My greatest spiritual work. . .

In the constant and seemingly endless debate over the role of our works and their contribution to our salvation, one quote seems to stand out to me.  It was probably an off the cuff kind of remark that ended up being remembered.  It was by an Orthodox author, although I do not recall who he was or is, but it is one of those things that drives a conversation.  It does not deny our works but frames them within the only context that they can fill.  So read it and give it some consideration.  I cannot remember the exact wording of the full quote although I am pretty sure that set within it was this pithy observation;

My spiritual works accomplish nothing except to bring me to that place where I realize I can do nothing to please God and am naked before Him.

The age of self-improvement in which we live seems to insist that if we want to, we can fix ourselves.  If we don't, we can accept ourselves as we are and live with it.  Both are lies.  How many podcasts and memes presume to tell us how to make a moral improvement on ourselves or at least to make a positive change in our appearance?  Whether we are intent upon fixing global warming and repairing the climate crisis or casting off the combustion engine and fossil fuels or making robots and smart machines replace the laborer on the production line, we are filled with the illusion that we can do this if we just try.  It is no wonder that this has translated into the realm of personal identity.  If we want to be a woman but find ourselves in a man's body, we can be the woman we want to be and no one can stop us.  If we want to discard a child in the womb we do not want, we can do so with a pill.  If we want to have a child but have trouble conceiving, reproductive technology can make it happen for us.  If we want to live in isolation and work, shop, eat, and entertain ourselves within the boundaries of our homes, we can.  If we want to believe in a truth that is only as deep and wide as our perception or has a time span limited to the moment, we can and no one can do anything about it.  So why don't we presume that we can invent the God of our choice or define ourselves in such a way that conflicts with nature and the work of the Creator? 

Of course, that is the problem.  All of our works bring unintended harm even when they do some good and all our efforts in the moment cannot prevent the direction of time toward its own destruction.  But our greatest spiritual work is to look into the mirror of our soul and find ourselves wanting, without the power to please God or repair our sinfulness or atone for our sins or hide them from His gaze.  Yet this is enough.  It might end in despair, regret without hope, but the Spirit swoops in to turn this into repentance and faith which trusts in God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  God delights in our acknowledgement of our weakness not because He gloats over our plight but because He knows that this is where the Gospel begins in us.  It fills the emptiness of our own failing and inability with the fullness of Christ and His work.  It leads us beyond ourselves and our despair, disappointment, and destruction to bring us from darkness into His saving light.  Although we fear that the light will only expose, it does something we never expected.  It heals and redeems, shining upon Christ even as it exposes our failing and impotence.  And in that moment, the grand gift of grace does its work and the fruits of mercy formed on a cross make alive what was dead, giving hope to those who can hope for nothing, and raising us from the death of sin to the life death cannot touch.  If this is all our works can do, they have not done nothing but the something that in emptiness allows God to fill us.  Thanks be to God! 

Now that it is over and done. . .

Politics is a game I rather abhor.  As I have said many times, I would prefer a benevolent monarchy to the mess that we call democracy.  However, that is what we have.  I am very conservative socially and politically, not a libertarian at all but neither am I militant about using the government or law to do what some would do on either side.  Laws do not make morality or even enforce it but reflect the sense of the time and that requires the Church to address the question of morality on issues less than on candidates.  

Ours is a strange system of two political parties which people seem to dislike with equal fervor and which parties seem powerless to stand for anything uniform or cohesive or coherent.  They are different more by degree than principle, more by pace of change than direction.  I have very little confidence in either of them.  Neither am I looking for a righteous person to get my vote.  I will admit to sometimes holding my nose while voting for people I do not like and would never count as friend but whose positions on the issues more closely conform to my own.  I suspect people on both sides do this and I also suspect that this is a much larger group than either party would care to admit.  I am writing this before the election so as I write I have no idea how it all turned out.  I will say this.  The civility of the political discourse in America was long gone before Trump although he has contributed to its coarseness.  Who can forget how Johnson tarred and feathered Goldwater with a mushroom cloud TV ad that lied about the man and his positions.  But America fell for it and Johnson got a landslide.  

Another thing that is missing is any sense of humor.  It is obvious that some candidates and office holders delight in casting out a joke which most folk seem to get except the media and their political opponents.  When a Texas governor said of a Bush that the poor guy was born with a silver spoon in his mouth we all laughed.  It was funny.  There is no laughter in politics anymore and most folks take themselves way too seriously (Trump is often a shining example of that).   Provocative statements are meant to provoke and this seems to be the way of things today.  In the end, how many of s trust anything a candidate says and how many of us actually expect campaign promises to be kept?  This is perhaps the most egregious result of our cynicism.  We vote without expecting all that much from those we vote for and they seem intent to give us all of that.  How said it has become!

Yet before we rush to blame the candidates, we need to look into a mirror.  The politics of the day are mirrors into the problems of America, amplified every couple of years in the ballot box.  If the candidates can say nothing to inspire us, it just might be that we do not want to be inspired but prefer to be enraged.  If the people running for office are not sterling folks, it might be that we have rigged the system to produce exactly the folks we love to complain about.  If the politics have become nasty, well, then, follow an argument on Facebook or any other social media platform to see the nastiness multiplied even among friends and family.  If the negative ads are all we see, could it be that we no longer wish to be educated about the issues or have the attention to give to a nuanced political debate of them and prefer to get testosterone packed sound bites texted to our phones or parading across that social media?  We tend to get the kind of candidates we are as a people and probably therefore deserve.

Israel once complained that they had no king and needed one only to have a laundry list of kings they did not want or like and are remembered by no one.  It happened then and it happens now.  I have personally aided and supported good men whose political campaign made them swear off politics forever.  Sadly, that is the fruit of our poisoned atmosphere.  Good people do not offer themselves to the process or as candidates to govern.  Is that what we want?  And pastors and congregations who become the kind of naysayers of doom who add fuel to the fire are also to blame -- on both sides.  I do not want Cardinal Cupich to pick my candidate but neither do I want Paula White to.  If you do not know those names, Google them.  But it does not help to have churches and their leaders try to enter the fray with the idea that they can throw mud without getting dirty.  We all get dirty in this process.  That is the problem.  So we need to spend less time on the people and more on the issues but not as oracles of wisdom as much as voices of conscience.  Some of the worst things on the ballot are not people but issues -- constitutional amendments and other things that transgress on the sacredness of life and the solemn duties of parents and children to each other.  We surely need to equip our people to see through the fog to know what it is that is at stake there.  So I guess I have had my fun.  You are free to disagree with me but frankly I am glad it is over for at least six weeks or so before the next election season seems to start again.  It is less seasonal anymore than it is continuous.  Sigh.

 

 

 

 

 

Grok Poet

I put this up as an example.  On another medium someone asked Grok to write a poem in the manner of Nobel winning poet Anne Carson.  This is the result.

It's best to be a fragment.
I want blankness for borders.
There are things classical.
One can gloss them for years.
Then they vanish.

The shelf hums me
of your unread margins.
There are things classical.
Dust, echoes, this faint trace
of meaning.

My personal page is empty.
I do not want to be whole.
I want to be classical.
Line to line, the spareness of air.
Cool, cooling.

Earth bears no such completeness.
Who does not end up
a translation?
Read all the ancients there is.
Still new. 

Not ever having read anything written by Anne Carson, I have no idea of Grok succeeded or not.  But, presuming this is somewhat close to the Nobel winning author, I think it is as much an indictment against what passes for poetry in this modern day as it is anything to do with AI.  I wonder what Shakespeare or Homer or TS Elliot or Browning or Wordsworth or Frost or any of the others I read in school and still would think of such poetry?  I tend to believe they would wonder what as going on with modern society that this passes as something like the great works of old.  What is wrong with us?  I have nothing against Maya Angelou but I do not understand how she merits a place on anyone's list of the 100 greatest poets of all time.  I would tend to put "Cat in the Hat" by Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel above her if only for popularity and the way my kids and grandkids repeat his rhymes even as I discern meanings there I never heard before.  Maybe I am the idiot.  It would not be the first time someone suggested it.  In any case my point still stands.  Is this what passes for great writing today?

Before you leave this page and dismiss me altogether, let me leave you with another offering.  Is it real or AI?

 

Forcing God to sublet. . .

I will admit up front there was a time when I wondered why churches spent so much on sacred space and why that cost could not have been mitigated with other uses which would not conflict with its holy use.  I was not quite ready to suggest that the worship space was multipurpose but did think that there were things that might be held within the sacred space of chancel and nave without detracting from its primary purpose.  I suppose I still think that sacred music might fill the wonderful acoustical sound of the church's holiest of spaces.  The issue is then where do you draw the line?  What is okay and what is not okay?  Is it a matter of how the decision is made and who makes it.  Obviously, I would be comfortable if everyone thought like me and made the decisions I would make.  But they are not.  So I guess my thinking has evolved.

While this has been brought to the fore by the news of Anglican cathedrals in the UK renting out the sacred space for everything from pop concerts and discos to art shows and craft fairs, the issue is not unique to them.  In this age of budget crunches and declining size of a parish, it is easy to justify the practice of subletting God's house to produce revenue streams, is it salutary?  It is surely about the usage itself but not only that.  Obviously there are some things which cannot be allowed to use the church building and the sanctuary in particular as a venue but what does it say about us when we treat sacred space as potential real estate income? 

Multipurpose space general does nothing well and everything rather mediocre.  That is one inherent issue.  What works for this, does not work for that and so it all means a compromise.  Is that what we want?  Is God merely one tenant subletting a space along with others?  Is the setting for the Divine Service simply what we can make do?  I am not speaking here of emergencies or even the urgencies of a mission setting but the regular and ordinary use of sacred space.  It is not about what we must do in the moment but the customary use of God's House.  More and more I am not sure multipurpose spaces help anything but the harm is more likely done to the sacred use than the other uses.  

Is there a reason we cannot build the great cathedrals of the past and why we find it so hard to maintain the structures we have?  Is it merely about revenue or resources or is it about our values?  Is worship merely one function among many within the Church?  Is it more likely that the churches are spilling over their identities into the other uses or that the other uses are siphoning off the sacredness of the worship space?  I think most of us already know the answer.  We do not value the things of God the way those generations did so long ago?  We build fast and cheap and not slow and grand.  We say it is about the wise use and stewardship of God's resources but we all know that there is something much more to this than that.  We think it wasteful to spend resources over generations to build monumental structures filled with the work of our finest craftsmen and then not wear it all out with invented uses to justify the cost.  We do not believe that the setting for the Word and Sacrament justifies anything.  We are more than minimalists but not by much.  I am not talking about being extravagant but about being wise stewards, counting the cost but committing the value to the cause.  Lets be real.  It is easier for us to make God sublet a common space than to dedicate such space wholly to His holy purpose.  That is why so many of our buildings are warehouses with a stage rather than tabernacles and temples.  

So what is the witness of our multipurpose spaces in which God is simply one user among many?  It certainly tells the world something of what is important to us and how important it is but it also tells the world that there is nothing all that unique or sacred about what happens within the Divine Service.  I would love it if we wore out our buildings for worship services or other appropriate and consistent purposes but it is a shame we are wearing them out by making them a community service venue.  It is no wonder the world seems not to notice the sacredness of the space while rocking around the clock or gawking at strange or almost pornographic things that supposedly pass as art.  They see what we do not.  If worship is not important enough to lay claim to the holy place, then it is not important enough to lay claim to them and their hearts. These things go hand in hand.  Maybe it is high time we all realized this. 

For all the saints. . .

As we observe All Saints and All Souls, now together on the calendar, we tend to look not simply at the names of those who are well remembered but to the many who are anonymous and forgotten.  This is good and salutary -- especially for those who do not canonize the saints with formal process, like Rome.  Over the years as we named in voice and in silence in our hearts the names of those whom we loved who died in the Lord, my own list was largely absent family.  Though fewer and fewer actually remember them the way I do, remembering with thanksgiving the lives of my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, etc., is both a highly emotional moment and a comforting one.  I suspect that as time goes on, this moment will be a different.

Too often the ripple effects of divorce is literally to eliminate one whole side of the family from the lives of the children.  As if that were not significant enough, relationships with the other side of the family is too often strained -- especially when they become aging parents no longer able to give but in need of help.  It seems the bonds of family are strained and some stretched beyond repair as we wake up to an age in which perhaps 1 out of 4 children have either no relationship or a strained relationship which is distant and lacks any regular or meaningful contact.  The drumbeat both of academia and social media seems to support those who have chosen to have no contact with their parents or siblings.  The victimhood which dominates therapy today further sanctions this distance as a essential function of needed self-support for those who hold their families responsible for the wounds they think they bear.

Of course, there are always exceptions which would justify such distance between parents and children.  No one is disputing that.  But when the exception becomes normal in the eyes of the world, we know that we live in difficult times.  How do you resolve this distance?  How do you even restore the desire for contact and relationship?  There was a time when the ties that bind lived through trouble and ease, pain and happiness, want and plenty.  Now it seems that the maintenance of family ties is dependent upon their quality   Relationship is the reward for high quality experiences not the normal pattern for these connections.  Family forever is breaking under the stress of divorce and remarriage, children who have deemed their parents abusive or unworthy of their affection, and a therapeutic culture in which individual and personal health and well-being is a higher priority than familial ties.

You see it in obituaries.  No longer do these death announcements describe much of anything of the life of those who have died.  Cost of publishing and fear of disclosing too much information leaves such death notices stark and cold.  As one who tends to read every obituary, especially, for example, those within my church body, it is as if these lives mattered little to anyone.  Even funerals are becoming the exception rather than the rule, cremains are scattered to the dust of the air without a stone or plot to mark the resting place of the deceased, and family mementos are consigned to the flea markets and thrift stores without even a cursory review of their contents by the surviving family members.  Not long ago at a flea market I saw a medal of honor for sale among other things considered insignificant by their family and even the marketers hawking these goods.  It is a sad testament to the nature of our lives and our deaths.

Part of All Souls is the solemn acknowledgement that all our lives matter to God.  He has redeemed us not because of who we are, what we did, or what we might become but solely out of love for those who saw Him as enemy and stranger.  His love was not easy but sacrificed in death so that the guilty might be forgiven, the lost returned home, the estranged reconciled, and the dead raised to everlasting life.  He did this not by divine fiat but by offering up His only begotten Son for us.  All Saints and All Souls is the celebration not of the sterling lives of the few but the common need of us all met in Christ our Savior and of the pledge and promise that this life is not all there is.  We belong to Him, citizens of a heavenly kingdom not even death can overcome.  In an age when families are estranged by anger and divorce, children and parents separated by old hurts and wounds, and people increasingly isolated and alone, the forgiveness that not only redeems us individually but marks us as members of the family of God is even more important.  In the Divine Service the family is gathered, those seen and those who presence is known but unseen, the foretaste of the eternal feast, for good and bad, the saints forgiven and bound in the blood of the Lamb.