With Faith and With Feathers

Johnny Horton and the Meaning of Life

2012-01-06T14:25:00.000-06:00

So here it is – the game:

1) Learn the #1 single in your country of origin in the week you were born.
2) Find it on YouTube.
3) Post it on your Facebook page without shame.

Sounded fine – a couple of Google clicks and I find out that the number one song on the Billboard Charts in June of 1959 was Johnny Horton “Battle of New Orleans.” I posted, but I cannot say without shame. While Johnny Horton was talented enough to earn a place in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, and one has to bemoan his early death in an automobile accident, this song has never really done much for me. It was some consolation when I discovered that Wilbert Harrison’s “Kansas City” was atop the Billboard R & B charts when I was born.
So here’s a news flash, there are some things that you cannot change. I appreciate the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer: God grant me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed. I did not pray the prayer when I found out “Battle of New Orleans” was the number one song on the charts in June 1959. It really isn’t that tragic. There are things that cannot be changed. We cannot change our genetic makeup. We cannot change our past, including those early experiences for which we did not have words. I think the psychoanalytic insight is spot on, our early experiences, even those for which we did not have words, shape, in part, who we are. Neither our genetics nor our earliest experiences determine fully who we are, but they play a role and we cannot change them. This is part of the mystery of life. “One never recovers from being human” (Michael Eigen, Contact With the Depths, 9).
I just finished reading Rebecca Goldstein’s wonderful novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. The final chapter is beautifully written and filled with penetrating insights. We end up beholding a world that is lavished with our own disgust at the uncleanliness that pollutes us, and with our yearning for a mythical purity that remains untouched, and with our vertiginous bafflement at the self that is inviolably me and here and now, and with our desperate and incomplete sense of the inviolable selves of the others that we need so crucially, and with our fear of all that’s unknown out there and that can hurt us, and with our suspicion that almost everything out there will turn out to be unknown and able to hurt us (336).
For good measure, there is this complimentary reflection offered by Michael Eigen. As a human group we are in the midst of a great journey, exploring ways we make contact with reality, contact with subjectivity, ways we constitute reality and reality constitutes us. It is awesome to be a living being who feels, cries, laughs, sings, dies. Who hurts others and is hurt, who goes mad, becomes inspired, or is just happy to be alive to each day to the extent one can. Life never ceases being an unpredictable sea, raising up, dashing down, pressing us through ranges of emotions, more alive, threatened, empty, deadened, eager (Contact With the Depths, 8).
For me, God is part of the mystery and complexity of the human situation. God is one who holds us on the journey. God is the voice calling to us out of the whirlwind of our lives luring us toward wholeness, maturity, graciousness. The God I know in Jesus does not take away the mystery of the world and of existence. I don’t think I could believe in a God who simplifies too much. God is part of the mystery, beckoning with enough light to help us see the mystery more completely and navigate it with a measure of grace.
And so we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise what are we? (Goldstein, 344).
And I see God as a companion on the journey to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence, helping navigate the mystery and balancing living for others and self.
And I cannot change that Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans” was the number one song in America when I was born.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Surf's Up

2011-12-10T00:05:00.001-06:00

And so this is Christmas, or at least the Christmas season. I should be listening to Christmas music, and I have a little. But The Beach Boys recently released Smile, an almost mythical album in rock history, and I have been listening to it. BTW there are two releases, a two-CD edition and a multiple-CD edition with countless outtakes and rare moments. I am writing about the two-CD version, particularly about the Smile album.
In the first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (1976), Jim Miller writes: Designed as Brian’s crowning achievement, Smile would supposedly place the Beach Boys right next to the Beatles in the pantheon of arty rock. Intended as a follow-up to Pet Sounds, Smile was never released. There were rumors that Brain Wilson had destroyed many of the tapes, which were obviously false. His notes to the new CD are wonderful.
Some of the Smile songs were released, some in slightly different versions, on subsequent Beach Boys albums. In 2004, Brian Wilson performed Smile live and released a CD of the songs performed by his band. This was an updated version of the original, with some new words and arrangements. And now the original Smile sessions are out.
So as I am listening, I am particularly struck by the song Surf’s Up. I am attaching a link to Brian Wilson’s 2004 performance of the song, and will post the youTube video on my Facebook page. It is a delightful and enchanting song – complex and beautiful. It is an invitation to wonder and to love. Brian Wilson has said “Music is God’s voice,” and listening to this song there is, for me, that quality about it.
Here’s what’s particularly fascinating. I am hearing this song as if for the first time, but I know it can’t be. In college I listened a lot to the Beach Boys, mostly Endless Summer. But that album did not have one really great Beach Boys song, Good Vibrations. So I bought a later compilation that did. I dug it out of the box in the closet where my vinyl records are stored. There it is, side two, “Surf’s Up” – one of the Smile songs released later. I must have heard it then, but it didn’t register. In 2004, I bought Brian Wilson’s Smile. Surf’s Up is there, but again, it did not grab hold of me.
Why now? It’s a bit of a mystery to me why this song has found its way into my heart and soul. I am glad it is there. If music is God’s voice, maybe this experience says something about that voice of God. Maybe we will miss it the first time we hear the story or song, maybe even the second and third and fourth times, but keep listening.
I heard the word – wonderful thing! A children’s song. A children’s song – have you listened as they play? Their song is love and the children know the way.
Might be a Christmas song after all. Surf’s Up!

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Brian Wilson: Surf's Up

Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T16:32:00.001-06:00

Being who I am, one of the apps I have on my i pod is the Poetry magazine app. Yesterday I thought it might be enjoyable to take a spin on that app looking for a poem for the day. The Poetry app allows you to spin for poems in certain categories – and you can choose different combinations of categories. So I looked at “gratitude” which could be paired with “youth,” “aging,” “family” etc. I paired it with “life.” To my delight I found this wonderful poem:

Although the wind
blows terribly here
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

Under new Facebook policy, this blog will no longer be posted there, so I will also send this poem to my Facebook site with the appropriate copyright information listed there.

I like this poem a great deal. The joy and gratitude are mingled with eyes open to see the harsh winds and the open spaces in the roof of the house. Thanksgiving is a wonderful time to give thanks for the good gifts of life: family, friends, home, music, books, movies, eyes to see and ears to hear. For those of us who are theists, we thank the God whose goodness sustains all life’s goodness and who is at work in the world inviting greater goodness. While giving thanks, I cannot forget those who are hurting, suffering, in need. I cannot forget the sorrows I feel sometimes. Still, through the cracks in the world, moonlight shines, and I am grateful for that.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Reading

2011-11-13T21:29:00.001-06:00

This afternoon I participated in a panel discussion for book groups organized through the Oreck-Alpern Interreligious Forum at the College of St. Scholastica. I have been the convener of a fiction book group since this effort began in 2006. Here is what I shared.

I would like to offer some reflections on the fiction book group that has been meeting since October 2006. My intention is that these brief remarks will respond to the questions we were invited to consider, but as may be appropriate for a fiction group, the response is rather literary, weaving in the words of others.

In his remarks upon accepting the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 1984, John Updike said the following: Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit. (Updike, Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism, 423)

Reading fiction and discussing it together creates space in a too busy world, space for the spirit. It is important space. It is difficult to say which books we have read over the past five years have created the most meaningful discussions. Even the book most found their least favorite, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, the only Nobel Prize winning author we have read, by the way, even Snow invited good discussion and I, for one, still carry images from that book within. The impact of this group seems cumulative – five years of reading and conversation flowing through us like water shaping stone.

It’s good when your conscience receives big wounds, because that makes it more sensitive to every twinge…. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904 (The Basic Kafka, 290)

In a world that often numbs us with reality television which is more surreal than real, or by the sheer pace of modern life, it is good to read books that break our hearts, break them with sadness over the condition of others in the world, break them open to care and to see beauty and tenderness.

Martha Nussbaum, who will be coming to St. Scholastica in February, writes these words that we have used in advertising our fiction group: Through the imagination we are able to develop our ability to see the full humanness of people. (Not For Profit, 107)

Our reading has helped keep our eyes, and imaginations, open in a world that often blinds with the constant flashing lights of the momentary. Our imaginations have been opened to the variety of ways of being human religiously.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Joan Didion, The White Album

To be human is to live by stories and our lives are richer, more open, more insightful, for having these stories and these conversations woven into our stories. With all the issues facing the human community, a gathering of people reading fiction seems an escape, a luxury. In some ways it is a luxury. Yet, if the human community is to work toward solving its most pressing issues thoughtful, open, insightful people willing to learn even more about themselves, others and the world will be required. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. This is part of the story of our group.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Sadly Beautiful

2011-10-30T15:02:00.000-06:00

I have long known the joy of discovering something that touches deeply, that excites, that brings a smile. As a boy there was the joy of discovering a favorite player in a package of baseball cards. Along the way there have been the joys of discovering a long-sought book in a used book store, an idea that helped articulate something I was feeling or thinking but had not found adequate words for, an idea that opens the world up in new ways, a poem that penetrated to the depth of my soul, a song which moved me.
I am not sure what led me to want to find out more about The Replacements, a 1980s band founded in Minneapolis. It think it was a thread of reading which led me to read about this band and think to myself, “I would like to give them a listen.” In the ‘80s the Replacements blend of punk guitar and pop melodies garnered them critical acclaim but little commercial success (The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll). I am experiencing some joy of discovery.
One song that has captured my attention is “Sadly Beautiful.” The song has little punk to it. The title describes the song – sadly beautiful. The idea in the title and song describes so much in life, and life itself - - - life will end in death for us all and yet it contains so much that is beautiful.
To live a more fully human life, we need to see life’s sadness and beauty. To miss one or the other regularly is to have a distorted view of life. There is much that leaves one sad – hungry children, war-torn countries, dysfunctional relationships that harm, small disappointments and hurts. I take these seriously. They cry for compassionate response. Yet when I spend too much time and give too much attention to those things that leave me sad, I am in danger of missing the wonder and beauty in life – a blazing sunset, a full moon rising over a lake, the tenderness in so many relationships, small kindnesses and acts of generosity, work large and small for a better world.
And the joyfully discovered idea, poem, song is often helpful in keeping perspective.
Sadly beautiful.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Once Only

2011-10-15T17:18:00.001-05:00

Steve Jobs died October 5. Since then we have heard a great deal about his life and the impact it has had on our world. I have i tunes on my computer, have both and i pod classic and an i pod touch. Technological change in my life time has been astounding. Two of my favorite activities have been transformed – listening to music and reading. I have over 6,000 songs on my i pod classic – and I remember carrying record albums to college parties. I can carry hundreds of books on my Nook – though I don’t have that many on there. It was great to put songs from cds on an i pod, but no one yet has figured out how to get the books you already own on an e-reader.
I enjoy my e-reader, but there are still some things about reading a book that one cannot replicate with an e-reader. While you can browse with some ease on a Nook or Kindle, you cannot really flip pages the same way. One gift of such page flipping is the discovery of hidden or forgotten treasures.
Last week I used a poem from Denise Levertov’s book of The Great Unknowing in a devotion for our Board of Ordained Ministry. At other times during our meeting, on breaks, in my room, I allowed myself the joy of flipping through the book, and discovered this little gem.

Once Only

All of which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every initiation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don’t
expect now to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body-halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.

Wise words well composed – and I will have the joy of discovering this poem by flipping through her book once only. But that is enough.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Soul Work

2011-10-08T23:43:00.000-05:00

Allow me to tell you a bit about my week last week. I will begin with Saturday morning October 1. That morning I attended a workshop about the new vital congregations initiative in The United Methodist Church. Beginning January 1, we will be submitting certain statistics every week for our congregation: average worship attendance for the week, number of professions of faith for the week (that is, people joining the church who are not currently members of another church), number of small groups that met that week for support and growth in faith, number of people engaged in ministry in the community, and dollars given to mission.
Bookending this workshop were two other ministry events. Earlier in the week I visited with a woman who had recently moved into a memory care facility. Her family felt it best for her own well-being that she no longer live in her home alone. They are genuinely concerned for her, and concerned about how her memory has been deteriorating in recent months. Anyway, I visited her and she was a little confused about all that was going on. She was mourning loss in her life. She was also mourning the death of a good friend and church member who had passed away a week before at age 90. During my visit, emotions welled-up in this woman, and her eyes filled with tears. I reached out and held her hand as we continued to talk and as I prayed with and for her. Two days later, I officiated at the funeral for her friend, and a much-beloved member of the church I pastor. The woman whose life we celebrated was remarkable in many ways. Her kindness was exemplary. Her faith was strong and matched with an inquisitive mind. She had survived the loss of three sons on one tragic night, three boys swept into Lake Superior. She not only survived this, but continued her journey of faith, continued to grow in kindness.
I pay attention to numbers. Every week, I check what the worship attendance has been and I continue to keep this before the leadership of our congregation. We give generously to missions here and pay our apportionments (monies given to our denomination for mission and ministry) faithfully. There is not a year gone by here when we have not welcomed some new persons by profession of faith. We have a number of small groups and this number has been growing due to intentional work by the congregation. Our people are very active in the community and we have begun some new church-based initiatives which reach out to the community. I understand numbers matter. I also know that one of the assumptions of this new initiative is that “our denomination has an adverse reaction and fear of metrics as a means of accountability.” I cannot be the only person who sees some irony here. To raise even constructive criticism of this vital congregations initiative is to be seen as part of the problem, to be seen as one who has only an adverse reaction to and fear of metrics as a means of accountability.
I am going to risk this. I will be submitting my numbers weekly and helping my congregation pay attention to them. I will also be asking us what other numbers might be helpful to us and meaningful for us as we assess our ministry together. Still, I also have to acknowledge that some of what we do in the church is simply difficult to count. There will be no place on any form to quantify holding the hand of a grieving woman. Now if a lay person does this, I can count that – and we have a wonderful lay visitation program at my church. My visit does not “count” though. I cannot count the 200 plus people who gathered to remember and celebrate the life of a remarkable disciple, but remembering and celebrating such a life is immeasurably important to us. It is one way we let people know that the journey of faith is one we take with others. It is one way we care for others. It is one way we communicate that a life matters to God. In soul work, not everything that counts can be counted.
At our best, we United Methodists understand this, even in our renewed fascination with numbers. After all we still follow one who once said something about gaining the whole world and losing our soul.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Water and Books

2011-09-24T12:42:00.000-05:00

The paper from which books are made is itself composed of wood products and water. Once the paper is in a book, however, adding additional water is never a good idea.
A few weeks back a dehumidifier we were running in the basement started running overtime and it iced up – then the ice melted. Water soaked a small section of carpeting on which were some shelves with books. A few books suffered some water damage. By the way, placing wet books in the freezer seems to help stem the tide of the damage and prevents mold. Our freezer has a few books in it for a time. Taking the books out of the freezer still requires that they dry.
Two books which came through this journey were themselves about spiritual journeys and have been a part of my own journey – Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey and Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island. I first read both of these books in college. Eiseley’s was assigned reading for a humanities course I took on the 1960s. Merton’s book was part of my coming more deeply into Christian faith after a time of wandering and doubt. I needed resources for a deeper, richer Christian faith than I had experienced before, intellectual and spiritual resources that could converse with the philosophers and psychologists I had been also reading. Merton was and has continued to be a help along the way.
Drying these books, I came across two passages that seem nicely complimentary. Eiseley begins his book with two quotes, this one from William Temple: Unless all existence is a medium of revelation, no particular revelation is possible. In his book, Merton writes the following: It gives great glory to God for a person to live in this world using and appreciating the good things of life without care, without anxiety, and without inordinate passion (85).
As summer recede and autumn ascends - with its cooler weather, its brilliant colors, its crisp apples it seems a good time to joyously appreciate the good things of life and see where God might be revealing Godself more deeply.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

September 11, 2011

2011-09-17T19:31:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday I was privileged to speak at the Duluth-area event commemorating September 11, 2001. These are the words I offered:

I begin with words of thanks. Thank you to all those who have worked to help make this event happen today. Thanks to all you who are attending as we both remember the past and consider what kind of future we want to create and the inner resources we have for creating that future. I also want to add words of thanks to all those who work for the safety and protection of our communities. September 11, 2001 reminded us of the countless people who work day in and day out to keep us safe. It reminded us of the human capacity to give of oneself for others. I am grateful for the courage and compassion of those who responded to the horrific events of September 11, 2001 and who continue to respond when disaster strikes.
Today we remember events indelibly etched on our memories. I also want to encourage us today to remember our common obligation as human beings to work for healing, and to care for each other.
I am here this afternoon as a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ and his way. I cannot claim to speak for all Christians, but I intend to speak from the Christian tradition and to Christians especially, even as my words are spoken to us all, whatever our framework for orienting ourselves in the world.
As a Christian I acknowledge that my faith tradition and the central texts of that tradition have not always been used in the service of healing, compassion, care, reconciliation and justice. Just weeks ago (July 22) in Norway a man making some kind of claim to be Christian went on a killing spree. My Christian faith tradition has been used to hurt, harm, damage.
Yet I believe, and I strongly assert today on this anniversary of September 11, the heart of my Christian faith is a heart that beats for justice, for peace, for reconciliation, for compassion, for caring. Today is a day for we Christians to say that this part of our tradition is what we stand on, this part of our tradition is what we will live out in our lives in a diverse world – a world with Muslims, Jews, Native Traditions, Buddhists, Hindus, others and those who claim no religious tradition.
There are a number of churches in our community that have committed themselves this fall to rediscovering the art of neighboring. An important part of neighboring is seeking to live peaceably with all, regardless of religious differences. The central story Jesus told about loving one’s neighbor is also a story about cross-cultural caring and compassion – the story of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Let us commit ourselves to being good neighbors. It is part of the heart of the Christian tradition.
“Honor everyone” (I Peter 2:17). These words from the Christian Scriptures remind us that respect is an important part of relating to others. Let us commit ourselves to being respectful. It is part of the heart of the Christian tradition.
When we seek to live out our faith, we seek to live with “all humility and gentleness” (Ephesians 4:2). Christians, like those of other traditions, believe we have insight into God and the world. We have truth to share and a way of life to commend. Yet our way of life is a way of humility and gentleness, which means deeply listening to others, respect for others, an openness to learning from others. Let us commit ourselves to humility and gentleness. It is part of the heart of the Christian tradition.
At the heart of the Christian tradition we find an obligation to heal and to care, to work with all others in those tasks, and to build bridges of peace and understanding. In the words of Christian theologian Stanley Hauwerwas written in the aftermath of September 11, 2001: God invites us to respond to September 11 with “small acts of beauty and tenderness,” which… if done with humility and confidence, “will bring unity to the world and break the chain of violence.” Ten years later, the words still ring true and they echo the heart of the Christian tradition.

Remembering

2011-09-10T15:39:00.000-05:00

This week many of us are remembering just where we were ten years ago, September 11, 2001 when planes were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon building. “Remembering” almost seems redundant. The memory of that day is indelibly etched in most of our minds.
I was a district superintendent in The United Methodist Church then, and part of the leadership for a retreat for the clergy of my district. We were at a camp in northern Minnesota (Northern Pines). That morning, one of the clergy, who was leading sessions on the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, approached me to say that he had heard about some disturbing events taking place in New York. There was one television set in the lodge, and the reception was rather poor, but we gathered around the set and watched, shaken, saddened and stunned. The retreat ended after we watched for a time, each person returning to their community to be a presence for prayer and healing.
I also remember the time around September 11, 2002. I was driving across the southern Minnesota prairie listening to National Public Radio. Writer and poet Kelly Cherry was being interviewed about a piece she had written to be included in an anthology of writings about September 11. She read her piece, entitled “A Writer’s Pledge of Allegiance.” It was profoundly beautiful and moving, one of the best pieces I have heard or read following September 11, 2001. I cite portions below. The entire poem can be found in September 11, 2001 American Writers Respond, ed. William Heyen.

I believe one must speak and speak truly. I believe in the power of language to show, to move, to solve, to heal, to build…. What is unsaid can be said. What is said can be heard. What is heard can be sung. I believe that the music of humanity must and surely shall encompass everything…. For I believe nothing is beyond knowing. I believe nothing is beyond saying.

I believe this and am without words.

We need words. I, too, believe in the power of words, of language, to show, to move, to solve, to heal, to build. Yet there are moments in life – September 11, 2001 among them, when words cannot capture all that we are feeling, all that we are trying to understand and know. Language arises out of silence and should, at times, give way to silence. “Be still,” the Psalmist enjoins.
On this tenth anniversary of September 11, let there be some silence amidst all our words, and may the words we speak be words of healing, building and solving.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Thoughts Along the Way

2011-09-03T13:13:00.000-05:00

Since my last blog I have been a part of honoring and saying good-bye to three members of my congregation by officiating at their funerals. I have also been working to get ready for the fall church programming season and have met with our Minnesota delegation to General and Jurisdictional Conference. Writing time has been at a premium.
Along the way a few droplets of wisdom have fallen on me, gifts of grace like a fresh spring shower. They are gifts to be shared.

Christian faith is no sentimental thing. It is a faith that takes all the dimensions of life into consideration.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Justice and Mercy, 34

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime.
Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone, 22

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.
Mario Vargas Llosa, In Praise of Reading and Fiction, 5

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

August Derleth

2011-08-13T12:11:00.002-05:00

While on vacation the last week of July we traveled to southern Wisconsin. We toured part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s estate, Taliesen. We visited the House on the Rock, a monument to one man’s interests and obsessions. In the area we stayed in the town of Sauk City.
Sauk City is a pretty, small town which flows right into another such town, Sac du Praire, both communities nestled on the banks of the Wisconsin River. As we walked through the town, we could not help encountering the name of a favorite son, an author named August Derleth (1909-1971). The breakfast room of the hotel where we stayed had Derleth memorabilia in a glass case, and a few of his books for sale. The local restaurant where we ate dinner one night also had Derleth clippings gracing the walls of a space called “Auggie’s reading room.” I confess that I had never before heard of August Derleth, but he was a prolific author with over 150 books to his credit – children’s books, poetry, biographies, fiction and criticism. He had edited Madison’s Captial Times. In his home town he established Arkham House, a publishing company which has been credited with saving the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
Discovering a new author is a bit like making a new friend, a friend whose conversation enlivens and enriches. Before we checked out of our motel, I bought one of Derleth’s books from behind the glass case in the breakfast room. The book , Walden West, is a fictionalized chronicle of growing up in Sauk City, interspersed with poetic reflections.
Part of the wonder, beauty and mystery of words is the way they both help us articulate our experiences in ways that deepen our awareness and sharpen our perception of them, and also open us up to new experiences. My new friend August Derleth offers words that have some of that power. Here is a sample:
There was always in childhood that hour when the streetlights came on – on the edge of evening, at the beginning of night, when darkness had not yet taken all the village and the afterglow still burned saffron or cerise, copper or old rose, magenta or emerald or mother-of-pearl along the western rim…. I never saw them come on at this hour without a lifting pleasure, and I never looked down that street at the afterglow and the prairie beyond without a sense of adventurous expectancy, as if that moment and that hour must signal the approach of an adventure profound and stirring, not of the flesh, but of the spirit…. This was a mysterious and beckoning borderland; none could say what might emerge in it, what voice might rise, what adventure might come…. I suppose that it is possible to adduce any number of reasons for this attraction, beauty being in the eye of the beholder alone and predicated upon countless determining factors unknown even to the beholder; and I have no doubt there was and is a relationship between this sense of adventurous expectancy and the spiritual isolation which is the common heritage of every individual; but reason and explanation cannot alter the exhilaration and wonder so integral a part of that hour between day and night, that hour when the creatures of darkness briefly know their brethren of daylight, that hour when the soul and the body become fleetingly aware, one of the other. (Walden West, 12-13)

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Wedding Bell Blues

2011-08-05T14:07:00.000-05:00

As a clergy person, most of the weddings I am at these days are ones at which I am officiating. July 30, however, I attended a wedding as a guest, a friend of both those getting married. The couple was older, not young people in their 20s. Their maturity showed in many ways. They had put a great deal of thought into their wedding, and it was very much a worshipful experience. Their deep faith was evident. In their vows, they pledged to help each other in their spiritual journey and support each other in their spiritual practices.
I was glad to be there for my friends Gary and Gary. Yes, both men.
Here are two ironies. This deeply faith-filled and spiritual wedding is one I could not, under the rules of my denomination, officiate at. This uniting of these two people is also one that is not recognized by the laws of the State of Minnesota, and in fact, in November 2012, the citizens of Minnesota will be asked to make this prohibition a part of our state constitution.
Ironies catch our attention. They cause us to think more deeply. They may inspire us to action. In this case I understand more deeply why I would like to see the policy of the United Methodist Church change when it comes to clergy officiating at such ceremonies. I am also energized in new ways to work against the 2012 Minnesota marriage amendment.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Sports and Life

2011-07-23T12:42:00.002-05:00

In the 50s every red-blooded American boy either wanted to play baseball or be Elvis Presley.
Bob Dylan, “Theme Time Radio Hour: Baseball”

I was not a red-blooded American boy in the 50s, living only six months of my life in that decade. Yet Dylan’s words ring pretty true, with some modification for red-blooded American boys in the 1960s, too. When I was a boy, I dreamed of playing baseball for a living. I was a little older before the rock star dream hit. I have deep and fond memories of heading to the drug store with a dollar in hand to buy baseball cards – ten cents a pack. I can almost smell the gum and vividly recall how hard it was in those packages. It sweetness lasted such a short time.
I still enjoy sports, though my own accomplishments have always been pretty limited. I was a Little League sub. I have been a decent slow-pitch softball player. I enjoyed neighborhood pick-up games as a boy. I swam in high school and contributed something to the team. My golf game has a few moments of brilliance surrounded by a lot of hacking around.
When I was a boy, I developed a love for reading and much of that reading was sports books. These were frequently brief, sanitized biographies of star professional athletes. I still enjoy reading about sports, especially baseball. It is a nice change of pace, and I recently finished Phil Pepe’s 1961, the story of Mantle and Maris’ pursuit of Babe Ruth’s single season home run record. Reading it I recalled another of Phil Pepe’s books I read, this one as a boy (and I still have somewhere in a box in the garage,) Winners Never Quit. While the title came from an aphorism: “Quitters never win, winners never quit,” the book was more nuanced and deeper than the usual fair of boyhood sports books. The stories were about athletes who kept going, despite hardships – Jackie Robinson, Ken Venturi, Johnny Unitas. Most succeeded in their sport. However, one story from the book that I recall was about Herb Score, a talented pitcher whose career was cut short when a batted ball struck his face while he pitched a game. He never recovered his best stuff. He had to be a “winner” in some other way.
There are life lessons that sports can teach, lessons about determination, courage and a love for something bigger (“the game”). This summer, however, I have grown increasingly concerned about the “sportification” of our national life, especially our politics. As we are mired in partisan gridlock, so much of the analysis I hear uses sports metaphors to ask about who is ahead, who has the advantage – as if every policy discussion were simply an election strategy, and elections are just about winners and losers. Quitters never win gets bastardized into “no compromise.”
Sports can teach us things about life, but sometimes the metaphors are too narrow, or perhaps we have only borrowed too narrowly from sports. Another way to think about what is happening is to postulate that what we have forgotten is that sense of something bigger (“the game”). Maybe in our politics we call that the common good. If we “win,” but our winning damages the game, no one wins. The story of Roger Maris is still interesting because all those who have since broken Maris’ record have had their careers tainted by baseball’s steroid scandal. Their victories are more hollow for it.
I usually read sports books as a nice diversion from other things, yet sometimes the lessons spill over. Without “sportsmanship” sports lose their meaning. Without a broader context of cooperation, competition ends up in a Hobbesian war of all against all.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Deep Self Help

2011-07-05T23:33:00.001-05:00

Ever since reading Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death in 2008 I have found myself exploring some of the literature of contemporary psychoanalysis. Majoring in psychology, I was acquainted with Freud. I read some Jung in college as well. At that time my psychological “mentor,” so to speak, was Abraham Maslow whose ideas I found fascinating and whose intellectual generosity I found admirable. In seminary, I appreciated how some theologians and ethicists took psychology seriously – Paul Tillich, Donald Evans, and others. Over the years I would find time to do some reading in psychology and pick up the occasional “self-help” book. Some of that literature is helpful at some level, though it often lacks a certain depth.
Becker’s book is not self-help literature. It is a probing, intellectually rich, psychologically deep exploration of the human condition, of the human confronting the fact that she or he dies and knows it. Becker drew deeply from the literature of psychoanalysis, and I began coming across other references to psychoanalysis since Freud and Jung. So I have read some D. W. Winnicott, Adam Phillips, Michael Eigen, Stephen Mitchell, Roy Schaefer, Harry Guntrip, Robert Stolorow. Much of the writing is stimulating, sometimes a little dense, often insightful. Most of it would not fit into the category of self-help literature, as we usually define it.
Yet one psychoanalyst I have discovered published a “self-help” book, or at least a book that would probably be shelved with self-help literature. Charles Spezzano has published work on the place of affect in psychoanalysis. He has edited a volume on spirituality, religion and psychoanalysis. He also published a “self-help” book – What To Do Between Birth and Death: the art of growing up. While it may be something on the order of a self-help book, its insights penetrate more deeply. Here are a few:

All significant life choices mean you get something and you give something up.

The one thing we all must do to find peace with a place, or a man or a woman, is be willing to surrender opportunities and pleasures we once rated highly and accept some constraints and limitations we once thought intolerable.

Much self-help literature never acknowledges such choices and limits. Here are a few more insights offered:

Talk is not useful just because it is deep…. The evidence that deep talk has been useful is not that you feel relieved but that your subsequent interactions with the other person are better, smoother, more productive, better coordinated.

Habits form and stick even when they are maladaptive and life-robbing.

Adulthood is… essentially the business… of the unavoidable.

As a theologian and person of faith I am sometimes confronted by those who argue that the language of psychology is not a good fit with the language of faith. I disagree. There may be times when the language conflicts, but at its best, psychology, spirituality, theology and ethics offer mutually illuminating insights into human life. I agree with Spezzano, when he writes in another book that “discourses about the soul and the discourses of the couch, could inform, and not simply argue with or ignore one another” (Soul on the Couch).
I am grateful for this on-going conversation in my life between theology, ethics and psychoanalysis. It continues to enrich my mind and shape my soul. I am grateful for this inner dialogue, even when it comes from a “self-help” book.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

P.S. Economy 3:Today’s (July 3) Duluth News Tribune published an Associated Press article about the economic recovery. Here are some of the facts cited. Worker’s wages and benefits make up 57.5% of the economy, an all-time low (the stable figure into the mid-2000s was 64%). “A big chunk of the economy’s gains has gone to investors in the form of higher corporate profits.” Corporate profits are up; CEO salaries are up significantly; while the average worker’s wages after accounting for inflation were 1.6% lower in May this year than last year. Gains in the stock market “go disproportionately to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans who own more than 80 percent of outstanding stock.” From a moral point of view, a strong economy is one which creates wealth and creates opportunity for ordinary persons who work hard to earn a decent living – enough to afford basic necessities, an education for children, health care. I have no problem with wealth being concentrated as long as the economy is working for ordinary persons. I simply wonder how well is it doing this?

Economics Again

2011-06-26T17:00:00.001-05:00

Humanity is not on earth to serve economics; rather the function of economics is to serve humanity, in accordance with God’s loving purposes.
J. Philip Wogaman, Economics and Ethics, 38

Maybe it is that my son is looking for a job right now, or maybe it is the brief moment I stopped on Fox News today to listen as some folks argued that unions are nothing but job killers, but news about the economy keeps capturing my attention. Actually, this is a long-standing interest. When I was working on my Ph.D. in Christian Ethics I had, for a time, considered writing a dissertation on economic ethics. Instead I decided on another side of Christian social ethics, Christian ethics and political democracy.
Anyway, there were a couple of interesting items about the economy in the most recent issue of The Atlantic (July/August 2011). Between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of all income growth in the U.S. went to the richest 1 percent of the population…. Today, half the national income goes to the richest 10 percent…. In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth – significantly more that the bottom 90 percent who controlled just 26.9 percent. These figures represent a significant shift from the recent past. During the Second World War, and in the four decades that followed, the top 10 percent too home just a third of the national income…. The last time the gap between the people on the top and everyone else was as large as it is today was during the Roaring ‘20s.
As the gap between the rich and others widens, what about the middle class? Since 2002, median household income has declined in real terms, as many middle class jobs have been either destroyed by technological innovation or lost to competition from overseas.
These economic realities raise moral questions. Granted that in a vibrant economy, there will be some persons who benefit more than others, is there some point beyond which inequitable distribution becomes counter-productive for the economy and damaging to persons? What are the larger effects of job insecurity and stagnant wages for middle class persons? If people feel the current economic policies and systems provide little security and insufficient opportunity, what may be the result?
These are tough times. They require tough thinking matched with compassionate hearts.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Life Saved By Rock and Roll

2011-06-19T22:18:00.001-05:00

What it comes down to for me – as a Velvets fan, a lover of rock and roll, a New Yorker, an aesthete, a punk, a sinner, a sometime seeker of enlightenment (and love) (and sex) – is this: I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism. I believe that body and spirit are not really separate, though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal.
Ellen Willis in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island

The very first issue of Rolling Stone I ever bought had Peter Frampton on the cover. It was February 1977 and the year before his album “Frampton Comes Alive” was a huge success. Songs from the record played frequently on the radio – “Show Me the Way” and “Baby I Love Your Way.” Every two weeks for awhile thereafter, until I started to subscribe, I bought a copy of the magazine to see what was happening in the music world.
The pattern developed early for me, I think. My enjoyment of most anything is enhanced by reading about it. When I fell in love with baseball, I started to read about some of its history and best players. With my eighth grade experience of God’s love in Jesus, I began another journey of reading – mostly evangelical and charismatic writings. When some of that reading brought me to more questions, other journeys began – philosophy, psychology, and rock and roll.
In April of 1977, Rolling Stone, in an issue with Hall and Oates on the cover (remember them?), published a long article by Ellen Willis about her spiritual journey – which was also a journey with rock and roll. I don’t recall how much of it I actually remember, but I found it on-line and was moved in re-reading by its deep honesty. What I remember vividly, the first time I read the article was this quote from a song called “Rock n Roll” by a group I had never heard of, The Velvet Underground. The quoted line in the article read: “her life was saved by rock and roll.”
Life saved by rock and roll. What could that mean? Jesus saved, but I was doubting what that meant. In my first encounter with Jesus it meant that those who believed in him, believed that his death was a necessary requirement for God’s forgiveness of our sins, were saved from the eternal punishment of hell. If you did not so believe, well…. I had come to a difficult place with all that, though. How could I write off people of other religious traditions when I knew virtually nothing about them? Cartoonish condemnations of existentialism and pragmatism left me wondering what these philosophies might teach. I wondered if the full impact of Christian faith in Jesus was really meant to be focused on another life? I did not want to give up on Jesus, but I wanted a Christian faith that could help me think more deeply and that could take into account so much that I was learning and encountering.
Part of what I was encountering was rock and roll and writing about music that matched the music’s artistry. A writer like Ellen Willis could pen words that discussed music and spirituality. Her words were truthful. I too, think we struggle against nihilism of one kind or another. I too believe that body and spirit are not really separable. I believe that redemption is never impossible, and always equivocal – by that I mean our embodiment of God’s love and grace is real but momentary, and in the next moment we can lose our way a bit. I learned this from Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and Ellen Willis.
In the end, I believe that Jesus saves – that is, through Jesus I experience the grace and love of God which lead to a greater degree of wholeness in my life, and lead me to work for the healing of the world. I also believe that the grace I know in Jesus comes to me in different, and sometimes surprising, ways – including rock and roll and the words written about it. This life was saved by rock and roll, at least, in part.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Economy and Justice

2011-06-11T22:11:00.001-05:00

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity
Preamble, United States Constitution

But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
The prophet Amos (5:24)

There must be some way out of here
said the joker to the thief.
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine.
Plowmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line,
know what any of it is worth.
Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”

This spring I read two books that indicate we may be in a time of economic confusion, a time to ask about what things are worth, about the meaning of justice and welfare.
Tyler Cowan, The Great Stagnation is an e-book that David Brooks has said may be “the most debated nonfiction book so far this year. “America is in disarray and our economy is failing us,” Cowan begins his book. He argues that we are in the midst of a multi-decade economic stagnation that began in the 1970s. Median wages have risen only slightly since then. Recent economic recoveries have been relatively jobless. Our economic success earlier this century, he contends, was based on picking “low-hanging fruit”: abundant land, rapid technological development, and a pool of bright, but uneducated children and youth. His words about technology are particularly interesting given many of the new developments we have experienced. Today… apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953. We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch (9). To make his argument, Cowan notes the rate of growth of median family income. It slows significantly in 1973. From 1947-1973, median family income doubled; from 1973-2007, it grew less than 22%. Cowan believes that until we find the next new low-hanging fruit, we might expect much the same – the great stagnation.
The other book, which I also read on an e-reader this spring, published in 2006 prior to the recent economic meltdown, is Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift. It comes at our recent economic history from another angle. For decades, Americans and their government were committed to a powerful set of ideals – never wholly achieved, never without internal tension – that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity. Animating this vision was a conviction that a strong economy and society hinged on basic financial security, on the guarantee that those who worked hard and did right by their families had a true safety net when disaster struck…. Today, however, the social fabric that bound us together in good times and bad is unraveling. Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families. (8-9, 15) Hacker acknowledges growing economic inequality in our economy. From 1979-2003 the average income of the richest Americans doubled, factoring for inflation, while the middle class saw their average income rise 15%. The incomes of middle-class families aren’t much higher today than they were in the 1970s – and they are much more at risk. (24) Hacker is less concerned about inequality than the great risk shift.
Weaving the arguments from these two works together we can say that at a time when economic opportunity seems more limited and difficult, average families are being asked to assume more economic risk. What might the meaning of justice be in such circumstances? How do we care for the general welfare? How do we balance sufficient government revenue for an adequate safety net with the encouragement of economic opportunity? These questions do not lend themselves to easy answers. My greatest frustration is that too few are even asking them.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Bob at 70 - Together Through Life

2011-05-27T10:42:00.001-05:00

Interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual
I Corinthians 2:13

Just to think that it all began on an uneventful morn.
Bob Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm”

My first memory of a Bob Dylan song came from a Young Life group meeting I attended in high school. There was this song book that included “secular” songs along with explicitly Christian songs. I remember singing, “I Shall Be Released.” I also recall a locally produced Christian newspaper, put out by the Jesus people group I was part of at the time. One article making a case for Christian faith cited Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” – No reason to get excited, the thief he kindly spoke. There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate. So let us not talk softly now. The hour is getting late.
When I began to ask questions about the Christian faith as I knew it then, one place I looked to expand my mind was to the music of Bob Dylan. Those song lyrics that I had heard or sung spoke to me. What more might I learn? I remember buying my first Dylan albums - Greatest Hits and Greatest Hits, Volume 2. There they were: All Along the Watchtower, I Shall Be Released - - - and a whole lot more: the biting lyrics of “Positively Fourth Street,” the tender lyrics of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” the ache of “Just Like a Woman” and “I Want You,” and the phenomenal “Like a Rolling Stone.” How does it feel? It felt pretty amazing. Remarkably, this guy was born in Duluth (like I was) and grew up in Hibbing, the north country. I wanted to know more, and hear more. My school library had a copy of Writings and Drawings of Bob Dylan and Anthony Scaduto’s biography. As I could, I bought albums (vinyl then!). Street Legal was the first new Dylan album I bought when it came out and I have bought each new album in turn, even the Christmas album (I am glad proceeds went to charity).
Dylan’s music, with roots deep in a variety of American popular musical idioms, and his sometimes brilliant lyrics, were sparks igniting intellectual flames in my young mind. This was one cornerstone in the growth of the horizon of my self-understanding and my understanding of the world. There were others along the way – the psychology of Abraham Maslow, the thought of Alan Watts introducing me to non-Christian religious tradition, Kerouac’s On the Road, Ginsberg’s Howl. I’ve not been quite the same since.
My journey brought me back to Christian faith, but it was a faith that could be more open to the world - that could listen to rock, jazz and Dylan, that could think with and about other religious traditions, that could be in dialogue with psychology and philosophy. Dylan’s music has been a part my journey for many years now. I am currently reading Robert Stolorow World, Affectivity and Trauma, subtitled “Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis”. I came to the chapter titled, “Our Kinship-In-Finitude” in which Stolorow argues the importance of persons connecting with each other in our common experience of finitude. We seek out “brothers and sisters in the dark night” and such connection (“deep emotional attunement’) is especially important if we are to be able to integrate our traumatic experiences into our lives. The essay begins with an epigraph from…. Bob Dylan. I’ll be with you when the deal goes down.
This week Bob Dylan turned 70. This summer I turn 52. I am grateful that our days have overlapped and grateful for this music which is part of the soundtrack of my life, these words which are part of the poetry of my life.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Kierkegaard parable

2011-05-20T22:27:00.001-05:00

It has been more challenging in recent weeks to find time to blog. Since Easter I have traveled out of state twice, officiated at two (with tomorrow – three) funerals, and been busy with all kinds of May activities.
Bradlee Dean’s prayer before the Minnesota legislature today could give me something to write about, but I want more time to consider how one might best respond. I appreciated the Republican Speaker of the House’s response. Mother Jones on-line has a piece about the connection between Dean and Representative Michele Bachmann, but I don’t have time to develop all this right now.
I hope, in the near future to develop some thoughts about the hatred of taxes “theology” that is prominent right now in many places (phrase from Michael Tomasky in The New York Review of Books), in light of a book recently completed and one in which I am significantly immersed – Cowen, The Great Stagnation (available only as an e-book) and Hacker, The Great Risk Shift. Again, I need more time for this.
Next week, Bob Dylan turns 70. There has to be something there.
This past week, Harmon Killebrew died.
A lot of tiny threads, but little whole cloth.

So here for your reflection is a parable written by Soren Kierkegaard (from Concluding Unscientific Postscript and found in Parables of Kierkegaard)

When in a written examination the youth are allotted four hours to develop a theme, then it is neither here nor there if an individual student happens to finish before the time is up, or uses the entire time. Here, therefore, the task is one thing, the time another. But when the time itself is the task, it becomes a fault to finish before the time has transpired. Suppose a man were assigned the task of entertaining himself for an entire day, and he finishes this task of self-entertainment as early as noon: then his celerity would not be meritorious. So also when life constitutes the task. To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Kristeva

2011-05-03T00:27:00.001-05:00

In college I majored in philosophy and psychology, and thirty years later the question – “what are you going to do with that?” still echoes.
To be a philosophy major is to have encountered, now and again, some piece of writing that is a challenge to decipher, but nevertheless leaves you feeling that there is more there to be grappled with. Perhaps what I have done with my philosophy major is to search out, now and again, difficult and challenging writings that nevertheless speaks to me and stretches me, even if through a fog, a cloud, a mist.
Julia Kristeva and I share a birthday, eighteen years apart. Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born, French philosopher, novelist, psychoanalyst whose writings transcend various academic disciplines. To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia Kristeva’s project. Scanning with exceptional intensity the whole horizon of Western culture, her writing investigates the terrains of philosophy, theology, linguistics, literature, art, politics and, not least, psychoanalysis, which remains the crucial intellectual influence on her work…. Speaking across the conventional disciplinary boundaries of the academic world, Kristeva raises the fundamental issues of human existence: language, truth, ethics love. (Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader, vi)
This is my kind of stuff, so when I came across her book This Incredible Need to Believe, I wanted to read it – and a recent airline trip made that possible. The book consists of essays and interviews on religious themes which have engaged Kristeva for a long time. Her perspective is unique: a woman who is not a believer – a psychoanalyst, teacher, writer – convinced nonetheless that the “genius of Christianity” has introduced and continues to diffuse radical innovations as concerns the religious experience of speaking beings (88). Her appreciation for Christian faith runs deep. Christianity opened the vast field of the sacred to figuration and literature: to the inner experience that goes from the quest for convulsive communion to the necessity I feel of questioning everything – from the abysses of childhood up to the unknown (viii). The history of Christianity is a preparation for humanism (83). She sees possibilities for helpful “complicities” between “Christianity and the vision of human complexity to which I am attached” (78)
I don’t claim to have grasped everything that Kristeva wants to say, but I appreciated the scattered insights gained as I struggled with this challenging work. I share a few with you.
The psychic life of the speaking beings that we are is the result of a long “working out of the negative”: birth, separation, frustration, various kinds of lack – so many kinds of suffering (79). Each and every one of us is the result of a long “work on the negative”: birth, weaning, separation, frustration (94).
The only alternative to these different forms of barbarism founded on the denial of malaise is to work through distress again and again: as we try to do, as you try to do…. Still, when new barbarians, having lost even the capacity to suffer, strew pain and death around and in us: when poverty grows by leaps and bounds in the global world, face to face with extravagant accumulations of wealthy, which doesn’t care, aren’t compassion and sublimation not much help? Of course. What I do know, however, is that no political action could step in for them if the humanism – itself a kind of suffering – didn’t give itself the means to interpret and reinvent this “loving intelligence” that comes and is inseparable from the Man of pain and suffering’s compassion that might be confused with the divine itself. (97-98)
Freedom means having the courage to start over (44).
My conversation with Julia Kristeva is not over.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Hell - No?

2011-04-16T00:21:00.004-05:00

Moreover some… of those who remain within the faith of the Church, while believing that there is none greater the Creator God, in which they are right, yet believe such things about him as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of men.
Origen, On First Principles

Rob Bell is the pastor of a large congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and an author who writes intelligently and creatively about the Christian faith. I read one of his early books on Christian faith entitled Velvet Elvis. Recently Rob Bell published a book that is creating quite a stir. I have not yet had the chance to read Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived so I cannot comment knowledgably about its contents and arguments. All I can do is comment on the commentary, and look forward to reading the book when I can find a copy of it. My local bookstore is sold out.
Here’s what I have heard about the book. Bell began pondering what a Christian doctrine of hell might be about if it was a place that included someone like Mahatma Gandhi. He struggled with the idea that Gandhi could be in hell for eternity and so began to reconsider the meaning heaven, hell and eternal destiny. Bell has been considered an evangelical Christian, and these questions have created quite a stir in the evangelical community in particular. The Christian Century characterized Bell’s argument this way: Bell challenges the notion that hell is a place of eternal torment for people who aren’t Christians and argues that an emphasis on hell is misplaced, although he denies he is a universalist. Dr. Riley Case of the United Methodist Confessing Movement, an evangelical renewal movement within The United Methodist Church characterizes Bell’s book as follows: The book asks some important questions about eternal destiny, but in the end posits something close to universalism, the belief that in the end all persons are saved and there is no eternal hell.
It is Dr. Case’s further argument that I want to consider here. Case argues that there has been a distinct lack of conversation within United Methodism about this book and asserts that “a good discussion on hell… would be insightful and helpful.” From there he offers some observations on hell, including this: It is difficult to make a case for Christianity without assuming that hell exists and the fires are quite hot. He concludes his essay, published on-line through the Confessing Movement’s “Happenings Around the Church” April 6, 2011 with a criticism of progressive Christianity, citing H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic 1937 statement about liberal Protestantism in America about “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
“It is difficult to make a case for Christianity without assuming that hell exists and the fires are quite hot.” When Dr. Case makes his case for hell, I am assuming by the context that he considers hell a place of eternal punishment, to use a phrase from the Vineyard Church statement of faith – “eternal conscious punishment.” I want to ponder this, though in what follows I am not necessarily claiming that Dr. Case would hold some of the positions I am criticizing. I am going to use his statement as a springboard for theological discussion and reflection.
As a Christian, I take very seriously human sin and the need for forgiveness. I don’t have to look any further than my own heart and life to understand the ease with which people slip into hurtful behavior and how insidious and entrapping such behavior can be. I say something hurtful that I really wish I had not said. I am ashamed of this, but rather than admit it, I seek ways to deny my action, and the problem becomes worse. A similar dynamic is repeated widely in human experience. Of course, sometimes the stakes are much higher and the consequences much more destructive. The death of Jesus is a tragic example of the wages of sin – uncomfortable truth needing to be silenced, disquieting love needing to be extinguished.
As a Christian I also take seriously God as truthful, just and loving. In God’s presence the truth about our lives is made manifest. We cannot hide from God, and God’s truthful presence is also a truthful judgment about our lives. My Christian faith is not a faith about a God who simply ignores human sin, nor is it about sinless humans, nor does it lack a profound sense of God’s judgment, and in it Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are central.
Nevertheless, I think it is crucial to question an understanding of hell as eternal conscious punishment for those who do not believe certain Christian doctrines. I think we can ask if it really is difficult to make a case for Christianity without assuming that hell exists and the fires are quite hot, or we can ask what kind of case for Christianity is made when a cornerstone of that case is the doctrine of hell as eternal conscious punishment.
What do we say about God if we believe in hell as an eternal punishment for non-believers? We might rightly ask about God’s justice. Justice requires a punishment that fits the crime, so to speak. In at least some cases for Christianity based on the hot fires of hell, there is one punishment given to all, no matter the degree of their offense. A Gandhi who was Hindu is in hell for his unbelief, just as is a Hitler. One could say that it is the same punishment for the same infraction – refusal of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Is eternal conscious punishment a just response to unbelief? What about those whose contact with “believers” is quite mixed, or even cruel. Gandhi knew some of the cruelties of British rule in India. People experience abuse at the hands of clergy. Their ability to believe may be quite limited by such experiences. Do they deserve eternal conscious punishment in the hot fires of hell? How seriously can we take Jesus’ command to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength if the invitation to love is footnoted with a “by the way, failure to love is punishable by an eternity in a fiery hell”? I don’t want to claim that theologians cannot make a case for Christianity that includes God’s love, God’s judgment, and an eternal hell. I do want to claim that there are some prima facie problems here that need addressing and that alternative cases for Christian faith can and should be made. I want to claim that at least some of the cases made for Christianity with hell as a cornerstone enjoin belief in a God as savage and unjust as some of the worst of our human rulers.
If Origen was right all those many years ago, that some in the Church, while believing in God, yet believe such things about God as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of persons, and if one belief that poses such a problem is belief in a fiery hell as place of eternal conscious punishment for those who don’t believe, then not only should a case for Christianity not depend upon such a belief, but we need to positively make another kind of case. I don’t believe Christianity depends on hell as a place of eternal conscious punishment, though the topic is worthy of serious discussion. I think another case can be made. I think other understandings of the death of Jesus, beyond the notion that God required a blood sacrifice in order to forgive so that people would not be sent to hell, are possible, and are present in the tradition, even in the New Testament.
As early as the third century CE, Origen offered a different understanding of the ideas of hell from those wherein it was seen as a place of eternal fiery punishment. “But when the soul thus torn and rent asunder, has been tried by the application of fire, it is undoubtedly wrought into a condition of stronger inward connexion and renewal” (On First Principles). “There is a resurrection of the dead, and there is punishment, but not everlasting” (On First Principles). H. Richard Niebuhr, in the same book in which he criticizes liberal Protestant Christianity in America, also wrote this: Liberalism represented again a dynamic element in religious life; it was a revolt against the fatalism into which the faith in divine sovereignty had been congealed, against the Biblicism which made the Scriptures a book of laws for science and for moral, against the revivalism which reduced regeneration to a method for drumming up church members, and against the otherworldliness which had made heaven and hell a reward and a punishment. (The Kingdom of God in America, 185.)
I look forward to reading more from Dr. Case. I look forward to reading Rob Bell’s book. I will do both with some other words of H. Richard Niebuhr echoing in my mind. I call myself a Christian, though there are some who challenge my right to that name… because I also am a follower of Jesus Christ… because my way of thinking about life, myself, my human companions and our destiny has been so modified by his presence in our history that I cannot get away from it… because my relation to God, has been… deeply conditioned by this presence of Jesus Christ in my history and in our history…. I call myself a Christian… because I identify myself with what I understand to be the cause of Jesus Christ. (The Responsible Self,43)

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

2011-04-02T16:02:00.001-06:00

Walt Whitman in an 1889 conversation about baseball: It’s our game: that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere – belongs as much to our institutions, fits them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.

Thomas Wolfe in a 1938 letter thanking his host after attending the Baseball Writers Association of America: One reason I have always loved baseball so much is that it has been not merely “the great national game” but really a part of the whole weather of our lives, of the thing that is our own, of the whole fabric, the million memories of America. For example, in the memory of almost every one of us, is there anything that can evoke spring – the first fine days of April – better than the sound of the ball smacking into the pocket of the big mitt, the sound of the bat as it hits the horsehide: for me, at any rate, and I am being literal and not rhetorical – almost everything I know about spring is in it – the first leaf, the jonquil, the maple tree, the smell of grass upon your hands and knees, the coming into flower of April. And is there anything that can tell more about an American summer than, say, that smell of the wooden bleachers in a small-town baseball park, the resinous, sultry, and exciting smell of old dry wood.

The 2011 baseball season began this week. Spring is here, or near, and almost every day in the coming months we will have scores to watch and games to mark our days as those days lengthen into mid-summer then slowly shorten as darkness encroaches with autumn.
For a few years when I was a boy almost everything I knew about spring was associated with baseball. Bubble gum cards hit the stores, and we wondered what the new year’s cards would look like. In sixth grade some of us received permission from the teacher to bring our transistor radios to school on opening day, so we could catch the Twins game, during recess or other breaks. These were the days of the radios with the single ear phone. Opening day 1970 was very special. Brant Alyea, a newly-acquired outfielder, had four hits, including two home runs, and drove in seven runs as the Twins defeated the Chicago White Sox on April 7. Truth be told, I had to do a little research to insure the correct numbers here, but I remember Alyea and I remember he had a phenomenal day. Later that same season (September 7), Alyea had another seven RBI game. The Twins won their division for the last time, until 1987.
There were years when my appreciation for baseball waned. I would follow the Twins some, and catch the World Series when I could, but some of the magic was gone. Perhaps that is the way with all childhood passions. Adult thoughts and responsibilities take up residence in the mind and heart, as they should. Recent years have seen a return to me of a love for the game. I am not sure why, except that in a world that is often complex, violent, disappointing, a world where progress towards peace and well-being is often glacial, there is a place for a game that reminds me of boyhood hope and enthusiasm, that comes with the lengthening days of spring, that is not on a clock, and that keeps score by bringing runners home. It is good to have this game as a part of the weather of my life.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Along with a return of interest in baseball has come a return to reading about the game. For me if it is interesting it is worth reading about. Logging in time at airports this past month I read two recently published baseball books, both worth checking out. Jimmy Breslin’s Branch Rickey, is a delightfully written book about Rickey and his determination to bring an African-American into major league baseball. I am kind of proud to say he was a Methodist. John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, tells the story of baseball’s earliest years in the United States. It is filled with fascinating detail and wonderfully rich characters. If you want to know what Helena Blavatsky has to do with early baseball, or the story behind the Spalding name on the baseball equipment you use, check this book out.

Music Again

2011-03-18T21:41:00.002-06:00

When I began listening to a lot of music – in junior high , high school and especially college, vinyl records were the primary medium for listening. I remember looking forward to the semi-annual album sales at Target – when most all their records would go on sale for $5. I remember searching record bins at stores and the delight in finding some relatively rare album. Part of the joy of a record album was the interesting artwork on the album cover. Much of that was lost with CDs and is gone forever (almost) with the advent of electronic purchase of music through itunes and the like.

I still prefer CDs when I purchase music. I like the tangible feel of holding it in your hand. Yet, I have itunes on my computer and have enjoyed purchasing some music that way, too. What has been especially fun about itunes is the ability to purchase a song that comes to mind almost like a free association. I have not done this a whole lot, but I recently burned a CD of songs I have downloaded over the past couple of years. That they fit on a CD says that I really don’t buy a lot of music this way, though these are not the only songs I have downloaded. They are the more random songs that did not fit in some other CDs already burned.

Here’s the list with some memories attached. Maybe it will evoke some memories for you, especially, if you are old enough to remember vinyl records.

George Harrison, Crackerbox Palace. I bought a George Harrison best-of CD a year or so ago, and in a review I read about the songs it did not include, like Crackerbox Palace. Listening to the song I remember high school, and the song brings a smile.

Don Williams, Good Ole Boys Like Me. This song also came out when I was in high school. At that time, few self-respecting young people listened to country music, unlike today. Yet this song got airplay on Top 40 radio, and I couldn’t resist a song that refers to late night radio, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams and Hank Williams.

Charlie Rich, Behind Closed Doors and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. These songs came out when I was in junior high. Charlie Rich was a country crossover. I liked the songs, and wasn’t even aware of all the kinds of things that might happen behind closed doors.

Cyndi Lauper, Time After Time. Cyndi Lauper was weird looking, but she could sing. This song came out in the early years of MTV, before I had cable. I was a youth pastor, and heard some of the youth in my group listening to it. One of the great things about being a youth pastor is the opportunity it affords to hear some new music. It’s not the primary thing about youth ministry, but it is a nice perk.

The Ronettes, Be My Baby. When I was in junior high, a guy named Scott Ross, a former New York disc jockey, had a fascinating radio show. He had become a Christian and he would play rock n roll records and weave in Christian faith themes. I read his autobiography and found he was married to one of the Ronettes. Anyway, this is a wonderful song, referred to later in an Eddie Money tune.

Albert Hammond, It Never Rains in California. Greenberg, a film with Ben Stiller, had this song in its soundtrack. I wondered if I had it anywhere on some CD compilation. I didn’t. I think it was another junior high song. I remember listening to the year-end top 100 songs on New Year’s day during these years. Casey Kasem. I am sure this was one song played on one of those shows.

The Brothers Johnson, Strawberry Letter 23. I think this was a college song. Probably danced to it sometime, and it’s still worth dancing to.

Anita O’ Day, My Ship (two versions): Miles Davis plays a beautiful version of this song on Miles Ahead, a great jazz album. Anita O’Day is one of my favorite jazz singers and when I read somewhere that she had recorded this song, I needed to hear it. I was not disappointed.

Andy Williams, Moon River. I am not sure what made me think of this song when I downloaded it. It reminds me of all the variety shows that were on television when I was growing up. I kind of miss Ed Sullivan.

Gerry Rafferty, Baker Street. Gerry Rafferty died recently, and this was a memorable song from my college years.

Rick Nelson, Garden Party. Another junior high hit, but with a wry take on the rock n roll scene of the day from a veteran of early rock n roll. It is a song about growing up and growing into being ok with who you are.

Smash Mouth, All Star. I think I heard this as my own children were beginning to discover music for themselves. It is a catchy song with an upbeat message. “Hey now, you’re an all-star, get your game on… Only shooting stars break the mold.”

Chris Isaac, Wicked Game. Another memorable song, though I am not sure just when I heard it or what made me think of it.

Lindsey Buckingham, Trouble. Fleetwood Mac was the band when I was in high school, enormously popular. Lindsay Buckingham was an important part of their popularity and then he had some solo success with this song. Catchy as can be.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

A Moment of Grace

2011-03-08T00:59:00.002-06:00

Are we healed, have we received healing forces, here and there from the power of the picture of Jesus as the Savior? Are we grasped by this power? Is it strong enough to overcome our neurotic trends, the rebellion of unconscious strivings, the split in our conscious being, the diseases which disintegrate our minds and destroy our bodies at the same time? Have we overcome in moments of grace the torturing anxiety in the depth of our hearts, the restlessness which never ceases moving and whipping us, the unordered desires and hidden repressions which return as poisonous hate, the hostility against ourselves and others, against life itself, the hidden will to death? Have we experienced now and then in moments of grace that we are made whole, that destructive spirits have left us, that psychic compulsions are dissolved, that tyrannical mechanisms in our soul are replaced by freedom: that despair, this most dangerous of all splits, this real sickness unto death, is healed and we are saved from self-destruction? Has this happened to us under the power of the picture of Jesus as the Savior? Paul Tillich, “On Healing” in The New Being, 44-45

A couple of weeks ago now, I was meeting with our Board of Ordained Ministry as we interviewed persons for ordination. We meet at a Catholic monastery and retreat center, and our evening worship is shared in their chapel.

This particular night, the following passage was read from Colossians: As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do , in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

As I listened to these words, I was looking up at a crucifix at the front of the chapel. The figure of Jesus grabbed my attention in a way that a crucifix never had before. There was Jesus, lightly clothed, yet clothed with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience and love. And there was this overwhelming feeling that I wanted to embrace this Jesus, to offer compassion. I could almost feel myself doing this, that I was helping carry Jesus. There was an oddly wonderful physical sense to all this, and theologically it made sense – in life I want to clothe myself with this Jesus and carry him into the world. It is not a solo act, but I have a role, a part.

Have we experienced now and then in moments of grace that we are made whole? Yes.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

The Economy - Stupid?

2011-02-27T23:17:00.001-06:00

I took college courses in both micro- and macro- economics. Since then I have read a number of books on economic policy. I pay attention to the debates on economic policy. If I understand one dominant position in current policy debate, the primary obstacle to economic growth and progress is government taxation and regulation. If only we will free up more money for businesses and corporations, they will expand and hire, putting people back to work.

Forgive me for being puzzled, then, when I read this story last week in The Minneapolis Star and Tribune. Medtronic, a Minnesota-based company, earned $924 million for the quarter ending January 28. This represents earnings of 86 cents per share, and compares to earnings of $831 million or 75 cents per share for the same period last year. According to the story, analysts were expecting the company to earn 84 cents per share, so this seems good news. What puzzles me is the other part of the story. Medtronic announced that it will reduce its workforce by 4 to 5 percent or 1,500 to 2,000 positions.

Higher profits and layoffs. That isn’t supposed to be how it works. I know that things are more complicated than the simple models in economic courses or in public policy debates. The story indicated that Medtronic’s earnings were based on lower taxes and that sales had declined in this quarter. Companies need to look to the future and not just to the past. But if the matter is more complicated, then why are we feed the story that all we need to do is free up more money for corporations and they will hire? Why are taxes singled out as the primary reason companies don’t hire? Am I just economically ignorant?

I am not singling out Medtronic for bad behavior. From what I know of the company, it has been a pretty good corporate citizen. What I question is the way our system seems skewed toward increasing profits at the cost of employment. Granted companies need to show profits to exist, is increasing profit the single bottom line to be considered? Last month an article in The Atlantic noted that the top twenty-five hedge fund managers earned, on average, one billion dollars in 2009. This while unemployment remains uncomfortably high.

I yearn for a richer debate on the place of profits in our economic system. I yearn for a richer debate on social policies that will combine to help companies be profitable while providing for the kind of public services and infrastructure that prepare our citizens for productive participation in our economy and a safety net for those on the margins. Simply slashing taxes, without considering more complex issues about profits and public and private good, doesn’t seem to be the prudent way forward, or maybe when it comes to the economy I am just stupid.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Books

2011-02-20T22:53:00.001-06:00

Last week on Minnesota Public Radio, Kerri Miller hosted a show in which the question was desert island books and music. What one book and what one cd would you take with you to a desert island? I have a difficult time with that question. There are so many books I appreciate. There is so much music that I love. I was listening while driving to the hospital to make a pastoral visit, so I did not have that much time to play with this. In the time I had, I chose Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Ken Burn’s Jazz (a bit of stretch of the rules as this is a 5 cd set). I am not sure I would stay with these choices, but I think I could live on a desert island with them.

Today at my church, a church member and friend, Anita Zager, shared with our adult Faith Forum her experiences with books, growing up with them and as the owner of an independent book store which she has just closed. Duluth will miss Northern Lights Books, and Anita’s generous spirit as a book store owner who is also a book lover. Anita reflected on her reasons for getting into the book business and on some of the factors which make independent book stores a challenge at this moment. The emergence of e-books and e-readers is dramatically changing the book business.

As important and meaningful as these reflections were, I particularly enjoyed her sharing her life in reading with us. She offered a more extensive list than a desert island pick, and she gave me permission to share her list here. I offer it to you with gratitude for Anita’s work and love of literature. I offer it to you to spark your own reflections on your life in books.

Anita Zager’s Reading Life
Nancy Drew
Boxcar Children
Biographies
Charles Dickens
Chaim Potok
Classics – Shakespeare, Greek Mythology – High School

Confirmation – Biblical Literacy
College – Old & New Testament Classes
Barclay Bible Study Series taught by Bev Ramstad
Dakota Kathleen Norris
When Bad Things Happen to Good People Harold S. Kushner
Man’s Search for Meaning Victor Frankl
Let Your Life Speak Parker Palmer
Siddartha Herman Hesse
Christianity For the Rest of Us Diana Butler Bass

Sigurd Olson – Singing Wilderness, Listening Point, etc.
Eric Sevareid, Canoeing With the Cree
Grace Lee Nute – Voyageur’s Highway, etc.

The Long Walk – Slavomir Rawicz
Three Cups of Tea – Greg Mortenson

To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Sijie Dai
Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials Trilogy”
Harry Potter

Mysteries
Tony Hillerman
British Classics
Scandinavian Noir
Colin Cotterill (Coroner’s Lunch)
William Kent Krueger

Historical Fiction
Patrick O’Brien
Dorothy Dunnett “Lymond Chronicles”

So what’s on your list?

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Silent as Stone Or?

2011-02-04T16:50:00.002-06:00

What to write about? Sometimes ideas pour out so fast it is all you can do to catch up and put them down. Sometimes the muses are as silent as stone. Things have been kind of quiet inside, so I thought I would share a few things I have encountered along the reading way.

Doing the right thing, even out of duty, changes souls.
Charles Foster, The Sacred Journey (56)

Be comforted that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.
Paul Harding, Tinkers (72)

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus, The Essential Writings (13)

A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do. Flannery O’ Connor

At first I thought of these as random and desperate, but some pattern emerges for me reading them together like this. Maybe an adult faith is one that understands and feels the complexity of the world, its heartaches and confusions, and yet persists in doing the right thing, in seeking to shape the soul, in searching for those images that open the heart to the beauty of the world.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Moments

2011-01-22T16:23:00.001-06:00

Moments that help you feel you are where you should be:

Sunday after the worship service in which you gave bows to each of the children to let them know that they are a gift, a little girl, wearing her bow, comes up to give you a hug, her mother telling you that she really wanted to say “hello” to the pastor.

Sunday afternoon you give the welcome at the community ecumenical worship service held at St. Mark AME Church to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. You welcome “all God’s children" using King’s words from his “I Have a Dream Speech.” The next day you are quoted in the newspaper.

Monday morning, you get to welcome people to the MLK Breakfast being held in the social hall of your church.

Thursday night, while helping with the monthly food distribution ministry at your church, you look out the window to see a brilliant and bright full moon shine over an icy Lake Superior. It is beautiful, as is the food ministry.

Friday morning you are listening to The Hold Steady as you drive to a local elementary school to mentor a student.

When you get to his classroom, you can tell your student is glad to see you. He has been waiting to play Yahtzee.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Not Alone

2011-01-11T22:36:00.001-06:00

This is my first blog of the new year. Kind of slow, I know, but it has been busy. The first full week of 2011, I officiated at two funerals, one for a ninety-seven year old woman and one for an eighty-seven year old woman. There was a lot of life there to celebrate.
On to the topic at hand.
I don’t know when I first encountered the Statement of Faith of The United Church of Canada. In seminary I think. When I did, I appreciated it deeply, and still do. The phrases are succinct and powerful and they really present a statement of faith. The ending lines come to me from time to time. A well of faith bubbling up. The whispering wind of the Spirit. They have been coming back to me in recent days.

In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.
We are not alone.
Thanks be to God.

Like many of you, I was horrified by the violence in Tucson over the weekend. The shooting of a congress woman, the death of a nine year old, a gun in the hands of someone whose thought processes were deranged. In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.
Over the weekend outside the small town of Cromwell (about 40 miles from Duluth), population about 200, two people were murdered. No suspects are currently in custody. Just the day before our church music director had purchased meat for our staff holiday party from the woman who was killed. The woman worked as a meat cutter at a local meat market. In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.
I have had a number of challenging pastoral conversations since the new year began – conversations where there has been hurt, anger, sadness, anxiety, concern about change, concern about relationships, concern about surgery. This in addition to the two families grieving. In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.
God is with us. We are not alone. Perhaps this God with us is whispering encouragement for us to be a kinder, gentler people. Perhaps this God with us is whispering encouragement for us to work together with God to create a kinder, gentler world.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

One Year to the Next

2010-12-31T14:19:00.001-06:00

As one year flows into the next, I wanted to review some of the memorable quotes I recorded for myself in 2010 and share a few with you (again, perhaps).

If we don’t see ideas as the voice of God in us, how can we hope to know more of God in this world – and in ourselves. Joan Chittister, Living Well

The truth will set you free. But not before it is finished with you. David Foster Wallace

We seem to be forgetting about the soul, about what it is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to a world in a rich, subtle and complicated manner; about what it is to approach another person as a soul, rather than as a mere useful instrument or an obstacle to one’s own plans; about what it is to talk as someone who has a soul to someone else whom one sees as similarly deep and complex. Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit: why democracy needs the humanities

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon

Thinking one knows it all, thinking one knows something one doesn’t, one miscalculates reality.
Michael Eigen, Madness and Murder

Recently a friend sent an article to me about Judson Phillips, a founder of the Tea Party Movement, who would like to see The United Methodist Church disappear, calling it socialist and Marxist. The change of year is a good time to clear the air, make confessions, free the soul. I confess that I am enamored with Marxian wisdom. I cannot deny the truth Marx spoke when he said:

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. Groucho Marx

Bring the new year in joyfully.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Bing and Bowie

2010-12-24T00:27:00.000-06:00

November 30, 1977. I was 18 years old and in my first semester of college at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. That night Eric Servareid bid farewell as a regular correspondent on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. His parting words are worth watching and they can be found on youtube.
That night the Bing Crosby Christmas special aired. Bing had died October 14. One of the most memorable moments that night was the duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie. There is some kind banter and then a lovely version of “Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth.” I posted this link earlier on my Facebook page. The song was taped September 11, 1977 – before September 11 was September 11. Anyway, I think I was watching that show that night, at least that is my memory. I was not a big David Bowie fan at the time, and Bing Crosby was nice, but kind of old school. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the song. It was and is a Christmas music favorite.
I have fond memories of Christmas music. My parents had a few of the Goodyear Greatest Songs of Christmas albums around the house. My wife, Julie, loves Christmas music, as do our daughters Beth and Sarah. I love the songs of the church for the season – especially It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, Little Town of Bethlehem, What Child is This, In the Bleak Midwinter, and Silent Night. I also love many “secular” Christmas songs. In recent years I have burned some of my own “greatest songs of Christmas” and its three CDs contains these songs:

Pachelbel, Canon in D
James Taylor, I’ll Be Home For Christmas
Vince Guaraldi, Christmas Time is Here (vocal)
John Coltrane, My Favorite Things
Johnny Mathis, Do You Hear What I Hear
Paul McCartney, Wonderful Christmas Time
Bing Crosby, White Christmas
Nat King Cole, Christmas Song
Bruce Springsteen, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
John Lennon, Happy Xmas
Tony Bennett, My Favorite Things
Bing Crosby/David Bowie, Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth
Vince Guaraldi, Christmas Time is Here (instrumental)
Louis Armstrong, Wonderful World
Mahalia Jackson, O Holy Night
Judy Garland, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
Julie Andrews, In the Bleak Midwinter
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Joy to the World
Vince Guaraldi, What Child is This
Sarah McLachlan, What Child is This
Chicago, Winter Wonderland
Diana Krall, I’ll Be Home for Christmas
Sarah McLachlan, Christmas Time is Here
Louis Armstrong, White Christmas
Chicago, Christmas Time is Here
Sarah McLachlan, I’ll Be Home for Christmas
Diana Krall, Christmas Time is Here
James Taylor, River
Diana Krall, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
Sarah McLachlan, River
Louis Armstrong, Christmas Night in Harlem
Sarah McLachlan, Have Yourself Merry Little Christmas
James Taylor, Baby It’s Cold Outside
James Taylor, In the Bleak Midwinter
Sarah McLachlan, In the Bleak Midwinter
Sarah McLachlan, Silent Night
Diana Krall, Sleigh Ride
Dianne Reeves, Carol of the Bells
Rosemary Clooney, Silver Bells
Perry Como, There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays
Andy Williams, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
Meredith D’Ambrosia, Christmas Waltz
Mel Torme, Christmas Song
Ella Fitzgerald, O Holy Night
Sheryl Crow, There Is a Star That Shines Tonight

Merry Christmas
With Faith And With Feathers,

David

What Does It Take

2010-12-10T20:08:00.001-06:00

This week, an acquaintance of mine, Adam Hamilton, posted a question on his Facebook page and invited responses to it. What are the five most important qualities of pastoral leaders that create or lead vibrant, alive churches? To be honest, I am not sure any short list captures everything that needs to be said here, but it is a question about which I have thought deeply. In short order, I typed out my list and posted it:
• Character/integrity/genuineness/authenticity (o.k. a lot for one quality)
• Deep relationship with God in Jesus
• Vision for ministry
• Passion for ministry – including ministry to the community
• Joy and humor

While I like the list, I did not feel it was quite adequate. I did not think it captured all that I might want to say in response to the question about the important qualities of pastoral leaders leading vibrant and alive churches. I began to play with the idea of intelligences. What sort of intelligences are needed for effective pastoral ministry? I reframed my list in terms of six “intelligences.”
1. Spiritual intelligence (I really don’t like that word here, but, hey, I am trying to work with a theme): has a deep spiritual life, a living relationship with God in Jesus
2. First-rate intelligence. I have long appreciated F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (“The Crack-Up”). These days we need pastoral leaders who can be comfortable with ambiguity, who exercise imagination, who can help navigate adaptive challenges, who can think theologically.
3. Emotional-Social Intelligence. People skills matter and they were not well represented in my initial list.
4. Vocational Intelligence. We have to be able to do the work, including having some vision for ministry that is intellectually, emotionally and spiritually rooted and compelling.
5. Communication intelligence. Pastors need to be able to communicate orally and in writing, including the use of electronic media.
6. Pedagogical Intelligence. We need to be able to teach.

And if I have something approaching a first-rate intelligence, I know this list will continue to be reshaped.

With Faith And With Feathers,

David

Francis Bacon Squared

2010-12-05T23:32:00.002-06:00

Last week I watched the movie Amazing Grace, a film about the life of William Wilberforce. I thoroughly enjoyed its portrayal of the combination of deep faith and a passion for changing the world. I also appreciated the Francis Bacon quote.

It is a sad fate for a man to die too well-known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.

I recalled it well-enough from the movie, but wanted to make sure I had it just right, so I typed “Francis Bacon” into a search engine and came up with a number of wonderful Francis Bacon quotes, including the following:

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Then I discovered that there is more than one Francis Bacon. The Francis Bacon quoted in Amazing Grace was a British philosopher, person of letters, politician who lived from 1561-1626. The Francis Bacon who wrote about the artist was an Irish painter from the twentieth century. A sample of his work is found below.

While having my Francis Bacon squared this week, I also found my way to a William James essay from 1898, “Philosophical Concepts and Practical Results.” In it James wrote:

Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders. What everyone else can feel, what everyone can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express.

At our best, perhaps pastors are like that, too. We give words to what can be felt and experienced in the bone and marrow of human lives. We point a way forward into a richer life and a deeper experience of self, others, the world, God. We aid the journey of self-discovery, for we, too, consider it tragic that a person should die too well-known to others and unknown to herself. Yet though we put words to experience, serve as path-finders, encourage self-knowledge, we do that within the wondrous mystery that is life as a human being.

James also wrote in his essay, “Philosophers, let them be as queer as they will, still are men in the secret recesses of their hearts.” Queer often means something different than what James meant, and he did not use inclusive language. Taking these into account, I hope what he says here is also true of pastors – be as odd as we will, we are still human in the secret recesses of our hearts.

With Faith And With Feathers (and deep in the mystery),

David

Wild Gratitude

2010-11-29T00:01:00.002-06:00

As the Thanksgiving weekend draws to an end, I share with you a fitting poem. It can be found on-line from the site of the Academy of American Poets (poets.org). I have included the link and if you follow it you can hear the poet read his poem.

Wild Gratitude Edward Hirsch

Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,
And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth,
And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,
And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,
And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,
I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,
Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing
In everyone of the splintered London streets,

And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke's
With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude,
And his grave prayers for the other lunatics,
And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry.
All day today—August 13, 1983—I remembered how
Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759,
For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience.

This was the day that he blessed the Postmaster General
"And all conveyancers of letters" for their warm humanity,
And the gardeners for their private benevolence
And intricate knowledge of the language of flowers,
And the milkmen for their universal human kindness.
This morning I understood that he loved to hear—
As I have heard—the soft clink of milk bottles
On the rickety stairs in the early morning,

And how terrible it must have seemed
When even this small pleasure was denied him.
But it wasn't until tonight when I knelt down
And slipped my hand into Zooey's waggling mouth
That I remembered how he'd called Jeoffry "the servant
Of the Living God duly and daily serving Him,"
And for the first time understood what it meant.
Because it wasn't until I saw my own cat

Whine and roll over on her fluffy back
That I realized how gratefully he had watched
Jeoffry fetch and carry his wooden cork
Across the grass in the wet garden, patiently
Jumping over a high stick, calmly sharpening
His claws on the woodpile, rubbing his nose
Against the nose of another cat, stretching, or
Slowly stalking his traditional enemy, the mouse,
A rodent, "a creature of great personal valour,"
And then dallying so much that his enemy escaped.

And only then did I understand
It is Jeoffry—and every creature like him—
Who can teach us how to praise—purring
In their own language,
Wreathing themselves in the living fire.

Edward Hirsch, "Wild Gratitude" on poets.org

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Irony - The Free Ride When You've Already Paid

2010-11-21T23:10:00.001-06:00

Whatever happened to Alanis Morrissette? A couple of days ago she was trending on Yahoo, but that lists changes pretty quickly. With the internet, things move rapidly. Information is available at your fingertips. I was trying to remember the date of a Bruce Springsteen concert I attended in 1978, and I found out the dates of his concerts that year within minutes surfing the web. Remarkable. Is there a down side, a dark side? Maybe.
Zadie Smith is a novelist and essayist who is sixteen years younger than me. I share this because her cautionary words about social networking, offered in the most recent issue of The New York Review are not the reflections of a fifty-one year old who could be written off as hopelessly out of touch with a Web 2.0 world (the person writing this blog who also read Smith’s article in a print version of the periodical – yes, I have more subscriptions than apps).
Here are some of Smith’s reflections. Of social media like Facebook, she writes: Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationships that connection permits – none of this is important…. a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other…. When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.Smith is not a Luddite. She raises the issue of the impact of technologies and tools. Tools are wonderful for doing certain things – but do we use our tools or do our tools use us? It is never that simple. Our technologies inevitably shape our sense of self. The question is whether we will give ourselves completely to our Facebook sense of self where relationships are defined by “status,” where we can “like” something or not, where we seem to be our preferences. Malcolm Gladwell, in a recent New Yorker article (yet another subscription) argues that social media are ingenious for developing weak-tie connections which have their strengths. Yet they also have their limits. Other relationships need to be fostered in a rich and full human life. Zadie Smith quotes Jaron Lanier, virtual reality pioneer, “you have to be somebody before you can share yourself.” Developing a somebody may require time off-line, time for quiet reflection, time away from a constantly connected world.
About the time I was thinking about such things, an announcement was made that Facebook would be developing an e-mail system that could link Facebook, e-mail, text messaging in one place. When e-mail arrived, letter writing declined. E-mail is now considered too slow. Who wants to read all that text (who is still reading these words of reflection?). Text messaging is overtaking the human voice of the phone conversation. Pulling all this together in a single site available on smart phones of all kinds, phones that need never be turned off, phones that seem to beg for constant attention lest you miss an update – how might this be changing us, and do we want to be changed in these ways.
Irony. I am posting these thoughts on the web, on a blog linked to my Facebook site. I use the tools and hope they don’t define all that I am.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Beauty

2010-11-14T22:01:00.001-06:00

Out of all the instinctual needs we humans have to put up with – sex, food, sleep, fresh air, water – the most important and least recognized need of all is beauty. It’s what magnifies us into human beings. character Bob Devonic in Laura Hendrie’s novel, Remember Me

I am in the midst of preaching a series of sermons using themes from Diana Butler Bass’ book Christianity For the Rest of Us. Some 60 to 80 people in the congregation I pastor are reading this book as a way of exploring what a vital Christian faith and a vital Christian congregation might look like in the twenty-first century. Today I preached on worship and beauty (and the sermon will be posted on my sermon blog in a few days).
Moving toward the conclusion of the sermon I said that beauty is better experienced than discussed, and then showed a power point slide show with John Coltrane’s “After The Rain” playing in the background. With Coltrane still playing, I ended by reading Denise Levertov’s poem, “Primary Wonder.”
I hoped people experienced something of the beauty I intended. When worship works, that is when it connects us with God, the world, and ourselves more deeply and honestly, it is because beauty is encountered. God’s way and work in the world could be described as the work of creating beauty, of weaving together disparate experiences in the direction of justice, peace, reconciliation, peace, healing, and love. We need beauty. We need it to open our minds and enlarge our hearts. Beauty magnifies us into human beings.
The irony of the morning was that our projector system at the church is in transition, and was not working today. I had to present my power point slide show using my lap top, a portable projector and a screen. The set up would not have been considered beautiful, the screen, in particular lacked almost any aesthetic value. It was even torn in the corner.
Yet even here there is something to be learned. We all have ugly areas in our lives, and certainly the world is marred by the ugliness of hatred, poverty, war, oppression. The work of creating beauty does not necessarily begin with beautiful materials. It begins with what we have at hand, sometimes a torn screen. Even then, though, God works toward beauty, and when worship works, some of that beauty shows through.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Nietzsche II

2010-11-05T13:53:00.000-06:00

We, openhanded and rich in spirit, standing by the road like open wells with no intention to fend off anyone who feels like drawing from us – we unfortunately do not know how to defend ourselves where we want to: we have no way of preventing people from darkening us: the time in which we live throws into us what is most time-bound… But we shall do what we have always done: whatever one casts into us, we take down into our depth – for we are deep, we do not forget – and become bright again. Frederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 378

Why read Nietzsche, son of a pastor (though his father died when Nietzsche was quite young), and later deep critic of the church and of Christianity? Why pay any attention to him? I think we need to hear our critics, listen to those who don’t find faith credible. They can teach us. What often amazes me about Nietzsche is how much I learn from him about aspects of faith. “I would believe only in a god who could dance” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part I). I happen to think this is the Christian God, and Nietzsche doesn’t.

In the passage cited above, I hear a deep spirituality and hear something of the vocation of the church. We nurture deep places of the Spirit within. We take the darkness of the world around us, let it get to that deep place of God, Christ, Spirit, and give back brightness.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Nietzsche I

2010-10-29T22:58:00.000-05:00

But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life.
Frederich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Is Nietzsche right, even partially so? Yes. Too many have experienced the church and Christian faith as something narrow, rigid, life-constricting. I have had some of those experiences myself but have found them antithetical to my deepest and most profound experiences of Christian faith. My faith, at its best, opens me up to the world and to life – to joy and suffering, hope and disappointment, mystery, complexity, questions, beauty, love – and even passion. Jesus is to have said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). It is when we know and can share such a faith that others might be attracted to it.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

AAugh!!!

2010-10-22T22:52:00.001-05:00

Having internet connection problems at home. Blogging is not much fun when those issues arise. In the words of that great theologian Charlie Brown, "Aaaugh!"

Still With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Weaving New Life

2010-10-16T10:51:00.000-05:00

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. II Corinthians 5:17

It has been awhile since my last post in part because of a busy schedule – travel to Nashville for six days for two United Methodist meetings, and in part because of internet problems at home. I arrived back home earlier this week to find that television service had been lost – missed the Vikings game on Monday (as did the Vikings themselves in the first half), and then once that was repaired to have sporadic outages in our internet even after replacing the modem and router. Anyway, on to other thoughts – thoughts conceived on a hotel treadmill and jotted down on paper in airports.
There is a type, probably no person fits it perfectly, but a type - - - the person who inside never graduates from high school. There is the athlete whose best time in life was sinking the winning basket, scoring the winning goal, throwing the winning pass. There is the homecoming queen who has never felt as adored since. There is the A student never again able to replicate her or his success.
High school for me was a mixed bag. I look back with a certain fondness, but also recall the pain, awkwardness, disappointment. Perhaps this is a type, too, one who too easily looks askance at those who hold too closely to high school.
In reality we all weave and weave again our past experiences into our present reality. A healthy weaving allows us to appreciate the past but live in the present, neither holding on to the past too tightly or rejecting it too severely. New life, even in Christ, is a new weaving, not simply a letting go, and the work of the Spirit is toward creativity and freedom as we do our weaving.
I thought of all of this on a treadmill in Nashville. While at meetings, I was on the treadmill every night and one night this fascinating sequence of songs shuffled through my ipod:

Dan Fogelberg, “Same Old Lang Syne” – song about running into an old class mate –
“felt that old familiar pain”
The Eagles, “I Can’t Tell You Why” – song about love fading away, popular when I was
in high school/college, great slow dance song if you could find a partner
Hall and Oates, “Sara Smile” – enormously popular song in high school, I could
almost feel myself driving wearing my letter jacket on a crisp fall day
Lou Reed, “Coney Island Baby” – the glory of love and playing football for the coach
Herb Alpert, “A Taste of Honey” – a song I remember from childhood. My dad had
this record with a rather unforgettable cover.

And so we live, weaving and reweaving our past – joys and sorrows, desires, dreams, disappointments, accomplishments. Newness of life is a new weaving made possible by a Spirit of creativity and love.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

18%

2010-10-02T23:23:00.001-05:00

In the September 17 issue of the Duluth newspaper, the News Tribune, there was an article about a recent survey conducted of Americans (Associated Press National Constitution Center). “Glum and mistrusting, a majority of Americans today are very confident in – nobody.” When asked about their trust in people running major institutions, 43% said they are extremely or very confident in the military. That tops the list. 39% expressed confidence in small or local business leaders; the scientific community came in at 30%, and next, at 18% organized religion.
That religion is in the top four should bring a modicum of comfort to those of us whose lives are deeply intertwined with organized religion. That the figure is 18% is a bit disheartening. There are many reasons for this, I am sure. Scandals surrounding Roman Catholic priests and other prominent clergy have been reported regularly in recent years. The face of organized religion is sometimes the face of a pastor of a small church who suddenly becomes famous because he plans a Quran burning (and I am pleased he changed his mind). A few Christians can be seen carrying signs that read: “God hates fags” or “Jesus hates sin.” Most of these actions are not the kind that promote confidence in organized religion.
When I read these numbers again, however, I wonder if there is another factor also involved. I notice that the scientific community rates higher than organized religion in evoking confidence. There is little question that scientific discoveries have enhanced our lives. We need to think only of the dramatic advancements in medical technologies to be grateful for the work of scientists. Perhaps one factor that erodes confidence in organized religion is the way some forms of faith have publically battled science. They have tried to substitute poetic bible passages for scientific literature and in the process give the impression that people of faith cannot contend in an intellectually sophisticated manner with the work of scientists. The most blatant example is the insistence of some in the Christian faith community on reading the first chapters of Genesis as science rather than as theological poetry. To do that is both to misread the Scriptures and to create a false battle against scientific work that helps us understand the processes by which life emerges and changes. If we read Genesis as significant theological poetry that grapples with existential questions about the meaning of life in relationship to God, then there is no tension between it and most scientific work on evolution.
This is not to give science a free pass on all its work. Science cannot answer some of our most basic questions, and some scientists reach too far in some of their statements. To claim that evolution proves there is no God is to go beyond science just as to claim that Genesis is science is to misunderstand the nature of Scripture. Furthermore it is important to remember that a scientific description of hormonal changes, blood vessel changes, heart rate changes is not the same as the human experience of being in love. Science worth its salt is open to data of all kinds, including the data of human experience which does not seem adequately captured by the biology of the brain. And some of the data of human experience is poetic, literary, religious. And again we are aware of scientists so narrowly focused on a particular study that they miss the moral implications of their work.
Perhaps if we in organized religion were willing to have some of these kinds of conversations, the confidence level generated might rise. I kind of hope so.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Don't Call Them Twinkies | The Current Music Blog | The Current from Minnesota Public Radio

2010-09-25T12:44:00.001-05:00

The lead singer of one of my favorite bands this summer, The Hold Steady, singing about Minnesota Twins baseball. Heaven is whenever... (play on Hold Steady album title!)

Don't Call Them Twinkies | The Current Music Blog | The Current from Minnesota Public Radio

Brief Thoughts on a Short Story

2010-09-20T20:57:00.001-05:00

One joy of the short story is that even when life is busy, a story might be read that captures something of the wonder, beauty, mystery of life, crystalizing it into a small gem. Last night before going to sleep, I read William Maxwell’s story “What He Was Like.” In a few pages Maxwell evokes the wonder and mystery of the inner life. The plot is simple enough, a man keeping a diary, his death, his daughter’s reading of his diary and wondering why she did not know so much about her father, her dismay at his interior life.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the diary as noted in the story: “If I had my life to live over again – but one doesn’t. One goes forward instead, dragging a cart piled with lost opportunities.” “To be able to do in your mind what it is probably not a good idea to do in actuality is a convenience not always sufficiently appreciated.”

Our lives are what we do, but also what we think, dream, imagine, appreciate. Maxwell’s story reminded me of that again.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Why I Continue to Read the Bible

2010-09-10T16:34:00.001-05:00

Why I Continue To Read the Bible

Sometimes because I think I have to;
Sometimes because I think I should;
Mostly for those times when the words
are like a gentle rain for
the parched field of my soul,
the familiar voice of a friend
in a time of deep loneliness,
an axe
for the frozen sea inside (Kafka).
For times like the other day
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
(Psalm 131:2)

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Autumn Nostalgia

2010-09-03T22:02:00.001-05:00

Today felt like autumn here in Duluth. It was rainy and temperatures struggled to get into the low 60s. Autumn often brings with it nostalgic feelings. School begins in the fall, and I love learning. I spent twenty-seven of my fifty-one years preparing for school in one form or another in the fall of the year.
I have been thinking about my childhood as I read Josh Wilker’s memoir Cardboard Gods. Wilker tells his story with the aid of baseball cards from his childhood collection (I collected baseball cards and tonight before their game the Twins introduced the top fifty Twins from their fifty years ). I have also been thinking about my childhood this week as I have been preparing to officiate at the funeral of a young woman (forty-six) who grew up in the same neighborhood as I did. Meeting with her family has brought back a number of memories.
In his book, Wilker writes the following: You can’t be a child forever. You have to slice that part of yourself away and put on a uniform of some sort, whether it’s official or unofficial, and punch that clock. Is there a way to do this and still hang on to a wider sense of the world?
Wilker poses a great question. Can we hang on to a wider sense of the world? Can we retain some of the sense of wonder that we have as children? Can we keep something of what seems an almost innate sense of compassion in children?
Perhaps one way we carry with us some of the positive qualities of childhood is to nurture a healthy nostalgia. By a healthy nostalgia I mean revisiting the past not to hold it up as an ideal now unachievable, but to cultivate some of the important feelings, attitudes and moral sentiments that may have been present. Such healthy nostalgia can come with a wistfulness and sense of loss, but those should not overshadow the cultivation of moral sentiments.
I think there may be something here. Didn’t Jesus encourage the cultivation of certain aspects of childhood?
Not long ago, I encountered another literary exploration of the past, one set in autumn. The sense of loss is palpable. Nevertheless it permitted me to think about my past in a different way - another aid to a healthy nostalgia.
Now I peek into windows and open doors and do not find that air of permission. It has fled the world. Girls walk by me carrying their invisible bouquets from fields still steeped in grace, and I look up in the manner of one who follows with his eyes the passage of a hearse, and remembers what pierces him. John Updike, “In Football Season”

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

On the Transmigration of Souls

2010-08-28T21:44:00.000-05:00

I don’t claim to be the poster child for the connected world (the web 2.0 world). I have a couple of blogs. I have multiple e-mail accounts. I have a Facebook page – though today I read another article on the “graying of Facebook.” Seniors are the fastest growing group using this social media. I am not yet a “senior” and I am not so much graying as balding. However, I guess the “graying of Facebook” sounds better than the “balding of Facebook.” Anyway, though I have posted on this blog for three and a half years now, I am still discovering features of this blog site.
I just discovered that if you go to your profile page you can click on the underlined items in your profile, such as “favorite music,” and you get a list of every other blogger who also has this listed as a favorite. 532,000 people list Bob Dylan as among their favorite music. That’s a lot of people, but it is nothing compared to The Beatles – 3,090,000. So I thought I would see if at least some of my choices were rarer. Lucinda Williams counts 20,300 blogspot bloggers who list her in favorite music, smaller, but still quite a few. One of my favorite bands of summer 2010, The Hold Steady, clocks in at 5,100. Then I decided to see if anyone else listed “On the Transmigration of Souls” in the favorite music category. I guessed it would be smaller than even The Hold Steady.
“On the Transmigration of Souls” is a classical piece composed by American composer John Adams. It was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to honor the victims of the 9/11 attacks and to honor those who reached out with a heroic and caring hand that day. It is a haunting and beautiful piece of music. In the booklet that accompanies the CD there is this description: “It superimposes pre-recorded street sounds and the reading of victim’s names by friends and family members, also pre-recorded, on live performances by a children’s chorus, an adult chorus, and a large orchestra.” I remember first listening to it while driving. If I wasn’t on a schedule, I would have pulled over just to hear it all without thinking about driving. I listened to it again that same evening, and then a few more times. I found this music profoundly moving, and I continue to be moved whenever I hear it. Not everyone has the same reaction. I remember wanting to play it for a small group of clergy colleagues, and they did not hear it in the same way I did. I admit to being disappointed, but I am sure I have disappointed others in not sharing their enthusiasm for something or other.
I realize that there may be some bloggers who list John Adams in their favorite music list. I simply have this one piece by name. So I clicked on “On the Transmigration of Souls” in my blogger profile. The list of bloggers who identify this as a favorite piece of music is small. “David Bard.”

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Anne Rice

2010-08-21T15:07:00.001-05:00

I am not a fan of Anne Rice novels. It is not that I have read them and don’t like them. It is that in the scheme of things, with more books to read than I have time to, I have chosen not to read vampire literature. I know it is on a long-term come back, but this is one wave I am not going to ride. I didn’t ride it years ago, either – anyone remember Dark Shadows?
I guess that I am not an Anne Rice fan is o.k., because she is probably not my fan either. Last week, Anne posted a statement saying that she was quitting Christianity, giving up on it because it is “quarrelsome, hostile and disputatious.” My sense of what I viewed of an interview with her was that what she was giving up was “organized Christianity.” As a clergy person, I certainly am a part of organized Christianity, and so assume that Anne Rice would not be a fan.
You might expect me to rush in to defend organized Christianity. I think it is defensible, at least in part, yet it is only so when we admit the truth of Anne Rice’s statements. The history of Christianity is littered with and marred by incidents of Christianity being quarrelsome and disputatious. The problem, in my mind, is not that Christians disagree. The Bible is a complex document. Disagreement about its meaning is to be expected. We are trying to grapple with deep mysteries of life and the reality of God. Our intellectual categories can come up short. Christians will disagree – with one another and with non-Christians. Healthy disagreement can energize and sharpen our thinking. Disagreement is not the problem, hostility is. The smallness of some of the issues we become exercised about is.
Despite our shortcomings, there remains something valuable and important about organized Christianity. The teachings of Jesus, his intriguing presence and the stories told about him are still part of organized Christianity, and they would not have made it this far without some organization that sought to carry them forward. That the teachings and spirit of Jesus have been distorted by the same people who carry them forward is tragic, but those same teachings and that same spirit provide a corrective.
Hopefully we who name the name of Jesus will learn to be less hostile and quarrelsome. Hopefully we can assert our viewpoints with gentleness, humility and love. That would be more in keeping with the teachings and spirit of our founder.

With Faith and With Feathers,
David

2010-08-16T23:36:00.002-05:00

Returning from vacation, to the hustle and bustle and noise and busyness of life, I would like to remember these words:

Until we go into silence, we have nothing to say except what we hear around us, nothing to think except what has already been thought by somebody else. Until we go into silence, we may know really very little about ourselves.

Joan Chittister, Living Well

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

2010-08-06T22:35:00.001-05:00

Taking some time away from writing while I have been attending the School of Congregational Development and on vacation.

Jesus in New York and Berkeley

2010-07-21T23:37:00.001-05:00

With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants. Somebody seems to have hoped so, once.
 Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Jesus fascinates. That this is so in a culture where “Jesus” has been used for everything
from selling hats and t-shirts to justifying white supremacy is a miracle of no small proportion. Jesus fascinates because of his on-going influence, because of the good that has also been done in his name despite the harmful and the tacky, and because of the literature in which the story of Jesus is told. Beyond that, the literature on the literature is something of a cottage industry. “The appetite for historical study of the New Testament remains a publishing constant and a popular craze” (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 24, 2010).
Two authors, Gopnik and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, have both penned thoughtful and engaging articles about Jesus and the Jesus literature this summer. The articles appeared not in arcane theological publications, but in journals of culture. Gopnik’s piece, a review of a wide range of material on Jesus and the gospels appeared in The New Yorker. Phillips work, a review of Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief in which the writer also engages in deeper religious analysis, was published in the summer edition of The Threepenny Review (published in Berkeley). I am fascinated by their fascination with Jesus, and engaged by their engaging thoughtfulness. While neither author tips their own religious hand explicitly, the impression given by both is that these are articles written by “outsiders,” passersby if you will.
Gopnik is an able judge of current scholarly literature on the historical Jesus. “The current scholarly tone is… realist but pessimistic,” that is to say, the scholars think there are historical materials in the gospels, but getting to the bottom of them is complex. Gopnik thinks this affects faith, or perhaps argues that it should have an impact on faith. “The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith.” Among the things that reasonably could be said about Jesus, Gopnik includes the following: He’s verbally spry and even a little bit shifty. He likes defiant, enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, perhaps by design…. Jesus’ morality has a brash, sidewise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness. His pet style blends the epigrammatic with the enigmatic…. There is a wild gaiety about Jesus’ moral teachings that still leaps off the page. Gopnik writes about Jesus’ “social radicalism” – the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table. Yet he also acknowledges another dimension to Jesus. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet… and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living. There is a “twoness” about Jesus, including a twoness between what Gopnik calls “Paul’s divine Christ” and “Jesus the wise rabbi.”
Here Gopnik offers additional reflections of his own, distinguishing between “storytelling truths” and “statement making truths.” The twoness in the Christian story is a part of its dynamism, Gopnik thinks. From the very beginning there is ambiguity and symbolism. The sublime symbolic turn – or the retreat to metaphor… begins with the first words of the faith…. The argument is the reality, and the absence of certainty the certainty. Jesus fascinates Gopnik because he continues to offer the possibility for this kind of deep conversation. Somehow in asking about Jesus, we dig more deeply into life.
Adam Phillips offers more than a book review, as already noted. He characterizes Elaine Pagels’ work as “trying to find, within the multiple faiths called Christianity, a version of Christianity that she can morally afford to believe in.” Like Gopnik, Phillips sees within Christianity a certain multiplicity. Phillips argues that Pagels is trying to find a Christian faith that does not demonize the enemy “even if the enemy is what you still need to call them.” Pagels search for such a Christianity has centered in gaining deeper understanding of and insight into the earlier years of the Christian faith. She has studied the writings of the Gnostics, and Beyond Belief focuses on the non-canonical “Gospel of Thomas.” She offers a sympathetic view of the rise of orthodoxy and canonicity. This act of choice… leads us back to the problem that orthodoxy was invented to solve: how can we tell truth from lies. What is genuine and thus connects us with one another and with reality, and what is shallow, self-serving, or evil? Anyone who has seen foolishness, sentimentality, delusion, and murderous rage disguised as God’s truth knows there is no easy answer to the problem that the ancients called discernment of spirits. Phillips then offers his reflections on this passage from Pagels. For Pagels, it is to our (defining) credit that there is no easy answer to the problem of discernment of spirits, and she suggests that our hardest and best task is to keep the problem alive. Orthodoxy robs us of our doubts, and it is only self-doubt that keeps us from demonizing our enemies. He believes that Pagels finds in The Gospel of Thomas a Jesus “who is on the side of the seekers rather than the finders… who prefers being sympathetic to being right.” Phillips wraps up his reflections on Pagels, Christian faith and Jesus with these words: For Christians like Pagels… Jesus invites us to reinvent Christianity, not establish it. He is the visionary who calls for revision. Like a contemporary pragmatist, he doesn’t want to be followed, he wants to be redescribed…. There are as many Jesuses as there are gospels – as there are Christians. All Pagel’s Christians have in common is a quest in which they must try and find what they are looking for.
Agreeing completely with either Gopnik or Phillips is not the point. I am fascinated by their fascination with Jesus, and fascinated by the Jesus they find fascinating. This Jesus, with his fondness for enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, with his invitation to a belief that also includes doubts and questions, casts a certain spell (the root of the word “fascination” is in a Latin word that means casting a spell). I am charmed. Parker Palmer writes, “truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.” Perhaps at the heart of Christianity is an eternal conversation about the meaning of Jesus conducted with passion and discipline. If so, Gopnik and Phillips sound tones, sometimes inaudible to some who have been engaged in the conversation a long time, that nevertheless need to be heard. Fascinating.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

A Prayer Rediscovered

2010-07-13T21:47:00.000-05:00

I had not thought about this prayer for awhile, but today in an e-mail box someone responded to it. This prayer is something I posted on a liturgy web site almost three years ago. I had forgotten it since, but was pleased to be reminded of it. It is a prayer inspired by the well-known “Serenity Prayer” composed by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

God - whose love envelopes each of us, whose passion for justice and kindness challenges us, whose care for all life inspires us - give us grace. May your Spirit dance delightfully through our lives. In grace, give us peace in the face of things that cannot be changed - our genetic make-up, our genealogy, past hurts and mistakes. In grace, give us courage to change what should be changed - our unloving attitudes, our narrow perspectives, our cynical hearts, injustice, our too easy resort to violence. In grace, give us wisdom so that we can distinguish between those things that cannot be changed and those that can and should be so that we don't spend needless energy in the wrong direction. In Christ, who changes lives. Amen.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Gifts

2010-06-29T23:32:00.000-05:00

I turned 51 last week (Thursday). The day itself might be among my least memorable birthdays. I was in the Chicago area for a meeting of the United Methodist Church’s University Senate, for which I serve on the Commission on Theological Education. We met in the morning, and that was just fine. I enjoy the people I have come to know in this work. We even got done a little early, so I was at O’Hare early for my flight. When I arrived, the check in screen told me that my flight was overbooked and to see the agent if I might be willing to change my plans. Well, there were three other flights to Minneapolis scheduled to leave O’Hare before mine, so I thought I would graciously volunteer to get on an earlier flight. No such luck. The airport was crowded and busy as the day before weather led to flight delays and cancellations. I would have to wait until my scheduled flight left – so on my birthday I spent six hours in a crowded airport. I enjoyed the reading time, but otherwise not a terribly memorable birthday.
The next day, however, I was greeted on Facebook by a number of good wishes for my birthday. I am deeply appreciative of each one, and find myself pledging to do better at checking for others’ birthdays on the site. Each greeting was a gift.
I got to thinking a bit about gifts, and about all the gifts in my life. It seems to me that the essence of a gift is that it is something received for which the language of “deserve” does not apply, or doesn’t apply easily or well. I am the grateful recipient of many gifts in life:
Love – God’s love. The essence of God’s gracious love is that it is not about “deserving.”
A good marriage. Yes, there is work to be done in creating a good marriage, and I hope I have done some of that work, but there is also a quality of gift about being in such a relationship.
Children who are doing well. Again, one hopes they contributes to the well-being of their children. Again, I hope I have given something positive to my children which has helped make them who they are. And again, there is a quality of gift when your children are healthy and relatively happy and you have a good relationship with them.
Friends.
Small joys: a good book, a baseball game, music (and this summer seems particularly rich with some good new music – The New Pornographers, The Court Yard Hounds, The Hold Steady – all previously mentioned; and more recently Teenage Fanclub’s new cd and Bruce Springsteen’s concert dvd), a walk.
With all these good gifts of life, who can complain about a day at the airport.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Summer Music

2010-06-19T17:22:00.001-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to burn a CD with some new music for this summer, most of it on recordings released this year. I am enjoying the music and wanted to share my summer CD with you.

Skyline, The Court Yard Hounds. The Court Yard Hounds are two-thirds of the Dixie Chicks – sisters Emily Robison and Martie Maguire. This is the first song on their CD and it is a song about finding peace and home. “I just look at the skyline/A million lights/are lookin’ back at me/And when they shine/I see a place I know I’ll find/some peace.”

Then Again, The Court Yard Hounds. Favorite line: “But then again, I never did understand me.” A song about the mysteries of the self and searching for deeper self-understanding.

Mass Romantic, The New Pornographers. The name of this group has disputed origins. One band member claims he named the group after watching a Japanese film. Some think the name comes from statements made by Jimmy Swaggart or John Ashcroft (or both) that rock and roll is “the new pornography.” In any event, this group makes good music and they released a new CD this summer. The song mentioned here is not from that CD, but from their first CD. “In the streetlight dawn, this beat turns on.” And it does.

Crash Years, The New Pornographers. This song and the next are from the group’s 2010 release, “Together.” “Light a candle’s end/You are a light turned low/And like the rest of us/You got those old eternity blues.”

Up in the Dark, The New Pornographers. “What’s love?/What turns up in the dark?” Good questions, catchy tune.

My favorite CD this summer thus far has been “Heaven is Whenever” by The Hold Steady. My summer CD finishes with six songs off this CD.

The Sweet Part of the City, The Hold Steady. “Back when we were living up on Hennepin…. We were living in. The sweet part of the city.” Turns out one of the band’s founders is from Minneapolis, where Hennepin Avenue is located.

Soft in the Center, The Hold Steady. “You can’t tell people what they want to hear if you also want to tell the truth…. You can’t get every girl. You’ll get the one’s you love the best. You won’t get every girl. You’ll love the ones you get the best.”

The Weekender, The Hold Steady. “But it’s not gonna be like in romantic comedies. In the end I bet no one learns a lesson.”

We Can Get Together, The Hold Steady. “They sang Love is the Answer. I think they’re probably right. Let it shine down on us all.” “Heaven is whenever we can get together. Sit down on your floor. And listen to your records.”

Hurricane J, The Hold Steady. Great song, catchy. “I don’t want this to stop. I want you to know. I don’t want you to settle. I want you to grow.”

Our Whole Lives, The Hold Steady. “We’re good guys but we can’t be good every night. We’re good guys, but we can’t be good our whole lives.” They may be wrong, but it still sounds great.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Annual Conference

2010-06-05T11:58:00.001-05:00

I was not looking forward to attending the meeting of The Minnesota Annual Conference this year (from which I returned yesterday). Let me be clear, however. I was also not not looking forward to it. The time just arrived and I had not given attending annual conference a lot of psychic energy. Anticipating something you are looking forward to can be a part of the joy of an event. It can also sometimes lead to disappointment when what you are anticipating does not meet your expectations. For whatever reason, and primarily it was because of the busyness of May, I had not invested energy in anticipating annual conference (which, for those of you who may not know, is the annual gathering of clergy and a lay people from United Methodist churches across the state of Minnesota).
Given that I had not spent time in anticipation, I can’t say that annual conference met my expectations. I can say that it was filled with joy. The trip down with Dale, our church’s lay member, was nice. Dale is not only a church member, he is a friend whose insights and opinions I value. After arriving I began seeing friends, clergy and lay, from across the state, some of whom I see only once a year. While I had not spent time this year anticipating conference, I began to see why I usually look forward to it. It is the people – the hugs, the smiles, the “how are you?s” It is also the opportunity to gather with a unique church community to worship and learn. There were countless moments of grace and joy in the three days we gathered – conversations, meals, worship, helping with ordination, working with the bishop as her parliamentarian.
While I was gone, however, I missed my daughter’s last three days of high school. Her commencement is this coming week and of course I will be there for that. It is difficult to believe that our youngest child has now finished high school and will be off to college in the fall. This morning she let me look at her year book. I asked if she minded my reading what people wrote about her, and she said “no.” What a delight to read such nice things about your daughter. As I was reading, I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be great if there were some adult ritual that took place every few years where your friends could write nice things about you and wish you well in life?”
Then it struck me. One of the things I really appreciate at annual conference is that we gather to see and hug friends who are glad to see us, who ask us how we are, and who wish us well in the coming year - - - kind of like signing a year book. I am already looking forward to next year’s conference.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Religions 1910-2010

2010-05-28T22:22:00.001-05:00

The May/June issue of New World Outlook, the mission magazine of The United Methodist Church, had a fascinating brief article comparing religious affiliation around the world in 1910 and 2010. In that one hundred year period, the percentage of the world’s population that proclaims they are Christian has remained about the same 34.8% in 1910 compared to 33.2% in 2010. I know from other sources that there has been a shift in where Christians are to be found, but the relative number of Christians has remained about the same. Islam, on the other hand, has grown tremendously as a percentage of the world’s population in the past one hundred years, from 12.6% in 1910 to 22.4% in 2010. I know some people who seem to equate numerical growth with what God is “blessing” in the world. By that thinking, Islam would seem to be the religion God is blessing most. To my mind, such thinking represents neither good theology nor good sociology. As a pastor, I pay attention to numbers. They matter, but I also know that the factors that influence one’s religious journey are complex. We need a more complex theology, sociology and psychology to dig more deeply into why people become religious adherents and stay or leave their respective religion. What seems even more ironic, for those who might claim in some simple way that numbers represent what God is blessing, by sheer exponential mathematics, the group that has grown the most is agnostics. Just .2% of the population in 1910, they are now 9.3% of the population – 46.5 times as many agnostics in 2010 as in 1910!
But those numbers are not what grabbed my attention most. Notice from the above figures that between Christianity (33.2%) and Islam (22.4%), over half of human kind considers itself either Christian or Muslim. So why is our world such a mess? Why so much war, such deep injustice? Why so many hungry and homeless? Some Christians may say that we are only a third of the population, and if only we grew the world would be better. Some Muslims might say something similar about Islam. Rather than compete with each other, though, might we do better to find those parts of our respective traditions which encourage mutual respect (even while offering witness to our own faith), which enjoin us to build a better world with whomever might join us on this journey? If we fail to do this, we may find the number of agnostics growing even more in the next one hundred years.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Poetry

2010-05-22T21:55:00.001-05:00

Railroad tracks split the campus in half
and at night you’d lie on your narrow cot
and listen to the lonely whistle
of a train crossing the prairie in the dark.
“The Beginning of Poetry” Edward Hirsch, The Living Fire

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
From “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower” William Carlos Williams

In the first two weeks of May I attended two poetry readings – one given by Robert Bly and the other a joint reading offered by Minnesota poets Connie Wanek and Joyce Sutphen. That I was free both these evenings was something of a miracle. That I could attend these readings was a gift of grace.
I first fell in love with poetry in high school. Words seem to have a certain power, a certain magic and when put together rhythmically and beautifully they plunged deep into my soul. My love affair with poetry waxed and waned over the years, but became intense again as I worked on my doctorate. The PBS series, Voices and Visions came out during that time, and watching it, hearing poems read – Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, others - rekindled a deeper passion that has stayed lit since. Reading poetry has feed my soul, sparked my imagination, ignited my mind, set my heart to dancing. Reading poetry has helped me enormously in my reading of the Bible which is filled with so much poetic language. The brevity of parables has a poetic quality.
And so I read. And so I listen.

To live without rotting from within,
to ignore imperfections of the skin,
to be heavy, and still be chosen,
to please a strict vegetarian,
to end the day full of light.
From “Pumpkin” Connie Wanek, On Speaking Terms

What you wanted was no less than the truth,
something you could hold lightly in your hand.

What you found was this uncertainty,
memory mixed with desire. How we live.
From “How We Live” Joyce Sutphen, First Words

And so I read. And so I listen. And I am changed.

Rene Char
you are a poet who believes
in the power of beauty
to right all wrongs,
I believe it also.
With invention and courage
we shall surpass
the pitiful dumb beasts,
let all men believe it
as you have taught me also
to believe it.
From “To a Dog Injured In the Street” William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Poetry helps me be there.

And the Word became flesh… full of grace and truth. And the grace and truth that became flesh can become word again, often in the words of poets.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Gathering Up the Years

2010-05-16T18:38:00.000-05:00

At that moment, you gather
up the years like a shawl
and wrap yourself in them,
one corner touching another.
Joyce Sutphen, “How You Learn”

This past Thursday night I attended a poetry reading, the second in as many weeks – a gift of grace. The poets were Connie Wanek and Joyce Sutphen. I was working out some thoughts for a brief essay on poetry for this blog, but then something else occurred which touched me even more deeply. I will return to the essay on poetry soon.
On Friday afternoon, I attended a graduation ceremony for our son, David. David has completed his Master’s degree in Advocacy and Political Leadership from the University of Minnesota, Duluth. When the program was created it was the first of its kind in the nation.
Listening to the program director, the University Chancellor, two UMD honorary degree recipients – a prominent Democrat and a prominent Republican, helped me realize what a special program David has been involved with. Listening as the students talked about each other, helped me realize what a unique community he has been involved with. Listening to one of his fellow students describe him filled me with pride and joy. A son who emerged into the world six weeks before he was supposed to, spent his first three weeks in the hospital, has grown into a wonderful human person. The years were gathered like a shawl, and we wrapped ourselves in them, one corner touching another.
As a parent, one hopes that you give your children a solid foundation on which to build a life. When they accomplish something special, you hope you contributed something to that, and you know that they have also done a lot on their own. Julie and I are proud of each of our children. Friday was a wonderful day to celebrate David. Congratulations, son.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Robinson and Bly (sounds like a law firm!)

2010-05-07T22:43:00.002-05:00

So we had traces of snow in March – very unusual for Duluth, and no snow in April, also unusual. Today, May 7, it snowed over four inches. Earlier in the week I had thought I might get the lawn mower ready to roll tomorrow. Guess not!
Well if snow was an unwelcome event in my life, I have had two very pleasant and welcomed events this past week. Two authors whose works I’ve read and enjoyed were in town, and my schedule actually allowed me to hear them both. Last Saturday night Marilynne Robinson, novelist and essayist lectured at the College of St. Scholastica. Tuesday evening, the poet Robert Bly read at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. I have had the joy of hearing him before, at Southern Methodist University while I was working on my Ph.D.
Robinson’s lecture was rich, densely rich. I would have been glad to have a manuscript to follow along, but the basic theme was arguing against what she views as reductionistic and “scientistic” views of humanity which don’t really account for the wonder and mystery that is human existence. She is out with a new book, based on the Terry Lectures at Yale, and entitled Absence of Mind. Her lecture seems an extension of that book, as best I can tell, not having read it all yet. Here are a couple of excerpts from that work.
Recently I read to a class of young writers a passage from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” in which he says, “In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time, - happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly…. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” These words caused a certain perturbation. The self is no longer assumed to be a thing to be approached with optimism, or to be trusted to see anything truly. Emerson is describing the great paradox and privilege of human selfhood, a privilege foreclosed when the mind is trivialized or thought to be discredited. (xvii-xviii)
Might not the human brain, that most complex object known to exist in the universe, have undergone a qualitative change as well? If my metaphor only suggests the possibility that our species is more than an optimized ape, that something terrible and glorious befell us, a change gradualism could not predict – if this is merely another fable, it might at least encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are. (135)
Robinson wants to make greater room in our current intellectual and cultural space for the mystery that we humans are. Poetry helps explore that mystery, too, deepening it. A favorite Robert Bly poem of mine, one that has not found its way into most of his selected works, comes from his early book Silence in the Snowy Fields (and how appropriate for this day in Duluth!).

Afternoon Sleep

I
I was descending from the mountains of sleep.
Asleep I had gazed east over a sunny field,
And sat on the running board of an old Model A.
I awoke happy, for I had dreamt of my wife,
And the loneliness hiding in grass and weeds
That lies near a man over thirty, and suddenly enters.

II
When Joe Sjolie grew tired, he sold his farm,
Even his bachelor rocker, and did not come back.
He left his dog behind in the cob shed.
The dog refused to take food from strangers.

III
I drove out to that farm when I awoke;
Alone on a hill, sheltered by trees.
The matted grass lay around the house.
When I climbed the porch, the door was open.
Inside were old abandoned books,
And instructions to Norwegian immigrants.

Sleep, dreams, sex, loneliness, age, death, books – the human mystery indeed.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Traveling and Reading

2010-05-01T17:26:00.001-05:00

I spent much of this past week on Portland attending a meeting of the United Methodist Commission on General Conference. I serve on the Commission and on the Rules Committee. I enjoy the people and appreciate the work.
The trip to Portland is a rather long one, and a benefit of long trips like this is the time they afford for reading – the time in the airport waiting, the time on the plane, and a little time in the evenings. My reading for the week was eclectic, as I like it.
Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood was first on the list. A reading group I convene is reading this novel. While I have owned a copy for awhile (it must be “for awhile” – the price on the cover is $2.95!), I had never read it. O’Connor, in an introductory note written ten years after the novel was first published in 1952 calls it a “comic novel,” and so it is, but darkly comic. The chief protagonist, Hazel Motes is a person haunted by Jesus and Christian faith. O’Connor writes in her introductory note: “That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death had been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.” That illuminating introduction ends with these words: “Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery, and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.” Having read the novel, I was a little haunted myself, by the mystery of O’Connor’s work. So I read a couple of her short stories, packaged with the novel – “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” I look forward to discussing O’Connor’s work with others, to see if they too were haunted a bit.
I finished Wise Blood on the trip to Portland and brought only one other book along, a slim volume entitled Psychoanalysis and Moral Values by Heinz Hartmann. Hartmann’s essay seeks to describe “the complexities of moral reality which every application of moral principles has to consider” (19). The book is insightful, but after a strong dose of O’Connor, I was looking for something a little lighter, at least for a time.
Thankfully, the hotel I was staying at was near a bookstore, and this being spring, a good baseball book seemed like a wonderful idea. So I bought and read George Vecsey’s Baseball: a history of America’s favorite game. It was a delightful read, but not removed from the mysteries of freedom and morality. Baseball, being “America’s game” has mirrored some of the beauty and ugliness of our land. There is beauty in this game – wonder that humans create games at all, beauty in the combination of team and individual effort that is baseball, beauty in the history of the game and some of its legendary characters. But baseball has suffered under anti-Semitism, and more especially, racism. Vecsey hides none of this, and his chapter on Jackie Robinson reminded me of the enormous courage of that graceful and determined man.
I am also working my way through the Bible again, and found myself in both Luke and Ezra – an eclectic combination in itself - - - the power of Jesus presence, the hope as exiles return.
Life cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery which eclectic reading deepens, and for that I am grateful.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

INSPIRATION

2010-04-24T00:08:00.001-05:00

Recent discussions have led me once again to think deeply about what it may mean to speak of the Bible as “inspired.” It was made clear to me in some recent conversations that how one understands the Bible to be inspired profoundly influences the way in which one reads this book and the way in which one expects God’s Spirit to speak through this text.
Christians agree that the Bible is inspired by God and revelatory of God. “Inspiration, however it is explained and understood, or even denied, refers to the divine influence in virtue of which the biblical text is, in fact, experienced by some people/communities as revelatory” (Sandra M. Schneiders, “Inspiration” in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible). The basic biblical text cited for this is II Timothy 3:16-17: All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
What this means, however, is contested. For some in the Christian community, inspiration seems to mean that God so overwhelmed the authors of the Biblical writings that their character as human writings is negligible. This position is sometimes called “verbal inspiration” and it claims that these texts are inerrant and infallible. Those who hold that Scripture is verbally inerrant attribute this trait to the infallibility of the divine author who, despite the limitations of the human authors and human language through which God communicates in Scripture, guarantees that there is not and cannot be error of any kind in the biblical text. (Schneiders) Others see the matter differently, but why might one even search for an alternative?
Sandra Schneiders argues that the position of verbal inspiration “bristles with difficulties.” All human language changes in meaning and reference over time…. The problem of how divine inerrancy could characterize essentially limited, perspectival, and linguistically constrained human discourse seems rationally insurmountable. I think Schneiders makes a convincing case, but it will not be very convincing to those whose primary mode of discourse focuses on Biblical texts themselves. They might respond that the Bible claims it is inspired and faith in the God of Jesus Christ entails faith in that claim, as well.
But there are some interesting statements in the Bible itself which undercut the idea of verbal inspiration. II Peter 3:15-16 reads, in part: So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. Paul writes according to the wisdom given him – PAUL WRITES! This letter writer is asserting human authorship, though also characterizing Paul’s writings as “scripture.” Jesus, in Mark 10 speaks of divorce, and in the give and take asks what Moses wrote – WHAT MOSES WROTE. People respond, and Jesus comes back with this: Because of your hardness of heart [Moses] wrote this commandment for you. The commandment has to do with presenting a certificate of divorce and can be found in Deuteronomy 24.
The Bible itself seems comfortable with claiming both human authorship of its writings and divine inspiration. Jesus is willing to say that writings of Moses, which are a part of Scripture, were written in a particular context, for a particular people, and may be limited by that context. Even II Timothy seems to have little concern for claiming that inspiration entails inerrancy and infallibility. The author of that work seems to think that inspiration has to do with the way Scripture shapes those who listen to it, read it. Scripture is inspired, and useful. It is useful in forming a life.
Maybe the writings of the Bible are human documents, written by men and, perhaps women, who were genuinely engaged with God’s Spirit, inspired by that Spirit to write, but writing as human beings still trying to grapple with all that God is and all that God requires. Some of what they wrote may even be context-bound. It is certainly written in language which by its very nature is limited, perspectival, and linguistically constrained. Nevertheless, it is as we read these writings in our own thoughtful, prayerful way, open to God’s Spirit today - read them in on-going conversation with other persons of faith, that our lives are shaped, transformed, and we become equipped for every good work. We are trained in righteousness. Such an understanding of inspiration is a bit messy. Those who claim it need to take time to understand history, culture, the nature of language, the nature of reading, in order to better understand the text. Yet reading the Bible in this way is an adventure as wild as the Spirit who inspires the writings in the first place.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

A Gift

2010-04-17T23:18:00.000-05:00

In the midst of a very busy week and weekend, this poem found its way to me, a bit of rain in a parched place, a gift of grace in my hurried world – even if I am not sixty yet.

“Halleluiah” Mary Oliver from Evidence

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

2010-04-09T23:03:00.002-05:00

More than any other sport, [baseball] summons the past…. Baseball is, I suspect, our most mythological of sports; it has the longest history, it is by its own proclamation our national pastime, and it harbors, I think, our greatest mythological figures…. It is a sport with its own rhythms and graces.
David Halberstam, in Everything They Had

Baseball memories are seductive, tempting us always toward sweetness and undercomplexity.
Roger Angell, in Game Time

For all its changes, baseball has not strayed far from its origins, and in fact has changed far less than other American institutions of equivalent antiquity. What sustains baseball in the hearts of Americans, finally, is not its responsiveness to changes in society nor its propensity for novelty, but its myths, its lore, its records, and its essential stability…. Spring comes in America not on the vernal equinox but on opening day; summer sets in with a Memorial Day doubleheader and does not truly end until the last out of the regular season. Winter begins the day after the World Series…. We grow up with baseball; we mark – and, for a moment, stop – the passage of time with it. It is our game, for all our days.
John Thorn, in Baseball: Our Game

The 2010 baseball season opened this week. The Minnesota Twins will play in a new stadium in this, their fiftieth year in Minnesota (it is my fifty-first year of life – I have grown up with baseball here in Minnesota!).

I enjoy baseball for its rich history. Some of the first historical photographs I remember seeing were old black and white pictures of famous baseball players from the past. I appreciate the leisurely pace of the game. It can get long, can be tedious sometimes, maybe a little boring even – but in our hectic world, a little boredom can be a good thing - - - time to think, time to reflect. I like the combination of team and individual effort that is a part of the game.

Baseball memories are seductive. I am sure I love the game for its deep associations from my childhood. I can still smell the hard bubble gum that came with a pack of baseball cards. I remember the white sugary powder that dusted the pink gum and can still recall its taste when you began to chew. The flavor never lasted long. I remember the games I invented to play with my card collection. I had my cards organized by teams, and the cards alphabetized within teams. One summer I took paper and made rosters for each of my teams, put together starting line-ups, and began playing a season – a season that I never finished. I still have the small vending machine baseball that I used to simulate plays. It is now hard and yellowed. I can almost hear the voices that broadcast ball games from out of a small transistor radio with the single ear piece – Herb Carneal and Halsey Hall. These memories do tend toward sweetness and undercomplexity. Growing up was not always easy. Yet baseball is deeply associated in me with a simpler time, with a certain innocence. I had yet to see some of the complexity and difficulty of the world.

Becoming a mature person, a person growing in faith, hope and love involves, I think, staying in touch with hopeful innocence and peacefulness while looking with eyes wide open at the world in all its ugliness and beauty. We cannot live in sweetness and undercomplexity, but perhaps visiting there once in awhile to refresh our spirits and recharge our batteries is not such a bad thing. Baseball does that for me.

Take me out to the ballgame.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

What Can I Say

2010-03-29T22:21:00.002-06:00

I’ve been one poor correspondent, I’ve been too, too hard to find, but it doesn’t mean you ain’t been on my mind.

What can I say? It’s holy week and I have a lot of other writing to do. Blessed Easter.

And in case that quote sounds familiar: America, "Sister Golden Hair"

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Heard It in a Love Song

2010-03-16T22:06:00.001-06:00

When I was a youth pastor one of my favorite lessons was one I taught on media. I shared with the youth that they needed to pay attention to what they were watching and listening to. I said I thought that media (movies, tv, songs) could be divided into three categories as they related to Christian faith: explicitly Christian, reflecting values counter to Christian values, or supportive of Christian values without being explicitly Christian. I used music to illustrate the point because it tended to be the most portable and I really like music.
The Raspberries, “Go All the Way” was used to illustrate a song that contained values counter to Christian values.
I used a song from a band called, Second Chapter of Acts to illustrate a song that is explicitly Christian. I don’t think this band is around any more but I have two of their albums on vinyl.
I used the U2 song, ‘Pride: In the Name of Love” to illustrate a song that was not done by a group that billed itself as Christian (though Bono is Christian and talks about his faith) but had values that were in keeping with Christian faith.
The basic message was pay attention to what you take in. You don’t need to just listen to Christian music, but if all you’re watching and listening to counters Christian values, that has an effect on your heart, mind, soul. My own listening tastes tend toward music that is often consistent with Christian values (though not always – I like The Raspberries song), but is not “Christian music.”
I thought about this last night while on a treadmill in a hotel in Nashville where this week I am at meetings for the United Methodist Committee on Faith and Order and General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. The evening devotion was a read from Psalm 121, an expression of trust in and celebration of God’s care. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in. As I was on the treadmill listening to my iPod Shuffle, among the songs I heard were:

The Rascals, “Groovin’”
Leo Sayer, “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”

Both these songs are celebrations of the goodness of life. Neither mentions God, but I can add God’s presence.
Heard it in a love song, can’t be wrong (The Marshall Tucker Band).

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Three Days In a Life

2010-03-07T23:14:00.001-06:00

Friday was a strange day. Woke up feeling blue and out of sorts. Any number of little things went wrong, small disappointments and frustrations confirming that this was a lousy day. I fought with negativity most of the day – not my favorite internal conversation, but it was there and I have had this conversation before. Thankfully I was alone much of the day. I was not good company. By day’s end, the clouds were clearing. Julie, Sarah and I traveled to the Twin Cities to spend time with our daughter Beth.
Saturday was an entirely different day. In the morning we went shopping with Sarah looking for a prom dress. It will be her last high school prom and while dress shopping has never really been on my favorite list of activities, being there with and for Sarah was special. In the afternoon I participated in a clergy panel at a conference at the University of Minnesota Medical School. The conference was sponsored by Med Students for Choice, and my daughter Beth had asked if I would be willing to be part of that panel. I was pleased to participate, and even more pleased that Beth asked. It was wonderful to be with her as she was with some of her med school classmates. After returning to Duluth that evening, Julie and I went to a local venue to listen to our son David play back-up mandolin for his friend Ryan, who is a singer and guitarist. I could not have had a better day, for I got to spend parts of it with my wife and with my children. I am blessed with a wonderful family.
Sunday – church was great. It was Girl Scout Sunday, and someone else preached and did a very nice job. We shared communion and that is often moving and meaningful for me. Following worship I participated in a class which this week was led by a guest. We had asked a local university instructor who is from Haiti to share his family’s experience with the recent earthquake. All who heard were moved by his story and the story of the people of Haiti.
Whatever ghosts were haunting me on Friday, and I know they will return from time to time, had been chased away. Negativity will rear its ugly head again, but I will struggle with it and against it. I have much to be thankful for, and there is healing work to do in the world.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Jazz

2010-02-26T17:40:00.001-06:00

I am a member of the Jazz Heritage Society. No need to send congratulatory cards. It is a music club to which anyone can belong. I am guessing that such clubs are dying out with on-line purchasing and iTunes and all, but I am holding on. By the way, the club offers on-line ordering. Every so often, I order music through the club (usually by sending the card back through the mail – someone needs to help keep the US Postal Service afloat) and about three weeks later my order arrives in the mail. It makes that day’s mail more enjoyable.
My history with jazz goes back to college. I listened to jazz occasionally then. I remember hearing John Coltrane’s “Central Park West” in a class on Art in America, and I was swept up in its beauty. Every so often, I would listen to some jazz here and there until about eight years ago I sort of “rediscovered” jazz with a passion.
Those who know me or have read this blog for any length of time know of my love for music. That love bursts the bounds of style and genre. Sometimes the wordless beauty of jazz (though I also appreciate jazz vocals) touches me deeply in a wonderfully unique way. The richness of a John Coltrane ballad like “Naima” or “After the Rain” moves my soul, as does the sheer joy of a Louis Armstrong trumpet solo.
My most recent jazz listening, care of the Jazz Heritage Society, has been “Duke Ellington: The Great Paris Concert.” Ellington’s large jazz ensembles could swing with such joy. From the first piano chords which led into “Rockin’ in Rhythm” I was smiling. My heart was smiling. My soul was smiling. The music testified again to the truth of the words of jazz drummer Art Blakey: Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.
And if you’ve not listened to jazz in awhile, click this link to Coltrane’s “After the Rain”

John Coltrane, After the Rain

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Whipped Cream and Other Delights

2010-02-19T22:40:00.001-06:00

Last year as I placed ashes on foreheads or hands on Ash Wednesday, reminding worshippers of our bodily life and our mortality, my own father was dying. He passed away last March. I couldn’t help but think about this on Wednesday night during worship.
My relationship with my dad was not the closest. He was not my confidant, nor my role model. The grief experienced during this past year has often been the grief for a relationship that never was. Yet my dad was funny, charming and a hospitable host. I appreciated those qualities. He enjoyed entertaining and parties, and he enjoyed music. Maybe that rubbed off a little, too.
At the house I grew up in, my parents purchased a console stereo and had speakers wired from the stereo upstairs into the basement rec room. It was there, with our walk-out basement, that my parents liked to entertain. The stereo allowed for ten records at a time to be put on the spindle, so one would drop after the previous record had finished playing. I later heard that this was not so good for records, but it worked well for these parties. Among the music my dad enjoyed was the Kingston Trio and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and I appreciate the music of both.
All of this came back to me the other day as I grabbed my Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass CD on my way to the treadmill. Why I picked that particular CD up, I can’t say, but as I listened I thought back to that house and those days, and a certain fondness warmed my heart.
O.K, I enjoy Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The music may not be the most sophisticated, as the song titles may indicate – “Whipped Cream,” “A Taste of Honey,” “Lollipops and Roses.” Still there is something here that lightens the heart, even if the mind may not be deeply challenged. That’s o.k. In the economy of grace, I think there is room for whipped cream and other delights.
More importantly, in the economy of grace, even difficult relationships bequeath gifts.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

2010-02-12T22:41:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I am asked what I am reading or listening to. I appreciate that some are interested in this, so here is my current reading and listening list.

During the winter, when walking outside can be problematic here in Duluth, I use our treadmill a lot. On the treadmill, I often watch videos, and the most recent video I watched while walking/running was “The Beatles: the first U.S. visit.” I enjoyed watching the excitement this group of musicians brought to a country just months after President Kennedy was assassinated. For three weeks in a row, the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show. Given the fragmentation of media, we are not likely ever to have the kind of attention given to any single entertainer that was given to the Beatles. That they were wonderful musicians certainly helped.

The three CDs played most recently in my car while driving:
Charlie Parker, The Complete Savoy and Dial Master Takes
The Beatles, Rubber Soul
The Beatles, Revolver

Books:

Christian Smith, Souls in Transition: the religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults. I have had the opportunity to read this with faculty from private colleges throughout the country and thankful to the College of St. Scholastica for helping this happen. I am just getting into the book, but thus far it is fascinating.

Huston Smith, The World’s Religions. I am reading this with a men’s group at our church. Smith writes exceptionally well and invites us into the wisdom of the world’s religious traditions. This is a nice follow to reading Smith’s autobiography Tales of Wonder last summer.

Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars. We are reading this novel in an interfaith book group. Again, I am in the early pages, but am thoroughly enjoying the read.

Mel White, Stranger at the Gate: to be gay and Christian in America. Mel White is going to be the keynote speaker at a Duluth-area conference this April, and people in our area churches are encouraged to read this, his autobiography.

I just got back from the Board of Ordained Ministry interview retreat, and there we discussed the importance of clergy reading theology, at least from time to time. None of the books above is a theological work, strictly speaking, though they have theological dimensions to them. One of the theological works I have read more recently is Peter C. Hodgson, Liberal Theology: a radical vision. Hodgson’s brief book seeks to assess the current state of “liberal” Christian theology and construct a vision for its future. I will be adding some more theology to my reading list as space opens.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

2010-02-02T01:07:00.001-06:00

I admit it. I am a sucker for intriguing titles. I got into the entire Julia Spencer-Fleming mystery series simply because her first book was entitled In the Bleak Midwinter and I spotted it on the store shelf. It was worth the read and I commend her work to any who are mystery aficionados.

So imagine my delight in coming across the story collection by Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out. Talk about a captivating title! So I read the title story with great anticipation. Would it be rich in theological references? Would there be symbolism to engage the curious mind? None of these.

The chief protagonist of the story is a man named Ray who lives in a small town, probably in Connecticut, called Farnham. Ray is a semi-retired attorney who has very mixed feelings about his marriage to a sometimes pretentious and difficult woman named Eleanor. Ellie reminds Ray every now and again that they promised to be married “for better or for worse.” She is not an entirely unsympathetic character, having undergone a hysterectomy at age 33.

The other primary character in the story is Ray’s daughter-in-law, Macy. She is a young woman whose life has been a struggle. Her mother has drug problems and borrows money. Macy was fortunate to receive a college scholarship, but lived in a boarding house and worked hard just to make ends meet. Macy has also lied to Ray and her husband, Ray and Ellie’s son Neil, about her parents and her background. She has told them that her parents are dead.

Another particularly memorable character is Randeane, owner and waitress at The Cup coffee shop. She describes her father as Jewish left-wing and her mother as white trash Pentecostal. Ray believes he is in love with Randeane. Randeane offers wisdom in the story. Visiting Randeane, Ray is offered his choice of a chair or a hammock. He chooses the chair, telling Randeane that the hammock is too unpredictable. “Oh, life’s a hammock,” Randeane said.

What the author provides in about twenty pages are small incidents which tell us something about these people and their relationships, especially about Ray and Macy. We move through moments of disappointment, sadness, embarrassment, small pleasures, and a few deep joys. No grand theology. No mysterious symbolism, save the hammock.

Maybe that’s just the point of the story. Where does the God of love hang out? Maybe God hangs out in the midst of ordinary lives that are sad and disappointing and embarrassing; lives with scars from hurts large and small; lives with small pleasures and a few deep joys. Where else would the God of love hang out? Where else is God more needed?

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

2010-01-24T20:02:00.000-06:00

We are into a new year, but I have some unfinished business from last year. In 2009, I turned 50. Sometime during the year, I began to put together a small list of works (books and music) that were published, produced, released in 1959, the year of my birth, and found their way into my life. Here is my list in no particular order:

Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
Gary Snyder, Rip Rap and Other Poems
Robert Lowell, Life Studies
Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues
Dave Brubeck, Time Out
John Coltrane, Giant Steps
Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come
John Updike, The Poorhouse Fair

Grateful for birth, grateful for the works born the year I was that have enriched my life.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Theology That's Too Pat

2010-01-15T17:33:00.001-06:00

Bad theology can be irritating. Really bad theology hurts and does damage. This week Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, was devastated by an earthquake. Much of the news has been soul-shaking and heart-rending Not long after I heard the news, I was on Facebook and read that my friend Ken Carter’s wife, Pam, was in Haiti, but had survived safely. While I’ve never met Pam, I was very glad for this news. A couple of days later, I heard heartbreaking news that hit close to home. Two friends of mine, April and Judd Larson, both pastors, had lost their son, Ben, in the earthquake. Ben was a seminarian and was in Haiti teaching in a Lutheran Church.
In between came the comments of the Rev. Dr. Pat Robertson. I have listened to them a few times to make sure the quotes are accurate. While in the midst of raising funds to help the earthquake victims in Haiti, Pat opined theologically about the tragedy on The 700 Club. Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal… The Haitians revolted and got themselves free. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It is cut down the middle; on the one side is Haiti on the other is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God and out of this tragedy I'm optimistic something good may come. But right now we are helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.
I do not want to disparage Rev. Robertson’s character or his Christian faith. I do want to take his theology to task. It is a nice, neat theology, very “pat” (couldn’t resist the pun). God is in control of all that happens, and this God takes issue with those who don’t pay him the proper respect. The Haitians made a pact with the devil and that is why they are poor and suffering. We can now throw an earthquake in there for good measure. This God seems rather insecure – needing constant reaffirmation of his “Godness.” This God is peevish, and vengeful. And what about those who were in Haiti doing good and bringing the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ and were killed in the earthquake? Well, they might be considered collateral damage in God’s plan. Pat Robertson is a deeply committed Christian, and he will offer a lot of help to the people of Haiti. I don’t think his theology is very consistent with the Christian faith as I know it.
That” pat theology” is not difficult to take issue with, but what if we push the envelope a little. Other Christians will say that while we cannot know why, God must have had some purpose in “allowing” this to happen. This theological position does not make God as directly responsible for the earthquake, but it does retain a sense of God’s ultimate control and purposefulness in whatever happens. I struggle with this position, too. What purpose does this earthquake serve? What purpose could there be in 50,000 plus deaths, including the death of a young seminarian? If an earthquake needed to happen someplace to prove some point, why Haiti – a country where daily life contained more than its share of suffering? Even the theology of God “allowing” is too pat for me.
I remember a story about Jesus in John’s gospel (chapter 9). There is a blind man, a man blind from birth. Jesus’ disciples ask the “why” question. “Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” How did Jesus respond? “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Now there is some ambiguity here. Is Jesus trying to say that God caused the man to be born blind, or allowed the man to be born blind so that Jesus could come and heal him later? Some might read it that way. I like Eugene Peterson’s take (The Message). Jesus says, “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here.” In other words, maybe Jesus is saying that the cause of tragedy is shrouded in some mystery, that trying to be too pat in our thinking leads us astray. Might it be that the earth needs to be the way it is for it to exist at all, the planet that includes faults and fissures that sometimes shift causing enormous disaster, suffering and heartache? In any event, the place to look for God is not as a causal factor in all that happens, but in the response to suffering. God is present when healing happens. God is present when the grieving are comforted. God is present when the hungry are fed and water delivered to the thirsty. God is present when people are inspired to reach out across the globe to people they may never meet to help them put their lives back together. This God is not insecure and peevish and vengeful. This God is not concerned about ancient slights, but cares about the well-being of all. This God is that quiet voice deep inside that whispers to us – “there is your brother, there is your sister, these are your children and your grandparents, help.” That’s the God I see in Jesus. It means my theology is sometimes messy and filled with ambiguity and “what ifs”. Whispers are sometimes difficult to detect and hard to discern. Somehow a messy theology seems to fit better with our complex world than a theology that is too “pat.”

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Life and Death

2010-01-12T21:47:00.001-06:00

Today I led a celebration of life for a 93 year old woman, long-time member of the church where I am pastor. It was the fourth funeral/memorial service I have led since Christmas and I will lead another one on Saturday.

I often use poetry during my reflections at these services. I try to find a poem with a distinct metaphor that helps me look at the person whose life story is in my hands for those few minutes.

Lacking time for much other creative writing right now, I thought I would share two poems about death and dying that I find very meaningful.

Otherwise Jane Kenyon (from her book Constance)

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Late Fragment Raymond Carver (included in the wonderful anthology Beloved on the Earth: 150 poems of grief and gratitude, published by Holy Cow! Press)

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

The Long and Winding Road

2010-01-03T21:20:00.001-06:00

New Year’s Eve was kind of quiet - stayed home with my wife Julie, our daughter Sarah and her friend Bryan. We watched a quirky comedy entitled, “The Maiden Heist.” That ended about 11:30 and with just a little time before the new year began, I popped another DVD into the player: Paul McCartney, “Good Evening New York City” a concert video filmed in July 2009. It is a great concert video – tremendous energy and fantastic music. One highlight would be “Here Today,” a song in honor of John Lennon.
Right about midnight, Paul began playing “The Long and Winding Road.” Not a bad song to end one year and begin a new one – one part of the long and winding road of life turning into another.
And if we answer the call to discipleship, where will it lead us? What decisions and partings will it command? To answer this question we shall have to go to him, for only he knows the answer. Only Jesus Christ, who bids us follow him, knows the journey’s end. But we do know that it will be a road of boundless mercy. Discipleship means joy.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 41
Joy. The next day I finished watching the rest of the McCartney concert as I walked on our treadmill (too cold to walk outside, but the consolation is that I watch some great videos). Joy filled Citi Field as McCartney played, and he exuded joy in playing. But why shouldn’t he? He was a part of one of the most phenomenal rock bands ever and is quite wealthy as a result. He gets to play music for a living. Of course he can exude joy. Then I also think about other aspects of his life – two close friends dead, one by murder; a wife who died of cancer. The road for Paul McCartney has been long and winding at times. Still there is joy.
The road of life, even for disciples, can be long and winding, sometimes even more long and winding because we are disciples - - - for we are called to care even when caring is difficult, we are invited to be more human and more whole, and that isn’t always easy. Still, our long and winding road can be filled with joy. Not a bad hope for the new year.
The concert ended with “The End”: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. Not a bad goal for the new year.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

A Song and Thoughts to End the Year

2009-12-30T22:18:00.002-06:00

As 2009 winds down, it is coming to an end in a flurry of activity. For the first time I can remember, I officiated at two funeral/memorial services on the same day. That was Monday. Today I officiated at another memorial service (that makes five this month). This time I was filling in for a pastor on vacation, but in many ways it was serendipitous. The funeral was held at the church I grew up in here in Duluth, and the man whose life we were celebrating was someone I knew as a kid, someone whose children I went to school with. Yes, Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” has been floating around in my head a bit.

Joni Mitchell, "The Circle Game"

Rather than a short essay to finish the year, there is the gift of song (Joni Mitchell) and a couple quotes.

I have only what I remember.
W. S. Merwin, from “A Likeness” in The Shadow of Sirius

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Mary Oliver, from “Sometimes” in Red Bird

The function of Reason is to promote the art of life.
Alfred North Whitehead, in The Function of Reason

Remember well the year gone by and live so as to create wonderful and kind memories in the new year. Use your reason to live well. Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

When Christmas Breaks Your Heart

2009-12-22T14:17:00.003-06:00

This is the reflection I offered at the "Blue Christmas" service held at our church last Sunday.

When Christmas breaks your heart. There are a lot of reasons why our hearts may be breaking this Christmas – this may be your first Christmas without a loved one who has died in the past year, you may have lost a loved one around this time of year and so the season is a reminder of your loss, a relationship important to you may have ended, maybe there has been a divorce, a job has been lost, this is your first year in a new place and you cannot get home for Christmas, a loved one has to be away this holiday season. So we gather, the heartbroken and those seeking to stand with us in heartbreak.
Christmas itself can seem pretty fragile. We often cloak Christmas in sweetness and light – we think of children’s Christmas programs, holiday music that is here for a few weeks then disappears, movies where all the endings are happy ones, trees laden with just the right gifts. Christmas can seem as fragile as a crystal angel hanging from a tree or fragile as a snow flake.
When we think of Christmas like that it doesn’t seem able to handle our grief, our pain, our sorrow. We find no place in it for sadness, no place for the blues amidst the greens and reds of the season. Our heartbreak seems to break Christmas, and we don’t want to do that, so we keep our distance. Because we don’t think Christmas can handle our pain and grief and sadness it makes this time even lonelier, even more difficult.
Yes, Christmas is more about joy than sadness, more about singing than silence, but it is big enough to hold both, strong enough to take our grief and sorrow. When we see Christmas as only sweetness and light, we see it too one-dimensionally. We miss important parts of the story, we miss the strength and resilience that the story offers.
The Christmas story is not just about angels and shepherds. It is also a story about an unplanned pregnancy. It is a story about a people under imperial rule. Mary and Joseph are made to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem by order of the Roman Empire and there seems something just a little bit cruel in making a pregnant woman travel a distance for purposes of taxation and a census. It is a story about a young family with no place to stay. It is about a birth outside.
When we begin to take in these dimensions of the story it seems less fragile. It seems more resilient. It seems like it might hold our pain and grief and heartbreak. I think it is meant to do that. While I think the Christmas story is for everyone, I think it is especially for us when we are hurting, when we are experiencing difficulty, when we feel sorrow and grief and pain. I think it is for us at such times because ultimately it is a story about a God who is with us even in, and especially in, such times. God does not abandon us when times are difficult, instead God walks the road with us. God does not shy away from our grief or pain, God shares them with us. The light of God’s love finds its way even into the darkest corners of our lives and our world. The Christmas story is about a God who is, in the words of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”
If we hear no other word this season amidst the carols and bells and chatter, may this word penetrate our hurt and sorrow – God is with us. God holds our breaking hearts. With God there can be healing, even when that takes time, and it does. With God there is light, even when that light is but a tiny sliver peering into a dark room. With God there can be joy, even if it is on the other side of deep sadness. God be with you. Amen.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Prolegomena to any Future Children’s Christmas Program

2009-12-15T22:13:00.000-06:00

With apologies to Immanuel Kant

Sunday was the Children and Youth Christmas Program at First UMC. It was presented during worship. The worship service was well-attended, even a bit better than last year, and people were very pleased with how the program and service went.
So is this worship? In many ways the children’s Christmas program is all sweetness and saccharine and sentimentality with little emotional depth. It is true, you really can’t go wrong by wrapping a few preschoolers in cotton balls or crowing them with donkey ears. Bathrobes make wonderful wrappings for wise men from the east when those wise men are under ten. Cows in spotted smocks and even some cats made this year’s manger. Can this really be worship?
Well if worship is meant to tell the story, if it is intended to evoke gratitude, if it is intended to remind us of who we are and what we are to do, if it is meant to connect us more deeply with One in whom we live and move and have our being, then maybe…
The story was told in familiar and more hidden ways. Mary’s voice rang out strong and true. I happen to know that Mary’s grandpa is battling cancer. One narrator was a middle school girl fairly new to our church. When she stepped into the pulpit to speak her lines, her voice was clear and steady. Maybe she and her family are finding a faith home here. Two little girls in the cast are being raised by their father because three years ago their mother died in an automobile accident on her way home from work. The Scriptures were read, the story was elaborated with characters and song – and it was told for all to hear. And a lot of us found a place in that story.
There was much to be grateful for: the patience of the staff and volunteers who worked so hard to make this happen, the energy of the children as they sang songs and led us all in singing, the people who came to be a part of this special day. It is a day to be grateful for the gifts of life for they run down like oil into Aaron’s beard (Psalm 133).
We were reminded of who we are. Didn’t Jesus say that there is something in children from which we can learn, that there is a childlike quality necessary to be a part of God’s kingdom, God’s dream for the world? Which childlike quality is most a part of God’s dream for the world? Is it wide-eyed wonder? Is it a willingness to display joy, like jumping kittens in Sunday’s manger? Is it a willingness to try something, to take a risk? Is it a willingness to love with an openness that is soon lost when one hits adolescence? Maybe it is all of these.
We were reminded of what we need to do as God’s people. During the announcement time I shared two thank you notes our church received from children who had been given clothing through a clothes closet our church has made a commitment to stock. The clothes closet is in an elementary school where there are a number of children who could benefit from such a ministry. One young boy was thrilled with his new winter outdoor clothing. Now he could be outside and not be so cold. Another child, a girl, was delighted with new shoes. Now she did not have to wear boots all day in school. These children are a part of our care as were the children in our Christmas program. And among the cast members are children from a local children’s home who come to First UMC for children’s church school every Sunday. We could only use their first names and last initials in our program because they are in that home because life has been difficult and they have not always made the best choices in the face of that. But they come to our church to learn and to pray and to be a part of another caring community. We care about all God’s children here. It is who we are and what we do.
And we care about children, some of whom we will never meet except through little thank you notes, because we know that we and they are connected to One in whom we all live and more and have our being. This One came close in Jesus. This One comes close in Jesus even now when love is shown, when children are welcomed and celebrated, when cows sing and sheep wiggle and kittens jump.
Yes, this is worship.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

A Little Bragging

2009-12-06T19:47:00.000-06:00

I am going to brag a little on my church. It is not a comparison thing, just a little horn blowing for the congregation to which I am appointed as pastor.
I don’t usually get into the office before 9 a.m., and often not until 9:30. I am often at the church in the evenings so no one is concerned I am not putting in my hours. But one day a year, I make sure I am at the church around 7 a.m. - - - that’s the day that our church serves as the site of the “Have a Heart, Help a Neighbor” campaign to raise food and funds for the Second Harvest Northern Lakes Food Bank. The local ABC affiliate, WDIO TV, hosts their morning show from our church parking lot. The director of the food bank is there. A truck receives food. It is a fun morning, and it helps the food bank and through the food bank, a lot of our neighbors. I am glad our church is located in a great spot for this event.
As the food bank event was winding down, a facial-dental clinic was setting up in our building. This clinic serves persons who might not otherwise receive care. I watched with joy as a couple of the children coming to the clinic put dollar bills in the food bank collection.
During all of this time, I also went up to my office a couple of times, and on one such occasion, a member of an AA group that meets in our church on Friday mornings stopped to hand me a small donation for the church. They are glad to have a place to meet.
The congregation I serve is housed in a fairly large building that is architecturally notable and is located in a wonderful spot on the Duluth hillside. Sometimes our big building is a headache, but the congregation is dedicated to using our building as a resource for the community and not just a place for its activities. It is a part of our ministry. We are, at our best, sort of a front porch for Duluth, and we like it that way.
This same week that I am writing about was also a week in which our church hosted three memorial services. One of the services was for a long-time member who would have turned 100 on December 23. The other two services were for non-members, but we open our church so that families can grieve together, support one another, tell stories and offer hugs in the face of loss. It is easy to take this kind of ministry for granted, unless it is your family that has experienced the loss and you are looking for some care and support. The memorial service for the church member who was nearly 100 was held Saturday. That same day our social hall was the location for a new year celebration for the Hmong community.
This is quite a place – better, these are great people to be in ministry with.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Advent

2009-12-02T00:08:00.001-06:00

Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me. Jesus, Mark 9:37

Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Jesus, Mark 10:14

Advent is a season of waiting and of surprise. We wait for God to show up and know that we will be surprised when God happens.
One surprising thing about the beginning of Advent this year in Duluth is our lack of snow. November typically brings with it about 14 inches of snow. This year we had closer to one inch, and as Advent arrived on Sunday there was no snow anywhere to be found.
More than that, however, this first Sunday of Advent lived up to its billing – especially the surprise part, and it came from children. God showing up in children? Seems as if this has happened before.
Every Sunday we invite children present in worship to come and share some time. Leadership for this varies some, but I have the joy and privilege much of the time. So I invited children to come up and was going to talk with them about imagining a different world, like in fantasy or science fiction. Anyway, I began with a simple enough question – “Did you enjoy Thanksgiving?” It took me much of the rest of the children’s time to get back to my chosen topic. One little boy, up front with his twin brother spoke excitedly about how he and his dad had been decorating, and they decorated most of the trees in their yard, but there might be a couple left. His enthusiasm for life’s small chores was infectious. In all honesty, while I hope I teach some small lesson during this children’s time, the most important lesson of all happens no matter what I say – that this place is home to children, that they are welcome here and this is their church, too. The enthusiasm of this boy let me know he knew this was his church, too. And God arrived in that somehow. Surprise!
Following the sermon, we celebrated a baptism. The child, a girl, was over a year old (I am writing this from home and so can’t remember just how much over a year). While I was asking her parents questions of faith, and asking the congregation to affirm its faith and pledge support to this family, the little girl waved at the folks gathered. She seemed very comfortable in the limelight. As I was praying the prayer over the water, a prayer I absolutely love, in part because I pray it while reveling in the baptismal waters, the little girl began to get a bit restless. Was this going to be one of those baptisms where every second of holding the child would be an effort?
The prayer finished, I reached for the child and she came to me, then, surprise, she hugged me tight and nestled her head snug against my shoulder and under my chin. Emotion poured through me like the baptismal waters I cupped in my hand and placed gently on her head. “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Grow gently in love of God. May you ever be a true disciple of Jesus Christ who walks in the way that leads to life.” She clung to me, as if for dear life, and if the seconds seemed to pass a bit more slowly it wasn’t because I was anxious to return a squirmy child to her parents, but just the opposite.
Something in me was growing gently in love of God. It is Advent, the season where we wait for God’s arrival knowing it will surprise us in some way. And darn if it didn’t happen that way again, and in a little boy, in a little girl.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Thanksgiving 2009

2009-11-27T18:46:00.001-06:00

It is actually difficult to edit life. Especially in regard to feelings. Not being open to anger or sadness usually means being unable to be open to love and joy.
Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom, 203

Psychoanalysis is a psychology of pain.
Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 259

This Thanksgiving I am grateful for many things: my wife Julie, my children: David, Beth and Sarah, my wider family, friends and acquaintances, food, home, music (I’ve been listening in recent days to Paul McCartney Good Evening New York City), movies, poetry, books, the ability to make some positive difference in the world, exercise. I am also grateful for those who help keep me open to myself and the world.
Rachel Naomi Remen reminds us of our need to be open to our own experience. The past year or so some of my favorite conversation partners in this journey of trying to stay open to experience and learn from it – all of it, even the painful stuff, have been writers who are psychoanalysts or who themselves are in significant conversation with the psychoanalytic tradition. Two writers, in particular, have been insightful dialogue partners – Michael Eigen and Ernest Becker.

Becker, writing about why growth and change are so difficult writes about the going through hell of a lonely and racking rebirth where on throws off the lendings of culture, the costumes that fit us for life’s roles, the masks and panoplies of our standardized heroisms, to stand alone and nude facing the howling elements as oneself – a trembling animal element. (The Death and Rebirth of Meaning, 146)

There is a hunger for nuance, for psychic taste.
Michael Eigen, Feeling Matters, 153

It takes a lifetime to grow into oneself, to become a home on can say yes to.
Michael Eigen, Flames from the Unconscious, 103

I am grateful for the journey and for these companions.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Adult Children

2009-11-15T21:53:00.001-06:00

Pain teaches love. Joy teaches love. Which is the better teacher?
>Michael Eigen, Flames from the Unconscious, 119

Today our youngest daughter, Sarah, turned 18. My wife Julie and I now have three adult children – David (whose middle name is “Lloyd” – different from mine, and why I often use my middle initial “A”) who is 26, and Elizabeth (Beth), age 24. We have brought three children to adulthood, and in the process I have learned a lot about being an adult human being.
Eigen’s words ring true – pain and joy can teach love, and parenting children to adulthood involves both pain and joy. For me, the pain has most often been watching the pain of my children as they have grown – physical pain like David’s lacerated wrist or Beth’s broken hip (both in the fifth grade – and we were so glad when Sarah made it through the fifth grade without serious injury), but also the sorrows of friends who turn away, the hurt of relationships that have ended, the difficulties of moving and having to start again, the disappointments of dreams that have come up short. In other ways, parenting has not been particularly painful. Our disagreements have been few and far between, and we find our way to reconciliation well. I am so grateful for this.
The joys are as numerous as the stars that shine on this cold, clear Duluth night – laughter shared, hugs and smiles, good meals enjoyed, games played, family movie nights with popcorn or chips and salsa, vacations, watching as my children discover the joys of music and reading, Christmas Eve – even when we all attended four church services together – stopping for supper at a convenience store because everything else was closed…..
The joys and pain of parenting have taught me a lot about love, and even though all our children are now adults, I know the lessons continue. Love is a life-long learning process.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Book Group Again

2009-11-06T15:05:00.001-06:00

This past Monday, my interfaith book group met again. The book for the day was Oscar Hijuelos’ book, Mr. Ives' Christmas. I had read this book a few years ago, and felt it was worth suggesting to the group. It was, and it was well worth a second read. I got most of my reading done on airplanes or in airports.
This well-written story takes us into the life of Edward Ives – adopted child, ad man, husband, father, person of faith. We come to know this man in his lonlinesses, in his joys, in his tragedies. We follow his journey of faith, which includes a mystical experience as well as years where his faith has lost heart. Whether caught in the throes of a deeply moving experience or just showing up to do what he needs to do, Ives never abandons the practice of his faith. The title of a Eugene Peterson book came to mind as I was reading the book, “a long obedience in the same direction.” This is a fully-embodied life (loneliness, art, love, sex, parenthood, the tragic death of a son, staying true to principles even when it is difficult, friendship, loyalty, struggle, forgiveness – it’s there) formed quietly by faith.
In a delightful serendipity, we discussed this book seated around a table in a local restaurant, and on the wall behind the table were photographs taken by a local artist. I could not help but look again and again at one in particular. It was a photo of a manhole over which were locked intersecting iron bars. The two bars looked very much like a cross, and underneath the picture were these words: “religious truths go deeper than we are allowed to know.”
Religious truths go deep, very deep, and they are often buried beneath the ground, seemingly locked away. I cannot say we are not allowed to go there. I do think many of us choose to keep the cover locked over some of the deep areas of our lives where we also discover deep religious truths. Michael Eigen has written, “I do think we are more afraid of ourselves than of death…. The taboo against getting deeper into oneself, learning about oneself, is more severe than sex” (Conversations, 60).
A book like Mr. Ives Christmas has the capacity to take us deeper. It took me deeper. It was an early “Christmas gift.”

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Leaving on a Jet Plane

2009-10-30T22:40:00.001-06:00

On my last flight out of town this month (I have one more next month) I flew to Asheville, North Carolina for a meeting at the Lake Junaluska Assemby. This lovely retreat center is owned by the Southeastern Jurisdiction of The United Methodist Church. Nestled outside of Asheville in the Great Smokey Mountains, it is a great place to visit.

My flight left Duluth early Thursday (6:30 a.m.). I flew first to Detroit and then on to Asheville. It was on my way to Detroit that I was greeted by a beauty wholly unanticipated, and experienced a serendipity of grace.

It had been cloudy leaving Duluth, but on our way to Detroit we flew above the clouds and between the clouds. Looking out my window, the sun was rising – or rather peering through holes in the walls of clouds off in the distance. With the light of this fiery red sun illuminating them, the clouds below looked like a warm cotton blanket. It was all a feast for the eyes.

I was also reading, coming toward the end of a book I began earlier this month, Jacob Needleman’s Money and the Meaning of Life. In his final chapter, Needleman quotes poets Rilke and Rumi. They were the perfect accompaniment to the beauty I was witnessing from my airplane window.

Isn’t the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may
shudder with joy?

Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday? – O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Rilke

Deliberation is one of the qualities of God.

Deliberation is born of joy,
like a bird from an egg.
Rumi

And so there was beauty and in that invitations to deliberation and to shudder with joy. Serendipitous grace, a grace wholly gratuitous.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Meeting Madness Month

2009-10-20T00:51:00.000-05:00

October is meeting madness month for me. To date: Minnesota Conference Budget Process Team, Minnesota Conference Common Table, Minnesota Council of Churches Nominations Committee, General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, Twin Ports United Methodist Ministry, Minnesota Conference Board of Ordained Ministry, Minnesota Conference Episcopacy Committee. Up-coming: North Central Jurisdiction Religion and Race Event, Commission on Theological Education review of Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, Committee on Faith and Order. This list does not include the meetings of my congregations Staff-Parish Relations Committee, Church Council, Finance Committee, or Nominations Committee; nor the great event I attended Sunday night with area United Methodists and led by Dan Dick. Nor does it include the presentation I made earlier this month at the College of St. Scholastica on “What Do Methodists Think About Perfection (process and results), the meeting I facilitated last week sponsored by Churches United in Ministry to discuss the elimination of Minnesota’s General Assistance Medical Care Program, the presentation I am making Wednesday to our United Methodist Women on “Living the Sacred,” the presentation I am giving at St. Luke’s Hospice on Thursday, nor the panel I am speaking on next week at the University of Minnesota Duluth Medical School on the topic of abortion.

This is an unusually busy month – did I mention the two funerals I have officiated at in the past week – both for delightful people, women whose combined age was 190! I am not complaining about any of this (after all, at some point I said “yes” to it all), just reporting, and letting you know why I have not written much this month. However, I enjoy keeping this blog going, and so will fill the remaining space this time with a couple of quotes from things I have read in the past months.

Something at the center of life incredibly beautiful, precious, holy, a sacred sense at the heart of life
Michael Eigen, Conversations with Michael Eigen, 77

To be a questioner is important. To be a critic, a questioner. To be ignorant. Does one have to sacrifice this need if one also feels God? Does one have to sign on a dotted line?
Michael Eigen, Conversations with Michael Eigen, 3

The contradictions of man’s earthly situation cannot be resolved by easy belief or by reflexively relaying the meaning of it to God. Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem. The ideal critique of a faith must always be whether it embodies within itself the fundamental contradictions of the human paradox and yet is able to support them without fanaticism, sadism, and narcissism, but with openness and trust.
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning, 198

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Pray Within Me

2009-10-04T22:33:00.002-05:00

I enjoy writing, and my blogging is one evidence of this. Over time, I have written some poetry, most of which I keep to myself. Occasionally I have had an inkling to write new words for hymns, but have never really followed through on this.

Last Thursday I read a brief devotional thought offered by Brother Roger of Taize, based on Romans 8:26-27. As I was closing the book, words began to form – “pray within me.” A tune attached itself to the words. I looked in The United Methodist Hymnal to find the tune – Tallis’ Canon. The thought of this “hymn” kept at me all day, until by day’s end, I had most of what follows, though I have revised it slightly in the days since.

In the coming weeks, we may try this in the church where I am pastor.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Pray Within Me

Pray within me
God this day
in all I do
in all I say.
Let even silence
speak your name.
Pray within me
God this day.

Within without
let all be prayer,
the loving heart,
the soul laid bare;
acts of justice,
deeds of peace,
Pray within me
Spirit please.

Transform the world
transform my heart,
rekindle faith
let fear depart.
May joy and loving
grace my life.
Pray within me
Jesus Christ.

Tunes:
Tallis’ Canon (682)
Gift of Love (408)

David A. Bard, 2009

Ahead of Oprah Just This Once

2009-09-28T00:11:00.001-05:00

Last Monday (September 21) I met with an interfaith book group I have been leading since the Fall of 2006. We met for our regular monthly gathering to discuss the book we had chosen in August, Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan. If the title sounds familiar that is because just days before our group met, Oprah Winfrey has chosen this book as her next Oprah pick - - - but our reading group was weeks ahead of her! We were ahead of Oprah, just this once!
I have appreciated this group for the quality of our discussion and for helping me read novels I might not otherwise have the opportunity to read. A reading list from our group is found at the end of this piece.
Akpan’s book is probably one of those I might well have missed, but am glad I didn’t. This is not because the book is pleasant reading, but precisely because it is difficult in the way books should sometimes be difficult. This book of short stories has as the setting for each story a country in Africa. Children play primary roles in every story, and the stories are told through the voices of children. The childhood portrayed here is nightmarish and horrifying – a twelve year old prostitute in Kenya, children being sold into slavery by their uncle, young friends separated by an adult world where religion serve as yet another way to divide people from one another, a young man with family roots in two religious traditions finding that he can be persecuted by both, a family torn by ethnic division. While these stories are fiction, they are grounded in the real life stories of conflict- and poverty-ridden countries. Reading them brings a painful, but necessary awareness of how far our world has to go in becoming more just and peaceful place. The stories can leave one in despair about the possibilities for change, but they also inspire a deep determination to help make the world better in whatever way one can. The stories can leave one in despair about the role of religion in the world – religion is often a divisive force, and a violently divisive force at that. Yet the stories can also inspire a deep determination to make religious faith, which can provoke division and violence, a force for justice, peace, compassion and goodness.
When Oprah chooses a book, many people read it simply for that reason. Others probably avoid reading these books just because they have now become so “popular.” This is one Oprah pick I hope is widely read and discussed. As a person of faith, I hope that other people of faith join me in helping make religious faith a force for good in the world, rather than a force for hurt, destruction and evil.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Interfaith Book Group Reading List
Camilla Gibb, A Sweetness in the Belly
Leila Aboulela, The Translator
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith
Kiren Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
Mark Salzman, Lying Awake
Dalia Sofer, Septembers of Shiraz
Yasmina Khadra, Swallows of Kabul
Dara Horn, The World to Come
Elizabeth Strout, Abide With Me
Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra
Orhan Pamuk, Snow
Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message Down Under
William Young, The Shack
Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
Arvind Adiga, The White Tiger
Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book
Jon Hassler, North of Hope
Amy Tan, Saving Fish From Drowining
Clayton Sullivan, Jesus and the Sweet Pilgrim Baptist Church
Uwem Akpan, Say You’re One of Them
Oscar Hijuelos, Mr. Ives’ Christmas (reading now)

The Beatles

2009-09-15T23:44:00.002-05:00

Praise the Lord.
Praise God with trumpet sound… with lute and harp!
Praise God with tambourine and dance… with strings and pipe!
Praise God with clanging cymbals… with loud clashing cymbals!
Let everything that breathes praise the Lord.
From Psalm 150

Part of me has always envied that apparent majority of my generation who seem able to do without models of heroism – who call on no figurehead to spur their own aspirations. Sometimes I think those people see the world more clearly than I do, and are certainly less vulnerable once heroism is exposed as equivocal – as it always will be. But another, more fundamental part of me believes heroism is a genuine and miraculous thing, when genuinely found; that for all the disappointments encountered elsewhere, it’s worth holding dear, when genuinely found. And I know there will never be another thing like the Beatles because there will never again be such popular heroes as they chose to be.
Delvin McKinney, The Beatles in Dream and History, 366

When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, it was the last time a live performance changed the course of American music, and when they became purely a recording group, they pointed the way toward a future in which there need be no unifying styles, as bands can play what they like in the privacy of the studio, and we can choose which to listen to in the privacy of our clubs, our homes, or, finally, our heads. Whether that was liberating or limiting is a matter of opinion and perception, but the whole idea of popular music had changed.
Elijah Wald, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, 247

John Lennon was killed December 8, 1980 by a man who couldn’t separate his own reality from John’s. I was about half way through my senior year in college. George Harrison succumbed to cancer in 2001. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have released new music in the past couple of years. Still the Beatles live on.

Last week, September 9, 2009, witnessed the release of the entire Beatles catalog on remastered CDs. A mono box set of 11 of the 14 CDs is sold out. The Beatles songs are now part of a video game. The week before the release, USA Today had a cover story on the group and the new releases. A recent issue of Rolling Stone, a publication I subscribed to faithfully while in college, had a cover story on the Beatles break-up, 1969-1970. The Beatles live on.

John met Paul in June of 1957, two years to the month before I was born. Nevertheless, the Beatles music has been a part of the soundtrack of my life. I remember hearing “I Saw Her Standing There” on a 45 owned by an older second cousin when I was still in grade school. My sister, in junior high, ordered an album through Scholastic Books, and on that album was “Blackbird.” I was probably about ten. While I was in junior high and high school, there was a persistent rumor that the Beatles would get together again for a concert or an album. It never happened. There was a joke about musically obtuse people during those years – “He didn’t know Paul McCartney was in a group before Wings.”

What was it about this group that captured our imaginations so, and still does? There is the music – wonderfully catchy, beautifully harmonic, played with joy and sensitivity, creatively written and exceptionally well-played and produced. Some have speculated that the Beatles arrived in America when needed most, in the grief-filled months following the assassination of President John Kennedy. Maybe they assuaged our grief and brought a life-force, a spirit, to our land. For many of us, their music remains indispensible – just look at the kind of things people still write about them - - - changed the face of popular music in a way no longer possible, embodied a certain heroism. They were not perfect people, but their music was (and is) joy and delight. They sought to use the platform of their music to send messages about peace and love – naïve, maybe, but who can fault them for that?

I recall in one of the summers of my youth staying up late watching “the late movie” on television and seeing an ad for a Beatles compilation. After playing snippets of so many songs that were already familiar, a British voice over was heard - - - “There’s never been a group quite like the Beatles.” I think that disembodied voice spoke truth. Their music still brings joy and dancing, and for me, also evokes praise, even praise of God.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Quotes

2009-09-07T14:51:00.001-05:00

Being a pastor, I am occasionally asked why I quote other people in my sermons, rather than simply engaging in an exposition of the Bible. I believe I use quotes from others as an integral part of my exposition of a biblical passage, use them to dig deeply into the meaning of a passage and the meaning of a passage for our lives. Some will also ask why my blogs don’t focus more on the Bible. I have two blogs, this one, and one on which I post my weekly sermons, sermons which dig into Bible passages to ask what it means to be a person of Christian faith today. So I use this blog to share thoughts that, while shaped by my engagement with the Bible (because my whole life is thus shaped), take a freer form and frankly engage cultural sources as much as strictly religious sources.
Recently I discovered this quote from St. Augustine which strengthens my case for my approach in preaching and writing. Every good and true Christian should understand that wherever he may find truth, it is his Lord’s, On Christian Doctrine 2.18.28. I like to find truth in a wide variety of sources and enjoy having truth come at me slant.
William James: I have always held the opinion that one of the first duties of a good reader is to summon other readers to the enjoyment of any unknown author of rare quality whom he may discover in his explorations (“A Pluralistic Mystic”). William James is well-known, and by me well-loved, but inspired by James and Augustine, I share a few quotes from authors who may be less well-known to those of you who stumble across or into this blog now and again.
The capacity for pathos toward oneself, the capacity to acknowledge and accept one’s suffering as real and poignant and, sometimes, unjustified, is important and constructive. A sense of pathos represents a coming to terms with our relative helplessness in the face of many aspects of our lives…. Genuine pathos entails compassionate acceptance of suffering caused by events and forces outside our control. Without pathos, we delude ourselves into denying our finitude, our limitations, our mortality. But accepting the limited control we have over our own lives is difficult, and genuine pathos teeters always on the brink of what we might term “pitifulness”: victimology and self-pity. (Stephen Mitchell - the psychoanalyst, not the translator and anthologist, Can Love Last, 167, 169). This is not an argument for irresponsibility, which would be a species of victimology and self-pity, but a case for compassion toward oneself in a world where we do not control everything.
Freud was to discover that the ways we protect ourselves tend also to be the ways we imprison ourselves. (Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness, 62-63). We need a sense of security and safety, but what we use to construct that sense can become the bars which constrict our lives. Life is an on-going struggle to balance pathos with our need to act to improve our lives and the world; and an on-going struggle to balance security with adventure. I believe God is One whose Spirit is always inviting us to compassion and adventure.
To love God with all your heart, soul, might and to feel the heartbreak at the center of existence, and the deeper joy, working within the storm, in the feel of feelings, the feel of life, the feel of one’s life (Michael Eigen, Conversations with Michael Eigen, x. Eigen is a writer I have discovered in the past year and I find his work incredibly rich and insightful. He is a psychoanalytically-oriented therapist who writes about God, the Bible, the mystic as well as about therapy and psyche).

With Faith and With Feathers,
David

2009-08-28T16:39:00.000-05:00

I bring you aged a young man’s love
Wendell Berry, “To Tanya on My Sixtieth Birthday,” Given, 6

The love songs of youth remain a joy to list to. For those of us who grew up in the rock era there have been beautiful ballads – “Something” (The Beatles), “Colour My World” (Chicago), “You Are The Sunshine of My Life” (Stevie Wonder), among many, many others. At junior high dances I always hoped to find a partner for The Carpenters “Close To You” or Bread’s “If,” but I was shy and often left standing heartbroken watching others dance.
Love songs could also rock. She was just seventeen… and I saw her standing there (The Beatles), What I like about you, you really know how to dance (The Romantics), et. al. Awhile back I came across a used CD by The Knack a power pop band from my college days whose biggest song was a love song of sorts “My Sharona.” Truth be told there was more lust than love there, but teenage love songs are often a mysterious mixture of affection, sexuality and a desire not to be lonely. I enjoy the love songs, ballads and rockers, of my younger years.
This summer I have also been listening to a different kind of love song, more akin to Wendell Berry’s poem to his wife. John Hiatt released a CD in the last year or so entitled Same Old Man. It is filled with love songs, not the love songs of youth, but of age. Hiatt’s voice is a wonderful instrument to convey such songs.
Even when I was dead inside/You saw something to remind you/of the man I was tryin’ to hide/I just wanna go on with you/All the joy and pain and beauty too. “On With You.” To have lived with someone a long time usually means there will be joy and beauty and pain. That’s life and you want a love that can take it all in.
That’s what love can do/Make you feel brand new….Fire your heart and burn clean through, “What Love Can Do.” The fires of love may burn a little differently over time, but they still burn.

Honey, I’m still the same old man
That you married way back when
A few less brain cells a lot less hair
Honey tell me you still care
I love you more than I ever did…
You start out trying to change everything
You wind up dancing with who you bring
I loved you then and my love still stands
Honey, I’m still the same old man. “Same Old Man”

That’s my favorite, a tribute to a love that lasts, that joins two people over the years, through easy streets and bumpy roads. Such love takes work, but it is work of the best kind. There is also a grace about such love, it is goes beyond the language of “deserving,” at least when one is the recipient of such love, as I have been (Julie and I celebrated our twenty-seventh anniversary in July). I hope I have given as much as I have received.
I will still listen to the songs of my youth, though I am no longer young. I will also celebrate the gift, the joy, the passion of a young man’s love now aged.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

15 Books

2009-08-11T01:06:00.002-05:00

I confess, I am often reticent to get into some of the many quizzes, contests, suggestions offered through Facebook. Which theologian do you most favor? What city would be your perfect home? What color should you wear when the moon is full? Which great looking star would you most like to play you in the movie of your life? Maybe I dislike that last question because I remember in college when people told me I reminded them of John Ritter (in his Three’s Company days). Now I fear Danny DeVito might come to mind.
Anyway, two friends (Lawrence and Jerad) invited me to share fifteen book titles under the following rules: “Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose.” I was intrigued. They got me. I posted my fifteen, with a little bending of the rules and tagged fifteen – o.k. sixteen – friends. Otherwise I kept it brief. Here is the list with explanatory notes.

1. The Bible: How can I say anything else, except this is not simply a nod to profession or piety. Among the first books I remember reading and loving were: Homer Price (and I still have my copy somewhere), Winners Never Quit (a portrait of various athletes who had hit hard times and came back) and The Greatest in Baseball. Love of books and reading came early to me, I guess, and there are certain feeling tones inside even as I type these titles. I came to the Bible most fervently after a born again experience. I asked for a copy of The Way (Living Bible) for my fourteenth birthday. I read the Bible straight through, struggling along the way. There are times when reading the Bible remains a struggle, but other times the words leap from the page into my life. Reading this book shapes the life from which I read. I should also admit that all my other reading shapes how I come back to this book again and again.
2. Writings and Drawings, Bob Dylan. As sometimes happens, a born again experience starts one on a journey that may lead away from the initial theological understandings with which one understood the experience. I remember hearing someone in my Jesus People group telling another person that they should probably not bother reading some certain book, and I remember cringing inside. What was outside this particular understanding of Christian faith? In some ways I think the same Spirit that gave me new birth urged me to think more deeply and broadly. I left that group and began asking all kinds of questions. I had sung a couple of Bob Dylan songs in a Christian small group and liked them. What more was there to this interesting guy with the remarkably distinct voice and gift for putting words together? I bought Greatest Hits I and II. I found Writings and Drawings in the Duluth East High School library. Hey Mr. Tambourine man play a song for me, I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to. Hey Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me in the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you. And I did.
3. Toward a Psychology of Being, Abraham Maslow. Senior year at East psychology class and I met Abraham Maslow (not literally). Many people know about his hierarchy of needs, but don’t get beyond that. That theory has some validity, but can also be criticized, and rightly so. But the Maslow I met in this book wanted to get beyond thinking simply about self-actualization to considering the transcendent and transpersonal. He wanted, as well, to develop a psychology of evil “one written out of compassion and love for human nature.” I deeply appreciated Maslow’s breadth and depth of learning and his gentle spirit, at least as those came through his writing.
4. Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, Alan Watts. As I sought to discover a wider world outside my intense born-again Christian faith, I wanted to learn something about other religious traditions. Alan Watts was my first guide. This book of essays is not as well known as some of his other works, but it provides a nice selection of some of his later writings. I enjoy the title, too.
5. On the Road, Jack Kerouac; Howl, Allen Ginsberg. At a used bookstore in downtown Duluth I bought a copy of Theodore Roszak’s The Making of A Counter Culture and made the connection between Alan Watts and the beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In a college English class on twentieth century American literature, just before we were to read some beat literature, the professor asked if anyone had read Kerouac or Ginsberg. My hand was among the two or three that was raised. I still appreciate the rush of language in these works. They were important beginning points into poetry and literature.
6. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein. The summer I graduated from college and had no reading assignments or papers to think about, I picked up Tolkein’s trilogy (actually began with The Silmarillion and The Hobbit) and spent a summer escaping when I could into another world. It was magic.
7. Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich. Christian faith never left me, or one might better say the God of Jesus Christ kept after me, and following college I went to seminary to explore this faith that had been so intense, but had, at times come up intellectually short. Why could I not let this go? Why did it not let me go? Tillich was the first theologian I grappled with in seminary and his work remains worth the effort. His definition of sanctification (life under the impact of the Spiritual Presence) as increasing awareness, increasing freedom, increasing relatedness, and increasing transcendence captured my attention and imagination then, and it still does.
8. The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr. During college I began to become more socially aware and politically active. The Christian faith I knew at that time was not terribly socially aware. In seminary, reading Niebuhr, I discovered that faith not only helped answer existential questions, but pushed one into thinking about human social relations, too. There have been at least two or three times since seminary that I have come across articles about “needing Niebuhr” again. I am glad I found him in seminary and have never let him go.
9. Process Theology: an introductory exposition, John Cobb and David Griffin. Tillich and Niebuhr remain rich theological resources for my life and thought, but the most profound discovery in theology in my seminary years was the discovery of process theology. It categories of thought profoundly shape how I think about life, God, Jesus, the Bible - - - God as Creative-Responsive love, power as influence, relatedness as essential to experience.
10. Struggle and Fulfillment, Donald Evans. This book by a relatively little-known religious scholar and ethicist weaves together psychoanalytic psychology, theology, philosophy, ethics and religious studies. Who could ask for anything more?
11. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman; Poems, Emily Dickinson. How different can two poets be - - - Whitman sounding his barbaric “yawp” and Dickinson asking “are you nobody, too?” Yet both poets touch something deep within. Perhaps within we find both multitudes and singleness, a need to celebrate life and confront death. Perhaps the poets are united in their sense of “divine madness.” One of the first Dickinson poems I remember reading I read on a small paper bag given me by Savran’s Paperback store in the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis. “Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye.”
12. The Centaur, John Updike. I began reading Updike when I returned to school to work on my Ph.D. While that work left insufficient time for outside reading, somewhere along the line this book fell into my hands. I appreciate Updike’s language and story-telling. This work weaves myth into the world of a father and a son in Pennsylvania. The best literature expands our ability to experience our experience and Updike helps me do that.
13. Love’s Knowledge, Martha Nussbaum. This was one of the first books of philosophy I read after completing my Ph.D. I had returned to parish ministry so didn’t really need to be reading this kind of work, but something in me is fed by it. Nussbaum writes beautifully, insightfully and intelligently about literature, feeling, ethics and life. This book led me to develop a love for Henry James, as Nussbaum used his work in making a case for a life that is to be lived finely aware and richly responsible.
14. The Dhammapada. In 2006 I read Marjorie Suchocki’s book on religions Divinity and Diversity. In one chapter where she was discussing Buddhism, I realized that it had been a long time since I had read much literature from this tradition, especially non-Zen literature. I am not sure why I felt it might be helpful to explore this tradition more thoroughly, but I began to read. The Dhammapada is filled with insight, insight that I find helpful in developing my own Christian faith and practice.
15. The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker. Last summer I decided to read this book I had owned since college. After being a candidate for bishop and not getting elected, I think I wanted to read something that would engage me deeply, that might cause me to think in some new ways. I had heard some remarkable things about this book, and so I read it. It engaged me deeply heart, mind and soul and I continue to ponder its insights into the human situation. I love how Becker uses insights from the psychoanalytic tradition. I appreciate his finding kinship with Tillich and Niebuhr. Passages in this book sing, though the tune is often haunting. Becker died while the book was moving toward publication.

Thinking Through Some Busy Days

2009-08-03T00:03:00.002-05:00

If you have been looking for something new here for the past couple of weeks, my apologies. I have been busy with a number of projects. From July 22-31, I was teaching a course in Christian Ethics for the United Methodist Course of Study School. Sponsored by Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, the course was held on the campus of North Central College in Naperville, Illinois – outside of Chicago. Since I last wrote here, I have been either teaching or preparing to teach. In between the first and second weeks, I traveled to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to join members of my church who were engaged in flood recovery work. Teaching was wonderful and our work in Cedar Rapids very worthwhile and meaningful.
One day, while teaching someone in my class asked me about substitutionary atonement, the theological doctrine that Jesus death was a substitute for our own, that in dying on the cross, Jesus paid the penalty for our sinfulness. What did I think of this? Well, the topic has not been central to the discipline of Christian Ethics, but the class was based in discussion and it seemed appropriate to offer a few brief thoughts. I responded by saying that the fundamental Christian affirmation of faith is that Jesus death has some salvific significance for human beings, but that the New Testament, and Christian theological thought through the ages has offered a variety of images, metaphors, perspectives for understanding that significance. We moved on.
Serendipitously, that day at lunch, one of my faculty colleagues, Ty Inbody, who I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time at Course of Study, was talking about his class in systematic theology and his discussion of atonement theory. He mentioned some of his concerns with substitutionary theories of atonement. Since arriving home I dug out my copy of his book The Many Faces of Christology (which I confessed to him I had not yet read) to explore his thought a bit further. To say that he has reservations about substitutionary atonement is to put the matter mildly. The cross means nothing but one more human tragedy apart from the power of the resurrection. God turns human wrongdoing around, and uses it against itself…. We are redeemed by the incarnation, not by the cross…. No one had to pay any price to anyone…. Rather the God of compassion and lovingkindness redeems us through the divine power which undergoes our suffering caused by our sin and raises to new life those who participate in the power of his cross and resurrection. (163)
This conversation got me to thinking more deeply about ethics and theology. The next day in class I told the students that one thing the discipline of ethics offers theology is questions about doctrine. If the adequacy of a theology is measured by the criteria of appropriateness to the Christian witness of faith and credibility to human experience (I learned this from my teacher Schubert Ogden), one dimension of the credibility of a theological proposition is its moral credibility. I went on to say that for many people, penal sustitutionary theories of the atonement lack some moral credibility. I stated this with humble boldness, inviting the students to disagree.
Well this past Saturday, I got up and turned on the television for a bit of news, but surfing by a church service, I stopped. I listened as the pastor, from a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran Church, developed in his sermon the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. Here is some of what he said.
God is angry with us because of sin. Apparently this anger of God is rather blinding because God does not differentiate between us and murderers, thieves or prostitutes. God is angry about human sin and that sin deeply offends God, and justice demands that a price be paid for this offense of justice. The pastor then discussed substitution, using the example of a volleyball team – substituting a better player when needed in a game. In this case, Jesus becomes the substitute. We have a price to pay for our sin, but Jesus takes our place by dying on the cross. Not only did Jesus die, said the pastor, he was crushed. He asked his listeners to recall what children do to bugs – they squash them, crush them, destroy them – and that’s what God did to Jesus on the cross. But because such crushing was the penalty due for our sin, we can now become children of God. One might legitimately ask, at this point, what that might mean. The pastor has just told us, afterall, how God treated one of his best children – by crushing him like a bug. I think this theological position raises some significant moral questions, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
In his book The Human Being Walter Wink discusses various theories of the atonement, the significance to human well-being of the death of Jesus. He concludes with these observations: There is truth in most of these atonement theories…. The point is that no religious experience can be made normative for all people. God reaches out to us in love wherever we are and instigates what leads us to wholeness…. The virtue of multiple images of the atonement in the New Testament is that each communicates some aspect of forgiveness and new life, without a single model being elevated as exclusively correct. Atonement theories are need-specific remedies for the spiritual afflictions that assail us. (111)
I am grateful for the multiplicity of ways Christian tradition has grappled with the significance of the death of Jesus for human life. Given the limits of penal substitutionary atonement theology, I am glad it is not the only option. My guess is that there are people outside the church who have trouble with that theory and who would like to hear about Christian faith in a different key. I'd like to talk with them.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Just a Job?

2009-07-10T18:01:00.001-05:00

In a couple of weeks I will be teaching a course for United Methodist licensed local pastors on Christian Ethics. If you are reading this and don’t know there is a difference between ordained persons appointed as pastors of United Methodist churches and licensed persons appointed as pastors of United Methodist churches - - - well, it is a bit of an explanation and not terribly germane here. One distinction is that licensed local pastors may, in lieu of seminary, take seminary-like courses as a part of a course of study. That’s where I will be doing my teaching.

One of the texts for the course is Rebekah Miles’ The Pastor as Moral Guide, a very good book and one I would recommend to all my colleagues in ministry. Dr. Miles writes well and raises important issues in a thoughtful manner. One need not agree with her on all the issues she presents to benefit from reading her book.

One section of the book I found particularly thought-provoking was her discussion of work. The following passage follows stories shared about persons struggling with various difficulties surrounding work – a family that has little time for each other, a single parent, and person who has lost his job. Miles argues that we struggle with balancing work with other parts of our lives (no big news there!). How might we work toward a better balance?

In addition to renewing the concept of vocation, we need to regain a new realism about work. If the first remedy is to raise the value of work, the second is to lower its value. Work is not only a calling and joy but also toil and vanity. We often value work too highly, expecting too much of it, letting it consume not only our time but also our identities. Love of work can become idolatry. What we need, then, is to lower the value of work. The purpose of work is survival and service. Our larger call is to be Christian. Employment is simply one part of that call…. We need to lower our sights and recognize that all work has limited value. We aren’t called to like it, just to do it. In short, we value work too much and too little. We expect too much of it when we look to it for ultimate meaning or when we forget that it is toil and vanity. Remembering God and the larger purposes of life, we are reminded of works important but secondary role. We need a hopeful realism and a chastened idealism about work. (69)

But does that apply to my work? After all, I am a pastor. I work with ultimate meanings, with people’s relationships to God, to one another, to the earth, to society. Is it ever appropriate to think of my job as, well, just a job?

Maybe it is turning 50, maybe it is a number of other factors converging, but Miles’ words make sense, even for pastors, even for me. Yes, I have the wonderful privilege of touching people’s lives in times of joy and sorrow, chaos, grief, pain, celebration. I get to hold babies and be a part of welcoming them as one of God’s loved children. I get to celebrate the love between people and stand with people when they bid their final good-bye to a loved one. I get to help people think about life in relationship to God and be a part of their spiritual journey. I get to help people work together to form community. These are the kinds of experiences that are a part of my job description that let me know that my job is more than a job, that ultimate meanings are woven within what I do. But I also have paperwork to complete, personnel issues to deal with, days when toil is not too far removed from my experience of being a pastor. Somehow Miles’ words have helped remind me that it is o.k. to remember that even if my job involves ultimate meanings, the job itself does not contain all ultimate meaning. God has called me to be a pastor, but first God called me to be a Christian, a full human being who finds what that means in Jesus. It is o.k., then, to have times when I don’t have to like all that I do, just do it. Sometimes being a pastor is just a job. I am deeply grateful that it is also often so much more.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Turning Fifty

2009-06-29T17:17:00.003-05:00

The voice that comes out in writing speaks from the depths of one’s aloneness to the aloneness of others.
Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 262

I turned 50 last Wednesday, June 24. I was in Nashville for a meeting of the United Methodist Commission on Theological Education and no one knew it was my fiftieth birthday – and I was o.k. with that. That evening I had a very nice dinner with some members of the commission and it was a nice way to mark the day. Of course, it was also very nice to get home and celebrate this day with my family, which we did Saturday night.

So Wednesday was my birthday. On Thursday afternoon, I was on a treadmill in a hotel in Nashville when the news came on that Michael Jackson died, at age 50. Earlier in the day, the news about Farrah Fawcett’s death was also released – her death at age 62. Growing up I remember the music of The Jackson 5. Thriller was released the year after I graduated from college and I heard it often while working with youth as a seminarian. Whatever strangeness emerged in Michael Jackson’s life, his music touched the world with joy and hope. I also remember Farrah Fawcett from Charlie’s Angels, though truth be told, I had more of a crush on Kate Jackson. Farrah’s type just seemed too unattainable.

On the treadmill, with news of these deaths swirling around, with my fiftieth birthday only a day gone by, these songs came on one after another on my i pod:

Landslide
But time makes you bolder
Children get older
I’m getting older too

Dream On
Everytime that I look in the mirror
All these lines on my face gettin clearer
The past is gone

Sing with me, sing for the years
Sing for the laughter, sing for the tears

Dream on, dream on
Dream yourself a dream come true
Dream on, dream on
Dream until your dream comes true

All these lines on my face are getting clearer. I’m getting older too. I hope time makes me bolder in good ways, and I hope I never stop dreaming – or singing.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Father's Day

2009-06-29T16:49:00.001-05:00

Father’s Day was a week ago and I spent only a part of the day with my three children – David, Beth and Sarah.

Beth I did not see at all. She is completing her first year of medical school at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and was in the Twin Cities studying for her final exams of this first year. She sent me a text and called me.

David was out working on a political campaign. He is the campaign manager for a candidate running for an at-large city council seat in Duluth. He has spent most Sunday afternoons distributing literature or knocking on doors for his candidate. That afternoon, our daughter Sarah went with him to help. They were home for dinner at which time we (Julie - my wife, David, Sarah and I) marked Father’s Day.

While I enjoy all the time I spend with my children, and if there is a lack of time together my schedule is often the culprit, I am not sure I could have had a better Father’s Day. To see my children as caring, concerned, compassionate adults – or on their way there, to see them working hard for things they believe in and things that will make the world a little better, is very special. To have them tell me that I have been of help along the way – there is no better Father’s Day gift than that.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Parker Palmer

2009-06-20T17:27:00.001-05:00

Writing last week I made a case for the importance of including Huston Smith in the company of Christians, though some might not want to do so because of his definition of what it means to be a Christian, and the way his own faith journey has incorporated Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Huston Smith is an important Christian companion for the way he stretches me.
Another Christian who some might consider at the edge of Christian faith is Parker Palmer – and I would want him in my community of faith for the way he stretches me, for the way he challenges me to think more deeply about faith and life.
A men’s group at my church is currently reading Palmer’s most recent book, A Hidden Wholeness and grappling with its discussion of bringing soul more fully into our lives. While this is his most recent book, since its publication, Palmer has reissued an earlier work (The Promise of Paradox), and the new introduction to that work written for the reissue is quite fascinating for the light it sheds on Palmer’s Christian faith.
Palmer’s first book was written from a more explicitly Christian perspective than more recent work, but in the new introduction he claims this faith. “I still understand myself as a Christian, and many traditional Christian understandings still shape my life” (xxi). He goes on to say: “I would be lost in the dark without the light Christianity sheds on my life, the light I find in truths like incarnation, grace, sacrament, forgiveness, blessing, and the paradoxical dance of death and resurrection.” Yet Palmer also says that his “relationship to Christianity has changed” (xiv). He finds using Christian language problematic.
In 2008, I find it hard to name my beliefs using traditional Christian language because that vocabulary has been taken hostage by theological terrorists and tortured beyond recognition (xxi). Strong words – words I may not use, but they cause me to pay close attention. What problems does Palmer see?
When Christians claim that their light is the only light and that anyone who does not share their understanding of it is doomed to eternal damnation, things get very dark for me. I want to run screaming out into the so-called secular world – which is, I believe, better-named the wide, wild world of God – where I can recover my God-given mind. (xxii) Palmer is disturbed by the lack of humility he sees in too many Christians, their “theological arrogance” (xxiv), their failure to acknowledge that we are earthen vessels. These earthen vessels – the containers that hold and convey the mysteries of faith – include every word in our scriptures and theologies, every doctrine in our creeds, every structure that holds up the institutional church…. All of them are clay pots, prone to crack and leak, crumble and break. And that’s a good thing because it reminds us we are embedded in a truth so vast that our mental constructs can never comprehend it; because it cultivates the humility required to look at that mystery through other people’s eyes, giving us a chance to learn more about it; because it keeps us from becoming theological fascists. (xxvi)
If humility is one problem currently plaguing the Christian community, or at least some parts of the public face of it, Palmer also believes the way some describe the Christian doctrine of atonement is troubling. What kind of God is it who demands blood – the blood of God’s own son – for atonement?... I don’t want a God to whom I can feel morally superior. And I don’t want a theology that advocates blood sacrifice as a way of setting things right. There’s way too much of that going around these days. (xxiv) Such a statement would mean that some Christians would exclude Palmer from genuine Christian faith, much as they might Huston Smith. Palmer does view the death of Jesus as redemptive. Jesus died on the cross because he got crosswise with the powers that be…. For me, his death is redemptive not because it fulfills the puppet master’s plan or works some kind of cosmic sleight of hand but because it represents God’s willingness to suffer with us in every moment of our lives, not least when we are willing to speak truth to power. (xxv) I appreciate the way Palmer pushes me to think more deeply about the significance of the death of Jesus. In a violent world, where religion has often encouraged violence, we should be uneasy with a doctrine that seems to justify sacred violence.
Palmer’s thinking about Christian faith is not simply critical, it is also constructive. “Above all God wants us to be alive: life, after all, is God’s original gift to us” (xxviii) Palmer argues for a spiritual life that is found in the midst of life, with all its messiness. We will find our spiritual lives in that mess itself, in its earthly realities, unpredictable challenges, surprising resources, creative dynamics…. We [need to] add a new prayer to the well-known short list of “Thanks!” and “Help!” The new one is equally simple: “Bless this mess!” (xxviii)
In order to live life more fully, to deepen one’s spiritual life, one must embrace paradox. The capacity to embrace true paradoxes is more than an intellectual skill for holding complex thoughts. It is a life skill for holding complex experiences. (xxx) Palmer writes insightfully about that in A Hidden Wholeness. The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love. (82-83) As I approach 50, the truth of these words has become clearer to me.
Above all, God wants us to be alive. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). I believe that those words, written to describe Jesus, name what all are called to do, wrap our whole selves around the truth given to us and live it out in our embodied lives. (xxxi) In reading Palmer, especially on the necessity of paradox for being fully alive, I am reminded of these lines from William Blake:

Twofold Always. May God us keep
From single vision and Newton’s sleep.

Parker Palmer, like William Blake, is a deep poet of the soul, and a deeply Christian one.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Is Huston Smith a Christian?

2009-06-07T21:45:00.002-05:00

To ask the question, “Is Huston Smith a Christian?’ strikes me as terribly impudent. He and I, after all, share a significant year together. This year, he turns 90 and I turn 50. Yet I think the question is important as I think about the meaning of Christian faith for the twenty-first century.
I have recently finished reading Huston Smith’s newly published autobiography, Tales of Wonder. Whatever one thinks about Huston Smith’s religious faith, this is a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable read. If there is such a thing as a beach read for the intellectually and spiritually inclined, this book may be one. It is a page-turner with sex (or at least love and marriage and children), drugs (psychedelics with Timothy Leary), murder (one of Huston Smith’s granddaughters) and “adventures chasing the Divine” (the book’s subtitle). In its pages you meet (or hear about Huston Smith meeting), besides Timothy Leary, Henry Nelson Wieman (who is Smith’s father-in-law), Martin Luther King, Jr., Aldous Huxley, D. T. Suzuki, Eleanor Roosevelt, David Bohm, Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, Bill Moyers.
Huston Smith is the child of Methodist missionaries to China. He has practiced Christian faith for ninety years. He writes of himself: Of most of the things that happened to me, had they not happened, I would still be the same person. Erase Christianity from my life, though, and you will have erased Huston Smith. (97) Huston Smith clearly sees himself as a Christian. He can articulate succinctly what he thinks is required for person to be Christian. What is the minimum requirement to be a Christian? If you think Jesus Christ is special, in his own category of specialness, and you feel an affinity to him, and you do not harm others consciously, you can consider yourself a Christian. (109)
That definition would not be sufficient for a number of my fellow Christians, making Huston Smith suspect. His daily practices would make him more so. He begins each day with exercises for body, mind and spirit. For his body he practices hatha yoga. For his mind he reads “a few pages from the Bible or a bible (the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Quaran, the Sufi poems of Rumi, and so on” (xxi). Then he prays. In his memoir, Smith writes of his Christian faith, and then of his “three other religions” – Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. I never met a religion I did not like…. I practiced Hinduism unconditionally for ten years, then Buddhism for ten years, and then Islam for another ten years – all the while remaining a Christian and regularly attending a Methodist church. (113) Such religious practice would take him out of the family of Christian faith, at least as some would define it.
I have never met Huston Smith, but reading his autobiography I could almost feel his spirit – kind, generous, curious, deeply in love with life and with the Divine. I see in his Christian faith such depth that he can incorporate other religious practices into it with integrity without losing that faith. His openness to and wonder about other religious traditions seem genuine virtues in a world where Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims are not half a world away, and may not even be half a block away. Can Christians share the good news of Christian faith while acknowledging that other religious traditions might also lead to genuine encounters with God, with the Divine? I believe so, and I think Huston Smith serves as a wonderful example of a Christian who lives, thinks and shares his faith while learning from other faiths. Somehow the Christian community would be a much poorer place if our definition of Christian faith excluded this kind, thoughtful, deep soul.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Polyglot Spirit

2009-06-02T11:42:00.001-05:00

I returned from annual gathering of the Minnesota Conference of The United Methodist Church on Friday. Seeing friends and worshipping together are always highlights of Conference for me.

Sunday was Pentecost Sunday, that day when we tell again the story of God’s Spirit sweeping among the Jesus community like a strong, driving wind, and the creative chaos of multiple languages being spoken simultaneously, yet each person hearing of God in a way they could understand. God’s Spirit is polyglottal.

I experienced something of the polyglot Spirit while at Annual Conference. I especially experienced it on the last night of conference through two very very different gatherings. Thursday night was the ordination service – often a deeply meaningful and moving experience. I and many colleagues donned our clergy robes and processed into the service together. Singing, praying, walking, sitting together reminds us that we are a community, we United Methodist clergy in Minnesota, and on this night we welcome new members into that community. We often recall our own ordinations. I have developed a deep fondness for that part of the service where we sing the chant Veni Sanctu Spiritus – “Come Holy Spirit” as each person is ordained. The Latin chant, sung repeatedly, evokes for me the mystical dimension of God’s Spirit, the Spirit inviting us to transcendence, to deep transformation, to plumb the depths of the heart and mind and open them to new life.

After ordination, my friend Dale, my son David, and I met a few other friends at an off-conference site, a small establishment a couple of blocks from the convention center where the conference was being held. We talked and laughed for awhile, then musicians took the unobtrusive stage. The first was a sort of Tom Waits folk singer who played guitar and sang, accompanied by a single drum drummer. The drummer stayed on while a talented blues guitarist played and sang. This folk/blues music was another voice of the Spirit – reminding me that God’s Spirit works in the midst of all the circumstances of our lives, integrates into our spirituality the earthiness of our bodies, our sexuality, our friendships, our laughter, our disappointments, our failures, our loneliness. The work of God’s Spirit is integrating and integrity, it is wholeness and holiness. To paraphrase Tillich, a man is no bigger than the amount of diabolic in himself he can assimilate (Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 9).

God’s polyglot Spirit continues to speak to me, and in me – uttering the prayer that I might be both more holy and more human.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

2009-05-22T17:30:00.001-05:00

To wait for moments or places where no pain exists, no separation is felt and where all human restlessness has turned into inner peace is waiting for a dreamworld.
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out (19)

There is no trauma-free world, no trauma-free space in real life…. Life is traumatizing. Trauma hits and keeps on hitting. It is part of who we are. Our very personalities have self-traumatizing aspects.
Michael Eigen, Conversations with Michael Eigen (116, 131)

An inescapable sadness is part of the life of any reflective person, but it is only part – by no means all – of living.
Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (111)

In recent years, I have come to see more fully the tragic aspects of life – its difficulties, struggles, pain, how intertwined joy and sorrow are in life. Maybe it comes with nearing age 50, which I will reach in about a month. Maybe it comes with living – with experiencing disappointment, with on-going struggles within, with recognizing how agonizingly slow some needed change occurs in the world. Not long ago I was jotting down adjectives to describe some of the range of human experience, adjectives I would guess encompass something of the experience of many human beings: deep disappointment, extravagant ecstasy, heart-wrenching sorrow, heart-warming joy, sheer boredom, tediousness, merely miserable, crushing anguish, soul-stirring hope, live-giving love. The realization that has come with age is that we continue to know the wide-range of experiences. The difficult experiences don’t vanish.

So what do we do with all that? I have just begun reading Huston Smith’s recently published autobiography Tales of Wonder. Thus far it is a delight. He shares how he first met Aldous Huxley and how later he invited him to lecture at MIT. Huxley drew a large crowd, but confessed to Smith, “It’s rather embarrassing to have given one’s entire life to pondering the human predicament and to find that in the end one has little more to say than Try to be a little kinder.” (46-47) Huxley was on to something. Jesus invited us to love. Paul wrote that among the fruits of the Spirit is kindness. Knowing life can be hurtful, traumatic, painful, disappointing as well as joyful, loving, hopeful makes me want to cultivate kindness and compassion. Somehow the life-long journey, sometimes struggle, to develop a compassionate heart, a deep soul, a kind spirit, a capacious mind seems worth it. If there is no trauma-free space in real life, "try to be a little kinder" seems good advice.

And so I seek to give birth to this person who can be kind and gentle and caring and loving and wise - seek to be transformed again and again by the Spirit of God into this kind of person.

What is keeping you from… living your life as though it were one painful beautiful day in the history of a great pregnancy? (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, sixth letter)

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Baseball

2009-05-12T00:12:00.001-05:00

We are about a month into the 2009 baseball season. The Minnesota Twins are two games under .500 and three games out of the American League Central lead. Thus far, inconsistency in their pitching, starting pitching and relief pitching, seems to be the biggest problem. Still, they have been fun to watch and I watch a few innings when I can.

I am not sure what it is about baseball that draws me. Some find the game absolutely boring, but where they find boring I find an unforced rhythm of grace (stealing a phrase from Eugene Peterson’s translation of Matthew 11). I know many of the interesting comparisons between baseball and life – the fine balance between team and individual, getting a hit 4 times out of ten makes you a huge success, and some of the songs sung about baseball’s uniqueness – the obscure statistics, the only game played without a clock. There is something in all of this that attracts me to the game. More than that, however, there is in baseball a deep connection to my childhood and youth. Unless one’s childhood is completely marred by family violence and dysfunction, by poverty, by violence in the society in which one lives, there are probably some deep, loving connections with that time in our life that continue to tug at our souls. Baseball seems one of those for me. One great tragedy about family violence and dysfunction, grinding poverty, war-torn nations and violent neighborhoods is the lasting scars left on children, the loss to their souls.

I began collecting baseball cards when I was in grade school. I loved listening to the games on the radio. Baseball is a great game for radio, which may be why it is not as popular as it once was. Baseball is a game you can listen too when you cannot watch. I alphabetized my cards by teams, wrote up rosters for each team and played games with my cards. I was horrified by the barbarians who used their baseball cards to help their bicycles make noise – clipping a card onto part of the fender with a clothespin so the card caught in the bike spokes and made a quick tich-tich-tich sound. The only cards that should be used for such purposes were the checklists. Not even the most inept player for the Montreal Expos deserved such treatment.

Baseball was a game you could read about, too. One of the earliest purchased books in my personal library is a thin volume called “The Greatest in Baseball.” I probably bought it in the second grade, maybe third. My life-long love for reading has roots in my love of baseball. Thankfully my reading skills developed beyond my baseball skills.

John Updike, who died earlier this year, is one of the authors whose books line my shelves, rather like my baseball cards stacked in boxes – alphabetized by team and banded together. Updike was such a prolific author that two posthumous books are out within six months of his death – a book of poems last month and a book of stories in June. In the book of poems (Endpoint), one finds a poem entitled “Baseball.” Here is the first stanza:

It looks easy from a distance,
easy and lazy, even,
until you stand up to the plate
and see the fastball sailing inside,
an inch from your chin,
or circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.

Much earlier in his writing career, Updike wrote a famous essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” about Ted Williams last game and “the affair between Boston and Ted Williams… a marriage composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories.” Ever the word lover, Updike uses a strange noun in a footnote – Schlagballewusstein, which he renders baseball-consciousness. Updike’s Schlagballewusstein was a long-lived one. He writes in the Williams essay about following box scores as a boy in Pennsylvania, and his poem in Endpoint testifies to his interest in baseball to the end. Updike’s interests certainly spanned well beyond baseball, but baseball-consciousness remained a part of his self-consciousness for life. Maybe for him, too, baseball touched a part of the soul that belonged to the child.

“Baseball is a game of the long season,” Updike wrote in his essay. In that way, too, it is like life. In the long season of life, baseball and good books make wonderful companions.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

My one moment on a major league field, 2004, throwing out a first pitch at a Twins Game

Labyrinth

2009-05-04T22:29:00.002-05:00

While busy, this past week was also rich. Wednesday and Thursday I attended the Spring Convocation at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, my seminary alma mater. I enjoyed seeing some former classmates, former teachers and other old friends and colleagues. The topic for the convocation was worship and Marty Haugen, a well-known and well-respected hymn writer, was a major presenter. I am still processing all that I took in over these couple of days.

One reason that I continue to process what I heard at UTS-TC was that I arrived home on Thursday afternoon and left Friday morning to be a leader at the Spring Spiritual Renewal Retreat for The United Methodist Women of Minnesota. I was warmly welcomed by the participants of this conference. They listened deeply as I shared insights on living the Sacred as Christians, and they offered probing and intelligent comments and questions. “Living the Sacred” was the retreat topic and I shared thoughts about “the Sacred” and about Christian spiritual practices using Scripture, poetry, stories and my own experience. One of the messages I wanted to convey is that whatever helps us get in touch with the God we know in Jesus Christ more deeply, and shapes our lives in the direction of love more profoundly, can be a spiritual discipline, can be a part of living the Sacred.

The women welcomed me not only as a presenter but also as a participant in the retreat, and their hospitality was gracious.

One retreat activity was walking the labyrinth by candle light. I have walked the labyrinth before and have always found it a meaningful exercise in spirituality. I have never before walked it by candlelight, or with such a large group. There were lessons to be learned that evening, new encounters with the Sacred to be made.

My first lesson for the evening came as I waited to enter the labyrinth. As my turn came near, I began to get a feeling of excitement and anticipation in the pit of my stomach. It reminded me of standing in line at Valley Fair and being next in line for the ride. Living the Sacred can be a wild ride sometimes - - - allowing oneself to be blown by the winds of the Spirit, dancing on those winds.

Lesson number two hit a couple of times during the walk. It arrived first in the form of a small kink in my back muscles – not overpowering but a little uncomfortable. Then hot wax from the candle I was holding dripped down through the paper and stung my hand as it hit it, before reforming a wax surface on a finger. The spiritual life is not pain free. The promise in living the Sacred is not an easy, pain-free life. In fact, when you choose to love, you open yourself to the possibility of more pain, because those you love may hurt or hurt you (think Roy Orbison, “Love Hurts”). The world you love will disappoint. The promise of the spiritual life is not a pain-free life, but fullness of life, a transformed life, a life where joy emerges even in difficult circumstances.

The third lesson arrived when I arrived for the second time in the center of the labyrinth. That’s not supposed to happen. I could tell myself that I messed up – “how do you screw up a labyrinth.” There is a part of me that goes there pretty quickly, being a perfectionist of sorts. But when I got to the center the second time, I laughed and was reminded that there is no single way to live the Sacred. You cannot screw up a labyrinth.

Finally, we get by with a little help from our friends (yes, there is a Beatles song!). The spiritual life is not intended to be lived alone, but in community. Most of us walking the labyrinth needed to be handed a second candle – I needed three! When I finished walking, though no instructions were given about this, I felt I wanted to stay and stand with those still walking – holding my candle as long as I could. I was early into the labyrinth, and others held their candles for me, I wanted to do the same. And when my third candle burned out, I still stayed.

Walking the labyrinth is a traditional discipline for living the Sacred, but like many encounters with the Sacred, one never knows just what the lessons might be this time around.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David