jamie's blog

2011-11-29T14:23:00.001-05:00

Advent 2011

Waiting and hoping. This is the story of Advent. Even though it comes around annually, there can still be a sense of newness to the season.

One aspect of life is its uncertainty. Like the biblical prophets, we see what is and interpret it in the light of faith and reason. There are no clear dates and times, no handwriting on the wall written in a language we understand. The best we can do is to know, based on our experience with God, that it is all going to be okay. Again.

God is coming to us, again. The normalcy of uncertainty is unifying if we let it be.Advent can be alive for us, because we, like those prophets of old, long for certainty, long for resolution, long for a knowledge of God that is unquestionable. Instead of change being the only constant, we would love to see stability be the constant, if only for a little while.

Economic ups and downs, constantly changing technology, governments in crisis, supposed enemies hiding within any stranger: these are our constants, and they can become our polar star. It is easier to doubt than to hope. It's even possible to see it all as ludicrous and absurd, giving us an excuse to be lazy and inattentive to life.

Advent gives us hope that God knows what God is doing. As the new liturgical year begins, our annual pilgrimage through the life of faith begins, again. There's another chance to interpret it, to see what we missed in the past. There is a possibility of that Word being spoken in a way we have not heard it before. This time we have a chance, a hope, of understanding it.

Advent: it's here again, leading us to the story of Christmas and the belief which so many of us hold dear, that God walked with us, lived with us, suffered with us, and knows us well.

What it leads us to is what we most need to know: God cares for us.

2011-11-21T14:56:00.001-05:00

Christ the King

I'm still getting used to adhering to a strict liturgical calendar. I am also continually bothered by noninclusive language, no matter the Christian tradition, and "Christ the King" is definitely bothersome. I was grateful, then, for Rev. Augusta Anderson's sermon at St. James' yesterday.

As she said, it is hard for those of us who cherish democracy as well as sensitivity to inclusive language to be comfortable with the word "king," or any other reference to royalty. But she was quick to think about traditions in which the king was not seen as an all-powerful potentate but as one who had responsibility for the community. Her opinion is that Christ the benevolent, caring, shepherding King is one that all of us might be able to get behind. She's right, of course. Still, I appreciate her gently steering us to think "outside the throne."

I think that there still needs to be some theological and even linguistic work done to improve our images, to modernize them some. It's not that old images are intrinsically and automatically "bad;" but if we as a faith are to speak to people living now, we had better find some language that speaks to them now.

Christ the President? Nah... too democratic; it's as though we can choose another One when we get tired of this One's policies. Christ the Ruler... could be confused with Christ the Yardstick. Christ the Leader? Hmmm... as "nice" as that sounds, it has about as much authority as a wet noodle. Christ the Pal...well, we'd not be particularly impressed with that, would we? Christ the Rock Star...you're beginning to get the gist now, right? Christ the Shepherd...been there, done that, and what's a shepherd doing in the 21st Century anyway?

The challenge for the present generation is to go beyond clinging to old models and ancient language. As beautiful as it is, as nostalgic as it can make us, and as powerful as it once was, the language of our faith must continue to speak to the present, not to remind us of a past that no longer is. It's more than a challenge: it's a responsibility.

Thanksgiving Again

2011-11-18T14:37:00.004-05:00

It's amusing. The things that seem so much like problems can hold such gifts. The worst things can make us grow. Someone said that every problem contains a gift, or something to that extent. I'd have to agree.

Years ago I wrote these lines in a song: "You'll think of old friends who have died; and those who you've pushed aside; and some who did the same to you; but you made it through." Cover Your Face with Tears was the name of that song. Wish I could remember more of it.

The amazing thing to give thanks for this year, I think, is for both old and new friends. Just when it seems that those you've known forever have moved on, some of those still hang around, accepting your changes and wanting to keep going on the adventure with you. Then there are the wonderful new people who come into your life and make you realize that you are still alive, still interesting, still growing and changing and moving forward.

This Thanksgiving, I'm thinking of both of those groups of people: the old friends who are still hanging on and wanting to be around, and the new friends who remind us that whenever God shuts a door, God also opens a window. It may sound like a cliche, but it's absolutely true when you start moving into that reality!

Late Start on the New Year!

2009-01-28T15:56:00.002-05:00

Better late than never. Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. All those things come roaring back at us when we let things go until they are too late.

I make a habit of waiting until the end of January to make my New Year's resolutions. There's something to this about wanting to see what the year is looking like before I jump in over my head with a list of things I'm inspired to do during a "down" time rather than in the midst of busy-ness.

For those of us who go ahead and make resolutions at the first of the month (like normal, intelligent people), is it already time to evaluate how you're doing?

How's the weight loss/exercise program? What projects did you plan to begin that you haven't yet done (started writing that book yet?)? How's the prayer life, the church life, the spiritual life?

It's never the wrong time to begin something new, to turn over a new leaf. While the year is still young, join me in making a few gentle resolutions that move us closer to our ultimate goals in life!

Thanksgiving

2008-11-21T15:07:00.003-05:00

Someone reminded me a couple of hours ago what real gratitude is.

We have heard the one about the guy who complained about not having any shoes until he met a person who didn't have any feet. That's this story.

Sometimes, life can be difficult. People put us in sticky situations that we have no intention of being in, but when you have no choice, well, it goes without saying that you have no choice. You get fired from a job. You get persecuted. You get talked about behind your back. People you thought loved you do something to hurt you or someone you love. All your anger and even hatred (oh, no, a good Christian once told me, I may dislike someone but I don't hate anyone! Hmmm...) get directed in one direction, and it is certainly not a direction you chose.

I read about the Desert Fathers and Mothers, stories that seem impossibly untrue, or at least mythic, yet the truth shines through. They suggest when you cannot get along with someone and there is no other option to solve your problems, stay away from them. Sound advice.

But you can't always stay away. And then the anger and hurt come roaring back.

But God is interesting, if not always seemingly so good that we can understand it. Listen, watch: you'll meet "the guy who has no feet" soon enough. It puts your own life in perspective. And then you can love again, and pray for that person who has it worse than you.

If that doesn't work, you need a reality check. Nothing I can do about that! Except pray for you, too.

And hope that you'll pray for me.

And maybe then, we can be thankful, even when life is difficult.

Identity

2008-09-16T15:20:00.003-04:00

Lots of talk these days about identity. From mission statements to identity statements to meetings about these things, ad nauseum.

Do we really need all this talk? Is it necessary? Is it helpful? That's the big question. The more we talk, it seems the less we actually do. I may be wrong about that, but who we are is not what we say, but what we do. All of us are known by our actual living, not by what we say.

It's election time, and we are being smothered in words. Ask a candidate a question, you'll get a stance, but not an action plan. Everything is vague. Purposely so.

The more I read identity statements, the more I feel the same way: more words, vague, a direction, perhaps, but no substance.

When Moses asked God for a name, God didn't give an identity statement. God said, "I am." The way I read this in Hebrew, it seems to mean, "I am my relationship with you, your forebears, your children. I am what I have done in your life."

Good thing Moses didn't live today. God might say, "I am a being whose purpose is to be the be-all end-all of creation, using these methods, and recognizeable by this logo. That's me: God."

Who are you?

Humility

2008-07-01T12:08:00.003-04:00

Someone told me recently that it takes a some arrogance to be a minister. I knew what he meant. Standing up in front of people, talking about one's faith as though one knew what one were talking about, having the - what? courage? ego? pride? pretentiousness? - to speak in the name of God: these things and more fall on the clergy as responsibilities and expectations.

But the key to dealing with arrogance is not to claim it but to work to overcome it. We shouldn't boast about our arrogance, or even act on it.

The key to successful Christianity is to remember that, like Jesus the Christ, we do not act as though our ordination is a thing to be grasped, but humble ourselves, taking on the characteristics of a servant.

No, it doesn't take arrogance to be a minister: anyone can be arrogant. It takes humility. And we have no clue what that means. It is one more divine mystery.

Brother John

2008-01-23T15:34:00.000-05:00

I was thinking about Br. John after the "What is Prayer?" entry. He was a monk I knew when I was in college. His influence on me was subtle, slow, deep, the way a good influence should be. None of this shallow, immediate, emotional change stuff. Like God's way, it was quiet, solid, an excruciatingly long time arriving.

When I met John, I was 20 years old and under the influence of a number of mentors: Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, Dan Berrigan, Karl Barth, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich. There was a group of students, the Monks of Atlantic Christian College, who met a couple of times each week to sing the Divine Office and discuss contemplative prayer and life. Those of us around in the first year of the group's existence had met a Trappist monk, Father Matthew Kelty, who was then living in an experimental monastery outside of Oxford, NC, Holy Mother of God Monastery. Matthew had left in 1973 to become a hermit in Papua, New Guinea. The monastery belonged to the larger abbey, Gethsemani, near Bardstown, KY. Gethsemani passed it on to St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, MA, another large Trappist house.

Four or five monks came down to NC to live. Over the years, the group changed from time to time. John was one of the monks I met during my last two years in college.

One of the things I tried to do when I visited the monastery was to keep the simple monastic schedule they had there: up at 3:15 AM for an office at 3:30, then the Great Silence for a couple of hours until Communion at 6:30 (there was no priest there in those days, so they picked up consecrated bread and wine from a local priest for use during the week), then breakfast on your own; this was followed by work from 8 to noon, community lunch, work from 2 to 4:30, an office at 5, then dinner on your own and quiet until bedtime. My "work" was usually reading and writing, while the monks attended to chores like feeding the chickens and gathering eggs, mowing grass, cleaning, and sewing vestments or making wooden silkscreened religious plaques (with holy and wise sayings on them).

John and I struck up a friendship as my questions about contemplative prayer bubbled up during these visits. He was more than willing to take long walks with me through the woods, discussing his simple-sounding but very deep understandings about God, Christian theology, Zen, monasticism, and the contemplative life.

But John's greatest gift to me happened one morning after the early office. Three or four of us remained in the church, sitting silently, cross-legged on the meditation pillows scattered around the empty room. I was in my usual Zen postition: half lotus, hands folded on my lap, staring unfocused at the floor about three feet in front of my; Brother Jim was a few feet to my left, in the same position. The only light in the room was from the eternal flame next to the Tabernacle, but after 10 minutes or so, I could see clearly around the room. I glanced up, stretching my eyes, and noticed John sitting across from me but facing the Tabernacle and flame and altar instead of toward the center of the room like Jim and I. It surprised me to see him, for some unknown reason, and I stared instead of going back to my own meditation.

John was staring in what looked to me like a kind of rapture at the Tabernacle. He had a look of complete love and adoration on his face. I could not take my eyes off him. John sat there, not moving, completely engulfed in what I could only describe as God's love of him. He seemed passive, a recipient of some kind of gift that went much deeper than I had ever seen in anyone else.

Later, during one of our walks, I asked John what was going on with him during the Great Silence that morning. My immaturity brimmed over as I asked, not for the sake of wisdom, but for my own nosiness, my supposed "need to know" about something so deep and personal. At first, John did not answer, perhaps taken aback at my selfishness. But so much like John, if he were angry, he did not let it hurt me: he calmly answered, "I was looking at Jesus and thinking about how much he loves me. That's all."

"That's all:" as though every Christian who ever lived had the same experience that John did, as though it were as normal as breathing to sit quietly and be absorbed by the presence of Christ.

Of course, it's not at all normal, sad to say. We modern Christians look at the Brother John's of the world as different from us, as special, as holy somehow, but not as part of our daily lives. John's rapt attention to the presence of Christ, as he saw it, was just one thing in a life of living in Christ's presence. But for me, who experienced Christ only as a behavior modifier, as one who told me how to live rather than as one who lived with me, it was new, foreign, strange.

Still is. We look to Jesus for how to act, never stopping to think that maybe if we spent some time with him, just walking with him, or sharing silence with him, or maybe even just letting him have some of our time without our telling him what he needs to do, maybe then we would begin to experience the Christ as what he really was: God with us.

- jamie

What is prayer?

2008-01-23T11:53:00.000-05:00

So we ask the question: what is prayer?

Depending on the group you ask, you can get simple answers or complex ones. The obvious ones: talking to God, talking with God, being with God, listening to God, tuning in to God, dwelling in the presence of God. What's your definition?

What about this? "Prayer is the way God and we love each other."

This allows for several things: talking to God, being with God, dwelling in the presence of God, sharing with God, all the answers you can imagine. Whatever way you have a sense of God's presence is prayer.

One of the keys to this is that it leaves you open to different ways of prayer. It emphasizes the idea of prayer as a state of being rather than an action that begins and ends. Changing the idea of prayer away from a limited-time activity into a state of being means that prayer moves out of the realm of words and ideas and concepts: we are not thinking about God, we are being aware of the ever-present God with us.

When I am focused on loving God rather than "getting something" from God, my whole life becomes involved in prayer. Instead of God being my celestial super-Santa, the one I seek whenever I or someone I love needs something, God is a friend, whose presence I look for and who is part of every moment in life. God is not a tool: God is the meaning and purpose of life.

- jamie

You have to begin somewhere....

2008-01-22T15:34:00.000-05:00

I've been speaking to lots of people lately about the spiritual life, so I thought that instead of the usual Christmount page for spirituality, I would try writing a few things every day or so about this thing we call the spiritual life.

Thomas Merton said, "The spiritual life is, first of all, a life." Or something to that effect: I'll correct the quote when I can find the book. But you see the point: you can't be spiritual unless you are involved in living. It's not something you go away to do. It's what you do every moment of life.

So, this is not an escape vehicle. I am not about to tell you to run away to pray. What this is about is praying as a way of life, a way of living. Most of it will be simple, maybe seemingly simplistic.

But who am I to tell you this? Just a 53-year-old guy who's been a student, a pastor, and, for the last 18 years or so a retreat planner and leader. One of my favorite retreat topics is just this: "Ways to Pray."

So, to begin with, let me ask you this: how's your prayer life? In other words, how's your life?

When I was in college, we had a group that met a couple of times a week, the Monks of Atlantic Christian College (the group existed from 1972 - 1983 in Wilson, NC). One of the ways we occasionally greeted each other was this: not to ask, "How are you doing?" but to ask, instead, "How's your prayer life?"

You have to begin somewhere. So, take a look and ask yourself, "How's your prayer life?"
- jamie