountains in El Paso, Texas. But the past 40 years I’ve lived in Kentucky, Indiana and Virginia. I still feel drawn to the quiet darkness of the Socorro mission and the shimmering bluegrass of rural Kentucky, however.

Working 40 years in the church, feeling more and more alienated, today I don’t belong to any church.

An American, I disavow policies in Iraq as well as the economic hegemony of American multinationals. No individual President, no matter how enlightened and determined, can overcome bureaucracy and vested interests to change all that needs to be changed.

So where do I call home? About three weeks from my 60^th birthday, how do I sum up my life?

Before I start, I have to acknowledge the extent to which my culture has suckered me into believing youth and physical beauty are the best. Age is trashy. Wisdom? These days you get 15 seconds of fame, and the gong sounds before wisdom even gets its breath.

Looking for answers

Psalm 90 is a good place to go for some answers.

You can discern a structure in the psalter, briefly stated: the rise and fall of the Davidic monarchy (pss 3-89) followed by the rule of Yahweh (pss 90-150). In 586 BCE the Babylonians destroyed Israel, carried the people into exile, which becomes a fundamental theological metaphor.

Ps 90 faces some harsh realities: the brevity and sinfulness of human life, the wrath of God. But it nests these in the mothering of God, and in God’s compassion, steadfast love and favor.

Beginning and End

It begins with the primeval fact: God, you have been our dwelling place, our refuge, in all generations. You transcend the birth of mountains, the evolution of species. You shatter time. You are God. By using the metaphor of a mother giving birth, the psalm softens and makes incredibly intimate the Big Bang.

Then, the psalm rolls to its conclusion, appealing to God to turn (the great Hebrew word for repentance, shuv) from wrath and anger to compassion, steadfast love, favor.

Nestled in between the immensities of creation and compassion is human life, a momentary flowering marred by iniquity and secret sin, marked by toil and trouble. A life may last no longer than from morning to evening. But time in this psalm is elastic; a thousand years are like yesterday.

Is one lifetime enough?

If one lifetime seems way too short, that’s no surprise.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in one lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite so virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

Reinhold Niebuhr, quoted in New Interpreter’s BIble, IV pp. 1044-1045.

Summing Up

If I were to sum up my life at the end of my 60^th year, I might say something like this:

I loved God, my wife and my son.

I loved the Word.

I served the people of God.

I endured.

Not perfectly, not even close.

Or I might not say anything. For, silence holds truth that words cannot conceive of.

Is it enough?

As Gandhi once said in response to a reporter, “It’s a bad question.”

My friend is gone, the house is still, I’ve slept around the clock almost twice. How Sandy, who resumed 10 hour days Wednesday, manages I don’t know. I hoped to write about his stay, but like an Orthodox Jew on Temple Mount not knowing precisely where the Holy of Holies is, I choose not to walk anywhere.

I think of these lines from Stephen King’s Rita Haworth and the Shawshank Redemption (an incredible piece):

We’re glad he’s gone, but a little sad, too. Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

We spent the last couple nights at the movies: Gandhi and Pope John Paul II. I agree with Gandhi’s statement, “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”

Invisible Violence

I am convinced that one of my and the Western church’s chief sins is materialism. We’ve had several Enlightened Ones now, Gandhi and Mother Teresa, and others who have shown us that God empowers the poor to change the world.

There are 9-11 massacres happening every day among nameless millions who lack food, water, vitamins, shoes, childhood inoculations. But they are invisible, they are institutional. Nobody sets out to harm them. They just fall to the side because of globalization policies that give preferential terms to the wealthy.

We do not realize when we shop for the cheapest price we are perpetuating child labor; when we buy multinational brands we enable employers who pay less than a living wage for commodities like coffee, while drug lords pay handsomely for the drug-makings that poison our streets.

I feel so damned helpless.

Learning to See

I am fascinated by Charles Freer Andrews, the Anglican clergyman who spotted Gandhi early on and quickly allied with him. How did he see differently from other Christians? I’ll be commenting on his biography in awhile.

(I’m half through three or four books: The Life of Dialogue, Anglo-Saxon Spirituality, Sadhana: The Realization of Life, by Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, friend of Gandhi, an overview of one kind of Hinduism, a religion I’ve never understood.)

Sick of Religion

We had a get together of my wife’s relatives, some of the best people on the face of the planet. And as we usually do, our conversation turned to the Southern Baptist history of the last 30 years, much of which is written in our families’ sweat and blood. But my son left the room. After awhile I went to find him.

He said, “Dad, I’m sick of religion. I’m not interested in religion, it’s not my thing.” He no longer goes to church, although we raised him to. In that moment I got a glimpse of myself. This is what my sectarianism has done! God, have mercy!

Mid-Year Milestones

Tonight we’re celebrating my son’s birthday, bringing in meals from Outback. Sunday will be Mother’s Day, then wedding anniversary and our birthdays, all bunched up in the middle of the year.

But I’ll have to punch my way through this damned depression to do all that. Writing is the last thing I want to do. I’m out of pain meds until next week sometime, and pain hovers at 5 or 6 or more. Not only that, I’m depressed as hell.

A Service of Blessing

For the Reverend Dr. Jean-Emile Ngué

6 May 2008

Each of us is invited to participate in words or in silence.

Opening Prayer

With hope and joy in our hearts we celebrate being friends one with another. With trust in the grace and love of the Almighty we part, not in heart or spirit, but geographically for a time.

Scripture

The Lord loves those who hate evil,
guards the life of the faithful,
rescues them from the hand of the wicked.
Light dawns for the righteous,
and joy for the upright in heart.
Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous,
and give thanks to God’s holy name! Ps 97.10-12

(Book of Common Prayer, Psalm prescribed for today)

Petitions

Response: You, Lord, are the beginning and the end.

Be with Jean-Emile as he returns to his ministry in Cameroon, we pray. Response

In the challenges that may arise, calm any fears and anxieties that he may have, we pray. Response

May the grace and sharing of all the Companions in Hope surround and protect Jean-Emile, we pray. Response

Common Prayer

In silence or words of your choice

Sharing of Blessing in the Bread and Cup

Bread

We do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Deut 8.3

God commanded the skies above,
     and opened the doors of heaven;
you rained down on them manna to eat,
     and gave them the grain of heaven.
Mortals ate of the bread of angels;
     you sent us food in abundance.   Psalms 78:23-25

Cup
Gracious is the LORD, and righteous;
     our God is merciful.
The LORD protects the simple;
     when I was brought low, you saved me.
Return, O my soul, to your rest,
     for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you.
For you have delivered my soul from death,
     my eyes from tears,
     my feet from stumbling.
I walk before the LORD
     in the land of the living.

What shall I return to you, LORD,
     for all your bounty to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation
     and call on the name of the LORD. Psalms 116:5-9,12-13

The Lord’s Prayer

Laying on of Hands

All
The Lord bless you and keep you!
The face of the Lord shine upon you, the Lord be gracious unto you!
The Lord look upon you kindly and give you peace! Num 6.24-26

AMEN – Sung (from The Lilies of the Field)

Adapted from a book of family worship celebrations called The Blessing Cup. All scripture from NRSV; masculine pronouns referring to God omitted or changed to 2nd person. Not all persons present wished to partake of Christian communion; therefore Hebrew Bible selections were chosen.

Don’t you wonder what the ascension of Christ was like? Some sacred rendition of “Beam me up, Scottie”?

Or the disciples’ walk home?

Luke says they worshiped and were filled with great joy. Matthew adds “but some doubted.”

We don’t really know what a video camera would have recorded. My money’s on nothing. The Risen Christ is only for human eyes (and perhaps other critters’, too). But that still begs the question of what a skeptical reporter would have seen.

It all smacks of hocus pocus.

My childhood tradition ignored the Ascension. Oh, maybe a preacher pitched a sermon at it now and then, but mostly it got swallowed up by the Old Rugged Cross.

Baal Cult, Yahweh Style

The daily lectionary calls for the reading of Psalm 68 on the eve of the ascension. That I can get into.

Depending on who you read, psalm 68 is early or late. Everybody agrees it’s difficult, at points barely translatable.

It celebrates Yah, rider on the clouds, Anglo-Saxon like:

Yah Cloud-Rider, Clap of Thunder-Roarer.

It’s also barely Yahwistic, a brash borrowing from the cult of Baal, Canaanite God of thunder. “Escape from death” (68.20) alludes to the primordial conflict between Baal and Mot, God of death. It celebrates how God shatters the hairy crown of the guilty, and promises a blood bath for the righteous to enjoy.

Worship in Temple and Heart

It transports us to the Temple, filled with the smoke of incense and sacrifice, maidens dancing, beating tambourines on palm and thigh, shofars blaring, the mighty Ark of the Covenant Shaddai’s throne taking its place at the head of the great congregation.

It reminds us that, although Yahweh’s might exceeds that of Egypt and all the wild animals that live among the reeds, compassion for orphans, widows, the desolate and prisoners is God’s key attribute.

It insists that we humans define ourselves by our response to God, that the humble and faithful will spiritually prosper, but the rebellious will live in a parched land.

Wilderness Wandering

I’ve been trudging through the desert these past few weeks:

O God, you are my God, I seek you,
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
     as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. Psalms 63:1 (NRSV)

Or is it, “God, I’m sick of you”? Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!

The whirr of my visiting friend’s jam packed schedule, extravert’s delight, and his bone-shattering fatigue. The stunning poverty and degradation which is Africa. My wife’s joyful integration into the United Methodist fold, while I remain of my own choosing outside the camp (Heb 13.13).

Outside the Camp

I prefer the Tent of meeting to the Tabernacle (Exo 33.7-11). A verse or two, a deep commentary (not just intellectual, but spirit-filled), a blank sheet of paper, a waiting heart.

I remember as a college student serving on staff at Glorieta Baptist Conference Center for the summer, and during music week the presentation of Handel’s Messiah, 2500 trained voices singing the Hallelujah Chorus together.

But that’s all gone with the wind.

What remains is the sound of sheer silence, and the fresh scent of rain far out across the desolation of the desert.

Dr. Jean-Emile and Sophie Ngué

7 a.m.

It’s been two weeks of great fresh French bread from Panera. Add rice, fish, plantain, and spinach and you have a diet familiar enough to Africans. Then, trips to Costco for fancy granola, fruit tarts and other goodies for a brunch type buffet.

The days when Sandy can spend the week cooking are a distant memory. Although it gained an exceptional counselor (in her husband’s unbiased opinion), the world lost a cook. As the apostles said, “It’s not right that we should neglect the word of God to wait on tables” Acts 6.2.

Quiet morning

A CD is playing: Sing the Journey 2, by Ken Nafsinger and the Journey Musicians of Eastern Mennonite University. Wistful, jazzy, profound. It’s been repeating all night.

Either that, or a M*A*S*H DVD on tv, volume at 5 or 6, so as not to disturb others. Klinger is on trial for stealing a Polaroid camera.

I believe in the gateway theory of pain: the brain can process only so many stimuli, so keep it busy with relaxing messages and it will not pay so much attention to pain. It works for me. I seldom sleep without something playing through the darkness.

Out the door before 6 a.m., our African guest Dr. Jean-Emile Ngué is spending much of the day in Washington DC, and the evening at Richmond Hill, an urban retreat center here in Richmond. Sandy went on to work, to put a dint in the interminable insurance paperwork that suffocate so many helping professions these days.

Grace of children

Last night we hosted a young couple with two small children. They provided me a delightful break in a pretty tough spate of pain due to atmospheric conditions. It’s been a long time since we child-proofed the house.

The young boy Roger was fascinated with my reacher, the long stick with a grabber on the end people with arthritis use. He used it to pick up tonka trucks, small wood pieces of a puzzle, ray guns, and walking sticks. The latter took a lot of practice.

His younger sister enjoyed our rocking chair. Both played the piano. And I got to be a grandpa type for an hour or so, while parents discussed the African Counseling Center (ACC) with fewer interruptions.

I think we’ll see these young people in Africa in the next several years, perhaps to build the roof of the ACC.

Automated upgrade

11 p.m. The house once again dark and quiet, I checked the blog. For some reason I looked into the wp 2.5.1 upgrade and believed the offer of a tool that automated the whole process. Sure enough! It worked without a hitch, and I uploaded my favorite family photo, the icon Savior of Zvenigorod.

Henri Nouwen introduced me to it in To Behold the Beauty of the Lord.

I ended yesterday with good French bread, toasted, slathered with I can’t believe it’s not butter.

 

 

I upload this Russian icon, the first image of the wp2.5.1 upgrade. There’s a new upgrade tool that literally reduces the process to a few clicks. Thanks be to God! I feel like a time of desolation is passed.

Every human being has the right to basic health care. We need national health insurance in the U.S.

Until I went on full disability, my health insurance cost $17,000 per year, not including $1000s for copays. My wife’s health care coverage, without which she would die, will cost $30,000 next year, not including $1000s for copays.

And we are “lucky” to be able to get insurance at all. My wife is in a group of four. When I was an SBC pastor, in a group of 36,000, we couldn’t get health insurance for her.

When Walmart and GM realize they can make billions more by shifting health insurance to the government, things will change. Or when 200 million people can’t get coverage.

We wrestle against principalities and powers, spiritual wickedness in high places.

I’ve found four references to Jesus of Nazareth in I and Thou:

• Jesus and love (not a feeling): his response to a demon-possessed man, to the beloved disciple; his bold risk “nailed his life long to the cross of the world…to love man” (pp. p. 66-67).
• The craving for redemption grows until “assuaged by one who teaches men to escape the wheel of rebirth, or by one who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the children of God” (p. 104)
• In the company of Socrates and Goethe is Jesus’ I-saying, the I of the unconditional relation in which a man calls his You “Father.” (p. 116)
• The gospel of John is the Gospel of pure relationship. “The father and son being consubstantial-we may say, God and man being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship.” (pp. 132-133)

Bare Essentials

Kyrios Christos!

If I strip Christianity bare, what’s left is the cry of the martyrs: Jesus is Lord. Close at hand is the history and experience to which the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament writings bear witness. But at the irreducible core is my experience of the Risen Christ:

You ask me how I know he lives-
He lives within my heart.

My spirituality for the past 20 years has centered on loss:

• loss of the mainstream Southern Baptist identity in which I was reared
• loss of the local church in a crucible of racism and parochialism
• a pastoral counseling residency which I would describe as a shamanic initiatory rite of being “cut up, cooked, and eaten”: loss of self, an internity of which my teaching colleagues were unaware

Anabaptists

Not surprising, then, in the years since to find myself drawn to the Anabaptists of 16^th century Europe, slaughtered by the tens of thousands for their simple insistence on adult baptism, symbolizing soul competency and liberty.

My church history course labeled these forebears as the radical reformation, and moved immediately to the English Baptists of the 17^th century.

But I’ve been drawn to these men and women who carried lists of scriptures in their boots and bore witness to the living flame of God’s love in their lives and deaths.

The Jesus whom they worshipped as Son of Man, Son of God, Savior, and the exemplary human Jesus of I and Thou are light years apart.

Spirit, which Buber conceived of as existing in between I and You, person and person, human being and God, is light years removed from the Holy Spirit of the New Testament.

How do I reconcile these two very different viewpoints?

Where does Jesus fit in

No need to. Buber wrote as a Jew, and as a Jew viewed Jesus in purely human terms, although his conception of Jesus is quite lofty. Jesus is one of humanity’s great religious founders of culture like the Buddha, one of history’s great philosophers like Socrates and Goethe.

Jesus also boldly risked loving humanity itself, and is an exemplar of the I-You relationship with God as of Father and son. There is not a hint of the Trinity. Spirit is not person, but the in between of an actual I-You relation.

The Jesus of the New Testament is not merely human, however exemplary he might be; he is God made flesh. You can’t work him into Buber’s ideas in some nifty fashion. But, as God-become-human he enters the human condition and relates to human beings as one among us.

However you fit the Logos and the man from Nazareth and the Risen Christ with Buber’s eternal You, Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses from inside our skin.

That changes everything.

Round 1

The sacred is here and now. The only God worth keeping is a God that cannot be kept. The only God worth talking about is a God that cannot be talked about. God is no object of discourse, knowledge, or even experience. He cannot be spoken of, but he can be spoken to; he cannot be seen, but he can be listened to. The only possible relationship with God is to address him and be addressed by him, here and now-or, as Buber puts it, in the present.

I and Thou, Prologue by Walter Kaufmann, pp.25-26.

We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response.

Prologue, p. 39

Who cares about Buber?

Like many today Martin Buber longed to release religion from institutionalism, to free God from theologians.

He stood apart from other Zionist leaders of his day by advocating an Arab state in Palestine.

Because he wrote prolifically about many subjects, people viewed him as a representative Jew in the 20^th century. His ideas about dialogue continue to wield a huge influence.

From wordslinger to I-YOUniverse

When I began this blog as “wordslinger,” an image from a poem I wrote in  college, I discovered there are dozens, perhaps 100s of “wordslingers” out there. So I tried “wordsLinger” which puts a different spin on it, the lovely sense of words leaving an afterimage like the flash of a camera does. It didn’t make that much difference, however. I wanted something unique.

I wrote something about speaking my words into the ether and stumbled on the idea of “e-thou” a play on “I-Thou” of course. Being a 60s child, I had taken part in encounter groups and sensitivity training, so “e-thou encounter” came easily to mind. I liked the assonance of thou and -coun-.

But people stumbled over it. I had to spell it, spell it again, then explain it. Although I liked it, I decided it might be dated. In a post on suffering I coined the word “YOUniverse” to celebrate God’s presence in the cosmos.

From there it was a short hop to “I-YOUniverse.” In the new translation of I and Thou, except in the title, I-You has replaced the older form.

Absorbing I and Thou

For a buck I had picked up a used paperback copy  of I and Thou, 2nd ed., translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (NY: Scribner’s, 1958). The brittle binding and stiff paper suit it.

The first owner underlined the first 34 pages copiously but left not a mark on the remaining 100 pages. I assume she gave up, having read more than I did.

When I started e-thou encounter, though, I felt an obligation to get past the jargon stage of I-It or I-Thou. If I named my blog for Buber’s thought, I ought at least to know it.

Encouraged by reviews of the new translation as being superior to the first, I ordered my copy from Amazon and, when it arrived, dug in. I was going to master this book!

It’s not a book you master, though. It masters you.

Wrestling at the Jabbok

 I read it half a dozen times, baffled by some passages. Kaufmann generously footnotes the German vocabulary, which helps you appreciate the verbal fog. Buber, like Shakespeare, could not pass up a good play on words, no matter what the context.

 Then, I caught myself striving to manhandle the book. Damn it! I was going to know this book inside and out.

I understand how to use knowledge as power. Except for writing a dissertation, I completed work on a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Old Testament.

Buber, like the wrestler at the fords of the Jabbok, refuses to be mastered.

Round 2 coming up!