Sometimes we just have to smile, if only to ourselves, when “the universe” – which I call Providence – conspires to give us exactly what we need.  Yesterday that happened at Peace House.  You may remember Peace House from my post on January 30. It continues to send those “zingers” and cut through the crap of life in ways that keep me coming back.  One thing I love about the people there is their transparency, directness and honesty.  They don’t have the money, means or “sophistication” to disguise or hide the truth of their lives.

Yesterday the ridiculously popular Serenity Prayer came up in group meditation.  A woman shared a version that was new to me:

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the people I cannot change,
Courage to change
The one I can,
And the wisdom
To know that’s me!

Another woman said, “Hell, I don’t have a problem with sobriety.  The hard part is living with serenity!”  Isn’t that the truth for many of us?  Perhaps it gets back to the glass half full or half empty idea.  How do we see the world?  …ourselves?  Is our focus on faults and failures or on blessing and virtue?  I left wondering what it would really look like in my life if I conscientiously focused on actively living/applying serenity, courage and wisdom for just one 24 hour period.  Imagine the effect!

A man also spoke about the second half of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer which had its debut in a sermon Niebuhr preached in 1943. I often find it needlessly prescriptive and theoretical but you really should take a look if you are not familiar with it (cf., http://www.lords-prayer-words.com/famous_prayers/god_grant_me_the_serenity.html)

What really hit home was how I saw my brother live the second half of this prayer in his thirty-plus years of working a 12 Step Program.  There were three special lessons, or gems of wisdom, that I take from his living with Alzheimer’s for ten years before his death last June at age 78.  Jerry had three mantras – so much so that at times he could drive you crazy with them!  ”Thank you, thank you, thank you!”  “Life on life’s terms!”  And, “Let God!”  Yesterday, I was reminded of his source.  More significantly, I have seen their truth actually lived.

The simple, ordinary, honest people at Peace House brought me back to these foundational truths… a very good place to start!

I’m in the middle of repairing a 90 year old clock! Who doesn’t like the comforting pulse of the gentle tick or the consoling chimes marking each hour from a distant mantel top? Well, so it seemed when I bought a handsome though broken Seth Thomas at a favorite antique store a few years back. Thankfully, we have a friend who just happens to be a member of the extremely dedicated and increasingly small Twin Cities Clock Makers Guild. Ivy generously offered her wisdom, guidance and well equipped “shop” for the task.

Last week we tore apart the innards and cleaned a gazillion little pieces in a bath of ammonia and then alcohol. We had to gently, ever so carefully, release the tension on the over-wound spring that keeps time. The spring that powers those comforting chimes had proverbially sprung, bending sprockets and brackets in its wake! Today we begin putting the pieces back together. Easier said than done! But this is an absolutely fascinating process and I am guided by a patient, forgiving master teacher. Whoever came up with this technology back in the 15th century, each piece hand-crafted and painstakingly calibrated, were geniuses of the first rate.

Today is also the seventh anniversary of my sister, Della’s death. It seems appropriate to spend time this afternoon tinkering with an old clock and carefully reconstructing its inner workings. Do we pay enough attention to the time we have? Can we gently release parts in our day that are wound too tight? How do we repair that which has sprung and damaged the way we operate? Do we sufficiently treasure each methodical tick in our day? Are we consoled by the marking of time and gladdened even more by chimes ringing forth the later hours?

Today I miss my sister with her quirky humor and sometimes maddening idiosyncrasies. I loved her. Della loved me even when I acted unlovable. Yes, it is a gift to disassemble the inner workings of our lives and restore the reassuring sounds of time. She is a master teacher and – when attentive – we recognize the wisdom of the ages, discovering both memory and promise.

Maybe I care about this topic more than most because my cousin’s son was sentenced to death for the contract murder of a real estate agent.  No, he is not a person of color who dropped out of school or an inner-city drug dealer.  Peter was raised on a farm in northeast Nebraska by good Catholic parents and graduated from local schools.  Between the time of the murder and his arrest, we were pall bearers together at his grandfather’s funeral at the Catholic Church in our hometown of 1600 residents.  I was baptized in this church and we have buried my parents from there as well.  His grandpa’s funeral was the last time I have seen Peter in person.

Thankfully, if there is any reason for gratitude in all of this, Nebraska has a peculiar clause written into its state constitution that enables death-row inmates the grounds for seemingly endless appeals. I still remember anguished notes from my dear Aunt Rose asking for prayers as the date set for her grandson’s death in the electric chair approached.  These last minute appeals – a delay tactic based on this “generous” state constitution – remains the legal strategy of choice for Nebraska’s death-row inmates.  For my Aunt Rose and Peter’s mother, my cousin, such excruciating suspension of any resolution constituted its own “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Relief came with the US Supreme Court decision which put into question the way the death penalty was being applied in the various states – not its legality, to say nothing of its morality!  A review of all death row cases was mandated across the country. A three judge review panel voted 2 to 1 to uphold Peter’s sentence.  Only that one dissenting vote on a panel of three judges provided that tenuous “reasonable doubt” – in the application of the death sentence, not the conviction – to have Peter’s sentence commuted to life in prison.  Coincidentally, that dissenting judge grew up two blocks from me in Omaha.  We went to the same schools.  To this day, I don’t believe he knows anything of our family connection because of the differences in surnames. Yes, capital punishment is up-close and personal!

I am outraged at every murder and my heart grieves for victims’ families – at the time their father was murdered, the sons of the man Peter shot were students at the same Jesuit high school from which I graduated. With this family association, a brief op-ed in the current issue of America magazine grabbed my attention and approval.  “It is a cruel irony that people debate about the ‘most humane’ way to kill a person… Is lethal injection morally preferable to the electric chair? Does a firing squad provide a more efficient execution than a gas chamber?”

The family of the victim in a tragic case in Ohio currently receiving a great deal of attention is, understandably, less sympathetic. “He is being treated far more humanely than he treated her,” they said in a statement. America — the magazine, at least — frames the issue perfectly: “True. But is this the right standard for judging the means of execution?  Arguments about the relative humaneness of different methods of execution miss the essential point: When the state applies the death penalty, it deliberately ends the life of a human being. Whatever method it uses, the state perpetuates the cycle of violence.”

Where will it all end?  Where will it end?

“Faith expressed by many … is often dull, oppressive and insipid.” With this quote from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, David Brooks’ January 27 NYTimes op-ed really grabbed my attention. I reluctantly agree with Brooks’ further supposition: “There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid, unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the Scriptures oppose it.”

Yet, with tenacious optimism reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins’ poem God’s Grandeur, Brooks celebrates “a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand.” Others have similarly identified the essential God-given capacity of humans to live within paradox. Parker Palmer’s incisive consideration, The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life was first issued in 1980 with an Introduction by Henri Nouwen. Attesting to the prominence and persistence of his topic, Palmer’s book was reissued in 2008.

Brooks makes a singular contribution by introducing us to Audrey Assad, “a Catholic songwriter with a crystalline voice and a sober intensity to her stage presence.” Assad enjoyed “an idyllic childhood” in which developmentally appropriate black-or-white dichotomies provided the necessary foundation for her identity. Then, true to life, inevitable tragedies and complexities began to mount. True to form, Assad experienced the familiar erosion of certainty.  And, isn’t that as it should be? Isn’t our worst response in moments of challenge and uncertainty to batten down old belief structures and frantically defend frayed formulations? Those who work 12 Step programs know very well that “control” or “white-knuckling it” sets up the very conditions in which self-defeating, addictive behaviors are likely to explode.

Assad describes her evolution into a person of mature Christian faith as making her way “from darkness into paradox.” Her story makes me grieve any who refuse to grow up — any who “turn away” from the invitation to an unknown future as did the Rich Young Man in the Gospel. Worse, yet, are “parental” leaders of faith communities who place all sorts of obstacles in the way of people growing up, burdens Jesus suggests they themselves are often unwilling or unable to bear. If there is any certainty, I believe it is from such as these that God comes to save us! 

This makes me recall a favorite comment by Flannery O’Connor in a letter to a dear friend: “Many of us come to the church by means the church would not allow.” AMEN to that!

___________________
Brooks’ column may be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/opinion/brooks-alone-yet-not-alone.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

Yesterday I got a sudden glimpse of myself.  What I saw wasn’t pretty!   It happened as I was leaving Peace House, a community begun by a now deceased Sister of St. Joseph of Corondelet some thirty years ago. Sr. Rose envisioned a gathering place where Minneapolis’ poor and homeless could gather to form a community of their own – a place  where their voice is heard, where their priorities are expressed, where they are in charge, hold leadership and exercise roles of service.  Yesterday I left questioning what had just gone on.  A certain discomfort and disappointment rumbled in my heart and gut as I walked out the door.

We have a quote from Neale Donald Walsch on our kitchen bulletin board: “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”  I have been going to Peace House for a few hours each week over the past couple months. Peace House gets me out of my comfort zone.  It also flies in the face of my propensity to be in control.  I generally prod myself on Wednesdays to show up by 11 a.m.  for thirty minutes of visiting with folks before “Meditation” from 11:30 to 12:15 followed by lunch and more small talk until until 1 or 1:30.  I also go to Peace House in obedience to some inexplicable need/desire to be in direct and mutual relationship with the economically poor and those on the periphery of society.

My “sudden glimpse” sprang out of what had taken place during meditation – a very generous term to describe community announcements, shared discussion of a given topic, then five minutes of naming people for whom we ask prayers.  A core group of “volunteers,” people who look and talk a lot like me, provide a thread of continuity.  Many knew Sr. Rose and attempt to carry on her charismatic presence three years after her death.  Generally the same volunteer moderates the meditation on the same day each week.

Despite the moderator’s intention to lead us in a reflection of the Serenity Prayer, we got off on a discussion of the President’s State of the Union address.  In retrospect that seems especially strange because only three of the thirty folks in the room had even seen the address given the night before.  Soon the conversation spun further off onto “politicians”, the fact that women earn 77% what men earn for the same work, the various merits of Democrats and Republicans, etc. Eventually, someone recognized that all the steam and most of the voices were coming from the visiting “volunteers.”  It had become very much the sort of conversation you could expect to have in our south Minneapolis living room.  Finally, someone interjected, “I want to hear from some others, especially those who are having a hard time jumping in or people who don’t often get a chance to speak.”  The pause was something that certainly could not be recreated in our living room!

A homeless woman who had lost custody of her children was the first to speak of her desire to “be her old self.”  Others added their stories.  A Thai man, who is literally homeless in that he lives on the streets and not in a shelter, softly shared his perspective.  The man from India sitting next to me explained that our speaker was brought to the U.S. for protective political asylum.  When not speaking to the group, he continuously mumbles a harmless dialogue between himself and some unseen others.  This time we all were listening.  In a a tone hardly above a whisper, he told his story of coming to America ten years ago with the dream of becoming an American.  He told of losing that dream.  “There are no jobs. … Why do Americans hate Asians so much?”  A broken man now holds on to his impossible dream, returning home to Thailand.  This gentle man of soft words poses profound questions.

While driving south on Portland Avenue toward home it hit me.  OMG!  I am easily verbal and convinced of my well founded opinions!  I love a good intellectual conversation about pressing social issues.  After all, my liberal bona fides are well polished and something I want others to recognize.  I think of myself as a compelling speaker and rightly informed on all manner of topics.  OMG! I had a sudden, embarrassing glimpse. Do I know how to listen?  Do I respect the need and recognize the right of others to speak, especially out of their lived experience and practical reality?  How often do I “talk over” others or remain comfortably fixed in the realm of ideas, disembodied policy and abstract values?  These questions push me beyond my comfort zone.

Coincidentally, if there really is such a thing, I came upon a reflection after arriving home by yet another Sister of St. Joseph of Corondelet, Mary M. McGlone:

When we have identified our brothers and sisters most in need of the light of God’s love, when we listen to their cry, we have begun to hear Jesus’ call. That, of course, is not yet the beginning of real discipleship. Discipleship, the spreading of Christ’s light, only happens when we are willing to leave behind every political or ecclesial position that hinders or prevents us from acting on behalf of people in need. We may find ourselves with unexpected partners; we may even need to avoid discussion of certain contentious topics. But in so doing, we will learn the unimportance of our opinions in the light of the magnitude of the needs of our brothers and sisters.

We may not be able to leave behind our occupations, the nets and boats necessary to sustain daily life, but we can accept the grace of being freed from the encumbrance of our viewpoints, the ideologies and prejudices that prevent us from joining together with everyone else called to proclaim the kingdom of God in deed, and then, if necessary, in word.”

“Is the life you are living the life-in-you that wants to be lived?”

With words something like that, Parker Palmer stopped me dead in my tracks. Some twenty years later his book, Let Your Life Speak remains one of the most significant books of my 63 years. Palmer disarmingly recounts the consequences of living out-of-sync with his core-self, telling of his consequent struggles with depression, troubled relationships, spiritual malaise and professional wandering. As he goes on to explain, “Way opened.” Parker Palmer and we are all the better for it!

Don’t we all wrestle again and again with the life-in-us that struggles for fuller expression? Such yearnings led me to end my secure career as a major gifts development officer to pursue a 12-month hospital chaplain residency. Still, I completed this focused period of reflection with no ultimate conclusions. Only one conviction became clear: I just didn’t have it in me to go back to a 40 hr/wk, nose to the grindstone type of job anymore. Life-in-me needs to be lived differently – new wine needs new wine skins! But, what? …how?

The Gospel for this Sunday (Mt 4:12-23) is the call of Peter, Andrew, James and John – a call to “Follow me!” I freely admit that vocational calls in Scripture send a shiver through me. I left ordained ministry in 2002 and the Jesuits after 23 years. Did I say “No!” to God? Is Jesus disappointed in me for no longer following? Yes, I admit struggling with flashes of remorse and guilt at times. But, my easily inflated ego aside, it’s NOT really all about me! Jesus did not come to instruct, or even admonish, Richard on his career path. No, Jesus’ call is much broader and directed to all: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” It’s not essentially about you, me or any one of us! Steeped in American cultural individualism as we are this may be hard – even disappointing – for us to hear. Sorry, Jesus didn’t come to provide personal therapy or individual career counseling. Jesus came to proclaim the Reign of God! No looking back — let’s get on with it!

Yes, Jesus’ call comes to us personally, particularly, sometimes even intimately. And in this regard, our Sunday Gospel may be ultimately more useful than the flashy pageantry we just left in the Christmas story. No choirs of angels for Peter and Andrew! No star leading James and John through their hesitation and doubts. Nope! Like each of us, just a stark direct invitation: “Follow me.” There are so many voices competing for our attention and commitment these days. None comes as unadorned as Jesus’ call to discipleship.

What’s the pay-off in this amorphous Kingdom of Heaven? Well, one thing it is not – it is most certainly not a ticket for early or easy transport to heaven. As Anglican bishop N.T. Wright explains about Matthew’s use of “Kingdom of Heaven” here and throughout his Gospel, this repent-and-follow talk is not “about our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven’.” To further make the point, we should not be surprised that the Beatitudes are in the very next chapter and what the lectionary gives us for next Sunday.

The only thing I know from my meager, and sometimes noble, efforts to “follow” is that Jesus’ summons disturbs us, confounds us, knocks us off-center (cf., Paul’s proverbial horse?) and requires conversion that comes with a price! Again, what’s our pay-off? What does Jesus promise? “I will make you fishers of people. I will take you where you are. But I will take your specific talents, unique skills, professional gifts and transform them into something greater. Your catch, harvest, yield, ROI will far exceed what even you imagine possible. Follow me!” Palmer’s paraphrase merely gives it a fresh spin: Is the life you are living the life-in-you that wants to be lived?

I have reread Let Your Life Speak at least four times over the past twenty years. Phrases and its very cadence are now familiar. But it remains always fresh. I know the text well. But upon rereading it’s as if I am hearing something for the first time. In that, it is like the Gospel – Living Word. Our lives evolve, morph and shift – usually subtly, sometimes suddenly, evenly tragically at times. Jesus does not so much snatch us out of life’s realities or elicit a cognitive assent to disembodied truths. Rather, the persistent call of Christ is a summons to personally follow with others in companionship, living life on life’s terms.

The directive Jesus would seem to give to Palmer’s putting of our ultimate human quest: Do what you do best for those who need it most. This is the Way, Truth and Life.

Source cited: N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York, HarperOne, 2008), p18.

God, it would be so easy to ignore this topic.  No one would notice – really!  But with a tinge of what the Hebrew prophets must have experienced, I cannot remain silent.  History is strewn with too many well-intentioned, polite folks who did not speak up in a moment of moral turmoil.  But it is simply the turmoil to which I can attest with any certainty.  I have no final resolution or easy route out of our cultural arguments.  All I know is life changed fundamentally for all of us forty-one years ago when the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade.

Expressing any Pro-Life sentiments feels something like coming out as a gay man – scary, risky and crossing the Rubicon.  I cherish my liberal, progressive orthodoxy and wouldn’t want anything I said to threaten my reputation, web of relationships, or access to people of influence.  It would be so easy simply to be stereotyped and/or dismissed by cultural elites of every stripe!  More significantly, I do not want to dishonor or dismiss women. Surely theirs is a privileged, though not exclusive, voice that must be freely and fully expressed.

And, we all have to remain in this together – this I believe with all my heart.  Can we agree that it’s precisely the frozen entrenchment of opposing camps which we all detest, yet holds our nation captive and keeps too many of us mute?  How do we begin getting past this on a topic that has held us in turmoil for forty-one years?  Where to start?

Can we all agree to celebrate the origins of Planned Parenthood?  Can we Catholics stop with our knee-jerk vilifying of the organization?  Will we recognize a shared value in the founding inspiration for the organization – to confront poverty!  I am also compelled by the “seamless garment” only most recently articulated by Pope Francis: “All life has inestimable value even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the unborn and the poor, are masterpieces of God’s creation, made in his own image, destined to live forever, and deserving of the utmost reverence and respect.” It is nothing short of refreshing to hear religious leadership calling all of us to such moral and ethical consistency!  Moreover, I believe there are more than sufficient “secular” threads holding us together as a nation (e.g., Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Pledge of Allegiance, etc.) to initiate a shared, civil conversation – if we have but the shared will and commitment.  Can we commit that our dialogue remains ongoing, inclusive and non-ideological ?

Yes, this would be nothing short of revolutionary.  But, do we have a choice?  Is the present state of affairs tolerable? …sustainable?  Besides, a revolution in cultural values, world-view and self understanding is underway in any case! The only question is whether we recognize seismic shifts and choose to exercise moral discretion and human influence in the shaping of our lives in this new reality.

All this reminds me of a profound reflection by Archibald MacLeish printed in the NYTimes on Christmas Day, 1968 immediately after the astronauts to the moon were the first humans to see Earth from the depths of space.  Perhaps his concluding remarks are instructive on this anniversary of our life-changing event of 1972. I leave his blindly “sexist” language intact for the purpose of showing just how much more enlightened we might become in only a generation or two:

“The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere — beyond the range of reason even — lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

The struggle to truly comprehend and consistently respect who we are – all of us and each of us, together – remains our challenge, opportunity and only worthy choice.

(Some may wish to read Archibald MacLeish’s reflection “Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold” in its entirety: http://cecelia.physics.indiana.edu/life/moon/Apollo8/122568sci-nasa-macleish.html)

“On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. Over and over I have found myself asking: ‘What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?'”       – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Like no other national holiday, this day challenges us to an individual and collective examination of conscience and honesty about how we live professed moral values. In that light, it makes sense that this day is increasingly being understood as something more than a day-off but, rather, a national day of service. Here is a reflection for the occasion:

Do we take Christmas seriously — God’s free choice to “become human”? Or, as another preacher once said, “Is our faith so heavenly minded its no earthly good?” Does our faith explicitly or implicitly encourage “disembodied” faith such that injustice is tolerated because “it will all work out” in the afterlife?

Do we see everyone as created in the Image of God? Does our faith affirm the fundamental dignity and worth of each and everyone, rejecting any claims of moral superiority, ether explicit or implicit?

Do we carefully and critically examine Scripture as “Living Word,” remaining receptive to the Spirit’s present impregnating action in our world, instead of being frozen in fundamentalism that idolizes the past?

Does our faith confront and reject any teachings that might cause us to, personally or collectively, act with violence or incite rage or hatred towards others? Do we believe that war is only to be used as a last resort or not at all?

Does our faith further interfaith cooperation and empower our ability to feel compassion for the suffering, for someone who may be different from me/us? Or, does it lead us to love and care essentially for those in our immediate group or people like ourselves?

Do we see social justice and equality – as well as individual acts of charity – as integral to the Gospel and “God’s will”?

Do we really believe that “God is love”? Do we profess the foundational commands to love God and to love others as we would love ourselves? Or, are we imprisoned by dogma with judgment as the defining characteristic of God?

I am hugely indebted to Paul Brandeis Raushenbush for inspiring this reflection.  You may find his original posting on which mine is largely based at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raushenbush/martin-luther-king-faith_b_4623051.html