I-YOUniverse

I’m currently reading 12 books—actually, 11. One “book” on my list is the Sacred Text Archive online, which contains hundreds of scripture-type books. But Internet reading ain’t the same, is it?

You see, I’ve got all this time on my hands. Due to chronic pain, I have to rest my joints and muscles a lot; my brain keeps going 100 mph, however.

Maybe I should memorize the DSM IV, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4^th ed. This 1000+ page tome contains all the quirks, defense mechanisms, and mental disorders a psychiatrist can dream up.

Believe me, you’re in there. (Me, too.) And your insurance company has your number, the code which stands for the emotional or mental problem you want them to pay for the treatment of. It goes in a box on a form in a computer file. And it’s public knowledge. Ain’t no such thing as privacy where your insurance company’s money is concerned.

I like the classics: Shakespeare. I have all the plays on CDs, so I listen to one or two a week. I can’t keep up with the President, who read three Shakespeares.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKiWWi8rdJQ

Oh, I failed to mention how much I enjoy teaching DVDs: Shakespeare survey, history of Africa, Greek myths, Greek tragedy, surveys of Russian literature and existentialism.

Bitten by the used book bug, I find essential used books on Amazon and eBay; there’s always some book I, y’know, got to have. I’m careful, though.

For instance, C.F. Andrews, my current rage, referred to The Hidden Life of the Soul by Jean Nicolas Grou, a French Catholic writing at the time of the French Revolution. I found it on Amazon for $1777.00.

At that moment I got very nervous about the buy-it-with-one-click button.

Alibris had The Spiritual Life by Grou for $3.95, which’ll have to do for now.

Yesterday I became aware how I’m racing internally from one spiritual aid to another, trying to get better being still, better being for others, etc. It’s like all this popcorn’s exploding in my brain, and I’m compulsively consuming.

As a Nursing Home chaplain, I got a beautiful leather gilt-edged 1928 Book of Common Prayer to read with residents. I decided to start reading from that the Gospel and Epistle each week. Today the gospel was Luke 15, the waiting Father.

I’m into lectio divina. I have four or five essays on how to do that, and a small book somewhere on my shelves. I haven’t seen it in about five years.

Anyway I was lectio-ing away at the exquisite King James Version (naturally, because I’m in my Elizabethan English phase—y’know, the beauty of the language!) And these words hit home:

“And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat,” Luke 15:16 (KJV)

Dead bang! The Spirit uses scripture like a shrink uses the DSM IV.

Here I am, cramming anything and everything into my intellectual spiritual maw, like a whale engulfing krill by the millions.

What’s up?

Last week I jet read through Andrews’ Christ in the Silence; now I’m reading him one or two paragraphs aloud. Take this morning:

There was evidently a suppurating disease at the heart of Western civilization, draining its life-blood, which only the infusion of a life-giving spirit could staunch and heal.

C. F. Andrews, Christ in the Silence (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933), p. 31.

Suppurating – causing to generate pus. I guess he’d seen many a suppurating wound on bodies in Calcutta. In the West he saw suppurating souls.

The earthquake, tornado, and lightning strikes passed, and finally, finally I got still. I realized, both Sandy and I have some run ins with medical types in the next few weeks. These are supposed to be fairly routine. But I’ve had more than once, a medical appointment rip up my life, shred my planner, implode my future. Even so called routine ones give me the heevie jeebies.

“You’re skittish about these appointments,” the Spirit said. No scolding. “Don’t be afraid.”

Lectio divina. That means reading only six books at once, huh?

Well, I’ll stick to 10, at least until we get the all clear from the docs.

My family of origin was DYSfunctional. Like most of my blood relatives, Mom was an alcoholic. Dad chose to stay away from home a lot of the time. Having learned a little Freud, I blamed my mother for some of my problems. Though she was a dry drunk by my growing up years, she was difficult to live with.  I kept my distance.

A healing dream-vision

A few months after my mother died, I had a dream or vision, I don’t know which. I saw her as the woman clothed with the sun with a crown of 12 stars on her head (Revelation 12). She held me a baby in her arms and was singing “Mighty Lak a Rose.”

I actually remember a photo of me as a baby on the piano bench and that sheet music on the piano.

This vision healed the breach between my mother and me. I believe whatever was cruel or unpredictable in her is now gone, and she is the woman God created her to be. I feel very close to her.

Uncovering unwelcome truth

During my training in pastoral counseling I discovered some big sins of Dad’s. In the last ten years of his life, I lived across country. We talked on the phone now and then. When he was no longer able to live alone, my oldest sister and I worked together to get him into a nursing home of his choice.

She became his legal guardian. In court I stood beside his wheelchair, my hand on his shoulder, except for the moment when the judge asked him if he understood and agreed.

As we left the federal building in El Paso, the lawyer said, “Your father’s legally dead.”

Accepting and forgiving is a process

Dad’s mother was Mexican. He grew up in El Paso, speaking Spanish at home and hiding from the outside world his Mexican heritage. To this day the Hamilton roots are more prominent than the Mercado ones. I know a little of the Mexican story based on my Aunt Margaret’s remembrances.

Dad did some wonderful things. He was a Major in the Army, serving in World War II. He founded five Spanish-speaking missions in Juarez, Mexico, and one in El Paso. He was a lay preacher, and for awhile ministered among migrant workers. He was devoted to his grandchildren, rearing two.

I realize it’s not up to me to forgive Dad. It’s between him, those he wronged, and God. I’m certain he spent the last years of his life trying to atone for his sins.

Yet … I’m still in the process of accepting. On my graduating from Seminary Dad gave me an 1862 Greek New Testament, edited by Constantin von Tischendorf. On the cover leaf are the signatures of my great grandfather B. B. Hamilton, a Baptist minister, another Hamilton preacher, my father, and me. I have put this book away for now; though precious, it has very complicated meanings for me.

I am a Father, too

I’m a sinner, too. My sins aren’t like Dad’s. But nevertheless I stand in need of God’s grace.

I hope and pray my son, who will discover no surprises about me, has a Dad whom he can look up to, though not perfect. But one who loved him and loved his Mom more than life itself.

When I get to glory, I look forward to meeting the man God created my father to be.

Healing, blessing memories of Dad

For now, I have two memories:

One. As a ten year old I accompanied Dad to the San Juan Mission, where he preached in Spanish and English. One communion Sunday, I felt unworthy to partake. Dad noticed, stopped the service, and directed the servers to serve me.

Two. Dad and several fathers took a group of us boys camping in the desert. Early in the morning Buzzy Parks the PK and several of us set off on a trek by ourselves and got lost. I recall clearly seeing Dad coming toward us late in the day, red-faced, having searched for us in the scorching heat for long hours. That evening, I heard him on the phone with other parents defending me from being blamed for the misadventure.

So, my image of God is not of the waiting Father, but of the searching Father, who treated me in a no-fault way. In that as in many things he’s an example.

I love you, Dad.

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.

Original Date? Unknown 

CS Lewis’ irrepressible marshwiggle Puddleglum is one of my heroes. (You’ll find him in The Silver Chair, one of the Narnia books.)

For depressives like me and Puddleglum, regret’s a cinch, a jaunt in the never never land of if only. You look back over the vast expanse of the past half hour and find all the ways you failed, got a raw deal, suffered. Melancholy is an elegant, Victorian variation on the theme, a frill of lace at your collar and a scrap of sonnet in your pocket. Despair, more muscular, takes some serious workouts at the gym, but it’s a whale of a great ride. (Ask Captain Ahab.)

Face it, Hamlet is the greatest role of all time, dressed all in black, turning on his mother when she urges him, “Cast thy nighted colour off.” We wiggles love to Ham it up.

Daylight lengthens in Lent, but hours of darkness still linger. Many feel SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)-winter’s absence of light has given the blues a stronger grip on folks. It’s a good time to dwell in Ps 42-43,

My soul is cast down within me;
     therefore I remember you…
⁷ Deep calls to deep
     at the thunder of your cataracts;
all your waves and your billows
     have gone over me.
⁸ By day the LORD commands his steadfast love,
     and at night his song is with me,
     a prayer to the God of my life.

¹¹ Why are you cast down, O my soul,
     and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
     my help and my God.

Psalms 42:6-8, 11 (NRSV)

I grew up believing a morbid preoccupation with sins and shortcoming (not to be confused with actual  repentance or a fearless moral inventory) indicated holiness. A turning point came when I read Jeremiah 2.25,

You said, “It is hopeless,
     for I have loved strangers,
     and after them I will go.” Jer 2:25 (NRSV)

I realized that all that mucking about traps you in hopelessness. Moral scrupulosity is reverse narcissism; it’s harsh, but still all about me.

Once, authentically struggling, I poured my heart out to God. I kid you not, in my spirit God’s response was laughter.

“What, you’re some sort of sadist? Laughing at my pain?” I asked.

In the serene silent caress that followed, it was as though God said, “No, little one, I am chuckling in delight, like a mother or father who is about to surprise you with your heart’s desire.” I’ve come to call that divine laughter “Isaac laughter” (since as you may know “Isaac” is Hebrew for “he laughs.”)

It’s laughter so close to tears that you can’t always tell them apart. I haven’t heard it in spirit since-but I remember it.

It’s the laughter in Tolkien/Jackson’s The Return of the King, when Frodo awakes the second time to find Gandalf sitting beside him, and both begin to laugh.

Sometimes hope takes the form of enduring. In Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana painter wise woman Hannah tells despairing ex-clergyman Shannon that blue devils respect endurance. Sometimes hope takes the form of song. Sometimes it takes the form of laughter.

It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2008 

The Savior of Zvenigorod, ca. 1384 by Andrei Rublev, greatest of the medieval Russian Orthodox icon painters.

Henri Nouwen, the gay Catholic writer, discusses this icon in Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons.

In Orthodox belief icons are windows of heaven and the subject is looking at you. In this icon the eyes are powerful; their calm gaze reminds you that Christ sees you with a heart of love.

Each detail is infused with meaning. Zvenigorod, where the icon was found under a barn floor, is a town near Moscow; its name means “town where they ring bells.”

The part of Nouwen’s meditation which makes this icon so meaningful to me, however, has to do with the destructive impact of time and neglect on a masterpiece. Originally the center panel of three in a deesis, a triptych with the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, this is all that remains, badly damaged.

Nouwen points out that, just as the art work was neglected and abused, so Jesus was neglected, tortured, and murdered. Thus, the icon symbolizes the suffering of Christ and of people through the ages.

I don’t believe that your assent to certain dogma makes you one of God’s own. Your character, a life of love and action on behalf of others and in service of truth, is what counts.

I’m writing this essay with a friend in mind. (I’ve avoided any information that could identify him.) I spent a few precious minutes on the phone with him today. He lives with pain and illness that would disable most people, yet he continues to love and serve, often past the point of exhaustion.

Like me he’s subject to periods of depression, those emotional black holes you just have to live through. He told me that he felt he was unable to serve in his state of mind. I recalled Jesus’ words from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Christ felt cut off from the Father, perhaps for the frst and only time of his life. Yet at that very moment, he embodied the redemption of the creation.

The theories of the atonement that you can read many volumes about do not speak to me. I can’t understand why God the Father doesn’t simply forgive sins. Why does God need a sacrifice? I’m no theologian, so I leave that debate to others.

What the cross means to me is simply this: God enters into the suffering of the world. On the cross God shares it, endures it; God faces brutality and violence of the worst sort, and overcomes it.

In John 9 is the story of the man born blind. The disciples saw the man at the side of the road as an excuse for a theological debate. “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” they asked. Jesus said, “Neither! This man was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” And Jesus restored his sight.

I don’t want to trivialize the mystery of suffering. I don’t know why the universe has tornadoes and other destructive forces in it, or why the human spirit is capable of unimaginable horrors. But I know that suffering gives us an opportunioty to respond with compassion and courage.

In a book called Reclaiming Youth at Risk: Our Hope for the Future I read of Janusz Korczak, distinguished Polish educator, director of an orphanage for Jewish street children; he refused safe passage when the Nazis took over Poland. He wrote and hid Ghetto Diary, found by friends after World War II. He taught the children in his care to face death proudly. He said, “I exist not to be loved and admired, but to love and to act.” His is the only name at the site of Treblinka, where one million died.

How do we respond to the suffering of neighbors, whether next door or on the other side of the world? Some of us can act with love and courage to change and to serve. Some of us, suffering ourselves, endure.

Putting the issue in Buber’s I-You language: our relation to the You of suffering defines the kind of I we are, person or thing. When we take on suffering, say You in response to the You of others and to the eternal You, whether by bearing our own pain courageously or by sharing others’ pain, then we become a living icon, embodiment of the Presence, a flame of overcoming love.