Good Friday

Two people asked me in church this past week where the name "Maundy Thursday" came from, and I was more than happy to show off some church-nerd knowledge.

(Growing up, I always thought the word "maundy" had something to do with washing, b/c the church services I went to tended to focus on Jesus washing the feet of the disciples. Somewhere early on in ministry, either during divinity school or shortly thereafter, I learned that it came from the Latin "mandatum," meaning "commandment." Depending on who you ask, that commandment refers to either Jesus saying "Do this in remembrance of me" or "Love one another as I have loved you" at the Last Supper.)

One person, however, followed up that question with "Well, what about Good Friday? Did that come from the word "God?" I was unable to find etymological information on Wikipedia, but I think the seeming irony is actually intentional. I wrestle myself with the sense in which we can think of the death of Jesus as good. (Great article by Rita Nakashima Brock in Disciples World here.) But, at the same time, I find Good Friday deeply compelling.

All four gospels spend a lot of chapters on the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus, and Paul, writing his letters to churches even earlier, talks about how Jesus died "for us."

I'm contemplating the mystery of today by listening to Jesus Christ Superstar: A Resurrection and fasting from noon to 3.

Love and Mystery

I'm performing my cousin's wedding tomorrow -- this will be the third cousin of mine I've married. (I know, incest and polygamy! Shocking! Actually, I have performed three weddings for my two brothers...) Anyway, this is, I think, my ninth wedding as officiant, and I really like doing them. Every one has its own unique quirks and drama; powerful symbols like this bring out powerful emotions in people, and even the smallest wedding I've done had a lot of logistics involved (which most people are not in a regular habit of dealing with).

One of the things I love about performing marriages is that getting to be the minister means being the "non-anxious presence" that is so important to many pastoral situations -- but nowhere does it seem more important than at a wedding. It's like being at the eye of the storm. But what I really love the most about doing weddings is getting to know a bit about the couple and their relationship, their hopes and dreams for their life together.

One of my central theological convictions is that God is Love, and so each little bit of love in the world actually reveals something about God. In B. and H.'s relationship, I see the way they constantly look out for one another's needs -- and it's a lot like the daily sustaining, often below-the-radar love that God gives us in every day. I also see their unreserved, unabashed, total smitten-ness with one another. They are completely in love, and not afraid to show it! And it's a nice reminder of how God is totally smitten with this crazy world, and the boldness we seek in trying to show our love for God.

How do people come to faith?

I'm full up of spiritual thoughts and feelings at the moment, having just gotten back from a really cool spiritual formation program I'm participating in at the National Cathedral.

What I took away from the lecture tonight was about how the essence of connecting to God in Christian faith is NOT: doing the "right" religious activities, believing the right things about God, or even treating one's fellow human beings in the right way. All of these are part of the life of faith, but none is adequate as a way to "get to God." Rather, the essence of faith is knowing oneself loved by the reality that is at the heart of the universe. Giving up on trying (and trying and trying) to be good enough and realizing that you are accepted (I think Paul Tillich might have had a few things to say about that).

This all makes good sense to me, but I'm wrestling again with a question that I ponder from time to time. If faith is, essentially, a gift from God (that we can't earn by working at it), why do some people "get it" and other people don't? That seems as arbitrary and unjust as a God who requires us to follow a set of rules that we're doomed to fall short of, or an insistence that one believe a certain set of things, or even a very rigorous moral ethic (again with the doom and falling short). I get a very strong sense from some people that they want to believe, but skepticism or upbringing or terrible experiences with religious folks and the things they do get in the way. I am quite certain that such people make excellent fellow-travelers on the journey with people who are more certain or less afraid of faith. But it seems a little unfair.

"Let anyone without sin cast the first stone"

I read this chilling article in the Washington Post today-- there's a very good reflection and summary here. The issue at hand is accidentally leaving children in cars... and how the parents who have done this don't fit any particular kind of profile, just a common pattern of stress, tiredness, and some interruption in the regular schedule of the day that fools the memory into thinking they have already dropped the kid off at daycare.

One thing that struck me when I read the salon.com commentary was remembering the first time I heard of such an incident (because you do hear of them, maybe once every couple years) after my daughter was born. She wasn't very old, and I was still very sleep-deprived all the time, and I just thought "wow, that could happen so easily."

The spiritual issue I see in all this is that so many people, some of those interviewed for the original article, and still more who commented online, seem very certain that they could never make such a mistake. They think that it means a parent who forgets about his or her child in the backseat of a car is a terrible person. The salon.com article pulls out a quote from a psychologist about why people feel the need to demonize others like this:

We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.

For me, I guess the central spiritual question is about compassion. I have no trouble feeling compassion for parents who accidentally leave their children in the backseat of a car. But I do wonder what "sort of people" I categorize as "monsters" because it makes me feel better about myself.

The Bible was made for hypertext!

I've been thinking for quite some time that, although the codex was a very important development for the Bible, its true perfect technology match is hypertext. So much of the meaning in individual bits of text has to do with the other passages to which they are referring. And since, let's face it, most people these days (and really, throughout the broad sweep of history, most people in most times) are not that familiar with the Biblical text, they are missing a lot when they just pick up and start reading at a particular place.

This cool link demonstrates graphically how many cross-references there are within the books of the Bible. Which is why I think hypertext is so well-suited -- it allows you not just to see the reference (chapter and verse) as a footnote, which is in a lot of editions of the Bible, but also to actually read the passage being referred to.

Sin, take 2

I recently read this passage from Roberta Bondi's book on the Lord's Prayer.

Even when I was a small child, holy beauty filled me with a longing to be worthy of it, not in order to please others but because I loved it. Now, my friend, notice that I don't say I felt an obligation to be good or a fear that I would be punished in some cosmic way if I weren't. What I did believe, however, was that if I was mean to my brothers, resentful of my parents, judgmental or without compassion toward my classmates (all of which I frequently was), I might lose my capacity to see it. To put it simply, I loved it and I wanted it, and I was convinced, like the ancient Christian and non-Christian Platonists before me, that "like is only known by like," that if I refused to share its qualities, I could well be left without it. (Roberta Bondi, from A Place to Pray, p. 42)

For me, this gets at our intuitive sense of what sin is -- how it separates us from God, others, all that is Good in the universe. It is about so much more than breaking rules (I think this is most people's dominant sense of what it means to sin) and fearing punishment. Rather, it's how we fall short of our call to love God and others. I'm acutely aware of my own limitations in this area.

Examen

I'm working on preparing for our first Lenten program tomorrow. I'm reading up on the history of Lent, which is really interesting. We will cover some of the highlights briefly tomorrow, but the focus of our series is going to be on what Lent can be for us this year, an opportunity to try some very ancient forms of prayer and spiritual growth that may be new to a lot of folks.

One of the things we'll start out with this week is the Ignatian Examen, a deceptively simple approach to spiritual self-examination that was an integral part of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (bka Jesuits). This approach has, I think, been integral to the lives of Jesuit institutions ever since, and Protestants have been fortunate to rediscover it (along with some other forms of Christian spirituality) in recent years. A lot of the folks that I have heard talk about it in Protestant circles are doing youth ministry.

Let me explain. The idea is that God is always speaking to you through your life. So, to do the examen, you look back over your life for the last day, or week, or several hours. for the "consolations" and "desolations," and, especially over time, learn from these high and low points about the ways God is working in your daily life. It was fun for me to realize in retrospect that this is why my friend who had been an RA at a Jesuit university always had her girls share "highs and lows" when they had hall meetings. And I'm pretty sure it's why a friend's youth group shared "blessings and bummers" every time they met. The third step, after recalling the high and the low, is to try to identify how God has been speaking in this day. I think sometimes this really only emerges over time, and it may or may not be directly related to the high and the low.

My bummer/ low/ desolation of the day has definitely been the sort of panic that crops up all too often for me on a Saturday. It's often true that I say "yes" to too many things, and have more to do for work in a week than I can get done in the time I have, and that's a problem. But what compounds that problem is something I really struggle with -- spending as much time and energy worrying about all the stuff I have to do as it would take to just do it.

The blessing/ high/ consolation was dinner with family at a new restaurant in our neighborhood. It's exciting on several levels, because not only is it the third restaurant in the neighborhood (and the other two are in an intense competition to see who can provide the worst possible service), but it also has really quite a nice vegetarian selection, which can't be taken for granted at a place with "bar and grill" in the title.

God has definitely been speaking to me today, as S/he often does, through the words of Roberta Bondi. I'm reading her book A Place to Pray: Reflections on the Lord's Prayer, and I expect I'll be blogging about excerpts more specifically in the coming days. But I was touched today by her account of experiencing God's holiness in her life, long before she ever had the theological language to call it that. It, along with the prep for this Lenten program, comes as yet another reminder to wake up to God's presence in my own life.

Sin?

So, I found out today that you can download some songs for free from the Franciscan Sisters of Charity. They selected songs that they feel have a "discerning spiritual message," and I have to say, their taste in both style and content runs pretty closely to mine.

I feel like very often, secular songs express spiritual concepts better than even a good sermon (or blog post). I am struck today by the way that so many many songs capture the sense of alienation (from God, others, the world) that I think everyone feels sometimes... one of the "spiritually discerning songs" is "The Maker," by Daniel Lanois.

What the song captures so well is what it's like to know yourself alienated from God and the Way Things Should Be. In classical Christian language, a sinner. "I'm a stranger in the eyes of the maker." And in this state of estrangement, Lanois writes, "I could not see for the fog in my eyes. I could not feel for the fear in my life."

I often have trouble making sense of sin in a personal way. I get it at a societal level much more easily. But this song helps me remember, better than any sermon, the hundred little ways it's easy to give in to fear that cuts off my feelings for others, the things that separate me from God and others and make it harder to see things as they truly are. So maybe we do need this season of repentance after all...

Observing Lent

We just got back from a fundraiser happy hour for Loaves and Fishes, a meal program for homeless people that my cousin's girlfriend is very involved with at her church. She mentioned that her priest had encouraged people to attend in the service on Sunday, encouraging it as a first act of charity for the season of Lent.

It was funny, because going to a happy hour where the bar is donating part of the proceeds to charity is really far from more traditional penitential, ascetic type observances (fasting, giving up chocolate, etc). It also, as charity goes, didn't feel burdensome. I do think (perhaps it's obvious?) that a very wide range of things fall into the category of valid and meaningful ways to observe Lent.

But I'm thinking about two questions: in the spiritual aspect of service, is what you give up to do something good as significant as the impact of the good you do? And, there are so many potential partnerships like this where everyone (the bar, the organization, the people who came to Happy Hour) walks away feeling good about themselves... how can we make them happen more often?

Meditations on Mortality

Well, Lent begins again today, and with it my discipline of blogging as an attempt to focus my mind and heart on the spiritual in the everyday.

Today is Ash Wednesday, and in our service this evening, I (along with the other pastor at my church) will place ashes on people's foreheads in the shape of a cross, admonishing them to "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

I feel like my life in the past year has been too full of reminders that all life returns to ashes and dust. We mortals are so fragile, and the difference between life and death is so often a breath, a step in the wrong direction, away. Three young women, either loved by me or by those I care about, have died suddenly and far too young. Two of them were struck by cars while crossing a street.

I've also marveled at the other end of life, how new life comes into being, especially over the past 15 months, watching my little baby and being amazed that such a tiny thing can be fully alive.

Life is amazing. Life is fragile. That's the deal. For me, this is a big part of the answer to one of the Big Questions of Lent (and, I suppose, Christianity) -- Why did Jesus die? Jesus died because he was human. We all die. It's the price of this precious life.